They have to shout about it. Discovery showrunners crave headlines and PR pats on the back for this type of virtue signalling. Incoherent mess of story-telling? Paper thin characters with zero foundation? A tone that shifts every season because they have no idea what show they want this to be? Who cares.
Absolutely. And there is no shortage of persons who will gas-light you into trying to believe that it isn’t virtue signaling or pushing an agenda. Just to add to your concerns let’s not forget the most recent Trek event interview with Alex Kurtzman. It’s not about Star Trek it’s about the platform.
It’s too obvious Trek is no longer about story first and neither is it about character development.
It’s now obvious that Trek is about agenda first and the story is just packaging. It was obvious to some of us that this has damaged the franchise, lowering viewership interests and destroying interest in licensing products (where long term franchises have capital value).
Now the evidence of the viewership is slipping through the cracks. The articles about viewership in Canada are out. American viewers aren’t that dissimilar to our Canadian cousins. The viewership of Short Treks and Lower Decks on YouTube are abysmal for a channel like CBSViacom with millions of followers.
And if the rebranded streaming service or All Access had any greater, iconic properties that could draw interest to a streaming service, Trek would have been cut loose years ago.
Now STD will be on broadcast. The numbers for that will be telling. And Kurtzman is public now that Trek is just a platform to push an agenda.
my point is that this will be tokenism. I’m a gay man and I felt Culber and and what’s-his-name were also token. Characters that felt like they were there to make a statement first. Burnham felt that way to me also, to a lesser degree. All of these “first for Trek” things that aren’t really and usually weren’t well researched when they took their cultural brownie points and ran with it to the press for the PR.
Frankly, it’s insulting for a show that purports to be the descendant of Gene Rodenberry’s Trek to continue on with the 2009 movie trends. That continues the trend from 2009 of replacing science fiction with science fantasy. For telling convoluted stories that are low IQ, vapid, vacuous, hyperkinetic, spasmodic, and manic with Louis sounds and explosions in the place of dramatic tension and character driven storytelling.
And now someone’s going to come here and try to pass the notion that this isn’t tokenism. That it isn’t to placate .02% of the population to grab a viewer who isn’t there and won’t spend money keeping Trek alive for the next 50 years.
It’s insulting. It’s disingenuous. It divides the fan base and creates the types of tensions that never were part of fan base debate and at times heated discussion. Our fandom has always been dynamic, diverse in opinion and in the various shades, shapes, creeds, and so on. It has been robust and often argumentative. We’ve have some ugly at times. But not like this.
This is a new level, brought about in an agenda that seems to exist just to push a boundary that most fans of Trek honestly don’t care about.
Trek- good Trek is a story that encompasses species that have more than two sexes. More than just a few shades of colors. More than just mammals or bi-peds. It should now still be about the story first as Trek has always been. There have always been morality plays and reflections of mores and ethics. But always through a good story and Trek of old tried hard to lead the audience to the point and let them decide, not beat the audience over the head.
But we can think less talented and less subtle writers from the CW and show runners who are more concerned with having a platform upon which they can stand and be tone deaf as they shout.
But hey, there will be those who will defend it tooth and nail. They will defend it to the detriment of the franchise. They will defend it while insisting that you are the nasty, evil person of their fantasmagoria. Those tolerant, liberal persons of social justice and virtue will defend the show and its bigotry of low expectations and tokenism. While simultaneously calling you all nasty things, declaring that you shouldn’t speak, and that this franchise isn’t for you obviously and that you should be the one to go.
I’ll bet anything dollars to latinum that you’ll see it here. Against all the evidence and logical reasoning. That’s what Trek is becoming and that’s what trying to debate with the ideologically possessed will bring you.
