First off, I would like to thank sincerely the creators of Discovery for taking onboard constructive criticism of season one. People here wrote pages upon pages about the seemingly dark deconstructive tone of some parts of Discovery, and why they felt Star Trek's enlightenment-style progressive message was fine without the need for post-modern deconstruction. The first couple of episodes were more humane, the characters got the time and the endearment we wanted, they become more than just extras. We were presented with a Federation that cares about the protection of life for it's own sake, heroic acts like Reno keeping war casualties alive, and the introduction of the considerate and principled Pike was joyful.
On the more production side, it is gratifying to see the Klingons reconciled with the species we knew, hair and all - the balance is just right. TrekBBS forumers wrote pages upon pages about the incongruity of the new D7 battlecruiser shown in season one, and the producers have pulled back on that much-hated design choice, reintroducing the classic ship.
The first two episodes of the season felt like Star Trek in spirit. Nothing is perfect of course, but I loved them. I actually looked forward to new episodes again on Fridays, which I haven't felt about a show in years. But I had this trepidation about getting too excited, because two episodes does not make a season - the tone could easily reverse in the space of an episode, as the same regime was still there - and the people who wrote theese episodes also happen to have been the people who bookended season one - worryingly, most of the tonal problems were concentrated in the middle 11-12 episodes of the season.
When Berg and Harberts were fired for allegedly shouting abuse at other writers, a lot of people felt maybe this was the signal of major changes behind the camera. Bullies should not be tolerated, and their behaviour, if true, was unprofessional. Perhaps it would clear the air and allow a more healthy writers room to develop. Yet... it wasn't their names attached to most of the worst material in season one, from Vulcan suicide bombings to Klingon sleeper agents murdering characters that had barely endeared themselves to us. The inconsistent material in season one, from the badly conceived mirror universe stuff, to the spore drive, to the unrelenting heaviness and mirthlessness of Burnham's attitudes to everything, was done with the full participation of the rest of the writer's room.
I am completely in the dark about who is responsible for what behind the camera, but as soon as we hit episode three, a lot of the worst material from the first season became central to the show again. Vulcan suicide bombers. A known perpetrator of genocide and known cannibal working for the Federation's covert interests. The episode was well plotted, but again, felt different in thematic content to Star Trek, in a way that a Star Wars story about drug addicts shooting up all day would in that franchise. I'm not opposed to material that examines the harshness of that the universe can contain, but I'm really not sure that is the approach Star Trek does best to inspire change and address problems.
Klingon Sexism
In Star Trek, especially after the 60s, gender equality was portrayed as such a given, that even adversarial societies like the Romulans and Klingons displayed no obvious bias, it was such a non-issue that societies of this level of development would have abandoned such primitive bigotry. If they can crack the warp drive, surely they cracked medieval attitudes hundreds of years ago? People were be equal under the law, and equal in fact as far as we can tell, in a society that had already entrenched reason to that degree. Things like bigotry occurred mainly between species, but not within them, as on the level of a Kardashev 1+ society, such things were generally in the past. Uhura noted that humans had learned to be delighted by difference, and had escaped the weight of history. That was really progressive, and inspiring.
But it is not how the current zeitgeist likes to do things. In the opinion of some current writers, if you don't show discrimination overtly, I get the feeling you are seen as something like a 'class traitor' in old revolutionary parlance - someone wilfully ignoring the struggle. So instead of presenting the inspiring upside of what we could achieve with reason, in current drama we are sometimes subjected to the very worst of prejudice with the best intentions. However, we all know the depths of prejudice and cruelty, surely, without having to overtly be reminded of what bigotry is like, in a show set 300 years in the future? In episode three, the Klingons go from being a species which seemed just as progressive as the Federation - Mara was science officer of a Klingon battlecruiser in 1968, at a time when the Soviet Union had more gender equality in the sciences and military than the west - to being one, in which the (admittedly untrustworthy) opinion of Georgiou, objects to L'Rell based solely on her gender? This change in Klingons started with DS9, as we know, but just became more acute.
Surely it does more to inspire a better world, if you show that even adversarial space age samurai consider such prejudice to be an anachronism? Irrelevant of if you think this is too idealistic, this was Star Trek's approach. It brings to mind a Ray Bradbury quote, about how science fiction is the genre of what can happen, as opposed to a genre of what has happened - the genre of revolutions in science and societies - showing a paradigm that does not exist yet, but only in the possibility of reason. I don't think these episodes made people uncomfortable because they are hiding from the truth, but because they can no longer watch with their family and say "look, this shows a better world"; it suggests inescapable conflict, and joyless struggle.
The Federation Kissinger Doctrine
I lack the godlike view of history that you would need, to say whether a progressive society needs to occasionally do something difficult or cruel, in furtherance of a greater good. Did democracies occasionally need to take a hard stance in order to prevent a worse outcome? Do societies ever need to torture, or to intervene in a threatening adversary's affairs? Or are these things that weaken those very institutions, cast doubt on their underpinnings? One might well then say that Lenin and Trotsky, or the leaders of the French Revolution, were right to seek any means to preserve their revolutions, although I know their republics were different in legal emphasis to say the USA, or India, or South Africa. The founders of those republics tried to set up imperfect institutions through which people could seek greater and greater universal rights, as opposed to sweeping away the old order through a coup. Perhaps as long as we struggle with this difficulty, and these choices are hard, we are at least not so far gone as to see human life as a means.
Star Trek is a show about a society that has continued to take reason as it's guiding star, a philosophical thought experiment in what rights and responsibilities time might reap, given the steady progression of reason, and of our conscientiousness for the environment and human welfare.
But why are modern writers so obsessed with introducing morally ambiguous elements into the United Federation of Planets? Do we really need an analogue in this future society for the well-understood failings of our own? Why not accept the central premise of Star Trek as part of it's charm, rather than trying to deconstruct it? Does the current zeitgeist assume that societies always have the same institutional problems, like a theory of eternal recurrence? History, and a reductive view of society suggests that future republics may have all the failings of the earliest ones like Rome. But crucially reason does not say that just because a thing has happened before, we are doomed to repeat it, and empiricism even suggests we are making constant strides in the right direction as a planet, despite setbacks.
Vulcan Jihadists
Even the most enlightened societies have their bad points. Any 'true world' doctrine can produce extremism, including secular ones. Yet, this has got to be one of the most egregious deconstructive flourishes incorporated into season one. The pacifist Surakian Vulcans... who literally worship the concept of diversity in the IDIC concept... have their own suicide bombers. "Surprise, we deconstructed your symbol of an enlightened people."
Star Trek was a show that was pretty gung-ho about the power of reason. Reason lets a person think "just because an injustice has happened before, does not necessarily mean it always must", where mere empiricism just reports the facts, reason imagines the possibilities. Tom Paine, and the founding fathers of the United States, reasoned that a monarch did not necessarily have to rule a state just because one had done so for a thousand years in England or France. They were imperfect people who reasoned a system that allowed people to win new rights. India's first and most successful prime minister, warned his constituents about that the process of election should be bigger than any one person, reinforcing an institution that remains in it's imperfect beauty today, despite setbacks.
But here we are, with presumably atheist suicide bombers, trying to presumably rid a pacifist free-thinking society of alien impurity, what, because they fear how unreasonable alien cultures are(?) Maybe they watch our TV, in which case I can't blame them. When you look at this from the perspective of atheists, the optics of this could look quite bad couldn't they? Non-belief is still, amazingly, highly persecuted as a community on our own planet in the present, despite having existed as long as religion has. In several countries, being an atheist carries the death penalty, largely at the hands of religious-nationalist regimes. Many people reading this would be executed if they were a citizen of some states, merely for the crime of existing. Freedom of belief is effectively illegal in many more countries, where changing your creed or having none is punishable to varying degrees. It is informally met with murders and persecution in yet more others. Even in liberal societies, non-believers face stereotyping, and negative media portrayals of their broad spectrum of philosophical beliefs. Did we really need this concept introduced into Star Trek? A rare show, created by a prominent atheist, who like other prominent atheists like Tom Paine or Jawaharlal Nehru trusted in the power of humanity to solve it's own problems, being brought uncomfortably close to the optics of making a point to one of last groups that deserve the lecture right now.
On the more production side, it is gratifying to see the Klingons reconciled with the species we knew, hair and all - the balance is just right. TrekBBS forumers wrote pages upon pages about the incongruity of the new D7 battlecruiser shown in season one, and the producers have pulled back on that much-hated design choice, reintroducing the classic ship.
The first two episodes of the season felt like Star Trek in spirit. Nothing is perfect of course, but I loved them. I actually looked forward to new episodes again on Fridays, which I haven't felt about a show in years. But I had this trepidation about getting too excited, because two episodes does not make a season - the tone could easily reverse in the space of an episode, as the same regime was still there - and the people who wrote theese episodes also happen to have been the people who bookended season one - worryingly, most of the tonal problems were concentrated in the middle 11-12 episodes of the season.
When Berg and Harberts were fired for allegedly shouting abuse at other writers, a lot of people felt maybe this was the signal of major changes behind the camera. Bullies should not be tolerated, and their behaviour, if true, was unprofessional. Perhaps it would clear the air and allow a more healthy writers room to develop. Yet... it wasn't their names attached to most of the worst material in season one, from Vulcan suicide bombings to Klingon sleeper agents murdering characters that had barely endeared themselves to us. The inconsistent material in season one, from the badly conceived mirror universe stuff, to the spore drive, to the unrelenting heaviness and mirthlessness of Burnham's attitudes to everything, was done with the full participation of the rest of the writer's room.
I am completely in the dark about who is responsible for what behind the camera, but as soon as we hit episode three, a lot of the worst material from the first season became central to the show again. Vulcan suicide bombers. A known perpetrator of genocide and known cannibal working for the Federation's covert interests. The episode was well plotted, but again, felt different in thematic content to Star Trek, in a way that a Star Wars story about drug addicts shooting up all day would in that franchise. I'm not opposed to material that examines the harshness of that the universe can contain, but I'm really not sure that is the approach Star Trek does best to inspire change and address problems.
Klingon Sexism
In Star Trek, especially after the 60s, gender equality was portrayed as such a given, that even adversarial societies like the Romulans and Klingons displayed no obvious bias, it was such a non-issue that societies of this level of development would have abandoned such primitive bigotry. If they can crack the warp drive, surely they cracked medieval attitudes hundreds of years ago? People were be equal under the law, and equal in fact as far as we can tell, in a society that had already entrenched reason to that degree. Things like bigotry occurred mainly between species, but not within them, as on the level of a Kardashev 1+ society, such things were generally in the past. Uhura noted that humans had learned to be delighted by difference, and had escaped the weight of history. That was really progressive, and inspiring.
But it is not how the current zeitgeist likes to do things. In the opinion of some current writers, if you don't show discrimination overtly, I get the feeling you are seen as something like a 'class traitor' in old revolutionary parlance - someone wilfully ignoring the struggle. So instead of presenting the inspiring upside of what we could achieve with reason, in current drama we are sometimes subjected to the very worst of prejudice with the best intentions. However, we all know the depths of prejudice and cruelty, surely, without having to overtly be reminded of what bigotry is like, in a show set 300 years in the future? In episode three, the Klingons go from being a species which seemed just as progressive as the Federation - Mara was science officer of a Klingon battlecruiser in 1968, at a time when the Soviet Union had more gender equality in the sciences and military than the west - to being one, in which the (admittedly untrustworthy) opinion of Georgiou, objects to L'Rell based solely on her gender? This change in Klingons started with DS9, as we know, but just became more acute.
Surely it does more to inspire a better world, if you show that even adversarial space age samurai consider such prejudice to be an anachronism? Irrelevant of if you think this is too idealistic, this was Star Trek's approach. It brings to mind a Ray Bradbury quote, about how science fiction is the genre of what can happen, as opposed to a genre of what has happened - the genre of revolutions in science and societies - showing a paradigm that does not exist yet, but only in the possibility of reason. I don't think these episodes made people uncomfortable because they are hiding from the truth, but because they can no longer watch with their family and say "look, this shows a better world"; it suggests inescapable conflict, and joyless struggle.
The Federation Kissinger Doctrine
I lack the godlike view of history that you would need, to say whether a progressive society needs to occasionally do something difficult or cruel, in furtherance of a greater good. Did democracies occasionally need to take a hard stance in order to prevent a worse outcome? Do societies ever need to torture, or to intervene in a threatening adversary's affairs? Or are these things that weaken those very institutions, cast doubt on their underpinnings? One might well then say that Lenin and Trotsky, or the leaders of the French Revolution, were right to seek any means to preserve their revolutions, although I know their republics were different in legal emphasis to say the USA, or India, or South Africa. The founders of those republics tried to set up imperfect institutions through which people could seek greater and greater universal rights, as opposed to sweeping away the old order through a coup. Perhaps as long as we struggle with this difficulty, and these choices are hard, we are at least not so far gone as to see human life as a means.
Star Trek is a show about a society that has continued to take reason as it's guiding star, a philosophical thought experiment in what rights and responsibilities time might reap, given the steady progression of reason, and of our conscientiousness for the environment and human welfare.
But why are modern writers so obsessed with introducing morally ambiguous elements into the United Federation of Planets? Do we really need an analogue in this future society for the well-understood failings of our own? Why not accept the central premise of Star Trek as part of it's charm, rather than trying to deconstruct it? Does the current zeitgeist assume that societies always have the same institutional problems, like a theory of eternal recurrence? History, and a reductive view of society suggests that future republics may have all the failings of the earliest ones like Rome. But crucially reason does not say that just because a thing has happened before, we are doomed to repeat it, and empiricism even suggests we are making constant strides in the right direction as a planet, despite setbacks.
Vulcan Jihadists
Even the most enlightened societies have their bad points. Any 'true world' doctrine can produce extremism, including secular ones. Yet, this has got to be one of the most egregious deconstructive flourishes incorporated into season one. The pacifist Surakian Vulcans... who literally worship the concept of diversity in the IDIC concept... have their own suicide bombers. "Surprise, we deconstructed your symbol of an enlightened people."
Star Trek was a show that was pretty gung-ho about the power of reason. Reason lets a person think "just because an injustice has happened before, does not necessarily mean it always must", where mere empiricism just reports the facts, reason imagines the possibilities. Tom Paine, and the founding fathers of the United States, reasoned that a monarch did not necessarily have to rule a state just because one had done so for a thousand years in England or France. They were imperfect people who reasoned a system that allowed people to win new rights. India's first and most successful prime minister, warned his constituents about that the process of election should be bigger than any one person, reinforcing an institution that remains in it's imperfect beauty today, despite setbacks.
But here we are, with presumably atheist suicide bombers, trying to presumably rid a pacifist free-thinking society of alien impurity, what, because they fear how unreasonable alien cultures are(?) Maybe they watch our TV, in which case I can't blame them. When you look at this from the perspective of atheists, the optics of this could look quite bad couldn't they? Non-belief is still, amazingly, highly persecuted as a community on our own planet in the present, despite having existed as long as religion has. In several countries, being an atheist carries the death penalty, largely at the hands of religious-nationalist regimes. Many people reading this would be executed if they were a citizen of some states, merely for the crime of existing. Freedom of belief is effectively illegal in many more countries, where changing your creed or having none is punishable to varying degrees. It is informally met with murders and persecution in yet more others. Even in liberal societies, non-believers face stereotyping, and negative media portrayals of their broad spectrum of philosophical beliefs. Did we really need this concept introduced into Star Trek? A rare show, created by a prominent atheist, who like other prominent atheists like Tom Paine or Jawaharlal Nehru trusted in the power of humanity to solve it's own problems, being brought uncomfortably close to the optics of making a point to one of last groups that deserve the lecture right now.
