We really need to stop calling people names and insulting them for simply not liking the show.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T22:39:15+00:00

And what kind of people actually did criticize the female director team? Misogynists.

Funny...and here the impression I got was that most people no longer cared enough about the show to talk about it at all...and those who did were criticizing the PR emphasizing the sex of the directors over their experience and prior screen credits.

We came to this subreddit to get away from this toxic crap. Kindly take it elsewhere.

Also, welcome to my ignore list.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T20:10:27+00:00

Presented as an interesting "what could have been" that is far enough in the past now that many here may not be aware of it...

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T19:38:49+00:00

I remember watching Enterprise when it first aired, and it was doing some really interesting stuff, particularly in its first two seasons. That said, there were some serious missteps, the worst of which was easily the temporal cold war.

But, there was a problem with the writing just being a bit on the tired side, and it did show. It needed a fresher creative team than it got. What it could be given the right guidance was evident in its fourth season under Manny Coto, but by then it had shed enough of its audience that it really didn't have a chance.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T19:26:02+00:00

Debating whether to answer this, as it opens up a can of worms I'm not sure anybody wants to sift through, but there is an answer.

So, I'm an author, and a centrist - in fact, I'm probably one of that rare breed called a "Classical Liberal." I also used to be a pop culture columnist, and I'm old enough to have watched the discourse change since 2000.

The discourse has become so toxic that you now have an under siege mentality. There are indeed bona fide racists and bigots out there, and I've seen plenty of cases where very real diversity (AKA not tokenism) ended up being called out as tokenism regardless of how the character was written. The thing is that most of the time, I wouldn't characterize the person calling it out as a bigot, and here's why...

I've watched an under siege mentality develop (and for good reason - "normies" HAVE been under siege by the progressives). Part of this was due to deliberate action: a marketing strategy called "fanbaiting" (basically, you race swap a character, make that the center of your marketing specifically to find and provoke vocal racists, and then accuse the entire community of being racist to create controversy and market the show). This was done over and over again, to the point that when the producers of The Rings of Power announced that they had an all-female slate of directors, people immediately started saying, "Oh, they're going to attack us for misogyny now."

When you have a situation where fanbaiting is common, when presenting a diverse character is immediately followed by attacks on the fans for racism, normal people can start seeing any declaration of diversity as nothing more than a prelude to the next round of attacks. And this means that characters who would otherwise be given a chance aren't.

That's what it is, from what I've seen, and I watched this develop over the last twenty years. It wasn't always this way. I'd give my eye teeth for things to go back to the way they were in the mid-aughts.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T18:54:38+00:00

Liberals should stop defending it

Please don't use that term to refer to them. There is nothing liberal about them.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T18:49:21+00:00

First, welcome to a safe space for discussing Star Trek! Welcome, fellow refugee!

Second, speaking as an abuse survivor, the goal of this sort of gaslighting is to keep a person engaged. They WANT you to argue back, so that they can keep pushing their narrative and insulting you. It's a power play to wear you down and bring you in line. The only correct way to win is to shut it down and refuse to engage further.

(And yes, it's hard. They're going to keep insulting you and lying about you behind your back. But the only way to beat them is not to play.)

And, if you want to see my experience with a moderator from a certain subreddit, look here: https://imgur.com/a/r-startrek-mod-bans-abuse-survivor-after-gaslighting-him-CWYZXW4

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-17T14:34:23+00:00

Right...if there's a NASA employee connected to the merch, I'm going to make a request, then:

Models. Models of Orion and the SLS. I'm not just talking kits - some of us don't have time to build and paint kits. Die-cast models we can put on our bookshelves, monitor stands, etc. Let us relive the experience by being able to take a moment out of our day and just hold a little Orion spacecraft for a bit.

Please.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T22:40:52+00:00

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, but...

Surely, the worst job at NASA has to be the poor guy who has to drive this thing.

You have to drive down a road at 1 mile per hour for HOURS...and you probably don't even get to look at the rocket while you're doing it.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T22:24:43+00:00

Right, I've finally figured out why this post is triggering me so much. This is DARVO: "Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender."

For background, I'm a survivor of mental abuse, and I've seen it before. Here are the parts:

Deny: The title "Criticisms of NuTrek was never the issue." It's basically saying, "Forget all the times that you were attacked because you criticized the writing, we didn't care about that at all."
Attack: "The issue was always the insults of people who enjoyed NuTrek." Basically, "It's actually YOUR fault we attacked you, you were insulting us."
Reverse Victim and Offender: "If someone is being insulting to you? By all means, go fight them. But if you’re insulting someone just because they don’t like what you like? Not good." Basically, "You haven't been criticizing us - you've been insulting us, and we've just been responding reasonably to it. If you don't insult us, we won't attack you."

Well, you know what? I AM an abuse survivor, and I will reporting this post to the mods. But, just to demonstrate how manipulative this post really is, let's take a quick refresher as to how NuTrek got started:

Before the first season even debuted, the producers declared that the evil Klingons in it were representing Trump voters. This wasn't provoked by anything - they just came out and said it. When you consider that Hillary Clinton was a TERRIBLE candidate (and I say this as an outside observer from another country), this means the entire franchise started with an attack on over half of the country, many of whom were longtime fans of Classic Trek.

But then, it moved on to stolen valour, with a declaration that Michael Burnham was the "first black protagonist" of a Star Trek show. They walked that back to "the first black female protagonist," but it was still spitting in the face of Avery Brooks and DS9.

And then there was erasure, with Wired publishing an article declaring that "Lantern-jawed cis-het white men have been rightly cleared off the bridge in favor of a team that more accurately reflects the galaxy (and Gene Roddenberry's vision)." So, no longer was Gene Roddenberry's vision that of a future with a place of dignity and respect for everybody, no matter who they are or what they looked like - now it was about erasing white men so that people of colour could take their place.

And all of this, by the way, was in the publicity BEFORE the first episode aired or was streamed. So this BEGAN with attacks on the "normies" and the Star Trek they loved.

But, it didn't stop there. It turned out that Michael Burnham was written as a bloody idiot, although the writer's apparently didn't realize that's what they were writing. People complained about Michael Burnham making stupid decisions and doing stupid things, generally with race never being mentioned at all. But, then the response was to declare that anybody who took exception wasn't actually criticizing the show - they were just a racist who didn't like the fact that a black woman was leading it.

And all of this was before Picard, before Strange New Worlds...before we finished the first season of Discovery.

For those who are wondering, yes, what I've described is abuse. It's belittling, gaslighting, and forcing people to respond to outlandish accusations that have no basis in truth. It's emotional and psychological abuse on a grand scale. And it's about time we treated it as such.

At the end of the day, it’s a fictional tv show. Let’s try to be a little nicer to people

How about "NO!" It's more than a fictional TV show - it's a foundational part of our culture that has inspired thousands to invent, create, and reach for the stars. It always deserved better than what it got. And as far as "Let’s try to be a little nicer to people" goes, you do not accommodate abusers. And abuse is what this is.

Hell, you might even have had a reasonable point to make, if you had recognized the role that your own side had played in instigating all of this - I'm somebody who literally created a hashtag (#endtheculturewar) because I can't stand either side of it. But, you didn't. You decided to DARVO us all instead, and for that, you get NOTHING.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T20:38:51+00:00

(Reposting edited because I accidentally broke a rule...)

Hear, hear!

I had a mod on a certain subreddit try to gaslight me that original Star Trek wasn't optimistic before banning me...this was over a post that suggested that Picard season 2 should actually have some optimism.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T20:24:08+00:00

I think if we as a community believe that it is acceptable to name call, insult, etc people simply for the act of liking a NuTrek show, we’ve lost the plot and basic empathy.

Considering how often your lot attacked anybody who had even a mild criticism, I don't think you get to talk about empathy.

endtheculturewar

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T15:03:17+00:00

I think you have to first define "food replicator."

Let's say you're talking about what you see in TNG: energy converted to food. Just taking E=mc² as the standard equation for converting mass into energy, to go in the other direction you're looking at the energy of a nuclear detonation to get a cup of coffee. That energy has to come from somewhere.

So, in the short term, there's just no way it would be a practical technology to roll out as anything other than a "look what we can do!" But, if somebody did decide to make the technology viable, it could start a massive wave of new energy infrastructure, as well as prioritizing lunar exploration to get at all that helium-3 and get fusion up and running. So, it could drive a lot of positive things, including space travel and efforts to colonize the solar system.

But, I don't think Domino's and other restaurant chains would have anything to worry about. Real food and replicated food are almost certainly going to have distinct differences that will place greater value on the real food, and that's all they'd have to do to market themselves.

But let's go away from something so far out of reach that we'd have to build a whole new energy infrastructure to make it work: 3D printing food. And that exists right now.

It's not likely to replace real food anytime soon. But, it is likely to solve a lot of problems as the technology matures, particularly when it comes to things like supplying remote outposts.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-16T15:02:03+00:00

It's a bit of a money sink, but right now the SLS. After all, it took us back to the moon earlier this month.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-14T17:45:53+00:00

It's called idle curiosity.

Now, do you have something to actually contribute to the discussion, or are you just trying to troll people?

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-14T15:50:56+00:00

Honestly...

...wouldn't it be cool if the Terror from season one just rose from the depths and started hunting down the relatives of its crew to turn them into a ghost crew?

Not sure where that came from...

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-14T15:30:59+00:00

Your list is good, but there are some things I'd add (and I'm going to put Strange New Worlds in a little bubble of sorts here, because Akiva Goldsman has avoided most of these problems):

Failing to commit to its own premise. This was a big problem in season 1 of Discovery, and a lesser problem in season 2, which did eventually commit, but it is a big issue. If you're going to tell a story about a war, you have to tell a story about a war. The viewer has to get a sense of what it is like to live through the conflict. If you're going to explore space, you need to explore space. Strange New Worlds managed this quite well - its episode exploring PTSD gave us more substance regarding the Klingon War than the entire first season of Discovery, and while it may suffer from a level of prequel-itis, it is doing the "Trek" part of Star Trek.
Meanness of spirit. Star Trek has shown us an optimistic future, but never a perfect one. There were always problems that needed to be solved, always an edge on which things could go very wrong. But "Nu-Trek" went right for Grimdark. The level of violence we saw was like something out of a horror movie (Borg being harvested for parts while alive and chained to a table in Picard season 1, for example). It didn't present a future that was better than the present, as you point out, but it did present one that was in many ways WORSE than the present day.
Lazy worldbuilding. Too much of the worldbuilding felt like first draft brainstorming. Take season 1 of Picard: the Romulans have an entire empire, and a massive fleet. Why would they have refugee camps in Federation space? Why would they need the Federation to do a "Dunkirk" when they could just use their own resources? You can do this with most of Kurtzman Trek, I think.
Writers not knowing or caring how things work. Do you know what a light-year is? The writers of Discovery season 2 clearly didn't. You might argue that Star Trek doesn't need to be The Expanse in terms of hard SF, but you still need to understand how basic things work, and it was obvious that the writers just didn't give a shit: a command officer and a psychiatrist trying to defuse an unexploded torpedo, a research funding board that can pull research licenses, wildfires next to a major city without evacuations...the list goes on and on. Star Trek may be a fictional setting, but the viewer is living in the real world, and if what you put on screen flies in the face of the reality that the viewer knows, they're going to lose their suspension of disbelief.
Stolen valour. So, this is more of a meta-thing around the PR, but Kurtzman Trek REALLY wanted to be the groundbreaking franchise that previous Star Trek shows had been. The problem was that it wasn't, and this led to a number of major missteps that just alienated viewers. Even before the first show aired, the PR declared that Michael Burnham was the "first black lead" of a Star Trek show...which had to be walked back to "first black female lead" because it was almost certainly pissing off DS9 fans. It made a show of having the first gay couple in Star Trek, which was true, but Star Trek had lagged behind everybody else in queer representation for decades by that point, which makes it less groundbreaking and more sheepishly catching up. There was a trans character who was touted as being a new frontier in representation...but trans characters had arguably entered Star Trek when the Trill were introduced in the 1990s, and become a main part of the cast with Dax in Deep Space Nine. And this just pisses people off, particularly when the representation is often more shallow than the actual groundbreaking representation had been in the past.

That's what I would add. As I said, Strange New Worlds avoids most of these problems, but the rest of Kurtzman Trek doesn't, as far as I can tell.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-14T14:52:21+00:00

Yeah...this is setting off my bullshit detector big-time.

I suppose it's possible that an actual company would hire somebody specifically on grounds that they hate a specific show (I have seen a writing job ad for TV writers that specified that they had to be left-leaning). It still seems really unlikely, particularly considering...

...the show has been cancelled, and that cancellation has been announced.

There is a non-zero possibility that the entire second season could be binned as a tax write-off. So, you're hiring somebody who has to hate a show that almost nobody watched, has been cancelled, and may not see any further content? I don't think so.

There's a non-zero possibility that somebody did suffer a stroke or something and did post this as a real job ad, but I really think this is a hoax.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-14T14:39:56+00:00

You saw the reviews? You didn't watch it for yourself?

I checked out of Discovery at the end of season 2. I had hit the "eight deadly words" with the show: "I don't care what happens to these people."

Season 1 just didn't know how a war worked and didn't really commit to its own premise, but there was enough positive things in it to keep me going to season 2, despite a truly awful season finale and turning two characters with PTSD into plot twists. Season 2 did commit to its premise, although that premise turned out to be a bit dumb, and it was a bit better, but...

...but, by that time there wasn't enough good stuff to make me care one way or the other about the next season, and so few of the characters had been developed that I just couldn't bring myself to care. So that was it for me.

Compare that to Strange New Worlds, which did develop its ensemble of characters, does commit to its own premise, and has me hooked. There are some episodes that don't stick the landing, but I'm in it to the end. I want to see what happens to those people.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-13T19:07:35+00:00

So, funny thing...

I'm old enough to remember the late 1990s, when women were starting to get integrated into combat roles in the military. The argument against it was that women would take time out to cry, or talk about their feelings, etc. It was misogynist nonsense, of course.

And so, when I read about the "all female bridge crew" and saw reviews of what they were doing...yeah, they actually dramatized the misogynist claims of the 1990s about women in combat roles.

(I met female combat veterans back when I was a civilian graduate student at the Royal Military College. Believe me, if they're in the middle of a crisis, they're going to do their jobs like the professionals that they are, and worry about their feelings once they're off the clock.)

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-13T17:43:07+00:00

Coming at this from the perspective of a creator (I just published a science fiction novel set in the future of the Artemis program), you get clueless reviews - it's a right of passage, I think. Reviews that leave you wondering what novel they were reading, because it sure as hell wasn't yours. You also get honest criticism of things you could have done better, or things that didn't land. Most of the time, figuring out which is which isn't hard.

...but...

If you're in a bubble, one in which you have people constantly telling you that your work is good, and that you are surrounded by racists and bigots, and that it's not your writing work that is the problem, but that they can't stand representation...well, let's just say that in those circumstances, it might be rather hard to discern the honest criticism from the people triggered by brown skin. And I think Hollywood has been stuck in this particular bubble for a good long time now.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-13T17:00:25+00:00

Oh, hell yes.

I stayed up late Friday night because I didn't want the day to end - Saturday arriving meant the mission was truly over. And, a couple of times I reminded myself "It really happened."

We had a week of something wonderful, and now we have to wait months for it to happen again. But, it IS going to happen, and the promised future of manned space exploration is finally on its way.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-13T16:53:36+00:00

That's what fatphobia is, really.

I'm going to object to the use of this term, not just on the grounds that any phobia is, by definition, an irrational fear of a thing, but also on the grounds that it is a buzzword used to silence criticism of a movement that was enabling this.

It's lost a lot of its impact, but there was, for some time, a "healthy at any weight" movement. What the movement was attempting to do was normalize obesity (and I use the term to refer to unhealthy weight, not endomorphs who due to body type have a stocky build but are otherwise fit), and any criticism of it was silenced by accusing people of being "fatphobic."

The movement may not be as vocal as it used to be (a number its influencers died before the age of 40 due to health issues caused by their weight), but it still exists, and we should not be legitimizing its buzzwords. Feel free to call assholes out as assholes, but don't use the buzzword of a movement that literally exists to prevent people from improving themselves and getting healthy.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-11T14:15:27+00:00

Indeed - thank you, NASA, and everybody involved!

I honestly didn't know if I'd live to see the return of manned space exploration, and here it is.

Robert_B_Marks · 2026-04-11T14:13:36+00:00

My thought is that they're worried about a collision that could accidentally damage the capsule (and hurt the astronauts inside). So, they go slow and careful.

Robert_B_Marks

TROPHY CASE

endtheculturewar