nicholaimalthus [comrade/them]

Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?

Thankfully Lower Decks fixed a little of this. Star Fleet is just one fleet organization in the Federation. With apparently the Andorians and Vulcans having their own ships running about doing their own things too. Like the Sh’vhal in Lower Decks, having to come in and save the Cerritos. Star Fleet is just the biggest of the bunch and more likely to be “out there” doing exploration instead of local system patrol or whatnot.

From a storytelling/production standpoint: Humans are easier/cheaper to costume. Human sized corridors easier and cheaper to build for doing shots with human sized chairs you can get out of a Lexus. So Starfleet is a very human fleet. Also in the early days of models, TOS just reused the enterprise over and over with different number combinations on the hull and a different name, so they don’t have to build new models. TNG they had money, but kept a design style going cause they had the molds and its cheaper to follow a style rather than start a new ship whole cloth. Thus why some alien ships in TNG are just models they built for the movies turned upside down or backwards and repainted. DS9 and on they started to breach using CGI so they got to expand a little but still had that same style to focus on. Modern trek they got lazy and copy pasted ships :P

Overall it is impossible to write a sci-fi and avoid human centrism in any fashion, even the abstract, because we only know the perspective of being human, and humans are the only ones we yet know writing fiction. Even in fiction where humans are say, the one amongst many, and not the most important in things, (And not throwing a fit about it like Anakin Skywalker. Looking at you Mass Effect) The story is usually from a human persepctive trying to understand the unknown alien ways that exist around them. Kind of like the impression I got from the Chanur novels by C.J. Cherryh but it’s been a decade or more since I read it so I may be wrong.

I haven’t seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.

A fair and understandable trepidation. I can say, watch SOME of Strange New Worlds. Some of it comes across very very well as a feeling of the old Star Trekish morality play episodic styling. And there’s even a Lower Decks crossover episode. Some of it however, is very much like Discovery and Picard.
If you want to avoid that particular feel, caution around these episodes All Those who Wander (Feels more like Alien than Trek, also just turns Gorn into space monsters). The Broken Circle (While a season opening, the directorial, cinematographic and story style just have a Discovery/Picard feel to them) Under the Cloak of War (It’s hard to trust someone that might be a killer) Hegemony (Again Gorn are space monsters for shooting and killing, also Scotty appears)

The rest go from strange alien relic stories, to wild musicals and alien entities turning the Enterprise into a storybook. Or actual episodes of moral quandry that don’t involve immediately siding with the “hard decision” typical in most other sci-fi writing.

It takes a lot of guts to run a show about the future, while in the midst of the evils and chaos in the world and say, “We will be better in the future, and things will be better too, even if we still struggle.” It’s nice when you can see it in a show, but rarer, and rarer, and rarer with each new atrocity and economic demise.___

The mindset that began around DS9 and strengthened in the new treks.

While DS9 had some good episodes and good characters, and great acting, it also created fans that began to take all the wrong moral lessons from it, or the ones the creators intended. Militarism, military fetishism, and “ends justify the means” thinking. It was probably a reflection of what would become more and more common amongst the US populace going into the 2000s and onward. Culturally we make excuse en masse for our conflicts or our war crimes or support thereof like Sisko because “It had to be done”. Related, I remember the scene with Dax/Sisko and the spent phaser coil from the ship. The “Take a good look people” and then a speech about pride of how long they keep on fighting and hanging that coil up on the wall as a trophy. I feel these sentiments have only carried on in the modern trek series even harder.

Which is why when Boimler in Lower Decks confronted his trigger happy, edgy, fellow crewmembers on the Titan with this line, I smiled<typo>. “I didn’t join Starfleet to get into phaser fights. I signed up to explore! To be out in space and making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. THAT’s boldly going. And you know what? I’d love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his transporter identical clone Thomas.”

And I feel that’s kind of what’s missing in the newer treks. The sense that the lives of these people in the future are different, and not always conflict focused. They have time to stop, to pursue a hobby, paint a picture, go on vacation, find out what it is to be who they are, and THEN go on a wild space adventure for the episode carrying that discovery their little downtime gave them to provide new insights. Perhaps the lives of the people in new trek are more relatable, because they to have rare downtime and are task focused nearly 90% of the time. But it doesn’t paint a picture that things will be better, only the same, with technology we don’t yet have.