New Testingstan

wow they don't just have him look like the devil

they call him that

and Kirk still says "he's a living being, that's all we need to know. we will not harm him"

i love it

kirk rox

Spock to Kirk at the end: "[...] this would be the second time Lucifer was cast out. And thanks to you, the first time he was saved."

kirk rox my sox off my cox

oh emm jee tubbz

That thread on TOB about feminism and sexism in Disney movies made me think of similar issues in Star Trek (that, and reading Inside Star Trek by Herb Solow and Bob Justman reminded me of this as well). Star Trek was obviously an innovative show for its time - nothing quite like it had been done before, it was highly complex, many things like the sounds and the props had to be invented from scratch and so on. Right from the start there was a commitment to putting racial diversity into the cast selection, which is one of the positive things Trek can boast about IMO. Guys like George Takei had never or rarely played characters who weren't 'Evil Orientals'. For that matter, Sulu himself wasn't the stereotype for 'inscrutable asian' either. On the other hand, when it came to advancing feminism and gender equality, it seems to have fallen on the wayside.

The book I'm reading pointed out a few areas in which this is so: no strong female characters. The original pilot 'The Cage' had Majel Barrett as Number One, a Lieutenant who was the XO of the entire ship, had a cool demeanour and was otherwise quite professional and competent. The myth was that NBC Executives didn't want a strong female character because of sexism, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, this is something Roddenberry peddled in his own personal blame game, when he was literally the one at fault - being a married man, he was actually seeing Majel Barrett at the time and the suits didn't want his girlfriend to have such a major role. So when the second pilot was being produced that entire character was scrubbed and Roddenberry blamed the network for it - well, he could have just come up with a new character or the same one but played by a different actress.

Anyway, even in 'Where No Man Has Gone Before', we have Sally Kellerman playing Doctor Elizabeth Dehner, who was also a highly competent professional. She was also integral to the plot and saved Kirk's life at the end, but paid for it with her life. Other than her though, we had a cute blonde girl play Yeoman Smith, who said like, one line and that's it. When the show was picked up we got Nichelle Nichols as Uhura, who aside from rare exceptions was mainly the person who said 'hailing frequencies open Captain' and that's about the extent of her character's role. You also had Grace Lee Whitney in the role of Yeoman Janice Rand, and Majel Barrett snuck back onto the show and became Nurse Chapel. I liked Rand a lot, not just because she was pretty hot, but they could have done a lot with her character - yeah a yeoman is basically a secretary or PA but that doesn't mean you can't do anything interesting with her. As it turned out the character was nixed anyway. As for Chapel well, can you say 'yawn most boring female character ever?' All she does is pine after Spock, or her mad scientist husband.

Then there are the uniforms. Well they're very flattering but not exactly the most practical garb a female professional could wear. But I left this one for last because I don't know if it's really that big of an issue - we do see some women wear pants (albeit rarely) so it might not necessarily be something female officers and crew are mandated to wear but rather something they elect to wear. In my opinion the bigger issue is the lack of strong female characters, and I am pretty sure we never see a single female officer who was of Lieutenant Commander grade or higher. Mind you that's from the Starfleet personnel. There were quite a few female guest characters who were a lot better, including an important bureaucrat in 'Metamorphosis' and a romulan Commander in 'The Enterprise Incident'. T'pau of vulcan was also a Very Important Person, and T'pring was quite proactive in getting what she wanted from the kunutkalleefee ceremony (or however you fucking spell that word). There was also the blonde scientist who loved Spock in 'This Side of Paradise' whose name escapes me at the moment. (I make a distinction between this character and Nurse Chapel. Chapel never gives up hope that Spock would look up and notice her, while the other character realises it's hopeless at the end of the episode and moves on.)

I think the biggest and most egregious example of lack of gender equality was in the episode 'Turnabout Intruder'. This is one of the worst episodes of TOS and I fucking hate it myself. As far as I am concerned, the show ended with the superb 'All Our Yesterdays'. In any case, this is the episode which revealed that women couldn't advanced in Starfleet to the point where they could command starships. It's one of those things where they didn't have to say it, or refer to it, after all you COULD just go 'well we simply haven't seen any female captains yet, Starfleet's a pretty big organisation and it's pretty rare for the Enterprise to encounter any other ships so just use your imagination'. Not only that, but 'The Cage' flat out showed a female XO - which by necessity would mean women not only could but would often be FORCED to become captains, just like how Number One took over after Pike was captured by the talosians. So honestly I think 'Turnabout Intruder' should be rendered non-canonical for the simple reason it was fucking stupid.

Anyway the only other thing I wanted to raise was how Roddenberry himself contributed to this. While he did a lot of good in relation to the show and hell, even created it, obviously the lack of gender equality needs to be somebody's responsibility, and you can't really go very far from Roddenberry as the guy who was most directly responsible. Justman notes how Roddenberry was quite the womaniser and it's difficult to see how this wouldn't affect his view on the role of women in Star Trek's world.

So what do you guys think? Even in TNG we don't really see much change. Sure we got Lieutenant Yar but she didn't even survive the first season. Also how good was Yar as security chief anyway? Troi rarely said anything that wasn't self-evident to everyone, and her entire role was a Counselor to the crew. After the pilot it would take years before she was seen in a uniform again. Crusher was a step up I suppose - she was the Chief Doctor and that's a position of authority that's really important for a big ship like the Enterprise - and they didn't really succumb to the temptation to make her and Picard an item. We also started seeing female captains and even admirals during TNG so I suppose there was some good changes. Hell even Crusher took command at one point :V

Anyone feel like discussing this?

yeah, roddenberry was a bit too much from the fifties in a lot of ways, the way he handled women in trek being a good example. as far as crusher and picard, while it's nice that crusher didn't just instantaneously turn into picard's love interest, it's lame that the reason she didn't was because they (gene/writers/studio) wanted picard to be able to have bullshit flings like he was kirk or summat.

also fuck you writers, I refuse to believe that people who were gene-modded as kids are second class citizens in the federation unless you actually want me to hate it

fuck, that's almost as bad as that tng episode with the horribly botched abortion metaphor delivered via riker clone disintegration with a helping of offensive irish stereotypes on the side

which is a shame because the rest of that episode was fun bullshit with split screen robert picardo and everyone saying bashir's annoying

Stofsk wrote:The book I'm reading pointed out a few areas in which this is so: no strong female characters. The original pilot 'The Cage' had Majel Barrett as Number One, a Lieutenant who was the XO of the entire ship, had a cool demeanour and was otherwise quite professional and competent. The myth was that NBC Executives didn't want a strong female character because of sexism, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, this is something Roddenberry peddled in his own personal blame game, when he was literally the one at fault - being a married man, he was actually seeing Majel Barrett at the time and the suits didn't want his girlfriend to have such a major role. So when the second pilot was being produced that entire character was scrubbed and Roddenberry blamed the network for it - well, he could have just come up with a new character or the same one but played by a different actress.

I think the bigger problem NBC had was that Majel was such an unknown that it would be an unacceptable risk to give her so important a role in an experimental (and expensive!) series like Star Trek. Unfortunately, Gene was a two-faced coward, so instead of recasting he just scuttled the character entirely so that he could blame NBC.

So honestly I think 'Turnabout Intruder' should be rendered non-canonical for the simple reason it was fucking stupid.

I'd be completely fine with that.

Anyway the only other thing I wanted to raise was how Roddenberry himself contributed to this. While he did a lot of good in relation to the show and hell, even created it, obviously the lack of gender equality needs to be somebody's responsibility, and you can't really go very far from Roddenberry as the guy who was most directly responsible. Justman notes how Roddenberry was quite the womaniser and it's difficult to see how this wouldn't affect his view on the role of women in Star Trek's world.

So what do you guys think? Even in TNG we don't really see much change. Sure we got Lieutenant Yar but she didn't even survive the first season. Also how good was Yar as security chief anyway? Troi rarely said anything that wasn't self-evident to everyone, and her entire role was a Counselor to the crew. After the pilot it would take years before she was seen in a uniform again. Crusher was a step up I suppose - she was the Chief Doctor and that's a position of authority that's really important for a big ship like the Enterprise - and they didn't really succumb to the temptation to make her and Picard an item. We also started seeing female captains and even admirals during TNG so I suppose there was some good changes. Hell even Crusher took command at one point :V

Anyone feel like discussing this?

I'd say that Gene deserves most of the blame for it. Some of it could be attributed to poor writing from some of the outside scripts they were able to scavenge up for the series, but I think a lot of it comes from his own desires and ideas about women and sexual gratification. There was definitely some self-indulgence going on during TOS production - for example, actress Teri Garr's outfit in Assignment: Earth was altered at Gene Roddenberry's direct order to raise the skirt again and again, because he wanted to see more leg.

Yar wasn't the best character, but a lot of the characterization was pretty rough in the first season (Geordi was basically the young guy with the magic eyes), and I think Yar would have worked well with better writing.

is the big bad batmang really making you guys argue about coffee in star trek

Really, Star Trek's problem with female characters in general continued well after The Next Generation, and it kind of manifests in subtle ways throughout the franchise as a whole. Or in big, glaring angry ways.

Following on from The Next Generation, we got Deep Space Nine, which had at least two strong female characters in the shape of Kira Ners and Jadzia Dax and thus did a bit better than having Counsellor Cleavage and the poor woman who was forced to give birth to Wesley Crusher. But it also did more or less the same thing that TNG did, albeit more towards the end than towards the beginning; it took one of its strong female characters and killed her off. I have no idea what the root cause of this was behind the scenes, admittedly, but this seems to be the rather unfortunate beginning of a pattern. Not a full pattern, since it's only two, but let's move on...

We then got Lost in Space Star Trek: Voyager, and we get introduced then to three prominent female characters throughout the series, and this time we have one of them being the Captain. Quite progressive I suppose. But then we get the rather unfortunate fact that they actively tried to avoid sexism. Now, you'd think this would be a good thing, but they put the simple fact of Janeway's gender into self-conscious focus as part of the writing, and they were pretty much terrified of making her do or say anything that would be judged as sexist. With the influence of Jeri Taylor on top of that we got an insufferable Mary Sue whose characterisation was so inconsistent that I actually have trouble pinning down a character trait of Janeway outside of her severe caffeine addiction. I don't remember much of Kes, but I have a few things to say about B'Elanna Torres.

Basically, B'Elanna Torres is a strong-willed woman in Star Trek, and you'll rarely find someone who disagrees with that. But handled somewhat badly, because her entire characterisation was centred around the fact that she was a headstrong, overly-emotional, hormonal woman who was ruled by impulse instead of logical and rational thought. Now, this wouldn't be bad on its own, but let's dial ourselves back... say... two hundred years or so, back to when thoughts about women were a little less evolved. The entire societal idea of women back then was that they were irrational creatures ruled by emotion, thus making them inferior to the logical and rational men. Coupled with that, her emotion and irrationality manifested itself as withdrawn fear and cowardice when she was split into her Klingon and human halves (note; it was a good episode in itself, as I recall, but that's not the point here), with all of her strength of will coming mostly from the fact that she's half-alien than the fact that she's a woman. In fact, when removing that 'other' aspect and turning her into a 'normal' person, you reduce her to the standard weakling who embodies women in science fiction. Unfortunately.

When we bring up Kes again, what strikes me is that she was the woman selected to join Jadzia, Tasha Yar and Number One in the list of women booted off the ship. In this case she was replaced by the Seven of Nine. This is where we reach the same problem that Troi presented all the way back in TNG; a woman who was added to wear a tight costume and look sexy for the camera. While her character arc was much stronger than most of anything else in Voyager, it wasn't really much of an improvement to have one of your major focal characters be the local incarnation of fanservice. She was accidentally an interesting character, but the entire basis of her was to appeal to the young male demographic who would loyally rise to attention whenever she was in the shot.

I didn't bother to watch Enterprise, but that had its own fair share of problems from what I can tell. The female characters were a Vulcan in a ridiculous catsuit and the only character who was actively terrified of the fact that they were in space.

VF5SS wrote:is the big bad batmang really making you guys argue about coffee in star trek

i guess i deserve it for throwing it out there in the first place. i dunno, it sounded sound enough when i first heard the argument over in the trek thread at SA.

Re: actresses who left Star Trek

Denise Crosby left allegedly because she felt she wasn't being given enough to do. Gates McFadden allegedly left because Maurice Hurley was a huge prick to her (and came back after he had been replaced). Terry Farrell left because of a contract dispute; she wanted more money, the producers said no, nobody flinched and she walked.

Jennifer Lien is an interesting story. Supposedly, the producers knew they were going to be bringing on a new character, but they didn't want to permanently increase the cast size, so they were supposedly going to kill off Ensign Kim instead. Around this time, some magazine nominated Garrett Wang as "sexiest man of the year" or something and the producers backed off, and decided instead to boot Lien.


Another sad instance of pandering is that, from what I've heard, there was chest padding going on all over the place. (Including Wil Wheaton, heh. I guess he was even scrawnier than what we saw on TNG.) I distinctly recall hearing that Nicole DeBoer reported that her costume had extra padding up front.

uraniun235 wrote:

VF5SS wrote: i guess i deserve it for throwing it out there in the first place. i dunno, it sounded sound enough when i first heard the argument over in the trek thread at SA.

Just start throwing out random quotes from Red Zone Cuba to keep him on his toes

Few beans left

uraniun235 wrote:Another sad instance of pandering is that, from what I've heard, there was chest padding going on all over the place. (Including Wil Wheaton, heh. I guess he was even scrawnier than what we saw on TNG.) I distinctly recall hearing that Nicole DeBoer reported that her costume had extra padding up front.

The padding doesn't surprise me. Modern media seems to have an odd obsession with enhancing the attractiveness and other such of its actors and models; using makeup, padding and creative cinematography when airbrushing and photoshop are unavailable doesn't really strike me as surprising. That they're all wearing costumes that cover quite a bit, including the catsuits worn by Seven of Nine and T'Pol, seems to play into that because the uniforms work to hide the use of such padding much more effectively than more ordinary costumes would.

I have to wonder why the executives behind Voyager thought that firing Jennifer Lien and getting rid of her character while keeping on the annoying bastard who everyone seemed to want dead was a good idea, though. But then, I've heard that, while writing Barge of the Dead, Ron Moore was particularly surprised at the more cavalier attitude of the other writers towards the characterisation of the various Voyager characters.

To be more precise, their attitude was 'who cares', as I recall. Can't remember the source, but it seems to fit. Voyager was a programme run by people who didn't care.

There is an interview somewhere from Robert Beltran (actor for Chakotay) who outright said he was just showing up as a job after some time as a cast member.

A similar interview also said that in Startrek Voyager they would reshoot scenes if the actors for human characters showed too much emotion in thier acting.

I remember reading that somewhere. It's one of those things that honestly does just boggle the mind when you think about how wilfully blind the executives of that series had to have been The major failing of Voyager was that the characters were too bland and uninteresting to actually have any real sympathy for them while watching. They were cardboard mannequins, and didn't really feel much like people, so we didn't really care much about what happened to them. Unless they were Neelix, in which case I'm fairly sure entire legions of people were kind of interested in the fact that he wasn't dead at the end of the episode.

I really do have to wonder what the writing sessions for that series were like. And if any of the executives had any contact with the outside world whatsoever, or if they lived in a box-like cage two miles underground with their only source of information being pamphlets written by a crazed man back in the sixties.

It would certainly explain why their pop-culture references were so outdated, I suppose.

Pretty sad that I can relate more to Cain fron nBSG, a murderer, rapist and torturer then I can the cast of VOY.

xon wrote:There is an interview somewhere from Robert Beltran (actor for Chakotay) who outright said he was just showing up as a job after some time as a cast member.

A similar interview also said that in Startrek Voyager they would reshoot scenes if the actors for human characters showed too much emotion in thier acting.

That last one was from Garret Wang and apparently it was something Rick Berman said in the 'welcoming party' at the start of the show. Basically they wanted all the human actors to try and be low-key, so as to make the alien characters seem more 'alive'.

What else can be said except 'Fuck Berman'.

IIRC Wang not only objected to this but went ahead and said he thought this was a stupid idea in like TV Guide or something. As a result of that Wang never got a chance to direct an episode of Voyager, unlike a lot of the cast, despite being keen to try his hand at it. Also if you know anything at all about Voyager you know that it sucks to be Ensign Kim. Frankly it's no wonder that guys like Betran just came in to post a check.

Because Star Trek's always had a problem with making the aliens interesting. I mean, before Voyager nobody would ever have thought of dressing up as one at a convention, or developing a language around one of them.

More seriously, the really sad thing about that is that Voyager's aliens, with the exception of Species 8472 for actually looking and seeming alien, were just plain bland and uninteresting compared to, say, TNG, DS9 and TOS.

how about those people with feather dusters on their heads because they were like birds

and there was a murder mystery

and the dog solved the case

VF5SS wrote:how about those people with feather dusters on their heads because they were like birds

and there was a murder mystery

and the dog solved the case

I didn't watch Enterprise. I watched the premiere, saw that it was going to be more of the same shit, and gave up.

I've caught parts of a couple other episodes on TV. I pirated that one mirror episode mostly so I could watch Defiant pummel the shit out of that Enterprise sister ship. Oh, and I skipped around through the finale, so I could see what a trainwreck it was. I still think that episode proves that the producers wished they could just go back to TNG forever.

that was an episode of Voyager

Ex Post Facto

yes veef we know voyager is terrible you don't need to remind us

sorry

i used to watch it every wednesday on UPN

along with Malcolm and Eddie

it sounds like you've been victimised by the experience

i have a tendency to remember some things

whether i want to or not