David Benfell, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

@Corgana People fawned over her because she was a loving character who did great. That greatness emerged from her redemption and would have been lost to whatever the Federation’s idea of a prison cell in the 23rd century otherwise.

I’ve been on social media for a while and I have to say, this has all the hallmarks of a flame war. So this is all I’m going to have to say on the matter. You can throw darts at her photograph on your own wall.

@Corgana That’s what redemption is about. It’s recognizing that even the greatest among us make mistakes and can still be great.

@Corgana she did redeem herself.

@glorkon @USSBurritoTruck

Star Trek also assumes a truly post-scarcity society in which capitalism plays, at most, a small part.

One of the problems we face in assessing human potential is that we pretty much only know of humans since the Neolithic, when authority and wealth became increasingly centralized. In the Star Trek universe, while authority remains hierarchical and highly centralized, economic inequality is somewhat diminished. These are different sets of social premises and the outcomes might vary.

@data1701d @ValueSubtracted

Yeah, this’ll be a hard pass for me too.

@ValueSubtracted I recall noticing the sexism on Enterprise. I don’t recall noticing it on Voyager, which had two strong female characters. But I’m an old man raised in a more chauvinistic era–I might not notice.

@ValueSubtracted @cybervseas

By such standards, the Original Series (#TOS) seems positively regressive. I don’t mean to defend this, but I’m guessing that, at the time, it was perceived that Enterprise needed to fit into that regression.

@usernamefactory I did manage to watch it all the way through, but I wouldn’t watch it again. Some of it is just too relentlessly horrific and it didn’t actually become interesting until the final few episodes before they cancelled it.

@jalanhenning pretty normal for the era.

@dethstrobe this M’Benga fellow seems like the most interesting character of the lot, with a backstory we’ve only seen bits and pieces of. It’s a shame Paramount will probably kill off its Star Trek franchise before we see more of it.

@StillPaisleyCat @hopesdead Yeah, I’m wondering if there’s a deal in the works that I, at least, hadn’t heard about.

Paramount has been too much in the news for the wrong reasons.

@yildo @MamboGator

Not just humor, but a particularly cynical humor. And yes, I think you have a point: To laugh, you need to be able to laugh at hubris and incompetence.

I turn to #StarTrek because I have encountered these attributes all too often in a real life that much more resembles the hell that Guinan described to Jean-Luc Picard when the crew traveled back in time to keep one of his ancestors on track to launch on a space exploration than not. It just isn’t funny to me because I have suffered these attributes my entire life and what #LowerDecks captures is but the palest, most faintly visible shadow of it.

I turn to #StarTrek because I’m desperate for something better.