Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- Thread starter Noeland
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These shows are written by children and I don't just mean that figuratively. Have you seen footage of the writers' strike? Most of them look like they're millennial age or younger. It's not surprising modern television/cinema is as unsophisticated as it is.
Before anyone scoffs at my dismissal of the creative capabilities of our youth, I'm quite aware that some of the greatest works were made by younger people. However, that was from a time before society decided that pajamas were acceptable as evening wear.
In under 12 parsecs
You do know Millennials are starting to near forty, right? Ageism is ugly talk. I knew people in their teens who got legally emancipated because they could take better care of themselves than their parents could... and I know people in their seventies who still can't. Similarly, age is no guarantor of cultural "affiliation". Just because someone's in their late twenties doesn't mean they wear pajamas as eveningwear, eat avocado toast, or any of that other zeitgeist stuff. I, for one, have never "acted my age". Most people think I'm at least ten years younger than I am, until I say something about President Carter or seeing Star Wars when it came out.
It's more of an institutional problem. Any rebel outlier, if it sticks around long enough, will eventually become part of the establishment it was rebelling against. Star Trek and Star Wars got co-opted ages ago, and have been being run into the ground by workers in the trenches and execs who don't understand the properties they own in the ivory towers. The rest is just the arbitrary line where fans realize it's not their thing any more, and what they choose to do about it. Some leave, some hang on hoping against hope it'll get "good" again, some pirate it and watch it out of spite so they can tear it to shreds for anyone who will listen, some rewatch the older stuff to live in the better times...
By and large, it is not the fault of the people in the trenches. They're making what they're told to make. Keith de Candido, for instance, wrote some great Star Trek novels back in the day. He's doing his best, now, to create quality content within the strictures from on high. Add in the inevitable misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and lack of science advisors, as in the old days, and I can point to how Star Trek has been slowly deteriorating since the third season of the Original Series. Not in a straight line, for sure. There have been peaks and valleys, but the general trend has been down. Entropy at work. All that is created breaks down over time.
A lot of writers these days are hacks, but that's systemic to the industry, rather than anything to do with generational failings. Reality TV got huge in the '90s, and execs wanted to overlay that feel on other things. We got found-footage horror movies, shaky-cam sci-fi, and a general trend of characters being backbiting dicks to each other, rather than behaving professionally. We got weaker and weaker science and less and less plausible settings and scenarios. And we get people who aren't True Fans™, who haven't absorbed the lore throughout childhood and/or adolescence the way we have. They're just people who like what they think they see from their limited exposure and want a job in the industry. I cant fault them for that. I do, too. But I'm unlikely to get it, because it would be to tell them how they're doing everything wrong. *lol*
I'm still trying to find productive and effective ways to bring about change, but grumbling about the kids these days ain't it -- especially as the generation being denigrated is standing next to you grumbling the same thing about their kids...
I agree wholeheartedly here. We focus on hyper analyzing these major franchises and prop them up as the standard because of their popular legacy. In actuality, they’re the poorest measuring sticks because they have, as you correctly state, been co-opted by those whose interests, one might say, skew toward fiduciary efficiency rather than artistic merit. Star Wars has very obviously suffered since departing its original creator and being reduced to a corporate asset but, Star Trek for 40 years up until the Abrams era had maintained a decent standard of writing, some better than others, but nothing I would call “amateurish”, at least not consistently. And it was building on science-fiction established decades before. It may have had a slow decline in all that time but it just fell off a cliff in 2009. Why was it able to maintain itself for so long before plummeting? Did the business model really change that much? Or has the talent pool of writing shallowed in that time?
As for ageism, I want to be clear, while I did take a bit of a cheap shot at millennials, I believed I had noted that it was not a criticism of youth but rather youth as it exists today with its desire to remain what I would call juvenile compared to previous generations. And yes, as I was writing my original post, I did realize that millennials are approaching “middle-age”, not too far behind me
. The “evening wear” jab was facetious by design. While I won’t pretend that there weren’t hacks working in the “heydays”, I would argue that their prominence now is greater than it’s ever been. Yes, again as you noted, partly because they’re showcased in wildly popular franchises but, it seems as though most “mainstream” film and television writing (especially concerning dialogue) has devolved somewhat in connection with society at large. I’m sure others disagree but that’s what I’m observing. Can I unequivocally make the case as such? No. Perhaps it’s as simple as art now imitates life for better or for worse.
Lightning
Master Member
Starting? I'm an elder Millennial and I turn 40 this year. And I'm not even the oldest. The 1981ers turned 40 two years ago. Basically if you don't remember the Challenger Disaster, but do remember 9-11 you are a Millennial.
but back on topic, looks like I've taken on the job of posting promo videos to this thread so here's a clip from Una's trial
True. As I said, my jab was not targeted at their age per se as much as the maturity level of today's younger generations. I'm sure many would argue it's always been that older generations look down on younger generations. It seems to me that immaturity among adults has become more prevalent in the past 10-20 years and that's carried into the arts. Many will disagree. Fair enough.
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Cephus
Master Member
The problem is that people don't want to grow up at all these days. Back when I was young, you were expected to have a part-time job when you turned 16. You worked nights and weekends and went to school during the day. Today, lots of people don't even have their first job until they graduate from college and they figure that by then, they have tons of debt, they need to be making a lot of money.
It doesn't work that way. Even with a degree, you need to work your way up and these people not only have no experience, a lot of them have no work ethic. They've been taught that they just deserve stuff. Therefore, the level of maturity in their mid-20s is often lower than people in their mid-teens a generation ago. Most people had families and careers by the time modern people are graduating with their degree in underwater basket-weaving.
By the time I turned 18, my employer was trying to get me into management. I'd spent years proving how capable I was. By the time I got married, I had a solid career and was making about 80k a year. We had our first house by the time I was 27. It's all about having a solid work ethic and, sadly, I don't see a lot of people these days that have it. They think they deserve a participation trophy for bothering to show up.
If these people want to know why they fail, they need to look in the mirror. It's not all their fault, but a pretty good selection of it is.
This is where we get down to cultural expectations. I am an adult. I have accepted adult responsibilities. I have a work ethic (that is not the Protestant one). I refuse to stop playing. I refuse to "put away childish things". I refuse to work in an office, I know how hard it is to escape food-service, and I've done enough retail-wage-slave work to know there is only a narrow range of those I'll submit myself to. Will I do whatever's necessary to survive? Yes. But if I have to stop playing, if I am doing interchangeable work than any human with a pulse and functioning brain stem can do, what the hell is the point of my being here any more?
I am dead-set on contributing in whatever way only I uniquely can, and I believe -- as Democritus did -- that life is to be enjoyed. There is nothing noble about sacrifice or suffering. If those before or contemporary with us abandon joy out of a feeling of necessity, I pity them. The stories that have stuck with me about hard times were the people determined to create joy out of misery, not beat succeeding generations over the head with that misery. "When I was your age, we didn't have this to eat! We had dirt! And we were grateful to have that dirt!" Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
The deck is stacked worse against Millennials and Gen Z for ever being comfortable and successful than any previous generation of Americans. Even during the Gilded Age that led to the Great Depression, the wealth gap was nowhere near what it is now. I am an "X-ennial". I was born early enough that I remember rotary phones, life before the internet, and three channels plus PBS. And late enough that the entirety of my adult life has been online, I have had video games since I was a tween, and that whole adult life has been determined by my credit score. I identify more with the under-40s than the over-40s. We have shared socioeconomic hardships. And I know a lot of Millennials who are working their asses off to try to do better than merely exist. And they are determined to not let it drag them down and stop having fun. That is not childish. That is determination in the face of hopelessness.
Stupid people, selfish people, and bad writers have existed in every era. I may not like a lot of current Trek, but they have yet to match "Threshold", and that I find about as unwatchable as "The Way to Eden". I may object to a lot of the trappings of Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks, but I can recognize the good bits. I lament the influence of Reality TV on modern (post-2000) sci-fi. All the worst elements of nuBSG and nuTrek owe their existence to that "filter". The rest is just an unfortunate tendency every generation has to not do their research.
I am dead-set on contributing in whatever way only I uniquely can, and I believe -- as Democritus did -- that life is to be enjoyed. There is nothing noble about sacrifice or suffering. If those before or contemporary with us abandon joy out of a feeling of necessity, I pity them. The stories that have stuck with me about hard times were the people determined to create joy out of misery, not beat succeeding generations over the head with that misery. "When I was your age, we didn't have this to eat! We had dirt! And we were grateful to have that dirt!" Barefoot. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways.
The deck is stacked worse against Millennials and Gen Z for ever being comfortable and successful than any previous generation of Americans. Even during the Gilded Age that led to the Great Depression, the wealth gap was nowhere near what it is now. I am an "X-ennial". I was born early enough that I remember rotary phones, life before the internet, and three channels plus PBS. And late enough that the entirety of my adult life has been online, I have had video games since I was a tween, and that whole adult life has been determined by my credit score. I identify more with the under-40s than the over-40s. We have shared socioeconomic hardships. And I know a lot of Millennials who are working their asses off to try to do better than merely exist. And they are determined to not let it drag them down and stop having fun. That is not childish. That is determination in the face of hopelessness.
Stupid people, selfish people, and bad writers have existed in every era. I may not like a lot of current Trek, but they have yet to match "Threshold", and that I find about as unwatchable as "The Way to Eden". I may object to a lot of the trappings of Discovery, Picard, and Lower Decks, but I can recognize the good bits. I lament the influence of Reality TV on modern (post-2000) sci-fi. All the worst elements of nuBSG and nuTrek owe their existence to that "filter". The rest is just an unfortunate tendency every generation has to not do their research.
I tried underwater basket weaving once... never could hold my breath long enough to finish that stupid basket.
Honestly, this is the first time I have ever heard it presented like that. A lifetime of underwater basket weaving mockery and it lives anew. Nicely done, I must say.
A hundred years ago, the majority of the US population lived on farms and an eighth-grade education was fine for most people, and for a variety of reasons, ~15 was considered a perfectly acceptable age to have taken on adult responsibilities in such a context.
Over the following century, the world got incredibly more complicated and complex and fast and now are children are sentenced to twelve to twenty years of school just to function in it. So even though we haven't really changed biologically from the time when sons were apprenticed at ten and adults by thirteen, societally we regard them as kids until their late teens or early twenties now. Scoffing at college degrees when any job that pays much over minimum wage (which isn't survivable on one's own) pretty much requires one is obtuse to the extreme.
Over the following century, the world got incredibly more complicated and complex and fast and now are children are sentenced to twelve to twenty years of school just to function in it. So even though we haven't really changed biologically from the time when sons were apprenticed at ten and adults by thirteen, societally we regard them as kids until their late teens or early twenties now. Scoffing at college degrees when any job that pays much over minimum wage (which isn't survivable on one's own) pretty much requires one is obtuse to the extreme.
And talent is exploited and consumed by ungrateful masses of adult children who think it should just be given for free.
And, yet, some would say that we’ve ironically grown dumber as our technology has increased.
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