echidna

Calling Star Trek racist, smacks of Political Correctness. Take each series in context and it was progressive for its time. Let's not forget Sulu and Chekhov, barely 2 decades after WWII & still in the midst of the Cold War, their characters represented a positive future beyond recent and current historical conflicts.

Sure the episodes are dated in today's context, but those who see morality in such naive absolutist terms should bear in mind just how dated and comical today's PC programming will be in another 20 years before they are so critical of the past.

mecca777

I actually think that Trek has become progressively worse with regards to stereotyping over the years. TOS had some amazing moments, like "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", and tried to present a genuinely multi-cultural vision of the future. I don't think you could reasonably call TNG or any of the subsequent series "progressive", considering how they've dodged or fudged issues like homosexuality and racial stereotyping.

Wyz_sub10

I can think of TNG episodes that dodged homosexuality ("The Host", for example) but I can't think of too many that dealt with racial stereotypes (it's not like Geordi's shuttlecraft was a pink Cadillac and Picard didn't *once* surrender to the Germans).

Do you mean 'racial' as in the races created for the show?

echidna

Yes, there seems to be 2 race arguments running here.

First that human racial stereotypes are encouraged, blacks, Asians, whites, etc, an argument I don’t subscribe to. While people like Chekhov & Sulu are openly proud of their cultures, I view this more in the light of the 1960’s atmosphere of xenophobia and distrust as the first steps towards a common message of humanity between various nationalities, quite a progressive model for today’s multiculturalism in fact.

Secondly whether or not it is possible to generalise someone on the basis of race at all, Klingons are like this, Romulans are like that. To an extent this is where TNG has become entangled in the Politically Correct quagmire, that racial / cultural generalisations are actually possible and often accurate, but not always.

I think my prime criticism of Star Trek is and always will be, that every episode has a fucking happy ending !!! By far this does more phycological harm to our audiences than any racial undertones.

brandon

This thread is pretty much useless. Star trek is purely a money making buisness. It is written by teams of writers who have no consistancy to just about anything. Thier two science advisers both have liberal arts degree's, and on the occasions that they do something other than insert technobabble, like make plot corrections based on sceintifically incorrect principals, they are almost always overruled.

The fact is you can't really say anything about star trek because its so damn inconsistant. There are general themes that come across more often than others, but even those can be drastically changed at the whim of a writer.

For example, the borg NEVER assimiliated anyone before they assimiliated Picard in The best of both worlds (which was just an attempt to kill him off in the case that Stewart didn't renew his contract at the end of that season). They were merely interested in technology. However, after that episode, they suddenly had a new purpose, they MUST assimiliate at ALL COSTS. Before you know it, they turned into the modern space vampires that you see in voyager.

The klingons in TOS were meant to represent the russians. However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, they were left without direction. So they were re written to be a violent war-like race that resembles Vikings more than anything else. ITs so bad that the entire fate of their empire can be decided by a knife fight!

My point is you can't really make any assertions from ST, after Roddenberry left the scene after TOS, the show lost any sense of direction. Its not impossible to come up with any timeline, because the show contradicts itself in so many ways.

For more information, check out stardestroyer.net

Zentraedi

I didn't think there would be so many people to bash Star Trek. Barely anyone refered to the topic. I see a mix of knowledgeable comments about Star Trek with the not-so-knowledgeable(to put it politely). It's a fun topic though, and I'm glad to see so much talk about one of my favorite shows.(at least TNG, never really watched the others) My Dad made be copies of the first five seasons onto Dvd and I was reminescing it all.

To comment on some of your replies:

I thought the original Klingons were to be like the Chinese, and the Romulans like the Russians.

If you ever read nitpicker's guide to Star Trek, you would see that there is a lot of problems with the logic in the program. Isn't that all television and movies?

I think Gene was pretty smart by making his alien characters have close to human faces. How can there be any depth to a character that doesn't have any human facial expression we recognize? That is a huge part to acting. Occasionly you'd see strange aliens that look nothing like humans, but no character development can come from such beings. They are there just to acknowledge the fact that yes, there is variety. Notice most Star Trek aliens just have there foreheads altered, a part of our face we dont look at much for communication. We have seen the technology of CGI displaying facial expressions perfectly, like Golem in LoTR and Yoda in Star Wars, and this will soon be something that you'll see on a show like Star Trek. To add, if you watch the SWII dvd features of Yoda, you'll see that this technology is cutting edge still, and very time consuming.

I mighthave to edit this later, as I can't really remember what else was said.

Just a point of view I'd like to add:

I still to this day don't understand what the fuss is about Genetic Engineering. How could altering your genetics do any harm? How can people get spoked about something so positive. Stupid movies and television.

Corwin

How could altering your genetics do any harm? Ask anybody who's been exposed to high energy gamma or alpha radiation.

The problems with genetic engineering are pretty varied. Most of mine can be traced back to not so much the technology itself, but who's using it and why. I don't like the agricorps messing with my food and I DON'T like not being told the food I'm eating is genetically modified. The industry has fought that sort of notification tooth and nail. I avoid pesticides. I don't like eating food that still has pesticides in it. Apparently I also have no right to know that the tomatoes I've just bought are genetically engineered to produce their own. (Just one example.)

It's not a simple issue, and there are legitimate concerns.

Marduk

"The problems with genetic engineering are pretty varied. Most of mine can be traced back to not so much the technology itself, but who's using it and why"

Bingo!
Just agreeing with Corwin

pz

I've got a few more problems than that with it. My main concern is that nobody knows what the heck they are doing: they're inserting genes into complex systems without knowing what all will happen.

Zentraedi

Yes being exposed to radiation is bad for you, but I don't see how that relates to any pitfalls in genetic engineering. Who is going around shooting gamma rays at people to genetcally manipulate them?


Your food is already genetically modified through farmers for millennia. This is just the next step to evolution, instead of relying on the age-old selection we are going a more intelligent route. Fear of something new is natural, kind of like worries of spacebugs from the moon. Why should you stop the progression of something out of fear alone. Let it stand the test of time like everything else. There is a lot at stake by not letting genetic engineering go forward. Maybe you have a problem with this, but why don't you balance the pros and cons, and you will know your wrong.