First, I never care about artists saying what their art is supposed to be about, I judge their work in and of itself. Second, stuff like McCoy being forced to work in space despite having a phobia after being bankrupt because of a divorce (sounds more shitty than the present, like a biographical sketch you could use for a cyberpunk character) and an acting captain marooning a fellow officer in a harsh climate without being court-martialed for it makes me perceive the movies as fairly antithetical to Trek's general principles with the emphasis being on me. You perceive it differently.
Star Trek's outdated vision of the future
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
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First, I never care about artists saying what their art is supposed to be about, I judge their work in and of itself. Second, stuff like McCoy being forced to work in space despite having a phobia after being bankrupt because of a divorce (sounds more shitty than the present, like a biographical sketch you could use for a cyberpunk character) and an acting captain marooning a fellow officer in a harsh climate without being court-martialed for it makes me perceive the movies as fairly antithetical to Trek's general principles with the emphasis being on me. You perceive it differently.
What? First, why would you think "cyberpunk?" All of that is the kind of stuff you'd encounter in the present day, aside from working in space, and cyberpunk is generally Earthbound rather than space-oriented. And second, the film's characterization of McCoy is based on what we already knew about him from TOS. From the 1967 revision of the series writers' bible:
That was DeForest Kelley's own suggestion for McCoy's backstory, which Dorothy Fontana incorporated into the series bible. It's been an implicit part of the character's backstory for over 40 years and has been explored in a variety of prose works (and his daughter Joanna was mentioned in TAS: "The Survivor"), but the 2009 film was the first canonical work that actually acknowledged the divorce overtly.
And McCoy's anxieties about space in the film are in keeping with his established fear of transporters and his general mistrust of technology seen repeatedly throughout TOS (and that's in the bible too). It's always been his nature to be a curmudgeon and complainer. It's all perfectly in keeping with how the character has been portrayed since the beginning.
About cyberpunk, it is kind of the opposite of Trek, portraying a world which is shittier than our present not at least to highlight potentially dangerous trends that might lead into this direction. Trek shows a better world and works basically like Picard worked for Cochrane in FC, like a prophet who tells something totally lunatic but makes the receiver believe in it just a little bit and act upon this belief (the other function of stuff like Trek is cathartic, you had a shitty day and watch Trek to be able to endure it).
About McCoy, his financial troubles have not been part of the character setup in TOS and if they stood alone I probably wouldn't mind it. But in combination with Kirk's nasty stepfather and Spock's messy childhood it formed a typical coming of age "let's get away from it all" pattern which is fine from a story perspective but dubious from a Trek view as Earth (or Vulcan) shouldn't be a place you wanna get away from.
In combination with Spock's questionable and semi-criminal behaviour and many other little things it created for me an atmosphere that isn't Trekish.
Note that my argument is not that Trek should portray a paradise but the struggle for paradise. Kirk hates Klingons and Picard hates Borg, they aren't perfect but at least they realize their mistake before they make a serious error. I think "The Drumhead" shows this 'paradise is a fragile thing which is constantly in danger and constantly has to be fought for' pattern most clearly.
STXI on the other hand did not imply that there is anything wrong with dickish people and dubious behaviour but said between the lines that everything is OK the way it is.
Nobody forces people to work in sweatshops either.
For me the scene created the impression of a world where people have to choose shitty jobs. Of course you can read it differently, McCoy enjoys his misery via exaggeration and cynicism, and such a character-focused reading is probably better.
Dude it was just a humorous exchange between characters. Why are you zeroing in on the "financial problems" aspects? McCoy went through a divorce that left him somewhat adrift so he joined Starfleet to get a fresh start. That's really all you need to get from the exchange.
What do we know about Step-Dad? He was upset that Kirk took his car. As for Kirk himself, we know from TOS and TWOK he was a risk taker who tends to think outside of the box. Life on Earth ( especially the perfect Earth you've described) probably isn't a place Kirk would like.
Spock's messy childhood it a matter "fact". "Journey To Babel" and "Yesteryear" show us growing up on Vulcan wasn't easy for a half human like Spock. Getting away was probably his best choice.
Spock's gone "rogue" before. See "the Menagerie" and "This Side of Paradise".
Being a doctor in Starfleet is a akin to working a sweatshop? Its a "shitty" job
Weird world you live in.
My point which you totally missed was that people who work in sweatshops are not literally forced to do it. They could stay in their old agricultural jobs but they pay worse than the industrial job so they choose the latter. It is nonetheless cynical to speak of a choice, to pretend that they are not economically forced to do it.
Same applies for McCoy, he is not forced to go into space but obviously he is economically forced because of bankruptcy to work in an environment which is unbearable for him because of a phobia. This is something I associate with cyberpunk and not with Trek.
As I already said, this is just my literal reading of the scene which focuses on the background and a character-focused reading is probably more appropriate.
Same applies for McCoy, he is not forced to go into space but obviously he is economically forced because of bankruptcy to work in an environment which is unbearable for him because of a phobia. This is something I associate with cyberpunk and not with Trek.
As I already said, this is just my literal reading of the scene which focuses on the background and a character-focused reading is probably more appropriate.
I'm sure a doctor with McCoy's credentials wouldn't have a problem finding a position at any number of medical facilities through out the Federation. His decision to join Starfleet seems to be a spur of the moment thing fueled by alcohol and depression not by economic reasons.
Ian Keldon
Fleet Captain
This article is nothing but a series of unsupported assumptions ("nothing waiting for us at the destination..." Really? Dvorsky's been there?) combined with unbridled technophillia. Apparently he's never met a technology he didn't like.
Quick test...how many times have we been assured that a product of Science and or Technology was a boon and it turned out to be a bane instead?
I can think of (off the top of my head): DDT, PCBs, Thalidomide, freon-based refrigerants, BGH. Let's also remember the millions of people who have been rendered "surplus to requirements" by advances in automation and/or transportation technology that have stolen their means of providing for themselves through their labor.
And of couse we can't forget the current wunderkinder of the technophillic crowd: genetic engineering.
Be stronger! Be faster! Be "better" in all ways and in all things! Live forever! All at the low, low cost of allowing fallible, imperfect men to tamper with the basic blueprint of everything that makes man "man". Nothing left to chance...every facet of who and what you are programmed into you at conception...
To be fair, it is possible that some genetic therapies might have beneficial effects (curing diabetes, etc for example).
But to actually "build" a person like someone build's a house?
That's a damned scary thought. Who decides what makes a "good" human? Getting rid of that cancer gene might be a good thing, but what about intellect? What if some parents decided their offspring don't need to be "smart", just "hard working", "obedient" and "loyal" and programmed their babies accordingly?
Isn't that how a slave caste is born? Aren't assumptions about human traits based on genetics the essence of racist theory?
Never mind that there is NO proof that we can even safely make large-scale changes in DNA at all, even if we have been stupid enough to let Monsanto (for example) start spreading it's Franken-seeds all over the place, threatening bio-diversity in foodstuffs and potentially opening the door to a genetic apocalypse in both plants AND animals.
And Dvorsky thinks that it's our "destiny" to use this unproven technology on us?
Let's go to another example he brings up to see exactly why his reasoning is not just suspect, but fatally flawed. He bemoans that Data "limits" himself because he follows ethical and moral subroutines and does not try to circumvent them as a general practice. He actually asks why Data doesn't "take over Starfleet" which would be "within his capacity to do so"...
Skynet (or in this case M-5) anybody?
Sorry if the above jumps around a bit, but it all boils down to (as I said at the beginning) Dvorsky's unbridled technophillia.
Anyone watching Star Trek knows (and anyone who has looked around at the real world today should know) that technology is always suspect, and must be carefully considered in conception, and regulated in application. "Fire well used warms, ill used burns", as the saying goes.
If we as humanity want to move forward into our future as humans, the Trek-ian vision of the future can never be allowed to become seen as "outdated".
If we want to move forward into our future as mere mechanical/biological mechanisms to be manipulated by each other for selfish benefit, reduced to the status and significance of a car, or a beast of burden, and seen only as a means to an end, then by all means embrace Dvorsky's "up to date" vision of the future...
Quick test...how many times have we been assured that a product of Science and or Technology was a boon and it turned out to be a bane instead?
I can think of (off the top of my head): DDT, PCBs, Thalidomide, freon-based refrigerants, BGH. Let's also remember the millions of people who have been rendered "surplus to requirements" by advances in automation and/or transportation technology that have stolen their means of providing for themselves through their labor.
And of couse we can't forget the current wunderkinder of the technophillic crowd: genetic engineering.
Be stronger! Be faster! Be "better" in all ways and in all things! Live forever! All at the low, low cost of allowing fallible, imperfect men to tamper with the basic blueprint of everything that makes man "man". Nothing left to chance...every facet of who and what you are programmed into you at conception...
To be fair, it is possible that some genetic therapies might have beneficial effects (curing diabetes, etc for example).
But to actually "build" a person like someone build's a house?
That's a damned scary thought. Who decides what makes a "good" human? Getting rid of that cancer gene might be a good thing, but what about intellect? What if some parents decided their offspring don't need to be "smart", just "hard working", "obedient" and "loyal" and programmed their babies accordingly?
Isn't that how a slave caste is born? Aren't assumptions about human traits based on genetics the essence of racist theory?
Never mind that there is NO proof that we can even safely make large-scale changes in DNA at all, even if we have been stupid enough to let Monsanto (for example) start spreading it's Franken-seeds all over the place, threatening bio-diversity in foodstuffs and potentially opening the door to a genetic apocalypse in both plants AND animals.
And Dvorsky thinks that it's our "destiny" to use this unproven technology on us?
Let's go to another example he brings up to see exactly why his reasoning is not just suspect, but fatally flawed. He bemoans that Data "limits" himself because he follows ethical and moral subroutines and does not try to circumvent them as a general practice. He actually asks why Data doesn't "take over Starfleet" which would be "within his capacity to do so"...
Skynet (or in this case M-5) anybody?
Sorry if the above jumps around a bit, but it all boils down to (as I said at the beginning) Dvorsky's unbridled technophillia.
Anyone watching Star Trek knows (and anyone who has looked around at the real world today should know) that technology is always suspect, and must be carefully considered in conception, and regulated in application. "Fire well used warms, ill used burns", as the saying goes.
If we as humanity want to move forward into our future as humans, the Trek-ian vision of the future can never be allowed to become seen as "outdated".
If we want to move forward into our future as mere mechanical/biological mechanisms to be manipulated by each other for selfish benefit, reduced to the status and significance of a car, or a beast of burden, and seen only as a means to an end, then by all means embrace Dvorsky's "up to date" vision of the future...
That is a pretty accurate personality profile of Kirk. He probably would have got into trouble a lot as kid, being a high risk taker.
That was an interesting exchange. If you take it as it is, then the movie did a near reverse of Picard's saying people don't need money anymore.
Trek's main selling point was built on the idea that the future will be much better than now. It was always something the viewer could rely on.
TNG almost went overboard with it in certain ways, portraying the 24th century as a technological wonderland, and humans as having super advanced personalities or something.
But I've noticed that with each newer series or movie, the atmosphere gets more and more dysfunctional, while at the same time saying that humans are still perfectly fine.
Or maybe the atmosphere became more realistic?
You finally get Trek 2009, that, intentionally does away with some of the Utopian ideas, or the producers weren't familiar with all the things Picard and others said about human society and the Federation.
But nothing in McCoy's comments in the movie has anything to do with that. I mean, if you think that a person losing everything in a messy divorce is something that could only happen in a world worse than our own, then you have an exceedingly rosy perspective on our own world. There is absolutely no connection between messy divorces and cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is about advanced computing technology and corporate dystopias, not unhappy marriages. It's a complete and total non sequitur.
I think people forget that TOS itself didn't depict nearly as idealized a future as TNG did. TOS showed us a future humanity that still had crime and drug abuse ("Mudd's Women"), bigotry ("Balance of Terror"), genocide and murder ("The Conscience of the King"), violent jealousy ("Court-martial"), destructive greed ("The Omega Glory"), homicidal insanity ("Turnabout Intruder"), etc. It was a better world in that humanity had survived its nuclear era, overcome race hatred within the species, and joined together for the benefit and advancement of humanity as a whole, but it was not completely devoid of human folly and venality on an individual level.
And "Spock's messy childhood" in the film was practically a beat-for-beat adaptation of TAS: "Yesteryear," so it's completely consistent with the original portrayal.
I have no idea where the hell you're getting that from. Heck, the whole story is about Kirk and Spock overcoming their respective jerky behavior and becoming better people, transcending the wrongs done to them in their youth. That's anything but endorsing those wrongs.
"Obviously?" No way is that obvious. All he says is, "Yeah, well, got nowhere else to go. The ex-wife took the whole damn planet in the divorce. All I've got left is my bones." Which is blatant hyperbole and certainly can't be taken literally, so it doesn't really tell us anything definitive about what his actual economic situation is. He could be using those words as a metaphor for his emotional bereftness, his sense that he's lost the life he had and no longer has any personal ties holding him to Earth, and just casting it in more economic terms as protective camouflage. So there's no single "obvious" conclusion to draw from those three sentences.
No, if it were a literal reading, you'd have to conclude that Jocelyn had become empress of Earth and McCoy was an animated skeleton. The whole passage is decidedly non-literal, so whatever you read into it is an interpretation.
If you still do not understand in which way cyberpunk and Trek are opposites I cannot help you.
I have no idea where you live but in the place where I live you cannot lose everything because of a divorce, there are well-designed laws which prevent this. So in this respect STXI portrays a world which is worse than our own although Trek is supposed to do the very opposite.
The movie clearly says between the lines that all the appalling behaviour, be it marooning fellow officers or following your daddy's advice and not holding your hate back, is totally fine whereas TOS never implied that Harry Mudd is a great guy.
Don't you find it mildly strange that a movie which tries to copy TWOK in some ways totally misses one point of TWOK, that giving in to desires of revenge is self-destructive behaviour?
Just... never mind. It's not worth it.
Not my problem when you guys do not care about NuTrek portraying a fucked up world in which guys are bankrupt because of a divorce and forced to work somewhere despite phobias, not my problem that you guys have no problem with Spock yearning for revenge, not my problem that you guys do not care about the general principles of Trek.
Trek has been progressive since day one so naturally some conservative viewers have a problem with it and try to redefine Trek in "mere entertainment". Nice try but you gotta try harder.
Trek has been progressive since day one so naturally some conservative viewers have a problem with it and try to redefine Trek in "mere entertainment". Nice try but you gotta try harder.
I am just going to hazard a guess that: 1) you might not know as much about what "[these] guys" think as you believe you do, and 2) the general principles of Trek encompass more diverse viewpoints than you believe they do:
- I certainly don't think it's out of character, even for Spock, to have a desire for revenge
- as for McCoy, well, as long as there is marriage, there will be divorce. So McCoy's didn't work out. There are billions of others that do! And I find it very likely that after McCoy's marriage failed, he would want to get as far away from his ex-wife as possible. So if she stayed behind on Earth, McCoy chooses a career which will take him far away from it (thus he can indeed claim that she "got the whole damn planet").
So there's room for even these so-called "uncharacteristic" moments to happen, and when they do, we may find that they actually fit quite well after all.
Or, to put it another way: there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Not really. As I said before Trek's general principles are pretty lax, portray a bright and progressive view of the future. The Feds ain't nasty conquerors or adolescent pew-pew guys but nice democrats. While life at the borders is rough at least the citizens who live in the core worlds are economically well-off ... which implies that you aren't broke after a divorce.
These are anything but tight parameters, there is ample room to be creative. As I said before, you can show all human flaws as long as you imply that there is a yearning to improve personally and more importantly collectively. This was clearly not the case in the last movie. To pick out your claim that it is OK for Spock to yearn for revenge, when he mindraped Valeris in TUC the movie clearly said between the lines that while this might be necessary it is not something which Spock can be proud of. No such subtext in STXI which rejoiced in Spock living out his revenge phantasies, not mentioning that Sarek gave him the idea. These Vulcans have nothing to do with the Rabbi-esque guys portrayed by Nimoy and Lenard.
If you do not mind that Trek is no more progressive you can claim all day long that you are not a reactionary fellow, it will not ring true.I'm a conservative?????
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