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Star Trek Discovery's First Trailer Brings a New Ship, New Characters, and Old Conflicts (cbs.com)
nyquil superstar writes: Hey all, the Star Trek: Discovery trailer is out. Looks entertaining! From a report via Vox: "The trailer features Sonequa Martin-Green, fresh from The Walking Dead, as Michael Burnham, a first officer promoted unexpectedly to the position of captain by her mentor, Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh). Set 10 years before the original Star Trek series (and 90 years after the franchise's only other prequel, Star Trek: Enterprise), the new series follows the starship Discovery as Burnham learns to become a captain. But she soon finds her abilities tested by a host of challenges that will be familiar to all lovers of the classic sci-fi universe: new worlds to explore and alliances to forge, hostile Klingons, and the difficulty of adhering to the Federation's peacekeeping mission."
Where the show was designed by the actor's race and sex instead of a plot and a casting call.
On the other hand, even the original serie, from the beginning has tried hard to be inclusive (the communication officier was a african american woman, the navigator comes from the other side of the iron curtain, etc.)
So trying to feature under-represented minory is absolutely nothing new in Star Trek.
The only key question is : are these characters otherwise well written, and are the actors portraying them good ? (or are their "under represented minority" the only noticeable thing about them). but that's hard to judge without watching 1-2 episodes of the serie.
(Which isn't available here around, at least not to me. So I can't judge)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Characters they showed seemed likable, but I didn't care for the lighting. I really hope most of the sets are brighter than the bridge, or this is going to be a very short-lived show.
(IMO Stargate Universe failed because the screen was so dark most of the time. People don't like dark screens in prime time.)
Senior Transgendered Asian Female Captain: Check
Gender muted African-American Female Protege: Check
Black males portrayed as vicious savages: Check
While males in unimportant, peripheral roles only: Check
I for one love this show and just know it will be a great success!
Star Trek was always diverse and inclusive, which was great. What they didn't do before now was to feel exclusive of anyone who can't check off their proper SJW victimhood credentials. If they follow the Hollywood pattern of late, there won't be one straight white human male in the main cast (unless he's a villain).
It saddens me to think of a Star Trek universe where this lifelong fan is villainized just because I was born with white skin and a dick. Excluding people ain't Trek.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yes, and it obviously worked, as 200something episodes will tell.
What Star Trek did right back then, and what it utterly fails at here, is that diversity is a good thing, but beating it into people with a sledgehammer is not. You see, people don't like that. Uhura was a black female as the communications officer. Back then that was an "impossibility". Not only a woman, not only a black person, but a black woman as an officer!
The real impact of it all was, though, that it was treated as a non-issue. They didn't parade her and try to "make a point" out of it, "look we are so progressive, we have a black female officer!". No, it was treated as normal. Which made in my opinion the even stronger point. The message was simply that in the future, black female officers are so normal that we needn't even talk about it anymore. It's a given. Nobody questioned her ability. Hell, if there was a mobbing victim on the ship, it probably was Chekov.
That was a pretty big statement for the 1960s, a decade when the civil rights movement still had to fight to at least get equal treatment of black and white people by law. And as we know, it still didn't really arrive in all heads.
What bothers me about the "new" Star Trek is that this message is now delivered by sledgehammer. Look, we're progressive, we have an asian female nonbinary transgender captain. If it was at least an alien... but for some odd reason, alien captains are still a nono.
Why not?
Why not have a nonhuman captain and a crew of humans and aliens that has to deal with it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually I was hoping to see the first purple nonbinary alien captain. But I guess Star Trek isn't ready for that yet.
The problem I have with the more recent development of Star Trek isn't that we have a more and more diverse crew. Far from it. What bothers me is that it becomes the focus of the show. We're not exploring exciting new worlds, we're exploring our feelings and how others hurt them.
I don't really need science fiction for that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't really see how you can say having a black female officer at a time when it was unthinkable wasn't really hammering it home. And I don't know where you got that stuff about the captain being nonbinary transgender, but it doesn't seem to be the case at all.
The trailer and the marketing so far doesn't push the diversity side at all. In fact I don't think it does anything new at all really, since the new movies have an openly gay character.
Really, what makes you think they are hammering this in any way? Almost all the discussion I've seen about it has been anti-progressives complaining about it, with basically zero from the studio.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Discovery doesn't seem to be particularly diverse though. There is one gay character, but it's not been made a big deal of, at least not by the studio. Lots of other series have had more diverse casts, openly gay characters and so on before. The main cast of Discovery is 50% white males, which doesn't exactly scream "quota", does it?
Where is all this coming from? Did the studio throw a pride parade I missed?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why not have a nonhuman captain and a crew of humans and aliens that has to deal with it?
Because, ultimately, Star Trek, like many Science Fiction shows has always been about "humanity" and the "human condition". Most of the best science fiction is about looking at humanity through a different angle (hence the "sci-fi" part is usually to look at humans in a "what if" scenario, it's easier to examine issues and morality by separating it from the everyday normal).
Now, what's that got to do with your question? Well, if the alien is captain it takes the spotlight off humanity since the captain frequently becomes the focus. All the Star Trek characters had aliens, not to look at aliens, but to look at humans.
Data is the classic example, he's the Pinocchio of the series, the puppet that wanted to be human.
Seven-Of-Nine another classic example, a human separated from humanity by the Borg trying to rediscover what it is to be human.
These characters were loosely based on Spock, not to be like him but to fill the same role. Spock didn't want to be human of course, but his "differentness" was frequently a plot device to compare him to humans and humanity.
You probably COULD have an alien captain, but then the screenwriters would have to work harder and more creatively to write stories about humanity and human morals. A human captain makes it easier to work those into the plots.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
This was so idiotic it made my brain bleed.
black female officers are so normal that we needn't even talk about it anymore
... except that if you actually put a black female officer on the show, all the Bros are going to whinge about what a SJW you are!
Apparently, the message did't stick.
Showing women (and scapegoated minorities) fighting to regain rights they know their ancestors had, in a Cold War-esque paranoid society with the general population trying to return to peace while the leaders and military know war looms and want to crack down on social progress to maintain control in the name of survival... there's so much material there. Plenty of which that would be a great analogue for the problems of today.
Except no one would watch it. The audience of Star Trek is white male nerds. They want shows about exploring the galaxy and science and aliens, and yeah a few episodes a season do some kind of social commentary thing. But when absolutely everything else in school, the HR department at work, the nightly news is RACE RACE RACE GENDER GENDER GENDER GAY SHIT GAY SHIT STRONG INDEPENDENT BLACK WYMYNZ WHAT DON'T NEED NO MANS they kind of don't want to see that shit in Star Trek. Star Trek is the escape from all that. So, you can make SJW Trek, but nobody's going to watch it. And then it'll fail, and HuffPo will right nasty articles about how racist and sexist white men are because they didn't want to watch a show about how racist and sexist white men are...IN SPACE.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Let me guess: a female captain to show how women are equal in the Star Trek universe, complete with a cast of POCs ruling over white men to demonstrate how SJWs have won the culture war in the future. No thanks. Ask Marvel how catering to that crowd goes. They have a lot of voice to scream with but no dollars to buy.
Wait, Poe isn't a white male? Or was he somehow a villain? Or was he grandfathered in?
Maybe you're just self-selecting to confirm your biases?
I don't think Ghostbusters 2016 has much to do with pushing a social justice agenda. They just wanted to make the film appeal to a younger audience, which meant upping the comedy aspect and reducing the horror/dry humour of the original. So they needed comedy actors to fill that role, and at this point a lot of the male talent is tainted by flops and turning everything they are in into just "another Ben Stiller movie" etc.
The acts they went with were coming up via the usual routes, TV shows like SNL and so forth. They made a reasonable choice, and then the internet found out and blew it up into a huge social justice male-genocide slactivist movement.
It's actually quite ironic... People complaining about "SJWs", while demanding more social justice for men and to have the film banned or boycotted. It's as if people who use that acronym only think other people are like that because it's how their own minds work... But I digress.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Which is what they did with Cisco and Janeway. The shows were never about how he was black or she was a woman. Geordi never had to give a speech about how he was discriminated against because "no negroes can engineer spaceships!" He was just the ship's engineer and nobody cared about his race.
The idea that nerds are especially racist or sexist is retarded. Nerds were watching all these shows and had no problem with strong independent women like Ripley or blacks in authority like Cisco for decades before wearing your tolerance on your sleeve became fashionable. Then the normies suddenly got their paws all over the franchises, make them shit because of the writing and the plots, shoehorn in "diversity" and then when the nerds complain "this is a bad show" they accuse us of racism and sexism.
It's just more nerd bullying. When we were watching shows about space and aliens with a diverse cast 20 years ago, they were pushing us into lockers for liking all that nerd shit. Now they've taken over all the nerd shit, made it crappy, and are bullying us for not liking it. The one constant is you can heap any amount of abuse you want on low social value males.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
>The one constant is you can heap any amount of abuse you want on low social value males.
Before you finish nailing yourself to that cross, consider that the drama nerds often have it pretty bad compared to other varieties of nerd until they're adults, and even then life can suck unless they're really talented or make it big. It's still the pretty people and the athletes that by default score well in popularity until you get out of high school. Luckily the majority of people grow the fuck up in their 20s and most of that shit fades away.
But it's the drama nerds who are writing the scripts and the drama nerds who are acting them out, and most of them know what it's like to be on the shit end of the stick. Unfortunately... they're just not as smart as us alpha nerds and can have trouble with logic and moral philosophy so they don't see the flaws in the SJW manifesto. ;p