"Star Trek is woke now"

And DS9 is the conservative one with all the religion and the baseball and the war crimes and stuff.
TNG was run by a Frenchman who thought allowing bronze age species to believe in God was a barbaric act and went to bat as a human rights lawyer for an android who in turn let his first child pick their gender at will. All that while his polyamorous first officer was busy arguing against conversion therapy when pushed upon his trans nonbinary partner.
- Uh... He wasn't against allowing anyone to believe in a god of gods. He only took issue with people worshipping "The Picard" and Ardra scamming.
  
  He gave a speech about how they had moved past religion and he wasn't going to allow them to go back to superstition
  
  He knew Ardra was a phony, but still passed up the opportunity.
  That takes some restraint and willpower, as opposed to Will-power, cause we all know Riker would.
  
  Let's be real. Picard probably worships the koala.
- Yeah DS9 was good, but it took me a long time to get past the fact that they made the Federation freaking space NATO. Martial law, biological weapons on your own citizens, papers please, most with the subtext (or lengthy deleted personal log) that morality is for peace time, and some of your favorite values should be abandoned when the stakes are high.
  I think ENT is the most conservative tbh. Who else would go that far to get revenge for Florida?
  
  I haven't gotten past that, to be honest.
  To this day I have a visceral reaction to all the online nerds complaining about NuTrek not being Starfleet enough but having memory holed that DS9 got that exact pushback at the time for honestly way more legitimate reasons.

Dear Paramount: Doctor Twink and his boyfriend Fashion Lizard is a spinoff I would 100% watch every week.
Thank you.
- Case closed.
- It’s ok - he’s just a plain… simple… tailor.
  The hypothetical discussions will be, without irony, absolutely riveting.
  
  Out of all the shows I've seen over the decades, out of all the characters I've seen, Garek is probably my absolute favorite. When top tier writing meets top tier acting. Beautiful.
- Oh my god yes. My Dinner With Andre style. Just the two of them flirting for an hour.
  
  I would watch that over and over again.
  
  Where do people find fanfic for Star Trek? Asking for a friend.
- julian.exe has stopped working.
- Haha why do you guys call him Doctor Twink? The man was a horn dog, chasing tail on the daily.

... Star Trek is and has always been woke. It's like the core feature of Star Trek
- ToS had the first interracial kiss shown on television. And then there was this entire episode.
  
  Still this over VOY clown episode tbh
  
  It wasn't the 1st interracial kiss on TV. By some metrics it was the 1st in the US but other countries had earlier kisses.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_interracial_kiss_on_television

Not gonna lie, as a straight white man, I would watch a show called " Doctor Twink with his boyfriend fashion Lizard".
- I'm thrilled they are making a series about me.
- Once The Doctor gets a Silurian companion.
  
  If you bend things enough, VOY Distant Origin and DW Silurians can be the same thing
  
  Silurian is a type of alien? It's a whole geological period. Calling something "Silurian" could refer to thousands of different species in the fossil record.

They forgot Libertarian Alien who's there for comedic relief. His kooky libertarian plans reliably blow up in his face like Wile E. Coyote.
- Quite woke of them to give representation to a conservative too. We wouldn't want to ignore any minorities. Not unless they shrink into nothingness. I hope.
  
  Conservatism ... in DS9 they gave them an entire planet called Ferenginar.
  I'm really loving the episodes with Brunt, Liquidator of the Ferengi Commerce Authority ..... if any being in the galaxy embodies taxation, it's Brunt. I love him because I absolutely hate him, a truly genius piece of character creation.

Wokeness is not the issue with disco, et al. It's terrible writing, poor science even for soft sci fi, and too many cringey moments.
I get that some people love it. But the emotional resolution porn is, to me, just icky.
- This sums Dico up perfectly for me. I consider myself "woke", I share the values they are advocating in Disco very much. But it's just. So. Shoved. Into. It.
  It's not subtle, it's not something coming naturally to the story in most cases. It's just badly writen into a already badly written overall show.
  And that, to be honest, is a shame.
  
  Hardest part of liking Disco for me was I couldn't shake the feeling they stretched Star Treks skin over another shows pilot/first season.
  
  I disagree that it's because of ''shoved'' or overt politics. It's just God awful writing and a terrible idea for a ST show. They made it a chronological story about one protagonist. There's consistent bridge crew we don't even know their names, their character or story, or even get to hear them talk besides ''there's a [thing] captain!'' Type of shit.
  No ensemble stories, no stand alone stories, and very close to no science fiction at all. It's all just trying to give you high stakes action scenes with close to nothing else happening.
  
  For a great example of this sort of thing done right, compare The Expanse books to the show.
  The books kinda glossed over the head of the fucking entire earth's story and plotline. In the show, she was a highlight. Also, a few characters were merged into one female character, and women, in general, were given more prevalence. Poly relationships were given good voice, and overall, things just fit and felt natural.
  That is to say: It can be done right. Disco just doesn't do right, imo.
- My biggest problem with Discovery is that whenever they see something interesting they have to cut to a reaction shot to every single person on the bridge but don't even show us what they're seeing.
  My second biggest problem is the writing. They don't talk like Starfleet, they talk like people from the 2020s.
- Stamets is coming for you.
  
  I know. He and I are very close. My question is how you know.
- There's so much wrong with it. Where's the 80s office décore?
  If it doesn't have some elements of kitsch, it's not Star Trek.
  Star Trek is NOT a Netflix production that can be churned out with improved dark, edgy, and abstract lighting, sleek sets, and dutch angle cinematography.... Star Trek is a series of Hallmark SciFi philosophy questions, set on fresh carpet with weird sculptures and props throughout.
  
  Star Trek is NOT a Netflix production that can be churned out with improved dark, edgy, and abstract lighting, sleek sets, and dutch angle cinematography…
  Well... It's exactly like almost all the others. Netflix managed to hit some 3 shows that got improved this way.

The first interracial kiss on TV was between Kirk and Uhura in 1968. Star Trek is and always has been set in a time when humans have achieved a post-scarcity leftist utopian. Shit's been this way since way before your uncle started calling everything he doesn't like "woke" which was only like 4 years ago for the record.
Know what was really woke? Keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics. For real. I'm quoting this article lol.
- Anything that progressives do is something they try to turn into a curse. They even try it with the word progress and progressive, but it doesn't have the same effect which they really struggle with.

Is Eddington communist himbo? Rom?
- Thank you. That's the only one I didn't recognize immediately, haha. Poor delightful faithful Rom.
  
  It’s Worf. Rom wasn’t a main character.
- Thanks for asking, I was racking my brain trying to figure it out
- Bareil?
  
  Communist? More like priest himbo I would think.

The problem isnt woke, the problem is CW level writing. I've watched every episode of star Trek up to season 2 of Picard and the writers of discovery not understanding the speed of light, and it feel like the writers are just in qualified for their positions. It's so bad.
The writing for all the previous shows all had their highs and lows, but characters acted within their characterization and had genuine motivations. Picard season 1 was a rip off of mass effect and old man's war, with the facade Picard shoe horned in. Season 2 you have him chummy with a cold blooded murderer who faced no consequences.
I liked discovery for the first few seasons, but the plot holes, inconsistencies, and poor characterizations, left me feeling like watching the show was more habit or chore. I also never really felt like I got to know characters because their actions are so off the wall that you don't figure out the algorithms of their personality and motivations.
I honestly feel like lower decks has been the best Star Trek made in this new era, but I haven't seen brave new worlds yet or Picard season 3. I just needed a break after Picard season 2.
- SNW is much better. It's not a single story stretched to fit over a whole season helps a lot. It's definitely one of the best of new era Trek.
  Season 3 of Picard is better than the first couple, but doesn't really add anything.
  The stand out surprised at how god damned fucking good it is though is Prodigy. The first few episodes are a little bit childish, but after that it is excellent.
  
  I'll have to give prodigy a chance, I loved Voyager and I heard there is a lot connections but the Voyager connections to Picard season 2 is partially why I needed a break from Trek, lol.
- SNW is legit really good. A return to form. They experimented with different genres like you mentioned on the other shows then when they were writing SNW some brilliant person was like "hey, how about if we tried making star trek?"
  
  Agree SNW followed by LD are the best ones recently. And by far the best episode is the crossover of them both.
  I feel like to enjoy discovery I need to mute and turn off subtitles and just enjoy the graphics because they're really good. But we'll the most important things is that it open the doors to so many new series at same time, more than ever happened.
  
  I think it was more "how about we create some actually likable, interesting, and multidimensional characters making actually sensible decisions?" I think SNW is better here than even all the old shows. I have the feeling that stuff like Worf being such an inexplicably bad dad or Sisco completely out of character committing genocide in one episode would not happen in SNW.
- Season 2 you have him chummy with a cold blooded murderer who faced no consequences.
  Hey, Picard had already been chummy with Worf for years on TNG.
- Picard s02 was a fever dream that fortunately didn't go onward (s03 is a totally different contained story). I agree with you tho, Disco had different writers at the beginning but turned into a festering disaster and killed itself.
- picard 3 is ok if you can tolerate blatant fan service. BNW is pretty good. and i 100% agree with you about discovery and picard 1-2.
- Prodigy is the best Trek of this generation, then Lower Decks, then SNW.

They were too cowardly to make Doctor Twink and his boyfriend a thing, so they don't get credit for that. Fashion Lizard works, though.
- That, and there is plenty of fanfic to fill the void. A little cowardly to leave it to the fans, but it's not like they didn't build the foundations. The writers deserve some credit.
  
  There's also that segment with Andrew Robinson in some DS9 docu where he states his opinion on the matter pretty clearly. Can't remember his exact words, but his vibe was one of "shoulda let us have fucked".
- They did! It's canon in the lower decks mobile game (don't play it (it's bad))
  
  Ha, that's great! Of course, the creators of DS9 had no involvement.

Let’s not forget:
The Kiss
white/black Riddler duking it out with black/white guy in an allegory to race relations
Abraham Lincoln calling Uhura a “a charming negress” followed by a brief discussion about the future’s take on linguistics and equality
the pilot episode had a woman named Number One who was so named because she was number one at everything she did. She excelled at all the things on the ship. A woman being better than men? Impossible. That’s woke.
the Enterprise and a bunch of klingons once showed up to a planet so woke they ended war and used space magic to make the humans and klingons also do no wars in their vicinity.
in another episode the Enterprise went to a planet that still had war but they calculated the results of battles using a video game console and then sent casualties to their death in a disintegration chamber and the Kirk blew up the video game console to force them to either negotiate or go back to actual war as a lesson in ignoring the Prime Directive directly.
there was a Nazi planet and the Nazis were the bad guys.
there was also a Yankee planet where they somehow independently wrote the Declaration of Independence in broken pidgin English and used it to defeat the Space Soviets.
the episode where Kirk and a woman exchange bodies was… not handled well and is not a good example.
the klingons were soviets, btw.
basically every episode of the original series had something “woke”, okay? It was literally the whole point of the series.
- Spock was supposed to be red, like the Devil.
- Sulu (to Uhura): I'll save you fair maiden!
  Uhura: Sorry, neither.
- Well said!!! To continue with your points, I really enjoyed this video essay that goes through a lot of what you’re talking about. Really proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that trek valued diversity in regards to both civil rights with race and LGBTQ. (Even though there’s no need to prove an obvious fact). It starts with DS9 but stretches to the rest of trek and even some non trek references
  https://youtu.be/j5_g1DY1FLg
  
  The Vulcan credo was IDIC — Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations.

Traumatized Goo
I see they put O'Brien on this list, but then which one is Odo?
- He's the Unionist.
  
  Odo is an identity-seeking pre-proto-fascist who redeems himself. (pre and proto both because he's not a fascist but he might have become one if the ~~Kardassians~~ Cardassians kept power)
  Imho
  Edit k->c
  
  ✨ even better! He was a union man ✨
  
  I don't remember the series that well... did he learn how to impersonate an Irishman?

It was woke then too.

Colm Meaney was associated with Sinn Fein (formerly the political arm of the IRA) for a long time, so "Pro-Union Irishman" took me a minute.
- Asking for a black and tan at a american fake Irish bar will also seem bad if you know Irish history.

Are we head canoning Kira as bi now or is she including mirror universe Kira in this? Or maybe I missed something in several watches.
- This is my problem with this meme whenever it comes up.
  There are so many direct occasions to bring up representation and acceptance in Star Trek, so why do people always jump straight into platonic erasure and make up sexualities that aren't there?
  I for one always loved the ability for people in Trek to work and live close to each other and develop deep friendships without resorting to coupling up. Turning every friendship into something more romantic just seems disrespectful, because people are perfectly capable of being friends without needing to make something more of it
  
  Babe, this 'platonic erasure' comes from the original airings.
  It was the 90's, we were starved of everything. There was no overt representation. The comm still operated heavily in code, so if a show threw us circumspection we read between the lines.
  
  I like your speech. Let's fuck.
  
  People are weird. Trying to see things that aren't there. Because.....? Hell if I know. I'm just here for the shows. Not to question who might bang who.
- Mirror Kira is only bold enough to do what regular Kira couldn't. We all know she thought about it.

The bad guys on the show were: Space Hitler, Space Karen, Quark
- Quark isn't a bad guy 😢
  
  He was an antagonist. Constantly trying to subvert order.
- Quark is more of an inside track informant than an outright villain. While he often held to the Rules of Acquisition, he found himself going against the grain enough to be exiled.
- You had the chance to call him Space Capitalist
  
  I thought about it. But that didn't capture the full package as much.
- And bees.
- I always thought of Quark as the moral center of DS9. Hear me out. It's a darker show, much more shades of grey, a bit of a break from Roddenbury's vision of star trek. Instead of Jean Luc's pompous speeches, and Janeway's infuriating (and inconsistent) adherence to the prime directive, DS9 actually toes the line and crosses it many times. Quark meanwhile has his own code, and he sticks to it as faithfully as anyone can. He is true to himself and his species and pretty much never crosses his own line - he crosses our line for sure, but rarely if ever his own. Pretty much the only time I can remember him doing something un-ferengi is when he turned down a gazillion bars of latinum to run weapons for those people planning on blowing up a planet with a few million people on it. At the end of the day you can always count on quark doing the right thing. He's quite complex, and by far one of my favorite characters in all of Trek.
- I liked the purity of quarks character. Always after whatever provided the most opportunity and profit. He frequently was thwarted in his shady dealings in the pursuit of profit, but that's capitalism baby!
  Not to imply I'm a fan of capitalism, far from it, but he was portrayed so perfectly as the embodiment of pure, unfettered capitalism. Regulations were little more than a suggestion and if breaking them didn't result in a loss (of profits), or if it had a fairly low chance of affecting his profits, in his mind, then he would simply ignore rules and do whatever the hell he wanted.
  Looking at the world today, that's exactly what capitalism is doing. If you have laws but no enforcement, corpos will do it because the punishment is basically non-existent. If you have laws and enforcement, but they can hide/relocate/obfuscate that they've broken any of those laws, then they'll do whatever they damn well please, and just hide it. If the punishment for the infraction is less than the profit to be made by ignoring the laws, they'll do that too.
  One notable example I like to go back to frequently is relating to tobacco. The laws are there but enforcement is stretched so thin that the chances that you'll be caught are pretty minimal. So many places, like corner stores and gas stations, don't give enough of a shit to enforce the laws. They make so much from just selling to whomever asks regardless of how old they look and whether they have ID or not (within reason, I don't think anyone is selling to 10 year olds), they'll just do it anyways. When/if they catch a fine for it, they'll easily pay for it with all the profit made from not giving a shit about identifying people. As long as you look old enough, or choose enough to old enough, you can buy some. I'll strongly express that not every place is like this, but there's a nontrivial number that are.
  If you take that same approach with everything, you get corpos just eating EPA fines for polluting that are a fraction of what they would need to spend to properly dispose of their industrial waste. There's probably thousands of examples, but I won't waste everyone's time to dig them up and cite them.
  He was the perfect embodiment of this profit-first mentality. Easily one of the best ferengis in any of the trek universe.
  
  Good news! If the MAGA party wins in November they'll surely defund, gut, or do away with the EPA entirely, so pollution fines will drop to zero, clearly indicating pollution is gone!

is Bareil the communist himbo?
- I was thinking Dukat, but Worf is the only one not in this so probably him.
  
  It's Rom.
- Prob just a priest dedicated to faith, not to institutionalized religion like Winn

Wait, who is the trans worm supposed to be?
- Dax and all trills?
  
  And the bisexual terrorist?
  
  I forgot the symbiote was a worm thing. They really only showed that in one episode if I remember correctly, and that was already a retcon from what they did in TNG originally. I was also confused by the trans part because the symbiote doesn't really have a gender identity, the host does.
- Fuck off transphobe

Now do Quark…
- That was Quark.

For a minute there I forgot Communist Himbo was even in DS9. I should probably re-watch it after I"m done with Voyager, it's been a good 20 years.
- Can you please remind me what character was the Communist himbo? Was it supposed to be Gul Dukat?
  
  Rom and its perfect
  
  It’s Worf. “Communist” because he grew up in Russia.

Hold up... Kira is bisexual?
- Well, mirror Kira was if I remember correctly.

Seriously, I've never personally seen anyone complain about startrek being woke now...
I have seen many people (including myself) complaining that star trek went from actually woke to just only virtue signalling and putting itself on the back on how progressive it suddenly is and yet somehow forgetting how to make people think about a ethics subject in a well written and entertaining way like it did in the past. Star trek has sucked ever after enterprise. Badly.
Commence the down voting and telling me I'm a racist....
- I've seen it. Especially in conservative circles.
  
  And that makes actual valid criticism racist / sexist / anti woke / whatever too, somehow?
- And I’ve never personally seen anyone called a racist for criticizing a show’s writing quality. In fact, there are plenty of people in this thread expressing distaste for Discovery who don’t seem to be getting much flack for it at all.
  For my part, while Discovery had its faults, I’d favour its writing over Enterprise’s any day of the week. Seems like a lot of fans have really warmed up to Enterprise in the past few years, but in my day it was almost universally derided, and every time I’ve tried to give it a rewatch it’s only reinforced that impression.
  
  I couldn't stomach Enterprise back in the day and it kinda turned me off to Trek until SNW and Lower Decks. Discovery is different but I still enjoyed it.
  Ive never watched DS9 but op makes me think I should lol

I assume they’re calling Worf the”communist himbo?” I don’t get the communist part though.
- Rom.
  
  Ok I guess that makes more sense. Was Rom a Himbo? I guess more so than Worf. They don’t mention Quark though. Jump straight to Rom.
- I thought it was Morn. That guy just would not stop talking about communism.
- I don’t get the communist part though.
  He’s from Russia. His surname is Rozhenko.
  
  He’s from Russia. His surname is Rozhenko.
  Actually, that's his adoptive parent's surname. They're from Russia.

One of the beauties of fantasy is that it is whatever you want it to be regardless of the authors intent

In the 24th century, I mean. It wouldn't have been 1980s USSR-style Communist at any rate.

So just god emperor of dune then

- Well maybe you shouldn't, because back in the '90s, when the phrase that meant the exact same thing back then was "politically correct" and not "woke," I remember hearing all about how a black station commander, a female captain and a black Vulcan were all "politically correct" and it was ruining Star Trek, which was never like that before.
  Edit: I wrote 'white' instead of 'female' because I have slept about an hour all night. Yay me.
  
  I remember hearing all about how a black station commander... were all “politically correct”
  "People won't accept it. It's not believable!"
- Nah, no one would call the Michael Bay Transformers movies “woke”. We all know it’s about displaying progressive values.
  If you want to say something’s badly written, you can just say that, and avoid aligning yourself with bigots who flip their lid over a black little mermaid.
- Acolyte's writing is fine. There's the occasional bout of wooden dialogue, there's stuff you can nitpick such as "why does only Osha notice those moths" but OTOH you could also not miss the forest for the trees. The big-picture stuff is where the writing shines: Through various twists and turns and reveals and different characters having different knowledge and versions of events it explores the general topic of Jedi vs. "off-brand" (non-Sith/Jedi) force users from all kinds of angles as the viewer considers all those different perspectives before actually knowing canon Jedi policy regarding the... fuckup, let's call it.
  That all that was deliberate and very well done, but it also requires you to watch until at least episode 7 (8 isn't out yet).
  Meanwhile there was a deluge of 1/10 reviews on imdb, before the first episode had even aired, presumably from 4chan and kiwifarms snowflakes getting triggered by "there's going to be a good amount of female characters" and "we casted Abigail Thorn".
  That all said, yes, the series is woke: It is aware of systemic injustices. It explores them. Nothing to do with our world though because there's neither Jedi nor other force users and as such they can't have a relationship. You could read it as an allegory to possibly a thousand things, or you could view it as an exploration of the general mechanisms behind such conflicts, your choice.
  That, right there, is good leftist writing. None of that sappy idealist Discovery crap but a materialist exploration of fundamental mechanisms.

And the bible...

I would say DS9 was progressive.
If the topic is woke Star Trek, it's rather Discovery.
- woke is not a bad word. don't try to make it so.
  
  you were making it bad for yourself, I haven't said that. It's a different thing Discovery sucks ass anyway.
- Discovery is just shitty writing and bad characters, the wokeness is the least of its problems
  
  I agree that discovery has bad writing but that's the only reason it is bad
  It doesn't have to do with progressiveness which the entirety of star trek has
  
  haven't said Discovery was shit because of its overwokeness, it has its serious issues on its own

Oh look. It's this one again. Honestly that list is like the worst fanfic from the people who would be banned by the horney hammer. Stop being suckered in and let the stories an characters tell their own story. You know why no one goes on about this shit in Star Trek? Because it's not supposed to matter. Aspire to this.
- Nah. Think I'll aspire to overcoming problems related to this shit no one goes on about instead.
- Many of those who worked on trek from the very beginning would very much disagree with you.
  This video is a great essay that backs up the above statement in a few different ways: https://youtu.be/j5_g1DY1FLg
  I encourage you to sift, if not watch through it. It’s not exactly short and succinct but it takes you through a journey of trek history in the context of LGBTQ, and as it goes on draws more and more parallels to other trek projects beyond DS9 and JulianxBashir, in addition to general film history on the subject of both LGBT and civil rights.

Woke isn't bad because representation it's bad because preaching
Piccard_Speech.avi
- Preaching is only necessary until the nazis are eliminated.
  
  honestly thought people here of all places would understand that Piccard is the king of preaching.
  anyway, I thought it was funny so that's really all that really matters, stay mad and remember the internet is real life kids.

✨ even better! He was a union man ✨