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.
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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.
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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.
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Kirk is a sex pest - This has been said to death, but leave your subordinates alone.
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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.
I like the poker in tng because it confirms my theory that the main point of divergence between the Trek universe and ours is that Texas Holdem was never invented.
And it’s played entirely differently, that or characters cheat constantly. There’s a few videos breaking it down, but quite often the continuity of the cards on the table and sometimes just small script mistakes show with a closer eye, they’re usually playing wrong.
Yeah, I’ve seen them playing some kind of stud game but the count of up vs down cards didn’t look like a standard game.
I always like how shows depict poker as an entirely bluffing and reading bluffs based game. I lived with some old hippies who had masters degrees in math and read like 5 books on it and did algorithm poker to eek out a profit in a way I’d consider more miserable than working and also did tournaments sometimes in hopes of big money and often did win and I never once heard them talk about bluffs or tells when comparing notes. Like, it’s part of the game and it’s the part that works for drama, so I get it, but looking for tells above all else is some body language expert bs.