4 ms·
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present
by bigstrat2003 16d ago
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
- Arainach 16d agoWhich Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"? Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)? Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin? How about the one with the Nazi planet? Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version? Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race? No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
- krapp 16d agoIt was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition. Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist. Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing. Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant. Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in. Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
- ThrowawayR2 16d ago"Patterns of Force" was broadcast within living memory of WW2; that the Ekosians were villains was as uncontroversial as water being wet. I always suspected they went with the WW2 German uniforms for the bad guys for that episode because they could rent them cheap (there were plenty of WW2 movies filmed in that era) to save on budget. And the crew kissed aliens aplenty; an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things.
- Arainach 16d ago> an interspecies kiss was surely much worse than an interracial kiss to those who were uptight about such things. It wasn't. Neither NBC nor the producers expressed any concerns over interspecies kisses.