So I do like Star Trek a lot, especially TNG, DS9, and Below Decks. Voyager and TOS are fine. Space socialism is pretty good and I can’t get enough of it. There are a few common tropes that irk me. tho.
-
Baseball is cracker Amerikkkan nonsense - You telling me that all these different species and planets get together to chill, and the vibe they’re gonna channel is Ohio?? Football (soccer) or some version of hockey make a lot more sense, you can pick up and start playing immediately. I can’t imagine Worf wanting to learn all those pointless rules about balls and strikezones and fowls. Sisko is arguably the best captain of any series, and I really get pulled out of an episode every time he drops some awful baseball trivia. It’s only slightly better than Nascar. I actually know one Scottish person who really likes baseball, and he’s literally the worst person I know.
-
The tribunal - It’s so damn common. It seems like every season there’s got to be a court-martial, hearing, or appeal against a Starfleet decision. I guess Law and Order is big there. It’s probably a minor critique, but it does reinforce the ideology that Western courtrooms are fair.
-
Kirk is a sex pest - This has been said to death, but leave your subordinates alone.
-
Poker in TNG - Poker has to be the worst form of entertainment, and I genuinely like maths. I blame TNG for reigniting the poker craze of the 90s and ruining all my guy friends’ personalities.
To expand on the Baseball thing, almost the entirety of Tom Paris’ character. With the honorable exception of the episode about old black and white Sci Fi shows, Tom Paris seems like a stand-in for a character who happens to enjoy all the things the audience’s dad likes. Referencing weirdly specific American 1900s culture is a common trope in Star Trek but with Tom Paris it seemed to magnify.
Good point. I really never vibed with Paris, and I could never figure out why.
Michael Piller had very dad tastes and was sort of the reason baseball became a thing in ds9. He was a huge baseball fan and then in his first tng script he established in canon that it was a dead sport. Ira Steven Behr who took over as shortener on ds9 and helped develop it mad Sisco a baseball fan partly as an inside joke and it took off from there.
You know, that I don’t mind. I’m not american, so I get to watch star trek in a way as an artifact of american cultural sensibilities over time. And it’s a great source since it started in the 60s. Sisko being into baseball, a dead sport, is an echo of baseball’s decline in popularity over time. I don’t mind that Riker is really into Jazz either. But God Tom Paris sometimes felt like a character written to sell Boomer merchandise. Tom Paris figurines! He likes Cadillacs!