What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[Ray Hardgrit]

Of course characters are important but Trekkies that consume Trek are an entirely different breed all of us here included. We need our Trek to be canon and explainable damn it!

That would explain why so many people hate BSG's ending...

 

[StarTrek1701]

That would explain why so many people hate BSG's ending...

Don't you dare open that can of worms here.

 

[Citiprime]

That would explain why so many people hate BSG's ending...

Don't you dare open that can of worms here.

A Star Trek-adjacent controversial opinion: I've always felt Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica was a pretty explicit reaction by Moore to his time on Star Trek. The overall tone of BSG, its themes, and even the ending were basically Moore taking a diametrically opposite philosophical position from Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek.

I've always seen a LOT of Deep Space Nine's ideas in Battlestar Galactica, and the overall series arguably takes inspiration from Moore's short stint on Voyager, where he advocated for a more realistic take on what it would mean for a desperate crew, alone, fleeing across deep space, looking for home (e.g., I think Moore advocated that when Voyager took damage, that damage should be there in the next episode and aspects like that should be recurring issues that have lasting impacts).

• The Cylon infiltration threat is the same paranoia inspiring problem the Changelings represent.
• The Cylons are divided into a hierarchy that's almost exactly the same way as the Dominion. The Centurions and Raiders are cannon-fodder slaves akin to the Jem'Hadar. The human Cylon models are a ruling class like the Founders. They have some models designed for human interaction and negotiation, but they also have the Vorta's resurrection abilities to retain memories in cloned bodies.
• Our military leader, Adama, is a single widowed father whose love for his son is one of the aspects that grounds him and gives him a purpose.
• Our political leader, Roslin, eventually comes to believe she has a religious destiny and operating according to prophecy (i.e., similar to Sisko's journey to accepting his role as the Emissary of the Prophets).
• The relationship between Helo and Athena shares aspects of Odo's and Kira's relationship, where a member of the "enemy" species chooses to go against their own kind out of love.

Where BSG and Star Trek diverge, and this gets into the ending and what I think a lot of people had problems with, is that Roddenberry's intention for Trek's philosophy is secular and optimistic about the betterment of mankind if only given a chance to be better, where Moore explicitly wanted a universe with an ambiguous spirituality guiding a screwed up group of people from a dysfunctional society that at times makes the audience question whether it deserves to survive.

In Star Trek, technology is a tool, with warp drive being a seminal inflection point for humanity's social evolution into something better and different. Data and AI are other forms of life to be explored and discovered, learned about and befriended. In BSG, humanity, by its nature, is a severely flawed species, and technology compounds those flaws, dooming humans to an unending cycle of violence and destruction.

So I've always taken Moore's "God did it" ending for BSG as him going to the other extreme from Roddenberry's position, making it almost an anti-Trek series.

 

[StarTrek1701]

A Star Trek-adjacent controversial opinion: I've always felt Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica was a pretty explicit reaction by Moore to his time on Star Trek. The overall tone of BSG, its themes, and even the ending were basically Moore taking a diametrically opposite philosophical position from Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek.

I've always seen a LOT of Deep Space Nine's ideas in Battlestar Galactica, and the overall series arguably takes inspiration from Moore's short stint on Voyager, where he advocated for a more realistic take on what it would mean for a desperate crew, alone, fleeing across deep space, looking for home (e.g., I think Moore advocated that when Voyager took damage, that damage should be there in the next episode and aspects like that should be recurring issues that have lasting impacts).

• The Cylon infiltration threat is the same paranoia inspiring problem the Changelings represent.
• The Cylons are divided into a hierarchy that's almost exactly the same way as the Dominion. The Centurions and Raiders are cannon-fodder slaves akin to the Jem'Hadar. The human Cylon models are a ruling class like the Founders. They have some models designed for human interaction and negotiation, but they also have the Vorta's resurrection abilities to retain memories in cloned bodies.
• Our military leader, Adama, is a single widowed father whose love for his son is one of the aspects that grounds him and gives him a purpose.
• Our political leader, Roslin, eventually comes to believe she has a religious destiny and operating according to prophecy (i.e., similar to Sisko's journey to accepting his role as the Emissary of the Prophets).
• The relationship between Helo and Athena shares aspects of Odo's and Kira's relationship, where a member of the "enemy" species chooses to go against their own kind out of love.

Where BSG and Star Trek diverge, and this gets into the ending and what I think a lot of people had problems with, is that Roddenberry's intention for Trek's philosophy is secular and optimistic about the betterment of mankind if only given a chance to be better, where Moore explicitly wanted a universe with an ambiguous spirituality guiding a screwed up group of people from a dysfunctional society that at times makes the audience question whether it deserves to survive.

In Star Trek, technology is a tool, with warp drive being a seminal inflection point for humanity's social evolution into something better and different. Data and AI are other forms of life to be explored and discovered, learned about and befriended. In BSG, humanity, by its nature, is a severely flawed species, and technology compounds those flaws, dooming humans to an unending cycle of violence and destruction.

So I've always taken Moore's "God did it" ending for BSG as him going to the other extreme from Roddenberry's position, making it almost an anti-Trek series.

You dwelved into the nittygritty way better than I ever could. Though I do have reservations about calling BSG(nu) anti-Trek.
For me personally and I know it'll be a controversial opinion, BSG started to miss the mark right after S2.5, that's when the storyline took this drastic turn towards inter-personal drama rather than focus on the battle for survival itself.
Yeah there were some memorable scenes and themes - Cylons marching down on New Caprica, the Adama Maneuver - but overall the series has been largely forgotten beyond scifi circles.
I honestly felt bad and embarassed when reruns of Enterprise were beating BSG first run episodes.

 

[Phoenix219]

That would explain why so many people hate BSG's ending...

BSG.... Lost.... Game of Thrones.....

 

[FredH]

• Our political leader, Roslin, eventually comes to believe she has a religious destiny and operating according to prophecy (i.e., similar to Sisko's journey to accepting his role as the Emissary of the Prophets).

I don’t think Roslin actually believes she has a religious destiny; she’s just perfectly willing to play the religion card to manipulate the masses.

EDIT: Speaking of “God”, I’m pretty sure that the entity that hates to be called that

Spoiler

is a primordial Cylon

; though bringing in religious or semi-religious elements is in keeping with the original show.

 

[Rahul]

Whenever people bring up the details of the tech in Star Trek, I always think of a show called Party Down that was about aspiring actors and writers in Hollywood working crappy jobs at a catering company. In one of the episodes, Martin Starr's character is writing a "hard" sci-fi script. They act it out, and he's put in all sorts of dialogue with highly-specific details in order to give a quasi-plausible explanation for every little thing, and it just does not work.

Steve Guttenberg, who plays himself, is the guest star in the episode and gets the group to rethink the whole thing from the ground up, get rid of most of the technobabble exposition, and realize that the story is about the characters and the situation the characters are in.

And I remember watching the episode and realized that something similar has probably happened at some point during a writer's room for Star Trek.

To me, you really don't have to explain any of the technology, like warp drive, in detail except in the broad strokes. What will make the audience suspend disbelief is if you give whatever fantastical technology within a story limits and rules, and you're consistent with those limits and rules. Or, if drama demands, you come up with a good exception for why you can break those limits and rules for a specific moment and acknowledge it.

Otherwise, if it's something fantastical that's not clearly defined with no limitations, it's basically magic within the story and you've gone into fantasy. Terry Pratchett, the English author responsible for the Discworld series, made this argument about Doctor Who. Pratchett once wrote an entire column explaining why he believed Doctor Who is not science-fiction. And one example he pointed to was that he likened The Doctor's sonic screwdriver to a magic wand. It has no clearly defined rules or limits and can basically do whatever the script needs it to do for the story.

I really agree with this, with one GIANT caveat:
Plot critical powers need their limits explained. Not how they work. But what works & what doesn't.

E.g.: You cannot beam through shields. You cannot beam from one planet to another. A shuttle is slower than a starship. You cannot "clone" people in the transporter. The phaser cannot resurrect people.

Not knowing this information would break the plot & the stakes (e.g. any hostage situation, or just beam a bomb on the enemy ship), so the writers kind of HAVE to awkwardly shuffle in some exposition, to make it clear what challenges the heroes must overcome and what is allowed/not allowed. An that's okay.

Stargate was a masterclass at this: They never went too deep into pseudo-science, but all the "rules" about wormholes (e.g. the 37 minutes, the one-directional travel, the iris) were logical & restricting "cheating" solutions to their plotlines.

Harry Potter was the worst. Great characterization & stories, but from a nitpicking perspective half the time the plots could/should have been solved with an already established spell, and the plot often needed to actively ignore it's worldbuilding to make sense (e.g. why did no one ever notice Ron's rat being a known person on the magic map?). There really needed to be some "anti"-tactics against common spells (like the polyjuice), to explain why only the heroes (or that one villain one time) could use it, but wasn't used all the other times where it would have solved the problem in seconds.

I know when they were writing '90s Trek they used to write [TECH] in the script in place of technobabble and let someone else deal with it. It was a good plan, except it resulted in the poor actors having to memorise and deliver lines of nonsense with conviction. On the other hand, the shows were surprisingly consistent with the nonsense, and it felt like they were giving us pieces of how the technology worked without just telling us outright.

I know the actors HATED it. And they overdid it a lot (e.g. on VOY so much, that even Berman & Braga self-corrected on ENT).

But in general I think this is great - it makes sure the science mumbo-jumbo is consistent (as it will come from the same consultants), at best even have some real-world background (if the consultants are good), the writers can focu on the characters (instead of vocabulary), and if the resolution to an episode's is written down as "[tech]", everyone knows it's a cheat, so the writers make sure the actual plotlines are resolved by something more clever (e.g. "reverse the polaron field" was never the solution to a science problem on VOY, it was something they attempted in the middle of the episode & failed, or was a minor thing, and the real solution was something more "human").

 

[Rahul]

A Star Trek-adjacent controversial opinion: I've always felt Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica was a pretty explicit reaction by Moore to his time on Star Trek. The overall tone of BSG, its themes, and even the ending were basically Moore taking a diametrically opposite philosophical position from Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek.

I've always seen a LOT of Deep Space Nine's ideas in Battlestar Galactica, and the overall series arguably takes inspiration from Moore's short stint on Voyager, where he advocated for a more realistic take on what it would mean for a desperate crew, alone, fleeing across deep space, looking for home (e.g., I think Moore advocated that when Voyager took damage, that damage should be there in the next episode and aspects like that should be recurring issues that have lasting impacts).

• The Cylon infiltration threat is the same paranoia inspiring problem the Changelings represent.
• The Cylons are divided into a hierarchy that's almost exactly the same way as the Dominion. The Centurions and Raiders are cannon-fodder slaves akin to the Jem'Hadar. The human Cylon models are a ruling class like the Founders. They have some models designed for human interaction and negotiation, but they also have the Vorta's resurrection abilities to retain memories in cloned bodies.
• Our military leader, Adama, is a single widowed father whose love for his son is one of the aspects that grounds him and gives him a purpose.
• Our political leader, Roslin, eventually comes to believe she has a religious destiny and operating according to prophecy (i.e., similar to Sisko's journey to accepting his role as the Emissary of the Prophets).
• The relationship between Helo and Athena shares aspects of Odo's and Kira's relationship, where a member of the "enemy" species chooses to go against their own kind out of love.

Where BSG and Star Trek diverge, and this gets into the ending and what I think a lot of people had problems with, is that Roddenberry's intention for Trek's philosophy is secular and optimistic about the betterment of mankind if only given a chance to be better, where Moore explicitly wanted a universe with an ambiguous spirituality guiding a screwed up group of people from a dysfunctional society that at times makes the audience question whether it deserves to survive.

In Star Trek, technology is a tool, with warp drive being a seminal inflection point for humanity's social evolution into something better and different. Data and AI are other forms of life to be explored and discovered, learned about and befriended. In BSG, humanity, by its nature, is a severely flawed species, and technology compounds those flaws, dooming humans to an unending cycle of violence and destruction.

So I've always taken Moore's "God did it" ending for BSG as him going to the other extreme from Roddenberry's position, making it almost an anti-Trek series.

This is exactly it.

Every artistic choice is kind of an anti-Trek decision, up to the minute details (e.g. the Trek bridge looks forward, so the BSG bridge looks inward. The Trek meeting room is a round table, so the BSG planning room is a forward centered briefing room. The engineering is specifically pipes and steam, because those were always forbidden on Trek. There's a clear hierarchy, with the pilots on top and technicians at the bottom, instead of everyone being eye-level. And half the plots are about resources & allocations, which is a non-issue on Trek)

But really the biggest contrast is the "no personal conflicts"-rule from Trek. BSG LIVES from interpersonal conflict. Everything is personal, even the main conflicts boil down to it.


Ironically, I never really warmed up to DS9, because I could never really shake the feeling the creators actually didn't really like Star Trek's philosophy that much, and their "deconstruction" was really just them trying to undermine the Trek rules.
However I absolutely LOVE BSG - because it's 100% it's own thing, and it really feels the writers finally fully do what they always wanted to have done, and stand 100% by their choices and ideas, even if they're crude sometimes.

And, ironically, by differentiating it in every single detail, BSG feels so much more unique and independent than, say, something like Babylon 5, which has a few unique ideas itself, but also feels like all the non-concious worldbuilding was just more or less directly lifted from Star Trek or Wars.

 

[137th Gebirg]

BSG.... Lost.... Game of Thrones.....

None of them got shit on the Sopranos ending. That was epic fuckery.

 

[Phoenix219]

None of them got shit on the Sopranos ending. That was epic fuckery.

I actually was okay with that one. The life of a gangster......

And the duality of, did Tony get capped, or .... was it us, the viewer, time to mind our own business, we don't get to watch anymore.

Maybe I just saw it before I got tired of crappy endings later in life. lol.

 

[Shawnster]

Starships in the Star Wars franchise universe have more firepower, faster speed, and are overall more advanced than ships in the Star Trek franchise universe.

Slave 1 has essentially the same level of firepower as the Enterprise D

 

[Frontis]

But the ships in Star Trek look cooler

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

Starships in the Star Wars franchise universe have more firepower, faster speed, and are overall more advanced than ships in the Star Trek franchise universe.

Slave 1 has essentially the same level of firepower as the Enterprise D

My impression: the ships are bigger and faster, weapons pack a bigger punch, but the world of Star Wars is generally low tech compared to Star Trek. Sure, Darth Vader might force toss Commander Riker around, storm troopers might blast up some red shirts, but the Enterprise-D vs. one star destroyer, the Ent-D will take a pounding, but they'll end up tech-ing their way out of it.

 

[fireproof78]

Starships in the Star Wars franchise universe have more firepower, faster speed, and are overall more advanced than ships in the Star Trek franchise universe.

Slave 1 has essentially the same level of firepower as the Enterprise D

Except Han says the fleet couldn't destroy an entire planet while TOS seems quite confident in its ability to level a civilization.

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

Except Han says the fleet couldn't destroy an entire planet while TOS seems quite confident in its ability to level a civilization.

Yeah, can't a single starship cruise around a planet a few times and take out all of the major cities with ease?

 

[cooleddie74]

General Order 24 exists in TOS, so possibly?

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

General Order 24 exists in TOS, so possibly?

What is GO24? I'm only 9 episodes into the show.

 

[Warp Core Breach]

What is GO24? I'm only 9 episodes into the show.

It's in "A Taste of Armageddon", late season one. I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but it's a great episode (as is most of S1).

 

[cooleddie74]

It's a General Order many fans feel shouldn't exist if Starfleet were an ethical body representing a democratic society, but for me the concept works.

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

It's in "A Taste of Armageddon", late season one. I'm not gonna spoil it for you, but it's a great episode (as is most of S1).

OK, late S1, the Armageddon episode, I'll keep that in mind, thank you!