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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that Angry Joe got taken down; AFAIK, RedLetterMedia's review didn't get taken down, and it featured decent chunks of non-trailer footage (not sure if any of them were 10+ seconds consecutively) [0]. And, like AJ's, it was a very negative review. I don't doubt AJ was the victim of manual review, I'm just surprised RLM wouldn't be on CBS's shit list as well.

(and tangentially: both are right; the "Picard" show is depressingly bad and derivative. I've only watched the first ep, but it had more gratuitous (and cheap looking) martial arts action than several seasons of TNG.)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfQdf93e63I

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> the "Picard" show is depressingly bad and derivative. I've only watched the first ep,

I don’t understand how you can pass judgment on a series based on one episode.

With so many shows to watch and so little time to watch them, most people pass judgement on series without watching any episodes. Can you earnestly say you watch two episodes of every series before deciding whether to watch more? I doubt there is any way you could find time for that; rather you judge most shows to be unworthy of your time after glancing at the promotional material at most. Everybody does.

So yes, watching one episode is enough to dismiss a show.

It’s also been discussed that the streaming services are also tending to not give shows as much of a chance to find an audience and a voice as was often the case previously.

To the general point there’s so much content out there and I watch relatively little. I have to find a show that at least looks interesting. And then I’ll almost certainly drop it after an episode or two if it doesn’t grab me.

It's also supposed to be derivative at first, I think. The poker game between Data and Picard is nearly exclusively derivative. But it's setting up a platform to jump from. I mean, I hope other elements aren't too derivative, but it seems unfair to criticize the first episode for it. The second one seems to depart quite a bit more (at least enough for my tastes).

sadly RLM was right, it is an atrocious show because certain people in Hollywood and political friends of their are more than willing to trash the legacy of respected shows and movies to score political points and show how "woke" they are.

Gone is the attempt to tell good stories and now we are stuck with political preaching which always requires all the canon of the show or movie being used to be trampled if not insulted.

RLM pointed out the defining difference between Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek and all the tripe we have today. When he wanted to deal with race he had the characters blow it off, it was such a non issue then they could not take offense because it did not occur to them. (episode with Abraham Lincoln)

Instead we are served the tripe and hatred that the woke political movement uses to silence those it does not agree with or those who dare call them out.

If you think Star Trek hasn't always been political, then you haven't been paying attention to any of the themes in Star Trek.

Imho that's what makes it all the more grating: Star Trek was always on the rather "woke" end of the spectrum, and it usually managed to be there without pandering or being too condescending about it.

But this new generation of Trek seems to have completely lost that ability, while at the same time retconning large parts of the universe, and its inhabitants, to serve it's now much more simplistic moral dilemmas.

Which becomes particularly apparent when contrasted with something like The Orville. Sure, MacFarlane's humor can be an acquired taste, but I found that comedy take to be much more relatable, and truer to the "Trek spirit" than recent Trek offerings.

Maybe that has to do with the fact that The Orville also depicts a way more optimistic picture of future humanity, akin to the old Trek, while new Trek seems to be too busy to make Trek as gritty, edgy and actiony as most other media nowadays.

The original Star Trek had a good (though contested) claim to be the first (Black and White) interracial kiss on US public television[1]; Compare that with the Pew study "Intermarriage in the US 50 years since Loving v Virginia", showing that in 1990, about 63% of non-Blacks would be very or somewhat opposed to a close relative marrying a Black person[2] Pew. Imagine what that figure looked like in 1968.

If we don't see the original Star Trek as staking as many firm moral positions on issues where popular opinions are mixed, it says more about who we have become today, and how popular morality has adjusted, than about what was or wasn't radical or confronting at the time.

There doesn't seem to me to be any plausible claim that earlier Trek was previously less "confrontational" or deliberate in promoting its chosen morality.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_interracial_kiss_on_tele...

[2] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/05/18/2-public-views-on...

> now we are stuck with political preaching

You might want to (re)watch Star Trek TOS. Glaring in my mind is The Omega Glory where Kirk reads off... well, spoilers: it's absolutely a political episode (as is most of Star Trek) and it rather killed the episode in my opinion.

its funny how some execs can slap the name on something and anyone expects it to be anything like what was the labor of roddenberry's life. can a bunch of people get together in a room and release a new "elvis" album cuz the name is owned by some studio?

DS9 was created without Roddenberry's involvement. And to your point, it severely clashed with his original vision, particularly the inherent non-exploration built into the setting and the dark interpersonal conflicts. But it's arguably still very good – even if you dismiss the later seasons as being too serial and warfare-oriented.

"Picard" imho is an across-the-board downgrade, carried only by the sentiments the fanbase has for Capt. Picard.

DS9 still had a lot of respect for the 'source material' so to speak. New Trek just wants to keep the iconography and tell whatever kind of story they feel like.

Yes. DS9 dealt with the realities of Roddenberry's vision when dealing with alien races that do not buy into it _and_ share your backyard, and an existential threat that was unable to be neutralized by technobabble after a single episode.

This is why, for instance, In the Pale Moonlight was so good. Sisko's actions went against the entire concept he had of himself as the goodguy Starfleet officer (a paragon of virtue!), and it _tore him up inside_. In any other show (and Star Treks since Enterprise), it would have been yet another "dark moment", probably followed by a torture scene.

DS9 never abandoned the Roddenberry ideal in favor of "dark edgy and xplosions", as RLM kind of alludes to in their video. Instead they showed it as an ideal worth striving for, but complicated in the absolute and in extreme circumstances. Previous Star Trek's did this on occasion too, but never admitted it to themselves, which is something much easier to do when everything is reset after the end of each episode (looking at you Voyager).

Picard -in the first episode- has given us a Starfleet that has failed to live up to its own principles. Do readers here honestly think that this idea is somehow an abdication of Star Trek's central conceit? - a project where morality tales about possible (fairly socialist, post scarcity) futures can and do help us think about moral issues and respond in more moral ways in our own lives.

Cold war Star Trek intentionally included a Russian crewmember, Civil-Rights-era Trek had a Black crew member as well as an alien race -Klingons- coded with racial tropes pointed at Black people and found ways for the viewer to gradually identify with the alien race. TNG had a Klingon crew member and gave us Ferangi (coded with some Jewish stereotypes), followed by the Borg (the 'looming threat' of Collectivism') and subsequent series are projects that bring sympathetic characters of each of these backgrounds (Quark, Seven of Nine).

Picard's anger at Starfleet in the new series stems from their moral abdication in the face of the largest refugee crisis Starfleet has ever seen. Today, we are in the second largest refugee crisis our planet has ever seen, and Western nations have responded less with sympathy than with rising anti-immigrant sentiment. I don't see how this is in any way "keeping the iconography to tell whatever kind of story they like"

Iconography in the sense of 'things we know' and brand recognition. USS Enterprise, Warp, Starfleet, the Borg, Vulcans, etc. In other words, things in popular culture that the average Joe/Jane would recognize as "Star Trek".

I was mostly talking about continuity and making storylines fit within the established universe. I wasn't talking so much about themes as I was talking about internal consistency. That being said, I fully acknowledge star trek cannon is a big mess.

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