I have this running theory that a lot of Discovery and Picard was written by people who haven't watched Star Trek, but do browse the wiki. I can just picture someone not really into Trek stumbling on the article for Section 31 and think, "Woah, this must be really cool and important!"

It's disappointing. DS9 was pretty unambiguous in its portrayal -- Section 31 is a violation of Federation ideals and shouldn't be allowed to continue. There is potential for an interesting story, but it's fundamentally not the story these guys are interested in telling. To them, Section 31 is just cool terminology to throw around; "I have the super-duper Q-clearance for top secret cool spy stuff!!!"

Angela's rant is great, but she also misses something. Season 2 of Picard is when this circus went from 'not getting it' and 'not wanting to make star trek' to being outright evil.

One of the most interesting aspects of Star Trek is how it evolves over time. Which includes how the canon evolves as well. What's key is how this happens in respects to how humanity built its utopia.

In the original series it was a complex trial by fire sort of thing. Fascist eugenics lead to WW3, and humanity got out of its hole with some alien solidarity from the vulcans. Its 1960s style alien messianism combined with cold war fears and the proximity to WW2 that lead to those ideas. 1990s Trek limited itself to calibrating where the emphasis was placed. All of those are still true and part of the story (TNG reminds us of it), but DS9 makes it clear that political struggle for equality and economic freedom were a part of it all while Enterprise reminded everyone that Humans did not achieve utopia by inventing replicators. They didn't even have replicators when they eliminated poverty, hunger and disease.

Picard meanwhile made everything including Climate Change reliant on finding a microbe in space. It's not humanity that overcomes difficulties. It's magic. And that's the showrunner's worldview. It's not just bleak and hopeless. It is that fascism is inevitable because there's no other option other than magic.

I feel like i could sit across a slowly cooling basket of shitty diner fries with this woman going "right?" "Yes!" "I agree!" "Omg thank you!" Etc etc for like, idk, six, maybe eight hours two or three days in a row. I feel pretty much the same way about star wars, fallout, lotr, and when microsoft announces the Elder Scrolls series at some point in the next 18 mos i'll feel the same way about that, too.

We're entering some bold new hell. Capital is trying to turn very big, unwiedly, difficult entertainment products like massive shows, games, and movies in to something like paid per line victorian era pulp slop that can be churnned out endlessly on a tight schedule, while also trying to strip all the craft and expertise out of it and turn the helm over to "ai", while also trying to meet their state mandated propaganda goals and their marketing goals and shore up the declining rate of profit. More and more parts moving faster and faster in ever tighter circles. And there's no bottom so it will go on getting worse, faster, in more perverse ways, until something drastic happens.

In the mean time please join me in declaring yourself a co-equal owner, creator, producer, and writer of lord of the rings, star slop, or whatever other story you love, and start making your own slop and refusing to call it fan-fic and just saying " fuck you, this is the true and authentic cup of christ because if a welsh story about a cool guy can turn in to fucking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and speilberg doesn't have to call it fan fic then I can write my own stories about random elves and I don't have to be fake humble about it."

If we don't steal our stories back from them they're just going to keep doing this shit until they wring all possible joy out of them. Lancelot is a self insert slash fic character and so can you!

Watch all four hours cowards.

But yes, I loved her analysis of how Section 31 existing fundamentally ruins the entire setting of Trek.

I tapped out after 2 or 3 episodes. It's not dignified to trot this old man around. bat'leth remember bat'leths!? remember worf?!

Ya know I might watch a four hour video about star trek, but I sure as hell won't watch a four hour video about Star Trek: Picard, a show that I have not watched, that I have no interest in watching and really couldn't care less about what it "does" to Star Trek.

The only actually interesting thing about Star Trek is how it reflects reality and the times it was made in. NuTrek doesn't ruin the original Star Trek, it doesn't even do anything to it. It's just some other random thing that some other random people made because some random company decided is going to increase the value of the "intellectual property" that is the Star Trek™ brand. And the fact that it is bad television made only for profit, that it is a sad and depressing turn for the original vision of the future that Star Trek used to be sometime back in the 60s is kinda sad, but it's also nothing but a reflection of the state of the world in its least creative, visionary and hopeful iteration. Any part of your heart that you put into that nebulous thing that is Star Trek over the years should flow freely from thing to idea to thing and back and not be exclusive to what really amounts to nothing but a brand. It's high time to get over it.

If anything Star Trek has been the poster child of cultural stagnation and reaction for all of its life, it being after all the original "show that got cancelled but then uncancelled after the fandom complained about it for a decade". It's not even just that, it's the original "fandom" show, the show that originated "fanfiction" and everything that comes with it.

And even in its best, most hopeful and visionary form, Star Trek has always really been a terribly limited show: What has it ever been besides "Wagon Train to the stars"? Always taking place at the imagined "frontier", always marching west. Sure, the show might have told you it took place in a post-scarcity quasi-communist utopia, but have its stories and its form ever felt like it?

It's a testament to the sheer force of reaction that followed the 60s (and also and maybe even more the short-sightedness of the 60s themselves) that ever since we have lost not only our ability to imagine a better future, we've even lost the ability to imagine a better television show.

Recommending a 4 hour video essay is violence.

I'd just like to remind everyone that Discovery S1 is completely plagiarized from some small indie game on Steam. Even though the poor guy lost the lawsuit, its pretty fucking obvious the writers had someone use literal google results for inspiration.

I loved her video and this is a great compilation but others have made the same criticisms for some time now. The RLM reviews go over most of these issues in a much shorter time.

I did not know about the Patrick Stewart biography thing but it only serves to show how much of a useless piece of shit he is. I do not care about the whatever good contributions he may have made or said, he can go die in a fire.

If you haven't already I recommend once again reading FADE IN: From Idea to Final Draft. PDF here. Its not like Michael Piller is a saint or anything but the Patrick Stewart letters should be put in any Trek museum IMO.

Again the quotes I love from PS

Yes, witty, ironic, self deprecating, teasing, cheeky are definitely traits that describe the TNG crew. God what a moron.

When she talks about Nemesis and the movies in general its important to realize just how terribly similar all of this is to the TNG movie era. You can read the nonsensical Patrick Stewart letters and how he so desperately wants to abandon the TV series.

Yeah they got PS because of Logan but Picard also turned out like this exactly because PS is an idiot that hates the TV series. If PS wanted it we could have had a more TNG relatable Picard series, but this idiot only wanted to make a statement about Brexit. The whole segment of why "Space Fox News" exist is exactly because of that mandate I'm 100% convinced. Yeah in the biography he brags about Season 2 but that was not his only input lol.

He said he didn't want a TNG "reunion". That was major bullshit, not only to shit on his fellow actors, but it would force the show back to the TV era. He always wanted to be a Movie Star^Tm^ like it was popular in the 90's and I fully believe that the Picard series was doomed from the start, PS would never come back to do actual real good TNG era Star Trek again, period. The success of X-Men did not change his mind, in 2018 he still wants nothing to do with the TV series.

Kurtzman and all are still complete assholes but its not like they could have made TNG 2.0 with Patrick Stewart either. It all just sucks for 30 years now.

section 31 is based and it's just cold hard reality that such an agency would have to exist for the Federation to exist

i mean this is literally my defense of China/the USSR/DPRK etc etc, you literally do need some clandestine bullshit intelligence agency when you're beset by those of others

this isn't a section 31 defense because I'm not enough of a nerd to know all the holocausts they've done for liberalism

The Ideology of modern reboots often comes down to "it wouldn't have gone down like that if I was on that plane, I can tell you that much."

I do like the concept of a Section 31, it was executed well enough in DS9 and offered something of a critique on the whole trope of "Hard shadow men doing what needs to be done" (the nu-trek version tho is pure post 911, 24-ass, tacticool brainrot that I personally consider anti-canon)

But the concept itself presents an interesting hypothetical; how would a future socialist utopia deal with the intelligence agencies of fascist interstellar empires? It's why I've never been particularly annoyed by the weirder poltical aspects of Trek lore, obviously they originate from the liberal politics of 90s era writers and producers and Genes idiosyncratic "maoism", but there's not much to do with that information besides mope about the dominance of liberal cultural hegemony

What's fun for me is taking the nonsense at face value and either subverting or deconstructing it with your own pet theories about how this socialist utopia presented to us on screen could work, it's utterly useless but fun daydreaming

I don't even mind when chuds get in on the action and come up with the dumbest interpretation of fiction known to humankind, their lore craft is easy to debunk and its fun to point out the contradiction in their self-identification with characters who would phaser or quarantine them on a deserted rock

Section 31

Gunna' check this out. After the Guys Podcast episode on Trek Guys the other week I've been craving Star Trek. I've never watched Voyager (outside like random episodes at my childhood friend's house) so maybe I'll watch that sometime soon too.