This misses what makes Star Trek special and what makes the Nu-Trek shows such a failure, in my opinion.
What make Star Trek what it is is that in a world filled to the brim with hopeless dystopian stories and prudent allegorical warning signs in story format, Star Trek offered a uniquely hopeful Utopian view of the future. No, things were not perfect, but it’s clear that many of the trivial problems of our world as well as nearly all scarcity issues were effectively “solved.”
Meanwhile, Nu-Trek seems actively and solely focused specifically on tearing down or critiquing that Utopian view. I’m not opposed to critical consideration of a property, in fact in most cases it’s an excellent way to re-evaluate a property. But in the specific case of Star Trek all it really accomplishes is turning this uniquely hopeful thing of beauty into just another generic and cynical piece of mild social commentary in a field absolutely crowded with exactly that sort of content already.
I’m not precious about Star Trek, I’m not above the idea of critiquing and reevaluating it, but when doing so accomplishes only taking away what makes it unique so it becomes just another interchangeable piece of Sci-Fi in the crowd… Well I guess I just have to ask “What was the fucking point?”
Picard is definitely the worst for this. It’s woefully generic and miserable.
On the other hand, SNW feels like it has much more of the TOS-era vibrancy, LD is pretty similar to TNG in terms of setting (plus modern humor of course)… Prodigy even takes the novel approach of seeming like generic sci-fi at first only to become probably the most similar to 90s Trek out of all the new shows, albeit in kid’s show format. Still, it’s really fun and is all about the hope the Federation represents.
And for that matter, while early Discovery is pretty dark, I feel like Discovery gets more hopeful. Sure, the 32nd century has kind of a “fallen utopia” thing going on, but it very quickly turns into rebuilding and by the end they’re looking hopefully to the future as they’re expanding their borders again. It’s different from the previous eras of Trek, but it’s still hopeful.
This misses what makes Star Trek special and what makes the Nu-Trek shows such a failure, in my opinion.
What make Star Trek what it is is that in a world filled to the brim with hopeless dystopian stories and prudent allegorical warning signs in story format, Star Trek offered a uniquely hopeful Utopian view of the future. No, things were not perfect, but it’s clear that many of the trivial problems of our world as well as nearly all scarcity issues were effectively “solved.”
Meanwhile, Nu-Trek seems actively and solely focused specifically on tearing down or critiquing that Utopian view. I’m not opposed to critical consideration of a property, in fact in most cases it’s an excellent way to re-evaluate a property. But in the specific case of Star Trek all it really accomplishes is turning this uniquely hopeful thing of beauty into just another generic and cynical piece of mild social commentary in a field absolutely crowded with exactly that sort of content already.
I’m not precious about Star Trek, I’m not above the idea of critiquing and reevaluating it, but when doing so accomplishes only taking away what makes it unique so it becomes just another interchangeable piece of Sci-Fi in the crowd… Well I guess I just have to ask “What was the fucking point?”
Picard is definitely the worst for this. It’s woefully generic and miserable.
On the other hand, SNW feels like it has much more of the TOS-era vibrancy, LD is pretty similar to TNG in terms of setting (plus modern humor of course)… Prodigy even takes the novel approach of seeming like generic sci-fi at first only to become probably the most similar to 90s Trek out of all the new shows, albeit in kid’s show format. Still, it’s really fun and is all about the hope the Federation represents.
And for that matter, while early Discovery is pretty dark, I feel like Discovery gets more hopeful. Sure, the 32nd century has kind of a “fallen utopia” thing going on, but it very quickly turns into rebuilding and by the end they’re looking hopefully to the future as they’re expanding their borders again. It’s different from the previous eras of Trek, but it’s still hopeful.
I’ve only gotten through two seasons but when I watched Picard I couldn’t help but think “TNG would have wrapped this up in one or two episodes”.
I was deliberately generalizing for the sake of humor. There’s a lot that I knowingly glossed over or oversimplified.
Very fair. Cheers.