This is an ongoing problem that I’ve noticed before but today, I saw it in action once again. Over on a forum, we’ve been discussing the upcoming Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, now that the trailer has been released and a lot of us are very skeptical. The trailer looks okay, not amazing but very reminiscent of the older shows, for a reason. The Star Trek series are all hemorrhaging money and viewers. So we have good reason to doubt that this will be any different.
So then this happens…
The very few “new” fans, read “young” fans, who are growing up on this garbage Discovery and Picard pablum, they keep saying that they like it. Okay, but why? I asked them and, as I expected, they have no answers. They just do.
Well how can you have an intelligent discussion over “because I said so!” Yet it seems that’s all that they have. The rest of us can detail exactly why we think these new shows are crap. We’ve already seen the overt political messaging that Paramount has shoved into their Star Trek efforts. We can show where none of the writers actually understand a military chain of command or even basic respect for your superiors because that’s not how anyone these days thinks. In the original shows, you never saw the kind of random familiarity among the bridge crew that you do now. Nobody would dare to tell the captain what to go do with themselves in front of other crew members, yet that’s exactly what we see today. Nobody knows and nobody cares and that effectively ruins the show for anyone who cares, at all, about realism.
Yet the youngsters not only can’t comprehend what’s going on, they don’t care. So long as they get “the message” spoon fed to them in everything that they consume, they’re happy. So I suppose it’s no surprise, when I asked one of the particularly vocal fans to justify their enjoyment, they responded with “I don’t have to prove anything to you!”
Well, no you don’t but the fact that you can’t or won’t just means that there’s no point in pursuing a discussion with you at all. I’m not saying that you can’t like it, I’m just asking you why and they don’t have an answer. It’s why these discussions tend to devolve into childish name calling and temper tantrums. That’s the kind of people that we tend to see on that side of the table.
It’s not just the fans either. I had to point out that this is how Hollywood tends to work these days. When a movie fails, especially a movie with strong political overtones, the cast and crew tend to come out and blame the fans for being “racist” or some other nonsense like that. Paul Feig did it with Ghostbusters 2016 and Bree Larson did it with criticism over Captain Marvel. There are many, many more examples that could be presented because this goes on all the time. Instead of being humble and accepting that they made a bad movie (or TV show), they throw a childish temper tantrum and blame potential viewers by calling them names and pretending there’s a vast conspiracy against them and “their message”.
No, these are just crappy shows! The fact that they’re desperately trying to appeal to the established audience by introducing TOS characters and situations proves as much, but it isn’t the Enterprise and Christopher Pike that will bring people back, it’s telling a good story without the overt political agenda that has polluted most new Star Trek properties of late. I pointed this out as well. Bringing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton back for Terminator: Dark Fate, that didn’t make the movie successful. It failed because it was poorly written, badly acted and very politically motivated. Guess what? They blamed the fans for that one too! Somewhere along the line, Hollywood has taken “build it and they will come” to heart and that’s not how reality works. You have to produce a good product that appeals to the fans and very little that comes out of Hollywood does that these days.
This is why we’re not holding our breath that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will be any good. They haven’t proven that they can make good Star Trek. They’ve proven only that they can pander to a politically-motivated audience that isn’t really interested in watching their show. That’s something I’m not sure why they haven’t figured out. Marvel pandered to the woke-whiners and nearly went out of business as a comic publisher because the woke idiots only wanted to control the content, they didn’t want to buy it. One Marvel was doing what they wanted, they went looking to cry and complain about something else. They drove away most of their existing fans with terrible writing and the ones they were counting on to pick up the slack, they were already elsewhere, doing the same thing. They’re like locusts, swarming from place to place and destroying everything that they touch. They did it to comics, they’re doing it to movies and TV and nobody seems to have noticed what’s going on except for the older, more mature, more intelligent fans.
Funny how that works, right? No, that’s not the word. I think it’s sad. Utterly pathetic that this is how the world works today and the people who believe this, they can’t figure out why they actually like it. Maybe because they’ve been programmed to think that way mindlessly.
Maybe they ought to do something about that.
