Lower Decks is the Best Star Trek in Years (Spoilers Abound)

Star Trek's history is littered with attempts to get back to basics, starting with Voyager and its desire, after Deep Space Nine, to go back to the planet-of-the-week storylines we'd seen with the Original Series and the Next Generation. Enterprise was a further attempt, this time going back to before TOS, although it effectively killed off the franchise for a few years. The JJ Abrams movies were another attempt, complete with recasting and timeline shenanigans, but while those movies were popular, there didn't seem much appetite to bring Trek back to TV.

Discovery changed that, and while it wasn't exactly an attempt to get back to basics, that was clearly part of its remit. How else to explain the setting, a few years before TOS, or the various references to TOS characters and storylines? I've recorded my thoughts on the first two seasons of Disco elsewhere, so won't rehash them here. I've also shared my thoughts on Picard's first season, which was at least laudable for going forward in time, rather than back.

When Lower Decks was announced, though, I was pretty skeptical. It didn't strike me as a "back to basics" type show, but the idea of animated Trek comedy just worried me a bit. This is not unreasonable: Trek has always had trouble with comedy, with DS9's absolute worst episodes coming when they tried to mine the premise, especially around the Ferengi characters, for laughs (Little Green Men isn't too bad, but it's still a bit stilted).

Nevertheless, I decided to give Lower Decks a try, and at first my fears were confirmed. Not only that, but it seemed to be mining the same vein of irreverence as Rick & Morty - a decent show, but it didn't feel like the trick was working on Star Trek. The comedy seemed to come from the straight-laced striver Ensign Boimler and the foul-mouthed, free-spirited Ensign Beckett Mariner playing off each other, and the jokes about how she did better than him by breaking all the rules initially fell flat. These were ideas I'd seen elsewhere, done better, and my tolerance for them was already not the highest.

Yet... stuff filtered through. Jokes and references and cameos. Tendi and Rutherford added a different dynamic, and the characters all developed beyond the initial sketches. I started to enjoy it more around the fifth episode, Cupid's Errant Arrow, where Boimler gets a girlfriend and Mariner thinks she's an alien. The sixth episode, which features a murderous software assistant named Badgy, was also good.

By the time the tenth episode rolled around, I was already onboard, but I remember being impressed with how the creators had turned the Pakleds from a TNG-era punchline to an actual threat. And when Riker and Troi come to the rescue, voiced by Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis themselves, I was close to cheering, right there in my living room.

The second season built nicely on the events of the first, with Boimler initially stationed on Riker's ship and the Pakleds remaining a threat that popped up throughout the season. The second season finale has a moment easily as satisfying as the Titan's rescue in Season 1, where the Cerritos crew all pull together to save another ship (captained by a minor character from a second-season episode of TNG, no less) from crashing into a planet. There, rather than getting me out of my seat, that last-minute rescue moved me, which I found to be an interesting reaction.

Comparing Lower Decks to Rick & Morty again, I'd say Lower Decks has more heart. Rick & Morty seems to be based on showing how outrageous Rick can get, and excusing his bad behavior by acknowledging that it comes from a place of hurt, but not actually having him reckon with it. That may be why Rick & Morty fans are famously trollish. Lower Decks started out from the same place, but does a better job of having the characters reckon with why they are the way they are, and it's clear that they all care for one another, whereas it's never quite so clear how much Rick cares for Morty.

The other obvious comparison is the Orville, which also tries to look at Star Trek through comedy. There are some decent episodes there (I've only seen Season 1 so far), including some really thoughtful ones that could have been lifted from TNG. It's clear how much Seth MacFarlane loves TNG, though frequently the references to the absurdity of the premise get in the way of the story. On the other hand, Lower Decks is in the Trek universe, so it can comment on the most absurd parts of Trek lore directly. Importantly, those jokes are only ever throw-away lines, rather than interrupting the flow of the story by having us hone in on them.

When I say that Lower Decks is the best Trek in years, it's because the show has managed the trick of getting back to basics, through understanding what those basics were. The thing that caught fans' imaginations in the 60s was the vision of different people working together, bringing their different skills and backgrounds to bear. TNG continued this tradition, but DS9 (much as I love it) decided to tell a different kind of story. Each subsequent back-to-basics show seemed to think that the important thing was the flying around the galaxy, rather than the characters' relationships. Disco and Picard, on the other hand, suffer from their attempts to be too much like the movies: serialized storytelling is great, when done well, but at least in the first two seasons, Disco did a poor job of developing the crew, and then ended with two big space battles. Exciting, but the best old Trek was explicitly about not fighting.

Lower Decks's main characters all have different backgrounds, but play well off each other, whether they're agreeing or disagreeing. Each one gets to show what skills they bring to Starfleet, with even Boimler's approach to following the rules coming in handy from time to time. Their differences are celebrated by the show, both for themselves and for how they mesh with the others. And that, more than space battles or aliens with weird foreheads, is what Star Trek is all about.

And yeah, the jokes are finally funny, which also helps.

Change of Scene

After two years stuck at home, my thoughts recently have been turning quite regularly to getting out of the house for longer than a couple of hours at a time. The problem is that I'm still taking the pandemic quite seriously, and so I remain uncomfortable with certain activities or locations. This has limited me to places I can reach by car, but I've been discovering that I can still reach quite a few places.

I just spent the past week down in Orange County, in fact. I took my work laptop and all the stuff I needed to spend a week away from home (exercise gear, books, personal laptop, foodstuffs I didn't want to go bad while I was away), and drove down Saturday before last. I stayed at my mom and stepdad's house down there, keeping him company while my mom was out of town (she's a lot more confident with traveling than I've been, though I've had external circumstances that made that harder). During the days I'd drive down to the condo they had nearby, which they were renting out but is currently empty and typically used as my mom's office. Because I'm fully remote at work, I didn't need to get permission, just headed down and got my work space sorted out down there.

Having now been back home for one workday, it's struck me how much like a vacation it was, even if I was working my normal hours. For one thing, the commute gave me a nice sense of split between work and not-work, even if I spent about ten minutes in the car each way. I'd arrive in the morning, change out of my jeans and pour a bowl of cereal, before logging on for the day. At five, I'd log out, change back into my jeans and drive back to watch German TV with my stepdad and have dinner.

The other thing that made it feel like a real vacation was the scenery. They live in a pretty prosperous part of Orange County, not far from Laguna Beach and the coast generally, with communities sprinkled onto hillsides, so that basically every house has a beautiful view. I kept going for my daily walks last week, and quickly realized that if I walked up the hill, I'd get to a road that had amazing views east toward the mountains, or west toward the coast. A far cry from the flat suburbia that I usually walk around in Palo Alto.

That last part was a bit of an adjustment for me, because I've spent the last twenty years being down on Orange County. I went to college at UC Irvine, and always thought of it as a blinkered place, full of right-wing people and racist cops. If I've considered the merits of moving to Southern California, it's always been to Los Angeles, where there's exciting cultural stuff going on and I'm slightly less likely to run into a pro-Trump protest. However, the prospect of being able to enjoy views like that every day has made me a little more open to settling in Orange County...

What also helped was the subtle changes from my regular routine. For whatever reason, even though I work from home and have zero commute, I usually feel a little rushed in the evenings at home, trying to fit in writing, dinner, cleaning and whatever other tasks I want to accomplish. Down there, my stepdad usually cooked and preferred that I leave the dishes in the sink, so he could put them in the dishwasher. Plus, they've got their cleaners back in once a week, so the place was more spotless than my house, which was also nice.

One other thing, not a particularly big one but fairly important now that I consider it, was the feeling of taking a break from the pandemic. Here in Palo Alto I still wear a mask when I go out for walks, or at least carry it with me. Down there, because so few people are out walking on the roads near the condo, I didn't even bring a mask along, and honestly didn't need it (it's not like there are stores nearby that I could nip into). I maintained my usual rules of masking up in stores and of not eating in restaurants, but on Friday my stepdad and I grabbed a drink at the balcony of one of the local hotels, and ended up eating dinner there.

As I said, I spent the bulk of the pandemic at home, first on my own and then with my then-girlfriend. Since I've been on my own again, I've been trying to balance staying safe (the pandemic is still out there, even if it's not quite as out of control) with doing stuff outside the house to keep sane. My first vacation away from home since 2020 was at Christmas, when I went to Orange County to see the family, and then my first long weekend away was in March, when I went skiing for a couple of days with my dad. This trip has awakened me to the possibility of decamping somewhere else to work for a few days, and really taking advantage of being 100% remote. I don't see myself becoming a digital nomad (I'm still not completely sold on air travel) but it's nice that the possibility is open.

And failing that, I've also spent some time scanning Zillow for houses within my budget in Orange County. I'd be limited to condos, but it's nice to see I'm earning enough now for it to be a realistic idea. It might be a stretch to imagine that I'll truly end up there (I have a better social network here in the Bay Area), but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Though if I do move down there, I'm going to have to invest in a Brita filter, because the tap water is gross, y'all.

Catching Up With the Rocky Series

When I was going through the Dirty Harry movies last month, my eye kept being caught by the brightly colored icons for the Rocky movies, and I promised myself that I'd tackle those next. Which is lucky, because it turns out that they're all leaving HBO Max at the end of April. It's been an instructive experience so far (I just finished Rocky III), watching Sylvester Stallone (and Rocky Balboa, of course) go from loser to world star.

I'm always taken by the story behind the original Rocky movie, which is that Stallone got the idea for it from spending his last few dollars to attend a boxing match. He wrote the script, starred in it, and it took off to an extent nobody was expecting. I was too young to watch the movies when they came out in theaters, apart from the sixth one, Rocky Balboa, but I was always aware of them, because kids at school were talking about Ivan Drago or there were commercials for them.

The other thing that sticks with me about the movies is that Rocky represented a sort of "Great White Hope" that appealed to America in the era of Black heavyweight champions, and especially Muhammad Ali, who was pretty controversial. For one thing, it's hard not to see Ali in Apollo Creed, the flashy and quick-tongued champion who fights Rocky in the first two films, and then becomes his buddy.

If you look at the movies through this racial lens, you can see a similar narrative at work in Rocky III, where he fights Clubber Lang (played by Mister T), who's portrayed in a pretty unflattering light, especially when he makes crude remarks about Rocky's manhood to Rocky's wife. It's there in the training montage, when Apollo takes Rocky to LA to train in the gym where he came up, and Rocky's friends are horrified at being around a bunch of Black people.

I've never seen the fourth movie, but I expect you can read the Great White Hope narrative into that one too, as the Black boxer, Apollo, isn't enough to beat the USSR's champion Ivan Drago, and dies in the ring, so that Rocky has to avenge him. In any case, I can report back on that once I've seen the actual film.

This blog got heavy fast, so I'll switch to another thing that struck me as I was watching the movies. Stallone's performance is really charming in the first two films, as he plays Rocky as a lovable lunk who has hidden depths. The actual fights are relatively unimportant in those movies, taking up only about half an hour at the end, but instead we get to see him woo Adriene and grapple with the turn his life has taken. There are also nice scenes showing how his stardom has affected those around him, like his friend Paulie.

It also struck me that when I'm watching Rocky, I'm not thinking back to the Rambo movies (which happen to be the only other serious exposure I've had to Stallone). I consider this to be the mark of a really good actor, especially when he's not changing his appearance drastically between roles. The other example I use is Harrison Ford, who is completely different as Han Solo compared to Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan.

As I said, I'm only halfway through the main Rocky series, so I still have Rocky IV and Ivan Drago to consider. It does feel a little silly to consider that Stallone thought he could make some political point with that film, but it'll be fun to see brainless 80s propaganda - and maybe there'll be some interesting stuff beyond the flag-waving?

Of course, once I finish these films, I'll be on the lookout for the Creed movies, starring Michael B Jordan as Apollo's son Adonis. I'm looking forward to those too, because they've got much better reviews than any of the main Rocky films except the first.

Getting Inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons

I've mentioned before that I did NaNoWriMo to get started on a novel-length project, back in November, and I've probably alluded to the fact that I've continued working on this project. NaNo's website is pretty handy to carry over even past the usual month that they do, because you can create a new project and track your progress against it. The best part is, you can set whatever word-count goal you want, so instead of aiming for 50k words each month since then, I've gone for more realistic goals, which I've hit every month (except December, when I set myself the goal of doing 25k words; probably not the smartest thing when you have a week of not working between Christmas and New Year's).

That said, I haven't talked much about where the idea came from. As the title suggests, it came from a weekly-ish game of Dungeons & Dragons that I've been playing with my friends since January 2021. I started playing my character, and as I fleshed in his backstory, it occurred to me that he might make for an interesting novel protagonist. So as I went on playing the game, I also thought about where he came from, why he's an adventurer, what his motivation is, and as those came to me, so did ideas for a story.

Another inspiration was the Classical Chinese account that inspired the novel (and TV series) Journey to the West, which gave rise to the character Monkey. To be clear, I've read neither Journey to the West, nor the Tang Dynasty era Buddhist monk Xuanzang's historical account, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions. But I came across a mention of the factual account in a history of China I was reading in 2020, and was taken by the idea of a scholar traveling across a fantasy world. That thought probably gave rise to the character I rolled for my D&D game.

Now, since I started writing back in my teens, I've seen the repeated advice not to try to turn your D&D campaigns into a novel, so I want to make it clear that I haven't. Rather, I've taken the way I play the character, and the way I see him, and turned him loose into a story centered around him. None of my friends' characters appear, nor do the settings we play in. I've shared some of the backstory I created for my character, including his family dynamics, with my DM, and she's incorporated a couple of these points, but the two are linked only by the same character appearing in both.

At the same time, it's important to mention that role-playing game settings can form the basis of actual stories: Steven Erikson and Ian Esslemont based their Malazan books in an RPG setting they'd created (and it kinda shows in the first book), while Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck based the Expanse series around an RPG setting that Franck ran, or at last devised. I'm sure there are others, even before we get to the decades' worth of Forgotten Realms and DragonLance novels that TSR commissioned in the 1980s as tie-ins to their D&D settings.

I suppose the difference is, creating a setting and exploring the stories that arise from that setting is valid, as opposed to trying to novelize an account of each fight and each perception check your characters run. It's probably why there have been so many bad movie adaptations of video games over the years. At any rate, I find that D&D stories are rarely fun to retell to someone who wasn't in that session, which makes it even harder to turn them in narratives.

As I mentioned, I'm not translating my D&D campaign into a story, so that's not a problem here. What I do find interesting is how it took certain elements I'd been thinking about for a while, remixed them and generated a story that I've now been able to draw out into over 70k words, and which I've been working on for a little over five months. I've found that story ideas frequently come to me like that: I'll pick up some interesting fragment from somewhere, and it'll sit in the back of my mind for a long time until it can latch onto another interesting fragment, until enough of them have fused together to become an idea worth exploring.

It also makes sense that D&D, or RPGs in general, should be the starting point for ideas. I've long played video game RPGs, starting with Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy on the NES, but even the most advanced ones that I've played recently are still fairly rigid. A table-top RPG, on the other hand, forces you to come up with a lot of backstory to explain why your character does the things they do. This backstory then influences the choices your character makes in the course of the campaign, giving you a good sense of their personality. I've always had trouble with characterization, but I think this campaign has helped me with that, at least to an extent.

Anyway, this is how it's panned out for me. There are many ways to get inspiration for stories, but D&D has revealed itself to be a good one. Just as long as you remember not to retell your weekly campaign.

Italian Football and the Dead Cat Bounce

To say I'm un-pleased about Italy crashing out of the World Cup qualifying playoffs this week is a gross understatement. Not that I'm raging or weeping and gnashing my teeth, but the idea that my team won't be there for the second tournament running has grabbed hold of me and won't let me go.

The main thing is Italy is now officially in the worst run of form for a previous winner. Since winning in 2006, Italy has gone out of the group stage twice (2010, 2014) and failed to qualify for two (2018 and now 2022). The previous worst showing over the four tournaments after a win was England's: after winning in 1966, they went out in the quarterfinal in 1970, failed to qualify in 1974 and 1978, then topped their group in 1982 before going out in the second group stage. Most other winners have won the tournament again within the next four attempts, but none have been so abjectly bad.

It's still too early to tell what the records for Germany (2014) and France (2018) will be for the equivalent period, but Spain has already had a better showing in the two tournaments since it won in 2010. But the thing that worries me the most is how inconsistent Italy have been, because their record in the European Championships has been miles ahead.

In 2008 Italy came second in their group because France was even worse than them, and went out on penalties to eventual winners Spain. In 2012 Italy smashed Germany en route to the final, where they were in turn humiliated by Spain 4-0. In 2016 Italy won its group, finally won a game against Spain in the second round and then went out on penalties to Germany in the quarterfinal. And then, of course, they won the 2020/1 tournament, beating England on penalties after having dominated in the group stage and seeing off the likes of Belgium and Spain (again).

There doesn't seem to be an easy explanation for this Jekyll-and-Hyde record. The qualifying process for world and Euro championships isn't too different, so why should Italy be so bad in one and not the other? Italy's weak goalscoring record has been mentioned by some journalists, and it's true that the team that faced North Macedonia this week was missing several key players. It could just be that this was an unlucky break, as happens at times, though these sorts of failures can stack on one another and influence future performance.

If Italy manages to qualify for 2026, it will have been 12 years since their last appearance in the tournament. There will be almost no one in the squad with the experience of playing at that level, while those in the management team will be well aware of the past four failures. Italy's football administration is generally quick to fall back on old patterns, so even if coach Roberto Mancini hasn't been sacked yet, it's possible that they opt for a "safe pair of hands", which has already been mooted as including former coach Marcello Lippi in the setup - this would be fine, as it was his team that won in 2006, but he was then back for the disaster of 2010, having opted for the older players he knew and leaving out newer players that might have made a difference.

It's also hard not to consider how weak Italian football has become at club level. No Italian club has won the Champions League since 2010, when Inter won under José Mourinho, and only Juventus has even reached the final since then, losing to Spanish teams each time. In the Europa League the record is even worse, as an Italian team hasn't won the competition since 1999 (when it was the Uefa Cup). In that time, Inter has been the only Italian team to reach the final, where they lost against Sevilla in 2020; but even that carries a hint of defeat, because Inter had only dropped down to the Europa League because they'd crashed out of the group stage of the Champions League.

This season Inter did better, but it and Juventus still got knocked out in the second round, meaning no Italian team is participating in the quarterfinals. It's a little depressing, if you think about it.

I don't know enough about Italian football to say why it's been so lackluster at club level. There's probably some aspect of over-reliance on foreign players, but other leagues, like England and Spain, have that problem and they've dominated the Champions League. It could also be residual shenanigans among the selections of referees; I've seen it suggested that, bribe scandals aside, larger clubs like Juventus still have more sway over referee selection than in other leagues, so they could just be used to everything going their own way at home, and not being able to cope abroad.

Whatever the cause (and I'm sure there's not just one cause), it feels like Italy's debacles of the last few years underline what a hollow exercise the European Super League would be. It's no surprise that Juventus's president is still pushing the idea, because he probably sees his club sliding out of Europe's elite, and wants to find a way to keep them there. Some pundits have asked if Juventus would really want to be at the bottom of the ESL every year, but I suspect that they wouldn't mind, as long as they didn't have to worry about getting knocked out and potentially failing to qualify. That's the attraction of a cartel model, after all...

All things pass, though, and I'm sure this current wave of Italian under-performance will end someday. Given its record in the last few Euro tournaments, it's also reasonable to expect Italy to do well there, too. But much as I love the European Championships, there's nothing like seeing Italy perform on the world's biggest stage, win or lose. 

Unfortunately, through complacency, poor squad selection or simply bad luck, I won't be able to root for my team at the World Cup this November. And yes, it's only a game... but it still hurts.

Bullitt, Dirty Harry and Old San Francisco

For the last couple of months, I've been scanning the "Last Chance" section that HBO Max helpfully adds, so that you can see which movies and TV shows are about to disappear from the service and plan your watching accordingly. It's a nice feature, which I wish more streaming services offered, though I also wish HBO Max were a little less glitchy as an app.

This month there were relatively few things I wanted to watch in Last Chance, so after I finished Bullitt, I moved on to the Dirty Harry movies, all of which are available on HBO. While Harry Callahan and Frank Bullitt are very different characters, they fit together nicely as Neo-noir cop films, and it helps that they all have soundtracks by Lalo Schifrin and are set in San Francisco. In fact, seeing the city as it was back in the late 60s and early 70s (I haven't yet watched the last two Dirty Harry films) is amazing, because SF is pretty different from back then.

As some background, I'd previously seen the first Dirty Harry film, but not since college, and I've caught bits of The Enforcer (the third movie) on TV over the years, but never watched it start to finish. Bullitt, meanwhile, is familiar to me more as a reference (the car chase, Steve McQueen on the movie cover), but I also hadn't seen the full movie before.

In both cases, it's been fun looking at where individual scenes take place and seeing how different they look now. The biggest thing has been the bits that take place on the Embarcadero, which is now an open thoroughfare with great views of the bay but then was dominated by an elevated freeway. That freeway, which collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, was by its demise generally considered to be an eyesore, so the city took the opportunity to remove it and opened the area up.

That said, when Bullitt and his partners are guarding their witness, they put him in a hotel just by the Embarcadero, in a room at the same height as the freeway's top level. The views you get of the area there and in the Dirty Harry films are much grubbier than the neighborhood is now.

It's fair to say that much of SF is grubbier in those movies than it is now, even despite the big homeless problem that the city currently has. Though it's also a lot more working class than we imagine the place to be now, since the tech industry hadn't quite taken over yet. As a result you get scenes and references that hark back to the working class Irish and Italian communities, not to mention the Black community (The Enforcer has a subplot around some black nationalists), which have maybe been forgotten in the last few decades.

The other fun thing about the early Dirty Harry movies (moreso than Bullitt) is the little slices of big-city weirdness you get in between the large plot points. There's the foot chase in the Enforcer, where Harry and the criminal he's chasing accidentally crash a porno shoot, but there's also the jumper in one random scene in Dirty Harry and the brief flashes of nudity that we see when Harry's staking out a building or chasing the Scorpio killer.

Stuff like seeing a woman receiving her guests for the evening completely nude, or glimpses of a gay interracial date through Scorpio's gunsights, is intended to show the weirdness of a big city in the wake of the hippy era, the weirdness of a big liberal city, and the general chaos that Harry Callahan lives in daily. It's a little dismissive (the second movie, Magnum Force, is co-written by the rather conservative John Milius) but also charming in its depictions of this bygone world.

It's also funny seeing Harry shaking his head at "wokeness" fifty years or so before the current culture war we find ourselves in. Now, of course, conservatives are mostly railing against LGBTQ people and especially trans people, while then they'd had it with women's lib, but it's clear that the arguments then were the same as what we're hearing now.

As a final point, the other thing I find interesting about that era of film-making is that they even set the movies in SF at all. Mute Witness, the book that Bullitt is based on, is apparently set in New York, but became SF when being translated for the screen: I feel like nowadays you're more likely to see the opposite case, where the source material is in San Francisco but for the screen becomes New York. Dirty Harry's another movie series that doesn't really have to be set in SF, and I can also think of films like The Towering Inferno that I guess were set in San Francisco for cultural reasons that are lost now.

It seems too bad that you don't get many movies just randomly set here anymore. Now it seems that every film that wants to depict life in a big city just automatically opts for New York or Los Angeles, unless the story has to be set somewhere else. One example is (500) Days of Summer, which was apparently set in SF in the screenplay but switched to LA.

The reason this bothers me is that, despite all the undeniable problems (the heartbreaking homeless encampments, the soulless co-optation of the city by the rich, and the ridiculous levels of income inequality), the city is dramatically sited and carries more stories than just tech people. I still haven't seen The Last Black Man in San Francisco, but it sounds like it makes great use of the location, though I wonder how much SF is a character in the film the way it is in the Dirty Harry movies.

That's probably to do with the fact that big cities in America now all want to be New York, but fail. And if every city's just a cut-rate NYC, why not just film in the real one and take advantage of that? I just question why we've decided (or why Hollywood has decided) that everything in New York is automatically more relevant to everybody than the rest of the country. One of the great things about the Wire was how it dug into Baltimore, rather than just being another crime show in New York; we have this cultural understanding of New York that makes, perhaps, for easier storytelling, but I think we're missing out on the opportunity to get under the skin of other cities, and show that worthwhile stories take place everywhere else, too.

Different Types of Gatekeepers in Star Trek

It may surprise no one to learn that I'm a member of a private group on Facebook devoted to Star Trek (for the record, I'm also a member of one devoted to comics). The idea is to celebrate Trek and share memes, and for the most part it's good to see the silliness that the other members share. Lots of memes about Garak being "that bitch" or Captain Picard telling dad jokes, as well as sharing actual news about Trek shows. And because it's a private group, it's not overrun by trolls who are pissed off about Trek's supposed wokeness.

Sometimes, though, the relentless positivity of the group gets to me. Not everybody feels this way, but there's a vibe that everything that's new in Trek is automatically good, and taking it a step further, that any criticism of it is just one of those trolls I mentioned above.

I've gone on the record as being a little underwhelmed with some of the most recent Trek. My issues aren't culture-war issues, but quality issues: what I've seen of Discovery and Picard has some good points, but also frequently veers too much toward the bombast and special effects of the movies, rather than the cerebral messages of the TV shows. Discovery is more guilty of this, since both seasons that I've seen feature big battles at the end. Discovery also does a really poor job developing characters, which was something the shows in the 80s and 90s always did better.

But whenever I air these criticisms in the group, I feel like I'm the only one willing to point out that these new shows aren't perfect. Nobody's been shitty to me about it, but a bunch of memes shared on the group feature people getting mad that people are liking the new Trek shows, or mad that they're canon, or whatever.

This attitude (also present on that comics group) seems to be an outgrowth of the days when liking Star Trek or comics or Star Wars was a niche interest, and you risked becoming a social pariah if you said you were into them. It definitely comes from the days when superhero movies didn't rule the box office and when Trek shows were relegated to weird, off-brand networks like UPN. Back then you didn't have as much Trek or comics content, so even if it was bad, you had to be loyal to it.

We don't have to now, though, because as I say, superhero movies rule cinemas and there are no fewer than five Trek shows in production right now (Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, Prodigy and the upcoming Strange New Worlds). Even in what I call Star Trek's "imperial phase" in the 90s, there were never more than two series in production: The Next Generation ran concurrently with Deep Space 9 for a few seasons, then when it ended Voyager ran alongside DS9 until that ended.

So I understand where the attitude on the groups comes from. But at its worst, this relentless cheerleading for whatever happens on Star Trek can shut down honest discussion about the shows just as much as those churlish gatekeepers who complain that adding gay characters or non-White male protagonists ruins the show.

Again, though, I can understand that when there's so much vitriol aimed at progressive shows, the first impulse on hearing criticism is to assume that it's motivated by this vitriol. I pointed out once that a use of the word "fuck" in Discovery was gratuitous, and was met with "Oh gawd, are you one of those?" I had to explain that, no, I'm not "one of those", but the thing bothered me because it was clearly put there to show that Trek had "grown up" or something, rather than any story- or character-driven need for swearing (I love Data's "Oh, SHIT" in Generations, btw).

That's the internet in microcosm, of course. People lose their shit at each other on social media so easily because in 99% of cases when someone says something shitty, they're doing it on purpose and in bad faith. We've had 20 years to understand that some people are only there to troll, and so the response has been a quick "fuck you" and a blanket block. The problem's only gotten worse as various organizations have learned that they can get a lot of exposure by amplifying misinformation and shittiness... so it's no surprise that misogynistic pick-up artist sites also carry reviews of new Star Wars movies decrying the fact that women have the lead roles.

There's not really an answer or a fix to all this. Private groups like the ones I'm part of are a good way to keep social media from turning too shitty (although they're also turning out to be good vectors to spread QAnon or anti-vax propaganda, which is also shitty). Arguing also doesn't help: if I say I don't like something in Discovery, that's my opinion, and all I can do is respect the opinions of those in the group who feel differently.

It would be nice, though, if the good-faith actors on the internet weren't so on-their-guard against trolls all the time, so that we could admit that these new shows could be better. That would require there to be fewer trolls, though, so I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime, I need to watch the next seasons of Discovery and Picard, and see if they're an improvement on what I've already seen. Because, like my more boosterish friends, I want to see good Star Trek, Star Wars and other nerd content.