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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."
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.
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.
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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