TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.
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To be fair, it would be a boring show if they didn’t.
Ship enters orbit of a planet
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Intense geologic activity, no atmosphere, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data, moves on to the next target
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Planet is frozen, no geologic activity, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data
Realistic sci fi is waaayyy too boring for a general audience.
I choose to believe that it's usually like that, and we're just seeing the days where something interesting happens.
I mean it has to be.
They age and have discussions of things we don't physically see.
Talking about the first encounter of the Q being 3 years ago not 1000 episodes ago
Yeah, it kinda feels like you could do a very ‘boring’ science series just showing all of that. But I feel like that’s just ‘sci’ with no ‘fi’.
Hey look, it's Starfield!
I'm glad you made this comment because I was about to.
Starfield, a surprisingly great framework for a game from Bethesda, but they forgot to put the actual game inside it
Todd spent all their time and money making sure the game was utterly impossible to see without a 3000 dollar OLED monitor (that LUT was a monstrosity).
I fully agree with this, but at the same time I just sort of assume any Bethesda game is gonna require a kind of baseline mod setup just to be comfortably playable, so that almost felt like par for the course to me 😅
More power to them, but I will genuinely never understand how people can play Skyrim or Fallout 4 unmodded or on console. I can see New Vegas unmodded, but that ain't Bethesda anyway.
Or Mass Effect 2 at times.
Probe launching noise
What pissed me off about ME2, amongst other things, was them saying they're not going to "make you go to every planet just to extend gameplay". Only to force you to go to other planets to launch probes and gather materials...just to extend the game play
Yeah it was annoying but the sad thing is Mass Effect 2 was still an improvement over Mass Effect 1 in that regard. As much as I can enjoy the planet sections they did overstay their welcome and actively annoy me. ME2 at least never pushed it's luck on that front.
realistic scifi can be fun for general audiences still. they just have to focus on the right bits.
look at the early seasons of for all mankind. it's about the realistic process of achieving space flight goals. it spends 60% of its runtime on how the launch even comes to happen. then it shows the bits that go wrong and the ways they manage fix them and the political/personal drama of the decision making process on all sides.
now, that's a very dry show for people that like science, politics, and history, but the realistic scifi could just as easily be wrapped in a funny show about dumb politicians and crazy rich people. use the same strategies, but make it about the engineers at space x having to work under musk. show them having to suddenly pivot away from lidar for no reason other than musk's ego. show them trying to talk about space flight with a podcast bro. create drama when one of the main character's lives is actually on the line because no one trusts the new valve gasket supplier musk brought in for political clout.
the parts stat trek glosses over are the parts realistic scifi focuses on. like how they decide what planet to go to next. the episode always starts with them already there or randomly being drawn somewhere. or like what actual physics would matter in what they're doing and not "plasma phase inverter coils" needing to be "degaussed of subspace radiation".
It was a list:
- to explore strange new worlds
- seek out new life and new civilizations
- boldly go where no one has gone before
Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks
Just watched an episode where they literally went to a section of space completely absent of all energy and matter and still somehow met this

TBF in the ToS it was ”Where no man has gone before”, not “Where no one has gone before.”
So if it was aliens then the statement was correct, we’d just have to skip all the weird human populated worlds they found.
And, not take any women along, which of course was never an option on Kirk's ship.
At the time "man" was often used to reference the human species as a whole. Like, when they'd say something like "the dawn of man" they were specifically referring to the earliest humans regardless of gender.
Obviously this is not particularly representative of roughly half the species, which is probably why it's less common today. Taking that into consideration, though, TNG's intro is arguably more colonialist than TOS.
"Man" and "woman" has never referred to humans exclusively in Star Trek, though.
"Mr. Data, you are a clever man - in any time period."
I mean the original line was "where no man has gone before" which at least made sense, although it didn't represent the female crew very well.
English uses 'man' and 'mankind' interchangeably.
Grammatically, 'no man' makes more sense than 'no one.'
I've always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn't being used in the way the change implies.
It has the same energy as saying that you can't use the term "whitelist" and must substitute "allowlist", or "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom", or that time they changed "monkeypox" to "m-pox".
"Master bedroom" being changed is such a silly one. That term wasn't even used until the 20th century and referred to the master of the household. It has nothing to do with slave masters.
It speaks to a larger cultural ignorance or poor literacy to even consider it, in my opinion. I've seen similar reactions to talking about "plantation-style" home architecture. It's as if many people have only ever heard these words in connection with slavery from their lessons in school.
A place I worked out stopped carrying "Plantation" brand peanuts because somebody complained.
Nevermind the fact that the word "plantation" existed long long before America ever existed and associated it with chattel slavery in the minds of Americans, or the fact that the peanuts in question literally come from a modern, active plantation still today!
I still think that Master and Slave were the most apt descriptions for IDE drive roles
Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.
You mean space secretary and space operator? The pilot had a woman as first officer but we couldn’t keep that for some reason…
You mean the Yeoman and Communications Officer?
Those are actual roles on warships that at the time women were not allowed to fill. How come when a woman is in those roles you reduce them “secretary” and “operator”?
I don’t. The show did.
As I pointed out there was a woman first officer, but we could not keep that.
The show didn’t, you did. The show put women into positions reserved for men at the time. The men in those positions weren’t called secretaries or phone operators, the female characters in Star Trek weren’t called secretaries or phone operators. The only person being reductive of their roles is you lol.
It kinda seems like you’ve never seen the show. I’m well aware of what a Yeoman does on a ship and it is not limited to bringing the captain tea and having the log dictated to you (or you just stand there while dude writes it). Those are, however, things that a secretary did in the 60s. I’m not reducing their roles, there’s a reason that women were only given positions on the bridge that were traditionally filled by women in 60s offices and that the female first officer was removed from the show.
But they weren’t given roles traditionally filled by women. They were given roles traditionally filled by men. They make a point of it in the show when Kirk is upset that the Yeoman they assigned under him is a woman.
You keep talking like these roles were works of fiction, created solely for the women of TOS to keep them out of having an “real” role. I don’t understand why you refuse to acknowledge the unarguable fact that these are actual, real roles on real human naval ships, for men, that go back centuries.
Why is it that despite these being real, traditionally male roles, when you see two women doing them you reduce them to “Secretaries”. Gene Roddenberry himself regretted not showing a female starship captain in TOS, but he didn’t denigrate the role the women played just because they were women.
Like, are you really just trying to argue that there’s something wrong with Star Trek because despite how unprecedentedly progressive it was at the time, it’s somehow misogynistic because it wasn’t wasn’t unprecedentedly progressive enough?
I’m not arguing that there’s something wrong with Star Trek. I’m arguing that people are giving way too much credit to the 60s. They were not given roles traditionally filled by men, men could not even type in the 60s. It was seen as beneath them. That they had the woman answering the phone on the starship wasn’t seen as oh they gave a woman a traditionally male navy roll. It was seen as oh look they still have a woman answering the phone even in the future. Most of the people who watched the show weren’t in the Navy and weren’t drawing those kinds of parallels.
They were not given roles traditionally filled by men, men could not even type in the 60s. It was seen as beneath them
They were. These were men’s roles, that men were doing, in the Navy, in the 1960’s.
It was seen as oh look they still have a woman answering the phone even in the future.
No, it wasn’t, except by you lmao. You are projecting here.
Most of the people who watched the show weren’t in the Navy and weren’t drawing those kinds of parallels.
They absolutely were drawing those parallels. Everybody in the 1960’s was fully aware that women weren’t allowed posts like that on naval ships. It would have been implicitly understood by literally everyone that women being allowed these roles on a ship in the future was a progressive idea. The fact that women were allowed permanent posts on a combat vessel at all was a novel idea at the time, much less a woman serving as a commissioned officer on the bridge of the vessel.
Would you also reduce O’Brien from TNG to an “Elevator operator”, or are these reductions of yours reserved for women only?
Okay well now you are just blatantly ignoring my point to make yours. I’ve literally talked to women, like my grandma, who lived through this time period and specifically asked them how they felt about these things. I encourage you to do the same. You don’t have to trust me, but I hope you don’t take offense to me trusting these people more than I trust you. My grandpa was in the Navy in the 60s and also felt this way about the portrayal. I hope you have a good day.
My mother and grandma both lived through the 60s and were a Navy family. They got me into Star Trek initially as they were big fans of the series. They, as well as many other women at the time very famously found Star Trek to be uniquely empowering for women among the TV landscape. The concept of women serving in science and technology and even leadership roles on a ship, as well as being treated as experts in their fields and with equal respect to the male crew was unheard of for the time. In fact it was a woman who started the letter campaign to get Star Trek back on the air for its second season. I guess your grandma didn’t tell you that.
It’s disheartening to see that in the big 26 there are still men like you who want to denigrate women in those roles and the lasting positive impact they had on our society. Do better.
The reason was Gene Roddenberry had cast his mistress in a costar role, and wasn't yet the Lucas-esque TV god that could get away with it.
That’s true, but they could have kept the part as a woman. There were other motivations in removing the role entirely.
They told Roddenberry he could keep Spock or Number One, but the network didn't think the 1960s audience was ready for both at once.
Look it up.
I honestly don't know if Majel minded that much in retrospect; she's still the only actress to voice the Enterprise herself. She died in 2008 and most recently voiced the Enterprise D in what? 2024?
Progress happened. Uhura wore Lieutenant's stripes so Janeway could wear Captain's pips.
Progress happening doesn’t negate my original point.
Fun fact: The first on-screen woman captain was in The Voyage Home.
Someone else posted that they didn't consider getting rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as big wins.
Most of the changes are performative and not material. imho.
Yeah I don't disagree, but that is still why they changed it. Using "man" to refer to all mankind (and even "mankind" for that matter) is going out of style.
I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.
It wasn't considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as "man" is a holdover from when "man" wasn't ever gendered; we don't have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.
The old words for male/female were "wer" (see: werewolf) and "wīf", the latter of which diverged into "wifmann" ("female human"), later "woman", and "wife", specifically referring to a married woman. You still see "wife" used without implication of marriage status in words like "midwife".
Anyway tl;dr "man" historically wasn't gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.
Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as "the race of man", where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn't specify that a woman can't.
I don't have anything to add, but I want to say that I found this comment super interesting.
wait, so are werewolfs trans people or intersex.
Very late response, but I was thinking back to this and realized that, to be pedantic, yeah, female lycanthropes should actually be called wifwolves, or something to that effect; a woman becoming a werewolf would include turning into a man, if the root words are taken literally.
Kinda like how female automatons should technically be gynoids, not androids, because "andro-" means "male" in Greek, like "wer-" in English, but language doesn't always evolve neatly like that.
"I am no man!" Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.
Goes into the women's bathroom because I really have to shit and the men's has been occupied for 20 minutes
There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn't a good story
I'm struggling to come up with an example of them landing on a barren rock and anything neutral or positive happening. It's almost always bad
The people who were already there didn’t go there if they were always there
Look, they are trying.
They just keep getting distracted on the way and where overtaken.

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