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Topic: Star Trek: The Next Space Nine From Boldly Go Original Series  (Read 13740 times)

Agent (gobble, gobble) Coop

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Fucked up that half of the actors for Voyager's main male crew members were called "Robert"
chai tea latte Mr. Hunky Academia Great Joe Sauce lazzer grardaion?

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Fucked up that half of the actors for Voyager's main male crew members were called "Robert"
Agent (gobble, gobble) Coop, January 06, 2021, 09:18:43 pm
And they shoehorned in another Picard
Agent (gobble, gobble) Coop

auaurorau

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I've watched about twenty episodes of TNG now. It's weird that Picard and Riker are fairly omnipresent on the internet when they are the most boring characters in the show. Picard has done grumpy sternman for twenty episodes, and Riker's main job seems to be to punch someone every other episode, have a beard, and look smug.

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Shell Game lazzer grardaion? chai tea latte sambair

Agent (gobble, gobble) Coop

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Salubrious Rex Shell Game

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Achilles' Heelies lazzer grardaion? Salubrious Rex

lazzer grardaion?

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First, I can't let Coop do all the Star Trek shitposting in this thread.

Second, this thread is suffering from a distinct lack of Morn.

I only put two and two together this year that MORN is an anagram of NORM from Cheers, and plays a similar role as the perpetual barfly on Deep Space Nine.

There is a running joke, in that Morn never actually speaks on-screen, but people are always talking about him as if he's an incorrigible gossip who will talk your ear off.

They made an action figure of Morn



Morn's actor, Mark Allen Shephard, is also a musician, who made an album 'Morn to be Wild'



MORN

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sambair Mr. Hunky Academia Great Joe Salubrious Rex RoeCocoa

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What could have caused the Federation to sign an unequal treaty that lets the Romulans and Klingons use cloaking devices but prohibits the Federation from doing so?

• An unseen war in which the Federation got spanked
• Munich-style appeasement during a period of domestic political crisis in the UFP
• Federation diplomatic corps riddled with Rommie sympathizers
• Inter-service rivalry: Federation diplomatic corps, envious of Starfleet’s status, intentionally sandbag the fleet
• Cloaking devices traded away for right to relocate sure-to-be-genocided conquered peoples
• Planetary governments within the Federation object to cloaking devices lest Starfleet vessels conduct covert domestic surveillance programs
• The term “cloaking device” in the treaty uses a definition that—unbeknownst to the Romulans—excludes the invisibility technology the Federation has been developing in secret
• Starfleet adopted an area denial/fleet-in-being doctrine, in which having extremely visible warships is part of the strategy
• Collaboration between political appointees and civil servants in the Federation negotiating team breaks down, leading to “Yes, Minister”-type farce
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I just always took it that way the Romulans and Klingons had already developed their cloaking tech by the time the treaty was signed but the federation hadn't so all current tech was fine to use but the federation couldn't develop any more technology to cloak. The Defiant had a cloaking device installed by the Romulans for example and I don't think they kept a Romulan on board for very long to monitor it.
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I just learned that there's an Alexander Siddig fan club youtube channel that has a ton of videos that appear to be Siddig and various other DS9 cast members performing fanfics. I haven't had a chance to watch any in full yet, so not going to speak to quality, but the clips I've skimmed through seem like everyone involved is just having fun getting to play the characters again.

lazzer grardaion?

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This is my effort to get out all my thoughts on Star Trek, after seeing the first episode of ‘Strange New Worlds’. Fair warning, I have a lot of thoughts about Star Trek.
———
Star Trek was important to me growing up. It was something that I both did and do share with my parents, who may remember how the tar monster from that one episode of TNG scared the bajeezus out of little me.
I want to highlight how many episodes of Star Trek I saw when I was very young, but which I still remembered decades later, because they had some fun idea that stuck with me (e.g. the one where Data gets amnesia and stumbles into a civilization that still thinks the elements are earth-water-wind-fire, and they basically think he’s a yeti. Fun!)

During the pandemic, Patrick Stewart tweeted out a promo code for a month of Paramount Plus to promote their new ‘Picard’ show. I heard mixed things about Discovery, so I hadn’t bothered to watch that, but I was curious about how they were going to handle this!

The character of Captain Jean-Luc Picard on TNG is really compelling to me. He’s a deeply principled man, guided by a love of history and archaeology, and by curiosity. In a galaxy this big, how could he not be? Imagine our own history on planet Earth, with all of the mysteries, all the (presumably) lost artifacts, and in the universe of Star Trek, every week you might visit a different planet with its own history! The way that Picard appreciated the magnitude of that mystery, of that sense of discovery, made me appreciate it too.

Also, Picard is a bit of a square! He drinks tea and reads old books. He’s the captain of the ship, and he takes that responsibility very seriously. I like that he’s not a traditional action hero like Kirk, he’s just a different kind of guy. I have never personally hit a man with a double-handed axe chop, but I have sat in a chair with a book and had tea.
Even TNG in its final episodes explored what Picard might be like decades in the future, and I was really curious about how they would take this character and move him off the Enterprise, and what kind of wacky sci-fi adventures he might get tangled up in.
———
So then I watched the new show about Picard.

Boy howdy it was just a bunch of nonsense crap. The show is a Matryoshka doll of mysteries inside mysteries inside mysteries, there are all kinds of brutal gory deaths in the middle, and then once you get to the final mystery it turns out to be stolen from a not-particularly-beloved video game plot. The show was helmed by the creative team of Alex Kurtzmann and Akiva Goldsman, who are buddies of noted hack JJ Abrams.

People continuously make impassioned speeches about nothing. Everybody’s having an emotional meltdown for some very contrived reason. One episode starts with a gory eyeball-removal torture sequence.
It was a very disheartening experience.

Afterwards, I questioned my memory of TNG, and the character of Picard. Man, this new show was just *so incredibly bad*, could the old show still be any good? Was it just rose-tinted glasses?

Since then, my fiance and I have gone through about 11 seasons of Star Trek together (skipping much of seasons 1 and 2 of TNG, ‘Code of Honor’ is not part of my comfort-watch schedule).

Star Trek is fun! It’s got hokey characters and big sci-fi concepts, and it’s something different every time! There might be a space anomaly or a time warp! Or some kind of alien being that’s so different from us we don’t understand if it’s intelligent! A lot of the time there’s some moral dilemma that makes you think or feel something. Star Trek is full of uppercase-I Ideas.

Star Trek is about as good as I remembered! It isn’t good all of the time, but sometimes it’s just wonderful.
Now, Picard was abysmal, and Discovery was another Kurtzmann/Goldsman product, so I was… reluctant to give it a try. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me.

Having watched the four (13-episode) seasons, I would say that Disco isn’t completely devoid of things I like, there are some character beats I found charming, most of the actors are doing their best with the material they’ve been given. Sometimes there’s a cool space whale or alien species. Tig Notaro’s there! Tilly is lots of fun!
I don’t want to take apart Disco’s whole sweater, but I want to pull on a couple of threads, because they highlight my main point:

There are so many *potentially* interesting ideas, things that if you took the time to do even the tiniest exploration of them, you would have a real solid foundation for a Star Trek episode, and I think every single idea Disco brings up, they either drop or completely mishandle.

———

First, the character of Evil Philippa Georgiou: The concept of the ‘Mirror Universe’ in Star Trek is great for one-off episodes. It’s another universe where you have most of the same people and institutions, but they’re evil now! Everybody’s got an interdimensional evil twin, which gives all your actors a chance to ham it up. It’s fun, and it gives you an opportunity to explore Ideas about morality and the nature of good and evil! Of course, it’s a silly idea that falls apart under scrutiny, but it’s a great premise for a Star Trek episode.

Discovery made the decision to interrupt a season-long story arc about a war with the Klingons to do a four episode story arc about Discovery going to the Mirror Universe. I would go so far as to say that the two-parters DS9 did about the Mirror Universe were pushing it in terms of ‘falling apart under scrutiny’, so four episodes is pushing it past the breaking point.

The big revelation (because everything has to have a big *twwwwist*), is that protagonist Michael Burnham (played with aplomb by Sonequa Martin-Green) feels responsible for the death of her mentor/mother figure, Captain Georgiou, and it turns out that Georgiou has an evil twin in the Mirror Universe, who is the emperor of the brutal and racist Terran Empire (the evil version of the Federation).

Evil Georgiou is a genocidal tyrant. The first thing we see her do is blow up a planet. She has slaves whom she occasionally has killed, and then eats.

She is a cartoon supervillain, which wouldn’t itself be a bad thing, but then the show makes the utterly baffling decision to bring Evil Georgiou back to the ‘normal’ universe, and keep her around as a character, doing secret missions for Section 31 (basically the Federation CIA), rather than putting her in a jail for her unimaginable atrocities.
This ties into another point, which is that I think Discovery is phenomenally cynical. Section 31 was introduced in Star Trek as a way of exploring how the Federation, nominally a bunch of peaceful secular humanists, handles groups who are not peaceful secular humanists. They are morally grey by design.

The way that Discovery’s version of the Federation takes a look at a lady who is basically Space Hitler, and goes “Ah, but she is so smart and such a tactical genius, that we must use her!”, it’s not necessarily unrealistic for a story set in the modern world, but Star Trek has, since Day 1, been about the idea that humanity can be better than the way it is right now, and it rubs me the wrong way that even a shady organization in a desperate time would turn to Space Hitler for help, and that the show would never ever try to seriously reckon with that. It’s one of many things that makes me wonder if the show’s writers even understand that what they’re writing is so cynical, or that they’re writing science fiction.

Saru (a ‘Kelpien’ played by the always-delightful Doug Jones) *knows* that Evil Georgiou has killed and eaten members of his species. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? She makes comments about how tasty the ganglia are when prepared by a specific chef, so we can assume she’s eaten enough Kelpiens to have a strong opinion!
In one season 3 episode of Discovery, Saru invites Evil Georgiou to dinner. I can appreciate that Saru is a Starfleet officer, a professional trained in communicating with and understanding alien species, but inviting any person you could characterize as a cannibal, to dinner… and again, they never really explore this idea! Did the writers forget? Were they trying to make the audience forget? And then they make a horribly contrived callback to a beloved original Star Trek episode so that they can write Georgiou off the show, and so she can star in their new Section 31 spinoff show (thankfully trapped in development hell for the moment, as it should be).

You could take any one of these angles and expand them into a real solid Star Trek episode. Maybe Georgiou and Saru are trapped on a planet together, and they have to work together and learn to understand each other, and afterwards their relationship is different. Maybe after Georgiou goes to space jail forever they can be pen pals. I think that would be fun! Not even as a goof, I think that would be a solid Star Trek episode that can explore some big-I Ideas.

———

The next big dropped ball in Discovery’s writing is a literal ball: During the second season, they find a big ancient sphere that’s tens of thousands of years old, and it’s seen civilizations rise and fall, it has immeasurable knowledge of technology and culture, thoughts and arts and languages from all over the galaxy. It transmits all its knowledge to the Discovery, and then…

I want to point to a TNG episode with a similar premise, ‘The Inner Light’. A probe from an ancient, now-destroyed civilization transmits the memories of one of its members into Jean-Luc Picard, and he lives the life of ‘Kamin’, seeing the beauty and tragedy of life on this long-gone planet. For good reason, this is many people’s favorite episode of Star Trek; it ties into Star Trek’s central themes of exploration and seeking understanding, and how that search changes the seeker.

Discovery never does a single interesting thing with the Sphere Data.

It tells them some stuff about the population statistics of the Kelpiens from a few thousand years ago, which ties into a whole storyline with Saru which never really has anything to do with the Sphere Data itself.
It apparently has extensive knowledge about artificial intelligence (which we never get to know *anything* about), and there’s an evil Skynet computer that wants that knowledge so it can take over the galaxy. It just makes the Sphere Data into a MacGuffin that the bad guy wants.

This ties into another point, that Discovery’s always going from a galaxy-ending crisis to a galaxy-ending (or universe ending, multiverse ending, whatever) crisis. You never get a chance to breathe, and maybe take the time to explore some capital-I Ideas. Sure it keeps the energy level high, there can be lots of action and drama, but you can never have an episode in there like ‘The Inner Light’.

Uh, the Sphere Data tells Evil Georgiou the planet she can go to so she can get written off the show.
The Sphere Data apparently has a self-preservation instinct, so it doesn’t want the Discovery to be destroyed, but it sure forgets about that a lot until it’s convenient for the plot. As an aside, 1980 anime Space Runaway Ideon did this plot point with infinitely more skill.

Here’s my pitch for an episode! The Discovery needs to do something dangerous to save the day, and the Sphere Data stops them because it’s too dangerous, and the crew needs to communicate with this ancient alien AI to convince it that whatever they’re doing is more important than self-preservation. Low-hanging-fruit!
That’s about it. Just a 565 km-wide dropped ball.
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« Last Edit: May 27, 2022, 06:13:06 pm by lazzer grardaion? »

lazzer grardaion?

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Splitting into two posts because I hit the 20000 character count.
lazzer grardaion?, May 27, 2022, 06:10:07 pm

In the third season, time travel shenanigans send the Discovery to the 32nd century, where a cataclysmic event called ‘the Burn’ made dilithium (the technobabble substance that makes the warp drive work) all over the galaxy (universe? multiverse?) stop ‘working’, and now warp travel is really hard, and the galaxy is in chaos.

The cause of the Burn is the big season-long mystery. Was it a secret Vulcan science experiment that they’re trying to cover up? Was it some ultra-powerful cosmic entity like ‘Q’?

The explanation they ultimately give is that a Kelpien child on a radioactive planet made out of dilithium somehow mutated to become ‘connected to’ the dilithium, and he got so scared and sad at seeing his mother die that he made a big psychic shockwave that burned out all the dilithium.

First, I want to say that this, by itself, would not be the hokiest sci-fi concept that Star Trek has ever done. There have been plenty of episodes about immature beings with immense powers, like S1E2 of original Star Trek! It’s been there since the beginning.

My first problem is that it’s not a satisfying resolution to a season-long mystery. It could be a good premise for a standalone episode, but “the heretofore unknown psychic child did it” is one step below “god/gods did it” and two steps below “the butler did it”.

Second, I wouldn’t complain so much if, in some way, it tied back into other themes or ideas, but Discovery isn’t interested in exploring themes or ideas. It’s interested in a big *twist*, and then there’s some okay character stuff with Saru, but the writers clearly have no interest in anything beyond that.

Here’s my minimal script doctor. Rather than the Burn being a complete mystery that nobody has an explanation for, it’s something that *everybody* has an explanation for. It’s an era of paranoia and finger-pointing. Everybody, even the nominally peaceful future Federation, is hankering for revenge and violence against whoever caused the Burn. Then, if the cause of the Burn turns out to be a child who can’t control their own powers, it forces everybody to confront their own desire to punish those ‘responsible’ for something that turns out to be an accident. That could be an Idea.

———

Maybe the biggest dropped ball is the first: the ship 'Discovery' has a ‘spore drive’ that lets it travel anywhere in the universe instantly. No warp drive, no weeks or months of travel, it can teleport anywhere.

The Discovery has the greatest ability to explore of any ship ever shown in Star Trek. They can go anywhere! They could end up in a part of the galaxy that’s never been explored before! They can really truly go where no one has gone before!

And then… they never really take advantage of that. There are the places they need to go to move the plot along, but they never just… explore.

There’s just not much of a ‘Trek’ in this Star Trek, and I think that’s a shame.

———

This lack of imagination, and absence of any overarching Ideas, means that sometimes, Discovery is just an absolute mess of a show.

S3E5 of Discovery starts off with the Discovery crew meeting the 32nd century Federation, and (as is so often the case in Star Trek), the admiral in charge is kind of a dick! He wants to split up the Discovery crew and put them on other assignments, and for a bit you think the episode is going to be about that.

Then it turns out that there’s a plague somewhere, and the Discovery is the only ship (due to its spore drive) that can get there in time to deliver medical supplies, and you think the episode is going to be about that.

But then it turns out that the cure for the plague is in some seeds on a seed-bank ship, and they have to go there, and there’s a weird guy who has his dead wife and daughter in stasis pods, and the guy keeps phasing in and out of reality because of a transporter accident during an ion storm, and it’s kinda about that for a while.

It’s just an absolute mess, and even though that’s one of the worse examples, you can pick episodes from each season of Disco that are just as much scrambled thoughtless nonsense, that manages to do or say nothing of substance in a 45-minute runtime. Sure, every season of every Star Trek series has a few clunkers, but even the bad Season 1 TNG episodes have An Idea or two in them, and the ideas guide the story, even if it’s hamfisted or sloppy or trite.

The ideas of Star Trek are its skeleton, and I think it’s quite a good skeleton to build on, in spite of the mixed results that various writers and directors have had over the years. Star Trek is a show about how human beings in the future might understand and respect each other, work together, and learn more about themselves by learning about those different from us.

Discovery and Picard have no interest in or connection to those ideas, and so you’re left with a sort of floppy blob-like sack of passionate speeches about nothing, quippy ‘smart’ dialogue, and some occasionally good special effects.

———

There are plenty of good actors in Disco, and a few good characters in there, too, but let’s take a quick detour in that direction.

Discovery has a lot of ‘bench-warmers’ in its core cast. Sure, in any Star Trek you have random crew members who are just sort of hanging out in the background, people who defend Discovery online like to bring up how Lieutenants Uhura and Sulu didn’t have first names in original Star Trek, *BUT* other Star Trek very rarely pretends like those crew members are real characters that we know anything about.

In Discovery’s Season 2 finale, Captain Pike gives a big emotional speech:

“Lieutenants Detmer and Owosekun, I wouldn't be here if you hadn't saved my life on the way to that asteroid. Lieutenant Nilsson, You've stepped up for Airiam in way that honors her. Lieutenants Bryce and Rhys, you're calm under pressure”

Lieutenant Detmer’s only notable characteristic is that she has a robot eye, and (after this speech happens) she gets PTSD after crashing the ship, and that gets handled mostly off-screen. Even in her tearful message (part of a montage) that she leaves behind for her friends and family before disappearing to the future, the only thing we see her talk about is how hard it was when she got injured and had to get a robot eye.

Lieutenant Owosekun’s Memory-Alpha page has a lot of “Owosekun was present at” in it. There’s one season 4 episode where she turns out to be a skilled pit fighter? But at the point Pike is giving this speech, I don’t even think we know her first name! People complain about Uhura being underdeveloped, and not having a first name, but Star Trek was also a show written and produced in the 1960s. A show written in the 2010s should aspire to being better than that; either it should develop the character enough that we understand and care about them, or it should cut out all the vapid inspirational speeches that would only have meaning if they had done that legwork beforehand.

Nilsson, Bryce, and Rhys are such nothing characters I can’t identify which is which by name.

Airiam is a robot lady. The writers didn’t know or care what kind of robot lady, some of the writers thought she was an alien, and she only got any kind of characterization or backstory the episode before she was killed off.

Expanding on the personalities of the background characters is a good thing. It provides texture to the show and its setting that makes it feel more real. TNG had a great episode ‘Lower Decks’ (the namesake of the new cartoon show), about cadets and ensigns and the guy who serves drinks at Ten-Forward, and what they do in their day-to-day life.
Fleshing out those background characters can make the stakes of the show feel more real, but we can’t just be *told* to care about a character. When Red-Shirt Crewman Number 6 gets eaten by a lava monster at the start of the episode, it demonstrates that the situation is serious and dangerous, but you probably don’t know very much about them, and the rest of the episode probably won’t explore them in any serious depth. In the cases where it does (again, like in ‘Lower Decks’) that death is a focal point of the episode. It ties into the show’s themes and ideas about the responsibilities of command, or the danger of exploring the unknown, or *something*, *anything*.

Discovery likes to take the roles that would usually be random redshirts in any other Star Trek show, and gesture to these character-shaped-objects as if we know anything about or care about them. No shade to anybody who likes them, I enjoy character-shaped-objects in my shows as much as the next person (MORN FOREVER), but I do not think for a second that Deep Space 9 would work as a show if you replaced most of the main characters with Morns who do nothing but deliver expository technobabble, and you occasionally hear about something neat they did offscreen.

———

Recently, Kurtzmann/Goldsman started a ‘new show’, subtitled ‘Strange New Worlds’. Some of the trailers looked promising! It promised a return to episodic storytelling with self-contained episodes about a problem or dilemma or whatever that the characters have to solve. After Discovery and Picard, I treated it as a ‘fool me once, shame on you’ situation, but I resolved to give it one episode to sell me on it.

Now, the Disco Defenders may argue that one episode is not a fair metric to judge the quality of a ‘new show’. However, the creative team is still headed by the same people, you have returning characters Pike and Spock in your core cast, still played by the same actors as in Discovery, and following through with storylines that were set up in Discovery (namely, that Pike touched a crystal that showed him the future, so he knows his face is going to melt from delta radiation at some point, and being sad about that is his main character beat).

‘Strange New Worlds’ is basically Discovery Season 5, but I agreed to one episode.

The first episode starts with a long voiceover monologue that basically says “first contact with aliens is the realm of science fiction, until it isn’t”. Extended flowery monologues saying very little struck me as a bad sign.

Then, you have Pike watching ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, specifically Klaatu’s monologue about how humans should take care of each other, and end war and exploitation. Very on-the-nose, also lazy to put a speech from a classic science fiction movie and act like you can just gesture to that rather than making a point yourself.

Imagining the art of the future is a difficult writing task, and one that Star Trek usually punts on, but this is… weak. (As an aside, it opens up the confusing question of what other classic science fiction exists in the world of Star Trek. If ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ exists, does the 2008 remake exist? What other sci-fi movies exist? So much genre fiction borrows from Star Trek in one way or another, does Star Trek necessarily exist in the world of Star Trek, or is there just this weird cultural gap?)

Then, true to its promise, the story has a problem that is introduced and resolved in the same episode.
Pike is called to duty, in spite of his reluctance (because he is sad about knowing his face is going to melt at some point) to salvage a first-contact scenario gone wrong. Normally, the Federation only contacts civilizations after they’ve invented warp technology, out of a recognition that alien contact can be disastrous for a civilization that hasn’t yet advanced to that point. Developing warp technology is the ‘graduation’ of a species, that puts it on the same footing as the rest of the galactic community they are now joining. This policy is the Federation’s ‘Prime Directive’ that is the focal point of so many interesting Star Trek episodes.

It turns out that the species that they *thought* had developed a warp drive has actually developed a ‘warp bomb’, which is never explored or explained in any detail beyond the name.

Apparently they developed the warp bomb after seeing the big space battle at the end of Discovery Season 2, which is a bit like a group of uncontacted peoples developing a nuclear bomb after watching a naval battle between nuclear-powered ships.

To blend in on the planet’s surface, Pike, Spock, and Lieutenant La'an Noonien-Singh (extremely subtle) receive an injection that temporarily rewrites their DNA so they look like the aliens. This is a spin on an established Star Trek idea, that people will undergo plastic surgery to blend in with alien societies to discreetly study them, except that this is a disguise that can randomly wear off at inopportune times to create conflict and move the plot forward.
On the alien planet that developed the warp bomb, there are people holding signs and protesting, and monitors everywhere displaying news of riots and violence. Spock goes “gosh, we seem to have landed on a planet in the midst of civil unrest”, because the writers think the audience is very very stupid.

Spock knocks out a couple of scientists and takes their scientist uniforms so they can sneak into the warp bomb facility, and then they transport the scientists up to the Enterprise, and try to keep them sedated, rather than leaving them in a field somewhere, or outside a bar, or anywhere, on the massive planet below them. Of course, the sedative wears off and there’s a scene of wacky hijinks where one of the scientists runs around the ship in a panic, until he gets stuck in an elevator with Uhura, where they talk about sports (???) until he gets off the elevator and nurse Chapel sticks him with more sedative.

Pike, Spock, and La’an sneak into the warp bomb facility, and of course the DNA-rewriting serum wears off at an inopportune time and they get captured.

As a captured alien, Pike gets an audience with the president of the planet, and he basically says “my planet, which was at one point exactly like your planet is now, did WWIII, and it was very bad, I recommend not building bombs and blowing each other up”.  The president goes “we’re the ones in control on this planet, we have the most power, we make the rules”, and rather than try to debate that philosophy of power, or highlight what has happened to other civilizations and cultures that thought that way, Pike goes “well, I have the most power” and uses the Enterprise to force these aliens to get along with each other, and that’s pretty much the episode.



It spends so little time thinking about the alien planet, and their society, and how it got the way it is. We learn absolutely nothing about the dissidents who are opposing the existing government, or why, it just assumes that this alien planet is literally identical to 21st century United States society right now in every single way, so they don't need to explain anything, and then it has nothing substantial to say except "Don't do a civil war! WWIII is bad!”
Honestly, even a bad Season 1 TNG episode has more to say about our world, and the different cultures, and philosophies, and ideologies in it, than this episode.

It has no ideas that it wants to explore, and it has no imagination about how alien cultures might develop. Pike’s character 'arc' in the episode is that he’s sad about his face melting, then he talks about WWIII being bad and how ‘life has possibilities’, and then he’s less sad about his face melting. It’s not an arc, it’s two points with a monologue in the middle.

That’s not even touching on La’an’s (god, how do you do a possessive “s” with that name?) awful backstory about being all her friends and family getting captured by the Gorn and being murdered and eaten and having their bodies cut open for Gorn ‘breeding sacks’ and her being the only survivor. UGH! AWFUL!

The show has no new ideas, no previously-unseen reserves of imagination, no skillful explorations of characters. It’s nothing!

 I gave it my one episode. I’m done.
———
By all means, if you found something in any of these shows, I’m happy for you, and I would love to hear about what you found interesting or inspiring or meaningful, but I don’t think modern Star Trek (at least the live action shows) hold anything for me any more.

The guys over at RedLetterMedia (whom I agree with on many, but certainly not all Trek-related topics) described the ‘Picard’ show as ‘being broken up with by Star Trek’, and as silly as that sounds, it does kind of describe my feelings.
Star Trek was something very important to me, but Star Trek today has changed into something different, and I don’t think we have anything to offer each other anymore. Science fiction without Ideas is just flashy lights and technobabble, and that’s exactly what Kurtzmann and Goldsman are serving up.

There is still plenty of good high-concept sci-fi television out there. I would like to draw attention to ‘Raised By Wolves’ as a show that is just packed to the gills with Big Ideas about religion, parenthood, the unknown, life and death and creation and the universe and everything, and which thoughtfully weaves those ideas into stories that center around a richly realized cast of characters and their motivations. Also, shockingly enough, I loved the new 'Halo' series, which also explores themes of religion, parenthood, the morality of war, emotion and identity, and ties those themes into its characters and plot.

The words ‘Star Trek’ are just a brand name, but even though there is good thoughtful sci-fi out there, I’m sad and disappointed that Star Trek, which was my first exposure to so many of those big sci-fi ideas, is no longer interested in those ideas. I don’t think any child out there is going to have their mind blown by something they see in Discovery, Picard, or SNW. I don’t think there’s anything that will stick with them long-term (at least in a good way, it is entirely possible that there may be a child out there who will remember the scary tar monster).
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