I mean my favorite is still DS9 which was morally skewed because -Dramatic drag on bubblegum cigarette- War is hell. But I want the general place of Star Trek to be 'nonono, we are going to be good fucking people if we can be.'
I don't trust them not to throw Picard into an everything's-morally-grey universe and be all "oooh it's so realistic to watch this hero get broken and disillusioned oooooh"
idk, I feel like a lot of the times, people see 'this is a dark thing', and then don't even bother looking at any of the rest of it to see if they're even trying to tell a story.
Because that's when streaming started to be a thing and full season arcs were more the go-to writing wise. And that's a lot of focus on character change, which usually means 'put 'em through hell.'
and DS9 had episodes where they flat out undermined the notion of the federation being serious about any of it's principles :x e.g. about how only the central planets matter and they don't care about anyone out in the boonies
Disclaimer, since I basically jumped in here and started yelling (sorry about that XD;;;; ) the older Treks have a huge special place in my heart and I haven't seen Disco yet because lack of time, I've just super burned out on so many other things that "ooh xyz is coming back" = "yikes plz don't grimdark that too plz".
there were things of bashir I liked, but actually letting him be a real spy was an ODD choice. Esp when they tried to make those episodes the funny episodes.
to the point that people have argued that DS9 is important because it shows that the federation is really imperialist and oppressive and dismissive toward other cultures whereas TNG was just internal and thus doesn't really show how bad the federation is
I mean neither did I, but there are weird bits of hawkishness in A LOT of DS9 (because they super wanted to recycle WWII swear movie tropes for whatever reason)
So one of the things was Roddenberry's utopic vision was a bit... too elitist and open? DS9 as the first series without his hand kinda added some practicality to things.
Later on they decided that it wasn't really equal to have the 'bad guys' have a CIA without the good guys also having one (because espionage and information handling is a vital part to functional governmental defense).
......I mean Old West stories are based heavily in Manifest Destiny and Watch Out For Them Indians, so I don't think it's hard to see where someone would read imperialism there >_> even if I don't think those are emphasized elements in DS9
(I think the only people that don't have a directly stated CIA in series is the Klingons, even the Ferengi have one (it doesn't do much they don't caaaare).
"operated for over two centuries with no oversight or accountability whatsoever, even free to kill those it deemed a threat to Federation interests at its own discretion." that's ABSOLUTELY not the cia
The whole point was that Section 31 was to bring Starfleet on level with Kardashians and Romulans, who had Obsidian Order and... fuck, what the hell was the name for the Romulan one?
Like, it looks like the CIA in the bad old wild-west days of the Cold War. Which isn't how the CIA should be but it was because the US is bad at stuff.
from one of my trek guides: "It is stated in "Elusive Salvation" that Section 31 began as an agency in the Pentagon, which in 1996 was dedicated to tracking alien threats." lol ok, star trek
"Julian was rendered catatonic, mute and wheelchair bound by the psychological trauma of losing Sarina. Captain Dax and Tarses delivered Bashir to Elim Garak. He is unrecovered as of 2 years later." JEEEEEZ, NOVELS.
yeah... this gets into my feeling that while the letter of Roddenberry's perspective was definitely too strict by itself, in tension with the writers, it made TNG great
he was a pain in the neck obviously but he did force people to justify and argue convincingly for conflict rather than just WOO CONFLICT EVERYTHING IS CONFLICT
I object to the notion that melodramatic grim-dark edginess is synonymous with practicality, even though most writers seem to present them as the same thing
The whole reason grimdark edginess is a thing in Startrek fanwork is because it is specifically uninvited to canon. If the idea is 'we've put away childish bigotry, hatred, and greed and the world is good.' and you look outside and nobody seems willing to part with those things now, you don't really have a grasp on what that world would look like.
Fanwork (which I fully include EU things as) goes places canon cannot go. This is, incidentally, why fanwork is super fucking gay. Because canons don't tend to be nearly gay enough.
- JJ Abrams admitted openly that he didn't like Trek the show because it was 'too intellectual for me', so I've always been uncomfortable with his Trek, and even the good ones (Beyond) have this real edge of hopeless misery. Kirk hates being a captain in this universe and that's just so wrong.
Someone did a reallyyyyy good analysis on the differences between movie!Picard and TV!Picard, for example, to examine how 'making blockbuster movies out of Trek' has always meant more violence, less diplomacy, less joy and less hope.
- I've never heard it argued before that Roddenberry's presence on the show made it better, but I think you folks have a point. Being forced to work within constraints almost always improves the process, as long as those constraints don't include censoring the existence of, like, human diversity
As another example, I think Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive are some of David Lynch's best work. I think Invader ZIM was better than the fully-independent comics Jhonen Vasquez put out.
See also some of the classic comparisons of old-style horror movies vs. new movies where full CGI is possible and cheap. (Or, for another comparison, the original fight between Luke and the monster on Hoth vs the updated fight after Lucas was able to CGI a monster in there.)
Being forced to use special effects sparingly, which only look good under specific lighting conditions, means you can't use lazy, boring, thoughtless compositions.
So yeah. For all that there's a lot of noise in the Trek fandom over how Roddenberry 'ruined' various plots in TNG (the season 1 finale with the brainsuckers is a famous example, apparently - the original pitch was for real corruption, not people being controlled by parasites, but Roddenberry didn't want that to be part of the Federation), I think there's a
really good argument to be made here that Roddenberry's absence caused them to go ALL IN and make the Federation a borderline malevolent force because they rejected the idea that people could outgrow conflict. Instead of just not outgrowing conflict, newer Trek decided we hadn't even outgrown fascism. /sob
(weirdly, the same thing that connects "V" and "Alien Nation" with the same...issue that made the thing that made that connection clear taken out by the writer's strike)
It's made a huge difference in my feelings towards TNG in particular to have all these little background notes about the times the writers and the actors tried to sneak queer people into it
but yeah another point of frustration for me with Vic Fontaine was that I really liked Diana and her job in TNG, and DS9 100% should have had an actual counselor.
and Vic Fontaine just kind of started doing that after his sudden insertion late in the show, but he was never a counselor. He wasn't even a bartender. He was a lounge singer behaving like a stereotypical bartender.
it includes a bunch of writers complaining about how Roddenberry's rules made it hard to write drama... ... but then one of them admits that it also made them aim a lot higher.
Which is why individuals doing bad things for... whatever reason, really, is okay. Like, is it the ideals of Roddenberry, no, but it isn't a slap in the face of them either. Meanwhile Roddenberry's specific issues with 'Starfleet vessels cannot be US Naval vessels' and other such things were just, kinda silly, to make rules.
(The 'people are flawed' vs 'the system is flawed' is why I didn't enjoy the Bashir spy game episodes, but Sisko doing morally bankrupt things didn't bother me.)
Having someone idealistic surrounded by liars and schemers is fine, it's why Bashir and Garrack worked, but it helped that ex spiessimple tailors don't actually want anything.
-Dramatic drag on bubblegum cigarette-
War is hell.
But I want the general place of Star Trek to be 'nonono, we are going to be good fucking people if we can be.'
"
I'd guess it's because they areThis is, incidentally, why fanwork is super fucking gay. Because canons don't tend to be nearly gay enough.
ex spiessimple tailors don't actually want anything.