LibraryLass @ LibraryLass @startrek.website

Posts

3

Comments

31

Joined

2 yr. ago

Moderating

---

How many more years before the crude, gritty aesthetic of Star Wars suffers the same fate as the crude and campy aesthetic of Star Trek?

People complained about exactly that during the Prequel Trilogy.

I mean... not that much. Daleks have gone through three redesigns just since the show went back. Sontarans went from the world's most unconvincing rubber masks to makeup. And how many eyes do Silurians have-- two, or three?

because apparently Star Trek, unlike every other fantasy and science fiction thing I like, is Forbidden from being treated like a secondary world that should have its own internal consistency.

Nonsense-- other long-running universes encounter retcons and visual redesigns all the time. Quick, how old was Dick Grayson when he first became Robin? What color is Superman's S? How old was Magneto during the Holocaust? What happened to Luke's father? Did James Bond fight in World War 2, or participate the Cold War?

Perhaps it implied that.

But it only ever implied that, and meanwhile we had other evidence that implied a separate conclusion, in the form of Kor, Kang, and Koloth.

Which is more likely-- that every Klingon Kirk encountered during his five-year mission was a survivor of the augment virus (edit: Including Kahless, who lived and died centuries before Archer!) and no Klingon encountered outside of that time period was; or that the Klingons ruthlessly quarantined or even executed carriers of the augment virus and wiped it out before it got too far, and TOS's visuals aren't literal?

I dug 'em. It was a good experiment in pushing Trek's aliens beyond a forehead and an accent.

Or, keeping up SNW's traditions of reviving projects from early in Star Trek's history, we could finally get M'benga leading a medical frigate in the vein of the Hopeship pitch.

>Is there anyone still holding out for a “refit” of the beautiful SNW Enterprise so that it “really” looks like a set from the late 1960s?

Sadly, I can confirm there are.

It’s a dizzyingly uneven show with the lowest points of quality in all of Trek.

Dude I've seen TNG season 1 and Enterprise seasons 1-2. I know we both know it can get worse.

Another key takeaway from this that I hadn't considered before:

Augments aren't just banned from Starfleet. They can't become doctors either. Speaking as a Jew my people know firsthand that one of the best ways to create an underclass is to restrict the occupations available to them. Are augments systematically kept out of skilled professions, denied the chance to better themselves and their fellow sapients? Very disturbing possiblity.

It's important to remember that Earth has an outsize influence on the Federation. The capital is, and always has been, there, and will continue to be until such time as it secedes entirely from the Federation after the Burn. The Academy is there. Starfleet is headquartered there, and grew out of United Earth's space service. Most of Starfleet is human, most Federation colonies are human. Azetbur was mistaken to call itself a "Homo sapiens-only club" but the fact is that from the beginning, as the only planet with friendly relations with Vulcan, Andoria, and Tellar Prime, as the very reason the Federation exists... Earth found itself with a power dynamic that highly favored it.

As such, I don't think it's too surprising that a specifically Earthican problem could weigh heavily on the Federation, even as it grew larger and more cosmopolitan.

In essence, Discovery followed the same arc as the Star Wars sequel trilogy. They swung for the fences on doing something wild and asking difficult questions that the franchise had taken for granted; and even if the answer they arrived at was affirming, there were too many loud nerds that couldn't look past either the flaws that genuinely existed or their own shallow prejudices. Those nerds were loud enough and long enough that the studio walked it back to try to appease them and ended up with something much less interesting, which both alienated defenders of the early direction and could never appease the bad eggs whose criticisms weren't in good faith, leaving something that only a few appreciated.