When Trek insults our intelligence

[TribbleFeeder]

This thread is tense. Haha

My 15 year old son and I have watched every episode of TNG, VOY, ENT, DS9, and DSC. He's not interested in even trying TOS, and he thinks DSC had the best first season of all of them. Kids today, eh? Probably ruined by the video games and the smart phones.

Maybe have him watch the Trials and Tribble-ations episode in DS9? That’s a good bridge between old and slightly less old

I don't feel insulted personally but sometimes I think those behind Discovery think we're all stupid misogynistic racist bigots who need to be schooled in what diversity is. After 50 years of Star Trek I suppose that's insulting not only to the fanbase but Star Trek itself.

Can you elaborate on this a little more?

 

[Vger23]

Wow, seriously? I couldn't disagree more. I think they're almost polar opposites.


How so? The Abrams films practically thrive on insulting the audience's intelligence. They practically exemplify the term "idiot plot."


That's really, really not true. Really. It's an exercise in endurance just to try to catalog them all.


Well, that's a shame, and his loss. Why not?


I don't follow your reasoning here. I can enjoy watching films from the 1930s or '40s (okay, not Flash Gordon, but higher quality stuff), and TV shows from the '50s, and have no problem getting emotionally invested. And this was equally true when I was a teen. What exactly do you imagine poses an "impossible" barrier between Star Trek and a teen today? The fact that something is old doesn't mean that it's hokey, or campy, or outdated, or irrelevant... or that its characters aren't human beings dealing with the same kinds of challenges we can relate to today.

I mean, you may be right about this particular kid's attitude, for all I know, but I don't think we can know without additional information, much less generalize about others his age.


Yes, the tone of DSC is very different from the tone of TOS. But I really can't agree with this hypothesis as the reason. There are certainly lots of daunting challenges facing society today, but that's been true for prior generations as well. I don't think our culture as a whole is significantly more nihilistic, and certainly the Millennials among whom I live, work, and socialize aren't nihilistic on an individual level.


OTOH, I can't agree with that either. Have you looked at American politics in the last couple of years?...


It is indeed interesting, and why would anyone be put off by politics? (Granted, it's meat and bread to me... I'm a lifelong political junkie, and these days I study the stuff.) Political psychology in particular is a fascinating subfield, and the author does a good job summing up some of the major findings about differing attitudes across the political spectrum. (I could wish that he'd cite some of the specific research involved rather than just listing references at the end, but that's probably just the academic in me...)


Because Trek has always been set in an idealistic, utopian future?...


Exactly!


Ah, sorry to hear that. Sanders would have won, y'know.

(Also, just a pet peeve, but it's the Democratic Party, not the "Democrat Party." Only right-wingers call it that!...)

Honestly, TWOK is riddled with plot holes, contrivances, continuity gaps, inane science and all the exact same things that plague 2009. TUC (another fan-darling film) is even worse. Hell, TSFS's entire existence is predicated in a massive, gaping plothole (why the fuck does Kirk even need to go back to Genesis?).

We just give those things a pass because they've been around longer and star the original casts.

Trust me, I remember these discussions with the JJ detractors back in May 2009. It is no different than now. If you inherently don't like something, those things come to the surface and become rationalization and justifications for that dislike (which by the way isn't required, because it's all a matter of taste anyway, so you don't need to justify anything to us! ). If you like something (I'm guessing one of the above films fit your "I like" category), we spend time making excuses and rationalizing those very same issues away.

There's certainly nothing wrong with either behavior. It's very human and we all have our own personal tastes. But let's not pretend like one film was worse in the plothole category than others. It simply isn't true in these cases that I've listed here.

 

[1001001]

I caught TUC on Starz the other day. And while I still really enjoy it, the plot is ridiculous. There is so much wrong with that film!

Maybe have him watch the Trials and Tribble-ations episode in DS9? That’s a good bridge between old and slightly less old

We did. And we did watch TTWT right before it (I told him he'd enjoy it a lot more if he saw the original).

 

[Nyotarules]

Star Trek does not insult our intelligence, it just expects its audience to suspend its disbelief for 45 minutes (the tv shows) to just under 2 hours (the movies).
Sometimes it works
a. humans having babies with aliens - Spock, Deanna Troi, Keylar, B'ELanna Torres
b. humans being the cultural big cheese in an interstellar community, (a reflection of how RL USA sees itself),
c. The Klingons, in all their forms (the first retcon was ST TMP, (I bet people where peeing their panties in 1979)
d. English being the official language of this interstellar community (Anglocentric much)
And sometimes it does not
a. You can get from Earth to Vulcan in under 5 minutes and to Kronos in ten seconds (JJverse)
b. When you save the world you jump 50 ranks and get promoted to Captain (JJverse)
c. This interstellar space navy has pyjamas and mini skirts as a uniform, and expects to be treated as a professional body. (TOS)
d. A TOS starship representing the Federation has one alien crewmember (the aliens better call the intergalactic NAACP, plus its like a United Earth spaceship representing Earth where 99% of the crew are Australian)

 

[Nyotarules]

The existence of the USS Intrepid - a Starfleet vessel crewed entirely by Vulcans - proves it.

They all joined one year after Spock graduated.. all 430 of them, believe it!.

 

[Vger23]

I caught TUC on Starz the other day. And while I still really enjoy it, the plot is ridiculous. There is so much wrong with that film!

It's true. The plot and various story points throughout make absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than 10 minutes.

And somehow, I still find a way to enjoy it, and not have to write a blog and start a YouTube channel about it.

I'm crazy like that though.

 

[Nyotarules]

Spock was a LCDR/CDR during TOS' run. The Intrepid, being a Constitution-class ship just like the Enterprise, presumably had a full command crew up to and including the rank of Captain. So since there must have been officers on the Intrepid who outranked Spock, some of them must have been in Starfleet before Spock.

Unless they all saved the Federation like Kelvin Kirk and skipped a few ranks

 

[Nyotarules]

I'm going by what was said in TOS. By the time of "Menagerie" Spock had served in Starfleet for well over a decade. Assuming he had at least 4 years of Academy training, and it becomes somewhere between 15-20 years.

Were any other Vulcans in Starfleet prior to Spock's entering Starfleet Academy?

I don't consider any novels to be valid sources in answering this, nor would I accept anything from Enterprise, due to the copious retcons in that series.

TOS has never stated Spock was the only Vulcan to attend the SFA, we might as well assume Uhura and Charlene were the only black females based on TOS

 

[Timewalker]

Hell, TSFS's entire existence is predicated in a massive, gaping plothole (why the fuck does Kirk even need to go back to Genesis?).

Because Spock's katra and his body need to be rejoined. Unless McCoy has gained the ability to steal and operate a starship all by himself, the safest way for this to happen is for Kirk, et. al to help him. Therefore, Kirk also needs to go back to Genesis.

I should have thought this was all quite obvious.

 

[Vger23]

Because Spock's katra and his body need to be rejoined. Unless McCoy has gained the ability to steal and operate a starship all by himself, the safest way for this to happen is for Kirk, et. al to help him. Therefore, Kirk also needs to go back to Genesis.

I should have thought this was all quite obvious.

You don't need to rejoin a katra with a dead body. Kirk and Sarek had no idea, until Kirk talks to Saavik in orbit of Genesis, that Spock's body was alive. Putting a katra in a dead body would simply "kill" it.

Therefore, there's absolutely no reason, in the way the film was written and in the way the plot unfolds, for Kirk to need to return to Genesis. Based on everything they knew at that time, they literally just needed to bring McCoy to Vulcan.

EDIT: and despite this gaping hole in the fabric of the film, I still find a way to LOVE TSFS. That's the whole point of my argument.

 

[BK613]

You don't need to rejoin a katra with a dead body. Kirk and Sarek had no idea, until Kirk talks to Saavik in orbit of Genesis, that Spock's body was alive. Putting a katra in a dead body would simply "kill" it.

Therefore, there's absolutely no reason, in the way the film was written and in the way the plot unfolds, for Kirk to need to return to Genesis. Based on everything they knew at that time, they literally just needed to bring McCoy to Vulcan.

EDIT: and despite this gaping hole in the fabric of the film, I still find a way to LOVE TSFS. That's the whole point of my argument.

But this was set up at the beginning with McCoy/Spock chastising Kirk about leaving Spock's body on Genesis:

McCOY: (in Spock's voice) Jim, ...Help me. ...You left me on Genesis. ...Why did you do that? ...Help me.
KIRK: Bones, ...what the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind!
McCOY: Help me, Jim. ...Take me home.

And McCoy/Spock is trying to charter a ship to Genesis for this very purpose. Although not stated in the movie I figure that retrieval of Spock's body was necessary for some reason and a living Spock was an unexpected bonus.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Kirk's log at the end of TWOK:

"Captain's log, Stardate 8141.6. Starship Enterprise departing for Ceti Alpha Five to pick up the crew of the U.S.S. Reliant. All is well. And yet I can't help wondering about the friend I leave behind. 'There are always possibilities' Spock said. And if Genesis is indeed 'Life from death', I must return to this place again."

Why do you suppose that Kirk did what he did with Spock's body in the first place?....loaded it into a torpedo tube and shot it off toward Genesis, instead of keeping it on board and returning it to Vulcan?

He doesn't like to lose. What Carol showed him in the cave and what he witnessed with the formation of the planet got him to thinking about those 'possibilities'. He didn't know about the Vulcan katra, because they don't discuss it. Not being a Christian, he was not constrained by the notion that you need your body in order to be resurrected (their prohibition against cremation).

It was a last-ditch effort to try something. I doubt that he would have shared his motivations with the crew. Even if McCoy or Scotty had asked him about the torpedo idea, he could have offered a vague answer that it was a 'Vulcan thing' that Spock had requested. A katra newly transferred, especially to a non-Vulcan, might reasonably take a bit of time to 'manifest' its presence.

They couldn't hang around Genesis for Kirk to be able to wait and see what might happen. This was a personal thing for him, not part of the mission. They had a job to do in going to pick up Reliant's crew. The best that Kirk could do was plan to come back to Genesis at a later time. Before finding out about the katra, it was likely his plan to return alone....while Enterprise was being repaired (so he would have thought, not knowing at that point that the decision would be to decommission her rather than fix the battle damage) and everyone was given time to rest and recover from the ordeal with Khan.

Kirk spent years out on the far frontier. He saw a lot of very strange things....some of which demonstrated abilities far beyond human understanding.

The Genesis Project itself was brand new. It was terra incognita. Would every little nuance of its capabilities be absolutely known? No. Not to the project's engineers and certainly not to Kirk. And David Marcus had not mentioned the use of proto-matter to anyone, so that was another wild card in the situation.

But there's yet another thing that might have been running through Kirk's mind. This was not the usual way for a planet to be formed. What if higher beings had some sort of alert system to let them know when something like that happened? Would they come to investigate? What might they do? What might they be able to do? Not even from a religious standpoint, but simply from having abilities far in advance of what humans can do.

Spock was right. There are always possibilities. Because it's science fiction.

We don't know how many different ideas were running through Kirk's mind.

Kirk had no reason to go back to Genesis?

As McCoy would say, "BULL!"

 

[Nerys Myk]

Please provide TOS references to support your conclusion.

There is no evidence for either side of the argument. No one ever said he was the first Vulcan in Starfleet nor have they said he wasn't. The subject never came up. The existence of the Vulcan crewed Intrepid implies there are other Vulcans in Starfleet, but not when they joined. One can assume that the Captain of the Intrepid is an experienced officer with a time in service equal to or greater than Spock.

FWIW. T'Pol was in Earth's Starfleet. We've no idea if she transferred to the Federation fleet when it was created or followed a different career path after leaving the NX-01.

 

[Lord Garth]

There is no evidence for either side of the argument. No one ever said he was the first Vulcan in Starfleet nor have they said he wasn't. The subject never came up. The existence of the Vulcan crewed Intrepid implies there are other Vulcans in Starfleet, but not when they joined. One can assume that the Captain of the Intrepid is an experienced officer with a time in service equal to or greater than Spock.

100 years ago in the Bad Old Days of the ENT Forum in its prime, didn't T'Bonz look through every episode of TOS and not find anything?

There's no love lost between me and ENT but, at the same time, it would seem pretty odd for 400 Vulcans (that we hear of) to suddenly join Starfleet in the short time after Spock did if he actually were the first.

 

[lawman]

I don't know but I think anyone who has a problem with how DSC looks but has no problem with how ENT looks is a hypocrite...

But now suddenly it's an issue for some people (note that I said "some") because they don't like DSC. If they loved it, I bet you they wouldn't care.

Case in point: do they have a problem with how the Kelvin looked? Which is considered Prime and was a mere 12 years before the TOS Enterprise was commissioned? No. They don't.

What about those of us who also had a problem with how ENT looked? (At least, the ship exteriors. Interiors seemed more plausible.)

As for the Kelvin, it was literally the only ship in the Abrams films that looked like it fit Starfleet's design lineage. Although even then, the notion that a ship that early had 800 crew and 20 shuttlecraft was laughable. Abrams really had a thing about size...

TNG and those after are set in an idealistic, utopian future. Or... are they?
...
This whole "no money/no want in Star Trek" bullshit started with TNG.
...
Ask the miners and the women in "Mudd's Women" if they live in an idealistic utopia. ... Cyrano Jones trafficks in all kinds of dubious merchandise, and basically lives on a shoestring. Where's his utopia?
...
In "The Measure of a Man" the Admiral talks to Picard on two occasions of "buying you dinner/a drink" (I don't recall the exact words). Why didn't Picard give her a lecture about no money, no want, no need to buy anything?

All these contradictions and hypocrisy are things I consider insulting to the audience. Pick one and go with it. But don't say one thing and show the other and insist that "No, pay no attention to what you see. It's what Picard says that's actually the truth."

Not a new conversation around here (of course), but FWIW, as I've posted before, the point to me always seemed to be that the Federation had a post-scarcity economy. That says nothing about conditions on colony worlds or other interstellar territory outside the Federation's domain, which could and did have different economies of their own, and with which the UFP (and its personnel) would at least occasionally need to trade. It also doesn't say that every single problem had been solved, or that people are without any conflicts of interest... that kind of utopia would just be boring.

Granted, sometimes characters (that is to say, writers) didn't do such a great job of remembering this, or (at the very least) used "outdated" figures of speech about economic transactions ("earn your pay," "buy you dinner"). I'd agree that this muddied the waters on occasion, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "contradictions and hypocrisy... insulting to the audience." Obviously none of them were economic or political theorists, and at any rate the shows were never really about exploring the details of life inside the Federation.

Trust me, I remember these discussions with the JJ detractors back in May 2009. It is no different than now. If you inherently don't like something, those things come to the surface and become rationalization and justifications for that dislike (which by the way isn't required, because it's all a matter of taste anyway...)

I fundamentally disagree with this. You're claiming that all opinions about a given story (including about its logical coherence) are 100% irreducibly subjective, and claims to the contrary are nothing but ex post rationalization. I think that amounts to an insult to the intelligence (and integrity) of the viewers, and of course if it were so it would render a thread like this completely moot. (And lots of others as well... if matters of taste are purely "inherent" and lack any other causation or consistency, then lots of aesthetic and critical discourse falls to pieces.)

I disliked ST09, from the very start, because it slapped me in the face with one egregiously stupid scene after another. It's not as if I developed some inchoate abstract dislike of it, and then invented those objections after the fact. These weren't even classic "fridge logic" problems; they literally jumped out at me as I was sitting in the theater watching the movie. STID was almost as bad.

FWIW, those are hardly the only Trek films or episodes that do so. I think the same kind of flaws run through STV:TFF, and even to an extent STIV:TVH (despite its fan-favorite status), although not remotely to the same extent as in the Abrams films. And of course VOY was infamous for it, with "Thresholds" being the example that really dials it up to 11.

It's true. The plot and various story points throughout make absolutely no sense if you think about it for more than 10 minutes.

And somehow, I still find a way to enjoy it...

Okay, this baffles me. When a story really "makes no sense," that severely interferes with my enjoyment. At best I might put it in the "guilty pleasure" category, if it has other outstanding qualities to help balance things out. (But the Abrams films don't qualify on that front, either.)

Not being a Christian, he was not constrained by the notion that you need your body in order to be resurrected (their prohibition against cremation).

Umm, what Christians have you been hanging out with?...

 

[TrickyDickie]

Somewhere along the line, IIRC, someone put forth the idea that the Intrepid #1 was a special case....that Starfleet loaned the ship to the Vulcans, as a courtesy. Advantages to both sides. The Vulcans would have the opportunity to test and evaluate the technology, and Starfleet would have the opportunity to find out if there were any possible advantages to an all-Vulcan crew. In a scenario like that, the crew would not have had to go through Starfleet Academy. The Vulcans may have had a big part in designing the Constitution-class ships.

Not canon, of course, but it makes for a sensible back story to explain the Intrepid.

 

[Lord Garth]

What about those of us who also had a problem with how ENT looked? (At least, the ship exteriors. Interiors seemed more plausible.)

That's different. That's someone being consistent with their views. That's not someone who up and changed their views on a whim because they suddenly didn't like the latest show and are now acting like they're some hardcore "It should be just like TOS!" fan when they're not. If someone was hardcore into ENT and loves the Abrams Films but then turns around and suddenly says "STD isn't like TOS!" I'm going to call "fowl".

If someone is a hardcore TOS Only fan or is someone who liked Star Trek in general until it hit Prequilitis (meaning they like some combination of or all of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) then they're not hypocrites. They've maintained the same view the entire time.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Umm, what Christians have you been hanging out with?...

Okay, I just looked that up and found this article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cremation_in_the_Christian_World

Evidently, I have been "hanging out with" Christians who are not aware of the change. Plenty of them are still operating on the idea that they will need that body in order to be 'reconstituted' or whatever. Never made any sense to me. What if enough time passed that there was no body left, only dispersed dust?

It looks to me like they were confusing the idea of God re-creating their body versus the idea that He would need their original in order to be able to do it. Which is contrary to the abilities of a deity.

I'll see what I can do when I have the opportunity, but I'll bet at least some of them are locked into the idea and will not listen.

 

[PiotrB]

FWIW. T'Pol was in Earth's Starfleet. We've no idea if she transferred to the Federation fleet when it was created or followed a different career path after leaving the NX-01.

There is no canon information but most plausible and logical continuation story is written in The Rise of Federation novels series by @Christopher in which she transferred. Besides we have canon information that Spock isn't first Vulcan in Starfleet. In DSC there is at least one Vulcan admiral in Starfleet. It would be strange that only 3 Vulcans served in Starfleet from 2161 to TOS times.

If someone is a hardcore TOS Only fan or is someone who liked Star Trek in general until it hit Prequilitis (meaning they like some combination of or all of TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) then they're not hypocrites. They've maintained the same view the entire time.

 

[Tenacity]

Although not stated in the movie I figure that retrieval of Spock's body was necessary for some reason

Yes, they were attempting to recover the body, which does suggest there was a good reason for doing so. Maybe the body is require to have Spock's kantra be deposited into the hall of kantras.

You don't need to rejoin a katra with a dead body

Prior to discovering that Spock was alive, was there any intent to join the kantra with the body?

Although even then, the notion that a ship that early had 800 crew

The were 800 live on board, how many were crew was never mentioned.