Was Trek ever really intelligent sci-fi?

[BigJake]

I'm wondering what people consider to be truly adult science fiction then?

Adult-oriented is fairly easy to identify. The metric of "challenging at an adult level" sounds like a lot more of a moving target. Different people might find Children of Men "challenging" or not, depending on how that word is defined or whether or not it's viewed as a good thing. With sufficient snobbery-fu one could rule out all of screen SF as "challenging at an adult level" with the exception of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or something.

 

[Ryan8bit]

Adult sci-fi:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZhJQX1LcIc[/yt]

Sorry, someone had to.

 

[Christopher]

The only people who are preoccupied with being "adult" are those who are insecure in their own maturity. It's really a very adolescent concern, the mindset of someone desperately trying to prove that one is all grown up and important now. I think that people who are truly mature are willing to enjoy any entertaining story without worrying about how "adult" it is. And I've seen a lot of "children's" shows and movies that are smarter, more meaningful, and more sophisticated than a lot of the "adult" shows and movies out there.

 

[BigJake]

Adult sci-fi:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZhJQX1LcIc[/yt]

Sorry, someone had to.

What in the world...

 

[Kemaiku]

I'm questioning traditional Trekkie thinking...

That's not allowed. If you don't recognize "Spock's Brain" as brilliant sci-fi, then there's obviously something wrong with you.

I remember on Futurama, Fry saying there were seventy-nine episodes and about thirty of them were good in reference to Star Trek. Which sounds about right if you sat down and did an unbiased review of the series (quite frankly, some of it sucks really bad). I think that ratio pretty well holds for the spin-off series as well. About forty-percent of the episodes were actually "good".

Which is roughly right for the movies too actually. Although I don't think the tagline "Star Trek, 40% of it isn't shit!" wouldn't go down too well.

 

[BigJake]

The only people who are preoccupied with being "adult" are those who are insecure in their own maturity. [snip]

Mr. Bennett, describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.

If you don't recognize "Spock's Brain" as brilliant sci-fi, then there's obviously something wrong with you.

Yes, there are tons of people who think "Spock's Brain" is brilliant sci-fi and anyone who doesn't agree with you must be one of them. That's the ticket...

 

[AgentCoop]

Adult sci-fi:
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZhJQX1LcIc[/yt]

Sorry, someone had to.

I don't like the guy playing Picard. He's too stiff.



I'll see myself out.

 

[Robert Comsol]

I'm wondering what people consider to be truly adult science fiction then?

BABYLON 5 & THE PRISONER (McGoohan)

Be Seeing You!

Bob

 

[Mudd]

I think that people who are truly mature are willing to enjoy any entertaining story without worrying about how "adult" it is.

That's nice. Of course I already said as much.

Of course, one can easily assert something like "the only people who react negatively to having children's entertainment identified as such are adults who are insecure in their maturity." I tend to think that's probably as inaccurate and as much of an overstatement as yours.

Nonetheless, the preoccupations of "Star Trek" remain adolescent; the show doesn't have much to say about the emotional and life concerns of adults. There's no reason that it should, of course, since like most adventure fiction it's devoted to the impossible adventures of people who could not exist.

 

[Kemaiku]

I'm wondering what people consider to be truly adult science fiction then?

BABYLON 5 & THE PRISONER (McGoohan)

Be Seeing You!

Bob

Poorly written religious mysticism in space and drug fueled anti-establishment paranoia. Adult maybe, interesting, not really.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I think some people are trying to use 'adult' and 'cerebral' interchangeably.

Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are wonderful, very intelligent scifi. Are they the measuring stick to consider something 'Adult' or 'Intelligent'? Absolutely not. Does a film have to cater to formalists and film students like 2001 in order to be considered 'Intelligent'? Absolutely not. Does science fiction have to declare itself completely reflective and disavow any 'Adolescent' adventure themes to be intelligent? Again, absolutely not. The two can coexist just fine and that's exactly what Star Trek intends to do, even if it fails often.

I'm scratching my head a bit about how somebody could call Babylon 5 more 'Adult' than Star Trek. More serialized, sure, but it's pretty much on the same level of 'Philosophically opinionated adventure scifi' as Star Trek. And The Prisoner is wonderful and highly abstracted, and that makes it cool, but it doesn't make it more 'Adult'. Maybe a little more cerebral.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

My definition of 'adult entertainment' is pretty much anything that doesn't talk down to its audience.

 

[BigJake]

Poorly written religious mysticism in space and drug fueled anti-establishment paranoia.

Heh. It's rare and quite fascinating to encounter someone who's even more dyspeptic than I am about what constitutes good and bad writing. (As for anti-establishment paranoia, I don't know much from The Prisoner but gosh darn it, at least the drug-fuelled variety is fun. I learned that much from Phillip K. Dick. )

I think some people are trying to use 'adult' and 'cerebral' interchangeably.

Spoiler: My take

There is -- Christopher's rather amusing attempts at psychoanalysis notwithstanding -- a perfectly good reason why "adult-oriented" is often used as a shorthand for what level of sophistication a given show aspires to. The reason being that you can generally get away with expending less effort on things like plot, script or acting (or almost anything else) when your exclusive concern is marketing toys and happy-meals to kids, since as long as you're providing a bare minimum of excitement and bright objects, kids generally don't know the difference. "Adult-oriented" is therefore frequently shorthand for extravagances like taking the material seriously, trying to write good scripts that have something interesting to say, and so on. That's why genres primarily thought of as "children's entertainment" are often described as being "disregarded as children's entertainment;" disregard has long been a fact of how children's entertainment is treated, certainly in television, or at least was so until the Nineties.

The distinction is a lot less bright in today's world, which has Pixar and MLP:FiM and Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Clone Wars animated series and a wide variety of other children's-oriented properties that are also intelligently written and produced and have broad appeal. (Hence the term "adult-oriented kids' movie / show" now exists, and it's not the oxymoron it would seem to be; it basically just means children's entertainment into which enough effort has been put to also entertain adults.) It comes into play here primarily, at least for me, because Star Trek originated from an older paradigm in which children's programming was proverbially idiotic -- excepting Looney Tunes -- and sci-fi was genuinely seen as "kid's stuff" in a way that would seem quaint today... except that it's still not unheard-of for properties to ditch any semblance of sophistication, coherency and creative ambition in the pursuit of making shiny things for children in order to leverage their parents' income.

 

[Mudd]

Adult sci-fi:


Sorry, someone had to.

Xander Corvus as Data? They'd have been better off with James Deen. And April O'Neil doesn't work as Troi.

Nice production values.

 

[Robert Comsol]

Poorly written religious mysticism in space and drug fueled anti-establishment paranoia. Adult maybe, interesting, not really.

You are entitled to your opinion if that's all you are able to see.

B5 addresses issues of being. Will you go through life with an egotistical social Darwinist attitude and a "dog eats dog" mentality, be herded around like a cattle of sheep because your government knows best or do something else and act and live differently?

And we do have principal characters that change from one end to its polar opposite during the series because of certain key events influencing their lives. That's a bit more realistic than having characters that essentially stay the same all the time, IMHO.

Your "drug fueled" comment about THE PRISONER reveals that you apparently haven't watched the series (but listened to the censors who felt it was "drug fueled" just because the Village wardens abused drugs to break Number Six in one or two eps). The series examined another interesting issue, namely how much can your keep your individuality and still survive within a system that requires conformism and submission (which reminds me ... ).

Unfortunately many people got the wrong message thinking the agenda was about "anti-establishment" which compelled the late Patrick McGoohan to state that this was not the case but that the Number One we had to battle every day was not the system but "the enemy within" ourselves (complaining about society is like complaining about a traffic jam - you are part of it).

Okay, you provided us with a "negative". Now, how about a "positive" which is adult and interesting according to your liking?

Bob

 

[Isolinear]

My definition of 'adult entertainment' is pretty much anything that doesn't talk down to its audience.

"Drugs are bad Wesley".

Intelligent, Adult, Cerebral. Agreed, there are many Star Trek episodes that don't exactly fit that description. But the average episode has a lot less "Pew Pew shoot the bad guys" than Star Wars or other brainless sci-fi.

 

[Isolinear]

Your "drug fueled" comment about THE PRISONER reveals that you apparently haven't watched the series (but listened to the censors who felt it was "drug fueled" just because the Village wardens abused drugs to break Number Six in one or two eps).

Well, I watched the series for the first time a few months ago, and I must say, near the end the show got weirder and weirder and weirder. So much so that I couldn't understand what the hell was happening in the last two episodes. Almost unwatchable. And this is coming from someone who likes David Lynch's Inland Empire.
To me it definitely felt like the writers were on something. A real disapointment after the fantastic first ten episodes.

 

[Kemaiku]

To me it definitely felt like the writers were on something. A real disapointment after the fantastic first ten episodes.

Exactly, whatever ideas they started out with rapidly disappeared, replaced with as much random nonsence they could think of.

 

[Drone]

To me it definitely felt like the writers were on something. A real disapointment after the fantastic first ten episodes.

Exactly, whatever ideas they started out with rapidly disappeared, replaced with as much random nonsence they could think of.

The writers., i.e. McGoohan, pretty much admittedly lost their way, were faced with running out of time to wrap up production, and were left taking stabs with relying on utilizing recognizable symbols of the zeitgeist to put the bow on a finale that a number of people felt they were being charitable in describing as an early precursor to "Oh, so it was all just a fantasy in the shower".

 

[Drone]

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" really isn't any less "cerebral" than "The Cage," but it has an added dose of excitement. There's a level of dynamic character and energy, passion, to the whole effort that makes it feel more alive. In this respect NBC was right in telling GR to try again. That isn't to say WNMHGB didn't make mistakes. While I haven't really thought out what they could have done differently there are choices in the episode that don't really make sense.

How about being a bit more deliberate in jumping off the deep end of the galaxy to begin with? You have just brought aboard, with much drama and portentousness, the time capsule of some unfortunates who attempted the same daring mission that you've been charged with. Needless to say, they weren't up to it, but instead of being a bit more circumspect about trying to discern what exactly may have happened to the Valiant so as to possible avoiding the same fate, your thoughtful Captain, er command staff, decides that giving the evidence about 2 minutes of scrutiny is sufficient and away we go!!


Is Starfleet surreptitiously keeping tabs on their time utilization? Perhaps there was a percived need that the virgin viewers not come under the delusion that work rules in the 23rd century allow for overtime!!


I guess it wouldn't be sufficiently active to have, say, sent a probe in first to get some gauge on what effects this unknown space with rather anomalous properties might have on their own technology.


Perhaps it's been addressed in some TOS fiction, but I've long thought it would have been appropriate to have a story that would have had Kirk bedeviled by the thought that he was essentially responsible for what happened to his friend, that his decision to rush precipitously into the Barrier was one that a more seasoned and sensible leader would not have made.