I think the difference between most of the older trek and the newer stuff is that while they did obvious stuff like this, the most impactful social stuff they did was treat revolutionary change as boring.
TOS had a black woman bridge officer, and they didn’t make a big deal about it, because in the future there was nothing remarkable about it.
And when they did confront the issues, those issues were alien things, the federation was past all this nonsense and as you say, boring mundane stuff and the alien issues were always “oh we got over that hundreds of years ago, we learned about that in history”.
This is a really good point but I feel there is a double edged sword here. Loads of old school bigoted nerds love star trek because for whatever reason they actually don’t pick up on the compassionate, far left messaging.
It was also different when 50 years ago, a black woman as bridge officer was scandal to right wing sensationalist media.
The overt and sometimes performative progressive details that are present now push the boundaries in a similar manner to the old boring change, while being much more noticeable to the rest of the audience.
I think the difference between most of the older trek and the newer stuff is that while they did obvious stuff like this, the most impactful social stuff they did was treat revolutionary change as boring.
TOS had a black woman bridge officer, and they didn’t make a big deal about it, because in the future there was nothing remarkable about it.
And when they did confront the issues, those issues were alien things, the federation was past all this nonsense and as you say, boring mundane stuff and the alien issues were always “oh we got over that hundreds of years ago, we learned about that in history”.
This is a really good point but I feel there is a double edged sword here. Loads of old school bigoted nerds love star trek because for whatever reason they actually don’t pick up on the compassionate, far left messaging.
It was also different when 50 years ago, a black woman as bridge officer was scandal to right wing sensationalist media.
The overt and sometimes performative progressive details that are present now push the boundaries in a similar manner to the old boring change, while being much more noticeable to the rest of the audience.