My Dear Gen X,
My joints hurt just as bad as yours do and we need to talk about “Strange New Worlds”…
Guys, it’s really good.
I know you. Your parents are old and sick and you’re wondering how they’ll manage. I know your kids have gotta finish strong in high school this year. I know your spouse is not perfect.
Watch this show and let it carry you back to the reasons you loved Star Trek when you were a kid. I know you, and I know this is what you need right now.
Maybe you are…
1.) One of those that saw Mr. Spock on our parents’ black and white TV in the 60s or 70s and thought that he had a perfectly reasonable approach to life. At least to an 8-year-old.
2.) That girl back in grade 10 who had a really unhealthy relationship with Deanna Troi because of some previous life trauma.
3.) Like my father, you liked the skimpy outfits (…no, protect, protect… you know the one) but also, AHEM… more importantly he likened Spock’s experiences to his own as an immigrant.
3.) One of the uber nerds back in grade 7 that lit up the local BBS or early Usenet with fierce discussions of Kirk’s superiority over Picard.
4.) Re-watching old episodes of TNG (God bless you BBC America) and it makes you feel like you’re visiting with old friends.
5.) A lover of competence porn. Don’t you wish your team at work had the competence and work ethic of Star Fleet? I love watching Miles having coffee (double strong, double sweet) with his sleeves rolled up getting ready to put in some hard hours.
6.) Your dad watched TOS in his dorm room in college. You watched DS9 in your first apartment when you moved out.
Listen guys, make the time for the show. I know you’ve gotta go walk the dog because the kids never do. But seriously remember the reasons you got into Star Trek when you were young.
There no such thing as time travel. But this show will remind you about the things you loved about Star Trek.
And if you’re one of those fans that cares about canon and timelines and are rightly concerned about the show runner’s respect for the source material… Put it like this, the show scores enough points to allow loose standards when it comes to canon.
Discovery doesn’t feel right. Lower Decks is awesome but scratches a different itch. I never watched Prodigy (sorry). This show is a gift to us in our old age.
This is modern Star Trek at it finest.
competence porn
That’s really a key point. Transitioning from a world where Dan Quayle got eviscerated for ‘potatoe’ to a Trump presidency (or Johnson, Berlusconi, Putin, Abbot, AfD, blablabla) has left scars and certain needs when it comes to entertainment.
Reverse that polarity on the deflector and match the harmonic frequency. Mmmmm.
The show is just good TV. The acting is good. The music is too. The writing is very good to the point they are confident enough to push limits, get meta, and rebuff the audience’s expectations while still consistently delivering. Even the least of the episodes is well worth the watch even if it is just the once.
As a fellow GenX I could not agree more. I was absolutely hyped when Trek returned to cinemas only to get increasingly disappointed by a “star wars reboot proof of concept” approach to the movies.
When Discovery came around I was all in, but soon it turned into a shooting gallery pew pew show and became the first Trek show I abandoned mid-way.
Picard was a confusing mess where they made friends with Borg only to fight Borg next season… and then ended to the crowd’s applause because showrunners drowned it in memberberries.
Strange New Worlds is about discoveries and relationships and science. It’s goofier than TOS or TNG but in a nice, friendly way. It does not try to be edgy or shocking - it feels fresh and engaging, just like TNG, DS9 and VOY felt when they were first broadcast.
I guess we’re just about to wrap up the second season, so it may be too early to call - but SNW is way on the way to becoming my favorite Trek, not just of the modern era but of all time.
I agree with you on everything but Strange New Worlds being goofier than TOS or TNG??? Trouble with Tribbles and Sub Rosa would like some words
What I mean is not the comedy episodes, but general demeanor of characters. Lots of little silly quirks that are more common in sitcom characters than navy/explorers that the federation is.
Personally I love it.
I agree with everything you’ve said, but would add that I yearn for a return to the season length of TOS, or TNG.
These 10 episode seasons, or eight in some cases, since streaming’s become the default, are for the birds.
As a viewer I’d love to have (more than) twice the amount of episodes. Knowing the reality of TV/film production though - it would come at a cost of quality. We’d see filler episodes, we’d have much less elaborate sets, plotlines…
I think quality is better than quantity in most cases.
I’ve noticed that the movie and t.v. industry will not tolerate a static shot. They must always be moving the camera around for no apparent reason. Sometimes they just use a jumpcut every half second or so.
I’m not sure if they think it holds the audiences attention better, but I find it extremely distracting and annoying. Maybe I’ve gotten used to static shots from watching real people do real things on YouTube or whatever. It’s like trying to watch a scene on a ship in a storm with these scenes sometimes.
It’s definitely an industry change. Frakes has talked about how when he directs an episode now, the show’s director of photography tells him to keep the camera moving.
I will say that older Startrek episodes did have the soap opera feel. My guess is that they’re trying to avoid looking like a soap opera. To me that means audio as well as visual. They mix soap operas in the lower range at a higher volume for older audiences, cutting out the higher vocal range. It makes it sound like they’re in a closet or something.
@SkepticElliptic @Reva
I was noticing that same thing this week. Hold still!!!
You’re not wrong, but that’s why I like it. Before I get in to that.
Discovery had some good moments and some good acting but was overall a mess.
Picard was like someone gave a big budget to a fanfic and said “I’m not taking any notes.” When a bunch of good actors turn in a lousy performances you know the whole thing is broken.
Lower Decks is just all around fun and I really like it.
Back to your statement. I (American) grew up on TOS reruns in the late 70s. I watched old movies and TV shows that had the American 50s optimism for the bright shiny future, but in the late 70s it felt like we’d failed not just economically but more importantly socially. Trek showed a better possible future where we’d solved our problems and learned to work together. It had the 50s optimism for tech and the 60s lessons in social justice. Gene’s vision (and he was by no means perfect himself) was that humanity had solved its problems and that serious conflict had to be external. We were still humans with loves, losses, and petty squabbles but we didn’t have hatred for our fellow man. But we were still working to be better at accepting everyone. Kind of a throwaway but a great example is Boimler the snotty ensign telling legendary Captain Pike it’s kind of offensive to assume all Orions are pirates.
SNW has been a combination of goofy fun, serious topics, and gut-punches like Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach.
I still loved DS9 but it strayed away from the vision a lot. I especially hated the parallel universe bullshit which really undermined the point of the original episode. And it gave my conservative friends license to say, look if we’re not tough we’ll get rolled over and be the underclass. Either be the Terran Empire or be slave. I reject that.
I’m tired of gritty dark Trek. Especially in these times where the future doesn’t look good I want to see a shiny happy future where we overcome the challenges by being smart and cooperative. The sets are bright and polished and everyone is fit but the characters actually feel more like real people to me than TNG. I love that we got to watch Uhura’s progression from scared cadet to confident at her job for example.
I’m a bit older than you and gotta disagree one one point. The 50s was NOT an optomistic time for American SciFi. With the exception of “Forbidden Planet”, which heavily influenced TOS, 50s SciFi was dominated by paranoia, repression & fatalism. There were monsters under every rock. Our inability to control ourselves and our technology was dooming our future. The early 60s TOS was an optomistic breath of fresh air. Maybe we wouldn’t blow ourselves up after all
We might have to agree to disagree on the overall look of the thing, but I want to comment on the job part.
It’s always been a bit of a disconnect that you supposedly had this post-scarcity, socialistic, utopia where we have overcome our baser instincts and work cooperatively. But for some reason the dominant organization has military ranks and some people agree to sign-up to take orders and get thrown in jail if they don’t. That never quite squared. But in the real world it’s a simple matter of writing what you know and Gene was ex-Navy so that’s what Starfleet was modeled on. Doesn’t really make sense. It’s also why admirals are so often bad. He had a beef with them.
But yeah I agree I like it better when they talk about their places in Starfleet being a matter of choosing to be a part of it and it being bound by honor and duty. I don’t know why they’re doing that, if it’s supposed to be earlier in the development of the Federation, or if they’re just copying the Orville jokes. I do really like is Una. A lot of that is I always felt robbed by the fact that the network made Gene cut out the idea of a woman first officer after the first pilot and I feel like we’re finally getting to see what could have been with Majel in that role.
When I wrote the above I had not seen the musical yet. It was well-produced and fun, but I think it really undercut the show and I didn’t like it. It made the characters seem silly. Contrast with the Lower Decks crossover which I thought I was going to hate and I thought actually worked fine if you could ignore the cartoon thing. I didn’t mind that it was played for outright comedy because it still took the characters seriously. Much like the DS9 Tribbles episode.
I do think DS9 was great by the way, with a few exceptions, mostly the mirror universe stuff. And Miles calmly encouraging the Ferengi to go on strike because of course that’s what you do, was maybe one of the most subversive things Trek has gotten away with on TV. American media loves to hate on unions so that was a bolder than you might realize and I loved it.
I have to agree, Strange New Worlds is, hands down, the best Trek this side of TNG. I couldn’t get into Discovery because it’s too E D G Y. Like, it feels like the showrunners discovered emo a generation too late, and the whole show should basically be a linewire music video set to Three Days Grace or Linkin Park. It’s fucking insufferable, I just can’t reconcile that with Star Trek.
Lower Decks and Prodigy are both great, but don’t feel like real entries into the Trek universe and therefore are just kinda time sinks to keep you from being alone with your thoughts and reflecting on the void.
Picard was also sort of in the same boat as Discovery in terms of Edge while also trying to be a murder mystery and also a 'Member Berries special.
