Should Star Trek Challenge Us, or Comfort Us? | Trek, Actually Comment Responses

34 thoughts on “Should Star Trek Challenge Us, or Comfort Us? | Trek, Actually Comment Responses”

• About STAR TREK IV and home… Spock also voyaged home — to his friends, and to his genuine self.

• Plug it in, Joe.

• My biggest problem with Picard & Guinan's friendship is it's more "tell" than "show". They tell us that there's a deep connection between the two, that they've known each other a long time and know each other well, and yet…it doesn't feel that way most of the time and any time we've seen any delving into the actual history they have, it's been underwhelming.

• "Robin and Marian" is the best Robin Hood movie.

• Art is open for everyone’s interpretation.

  If you think that Kirk learns the lesson of the Kobayashi Maru towards the end of ST2 because Spock dies fine.

  In my eyes, Kirk’s arrogant statement that he doesn’t believe in a no win scenario is proven valid because Spock comes up with a solution to save everyone but himself.

  Then when combined with the sequence of events that brings back Spock, even the nobility of a franchise to write off a character is lost alongside the thought provoking nature of a no win scenario in fiction

• It's interesting. The lesson Star Fleet intends to teach with the Kobayashi Maru exercise is: There are no-win scenarios and you have to be prepared for that eventuality. However, a different philosophy seems to underpin Star Trek itself: Reject zero-sum analysis that suggests for someone to win, someone else has to lose. There's a basic rejection of fatalism and faith in innovation that seems more in line with Kirk's solution.

• I would have enjoyed Disco season 1 much more if they had used TNG Klingon makeup, or at least something closer to it. Im not against changes as a rule, but the difference was much more jarring than the changes between TOS and TNG, so drastic that every time they were shown on screen it kicked me right out of the story. Sometimes its better to maintain consistency in established canon rather than change just for the sake of change.

• This might be the bridge too far Steve. Men in Tights is at least middle of the pack for Mel Brooks films. It’s not the best, but it’s certainly better than Dracula, Dead and Loving it. For that matter, I think it’s better than High Anxiety. Is it his most clever film? No. But is it more charming than its subject material? Absolutely. Cary Elwes > Kevin Costner.

• Ten years ago, I very vaguely, distantly heard of Steve Shives as a guy who just blocked everyone online, no questions asked.
  No fun allowed.

  A few (many) changes in my mental diet later, imagine my surprise to find Steve Shives just sitting here, relaxing as he talked about a subject of mutual passion: Star Trek.
  I don't know, I think he'd be a cool uncle.

• On Guinan and the nexus: I agree narratively, but I also kind of disagree, because I see the nexus as an analog for addiction. So I think she would totally issue this warning to Picard, in the way that we issue this warning to most children, not because we expect them to become opioid addicts, or get into cars with strangers, but because the danger is so great, that it's well worth mentioning. Especially when it comes from someone so wise and ancient and solid as Guinan. In a way she's a recovering addict. So she goes dark in a way that feels rare for her, and adds so much gravity to the situation.

  Of course that's just my head cannon on the whole thing. It's not necessarily true for the writers that they were thinking that way. It could just be crappy writing, and I wouldn't put it past them to do so.

• The Doctor and Seven aren't a good fit for BFF. They might have been but the writers got Berman era male gaze all over it and it ends up really creepy. There's a lot of inappropriate power dynamics stuff in that era of Trek. BFFs should be equal or near equal powerwise

• We want you to admit that its a funny show and this whole time youve just been a curmudgeon about it

• Star Trek (TOS) was a little bit harder SF than the NG onward. But true, it's not really intended to be hard SF but "a wagon train to the stars." Adventure, as it were. But that doesn't mean you can't be consistent with the rules of the story (and even TOS wasn't really but obviously it's gotten a lot less consistent over the years).

• On the "DISCO doesn't feel like Trek" conversation: I know it gets made fun of, but the spore drive is so cool to me, because it represents the spirit of Trek in this really novel way. If you read Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets (the actual scientist for whom the character is named) you see how incredible and fascinating mycelium networks are. They're like the circulatory systems of forests, and are incredibly intelligent and responsive. It's fkn wild. So the way DISCO is was trying to shed a light and create this very SciFi (albeit fanciful) adaptation into the technology of a ship called Discovery, they were really giving a fresh voice to the spirit of the franchise that took in new and interesting science, organic science meeting with quantum theory.

  I do agree the tone was a bit jarring at first, but I really hope the fandom didn't scare writers and producers away from exploring new ideas.

• 10:30 Men in tights was just a fun movie to listen to when you're doing stuff around the house, it's just a fun parody. Captain Picard as King Richard, chefs kiss. Now Prince of Thieves, a good movie with a great cast. I mean after Die Hard who else would you want for the Sheriff of Nottingham? The movie score sells the whole vibe too.

• The answer can be "Yes".

• perhaps mentor/student is a category of relationship, that warrants its own vid.

• Kirk sees Worf and is like, "That guy looks just like my lawyer!"

• DS9 did both comfort and challenge it's audience. For every "In the Pale Moonlight" there was a "Take me Out to the Holosuite". I felt that DIS endorsed a cynical, realpolitik view of the world. Section 31 is consistently treated as a sexy, taboo, black ops agency in the Kurtzman Era. When I watch DS9, I get the sense that the writers hate Section 31.

• Do we see non Star Fleet people in Trek often? As something to reinforce that the Star Fleet is the crème of the crop.

• The time travel book from Donnie Darko IS real, kinda. A 15ish page version of it was featured on a website full of secrets that launched with the movie. You can still dig it up, it contains a LOT in just a few pages.

• One of the things I love about Trek is the number of close friendships the characters have, regardless of the gender.

• I thought it was all about the whale's true voyage home. Saving Wales. Star Trek IV is definitely up there on the list of best trek adventures. The musical score for the voyage home is quite epic mixed with light-hearted interludes that really highlights the more comedic tones of the film. I've had it on vinyl since I was a kid, I've seen every trek film in the theater minus the first one, not borne yet. Wrath of Kahn was the first movie I saw in the theater with my dad.

• Miguel Alcubierre didn't just happen to come across a concept that resembles Star Trek's warp drive and thus call it that because it resembled warp drive, he was a Star Trek fan and wanted to see how plausible it would be to create a Star Trek style warp drive in reality. His paper was published 1994, or around when TNG ended which is after subspace and warp bubbles were already established in canon. I don't think Star Trek written after Alcubierre's paper really changed how they presented warp drive to be more like what was described in the paper. It was already as close to Star Trek warp drive as possible within the confines of General Relativity and Star Trek writers can't even get even the most basic science right most of the time let alone something as complex and difficult as General Relativity.

  It's important to understand just what Alcubierre's concept is though. Although usually called the "Alcubierre Drive", it's more accurate to call it the "Alcubierre Solution". In General Relativity, mass and energy warp spacetime. What Alcubierre did was start with the endpoint he (and everyone who wants to travel the stars) wanted – a spacetime metric in which FTL occurs – and worked backwards to see what configuration of mass and energy would create that metric. But just because there's a mathematical solution doesn't mean that the solution has any physical meaning. You can get antigravity by putting a negative mass into either General Relativity or Universal Gravitation, and you can get perpetual motion by giving an object a negative coefficient of friction.

  You're being pretty elitist in your declaration that X or Y isn't funny. Humor is particularly subjective and to declare that something is terrible and not funny because you don't find it funny says more about you than about the work if it's not backed up by more than opinion. I personally don't find Ghostbusters particularly funny, which is definitely not the majority opinion given its legacy.

  Like with all fandoms and religions, there's more than one sect among the devotees of Star Trek. Some want comfort and some want a challenge but looking at the general responses and popularity of the various series, the comfort faction is definitely the larger one. TNG was and remains atop the throne in terms of legacy and size of fandom, and it's definitely the comfort series. Even when things got dark, there would always be a nice, clean, simple solution and Picard would always be there to deliver justice, usuall with a powerful speech. Then there's DS9, the series which overtly challenges TNG orthodoxy. It was controversial when it was airing and although now grandfathered in as a "classic", those who prefer it are a distinct sect.

  So by and large, people want comfort, they need to be challenged. The strategy of the demagogue is to offer a nice, clean, simple, comforting solution to complex problems, and to do so with a strongman who can deliver powerful speeches. Worship of Star Trek captains comes dangerously close to being a cult of personality; the writers of DS9 made Sisko a demigod in the end because that's basically how a lot of fans were already treating Kirk and Picard. DS9 is sometimes criticized for turning Dukat from a well-written, complex villain to a mustache-twirling one, but the reason for that is because the writers encountered enough fans who fully bought into Dukat's rhetoric that it horrified them and wanted to make it clear that he was a really nasty guy behind the charisma.

• i am comfortable with being challenged. Thanks Steve. Peace and long life.

• Your awesome

• Oh hey, I picked-up on the fact that Kirk was doing it as a mission of mourning and mercy in my very first viewing! (Preen, preen.) I think watching with subtitles helps get little important bits of dialogue like that stuck in my brain though. 

  I loved that he went to all that trouble just to honour the death rites of his best friend. He doesn't care that it's illegal, could blow up his whole career, or even cause an incident with the Klingons. None of that matters anymore, because Spock is DEAD!! 

  A more modern film might've over-sold how little the rest of his life mattered to him, in those moments, with a montage of Kirk moodily drinking first. Or flying a shuttle recklessly. But they just left that little plot detail there, to be picked-up whenever the viewer's ready. And I respect that.

• Sure, you can get a legendary popculture altering set of films like the Star Wars OT by making it up as you go- but you are playing the lottery that everything will just fall into place thanks to having all the right people in the right place at the right time at the right point in their careers. Pre-planning to have ideas on structure and arcs that can inform each movie takes a lot of that random dice rolling out by ensuring everyone is on the same page about what you are trying to do. The point of Pre-planning isn't to set the entire story in stone and have it be unalterable, the point is to start breaking the story ahead of time so you have time to parse out problems, to fully develop ideas and to add polish. When you do that ahead of time you can also often come up with new ideas built on the original that you otherwise may not even have thought of as you wouldn't have had the time to put that much thought into them.

• I know you're picking a fight here over Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but I couldn't give less of a shit if you don't like it. I thought it was funny when I was young and I thought it was funny when I was very, very high in my twenties and that's good enough for me. I love the very stupid wordplay.

• Working smarter, not harder. Good man.

• So you’re talking about Chekov’s battle bridge. (Anton not Pavel)

• I was born in the early 60's- literally cut my teeth on ST TOS. Was far too young, at the time, to really understand the social commentary of most of the episodes, but was struck by "Devil in the Dark," and "Let that be your Last Battlefield." Both of those were epiphanies for young me.

• SO with you on The Last Jedi. It was the first time I was actually surprised by anything in Star Wars since Empire, and it took the series forward…. until whatever Rise of Skywalker was happened.

• May your forehead grow like the mighty oak!

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