Star Trek: Picard

I haven't really talked about how "New Woke Trek" hasn't hit my radar very much, have I? Well, it hasn't.

Sorry Internet, I did that wrong:
 Well, SPOILER ALERT, it hasn't.

The last new Star Trek property I watched was Into Darkness. You may recall my review (FaggotSpock, etc.). I didn't do a review of Star Trek Beyond because I didn't even watch it, partly because I had no interest in literally watching FaggotSulu (a woke nod to real life that even that evil sodomite Takei was upset by). That Star Trek Discovery "SJWDiscovery as I dubbed it" featured two evil sodomite main characters was all I needed to know before I chose never to let it darken my screen (which, from reviews I've seen/heard, is pretty much metaphorically what happened).

So by the time Star Trek Picard came along I knew it wasn't going to be for me. Part of the problem is that from the get-go, the series has had creative input by a man who has famously been incapable of properly understanding the character of Jean-Luc Picard. No, not Alex Kurtzmann (who has just a general lack of understanding about Star Trek). I'm talking about Patrick Stewart himself [all references to "Sir" in reference to this Brexit-hating lunatic have been removed out of respect for Her Majesty's Loyal Government. -ed]. Remember, this is the guy who welcomed Ira Steven Behr to the franchise by complaining that the diplomatic tea-drinking thinking man's starship captain didn't do "enough fighting and fucking". One of the reasons the TNG movies all suck is that, unlike the TV show, the actors sign on per-film after first seeing the script. If you read the classic Michael Pillar book FADE IN: The Making of Star Trek Insurrection (you can download the .PDF here, you'll see how one of the issues in getting it (and all TNG films) produced is getting their lead actor to sign on.

Piller's treatment - reprinted in full in the book - reads well. It's exciting and full of political intrigue. It also offers a heavy amount of action and seems to give Picard a compelling moral dilemma and an interesting conflict when he turns his back on Starfleet and the crew. Obviously he's exonerated in the end, but it's a hard-fought victory.

The treatment goes to the Paramount execs. They love it, including Sherry Lansing, then-chairman of Paramount Pictures. Smooth-sailing, right? Wrong.

But there was one more voice at the studio to be heard from and it belonged to Jonathan Dolgen, Chairman of Viacom Entertainment Group, the chief operating officer of the company. As a rule, Dolgen doesn’t involve himself in creative decisions. But he breaks that rule for Star Trek. And it’s not (just) the money. He happens to be a huge fan. Dare I say, a Trekker?

He thought the idea of people being exploited for natural resources was old hat and that Picard needed a bigger challenge. He didn’t feel there was enough action for Picard in space. He complained the story had too much internal Star Trek intellectualism and thought the countervailing argument by the Federation conspirators made a great deal of sense. Picard might be perceived as being on the wrong side of the issue.

Rick and I were discussing how to respond to the Dolgen notes when we received a call from Australia. We’d also sent a copy of the story to Patrick Stewart.

Patrick hated the story even more than Jonathan Dolgen. (p. 95-96)

In this particular case (as Bitter Script Reader explains), Stewart referenced it being a rehash of episodes of the show, and even Brent Spiner had some positive contributions. It's not inherently bad that the actors have a say. Both of the Nicholas Meyer written TOS movies have elements that came about trying to make the actors happy: Captain Sulu drinking tea as the first line of the script to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is what convinced Takei to sign on and precluded Doohan and Nichols (who along with Takei almost banded together to refuse en masse to sign onto Star Trek V) from refusing as well. If you know the story of how Meyers wrote the first three drafts The Wrath of Khan in less than a week, you'll know that making Shatner and Nimoy happy was the impetus behind the first and second drafts (each approved by one, rejected by the other, the third combining the aspects both liked) and both of those films were received fairly well.

The comparison fails in that Shatner is driven by pure ego and can be distracted by shiny baubles, Nimoy deeply understands the Spock character and the Roddenberry world of Star Trek as a whole (and his main TWOK issue was he wanted to be killed off), and Patrick Stewart fundamentally doesn't get Jean-Luc Picard. Watch Section 5 from the infamous Mr. Plinkett review of Star Trek: Nemesis in which it's revealed why exactly there's a stupid dune buggy chase in the movie for the most glaring example (time code 4:41):


So this idiotic portrayal of Picard is the one likely sold to Patrick Stewart before he would sign onto the show. So that's already a giant part of the problem. The second part is that Stewart has famously promo'd the series by bragging about how it would do what no production by far-left Hollywood leftists were ever daring to do: criticize President Donald Trump.

Stewart says the new show “was me responding to the world of Brexit and Trump and feeling, ‘Why hasn’t the Federation changed? Why hasn’t Starfleet changed?’ Maybe they’re not as reliable and trustworthy as we all thought.”

Stewart went on to say that he believes the U.S. under Trump and the UK under Prime Minister Boris Johnson are “completely fucked.”

As I and many others remarked during the infamous "Trek Against Trump" campaign, left-wingers thinking that they "owned" the Star Trek concept was a little disingenuous. Jonathan Frakes apparently forgot the part where Commander Riker, when faced with an invading army pretending to be poor refugees on a mission of peace, locked phasers and prepared to blow them out of the sky. How was that different than Trump's response, other than actually being more violent? Sure, Gene Roddenberry figured the Federation had evolved into Marx's perfect communism (somehow, just before Star Trek Enterprise apparently), but that was the weirdo belief he imposed on early TNG, and even then not exactly universally. But outside of Gene between 1975-1991, "woke leftism" was hardly the total story of Star Trek.

Which pro-Vietnam War episode of the original Star Trek series was your favourite?

Yes, you read that right: episodes in favour of unilateral U.S. military action in Vietnam in the late 1960s. Now I know what you're thinking, no no, it was anti-Vietnam war: I watched that episode and it was called "The Omega Glory". Or was it Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"?

There's the thing, and that's my key point here: those episodes were against the Vietnam War. But other (better) episodes were in favour, including "Errand of Mercy" and "A Private Little War". Meanwhile, while not so explicitly about Vietnam, there was a little episode denouncing peace activists and expressing how wars can be totally justified and necessary...just a little obscure episode called "CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER". While the authors themselves were still far-left lunatics who caused huge suffering by refusing to allow America to win the Vietnam War at the very least their stories were nuanced affairs that covered both sides of the issue fairly. In fact, if you're looking at quality of episode instead of quantity of argument, it's almost like when Star Trek writers tried to promote their own political beliefs that they couldn't seem to find a narrative to support it:

1. City on the Edge of Forever (Pro)
2. Errand of Mercy (Pro)
3. A Private Little War (Pro)
4. Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (Anti)
5. The Omega Glory (Anti)

So with that said, and acknowledging that I'm not up to speed on either series, where's the pro-Trump episode of Star Trek: Discovery? Which episode of Star Trek: Picard looks at both sides of the issue and comes down however slightly on the Brexit side of the equation? Hell, in "A Private Little War" even while the episode takes the pro-Vietnam side Dr. McCoy takes the other side of the issue. In TNG episodes like "Pen Pals" or "Who Watches the Watchers" main characters fall on two sides of an issue even as the show itself is strongly skewed in one direction.

Can we even get a sympathetic main character who expresses the beliefs of the majority of American and British voters?

Even if the other characters evaluate his/her argument and express semi-strawman takedowns of it, at the very least it can be seen to exist. But that's not how the modern far-left cancel culture works: if you deviate from the approved groupthink like a Dean Cain or Roseanne Arnold or a Manu Intiraymi then you are a nonperson who isn't being considered for roles anymore lest you use your celebrity platform to say the opposite of what celebrities are "supposed" to all think. Antonio Sabato Jr. and Kristy Swanson have also reported they have been blacklisted and wait who's Manu Intiraymi? Well I wouldn't have been able to tell you that a week ago either. I was never a big fan of Star Trek: Voyager and the "kiddie Borg" episodes are some of the worst ones, so the name of the actor who played Icheb was never anywhere in my brain. But that's who Intiraymi is, and despite even being on the "Trek Against Trump" bandwagon the rumour is that the active actor was not asked to return to his role because of comments he made about sodomite actor Anthony Rapp (one of ass pirates on SJWDiscovery) and how he was whining about Kevin Spacey's "unwanted sexual advances". It's especially ludicrous when you realize that Rapp only used it to whine about how he was being asked to ass fuck a different homo than the homo he was already ass fucking. Neither Rapp nor Intiryami are expressing the correct answer about what you do when a uranist hits on you: you break his fingers and beat him into a bloody pulp (it's easy and fun, I can assure you). But Intiryami wasn't even that rational, all he did was suggest the obvious that the #MeToo nonsense is going too far when its a complaint that you get propositioned by a creepy man who you can just go ahead and say no to. It's the "Kent Hehr leered at me in an elevator" affair all over again. Now sure, like child molesting faggot Dr. Kristopher Wells, Spacey's tastes range well into the single digits. But Rapp was 14, and Intiryami's comments coincide nicely with the people who think that a 14 year old with the same mental disability as Rapp can get his nuts cut off and go on hormone treatments, so they really have no leg to stand on here.

For more on the specific discussion, here's the RedLetterMedia Re:View episode on Star Trek: Picard episodes #5 & #6: The fate of Intiryami is an important reminder: the far-left who write for Hollywood are petty, irrational, and they will come for you unless you're in lockstep 100.5% of the time. They are as intolerant and as psychotic as the fictional right-wingers they falsely portray in media (leftists always project their own sickness onto others), and their dangerous views on the way the world should work would create a hellish Orwellian nightmare of a future. It wouldn't be anything like Star Trek, come to think of it. The perfect world of Trek requires conservatives, and trying to remove them from society would turn a wonderful civilization into a disaster. It sounds like a great relevent plot for a TV show, in fact. Pity the losers in charge of Star Trek: Picard are sticking to their tired one-sided anti-Brexit diatribe.

Bonus Bitter Scriptwriter content: The pansy http://thebitterscriptreader.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-rise-of-skywalker-tries-to-give-us.htmlgoes apeshit claiming Trump is running "concentration camps"