Science Fiction

An interesting reflection. Thanks OP for sharing.

Star Trek does get a call out near its conclusion.

The prognosis is bleak. Invention inspires entertainment, but entertainment too inspires invention. Without Star Trek we wouldn’t have had nerds inventing the future. This next generation of pop culture doesn’t have the same egalitarian subtext. We will never be Spock, but new media won’t even let us make the presumption. We risk cycling through the inventions we already have, shrinking them smaller and smaller until we have nothing left. Down that path lies stagnation, decadence, and inevitably a Ross Douthat column.

One of the things that I would find worthy of a discussion is how scientific progress and working the problem to get to the technical solve seems to have been downplayed in the new era of shows.

Prodigy seems to have been an intentional exception as a STEM teaching vehicle, but the other shows have risked offering platitudes like ‘I like science’ in place of risking technobabble explanations.

The aversion to technobabble comes through in interviews with the writers and the actors. Most seem not to appreciate that the technobabble is about representing the process of science and engineering as much or more than the science fiction explanation.

Instead, Discovery and SNW have been offering us isolated, prickly, introverted, eccentric and/or awkward geniuses without much insight into their process. While I love all these characters, I miss the aspiration of competent and inventive teams that we saw in the 90s shows.

One of the reasons Voyager is well loved is because it showed its intelligence officers cooperating to work a problem to adapt or invent their way out of one dire situation after another. Is possible to have neurodiverse and other representations in the inventive roles in Trek while also showing integrated and functional teams working together. I’d like them to try.