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  • I find many of these shows and movies that are accused of being woke is because they create protagonists without flaws, out of fear of making non traditional characters look bad I guess? But protagonists without flaws are boring.

    I'm trying to think what Burnham's fatal flaw is, or her deadly sin. It's mostly stuff that has happened to her and she has to overcome but that's not the same thing. Interesting protagonist have flaws like hubris, vice, hypocrisy, greed, something that makes them more real. You look at characters like Rey from star wars and again, flawless except for her past, which again is something that happened to her not something she is.

    That's why people didn't like when Han Solo didn't shoot first. Yes Han Solo is overall a good guy, but he's also ruthless and a gangster when we meet him. If he's already a flawless good guy at the start,that just sucks. Anakin as well, good but arrogant and controlling

    • I think i agree with the general premise that flawed characters are more interesting, and i also feel (with no data to back up that feeling, so bear with me) that these 'woke' characters sometimes fall into a pitfall where they're just so boringly written that it does feel like the writers are either afraid of being perceived as 'punching down' or (edit: finishing this thought) want to misguidedly write a perfect character for the sake of superficial representation of some group.

      That said, for this show in particular (i have watched TNG/DS9/Voyager but not Discovery), is it a valid criticism for this captain that couldn't be applied to the older series? Picard's flaws are heavily understated - sure, he was a violent little shit off screen when he was younger, and he can be a little more of a hardass than called for occasionally, but I always felt he was pretty consistently portrayed as the voice of reason, and his flaws were only relevant in a couple episodes. I think I would say that's also true of Sisko and Janeway, though Sisko has a lot more nuance to his pragmatism that is really interesting as DS9 continues.

    • No issue with what you're saying but I will say that Burnham does have some fatal flaws that are throughout the show and not past things she's overcoming.

      1. As you mentioned, hubris. Throughout the entirety of the series she thought she knew what was best or had to shoulder every single responsibility single handedly. Spock openly mocked her for it in front of other crewmen during Season 2 and other crew constantly kept saying that she does it or doesn't need to.
      2. She's hypocritical as hell but that seems to be a thread through most Starfleet officers. Hypocrisy when it serves you. Look at the Prime Directive for every ounce of proof you'd ever need for any other Captain and hypocrisy but she does it pretty regularly too. Again something Spock pointed out in Season 2.
      3. She's hot-headedly emotional because she was a human raised as a Vulcan. She suppressed the everlovingfuck out of her emotions and by the time she was embracing her human side and starting to cope with those emotions she was already well into adulthood. A significant crux of the show is that Burnham has trouble regulating emotion because its new to her. People point this out as a complaint saying she "cries too much" but her character is literally someone who feels things more overwhelmingly because she was never raised to cope. Every season is her overcoming that little by little with Season 4 being all of that coming to a head. Her listening to Rillak and trying to do everything she could that she felt was right while also not doing the stupid shit like abandoning Starfleet to go save Book without asking for permission that would have been granted or freaking out over her biological mother and letting those emotions cloud so much of Season 2.

    • I love Disco but it’s not exactly Trek.

      Well, it sort of is due to it being a Star Trek show. That sentence is extremely gatekeepy. It assumes that Star Trek is definable in what type of show it creates (it isn't), is uniform in its types of shows (it isn't) and that anything different than status quo is not applicable. It's utterly nonsense and the same nonsense that was parroted about TNG, and DS9 and Voyager and Enterprise and every other show that wasn't TOS. Remember everyone whining about the Kelvin timeline and "ItS nOt ReAl StAr TrEk!" Sure seems like most of them are gone now and the movies are getting loved.

      Star Trek goes out of its way to scream about diversity, to allow differences and celebrate those, and that not every path has to be the same. I don't understand the insistence that the shows themselves cannot be diverse either.

      • The themes of celebrating diversity are absolutely the same. The difference I see is mainly the cinematography, story structure, and pacing. SNW and Lower Decks are a lot closer to what Trek has been in those aspects than Discovery was.

        Again: Not saying Disco is bad at all. (Except for having a reaction shot of every one of the dozens of people on the bridge any time anything interesting happens. Those irk me.)

        EDIT: After further consideration, I've decided that Disco is Trek, but it's a series of Trek movies and not a series of TV episodes. But the last season is still the same premise as Andromeda.

    • Disclaimer: Only Trek I had watched beforehand was Lower Decks (loved it) and SNW (loved it) in that order. With that said, here are my opinions nobody asked for:

      • S1 had its flaws but I was there for dark, depressing, and moody.
      • SNW cast carried the fuck out of S2 and the plot was good too imo.
      • First half of S3 was promising...but they fucked it up so utterly and completely in the second half that it was hard to take the rest of the show seriously afterwards.

      I had to forward through starting from the second half of Season 4 just to get through it. It got so ridiculously boring. I was hoping it'd get better and I could watch normally again but it just didn't.

      Watching TNG now and I'm loving it. Can be a bit slow sometimes but still enjoyable.

      Edit: Does boost not do spoiler tags?

  • Star Trek: Oops All Politics (and it always fucking has been)

    • It really is amazing to me that anyone can be familiar with Star Trek and at any point claim it's gotten too political. Like what show were you watching? Are you just some weirdo who went to Memory Alpha and memorized a bunch of Star Trek trivia but never watched an episode?

      There were probably fewer non-political episodes than political ones. TOS had political episode after political episode, intentionally challenging TV executives so that they could talk about issues of the day. TNG continued this and added many social issues as well. DS9 was basically all politics for its last four seasons. Voyager was more in the TNG mold, and then Enterprise had an entire season that was an (IMO bad) allegory about 9/11 and the War on Terror.

  • I watched them all, and I loved them all too. I had opinions and favorites, but now that I'm done with everything Trek I just wish I could watch it all for the first time again.

194 comments