Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Ep. #1 Title "Strange New Worlds"
Directed by Akiva Goldsman
Teleplay by : Akiva Goldsman
Story by : Akiva Goldsman & Alex Kurtzman & Jenny Lumet
Aired: May 5, 2022
Yup, the usual suspects. Exact same producers, directors, and writers who gave us Star Trek: Discovery (STD) and Star Trek: Picard's Identical Soogn Synth (Star Trek: PISS)
Fool me thrice? Nope! If SNW really is a "good" series that is "more like TOS" and "faithful to Roddenberry's optimistic vision", why the hell DIDN'T Alex Kurtzman do that for ALL the other Star Trek stuff they've made?
This was pretty much my favorite scene of Into Darkness. When I saw the magnitude of how friggin huge Vengeance was compared to Enterprise I went wide-eyed in a holy shit moment. Then it got better when we found out Vengeance could catch up to Enterprise in warp AND fire during it.
Sorry, I've seen the SNW trailer, and it has a lot of Pike "whispering behind his hand" to people, and pratfalls, and stuff that is NOT Star Trek. Kurtzman, you're a kunt!
I've heard rumors they're already writing off Spock as "asexual." I call bull on that one. Just because someone chooses to be celibate, or never has the chance to find "the one," does not mean they automatically fall under that ridiculous buzzword mental ailment the rainbow mafia came up with for the 0.0073% of the population that have no sex drive. (By the way, quickest way to piss them off is to tell them what the term "asexual" really means, particularly where microscopic organisms and insects are involved). I'm also not a fan of the stupid, school bus yellow uniforms they're wearing. They look like they're trying to attract Minions from "Despicable Me" into coming to the Enterprise.
Spock is literally shirtless about to have sex with his girlfriend at the beginning of episode 1. Not defending this show, but the rumor you heard is false.
I would have expected at least seeing any non-Vulcan crew members finishing getting dressed in their quarters while their bedroom partner is doing something similar. Having Spock doing that is, as you said, out of character for him.
It has long been assumed by fans that Vulcans are compelled to sex by the Pon Farr cycle, but capable of it at other times. Perhaps this is just to make them seem less alien and more relateable, which seems an odd notion, but it is long established as an idea.
Just because Vulcans can force themselves to have sex outside of the Pon Farr cycle, does not mean they do it on a whim or jump into bed with the nearest person willing to bone them. Remember, Vulcans don't think like humans do. They don't have the same kind of drive outside of the Pon Farr cycle as a horny human would.
I agree that the Vulcan scene was not the way I imagined Vulcan sexuality. The whole interplay was clumsy and out of character. It is, however, not an impossible interpretation, so I figure we can live with it.
I don't know what the problem with the uniforms might be. The original series had yellow, blue and red as standard colors. Since then the alternatives have been odd at best - muted earth tones in TMP, military cut maroon for everybody in the later movies and whatever dark outfits Discovery had. The bright colors say Star Trek to me.
They were actually wearing tan turtleneck tops in "The Cage," rather than bright, Minion yellow. I don't think the uniforms for Kirk's generation had been fully developed by Starfleet by then. The colors were much more muted in Pike's time.
You wanted the uniforms from "The Cage"? The velour uniforms that Star Trek got rid of as soon as possible... It's not a detail I think would remind many people of Star Trek. We are already stuck with several later uniform changes (earth-tones - variations on the maroon) suggesting, annoyingly enough, that Starfleet changes styles every few years. I'm glad they went with the a recognizable version of the classic look.
Do you also resent the use of weapons that are not the "classic" laser or a communicator that doesn't look like the prop from the pilot?
Um, Kirk and his crew wore velour too. It would make sense that Pike would be wearing a more primitive version of the later uniform styles that Kirk's crew wore later. And yes, the colors were more muted. I know you like bright, flashy, canon-breaking fashions, but that's not what real Star Trek fans want to see. They like consistency, and Kurtzman's Trek breaks canon every chance it gets, ruining that consistency, just to rub our noses in it, like he's saying, "Ha-hah! I ruined your franchise, and there's nothing you can do about it! And I'm still getting paid, bitches!"
And yes, it looks wrong to show people from Pike's time not using similar tech and weaponry from the pilot. Doesn't it look odd to you, how Pike and his crew have a more advanced-looking ship than what Kirk was flying just a few years later? It makes it look like Starfleet went backwards in their tech development than forward! Didn't anyone tell you that there are no spoilers in history? That's like saying the Romans developed indoor plumbing before the aqueduct!
I've always thought that the brightly colored uniforms of TOS were the only Star Trek uniforms that look authentically different from anything we are used to in military uniforms. I consider that a bonus not a defect. . And the notion of trying to adapt the muted palette of The Cage for the sake of "historical accuracy" rather than going with what is known to be the classic Trek look, seems like a mistake.
We are now well past trying to ape the low tech look of either classic Trek or The Cage. These shows cannot be seen as antecedents to the Star Trek series we saw in the '60s. And that is AOK. The technology of TOS is silly by todays standards. A book doesn't require a plastic block the size of a playing card to encode. No control panel on the bridge ought to look like a bunch of candy colored lightbulbs and computers of meagre capability do not need to be as big as a breadbox. If this series leads to anything it ought to be a reboot of TOS, with new actors, like in the otherwise useless Abrams films.
Furthermore, Star Trek gave up trying to maintain internal long ago. Remember the new look of the Klingons in TMP? According to Roddenberry, that's what they always looked like. But fannish desire for consistency led to insane invention to explain how the Klingons changed. To hell with that sort of consistency. Star Trek has no sensible history - First episode of Enterprise? Klingons appear, and not the look we saw on TOS. Romulan war fought with ships that were primarily dueling at sublight velocities with neither side even knowing what the other looked like? Apparently not. And behind it all there is the scrambling attempt to re-write things like The Eugenics War and WWIII, both in dating and every detail we could infer from the TOS episodes.
I submit that every new Star Trek has been a sort of reboot. And I am fine with that.
Which is strongly suppressed between those seven years. Vulcans are not the types to just jump happily into bed with the first person who propositions them. That's more of a behavior of desperate, horny humans. The writers F'ed up...again.
So what if it’s “strongly suppressed”? The libido is still there, nonetheless.
I’m not disagreeing that the writers screwed the pooch. I’m reinforcing the fact that, in a narrative that in real time in decades terms of being delivered to its audience, the current writers often know DICK about the source material; nor do they care. Hey! They’re young! They’re cool. They are “creative.”
Do you remember how hard it was for Kirk to find out what Spock's problem was in "Amok Time?" It took quite a while for him to finally get the information out of the guy, and it was only because they were in a private setting and Spock trusted Kirk more than anyone else.
Pon Farr was a humiliating experience to Vulcans because it caused them to lose control of their emotions and drive. They kept it secret from other races because it would ruin their image of the logical, emotionless creatures they had presented themselves to be. To be ruled by their hormones like [weak-willed] humans often are, is not a hallmark of Vulcans. They can control their bodies during most of their lives, save for the Pon Farr time. If there is a "libido," they are very good at keeping it in check, far better than humans or other species can. The only exception to this rule would be if a Vulcan was married to a human, and was willing to have sex with them if requested, but such a union is super-rare. In fact, you could probably count on one hand over a period of two centuries as to how many times a Vulcan paired themselves with a human mate, Sarek and Amanda included.
I sincerely doubt that Spock would have just thrown that all out the window years before working under Kirk's command.
You might find that this is looking a lot like a show that has learned a lesson from somewhere... Possibly from The Orville. Anyway, the first episode is very promising, unlike the opening of Discovery.
I don't trust those bastards running Secret Hideout Studios. They're doing this to lure us in before they drop the woke shit on us. You just watch. It'll get bad in a heartbeat.
I never can get the whole "woke" thing as a criticism of Star Trek. How is the racial and sexual percentages among the crew such an issue? I even heard people upset that there was a gay guy on Discovery. Fans had been bitching at Roddenberry forever to do that. We had to listen to pointless claims that there were same sex couples to be seen at tables in 10 Forward and this was somehow addressing the issue. It was so pathetic that I remember arguing with a guy at a convention in the eighties who believed that gayness was "cured" by the time of Star Trek.
Star Trek was always "woke" but never "woke" enough as far as I could see.
That's a strawman argument. Before 2016, the Star Trek franchise was clever and respectful in how they taught progressive fables in their stories. They showed respect for both types of people watching, both liberal and conservative. It was usually disguised in a good story that made you think, and want to talk it over with people who watched the same episode. They didn't make a big deal about people's ethnicities or sexual preferences; they just showed them as they were. They even showed that people could move beyond their bigotry if it was approached the right way.
Ever since Kurtzman took over, the writing has gotten very insulting and low-quality. It lectures people that the writers hate, and they use checking off "diversity boxes" as a weak crutch for "character development." The stories basically slam anyone who is further right than extreme-left to the ground, puts a boot on their neck, and outright says, "You're gonna like this show or else you're a monster that doesn't deserve any respect for your beliefs or views." Do you have any idea how many people have been driven away from the Star Trek franchise because of Kurtzman's bullshit? Millions! Because they don't want to be lectured to through shitty story-telling. They want to be entertained and able to leave the real world for a while, not to have real-world bullshit thrown into their faces the moment they turn on the tv. And contrary to what the internet says, a lot of people still do not like seeing bad black actors shoved front and center, gay "romance" that is put constantly in the spotlight with no positive heterosexual romances anywhere, excessive swearing, bad acting, and annoying Mary Sue's dominating their screens!
But if you like watching that trash, I won't stop you. I have better things to do, like laundry and scrubbing toilets.
I watched two seasons of Discovery and the problems I had with it were: Newly invented sister for Spock. Bizarrely new Klingon culture and look. Space battles that owed more to Star wars than anything Trek. Most of the secondary characters ignored - This was acceptable in TOS where Kirk, Spock and a bit of McCoy was the standard, but in serialized storytelling it was foolish. In Discovery season two they did a great episode where one of the bridge crew died a significant and supposedly emotionally fraught death...and that episode was the first background on her we had! That was the essence of their flawed storytelling and calling it a Mary Sue thing misses the point. By this standard Kirk was the ultimate Mary Sue.
Star Fleet is depicted as allowing grotesque exploitation of aliens to make the new (and soon to be abandoned and ignored) "Spore Drive". Bloody awful ugly Section 31 is front an center... And another iteration of the overused mirror universe... The second season was basically one simple story, pointing up the inherent weakness of their use of serialized storytelling to avoid the necessity of having to deal with more than one or two ideas in a whole season.
Those are the basic problems I have with Discovery. You appear to find many of the things I like about the show offensive.
Had to look up the name... Shes' the naive mildly cute one... Not that interesting, but at least her character is not a cypher.
The character who died the allegedly emotional death was Airiam, a cyborg woman who was just there for all the previous episodes and was given considerable background ONLY in the episode when they killed her off. That annoyed me. We see all these potentially interesting characters on the bridge and aside from a word of technical dialog (equivalent to "Opening hailing frequencies.") and the occasional non verbal reaction of shock or surprise or concern... We learn nothing of them. Mind, I decided not to watch any more after two seasons, so if the show has reformed radically, I suppose I oughta watch more...
I'm going to give it a chance...It does have the camradarie and sense of affection among the crew missing from Discovery........or the few episodes I choked down.
It's a little top heavy with the female representation but I'll wait and see if it works itself out. I'm female myself but tired of the current trend of straight guys ( straight white guys in particular) getting delegated to villian or idiot..I happen to like straight guys and it won't feel natural if they get short changed in too many key positions.
The original was organically diverse and felt natural for the times.