Red Letter Media

[Strange Wilderness]

This show looks like a fucking trainwreck. I love Q, and the fact they roped him into this thing is just depressing.

Also Mike's senile Picard impression near the end was hilarious.

Hopefully fan reaction to Mike as senile Picard is positive and they take it as a "Q" to make a video based on their predictions for season 2. Mike can play senile Picard, Jay can play the doctor trying to reform immigration, and Rich can play Seven of Nine in drag protesting climate change.

Assuming that doesn't get them canceled because it will be revealed that Stewart really does have dementia, Jay is not a POC and can't understand their experience, and showing Rich Evans in the Seven of Nine body suit is considered a crime against humanity.

Amazing, it looks like they're trying to throw literally every single liberal talking point at the wall at once. Vaccine chips are part of our utopian future (please ignore that we rewrote season one of picard to show the future as being a bigoted angry shithole), illegal immigration, environmentalism, fascist (right wing only!) boogieman. Surely in a show with phasers that disintegrate people they wont also do guns r bad?

What gets me is how lazy the whole thing is. Old Star Trek shows dealt with issues that were big at the current time but they did so in allegory. They'd beam down to a random planet and deal with the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement through aliens, robots, or lost colonies. You could have the cast of Picard go to a random planet and have them try to solve a problem where the societies energy source is causing the planets core to become magnetically unstable but the planet is resistant to a new energy source because they treat the warnings as a doomsday scenario. Have the cast then debate how to stop the planet from exploding and maybe some of the issues with changing energy sources so rapidly, like the new energy source could destabalize the planets atmosphere in the future. Instead they transport the cast to modern day Earth and hit viewers over the head with "climate change bad". Its like they didn't want to make any effort and if this wasn't a Star Trek show it would be a YouTube video of them all in a zoom call staring at the camera and virtue signalling.

Also I don't want to rain on Rich and Mike's glorious nostalgia for the past, but some of those star trek episodes from way back when were actually quite preachy. Granted no where near as bad as today, and they're right that they did a better job of humanising the other side, but some still managed to be on the nose.

At least in the older episodes, like you said, they tried to humanize the other side. The crew of the Enterprise would have a conversation with the antagonist of the episode and at least their viewpoints would make some kind of sense. Like when Kirk and Kodos talked and Kodos tried to justify that his actions made sense with the information he had but it was clear that he felt guilt for what he had done. In Picard Kodos would go on a supervillain rant about how people who are different than him are weak and need to be destroyed and how he will make Tarsus IV great again. Also every Shakespeare reference would be explained to the viewer.

 

[byuu]

What are you doing on Eradication Day?
I'm thinking of taking my Romulan sex slave to the Museum of Conquest to look at photos of dead Cardassian children.

 

[Flexo]

What gets me is how lazy the whole thing is. Old Star Trek shows dealt with issues that were big at the current time but they did so in allegory. They'd beam down to a random planet and deal with the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement through aliens, robots, or lost colonies. You could have the cast of Picard go to a random planet and have them try to solve a problem where the societies energy source is causing the planets core to become magnetically unstable but the planet is resistant to a new energy source because they treat the warnings as a doomsday scenario. Have the cast then debate how to stop the planet from exploding and maybe some of the issues with changing energy sources so rapidly, like the new energy source could destabalize the planets atmosphere in the future. Instead they transport the cast to modern day Earth and hit viewers over the head with "climate change bad". Its like they didn't want to make any effort and if this wasn't a Star Trek show it would be a YouTube video of them all in a zoom call staring at the camera and virtue signalling.

It's also incredibly short sighted.

TOS had a literal hippie episode.

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/s074.php

The whole thing has aged like milk and is now borderline lethal with the cringe it can induce. Any enjoyment of it is ironic and any message it might have is now lost to time.

Compare to say... the city on the edge of forever.

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/s028.php

An episode which remains timeless and beloved. It's not only quality, but it has a message that continues to resonate and echo through the decades.

When you tie you message so tightly to a moment in politics, your story then looks silly later when things end up changing. Like the TOS episode about overpopulation:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon_(episode)

Forget 5 years, Picard S2 is going to look stupid before the end of this year.

 

[IDanceonTrannyGraves]

I have no history with Star Trek, but holy shit I can't imagine how miserable being a Star Trek fan must be right now.

I had to stop during this season of STD. I realised I was skimming through the episodes and barely watching them and thought "What's the point?". I can't bear to watch Q and Picard be wheeled out like Stan Lee for the writers to leech off their life force.

 

[Brain Problems]

What gets me is how lazy the whole thing is. Old Star Trek shows dealt with issues that were big at the current time but they did so in allegory. They'd beam down to a random planet and deal with the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement through aliens, robots, or lost colonies. You could have the cast of Picard go to a random planet and have them try to solve a problem where the societies energy source is causing the planets core to become magnetically unstable but the planet is resistant to a new energy source because they treat the warnings as a doomsday scenario. Have the cast then debate how to stop the planet from exploding and maybe some of the issues with changing energy sources so rapidly, like the new energy source could destabalize the planets atmosphere in the future. Instead they transport the cast to modern day Earth and hit viewers over the head with "climate change bad". Its like they didn't want to make any effort and if this wasn't a Star Trek show it would be a YouTube video of them all in a zoom call staring at the camera and virtue signalling.

Whoa whoa whoa hold on there friend. That sounds dangerously close to subtlety. Not sure if you've been keeping up on current events but things like nuance aren't look on too kindly round these parts.

Seriously though, the writing is so on the nose that it's a dramatic version of late night hosts doing their "jokes" for the applause and not the laughs. I also lay the blame firmly at the feet of absolute retards that think every series requires a storyline that runs through every episode connecting them all at all times. Over-serialization is a cancer. That's part of the reason why the Orville, for all its faults, is still heads and shoulders above anything nuTrek has squeezed out.

 

[Quintex96]

I have no history with Star Trek, but holy shit I can't imagine how miserable being a Star Trek fan must be right now.

I have an honest confession to make. Voyager was the first Star Trek series I saw as it was the show that was airing when I was a kid. A few years later after the show ended I got into internet forums and I would argue earnestly that Voyager was a good show against people that thought it was awful and a disgrace to what Star Trek stood for.

I now know how those people felt.

 

[Mega Man II Intro - GB]

Best thing about Voyager was the opening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9FU8bmxQs

Big space adventure coming up! Epic space adventure, exactly what you want as a 12 year old! Then it's a bitchy lady captain arguing with the same damn aliens week after week despite them supposedly jetting across the universe. If I'd had another Trek to compare it to, I would have said "this is no Star Trek".

 

[Flexo]

I have an honest confession to make. Voyager was the first Star Trek series I saw as it was the show that was airing when I was a kid. A few years later after the show ended I got into internet forums and I would argue earnestly that Voyager was a good show against people that thought it was awful and a disgrace to what Star Trek stood for.

I now know how those people felt.

I would like to apologize if I was ever one of those people.

We never knew how good we had it.

 

[Mikoyan]

Whoa whoa whoa hold on there friend. That sounds dangerously close to subtlety. Not sure if you've been keeping up on current events but things like nuance aren't look on too kindly round these parts.

Seriously though, the writing is so on the nose that it's a dramatic version of late night hosts doing their "jokes" for the applause and not the laughs. I also lay the blame firmly at the feet of absolute retards that think every series requires a storyline that runs through every episode connecting them all at all times. Over-serialization is a cancer. That's part of the reason why the Orville, for all its faults, is still heads and shoulders above anything nuTrek has squeezed out.

Fuck. I remember how -amazing- it was when B5 came out and really did an overarching plot. If you'd told me then that I'd find endless plot arcs fucking insufferable, I'd have thought you were nuts.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

I have no history with Star Trek, but holy shit I can't imagine how miserable being a Star Trek fan must be right now.

Sadly most Star Trek fans I know eat this shit up. They're complete consoomers on top of being liberal mush brains.

 

[Saul Goodman Fan]

Hopefully fan reaction to Mike as senile Picard is positive and they take it as a "Q" to make a video based on their predictions for season 2. Mike can play senile Picard, Jay can play the doctor trying to reform immigration, and Rich can play Seven of Nine in drag protesting climate change.

>Rich in a skintight Seven of Nine outfit
I can only get so erect.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

I have no history with Star Trek, but holy shit I can't imagine how miserable being a Star Trek fan must be right now.

It's like being a Star Wars fan, but with even less money. Also, I agree with Kirk. Those hippies should have been arrested. Then they wouldn't have been taken by the bald guy and go to a literal acid-washed planet.

 

[Flexo]

Amazing, it looks like they're trying to throw literally every single liberal talking point at the wall at once. Vaccine chips are part of our utopian future (please ignore that we rewrote season one of picard to show the future as being a bigoted angry shithole), illegal immigration, environmentalism, fascist (right wing only!) boogieman. Surely in a show with phasers that disintegrate people they wont also do guns r bad?

Also I don't want to rain on Rich and Mike's glorious nostalgia for the past, but some of those star trek episodes from way back when were actually quite preachy. Granted no where near as bad as today, and they're right that they did a better job of humanising the other side, but some still managed to be on the nose.

I know on the trek thread we were debating why this happens. Literally just now I think I found the answer.

https://defector.com/i-watched-a-ben-shapiro-movie-by-accident/

You don't have to click the link, here's the first paragraph:

“if you’re looking for something to watch, SHUT IN, is pretty fun and vincent gallo gets his ass kicked if you’re into that sort of thing.” That’s a tweet I wrote a couple of weeks ago late on a Saturday night. It no longer exists. The reason it doesn’t exist is because almost immediately after I posted it, I got a DM from a friend: “uh, you know that movie was produced by the ultra-right-wing daily wire with only ultra-right-wing producers, talent, and so forth, for that market?” Uh, what? No. No! Delete! Delete! What? “Yep. They’re trying to make ‘real’ movies now…sneak that shit in under the cover of actual production values.” For fuck’s sake, this always happens to me. I will be watching an ultra-evangelical movie and not realize it’s ultra-evangelical. I will be listening to Christian radio and not realize it’s Christian radio. If Jesus is around, I need him to announce himself. Or I’ll just think he’s from Brooklyn.

And the last paragraph:

That’s the problem. I felt tricked. I felt tricked into swallowing (even if only subconsciously) Shapiro’s ethos. I don’t feel tricked when I watch one of Clint Eastwood’s conservative heartland movies. I don’t feel tricked when Mel Gibson makes a movie about Jesus Christ. I didn’t even feel tricked when I watched Sonnier’s movies from before he started working with The Daily Wire. That’s because none of those movies are insidious; they are as obvious about their intentions as a brick to the head. But Shapiro and the right-wing ecosystem he belongs to seems to be an increasingly slippery one. As my friend put it, “sneak that shit in under the cover of actual production values.” It concerns me that Shapiro so seamlessly infiltrated what was supposed to be just a boring Saturday night. Not in the sense that I might accidentally become a fascist, but in the sense that I wasn’t really given the chance to actively decide whether or not I wanted to watch a movie produced by a piece of shit. And because of that, Shapiro achieved his goal. I fell for his ruse. And that is why you don’t watch pirated movies.

See? These movies & shows CAN'T be subtle about it because otherwise how would the NPCs know if it was approved viewing or not?

 

[Mola Ram]

See? These movies & shows CAN'T be subtle about it because otherwise how would the NPCs know if it was approved viewing or not?

If you told me that was satire I would have believed you. The cult thinking is all too real.

Speaking of cults, I think Imma rip my own heart out now.

 

[Megaroad 2012]

I have no history with Star Trek, but holy shit I can't imagine how miserable being a Star Trek fan must be right now.

I'd say it's probably second most painful to being a Star Wars fan maybe.

I'm not a SW fan myself, but I'd find it painful if some 40 years of canon just get tossed out for some retarded danger hair stuff (I dug the Knights of the Old Republic stuff).

 

[Saul Goodman Fan]

I know on the trek thread we were debating why this happens. Literally just now I think I found the answer.

https://defector.com/i-watched-a-ben-shapiro-movie-by-accident/

You don't have to click the link, here's the first paragraph:

And the last paragraph:


See? These movies & shows CAN'T be subtle about it because otherwise how would the NPCs know if it was approved viewing or not?

this person is acting like watching a movie is the same thing as murdering somebody

 

[Commander X]

One of the space-hippies was played by Charles Napier, which struck me as funny because later through his career he played some characters who did not seem like they would be friendly to hippies, space-faring or otherwise. Like the head of the country band that threatens the Blues Brothers with "You're gonna look pretty funny tryin' to eat corn on the cob with no fuckin' teeth!"

 

[BScCollateral]

Also, I agree with Kirk. Those hippies should have been arrested.

It's not a very good episode, but I've always suspected one of the reasons it's so disliked is it made a big chunk of the audience realize they'd never make it in Starfleet.

 

[Bush King]

It's also incredibly short sighted.

TOS had a literal hippie episode.

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/s074.php

The whole thing has aged like milk and is now borderline lethal with the cringe it can induce. Any enjoyment of it is ironic and any message it might have is now lost to time.

Compare to say... the city on the edge of forever.

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/s028.php

An episode which remains timeless and beloved. It's not only quality, but it has a message that continues to resonate and echo through the decades.

When you tie you message so tightly to a moment in politics, your story then looks silly later when things end up changing. Like the TOS episode about overpopulation:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mark_of_Gideon_(episode)

Forget 5 years, Picard S2 is going to look stupid before the end of this year.

The big issue is that TOS (to producers) was a boring sci-fi pulp show meant to fill up time slots between programs. They thought it far too slow and cerebral. Episodes on Hippies were meant to bring in viewers by talking about hot-button issues, the enduring popularity largely being a fluke. Contrast with Picard and Discovery- they have the same perspective of it being disposable, but it is now flagship schlock. Every episode is about space Jesus, the end of the world, SPOCK, tomorrow we'll all be dead, giant space laser battles, kill everyone, and phrases from 50 years ago uttered as throw away lines being repurposed as the hinge of entire plot arcs, and then it is all completely forgotten. As much as everyone hates capeshit, I think we can all agree that Marvel at least treated it with the respect it deserves for the weight of the material. You have to earn your end of the world plot, and there were a handful of films about really simple plots before they got to Avengers, and almost a decade before the sequel to that. People still remember and talk about it, if for no other reason than they spent 45 hours watching and $500 on tickets.

I think it's perfectly acceptable and possible to make an incredibly powerful and timeless piece on current politics (or using an analog to talk about current politics) but it has to be given weight and reverence. It's obvious that the writers just thought that whatever they don't like is bad, so write that climate change and industrial factories bad and the reason they happen is because the bad men hate everyone (but don't worry about how every plot is about how hateful the good guys are). You could have made a show the day after Trump lost and have it be praised by both (sane) sides of the aisle by just given the weight of argument to both sides. Everything has to be written as the next big political manifesto but is produced as a popcorn flick. Bring back those cringe episodes on Hippies, make an SJW BTFO Compilation episode of Star Trek or whatever the fuck else, everyone understands it's mindless fun and that gives you the chance to make some really goofy shit. I can't remember a single episode of Treehouse of Horror that parodies anything past the 90s.

 

[Comicsgeist]

Sadly most Star Trek fans I know eat this shit up. They're complete consoomers on top of being liberal mush brains.

Can confirm. While CBS All Access don't release viewing numbers (because they'd be embarrassed), Picard is apparently their most watched show ever making it their flagship show. Like Star Wars, trek fans it would seem are more than happy to choke on memberberries, so the garbage train isn't likely to derail any time soon.