Sorry about that. David Gerrold's influential 1973 book _The World of Star Trek_ includes a lengthy discussion of what, in his view, was a stupidity in the show, viz., that Kirk and Spock were the main explorers. He argued that this is analogous to an Army colonel doing recon work, and therefore stupid. He's wrong about that; the better analogy is to age-of-exploration ship captains, not the captains of modern-day aircraf carriers. (Part of) Kirk's job _is_ to be the explorer. Anyway, Gerrold argues that what they should have done was have the Captain stay on the ship, and have some sort of "Away Team" do all the beaming down to strange new worlds. So when TNG first came on and made a big deal out of doing it that way, almost with a tone of superiority, I took it as a repudiation of the original vision of the show, which as a fan of the show, was off-putting. It was as if TNG was saying to fans of TOS "ok, grow up, we read Gerrold, now here's some _real_ sci-fi." They repudiated the old show in another off-putting way: the explicit mention of a nuclear holocaust on Earth in the pre-Starfleet days. In TOS they make it very clear that humans found the wisdom to avoid that. There's mention of a WWIII, but it was non-nuclear. This isn't just nit-picking geekery, it's thematically central -- finding the wisdom to avoid self-annihilation was a key element of Roddenberry's optimism about the human condition. Seeing out future as the result of "learning from" nuclear devastation (or worse, from paternalistic Vulcans) is a repudiation of the entire spirit of the old show. So there's that also.
And that's on top of the anti-semitism thing, and the capitalism-bashing, both of which I address elsewhere.
by Aeon J. Skoble on September 1, 2004 at 1:32 PM