Why it is important some people are unhappy
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I disagree with the argument that ST has a Sunday School morality.
It discussed quite adult issues.
'Let that be your last battlefield' was quite an adult discusion of racism.
TNG in particular was very adult. Nemesis dealt with the ethics of cloning.
ST6 dealt with the cold war and the JFK assassination.
If you take the morality out of ST, you have lost it completely. It's allegorical. The action is a vehicle for the morality.
It discussed quite adult issues.
'Let that be your last battlefield' was quite an adult discusion of racism.
TNG in particular was very adult. Nemesis dealt with the ethics of cloning.
ST6 dealt with the cold war and the JFK assassination.
If you take the morality out of ST, you have lost it completely. It's allegorical. The action is a vehicle for the morality.
Sorry, we had more adult discussions of racism in my sixth grade Sunday School class. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was a simple-minded, self-congratulatory and poorly-delivered polemic.
And a melodramatic, silly movie like "Nemesis" featuring bad guys doing cloning doesn't qualify as "dealing with the ethics of cloning" on even a grade-school level.
If the kinds of examples you're citing constitute the depth of "Star Trek's" contributions to morality and ethical debate then the world loses nothing by its discontinuance.
Did that Sunday School class teach a world free of racism was possible without divine intervention?
Odd rhetorical question, since "Star Trek" taught no such thing (the show was mercifully unspecific on how that world supposedly got to be the way it was, other than that somewhere along the way we'd had ourselves another world war or two). What people choose to infer from the bits and pieces of the episodes does not imbue the original narrative with those ideas or qualities, no matter how badly folks want Trek to be Significant.
Or are you suggesting that Trek proposed original ideas about social progress? That would be an impossible assertion to defend.
BTW, what we were taught in Sunday School was that prejudice and racism is wrong. That's as much as Trek did, and with less bathos.
I blame bad writers for the bathos not the ideas they mangle.
And I thought first contact was the "inside Trek" reason humanity got its act together. (Mercifully unspecific? I liked that film!)
Where do you see a lack of acknowledging the fanbase? It seems to me that the movie's creative team is going to great lengths to include plenty of homages to the series that inspired it. What more acknowledgment is needed? I guess I'm curious as to where you'd draw the line.
I think "pandering" is the perfect word for what the hardcore fans are expecting from anyone in creative control of Star Trek. And by "hardcore", I'm talking about those who consider canon sacred above all things (except, for some reason, Kirk's death in Generations...yeah, makes no sense to me either), and feel that it's not Star Trek if William Shatner isn't involved in some fashion. Take Enterprise, for example. I'll concede that Manny Coto was pretty much damned either way, because he was the equivalent of a man with a bucket trying to bail out the Titanic. But when we started seeing all these TOS-inspired elements being thrown in (Stratos, Orion slave girls, T'Pau, etc.), it felt like the creative team was shoving it all in our faces saying, "See? See how Star Trek-y this is? NOW will you like us?!?" By then, it was already "too little, too late". I remember how incensed some people were because they didn't find a way to have William Shatner be on an episode. These are the same people who are just beside themselves that Abrams didn't find a way to have Shatner in the movie as "future Kirk" or some such nonsense. Never mind that his character died in Generations and that there is ABSOLUTELY NO NEED FOR HIM TO BE IN THE MOVIE. Hell, I'd be fine if Leonard Nimoy wasn't in the movie. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy to see him in it, but it's unfortunate that the powers that be felt the movie couldn't stand on its own legs without adding him to keep the fans happy (which, apparently, isn't working as well as they'd hoped anyway).
From all the negativity I've seen from hardcore fans on various boards and mailing lists, I am absolutely convinced that they would not be satisfied with this movie unless it was utterly and totally faithful to Gene Roddenberry's original vision for Star Trek, and exact in every detail, from ship design to sets to uniforms. I, for one, don't want that. I have that already, with the original series, and we've seen Gene Roddenberry's vision get expanded on, tweaked, deconstructed and mutated through the years. The guys who were running things before have failed and have nothing new to offer. The commercial failures of Enterprise and Nemesis proved that. Even if Abrams' effort is a failure at the box office, Star Trek will be no less dead than it's been since Enterprise went off the air.
I liked it too. But once they give you specifics anyone can punch great big holes in their logic and the story's plausibility. The producers originally adopted a pretty smart policy of avoiding the "hows and whys" of a lot of this when they were doing the original series.
When you think about it, ascribing improvement in our treatment of one another to "first contact with aliens" is the same thing as ascribing it to "necessary divine intervention." In each case, the proposition is that it's not possible - or likely - without some outside entity beyond us human beings somehow motivating us. It's just the specifics of the mythology that are different.
When you think about it, ascribing improvement in our treatment of one another to "first contact with aliens" is the same thing as ascribing it to "necessary divine intervention." In each case, the proposition is that it's not possible - or likely - without some outside entity beyond us human beings somehow motivating us. It's just the specifics of the mythology that are different.
So long as Vulcans and/or the divine remain myth, I agree.
But once we detect an extrasolar "goldilocks" planet with abundant atmospheric oxygen and water? Star Trek - to me at least - teaches at some level there's evidence as well as belief for motivation. (And I have no idea how humanity might react to such an actual, imminently feasible discovery.)
No. At most, I'll accept that a lot of the Trek fans who are looking forward to this movie like change.
Well, there are folks who consider that there's a lot of "evidence" for God, whose existence they consider entirely feasible (I'm not one, BTW - I'm an atheist).
The point is, as things stand we're just talking about fiction, and to the extent that Trek has explicated that supposed "cultural evolution" toward tolerance it's done so by calling upon an outside agency to catalyze it rather than showing that we're inherently capable of it on our own - really no different than telling a story that invokes "god."
No, because THEN they'd bitch that the film doesn't take advantage of new technologies and new opportunities.
Hardcore fans will never be happy, because they want something that's new and original and exactly like what they remember and totally familiar. These are, of course, contradictory drives -- thus the hardcore fans are eternally unhappy.
They wouldn't be happy unless Paramount suddenly found a lost episode of TOS, written and directed by Roddenberry himself, starring the original cast, produced in 1967, and distributed it to theatres. They want to go home again -- but the problem is you never can. The world only turns forward.
That might be a part of it then, or it might depend on the story-teller. It might just be a boring story otherwise.
Looking for counter-example, is there any SF with a Trektopian-type future that posits "we're inherently capable of it on our own" without the catalyst of such an agency?
Kirk obviously having "moments" with women he wasn't married to (and usually barely knew), the films establishing he'd had a child out of wedlock whose life he'd never been a part of, despite knowing about him...
How anyone can say Trek's morality was "Sunday School" flavored is beyond me.
Don't even get me started on what a tease Spock was with Christine...
But the fan base hasn't been alienated - only a small percentage of it - and those will watch it time and again, just to bitch.
So it's win-win for the production company!
And this also misses the point that this film has been budgeted on the basis of attracting a mainstream audience - sure they will lose some hardcore but that's the gamble the studio is willing to take.
Uhhh WTH are you going on about?
The reason Trek has failed is the hardcore people have tuned out with the attempts to make the series more "mainstream" with Enterprise and Nemesis.
Abrams Trek isn't appealing to those people (the hardcore fans) and it seems like the only people that are excited about this crap are the ones who stayed with Enterprise. I wouldn't call Enterprise people the base of the fandom.
I didn't like Enterprise, and I am looking forward to this movie.
I barely saw Enterprise, and am looking forward to this. Be careful about generalizing about the subgroups of fandom.
Starship Polaris:
I don't see how you can say that TNG had a Sunday School morality.
It was quite adult. 'Encounter' was adult.
And, don't you think it wouldn't be ST without some message? Read Stephen Whitfield's book 'The Making of Star Trek'. It was what it originally intended to be; on the surface, fairly safe adventure stuff, but, carrying a message. 'God, war, sex, politics'. These aren't sunday school things.
Action adventure on it's own is just ripping people off. Surely you're even more immature if that's all you want? That's what Lucas is into; making as much money as possible by re-hashing old themes. That's ripping people off.
I don't see how you can say that TNG had a Sunday School morality.
It was quite adult. 'Encounter' was adult.
And, don't you think it wouldn't be ST without some message? Read Stephen Whitfield's book 'The Making of Star Trek'. It was what it originally intended to be; on the surface, fairly safe adventure stuff, but, carrying a message. 'God, war, sex, politics'. These aren't sunday school things.
Action adventure on it's own is just ripping people off. Surely you're even more immature if that's all you want? That's what Lucas is into; making as much money as possible by re-hashing old themes. That's ripping people off.
