Prouvaire @ Prouvaire @kbin.social

Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually del

---

Read more

Posts

2

Comments

114

Joined

2 yr. ago

Arrgh! I just wrote a detailed response to your post, acknowledging that you're completely right about how TOS's liberalism hit you in the face in a different way, explaining where I was coming from, and ending with how I actually doubt Roddenberry would have put a queer character in the show based on his nixing of "Blood and Fire", David Gerrold's early first season TNG script. But kbin ate it. sigh

We see this bear out in Miles O’brien

IIRC Roddenberry's idea was that everyone in Starfleet was a commissioned officer, but later writers overrode that.

One of the things that was good in the way O'Brien was written is that he was clearly a senior and respected member of the command structure. But that did not mean he had the positional authority to disobey a commissioned officer's orders should he disagree with them. Something that came out in... err... I think it might have been "Hippocratic Oath", where even though O'Brien had more years of military experience, and Starfleet experience, he still had to obey Bashir's orders (who might still have been a Lieutenant Junior Grade at the time?).

This is one of the reasons Discovery effectively promoted Tilly rapidly (all the way to being the XO for a little bit) because she was a pivotal part of the cast and needed screen time.

It's a testament to Mary Wiseman's acting that the writers sought to give Tilly more screen time. But the way they did it made my eyes roll through the roof. I did not for a second consider it believable that an Ensign, only a couple (?) of years out of the Academy, would be skyrocketed through the hierarchy to become the Chief Operating Officer of the ship.

Tilly's promotion was even more unbelievable than when Jed Bartlet made CJ Cregg his Chief of Staff, elevating her above her Toby Ziegler (whom she reported to) and Josh Lyman. I know why the writers did it - because Allison Janney was the best actor in a world-class ensemble, and they wanted to give her more to do. But it didn't ring true to me (even though there is an argument to be made that all the West Wing characters are so hyper-competent that reporting lines are mere formalities).

Sure, you could argue Starfleet has a history of promoting promising youngsters unbelievably fast - like when they gave that cocky repeat offender fresh out of school command of the most modern ship in the fleet simply as a reward for saving the world. But even so.

This actually goes to a related point about DIS and how the writers treated the rank of its main character. Discovery was notable in that it was the first show where the lead actor was also not the most senior member of the crew. As David Gerrold pointed out in The World of Star Trek (IIRC), there's a reason why the captain is the star of the show. Because in a crisis all decisions come back to that role. And the ability to make decisions is what makes for good characterisation (Hamlet notwithstanding). But if the command decisions, the decisions around which the plots and the drama pivot, are ultimately made by someone other than Michael Burnham, more senior than her and who can overrule her, what do you do then? Well, you make the Captain a baddie (like in season 1) or you find other ways of making the main character go against orders (which Burnham did repeatedly). Unfortunately that led to a backlash because the character, Mary Sue-like, was always proven to be correct whenever she went rogue.

I actually liked the fact that the lead character in DIS wasn't the CO. But - like Tilly's promotion - I just wish the writers had found a better way of exploring that dynamic. Having Burnham assume the traditional captain's seat in season 4 was - in some ways - an admission of defeat, but an understandable one.

Lower Decks of course pulls it off, but as a comedy the stakes are generally lower, and the fact that the main characters often don't know what's going on, or aren't in a position to decide how to shape events, is part of the gag.

many of those progressive things are [now] either the norm, or seen as regressive

Totally agree.

Part of it might also be that they didn’t see Trek as anything more than “cool space show, with a whole bunch of scantily clad men and women”, and didn’t bother to look any deeper

Again, I think we're actually in agreement. If you look past the cool space show and can avert your eyes from William Ware Theiss' gravity-defying outfits you should be able to discern that Roddenberry's future is largely socialist, some would argue even communist. Centralised world government, no private enterprise (pun not intended), and by the time TNG aired, even no money. (Note there were references to money in TOS.) Not that I'm trying to imply conservative Trek fans aren't smart enough to figure this out. But - like the diversity and inclusion in the TOS cast - TOS's liberalism (social, not economic) isn't something that the show hit you in the face with. It's treated matter-of-factly, as backstory or backdrop. Whereas a show like DIS basically grabs you by the lapels and shouts "I'm progressive! I'm progressive!!" (Exaggerating of course, but you get the idea.)

not unlike Star Wars. It’s just guns, cool ships, and shooting, with the imperialistic allegory being ignored, or gone unnoticed

Not much of a Star Wars fan, but I assume this is David Brin's critique?

Hah! Normally I say that VOY is TNG-lite and ENT is VOY-lite, but decided to skip a generation this time. 😅

As someone who used to hang around TrekBBS back in the day, there are actually many conservative and libertarian Star Trek fans.

It always baffled me also, but I think many of them were/are TOS fans. Kirk's swashbuckling, individualistic, break-the-rules, throw-a-roundhouse-when-you-need-to style disguised Roddenberry's socialist utopia that existed in the more civilised parts of the Federation. Certainly more so than adventures of the tea-sipping, conference-chairing, "I think I'll surrender in my very first appearance" Frenchman who followed him.

ENT was basically watered down TNG for its first two seasons. Some of the time it was good (eg "Carbon Creek"), some of the time it was bad (eg "Precious Cargo"), but most of the time it was stultifyingly mediocre. Season 3 tried something different, but it was only in season 4 that ENT found its true voice.

And it was Manny Coto who was responsible for the upswing in quality. I'm generally skeptical of prequels, but at least Coto fully bought into the premise of ENT being a prequel show, and showed us how various aspects of Trek lore came to be. I think his stint running that final season may have been his best work.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f8df9dde-be5d-489e-93c3-d7e03e8d3439

I was not a fan of introducing legacy characters like Spock, Kirk - and even lesser-explored characters like Pike, Chapel, Number One and M'Benga to an extent - in DIS/SNW. Introduce new characters I say, that aren't hamstrung by what's already been established - something that I think is even more important in a show that's set in the "past".

That said, if we were to have a pre-TOS Spock, I wanted to see a Spock who would credibly grin at a plant or exclaim "The women!". I think SNW has given us that.

However, you're absolutely right. The destination for the character in SNW is for him to choose his Vulcan half over his human half. Hopefully the writers have planned this out. There's potential for a poignant story arc here, not just for Spock but also Chapel and T'Pring.

I wonder if the activitypub protocol (or, if not the protocol then some other layer) allows for the idea of "community mirrors". The way that the protocol works at the moment, as I understand it, only the host instance has a complete record of a community's posts and comments. But if there was a way for a community to designate one or more other instances as "mirrors" which maintain a complete sync of a community's content (going back all the way to the community's founding), that would lower the exposure to instances going down.

There would need to be a process (both technical and administrative) for a mirror to be designated as the new host instance should the original host disappear.

This would build in additional resilience into the fediverse model, by taking advantage of its distributed nature.

It's possible that said showrunners are giving interviews in their capacity as producers, not writers.

This is a point of contention between the WGA and studios. See for instance:
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/showrunners-writers-strike-producing-writing-1235626881/
https://deadline.com/2023/05/writers-strike-disney-hbo-showrunners-letter-other-studios-wga-1235357794/

As long as they're about how terrible DC films are, I suspect Marvel will be okay with it.

@USSBurritoTruck

Too bad “The Omega Glory” didn’t also get in on the game.

That would have been funny.

The difference is that "James T" is actually spoken in "Mudd's Women" (also "The Conscience of the King", "Court Martial", "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "A Taste of Armageddon" and "Errand of Mercy" in the first season) , whereas "James R" only appears visually on the tombstone in "Where No Man..."

I'd guess the real world reason for the discrepancy is that the tombstone was a mistake by the props people that slipped past Justman or Roddenberry. But fan theories that used to go around included that the "R" referred to a private joke or nickname between Mitchell and Kirk, or that the events of "Where No Man..." took place in an alternate reality. (IIRC one of the novels ran with this one.)

Interestingly the "T" middle initial goes back all the way back to Roddenberry's original outline in the early 60s, when the name of the captain was "Robert T. April". Other notable Captains with "T" middle initials include "William T. Riker", "Captain J. T. Esteban" and.... err... I thought there was at least one more, but am drawing a blank.

edit: The other person I was thinking of was "Leland T. Lynch", but he wasn't a captain.

@USSBurritoTruck

Kirk’s middle name, Tiberius, was established in the TAS episode, “Bem”. Prior to that, the only indication of what his middle name might be was in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when Gary Mitchell created a tombstone reading ”James R. Kirk”.

While David Gerrold canonised the "T" as standing for "Tiberius" in "Bem", we did know that his middle name started with the letter "T" as far back as "Mudd's Women" IIRC. You undoubtedly already knew this, but the way this particular connection was worded suggested that the "T" also first appeared in "Bem", when it had been established early in TOS.

Incidentally, but non-canonically, in Gene Roddenberry's novelisation of The Motion Picture, he has Kirk write, in "Admiral Kirk's preface" to the novel, that:

Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.

And quoting from that same preface just for shits and giggles and to proffer today's insight into the mind of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry:

I received James because it was both the name of my father's beloved brother as well as that of my mother's first love instructor.

@kingmongoose7877 Of course Scorsese's mastery, knowledge and love of movies is matched by few and surpassed by none. But I do find it amusing that the he criticises lowbrow superhero genre movies when every third film he makes has a bunch of Irish or Italian guys telling each other to fuhgeddaboudit, then shooting each other in the head. (Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by that much.)

My point? There are bad, mediocre and good superhero movies, just as there are bad, mediocre and good gangster movies. And every so often there are great genre movies, like The Godfather, or - for my money - Logan (which I think deserved Oscar nominations for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actor, supporting actor and supporting actress).

And, basically, you just need a lot of movies to be made before a masterpiece is produced. For how many decades were westerns a popular genre? Were directors complaining about the guns'n'horses theme parks in the 1950s? Most westerns that were made over that time have been forgotten, but the great ones like Shane or Unforgiven live on. In fifty years most superheroes will have been forgotten, but a handful will live on.

To address @chickenwing 's post more directly: I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the age of the movie star was dead (Tom Cruise being cited as one of a few exceptions), and that the age of the franchise/brand (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar) had arrived. If the age of the franchise is dying, what will rise to take its place?