Star Trek cleanup

But seriously, the Star Trek pages need a bit of looking at. They suffer from numerous problems that need to be cleaned up. Among the problems are:

• Complaining:
  • Hating on Base Breaking Characters, such as Neelix and Wesley Crusher.
  • Snark in the Recap pages for badly-received episodes like "Spock's Brain" and "Threshold". Enterprise in particular has many snarky image captions in the Recap pages.
  • Hating on Voyager and Enterprise.
  • Snarking about the Early-Installment Weirdness in the first seasons of TNG and DS9.
• First-Person Writing
• Possible instances of breaking the first half of No Lewdness, No Prudishness, especially tropers getting horny about the female characters. Seven of Nine, probably due to her catsuit, is a magnet for these creeps, with some people even looking for a "scientific" reason for it (such as she was made to look perfect by the Borg).
• Recap pages that don't recap the episode at all; just summarise it in one sentence. I've seen that problem in spades with Enterprise and completed the recaps for "Vanishing Point", "Bounty", "Two Days and Two Nights", and "Minefield" but I'm pretty sure there are more.
• The unholy lovechild of complaining and lewdness: complaining about Fanservice or even scenes that are erroneously labelled as fanservice (for instance, a now-removed entry on Catapult Nightmare said that Troi waking up panting and sweating was played frequently for fanservice, even though she's had very few catapult nightmares, and only one or two of them involved panting and sweating in her nightie).
• Shippy writing, especially with Janeway and Chakotay, Kirk and Spock, and Bashir and Garak.

So, I'm summoning all Trekkies on this site to clean up those pages! Engage!

Edited by Unicorndance on Jan 20th 2021 at 9:50:22 AM

I can't do much because I don't know a great deal about Trek, but I posted about this cleanup in the Trope Report thread in the hopes that some attention to this cleanup can be given through Trope Report.

Do we really have to tone down the snark on Spock's Brain's recap? Even people who like it (such as myself) do so because it's So Bad, It's Good.

Not a Trekkie, but recap pages are essentially main pages and have to be written objectively.

On the main page for Series.Star Trek The Next Generation, the note on the caption on the page image might have a pothole with both complaining and lewdness: Wesley's name is potholed to Creator's Pet and his mom's is potholed to Hospital Hottie— even though, in-universe, only Picard and some one-note guys found her hot.

Found this sorta complainy entry on LighterAndSofter.Live Action TV:

• Star Trek: Voyager. Even the haters are loathe to admit that the show had some fantastic episodes (the two-parters, especially), but there were aspects of it that were less in keeping with "To go where no man has gone before" and more in keeping with "Lost in Space circa 1995". How much time is given to Holodeck pursuits? On a ship which is stranded in uncharted space, one understands the need for distractions, but it always felt like the energy reserves should come first. There seemed a lack of consistency with what was important to the crew outside of just getting home. Voyager was also notorious for coming through battles with Borg Cubes and and taking more of a beating than other, larger ships (e.g. Enterprise-D) without so much as a scratch. The stories felt like Voyager was always a day away from the nearest starbase. Red Dwarf took its premise more seriously.

That's an interesting take on the series, but has nothing to do with the trope.

I agree that Beverly isn't a Hospital Hottie, that sounds like a hangover from the days when Hospital Hottie was being misused as YMMV. 'Characters get romance arcs sometimes' isn't really what Hospital Hottie is. I'd also be inclined to remove Wesley from Creator's Pet. Unless the pothole is relevant to the context around the pothole, there's no need to pothole that just because his name crops up.

I also agree that the Voyager entry is not the Lighter and Softer trope and reads as complaining about people who dislike Voyager.

I have finally met another! I always was in that shunned corner of Trekkies who secretly didn't mind Spock's Brain because it felt like pure 'graveyard shift bad B-movie' gold. And, dammit, if you can't find a place in your heart for 'graveyard shift bad B-movie' gold then, by golly, life just isn't worth living!

Edited by Wyldchyld on Feb 1st 2021 at 5:23:58 PM

On Recap.Star Trek S 3 E 24 Turnabout Intruder this is the page quote:

Turnabout Intruder is not embarrassing in hindsight. It is an episode that embarrassing from the very moment that the story was developed, that continued to be embarrassing through production, and which will be embarrassing until the moment that either people stop watching Star Trek or mankind goes extinct.

— Reviewer Darren, writing in the Movie Blog review of this episode

Too complain-y. Cut or replace with something less complain-y.

The image caption is also complaining.

Sorry for double post, but the synopsis section also features a debate over Lester's line about female captains, which seems like it should be placed under a trope, not in the plot synopsis.

Edited by costanton11 on Feb 2nd 2021 at 5:40:38 AM

I think the debate about Lester's line should go on an Analysis subpage, but can you have those for Recap pages?

On another note, the entry for the Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor" on Debate and Switch is (unsurprisingly) a bit negative in tone, but it's a legitimate example. What should I do?

These entries on Alternate Continuity need a check:

Comic Books

• The comic mini-series, Star Trek: Countdown bridges the continuity gap between Star Trek: Nemesis and Star Trek (2009), depicting Spock Prime along with a partial TNG cast reunion helping Nero trying to prevent Romulus' imminent destruction in the prime reality. Though Word of God decanonizes the comics, the film doesn't explicitly ignore them either leaving its canonicity up to the readers, thus rendering the mini-series' continuity ambiguous. Although it should be noted the graphic novelization of the 2009 movie officially integrates and features the events of Countdown in the scene where Spock Prime mind-melds with New Kirk on Delta Vega.

• The Star Trek reboot movies^note Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond a.k.a. "The Kelvin Timeline" are explicitly set in an Alternate Timeline that exists parallel to the TV shows and the first ten films ("The Original Timeline"), so it could be a prequel without being Continuity Porn or getting hated like Star Trek: Enterprise. Nero and his Narada crew as well as Old Spock are from the original timeline. An Admiral Archer is also mentioned in passing.

Then there's this from Film.Star Trek 2009 which needs attention:

• Broad Strokes:
  • Time travel does not quite explain all the stylistic differences in this movie, as it is technically in an Alternate Continuity and is not a complete Continuity Reboot. (Warp drive leaving a ship blind, for example.)
  • It's implied that the Narada's attack (the one that killed Kirk's father) initiated a sort of "Cold War" for the Federation, leading to their design philosophies changing.
• Canon Discontinuity:
  • Subverted. Though this film and any sequels that follow revamp the TOS era of the Trek Verse in a divergent, parallel timeline, they still accept the previous shows and movies as canon as they're a loose continuation of that continuity. Contrary to popular belief, the timeline in the new movies is not the original timeline having been altered, but simply a new, separate timeline altogether that branches off the original one as a weird result of Time Travel. The creators were not going to disrespectfully erase 43 years of iconic sci-fi.

Continuity Reboot also has an example:

• Star Trek (2009): It tells of Kirk and Spock's early years, mixing this trope with Alternate Continuity through use of the Timey-Wimey Ball. Word of God made it very clear that the universe it reboots still exists unaltered and that this new film series is an Alternate Timeline, thus calming down all of the fanboys and giving themselves room for Alternative Character Interpretation. (Fan reaction has been divisive, but the new films are doing well from a financial and critical standpoint.)
  • Though it lacks the canon-weight of a series or movie, the MMORPG Star Trek Online is set back in the original timeline, about 30 years after after Star Trek: Nemesis and incorporating a few other elements in the back story of the 2009 pre-boot.
  • Currently, Star Trek: Enterprise is the one series that remains canonical for both timelines, having taken place a century before they diverged. It receives appropriate Continuity Nods in the current film series.

These three probably need simplifying and/or re-writing to make it easier to understand for people either unfamiliar with the works, or who aren't Star Trek fans.

The Star Trek: Voyager page in particular is in need in some help: it's been a favoured target of recurring troll johnnyfog who clearly has a bone to pick with the show and its writers (infact the most recent edits on his latest sockpuppet is adding more snarking to the Trivia page).

I'll point to the following entry

• Creator's Apathy:
  • You can actually see Robert Beltran dying behind his eyes when reciting his dialog. He’s long given up on the show giving him opportunities to act (and he was very vocal about it), and it's darkly hilarious to see how badly he is phoning in Chakotay.
  • Tim Russ, who auditioned for many Trek productions and is one of its biggest fans, says he was drained working on the set and flat out of juice; he doesn't even bother to hide his indifference in his DVD interviews.

Robert Beltran is definitely an example (cf memory alpha: He once remarked in an interview that he thought Star Trek: Voyager was "punishment for everything in my life up till that point. Thanks, dear Lord for the… uh, Star Trek gig.") though the entry stands to be rewritten, but I'm not sure about Tim Russ, I've only really gotten in the franchise in the past year so I'm not an expert but my impression from Russ's social media posting, the Voyager cast reunion, that he showed up in fan films, etc was that he liked working on the show and its legacy more than he didn't, and didn't (deliberatly) phone-in his work. Can anyone source quote from those DVD commentaries?

Edited by Glowsquid on Mar 4th 2021 at 1:58:42 PM

Can't source them I'm afraid, but I'd suggest cutting Tim Russ (since he probably liked working on the show) and rewriting the Robert Beltran entry into:

Robert Beltran didn't think much of his job on the show, and he once said in an interview that he thought the job was "punishment for everything in [his] life up 'til that point."

Not sure how helpful this is gonna be; mainly just writing it out of boredom, but I've compiled a list of Star Trek subjects that could attract problematic writing. Hope it's helpful to at least some extent.

Bumping after a long while to bring this up.

Star Trek S3 E1 "Spock's Brain" is a complaining nightmare. The complaining cleanup thread cleaned a little bit up, but the page still needs work. Anyone willing to volunteer with more knowledge than I about Star Trek to clean up the rest of the page?

A lot of the TOS episode Recaps seem to have informal tones in the description.

"Informal tones" are fine for TV Tropes, as long as it's not excessively snarky.

As someone who thought the episode was fun and better than a lot of season 3, I don’t think the Spock’s Brain page is that bad. The description is snarky, but it is mostly so in instances of pointing out common tropes (like the reference to Planetville) rather than just straight up bashing the episode and I think some of the asides are quite funny.

Plus, the episode’s negative reception is just an objective fact about the episode, even the Wikipedia page mentions that most people think its the worst. Making mention of that isn’t complaining, just like mentioning the praise for Citizen Kane is perfectly appropriate on that page.

From InformedWrongness.Live Action TV, under a sub-bullet for Deep Space Nine, we have:

In "Life Support", we are told that It was wrong for Jake to get offended by Nog's misogyny and that Jake should respect it.

That makes it sound like it was supporting misogyny! I want to change it to something like:

In "Life Support", we're told that Jake was being disrespectful for being offended by Nog's customs, because where Nog comes from, those customs are traditional. However, some of the customs, such as asking girls to cut up his food for him, are misogynistic and caused Jake's date to dump him, giving him adequate reason to be offended.

Hello. FWIW, I linked this thread to the Sandbox.Works That Require Cleanup Of Complaining page.

I have noted that some of the Star Trek: Voyager recaps pages contain occasionally large quotes from snarky reviews or even SF Debris. I have started to remove some of them because 1) I don't think Voyager recaps need any more snark, 2) I believe quotes are supposed to be used for quoting lines from the show itself, not from another media commenting on it 3) this might be considered some form of plagiarism. I can revert my edits if there is no consensus on that.

Just as an example, here is one such entry (before I modified it) from the recap page of "The Gift":

• Shutting Up Now: Jim "Reviewboy" Wright explains what happens when Janeway shoots a Death Glare at the Doctor.
  "This drone cannot survive outside of the Collective," Seven shouts.
  Behind the captain's shoulder, Doc raises a finger, cheerfully pointing out that her prognosis is excellent. "With the Borg implants removed, your human systems are free to thrive—and thriving they are," he says happily. "As a matter of fact, I—"
  Janeway does an over-the-shoulder, high-intensity burst of The Look.
  Doc's Mute button is activated instantly. He turns around and runs away.
  The female security officer bursts into flames.
  Three audience members in Fort Madison, Iowa, sitting a little too close to the screen, will never be able to look a redhead in the eye again without screaming incoherently. A pity; one of them is a redhead. Before the hour is up, every mirror in her house is shattered in self-defense.
  Janeway returns her gaze to Seven of Nine; they stand toe to toe as the security officer stops, drops and rolls.

Those can probably be removed.