What do you HATE about Star Trek?

[F. King Daniel]

I thought this would be a fun counterpoint to milojthatch's thread.

I hate...

The idea of an "evolved" humanity. It often seemed to me as if TNG was going out of it's way to make their characters as smug and unrelatable as possible. People will still be people in the future, there will still be greed and all the other things Picard and others made speeches about. As proved throughout TNG (in their treatment of Barclay, especially), DS9 (which intentionally subverted TNG) and Voyager, the humans of the 24th century are no better than we are today.

The often trite moralizing. I often hear fans talk about it being one of Trek's defining features, when IMHO it's usually about on par with Stan's "I've learned something today..." speeches in South Park. Deep and meaningful stuff, it ain't.

The Prime Directive. A little girl (and her planet) was going to die in "Pen Pals" and Picard's reaction was that he was annoyed at Data. A tribe of aliens were going to die in Into Darkness and Pike was mad because they saw the ship. Worf's brother saves the lives of an entire village and Picard is furious. It's a stupid plot device. If they're all dead, it doesn't matter.

 

[Dale Sams]

The idea of an evolved humanity.

At least ST:FC wonderfully skewers that.



In the words of the Iotians, my beef is: Since Day 1 of TNG, the producers decided to eschew the idea that the ship kicks everyone's ass and that its Captain kicks everyone's ass.

Kirk was a tactical genius. He defeated the Romulan's finest flagship. He held a crippled ship together until the warp engines could be repaired and defeated a Klingon ship. Outguiled an Orion ship. Defeated a Gorn garrison single-handedly. Defeated Khan.

But starting with TNG, they constantly ran into ships that outgunned them. Picard is a thinking man? Fine. And yes, there were some exceptions. The movies mostly. DS9 let Sisko and the Defiant be badass.

Then they turn right around with Enterprise and lay it on thick. So much so that Archer getting beat up became a meme of sorts.

and NuTrek? Kirk gets beat up by cadets, Spock, Romulans,...he can't even make Khan breath hard...Klingons,....he's always running and screaming. The Enterprise? Ridiculously outgunned. We don't even get to see Kirk TRY and be a tactical genius. Hell, Spock is the stoic badass hero in NuTrek. They should have just kept Spock as Captain and have Kirk be the hot-headed XO. I'd have been fine with that.

It's as if starting in 1987, the producers forgot that we LIKE our heroes and their ships to kick some butt. The very first time we see Kirk, what does he do? (Besides defeat a Vulcan at chess) He beats up and defeats a GOD.

What does Picard do? I'm still not really sure. He showed a God that humanity was worth saving because they freed some space jellyfish? I guess that's what happened.

 

[BillJ]

What do I hate about Star Trek? Not much really. The thing that disappoints me the most is that the sense of adventure and wonder is lost during much of the Berman-era. The two Abrams films have brought back the adventure, I'm hoping the third brings back the sense of wonder at it all.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Women in catsuits (even though they always look far better in proper uniforms) or stripped to their underwear (ENT did do work to even things out though, they took at least that risk).

The miniskirts of TOS are different, due to the era the show was produced and the statement they made about women's liberation, so they have to be looked upon in historical context. The shows of the 80s-00s (and current movies) had no other reason that titillation.

 

[LobsterAfternoon]

I also hate the "evolved humanity" angle, but thankfully DS9/parts of TNG and Voyager abandoned that.

My big gripe is the pacing of most of TV trek. TNG especially suffers from this, but the pace is sooooo slow.

 

[Nerys Myk]

Very little.

 

[The Wormhole]

The constant denial that Starfleet is a military, even though it clearly is one.

 

[jespah]

No money. What a terribly crippling plot device that is.

 

[Dale Sams]

I also hate the "evolved humanity" angle, but thankfully DS9/parts of TNG and Voyager abandoned that.

My big gripe is the pacing of most of TV trek. TNG especially suffers from this, but the pace is sooooo slow.

Really? I adore the pace of TOS. It's one of the things I think Shatner shines at. And I don't mean his odd pauses. But for example in The Omega Glory, the build-up to them beaming down...the spookiness. The long pause Shatner takes to say "We're beaming down to the planet surface!"...then the camera pans down to the empty uniform of the ship's surgeon that saved them. Wonderful stuff.

 

[BigJake]

I don't know about "hate." But there were flaws to be sure.

- The pervasive sexism of TOS is its biggest and most noticeable flaw some decades on, and I'm not talking about the miniskirts. That Uhura was a step forward for black women in American television is basically just an incredibly sad comment on the state of American television at the time. At almost any time that TOS characters open their mouths to talk about men and women, what comes out is cringeworthy. (Later adventures in Trek titillation and stunt-casting-for-titties are a bit pathetic, and women's horizons hadn't grown as much as they should have by TNG, but there's just no beating the Sixties at this game.) One can hardly even use "it was of its time" as a defense, because I think Trek was pretty bad for this even by the prevailing standards of its day. Sixties pop culture had female heroines, for example, but TOS Trek could barely bring itself to conceive of such.

- TOS did try to be more conscious and inclusive as far as race and nationality went -- in sort of a clueless male-WASP-of-the-Sixties way, but still at least there was a discernible effort there -- but nevertheless it also had a pronounced hostility toward "Asians" and "Asiatics" wired into its DNA which is very noticeable and distracting now (reflecting the prejudices of those involved, most likely, who were vets or knew vets of the Pacific Theatre, not to mention the Orientalist rhetoric common to the Cold War).

- The franchise as a whole became prone to sentimentality the longer it ran. Hence we first had the inflation of Kirk and his crew into an improbable dominance of Starfleet and the Federation between TOS and the movies, particular the post-TWOK movies; and we had similar spirals into sentimentality regarding the later crews that we spent any amount of time with, especially in TNG and DS9 (whose series finale was so drenched in emotional syrup that I found it unwatchable).

- As time passed, Trek also began to refer more and more to its own conventions and mythos than it did to the world around it -- a trend that began with TNG but was really noticeable with subsequent series, and which ultimately began to hold it back.

 

[Xerxes1979]

I don't know why people hate the idea of evolved humanity. If we project backwards in time the same number of years Trek is set in the future we have people being burned for witchcraft and widespread human slavery.

Does the distaste come from the idea that modern society is now sufficiently self-aware that our most eggrious issues are behind us and we have reached an improvement plateau?

Look back fifty years, advancement in civil rights issues has been huge.

 

[BigJake]

I don't know why people hate the idea of evolved humanity. If we project backwards in time the same number of years Trek is set in the future we have people being burned for witchcraft and widespread human slavery

I think it was too often presented to excuse something in TNG that looked more like sanctimony and complacency than anything else. It's true that I did come to cringe whenever Picard started lecturing somebody about how humanity had "evolved beyond" the need for this or that. Even just in terms of dramatic decisions -- some forms of progress should take place, but eliminating things like money really can become a storytelling straitjacket (note that DS9 had to reintroduce cash).

 

[RAMA]

I thought this would be a fun counterpoint to milojthatch's thread.

I hate...

The idea of an "evolved" humanity. It often seemed to me as if TNG was going out of it's way to make their characters as smug and unrelatable as possible. People will still be people in the future, there will still be greed and all the other things Picard and others made speeches about. As proved throughout TNG (in their treatment of Barclay, especially), DS9 (which intentionally subverted TNG) and Voyager, the humans of the 24th century are no better than we are today.

What form it will finally take may be open to question, but this doesn't seem unlikely at all to me. By "evolved" I wouldn't describe anything as utopia, but humanity won't be "the same but different" in 200 years, it'll probbly be radically different in less than a few decades. What is certain is that Trek and almost all science fiction is probably underestimating the level of change and it's rate.

I could see an "evolved" humanity, one that is first techno-biological in nature, superior in it's handling of aging, disease, injury through technical means and the currently ongoing bio-tech boom..which is now an info technology. I see this evolving as still primitive, leading to a mechanical-electronic form exchanging information and in a sense "homegenizing" thought process to a point that makes differencess between humans pointless, in effect reducing many of the ills of our world trough mutual understanding. The economy is such a world would become post-scarcity, and economic ills would be mostly eliminated. Finally these humans might exist completely as information or predominately as digital copies, using foglets to take form however desired.

Of course the opposite is possible if humans don't evolve themselves, as evolution is now firmly out of the hands of biology for the first time ever, and in ours.

The point I am making is that dystopia or "mostly-fallible" humans is not a given. Let's hope we do the right thing.

Finally, Star Trek is obviously a TV show and must appeal and reflect the masses, or even a small percentage of them. By showing us evolved humans, we learn by seeing what is less evolved and that all humans do not advance at the same rate (i can think of a half dozen admirals and another few dozen scientists from STNG alone that fit this description ) ST can deal with issues of our time in this way, which is unusual for most scifi, which teaches it's "Lesson" through dystopia and disaster that's already occurred or imminent.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

http://bigthink.com/in-their-own-words/glimpsing-the-meta-intelligence-of-the-future

http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/03/24/future-foglets-of-the-hive-mind/

RAMA

 

[Robbiesan]

As a sometimes poet and writer (hard to believe from my grammar and spelling errors), hate is one of those oft abused words. It's way down a continuum. It almost has lost its definition in the same manner as "love" since both words are so casually utilized.

I don't hate anything about Star Trek. To me, that would mean I would stop watching the many series and films, as well as stop reading fiction, stories, and commenting on forums.

The perversion of the Prime Directive induces nausea at times. There are moments when I loathe the misapplication of Social Darwinism. While it vaguely makes sense, it allows Starfleet to exonerate their inaction. When any organization makes excuses for their corporate behavior, while then also allowing for "bending the rules" when it suits the individual or corpus, there's a problem. First an irritation, like a pebble in your boot, that you can't remove for lack of time, but over the course of a journey leads to it being an nuisance or worse a bruise.

Intentionally saying, "Well Starfleet has to do this because it's the right thing", ignores the history of humanitarian aid. It's abrogating any responsibility for having the resources, education, and ability to do something to assist another through benevolence. It's extremely passive, when such actions result in the harm of others.

Worse, it's arbitrary since warp drive is not the pinnacle of a society, but rather merely another mode of transportation that will lead to other modes. Would such a rule ever be applied to combustion engines? Demonstrate the necessity of doing so.

 

[RAMA]

As a sometimes poet and writer (hard to believe from my grammar and spelling errors), hate is one of those oft abused words. It's way down a continuum. It almost has lost its definition in the same manner as "love" since both words are so casually utilized.

I don't hate anything about Star Trek. To me, that would mean I would stop watching the many series and films, as well as stop reading fiction, stories, and commenting on forums.

The perversion of the Prime Directive induces nausea at times. There are moments when I loathe the misapplication of Social Darwinism. While it vaguely makes sense, it allows Starfleet to exonerate their inaction. When any organization makes excuses for their corporate behavior, while then also allowing for "bending the rules" when it suits the individual or corpus, there's a problem. First an irritation, like a pebble in your boot, that you can't remove for lack of time, but over the course of a journey leads to it being an nuisance or worse a bruise.

Intentionally saying, "Well Starfleet has to do this because it's the right thing", ignores the history of humanitarian aid. It's abrogating any responsibility for having the resources, education, and ability to do something to assist another through benevolence. It's extremely passive, when such actions result in the harm of others.

Worse, it's arbitrary since warp drive is not the pinnacle of a society, but rather merely another mode of transportation that will lead to other modes. Would such a rule ever be applied to combustion engines? Demonstrate the necessity of doing so.

If it raises issues to debate, that's a good thing. No need to hate, just examine what we do and don't agree with and move on. Everybody brings personal bias to the proceedings, it's the petty ones who hate.

RAMA

 

[RandyS]

Trip Tucker.

Not even Troi's mom irritated the hell out of me just by being on screen the way this guy does.

 

[Robbiesan]

If it raises issues to debate, that's a good thing. No need to hate, just examine what we do and don't agree with and move on. Everybody brings personal bias to the proceedings, it's the petty ones who hate.

RAMA

I agree. In the academic world, students and scholars alike debate from the diverse world of ideas that result from our education, upbringing, culture, and identification.

Debate can be very emphatic, at times seemingly pugilisitic, but it's a process in which the participants are willing to challenge the assertions of the Other. That doesn't mean the Other is wrong. It means that the challenger is willing to engage the Other, to write or speak with conviction and logic, provide evidence, etc.

To enter that process means accepting the Other's ideas, but not believing them. Not all ideas are equally valid, and need to be challenged. In fact though that challenge we better understand our own position. We might also alter our position, accept some ideas from the Other, or jointly collaborate and synthesize new ideas.

That's particularly a part of any graduate school process.

Or a communication can be filled with pleasantries and meaningless. All of which is rather boring and pointless.

 

[RAMA]

Trip Tucker.

Not even Troi's mom irritated the hell out of me just by being on screen the way this guy does.

Well I don't hate you , BUT if you had told me the Southern American character on ENT would have become my favorite, I would have been skeptical. Just shows you have to keep your mind open...because he did become my favorite character.

RAMA

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I thought this would be a fun counterpoint to milojthatch's thread.

I hate...

The idea of an "evolved" humanity.

The often trite moralizing.

The Prime Directive

While I theoretically hate all this stuff I've had way too much fun mocking it over the years to wish it all away

What can I say, I work to better myself.

 

[suarezguy]

I liked the idealized future aspect but some moral dilemmas were a little too easy and without enough internal or external conflict.
Annoying tropes: reliance on technobabble, excessive "reset button" use, the starship losing its shields very quickly or being "the only ship in range" or returning to Earth quickly.