#also fuck rick berman

[tremorsmackenzie]

my problem with trek shows atm is that they all take themselves so seriously. there is so much pathos and everything is heavy and dead serious. its actually exhausting.

the older shows up to enterprise all used star trek as a backdrop, but it really wasnt about that. it was about the characters, the stories, the subjects at hand, and things being okay at the end of the day. the lore was just a second thought. most of the episodes could have happened in any genre.

they were also way lighter in tone most of the time, it was enjoyable to watch, and then they still had fucking dark episodes that didnt have a happy ending and that were super heavy, and had important messages and those were important and really stood out. i still cry when i think about jadzia dax and lenara karn. or entire arcs like the dominion war in ds9 that were amazing.

but in the new shows it feels like every episode is one of those, and it cheapens their overall impact so much. it no longer feels like theyre bringing attention to important things, it just drags on the negativity. and so often they make it about star trek and not something important in the real world and thats just not the point.

the only exception is lower decks, and for some reason its not getting renewed past this season. idk man i just miss my 80s/90s/2000s era trek vibes. those shows were amazing and we could do that but dial the sexism down and the queerness up by like 500%. instead we have movie bars and dutch angles and ten episodes per season and more special effects in one pixel than in the entirety of the jj abrams trilogy. yay.

[stormclawponyrises]

so my boyfriend and I finished watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine tonight. It was my second watch-through and his first. We watched most of it but did skip some episodes that were bad or unimportant and unfun.

Experience was great though. DS9's characters are so immersive and fun and enjoyable to watch. They feel like real people with rich lives, and it's great seeing them each develop as characters and form real relationships with one another.

More under the cut (bit of a longer post and may contain minor spoilers- DS9 may be almost 40 yrs old but not everyone's seen it and it's really best watched without spoilers)

The ending pissed us off as you'd expect, and I think I pissed my bf off even more by spending the next thirty minutes talking about the final Sisko scene and then about Star Trek: Voyager (which I've decided we will not be watching together - he will NOT enjoy it). I wish Ezri had had more development but she was only present for a season when most of the rest of the cast had been there all 7, or at least for the majority, and she was replacing a very well loved character.

Overall my bf said his favourite character was Jadzia Dax, by reason of her being fun, silly, intelligent and smoking hot.

On my first watch-through I think my favourite was Odo, but after this rewatch I'd say my favourite is a tie between Sisko or Kira. Sisko is such an incredibly complex and wonderful man, and I wish my dad were a little more like him. The way his relationships with all the crew and with his son developed was just so enjoyable. It makes sense the characters respect him or act the way they do around him, the feeling is tangible and sensible. Avery Brooks is such an incredible actor, and he feels so real in every scene he's in. And he's fun. And a bit scary. And kind. Kira is so wonderfully complex as well. She seems like she flip-flops in characterization, but in reality she's just a woman who wants to live a normal life after spending so many years resisting the occupation. The way she was presented in a non-negative light despite a past that our modern sensibilities would commonly be disgusted by. She was just fighting for her freedom, and the fact the complexities of that were explored is also another thing I loved about DS9. I also like how she's still someone who enjoys romance and was happy to be a surrogate for Keiko, while also being an openly religious woman who kicked ass and loved to have fun just made her such a deep and interesting character. I think the parts about kicking ass and having fun may have been why my bf loved Dax too, they're different characters but share those enjoyable aspects.

Kira, alongside Seven of Nine (from ST:Voyager) were major inspirations for my OC Miltei Swax-chey, a protagonist of my comic Rising From The Ashes.

If you'd like to show DS9 to a friend or want to rewatch it after not having seen it for a while, I recommend Algernon Asimov's DS9 watchlist: https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/wiki/algernonguide_ds9/

I don't fully agree with the watchlist's rating of certain episodes (I feel that the season 7 episode "Take Me Out To The Holosuite" should be watched by everyone at least once) but it's a very good reference.

Overall, while I've thus rewatched the show only once, DS9 would have to be my favourite Star Trek of all time, and the best of the older eras that Star Trek has to offer. It may not start great but when it gets going IT GETS GOING.

[quasi-normalcy]

Why Deep Space Nine wasn't as popular as the other 90s Star Treks when it aired

So I keep seeing this one kind of conspiratorial text post circulating around which asserts that Deep Space Nine wasn't as popular as the other Star Trek series from the 90s because Rick Berman hated it and deliberately sabotaged it, and also (somehow) marginalized references to it in canon even decades after he stopped having absolutely anything to do with the franchise and just...no. Like, I have no idea how Rick Berman personally felt about Deep Space Nine, but what I do know is that he co-created it and executive produced it and basically ran the entire Star Trek franchise during the 90s, so if he *really* hated what it was doing, he could have just put his foot down and stopped it. Moreover, he didn't marginalize references to Deep Space Nine in canon; Voyager getting into contact with the Alpha Quadrant and learning that the Maquis had been exterminated by the Dominion (something that happened on Deep Space Nine) was one of the very few plot points on that series to have repercussions for more than an episode; First Contact featured the Defiant; both Insurrection and Nemesis have references to the Dominion War. The post is reacting against a problem that doesn't really exist.

But it does raise the question: why *wasn't* Deep Space Nine popular when it aired? And I think that the answer might be difficult for people who weren't alive and conscious during the 1990s to understand, so I'm going to try to lay out the reasons:

Serialization was only just becoming a thing on adult American television: I know that this might sound a bit difficult to believe now, but there was a time when networks really hated serialization and, with context, it's not too hard to understand why. In the 1990s, there was no streaming; there weren't even any DVD sets. Any given episode aired once at a designated time. If you missed that time, then your options were to wait until it was rerun a few weeks later, or again during the summer (and the networks would often air reruns out of order, so good fucking luck with that), or to hope that one of your friends had recorded it on a VHS tape. Otherwise, you just couldn't see it. Even worse than that, networks could arbitrarily pre-empt their own programming. Like, "Oh, you wanted to watch Star Trek? Well a baseball game just went into overtime and it brings in ten times as many viewers. Hopefully you won't find it too jarring if we just begin half an hour into the episode." So you can understand why this would have a knock-on effect on serialised storytelling; if you've missed one episode, and the subsequent stories depend on plot points from the episode, then you're just going to be confused. But even beyond that, if you're not used to serialization as an audience, then you're not going to be on the look-out for context clues. "Oh, that alien just told Quark about something called 'the Dominion'? Oh that sounds important--oh, wait, no, they got to the end of the episode and nothing happened with it. I guess it wasn't important after all."

The Star Trek name: This one seems a bit counterintuitive, because of course the name should be a draw to fans of the other series, but you have to remember that, at the time in question, the franchise consisted only of the original series and movies and the first six and a half seasons of TNG. Now, these differed in several ways, but what they had in common is that they were all about a bunch of moral paragons who flew around in space in shiny starships, having episodic adventures. That was what Star Trek was. And then you got a new series about a bunch of morally compromised characters who sat still in space on a gungy old space station having serialised adventures. It's not the same thing, and so a lot of people who wanted the first thing tuned out (which was, in fact, why Voyager had to be created), whereas a lot of people who wanted the second thing might not have tuned in because they figured it would be the first thing. And this of course brings us to the third reason:

Babylon 5: So stop me if you've heard this one before: it's a serialized drama from the 1990s all about a bunch of humans and aliens having to coexist on a space station as they navigate diplomatic crises and gradually become enmeshed in an elaborate space opera story arc. It features a race of aliens who can be called "highly spiritual", a race of aliens who have recently overthrown a decades-long brutal occupation of their homeworld by a crumbling and overstretched empire, a race of aliens who are often mistaken for gods (and who cultivate this misconception), and a mysterious new threat emerging onto the galactic scene, eventually culminating in a seasons-long war arc. I am of course describing J. Michael Straczynski's science fiction masterpiece Bablyon 5, which he, and a great many of his fans, regarded (and not without reason) as having been ripped off and pre-empted by Paramount in the form of Deep Space Nine. Now, looking at the evidence, I personally think that most of the similarities between these series are a sort of convergent evolution; but, whatever your opinion on the matter, the fact remains that these two fandoms hated each other during the 1990s. And the net effect of this was that a bunch of SF nerds who would probably have really liked DS9 if they had gotten to see it never watched it at all as a matter of principle because as far as they were concerned, its very existence was a corporate ploy to bully an upstart rival out of business.

Anyways, for all of these reasons, it's not remarkable to me that Deep Space Nine never became as popular as TNG and Voyager; and because it wasn't as popular, it makes sense that Paramount would be more circumspect about greenlighting Picard-style sequels or Lower Decks or Prodigy-style spinoffs to it (and indeed, I'm not convinced that all of the writers have even seen it). But I think that it is a testament to just how good DS9 was that it still managed to get the same seven seasons, even if it never drew in the same audience

[7deadlycinderellas]

While I agree that the finale of Lower Decks should be focused on the main cast and cameos/roles for the others should be minimal, I will make allowances for these two:

-T'pol and T'lyn interacting. T'pol struggled so much with what being a Vulcan meant I think she would appreciate someone sent away as a dangerous renegade who now considers herself Vulcan as a m*therf*cker

-A surprise Terry Farrell cameo to complete the story set up with the Dax symbiote and also to complete the "Fuck Rick Berman" trifecta

[animentality]

the main reason ds9 isn't remembered as well as the original series or tng by the general populace is not just because it wasn't the very first trek or the most popular trek (tng's popularity was what really brought trek into the mainstream).

it was hated by Rick Berman, who was the head of the franchise at its height, and who deliberately spited it by never including its canon in other treks.

and that effect has lasted to this day, as modern writers who only bother to watch Star Trek movies never seem to remember ds9 even exists. the way the Pine-Quinto movies mention Archer and his beagle, and trek movies and shows make multiple references to TOS, and newer treks center entirely around tng plots or the Borg.

the way they brought back seven of nine before literally anyone on the cast of ds9.

there's a reason that the damn tng movies had a million references to Voyager, with Janeway and the EMH actually having cameos, but ds9 never even got a passing reference, even where it actually would've been appropriate.

Berman hated ds9 for its focus on serialization, i. e., connected storytelling, rather than syndication, i. e. episodic storytelling, because he was a money grubbing misogynist and homophobe, who thought all the money was in syndication. he hated the writers/other producers of ds9 for going behind his back and doing their damnedest to make quality star trek.

one of my favorite spiteful Berman stories is that in star trek first contact, the 2nd tng movie, he wanted to blow up the defiant and destroy it permanently, just for no reason at all.

and the ds9 writers were upset because no one had asked them about it. so they said you can destroy the defiant, but we're just gonna keep using the defiant and pretending it didn't blow up if you do.

which is why Worf asks Picard, in a completely thrown in line, what's the status of the defiant, and Picard says adrift, but salvageable.

and this particular movie is funny to me also because in that period, Worf is technically supposed to still be serving on ds9, and bringing him into the movie was basically justified as something of a side quest for him, being dragged off the station for a little tng romp.

so you see the crew of the defiant, but... again. Berman spite. rather than letting ANYONE on ds9 cameo in the first contact movie, even though that might've been cool... they just have some randos. one might be Adam Scott.

and remember that JANEWAY AND THE EMH are in that movie.

so berman deliberately wanted to spite ds9 by destroying the defiant, stealing worf (even making fun of him for his role on ds9 in another thrown in riker line) AND snub the entire crew of ds9 by having none of them anywhere in the movie, even though they COULD HAVE CAMEOED TOO, or at least been mentioned...

and to me that's pretty funny, because Rick Berman could have as many tantrums as he wanted behind closed doors, and hate the staff of ds9.

didn't make a difference. they'd still keep defying him, and you know...

not to be a total prick but... ds9 still has a thriving fanbase to this day. tng does too, and so does tos, and star trek in general is doing pretty well...

but out of all the old treks, ds9 has aged the best, not just in how it looks, but also in how it bridges the gap between, old world optimistic charm and more gritty, humanistic sci fi story telling.

it balanced syndication and serialization really well, and had great standalone episodes AND a fun connecting overarching narrative that made the world of star trek feel richer and more lived in. I also want to say that for modern audiences, who are accustomed to serialization more than syndication, ds9 is a far easier entry point into the world of star trek than any other trek.

Rick Berman can go fuck himself, is what I'm saying, in summation.

ds9 will stand the test of time.

and you know what?

both tng and voy succeeded in spite of Berman. not because of him. everything that makes those two shows work, is in defiance of the Roddenberry mandates that both Roddenberry and Berman constantly tried to uphold, even though it was to the detriment of the stories.

[opinions-about-tiaras]

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is back for a second season after an EXTREMELY strong freshman outing, and I’d like to talk a bit about an opportunity this show has, if not this season than at some point, to right some previous wrongs.

I’m speaking specifically of those done to Jolene Blalock, and to her character, T’Pol. Let’s dive in, under the cut! This’ll be a long one.

All of the classic 20th century Trek series (TOS through to the end of ENT) had a female actress and character they did not do especially right by either on or off screen. TOS had Grace Lee Whitney’s Yeoman Rand, and Roddenberry did... not always treat Nichelle Nichols appropriately. (Roddenberry had real problems with women at times.)

TNG had Marina Sirtis’ Deanna Troi, forced to constantly parade around in that cleavage-showing onesie and regularly being written into really gross and weird situations. It also had Gates McFadden’s Beverly Crusher; the show just very clearly had no fuckin’ clue what to do with an actress of McFadden’s caliber, and while she had some incredibly episodes (Remember Me is one of the best of the series) she was grossly underutilized.

DS9 fares the best here; Terry Farrell’s Jadzia Dax was generally given a lot to work with on-screen and her character was treated with respect and dignity. Off-screen, however, she was basically harassed into quitting the show by Rick Berman. (She spoke out in detail about this for the first time very extensively in the 2018 DS9 documentary What We Left Behind.)

VOY never knew what the fuck to do with Jennifer Lien’s Kes, and it must have been extraordinarily humiliating for her to be fired to free up money for Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine. Seven, of course, became a colossal fan favorite and ended up having some dynamite scripts and episodes, holding up a LOT of the back half of VOY... but we can’t pretend or ignore that she wasn’t brought onto the show because they wanted a hot piece of ass to pour into those awful shiny skintight uniforms. Or that she wasn’t given some weird and gross materiel to try and make work.

And then we come to ENT, and Jolene Blalock’s T’Pol.

Blalock had a thankless task. She was the best part of ENT, hands down, carrying that show on her back through four seasons. For this, she was constantly put in very tight, revealing outfits while the rest of the cast got to wear, you know, uniforms, and T’Pol was often written as either a ball-breaking bitch there to be shown up by the much more clever and emotional humans, or as nearly on the verge of an explosive meltdown herself. She had a whole plotline devoted to her addiction to space cocaine.

The absolute nadir was probably the time Rick Berman responded to a press question about upcoming episodes saying they had a “fun, sexy T’Pol episode” coming up... and that “fun and sexy episode” was her getting mind-raped by another Vulcan.

(Rick Berman was a piece of shit and the franchise prospered in the 90s in spite of, rather than because of, him.)

This isn’t to say she wasn’t in episodes of worth; ENT managed to right the ship in the third and fourth seasons with the involvement of the Reeves-Stevenses, and even before that she was rather the breakout star in the same way Jeri Ryan had been on VOY before her. (It probably helped that, with respect to the rest of the cast, Blalock was leagues ahead of them as an actor and it showed.) But she wasn’t treated well, and she hasn’t been shy in speaking up about it.

This was all two decades ago, of course. What’s happening now?

Well, Star Trek as a franchise has been making some effort to... sort of apologize. I yield to no man in my utter contempt for Star Trek: Picard; I consider it a creative failure on almost every level, yes, even Season 3. But something it resolutely did RIGHT is to revisit the franchises female characters and try and make amends for past wrongs. Seven of Nine was allowed to grow into this complex, weary, mature woman, a proper leading character, treated with respect by the narrative she was in. Ditto Deanna Troi. Beverly Crusher... okay, it’s kind of weaksauce to have the doctor man the weapons console and blow some ships the hell up and quip about it as a way of demonstrating “Doctor Crusher was cool then and she is cool now, dammit” but their hearts were in the right place even if their writerly talents weren’t up to the job.

Which brings us all the way back around to Strange New Worlds, and the opportunity this affords narratively.

A major ongoing theme of SNW is Ethan Peck’s Spock trying to find his feet within both Starfleet and within Vulcan society as he grapples with his mixed heritage. This has been a theme of the character since Leonard Nimoy’s day, of course, but Strange New Worlds is finding new ground to break; Nimoy’s Spock was more mature, more seasoned, largely understanding himself and possessed of a strong, inner self-confidence and unflappability. SNW is showing him BECOMING that man we saw in TOS. Spock always engaged with Kirk as an equal, even if Kirk technically outranked him, but he clearly engages with Chris Pike as a MENTOR, which is a wonderfully different dynamic.

You know who slots directly into this narrative space, these narrative themes? Motherfucking T’Pol, that’s who.

You cannot tell me that T’Pol would not have a burning, intense interest in the first product of a mixed human/Vulcan marriage. Spock is the shadow of what might-have-been for her and Trip Tucker; where their own mixed child, conceived in secrecy and violence as a weapon, did not survive, Spock lives and thrives.

T’Pol was an unwelcome, burdensome addition to the NX-01 Enterprise, needing to constantly claw and scratch to earn the respect, trust, and confidence of her peers, distrusted by the human authorities and regarded as a suspect borderline failure by her own government. Spock is a beloved member of the NCC-1701 Enterprises family almost from day one, the first Vulcan to go through the Academy, the first of his people to be “proper” Starfleet... and a huge part of the reason he’s able to be that is the work T’Pol put in when in the UEG Starfleet, and the colossal lift she preformed in reforming Vulcan society. The High Command in her day would not have countenanced Sarek and Amanda’s marriage, and would never have admitted Spock to the Academy.

Spock exists because of T’Pol.

T’Pol would know this. SPOCK would know this. There’s no way he has not read, extensively, of the Vulcan first officer of the NX-01 Enterprise. T’Pol, in turn, would have maintained an appropriately Vulcan interest in Spock’s career, his successes and failures. As an elder, respected Vulcan, she would likely have nudged it along to the extent she was capable. She would have mentored.

This all creates a ton of narrative space for T’Pol to appear on SNW, to have some really dynamite interactions with Spock and T’Pring, and more importantly for her to get the same “uplift” that Seven of Nine, Troi, and Crusher got in Picard, just... hopefully with a lot better writing behind it.

Maybe the writers aren’t interested in going in this direction. Maybe Blalock has zero interest in returning to the franchise. But dammit, this possibility should be explored and explored aggressively. It’s a golden opportunity to salvage some of the best parts of ENT, which was, yes, a very bad Star Trek show but had some things of worth in it, and to do right by another woman, and another character, the franchise wronged.

[olderthannetfic]

I recently read that Risa from Star Trek was originally going to be shown as explicitly LGBT-friendly thanks to Gene Roddenberry but that Rick Berman told the person in charge of designing Risa to ignore the note where he had asked for same-gender couples to be shown. Memory Alpha's Article on Risa says that Roddenberry had wanted to "radically change Risa's culture to incorporate extremely graphic depictions of homosexual behavior" (which to me reads a bit confusing and a bit like a homophobe wrote that because I doubt that Roddenberry wanted to show gay couples explicitly fucking on-screen with their genitals visible or a close-up of two guys making out with the camera zooming in on their tongues lol - but I may also have taken the phrasing of "extremely graphic depictions of homosexual behavior" in bad faith tbh though I kinda doubt it), and I haven't looked for the documentary where that is said yet but am a bit sad because that would have probably been quite nice, considering it's supposed to be a planet whose inhabitants are sexually open and which is known as a pleasure planet. I know canonical Trek has become more open to depicting the existence of queer people in actual text (or on-screen) rather than just subtext, which is very neat, but realizing that could have been incorporated more obviously in TNG or almost was done does make me a bit sad.

I have heard/read multiple times of people trying to include stuff that's more openly queer and queer-friendly and then being shut down because of either people in charge being scared of censors and homophobic viewers boycotting Trek or getting the show(s) to be shut down or people in charge themselves being homophobic. That sucks.

This paragraph was mostly me rambling about Barclay (am Data/Barclay anon from a while ago ehehe) because in one Voyager scene Barclay is shown being served drinks by a twink with a rather prominent bulge on Risa but then I decided not to bore you to death with my delusional ramblings about that being an indication of Barclay being bi due to him first interacting with another guy in a scene that starts with panning over a Risian beach where mostly straight couples are shown interacting with each other, as well as one throuple (two ladies, one guy) and a lonely woman getting up from the sand.

Sorry for rambling again. Also sorry if I have sent an ask like this (as in talking about Barclay in that Voyager scene on Risa) a while back, my memory is quite bad.

--

Hi, just sent in a long-winded ask about queer representation in Trek and specifically talking about Risa, and rambling about Barclay... I just realized the "lonely" woman getting up wasn't actually lonely, but that I managed to overlook that she had been on the chair next to and conversing with another lady. I was too distracted by the waiter alien's bulge lol. So either they're a couple too or my silly grasping-at-straws-pseudo-theory is indeed bullshit. Still wanted to clarify for accuracy.^^

[strangenewwords]

(this is Indeedcaptain!) 9, 14, 35 for the ask game :)

9) What division do you think you'd most likely be in if you were a Starfleet officer?

Engineering. Hands down. A thousand times. Holy SHIT let me at that engine. At one point in my life I thought I'd like command, but I'd rather be able to bitch and slap at things and have the pressure of making everything work without having to be like who dies.

14) Favorite characters?

WHY WOULD YOU ASK THIS QUESTION.

Alternatively, do you have all. day.

Okay, we'll break it into series. I'm picking one from each. But know I really love like everyone.

TOS/TAS/AOS - The three of them (Kirk/Spock/Bones) go together and can't be separated, however. I'm gonna say Bones. I'm in love with that man.

TNG - Shit this is so hard. Ro Laren? She wasn't really there for very long. Miles? No, well only kind of kidding. Q? This is an insight to my feelings on TNG. We'll go with ... Worf.

DS9 - HOW. CAN. I. PICK. OUT. OF. MY. FAMILY. Dax. Of the Jadzia variety. Poor Ezri, but I don't like you. Fuck you Rick Berman.

VOY - So my first ever crush in life was Gambit from the cartoons in the nineties. My second ever crush was Tom Fucking Paris. (Another of the wait do I think he's hot or do I want to be him). So he was my fave for a loooooong time. Now it's probably the Doctor.

ENT - Phlox. I think. I really just genuinely love him as a character flawed and funny and different.

DISCO - Saru. Wow that was insanely easy. But I really really like so much about him.

SNW - SPOCK. I am -not- okay. (Although once Bones pops up I think all will be lost).

PIC - SHAW. Because I straight up want to climb that man. Worst reason to love a character. and He's fucking awful. But hot. Damn.

LD - MARINER. I'm perfectly normal about her.

I haven't actually watched Prodigy.

I think that's everyone.

I'm kinda surprised there aren't more women on the list, but I'm gonna go with less internalized misogyny and more I id more strongly with masc.

35) How would you feel about a mind meld?

Hook me up. I am that crazy person that's like OH IVE NEVER DONE/TASTED/FELT THIS and then I dive in head first even if i have no idea what I'm doing. So would I be totally nervous and freaked out and pushing all the worst thoughts forward not at all on purpose but just because I was trying to shove them down and doing the opposite? Yes. But I'd also not want to pass up the opportunity.

[subbyfoxelf]

[tv review] ds9 4x06 "rejoined" (1995)

this episode never really comes up when people talk about the greatest star trek episodes, but i sincerely believe it belongs in that conversation.

i love that avery brooks directed this. it’s such a fucking perfect match between director & material. brooks might not be as flashy with camera movements/etc as, say, a jonathan frakes, but he’s nevertheless quietly one of the best star trek directors? when you read people talk about working with him as an actor they say that they love acting across from him because he just gives you so much to work with and does all kinds of little things to tee up awesome moments for his costars, so it’s no surprise that when you read other cast members talk about working with him when he’s directing an episode they just fucking love it. and their performances when he’s directing them really do just sizzle in a very noticeable way.

so yeah, him directing an episode that absolutely hinges on the performances of one main cast member & one co-star is maybe the most perfect match there’s ever been between director & material on this show.

and like, i don’t want to undersell the fact that terry farrell is an incredible performer when the show actually allows her to be, but given everything his costars have said about brooks’ directorial style it’s just easy to imagine what an awesome, collaborative experience making this episode was for everyone involved.

the fact that this episode happened at all in this era of star trek is nothing short of a minor miracle, also. like, notorious “raging homophobe” rick berman must’ve been nowhere near this episode, and thank goodness for that. (just out of sheer curiousity i did open the memory alpha article about this episode & ctrl+f his name, and yeah, his name didn’t come up a single time in the article, so that probably explains a lot.)

and, y’know, as a queer person seeing that intense kiss with the trail of spit & everything, fuck! that shit was life-affirming.

if you wanted to criticize this one you could certainly point to the fact that dax & kahn don’t end up together at the end, which it’s a well-established trope that this tended to happen with queer couples on the rare occasions that they were depicted at all at the time. but i do have to point out that on star trek, this almost always happens with relationships between main cast members & guest stars?

it’s also the second time this has happened to dax specifically, and this relationship was clearly taken much more seriously than the one with disappearing planet fuckboy, like there’s just no comparing the two episodes, so yeah. and the way the relationship ends, and all the very serious stuff tied up in it… it just really feels like this episode enormously respects dax and this relationship. like, hell, this is probably the best dax episode of the entire series.

this episode is also a fucking oasis in the absolute desert that star trek was for queer representation until discovery. it’s just miles better than the franchise’s only previous attempt (tng’s “the outcast”), which, not to harp on this but guess which one rick berman was far more intimately involved with? and all of that aside, it’s just a damn good episode and one of the most believable whirlwind romances the franchise has ever done.

s-rank

[animentality]

Listen it was peak misogyny to kill Jadzia Dax and you did need to replace her with a woman, at the bare fucking minimum, to atone for this heinous crime against womankind.

But also.

But also.

How great would it have been if Dax came back as a dude and we STILL had Worf and Quark and Julian lusting after him/her/them?

Hot as fuck. Unbelievably based. Truly goated. Sauced.

But star trek was never as progressive or boundary breaking as it could've been, and Rick Berman, the starter of all problems, would never have allowed it.

But I can dream.

I can imagine Worf saying FUCK I'm still down bad for this hoe.

Maybe it's his bisexual awakening.

And Julian was always bisexual so it's just like whatever, still bisexual, but Quark is you know what, Odo WAS my one exception but uhhh maybe these hoomans are rubbing off on me in all the wrong ways, and I can tweak my rules of attraction like I tweak the rules of acquisition.

Maybe I can acquire a smidge of bisexuality.

[subbyfoxelf]

[tv review] tng 5x17 “the outcast” (1992)

yeah, i have kind of a lot to say about this one.

so, if you’re watching this for the first time sometime in the 2020s, you’re probably thinking something like, “um, wow? this is shockingly good trans representation for something that was made 30 years ago? like, yeah, there’s some rather irritating gender essentialism on display, and it’s kind of ironic that the bad guys are basically enbies before it was widely understood that enbies were a thing, but still!” and you would be right if this was supposed to be about transgender people, but actually what actually happened is much sadder and much more hilarious.

you know that thing where misogyny was so ingrained into every aspect of victorian society that men and women were kind of forced into almost exclusively homosocial friendships, and consequently a lot of victorian literature now accidentally reads as hella gay? this is like that, but it’s so homophobic it accidentally reads as a shockingly modern depiction of a transgender character.

i’m gonna get into all the reasons why this sucks, and it really does suck, but i do want to pause for a second and enjoy the fact that bigotry is so unnatural and so governed by context that it can literally have trouble surviving in static artifacts of media because society is evolving around it. i know there’s plenty of counterexamples, but i just want to enjoy this one for a second.

so, yeah. what actually happened here is tng was trying to finally make good on gene roddenberry’s broken promise to feature gay characters and stories on the show. apparently they had been receiving fanmail pretty regularly about how awkwardly obvious this omission was by this point in the franchise’s history. if you’ve read my article about blood and fire, the fact that they didn’t just… straightforwardly present a character as gay probably comes as no surprise.

what they ended up doing instead was having a planet where everyone is functionally nonbinary and asexual (though, again, those being legitimate identities people can have wasn’t really a well-understood fact at the time, and i find it almost impossible that anyone in the writers room was approaching it that way) and, omg, what if heterosexual people with binary gender were the ones being discriminated against???

star trek can be really infuriatingly gutless and liberal sometimes, guys.

there is one good guy in this situation, though, and that’s jonathan frakes. apparently he strongly lobbied behind the scenes for them to at least have his romantic interest in the episode be played by a man instead of a woman, but rick berman was having none of it. and to frakes’ further credit, he also went public with his criticisms, saying, “i didn’t think they were gutsy enough to take it where they should have. soren should have been more obviously male. we’ve gotten a lot of mail on this episode, but i’m not sure it was as good as it could have been – if they were trying to do what they call a gay episode.” riker is increasingly becoming one of my favorite star trek characters thanks to how awesome jonathan frakes is, y’all. this is just the year of me finally realizing that riker is the fucking best.

anyway, the episode is about commander riker falling in love with a member of an androgynoous species called the j’naii. aside from my aforementioned frustrations, i find it really frustrating that stories like this often locate other forms of gender expression within an individual species where that’s just kind of… their entire deal? like, basically every species should have whatever kind of dominant gender narrative they have, and then all kinds of variations on that gender narrative. that’s really something that not even nutrek is really living up to in my opinion, and it’s probably the biggest thing i’d like to see change going forward.

the reason i still have this episode ranked so highly in spite of my obvious frustrations is that it’s actually just a damn good tragic love story? i usually cry when i watch it, but this time i rather intentionally distracted myself at key moments to try to keep myself emotionally insulated from it, and it did actually work unlike when we watched “the offspring.” but, yeah. there’s also a ton of nice little touches like riker seeking counselor troi’s blessing to embark on the relationship, and worf barging into riker’s rescue mission and demanding to help. everything really does frame this as a very important relationship for riker, and it would’ve been honestly terrific if they had just had it be an actual gay relationship instead of this weird tangled allegorical web. even captain picard, who initially warns riker that he can only protect him so far, is a consummate bro at the end of the episode when he asks riker if their business with the j’naii is concluded before proceeding on their next mission.

so, yeah, i have some pretty profound frustrations with this episode but it’s still kind of impossible to say that it isn’t a good episode. it’s not one i’m necessarily going to go to bat for if i see people (understandably) hating on it, but on the whole i actually do think it’s a pretty good episode in spite of all the things working against it.

b-rank

[prider-parker-imaginations]

if i cannot find the gay shit, i will create the gay shit

[kirkpussyindulgence]

I definitely recommend skipping cogeniter it isn't relevant to any plot at any time and it only serves as a character assassination for everyone involved

thank you for warning me!!! im watching enterprise atm so this is def the kind of warning i appreciate

[loudfederationscreeching]

absolutely fascinating that in voyagers ‘living witness’- the closest voyager comes to having a mirrorverse episode (an alien races historical account of their encounter with voyager demonizes them casting them as ruthless killers and the vibe is very mirrorverse) janeway has a short masculine haircut pretty much queercoding her

its not as gratuitous as explicit bi/pansexuality featuring in mirrorverse women (emperor georgiou, intendant kira, mirror!ezri) in order to further demonize them (of COURSE this really sucks) but unfortunately voyager does it too 

[romulanfucker]

its late and everyones asleep so im just gonna say. like everything about kira is so good in theory and i should like her so much and i Do think shes fantastic when im just thinking about her and spinning her around in my mindcrowave. but then the secon i actually watch her in the show its just so obvious that the people writing and designing her were huge misogynists and no matter how many “girly” tropes they try to avoid they pick up another to replace it and its so obnoxious

[gulducock]

gonna be real with you i do not care about anything in snw at all except for the aenar guy which is the only reason i will watch the show i do not care about tos i want them to suck enterprise off with sloppy style because it deserves it after everything that show went through just by existing in the first place i want spock and kirk and pike to get hit by a car if it means i can see archer. trip and t’pol and hoshi -_-  dont you care about your herstory