I wasn’t expecting much from SNW final season, but this episode just does some stuff that seemed very uncharacteristic for Star Trek in my recollection (I’ve not watch TOS, so maybe there’s something similar in there). Anyone else seen it and had weird vibes about it?
Trying to avoid spoilers, but will probably get into spoilers in the comments if anyone else has seen it too. About to restart/watch DS9 with my partner (trying to get them into it), so I might not reply for a bit).
SNW has been pretty libby and meh for me from the get go
off the top of my head: the first season’s Omelas episode ending with Pike shrugging and going “yeah nah they can keep torturing kids to death this metaphor for the highest stage of capitalism is p rad i can’t refute this”, them suddenly making Pike Christian at the start of S3, and then the final episode of S3 revealing that genuine, literal ontological evil exists in star trek’s setting
Yes, I’m mostly just watching it to see how far gone the show can get at this point. They’ve repeatedly fumbled things terribly when trying to do anything at all meaningful. And even when they are doing some indulgent sillyness, they still manage to create some really dark implications quite often.
I’m starting to wonder if the announcement of the Section 31 movie was when anyone with a modicum of Trek Ethics ™ basically stopped caring at all.
section 31 is such a libass concept, like oh yeah we need to add a ton of fascist grit and leather trenchcoats to our hopefuel, cant just let commies have fun
I have so much beef with DS9 post-season-three.
Star Trek as a whole has had the potential for extreme libbitude from the start, don’t kid yourself. People love to point to the “conservative Trek fan” is the go to example of someone missing the point of media entirely, but frankly, it’s not an entirely unreasonable interpretation for someone to arrive at. Starfleet is a heavily America-coded intergalactic military force that is portrayed as the ultimate good, going out and doing endless “peacekeeping missions” that inevitably end up with armed conflict. Humanity literally made it to the “golden enlightenment” era because one Great Man made a warp drive all on his lonesome and met aliens. There’s even this undercurrent that Starfleet is basically inevitable, so you don’t need to put effort into changing anything, everything will sort itself out in due time so you don’t have to inconvenience yourself or make any sacrifices on a people-wide scale about it. It’s lib.
I tried the first three episodes of SNW. I liked the Vulcans flirting but the rest was pretty tedious and very Sorkin-esque. Like they have two veteran characters giving a new-recruit character, whose fatal flaw is not recognizing how amazing she is, a hard time. She rattles off a series of epic clap backs and then storms away. Veteran character 1 pauses and said “I like her” other one says “me too.” End scene.
A “well that just happened” could break out at any moment.
I remember they had an episode that had clips from jan 6 🥴. I saw another where the crew was hanging out in pike’s quarters while laughing at incredibly boring stories and drinking wine. The show always gives off super lib vibes like all nutrek basically. I once ran into a mormon grannie who had the dvd box set for either SNW or discovery in her house, if you’re curious about the kind of person who enjoys nutrek.
And actually I do get how roddenberry or berman trek has lib vibes (roddenberry made cowboy and cop shows before TOS and berman’s approach to TV was “more boobs and bigger!”) but they really aren’t as strong as nutrek.
It was season 3 level bad, but I am a sucker for dinosaurs. If you put a dinosaur on my screen I will have at least a little bit of a good time.
The stable time loop thing was rushed and too pat. Having Pike decide to let billions die on a hunch then having that all work out was very not Trek.
decide to let billions die on a hunch
Yes, this was the worst part for me by far. The other stuff was just sort of in the realm of goofy ST and not too far out of the SNW playbook. But just letting a whole species get destroyed because “that’s just how the timeline is supposed to go” was just bonkers from a ST show. Maybe if there hadn’t been the option to do something else it wouldn’t seem so ridiculously bad. I was hoping we would get to see the insect aliens at all, but they were just a prop to be destroyed. Really off-putting, and I’m going to be hypersus about the writing for the rest of the season.
I know Jessie Gender has done some deep dives on how problematic the SNW writing has been on a number of episodes, but this was just sort of in another galaxy of bad for me.
It would have been so easy to just tweak it so the timing barely didn’t work, they didn’t get the chance to take the shot, and they got all broken up about it, but then it still turned out to preserve the timeline. Same result but without the Starfleet captain actively deciding to let a planet die.
Jessie Gender’s vid on this episode was extremely critical, but she also has a video on the first 6 episodes of the season from screeners she got and she claims the rest of them are a lot better.
i hated SNW im probably going to get really
and put it on at our lgbt center so me and some drag queens can complain about it too loudly and make the whole party uncomfortable
