I don’t watch Star Trek, but word of advice, your idols have been assholes for decades, self righteous ones who are actually way more conformist than they think
They’re pretty much NPCs of a sort
No, not really.
It is true that Star Trek has always been liberal, with TOS being a more action show and the later series being more cerebral in nature and focusing on ideological aspects found most common in Yankeedom, New Netherlands, and the Left Coast, but it was never a haven for Progressive politics. That's an entirely new assertion and invention by a specific group within Progressives.
Moreover, Star Trek never really had an overarching political message. What it did have was a theme of a utopian society that promoted ethnic tolerance, open mindedness, self-sacrifice to the greater good, individual exploration, respect for other cultures, good works, and self defense.
What a show like Star Trek discovery has is a political message and in doing so, they misuse and misunderstand both the themes they use to try and convey that political message and the general theme of Star Trek itself. For example, the initial episodes of Discovery wanted to address the nature of ethno-nationalism, while empowering women and minorities. How did they attempt to do that?
- First was the promotion of a black, female character as the main focus. This in and of itself was not a problem. What was the problem was the execution and the motivation behind that execution that caused the theme to go array. First, the writers felt that the black woman needed to be both morally blameless and incredibly competent. To accomplish this, they made her a family relative of Spock, as a neat tie-in to her increased intellectual capabilities of a Vulcan. At the same time however, they intended to portray her as a victim of the system, which meant that she had to work with people who were either incompetent or immoral or both. What they intended was a character who was paying the price for a crime she did not commit, but instead they produced a mismatch of poor writing and a character who comes off as horribly impulsive.
- To empower minorities, the producers shoved in as many token characters as possible and removed as many men as possible. In TOS, men had the engineering and security roles, as well as the leadership roles. In TNG, this shifted to a more equal balance between the genders, ranging from obvious tokenism in areas like engineering and security to near equal balance depending on the show, casting, and so forth. In Discovery, instead of portraying a near equal distribution of both genders, it instead tends to favor women and it focuses on what I term misfit characters; people who are obvious misfits to the norms of society or what most people would consider normal. It's a means of empowerment, but what it does is instead isolates the wider audience on a subconscious level.
- The theme of ethno-nationalism was poorly executed. First, I am of the opinion that if you want to write a piece to address a domestic population's social discussion on ethnicity, you do not typically use a foreign speaking, foreign looking, and foreign acting fantasy race to portray that. Rather, you want a representation that audiences can immediately identify with, so you can give voice to the fears and problems that ethno-nationalism attempts to answer, while at the same time pointing to flaws within said system. Instead, the STD team took a culture group that came off more as some sort of African or Arabian inspired culture and portrayed them as barbaric and insane. And it did so by taking a pre-established group such a the Klingons and completely rewiring them for the sake of scoring a political point. As far as production in a new story with a new take goes, you are already putting a great deal of risk on re-imagining a long-standing piece of Trek lore and face the risk of alienation from franchise fans. Adding political fodder on top of this was just asking for trouble.
STD fails because it fails to properly execute the themes that people enjoyed in Star Trek. To succeed at the themes of Star Trek, you must accept and promote both white people and men. Since STD's writers are of the opinion that they themselves are the problem, the show focuses more on undermining the themes of the franchise than meaningfully exploring those themes.
This is why it fails and this is why it will continue to fail.
