If you've been in conservative Star Trek circles lately you may have seen Guillaume Durocher's comparison of Star Trek: The Next Generation with modern TV and films in general from a conservative Jewish perspective.
As an inspiration, commenter "Divine Right" wrote this missive on the state of modern "nuTrek" and how it compares negatively to yesteryear. It raises a lot of points and contentions: some valid and others less so, but ties it all fairly nicely into how the pussification of society has decimated the sort of things that (mostly male) sci-fi fans are into.
Star Trek very much embodied what liberal American white males of the 1980s and 1990s thought the future would (or should) look like: secular, sexually liberated, humanistic, meritocratic, equitable, and technological – a man’s world, basically. In this world, religion plays practically no role in public life. Problems are solved with diplomacy instead of violence. Money doesn’t exist, so there is no capitalism, greed, or want. People spend their lives bettering humanity and doing other such noble things like negotiating peace with aliens or exploring the universe in one of Starfleet’s advanced starships, each equipped with a plethora of miraculous technologies. In their leisure time, the crews of these starships visit a holographic room, the holodeck, which can conjure any fantasy into a photorealistic facsimile of the real thing.
No argument here except to note that even with this, we have to make a slight distinction. When Gene Roddenberry started out in the 60s he still envisioned an equitably humanistic and meritocratic system with technology (mostly) helping us achieve our dreams, yes. However we also have to consider that a lot of the other stuff was shoehorned in between TOS and TNG with varying degrees of sensibility. Making it more secular wasn't in-and-of-itself that crazy: organized Christian religion was part of the Federation makeup between 1966-1969 but it wasn't huge. Consider it more early post-Christian Europe: many of the beliefs and cultural underpinnings were still there. Uhura explicitly referred to Jesus as the Son of God (the crew assumed
space!Roman primitives on a planet were pagan "sun" worshippers when they instead were "son" worshippers), Kirk held a Christmas party on the
Enterprise, and the ship had a chapel (
and a Chapel). It's not like we expected the entire cast to show up for church every 7th stardate, but you could envision at least some of the crew (Riley for sure, Uhura/Chekov/Chapel most likely, Scotty/McCoy/M'benga possibly as wel) would be church-y folks. Kirk and Spock not so much (unrelated to the Jewishness of the actors) and I believe Sulu was referred to in dialogue at one point as a Confucianist (though the debate about whether that's even a religion likely still hasn't been settled by 2275). Still it wasn't until TNG when the Federation became
aggressively secular and
aggressively noncapitalist (and technology became even more critical to the role). Neither point particularly impacts the thesis (90s liberal values morphing from 60s liberal values is partially related, though it's worth noting that mainstream liberal centrists mostly stayed still while influencers like Roddenberry are the ones who moved).
Probably the only place in the Western world where this mentality can still be found is California’s Silicon Valley. As in the fictional world of Star Trek, men do most of the work; they advance through meritocracy; and there is something akin to a fraternal culture, irrespective of the prevailing progressive ideology. Silicon Valley is also still largely free of the odious diversity requirements imposed on the rest of society.
That was also once true of Hollywood itself, and it showed in the television they produced — Star Trek, for example. That franchise, spanning hundreds of television hours and a number of theatrical releases, was mostly helmed by men who got their jobs through merit – actors, writers, ship designers, show runners. The main characters of each of the television series were also men. The Original Series (TOS) featured a lead triangle of male actors – Kelley, Shatner, and Nemoy. The sequel, The Next Generation (TNG), featured mostly male characters, certainly all the most popular ones. These characters often featured something educated men are interested in: the second officer is an android; the chief engineer has a technology-supplemented vision; the executive officer is a ladies man and a master strategist who plays games of skill underpinned by mathematical rules; the captain is a wise and cultured authority figure who reads Shakespeare; the security chief is a noble warrior from an alien species whose culture is based around rules of honor.
Spinoffs like Deep Space Nine (DS9) and Voyager were more diverse, but still roughly comported to what the male audience desired. DS9 featured a male captain, and the most popular characters were all men. Voyager had a female captain who mostly avoided gender politics outside of a few instances in the earlier seasons (written by a woman) – a rarity these days. In that show, one of the two most popular characters was a male and the other was a sexy Borg chick, Seven of Nine.
The high point of the franchise, The Next Generation, featured a mostly white liberal cast and various things white liberals liked at the time – sex appeal, food, pseudointellectualism (although handled capably by talented male writers), cutting edge tech, meritocracy, optimism, exploration, and the white man’s moralism.
Starfleet, the Federation’s military and scientific branch, was a rigorous meritocracy, just as Silicon Valley is today. Members were admitted only through a combination of senior officer recommendations, high scholastic achievement, and phenomenally high standardized test scores. Character was also paramount. Crew evaluations feature prominently in several episodes of TNG, and it was made clear to underperforming members that the starship Enterprise cuts a standard above the rest; perform or hit the road.
The only questionable line in this bit is that DS9's most popular characters were
all men: Kira was relatively popular because she eschewed the traditional role "helper jobs" like doctor or counsellor and instead was a rough and tumble terrorist: the bad girl tomboy that just needed a man to tame her. That alone spoke to the tendency (that's even more pronounced today) that to be a "strong female" character you needed to act more like a man. A strong female character couldn't be just a wife and mother like a Wilma Flintstone or a Kitty Forman: she had to be
Salt or
Aeon Flux. She couldn't even be a Dr. Quinn: her femininity is only expressed by her embrace of disgusting sapphic perversions (more on that to come).
In the diverse world of Star Trek, the white writers imagined meritocracy would ensure whites like themselves would still have a position at the top of society (just as in Hollywood then and Silicon Valley now) despite soon becoming a minority in real life America. You’ll notice progressive humans are at the center of the Federation in Star Trek despite being a small minority in that fictional universe as well. That’s by design, conscious or not.
You can tell the creators desperately wanted to believe this sweet little lie about diverse societies. I’m sure they imagined their tolerance would be reciprocated when they were on the receiving end; we now know that’s not true, unfortunately. Remember, this was the generation that famously cheered President Bill Clinton’s college commencement speech where he lauded the idea of America soon becoming majority minority. The primarily white crowd roared in approval.
In this imagined future, white liberals would still get to feel morally superior to contemporary white conservatives, just as they often strive to in today’s world. In TNG, this is accomplished through various means – cooperation with hostile aliens (demonstrating philosophical supremacy, superiority of intellect and temperament), bravery, tolerance of differences in others, multiculturalism (the show almost never celebrates an earth holiday like Christmas but often supports alien cultures, including breaking Starfleet’s rules of dress for aliens), standing up to corrupt superiors (usually white conservative caricatures).
In the TNG episode The Drumhead, Picard faces down a witch hunting admiral — a woman, no less. The plot revolves around an incident that occurred on the starship Enterprise. Sabotage is suspected, and the situation is tense. The initial evidence points to a low ranking crewman who is later discovered to be of mixed race, one-quarter of the Federation’s most feared enemy. This all but convicts him in the eyes of the admiral’s tribunal. The admiral mercilessly presses her case, threatening to destroy anyone who gets in her way. She’s meant to be a caricature of conservative jingoists of the era – always scared of the Russians, racist against minorities, emotional. In Hollywood’s view of history, those were the people behind the McCarthy hearings, which this episode obviously pulls from.
As always of course, the Hollywood depiction of the McCarthy era always covers up the dirty little secret that
liberals really were guilty.
Toward the end of the episode, Captain Picard confronts his antagonist and gives a fine speech about principle, temperament, and morality in the process. The admiral is defeated when a fellow admiral, a black male character, stands up and walks out in disgust at her actions.
This is one of the reasons why fans liked the character of Jean-Luc Picard: he was a decent, honorable man despite not being perfect himself. He had a code he lived by, and he led by example. Men like that sort of thing. Star Trek Picard, in contrast, portrays him as a bumbling moron who is always wrong and continually berated by female underlings. His view of the world is portrayed as naive or just wrong, requiring strong SJW women to take it to the enemy themselves, often employing violence – including rank murder and sadistic violence.
In another episode of TNG, white male commander Riker stands up to his white male superior — an admiral — who wishes to break the terms of a peace treaty to gain a military edge over a mortal enemy. Riker prevents him from doing so and exposes the dastardly plot. Moral of the story: principle trumps Machiavellianism.
Star Trek was very much a pre-Millennial liberal morality play whereby inspired characters (mostly white) would often stand up to authority figures (mostly white) in order to promote a general moral code — a greater authority — among fellow whites.
If you look carefully you may notice that two very distinct concepts are sort of being meshed together in the above passage. Both are correct but both need to be separated. The first is the thing that men enjoy from their fictional characters: men who both
represent authority but also
confront authority when it's wrong. These at first seem like two disparate paths but not really. It stems from changing from nominally Christian to aggressively secular as previously discussed. Man is to render unto Caesar, but at the same time Caesar is also subject to God's Laws. In passages like
1 Peter 2:16 and
Isaiah 1:17 Mankind is implicitly commanded to setup structures of government and society that work to reward good and punish (or at least de-incentivize) wickedness. When an authority like Starfleet is endeavouring to work in sync with God's Laws then they and the officers that are engaged (ha!) in them are themselves doing good and deserve their authority and are working within them. If they fall from that path then it is the job of the moral idealized man (represented by Picard) to fight against them and right the wrong: the measure of a society could be expressed in how often the character an audience is to recognize as a moral centre gets to work
with the system to bring down an external threat (yay!) versus working
against the system to stop it from being an internal threat (boo!). As a general rule women are not interested in their protagonists performing courageous feats on the battlefield: whether a literal Worf-style battlefield with shields and swords and chariots (or shields and phasers and starships) or a Picard-style battlefield with documents and political systems and legal structures.
However it's also worth noting the distinction between whites and nonwhites about what they want their political structures and swords to be in authority
of. The moral code of whites is based on Judeo-Christian histories going back to Ancient Egypt and Rome. If you're getting your moral code based on Chinese/Japanese history for example you're going to end up with a radically different structure: authority existing more for its own sake than to express God's principles, as is the want when you replace a monotheistic moral structure with a polytheistic Buddhist structure where morality is less rigid and Mankind has much more influence in what the world
should look like. If you're looking for a moral code based on African history, of course, you're shit out of luck. Instead you get a Marxist underpinned
fake history and a nihilistic collectivist worldview being pushed. As Divine Right notes, white liberals sometimes lose sight of the fact that their multiculturalism eventually pushes out the things they find of value.
Consider some of the following things about Star Trek: The Next Generation and ask yourself if any of this would be allowed on television today without controversy.
- Implied heterosexual attraction is present – Riker and Troi, Picard and Crusher; this is true of the spin-offs as well. The male characters all have numerous romances throughout the show’s run. Even the android, Data, has a romantic encounter with a woman.
- The black characters are portrayed as white people with dark skin, for the most part. Michael Dorn, Worf, is a proud Klingon warrior; he’s a noble character the audience looks up to for his courage and good sense (even if the writers comically ignored him). Whoopi Goldberg, Guinan, is the show’s Delphic Oracle; she gives advice even to the wise Jean-Luc Picard. Levar Burton, Geordi, is the ship’s chief engineer. He’s a black male nerd who has trouble dating girls but is otherwise a genius.
- Basically, TNG was what white male liberals of the time hoped the future would be. “Threatening” minority characters would act safe and white, technology would trump superstition, and reason would prevail over emotionalism. The future would be a paradise where all problems had been solved and white men would still have a place at the table they created – it being governed by the same rules they originally put into place.
I'm not sure if "white people with dark skin" is as useful a metric as saying that a character's race was incidental. RedLetterMedia made this point about Winston in
Ghostbusters: his being black wasn't really part of his character anymore than Ray being white was part of his character. In TNG when you exclude Worf and Data (characters whose race was tied closely to the fictional alien society they belonged to) the only two characters to have an explicit
racial characteristic were Picard (France) and Riker (Alaska). In these, even Riker's was a bit of stretch, I suppose Alaska could have black people or even Eskimos representing them in space, but "big burly man with beard" is how everybody in the world pictured "guy from Alaska" and also how they picture "William T. Riker" unless they've been watching
Insurrection on cable lately. Guinan was an alien as well, of course, but she shared her planet with Malcom McDowell, so you need to argue that race was (appropriately enough, based on Whoopi's history with TOS) incidental with her as well. The other alien in the cast, Troi, was chosen to be exotic enough to be interesting but her racial makeup wasn't that important either. (Note Marina Sirtis also played a half-negress in
Death Wish 3). "Divine Right" then brings up the one black mark (no pun intended, believe it or not) on
Star Trek's
wonderful post-racial future: the Ben Sisko
refusal to participate in (historically) racially segregated holodeck (fantasy) Vegas. More column-inches have been spilled in Trek fandom on this scene than any other scene this side of "The Best of Both Worlds" which gives you an idea that Divine Right is being slightly disingenuous by bringing it up in any context.
Quark, the alien bartender, is a sexist who steals his employees’ tips and requires women to dress seductively in order to scam male customers at the gambling table. He expresses outrage when his mother starts dressing in clothes, which is forbidden for the house-ridden, oppressed Ferengi female demographic. There is also an episode where he tries to take a picture of the female executive officer in order to make a real-life sex object based on her likeness for a customer. The Ferengi are also obsessed with accumulating wealth and often scam people out of their money.
Despite all of that, Quark is often a moral character (sold medicine and blankets to sick aliens during a war). There is an episode where he points out that Ferengi at their worst aren’t as bad as humans have been in recent memory – no genocides or slavery or concentration camps. Quark is supposed to represent much that is wrong with the contemporary world. He is also representative of the writers’ moral relativism – bad guy isn’t all that bad depending on perspective. But even that reasoning probably wouldn’t allow such a character to exist in modern Star Trek
For those keeping score, I've already
written about this roughly a month before Divine Right did: woke media can't even defend its positions by having relatively weak strawmen present inferior arguments they can easily swat down. DS9's second last episode featured Ferenginar doing the 1940s Britain/1960s Canada thing of going hard into the social welfare model, and Rom as the noble enlightened liberal easily countering Quark's lame reactionary complaints. The writers clearly don't understand the Objectivism that they are clumsily putting into Quark's mouth, so Rom easily wins the argument...but at least they have an argument.
- In DS9, the Bajorans turn away poor immigrants who wish to settle on their planet. Their reasoning: Bajor is poor and can’t support them; they have their own problems to worry about.
- The Ferengi, Nog, needs a recommendation from a senior officer and phenomenal test scores just to be considered for entry into Starfleet academy. No affirmative action at all.
- The Cardassian antagonists have segregated their society along gender lines – men serve in the military and women serve as scientists. Female Cardassians think male Cardassians are bad at math and male Cardassians think female Cardassians are emotionally weak, so they are mostly excluded from the military leadership. The few female Cardassians who appear in the earlier seasons are mostly evil – a cruel judge and an intelligence official in the Obsidian Order (KGB equivalent). Dukat, the Cardassian male military officer, is once pitted against his female Obsidian Order boss and turns out to be the more compromising of the two characters before the end.
- In DS9, multiculturalism can sometimes have a dark side: the diverse, authoritarian, Dominion wages war against the diverse, but cooperative, Federation.
- There are lots of romantic relationships among friends and not as much of the Millennial hookup culture trash seen in the modern Star Trek iterations.
- The male characters are often the center of attention – leaders, philosophers, diplomats, family men, scientists, doctors, comic relief.
Again some of the bits here go against the mark: Rom the bumbling genius savant is the "center of attention"? This doesn't seem that crazy. These all fall under his "things Woke Trek" will never again feature, and that one falls flat. The other ones don't seem like "new TV wouldn't do" as much as "neat things about DS9: I like how he directly links in a way I've never considered before the two narrative points everybody knows about The Dominion: twisted mirror of the Federation plus multi-racial/multi-ethnic empire. That it can speak to the downsides of multiculturalism is interesting though in fairness most of the cultures shown within The Dominion are themselves genetically predisposed to be deferential to The Founders and all should probably be considered a monoculture.
But as America’s demographics have changed, so too has the ethos of the Star Trek franchise. Starting with Enterprise (2001 – 2005), the former paragon of stoicism, the Vulcans, are continually denigrated – treated as paternalistic, deceptive, and even belligerent towards other alien races. Notably, Vulcans are more intelligent, more accomplished, and much stronger physically than humans; they are a paragon (sometimes a foil) of what pre-Millennial humanist white males imagined themselves to be … or hoped to be in the far future. Their treatment is odd. It’s almost as if the new – feminist – writers now feel they have to use the Vulcans as stand-ins for the white males they envy.
The Vulcans in
Enterprise were probably more
deconstructed than
denigrated. Obviously I can't speak much to their treatment in nuTrek (I didn't exactly watch a lot of
Enterprise either), but part of it surely comes from the melodramatic urges of SJWDiscovery: a cool rational people doesn't fit the narrative well so the "bubbling rage below the surface" depiction of Vulcans had to supplant it. There's definitely some pop psychology at play there as well: the belief it's just not possible for somebody to be (relatively) unemotional. Unsurprisingly, chicks write characters this way.
The new shows by Alex Kurtzman, Discovery and Picard, are helmed by a diverse set of writers decidedly unlike the target audience of straight white males. They’ve predictably produced shows denigrating that demographic: the lead characters are usually female; the male characters are continually insulted by wiser female underlings (Pike, Picard); many of the former straight characters are now gay (Picard, Data, Seven of Nine); aliens which were previously played exclusively – or nearly so – by white actors are now bizarrely multicultural in skin tone, just like humans. Can’t have too many whites on screen, I guess.
The diverse new cast of Discovery and Picard mostly excludes white males. The only principle white men who did not appear in make-up during Discovery’s first season were either villains or openly gay. The show’s lead is a black woman who’s the best at everything, acts bizarrely hostile towards the crew and later berates the male commanding officer, captain Pike – introduced in season 2. There’s also an assortment of other female archetypes more typically seen in network television crime dramas – the dorky female comic relief, the bestest ever leader, the tech guru.
The curious thing about both
Star Trek and
Star Wars is this insane belief that their target audience
shouldn't be straight white males. They keep trying to "expand the fanbase" by making a property something that it isn't intended to be, basically just trying to milk the I.P. for dollars. It's allegedly too risky to create a new property, but it can't be
less risky than sullying your brand by turning off science fiction fans and hoping that chicks and sodomites can fill in the gaps: the former are abnormally obsessed with Mary Sue characters (hence the lame "female archetypes" noted above) and the latter are 2% of the population and likely to die of autoimmune deficiencies related to COVID-19 anyways.
Star Trek: Picard’s white male actors, aside from TNG cameos, are mostly villains when they appear at all. Picard himself is a senile old man who contributes essentially nothing to the show. He is used as the butt of criticism from the cast. It’s clear the writers are using him as a canvas to paint their grievances with the real world. Picard — white male America — stands in the new boss’s empowered way. He lives in luxury as minority characters live in poverty. The (white) institutions he represents are all corrupt and racist. To rectify this injustice, the diverse cast must defy Star Trek convention – up to and including committing acts of cold-blooded murder (even villains don’t deserve that).
It's worth noting how ridiculous the resumption of poverty
on Earth was in
Star Trek: Picard. As Mike and Rich at RedLetterMedia pointed out it not only spits in something that Gene himself established in the Original Series but
also makes no sense within the context: Picard can't have "antique furniture" in his chateau because it's less than 25 years old: the original building burned down offscreen at the time of
Star Trek: Generations killing his entire family. The current winery is clearly something he rebuilt, likely in his off-period after
Star Trek: Nemesis. As usual, the Kurtzman writing style of ignoring everything just makes the universe ring hollow.
The new shows also – bizarrely — feature a dearth of straight black male actors. TNG had two; Voyager had one; DS9 had several, including a masculine male captain. The feminists who write this newer junk must feel threatened by their masculinity, a common phenomenon in modern Hollywood movies, comic books, and in network television: black men are usually removed (Star Trek), made gay (Marvel’s New Warriors), or turned into female servants (Samuel L. Jackson in Captain Marvel – a pet to Brie Larson). So, they’ve almost entirely been excised as primary leads in the new shows. The mostly unaccomplished female writers of Discovery even reported the more accomplished (read: threatening) black male writer, Walter Mosley, to Human Resources for uttering a racial epithet (in context with writing about racism), causing him to quit the show in disgust.
It was news to me that Walter Mosley's only/main crime was using the word "nigger"...that Mosley
himself was a nigger was news as well. This really is safe space sensitivity turned up to 11, especially when you discover why he said it:
"I hadn’t called anyone it. I just told a story about a cop who explained to me, on the streets of Los Angeles, that he stopped all niggers in paddy neighborhoods and all paddies in nigger neighborhoods, because they were usually up to no good. I was telling a true story as I remembered it."
We already, of course, had the snowflakes dialed up to 10.5 when they had two
Star Trek: Discovery showrunners fired a year earlier because they
"learned across the writers room table while shouting an expletive" at a writer. Let that sink in. A writer was
swore at by their boss and got him fired. No wonder the writing on NuTrek is 5th grade calibre at best! Back to "Divine Right"'s article:
Discovery and Picard are both written by a crowd that obviously hates the demographic they are writing for, so they pepper many of the episodes with things they know that demographic will take as insults – female characters insulting male characters, underhanded jokes about masculinity or mansplaining, obnoxious female leads, incompetent white male characters who need female instruction, excessive melodrama, denigration of lore. It’s patently obvious. They aren’t even being subtle about it. The Klingons, once a proud masculine race, are now reduced to xenophobic Trump voters in Discovery. The show runner directly stated this in an interview before the series premiere. Klingons now speak in subhuman, guttural-sounding vocals. They redesigned them to look like hairless Tolkienesque goblins – hideous primitives. Klingons were previously boastful, proud in speech and in manner … threatening black men, basically. Feminist writers can’t have that. Bye. Fundamentally, these new shows struggle because they are written by people wholly unlike the target audience, so they are not able to appeal to them (the same is true of other ruined male franchises like Star Wars – but I’ll save that for another time). These new shows aren’t for the old audience. The new — diverse — show runners have made that clear. Star Trek now serves as a vehicle for airing out racial and gender grievances against the perceived white male audience. It’s akin to planting your tribe’s flag on another tribe’s territory. The aggrieved gets a rush from being able to rub their enemy’s face in their loss. It’s intentional.
I think I covered a lot of this territory already, but it's good seeing it in black and white (pardon the pun). "Divine Right" first notes that when
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a black male captain with a feminist second-in-command he put her in her place on numerous occasions (the very second episode, if I recall!), and then goes into the anti-capitalist feminist underpinnings between some of what seems to be the most ridiculous of the NuTrek tropes:
What do men like in Star Trek?
Men like technology. So, the writers of Picard introduced a magic wand to the newest iteration.
Men like adventure, not melodrama. So, obviously the female writers feature an inordinate number of episodes of characters crying.
Men like friendships, not … what the writers did to Jean-Luc Picard and Data at the end of Star Trek: Picard. The season finale of the new show ends with Picard confessing his amorous affection for Data, the male android – totally out of character. The writers thought they were being subtle, but it’s clear what they meant. It’s an implied gay relationship between the two most popular male characters in TNG, two characters that were never really that close to begin with. It was meant as a deliberate insult to the audience.
All obviously true. Picard was telling Data to just shut up and get to work as recently as
Star Trek: First Contact, and was hardly as close to him as LaForge or Wesley Crusher or Deanna Troi or even Worf. Hell, arguably even Guinan and Riker were closer to him. Turn Picard poofter is just that, an insult. Sodomy has never been an acceptable or desirable lifestyle: they know it, they know we know it, and they still pull this nonsense.
Men like relationships with women, so that’s almost totally ignored – even the subtle implication of male / female attraction; there is some casual sex between characters we hate, but few meaningful or traditional relationships in the newer shows. The female characters in nuTrek are now also disproportionately lesbians (literally – no exaggeration intended), closing off that male fantasy for the audience. For example, the once sexy Seven of Nine is now also a lesbian. I’m sure that was deliberate. The rest of the women are physically unattractive, emotionally disturbed, or otherwise weird.
Men also like ship design, which was a major component of the old shows. They provided countless hours of free fan promotion across message boards and websites, they were cool locations for new episodes, and they inspired fan movies. So, obviously that had to be sidelined in the new shows. The ships, once iconic and profitable selling toy items, are now generic CGI models – totally uninspired trash hastily put together as an afterthought. The new shows can’t sell the merchandise, so the retailers have refused to license much of it.
Another thing men like? Group service – following rules, meritocracy, sacrifice for the tribe, defending territory (even the non-violent philosophical variety), that kind of thing. Well, that’s almost totally absent in Discovery and Picard. The once-honorable and meritocratic military-like Federation is portrayed as corrupt and unequal; the black female lead of Picard berates Jean-Luc in one episode for living “in his fine chateau” while she lived in poverty – again, a totally antithetical concept to the old shows.
The
Pensky File's podcasts about Star Trek: Picard often asked why they weren't showing starships anymore: the (white, geeky, male) cohosts both were excited about seeing what starships were going to look like in this timeframe with this CGI technology. They were both obviously disappointed not to get a good answer, but never really examined why. This was why. The bit about group service and defending physical/rhetorical territory is pretty much a less verbose version of which I wrote earlier.
Many of the characters in the new shows act entirely unprofessional towards each other. They are sometimes even cruel or sadistic. The female captain of one Discovery short Trek allowed a bumbling white male crewman (whom the female writers mocked the entire episode) to die horribly and then simply shrugged it off when asked about it, “he was an idiot” (implication: he deserved to die because he was annoying her). I’m guessing this occurs in the new shows because women don’t generally like things such as military service. Sure, women serve in the armed forces, but that’s just a gig for a lot of girls. Tactics, uniforms, codes of behavior, and group work are all things men sit around and think about when they aren’t being paid to do it.
When RedLetterMedia's Mike Stoklasa first heard about Patrick Stewart's involvement in a new
Star Trek show he sat down and wrote a partial treatment about his idea for what the show could be: titled
"Star Trek: Galaxy" it would feature an aged retired Picard being brought back into service by Geordi LaForge to recover the
U.S.S. Galaxy which had been lost since the Dominion War. While a low priority for Starfleet/the Federation, LaForge and his wife were assigned/requested the detail (with his own son and some other members of his engineering academy) and Geordi already had a bad feeling about the brash young captain assigned the recovery effort. To help reign that captain in and also to help Picard get out of seclusion, LaForge pushes Picard to join him. When they get to the ship and start trying to piece together the mystery of what happens to them, they are attacked by a mysterious new foe and Picard needs to take command to save them all. Throughout the season they would piece together the mysteries of what happened to the ship, who these new baddies are, and on the way uncover a new threat to the Federation. The point being that, as he told Rich Evans in that YouTube video,
"nerds to this kind of shit all the time". Most of those nerds are, in fact, male. Not all of them, mind you: two of
Star Trek's best writers are Diana Duane and the late Dorothy Fontana. But both women understood more than any homo writer working for
Star Trek: Discovery ever could.
Jeanne Kalogridis (pen name "J. M. Dillard") wrote both the epic
Star Trek: The Lost Years and the super-nerdy kitsch "Federation Passport". But wake me up when the female writers of
Star Trek: Picard write anything
scientifically literate as this:
In general though, yes men are the ones who tend to write their own (non-Mary Sue) fanfiction, or technical backgrounds, or make CGI models or record themselves playing music from the shows they love. Even hippie feminist writers like Margaret Wander Bonanno understood how to write for a
Star Trek audience.
Not surprisingly, the biggest internet critic of these two incarnations is an Israeli Jew (I suspect); he compiled many of the clips above. It’s not hard to understand why. Israel is a masculine country that requires compulsory military service, is based around codes of principle (Jewish heritage), is partly multicultural (maybe 20% of the population isn’t Jewish), is group-oriented, and has a high percentage of intellectual figures. These are all things you might vaguely see in Star Trek’s The Federation, especially in The Next Generation.
The biggest supporters of these new incarnations, not surprisingly, are the show’s American writers – along with a few “critics”. These people lack any loyalty to a higher cause (other than themselves), are nihilistic, are sadistic, enjoy berating “the other” (men, whites, themselves even), and have practically no respect for anything they aren’t personally invested with. In other words, they are thoroughly Americanized losers. There would be a college thesis in that observation if we lived in a better timeline. In this one, the world where the bad guys won, you are stuck reading it in a random internet comment.
If that Brit sodomite can get a thesis out of
Star Trek surely others can as well. "Divine Right" really ties it all together at the end though:
I think that observation explains much of what is wrong with modern culture: the past, in many ways, was better than the present and probably will end up being better than the near future. That’s intolerable to a lot of political extremists, the very people who put us in this position in the first place. So, the past has to be destroyed; it serves as a foil to the current reigning madness. “Let the past die, kill it if you have to.” That’s why pop culture had to be denigrated. That’s why Star Trek is trash nowadays.
When conquering armies of the ancient world subdued an enemy, they often defaced the conquered tribe’s symbols – destroyed the statues, burned the temples, desecrated anything sacred; both Muslim and Christian conquerors were famous for this. Same thing here. The new regime is burning the cultural bridges so you can’t go back to the better world left behind, the one not ruled by them.
Mark Steyn also noted that modern "woke" media can only appropriate what came before them: they can't write a good female comic book character outside of
X-Men...so instead they co-opt
Captain Marvel and
Thor. They're vultures, not creators.
Bonus Trek comparisons from the comments: Divine Right's post was originally a comment and this comment to his comment has good bits:
Because those episodes spoke to me. They moved me. They changed me. They made me more (or less) than I was before I watched them.
Those damn episodes don’t do anything for me anymore. They’re visual and sonic wallpaper. Background clutter. White noise. Mind droppings. Been there, done that. So f**king tedious.
