Star Trek Next Gen: Up The Long Ladder

So I'm slowly working my way through Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I'm almost done the second season.  I just finished the eighteenth episode, "Up The Long Ladder," and...wow.  Just wow.

STAR TREK, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT.  THAT SHIT IS MESSED UP.

So the episode starts off with some dinky little subplot where Worf gets Klingon measles and has tea with the doctor.  If that counts as a subplot, because that's pretty much all that happens.  It's also the most tolerable part of the episode, so...yeah.

The rest of the episode is about the forgotten human colony they find and rescue from a bad case of splody planet or soemthing, a colony of the most cliche stereotypes of Irish people you can imagine.  Complete with Irish accents, despite being isolated from Earth and other humans for three hundred years.  They're a bunch of redheaded farmers who don't know anything about computers or science and the men are all portrayed as lazy drunks and the women are sharp-tongued and complain about how they have to do all the work and they've got sheep and pigs and goats and assorted barnyard animals and use equipment like looms and wear homemade peasant-type clothing, and it's basically just a really offensive Irish stereotype and what the hell Star Trek, I thought you were supposed to be progressive.  The sharp-tongued redhead daughter who's dad keeps trying to marry her off to random dudes wears a petticoat.  A petticoat, for crying out loud.

Then it turns out there's ANOTHER forgotten colony!  So they go check that out and it's from the same group who went up, but they're not Irish because they're scientifically advanced!  So they speak with normal American accents and have basically the same lifestyle as the crew on the Enterprise.  Except they reproduce by cloning!  You see, all but five of the original settlers died in a crash or something and the survivors were scientific peoples, so they just started cloning and at first they stopped people from inbreeding through drugs and punitive laws, and "now, after three hundred years the entire concept of sexual reproduction is a little repugnant."  Because that's how people work, right? Just put up a bunch of laws and stuff and eventually nobody ever wants sex ever.  But blah blah reproductive fading copy of a copy blah blah, and they need new blood!  So they're all "Hey you, want to give some dna?" and Riker is all "Oh fuck no, I'm too special!" and Picard is all "Yeah probably everyone's gonna feel like that so I won't ask around or anything."  So they steal some DNA from Dr. Crusher and Riker in a really ridiculous, needlessly dramatic scene.  And when Crusher and Riker find out they go kill their clones and the clone dude is all "What choice did we have, you wouldn't help!  We have a right to survive!" and the show is all "huh maybe they have a weird point here" and I'm like THE FUCK THEY DO.  They have a right to exist, they have a right to reproduce themselves, but they do not in any way have a right to impose on other people.  Some random dude who wants to make sure his bloodline survives doesn't have the right to force a woman to carry his baby against her will, that's just a more extreme version of what the clone people are trying to pull here.

So the crew goes back to the ship or something and have a meeting and go "What these dudes need is breeding stock....oh!  We've got those homeless Irish assholes in the hold!  Let's shotgun wedding this shit."  Not "Let's present the option to both cultures while informing the rest of the Federation that there's a Class M planet that could use some settlers."  Just straight up "bully these homeless people who've just had everything torn away from them into living with these assholes who have no sense of respect for other people and who clearly look down on them, but need them because their society is collapsing due to a lack of a genetically diverse population."  Then they go into a private meeting, just the two male leaders and Picard's group, and after a bit of disagreeing they finally settle on WHAT THE FUCK STAR TREK THIS BULLSHIT IS CREEPY AS HELL.

Ahem.  Sorry.  They settle on a plan where the Irish group settle the clone planet and monogamy is illegal now because we need lots of babies, so every woman, both the poor Irish women who have just had their entire lives ripped up and are thrown into chaos and the clone women who have a culture of finding sexual reproduction absolutely repugnant, have to have at least three kids by three different men.  None of these women, who's reproductive future is being decided on by a group of men and one doctor, are present for this meeting or have any say about what's going on.  We don't see the reaction of the clone women (who are probably gonna end up rape victims, because none of them actually want sex but they will be pressured into becoming broodmares by the (male) leader of their society), but we see one Irish woman's reaction.  She's the one who's had her father try to marry her off to every man he sees.  She's understandably furious that her father and Picard went around making all these grand plans without ever asking if the women would be willing to play along, and Picard is all "wtf you said you wanted a new home, here it is!"  She goes "Yeah, but I never said I wanted to be Eve!"  Because seriously who would willingly sign up for that bullshit.  Picard is all "Fine, I'll just take you to the nearest star base so you'll have lost not only your home, but your family and friends and entire culture as well."  Because that's not coercive at all.  Suddenly she has a complete 180 on her opinion and goes "Wait, that dude looks important.  He's rich, isn't he?  And I can have three husbands?  Ok, that makes up for everything," and wanders off to hit on people.

What the ever-loving fuck is going on here?!  Granted, a lot of Star Trek episodes are pretty doofy, but this is the first time I've been literally repulsed by the events of an episode.  It's like they tried to think of every possible way to make this episode as creepy as they could, or something.  And they put a cheerful comic-relief/happy-ending gloss over it just so you could tell that they gave zero shits about what a bullshit society they just created.  I thought Star Trek was supposed to represent some futuristic utopia, but here they throw this super-dark, seriously fucked up situation in our face and pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.  Fuck, show.  Don't do that.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Guess what movie I saw the other night!  And will now blog about in an unstructured and random and not-even-a-little-bit-thought-out way!

As you may have guessed from the title of the post and the spectacular gif, it was the new Star Trek!  It was...good, I guess?  No, it wasn't nearly as good as the first one, but I still had fun watching it.  I think part of the problem is it felt somehow smaller than the first one, which is rarely a good thing with a sequel.  Though still, fun to watch.  I admit I did laugh my ass off when they pulled that Wrath Of Khan flip-ending thing.  That was pretty goofy, it felt almost like a parody (that scene was supposed to be funny, right?).  Also I didn't entirely get the point of making Kirk no longer captain for all of...what, ten minutes?  Seemed like pointless drama.  The death of Pike was pretty rad, though, and I really liked Spock mind-melding with him to experience his death.  I gotta wonder how that could have fucked him up, though, because for serious that is some traumatizing shit.  There will be good fanfic to read, I am sure.

I'm sure the entire internet has already lost its collective shitstack over this, but what was the deal with making Khan white?  The character was like, Indian or something, wasn't he?  And a Sikh, if I'm remembering right, it's been a while since I've seen the original series.  How the hell did they get away with casting Sherlock Holmes instead of somebody who looked the part?  Yeah, Sherlock did a good job in the acting department, I guess, but it seems kind of shitty to replace a dark-skinned character with a super-pale-skinned character for no reason, especially when it makes absolutely no sense; even if you wanted to use the argument that this is an alternate reality, it's only alternate from Kirk's birth or so, it wouldn't have any effect on the people who were frozen hundreds of years ago and only just got thawed out.  I guess maybe the movie was trying to avoid the possibly unfortunate implication of having the villain be a dark-skinned person.  That sort of makes sense, but you'd think that in interest of not looking like they're whitewashing the series they'd make one of the good-guy characters a minority, to make up for the switch.  Like, the new girl could have been Indian or something.  Speaking of her, what was with the random stripping scene?  And while we're on tiny little nitpicks, why didn't Spock ever give away the conn?  He constantly runs out of the bridge while he's acting captain person.  I am not entirely sure on the rules here, but shouldn't he hand off the conn to the next highest-ranked person in the room before dashing off?

I know that me going on about all these little flaws makes it sound like it was a terrible movie, but I did have fun watching it.  Not nearly as much fun as I had watching the first movie, though.  I'd say it's probably about equal to the newest Die Hard film, or one of the Hugo episodes of Bob's Burgers.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to track down some original-series Star Trek to watch.  It's been far too long.  Also eventually I have to start buying TNG dvds, because that seems to be the only way I can watch some shows.  Drama-ish shows especially, I am far too easily distracted to have internet tabs in the other window when there's a slow or quiet scene.  Next Gen was a good show but I couldn't even get halfway into the second season while trying to watch it on my computer.