“When did Star Trek get so woke?” — My idiot former boss.
Back in 1965.
Only 37 years to go.
I believe it was also an old Shatner tweet (well, if memory serves, he technically asked when it got political) Surprised to see this shift from him. It’s a welcome one but I’m still not sure if I should trust this.
The gender episode was so ahead of its time. It introduced some ideas that I didn’t even know there were concepts for.
the gender ran across 4 series. DS9 had jadzia(other host) preferred women and shes a women still with those feelings, and another where a female dominant race from the gamma quadrant fled DS9 through the wormhomle, and a similar one on enterprise show(where the explosion disaster caused by the suliban), Genderless insectoid Xindi.
Nutrek through kurtzman isnt very good and not very subtle with exposing mysogyny/genderphobia .
“You said ‘class warfare’ twice.”
“He likes class warfare.”
Hey see - that wonderful thing in the past is similar in some way to the dogshit we produce now. Therfore the problem is you!
I wouldn’t say woke is against norms, rather against traditionalism. Traditionalism itself is often abnormal, even within its own culture.
From what I’ve heard, Shatner is normally pretty right-wing about issues. Maybe fiscally, but not socially. Maybe I’m misremembering, or conflating his character on Boston Legal.
I guess it shows people can be complex.
He’s been critical of Trump and I’m pretty sure he defines himself as apolitical. I’m not sure where you’re finding that he’s right wing, but I’m open to being proven wrong.
Upon further research, he seems hard-core apolitical.
I must have assumed he was like his character that he played on Boston Legal - who was clownishly right-wing.
Sorry about that improper assumption, and thanks for calling me out on it!
I appreciate you vibe checking Shatner anyway. I learned
Anybody who calls themselves apolitical doesn’t recognize how much politics affects us, and in my book, thay makes you kinda dumb.
He can be apolitical in public, and I wish more idiot celebrities would be. You and I don’t need to know his politics. It doesn’t help anything in the grand scheme of things.
Eh, being apolitical doesn’t mean you’re unaware of how much politics affects us. It just means it’s not a subject you’re interested in, which is perfectly acceptable.
having no interest in politics is only for the extremely priveleged, so they’re either dumb or theyre assholes
and also, the guy is almost 100 years old now. Any person that old with progressive views and stances is very uncommon in my book. At least the ones from now, maybe it will change when it is our turn.
He was the commencement speaker at my college graduation and he talked about how society was destroying the planet. It was a real downer message but at least it wasnt maga talking points
In the early iterations of the 1960s smash hit Star Trek, audiences were shocked and titillated to see a white male officer in a romantic relationship with a black woman officer.
This continues to be shocking today, as modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi media doing anything at all.
modern audiences are not ready to see any (fully clothed) woman in any form of Sci-Fi
What? Pluribus was the biggest new Sci Fi TV show last year, was liked by critics and audiences, and won a bunch of awards.
Same with Silo and Foundation. This is like “reverse racism” but sexism instead.
I guess i’m in the minority of people who thought Janeway was the best starship captain as a kid. She’s badass and she drinks coffee.
With you 100% on that. I love Picard, but it’s Janeway I’d trust to get me through the delta quadrant.
I agree, I love Picard don’t get me wrong but Janeway was always my favourite, she kicks ass and is just fucking cool
The new trek was cancelled because some people hated it and had outsized influence.
So thanks, those of us who liked it don’t get any more of what we liked because a few dicks had outsized influence.
I don’t get to enjoy something because you didn’t like it. Thanks.
You could have just not watched it, but instead you had to ruin it for me too.
Fuck you. We all need to stop watching these fuckwits who think they know more than us. Unsubscribe from these channels. Stop watching them. They’re ruining our ability to watch things.
This is the one thing I will never understand. If you don’t like something just ignore it. If you think you are in the position that your opinion matters in any way you can declare why you don’t like something once and then move on. All those grifters and their brainless drones consume stuff they don’t like willingly and regularly. People who are of sound mind don’t do something like this.
Sorry, what happened?
i’m pretty sure it’s because they tried to make degrassi in space.
academy? kurtzman ruined every trek he showrunned, if they dint figure it out with STD, SNW, AND picard they arnt going to with academy. they are running out of Ideas for a trek show. making the show only 10-12episodes per season hurts it as well.
The show felt unfocused and confused. The characters, like the storylines, were kinda all over the place and didn’t really seem to know where they were going. Too much effort seemed to be put into the show’s set and setting, and not enough effort went into the things that went into the sets and settings. It had a lot of potential, but it all of it never really seemed to come together.
All new Trek series feel unfocused and confused in their first season. Watch the first season of TNG or DS9 and tell me it was tight. Every Trek is kind of a mess at first.
Well… yes, but not anywhere near as bad as this. This was like a bad GHB trip, crazy nightclub setting and all. For any new television show, there are at least a couple dozen foundational elements that set the overall direction of the show and where it’s going, but for this show, all of them were crazy haywire, pointing in a bunch of different directions none of them coordinated. For a normal TV show, when a few of them don’t really work out, they can be re-oriented or smooth out or whatever, but that is made easier because they’re all kind of heading in the same direction. With academy, none of them were ever heading in the same direction, none of them really knew what they wanted to be or what they were even about, or where they were going, so there’s no way to smooth them out or rework them, because any new version of them is still gonna be going in some random direction and wouldn’t know what they were going to be.
If I were the one who was in control of all of this, the first thing I would do, besides firing Alex Kitzman, would be to reboot the show entirely. To make sure that, from the start, everything was coordinated and aligned, and everything was all heading in the same direction, and everything knew what it was, everyone knew what they were or at least where they were headed, and what they were eventually going to be, and we were all on the same page. That everything made some sort of sense, or at least would eventually makes sense, and that we were all on a journey to the same destination. Because, if anything was extremely obvious about this show, it was that nobody had any sort of destination in mind.
Luck, I get what you’re trying to say. Star Trek is very famous for having terrible first seasons for their shows. But this one… This one was different. This first season be lied the fact that no one was thinking of the same thing. No one had any sort of central planning for where they were going. Everyone working on the show was thinking of something different, and there was never any possibility of it all coming together at the end, and we saw that because, at the end of the season, it really didn’t come together at all. At the end of the season, every character, every storyline, every different location, ended up somewhere completely on its own. And nothing really ended up, making any sense at all. And, for every other Star Trek show, during its first season, they were at least able to resolve it in one way or another. All the arcs came to a conclusion, all the storylines ended up in one place, and everything was resolved. But in this case? We were no better off than when we were in the beginning. Lost and confused.
It was the first season (and only 10 episodes in, at that, because TV production is stupid these days).
Imagine if you could only judge, say, TNG on the first 10 episodes.
Yeah unfortunately nothing works like it did during TNG-era anymore. There’s no more syndication, no soft continuity resets, no time to try different things. Every season of a show has to be a 12 hour movie, with every episode integral to the last. You just can’t do that for more a handful of seasons before show runs out of steam dramatically. Shows have be in the groove from the start or they’re just going to be cancelled.
It’s why I don’t even bother torrenting any series anymore. It’s a failure of the modern enshitified financified mega monopoly dystopia rather than the shows themselves though.
Imagine if you could only judge, say, TNG on the first 10 episodes.
Still better, more original, with characters (and actors) on a WHOLE DIFFERENT LEVEL.
In that level? Better production staff
On one hand, I would say that it was, by far, the worst first season of any Star Trek show so far. On the other hand, I don’t think it deserved to be canceled. Just heavily reworked, much like TNG after its first season.
But Kurtzman has a pretty poor track record, and it’s just been getting worse and worse and worse. With the exception of Lower Decks, which was exceptionally awesome. seriously. That show was fucking amazing, and I really miss it.
Academy has a great premise, and I actually really like all of the actors and the prototypical concepts for the characters, but the rendering of all of them is just a total mess. it’s hard to say what to do with all of them because, honestly, I hardly even know where to start. There’s just so much… I don’t even know where to start. It’s a lot. It’s like I have all of the ingredients for a really awesome Thanksgiving dinner, but someone put them all in a blender. And now I have to deconstruct the whole thing and start from scratch. Like, it’s all there, but someone makes it all up the wrong way. I don’t know.
I didn’t know the show was canceled. That’s too bad. It deserved another chance. You could tell all of those actors were working really really hard, and they all had a lot of talent. Honestly? I think that they deserved a lot better.
They DESPERATELY needed more episodes. Like they had this whole War College thing (don’t get me started on the stupid name), and then suddenly it was just kind of gone.
We got ten episodes, 4 were dedicated to.Caleb/Nus/Metaplot.
Two were centered on SAM, one on Jay-Den, and like 1.5-2 on Tarima. Genesis and Darem basically shared 1.5 episodes.
OK, so with modern TV production, that’s never gonna happen. What they need to do is find some way to transition the style of storytelling to 10 episodes per season. I honestly don’t know how they’re gonna do that, but they need to figure it out. And Alex Kitzman certainly doesn’t know how to do it. So they need it first of all get rid of his ass. He sucks his whole production team sucks.
They also need to get rid of their visual effects team. I really am sick to death of this hyper realistic unreal presentation of this needle in your brain CGI graphics. I hate it so much.
I really think they need to take a break for a little while and figure out how to adapt the 90s storytelling style to contemporaneous production style. Kurt‘s been tried and failed, and they need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do it again. And if the price we have to pay is waiting a few years before we get more Star Trek, I’m willing to make the sacrifice.
The new show was cancelled because not enough people watched it.
“Outsized influence” my ass.
Money talks. You think if the show hit the top ten in the streaming Nielsen stats that they’d cancel it because some people “didn’t like it”? Get real.
People are allowed to like something. People are allowed to dislike something. If enough people like it, the show gets enough viewers to continue. If not. It doesn’t.
People who don’t like it aren’t obligated to watch it just to prevent it from being cancelled for your sake.
Good shit to him. He’s 100% right here.
Exactly. Star Trek takes place in utopia - and the creators’ version of utopia is one with equality, freedom, and respect for all. If someone’s version of utopia doesn’t align with this, I think that says a lot more about them than it does about how “woke” Star Trek is
Their utopia also highly resembles communism as a classless, stateless society
Yeah, and it shows how hard it is to build a utopia even when intentionally trying to remove class, when oligarchies are motivated to prevent that, and in a post-scarcity reality, which we don’t yet have.
i think what got thier panties in a wad was STD, because it had a certain demographic playing lead roles over men. then it became DOCTOR WHO, whittaker and then ncuti(but him mostly), why because a certain election was under way that year, while STD was in thier 1st/2nd season, and it annoyed the hell of cons with all the women in the lead roles and then they started attacking every trek video they see. Janeway wasnt SPARED TOO but that took years for them to use mental gymanstics.
Isn’t shatner maga scum?
Edit: apparently not. Who the hell was I thinking of?
Nah, he’s a good Canadian.
Okay, he’s rich, out of touch, and a total dick to his coworkers. But I’ve never seen him express any particularly bad political views.
Possibly lt broccoli
I think (but don’t remember specific instances) Shatner is conservative leaning but I guess the canadian perspective makes him very different to MAGA.
You are probably thinking of Robert Beltran? he went open about MAGA shit on twitter shortly after jan 6 IIRC.
That makes sense of it. It was years ago, and my memory was diluted by my contemporaneous stress. Thank you for making me feel a little saner.
You are also thinking of Shatner lol but his ego makes everything confusing.
It’s a silver lining to see Shatner using his platform for the greater good.
Yeah, I always thought he was kind of a douche, but I guess his heart is in the right place.
Yeah, it’s shatner so
youone expects him to be crass, andyouone forgets he was the first star trek captain. and agreed with the ideas being shown on screen (unlike, IDK, Barclay’s actor)Huh? What’s up with Barclay’s actor?
Right wing propaganda guy. Dwight Sclutz
fits, hes always a wierdo that needs a psychological help in the show, probably a wierdo in real lfie. he played the same wierdo character on sg1, 1st season i believe as the “virtual reality guy”
@Skullgrid @Maestro Never meet your heroes.
I’ve actually done pretty good meeting my heroes, they’re mostly down to earth types.
That speaks as much to your excellent choices in hero’s as to the hero’s themselves 🙂👍
Sooo many of them too. I just can’t rewatch Hercules or Lois & Clark.
Boy, do I wish I hadn’t read this comment. This makes me sad to know.
What really gets to me is that he’s fucking Mung Daal in Chowder, whose actor is was a literal kid. God knows what kind of poison lies he fed that boy. I really liked him in chowder too.
No more! I had no idea of that, either! I friggin loved that show! I am now double depressed. I wish to know no more!
Aw man v.v
Jeffrey Hunter was the first Star Trek captain.
Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the starring role of the TOS series , Captain Kirk was played by Jeffrey Hunter. How many episodes was he in?
Captain Christopher Pike was played by Jeffery Hunter in the first Star Trek series, but was only in the pilot or something before Shatner took the reins. If you were sincerely asking.
The first pilot that wasn’t aired. It’s what got turned into the Talos IV episode with Pike, they used that footage for his “dream” life
If you were sincerely asking.
not really. When people are thinking about their favourite captain, especially before the revival, Jeff was never in the running. Hell, Bakalar is barely in the running.
I agree. It’s one of those nerd pedantic facts that people throw out.
just, don’t ask him how many horses he owns
I think Shatner is complicated because (a) he’s 95 years old, and can’t be expected to be fully “in touch,” and (b) has definitely had some questionable people handling his social media over the years.
true, and he went with BEZOs into space as a tourist and became disappointed after, only for bezos to laugh for no reason after spraying him with ALCOHOL.
I just had to double check and holy crap I did not realise he is 95!
Yeah. I wish people like him, sulu, and stephen king would abandon it already though.
Looking at the downvotes, I don’t think anybody realized you meant “abandon Xitter,” not “abandon using their platform for the greater good.”
Lol! That’s too bad
I recently learned that Shatner and Takei don’t actually use social media and all the posts you see from them are just some employees that were instructed to speak in their style.
It’s possible on a regular basis.
However, as with other high profile accounts, one expects that messages that are high profile would be cleared with the person under whose name the official account is made.
Not at all. Chapelle told that joke about hearing that “his” “official” Twitter account was having beef with Kat Williams’ “official” account. During one show when both of them were in the audience, he went over to Kat and told him the situation - to which Kat replied, “wtf is Twitter?”
The thing was in TOS that kiss, in-universe, was no biggie. In DS9 with all the gender and sexuality shifts in the Trill scenario, it again just ‘was’. When it was a big deal, it was some alien culture being backwards and the Federation being an example of doing it right.
STD was oddly self-congratulatory. “First ever non-binary character in trek!” they proclaim as people were able to respond with just so many examples of previous non-binary characters. The character despite being a human, being on Earth, had to make a big deal of “coming out” and a big outpouring of support in-universe to balance out the trepidation of coming out. Which should have just been a very mundane scenario, you want the character to be non-binary, fine, they are, people will be respectful but it will be a boring mundane fact rather than some big deal.
Yes, there are those that are flipping out over too much representation that are done consistently with star trek. Probably the most fair point was that someone probably wouldn’t be out of shape, but by that logic, Picard shouldn’t have been bald, so…
It… insists upon itself?
lmao did they really? didn’t riker bang a non-binary alien (or try to at least)?
Actually, as I recall the entire society was ‘non-binary’ and that specific alien wanted to come out as female. And of course Riker banging was a green light after she declared herself female. Probably not the best choice to have Riker banging her as part of the narrative, but yeah, that was famously an example of them trying to address a point by inverting real-world, the ‘norm’ is non-binary and the ‘unusual’ one is gendered and the Federation serves as the model of ‘we respect your people either way, you should too’.
That’s right, the entire species had evolved past having gender. That makes it even sadder/funnier that ST:D tried to claim it.
Is where they officially declared that Trek was doing a non-binary character for the first time.
The Star Trek universe’s first non-binary character
wow, not even the first crew members or first actors, they tried to claim it for the whole Star Trek universe. unbelievable. I think Dax would like to have a word with them.
shat is part of the problem, outspoken anti-trans
I’m not defending him, but let’s be honest with ourselves here. He was born nearly a decade before World War II. It’s amazing that he’s this progressive. Credit where credit is due.
He’s such a straight white cis man! (Apparently that’s a slur to him.)
How dare you use the Star Wars term!
He is.
Doesn’t mean we can’t take him out of context and use his words to advocate for more than just the things he thinks they advocate.
He has it right here. That he doesn’t fully know that is his problem.
is it true that the kiss was originally supposed to be between Spock and Uhura, but Shatner refused to be upstaged so he had them rewrite it to be with him?
either way, good point, somewhat problematic author.
broken clocks, eh?
Naw. It was originally written for Kirk and Uhura, but when the NBC executives found out they were worried it would offend TV stations in the south. The idea of having Uhura and Spock kiss was brought up because Spock is half-vulcan (which NBC thought racists would find less offensive???), but Shatner insisted that they stick the original script. Eventually NBC ordered that two versions of the scene be shot - one with the kiss and one without. Shatner intentionally flubbed every single take of the non-kiss version to force the executives’ hands. It wasn’t the first interracial kiss on televion, but it was the first instance of a scripted kiss between a white man and a black woman.
The worst part (in my opinion) is that if I criticize star trek academy a lot of folks assume I’m some hate filled right wing chud because of all the extremely bad faith criticisms by hate filled right wing chuds.
When in reality I just think it’s poorly written and very self congratulatory, just like Discovery and Picard were.
see also: critiquing Avatar Legend of Korra gets dicey fast because most of the online discussion surrounds how the buff tan teenager being physically attracted to a woman is forced diversity when my critique is that the character writing isn’t very good and the series breaks the lore
If you can speak to the specifics of why you found the writing bad, I think thats fine. If your critique is just “writing was bad”. Well then maybe think on it for longer before sharing your opinion if you dont want to be lumped in with the chuds who also arent going past skin deep with the same opinion.
I have major issues with The Last of Us 2, a game that was also piled on by right wing chuds. I did enjoy the game, but there are issues i have with character motivations where I think the story writers didn’t do enough to convince me that the characters had the conviction they were portrayed as having. I also feel the game had a clear ending that was acceptable and then decided to tack on an additional section because I guess they wanted to resolve somethings that were better left unresolved.
Other than the driving plot forward, once you’re able to ignore some things yeah, enjoyable game, with some missed potential.
Ultimately I also think its about recognizing that these things are other peoples yums, and i think critiquing them is ok, but stating something like bad writing is objective and doesn’t seem subjective. You are denying someone who thought the writing was good. You’re allowed to not like something, but dont yuck it.
My biggest complaint about academy is the same as everyone, poor writing. But since everyone also wants to bring up the ‘woke’ panic as well being why it’s so bad, I disagree. It isn’t the package that is bad, it’s the packaging.
Don’t give ‘the Gay™ character’. Give me a good character who is gay.
Why are you forcing me to care about a character because they are gay? What a wasted opportunity. You had a not so subtle anti-archetype klingon who had the heavy handed writing of being into science, medicine, and openly gay and intentionally written to be anything a klingon is not. What shitty writing. They had all the opportunities to make me love the character for who they were, their personality, their true choices and internal struggles, and make me care about them as a whole person that happened to be gay because that is who they are. Make me love their choices about being gay, not tell me I should love them because they are gay.
More than that, the previous iterations of trek they knew how to do it right. Most people bring up DS9 because it was done so well. We loved the characters for who they were, and who they were happened to be gay. Academy told us to love them because they were gay, and just happened to also be a character.
