Star Trek

You don't have to be on cable for it to work. Have you seen soap operas lately? They aren't afraid to have two guys together in bed with their shirts off (it's not like they ever show anything else.)

Nobody's watching TV in the daytime anyway, and the people who do watch soap operas are all about scandal-fueled drama. It's just Prime Time that the Moral Guardians care about.

Hence Star Trek could go one of three ways:

• Actually care about LGBT characters and show them in (Gasp!!) relationships.

• Tease and hit at it like they always do, have the suits shut down any LGBT-ish characters.

• But Not Too Gay taken Up To Eleven, so toned down that it's worse than doing nothing at all. Thowaway lines, "oh the character is an ''alien" so it's okay" (see Discount Lesbians).

It's 20-fucking-16. It's high past time Star Trek actually acknowledged that homosexuality is a thing and actually showed openly LGBT characters and romances. They cannot keep trying to hide that stuff. Grow some frigging decency.

If they have any decency at all, then one of the main characters with be openly LGBT, and will have the same awkwardly-written romances that the straight characters get. Because Star Trek is . . . not great at romance. (DS 9 actually had several excellent romances, and I liked Tom/B'elanna in Voyager. But by and large, Star Trek gets most cringe-worthy when it tries to do romantic plots.)

Remember, ever member of the senior staff on TOS and TNG were single for the show's run. They hinted at Riker-Troi and Crusher-Picard but they didn't go all the way on the former until the movies and nothing developed at all from the latter. Romance was limited to Kirk's girl-of-the-week or single-episode flings with the status quo reinforced by the end of the episode.

Because of that, I don't really object to them not hitting on LGBT romance in either of those series. Romance was not their focus at all; it was peripheral at best.

The one series that I feel a gay character would have fit really well on was DS 9. And Bashir-O'Brien was basically the writers slash baiting. They were begging for them to get the Kirk-Spock treatment.

And I refuse to believe that Harry Kim was not gay. Sure buddy. You have a fiance "back on Earth". We believe you. Really.

edited 3rd Mar '16 12:53:45 PM by sarcastibot

Garrett Wang forever rues the fact that the writers had Harry respond to Seven guessing that his awkwardness indicated that he wished to copulate and telling him to get undressed so they can get it over with by denying everything.

News.

Good news: I've gotten through all of TOS and the animated series, as well as the first four movies, and I've finally started TNG.

Bad news: I've finally started TNG.

I know that this may be too early to tell, but going by just the first four episodes, TNG S1 seems pretty bad. Encounter at Farpoint was actually fairly decent, and while The Naked Now was a shameless and inferior The Naked Time rehash, it wasn't bad persay. But Code of Honour and The Lost Outpost are both racist and sexit POS's, and while they both have a few nice moments in them, it's not enough to redeem the wholes. On top of that, the show feels too much like TOS much of the time. Don't get me wrong; TOS was a good show, but this is supposed to be 'The Next Generation'. Don't give us the same sorts of stories we got 20+ years prior. Give us brand new kinds of stories that we haven't seen from Star Trek before while still keeping true to the spirit of it. Give us the true 'Next Generation' of Star Trek, rather than just being TOS with a reskin.

I'll still watch a few more episodes to give it a chance, but I may be skipping ahead to the next season if things don't pick up here, because right now, TNG S1 is baaaaaaad.

edited 3rd Mar '16 9:06:11 PM by kkhohoho

Yeah, it's pretty bad.

Riker doesn't have his beard yet.

Don't skip Heart of Glory. Wait, that's second season, isn't it? Don't skip "The Neutral Zone". There, that's definitely season one.

See, in the beginning it was meant to be an updated TOS. It took them a while to figure out that leaning on their ensemble cast was better than the negative space wedgie of the week.

The problem was that while Gene was a cool idea man, he'd lost his touch with SF and the general public. His ideas of what was cool or awesome...are not well received even today. The Ferengi were supposed to be more sexual...Troi was supposed to have four breasts...and other ideas that sounded great only to Gene.

After season one, other helped flesh out and develop TNG past "TOS mark 2" and give us better Q stories, the Borg, ''The Measure of A Man' etc.

Seriously? Did Gene think the Betazoids were descended from cows? And how on Earth did he ever expect to get away with that? Three boobs in a movie is one thing, but four on TV is another.

You don't suppose Gene ever took drugs? It'd explain a lot...

edited 3rd Mar '16 9:29:06 PM by kkhohoho

"Heart of Glory" was season one, and the first really good Klingon story. It was rooted in the fact Roddenberry was uncomfortable that Klingons were always the "black hats" of TOS.

Season one had a handful of really good episodes, but were offset by a lot of really bad episodes. "Heart of Glory," "Where No One Has Gone Before," "11001001" and "Arsenal of Freedom" are genuinely pretty good episodes. Season two didn't have necessarily better episodes, but simply wasn't quite as cringeworthy as the worst of season one.

^ Roddenberry was quite heavily into drugs. Most of Hollywood is. David Gerrold said that factored into his death at a relatively young age.

edited 3rd Mar '16 9:27:06 PM by KJMackley

The Final Frontier had a three-breasted woman too. But that was probably a Shatner idea.

I read The Final Frontier as pretty much the reason why Shatner's ideas are better suited for TekWar.

edited 3rd Mar '16 9:36:12 PM by TParadox

@Kkohohoho: To be fair, Star Trek did come out in the 60's, man.

TNG gets better around season 3. Personally it didn't click with me as much as TOS, but it's a good show.

3 Breasted Cat Girl stripper, they tried to hit as many strange fetishes with that character as the could. But it was a dive on the shittiest planet in the universe and such.

edited 4th Mar '16 1:59:09 PM by Memers

I discovered Trek through TNG, somewhere around season 3, and was instantly hooked. It was only some time afterwards that I got to watch the first season of TNG (and TOS). It has its share of good episodes, but the bad ones are really bad (kinda like season 7, come to think of it). At least watching it helped me understand the hatred toward Wesley Crusher (I found him rather palatable in the latest seasons where he's still there). I also had some fun watching Patrick Stewart speaking the occasional French word with a horrible accent, especially when it was to say "Merde".
It's also a useful season to watch, for instance to see the introduction of Lore and the departure of Tasha Yar.

Actually, having rewatched DS 9's first season not long ago, it's not bad at all. There are some rough parts here and there. But for the most part, it's some fairly solid Star Trek stuff.

Or if they'd gone with the canonically white superhuman character.

edited 5th Mar '16 3:03:54 AM by Deadbeatloser22

Gary Mitchell?

Yeah.

Hell, it would probably have worked better if the character was one of the other augments. Like, Khan is still around, just frozen in one of the other tubes.

It wouldn't be perfect, but the original show and the movie have a bunch of other augments so it wouldn't be as jarring.

Headcanon hijack