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The Human Adventure Continues: Talking About Star Trek
- Thread starter Johnny Unusual
- Start date
"family-friendly," of course, didn't include queer people
Yuuuuup. That's one of the many things the guy ought to be held to task for. I also don't hear many people talk about this either, and I'd love to see someone try and crunch some numbers on it too. But if you ever look at the background characters for any given Star Trek show, just pay attention to the kinds of faces you see. In TOS, Gene made it a point to have diversity walk the hallways of the Enterprise to show an integrated workforce. That ethos was still there in the first season or two of TNG. Once Berman took over though, I can't help but feel like the background characters filling the hallways or inhabiting alien worlds all of a sudden started looking a lot more like 90s Hollywood - e.g. almost exclusively white. I always think back on Jonathan Frakes' director's commentary on Insurrection where he just unprompted starts opining, "Ever notice the casting of this Baku village? How this harmonious, perfect society, everyone in it just happens to look Sweedish? Weird, right?" Star Trek gets a lot of credit for its portrayal of diversity, but the Berman years, at the very least, coasted on that reputation and did a bare minimum to appear diverse when they could have done a lot more.
First two episodes were good. Not amazing or anything, but the show is fun and comforting. It's been over two years (!!!) since we had new Disco, and a half year since any new Star Trek in general. This Writer's Strike drought friggin' sucks, but it's nice to have something to look forward to every week now for the next few months.
In other Star Trek news - today is First Contact Day. And apparently, a French broadcasting affiliate dropped all of Prodigy Season 2 a few weeks ago. So if you speak French you can go watch that show early lol. But beware because I'm sure spoilers are now lurking the internet for that show.
Watched a bunch more, and there's a lot of interesting stuff in mid Season 6 (even if also some disappointments... I don't know if I'd have thought about it if I hadn't seen it pointed out but the show has definitely backed way off on Garak/Bashir times, which is a shame.)
Resurrection - A mirror universe ep where nobody actually goes to the mirror universe. Manages to make one of Kira's white guy love interests slightly less boring for moment I guess?
Statistical Probabilities - Okay, this is the one with Bashir and a bunch of more severely modified folks who are pretttty clearly an extrapolation of being on the spectrum. It... could've been a lot worse, I guess? They're painted in broad strokes but the show treats them somewhat sympathetically overall, and with at least a little nuance here and there. The idea that they're so smart they basically just invented psycho-history on the spot is a bit of a stretch, but whatevs.
The Magnificent Ferengi - was pretty fun as was Who Mourns for Morn? and Honey I Shrunk the Runabout I mean One Little Ship.
And then we hit some biggies - Waltz and Far Beyond the Stars. (Which is to say, if you forget titles, the one with Sisko stranded with an increasingly unhinged Dukat, and the one where he's an SF writer in the '60s.) Pretty sure both of those have been discussed to death in Trek circles as I kinda remember them just from osmosis, so I don't know that I have much to add, but yeah. Powerful stuff, with Avery Brooks puttin in some serious work. (Also fun times trying to recognize everyone out of makeup in the latter.)
Oh and I almost forgot we just saw Honor Among Thieves, where O'Brien gets to do a solo *non*-period noir piece, that was pretty good too (even if the setup is a super weird thing for Starfleet to do... sure, let's send the brilliant engineer keeping our most strategically important outpost running on an extremely dangerous undercover mission somewhere entirely else for... reasons.)
Resurrection - A mirror universe ep where nobody actually goes to the mirror universe. Manages to make one of Kira's white guy love interests slightly less boring for moment I guess?
Statistical Probabilities - Okay, this is the one with Bashir and a bunch of more severely modified folks who are pretttty clearly an extrapolation of being on the spectrum. It... could've been a lot worse, I guess? They're painted in broad strokes but the show treats them somewhat sympathetically overall, and with at least a little nuance here and there. The idea that they're so smart they basically just invented psycho-history on the spot is a bit of a stretch, but whatevs.
The Magnificent Ferengi - was pretty fun as was Who Mourns for Morn? and Honey I Shrunk the Runabout I mean One Little Ship.
And then we hit some biggies - Waltz and Far Beyond the Stars. (Which is to say, if you forget titles, the one with Sisko stranded with an increasingly unhinged Dukat, and the one where he's an SF writer in the '60s.) Pretty sure both of those have been discussed to death in Trek circles as I kinda remember them just from osmosis, so I don't know that I have much to add, but yeah. Powerful stuff, with Avery Brooks puttin in some serious work. (Also fun times trying to recognize everyone out of makeup in the latter.)
Oh and I almost forgot we just saw Honor Among Thieves, where O'Brien gets to do a solo *non*-period noir piece, that was pretty good too (even if the setup is a super weird thing for Starfleet to do... sure, let's send the brilliant engineer keeping our most strategically important outpost running on an extremely dangerous undercover mission somewhere entirely else for... reasons.)
I just watched all of these episodes very recently so they're very fresh in my mind. Was waiting on you catching up Kirin to see what you had to say about them though before blabbing on myself. Glad you've enjoyed everything so far. Some quick notes from myself:
Far Beyond the Stars takes place in the 50s, not the 60s. All the accoutrements are starkly 50s not 60s, but for me one of the bigger giveaways is that Michael Dorn is ostensibly playing Willie Mays (though he wears a different number, he's called Willie and is very clearly an allusion to Maes - the greatest baseball player of all time) who played for the New York Giants starting in 1951 through 1957 - when the team was then moved to SF.
I also really like that Nana Visitor's character in that episode has to go by a pen name "K.C. Hunter" which IMO is a pretty clear/obvious nod to D.C. Fontana who had to hide the fact she was a woman while writing for the Original Series.
Also like that René Auberjonois played the spineless, racist-apologist editor. And that he couldn't bring himself to look Benny in the eyes when giving him the bad news. It fits in perfectly with Odo's character, who was essentially just that during The Cardassian Occupation. "Just doing his job" and telling himself he was trying to be fair, but ultimately carrying water for an inherently unfair and oppressive system.
That episode REALLY felt like it should have been a Bashir joint, but then we don't see him get picked up by Section 31 until later.
Mr Bean
Chief Detective
Magnificent Ferengi has one of my favorite Trek comedy moments:
Sisko no-selling it just makes me giggle every time.
Johnny Unusual
(He/Him)
It also has Iggy Pop as the best non-Coombs Vorta.
Well that's a fun bit of trivia I'd missed.
Meanwhile, Change of Heart is extra gut-wrenching, knowing what's coming.