What's your Star Trek hot take?
What's your Star Trek hot take?
Mine is that Discovery should have been a series taking place in the Picard era.
The Wrath of Khan ruined Khan's character.
Khan was introduced in the episode Space Seed, where his crew of genetically-enhanced tyrants are discovered hibernating on a ship, having been kicked off Earth centuries before. It’s a wonderful episode about opposing moral perspectives, and we get the positive and negative views on both.
You could say it’s about slave/herd morality versus master/strength morality, or you could say it’s about compassionate humanism vs tyrannical domination. Both these perspectives are given their space in the episode.
Khan talks about how they were actually persecuted for their reproductive schemes, how that’s an infringement on their freedom. That makes him somewhat sympathetic, but at the same time he accepts nobody’s rules except his own.
The most interesting part is how the crew of the Enterprise are actually enamoured with the strength, charisma, and freedom of the tyrants. The final scene (after they defeat Khan) show the crew almost lamenting how they can’t do the kind of tyranny that Khan does. They want it, they kind of respect it, but they acknowledge the importance of equality and rule of law, so they almost-grudgingly agree that they did the right thing by defeating him.
When they defeat Khan they exile his crew once again to a harsh planet.
Ultimately the episode demonstrates why fascism will always be alluring to men and women, and also why it’s important to make sure that it doesn’t take over.
Then we get The Wrath of Khan. Khan is no longer charismatic. There’s no philosophical discussion. Just a revenge story. And this is somehow the version of Khan we remember!
You could argue that Khan’s vengeful turn is what happens when the spirit of freedom is crushed and ostracized. That would make a good arc, and a good psychological study. But none of that is discussed. He’s just a bitter, resentful loser who will stop at nothing to hurt Kirk. Khan as a character is ruined, and the story isn’t even ten percent as good as the episode where he was introduced.
Edit: I had the name of the episode wrong.
Mine is that Ahsoka has become a bit overrated over the past decade. Yes, we grew up with the clone wars, we saw her grow into a fantastic character, and yes she deserves the attention she's getting. But everything she's in now seems to be just to get adult fans nostalgic for their childhood. I'm worried that I'm going to stop caring the next time Disney makes a new property about her. It's hard seeing my childhood die in front of me while I watch.
Moral of story: stop making sequels. I want another season of Andor!
Edit: I might be illiterate
The 90s aesthetic doesn't make the second gen series unwatchable, but damn if it isn't hella distracting. (It's the hair. And the wardrobe. But mostly the hair.)
As much as it is fun to revisit legacy characters and settings, they need to do a complete break, TNG style, and set a show somewhere where we can have new adventures with new characters. Lower Decks is somehow the closest to doing this and it's a member berry show. The constant revisiting (and retconning) is slowly suffocating the franchise.
Keiko wasn't that bad of a character. She wasn't a great character, but the biggest problem was that her actress, Rosalind Chao, had very poor chemistry with Colm Meaney, who in turn had great chemistry primarily with Alexander Siddig, and also with several other actors. This wasn't a problem when she was cast in "Data's Day" as the bride to be with nervous bride energy, if anything that's an asset in such a short time frame. But then expecting that to work in what is supposed to be a long-term marriage is what led to perception of her being all MIIIIIILES all the time.
Now, I don't know that mid to late 90s Star Trek producers would have been on board, but they should have written an amicable divorce plot for the O'Briens. Miles and Keiko clearly grew apart from each other over the course of the show. Between her extended trips to Bajor and the way she all but threw Miles at Kira, they were already about 85% of the way there anyway. A divorce would have been a great way to resolve that issue, and use Star Trek as it was always intended: to explore real life issues in a scifi universe.
Lower Decks deserves 7 seasons x23 episodes per season, with better quality animation for the space-based visuals
My hot take is that there is no way in hell an entire planet of people could be armed with planet destroying weapons and not immediately go around blowing up other planets.
You're telling me that there's never been a single rogue captain in Starfleets history that has just not started unloading photon torpedoes and plasma blasters and all kinds of crazy shit on a random planet just to see what the fuck happened?
Think of the mining potentials if nothing else? You can just sift through the wreckage rather than digging.
Wake up sheeple
oh boy. here we go.
Faith of the Heart is great. the arrangement is a little weak but the tune itself rules and the words capture Archer so well i was shocked to learn it was a cover and not purpose-written for that
The Wrath of Kahn is just ok. it's less Star Trek and more an action movie celebrating the characters that we love, which makes it just the same as the later movies everyone hates. the only ones that are really feature-length Trek are Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. Into Darkness would be listed there too if the plot didn't keep getting hijacked by Wrath of Khan nostalgia baiting, ironically
the soap opera vibes in Discovery make sense in universe. they never really got a chance to be a peacetime exploration vessel and then it turned out their captain was secretly a space Nazi. compare and contrast how Pike treats them and the Enterprise crew- he seems to be aware of this and treats them with kid gloves. whether or not that was intentional and/or if it makes for good TV is left as an exercise to the reader
Dear Doctor was a good episode. they didn't condemn those people to die, they offered them a multigeneration treatment that just kicked the can down the road. it's not about the decision so much as the decision to not make a decision (which granted, Rush tells us is still a choice). it's messy but that's the point. Cogenitor is the episode that deserves the hate. it may very well be the single worst episode in all of Trek
My hot take is that the dominion war was hot garbage. Just episode after episode of the least fun parts of trek for me. It has some stand out episodes, but it drags and I basically stop rewatches in the late seasons. I also think Sisko's ending sucks, he should have stayed with Jake. Lastly, the prophets were way better before they introduced Pah-Wraiths and made them way more mystical.
"Spock's Brain" has been memed as the worst episode ever, one of the ones we pretend doesn't exist.
My hot take is that it's not actually that bad. It's not a top tier episode, but it's perfectly serviceable. The worst actual thing in the episode is the sound effect used for the medical device to keep brainless Spock alive. I'll grant that. Otherwise, the central conflict is average Trek stuff. The scene where McCoy gets an ancient medical database downloaded into his brain is actually really neat.
I am convinced the legacy of an especially bad reputation of this episode is because it appeared on a few "Worst Episode" lists because of the personal taste of the authors and very few people actually watch TOS for themselves, but instead absorb it through articles. So it just became accepted that the episode was outlandishly bad.
Not much of a hot take, but Ronald D Moore was my favorite writer of the franchise.
Vulcans and Romulans having hand sex together is WRONG and doing it out where any child could see it on broadcast television is INDECENT!!
Star Trek should not be as expansive as it is, because the sheer volume discourages new viewers from engaging with it more than casually. It's the same problem as one piece.
New IP pls
TNG is boring as hell, genuinely, and a complete abandonment of the space opera formula that gave TOS its charm. The entire TNG cast is dull and equally as robotic as Data, who gets far too much emphasis every episode. It's exhausting and repetitive to constantly show Data making the same head and eyebrow movements, demonstrating emotions like irritation while everybody pretends he doesn't have emotions, and everybody prefacing every sentence with "Captain..." Frankly I think TNG was written to appeal exclusively to nerds who get off on watching people do things robotically. The only interesting character is Q because everybody else's dead performance makes him look like a superstar.