Strange new worlds
We've been watching the new Star Trek series, which is set on Captain Pike's Enterprise a few years before Classic Trek began.
Trek has always been about ensemble casts of people with different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses, facing challenges together to illuminate issues that real people in the real world face, and this series is no different in that respect. It's an excellent ensemble, both actors and characters. (And so many hot kick-ass women!) Each character has a complex past, each character has secrets, with its own traumas and insecurities -- accidents of birth, choices made and occasionally regretted -- but they go on and deal with the next challenge anyway. There have been episodes about racism, sexuality, asylum, self-sacrifice, forgiveness and justice, remembering and forgetting, lying and truth-telling, all sorts of important topics. And every character undergoes a real arc from episode to episode: you could never mistake the characters from a second-season episode for the same characters in a first-season episode. Even the "shorts", the fifteen-minute "teaser" episodes of which we watched a few before finding the main series, connect to character developments many episodes later.
Trek has also always liked playing with time.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere's BFF from grade school once gave us for Christmas a DVD set of "just the time-travel episodes" drawn from TOS, TNG, DS9, etc. The new series leans into that: at least a third of the episodes have at least something to do with time travel, and others are even more "meta". One episode we saw last night was a hilarious crossover with the animated series "Lower Decks", of which I've never seen more than a brief clip, and of course it involved time travel, good-natured fun at the standard tropes of time-travel episodes, and a certain amount of fourth-wall-breaking. The night was young, so we watched a second episode, which was much heavier, involving combat flashbacks and good-but-traumatized people unable to let the past go, for reasons that are more complex than they first appear.
But asshalmestere has pointed out, Classic Trek looms in the future. Some of these characters will be in TOS, some won't, and we'll miss the latter. (Do we have to lose Ortegas to get Sulu?) And it's hard to see how this society, in five or ten years, becomes the society of Classic Trek in which women wear mini-skirts and either moon over or hand clipboards to the men who do all the important stuff.
Trek has always been about ensemble casts of people with different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses, facing challenges together to illuminate issues that real people in the real world face, and this series is no different in that respect. It's an excellent ensemble, both actors and characters. (And so many hot kick-ass women!) Each character has a complex past, each character has secrets, with its own traumas and insecurities -- accidents of birth, choices made and occasionally regretted -- but they go on and deal with the next challenge anyway. There have been episodes about racism, sexuality, asylum, self-sacrifice, forgiveness and justice, remembering and forgetting, lying and truth-telling, all sorts of important topics. And every character undergoes a real arc from episode to episode: you could never mistake the characters from a second-season episode for the same characters in a first-season episode. Even the "shorts", the fifteen-minute "teaser" episodes of which we watched a few before finding the main series, connect to character developments many episodes later.
Trek has also always liked playing with time.
shalmestere's BFF from grade school once gave us for Christmas a DVD set of "just the time-travel episodes" drawn from TOS, TNG, DS9, etc. The new series leans into that: at least a third of the episodes have at least something to do with time travel, and others are even more "meta". One episode we saw last night was a hilarious crossover with the animated series "Lower Decks", of which I've never seen more than a brief clip, and of course it involved time travel, good-natured fun at the standard tropes of time-travel episodes, and a certain amount of fourth-wall-breaking. The night was young, so we watched a second episode, which was much heavier, involving combat flashbacks and good-but-traumatized people unable to let the past go, for reasons that are more complex than they first appear.But as
shalmestere has pointed out, Classic Trek looms in the future. Some of these characters will be in TOS, some won't, and we'll miss the latter. (Do we have to lose Ortegas to get Sulu?) And it's hard to see how this society, in five or ten years, becomes the society of Classic Trek in which women wear mini-skirts and either moon over or hand clipboards to the men who do all the important stuff.