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The last new star Trek movie came out, what, 10 years ago, and they weren't particularly woke anyways (by Star Trek metrics). The beef with them was they were shallow James Abrams action-fests, not that they were too woke. Star Trek has always been progressive. It just wasn't always so #CurrentYear.
My beef is with Star Wars, anyways. I very specifically got accused of "being against strong role models for girls" when I said The Last Jedi wasn't very good, and I've kinda never forgiven the world for that.
There's still a set of critics and influencers who will clap like circus seals at anything that vaguely alludes to capitalism bad or hwiteness bad,
If anything, I find The Last Jedi a very strange film to use as a vehicle for that criticism? The female characters in The Last Jedi aren't very good role models, even if all you value is strength!
The major female characters in The Last Jedi are Rey, who achieves very little in the story and whose primary moral struggle is to do with resisting the appeal of sexy Adam Driver; Rose, who is a sidekick whose big heroic moment is saving the life of the man she's in love with; Holdo, who makes a series of bad calls, is overwhelmed by the First Order, and has to sacrifice her ship just to give the other characters a chance to escape; and Leia, who we last see nodding to a young male hero and telling everybody to follow him. If you look at the heroes whose actions actually drive the plot or save the day, it's mainly Finn, Poe, and Luke.
As Adam Roberts put it:
I don't know, I just feel like if I were going to pick a mediocre-to-bad film to defend to the hilt on the basis of it having good role models for girls in the form of its strong female characters, maybe I wouldn't pick a film in which the two female leads are motivated in large part by their attraction to more proactive male leads, and where the female supporting characters are demonstrably bad at their jobs.
I might choose a film that actually has compelling, three-dimensional female characters with well-rounded motivations, who overcome various obstacles through their talent, courage, and virtue; or failing that, at least a film with female leads who actually succeed at things.
Well-spotted, but I'm sure the person who said that to me was basing it off a YouTube video about how only misogynistic chuds don't like Star Wars.
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I don't really hate the new Star Trek movies, they were stupid but at least kinda fun. it's the new TV shows I can't stand. Like you said, they went all in on the "strong female role models" angle and it became impossible to criticize them. But they were also this joyless slog through a grimdark universe of unrelenting misery. I do think some critics are finally waking up to that, or at least new critics are appearing who have noticed that the core audience is fed up.
I really do think it's becoming a more "normie" opinion that the Star Wars sequels were bad. If anything I hear more praise for the prequels now, people appreciate them for at least trying to be fun and being their own weird quirky thing.
There was a great article in Social Matter(?) (possibly by David Grant?) charting the decline of American liberalism through Star Trek.
From Kirk lecturing aliens about democracy in front of the literal American flag, to TNG's mushy ethical navel gazing, to DS9's cynicism, to Voyager's "me and my tumblr mutuals against the galaxy" interpersonal drama.
TOS liberalism wasn't coherent, but it was muscular and sure of itself. After that everything was built on a foundation that was already being "deconstructed"
I wonder what the author would make of the new shift to Gaslight, Genocide, Girlboss.
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It's ironic that you resent the latest Star Trek shows being unrelentlessly grimdark, which is true, because Star Trek was originally a very optimistic view of the future, but as @haroldbkny says above, that was largely a progressive worldview. Star Trek has always been very explicitly leftist, albeit center-leftist (the original premise being that progressive multicultural politics would transcend all and the Federation was basically a future United Nations, as the UN was supposed to operate and not as it really does). You are no doubt aware that it's famous for featuring the first interracial kiss on broadcast television, and many, many episodes from the various series have been essentially liberal talking points turned into sci-fi thought exercises (sometimes poignantly and sometimes in a very ham-handed fashion).
Gene Roddenberry was extremely liberal and very much "woke" by 60s standards. Deep Space Nine was not the first time that writers took a somewhat more critical view of the Federation and suggested maybe it wasn't the post-scarcity utopia that early series sunnily portrayed it as, but Star Trek was still supposed to represent a future that is positive and optimistic. Humanity will eventually get its shit together and work together as a species, and we will face external threats and have moral conflicts, but we'll resolve them rationally and humanely, and we'll be able to include other races as well, grant civil rights to androids, recognize the self-determination rights of less technologically advanced people, etc... All very liberal and woke, no?
The more recent series have felt like they were written by writers who resent this optimistic view of the future - specifically, the idea that a largely Western, liberal democratic society could actually produce something good. And so they have painfully deconstructed it, so now the Federation is shit, all the characters we knew and loved are dead or assholes, and there is certainly no "fun" to be had in a universe where Western Enlightenment still holds sway.
The path with Star Wars is similar though not as obvious because Star Wars was always less nuanced. It was a children's story of good vs. evil space wizards. The Jedi were never supposed to be perfect, but they were fundamentally good guys. But unproblemetized good guys (especially white men) are not in vogue any more, and must be deconstructed.
Thus we arrive at Rings of Power and the laughable "Orcs just want to raise their families in peace." The problem with this is not that the idea in itself is laughable. It's that the writers actually think they are doing something new and subversive here.
Look, way back in the 70s, D&D players were raising questions about the "Always Chaotic Evil" trope. Just why should every single Orc be born evil? Yes, in Tolkien they're "fallen" elves and basically a sort of artificial race, but in D&D and its many spin-offs, they were just another humanoid species and thus presumably had agency and free will, so.... Half-orcs were a playable race since the very early days, and they weren't required to be evil, so clearly Orcs don't necessarily have an "evil gene." Most explanations were something like "They're naturally brutish and stupid and live in a violent society" (raising all kinds of Implications that have become Discourse today), but even very non-woke D&D players in the 70s didn't find the idea of an Orc raised in a more civilized environment turning out to be a Paladin or something outrageous. And later games (Shadowrun, 1st edition published in 1988) and Orkworld (published by the insufferable John Wick in 2000) took an explicitly critical lens to the "always evil" trope and made all the races, if still archetypical, less stereotypical.
These "woke" writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem, but they think they are the first people ever to have mind-blowing thoughts like "What if the Jedi got too arrogant?" or "What if Orcs aren't just mindless killing machines?"
Not really. Where's the eternal oppressor class, which must be forever blamed for every wrong? Where's selecting a specific group and declaring it forever tainted with past sins? Where's the identarian strife and the oppression hierarchy? Where's the guilt for past injustices, overwhelmingly driving any future decisions? Where's the affirmative action, land acknowledgements, deconstruction and destruction of every past achievement due to them all being oppressive, removal of monuments, rewriting of films and books? Where's the only cure for past discrimination being future discrimination? Where are the species quotas and quarterly reports about racial and species-al makeup of the command structure, the redshirt casualties and the promotion schedule from every captain? I mean, no starship even has a DEI officer! That's not even close to woke.
Troi was totally the ship's political officer though. You can't unsee it after you notice. Outside the command hierarchy but involved in decision-making, authority to interrogate anyone on board for problematic thoughts the computer caught them writing in their journal?
Could be. So they are much closer to early commie sci-fi - especially Soviet - which also often was very bravura and optimistic. Woke though naturally would tend to be much darker and depressing.
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Oh god, now I'm gonna have nightmares about corporate HR ladies seeing right through my poker face because they can sense my feelings as they drop prog talking points at lunch.
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I once read, somewhere, that sci-fi tone shifted hard in the very early 2000s and that that was the death blow for star trek. I think the blame was put on Battlestar Galactica being so successful in the reboot.
Galactica probably does deserve some of the blame, but I frankly suspect a lot of that was mostly just the post-9/11 zeitgeist (which itself influenced new!BSG). It felt like everything got darker, edgier, and more cynical around that time.
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We Stargate fans blame it for killing that franchise too, except it was more the network wanting a series that focused more on the melodrama BSG had in its later (arguably worst) seasons than the classic SG technobabble optimism.
Honestly Stargate was a 'humanity, fuck yeah!' series that could easily have been darker and edgier and was probably trending that way anyways. The turn towards interpersonal melodrama was, however, baffling- I liked seeing American soldiers kicking ass in space, not some alien hangers on worrying about their personal problems.
It could easily have had a Space! Iraq storyline.
Some of Stargate SG-1's problems were also wanting to become Voyager of all things, rather than Battlestar Galactica. Some extent of that was probably inevitable as power inflation started giving the US military access to spaceships, superweapons, (those stupid zats), Jackson ascending so often it turned into a punch line, and so on, but a lot of the entire Ori plotline was trying so hard to be MagicBullshitBorg following in the tracks of Seven of Nine, without understanding why that worked (and so many other interpersonal melodrama bits of Voyager didn't work!).
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There were definitely dark veins and they could have tried to balance things (or just kept "classic" SG and then added things like Universe).
But I think they were just embarrassed, it's a status thing. Stargate was essentially the sort of show people mean when they say "I don't like fantasy besides Game of Thrones". BSG and the praise it got gave them an alternative/pretext.
A shame it wasn't actually as popular or well-regarded as Game of Thrones.
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I don't understand why Orcs have always been the go-to example for this. First of all the "Always Chaotic Evil" terminology only goes back to 2000 and was gone again by 2009 - it originates with the 3rd Edition Monster Manual introducing a bit more nuance into alignments, with the usual alignment now preceded by "Always" (for things like demons where that alignment was part of their nature), "Usually" (where it was more a case of strong cultural associations with that alignment), or the rarely-used "Often" (like usually but the association is much weaker). I think humans got "Often True Neutral" but I can't remember another case where "Often" was used.
And Orcs were firmly in the "Usually" bucket. You even gave some of the reasons for this. All over the Internet people talk like they got tagged "Always Chaotic Evil" and it's just not true! In both editions where that terminology exists they are "Usually Chaotic Evil". The problem they are referring to (EDIT: insofar as it ever existed, which wasn't very) was already fixed in the same book that originated much of the terminology used to discuss it.
I'll need to check the books when I get home, but off the top of my head, orcs themselves have never been Always Chaotic Evil. The language used for monster alignment has changed across the editions, but I believe you're correct that 3e introduced the 'Always [Alignment]' phrasing, and in 3e, orcs were not Always Chaotic Evil. Always Chaotic Evil was reserved for demons and a few other similar characters - monsters that are by definition evil.
Even prior to 3e, though, there was some nuance with orcs - they were presented as usually evil, but not always, and sometimes they were presented with a valid perspective of their own. I remember the origin story for orcs in 2e Forgotten Realms was reasonably sympathetic to them, suggesting that maybe the 'goodly' races really did screw them over, and orc aggression and hostility is a response to an initial divine division of the world that relegated them only to the wastelands, and miserable lives of violence and poverty therein.
More when I have the old sourcebooks to hand, I think, but as far as I'm aware now, ACE orcs is a strawman.
But as I grouched a little while back, I think today, even among D&D players, there's widespread illiteracy as to D&D's past, and a tendency for people to substitute an imagined caricature of mindless hack-and-slash for the game as it actually existed. ACE orcs fit the narrative if you believe that everything prior to 5e was troglodytic monster-murdering with no hint of story.
EDIT:
Okay, here we are.
AD&D1e and AD&D2e both just list orcs' alignment as "Lawful Evil". AD&D doesn't give frequency, but it does say in the introduction to the Monster Manual 1e "ALIGNMENT shows the characteristic bent of a monster to law or chaos, good or evil or towards neutral behavior possibly modified by good or evil intent", and for the Monstrous Manual 2e "ALIGNMENT shows the general behaviour of the average monster of that type". As such I don't regard either manual as indicating that all orcs are necessarily Lawful Evil.
I don't have the 3.0 Monster Manual to hand, but I do have 3.5. 3.5 lists orcs' alignment as "Often chaotic evil", so not only have they swapped from law to chaos, they've also qualified it. The glossary at the back of the book clarifies that "Often" means "The creature tends towards the given alignment, either by nature or nurture, but not strongly. A plurality (40-50%) of individuals have the given alignment, but exceptions are common."
The 4e Monster Manual just gives orc alignment as "Chaotic Evil" without further qualification, but the introduction does note explicitly "A monster's alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule".
The 5e Monster Manual also just gives orc alignment as "chaotic evil", though its introduction also states, "The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign. if you want a good-aligned green dragon or an evil storm giant, there's nothing stopping you."
As far as I can tell orcs have never been rigidly boxed into a single alignment. They have always been presented with an evil alignment as the most common default for them, but anybody who says that orcs were ever presented as ontologically evil in all cases no matter what is telling a falsehood.
Even in 1st edition AD&D, no one thought "Alignment: Lawful Evil" meant there could be literally zero exceptions in all the multiverse, and the earlier editions of D&D were much more freewheeling in suggesting DMs just make up whatever they wanted ("rulings over rules"). People came up with reasons to have non-evil Beholders and Mindflayers, after all. The point of the trope is not that modern players think back in Ye Olden Days, it was Gygax Law that all Orcs must be Evil, but that a lot of players (remember, D&D was mostly played by young men, often tweens and teens) did take the rules pretty literally. Remember that Alignment Languages were a thing? (Don't know if they still are in more recent versions.) And Alignment itself was based on Moorcockian and Vancian ideas that implied they were mystical properties of the universe and thus a fundamental part of a character, not just a rough label to describe behaviors. There were complicated rules for changing alignments.
So in that context, labeling races in the Monster Manual as "Evil" was taken as a sort of metaphysical categorization. 5E, which as I understand it has moved towards a more "blank slate" model where races do not have attribute modifiers or alignments or class limitations, is largely a reaction against that.
"Hack and slash" gaming also existed, and described quite a few campaigns and convention games. It was so common as to be another trope. Of course this wasn't how the creators of D&D meant it to be, nor how it was presented in the books, and players and GMs frequently bemoaned "hack and slash" gaming. But they bemoaned it because it was common enough to generate semi-parodies like this.
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I was done with D&D by 3rd edition, so I didn't even know how they mucked with the alignment system in later editions. But Orcs are the go-to example because even in earlier editions, they were a canonically "evil" race, like many others, but the ones even normies were likely to have heard of.
The only other race with as much resonance over this issue were the Drow.
The main bit of pre-2E orc lore I remember was an article in Dragon on their gods, most of which later showed up in books like Monster Mythology and thus became fairly canonical, if it wasn't already. Though skewing toward the violent and warlike compared to, say, elves, theirs were varied enough that even back then it didn't really support an "Always Chaotic Evil" interpretation.
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No, they weren't. "Always __ evil" was a 3rd edition exclusive, and didn't apply to orcs anyway. Anyone who says this, particularly using the exact phrasing "Always Chaotic Evil", is probably quoting TV Tropes or imitating a meme copied from TV Tropes.
I was there, son.
Orcs were actually Lawful Evil in 1st and 2nd edition, if I recall. But that wasn't the point (as you are perfectly well aware). Whether or not the TV Tropes phrase existed, the issue did.
2nd edition: "Alignment shows the general behavior of the average monster of that type. Exceptions, though uncommon, may be encountered."
And this contradicts what I am telling you how? I know you love to think you have a gotcha that proves people are lying every time you find a single word that can be parsed in the most pedantic, literal fashion to contradict them, but reread what I wrote and then stop trying to die on a hill you already died on. "Always evil" monsters were a trope that was talked about in the 70s, it isn't something wokes discovered to make fun of on TVTropes in the 2000s. Dragon magazine published cartoons about it. People joked about it and made satirical adventures about at conventions. You are not being clever or getting applause from the crowd as you Au Contraire Mon Frere!
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Sorry but how is that "ironic?" It's like you're saying that I'm "ironic" for hating new Star Trek for being something 100% against the core themes that it started with. That's not ironic that's just... natural? If anything I just want to acknowledge what a weird state we've arrived at, where these huge popular media franchises have been perverted into something that seems designed to antagonize all of its original fans, and we're not allowed to criticize them for it. I guess you could say it's our fault, as nerds, for not paying attention during high school English class- we were all so focused on the plot and worldbuilding that we missed what the teacher was saying how it's the theme and tones that really matter, so we let our ideological enemies take control of "our own" beloved media.
Like you said, it seems as though the writers hate optimism, hate fun, and genuinely hate anything good in life. I wouldn't mind so much if they just had a bunch of stupid plot holes. But these new sci-fi writers seem to genuinely want to inflict pain on their audience. I don't even know where they can go from here. Will the next season just be a long, extended, graphic scene of Patrick Stewart being raped? Because that seems to be the tone that they're going for.
Also like you said, "but what if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" is not really the innovative question that some writers think it is. It basically just marks the boundary between entertainment and literary fiction. But if you're going the literary route, you need to know that it's a tough road that will not be fun to follow, and you'll lose most of your audience along the way. Putting that into a normal genre fiction piece will destroy it.
The irony is in thinking it's progressivism that is making Star Trek grimdark. Of course I know some people think all liberality (even going all the way back to the Enlightenment) is an inevitable path to the grimdark authoritarianism we see today, but Star Trek was originally a very liberal vision. I guess technically it still is, unless you are one of us liberals who have become by modern progressive standards fascists. Though to be honest I haven't seen the last few shows or movies, so I only know what it's like from cultural osmosis and memes.
Strongly disagree with this. You can have complex, three-dimensional characters, like villains who have sympathetic motives or heroes who are flawed, in genre fiction. It doesn't all have to be black hats vs. white hats. "What if the bad guys aren't really all bad?" "What if Orcs aren't all evil?" "What if the Jedi fucked up?" Those are perfectly fine questions to introduce even into a genre set piece with bright lines between good and evil. The problem is not with introducing moral complication and nuance, the problem is with fundamentally rejecting the idea that "good" or "evil" exist, even within the context of a universe that was built on the premise of a conflict between Good vs. Evil. Deconstructing that and saying "Well, actually they're all just the same; Sauron vs. the Fellowship is like the Republicans vs. the Democrats, the Rebel Alliance vs. the Empire is like rooting for the Packers or the Cowboys... at the end of the day it doesn't matter who wins," that destroys the narrative unless you are just that level of cynical.
Was it though...? It was set onboard a military ship, with a strict hierarchy, and the characters all strongly demonstrating classical virtues. It had some worldbuilding that could be seen as liberal, like the replicators that made everything free, but that's just sci-fi plot stuff. It certainly had some moments that would have been considered liberal for the 60s, like the famous "first interracial kiss on TV," but that was also, you know, a captain kissing his secretary. The themes of the show were classic western/hero's journey stuff, "wagon train to the stars." Most of the plots were along the lines of "a big bad Other shows up, and the heroic Captian Kirk must punch it to death."
The problem is, we get all that in real life. We look to entertainment to simplify and escape that sort of thing. If you want to write a story where the orcs aren't evil, it just ends up being a grimdark slog where Aragorn was ruthlessly genociding a sentient people and "we all need to feel sad, man, because that's just like what happened with the Native Americans, you know?" You can just read actual history for that. Or, perhaps, an avant-garde literary novel that assumes you've already read thousands of pages of both popular entertainment and criticism. It's not going to work for a normal human who just wants to experience the feeling of being heroic for once in their life, without having to feel guilt and shame for it.
Same thing with "what if the Jedi fucked up..." you mean like all politicians do? Just go watch the news for that. The Jedi were awesome as this mystical fictional ideal. We don't need to see that perverted into something corrupt. Surely you can find some other example of a corrupt politician, if that's what you're interested in.
edit: to me, that sort of criticism is like saying "what if the unobtanium is not really unobtainable?" It's not some profound insight, just poking at something that the writers used to tell an entertaining story in a simple way. Maybe that could be the basis for a great story, but you'd have to really think about why you want to tell that story, and make sure it's not just "because I want to depress the hell out of the audience."
Those were not seen as incompatible with liberalism at the time.
Harlan Ellison famously denigrated Uhura as a telephone operator, but she was not Kirk's secretary. The "secretary" position was filled by Yeoman Rand, who had a thing for Kirk (at least until "wolf" Kirk tried to rape her). Further, I don't think the idea that a power imbalance was inherently rape entered the mainstream until the 1970s. The past remains a foreign country.
I think thats really the crux of it. I wouldnt argue that TOS star trek is some sort of alt-right bedrock, but it's hardly modern woke either. Even the existence of a heroic straight white male main character would invalidate that. It's... its own weird thing. A weird mix of ww2 nostalgia, 60s california hippies, and Gene Roddenberry just being weird.
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Mm, speak for yourself. Unambiguous Good Guys vs. Bad Guys can be fun sometimes, but not all of us want "simple" entertainment.
Introducing moral complexity and shades of gray doesn't mean you have to go all grimdark and nihilistic.
Agreed, but writers should think about why they're adding these "shades of grey."
Like, if I go to a bakery and buy sugar cookies, I expect them to taste sweet. Sweet tastes good. Perhaps it might be interesting, sometimes, to dump in chili pepper or coffee grounds or whatever and "subvert expectations" with complex flavors. But unless you really know what you're doing, it mostly just tastes bad.
JRR Tolkien was not a stupid man. He fought in WW1, and was well familiar with the horrors of war against a morally complex foe. But he still used orcs as a simple, pure evil, because that gave him the space to focus on other elements of the human condition. Saying "well what if the orcs arent pure evil" would overwhelm the rest of the story.
I actually had that happen in a DnD game once, sorta. We were being attacked by bandits, and knocked them unconscious. We were lawful good, so we couldnt just execute them. It basically turned the rest of the campaign into a boring slog as we ran a prison camp to try to keep these stupid NPCs alive, instead of doing any fun adventuring stuff. If I wanted to hear a story about the human nature in prison, there are other, better places for that.
Bad GM. Should discuss player expectations. In most pseudo-medieval D&Dish settings, executing bandits is a perfectly Lawful Good thing to do.
Which ties back to the point above. You are right, people don't want to see the Federation turned into a fascist dystopia, they don't want to see Aragorn called a genocider, they don't want the Jedi turned into a corrupt space Nazis. The problem with the new shows is not that they are too gray, it's that the writers don't think about why they're "subverting" the narrative. (Or worse, they do, and it's malicious.)
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Meh. It was also pretty reactionary. I'll even say most of it's optimism comes from rejecting progress.
So what? Things are what they are, not the direction and velocity with which they are moving. Woke progressives have no claim on Star Trek, whichis proven by them having to adjust it to fit their ideology, and breaking it in the process.
It's reactionary in the sense that, as harold says, Roddenberry himself (and probably most of the show writers) still had a positive view generally of democracy, law and order, American military power, and the military in general. But they assumed we'd continue down the progressive path on race relations, gender relations, abolishing inequality, etc.
Well yes, my point is that the current woke movement is a rejection of the optimistic liberalism of the 60s. That wokeness is in fact very illiberal is not a new observation.
It's a lot deeper then that. It's reactionary in the sense that it has respect for the limits nature places on humanity, that borders on religious, even if they're all superficially secular. They have the ability to rewrite DNA on the fly, hack into the nervous system, support lifestyles of endless hedonism and debauchery... and they never take the bait. If they used the technology they had to it's full potential (and/or in the service of self-actualization rather than higher ideals, as following progressivism would imply) the average episode would end up being a mashup between Black Mirror and The Garden Of Earthly Delights.
Then what was the point of mentioning it's relative "wokeness" in the 60's? You made it sound like there's something ironic about people bemoaning Current Year's Star Trek making a far-left turn.
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To be fair, honestly most of us are in grimdark phase right now anyway because so much of our real world society is falling apart. You’ve undoubtedly been reading the descriptions of Philadelphia here. Or if not you’ve seen the ruins of most major cities with bars on the windows, trash in the streets, drug use and homeless people everywhere one looks. Where taking public transportation is an exercise in risk management during the day and unsafe at night. Where kids no longer expect to live as well as their parents even as they must work ever harder to not fall into poverty from the cost of living and debts and lack of real opportunities even though those kids worked extremely hard to get where they are. It is not exactly surprising that the grandkids of people who watched the original show resent that their grandparents believed in a hopeful optimistic future where there’s no poverty and people can live a life they want when the promise is not only no closer to being delivered, we’re actually farther away from many of them than we were in the 1960s.
Philadelphia was that way in the early 2000s too (it got better in the interim), worse before that or so I'm told, and media wasn't so grimdark.
Media was dark back when it was worse, but it wasn't grimdark and it was good.
And it could play its darkness off really lightly. Crocodile Dundee is very family friendly for how it portrays the dregs of Manhattan in the 1980's.
Yes, media was less dark, but the reality was at least as dark if not darker (certainly Manhattan and Philadelphia were worse)
Kind of interesting how, as things get better, the outlook gets bleaker.
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I don't know who "most of us" is. There are problems I find intractable at present, yes, but that said, if you asked me if I'd rather live today or in the 60s (without any tricks like "You get to know the next 60 years of history and can make decisions accordingly," etc.) I would definitely choose today.
Reminds me of all the black people who insist America today is not even a little bit better for black people than in the days of slavery. I just flat-out don't believe they actually believe this.
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Roddenberry was a political odd duck much like Robert A. Heinlein. He was a progressive hippy, but also a former military officer and LAPD policeman. So he had a lot of progressive ideals, but also held fairly small-c conservative attitudes towards organizational hierarchy and he believably writes what a pseudo-military organization (Starfleet) would look and act like. And he’s pretty optimistic about that pseudo-military organization’s morals and goals. No Machiavellian glowies like Section-31 in his mind.
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I imagine this is a large part of why lower decks was so well received. Unlike the other shows it sticks with the original positive premise, even if it's modern, progressive and deconstructing star trek.
did it though? From the (two) episodes I watched, it seemed to be constantly taking the piss out of the optimistic naive male character that wanted to do good, while propping up the #girlboss# female character as a queen who could do know wrong, no matter how insufferable she was. Most of the jokes were just taking little bits of what the older shows did for convenience (eg, making a teleporter because filming a shuttlecraft was too expensive) and trying to seem "smart" by pointing out minor inconsistencies.
In star trek tradition the first episodes (and by extension the first season) were the worst of the series and things get better from there on. The female character doesn't get to just be an uncriticised girl boss that does no wrong and the male character isn't just a pathetic punching bag. I watched the first episode and though it was a bit shit but pushed on because there seemed to be such widespread praise of the series even from places that were kind of primed to shit on new Trek.
Even after the first season, there were standout stinker episodes to the point where one in three was good, another one in three was serviceable or had something redeeming, and a 3rd was offensively bland and pointless garbage.
I do love Landlord Cops, though. And Big Strong City, Capital of Pakled Planet.
That may be but it's hard to overstate how much of an improvement these metrics are to the rest of new Trek.
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Even Tolkien himself didn't like orcs being irredeemable. You might already know about this, but if you don't, you might find it interesting. Look up Tolkien letter 153.
I think it's worth mentioning that this shift is probably largely because progressivism or leftism itself has shifted. Back in the 60s, I think people were more optimistic on the left, and less of the view that the west sucked. There were those people and those themes, but they weren't the majority. More liberal themes dominated, and people were more into the idea that we can all live together in utopia, less that the West is responsible for dystopia. It wasn't until the 2010s that the "West sucks" crowd became the majority.
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Picard S3 abandoned most of this and wasn’t bad. SNW is also not bad (there are some work themes but focus is generally on the characters and not the message).
To me, that's like saying "Bill Cosby has a new comedy series, and it's not that bad! A lot less terrible than his last season of the Cosby show!"
Like... why. Why do these people get to make so many mistakes, and still get the big chances to try again. We need to stop watching them.
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I held off from watching season three for about a year, watched the first episode, then didn’t bother with the next. They had Beverly Crusher do a murder and then setup a mystery box, and I lost all interest.
Though after watching Collier’s review I learned the mystery boxes all get resolved immediately in the next episode.
They didnt let mysteries simmer which was nice. Bev made dumb decisions
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Literally everyone I've talked to about episode 8-9 irl have thought they were atrocious. The apolagia for the new movies seems like an (almost) entirely online contrarian/"AstroTurf" thing to me. Perhaps it's different in parts of America though.
When Force Awakens came out I liked it. Looking back, if I could watch it alone without the ones after, I'd still like it okay--because it was basically of the same film family as the original trilogy, down to the exact same tropes. Rey was feisty and headstrong, but that was a combination in a way of Luke and Han. She showed weakness, at least one time, until she suddenly didn't, but there were unanswered questions that might have been answered in a way later that could have explained this. The film ended with a cliff hanger--you knew Luke was going to be awesome in the next film.
He wasn't. The Last Jedi on first watch was like a spice you've never had at a restaurant you're trying for the first time that serves food you thought you knew how to eat. The spice wreaks havoc on your digestive system and you think "God damn what did I eat? What was in that burrito?" I wanted to like it. I even refrained from piling on when people complained about it. And I still feel like Rise of Skywalker at least tried to undo some of TLJ's damage. But the trauma was too great. It was like taking an overdose of painkillers for a really bad headache. The cure made things worse.
The only thing positive I can say is that the acting as a whole was pretty good in the sequels. Every lead role actor and actress gave convincing performances. The soundtracks were quite good, as to be expected. And now I'm out of praise.
Tellingly, my sons, who I showed the original series to, and then the prequels, and who rewatched these films many times, never wanted to re-watch any of the sequels after seeing them once. Once!
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The one guy who I've met in real life who claimed to love the Last Jedi was a literal Antifa guy on a flight to seattle to "help out" with the Chaz/Chop thing after it had already ended. All the people who will try to make excuses for it have been some manner of Leftist. Probably because it vaguely alludes to "capitalism bad" at one point.
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I remember 8 being hugely contentious. Lots of people were saying it was great, and we "just didn't get it." The main star wars subreddit banned all criticism, to the point where people started a new one "saltier than crait" just so they could complain about it. I worked with nerds in a progressive area, so I was kind of afraid to discuss it with them. I feel like it started with a ton of apologia, and even ardent fans, and now that shit is finally dying away.
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