I always found the Utopianism of Old Trek overstated. More often than not, it was the Trek crew stumbling on some alien race or society that was experimenting with another Sci-Fi author’s idea of Utopianism. And then the Trek crew became the vehicle of Rodenberry’s critique of the utopian philosophy. […] the Trek Society was still very militant and authoritarian

This is what happens when we fail our students. Inattentiveness combines with poor narrative comprehension and people only take away surface-level impressions to (of the few parts to which they paid attention, the still fewer) parts they retain.

Real comments like that always make me think of Douglass Adams’ “rules” on growing old

I would have thought my comment made you think of every digit of pi, because that’s also something you didn’t read all of before replying to me. Seriously, if conservatism were applicable, why would my thesis be trashing Voyager and Enterprise, and pretty explicitly pointing out that Enterprise is overall even worse than Discovery? Shows that came out when I was little, I might add, and about 20 years before I increased my lifetime watching history of Star Trek beyond a single digit number of episodes across all shows.

Plus, I never said older Star Trek shows didn’t have bad writing, but you chose a bad example. Let That be Your Last Battlefield isn’t hamfisted, it’s just a clear narrative about racism, obsession, and hatred that aired before there was any grass growing on Dr. King’s grave, but it admittedly doesn’t resonate with people who are so jaded they consider an objective and unambiguous moral position intrinsically corny and trite. I guess To Kill a Mockingbird is just a hamfisted after-school special too, huh? Do you know what Let That be Your Last Battlefield doesn’t have, though? I do: it doesn’t have an undercurrent of insincerity, nor does it have characters whose narrative function is contradicted by everything they say and do. In that way, DS9’s Meridian is not far from being a Discovery episode.

Star Trek has, at various times, televised episodes that were boring, nonsensical, transparently insincere, objectifying, hamfisted, acted poorly, or rife with grating and unnatural dialog. It wasn’t till Voyager that these became consistent (especially boring and nonsensical, which are rarely absent). Enterprise and Discovery very consistently share most or all of these qualities in abundance, though I will damn Discovery with the faint praise that it doesn’t really have characters whom elderly perverts shoehorned in to add sex appeal, like T’Pol or Seven of Nine (or arguably Troi, though she also got legitimate character moments whenever Gene Roddenberry and/or Rick Berman were distracted by sexually harrassing someone else).

Discovery isn’t the worst Star Trek, that honor goes to absolute trash that is Picard, but it’s still a bad Star Trek. And again, let me be clear because you probably skipped to this paragraph, that’s not because it’s “woke”. It’s not bad because it has LGBT characters (some of whom aren’t killed off immediately), it’s bad because they don’t have anything recognizable as personalities and still have a closet to come out of. It’s not bad because a the captain is a black woman, it’s bad because they can’t decide whether she’s a Starfleet captain, Jesus Christ, or the Rambo fantasy from UHF. Throwing the public a bone with representation for marginalized minorities is not the act of kindness it should be when what they’re being represented as is incompetent and unprofessional dolts who speak in monologues and act like they have lead poisoning. For wokeness done correctly, see Lower Decks, a show I intensely dislike but recognize is overall good. Discovery isn’t aspirational, it doesn’t have challenging ideas, it doesn’t incite emotion, it doesn’t make you think, and it doesn’t have any heart, at all. Discovery is really not a woke show in any substantial way. It’s still better than Enterprise, Picard, and TAS because the bar is so low it’s in the mantle.

I think the better question is “when did Star Trek start preferring awkward, hamfisted, and cynically inauthentic writing that makes you feel like you’re watching community theater?”

The answer is a toss-up between partway through Voyager and Enterprise, but ENT was definitely the point at which Star Trek was no longer being used to speculate about the possibilities of exploration and discovery in an optimistic future, and instead became an embarrassing soapbox on the part of writers and producers who haven’t had an idea challenged since they were in preschool. The entire 9/11 + War on Terror allegory is very possibly the most cringeworthy Star Trek content ever televised. That’s really saying something considering we also have Discovery, an exercise in why you can’t hire a bunch of hacks who all want to be Joss Whedon, nor give them free rein to produce a version of Star Trek in which every character is a creepy asshole who never shuts up and uses the kind of corny faux slang that only exists in TV commercials.

As with many things, I blame Rick Berman.

Weird, that’s not the title of any of the episodes, and they never made any TNG movies, so I can only assume you’re referring to a novel.

If it has the Volcano and the Cool Ranch Dorito stuff then we’re all set. I’m not going back even if they fix it.

Riker is ultimately one of the best possible examples of a character who doesn’t make sense from a Watsonian point of view because he was used for Doylist purposes. Realistically, Riker should have either left for his own command or taken command of the Enterprise if they’d ended up going with killing Picard in the Borg arc. Instead, he stays on the show in his same job because he’s a well-acted, charismatic fan-favorite who’s also a military administrator with no technical specialty: in other words, he’s the ideal audience-insert character to ask people like Geordi or Beverly to explain a complicated concept so they can have expository dialog for our benefit. For those who know Stargate SG-1, he’s strikingly similar to Jack O’Neill, whose most common script function is to say “uh, can you try that again in English?” in conversations about archaeology or theoretical physics.

That said, they did do a decent job working with that in-universe. There’s actually something compelling with having Riker’s story arc play with the idea that sometimes a person can grow to regret their own ambition, discovering instead that they can actually grow more by putting down roots for a while than they would have by doing the most that they could. But it doesn’t really work in the long run, and there’s a reason he was always depicted as a Captain in every glimpse of the future.

https://smoothest.ytmnd.com/

Emotion and empathy are core and required components of sapience in addition to intelligence, in the same way that eggs and sugar are necessary components of cake; no amount of sophistication will render a cake from just flour. An entity that doesn’t have emotion and empathy is too primitive and limited to be sapient regardless of its computational power because it lacks fundamental building blocks of awareness.

Before you try to get out in front of me with this: I’m fully aware that there are human beings with no empathy or emotion. I will not elaborate and I am taking no questions.

Ironically, you’re proving my point in asking this question.

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word

You got lost in the sauce because your critical thinking skills are already eroding. The LLM brainlet effect is real, the neurodegeneration has already set in.

None of the above, I just don’t suffer fools.

It’s not realistic to expect no AI assistance in coding in 2026.

Pathetic. You have a serious skill issue, that much is true, but you need to keep it to yourself instead of sharting it out into society. Code better or go get a job you’re more qualified for, like operating a tollbooth.

It does feel like Star Trek used to be woke, but was a story from the mouths of people who had something to say, to now it’s woke, but in a very icky corporate-sterilized kinda way.

Exactly it, modern Trek’s wokeness is diluted and committeed to death, it’s the writing equivalent of performative rainbow capitalism from corporations that now toady to the Trump administration.

Oh you must be right then, not the people who were alive at the time and made and absolute shit ton of media about the exact thing you’re contesting.

A while back I made a spoof account called Universal Crunk. It used his same avatar but photoshopped to be flashing cash in front of the Raytheon HQ, wearing Ray-Bans and a Yankees hat, and smoking crack; the profile bio was the standard one he uses but his the language was changed to be praise of crypto, defense contractors, and hedge funds. I made one comment and within about 2 minutes it was nuked.

Considering Wesley was Gene Roddenberry’s self-insert character, I think the idea was to establish that as brilliant as Picard is, there’s still someone who can get his goat by virtue of just being that special.

In early development, Dr Crusher originally had a daughter named Leslie Crusher. The point of that character wasn’t very well-defined before she was turned into a brilliant male wunderkind named Wesley by a man whose full name was Eugene Wesley Roddenberry. In other words, the point of the character was that an aging egomaniac wanted a self-insert character whose traits are that he’s special, he’s a genius, and that he’s frequently misunderstood and let down by all the dolts who surround him.

Yes, such as spyware

That’s IRC dawg

DS9 was also an outlet for Rick Berman’s nasty misanthropy, he despises the world of Star Trek and loathes the idea of the Federation.