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What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

Fans aren't crying when a nameless redshirt fails to return from a mission.
Speak for yourself.


Yes it is. If you love the portrayal it is at best cheap to go why not recast so we can milk that for some more appearances by different people.
I don't see the disrespect. This is still a business first.


Rarely is, at least or especially for people who loved one version, a successor also embraced
Irrelevant. Not asking for an embrace. Just noting that it can be done, has been done, and isn't disrespectful but a part of the nature of the work.
 
I have NEVER seen the original Hamlet.

See, here's the thing about Hamlet and how this response is really a strawman argument. Hamlet is 1 story. Each production is a retelling of that same story. Each alteration or reinterpretation is essentially a reboot. There is no Hamlet saga. There is no Hamlet universe. Nobody has produced 60ish years of the continuing story of Hamlet, Hamlet: The Next Generation, Deep Space Hamlet, Strange New Hamlet, etc...

To apply the Hamlet rationale to Star Trek is great as long as it's accepted that Star Trek is being rebooted, reinterpreted, reimagined, etc and that the subsequent productions are not telling the story of a cohesive universe that span 300 to nearly 1,000 years.
 
See, here's the thing about Hamlet and how this response is really a strawman argument. Hamlet is 1 story. Each production is a retelling of that same story. Each alteration or reinterpretation is essentially a reboot. There is no Hamlet saga. There is no Hamlet universe. Nobody has produced 60ish years of the continuing story of Hamlet, Hamlet: The Next Generation, Deep Space Hamlet, Strange New Hamlet, etc...
There WAS a Hamlet 2 movie which was laughed out of town, though it wasn't meant to be taken seriously anyway. An American production.;)
 
Who was she saving, though? Sheridan. Who wad Sheridan? A person she loved dearly. A character the fans were heavily invested in. Sheridan was well known and beloved.

Now, change Sheridan to a different character, a character nobody knows. A character never seen before, during, nor since. A character never on screen and never heard of before that moment. Does Delenn still willingly sacrifice for this completely unknown individual? As a fan, do you care? Is that a dramatic moment that tugs at the viewers heartstrings? No.

Now, it should. It still is heroic. It's still the ultimate sacrifice. But we're talking dramatic entertainment, not real life. It's not a compelling, heroic story. As pointed out above, viewers mourned the loss of lives on those planets Nomad sterilized, nor the crew of the Constellation. Fans aren't crying when a nameless redshirt fails to return from a mission.

Drama and heroism in fiction comes from connecting with the audience. Threaten to destroy Earth I actually destroy Vulcan and fans are involved because we feel we have skin in the game.
Delenn was also ready to sacrifice herself for others (or a single, random person) on numerous other occasions. For example, in "CEREMONIES OF LIGHT AND DARK", when the random, unnamed third captured Minbari was being taken to be killed to prove a point to the B5 command staff, she was pleading with the kidnappers to take her instead.

It's still heroic, whether the person or people sacrificing themselves for is known to us or not. WE know Delenn. WE know Kirk. They are being heroic.
 
See, here's the thing about Hamlet and how this response is really a strawman argument. Hamlet is 1 story. Each production is a retelling of that same story. Each alteration or reinterpretation is essentially a reboot. There is no Hamlet saga. There is no Hamlet universe. Nobody has produced 60ish years of the continuing story of Hamlet, Hamlet: The Next Generation, Deep Space Hamlet, Strange New Hamlet, etc...

To apply the Hamlet rationale to Star Trek is great as long as it's accepted that Star Trek is being rebooted, reinterpreted, reimagined, etc and that the subsequent productions are not telling the story of a cohesive universe that span 300 to nearly 1,000 years.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern disagree. Or they would, but it seems they are dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet#Derivative_works
 
The tons of apparently human "aliens" on all these planets they run in to are actually humans from generation ships (or suchlike) who haven't been caught up on the "modern" era.
oh I LIKE that one.

Kinda wish we had a few explicitely sleeper/generation ship plots in TOS so we could see how non federation human settlements are handled compared to the non human non federation settlements.
 
And the Earth Cargo Service ships sort of functioned as their own authorities, so we got to see how humans in deep space of the 22nd century got to govern their own affairs and react to outsiders telling them how to behave with other species.
 
Kinda wish we had a few explicitely sleeper/generation ship plots in TOS so we could see how non federation human settlements are handled compared to the non human non federation settlements.
It makes sense that in the window between space travel becoming popularly viable and the development of warp drive that people would do that. Especially the cult-y types that end up forming strange societies for the Enterprise to run into ...
 
Yeah, but that’s basically where we live. In Trek, (human) warp is invented less than 39 years from now!
Yeah but its not like everybody's off galivanting around the galaxy the day the warp drive is invented. The majority of human activity is in the Sol system even in the ENT era.
 
I think there's a gap that someone could make an Expanse-esque story about how humanity reacted after first contact and the invention of warp drive.

The current canon implies that it takes almost a century after Cochrane's warp flight for United Earth to become a unified world government with total control of the planet.

Q's court of atomic horrors that occurs in TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint" is supposed to be in 2079. That's a full 16 years after first contact. Whatever government that court was supposed to represent had drug-addicted soldiers that were being used to fight someone.

So warp drive and contact with the Vulcans sets humanity on the path towards the Federation, but I've always thought given the different pieces of story we've gotten about the 21st and 22nd centuries, there must have been conflicts to unify Earth, or maybe conflicts over control of resources in the solar system, that occurred between different powers and interests, some of which that may not have wanted to become part of United Earth.

I also think a story like that would put a different spin on Enterprise's take on the Vulcans withholding advanced technology. If you were dealing with a species that had just nuked their own planet, and even after achieving warp drive was still kind of a shitshow for decades, I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable giving them phasers and photon torpedoes.
 
I think there's a gap that someone could make an Expanse-esque story about how humanity reacted after first contact and the invention of warp drive.

The current canon implies that it takes almost a century after Cochrane's warp flight for United Earth to become a unified world government with total control of the planet.

Q's court of atomic horrors that occurs in TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint" is supposed to be in 2079. That's a full 16 years after first contact. Whatever government that court was supposed to represent had drug-addicted soldiers that were being used to fight someone.

So warp drive and contact with the Vulcans sets humanity on the path towards the Federation, but I've always thought given the different pieces of story we've gotten about the 21st and 22nd centuries, there must have been conflicts to unify Earth, or maybe conflicts over control of resources in the solar system, that occurred between different powers and interests, some of which that may not have wanted to become part of United Earth.

I also think a story like that would put a different spin on Enterprise's take on the Vulcans withholding advanced technology. If you were dealing with a species that had just nuked their own planet, and even after achieving warp drive was still kind of a shitshow for decades, I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable giving them phasers and photon torpedoes.

I like this idea. I have a kind of headcanon, not really fleshed out, that post-first contact Earth continued to decline until it ended up as a anarchic basket case in the 2070s and 2080s, really a failed world, and it was the colonies that warp drive allowed to exist and flourish – first on other planets and moons in our solar system, then on nearby solar systems like Alpha Centauri – that took resources back to Earth and enabled it to rebuild.

As you say, this makes the Vulcan reluctance to help Earth out make much more sense. In the space of one Vulcan lifetime they've gone from not knowing aliens exist and being confined to a single planet, to almost wiping themselves out, to discovering warp drive, to their homeworld collapsing into anarchy while they go off and build their first colonies, and now they've rebuilt their homeworld with new resources and a brand new and untested planetary government – and they expect to be taken seriously on the galactic stage!? These people are clearly bonkers and want careful watching!
 
I also think a story like that would put a different spin on Enterprise's take on the Vulcans withholding advanced technology. If you were dealing with a species that had just nuked their own planet, and even after achieving warp drive was still kind of a shitshow for decades, I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable giving them phasers and photon torpedoes.
Out of universe TPTB from UPN were desperate to get the ENT upgraded to phasers and photon torpedoes.
We really could have done without the whole 'Klingon lands on Earth a century prior cuz of temporal cold war' crap.
 
I think there's a gap that someone could make an Expanse-esque story about how humanity reacted after first contact and the invention of warp drive.

The current canon implies that it takes almost a century after Cochrane's warp flight for United Earth to become a unified world government with total control of the planet.

Q's court of atomic horrors that occurs in TNG's "Encounter at Farpoint" is supposed to be in 2079. That's a full 16 years after first contact. Whatever government that court was supposed to represent had drug-addicted soldiers that were being used to fight someone.

So warp drive and contact with the Vulcans sets humanity on the path towards the Federation, but I've always thought given the different pieces of story we've gotten about the 21st and 22nd centuries, there must have been conflicts to unify Earth, or maybe conflicts over control of resources in the solar system, that occurred between different powers and interests, some of which that may not have wanted to become part of United Earth.

I also think a story like that would put a different spin on Enterprise's take on the Vulcans withholding advanced technology. If you were dealing with a species that had just nuked their own planet, and even after achieving warp drive was still kind of a shitshow for decades, I wouldn't exactly feel comfortable giving them phasers and photon torpedoes.
Suggests a sort of “Earth Trek” Post Atomic Horror-era series, with the new fledgling United Earth Project sending Expeditionary Reconstruction teams out into the wastelands to treat with various little technobarbarian communities — all while aloof, mysterious Vulcan starships hover ominously in the sky.

Probably no talking chimps, but you never know.
 
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