I guess I'm curious as to why this is a problem. Star Trek is absolutely about our humanity and that includes our darker aspects. The instinct can be fought but you don't fight it by pretending it all went away.
Spoilers Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 3x03 - "Shuttle to Kenfori"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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Star Trek wasn't designed as some seamless fabric overseen by a wise philosopher. It was cobbled together week-by-week in the effort to tell the best story they could in the time and resources they had.
It's chock full of stuff that doesn't fit into the "Star Trek Universe." You can ignore all of it, but then you're not really honoring all the work that so many people put into it over years and eventually decades - you're second-guessing them for somehow not being up to snuff and in sync with your personal fantasies.
It's chock full of stuff that doesn't fit into the "Star Trek Universe." You can ignore all of it, but then you're not really honoring all the work that so many people put into it over years and eventually decades - you're second-guessing them for somehow not being up to snuff and in sync with your personal fantasies.
I agree. My objection is more to do with normalising or, worse, lauding those darker aspects. I absolutely love an anti-hero but lots of Wolverine fans who applaud his violent tendency to take no crap from anyone refuse to acknowledge that he is basically a liberal Canadian with PTSD and serious anger management issues that hamper his ability to be much more than a bum. Ok I admit, I'm rusty on his inconsistent back story and he might actually have been born in the USA in the 19th century and probably only became liberal when he was indoctrinated by friendly Canadians, but my point is broadly the same.
The Nitpicker's Guide to Trek has plenty to say about Trek inconsistencies. We all have our own head-canon but tongue-in-cheek criticism of widely acknowledged writing blunders should not be reduced to 'stop second-guessing writers to support your personal fantasies'. That's like telling us to stop doing one of the most fun parts of the Star Trek universe.
Plus, think about what you are saying. Does the fact that Crewmen are beamed through the shields in a Taste of Armageddon mean that ships can, in fact, beam through shields, despite all the other episodes where they said they couldn't,? Is it acceptable to acknowledge the oversight and rationalise it somehow or to rationalise all those other occasions where they expressly said they couldn't? Or do we assume that sometimes they can beam through shields and sometimes they can't and we shouldn't really try to rationalise the fictional technology.
The tech works how ever it works in the most recent episode.
That is objectively true. A Writers' Bible can help the most recent be consistent with the preceding episodes, however. How else will we get Star Trek Stargate, where the Federation just equips officers with portable transporter units and the transwarp equation to allow them to explore strange new worlds?
Deep Space Nine was far guiltier of that, as was TOS at times.
Is that what a "Writer's Bible" does?
Yes Deep Space Nine was exploring a non-Federation nation that was at a crossroads rather than a post-scarcity utopian alliance. Non-Federation aliens were frequently used to showcase moral dilemmas. Deep Space Nine did that very effectively, whether through Bashir's naïve idealism, Kai Winn's populist dogma, or Sisko's practical compromises.
TOS certainly had a lot of frontier colonies that were certainly not utopian and it did have a much better frontier feel. I was hugely disappointed that Enterprise didn't manage to capture much of that frontier vibe.
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