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Modern Star Trek is too concerned with checking boxes (europe.pub)
submitted 4 days ago by [M] to c/risa@startrek.website
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Excerpt from 'Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series'

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[–] 27 points 4 days ago (6 children)

If I’m understanding your post correctly, you’re saying that ‘60s Trek had representation because it was the right thing to do, while modern Trek has it because it believes it is more profitable. That leaves me with two death-of-the-author type questions:

  1. How do you know the motivations behind these decisions?
  2. If representation is a good thing for the show to have, why does the motivation behind its inclusion matter?
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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago (5 children)
    1. Roddenberry's desire to include social commentary in TOS has been discussed for decades and is well known.
    2. Representation that cares about the issues tends to be more honest and true than the tokenism and hand-puppet waving that more typically come from targeting a consumer audience.
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  • [–] [S] 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

    Regarding point 1, Roddenberry was indeed very open about his desire to make sure that when people watched Trek, they saw a version of the future where things were more egalitarian. He wanted a woman to the first officer on the ship, even though he also had Pike voice some consternation about having a woman on the bridge regarding yeoman Colt. He wanted people of colour on the ship. During the height of the Cold War, he wanted a proud Russian character on the ship, and even made up a story about being a Russian magazine article criticizing the lack of representation. He wanted people of colour on the ship. According to George Takei, when he tried to convince Roddenberry to include gay representation, Gene said that he wanted to, but couldn't push for that with the studio. TOS famously had the first scripted interracial kiss in a North American television show.

    As you alluded, even if we recognize that some of Roddenberry's motivations were money and ratings oriented -- like having Chekov's hair be styled like the Monkees' to appeal to a younger demographic, or his introducing the Vulcan IDIC he could sell merch of it -- we also have to acknowledge that he was dedicated to portraying that egalitarian future as much as he could given the constraints of the era.

    But how do you know the motivations of the people making those decisions today?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    But how do you know the motivations of the people making those decisions today?

    You can just look at the writing.

    Sometimes on shows and movies they have fan service references to things from the franchise's past. You can spot that, right? They show you the thing, make sure it's center frame to be sure that the audience knows you have that thing they know in the show. But there's no point to it in terms of the plot, it's solely there to say to the audience "look we have this thing you like in the show!"

    Many shows do the same thing but with political issues. They mention it, but they don't bother to have a plotline about it, or have it integrated into the story line. It's just there so they get credit for mentioning an issue exists. They don't want to actually discuss an issue too deeply, that would be too controversial.

    Actual social commentary is very rare in TV shows and movies now. What we have now is social fan-service. Just references to issues, not actually taking a risk and doing anything meaningful with it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago*

    If your question is sincere you should do a little searching on Hollywood or Show Biz pandering to the loudest voices on social media. There are tons of stories from entertainment celebrities, writers and other insiders, attesting to how executive decisions respond when social media deifies or demonizes something. I support giving people the benefit of the doubt, but in this case you could just as well ask how we know Trump doesn't have a secret plan for an egalitarian utopia.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 days ago

    I never said I doubted Roddenberry’s intentions. I don’t particularly doubt the modern team’s, either, though.

    Representation that cares about the issues tends to be more honest and true than the tokenism and hand-puppet waving that more typically come from targeting a consumer audience.

    That sounds fair to say in general, but it’s not very specific. Which characters in modern Trek would you say are token minorities?

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