Don’t get me wrong; I like the show. I’ve seen every episode of TOS – multiple times (as well as every episode of TNG, DS9, Voyager, and probably half the episodes of Enterprise).
But I don’t understand why everyone – and I do mean everyone – insists on describing it as an “optimistic” view of the future.
Where’s the optimism? There are always bad guys up to no good, good people in harm’s way, disasters that can’t be averted.
Is the source of optimism the fact that Uhura is black, Chekov in Russian, Sulu is Asian, and Spock is Vulcan and they are all part of the same team?
The optimism is in the premise that the people of Earth have peacefully united to form a global free, fair, just, equal, and democratic system and don’t suffer from hardship or deprivation, and have been able to build the technology to explore the galaxy and meet extraterrestrial societies with primarily peaceful intentions. They have solved the problems of the 1960s—war, racism, etc. That’s the premise, anyway. The show itself actually reveals the limitations of the people creating it, like blatant sexism.
The series is from the 1960s. If humanity isn’t extinct in the 22nd century, or ruled by a dictatorship, or living among the ruins of our cities, it’s optimistic by 1960s standards.
The alternatives at the time were the myriad dystopias anthologized on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, a planet ruled by apes or giants, or stuck on a small flying saucer with Jonathan Harris. It was a pretty low bar.
TNG was even more optimistic. There was no problem that couldn’t be solved without resorting to killing large numbers of people. Some people hated that, they said Picard talked too much, that he should have fried the borg. I don’t, I find the show optimistic. Not like that current “everyone is a jerk” thing they’re calling Star trek these days.
I’ve also gathered (based on some reviews of Picard) that Star Fleet and the Federation are now xenophobic, and apparently the fact that the Romulans and the Federation fought a war against the Dominion together doesn’t matter anymore?
Partly that. While the show ran people IRL were getting killed and cities were burning over the issue (which they then turned into a particularly hamfisted and preachy “message” episode). Plus, what they said:
And even though they canonically recognize the Earth HAD had at least one more World War plus a bunch of other unpleasantries, humans came through it and overcame.
As was mentioned before, TOS was a Show of the mid-60s; TNG of the mid-80s (lots of talk-don’t-fight and a larger dash of anticapitalism = Gene was a very annoyed anti-Reaganite); *Picard *and ST/D are shows of 2020. In 1966, in the face of all the turmoil around the world, the creators of this show were believers in the preching that “the arc of the moral universe is long but bends in the direction of justice”, as MLK put it, and were making this one of the points in the writing both as aspiration and as reassurance that things *would *turn out right.
Still, in TOS they kept it broad and open-ended as to what it meant on a day-to-day. I in the TOS “Writer’s Bible” one of the rules (dropped in TNG and later) was to not set episodes in the future Earth nor describe the civil government or economic system of Earth itself in any sort of detail. Heck, I don’t think you ever saw in TOS an actual envoy of the authorities of *Earth *itself rather than of the Federation; it was always Federation ambassadors and High Commissioners right and left.
Post-Roddenberry, though, the showrunners/filmmakers in later titles renounced utopianism, saying “Really? We, the humans, created this wonderworld of perfection and everything being nice? While remaining relatably human? We think not. We may have technology indistinguishable from magic but there will always be bastards bastarding it up. Let’s have some gritty dark-side-of-the-Federation storylines.”
And hey, one could say that if in Picard’s future humanity are not all slave-drones controlled by Google, then that’s still optimistic.
Sounds like they are writing for the world we live in. TOS and TNG for the most part wrote for the world we wanted to live in.
My personal theory is making dystopian thinly-disguised fictional TV shows in a time of impending dystopia is not a good thing. 24 seemed more like a training film for America becoming a police state than it did a simple adventure show. “You’re with me, no matter how much of the Constitution I shred, or MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE!”
The optimism thing is more of a TNG thing. When Roddenberry forgot what makes good drama and wanted to promote how ’ progressive we’ve all become’
The conceit of PICARD is that all that was just window-dressing for a society that had it good until they got a bloody nose but in reality haven’t progressed much. It was always there Jean-Luc. Not only that but YOU promoted it. Take the ep where ‘you found frozen cavemen with terminal diseases’. Data had to talk you out of LEAVING them in their ship to drift forever. Meanwhile you were spouting tripe like “Ahhh…they come from a time where man hadn’t conquered his fear of death.” YEAH. I saw THAT a lot in TNG.
And there are several examples in DS9 of humans reverting to type as soon as their ‘utopia’ is threatened.
It’s just an extension of what we saw in ST VI.
In 2020 this is no big deal - it not happening would be a big deal. In 1966, when I started watching it, not having an all-white male crew was a shocking departure from TV norms.
Yeah he was better at sexism than racism - but remember Number 1 in the first pilot was Majel, which got shot down by the network.
While Uhura was important, the most interesting slap at racism was that Kirk’s superior - and admiral - in “Court Martial” was black, which in the show was unremarkable. Probably made some Alabama redneck KKKers shit in their pants.
Hmmm, well, I suppose I’d be interested to see how they pull it off. Thinking back on TNG, one of my beefs with the series was how “effortless” it all seemed to be, as if we, the viewer in our late 20th century homes, should be ashamed of ourselves for not having already dispensed with money and wage-work.
I guess, in a sense, it actually would be nice to see all that deconstructed. But does it get deconstructed, or do we just get a society that is superficially similar to ours for the purposes of critique, but which really has no or insufficient reason to behave the way it does? Because one of the reasons’s occasional poo-pooing of monetary standards and wage-work failed was that we don’t have the ability to materialize whatever we want out of thin air (or photons or deuterium or whatever they use to make the replicators do their thing).
What I hope to see, if they’re going to tackle xenophobia and such, is a plausible, rather than simply contrived, explanation for how they got that way, or how it turns out they always were that way and Picard and the viewer both just never noticed. Because, I mean, DS9 got dark, but it was dark in reaction to a genuine in-universe threat, not just because the writers needed it to be dark for the show to happen.
Bottom line, I suppose I can hold off on lamenting the assassination of Picard and the death of Star Trek until I’ve seen it. For now. But then again, I don’t have (or intend to get) CBS All Access, so… shrug
But she wasn’t Kirk’s slave (unlike Drusilla from Bread and Circuses, who was assigned to Kirk’s service by her actual master). She was a fellow thrall, like Kirk. She was attracted to him of her own free will, not because she was ordered to (and in fact she was punished by her master for it). So I don’t think that one was morally reprehensible on Kirk’s part.
Much more reprehensible was Kirk’s frequently hitting on female members of his own crew.
I recently watched “Forbidden Planet.” The sexism in that movie was spilling out of the screen onto the floor.
Actually, it’s a fairly realistic depiction. People do look back to the past and wonder why they couldn’t figure out things that seem to come naturally to people in the present.
