Star Trek Picard and Trek Taking on Modern Politics

[Yukaphile]

I can't say I hate him. I don't know the man personally. I just know Season 1 and Season 2 TNG Picard was NOT up to snuff at all. That changed in Season 3 when Maurice Hurley left (AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING) and Michael Piller stepped in. And that he wants more action and boobs is... frankly what I am so critical of in modern movies. Credit where it's due for Star Wars, at least to my knowledge, they haven't taken that approach. The Bayformers are still embarrassing.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Stewart's remained rather modest on the political front up to and through 2016. He's very liberty minded, but he works with what he's got his nose into and he doesn't make that big a deal of it as far as his public persona. To turn around and call him a political shill over this kind of thing because of equivity math is really unfair.

Yes, it's recognized by a lot of people as figurative as far as any degree of imperative or expectation is concerned.

And after 2016 he became exactly what Brexiteers term "a Remoaner".

And just so we are clear, a Remoaner differs from a Remainer in that they are condescending, elitist, and oh so smug in their moral certitude. I have never heard the self-mastabatory phrase "right side of history" used by anyone else more than Remoaners.

I stick by what I said: he is a washed up old man who has not had a good role in years. He is the British John Travolta.

A lot of times beloved characters on genre shows are seemingly typecasted to the character they're playing, to the point where maybe you never really see them in any roles. Stewart fit into X-Men like a glove and was a respectable part of the movies for almost two decades. He went out with Logan and respectfully retired the character in 2017, long before the Fox-Men volcano started erupting. So, there's some room to consider the strength of his professional career, but it's not exactly a dud. True too, he has been pretty vocal about Brexit, I was thinking more on the American side, but yeah still he is very respectful about American politics.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

As far as him "just being an actor," you're rationalizing a bit in detaching him from Picard. That's practically preaching the reverse of death of the author in trying to reduce Stewart's integral involvement on the matter.

And, yes, season 3. By that time the actors had gotten running ideas of the strengths of the characters and conversed with showrunners and writers to mold the characters into what they became. If anything the overall weakness of TNG character development compared to other shows is more pointed towards the creativity in writing more than the actors viability. Still though while that might not be the point specifically, Stewart's shakespearean dialect was ripe potential for making Picard.

[Darth Wedgius]

He is more writer than those that hate him from drop of the hat that's for sure.

(1) As far as "from drop of the hat" (sic) goes, from his statements, he's a bigot. It may be bigotry you sympathize with, or even agree with, but, if taken literally, it's still bigotry. Maybe it was tongue in cheek, but I've seen many on your side of the aisle who are happy to attack people on the basis of race or sex provided it is the proper race or sex being attacked.

(2) Nobody here AFAIK has evinced wishing him ill. If anybody here hates him, it's a gosh darned mild hate.

(3) Even if you were right about (1) and (2) you haven't demonstrated any quality of writing on his part, the thing you are "sure" of.

[clearspira]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clHkz-ovA1k

I don't know if links are still broken or not, but here is Midnight's Edge latest vid where they go into a lot of the politics of the show and of Stewart. Worth a watch in the context of this thread. And yes, it is very much based on his opinion of Trump and Brexit (and this comes straight from an article that he himself wrote).

For those of you who are not going to watch, Stewart outright states that ''Picard'' is going to be the darkest Trek yet and is imo rather insulting towards TNG. Automatically therefore I am calling this series for the lemon it is. If this series is darker than STD, darker than DS9s darkest dark, and is made by someone who is disparaging towards TNG; this series is going to be awful. I'll give Disney Star Wars this much - at least it isn't modern Star Trek.

The ''hopeful series'' is dead. Replaced by literally every other nihilistic science fiction franchise out there today.

[Yukaphile]

Well, tbf, clearspira, I can sympathize, to an extent. Women are woefully underrepresented in politics, and in the US to this day, 100 years after women got the right to vote, a few out-of-touch male candidates are resorting to tokenism-pandering masquerading as equality instead of actually supporting those they say they want working for them, on such a historic year, when they are so ancient I can't see them surviving another eight years, because to an extent we have largely forgotten how hard our ancestors had to fight for our rights we take for granted today. That said, it has to be a choice, it can't be enforced. And that's where the craw in my bonnet goes over some idiotic male candidate offering to give a token spot in a supportive to a woman, as Vice-President. I think the party should vote on that. Any meaningful change has to come from the heart, within, through conviction or intellectual persuasion. It can't be achieved via force. And it's why I just gave up on activism. I could literally see this tokenism-pandering bullshit coming even in 2016.

And yeah, changing it so that it is "not the Picard we knew" - because that worked so well with Star Wars and Luke Skywalker, eh? Some of the stuff I've seen is already cringe. "Number of days we have gone without being assimilated!" Plus the Borg were overused before 9/11, and that was nearly 20 years ago. And involving the Romulans? Why? As I had said over and over, my greatest fear is when the Dominion and the Romulans finally get their turn... because during the heyday, the golden age of Trek, they were written with competence, as complex and three-dimensional villains. Those you could even emphasize with and understand, to a degree. I don't think so today. The leftists in charge of the show will see them as a convenient allegory to preach against the evils of Fascism, which... while a notable goal, is still hamstrung if they have the WRONG writers. Do they have the same level of talent they had during DS9's run? You tell me.

One thing I wanna note about Stewart, however, is he's said a few things that personally irked me. His father was an abusive git, a completely awful asshole who beat his mother after a few drinks, and even probably raped her, God knows it would have been common during the times, and the police did nothing, yet here he is, decades later, admitting that if his mother had asked he would have helped her murder him, sympathizing to the plight of the poor, drunkenly, inhuman sack of shit father in how he had suffered from shell shock and was never properly treated, at the same time he is insisting that domestic abuse is an overwhelmingly male crime. Maybe if that's the case, don't try spin-doctoring those guilty into the real victims?

[Al-1701]

I wouldn't say the "hopeful series" is dead and this will necessarily be nihilistic. If this was nihilistic, Picard would rot on his vineyard. Instead he's returning to space even if not under Starfleet's flag.

The thing is, hope is easy when everything is going well. But it truly shines in the darkest moments. I have to imagine the point of Picard is to see us through this dark time for the Alpha Quadrant to see like everything else this darkness will pass.

[Yukaphile]

One could easily argue The Last Jedi was about hope too - for the new generation, except rather than the mentor teaching the student like in Empire Strikes Back, it's the student teaching the mentor.

I truly think depending on how much of a hard-faithful adaptation The Culture series is on Amazon that it could be more Trek than Trek is these days.

[clearspira]

One could easily argue The Last Jedi was about hope too - for the new generation, except rather than the mentor teaching the student like in Empire Strikes Back, it's the student teaching the mentor.

I truly think depending on how much of a hard-faithful adaptation The Culture series is on Amazon that it could be more Trek than Trek is these days.

The Culture done well could be amazing, but as I have said before, I have no faith whatsoever that a story with strong anti-capitalist and anti-religion views won't be sliced up. I also do not believe that they will be able to pull off a world where gender is truly not a thing given how everyone can change sex at will.

[Yukaphile]

I feel the same, haha. Mostly what I can glean from The Culture comes from transcribing Matter from my Kindle to a Word doc and reading online articles and perusing the wiki. I need to eventually buy the physical books, since that's how I prefer to read.

Dude, if you could easily transplant between genders at will, and shift between a pure biological state of male AND female, I'd more than wanna give it a try. Seriously. Not just to play with your own boobs like too many of us would do, lol. I'd genuinely wanna see what it's like looking through the eyes of "the other side," so to speak. Curiosity. I'd prefer being male, but who knows? That could change if that was possible.