Actual fans of Star Trek have been grousing for several years now (since either the beginning of STD, or the beginning of the JJTrek movies, depending) about the lack of quality Trek, how the garbage that’s being cranked out is poorly written, nonsensical and massively anti-canonical. While actual finances and viewership numbers for the streaming shows are impossible to come by, the fact that these shows have made approximately *zero* cultural impact (when was the last time you saw an STD toy, model, T-shirt or any other bit of merchandise for sale at WalMart… or *anywhere*?) indicates that other than hate-watching, nobody much cares about these shows. So, it is in the interests of the brand for those in charge to make good decisions. And by golly, looky here:
Yes, the bios of the two new acting units start off by telling us what their pronouns are, because that’s *all* they are. I’m sure all the fans who complained about Picard being turned into a useless, neutered shadow of his former self, incapable of accomplishing anything but meekly accepting abuse from every female character within a dozen light years, will line the frak up to watch *this.*
For decades people have been arguing over whether Heinlein’s novel “Starship Troopers,” and the Paul Verhoven movie that is as faithful to the novel as “Star Trek: Discovery” is to the Star Trek franchise, describe a society that is fundamentally fascist… and whether they are in fact advocating for fascism. These days most of the debate revolves around the movie (because reading are hard, I guess); the fact that the military are shown to have some uniforms that are directly inspired by Nazi SS uniforms kinda makes the “fascism” detail kinda jump out at you. And so, on one side we have this detailed explanation as to why the movie advocates for fascism:
But on the other hand, we have this video which does a pretty good job of tearign down the first videos arguments:
In short: the society shown in the movie is a democratic one, one that has a strict set of laws that it apparently actually sticks to and applies fairly. It has freedom of speech, including allowing people to publicly argue against not only government policy but also the basic nature of the government. It seems that businessmen can do quite well and get quite rich while still publicly opposing the government. And while it’s fighting a total war against an alien race, the military respect the capabilities of that race; and while the military seems to be carrying out a *genocidal* war against that alien race, the aliens are doing the same to humanity. Yes, there’s not much empathy for the enemy, but then the enemy does not show any personality to empathize *with.* Their sole means of communications with mankind are to wipe out whole cities of women and children and puppies, and to chop up colonists.
In the movie, the humans seem to be fascist *solely* in their choice of fashion. It’s the alien bugs that seem to have the more fascist society.
As rumors persist of Star Trek Discovery circling the drain, new rumors arise about the mysterious second Star Trek project being worked on by “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” director Nicholas Meyer. Rumors have suggested that what he was working on was a new series to replace STD after its first – and only – season; perhaps trying to make STD into an “anthology” series, where each season is something entirely new. While certainly possible (“American Horror Story” does that), it has been assumed that this approach was simply a way for CBS to save face, a “we always meant to do that” after the disastrous decisions made for STD.
But in the fact-deficient article linked HERE, a new idea is proposed: what Meyer is working on is a miniseries featuring Khan Noonian Singh, the genetically enhanced super-jackwagon from the TOS episode “Space Seed” and Star Trek II. It is surmised that the miniseries takes place between those two while Khan & Co. are stranded on Ceti Alpha V.
On one hand… kinda meh (yet another Trek into its own past, rather than pushing into the future; a story about people the audience can’t really relate to dumped on a backwater planet with no technology). On the other hand, Nick Meyers. On the gripping hand, it’s *apparently* a miniseries, which means a beginning, middle and end.
In Star Trek Into Darkness, Khan was inexplicably played by Benedict Cumberbatch, i.e. Whitey McWhiteguy. Khan was a Sikh (who’d originally been played by a Mexican of Spanish ancestry). So I suppose that in the miniseries he could be played by a Korean fella. But it would be nice to have Khan played by someone who actually fit the part… either a convincing Sikh, or someone who made a good Ricardo Montalban. Any suggestions?
About that last point: as the rumors of STD sucking have grown (aided by the reveals of plot points that are questionable at best), CBS has taken to using the Ghostbusters: 2016 defense playbook: accuse the haters of being misogynists/alt-righters/racists/whatever because the main character is a black woman. It’s easier to deflect than defend, though that strategy didn’t work that well for Sony & Feig. As part of the deflection, reference is always made to the history of Star Trek being “progressive,” featuring multicultural crews and such. Well, here’s the thing: while it is undeniably true that TOS was well ahead of the curve and featured, for the time, an astonishingly multi-ethnic cast, it was anything but multi-cultural. Virtually everyone came from the same culture, a Federation that came off as a somewhat smoothed-over version of the United States. Uhura, for example, came from somewhere in Africa… but she spoke with an American accent and behaved as if she was raised in American culture. The only accents to be found were on Scotty and Chekov. The only distinctly different culture to be found on board was Spocks Vulcan – importantly, non-human – culture. When Next Gen rolled around, the same situation held true; the only distinctly different culture on display was the Klingon. While the religious affiliations of the crew didn’t come up much on TOS, it was clear that by the time of TNG, all humans (supposedly) had the same religious views, which is one of the more unlikely predictions made on that show.
The headline contains just about all the actual information that’s available. Maybe it’s a series. Maybe a movie. Maybe a video game, maybe a comic book, maybe a pack of trading cards.
Still, lack of data is never a good enough reason to not speculate wildly. One possibility: Paramount has finally realized that STD is promising to be such a disaster that they’re already looking at ways of rapidly recovering by doing something that, unlike STD, won’t irritate the fans. Possibilities include the obvious such as a series set 15 years after the end of Voyager in the “prime” Star Trek universe. If it covers such stuff as the trashing of the Romulan empire and twenty years of post-Dominion War changes, it could be pretty interesting.
But for some reason, the suits think it’s a good idea to keep setting Star Trek series in the “past.” Enterprise, the NuTrek movies, Discovery. It seems they have an obsession with it. So… fine. I have an idea.
How about a series that covers *two* eras? Deep Space Nine showed Reliant-class vessels and Excelsior-class vessels all the time. These ships could well be pushing a century of service life. This it not that unlikely… the B-52 has been in service more than 60 years, for example. If things were only slightly different, Iowa-class battleships might still be in service, three quarters of a century later. So a starship a century old? Sure, I can buy that.
So here’s my notion: Star Trek: Rand, say. The adventures of the USS Ayn Rand (because why the hell not), a Reliant-class vessel that was first built around the time of “The Motion Picture” and was the pinnacle of high tech for its time. And… it’s still around a century later, with upgraded everything. No longer front line, but still doing a job. So show two entirely different crews: an early crew wearing “Wrath of Khan” era uniforms, the top of their class , in a ship that’s still new, out doing a 5-year mission. And alternate that with episodes featuring a post-Voyager crew… *not* the best of the best. You can use a lot of the same sets, and maybe even go to a lot of the same destinations, a century apart.
Have a *few* overlapping characters. Ensign Skippy is Early Rand’s enthusiastic young Vulcan science officer-in-training. Commander Skippy is Old Rand’s curmudgeonly, cranky first officer or Chief Engineer. “A century I’ve spent on this same damn ship, serving under a succession of increasingly dumbass human captains. Sigh…”
You could throw some real curveballs in there. Voyager showed a lot of new propulsion technologies, stuff pushing well past warp drive. Most of the time they didn’t work well or reliably, but they’ve had a generation to perfect what Voyager brought back.So the warp nacelles have been removed and replaced with… what? Tiny nacelles? Landing gear? Cargo pods? Empty space? Given the possibilities of the new propulsion system, then perhaps the Rand is a technology testbed, being sent to the Magellanic Clouds.
I stumbled across some paperwork that for no readily apparent reason I’ve kept for a quarter century. Shown below are two correspondence that might be of some amusement. They deal with my very first “real” job after graduation, when I was hired to work on a The Next Big Thing project for Orbital Sciences Corporation.
First up (some personal data redacted):
Neato! I’m hired! So I packed up my stuff (including my baby archive, which fit in two boxes), drove from Illinois to Virginia right smack in the middle of the Blizzard Of The Century, spent a bucket of cash for an apartment, and started an exciting new adventure, sure to be filled with excitement, career fulfillment and fair and reasonable treatment from my employers. What could possibly go wrong?
Gee, that was fun.
It was a short, sharp shock that gave me a good solid look at the aerospace industry in the US. Unfeeling corporations, sociopathic bosses, incredibly blinkered, short-sighted management *and* self-serving unions, all beholden to quite possibly the *dumbest* politicians in human history.
I shoulda gone into art. I have no real talent for it… but then, I’ve seen “Star Trek: Discovery” and it’s clear that talent and skill are no longer important or even desirable in modern artistic endeavors.
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.
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?
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.
Short form: yet another Bernie Sanders supporter committed an act of political terrorism, this time by breaking windows at a GOP office and apparently (incompetently) trying to burn it down. This follows after leftists attempted mass murder by ramming vans into GOP voter registration events and another tried to commit mass murder with an SUV at Mar-A-Lago and Bernie workers were caught on tape suggesting democide. And let’s not forget James T. Hodgkinson, the poster child for Bernie Bros, who shot multiple people a few years back in support of Sanders’ politics. Many more stories out there of Sanders supporters committing acts of political violence great and small. Why are so many of Bernie supporters so ready to carry out acts of violence?
It’s probably simple: Bernie is a communist. Sure, he and his supporters often try to soften the blow by claiming that he is a “Democratic Socialist” and not a communist, but as has been clearly explained hereabouts before, the express aim of the Democratic Socialists is to bring about actual, factual *communism.* So Bernie claiming that he’s a Democratic Socialist and not a Communist is kinda like me explaining that I’m not a fabulously wealthy author, I’m really just a dirt poor author. While this is true, being a dirt poor author does not negate the fact that I want to be a fabulously wealthy one… just as Bernie wants actual communism. The policies he advocates for, such a limits on income that would essentially end innovation in the United States (just how much investing in Tesla and SpaceX would Musk have done had he been limited to selling PayPal for, say, a million bucks) and nationalization of major corporations, speak strongly and clearly to a worldview that is close enough to communist as to make no difference. This is clear not only to his political opponents, but also those who agree with him and his policies. And if the history of the last century taught us anything, it’s that socialist economics, from Venezuela to Zimbabwe and Cuba and Nazi Germany and Red China and the Soviet Union, lead to governmental mass violence against the public. After a century and well over a hundred million dead, no honest person can believe that this is just an accidental byproduct; instead, violence is baked into the belief that some group has the right and obligation to tell others how much they can make, what they can make, how well they can live based on their own labor. Communism and Socialism *are* violence. Communism and Socialism attract the violent. Sanders, coming off as a communist, attracts the violent.
If you find yourself near a Bernie supporter, do not let your guard down. It seems that they want to take your stuff and will use violence to get it. Someone publicly proclaiming their support for Sanders should be viewed in the same light as someone publicly proclaiming their support for anti-semitism or their support for pedophilia or Star Trek: Discovery or gulags. These people are not to be trusted.
Confirmation that my decision not to spend money signing up for CBS All Access just to watch the hyper-funded anti-canonical amateur fan film series “Star Trek: Discovery” was the right decision.
Yeeeeesh.
You know, I was always more TOS than TNG, more Kirk than Picard. But the STD Captain shown here makes Picards traditional moralizing and lecturing seem downright appropriate. From Doomcock’s review of this little episode, the STD writers have decided that Tribbles aren’t some interesting little organism that evolved to breed fast, but instead are the products of not only unwise genetic engineering by a Starfleet officer about ten years prior to “The Trouble With Tribbles,” but he also injected them with magic: apparently they reproduce without the usually required step of *eating,* they gain mass without actually ingesting any mass.
Also note the serious overtones of modern woke fictioneering: the female character is right, the male is wrong. But more than that, the white male (and undoubtedly cis hetero) character is an *idiot,* and the female character sneers at him, undoubtedly to a chorus of cheers from the mental illness haircuts who actually like this show.
