#I know I know there’s no prodigy and no Picard

[t0ast-ghost]

If you could serve with any star trek crew what one would you choose?

Feel free to explain why below

[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.

[quasi-normalcy]

The Borg Queen has now been killed at least 4 times on screen. 5 if you count the time that Agnes shot her. She has become the Davros of the Star Trek universe

[xchronicles]

Brett my beloved, you deserve the world... but everything else ... help

Listen, we all know Janeway's not going anywhere since she's alive in Picard S3, but I always had this dread that the reason why no one mentioned Chakotay is because he's.................... And I am very much going to NOPE that. There is a reason people weren't big fans of Picard and it's because it was heavily leaning on tragedy in a franchise that's supposed to be about a bettter future.

Brett deserves S3 and beyond. Kate deserves to take time off from giving (outdated) ideas.

Read the full interview here.

[cantsayidont]

If I seem overly harsh about STAR TREK, a big part of my problem with it has less to do with my criticisms of its values than with the franchise's attitude toward its own ideology. From a storytelling standpoint, the fact that the franchise's stated values (optimism, tolerance, diversity) are often at odds with its actual values (colonialism, American nationalism, assimilation) is not necessarily a bad thing, and the franchise is often most interesting where these contradictions are clearly expressed and examined. Where it becomes galling is when the franchise and its fans become so invested in those stated values (which are sometimes admirable, but often threadbare even on their own terms) that they elide or outright deny the obvious contradictions and hypocrisies the actual narrative presents.

In the recent shows (DISCOVERY, PICARD, LOWER DECKS, STRANGE NEW WORLDS), this has begun to manifest in a peculiar kind of heavily sentimentalized faux-nationalist propaganda, where simply depicting the symbols associated with Starfleet or the Federation is expected to produce an emotional reaction the narrative doesn't necessarily support. The way "We are Starfleet!" has become a rallying cry throughout all four of those shows is particularly unsettling to me. Obviously, Starfleet is a fictional military organization in a fictional interstellar empire in a pop sci-fi postapocalyptic future that hopefully won't come to pass (at least not the way modern TREK says it does, which involves, among other things, the nuclear devastation of our world and the systematic extermination of every single Jew and Muslim on Earth), and even within the narrative, Starfleet's actions and motives have never been without stain, up to and including the very recent canon. So, who or what does that slogan really serve, and why are the writers and producers pushing it so hard? My perhaps cynical assumption is "to promote real-world military recruitment," but at best, it's indicative of a weird determination to sell the idea of STAR TREK rather than STAR TREK itself.

[mascara-pyjama]

My one compliant with Prodigy is that Zero said math.

They are British! They smoke fags behind Tesco! They won't drink tea made in a microwave! They eat beans on toast!

They'd say maths! They know it's a plural word, they know mathematics contains multitudes! They wouldn't say math!

[aceofwands]

idk man I just think of all the franchises you could try to make the Next Big Thing by creating a bunch of new shows and movies, maybe don't pick the one with the notoriously nitpicky obsessed with canon fandom ?? if you don't plan on applying any sort of consistency to the world, characters, alien cultures, entire ethical and moral framework of the universe, etc etc ????

[a-demonic-duck-of-some-sort]

“Hey, boss, we’re finalizing the scripts for the new season of our family-friendly Star Trek show. You know, the one that’s meant to be accessible to people who have never seen a Star Trek show before?”

“Did you remember to include a pivotal plot point pulled from each season of our least family-friendly, least-accessible show? It has to be a discreet, unrelated thing from every season, remember?”

“Of course, boss, and we threw in a whole bunch of characters from and callbacks to a 170-episode show from the 90s just to make sure it’s extra-accessible to the kiddies!”

“Great, now just put it on a different streaming service from literally every other Star Trek and we’ll be good to go!”

[comradecowplant]

*sniffle* well, that's that then. voyager has made it back to the alpha quadrant (albeit i'm not the biggest fan of the "timey whimey antics save the day" means utilized but i've seen similar plots play out far worse so i'll accept it with minimal brow furrowing), my mind & heart are full with a new sci-fi obsession, and while i know i said i'm diving into TNG asap, i do think my little ticker needs a minute to process & say goodbye to the star fleet captain who-- no matter how good picard/other captains i can't wait to meet are-- will now forever be My Captain(tm), and her intrepid crew (i'll even miss the doctor!) of the U.S.S. Voyager o7

[youngpettyqueen]

been thinking about the viewing order for my remaining Treks and I think ive settled on

Discovery

Strange New Worlds

Voyager

Prodigy

I have seen Voyager, but only most of it. I havent seen all of it, so I want to do a rewatch so that ill have seen everything, like I did with TOS leading up to TAS + the movies. I also need to watch Nemesis at some point because ive been avoiding watching that movie forever but if im gonna be true to my goal of watching every single Trek, I need to watch it, so maybe once im done Enterprise ill put that on and then move on into Discovery

[autismtrek]

Upcoming Poll!

Hi everyone! I’m going to be running a bracket in the format of other tumblr character polls for the best autistic Star Trek character.

Please tell me your favorite autistic-coded Star Trek characters so they can be added to the bracket! I will wait a couple days to start it because I want people’s input, especially since I have only watched golden age Trek but want to include characters from all series if possible. You can submit characters through asks, replies, reblogging the post with a comment, or submissions.

The ONLY RULES FOR SUBMISSION are that the character has to be in Star Trek at least once and you need to consider them autistic-coded. You are welcome to submit characters that aren’t widely considered to be autistic but you think they are. Side characters and one-time characters are also welcome - I will include as many of them as necessary to have a big enough bracket.

I went ahead and made a sideblog for this so that people who want to see the poll won’t have to see other posts too.

Characters I have already decided to include in the bracket are under the cut, so if you don’t see your favorites here, make sure to submit them!

Main Cast (Definitely Will Be Included):

B’Elanna Torres

Benjamin Sisko

Data Soong

Deanna Troi

Elnor 

Emergency Medical Hologram

Geordi La Forge

Jean-Luc Picard

Julian Bashir

Katherine Pulaski

La'an Noonien-Singh

Odo

Samanthan Rutherford

Seven of Nine

Spock

Sylvia Tilly

Tuvok

Worf Rozhenko

Zero

Important Side Characters (Next In Line For Inclusion):

Lwaxana Troi

Reginald Barclay

Rom

Side Characters Who Appear Rarely (Included If There’s Not Enough Other Characters):

Jack

Lauren

Patrick

Sarina Douglas

Tam Elbrun

[acatwithstockings]

One of my favorite things to do is to talk to fellow Trekkies on the english side of the internet and just sprinkle in some agressive german pronouciation of names .

It's not that i like the german pronouciation quite far from it, i just find it hilarious.

[a-fistfull-of-datas]

I am very curious about how people go about watching star trek since there is so much of it

I am also curious about the order in which you watched the series as a whole, so let me know!

please reblog for a larger sample size

[xchronicles]

If you want to feel good about J/C in Prodigy, I suggest listening to this interview which is great and has the completely opposite vibe from what's Kate been saying.

[cantsayidont]

#food for thought #i don't agree with all of this (e.g. i reject the idea that PIC decline was caused by its attempts at breaking the mould #and showing a story outsie Starfleet because that's something the franchise can't support #i think it's that the franchise cannot support a narrative structure like PIC s1 attemtped but that the current corporate climate #which is so laser focused on regurgitating safe nostalgia and not antagonizing the loudest (though not largest) part of the fanbase #was unwilling to stick to its convictions and really give the show a chance #and what killed it was the haphazard stumble towards that older 'safe' narrative structure #but i'm with you on a lot of the other points op and i really like this perspective #will be thinking about this quite a bit #star trek #star trek meta #imperialism #nostalgia #loss of nuance #and a whole range of other issues…

@procrastinatorproject— I want to clarify that I don't think the inability to meaningfully tell a story outside Starfleet was the sole or even primary problem with PICARD, and I agree that the most insuperable issue was ultimately the corporate fixation on nostalgia (even at the expense of internal coherency, like the fact that the third season worked overtime to negate the endings of the previous two). However, I think PICARD did serve to illustrate, not for the first time, that onscreen STAR TREK media is poorly equipped to show life outside of Starfleet even when it tries, for reasons that go back to the decision in TOS to not ever return to Earth in Kirk's own era. (Obviously, the TOS cast movies do, but it was expressly off-limits in TOS itself.)

Because onscreen STAR TREK media has almost always focused heavily on Starfleet, much of what little we see about civilian life in the Federation is defined oppositionally: This is what the characters did before or after being in Starfleet; this is where the characters go when they're on leave from Starfleet; this is a thing certain characters are doing because of a conflict with Starfleet (e.g., the Maquis or the Rangers); this is a thing some characters are doing that Starfleet must resolve, etc.

The problem this creates is that even if the franchise tries to focus on life outside of Starfleet — which PICARD, especially in the first season, actually tries fairly hard to do — the onscreen media can't and doesn't ever really want to avoid Starfleet entirely. Moreover, it's painfully obvious that the writers (and probably the network) regard any serious critique of Starfleet or the Federation as unsustainable, so if the story formulates any such critique (which PICARD also does repeatedly), it's either hand-waved away or simply dropped in short order. (This for me was the most disturbing flaw of PICARD, which raises various troubling points about the Federation, Starfleet, and Picard himself that never get any organic resolution within the story.)

So, even where part of the story takes place outside Starfleet, it's still defined in terms of Starfleet, all roads must lead back to Starfleet, and nothing bad anyone may say about Starfleet (even stuff like torturing prisoners of war, which Picard and Crusher don't deny and don't seem to care about!) can ever be allowed to stick. Those are significant structural issues, and they aren't limited to PICARD, although PICARD slams its head on them repeatedly.

(I specify "onscreen media" because the novels, comics, and games have not necessarily been quite as handcuffed by those issues. For instance, the old Pocket Books paperback series had stories that were told almost entirely from a Romulan or Klingon point of view, and a couple (like DWELLERS IN THE CRUCIBLE) that weren't Starfleet-centric at all, although the editorial tolerance for that seems to have dropped off sharply by the '90s, probably for the same reason the comics writers were told to stop adding OCs beyond the main cast.)

When attempting to critique the values of a long-running franchise like STAR TREK, it's important to draw a distinction between superficial issues and structural ones.

"Superficial" in this sense doesn't mean "minor" or "unimportant"; it simply means that an issue is not so intrinsic to the premise that the franchise would collapse (or would be radically different) were it changed or removed. For example, misogyny has been a pervasive problem across many generations of STAR TREK media, which have often been characterized by a particular type of leering-creep sexism that was distasteful at the time and has not improved with age. However, sexism and misogyny are not structural elements of the TREK premise; one can do a STAR TREK story where the female characters have agency and even pants without it becoming something fundamentally different from other TREK iterations (even TOS, although there are certainly specific TOS episodes that would collapse if you excised the sexism).

By contrast, the colonialism and imperialism are structural elements — STAR TREK is explicitly about colonizing "the final frontier" and about defending the borders, however defined, of an interstellar colonial power. Different iterations of STAR TREK may approach that premise in slightly different ways, emphasizing or deemphasizing certain specific aspects of it, but that is literally and specifically what the franchise is about. Moreover, because STAR TREK has always been heavily focused on Starfleet and has tended to shy away from depicting life outside of that regimented environment, there are definite limits to how far the series is able to depart from the basic narrative structure of TOS and TNG (a captain and crew on a Starfleet ship) without collapsing in on itself, as PICARD ended up demonstrating rather painfully.

This means that some of the things baked into the formula of STAR TREK are obviously in conflict with the franchise's self-image of progressive utopianism, but cannot really be removed or significantly altered, even if the writers were inclined to try (which they generally are not).

What I find intensely frustrating about most modern STAR TREK media, including TNG and its various successors, is not that it can't magically break its own formula, but that writer and fan attachment to the idea of TREK as the epitome of progressive science fiction has become a more and more intractable barrier to any kind of meaningful self-critique. It's a problem that's become increasingly acute with the recent batch of live-action shows, which routinely depict the Federation or Starfleet doing awful things (like the recent SNW storyline about Una being prosecuted for being a genetically engineered person in violation of Federation law) and then insist, often in the same breath, that it's a progressive utopia, best of all possible worlds.

This is one area where TOS (and to some extent the TOS cast movies) has a significant advantage over its successors. TOS professes to be a better world than ours, but it doesn't claim to be a perfect world (and indeed is very suspicious of any kind of purported utopia). The value TOS most consistently emphasizes is striving: working to be better, and making constructive choices. Although this can sometimes get very sticky and uncomfortable in its own right (for instance, Kirk often rails against what he sees as "stagnant" cultures), it doesn't presuppose the moral infallibility of the Federation, of Starfleet, or of the characters themselves. There's room for them to be wrong, so long as they're still willing to learn and grow.

The newer shows are less and less willing to allow for that, and, even more troublingly, sometimes take pains to undermine their predecessors' attempts along those lines. One appalling recent example is SNW's treatment of the Gorn, which presents the Gorn as intrinsically evil (and quite horrifying) in a way they're not in "Arena," the TOS episode where they were first introduced. The whole point of "Arena" is that while Kirk responds to the Gorn with outrage and anger, he eventually concedes that he may be wrong: There's a good chance that the Gorn are really the injured party, responding to what they reasonably see as an alien invasion, and while that may be an arguable point, sorting it out further should be the purview of diplomats rather than warships. By contrast, SNW presents the Gorn as so irredeemably awful as to make Kirk's (chronologically later) epiphany at best misguided: The SNW Gorn are brutal conquerors who lay eggs in their captives (a gruesome rape metaphor, and in presentation obviously inspired by ALIENS) when they aren't killing each other for sport, and even Gorn newborns are monsters to be feared. Not a lot of nuance there, and no space at all for the kind of detente found in TOS episodes like "The Devil in the Dark."

[frommybookbook]

Earlier today, some friends and I were discussing one of those Star Trek captains memes. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that pit the captains against each other with pithy descriptions that glorify and champion the men and shit on Janeway. The ones where Picard is describe as the wise teacher and scholarly diplomat; Kirk is the brave trailblazer and lovable rogue; Sisko is the take-no-shit commander and more-than-human uniter; Archer is the quick thinking explorer and the avenging do-gooder; Pike is the empathetic Boy Scout and the quippy everyman…and Janeway is an irrational murderer and erratic loose canon. And, as usual, I went on a bit of a rant. They (looking at you @redsesame, @epersonae, and @emi--rose) told me to share it here so, if you trudge through this whole thing, blame them.

Does Janeway make some questionable decisions throughout VOY (Prodigy!Janeway is a different conversation for another time)? Yes, absolutely. But here’s the thing: every captain does. What I still love about her though and will champion until I'm blue in the face is that Janeway owns her decisions more than I think any other captain does.

Picard and Kirk hide behind the Prime Directive a lot. That's the reasoning Picard gives for not interfering in the drug running in “Symbiosis” and leaving the Ornarans trapped in dependence on the abusive Brekkans. His line, “Beverly, the Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well-intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous." is a cop-out we hear from him time and time again, especially to Dr. Crusher, as she is the one who most often calls him on his bullshit.

Kirk does the same thing. We still this when he leaves Shanna and the other thralls behind in "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and when he forces Elaan of Troyius into a marriage she clearly doesn't want because it's "for a greater good." And all the while, he's got Spock at his side giving him confirmation bias that he's following regulations.

And Sisko, Sisko makes some of the most horrific and destructive decisions of any captain and uses not only the Prime Directive to fall back on, but he's got the Dominion War to blame. He poisons an entire planet to get back at one man he feels betrayed him in "For the Uniform" and don't even get me started on his actions in "In the Pale Moonlight".

Enterprise is so unjustly shat on by the fandom that I almost hate to bring some of Archer's questionable choices into this conversation but I'm going to do it anyway. Similar to Sisko and the Dominion War, Archer has the threat of the Xindi in his back pocket to excuse some of his worst behavior. If Tuvix is the worst thing people can point to for Janeway, then we have to talk about Archer and Sim, the simbiont created solely to be a living tissue donor for an injured Trip, a procedure that will kill the living, breathing, sentient Sim. Archer orders Sim created against the arguments made by Dr. Phlox. He rationalizes his decision with the same argument for the greater good that we see from all the others. He says to T'Pol before Sim is created "…we've got to complete this mission. Earth needs Enterprise. Enterprise needs Trip. It's as simple as that." And it doesn't end there. When Sim is grown enough for the procedure and has figured out what's going to happen to him, he challenges Archer himself, arguing for his own right to live, and Archer sticks to his guns. This exchange directly between Archer and Sim is haunting.

Archer: I must complete this mission; and to do that, I need Trip. Trip! I'll take whatever steps necessary to save him. Sim: Even if it means killing me? Archer: Even if it means killing you. Sim: You're not a murderer. Archer: Don't make me one.

Not only do all of these captains (except Archer, who arguably writes the damn thing himself at the end of the series) have the Prime Directive to fall back on, they also have Starfleet/the Federation/Vulcan High Council right there on speed dial to validate their choices and hear their excuses and give them another commendation. They all know that ultimately, they can turn to someone higher in command to turn to for help.

Janeway is alone. She is alone with her crew 70,000 lightyears from home with only her training and her own moral compass to guide her. Yes, she claims the Prime Directive a lot but she also goes with what she feels is right and she is clear about that with her crew. When she makes the decision to split Tuvix, despite what everyone else says, she sticks to it and more importantly, does the procedure herself. Picard would have forced Beverly to do it, saying Doctor I gave you an order, your conscience be damned, and Archer does the same to Phlox with Sim, but Janeway takes the tool out of the Doctor's hand and says it's my call, I'll do it. When everyone is angry and mad about her destroying the Caretaker's array, she stands up for her decision and says yes, I did it, because it's what my Starfleet training said to do AND because I think it was the right thing and it's on me to make the hard choices.

She also can admit when she made the wrong decision, which isn't something we see from the other captains. In the season 5 opener, "Night", we see her in a depressive state because she's questioning her decision to effectively strand her crew in the Delta quadrant but she comes out of it when she's reminded by her senior staff that the crew believes in her and trusts her, she should do the same for herself. When the Doctor has a mental crisis in "Latent Image" after questioning his own choice to save the life of Harry Kim over that of another crew member, Janeway admits she did the wrong thing by first deleting his memories of it so he could get back to work and then sits with him for days while he works through it because that's what captains do.

And she does all of this without the backup and support of Starfleet. She doesn't have anyone higher on the chain of command. She's 70,000 miles away from the admiralty and her support system. There's no one higher than her to give her a break from making every decision.

To quote my fellow Missourian Harry Truman, for Janeway the buck stops with her in a way it doesn't for any other captain and she is painfully aware of that and owns that and that is why I love her and she's my captain.