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Ursula Le Guin on Star Trek: TNG (1994)
- uxcolumbo 4y agoThese two snippets stood out for me: "Violence, on The Next Generation, is shown as a problem, or the failure to solve a problem, never as the true solution." "Lots of young people watch it, too, of course, and, recently, at a conference about science fiction, one of them told me why: “A lot of science fiction shows us a future just like now, only worse,” she said. “I like The Next Generation because it shows us a future I could live in.” " Compare the old shows, TNG & DS9 with the new shows - Discovery and Picard. Alan Kurtzman and team have completely destroyed the spirit of Star Trek - totally ignored what Roddenberry tried to achieve - which is nicely encapsulated in the two snippets above. Instead Kurtzman & team created something bland, superficial with no depth by desperately and selfishly imprinting their own mark on the Star Trek world without respecting its history. Even the great actors like Stewart, Spiner or De Lancie couldn't save it. ---- PS. This is a good summary of the new Trek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaK7jGyY4Wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaK7jGyY4Wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BiyH8lENRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BiyH8lENRs
- Jalad 4y agoRedLetterMedia does a fine grained overview[0] of Picard, where they brutally dunk on the show over the course of hours of commentary. I wholeheartedly agree with their takes too which is sad, because I really enjoyed Star Trek as well [0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hfQdf93e63I&list=PLXiyyhCy2ANpZxINTHkuQCa9KF0rzcZ_h&index=3 https://youtube.com/watch?v=hfQdf93e63I&list=PLXiyyhCy2ANpZx...
- morelisp 4y agoIIRC (it's been a while since I watched it) RLM's take is very different than the parent's "great actors like Stewart, Spiner or De Lancie" - RLM places a significant amount of Picard's failure on Stewart being given far too much latitude to chew scenery and bounce around heroically. Edit to reply to both replies below: Go read up on Stewart's influence on e.g. Starship Mine or Captain's Holiday - he never cared about maintaining (at least what OP says is) the spirit/lore of TNG. Is it really surprising that the guy who loved Starship Mine would, when given more creative reign, push something like Picard? It ain't coming (only) from the writers... Chabon for sure can do the genre-heavy psychodrama just fine.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoI thought RLM's take was Steward didn't care at all about maintaining the spirt/lore of TNG but just cashing a check?
- uxcolumbo 4y agoAgree - I couldn't understand how Stewart could agree to take part in this - surely he must have read the script. The only thing I can think of is that he's 80 something and getting out of the house, being part of a bigger project again, acting, meeting your old friends etc - it's exciting. So he compromised.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoThese shows don't always write the scripts ahead of time, so he might have only see the pilot, which wasn't that bad.
- bsder 4y agoFor "Picard", I wholeheartedly disagree. Supposedly, Picard was kicked out for a "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" level speech that pissed off EVERYBODY in Starfleet Command. That they never showed. You have an actor practically synonymous with Shakespearean scenery chewing and you never have him deliver the actual speech that supposedly kicks off the whole series?!?!?! That should be an unending shame to the series writers. Furthermore, had the writers created that speech, it probably would have created a much better series as it would have set up the boundaries of the world properly for the series writers to operate within.
- paulryanrogers 4y agoAgree that missing speech really left a bad taste. My guess was it must have been years ago to explain why the series was beginning when Picard was at such an advanced age.
- Swalden123 4y ago
- unethical_ban 4y agoSometimes even if they have points, their analysis is asinine. They could hold their own in a debate, but do I really want to see TNG through their lens? We get out of it what we want, and they search for technical inconsistencies in search of flaws.
- morelisp 4y agoDS9 is perhaps not the show to hold up to prove violence is never the answer. In the Pale Moonlight for example is quite explicit. I agree overall Picard was a thematic and narrative mess and Discovery needs someone who can stick the landing they're missing in the last two episodes of every season. But Roddenberry isn't god; some of his future was good in the 70s but naive or trite even by the 80s and regressive by the 90s; and some of it was never good to begin with.
- uxcolumbo 4y agoYes true - Pale Moonlight was a great episode though. Zero violence is most probably a Utopian view and maybe the writers of this episode wanted to pull back a little... after all the whole Alpha Quadrant was at stake. And also good point about Roddenberry. I meant more the principle of showing a better future and how humanity overcame its problems. It made people think.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI think DS9's violence is just a side effect of one of it's key intentional differentiators that it's "darker". I think it's still fair to say that the violence is portrayed as at best a necessity, and never a goal or a definition of success. The only positive light or satisfaction or pride is maybe that of professionals performing their task well.
- goodpoint 4y agoYou missed the point. Star Trek never showed and endlessly peaceful universe, or a Federation that refused to act in self defense. But it systematically depicts war and violence in general as not being a solution, rather a problem to be solved, a wound to be healed, an understanding to be found. [yes, there has been few shocking exception, including Archer in Enterprise torturing an alien]
- morelisp 4y ago> You missed the point… it systematically depicts war and violence in general as not being a solution With absolutely zero respect, I think you missed the point of the episode I named, widely considered one of the best episodes ever. They literally murder someone in cold blood to start a war, to solve the problem they might not otherwise win it.
- foobarbecue 4y agoI agree with you about Discovery and (ugh) Picard. But calling those THE new shows? What about Strange New Worlds? I love SNW because it's very much in the spirit of TOS and TNG. And while I wouldn't say Lower Decks /respects/ the spirit of early Trek, it certainly shows an awareness of the utopian philosophy!
- uxcolumbo 4y agoI haven't watched it yet - I stopped following Kurtzman's projects, as the other shows were such a disappointment. But if you think SNW is better maybe I should check it out.
- ho_schi 4y agoHigh Five for Lower Decks. It is TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT as animation series at quality level. Cannot say something about SNW because Paramount decided to tease people with another streaming platform. Back with TNG the did it right, offered the series to all TV-Stations instead partnering with one. The drawbacl, the first seasons of TNG were low on money.
- drdec 4y ago> Back with TNG the did it right, offered the series to all TV-Stations instead partnering with one. That wasn't a choice, if one of the networks wanted it, there's no way it would have been in syndication.
- shadowgovt 4y agoAnd if I recall correctly, it wasn't so much "offered" as "inextricably bundled to the TOS syndication rights so if networks wanted to keep running that series they had to bankroll a season of TNG." Smart business practice but kind of rude to the stations.
- foobarbecue 4y agoJust torrent it. Seems like the industry isn't bothering to sue anyone these days.
- ho_schi 4y agoYes. We should mention that - aside the actors - the writers rescued TNG. Ronald D. Moore for example. Gene Roddenberry nearly ruined TNG with his lawyer. But nobody is perfect, right?
- SkyMarshal 4y agoI think the reorientation around conflict actually began with Rick Berman after he took over from Roddenberry back 90s or early 2000s or whenever it was. He explicitly stated that he wanted more interpersonal conflict between the crew of the enterprise. His notion was that Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the way the crew worked together was just not realistic. Of course he missed the whole point, that it may not be realistic today, but it was an aspirational vision of a better future. I watched TNG religiously as a kid, but once Berman took over and began infusing pointless interpersonal conflict, I lost interest. That said, everything I’ve seen of Strange New Worlds so far is excellent, it’s like the old Roddenberry vision reincarnated.
- morelisp 4y ago"Star Trek got bad shortly after I grew up" is not the thoughtful take anyone seems to think it is.
- dendriti 4y agoIs that what OP actually said?
- such12 4y agoCan you give an example of the kind of conflict you thought was pointless? Early TNG seemed like a new age cult to me, and then it became more real without losing the positivity.
- liveoneggs 4y agoearly TNG, literally, re-used TOS problems and solutions (aka plots). It was like a best-of playlist. Absolutely ridiculous as a television show.
- Aloha 4y agoThis isn't uncommon in TV series. How many I Love Lucy plots were recycled later on? All in the Family? I can go on, but great writing and plots are often reused later.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y ago> "Lots of young people watch it, too, of course, and, recently, at a conference about science fiction, one of them told me why: “A lot of science fiction shows us a future just like now, only worse,” she said. “I like The Next Generation because it shows us a future I could live in.” " I'll argue this isn't a problem with Star Trek as a problem with our society... in general we have seen a general bitterness in media since 9/11. Imagine a show that you saw before then and generally whatever you imagine will be far more positive than post-9/11 television.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoMakes me think about how after the 2008 and occupy wall wall st protests being squashed that the Hunger Games was super popular.
- goodpoint 4y agoThe bitterness has little to do with 9/11.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- regular 4y agoI really, really wanted to like Picard (as I'm sure most fans did). But it sucks. It's boring-ass gibberish about... um, I think it's about people who hate androids. Right? Terrible. Remember how the Phantom Menace's central premise originated with unjust taxation, but didn't show any hardships or physical struggles caused by said taxation? Also shit.
- pessimizer 4y agoThe weirdest part is that the Star Trek revival was shepherded by Rick Berman, who leaned very conservative, but the show stayed techno-utopian. Now that the show is explicitly woke (in the modern sense), it's become unbelievably authoritarian and militaristic. I had to bail on Discovery when the Federation turned down an (gimmick-verified) honest offer of universal peace at the conclusion of a season because of their deep desire to punish and humiliate the enemy that was offering it to them. I hope the Federation was written as the evil empire from then on, but I'm not going to be there to see it. In the world of Discovery, the return of the Federation is obviously the biggest threat to the galaxy. ----- edit: I have to admit that the Federation turning down the offer made me more angry than anything I had seen in fiction for years, so if it was a trick that they played with or overturned in the next season, they sure got me. I mean they lost me, because I bailed, but they got the emotion they were going for.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIf you're referring to the Emerald Chain plot, I think you may have missed the point. The party offering wasn't interested in rule of law. There was no long-term peace to be had with authoritarians who would only be content with peace as long as it was peace that put them above the law.
- pessimizer 4y agoThat's exactly the point of view that I'm condemning, so it looks like I did understand it and they didn't reverse it. The "rule of law" (with scare quotes because there is no in-universe government of the galaxy to be violating the laws of) was the desire to punish the "authoritarian" who was making an honest offer of unconditional peace. Please save us from that rule-of-law, and deliver us to the authoritarians.
- shadowgovt 4y agoYes. All of Earth would have had peace had they merely accepted the rule of Khan and his supermen. ... of all the deviations from Roddenberry's vision one could criticize Discovery for, I think this criticism fits least. (They didn't "reverse" it so much as Osyraa died in the subsequent events that season and since the Chain was authoritarian, it collapsed without its mafia boss at the head. Dictatorships are such fragile things).
- shadowgovt 4y agoI'm old enough to remember the Activision / Viacom lawsuit in 2003 when Viacom was accused of so badly mis-handling the franchise that they'd ruined the value of Activision's exclusive license. Whatever our fond memories of the older versions of the show, they stopped resonating with audiences. And a franchise that cannot adapt dies. The new Star Trek is a different flavor from the old, but it has to be. Because the kids that grew up watching the old Star Trek didn't see that future manifest (if anything, history has played out in a direction bending away from it). I'm honestly impressed at the new material's ability to bridge the core ideas of the original shows to a language that modern audiences speak. It's pulling in viewers again, and that's vital to the franchise surviving.
- ginko 4y ago>The new Star Trek is a different flavor from the old, but it has to be. Because the kids that grew up watching the old Star Trek didn't see that future manifest According to the Star Trek timeline we're 4 years away from World War III.
- midoridensha 4y ago>According to the Star Trek timeline we're 4 years away from World War III. That seems pretty accurate.
- sangnoir 4y ago> Because the kids that grew up watching the old Star Trek didn't see that future manifest On the contrary: those kids are making the tech real (communicators & ever present computer acting as a digital personal assistant using voice communication)
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe Star Trek universe is far more than its tech, and those other things are far more important.
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- mikebenfield 4y agoI don't entirely disagree with you about old vs new Trek. But I think it's important to avoid the idea that Roddenberry was "trying to achieve" some grand vision. What Roddenberry was "trying to achieve" was to make a TV show, and then he was the target of hero worship by some overzealous fans, and then he bought into the hype himself. It really weakens the argument to continue to present Roddenberry as a bold visionary when this is known to not really be true.
- uxcolumbo 4y agoFrom what I read, he was inspired by futurist Jacque Fresco and Roddenberry wanted to show that a better world is possible and challenging norms that are holding back humanity. That's what I meant with what he was 'trying to achieve' at the beginning with TOS. I also read that later in his life he believed the hype about himself and became difficult to work with. Whether it's true or not - I don't know.
- GordonS 4y ago> I like The Next Generation because it shows us a future I could live in. I watched TNG as a kid, and maybe this is why I liked it so much. Recently, my 5 year kid came running to me with his tablet during his allocated screen time, all excited in the way that only young kids can be. He was going on about how great it was he'd "killed them before they killed me!"*, and I just can't stop thinking about what an awful moment that was :( Maybe we need to sit down and watch TNG and DS9 together... * He has a Kindle Kids with an age limit set, so he's only playing curated games from the Amazon Kids collection
- nytesky 4y agoI think this may add value for a discussion on Roddenberry’s legacy. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/plane https://theoatmeal.com/comics/plane And the best new Star Trek is Orville, clearly carrying the mantle from TNG.
- diffxx 4y agoUrsula K. Le Guin pulls off the rare trick of being an incredible writer _and_ critic. She was well ahead of her time and I hope that we can collectively catch up.
- Animats 4y ago> Ursula K. Le Guin pulls off the rare trick of being an incredible writer _and_ critic. Yes. Read her "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie", in "The Language of the Night", where she discusses what makes fantasy read like fantasy.
- gommm 4y agoWhat differentiates the older Star Treks from the shows that have come out in the last 20 years is the optimism. Instead of a depressing vision of the future, Star Trek dared to show a better future. Instead of only having conflicts drive the story forward, Star Trek's main drive was the thrill of discovery, asking questions about what it means to live in this Galaxy. I miss having shows that convey a feeling of hope for the future. The current mostly dystopian grimdark sci-fi is an easy way for unimaginative writers to make their world feel more real at the expense of destroying that hope. It's sad that even the new Star Trek movies (post 2009) and shows courtesy of Alan Kurtzman and J.J. Abrams have completely lost that spirit of the previous Star Treks. Instead it's a bland insipid take on the Star Trek universe by people who have no clue of what makes Star Trek Star Trek and do not respect it.
- ho_schi 4y agoYep. The older Star Trek cared about the story and acting, despite the struggles in the first seasons of TNG the succeeded. The newer ones lacking (any) logic and are just quick action. PS: ST Lower Decks is great :)
- yamtaddle 4y ago> The newer ones lacking (any) logic and are just quick action. It's not just that they're "not Star Trek"—they're terribly written even if you pretend they're not Star Trek and are just generic sci-fi. Picard especially. My god, what a trainwreck. Like five people, zero of whom were good writers, assembled the plot using the telephone game. SNW is, somehow, extremely good. No idea how that happened. And yeah, Lower Decks should have sucked (that trailer, ugh) but is in fact quite good.
- pmontra 4y agoStrange New Worlds is a welcome change on this trend. About TNG, who am I to argue with Ursula Le Guin but it lost me after only a few episodes because it was all talking talking talking, nothing interesting to see. Plenty of shows like that (no scifi.) My friends loved it.
- photochemsyn 4y agoI read all of Ursula K. Le Guin earlier works and really liked it, not so much the post mid-1970s work. Much of science fiction has a curious political-social bent, it must be said - people often imagine the kinds of worlds they'd like to see, socio-politically speaking, and then create them, and their stories take place in those worlds. A notable exception is Frank Herbert, whose works had a more meta-political flavor, i.e. he wrote about theories of politics and how they might play out in the future, without championing any particular outcome. Hence, there's less of the preaching-to-the-choir stuff in his work. It's very interesting to see how people in tech line up with their scifi - for a while, there was a 'Star Wars' vs. 'Star Trek' divide in some tech circles, perhaps mainly promoted by Peter Thiel: https://www.thewrap.com/peter-thiel-star-trek-communist-star-wars-capitalist/ https://www.thewrap.com/peter-thiel-star-trek-communist-star... The fact is, you can find whatever socio-political flavor of science fiction you like, for example Orson Scott Card is probably the ideological opposite of Le Guin in many ways. Iain M. Banks of the Culture Series fame is perhaps a hybrid of Asimov and Le Guin on sociopolitical matters, sped up a bit, with more chaos and violence. Note this all has a kind of 'big space opera' theme, regardless of whether, you have leftist or rightist sci-fi preferences. William Gibson, in contrast, revolutionized sci-fi by writing about the people who fell between the cracks, those who got run over by the system and were left to fend for themselves as best they could (basically, sci-fi noir). Maybe a Captain Picard / Darth Vader crossover series would be funny... comedic sci-fi works sometimes. Galaxy Quest was memorable.
- djur 4y agoCard may be the ideological opposite of Le Guin, but he was also in a sense one of her disciples. His work shows a great deal of her influence, including the borrowed concept of the 'ansible'. _Speaker For The Dead_ is his big attempt at Le Guin-style anthropological SF. Of the two of them I'd rate Le Guin higher (despite having a username borrowed from Card's work), but I don't think this has much to do with Card's politics, which never really came through in the books I read. (I understand that he has later books with more explicit politics, but I had stopped reading by then.) Thiel's take on Star Wars vs. Star Trek seems like a case of someone trying to align their likes and dislikes to be mutually reinforcing, which is a typical human foible. I've never noticed any political divide in fans, and a lot of people enjoy both.
- djur 4y agoI appreciate that a solid paragraph is about how Worf and Picard are hot. Some retrospectives on TNG are so focused on the high-minded, cerebral elements that you'd think each episode was a symposium on different aspects of the human condition. One of the remarkable things about the show is that it managed to include some of these lofty themes while also having a strong populist appeal -- weird aliens, starship battles, interpersonal drama, and sex (to the degree permitted on early '90s broadcast TV). For every "The Inner Light", there was a "Captain's Holiday", the episode where Picard goes on vacation to the sex planet Risa and has an Indiana Jones adventure involving a mysterious ancient artifact, an attractive and unscrupulous archeologist, and time travelers. TNG wouldn't be so great if it had just been one or the other.
- sfpotter 4y agoThe most entertaining part of TNG and DS9 to me are the lengths they go to dance around the obvious fact that Risa is The Sex Planet. Everyone seemed to have a great time with the gag.
- shadowgovt 4y agoRoddenberry had some pretty specific ideas about the sexual liberation people in the future would experience that definitely wouldn't fit on TV in the '60s and still wouldn't fit on TV in the '80s-'90s.
- morelisp 4y agoThey also wouldn't fit onto TV today, for entirely different reasons (i.e. the homophobia and the fact actresses aren't considered a personal bonus to showrunners anymore).
- block_dagger 4y agoSTTNG continues to be one of the best fiction series I’ve ever experienced. Just the opposite of what they did with the show Picard. A real tragedy of art.
- trothamel 4y agoAs an interesting note, this (from May 14, 1993) was published 9 days before "All Good Things...", the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoOne of the reasons I enjoy Dr. Who so much (all of it, but here I'm mostly talking about the 21st century incarnation), is that at the end of each episode, I feel more wholesome than when it started.
- SevenNation 4y ago> It’s hard to remember that at first I didn’t like the program. It's also easy to forget how bad the first season was: > Reviewing the series as part of the DVD release in 2002, Marc Bernardin for Entertainment Weekly said of season one, that it was "almost hard to believe ... just how bad much of it was". He thought that the first season was too similar to the end of the "cheesy" original series but said that it "succeeded where it needed to: It introduced viewers to the characters who would carry the torch through six more seasons", and gave it a score of B+.[72] Tor.com reviewer Keith DeCandido was less positive, feeling that it "earned" its reputation as the poorest of The Next Generation's seven seasons because "the episodes were uneven, poorly plotted, ineptly scripted, and acted by actors who were still trying to figure their characters out". He gave it a score of 5 out of 10.[73] The season has been given an 80% "fresh" rating by review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.[74] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_(season_1)#Reviews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation...
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- secondcoming 4y agoI disliked every episode Lwaxana Troi was in. I had no time for her character. I never saw the point of Guinan either. The ship already had a counsellor.
- midoridensha 4y agoThere's a big difference between a trained and certified counselor who has a professional clinical detachment, and a bartender that you can really talk to.
- pencilguin 4y agoIt is hard for people today to understand the world that "Troi" surfaced in. At the time TNG came out, mass culture was obsessed with what was called "channeling", which was taking dictation from "spirit guides" that everybody was supposed to have riding around on them. Everybody knew people who claimed to have a spirit guide, somebody who had been a person two or twenty centuries ago, yammering fake-profound spiritual commentary on everything. Whole racks in bookstores were full of "channeled" books that today you can't even find any of at used bookstores or even thrift shops. It has all washed away, and people are embarrassed about it now. Troi started as a sort of parody of the channelers that must have been especially thick on the ground in LA where, I guess, the writers lived. She kind of outlasted the phenomenon. That is why she never had anything to do, because what was there for a Ship's Channeler to do? They mostly talked at great length but made no sense, but she couldn't be doing that when they were getting shot at.