Official Star Trek Thread

They can do whatever level of diversity they want so long as the characters/actors are good and the story is interesting. An incredibly diverse or incredibly non-diverse crappy show still equals a crappy show and vice versa.
 
Perun said:
Good point, Star Trek is the last series you'd expect to push the boundaries of diversity on television.
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Different time, different television, different issues.
Uhura was black and that was it. She was in any different to others, in general behaviour or the stuff she does.
Which promotes diversity in the best possible way. She is different visually but she is the same human as the rest of them.

That level of subtlety is out of reach for current productions coming out of U.S.
I'm not talking about race, religion and sexuality, because that's simple. If you want a lesbian character then she goes for a girl in the episode(s) allocated for character development. Just like Picard and archeology or Chakotay and DMT trips.

We're bound to get a fucking hipster/goth/annoyingly eccentric girl here.
I hope I'm wrong, and the diversity is about something real like slight mental disorders and people coping with them in life. But I don't think so.

In any case I'm just ranting and I will be watching this show from start to finish regardless of the main character being Maggie T. herself
 
bearfan said:
They can do whatever level of diversity they want so long as the characters/actors are good and the story is interesting. An incredibly diverse or incredibly non-diverse crappy show still equals a crappy show and vice versa.
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Fully agreed, and what made me post, is the fact they pushed that 'diversity' thing up front.
Btw. TNG is timeless. The Original Series is not. Kids today don't see Uhura, Chechov or Spock (alien) as something interesting, and if you don't explain in the context, they won't get the point.
If one of the major plot devices is a misfit, keep in mind that we view her as a misfit from 2016 perspective which might not be true 20 years from now.
 
Zare said:
Different time, different television, different issues.
Uhura was black and that was it. She was in any different to others, in general behaviour or the stuff she does.
Which promotes diversity in the best possible way. She is different visually but she is the same human as the rest of them.

That level of subtlety is out of reach for current productions coming out of U.S.
I'm not talking about race, religion and sexuality, because that's simple. If you want a lesbian character then she goes for a girl in the episode(s) allocated for character development. Just like Picard and archeology or Chakotay and DMT trips.

We're bound to get a fucking hipster/goth/annoyingly eccentric girl here.
I hope I'm wrong, and the diversity is about something real like slight mental disorders and people coping with them in life. But I don't think so.

In any case I'm just ranting and I will be watching this show from start to finish regardless of the main character being Maggie T. herself
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That is a good point .. if they have a interesting character and that character is gay/black/whatever ... cool, that works If they end up with a character who is solely/mostly defined as being there for the sake of being diverse or some let's hit you over the head to show "we are diverse" ... that would be horrible.
 
To make a comparison, a show that has done this really well is Orange is the New Black. While not a sci fi show, there are some similarities - people of all races and sexualities and with varying mental issues forced into one place, and the characters are allowed to explore in a manner that is and seems entirely natural. Similarly, in Beyond,
the way Sulu's sexuality was highlighted was done in a way that it was entirely natural. It wasn't blown up, he didn't run around saying, "Hi, I'm Big Gay Sulu! I do Gay Things!", it was just that he had a husband and a child, as any other male character might have a wife and child.

It should be noted that diversity on the set of the original Enterprise was a lot greater than just having Uhura be black. Sulu was Asian, in a world where nuking two Japanese cities was less than 20 years in the past, and where Nixon had yet to open Red China. Chekov was Russian - Soviet, actually, as TOS was written when nobody could imagine the sudden collapse of the USSR that would occur about 25 years later. Even the American characters were disparate - one was from the Deep South in a time when white men from the Deep South were being painted as the poster child for all that was wrong with America.

The discussion of Earth diversity has been prevalent in other areas of Star Trek as well, explored both by DS9 and by Voyager, driven by Avery Brooks and Robert Beltram in their respective series. Those tend to be incredibly strong episodes of those particular series, but my personal favourite of those is Far Beyond the Stars (DS9 Season 6), which I think was a standout episode in a standout season of DS9. Of course, DS9 did very little wrong in their last 3-4 seasons.
 
Well put LC .. what made Far Beyond the Stars effective, IMO, was that it was a contrast to how things were compared to DS9s how things could be and the viewer could make their own determination to how things are "now" and that is what makes that episode really timeless as you the "now" changes and you can reevaluate.
 
Absolutely. And Avery Brooks deserves credit for pushing to include that identity as a black human in the show, for making that part of the Sisko character. And also for overcoming some of his reluctance to trivalize humanity's racist past, like in the episode Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang he makes an excellent point - that the 1960s was not a happy era for black people, even in Vegas. But he also sets that aside to push forward. Good stuff.
 
Bummer .. he was probably the best Admiral they had

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That episode (far beyond the stars) didn't leave a significant impression on me. I'll watch it again. I had last DS9 full run a lot of years ago.
On the other hand, 'in the pale moonlight' is really unparalleled (TNG is my favourite show, then DS9). It shows that humans have not changed. Push them hard enough and the ol' mentality is back.
 
Zare said:
On the other hand, 'in the pale moonlight' is really unparalleled (TNG is my favourite show, then DS9). It shows that humans have not changed. Push them hard enough and the ol' mentality is back.
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I can live with it. I can live with it.

Fun fact, the guy who played the Romulan Senator was from my town in Nova Scotia.
 
Just finished reading a TPB of ST comics by John Byrne. They are prequels to TOS. Very well drawn (as everything by John is). Enjoyed this look at the ST universe from other character's POV; some new, some familiar.
 
Finished reading an enjoyable ST book called My Enemy My Ally by Diane Duane from the 80s. She has written many ST books and very well captures the personalities of Kirk, Spock, Bones, & Scotty. Story is about Enterprise joining with a Romulan ship for a mutual mission (don't want to give more away).
 
I think the new movie is very good. They even brought back some good'ol treknobabble.
 
When I took my family to Washington DC to see Yes last August, we stopped by the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum and I took this photo:

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