Any areas you passionately agree with Chuck on?

[MightyDavidson]

His break down on why Janeway is a broken archetype and comparing her to Sisko.
Sisko was written as the Commander. Being black was way down on the list for him.
Janeway was written as the Female captain, and balancing that with different writers dragged her all over the map.

Too many characters having faux skills as they are credited with being X genius or instructor. Like Chakotay being a tactical genius and instructor. Tuvok being an academy instructor. But neither being good at teaching. Like the writers had never had to give instructions to anyone so they understood tasks.

The differences on TOS prime directive and TNG prime directive and why one felt right and the other felt like an anal probe.

It helps that in TOS they had episodes like Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action that showed how violated the Prime Directive on purpose like in Patterns of Force, or being insufficiently careful as in A Piece of the Action could go bad. One expects Starfleet Academy uses them, particularly the first one, as an example of why the Prime Directive is necessary in the first place. I mean really if what John Gill did became common knowledge, it'd be a black mark on the Federation for generations.

[Riedquat]

The 'rural simplicity' Star Trek gets a hard-on for in Insurrection and episodes like 'Paradise'. Chuck rightly points out the fact that it'd involve back-breaking labour, poor sanitation and a reduced lifespan simply to be 'closer to nature'. I can't wait to see his reaction to the modern BSG finale.

What he usually seems to be attacking there are examples so bad that they look like strawmen set up by people who want to push "cramming as much technology into our lives as possible is great, imagine the hardship it must've been before TVs had remote controls!" This is instead of looking at just what makes the idea appeal, even when there's naivety about some of the reality, and claiming it's just a "grass is always greener" view. It raises important questions about what is the ideal lifestyle, what really are problems and what just get viewed as them due to being over-pampered, how the differences can be reconciled etc. For example too much physical hard work - no thanks. But too little and we end up with lots of unhealthy people (and a few who go and spend money to do pointless hard physical activity in a gym). Current lifestyles are in danger of reducing lifespans (the postwar generation arguably hit the best balance, at least for those who don't smoke like chimneys).

By rejecting the whole concept a lot of points about human pscychology and relevence of activities to life are being missed. IMO we shouldn't be saying "the back to nature thing is a load of ****", we should be asking how can it be achieved without too many of the downside, and would that be right for a lot of people who think they want it. Because the modern world, and what the future looks like it's turning in to, certainly aren't the best for everyone. The levels of stress, depression, even suicide are things that need to be looked at a lot more closely, and ask why. IMO that's where a lot of it comes from, and it's far too easy to sneer at people suffering from them by saying "you've got it physically easier than anyone in history so stop complaining, because that's all that matters."

Oh, and it's also an interesting exercise to consider what proportion of past miseries are social rather than material in nature (i.e. could most people have had easier lives with different social structures). The sort of question in fact that science fiction likes to ask. And even today I rather suspect that we're too busy searching for technological (or economic) solutions to fundamentally social problems - technology and economics may be some of the tools for reaching the solution but lack of them may not be the problem, or all of it.

[Sir Will]

Prime Directive rants. PD = kill them all for their own good.

This! The PD is so often handled so poorly. I think I saw it even back then, but watching his reviews over the years just solidifies it. It's so sick what they use it to justify sometimes. It's good in theory but in execution... ugh.

[Artabax]

His break down on why Janeway is a broken archetype and comparing her to Sisko.
Sisko was written as the Commander. Being black was way down on the list for him.
Janeway was written as the Female captain, and balancing that with different writers dragged her all over the map.

Too many characters having faux skills as they are credited with being X genius or instructor. Like Chakotay being a tactical genius and instructor. Tuvok being an academy instructor. But neither being good at teaching. Like the writers had never had to give instructions to anyone so they understood tasks.

The differences on TOS prime directive and TNG prime directive and why one felt right and the other felt like an anal probe.

It helps that in TOS they had episodes like Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action that showed how violated the Prime Directive on purpose like in Patterns of Force, or being insufficiently careful as in A Piece of the Action could go bad. One expects Starfleet Academy uses them, particularly the first one, as an example of why the Prime Directive is necessary in the first place. I mean really if what John Gill did became common knowledge, it'd be a black mark on the Federation for generations.

Certainly not. Starfleet insist PD is the ONLY way. They don't need reasons. Reasons get in the way of the One True Dogma.

Patterns of Force asserts that genocide is a BAD thing. That message is the total opposite of PD.

[MightyDavidson]

His break down on why Janeway is a broken archetype and comparing her to Sisko.
Sisko was written as the Commander. Being black was way down on the list for him.
Janeway was written as the Female captain, and balancing that with different writers dragged her all over the map.

Too many characters having faux skills as they are credited with being X genius or instructor. Like Chakotay being a tactical genius and instructor. Tuvok being an academy instructor. But neither being good at teaching. Like the writers had never had to give instructions to anyone so they understood tasks.

The differences on TOS prime directive and TNG prime directive and why one felt right and the other felt like an anal probe.

It helps that in TOS they had episodes like Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action that showed how violated the Prime Directive on purpose like in Patterns of Force, or being insufficiently careful as in A Piece of the Action could go bad. One expects Starfleet Academy uses them, particularly the first one, as an example of why the Prime Directive is necessary in the first place. I mean really if what John Gill did became common knowledge, it'd be a black mark on the Federation for generations.

Certainly not. Starfleet insist PD is the ONLY way. They don't need reasons. Reasons get in the way of the One True Dogma.

Patterns of Force asserts that genocide is a BAD thing. That message is the total opposite of PD.

Except it's really not. Clearly it's meant to prevent situations like the ones in Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action since those episodes clearly show how badly messing with a pre-warp society can go. Nothing in TOS indicated that Starfleet was required to let a society die if it was faced with annihilation and there's at least one TOS episode where Kirk and company take steps to prevent a pre-warp society from dying without any mention of the Prime Directive or violations thereof. It was crappy writers in TNG, Voyager and Enterprise misinterpreting what was stated about it in TOS that it started to go wrong.

[Darth Wedgius]

Even in TNG, genocide was considered a bad thing, it's just that violating the prime directive was considered worse. After all, when the crew of the Enterprise D allowed a biosphere with sapients to go extinct in Homeward, they stood up to make themselves feel better. I mean to commemorate them.

Not that I'm in any way still bitter about that episode or anything like that. Maybe the new Picard show will consist of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged insulting Picard forever in a Cause and Effect-like timeloop because I might subscribe for that, but it doesn't mean I'm bitter.

[Artabax]

Except it's really not. Clearly it's meant to prevent situations like the ones in Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action since those episodes clearly show how badly messing with a pre-warp society can go. Nothing in TOS indicated that Starfleet was required to let a society die if it was faced with annihilation and there's at least one TOS episode where Kirk and company take steps to prevent a pre-warp society from dying without any mention of the Prime Directive or violations thereof. It was crappy writers in TNG, Voyager and Enterprise misinterpreting what was stated about it in TOS that it started to go wrong.

Except it is really so. Only in Classic Trek and Orville were we shown examples where breaking PD made things worse: gangsters and Nazis and bears, oh my.

Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer all gleefully genocide planets for the greater glory of PD. Ryker insists that Genocide is The Cosmic Plan TM, that Genocide proves the existence of God and then Outcast is the only exception because it is God's Plan that Ryker shag the hoit lesbian man.

[CMDR_Bob]

I think that's what I disliked about Pelowski in general. In "Homeward", she claims it's "callous" and "cowardly" to stick to the PD, even if you're allowing someone to knowing die as a result. Putting aside her hippocratic oath, when Picard asks if it's okay to violate the PD even if it means getting involved in an armed conflict, her only rebuttal to his pressure is "because it's kind!" Yeah, I'm sure a number of well-intentioned PD violations were "kind". That doesn't mean that the intent will be interpreted as such, or that the outcome will reflect it.

Pelowski, to me, was basically the "abolish the PD" nuts that the ST universe tries to give a platform to, but otherwise disregards because they speak more from an emotional position than a reasoned one. Yeah, sure, cold logic is cruel and whatever. However, these are sentient races almost completely ignorant of the larger universe. If you came down with your transporters and wielding phasers, how might they react? How might it alter their history? It's the difference between giving a neanderthal a tank and giving Henry Ford the blueprints to a corvette. Ford will develop the corvette over a period of time and perfect the design. The neanderthal will likely destroy his own species trying to comprehend the basics of such a machine.

You can argue that we can teach the neanderthal, but what changes in the long-term? How many Adolf Hitler's did that tank spawn just because you felt that extra little "push" would make things better for the species?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Well technically you're not supposed to give the Corvette diagram to Ford anyway.

[MightyDavidson]

Except it's really not. Clearly it's meant to prevent situations like the ones in Patterns of Force and A Piece of the Action since those episodes clearly show how badly messing with a pre-warp society can go. Nothing in TOS indicated that Starfleet was required to let a society die if it was faced with annihilation and there's at least one TOS episode where Kirk and company take steps to prevent a pre-warp society from dying without any mention of the Prime Directive or violations thereof. It was crappy writers in TNG, Voyager and Enterprise misinterpreting what was stated about it in TOS that it started to go wrong.

Except it is really so. Only in Classic Trek and Orville were we shown examples where breaking PD made things worse: gangsters and Nazis and bears, oh my.

Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Archer all gleefully genocide planets for the greater glory of PD. Ryker insists that Genocide is The Cosmic Plan TM, that Genocide proves the existence of God and then Outcast is the only exception because it is God's Plan that Ryker shag the hoit lesbian man.

So your examples that you seem to have made up out of whole cloth supersede my examples that come from the actual show? Yeah I don't think so.