Spoilers Yeah... I give up - Star Trek has abandoned philosophical naturalism - it's depressing/juvenile

[eschaton]

Ah, so DS9 fell due to terrible competition?

Fans are always making up silly excuses for Trek's decline on TV. The answer is the same that as for every show that declines: people grew tired of Trek and stopped watching.

I don't care that DS9 wasn't as popular. Many popular things are terrible. What I care about is that it was really good. Best characterization and most consistent writing by far. They made some big mistakes with the show (Pah-Wraiths, Section 31, turning Dukat into a mustache-twirling villain, etc) but delivered a higher ratio of incredible hours of Trek to the small screen than any other series.

 

[seigezunt]

I was referring to the poster's contention that the spiritual aspect of DS9 was some sort of falter, a violation of what Star Trek "is," when in fact the franchise just simply isn't monolithic, and DS9 was perfect for its time IMO. As is DSC. Well, not perfect, but certainly a reasonable incarnation of a living and evolving franchise.

 

[ozzfloyd]

Well they can't all be Tin Man............

EVERY episode of DSC to date has been superior to that middling episode.

 

[Longinus]

Ah, so DS9 fell due to terrible competition?

Fans are always making up silly excuses for Trek's decline on TV. The answer is the same that as for every show that declines: people grew tired of Trek and stopped watching.

Or despite how much people here love the darker tone and focus on war that DS9 had, it is not actually what majority of the people wanted to see. Discovery seems to be cast in the same mould, we have to see how it fares.

 

[BillJ]

TNG grew its viewership. It lent DS9 a pretty high jumping-off place to begin its downward plunge from.

That's what you call orbital skydiving!

 

[cultcross]

This.

All the way.

Trek has always had human reason front and centre bu the idea that it has any strong grounding in science or has never included what we might euphemistically term "mysticism" is just nonsense and barely warrants taking the time to address.

It's genuinely like @USS Einstein has never actually watched the show.

It's part of Star Trek's legend. Probably, the best thing Star Trek ever did was sell its own hype as well as it did. "Utopia", "visionary", "progressive", "scientific", "realistic", "inspired real life technology"....
Fans genuinely believe it, and what's more, the general reputation of the show supports it. Articles trip over each other to talk about the special vision of the future. The nice side of it is that it genuinely inspires people into sciences, into space, and into all sorts of things. That's great. The downside is that new Trek is held to an impossible standard which its predecessors never actually achieved. The mycelium network is 'magic' but Q violating the basic laws of the universe is science. Vision Culber is absurd but interactive visions of dead Trill hosts is science. Tyler/Voq is ridiculous but minds in and out of android bodies is pure hard science.

As for the humanist philosophy of Star Trek, however you express it - "your enemy is the same as you", "be who you say you are going to be", etc - well, Discovery has that just as much as Trek ever did. The story of the tardigrade is a standard Star Trek plot, from The Devil in the Dark onwards. Just last week we had a whole "unity and peace with your enemies" sequence in the mirror universe of all places. I anticipate that being the solution to the Klingon war.

What's next, maybe the show can incorporate psuedo-prophets having visions that nobody is sure whether to trust? A person inexplicably returning from the dead with a prophetic warning? Cara Thrace leading the Federation to it's destiny? The USS Destiny journeying to the center of the universe in search of "god", encountering will-o-whips that take the form of their deceased family members.

All of that has been done one way or another in Trek before. That's what Trek has always done, dressing up fantasy concepts in a pseudoscience wrapper. Discovery is no different.

 

[BillJ]

All of that has been done one way or another in Trek before. That's what Trek has always done, dressing up fantasy concepts in a pseudoscience wrapper. Discovery is no different.

We may debate how well it does it. But Discovery does seem to be following in prior Trek's footprints. Good and bad.

 

[fireproof78]

All of that has been done one way or another in Trek before. That's what Trek has always done, dressing up fantasy concepts in a pseudoscience wrapper. Discovery is no different.

We may debate how well it does it. But Discovery does seem to be following in prior Trek's footprints. Good and bad.

Exactly so.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

TNG grew its viewership...

... before slowly going into decline. By the start of its 7th season it was experiencing the same downward spiral as the rest of the series, following exactly the same trends. If they had continued TNG for 10 more seasons in place of DS9 and Voyager, the results would be exactly the same.

However, I WILL note that this is another datapoint to the theory that the majority of the haters for Discovery -- like the anti-JJ crowd before them -- are basically one in the same with those who think TNG was the best show ever. I have a feeling that if I go back and re-read ALL of your posts related to Discovery the only thing consistent about your complaints would be "It's different from TNG"

 

[Longinus]

are basically one in the same with those who think TNG was the best show ever.

Well, it was.

 

[Ovation]

Well, it was.

No. It wasn't. (See? Easy to make assertions. Much harder to objectively prove them.).

 

[Balok's Decoy]

I haven't read the entire thread, but have we all reached the conclusion yet that most of the "science" in Star Trek has pretty much always been hand-wavy magical nonsense?

 

[Tenacity]

No. It wasn't.

TOS was the best trek show ever, TNG is second.

 

[fireproof78]

I haven't read the entire thread, but have we all reached the conclusion yet that most of the "science" in Star Trek has pretty much always been hand-wavy magical nonsense?

Not quite yet. Give it twenty more pages or so.

TOS was the best trek show ever, TNG is second.

TOS is the best, period. The rest are not Star Trek.

This is fun

 

[mos6507]

The mycelium network is 'magic' but Q violating the basic laws of the universe is science.

Suspension of disbelief is subjective. What one person buys into will cause another person to snicker and treat it as self-parody.

The aspect of Q in particular revolves around a very old sci-fi concept, that evolution reaches a point in which life sort of ascends to a kind of godhood. That's a very conventional topic that we've seen in things like Contact, Interstellar, 2001, etc... Spore drive, though, just on a visceral level, feels.....goofy.

Not only that, but Q acts as a sort of atheistic stand-in for a deity. Sure, he's comic-relief and seems amoral but as TNG was bookeneded in Farpoint and All Good Things he stands over humanity and judges our actions. He is the very essence of Star Trek. "You just don't get it...The Trial Never Ends"

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That's a far more important function than "hey, tardigrades are in the news, wouldn't it be cool to ram them into Star Trek?"

Usually when the underlying motivation is little more than "wouldn't it be cool if", people will interpret it as B-movie schlock like that movie with the flying brains.

But hey, if it's all the same to you...whatever.

 

[fireproof78]

Not only that, but Q acts as a sort of atheistic stand-in for a deity. Sure, he's comic-relief and seems amoral but as TNG was bookeneded in Farpoint and All Good Things he stands over humanity and judges our actions. That's a far more important function than "hey, tardigrades are in the news, wouldn't it be cool to ram them into Star Trek?"

Since we don't know the other "book end" for DISCO, this is a difficult conclusion to accept.

 

[cultcross]

The aspect of Q in particular revolves around a very old sci-fi concept, that evolution reaches a point in which life sort of ascends to a kind of godhood.

Which is nonsense - it trips over the common sci-fi conceit that evolution is a march toward some higher, greater form, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. I don't have an issue with that, I think it's a good plot device. But it is no more logical or realistic than a network of mycelium.

 

[Balok's Decoy]

Which is nonsense - it trips over the common sci-fi conceit that evolution is a march toward some higher, greater form, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. I don't have an issue with that, I think it's a good plot device. But it is no more logical or realistic than a network of mycelium.

Wait...you mean the point of evolution isn't to evolve into psychic interdimensional gods unbound by time and space? *flips table*

 

[mos6507]

Which is nonsense - it trips over the common sci-fi conceit that evolution is a march toward some higher, greater form, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution.

How do you know? Have you studied intelligent species that have evolved for billions of years?

 

[cultcross]

Wait...you mean the point of evolution isn't to evolve into psychic gods unbound by time and space?

I'd answer, but I'm about to turn into a glowing ball of light so won't have time to go into det-