I've been watching ST:Voyager on netflix lately. First time I've seen these episodes since they aired.
as usual, I have comments on and observations as if TV was real life.
Bear in mind, I like Star Trek. I think it is mucho better than Star Wars. The Enterprise can defeat the Death Star because
Star Trek is better than Star Wars.
I realize, there might be some people who disagree that
Star Wars is better than Star Trek, but this thread is about Star Trek.
I'm up to season five of Voyager and such rapid viewing makes certain patterns more obvious than when watching it 1 show per week.
The writers portray alien races as single job function extremists. It's no wonder that Humans are better than any other race, when every other race seems to glom into a single extreme political stance or social function.
Hozari: a race of bounty hunters. Gee, T'mee, what do you want to be when you grow up? A bounty hunter, duh!
Malon: a race of garbage dumpers. Even the guy who disputes, "we're not just garbage haulers, I'm an Artist!" has the corellary, "but I haul trash to pay the bills"
I imagine that on ST:TOS, this writing style was a novel means to illustrate the problem with extreme view points like hating somebody because the color of their skin was the opposite of yours.
Used occasionally, it's a useful tool. But packed into episode after episode, season after season and then watched serially in rapid succession on Netflix, it becomes blatant and old.
If they were writing ST today, I would expect to see an episode where one of the current political parties ideals was shipped to an alternate Earth where only they ruled, and then the crew would travel there and see what was wrong with that world.
If ST hadn't bludgeoned the heck out of that tool, it might have been a decent episode and a subtle illuminating tool. Now it would be seen as a political attack and bias by the opposing party viewpoint.
PS. I also hate the dumb as heck way that the 24th century has to manually distribute DataPadds with information on it. This show was airing in the Windows95 era.
You've Got Mail has been in the theatres and America is familiar with the concept of e-mail. we can give the Okuda's credit for inventing the iThing, but apparently they all missed the point that data is TRANSMITTED OVER NETWORK, and not passed around manually. We might as well have ensigns in miniskirts walking around with clipboards to be signed.
Here's how tech was supposed to work: Each crewman is issued a DataPadd that is keyed to them, maybe it's DNA secured. It has wireless access to the ship's server and thus can show them messages, task lists, act as a remote screen into the system, etc. Neelix does not need to fracking walk around the ship handing out messages from home.
Anyway, that just about covers my view on what's wrong with Star Trek, despite the fact that I like Star Trek.