Star Trek has never been wholely and completely feminist and inclusive. Certainly Harry Kim was an Ensign much longer than he needed to be, and the first series was greatly bound by the standard of its times, but: what bothered me most about Enterprise and the new movie is that they didn't even seem to try.
They created interesting characters, and then abandoned them unexamined. They created a character who has a polyamorous relationship, which is standard for his species, and the only episode I saw that touched on it was more of a "point and giggle" episode than anything else. They created an interesting linguist, and spent most of the remaining episodes getting her half naked and playing up sexual tension. They did the same thing with the female Vulcan, who *should* have been a viewpoint character we could identify with and who changed up the way the world was perceived, but wasn't. You had a character raised in space in a world enough like our own that his differences from us should have been critical to plot, but weren't.
Instead, you had cowboy A, cowboy B, and comic relief C, with T&A 1 and 2. That is not to disparage the actors. They had lots of talent being underutilized there. But the writers and producers let us down.
And the movie was straight up cowboy crap that returned to the first series roots *without* having the excuse of the standards of the era.
On another show I've watched, NUMB3RS, I spent some years watching Alimi Ballard invest his character, David Sinclair, with personality while the writers were simply writing him as Generic Black Guy #3. When the writers finally joined him in working to make David a fully rounded person, the change was palpable and obvious.
Anyway, I piped something not to defend the movie but to say that there are a bunch of us contemplating these very issues and doing things with these thoughts -- the response to it isn't only uncritical acceptance or disappointed revulsion. There are people who did enjoy it, but not uncritically, and are considering feminism and people of color and other issues of social justice in our responses to it.
(Also, LJ has been having delays in comment notifications. I've only gotten one of yours so far.)
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 08:05 pm (UTC)They created interesting characters, and then abandoned them unexamined. They created a character who has a polyamorous relationship, which is standard for his species, and the only episode I saw that touched on it was more of a "point and giggle" episode than anything else. They created an interesting linguist, and spent most of the remaining episodes getting her half naked and playing up sexual tension. They did the same thing with the female Vulcan, who *should* have been a viewpoint character we could identify with and who changed up the way the world was perceived, but wasn't. You had a character raised in space in a world enough like our own that his differences from us should have been critical to plot, but weren't.
Instead, you had cowboy A, cowboy B, and comic relief C, with T&A 1 and 2. That is not to disparage the actors. They had lots of talent being underutilized there. But the writers and producers let us down.
And the movie was straight up cowboy crap that returned to the first series roots *without* having the excuse of the standards of the era.
no subject
Date: 2011-03-03 08:18 pm (UTC)On another show I've watched, NUMB3RS, I spent some years watching Alimi Ballard invest his character, David Sinclair, with personality while the writers were simply writing him as Generic Black Guy #3. When the writers finally joined him in working to make David a fully rounded person, the change was palpable and obvious.
Anyway, I piped something not to defend the movie but to say that there are a bunch of us contemplating these very issues and doing things with these thoughts -- the response to it isn't only uncritical acceptance or disappointed revulsion. There are people who did enjoy it, but not uncritically, and are considering feminism and people of color and other issues of social justice in our responses to it.
(Also, LJ has been having delays in comment notifications. I've only gotten one of yours so far.)