#Discovery finale

[biblioflyer]

To boldly go backwards?

Unpacking the attitudes behind people burned by Burnham. No, not those people. The other people. The ones who authentically seem to care about something other than protecting their image of Columbus as a cool dude.

This will be a series. If you’re reading this on the day it escaped my queue, the rest are queued for a 1 a day. If not, all will have the ‘Star Trek ethics’ tag in common. If I’m really on the ball, I’ll come back later and edit in links to the other chapters here.

I can see it now. Enterprise had its 1701-D cameos, Star Trek Picard had its Enterprise-G moment, and now Discovery’s finale will likely be controversial on the basis of Burnham placing the Progenitor’s technology out of reach of pretty much everyone. There will be many different ways of contemplating this, but I think you can sum it up as:

Did Discovery “give in” to techno-pessimism and in doing so undermine a core theme of Star Trek?

I don’t personally think so, but you might and I think I know why. Burnham is kind of, sort of applying a reverse Prime Directive on the Federation. She comes away believing that the Progenitor tech should not be entrusted to one person or even one civilization, and that ultimately it's unnecessary. So she “throws it away.” 

By throw it away, I mean she has it yeeted into a Black Hole where theoretically more advanced civilizations than the Federation can access it if and when it comes to it, but by that point it will likely be more of an anthropological curiosity to them rather than a new technological singularity.

Thus, the series finale of Discovery is one in which some observers might feel that a core premise of Star Trek, that of techno-optimism, is betrayed. While the grousing I think is likely to be hyperbolic, not all of it is necessarily a mask for something more nasty, feral, and likely to get a person kicked off any reasonably well moderated platform if expressed in the open.

What you think the core values of Star Trek are may actually be just that: a different understanding of what the core values are, and thus a different understanding of when they have or have not been undermined. I have my own take on those values.

For instance I despise Section 31 as a concept and storytelling device, believe it has directly attacked one of the most important core conceits of the setting: its fundamental optimism, and the damage this embrace of cynicism has done is continuing to ripple through Trek into the present day.

Yet at the same time, I also understand Trek as a set of modern fables, that the Federation is not a real place, and that it has a narrative function. That function being to model becoming aware of and confronting that which we should find repugnant and unacceptable in our own society if we were not desensitized to it.

Thus Burnham’s choice is one that can be read a few different ways, and that’s without getting into whether it was satisfying as a climax. While it is often derisively referred to as “NuTrek”, a label that both describes a worldview and a storytelling style anathema to those who prefer the more professional affectations, high regard for Classical Education, and “competency porn” of TOS & TNG or the more “neo-realist” shades of gray of DS9; Discovery is in many ways a fusion of the Treks of yesteryear. 

Sometimes it can be a lot closer to The Original Series in worldview than one might imagine in its willingness to indulge moral gray zones: “the Vulcan Hello” being a prime example. Other times it affirms the TNG obsession with personal and civilizational virtues as a thing one actively commits to upholding even when there are tremendous, even transformative benefits to be reaped by conceding. The refusal of the Progenitor tech being one of those examples.

This is something I’m going to unpack in subsequent posts in an attempt to try to sidestep some of the nastier fissures in the fandom and uncover what I think may be a genuine difference in the worldviews and orientations of some fans rather than, at best a distaste for the story structures and affectations of Discovery, and at its worst naked hostility to a crew that isn’t predominantly Anglo-European, heterosexual, and male. 

Next: What is the Kirkian ideal?

[teaktty]

I'm going to rewatch the Discovery finale soon, anyone want to live watch it with me?

either with messages or vc?

i'll wait 30 mins before I start, unless anyone is fast

[theotterpenguin]

it’s always “let aang swear” or “let zuko swear” but y’all are missing out on the comedic potential of katara being the one who has the dirtiest mouth. she swears like a sailor but is just better at hiding it than everyone else because she doesn't want to influence aang or toph, and tries to keep up pretenses of being proper.

after all the time they spent fighting each other as enemies and sparring as friends, zuko’s the only one that knows this about her but no one believes him.

(for those who question where katara could possibly learn to curse, i ask - have you ever assisted women through childbirth in a world where epidurals don't exist? katara has. like c'mon. she knows all the swear words).

[dougielombax]

Holy SHIT!

No way!

No FUCKING way!

New shit has come to light! (To quote The Big Lebowski)

Somebody found the original source for the backrooms image!

(Screenshot is from the backrooms subreddit, credit to the uploader (I forgot their username))

And an additional pic from Tw*tter as well.

Holy shit!

At LAST!

I’m gonna include a few web links for good measure.

(THE NEW!)

I knew it would happen eventually but still.

This is incredible.

To me at least (shut up).

Feel free to reblog.

Apparently it’s an indoor racetrack now or something like that. Somewhere in Wisconsin.

Backrooms Kart when? (PLEASE DON’T! THIS IS A JOKE!)

[daydreamerwonderkid]

All Tim does is eat hot potato chip and lie.

You do NOT have permission to repost my art.

[trekkie-polls]

For bonus points share one thing you wish would have happened in that extra season

Edit: So many comments about Prodigy not being on here! Well, I am a Prodigy fan too. But I left it off because last I heard Netflix picked it up. Now I don’t have faith it will happen, but nonetheless there is at least one more season planned and maybe more.

On the other hand, even though the last seasons of discovery & lower decks haven’t finished airing, they both have planned end dates.

[trek-tracks]

Sarek REALLY regrets teaching his children this

[poebrey]

Imagine getting adopted after your parents were brutally murdered through circumstances that were seemingly your fault, being told that it was so you could serve as both an experiment (for your foster father to prove humans could follow Vulcan teachings) and a tool (for your foster brother’s development), seemingly failing both of them, then later being told by your foster mother who you thought you had a healthy relationship with that the reason you were given as much love and affection as you were when you were a child was because it had to be denied to the child she really wanted to give it to, her real child. Oh and that she thought you were the reason your family was falling apart. Michael is a better person than me because I would’ve said fuck everyone and taken a nap.

[robbiebear540]

Happy Star Trek Day!

[spkyart]

Under the red sky

[eruptedinlight]

hello hi the romance punched me so hard in the throat i almost snapped my laptop in half

[biblioflyer]

Picardism

This is part of a series analyzing the finale of Discovery and the conflict between different aspects of the Star Trek fandom. This is in part inspired by and a reaction to a conversation between Andrew Heaton and Tim Shandefur on the Political Orphanage podcast. For more like this, use the Star Trek ethics tag.

I’m going to do my best to present a steelmanned version of what Sandefur’s critiques of the TNG era of Trek are (and this overlaps with Undiscovered Country because while they are a century apart in Trek continuity, they are contemporaries as far as the society and social thought that produced them as stories.) This will be challenging because, to be honest, I found him much less fair and cogent when it came to TNG.

His two big gripes are cultural relativism and techno pessimism.

The cultural relativism is expressed through the much stricter interpretation of the Prime Directive that is in practice in TNG. The sort of interpretation that makes it incredibly difficult, absent some extreme rules lawyering, to save preindustrial people from natural disasters of a sort they cannot possibly fathom, let alone effectively confront on their own. 

Although not directly mentioned, the lack of interest in addressing the collapse of Tasha Yar’s world, a failed Human colony, is also often lumped into the category of Prime Directive cowardice or an overcorrection to the perceived ill advised or straight up imperialist interventions of the Cold War.

I’m not going to exert a lot of effort arguing against this, but suffice to say I think complaints about the Prime Directive in TNG are overstated namely because every time it would have been depraved not to violate the Prime Directive, Picard violates it or allows the crew to contrive a highly legalistic solution that embraces the spirit of the Prime Directive but is probably coming very close to breaking the letter. 

I’m vaguely aware of an Enterprise episode that is widely considered to represent genocide through inaction, but I have not personally seen it.

Notable for Discovery, Burnham violates the Prime Directive pretty flagrantly in Season 5 and in a manner very reminiscent of something Kirk would do, and she gets away with it. Not even a hint of a reprimand.

The other manner in which cultural relativism is expressed is in the arena of astropolitics. 

Picard is notorious in some circles for his willingness to let his ship take a punch and keep trying to talk the other side down. 

The Cardassian peace treaty is widely regarded as not worth the isolinear chips it’s stored on as well as a brazen and immoral giveaway to fascists who were definitely always going to use the treaty to take a breather before their next round of massacres and land grabs.

The Federation treating the Maquis as terrorists instead of freedom fighters is also viewed as rather dystopian.

The Klingons continue to be slavers and brutal thugs and the Federation continues to politely tolerate it in this era.

Sandefur is intensely critical of having made peace with the Klingons at all in Undiscovered Country given no requirements that they change their ways, only wide eyed assumptions that with enough time and engagement they would mellow out. The Klingons are even described as being members of the Federation in a few early episodes before this was quietly retconned to mean allies.

For some bizarre reason that I cannot fathom, Sandefur takes Azetbur and Chang as objective observers and mouth pieces for the writers in Star Trek VI when they describe the Federation as racist and imperialist during the dinner party aboard the Enterprise. 

It's insightful and alarming that some people don’t seem to grasp the concept of an unreliable narrator or can’t tell the difference between being lectured by an omniscient narrator and characters spouting talking points lifted from the real world so that their perspectives feel familiar without granting those perspectives legitimacy. That this phenomenon exists shouldn’t surprise me but in a way it's revelatory because it really goes a long way to explaining how bizarre fandom discourse often is.

Credit where credit is due, Sandefur’s opinions on detente with the Klingons and Cardassians are not ones I’d characterize as unpopular. They’ve especially surged with the Russian invasion of Ukraine although optimism about civil engagement with the morally distasteful already was under siege throughout much of the 21st century. 

While I am personally unabashedly pro-Ukraine with some pragmatic caveats, in other arenas, such as discourse about the Federation’s toleration of unjust societies, I find that there is a very problematic tendency to try to use analogies about individuals or small groups, i.e. confronting a school yard bully or protecting your favorite bar from racist thugs, and scale them up to fit situations involving millions or billions of people. 

Throw in a dash of magical thinking about just how directly you can translate GDP disparities into useful objects in the real world, cultural fluency as it pertains to understanding what makes people move on from traditional (read: "backwards") norms or riot, and the precision with which spur of the moment decisions can be made in stressful situations, and you can easily wind up with a theory of change that paints the Federation as cowardly for not doing exactly the sorts of things that in the real world have at various times left much of Africa, Asia, and South America shattered and under the thumb of warlords based on the theory that the people were not fit for self rule.

Next: Is "Picardism" anti-progress? Also, I try not to get very upset about the idea of applying imminent domain laws to immortal aliens who are, like, just really into farming.

[all-mirth-no-matter]

mirth’s otps | matthew + diana

once the world was full of W O N D E R S, but it belongs to humans now. we creatures have all but disappeared; daemons, vampires and witches. hiding in plain sight, fearful of D I S C O V E R Y, ill at ease even with each other. but as my father used to say: in every ending, there is a new B E G I N N I N G.

[m0rbs]

Disco Spock is destroying my autism today for some ungodly reason. Someone kill me I desperately need to put him in a salad spinner

[elliewiltarwyn]

just a song before i go

a lesson to be learned

traveling twice the speed of sound

it's easy to get burned

i wouldn't exactly call Ellie a ladykiller, but there are multiple women she's loved throughout her career where things just didn't or couldn't work out...

bonus: the ones who did;

[stra-tek]

The Weirdest Places on Federation Starships

Engineering on the U.S.S. Enterprise (2009 Star Trek) has a maze of coolant pipes which of course lead to a giant blender

The classic movie Enterprise-A has a 78 deck turbolift shaft, numbered bottom to top when she ship should really only have 20something decks, numbered from top to bottom

There's an entire swamp on the deck beneath the arboretum on the U.S.S. Cerritos (Lower Decks), full of hallucinogenic spores

The U.S.S. Franklin (Star Trek Beyond) has 3 decks on the outside, but an infinite turbolift shaft on the inside

But the U.S.S. Discovery NCC-1031-A tops everything with The Great Turbolift Carverns hidden between her decks, stretching off into infinity and full of what look like giant electrical transformers and entire buildings