Too many dystopias - the world needs utopian Star Trek
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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First, the world doesn't need Star Trek at all. The world needs Trek like I need a butter brickle ice cream cone; it's a nice-to-have luxury.
People say they want Star Trek to "comment on the human condition" and at the same time present a Utopian vision for the future.
They want Military Intelligence, Bureaucratic Efficiency, Jumbo Shrimp: they want a contradiction.
The mistaken attempt to portray Picard and his companions as evolved beings born and bred into Paradise meant that in order to deal with human situations and problems as we really experience them meant that they had to:
Fuggedaboudit.
Look at the news this weekend.
This is the condition of human beings on the only planet we know jack about. If some fiction writer has something to say about the "human condition" they should hurry up - and they should damned well say it about humans.
People say they want Star Trek to "comment on the human condition" and at the same time present a Utopian vision for the future.
They want Military Intelligence, Bureaucratic Efficiency, Jumbo Shrimp: they want a contradiction.
The mistaken attempt to portray Picard and his companions as evolved beings born and bred into Paradise meant that in order to deal with human situations and problems as we really experience them meant that they had to:
- Find a less-enlightened planet where something human and troubling was going on, and
- Encourage the inhabitants to Do Better. "Look at us! You can do it!" Picard would exhort.
Fuggedaboudit.
Look at the news this weekend.
This is the condition of human beings on the only planet we know jack about. If some fiction writer has something to say about the "human condition" they should hurry up - and they should damned well say it about humans.
Yeah, if the pilot for the new show has the captain forced to kill his best friend who has been driven mad by power, I'm outta here.
Roddenberry would have never stood for something that dark or downbeat . . .
But Kirk didn't cry about it for five seasons. And today it's not a story any more but just a vehicle to give him a reason to do it (the crying and sad face).
Back then a pilot was always the same. In the end they all stood together and said "Wow. That was an adventure. I'm curious, what lays ahead of us. It'll be all fun!"
Today it's just the same, just the "fun" has turned into "horrible" or "an ordeal".
Well, the new series is being produced by the folks involved with the nuTrek movies, and I found neither of those films "horrible" or "an ordeal:" they were both fun in the way that the original Star Trek series was and that most of the sequel productions were not.
To be fair, sometimes that end scene with them standing around the captain smiling was HORRIBLY tone deaf. Like the episode where Nomad wiped Uhura's mind, but hey, we've almost got her retrained to do her job, and that's all that matters, so all good. Or after Miramanee died. Dead wife. Dead child. No big. Big smiles all around....
Yes, it was the sixties (Spock erased his memory about Flint's android though). The other Trek was like that too. My fave is O'Brien at DS9, where he had to live through a full life in a prison where he killed his cellmate in the end. Next episode it was all "hey, let's play some darts, Julian" again.
I don't think they show us such naivity. But I didn't only have the new series in mind. I'm a little annoyed with all those shows where everybody is a walking psychological problem so they do character-analysis all day. I don't really expect series 6 to become like that necessarily.
"The Apple" is the prime offender here. Something like a half-dozen redshirts are violently killed, but the episode ends with some some mildly racy humor about how the aliens are going to enjoying figuring out how babies are made, as well as Kirk and McCoy teasing Spock about how he looks like the devil.
Plus, Chekov gets the girl, so it's all good.
More seriously, I'm not sure the attitude was ever, "It'll all be fun!"
Fun like the ending of "Balance of Terror," or "Charlie X," or "Conscience of the King," or "City on the Edge of Forever," or "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield," or "A Private Little War," or "All Our Yesterdays," or "The Ultimate Computer," or . . . ?
Don't get me wrong. Swashbuckling adventure and excitement were always part of the recipe, but let's not pretend that TOS was all starry-eyed optimism and happy endings.
I like DS9's balance of utopia and reality. They had a utopia confronted with real world horrors and having to fight and make compromises to preserve itself. Paradise Lost was a great episode in this regard.
@Dennis
You're inventing a lot of contradictions and false imperatives here. Just because there are problems and evil people now doesn't mean it's a contradiction to suggest that in the future they may not. The same kind of reductionist splitting behavior from your other thread where you take two different contradictory things said by two different people and pretend they're contradictory demands from some amorphous whole, topped off with the sanctimonious placement of the 'Bigger problems exist' card.
Having Earth be a place where people have overcome current social problems does not preclude conflict or imply superior judgment of the main characters toward outsiders. Picard usually took the side of the different culture against his crew urging him to impose Federation values, and only tended to violate that when an individual asked for help.
And Kirk judged and interfered with other cultures far more than Picard ever did. He destroyed more than a few of their deities.
@Dennis
You're inventing a lot of contradictions and false imperatives here. Just because there are problems and evil people now doesn't mean it's a contradiction to suggest that in the future they may not. The same kind of reductionist splitting behavior from your other thread where you take two different contradictory things said by two different people and pretend they're contradictory demands from some amorphous whole, topped off with the sanctimonious placement of the 'Bigger problems exist' card.
Having Earth be a place where people have overcome current social problems does not preclude conflict or imply superior judgment of the main characters toward outsiders. Picard usually took the side of the different culture against his crew urging him to impose Federation values, and only tended to violate that when an individual asked for help.
And Kirk judged and interfered with other cultures far more than Picard ever did. He destroyed more than a few of their deities.
Utopia, to me, means perfection.
Perfection is unknowable. (To paraphrase Kevin Flynn in TRON Legacy)
Doesn't mean that you can't still have a good natured society trying to do the right thing for themselves and (when possible) for others.
We're only human. Humans have merits and flaws. (As, I'm sure, other alien species do. ) Humanity in a new Star Trek doesn't have to be overly flawed to where it becomes a chore on the viewer to try and enjoy the show, but I don't want to see them as antiseptic as they appeared to be in the first couple seasons of TNG.
I thought DS9 struck the right balance. Sisko was an excellent example of that balance, as was James T. Kirk in his time. Both strove to do the right thing when at all possible, but both also bent the rules to see the right thing as the end result. It's not that they weren't afraid of rule-bending/breaking options (I'm sure they were), but knowing that, in the end, the right thing was done, a slight malfunction of their inner moral compass was a small price to pay.
(BTW, I loved the recent BSG series. I didn't think that everyone was bogged down in dysfunction and immorality. I thought lots of characters had redeeming qualities, and when the time for heroes came, there were heroes to be had.)
Perfection is unknowable. (To paraphrase Kevin Flynn in TRON Legacy)
Doesn't mean that you can't still have a good natured society trying to do the right thing for themselves and (when possible) for others.
We're only human. Humans have merits and flaws. (As, I'm sure, other alien species do.
) Humanity in a new Star Trek doesn't have to be overly flawed to where it becomes a chore on the viewer to try and enjoy the show, but I don't want to see them as antiseptic as they appeared to be in the first couple seasons of TNG.I thought DS9 struck the right balance. Sisko was an excellent example of that balance, as was James T. Kirk in his time. Both strove to do the right thing when at all possible, but both also bent the rules to see the right thing as the end result. It's not that they weren't afraid of rule-bending/breaking options (I'm sure they were), but knowing that, in the end, the right thing was done, a slight malfunction of their inner moral compass was a small price to pay.
(BTW, I loved the recent BSG series. I didn't think that everyone was bogged down in dysfunction and immorality. I thought lots of characters had redeeming qualities, and when the time for heroes came, there were heroes to be had.)
The contradiction is in wanting to see an idealized world portrayed while demanding that the stories comment on real-world problems.
You know, the problems that don't exist for the characters in the idealized fictional world.
That was pretty clear the first time.
In any event, I've no interest in seeing a return of modern Trek/24th century "evolved humanity." Give me the contemporary people living in the future that TOS portrayed - stories that recognized the existence of every kind of contemporary human failing, pettiness and evil and in fact depended upon those things in order to tell stories.
Fortunately, I doubt that Kurtzman wants to dig up the 80s/90s approach to the Franchise.
In one of my novels, Kirk is embarrassed to discover that he's acquired a reputation as a "God-Killer." Which comes back to bite him.
Getting back on topic: Aside from the obvious example of the new BSG, which ended years ago, what other genre shows are all gloom and doom and dysfunction all the time? THE WALKING DEAD? Well, that's a horror show about flesh-eating zombies, so I'm not sure anybody expects it to be super-optimistic. GAME OF THRONES? Maybe.
Asserting that everything these days is doom and gloom and dystopia seems a bit of an overstatement. I wonder if the real issue is that TV shows are more serialized these days, so that all problems are NOT wrapped up in a neat little bow at the end of the episode, so that, yes, it may seem like there's more angst than back in the old days, when Kirk blithely moved on to the next episode and never mentioned Edith Keeler again.
But that's not "dystopian." That's just actions having consequences and characters having memories.
And now I'm going to go watch the grim-dark, dystopian sobfest that is THE LIBRARIANS . . .
"War... war never changes." - Fallout
There are many problems that we can, doubtless, correct. But there are many, many problems that can't be resolved without us changing *ourselves* in some fairly fundamental ways. And the difficulty with that in our current context is that, much like the TNG crew from early seasons, those changed humans would be fairly difficult for a television audience to identify with.
Exactly - humans are flawed and always will be. I think that is part of why I find TNG hollow now and can still go back and watch TOS without issue.
When I think of Trek utopianism, it's the God-awful TNG "bettering ourselves" stuff that I think of and don't want to see repeated. TOS didn't possess it and DS9 actively contradicted it.
Even in a technologically advanced, post-scarcity society, dicks will still exist. Occasionally, it's nice to watch dicks screw around.
Even in a technologically advanced, post-scarcity society, dicks will still exist. Occasionally, it's nice to watch dicks screw around.
I don't think fans want Trek to turn to dysfunction in order to to be entertaining, they just want it to be interesting and entertaining.
At first TNG was THE show to watch and was cutting edge. But in hindsight, people now tend to describe it as bland.
The technobabble, and all the restraints on the characters, dialog, plots etc, probably makes it a harder rewatch, at least for some fans.
Apparently something happened to make the fans turn off the franchise . It seems most likely it was either boredom or lack of interest.
Like I mentioned before, a typical TNG bar scene might show people quietly talking at tables while some standard music plays.
Nu Trek shows a futuristic club with flashing lights, and loud modern sounding music, Kirk trying to hit on Uhura.
I never got into NU Trek, but that scene did catch my attention, because it was different looking.
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