First Star Trek: Discovery trailer

That might be a good indication that is is a Star Trek version. After all, I assume they want repeat customers.

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Heeeey. That’s not fair to Neelix. Sure he was annoying but he was largely supposed to be annoying. :cold_sweat: I could write a whole blog post about Neelix and his role subverting the “every man” character in literature. If I ever get my SF media blog going, I might just do that.


I’m happy there’s so much love for Voyager on this thread. I mean, sure, lots of hate too. >_> I really didn’t get the show for a long time but it’s become one of my favorite Star Trek series.

Star Trek isn’t dead. It just needs to evolve. With TOS, it regularly pushed the boundaries of what censors and local affiliates would allow to be aired. Up until a few episodes of DS9, the other series didn’t. As much as I love my TNG, it was even a bit behind the times with its attempts to replicate an 80s era office dynamic (and even aesthetic). The first two Abrams reboot movie were steps back to even before TOS the TV show and not just because they were set to come before TOS in a parallel universe caused by handwavium jello.

I like the new trailer. It’s not great. We can complain about the costuming if people want but I don’t really care to see a 2017 version of the predecessor to the best technology and fashion the 1960s could conceive of anyway.

As @clifford pointed out, there’s something to be really optimistic about in the new trailer and I can’t wait to see where they go with it.

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I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. I’m keeping my expectations well in check though.

Sorry, but I got no love for Neelix. In addition to being perpetually obnoxious, he harbored vaguely offensive echoes of colonialist native stereotypes IMO.

The Doctor, on the other hand, might in fact be the single most well-developed character in Trek history.

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You’re right, I’ve been basing my perception almost totally on a contrast between the way the writing staff treated Neelix vs. Chakotay. Thank you for bringing the colonialist aspect up. It was a blind spot for me and I’ll integrate that information into my understanding of his character going forward. :smiley:

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Been watching Voyager lately. I thought it had a rocky first season, but it gets better in the 3rd and 4th seasons for sure. The relationship between Janeway and Seven is well executed. Early seasons had a problem of packing too much into an episode, so the story of each episode tended to be uneven and rushed. They fix that problem later on and they had much better stories.

@Ignatius, do you think they did the mysterious Native American trope with Chakotay?

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Kind of a mix of things. Mysterious Native American combined with non-specific Native American, made up rituals. They didn’t really try to make Chakotay a fully realized character until later on and didn’t do it well when they tried. Add to that some of the complaints I have for a lot of the actors on the show. Robert (Beltran) didn’t get a chance to branch out and show the depth of his acting skills. Roxanne and Garrett didn’t really get to either. Tim Russ did quite a bit (and it always made for some really great Star Trek).

Some of the mistakes are ones ones X-Files made too. From what I’ve heard, the X-Files creators worked with NDN consultants to improve their representation on the show after criticism of Shapes. Unfortunately I’m having trouble finding references so I may have misunderstood what happened there.

ETA: There’s more than one Robert on the show. Clarified. :cold_sweat:

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Re: Chakotay.

IIRC the writing staff hired a “native American consultant” to try and get the culture right but he turned out to be some rando with a fetish for playing cowboys and indians who pulled everything out of his ass. By the time he was found out Chakotay was the stereotype mess he was.

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That makes me super-sad!

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I’m of two minds on Chakotay. On the negative side, I do think they used the NA trope in a semi-stereotypical way and they could have done a lot better - after what @Ignatius said, I’m more understanding since it sounds like they tried and just didn’t do a great job vetting their consultant. On the positive side, it was good to see a NA character presented in a positive light.

In a broader sense, I do like that Voyager at least tried to present a Federation that wasn’t quite so Western-centric. You guys know I’m in favor of evidence driven empirical medicine, but the fact that the Doctor was programmed with medical knowledge of other Earth cultures as well as alien ones was a small but important touch I admired.

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The early seasons of Voyager also had a bit too much plot repetition considering the premise of the show. If they had the fastest ship on that side of the galaxy and were trying to make a beeline for home then why did they keep bumping in to the same people? They also had a lot of “Gilligan’s Island” plots (“Could this be our ticket home??” Of course not because then the show would be over).

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Me too. Beltran got really screwed over because of it. But I found that he was a good “Dad” to Janeway’s “Mom” and he could have done a lot with the role if they had allowed him to grow in that direction.

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