Dark Trek is the worst era of Star Trek. Most of Discovery and Picard were just depressing. I like my Trek to be about human kind learning how to better themselves, building unlikely alliances, overcoming differences. After the new movies, everything just turned into “look at how shit the Federation is, isn’t that terrible? Fuck humans, amirite?!?!?”. At least Discovery went for “let’s rebuild everything” in the last seasons. SNW is walking the line between “the space communists make strange friends across the galaxy” and “horrors of war befitting an O’Brien episode” but at least the main plot direction isn’t as depressing.
The contrast with Dark Trek is one of the reasons I like Prodigy so much. It’s not exactly the Janeway we know, but it represents hope and possibilities rather than depression. It’s also why I’m not all that excited about the Section 31 movie, because that just sounds like more depressing, grimey, dark Trek.
I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren’t always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.
But shifting to that “oh there’s a dark side to all the optimism” as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.
It’s the broad brush that gets me. Going dark has to be a principled choice. DS9 nailed it with the “it’s easy to be a saint in paradise” mentality. The hope in most Trek writing comes from a worldview that most people are inherently good unless their environment forces them to act otherwise (which I would very much say is how the world actually works). When shows go dark using something closer to a “people are inherently evil unless they really fight back against their nature” mentality, it feels bad and rings hollow.
Nah it’s 9/11 not GoT. Even Enterprise had its edgy serialised darkness.
The world lost its optimism and the media reflected the fucked up reality of stiffing our freedoms that our governments have been putting us through in the name of stopping the terrorists ever since.
Yeah, 100%. Why does everything have to be so dark now? Ever since Game of Thrones, it’s like ever single show has to be depressing bleak.
Dark Trek is the worst era of Star Trek. Most of Discovery and Picard were just depressing. I like my Trek to be about human kind learning how to better themselves, building unlikely alliances, overcoming differences. After the new movies, everything just turned into “look at how shit the Federation is, isn’t that terrible? Fuck humans, amirite?!?!?”. At least Discovery went for “let’s rebuild everything” in the last seasons. SNW is walking the line between “the space communists make strange friends across the galaxy” and “horrors of war befitting an O’Brien episode” but at least the main plot direction isn’t as depressing.
The contrast with Dark Trek is one of the reasons I like Prodigy so much. It’s not exactly the Janeway we know, but it represents hope and possibilities rather than depression. It’s also why I’m not all that excited about the Section 31 movie, because that just sounds like more depressing, grimey, dark Trek.
I’ve not agreed with some stranger on the internet so much in quite some time.
I really enjoyed some darker content in terms of establishing that humans aren’t always the good, wise, enlightened people of the galaxy, consistently The Good Guys in nearly every encounter.
But shifting to that “oh there’s a dark side to all the optimism” as the consistent ongoing tone for the show rings wrong as much as the always good guys tone did with older trek.
It’s the broad brush that gets me. Going dark has to be a principled choice. DS9 nailed it with the “it’s easy to be a saint in paradise” mentality. The hope in most Trek writing comes from a worldview that most people are inherently good unless their environment forces them to act otherwise (which I would very much say is how the world actually works). When shows go dark using something closer to a “people are inherently evil unless they really fight back against their nature” mentality, it feels bad and rings hollow.
That’s such a good term for early Discovery and pretty much all of Picard.
Nah it’s 9/11 not GoT. Even Enterprise had its edgy serialised darkness.
The world lost its optimism and the media reflected the fucked up reality of stiffing our freedoms that our governments have been putting us through in the name of stopping the terrorists ever since.