Ursula Le Guin on Star Trek: TNG (1994)
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"Violence, on The Next Generation, is shown as a problem, or the failure to solve a problem, never as the true solution."
"Lots of young people watch it, too, of course, and, recently, at a conference about science fiction, one of them told me why: “A lot of science fiction shows us a future just like now, only worse,” she said. “I like The Next Generation because it shows us a future I could live in.” "
Compare the old shows, TNG & DS9 with the new shows - Discovery and Picard.
Alan Kurtzman and team have completely destroyed the spirit of Star Trek - totally ignored what Roddenberry tried to achieve - which is nicely encapsulated in the two snippets above.
Instead Kurtzman & team created something bland, superficial with no depth by desperately and selfishly imprinting their own mark on the Star Trek world without respecting its history. Even the great actors like Stewart, Spiner or De Lancie couldn't save it.
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PS. This is a good summary of the new Trek:
[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hfQdf93e63I&list=PLXiyyhCy2ANpZx...
Edit to reply to both replies below:
Go read up on Stewart's influence on e.g. Starship Mine or Captain's Holiday - he never cared about maintaining (at least what OP says is) the spirit/lore of TNG.
Is it really surprising that the guy who loved Starship Mine would, when given more creative reign, push something like Picard? It ain't coming (only) from the writers... Chabon for sure can do the genre-heavy psychodrama just fine.
The only thing I can think of is that he's 80 something and getting out of the house, being part of a bigger project again, acting, meeting your old friends etc - it's exciting. So he compromised.
Supposedly, Picard was kicked out for a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" level speech that pissed off EVERYBODY in Starfleet Command.
That they never showed.
You have an actor practically synonymous with Shakespearean scenery chewing and you never have him deliver the actual speech that supposedly kicks off the whole series?!?!?!
That should be an unending shame to the series writers.
Furthermore, had the writers created that speech, it probably would have created a much better series as it would have set up the boundaries of the world properly for the series writers to operate within.
Eg The Witcher series it seems Henry Cavill signed on for a different portrayal of the world then what was delivered.
What ought it be? What about insisting on driving a dune buggy is problematic?
Let's agree to disagree about "Captain's Holiday" (for a "fun" episode IMO it really clunks along, e.g. a whole predestination paradox for what is ultimately a MacGuffin), but yes, I also liked "Starship Mine" - but it's utterly unlike the TNG so many fans claim to remember. Like, critique what's actually there both then and now, not your own nostalgia and disillusionment!
I agree overall Picard was a thematic and narrative mess and Discovery needs someone who can stick the landing they're missing in the last two episodes of every season. But Roddenberry isn't god; some of his future was good in the 70s but naive or trite even by the 80s and regressive by the 90s; and some of it was never good to begin with.
And also good point about Roddenberry. I meant more the principle of showing a better future and how humanity overcame its problems. It made people think.
But it systematically depicts war and violence in general as not being a solution, rather a problem to be solved, a wound to be healed, an understanding to be found.
[yes, there has been few shocking exception, including Archer in Enterprise torturing an alien]
With absolutely zero respect, I think you missed the point of the episode I named, widely considered one of the best episodes ever. They literally murder someone in cold blood to start a war, to solve the problem they might not otherwise win it.
At no point did the episode show this as a good thing.
But the question isn't whether it's shown as a good thing, the bar was "Violence [is] the failure to solve a problem, never [a] true solution." Presenting the violence as necessary is still diametrically opposed to this, in some ways even more than showing violence in a positive but unnecessary light.
That's a genuinely uncommon attitude in genre fiction. Reducing it to any situation where a show posits "do the ends justify the means? perhaps!" - which is the basis of like, every piece of high-stakes TV today - does a disservice to the original critique and the TNG episodes which argue otherwise (and frankly, also to the deftness with which DS9 does usually present it).
Maybe the idea is if you set the bar high it will reduce violence and that's the best we can achieve?
Have you read the HN guidelines? You can spare us and go troll on 4chan.
And while I wouldn't say Lower Decks /respects/ the spirit of early Trek, it certainly shows an awareness of the utopian philosophy!
But if you think SNW is better maybe I should check it out.
Cannot say something about SNW because Paramount decided to tease people with another streaming platform. Back with TNG the did it right, offered the series to all TV-Stations instead partnering with one. The drawbacl, the first seasons of TNG were low on money.
That wasn't a choice, if one of the networks wanted it, there's no way it would have been in syndication.
Smart business practice but kind of rude to the stations.
And of course, so is The Orville.
Yup, it's satirical but not unlovingly. The recent live action shows are veneer of star trek characters and visual themes atop a Marvel movie.
That said, everything I’ve seen of Strange New Worlds so far is excellent, it’s like the old Roddenberry vision reincarnated.
Mostly they were glad to have work.
Either way, SNW is fantastic and I agree with your comment.
Berman took over basically near the end of season 2/beginning of season 3 when the original writers were slowly kicked out and Gene Roddenerry's health was in definite decline. This was also when the show got good.
Berman had many faults he brought to TNG (and magnified in Voyager, and you can see was Star Trek but with a looser Berman hand is like on DS9), but this wasn't one of them. If anything he stuck up too much for Gene's vision which sometimes struggled fitting into actual scripts that were compelling and made sense.
Season 3 started right after the Apollo 11 moon landing, when people had got a hint of how difficult and terrifying space travel really was. Aliens with bumpy heads weren't inspiring anymore.
It’s not realistic because it’s fundamentally either autistic or straight up dehumanizing and authoritarian. People have deconstructed the Star Trek universe and themes ad infintum at this point, but I don’t think anybody is missing the point just because they find it distasteful.
Say what, now?
It's important to note that in STTNG, Star Fleet is not the entirety of the human population in the show. This concept is often overlooked. The idea that human interpersonal dysfunction is a psychological and maslow-dependent side-effect is abhorrent to some people. It's seen as dehumanizing because such an observer is not able to connect with any of the characters. The assumption is that the writers have somehow taken away their humanity for them to be psychologically stable, mature, and well-adapted individuals. Read into that what you will. This is supposed to be "utopian" despite the obvious conflicts that arise, nonetheless.
Orville does something similar, but magnifies the differences and interpersonal conflicts in a fun way.
Oh that’s right, they’re often comically overtly racist caricatures.
In any event Star Fleet specifically is a dystopian hell has been analyzed to death. And the genesis of DS9 is completely straightforward. You can use the idealized yet completely ridiculous portrayal of Star Fleet for a movie or two, some short stories. Stretching it out to 7 seasons was admirable (but even they had to make some concessions with story arcs post Roddenberry). Let’s not forget TOS only needed to last 3 seasons and the Roddenberry era TNG is pretty crappy overall at least outside the diehard fandom.
I didn't get the dystopian vibe at all when watching TNG, DS9, Voyager or Enterprise.
I did Google it, though, and found the expected handful of thinkpieces and Reddit posts. Obviously the shows have fallen short or aged poorly at times, and people have discussed that the same way they've discussed everything else about Star Trek. I'm not seeing evidence for your claim that "Star Trek is dystopian" is a settled conclusion.
Also, I'm still waiting to hear what "fundamentally autistic" means.
Analysis about the dystopian back-workings is fan fiction. It's all fiction, to be sure, but the topic is constrained. STTNG portrays a society, in good faith that it's harmonious. This article is about STTNG, not DS9.
> I think the reorientation around conflict actually began with Rick Berman after he took over from Roddenberry back 90s or early 2000s or whenever it was.
Well, I watched season 1 of Picard. So I can't do much with the comparison being requested.
But DS9 is completely oriented around military conflict (between the Federation and Cardassia, or between the Federation and the Changelings), and it throws TNG's notion of a communist society with no money out the window. (Jake does once remark that, as a human, he has no money, but whenever Riker shows up he has plenty of it.)
But TNG (and TOS to some extent) is a total post-scarcity society. Effectively infinite energy from anti-matter reactors combined with energy->matter conversion "replicators" solves scarcity totally. The only limit on what can be created is how complex it is, and how advanced the science and engineering of the reactors and replicators are.
Hence TNG society is totally oriented around science and discovery, rather than production, economic growth, and financial gain.
This part of ST doesn't really make sense. They're shown as having the tech to build enormous starbases (and with domed artificial habitats like "Running Silent" in the latest SNW episodes), so they don't need planets to colonize: they can just build O'Neil cyilnders.
Not unless they want to be wiped out.
The "who owns the means of production" problem was to be solved by socialism. Which then supposedly enabled the higher productivity and faster development that would lead to the true post-scarcity society - which would be communism. This is especially evident in Soviet sci-fi, which would often poke over that boundary - e.g. Yefremov's description of future communism in "Andromeda Nebula" and "The Hour of the Bull", or Strugatsky's in the Noon Verse series.
Whoever did that is completely ignorant about the meaning of the words "socialist" and "communist", as used in all the countries where communist parties have detained the power.
The comment above is perfectly accurate.
Whether that one includes massive plot holes, I cannot say.
Really? So you actually liked Season 1, and lost interest at the start of Season 3? You're a really rare person then. Most fans acknowledge that the first season was pretty bad (esp. the racist episode), and the second season was better but still rough (Pulaski was annoying), and that season 3 was when all the classic episodes started. You're the first person who's ever said they liked the first season the most.
I'll argue this isn't a problem with Star Trek as a problem with our society... in general we have seen a general bitterness in media since 9/11. Imagine a show that you saw before then and generally whatever you imagine will be far more positive than post-9/11 television.
Terrible. Remember how the Phantom Menace's central premise originated with unjust taxation, but didn't show any hardships or physical struggles caused by said taxation? Also shit.
I had to bail on Discovery when the Federation turned down an (gimmick-verified) honest offer of universal peace at the conclusion of a season because of their deep desire to punish and humiliate the enemy that was offering it to them. I hope the Federation was written as the evil empire from then on, but I'm not going to be there to see it. In the world of Discovery, the return of the Federation is obviously the biggest threat to the galaxy.
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edit: I have to admit that the Federation turning down the offer made me more angry than anything I had seen in fiction for years, so if it was a trick that they played with or overturned in the next season, they sure got me. I mean they lost me, because I bailed, but they got the emotion they were going for.
The party offering wasn't interested in rule of law. There was no long-term peace to be had with authoritarians who would only be content with peace as long as it was peace that put them above the law.
... of all the deviations from Roddenberry's vision one could criticize Discovery for, I think this criticism fits least.
(They didn't "reverse" it so much as Osyraa died in the subsequent events that season and since the Chain was authoritarian, it collapsed without its mafia boss at the head. Dictatorships are such fragile things).
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edit:
> Dictatorships are such fragile things
You know that the writers choose how things turn out, right? It wasn't a real dictatorship, so you shouldn't take any life lessons from how it ended. There won't be any deus ex machina in real life to save elites from the consequences of similar decisions.
She refused, for obvious reasons.
It's a tad fraught to speculate what Roddenberry would have thought of the new Star Trek, but he fought in World War II so I'd imagine he'd understand the position that one does not accept the peace terms of, well, rulers who place themselves in a position where they are the only authority.
> you shouldn't take any life lessons from how it ended
Agreed. For example, I don't worry over-much about whether Admiral Vance's adherence to the principles of Starfleet over a tenuous peace that would last until the dictator across the table decided it had ended wouldn't make for good realpolitik. In reality, countries make strange bedfellows when dealing with powerful opponents all the time. Of course, history suggests those decisions have consequences, but c'est la réalité.
> There won't be any deus ex machina in real life to save elites from the consequences of similar decisions.
I sure hope not.
It's that she was going to be given a show trial for crimes she was obviously guilty of and that would obviously deserve the worst penalty that the system could deliver. So it was to be pointless humiliation before pointless execution.
> he fought in World War II so I'd imagine he'd understand the position that one does not accept the peace terms of, well, rulers who place themselves in a position where they are the only authority.
Is this about that one time when Hitler offered the world unconditional peace and the world turned it down in exchange for the hope of maybe one day bringing him to trial?
> a tenuous peace that would last until the dictator across the table decided it had ended
I was hoping this is what the story was about, but the mechanical lie detector machine gimmick that couldn't be fooled said that this was not the case. Any secret treachery is something that you're adding that the writers made explicitly impossible to add.
> history suggests those decisions have consequences
Exactly what historical parallel are you pointing to that involved a magic truth machine?
If she was obviously guilty, then wouldn't rule of law indicate she should be held accountable?
If she isn't held accountable, what is the nature of the government formed by the Emerald Chain / Federation alliance?
ETA: lies aren't necessary. Osyraa could 100% believe what she was saying in the moment. But that's the thing about those who are above the law... The next day, she could decide something else was more expedient, change her mind, and break the peace. There would be nothing to hold her to account if she did, and she had clearly been indicated to be an opportunist and a power-broker.
> If she isn't held accountable, what is the nature of the government formed by the Emerald Chain / Federation alliance?
They literally had a truth machine. If they cared, they could just ask.
> The next day, she could decide something else was more expedient, change her mind, and break the peace.
So could the Federation. So could anyone, so that really precludes anyone dealing with anyone else because even though they could be honestly dealing today, maybe at some later date everything could change.
All of these excuses require facts that are not in evidence, or that were explicitly contradicted by the plot. I wouldn't trade one innocent life for the chance to execute a dictator who has completely stood down. The Federation was willing to exchange uncountable ones.
That would be counter to the Federation's principles. And that's the point. The ways-of-life on the table in the negotiation are "You do what you have to do" vs. "You do what you should."
Taking a step back from the immediate conversation: We've gone several posts deep in point-counterpoint on the decision made in this episode, and I think you are making excellent points. I'm pleased this decision can be looked at from multiple valid points-of-view supported with conviction. That's what the best Star Trek writing is made of.
edit: this sort of thinking really gets on my nerves because it happens in the real world. Any number of innocent corpses are justified if some particular enemy individual can be punished. It really makes it clear that for some people life is a game between elites to dominate each other, and most people aren't players, they're the board.
It's not about her submission; it's about justice. If she's not accountable, then why would her lieutenants be? Or their lieutenants? Or anyone, for the openly-practiced slavery and exploitation in the Chain? There's no peace without justice to be had, not really.
Vance was being asked to declare "In the interest of peace, all this slavery was nobody's fault," and that's a non-starter.
> Vance was being asked to declare "In the interest of peace, all this slavery was nobody's fault," and that's a non-starter.
If your choice is to free the slaves, or punish the slaver, which do you pick? If you choose to punish the slaver over freeing the slaves, are you putting your own ego above the suffering of people who you clearly don't particularly value?
edit: did anyone at the Federation know any slaves? Did they ask them if they would rather be free than hold out as slaves for a trial in an indeterminate future? If the Federation managed to capture her and free the slaves, would the trial be nutritious for the slaves? Would it clothe or house them? Would it deter anyone else from becoming a warlord?
False dichotomy. As an American, it sometimes rubs the wrong way when that's presented as either-or because the US chose not to punish many of the slavers and we continue to live with the consequences of that decision: they regained power and built the Jim Crow South.
Justice is required for lasting peace. It perhaps need not be fatal, but it must be real.
Spoiler: Conveniently, the unfolding events saved the Federation from the consequences that this decision would have otherwise had. And in the end, they ascended again, even though Vulcan^H^H^H^H^H^H Ni'var made it very clear that their rejoining was very much conditional.
That sounds to me like an aging space empire who wouldn't exchange its pompous unearned claims of moral superiority for what could have been untold billions of lives. And apparently, in the end they were saved by the writers from the consequences of that action.
Not really. Plot of the next season has as background action the hard work of rebuilding, planet-by-planet, the old alliances that had fallen apart when the Federation collapsed.
(But then a galaxy-wide threat shows up so there's something else to worry about)
Whatever our fond memories of the older versions of the show, they stopped resonating with audiences. And a franchise that cannot adapt dies.
The new Star Trek is a different flavor from the old, but it has to be. Because the kids that grew up watching the old Star Trek didn't see that future manifest (if anything, history has played out in a direction bending away from it). I'm honestly impressed at the new material's ability to bridge the core ideas of the original shows to a language that modern audiences speak. It's pulling in viewers again, and that's vital to the franchise surviving.
According to the Star Trek timeline we're 4 years away from World War III.
That seems pretty accurate.
On the contrary: those kids are making the tech real (communicators & ever present computer acting as a digital personal assistant using voice communication)
Smartphones are cool and all, but where is my luxury space communism? Where is my appliance that creates a hot cup of coffee out of raw spacetime for me on command and runs on free energy and space magic? When do I get to stop using money? When can I just spend all day engaging in intellectual and creative pursuits in some kind of jumpsuit or possibly just a futuristic bathrobe?
Can't wait to be able to engage in intellectual and creative pursuits all day in my comfy futuristic bathrobe ;)
That's what I meant with what he was 'trying to achieve' at the beginning with TOS.
I also read that later in his life he believed the hype about himself and became difficult to work with. Whether it's true or not - I don't know.
I watched TNG as a kid, and maybe this is why I liked it so much.
Recently, my 5 year kid came running to me with his tablet during his allocated screen time, all excited in the way that only young kids can be. He was going on about how great it was he'd "killed them before they killed me!"*, and I just can't stop thinking about what an awful moment that was :( Maybe we need to sit down and watch TNG and DS9 together...
* He has a Kindle Kids with an age limit set, so he's only playing curated games from the Amazon Kids collection
And the best new Star Trek is Orville, clearly carrying the mantle from TNG.
I miss having shows that convey a feeling of hope for the future. The current mostly dystopian grimdark sci-fi is an easy way for unimaginative writers to make their world feel more real at the expense of destroying that hope.
It's sad that even the new Star Trek movies (post 2009) and shows courtesy of Alan Kurtzman and J.J. Abrams have completely lost that spirit of the previous Star Treks. Instead it's a bland insipid take on the Star Trek universe by people who have no clue of what makes Star Trek Star Trek and do not respect it.
The older Star Trek cared about the story and acting, despite the struggles in the first seasons of TNG the succeeded. The newer ones lacking (any) logic and are just quick action.
PS: ST Lower Decks is great :)
It's not just that they're "not Star Trek"—they're terribly written even if you pretend they're not Star Trek and are just generic sci-fi. Picard especially. My god, what a trainwreck. Like five people, zero of whom were good writers, assembled the plot using the telephone game.
SNW is, somehow, extremely good. No idea how that happened.
And yeah, Lower Decks should have sucked (that trailer, ugh) but is in fact quite good.
About TNG, who am I to argue with Ursula Le Guin but it lost me after only a few episodes because it was all talking talking talking, nothing interesting to see. Plenty of shows like that (no scifi.) My friends loved it.
Also, best to start with season 3 :)
The show gets by on the reputation of later seasons, and handful of excellent episodes, and that era of TV being pretty mediocre, especially for sci-fi. S1 has basically zero good episodes (though, unfortunately, several that you kinda need to watch anyway) while S2 only has a few, and in S3 it finally really gets going. Even then, in the "good" seasons, a solid 1/4 of the episodes are pretty bad.
But it really takes off in S3 and it's a solid ride to the end, with some episodes that are stand-out best-of-era TV.
DS9 has a few of those too, but it's grittier and less obviously utopian.
Modern takes on everything suck. The culture that produces modern tv/movies is not one I want to participate in, and their writers are terrible. Abrahms ability to ruin everything he touches while everyone celebrates is jusst another extension of this. The one thing the marvel MCU used to have was the ability to still tell hero stories. DC never figured it out (although there Z Snyder was at fault).
I'd rather not know what is being done now, and just cherish my memories and copies of the older material. It's less annoying and honestly there's nothing of value in the new stuff except sometimes cinematography.
For every "The Inner Light", there was a "Captain's Holiday", the episode where Picard goes on vacation to the sex planet Risa and has an Indiana Jones adventure involving a mysterious ancient artifact, an attractive and unscrupulous archeologist, and time travelers. TNG wouldn't be so great if it had just been one or the other.
Yes. Read her "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", in "The Language of the Night", where she discusses what makes fantasy read like fantasy.
At the time TNG came out, mass culture was obsessed with what was called "channeling", which was taking dictation from "spirit guides" that everybody was supposed to have riding around on them.
Everybody knew people who claimed to have a spirit guide, somebody who had been a person two or twenty centuries ago, yammering fake-profound spiritual commentary on everything. Whole racks in bookstores were full of "channeled" books that today you can't even find any of at used bookstores or even thrift shops. It has all washed away, and people are embarrassed about it now.
Troi started as a sort of parody of the channelers that must have been especially thick on the ground in LA where, I guess, the writers lived. She kind of outlasted the phenomenon. That is why she never had anything to do, because what was there for a Ship's Channeler to do? They mostly talked at great length but made no sense, but she couldn't be doing that when they were getting shot at.
It's also easy to forget how bad the first season was:
> Reviewing the series as part of the DVD release in 2002, Marc Bernardin for Entertainment Weekly said of season one, that it was "almost hard to believe ... just how bad much of it was". He thought that the first season was too similar to the end of the "cheesy" original series but said that it "succeeded where it needed to: It introduced viewers to the characters who would carry the torch through six more seasons", and gave it a score of B+.[72] Tor.com reviewer Keith DeCandido was less positive, feeling that it "earned" its reputation as the poorest of The Next Generation's seven seasons because "the episodes were uneven, poorly plotted, ineptly scripted, and acted by actors who were still trying to figure their characters out". He gave it a score of 5 out of 10.[73] The season has been given an 80% "fresh" rating by review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.[74]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation...
It's very interesting to see how people in tech line up with their scifi - for a while, there was a 'Star Wars' vs. 'Star Trek' divide in some tech circles, perhaps mainly promoted by Peter Thiel:
https://www.thewrap.com/peter-thiel-star-trek-communist-star...
The fact is, you can find whatever socio-political flavor of science fiction you like, for example Orson Scott Card is probably the ideological opposite of Le Guin in many ways. Iain M. Banks of the Culture Series fame is perhaps a hybrid of Asimov and Le Guin on sociopolitical matters, sped up a bit, with more chaos and violence. Note this all has a kind of 'big space opera' theme, regardless of whether, you have leftist or rightist sci-fi preferences. William Gibson, in contrast, revolutionized sci-fi by writing about the people who fell between the cracks, those who got run over by the system and were left to fend for themselves as best they could (basically, sci-fi noir).
Maybe a Captain Picard / Darth Vader crossover series would be funny... comedic sci-fi works sometimes. Galaxy Quest was memorable.
Thiel's take on Star Wars vs. Star Trek seems like a case of someone trying to align their likes and dislikes to be mutually reinforcing, which is a typical human foible. I've never noticed any political divide in fans, and a lot of people enjoy both.
I never saw the point of Guinan either. The ship already had a counsellor.