One approach, of course, is to simply do a half-assed job of it. Another approach seems like it will be exemplified by HBO:
Trying to equate 1950s Jim Crow-level racism with cosmic horror? Yeah, you’ve utterly misunderstood cosmic horror.
This is brought to you by J.J. Abrams, one of the men who ruined Star Trek, and Jordan Peele, who has made a career out of hating white folks.
Yaaaaaaay.
So one of the things I found kinda laughable about “Star Trek: The Next Generation” was the idea that in the 24th century *all* of humanity would be atheist (along with non-capitalist, and devoted solely to ‘improving” themselves, etc.). This was part of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future; utopian and wholly unrealistic. But… it’s canonical. So it is written, so it shall be.
When Roddenberry got shoved out of the role of Head Honcho Of Star Trek, religion started becoming a bigger part of Trek. Witness Worf’s spirituality in later seasons of TNG and Bajoran religion being of prime importance in “Deep Space Nine,” and even the wholly rational Vulcans started picking up gods and such. But even so, *human* religiosity seemed essentially nonexistent. The writers and producers knew it was silly that mankind would suddenly give up seventy thousand years of spiritualism in favor of rationality; that won’t happen until mankind undergoes mass genetic re-engineering to get rid of the apparently genetically encoded need to believe in *something.* Still… humanity’s lack of religion is canonical.
But then this:
The article was from July 2019 and is only about a single fan cosplaying as a gender-swapped Muslim version of Geordi La Forge. You know, it’s actually a pretty clever getup… but still, it’s just one fans non-canonical costume. Not the sort of thing to get worked up over, and in fact something that someone can nod at and say “whatever float’s yer boat.” If there’s ever a place where cultural appropriation should be celebrated, it’s cosplay. But then:
The official Star Trek YouTube channel takes time out to accept uncritically the idea that not only does Islam exist in the future, but Geordi La Forge is a Muslim. Note that comments are turned off for reasons that are as likely to include pointing out the anti-canonical nature of that as any naughty words.
So… if the corporate geniuses who took a giant dump on canon with “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Picard” (due to CBS All Access having been free for a month, I finally got around to watching all of STD and STP and… ugh) see fit to try to establish that long accepted popular characters who, IIRC, never once mentioned anything remotely like a religious preference are now to be declared to be members of such-and-such religious group… is there going to be a rush to establish the religions of everyone else? Is Picard a Catholic? Is Riker an Asatruar? Is Crusher a Wiccan? Sisko a Buddhist, Janeway Jewish, Paris a Raelian? Or are the suits behind modern WokeTrek going to basically just suggest that humanity shed all religions *but* Islam? Hell, are they going to suggest that Islam finally won and converted all of humanity and, against all historical evidence, continued forward technologically and culturally?
And this is as good a point as any to rail against one of the most popular misconceptions about Trek, both TOS and TNG: the idea that it shows the wonders of a “multicultural” future. It does not. Look at the bridge of Kirk’s Enterprise: you see a gloriously white straight male captain, a Russian, a Scot, an alien, an African, a Japanese, occasionally an Indian lady and a rotating Benneton ad of different ethnicities of humanity. Trek was spectacularly multi ETHNIC. What is wasn’t was multi CULTURAL. Everyone spoke the same language (even if there were accents), everyone had the same values, worked in the same hierarchical command structure, had the same goals. Everyone on the Enterprise and around the Federation had the same acceptance of STEM over woo and, as previously mentioned, all of humanity had the same lack of religion. Trek suggested that humanity would come together to form essentially a single culture with areas of slight differences, not a hodgepodge of non-integrating, non-assimilating unique cultures (in essence, the US versus the UN). In TNG, it has been canonically established the Geordi was indeed born in Somalia, but like Uhura, you’d never know that he wasn’t from heartland, USA, based on his attitudes and actions, his apparent ideology and culture. Monoculture FTW.
Back to the cosplayer: in Starfleet, there is a dress code for starship crew. Worf apparently got some special dispensation to wear his Klingon sash, but then, he was the first and only Klingon in Starfleet. Ensign Ro was told to remove her religious earring, but was eventually allowed to wear it; but then, she, too, was an alien. I do not recall any humans wearing anything but more or less stock Starfleet uniforms. If there were Muslim Starfleet officers, they certainly didn’t show it… anymore than the Sikh officers wore turbans and knives or the Catholics wore rosaries or the Orthodox Jewish officers wore their dreads and yarmulkes. And what of the human worshipers of Cthulhu and Slaanesh?
If, like me, you saw that headline and went “Marina who?” then be forewarned: she takes “weirdo” to a whole new weird level. She’s a “performance artist,” which often enough means less about any actual artistic talent and more about the ability to ᛒᚢᛚᛚᛋᚺᛁᛏ and self-promote and convince the vacuous that she is “deep.”
It seems that living lives of being the center of attention really does drive people insane. At the very least, it looks like many of them become addicted to constant attention, and when they can’t get it, they go bugnuts. Gentlemen, behold:
Fame. It’s a hell of a drug.
I’ve never understood the need some people seem to have to be the center of attention. Not a need I have in great abundance; hell, the whole point behind starting this blog a dozen years ago wasn’t to go “lookit me!” but more “buy my stuff!” and that, along with being a simple way to bitch about things and serve as a crude diary just about covers it. So far as I’m aware I’ve never posted anything that should give a clear idea of what I even look like, because y’all don’t need to know what I look like and I have no burning desire that y’all know what I look like. So all these overpaid weirdos making fools of themselves because they’re sad that they can’t go out in front of an audience? No sympathies.
Bonus round:
Governor Blackface aka Virginia’s Democrat Governor Ralph Northam strikes again. pic.twitter.com/SKnbtv9Mq8
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 6, 2020
So, CBS All Access finished up their run of “Star Trek: Picard,” and it was apparently such a rousing success that in a desperate bid to get *anyone* to watch it they’ve made it free to watch until April 23. Well, what with lockdowns and working on the computer and such, what they hell, I binge watched the series.
Summary: five “mehs” out of ten.
There are a number of reviewers out there who can give you chapter and verse about how STP craps all over Trek… and they’re not wrong. Taken as a followup to TNG, it just lands with a baffling thud. Pretty much everything is just “off” enough to grate, like someone dragging their nails on the chalkboard two rooms down. And since these reviewers are better at that sort of thing than I am, I’ll let their reviews speak for themselves at the end. I will instead focus on two things… one bad, one good.
The bad: starship design. The ships that appear in STP are video game generic ships for the most part. The Hero Ship looks like it could have come out of damn near any video game from the last 20 years, and were you to see it outside of the Trek context there’s almost no chance you’d think that it belonged in Trek. Worse: not only do the shuttlecraft from Star Trek: Discovery make several appearances, the mutant STD All Wrong Enterprise NCC-1701 *also* shows up in the form of a prominent holographic display. Thus “Picard” takes place in the STD timeline, not the TOS/TNG timeline. This can be used to explain why everything seems wrong: because everything *is* wrong.
The Romulan ships that show up, everything from small fighter-like designs on up to capitol ships, do not look remotely like Romulan ships. With the exception of a TOS-era Bird of Prey that shows up briefly under the control of some sort of space pirate, once again you’d likely never guess that these were meant to be Romulan ships unless you were tipped off by the green coloration.
Starfleet almost never appears. Near the end of the last episode, though, an entire fleet of Starfleet vessels shows up. Huzzah! The ships actually look like something more or less Starfleety. But… there are hundreds of ships, and they are THE SAME EXACT DESIGN. Feh.
OK, the good.
As the ten-episode series drags ponderously onward, it becomes clear that STP is as much Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror as Star Trek. Attend:
1: There is an ancient secret left behind by a vanished race.
2: The secret is held by a secret society
3: Most of the people who learn the secret promptly lose their fricken’ minds… one caps herself with a pistol, another rips her face up with her fingernails, another bashes her noggin in with a convenient rock.
4: And the nature of the secret? There are vast elder beings out there in the dark beyond the stars just waiting for the time to be right to come back here and lay waste.
5: There are cultist-like folks (a small number of folks almost completely lacking visible character traits) yearning for just that to happen.
6: How does the great evil come back? By way of a portal that the cultists open up.
7: And when the great evil starts to come through the portal, what do we get?
Now, I’m all in favor of blending Star Trek with Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror. Hell, that’s a little project I’ve been pecking away at for probably well over a year now, complete with dozens of pages of text, 3D CAD models and gravity maps of things that distort spacetime (it involves something that makes Vulcans go buggo when they come to understand The Secret). But to have a proper blending of Cthulhu and Trek, ya *gotta* have proper Trek. And Picard just ain’t. Never mind the design issues I raised, it’s just wrong. And here’s a hint as to why:
See, now, *no.* If you start off Trek with the intention of annoying the fans… what the hell is wrong with you. So they could have had something really interesting, but ended up with the sound of something large, squishy and uninteresting going “splat.” So, in summary… a wasted opportunity. Pretty much like all Trek since 2009.
… does this seem more like “an exciting new approach to Marvel comics” or “this is the end of Marvel?”
This sounds *horrible.* Is this the comic book version of “The Producers?” SJW writers have done a dandy job of torpedoing not just the likes of Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who, but also the comic book industry. At the same time that crowd-funded non-SJW independent comic books can get thousands of buyers and make a quarter to half a million dollars or more each (“Expendables Go To Hell:” $200 grand; “Cyberfrog:” $538,000; “Cyberfrog 2:” $374,000 so far; “Trump’s Space Force:” $72,000; “Jawbreakers – Lost Souls:” $404,000), the like of Marvel can struggle to make ends meet… at the same time that Marvel movies crank out a billion dollars profit a year.
A video commentary on this nonsense:
People are freaking the hell out. Not surprising given the reporting in the media… a combination of actual bad/scary news, and overblown hysterics. I am, perhaps oddly, fairly calm about things even though I know that if *I* catch the Wu Flu chances are pretty good it’ll kill me. Anyone been on this blog long enough may remember a number of bronchitis episodes some years ago that almost did me in then… something like the corona virus seems like it would ride the coattails of that issue to piledrive me straight into my grave. Yay. But a whole lot of people are losing their damned minds to panic. It is thus incumbent upon the media and the political leadership to try to put forward a calming influence.
And then THIS article comes out:
But the article *ends* with:
CNEOS said the asteroid is expected to approach Earth on March 18 at 11:15 p.m. EDT. During this time, the asteroid will fly past Earth from a distance of 0.04241 astronomical units or roughly 3.9 million miles from the planet’s center.
For frak’s sake. That’s not even close from an astronomical standpoint. There’s no valid math that would put that asteroid on anything like an impact trajectory, and thus “could” is in my opinion inaccurate to the point of dishonesty.
Political tattoos are always going to be questionable, as anyone who got a Mondale, Dukakis, Perot or Palin tattoo can attest. And then there’s *this* which has the dual feature of not only being of temporary relevance, but also *immediately* recognizable as being in astonishingly poor taste:
What we have here is a Comrade Warren staffer who got a tattoo reading “#B7E4CF,” the hex color code for the color used by the Warren campaign.
And… yeah. Took about a millisecond for people with more awareness than her to realize what it actually looked like:
Smart to memorialize a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives with a decision they'll regret for the rest of their lives.
— Jake Sperling (@Jake_Sperling) March 10, 2020
Snerk.
A racist Twitter mob came for me over a trivial math mistake. I'm not going anywhere. https://t.co/McxAT8P7OI
— Mara Gay (@MaraGay) March 11, 2020
“Trivial math mistake.” She did the math that said that Mike Bloomberg could have given every American a buck and a half, and came away thinking that he could have given every American a million dollars. That’s not trivial by *any* estimation. That is phenomenally bad math. It’s like looking at a small child and estimating that it weigh twenty seven thousand tons. This is, I suppose, part of the left-wing war on math, science and reason, trading western notions of mathematics for “other ways of knowing” where assuming that two times two equals four and not twenty-eight quadrillion is a result of cis-hetero patriarchal whiteness.
