#anti discovery klingons

[star-trek-fandom-confessions]

#894

TNG and DS9 improved upon TOS canon for Klingons and ENT helped the lore even further. DISCO just shat all over a perfectly good thing. I can see why Lower Decks and Prodigy prefers 90s and 2000s Klingon design.🤭

[biblioflyer]

Star Trek Wars and Responsible Allegory

The ending for Strange New Worlds season premiere has me setting yellow alert. Mild spoilers follow.

I trust the writers and showrunners of Strange New Worlds.

I trust them to maintain a fundamentally optimistic worldview while not shying away from the impact of what the characters are experiencing. M’Benga and Chapel illustrated that beautifully.

Strange New Worlds is an easier watch than Picard, and that is to be expected. As I’ve passionately argued, Picard is a show about damaged people bereft of resources and facing hard moral dilemmas. Star Trek the Next Generation and Strange New Worlds are about the elite, handpicked for their gifts, provided every advantage, and with the best ship in the fleet insulating from the consequences of poorly calculated risks.

Neither is a better concept! Although even with an open heart, Picard is not an easy show to watch. I love Strange New Worlds for its ability to go down smoothly without feeling stupid. I’m unbelievably burnt out on hopeless suffering and bleak universes that defy attempts to improve them.

Which is why the implications of a Gorn war story alarm me so much.

My ethics call me to be pro-Ukraine but anti war propaganda.

Do you follow that nuance?

I’ll unpack it.

If the Ukraine War is something the Strange New Worlds production feels it needs to acknowledge in some fashion and allegorize, then using the take on the Gorn we’ve seen to date speaks to the soul scorching atrocities of the Russian invasion force, but little else about this conflict.

The likely Gorn motive of expansion for expansion’s sake is not an inaccurate parallel to Russia but it is superficial. It's comfort food for those of us rooting for the speedy removal of Russia’s occupation and horrified by the carnage wrought, but frankly Star Trek doesn’t need to be that ham fisted. It has a history of treating war as more than a spectator sport and seeking a deeper, richer understanding of the origins of conflict.

The Gorn, thus far, are entirely lacking in the sort of dimensionality and nuance that would make them compelling villains or hold a mirror up to our world to seek more profound truths. They’re the sort of villains to consume war as content, not understand war.

For all the slings and arrows directed at Discovery, something it did right with its Klingon War arc is show how actually it's not entirely about cynical, material motives like those of us who see the machinations of greedy oligarchs behind society’s ills would prefer to think is generally the rule. 

T’Kuvma’s supremacist ideology, contempt for other cultures, and “fear” of assimilation and loss of identity is familiar to students of the intellectual rationalizations of Russia’s invasion. That’s not coincidental. T’Kuvma was rather clearly meant to stand in for various strains of ultranationalism and ethnonationalism circulating at the time. 

T’Kuvma is reminiscent of Orban, Trump, Johnson etc. because the advisers whispering in their ears were themselves inspired by if not directly, then by very few degrees of remove, by Alexander Dugin and other architects of the Dark Enlightenment values that gave Putin the labels and rationales to crush both political threats to his regime and people he found aesthetically repugnant. These same Dark Enlightenment values create the permission structure for invasions, annexations, and the systematic murder of Ukrainian public intellectuals, civil leaders, and other cultural figures.

Now of course other Klingon House Leaders, oligarchs if you will, flock to T’Kuvma’s banner for their own cynical reasons, but much of our current reality is difficult to explain using an entirely cynical, materialist framework. If only because it's hard to imagine how the most outrageously successful (for Russia) invasion would have been a profitable enterprise without a myopic degree of cultural supremacism and complete disregard for the idea that this invasion might fail utterly to achieve any goal that would shore up and enrich the Russian economy, demography, or even just enrich the already extravagantly wealthy.

In the Dominion War, we find the Founders, themselves consumed by a supremacist and xenophobic worldview, using Jem’Hadar and Cardassians alike as phaser fodder with the casual attitude of Skynet deploying a wave of Terminators. 

At one point DS9 even manages to humanize the Jem’Hadar. Outmatched and Ketracel White starved survivors recognizing the futility of their assault on a prepared Starfleet position, but unwilling or unable to shake off their conditioning to choose surrender. Even the betrayal of this band’s Vorta is reminiscent of accusations that Wagner was leaking intelligence on the Russian army in exchange for lighter treatment from Ukrainian forces.

Meanwhile, Damar portrays the horror of recognizing an ally is intentionally wasting the lives of your people for a cause that seemed worthy in the beginning, but has been exposed as inevitably bringing greater ruin not glory. Damar drowns his grief in kanar because he can’t see a way out. His own cultural heritage has left him without much of a tangible idea of a different society to hope for and fight for. Eventually though, he realizes if he doesn’t do something the humiliation of losing a war will be just the beginning of the horrors visited upon the Cardassian people.

Damar is many characters. He’s the separatist who realized his “liberator” cares nothing for him except as a prop to rationalize the war and will sell his life cheaply once his part in the narrative is no longer interesting. Damar is the homegrown resistance to the war in Russia we scan the news desperately searching for.

The Gorn of Strange New Worlds can allegorize the depravity of the Russian invasion, but it would be a caricature in every other respect. Good allegory shouldn’t simply inspire us, it should inspire dissent and righteous rebellion were it to leak across digital iron curtains. If Star Trek is to dabble in propaganda, then it should not just be about great victories on the battlefield, it should describe a better future.

Sorry George, there are not heroes on both sides, but there are victims. Yet the Gorn really don’t seem like they can be victims unless Strange New Worlds is preparing to show us a different side of them. Maybe we’ll see some Gorn convicts used as phaser fodder or sympathizers who thought they were purchasing freedom with their loyalty but have found themselves instead press ganged with bottom of the barrel equipment in hand.

[speculativism]

STAR TREK DISCOVERY

Here's my honest and balanced reaction now that I've seen all of the episodes:

Initially I liked Discovery from episode one. I was a bit upset that some other people didn't like it and I noticed how the directors and writers began bending over backwards to please everybody all at the same time.

The effort to please those people who hadn't liked the first few episodes led to some slightly cringe-inducing scenes in later episodes where everyone seemed to be trying too hard to establish the benevolent principles of Starfleet and the upbeat, optimistic feel of the show. These oh-so-positive elements were just about bearable and I still found the remainder of story enjoyable.

I wished for more of the new Klingons and some deeper backstory on the history of different Klingon types. I imagined that there could be potentially a lot of story development in revealing how the augment virus had affected the Klingon genome and led to increased popularity of cranial reconstruction surgery and a lot of anti-human rage and the rise and fall of various Klingon political factions. I really wanted to see on screen the L'Rell type of Klingon alongside of the TOS and TNG types debating different strategies around the "Remain Klingon!" issue and the continuation of the temporal cold war. I also wanted guest appearances by Star Trek: Enterprise characters.

So I was a little bit disappointed with the overall direction that the show took but I still mostly enjoyed the episodes.

I felt a bit uneasy about the "spore drive" but, when all is said and done, it isn't really any more far-fetched than the warp drive.

Moving the show a thousand years further into the future was a good idea and opened up a lot more freedom of storytelling.

Sonequa Martin-Green was the perfect actor for the lead role and her performance in every episode was stunning. All of the other actors were also well cast and the character developments of each of them was interesting. My overall feeling as I watched each episode was sort of like "This is good but......." because I was enjoying the show but that feeling of regret was still somewhere in the back of my mind wanting the rest of the Klingon story.

It's a pity that there's going to be a long wait for the next Star Trek show to appear. I really feel that they should be keeping up the momentum to take the franchise further. It should be like the energy of the Star Wars franchise over at Disney Plus which seems to have a new show every time I blink.

[stardate44002point3]

One of the issues I have with Star Trek is that I sometimes think that the writers don't think through their moral dilemmas very well. In the case of the Maquis, I think it's pretty easy to argue that they are wrong, and it isn't worth lives to protect their homes, because they live in a galaxy of functionally unlimited resources. There is no reason that they can't be moved somewhere within Federation borders to start again, with all the Federation support they need. Particularly given that they can only, at the very most, have a century or two attachment to the place they are being asked to vacate. In the interests of not restating a war, that seems reasonable (not to them obviously, but in a larger meta-sense).

On the other hand, the end of Discovery S1 gives us the opposite kind of dilemma, where the consequences of not acting (not destroying Qo'nos) are the end of Earth and the Federation and the triumph of a very specific kind of anarchic evil. Now, the writers deus-ex-machina'd their way out of that; but I saw a lot of discussions at the time that Starfleet's upper echelons should have been tried for war crimes for even thinking about what they did. The argument is essentially, that no-one in the Federation deserves to live if the destruction of Qo'nos was the price of living. Because that was the scenario that the writers gave us - the consequences of not acting were truly catastrophic; the only options available were truly heinous; but the alternative was annihilation. 

I would argue that was shitty writing, because there is no moral dilemma there. Either we act or we are annihilated; every single person on Earth and then every being that falls under the inevitable rule of the Klingon factions who have now won, would suffer and die, because of the moral squeamishness of the crew of the Discovery. That is deontological thinking taken to a ridiculous conclusion "my morality is more important than the lives of billions of people, people that I am charged with defending." Of course, there was an out, L'Rell, so that Michael could be both moral and victorious; but I really, really hated that conclusion; because it was so unrealistic. 

Taken to its logical conclusion, of course, this argument would lead to the inevitable triumph of the worst actors in any society/galaxy/universe. If they are the only ones willing to do what is necessary to win (and are willing to initiate the circumstances under which conflict is inevitable) then they will always win. 

The argument also ignores the real difference between committing heinous acts to further aggression and heinous acts to stop aggression. There is a moral difference between those two things. Again, if there isn't, then the more immoral party (the aggressor) will always win, unless there are overwhelming odds in favor of the other party. 

These discussions always default back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and again, I have a slightly different perspective on this than the classic internet take; largely because I've read a LOT of modern history on the Pacific theatre. Generally the argument is that dropping the bombs was morally unjustified because a) Japan was about to surrender and b) it was a calculus done to preserve American lives over a ground invasion. 

However, that perspective comes from the 1970s after John Toland's massively popular book The Rising Sun came out with a Japanese perspective on WWII, right as the anti-war movement in the US was ramping up. And while Toland's perspective is valuable, it is also biased and incomplete. Subsequent research has shown that a) Japan was NOT about to surrender and b) much of the life-saving calculus had to do with preserving Japanese and Chinese lives if the war was to drag on until the end of 1945 (which was the fastest possible end through the ground invasion route). 

If you want to argue that using the bombs was immoral because it was a new class of weapon, that's one thing. But the atomic bombs saved millions of Japanese and Chinese lives - and probably tens of thousands of Soviet and American ones, too. The bombs ended the fire bombing campaigns, which had already killed 300,000+ Japanese civilians in 5 months; they ended Japan's occupation of China which was killing 100,000+ Chinese a month, they ended the possibility of a Soviet invasion of Japanese-occupied China; they ended the ongoing starvation of the Japanese domestic population; they ended the torment and death of hundreds of thousands of allied civilians and POWs in Japanese camps; they ended the torment and death of tens of thousands of women in "comfort camps"; they ended the possibility of mass suicide in Japan (as had happened in Saipan and Iwo Jima) in the face of a US invasion. Google ichioku gyokusai  (literally, 100 million shattered jewels) which was Japanese government policy after 1944. 

I find it hard to argue that ending a war that would otherwise have dragged on for 6-12 months, and killed millions more people, is an immoral act. However, because we have considered it so, we have allowed Japan to essentially not grapple with it's past in the way that Germany did post-WWII and that has contributed to a telling of history that deems the extension of the war in the Pacific to be "NBD" and that dropping the bombs was unnecessary. 

Again, not expecting this to be a popular take, people's feelings on this are deeply entrenched but I think there needs to be at least a little push back against the idea the moral perfectionism should be upheld at all costs, even at the cost of the lives of millions of people. 

To be clear, I don't hold DS9 as the best of Star Trek or think all its deconstructing woked, but from what I remember, the "easy to be saint in paradise" is more about criticizing the arrogance and borderline xenophobia of Gene's vision, or at least aspects of it and (which DS9 did as a whole) contrivences that kept it unchallenged. If nothing else, IMO it's a fair game to show that a society as dedicated to peace and avoidance of armed conflict would leave some people feeling unfought for.

“It’s easy to be a saint in paradise” is in fact in reference to the Maquis, and Starfleet’s treatment thereof. The official judgement of the Federation is that the Maquis are terrorists (a matter of perspective), a threat to the peace with the Cardassians (potentially, but certainly not more so than the Cardassians themselves), and deserters and thieves (absolutely fact; a majority of Maquis are active duty Starfleet who walked off the job with Starfleet weapons, ships and intel). Thus the Starfleet policy toward Maquis is pursuit, capture, or destruction without quarter.

Sisko cheerfully enforces this policy - he literally committed a war crime in order to catch his former security officer, so he’s obviously on board with “stop the Maquis” as a concept - but he also takes a moment to be judgey about it when the issue first comes up. The people at Starfleet headquarters, he implies with the quote, are arrogant, ignorant, and cold. The Maquis had their homes traded away right underneath them by the Federation, traded to the very enemy who was attacking them in the first place. Even worse, the Feds didn’t even really make an effort in the war - consensus among the sort of fans who Figure Out Things Like That is that if they’d tried at all, Starfleet would have crushed the Cardassians and lost nothing. And now the Federation attacks its own betrayed citizens for fighting back? Sisko, and apparently the show, want us to consider that perhaps the Liberal Elite in their Ivory Towers pushing Peace and Reconciliation with the Bad Guys even to the point of punishing the former Good Guys to maintain it are showing a disgusting lack of 1) compassion for the people they’re supposed to be prioritizing, who suffer the consequences of their decisions and 2) understanding of how the Real World works, because they’ve never lived in it.

Unfortunately, this is patent fucking nonsense.

Consider:

Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime?

Really?

Even though the Japanese were the aggressor? Even though they committed absolute atrocities against American citizens in the Pacific territories? Even though Truman’s literal job description was “protect American lives and American interests,” meaning he owed his soldiers a strategy that risked their lives as little as possible and ended the war as quickly as possible, and owed the Japanese absolutely nothing? If you’re still out here saying “yes,” congratulations, you’re what Gene’s humanity is supposed to be all about. Someone who remembers that the enemy is still people too, and you have a moral obligation to use exactly necessary force and not a single Newton more. To value their lives, society and culture equal to your own.

If the Federation negotiated peace with the Cardassians even from a position of power, it was because they deemed the potential loss of combined Federation and Cardassian life to be of greater significance than the (easily substituted in a post-scarcity society) homestead rights of Federation citizens on those contested worlds. They chose life over land, even enemy life over their own land. This is the decision we want them to make. We want them to be the people who would not have dropped a nuke on Japan. We want future humanity to be in a place where we consider the Maquis to be in the wrong for choosing bloody war to avoid giving up property.

But the thing is…. how the fuck do we get there, because humans do not, humans cannot make that decision. Humans get emotionally invested in things. Humans get angry and scared and humans are wildly fucking tribal and we make self-serving and short-sighted decisions in order to protect the things that are ours whenever we feel threatened. Poverty creates crime because when people are scared for their survival they don’t care about the rules, strange cultures interacting generates bigotry because new things are frightening, and power breeds sociopathy because losing that power frames itself to the human brain as a loss of identity and safety. And Gene’s humans are not actually different from the real ones. They didn’t develop telepathy like Betazoids to make them physically incapable of forgetting that the enemy is a person. They haven’t altered their own brain chemistry through ritualized philosophy like the Vulcans. They are still giant bags of reactivity, violence and malice. So. What do?

Well the really funny thing is that the answer to this question is within DS-9 itself. One of fandom’s other favorite lines from the series is Quark musing on the nature of humanity:

Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.

WELL JUST FUCKING INVERSE THAT, GENIUS!

DS-9 is fascinated by the idea that humans are Not As Good As You Thought, Gene, but it seems to persistently overlook the fact that he understood that completely, and that’s why the Federation exists. That’s why they have the free holosuites and free food and Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism. It is easy to be a saint in Paradise, and the Federation wants to be saints, so they put the people who make the decisions in Paradise. Hell, they try to put everyone in Paradise, because it lets us not be massive shits to each other even without telepathy or Logic™. The whole origin story of Trek humans is that they went through a decade or so of Mad Max hell and went “holy fuck never again, what do we do to make ourselves stop being assholes,” and utopian socialist paradise is what they came up with.

Sisko seems to think that not getting on board with the Maquis’ decision to fight for their homes is a sign of blindness and elitism on the part of his bosses, because those bosses aren’t facing the tribulation of losing their own homes. But in fact, that very tribulation means that the Maquis are the blind ones - they can’t be objective or adhere to the principles they normally value, because their lizard brain has knocked all the way down Maslow’s hierarchy to “YOU NO TAKE CANDLE,” while the guys back home on Earth, explicitly because they’re not involved, can act from the top of the pyramid with compassion for all involved parties.

Now, you can disagree with this moral perspective, certainly. You can say that leaders have a greater responsibility to their people than to the enemy and that protecting homes is worth lives and that the Federation should be secretly supporting the Maquis (like the Cardassians are supporting their own “renegades” attacking Federation colonies, something the series really should have spent more time on), and you wouldn’t be wrong. These are matters of perspective, not absolute truth. But that isn’t the argument Sisko is making. He’s arguing that the froofy safe Feds just don’t ~get~ it, which is a shockingly limited understanding of the history and principles of Trek Earth’s culture for a Starfleet captain.

[eric-coldfire]

Talk to your Star Trek aliens about using protection to avoid contracting STD’s.

Klingons with protection:

Klingons without protection:

Orions with protection:

Orions without protection:

Trill with protection:

Trill without protection:

Ferengi with protection:

Ferengi without protection:

[moved-to-piersgender]

Unrelated, I hate the Discovery klingon redesign. Big bulky ridged forehead dudes worked, Discovery klingons look like a cross between a snake and a hate crime

[theravennest]

So, I’ve been on a Trek high so I decided to marathon all of Trek from the start since I’ve never actually watched the entirety of all Trek shows. 

I started with TOS of course since I’ve only seen a few eps per season of that one.

I just got to the first Klingon episode and I am blown by how much unmerited bullshit DSC got for apparently “retconning” the Klingons and “ruining” Star Trek.

Literally these guys are just white men in racist ass brownface and Fu Manchu facial hair.

No ridges, no Klingon language, and their entire culture so far is basically the non-Roman version of the Romulans we met earlier in the season.

All the Trek shows/movies have basically retconned the Klingons from the jump every time they’ve appeared.

Every single wanky fanboy who complained about the Klingon design changes in Discovery owes me and the show $50.

Y’all harassed these actors (Sonequa especially) and showrunners, and hate spammed every single Youtube video over some serious bullshit.

Y’all can kiss my entire Black ass for how much shit y’all put Sonequa and the rest of this team through.

[agaystarfleetcadet]

me watching Lorca getting captured by the Klingons the first time: NOOOOOOOOOO!

me watching Lorca get captured by the Klingons the second time:

[willowbilly]

Yup. Still hardcore grossed out by how Star Trek: Disco is trying to get me to sympathize with L’Rell and root for her and Ash Tyler’s relationship. 

When she still seems to believe she’s done nothing wrong. 

And when she was so offended/hurt by Ash saying that her touching him felt like a violation and that she immediately left the room without a word rather than face that fact. Bc suuure. She’s tooootally the injured party here.

And when the narrative itself invalidates Tyler’s trauma at her hands by treating his forgiveness of L’Rell as something necessary and inevitable (when they should make it clear that she is Not entitled to Anything from him, Ever, because whether or not he does forgive her is ultimately up to him and him alone, and, regardless of forgiveness, the damage she inflicted upon him can never be wholly undone and should never be cast as anything other than an absolute wrong). 

I wouldn’t mind if they, like, wanted to show a victim having complicated emotions regarding their abuser, so long as they firmly and textually (IN DIALOGUE and preferably WITH CONCRETE CONSEQUENCES dammit) condemned the abuser for their actions (whether Ash himself does or not), and I might not even mind if L’Rell herself never apologized or even fully realized that he was unable to consent (bc shitty people do exist), but they’re portraying L’Rell’s abuse of Tyler as somehow justifiable or at the very least able to be overlooked due to her motivations having been out of “””love””” and they’re trying to get me to feel bad about Ash flinching away from intimacy with L’Rell because of Something Which SHE DID TO HIM and they want me to care about her having to Fight Against Sexism and it reminds me of that Onion headline about a white woman having to waterboard so many more people to be taken seriously in her career as a CIA agent and honestly I’m exhausted. 

I don’t want this as it is now. For a show which is so eager to put out forward-thinking messages of empowerment I’m amazed that they managed to bungle something so simple as Rapist = Unsympathetic. I’m holding out hope that they’re going to eventually do right by Ash Tyler and also (one can dream) Just Condemn L’Rell Already, GOD, but. Goddamn. I’m so tired.

[pixiedane]

New theory: Lorca is getting the Seska arc I always wanted.

read the recap @ State of Flux

[star-trek-fandom-confessions]

#980

I’m actually glad that SNW de-retconned Discovery’s design change for the Klingons

[scruffylookingpiratecaptain]

Funny story about L’Rell the Klingon

Production was happy with how she looked at first.

That is until Dennas came around. She is played by a woman with finer boned features than L’Rell. Production decided that Dennas, with her daintier features, was ‘sexier’ than L’Rell. They worried that once male audience members saw Dennas, they would then find L’Rell ‘too ugly’.

So their solution?

Quite literally, to shoot L’Rell in the face. They decided that would somehow fix her ugliness. That a disfigured Klingon woman would be more acceptable than a ‘not sexy’ Klingon woman.

I wish I was making this up.

[aceofwands]

Lol, just read another article explaining that Lt Tyler is obviously a spy (which yeah, duh) because he’s played by the same actor who plays the albino Klingon dude and like ooooooooohhhhhhhhh that makes so much sense! I didn’t realise because I pay attention to like 0% of the Klingon scenes, and who can tell who’s under all that makeup when they can’t speak properly anyway?

Anywho, clearly - unlike the Discovery crew - the Klingons know what makes a good Starfleet officer, given that I thought he was the only decent one we’d seen so far! oh the irony

[ichayalovesyou]

Why Does God Need A Starship? (Live Reaction):

I always thought Sybok was cool and interesting and NOW I’m sure! You know it’s times like these that I’m grateful I kinda came back into the Star Trek fandom on my own, because I don’t have to deal with Opinions of older/louder Trekkies. This one kinda has a lukewarm reputation but I’m getting the vibe that I’ll genuinely enjoy it.

Yet again Bones is serving up some LOOKS damn! Look at these elder gays! Spock has rocket boots, amazing. “Because it’s there” and then falling off the goddamn mountain is such a James Tiberius Kirk thing to do 😂 “HI BONES!” These guys omfg. OH MY GOD SO WE DO SEE CAITIANS OUTSIDE THE CARTOONS?? Hell yeah! Also pole dancing to no music, is... weird. Lmao. Also okay I’m sorry Sybok is cool! Sybok is cool and interesting and I really like him! (Not morally obviously dude is shady as all fuck, but a cool dude nontheless!) Always fascinated by Cult Leader type villains, especially when they point out valid criticisms about the society from which they came (important distinction is that the CAUSE is not vilified, but the person and their means, something M****l has largely forgotten)

Awww I may ship Hikura, but Uhura & Scotty are also cute as hell!! Awwwwwww!!!! Old married couples can be so freaking cute. Chekov & Sulu are LOST ohhhh my god this is hilarious, these two idiots. Also can we talk about how Koenig’s eyebrows are slowly gaining sentience and Takei aged like fine wine? Lol. THE HOLY TRINITY OF ELDER GAYS ARE CAMPINGGGG! I’m- oh my god they’re so cute. “Marshmelon” this is cute as hell oh my god. They’re indulging and messing with Spock at the same time I’m dead! They’re singing ohh my god this gonna give me cavities with how sweet it is!!!

This Klingon dude is frickin ROCKING the eyeliner! Bruhhhh was the frickin spotlight necessary! Leave the gays alone SHHHH they’re SLEEPING!! Lmao. Yo I’ll be real this movie starts incredibly slowly but I seriously do not mind, it’s relaxing to not have to worry about missing important details if you look away for a second, it’s nice. WAIT? Does Jim’s shirt say GOT MILK?!!? Oh no, it says go climb a rock, oh thank god [“fatty milkers” flashbacks]

Seriously McCoy is just radiating so much old southern lady/gay energy in this movie and I love it so freaking much “if you ask me (and you haven’t) this is a horrible idea” he sounds like my North Carolina living Meemaw. Wow you can see Spock low-key taking psychic damage from seeing Sybok 😲 V’tosh Ka’tur of the highest order huh? Still disturbing that his government literally cast him out, that’s a red flag 😬. What happened with Sybok is probably a lot of why Spock was pressured to be as Vulcan as he was, I’m sure Sybok was a massive scandal/shame for Sarek, and knowing him, he’d end up making that his kids’ problem not his 🙄

Oh neat!! Chekov is in the in the captain’s chair. Oh this is the song they replaced Nichols’s voice for 😤 but also GIRL THAT WAS BADASS AND THAT SONG WAS A BOP! Quick question, wow these “alien” horses are somehow even worse than the unicorn dog (also it’s a desert planet, wouldn’t it be better to have, like, alien camels or something?) This dude’s Klingon is freakin impeccable btw! He’s really got the vibe down! Jim did you forget how fuckin bananas strong Vulcans are??? Sybok went like 😡☹️ when Spock pointed that laser rifle at him 😂😂😂 again even tho I know Scotty and Uhura are married but it’s scenes like getting held hostage right there where they radiate such POWER COUPLE energy GAWD! 🤩

Stay out of this Bones we’re having a lover’s quarrel! Jim is taking fucking psychic damage from this entire conversation lol. Okayyyy whatever Sybok is doing is definitely some kind of mind control type thing, that shit is creepy af no thank youuuuuu (spores anyone?). Oh my god Spock & Jim are so married lmao, that “I’m sorry” Vulcan kiss in the brig man Aw. (Oh man Magic’s of mega-tsu got devani mixed by that comment lame!) SCOTTYYYYYY!! YAS!

Yay rocket boot glomp! Lmfao! Sybok needs to brush up on his earth history Columbus did NOT figure out the world is round 🙄 Ah Scotty being like “listen, you’re not okay rn so I’m not really down for whatever you think you wanna do right now it can wait until you’re right in the head again” and they could’ve not done that and it would’ve been creepy (especially by today’s standards) but they didn’t! And that was awesome!

Bones being skeptical and has every right to be! He’s faced down would be gods and would-be messiahs before! Also I’ve seen people judge Bones for being the first to cave but Sybok totally did that shit to him without consent! He didn’t go back on his beliefs, Sybok forced him to! BONES PROTECTION SQUAD IS HERE AND ITS ME! Oh Bones, man, poor babeyyyy (fuck Sybok!) 😭😭😭 OH MY GOD BONESSSSSS Sybok leave him alone! Goddamnit! Leave him alone!

I think Jim can see Spock’s Sybok induced vision cuz they’re ✨Bonded✨ (it didn’t seem like they could see Bones’s, other than what Bones was doing). JIM KNOWS SO MUCH BETTER! ITS HOW HE BEAT THE SPORES ITS HIS CORE! I UNDERSTAND AND LOVE HIM FOR IT!!! Spock 😍😍😍 he’s like, you’re bullshit happiness pill doesn’t work on me cuz I am whole for the first time in my life, and I love my husband, and I already learned my lesson decades ago 💚🖖🏻💚 (who knew how important the character development from This Side of Paradise AND Return To Tommorow would be??? Hell yeah!)

I love Scotty so much 🥰 hardcore badass Hufflepuff from beginning to end! Also I hope Sybok appears in SNW that could be really really interesting if they do it right! ITS GOD (derogatory) REVERE HIM! Oh here comes that legendary question!! “What dies God need with a starship?” Red flag don’t call Jim a creature! Oh shit god has laxer eyes oh no lmao! Bones snaps out of whatever Sybok did to him when “God” hurts his friends and we LOVE HIM FOR ITTTT! Awww Spock & Sybok and be saaaaad, oh shit! Into the lightning to fight a mirror of yourself like Lazarus in that one episode!

OH SHIT THE KLINGONS ARE HERE! Oh damn Spock just swore a cuss the right way, at a Klingon General no less! General dude just went “caotain tell Kirk you are sorry!” LMAO! NOT IN FRONT OF THE KLINGONS 😂😂😂😍 KISS DAMNIT!! God this whole after scene is so good, maybe the god is the friends we made along the way. “I lost a brother once” you also lost SAM dummy, I know you were just telling Spock you love him but still. SHUT UP SPOCK IS PLAYING ROW ROW ROW YOUR BOAT ON HIS LYRE??

Okay, seriously, I unironically love this movie, it might be my favorite out of the ones I’ve seen so far actually. TMP felt like the movies getting their sea legs, but it was slow and messy, it wasn’t as thought provoking as it wanted to be (aside from Spock’s wonderful arc in that film). WoK & TSFS are amazing for drama and angst and Spirk content, but they weren’t really asking the big questions Star Trek is wonderful for. Then The Voyage Home is just plain silly and fun and wholesome. But this, this movie had depth! The whole premise is “what is god and is there is one?” I LOVE that as someone who has a very complicated relationship with spirituality. I also already loved the TOS episodes This Side of Paradise, Return To Tomorrow, The Omega Glory and The Way To Eden, and this movie had the best of those concepts! Sybok was such a fascinating antagonist/anti-hero and I hope we get to see him explored more on screen one day, even if it’s just through Discovery/SNW flashbacks. It may have started off slow and it’s not without its flaws but this felt like the Star Trekkiest TOS Star Trek movie so far!

[mylittleredgirl]

trekathon: disco 1x11

“the wolf inside”:

pretty impressive that an episode can start with a man cradling his dead husband’s body and then get more distressing from there

it’s worth it to me though, personally, because mirror sarek is a prophet and it’s really working for me

the opening credits come a full 14 minutes into the episode. six teasers before breakfast and discovery laughs in the face of god

not like a Prophet™️ prophet:

the regular kind

or actually maybe he just mind-melds with people sometimes and then wows them with his psychic knowledge of their inner selves idk

i also really loved mirror!soval beyond all reason. apparently all i need is an older vulcan man who’s anti-fascist and pro-goatee 

sarek’s confused math lady face as he tries to process finding his own katra inside michael’s head

michael has longed her whole life to hear sarek say something that nice about her and she only had to travel outside her quantum universe to do it

the i.s.s. suffering:

michael’s narrated slow-motion existential crisis feat. sexy nightwear

there’s a shot in the unsettling bath scene with steam curling around michael’s face that’s pure cinematic art

michael and prime!saru both lying to each other in this episode to spare the other’s feelings

also the “i will call you saru after a respected friend” parallel with the emperor telling mirror!saru about “a starship captain named saru” 🥺

i don’t think i mentioned last time how much i enjoyed seeing the iconic shenzhou transporter room again and really wish i had done so before it turned into the iconic shenzhou execution chamber

i LOVE that keyla gets to stand up! and walk around! and contribute to the plot!! and the continuity between this and “terra firma” of her being michael’s right hand

“terrans don’t apologize” but keyla DOES apologize to michael. you know i don’t like going extra curricular for info but emily coutts said in a ready room episode that she thinks their mirror universe selves may have impulses to Be Good that they have to suppress the way that we have to reject our evil impulses

anyway, i assume we’re all here for shipping mirror captain burnham/commander detmer

michael insisting she’s still starfleet so she has to foster this coalition of species... that fire of federation optimism....... we love to see it 💗

and also voq is there:

i can’t tell you how much i secretly hoped that THIS TIME ash tyler would manage not be voq after all

the reveal coming because he heard part of the activation phrase in his own voice is inspired though

he TRIED to stay HUMAN for MICHAEL how am i supposed to just LIVE WITH THIS

michael and tyler’s lovely scene in bed together made me think about how this is michael at her most traumatized, and tyler of course is traumatized in ways that literally defy understanding, so it’s this beautiful broken thing

and holding that up against season 3 michael who has moved through so much of her trauma and is ready for a sweet and loving relationship with a dude who rescues animals and loves her almost a full 90% as much as he loves his cat

like obviously, given the secret klingon agent of it all, it’s not exactly “falling in love with the right man for the right time,” but i like the way discovery challenges the draw of OTP and instead gives us “people can love deeply for a time and then can love someone else just as much later, because all of us grow and change and seek different things at different times to help us do that”

i don’t understand how any of this works:

really thought i was hanging on to the mechanical theory of How Spores Work as presented until now, but tilly said “neuronal link” like i should understand it and the whole house of cards came down

still not sure how hugh becomes a spore ghost. “fungi have the biological aptitude to link death with life” and “wherever you are, i hope he’s with you” sets it up, so i EXPECT that paul in the mycelial network will meet hugh, but instead it’s mirror paul in a sexy leather uniform

actually i don’t understand transporters anymore either. where is the discovery when they beam tylervoq aboard? is this like in aos where sometimes transporters just work over enormous distances? did they jam some spores into the transporter buffers?? 

EvilWatch 2255:

“i feel that your suffering has influenced your judgment”

really love lorca and all the mirror universe characters turning away from the explosion while michael stares directly at it

EMPEROR. PHILIPPA. GEORGIOU.

now that she’s a character i Know And Love rather than the standard cartoon villain one expects from the mirror universe i cannot WAIT for this.

[feifiefofum]

anti sjw star trek fans

what the hell’s going on? like, are you getting the same message from the show that i’m watching?

like, star trek has always been an sjw show. if not outright on the left, definitely left leaning. always has been. where do you get the idea that they were ever on the right wing conservative side?

was it the space communism/socialism that made you think it was on your side?post scarcity society? ferengi were called a ‘young race’ and ‘foolish’. if you missed it, ferengis represented capitalism.

was it the fact that it has always been anti-war? the federation, the big military of the show is constantly all about, what was it again? exploration, meeting new life forms, building bridges. 

y’know, kinda the opposite direction that the right wing’s all about.

when racism was still fashionable, they put an interracial kiss on air. when global warming was still being covered up by big oil, they criticized the short sighted nature of their own federation to make a point.

in the tng era, there had been female admirals. in case you military otakus can’t figure it out, they outrank your precious picard, who’s a captain.

star trek has always tried to be on the leading edge of social discussion points. the thing with discovery and the klingons? allegory for terfs and feminism.

don’t believe me? unifying voice calling for social change in a people, the message is co-opted and used instead to cause harm and distort the original message of the founder of said movement, leading to a split where those who called for unity now have to regain control of the movement. sounds like a social issue to me.

second season’s a little easier with the whole surveillance state thing and losing control of an empire/republic/federation to said secret spy organization with no oversight. also a side-eye at out of control AI.

picard is so easy, i shouldn’t even have to go into it. fear of the unknown, leading to persecution, leading to a glorious backhand across the face of bigotry. self fulfilling prophecies and all that. you hate them, they’ll hate you right back.

and then there are some y’all complaining about how ‘it don’t make sense for spock to have a secret sister’. completely forgetting the fact that until his parents came onboard the enterprise, james didn’t even know they were spock’s parents. 

y’know, his bestest space husband. who i’m sure he tells everything to. including the fact that he was engaged to some vulcan broad. who tried to orchestrate his death so she won’t have to marry him. y’know that talkative bastard.

and i’m hearing some rumblings in some corners of the fandom, that picard don’t make sense. if the romulan homeworld was destroyed, where’d they get all them warbirds? forgetting the fact that spock created a fucking blackhole and traveled back in time. forgetting that this solution was the experimental wacky science kind so you’d want to evacuate just in case this don’t pan out. forgetting that a supernova could affect lightyears worth of a sector. remember that futurama episode where a star went supernova and there was that throwaway line about billions suffering but at the right distance, the radiation acted as a ‘love ray’? remember science? 

but where’d they get them warbirds? if my mentioning the fact that spock curtailed the worst of it didn’t patch the plothole for you, and the fact that they also had access to a friggin’ borg cube along with said tech goodies to go with it, well, i’m sorry, but you can’t extrapolate for shit.

look, picard tells us that no society just breaks past bigotry and fear and stays enlightened forever. it warns us that we can’t be complacent, that we can backslide as a society and be every bit as unsightly as we are today.

and frankly, i think that’s a pretty good point. 

discovery told us to 1) the logical route (shoot first and survive) may not be the morally right route and 2) complacency and feeding our personal information to big data is not a good idea. season 1 did it better, but the first episode just puts out the thesis. should we be moral always or morally flexible? captain georgiou (goddess, ephemeral, phenomenal, perfection, please step on me) says we should stick to our guns, always. burnham says, uh, not if it gets us killed. by the last episode, michael comes around to phillippa’s way of thinking and thus graduates to the mindset of the usual captains of starfleet that the audience sees.

basically those that hate burnham could probably learn a thing or two from her. about learning a thing or two. because i have to spell it out for you. honestly, i have no faith in your lots ability to read between the lines.

also, why you hatin’? it’s so rude? like, she’s too vulcan, and she’s not vulcan enough. like completely forgetting her backstory where she’s raised by human parents for a good ten years. then a vulcan education. of course it’s going to be a bit of mish mash of both cultures. and are we really forgetting the fact that vulcans are hardcore emos that said ‘yo, that’s embarrassing, let’s be logical and shit’. like pretty sure that’s mentioned in tos, tng, ds9, voy, ent, and dsc. like, smooth waters have hidden depths. 

i seem to have lost the thread of this, but star trek has always been about that sjw juice. do they show side titty to distract the right from the sjw agenda? hell the fuck yes, from tos to seven of nine, to captain georgiou (again, goddess, step on me, don’t even care if it’s former empress georgiou, either or-) star trek has always been about anti-bigotry, equality and putting women on the bridge of a fucking starship, from uhura, to janeway to michael fucking burnham. try to point at any episode that’s supposedly right wing, and you’ll probably just see a nazi getting punched instead.