My Dear Gen X,
My joints hurt just as bad as yours do and we need to talk about “Strange New Worlds”…
Guys, it’s really good.
I know you. Your parents are old and sick and you’re wondering how they’ll manage. I know your kids have gotta finish strong in high school this year. I know your spouse is not perfect.
Watch this show and let it carry you back to the reasons you loved Star Trek when you were a kid. I know you, and I know this is what you need right now.
Maybe you are…
1.) One of those that saw Mr. Spock on our parents’ black and white TV in the 60s or 70s and thought that he had a perfectly reasonable approach to life. At least to an 8-year-old.
2.) That girl back in grade 10 who had a really unhealthy relationship with Deanna Troi because of some previous life trauma.
3.) Like my father, you liked the skimpy outfits (…no, protect, protect… you know the one) but also, AHEM… more importantly he likened Spock’s experiences to his own as an immigrant.
3.) One of the uber nerds back in grade 7 that lit up the local BBS or early Usenet with fierce discussions of Kirk’s superiority over Picard.
4.) Re-watching old episodes of TNG (God bless you BBC America) and it makes you feel like you’re visiting with old friends.
5.) A lover of competence porn. Don’t you wish your team at work had the competence and work ethic of Star Fleet? I love watching Miles having coffee (double strong, double sweet) with his sleeves rolled up getting ready to put in some hard hours.
6.) Your dad watched TOS in his dorm room in college. You watched DS9 in your first apartment when you moved out.
Listen guys, make the time for the show. I know you’ve gotta go walk the dog because the kids never do. But seriously remember the reasons you got into Star Trek when you were young.
There no such thing as time travel. But this show will remind you about the things you loved about Star Trek.
And if you’re one of those fans that cares about canon and timelines and are rightly concerned about the show runner’s respect for the source material… Put it like this, the show scores enough points to allow loose standards when it comes to canon.
Discovery doesn’t feel right. Lower Decks is awesome but scratches a different itch. I never watched Prodigy (sorry). This show is a gift to us in our old age.
This is modern Star Trek at it finest.
But that’s just the thing. I too like utopia, but I want a believable utopia, not a Starbucks upper class version of what they think is “yass relatable”. I thought DS9 was actually a wonderfully utopian show because it showed that despite incredible hardship, people can still overtake their circumstances and keep a level head, good relationships and a just society. It was authentic to what I as a working class person experience, to what my life is; just an idealized version of it where others and society as a whole share my ideals and ethical standpoints. New Trek on the other hand tries so hard to appeal to progressive politics but fails at realizing the actual authentic circumstances of the working class and instead makes it into some kind of “Eurovision” or “Oscars”-ish upper class atmosphere thing. The recent musical episode was even more insulting in its “what rich people think is fun”-ness.
Now that you mentioned it, I hate that they stopped talking about “duty” and started talking about “work” or a “job”. It’s not supposed to be labour! That’s the entire point of a utopia! Why does everyone treat their Starfleet career like an employment contract with annoying bosses and all? The Lieutenant next to me is my comrade, not my “coworker”. Do they think it becomes relatable because they - in this utopia - still deal with the socialized equivalent of wage labour?
Everything in SNW/DSC/PIC looks, feels and sounds like a Marvel movie with unfunny quips and one-liners, or an advertisement at worst. They speak like the Microsoft boss does when he talks about Xbox - “millions of players all over the world come together to celebrate these incredible, amazing worlds that our people have created for you to express yourselves in” - it’s just marketing talk. It feels incredibly, incredibly sterile and corporate, but when DSC/SNW/PIC characters talk about Starfleet or the Federation, they sound exactly like that. The characters look like Hollywood actors, especially Pike; not like people I know in real life. Miles O’Brien could have been in my local pub; Pike looks and acts like someone who lives in a Californian villa and socializes with Jeffrey Epstein.
Star Trek has turned from union shop working class entertainment to rich white Americans’ entertainment. I do not like that one bit. And it’s not like I hate everything new. I thought Lower Decks was really enjoyable outside of a few stinkers, and I keep reading the novels.
We might have to agree to disagree on the overall look of the thing, but I want to comment on the job part.
It’s always been a bit of a disconnect that you supposedly had this post-scarcity, socialistic, utopia where we have overcome our baser instincts and work cooperatively. But for some reason the dominant organization has military ranks and some people agree to sign-up to take orders and get thrown in jail if they don’t. That never quite squared. But in the real world it’s a simple matter of writing what you know and Gene was ex-Navy so that’s what Starfleet was modeled on. Doesn’t really make sense. It’s also why admirals are so often bad. He had a beef with them.
But yeah I agree I like it better when they talk about their places in Starfleet being a matter of choosing to be a part of it and it being bound by honor and duty. I don’t know why they’re doing that, if it’s supposed to be earlier in the development of the Federation, or if they’re just copying the Orville jokes. I do really like is Una. A lot of that is I always felt robbed by the fact that the network made Gene cut out the idea of a woman first officer after the first pilot and I feel like we’re finally getting to see what could have been with Majel in that role.
When I wrote the above I had not seen the musical yet. It was well-produced and fun, but I think it really undercut the show and I didn’t like it. It made the characters seem silly. Contrast with the Lower Decks crossover which I thought I was going to hate and I thought actually worked fine if you could ignore the cartoon thing. I didn’t mind that it was played for outright comedy because it still took the characters seriously. Much like the DS9 Tribbles episode.
I do think DS9 was great by the way, with a few exceptions, mostly the mirror universe stuff. And Miles calmly encouraging the Ferengi to go on strike because of course that’s what you do, was maybe one of the most subversive things Trek has gotten away with on TV. American media loves to hate on unions so that was a bolder than you might realize and I loved it.