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I actually thought Raffi's home was a pretty good reflection of what it would be like if you had all the food, water, shelter, and healthcare you needed to live, but had mental and emotional needs that could no longer be met because of your circumstance. No one would starve to death in the Star Trek universe, but that doesn't mean you could never feel loneliness.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Rafi feeling left behind and fucked over by losing her career felt fine. But they were like heavily pushing on the "she's experiencing actual deprivation" thing with where and how she lives. Especially with the whole "I'm stuck out here in the desert" thing.
I mean, there is a huge difference between Raffi's shack and Picard's family vineyard. Federation society means you'll always have a place to live, but that doesn't mean it'll be a mansion. Star Trek isn't The Culture, they don't build plates for people to live on and have drones to build you any sort of house* your heart desires. So there is some kinds of deprivation in Star Trek, just not the kinds that will kill you.
*Though given that in our modern world, they've found a way to take 3d printers and "print houses", I would expect there would be replicators large enough to build houses. But maybe a writer could make the in-universe excuse that the technology can't quite handle something that big, just as you can't replicate an entire starship.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I would not describe any of those things as edge cases or border communities but yeah, the show is definitely about most of those things.
If I was describing what Picard was about in broad terms I'd say it's much more a Big Existential Threat and Big Core Idea show. The Mass Effect 3 vibes are super super strong for various reasons.
That's not really how it's ever been described before though. That was kind of a big plot point in DS9 even.
I'm not sure what plot point you mean, but the first one that comes up is that the Maquis worked hard to make their land livable, then Star Fleet gave that land to the Cardassians, and the Maquis ended up fighting (to the death) over that specific land, so it kind of leans into what I'm talking about. Not necessarily that land is scarce or anything, they could live anywhere, but that you can't just have the home you made on one world be transported exactly as it was and recreated on another planet, Star Trek technology thus far has not worked that way.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I'm not sure why you wouldn't describe them that way, it's what they are.
Mass Effect vibes, yes, not just 3. Mass Effect is also often set in border communities and deals with edge cases.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
The Maquis and colonists in general live out on the edge of the Federation where it's always been clear you can't necessarily get everything. Rafi lives on Earth. It's a big difference. As I said, DS9 is real explicit about that difference. I believe multiple times.
So why are we endlessly debating about what is and isn't Trek and constantly snipe at each other over what went on inside the heads of producers on shows 20-30 years ago, when today is something completely different?
Honestly, I would have been happy if he stuck to the vineyard for most of the season
Also, does anyone know where I can watch that price is right series, I am hooked
That's why you're starting to see people say good things about Enterprise, which is crossing that line as we speak.
And the fandom reacts to any news with derision and suspicion, fueled by an internet culture that thrives off absolute negativity. But that's just modern fandom in general.
As soon as you mentioned it, I had to listen to it. Those are the Rules.
ETA: @Quantum Tiger , think it's here.
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I love Odo but it's pretty hilarious to watch especially the first couple of seasons and see how gratuitously they're like LOOK KIDS IT'S MORPHING LIKE IN THE RECENT BLOCKBUSTER MOVIE TERMINATOR 2
I'd never thought of that connection, but you're spot on.
Speaking of unexpected connections, I was today years old when I realised that Tamlyn Tomita played both Commodore Oh in Picard and Laurel Takashima, the original first officer in Babylon 5. Nice to see people get pulled back into the big sci-fi shows.
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Anyway my point is she's self exiled out there in depression-land and blaming everyone else for it. The physical location and quality of the housing is a result of, not a cause of that.
This is less evident now in the age of streaming, but they were very up-front and in-your-face with it at the time. Odo's morphing got mentioned in every article and interview about the show and the "next week on" preview would always have a shot of him doing it.
It wasn't just DS9, though. It was in the zeitgeist. TV, commercials, everything. There were a couple years there in the early 1990s where you couldn't take a shit without morphing into a silver ball and flying away on a skateboard.
This, by the way, kind of speaks to what I think of as Real Star Trek.
Trek has always had an element of showmanship to it, of doing things to get butts into seats. Sometimes that means putting sexy people (mostly, though not always, women) into skimpy or skintight outfits, sometimes it means riding a trend hard and having hippies on your spaceship or making your entire movie look like "2001" or showing off your cool new blobby early CGI effect, sometimes it means celebrity cameos, sometimes it means big twist cliffhangers.
Not only is that fine - you do have to get butts into seats or you don't have a show no more - sometimes it's often led to the best parts of the show! Odo 100% was a zeitgeisty morphing-is-cool character. Seven of Nine 100% was a sex appeal catsuit lady. Guinan was 100% "oh shit a famous movie star wants to be on our show, think of something quick." They just didn't stop there.
To me, Real Star Trek is when you have three elements:
1) That entertaining exterior, however you get there (sex, action, etc).
2) Rock-solid craftsmanship. Characters who feel likeable and fleshed-out, plots that hold water, editing that doesn't dizzy and confuse.
3) A set of pretty radical, challenging core values (such as, but not limited to, "violence is a failure state," "people and institutions can be better," "you can have meaning and dignity in life without having to fight every day to survive").
If you take any of those elements away, you've got something that maybe has the Star Trek Multi-Platform Fully Leveraged Global Transmedia Brand on it, but isn't gonna be something I'm interested in. Discovery and Picard, for instance, largely failed step 1 for me: I found them boring!
Lower Decks, by contrast, at least has my provisional interest because "having jokes" is to me not very different from 'having morphing" or "having stacked lady."
Neat. In the early-mid 90s, if it wasn't Trek* or Power Rangers, I basically didn't notice. I think Titanic was the first non-SF thing I really got into.
*And I mean TNG. I remember my mom put on the DS9 premiere and it flew so far over my head it could've been an airplane.
"Voyager was terrible because it was terrible" isn't particularly helpful or compelling, but I'd point out that DS9 did a multi season arc covering a war whose loss would have meant massive genocide if not extinction for every spacefaring civilization in the alpha quadrant and we don't ever seem to use that as an explanation of why DS9 was bad. (Probably because DS9 was Good)
Enterprise wasn't bad because they lifted the stakes too high, it was bad because most of the main cast of characters were shallowly written and poorly acted. Like ugh them trying to finally do something with Mayweather in the last season and it was just an absolute trainwreck.
I think the description of CBS trying to "make another MCU" is very apt, though.
I think that a significant area where they're blowing it of late is with #3. "Challenging core values" has become "something to fight people in space battles about," and that's definitely bleed-in from the MCU and Hollywood generally.
Even better, you can preorder it at DriveThruRPG and download the beta version of the PDF right now.
I've read it and it's good stuff. The rules updates are great. They totally overhauled the XP system and it's so much better now.
I don't think so. While CBS is making a lot of Trek, there's no apparent effort to connect it all like the MCU or its copycats.
Picard doesn't reference Discovery at all and, given Discovery's second season, it's very possible Strange New Worlds won't either. It remains to be seen how closely tied Lower Deck will be to the rest of the franchise--my guess is not very. Section 31 seems like a direct spin-off from Discovery, but we'll see how much that matters. DS9 is technically a direct spin-off of TNG, but you can count the number of times that matters on one hand.
Speaking of, half of DS9 deals with a galactic conflict that culminates in a war that leaves half of Starfleet dead, multiple worlds in ruins, and radically alters the balance of power in two quadrants. It gets throwaway lines in Voyager and the TNG films. Trek has never had real arc-welding or crossovers outside its EU, and I don't think that'll necessarily change under Kurtzman.
I can't speak to Picard because I tapped out after 4 or 5 episodes, but Discovery is...it's complicated. The characters assert their values as strongly as in any Trek ever, which is why I fundamentally disagree with Grease-Covered Generic Youtuber #23 going "bluuuuuh, everyone in the show is so dark and cynical, bluuuuuh." They super aren't! They talk about idealism and science and hope all the time! Possibly too much!
The problem is that the actual plot never follows through and, indeed, always ends up in a giant apocalyptic space battle because of ???reasons???.
And then the space battle is also boring and badly-edited. So not only am I not getting what I wanted, I'm getting bait-and-switched badly. I asked for a Reuben and got a well-done steak.
Right. It's Video Game Dialogue now, instead of a thing the author was thinking about and writing around in putting the episode together. They know they have to acknowledge the history / DNA of speculative sci-fi but they don't know how to do it effectively anymore because Big Set Piece Battle / SFX Budget overshadows the whole thing.
Hard disagree. Voyager was terrible precisely because it fled from its own premise at almost every turn in favor of being The Next Generation-lite. That's where all the “wasted potential” talk that surrounds Voyager comes from. Enterprise made a big deal upfront about how there were no shields to raise, but ended up using “polarize the hull plating” to mean the exact same damn thing.
Better acting and writing could’ve made enjoyable shows in spite of those shortcomings, sure. But the inverse is also true: if either of those shows had stuck to their conceptual guns, some wooden performances and occasional leaden dialogue could’ve been excused.
I can't pull the episode up directly anymore but that's absolutely not the impression one gets from the scene imo.
But it is straight out of a much more standard non-utopian style of setup. Which is what it feels like.
jesus please don't remind me - there was a period of about 2-3 years after that movie where literally everything was morphing this and morphing that, not just movies and TV shows (Mighty MORPHING Power Rangers came out 2 years after T2), even commercials got into the act
Yeah. I'd like to believe that Raffi's living situation is essentially voluntary (inasmuch as it's an outcome of her not-great mental state, anyway) and it's an easy case to make but the actual scene on actual film does not do enough to make that case.
Which is part of why so many people - even people who otherwise like the show! - keep coming away from Picard feeling like it's doing some other sci-fi thing.
I personally spent five days morphed into a skateboard in the summer of 1991
I think either interpretation is reasonable. Part of the problem is similar to the rest of Picard's writing; they put the Raffi piece on the board, give just enough background information to drive the character's actions, but hand wave any details that justify those actions because there's just no time or budget! (The Rios holograms are another example of this.) The writing is so obviously causal in this regard -Picard needs to build a team, but there needs to be drama about this = Raffi needs to be mad at him for reasons that are never fully explained. All we know is what we saw in the scenes with the two of them after he walks away from Star Fleet, which isn't much.
God damn it
i'm the basketball
Between the massive death of the late 20th/early 21st Centuries in Star trek (eugenics wars and the nuclear war/post-atomic horror get most of the attention, but TOS also mentioned an ecoterrorist attacks between the two wars that killed millions and TNG referenced several other serious conflicts before and after WWIII like the Irish war and the destruction of France, and Voyager confirms that The Big One completely wiped out Southern California at some point) and colonization, Earth's population in Star Trek is 4.2 billion in 2370. There's fifty million on the moon and several hundred million throughout the rest of the system, then a number of the early colonies like Alpha Centauri and Vega had populations of hundreds of millions or billions.
Basically, Earth doesn't need to be any more urbanized than it already is, and a decent number of cities probably never got rebuilt to their pre-WWIII sizes. And without heavy agriculture it's natural environments are well maintained and as restored as they probably ever could be after the wars.
edit - speaking of takes but nobody here does that, at least that I can recall
edit 2 - so many takes this is patently false and i would say most fans who kept watching season 3 of enterprise, and especially season 4, would say "hey this is good now" at the time of air, I know I certainly did and we discussed it at length at the time.
That was a very 1960s, atomic age, can-do attitude. "In the future we'll have fixed the problem of deserts!"
In part because of the ecological thinking that Dune inspired, we've begun to have a more holistic attitude about these things and ask ourselves if deserts aren't a necessary part of a healthy ecosystem. You can see that in TNG with how incredibly careful and reluctant the characters are to upset any kind of natural state of affairs (like in "Home Soil" from S1, where we learn that terraforming is expressly forbidden on all but the most lifeless worlds). So it makes sense to me that there's a desert for Raffi to live in, that part of the scene doesn't bother me at all.