Star Trek: Strange New Gorns

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

4 minutes ago, Annara Snow said:

So, you are arguing that Kirk being known for having sex with green alien women makes perfect sense even though he never had sex with green alien women on the show, because he would've totally done that if people in the 1960s hadn't been racist against..green people? 

Yes. If there was a Star Trek episode released in the late 1960's that involved an obvious romantic relationship between Kirk (the white, male, lead) and a non-human female; green, scaly, feathered, whiskers, whatever;  yes, the studio would have concerns.  

This is the same series where the kiss between Kirk and Uhura (mind controlled BTW) came *that close* to not being included because of fear of how people would react. 

[JGP]

 

[Cas Stark]

34 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Yes. If there was a Star Trek episode released in the late 1960's that involved an obvious romantic relationship between Kirk (the white, male, lead) and a non-human female; green, scaly, feathered, whiskers, whatever;  yes, the studio would have concerns.  

This is the same series where the kiss between Kirk and Uhura (mind controlled BTW) came *that close* to not being included because of fear of how people would react. 

I kind of doubt that.  The 'green Orion slave girls' were totally human looking except for the green skin, I can't imagine there would have been any more uproar if Kirk had a fling with one than any of the other hot, mini skirted humanoid women he came across during TOS.  

[Ran]

Kirk had dalliances with at least three or four aliens in TOS, though admittedly they all appeared as humans. One of them, Elaan of Troyius, was played by a Vietnamese-American actress. 

I doubt they would have been bothered if KIrk had a dalliance with an Orion girl... but the thing is, I believe the only Orion women on the show were slaves, and that was definitely not going to happen on the show.

I think SNW's Kirk is entirely contextual. He barely interacts with any of the women on the Enterprise and they have an emergency to deal with. I don't see any reason to think Paul Wesley can't play the ladies' man. He played a lead vampire on CW's The Vampire Diaries and I'm guessing that played up the usual seductive vampire tropes.

Edited July 11, 2022 by Ran

[IheartIheartTesla]

I'm not the first to point out that the resemblance between Paul Wesley and Jim Carrey is uncanny, so I expect S2 will continue its homage to things past by having a Wrath of Farrakhan redux.

As for SNW I thought the first season was very good but stopped short of being really great. To paraphrase Peter Grifin's review of Godfather (which he never watched all the way through) - "it insists upon itself". While SNW isnt guilty of that, there were a few tendencies towards it, particularly with the  Elysian kingdom episode, and the somewhat forced relationship between the Romulan captain and Pike. I didnt believe they would call each other 'friend' although appreciated the inference about 'in another time'.

[Lord Varys]

59 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Yeah this has always been really dumb. How do you fight a war and never once see the enemy? There were no ground battles? No prisoners? No dead bodies found after a ship was destroyed?

Maybe every time a romulan ship was capture the crew was like "Oh thank god you came! Those romulan's uuh, just left. We're vulcan prisoners they were torturing."

It made sense in 'Balance of Terror' where the implication really is that it was a much more primitive era than it was when we got to Enterprise. Spock says it was fought with primitive ships and primitive atomic weapons.

Although Enterprise really went out of its way to maintain the 'they never saw any Romulans' thing while quietly dropping the 'they had only audio communication back then' thing.

4 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

Enterprise was leaning heavily into the idea that the Earth/Romulan War was the catalyst that allowed for the official formation of the Federation. 

The was had been ended over audio. (According to the sources I believe...)

I'd gather that the establishment of the Neutral Zone was absorbed into the Federation. 

That was the implication. Season 4 very much build up the idea that the Romulans feared the influence of mankind on the other races, trying to drive them apart ... once that didn't work they would have been an actual war, presumably one only declared against Earth. I imagine they would have portrayed the Romulans using patsies and intermediary and allied/enslaved species as ground troops, etc. to make it believable that nobody ever saw one.

The Neutral Zone was originally established between Earth and Romulan 'influence spheres' I guess, with the border apparently still being in a place 100 years later at the edge of Federation space, meaning the Federation never expanded in that region ... for obvious reasons.

[felice]

55 minutes ago, Cas Stark said:

I kind of doubt that.  The 'green Orion slave girls' were totally human looking except for the green skin

Uhura was also totally human looking, but the colour of her skin was considered a problem by racists at the time. And most people were still watching in black and white in the 60s, so green skin would just look dark.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

There's an interesting anecdote from Nichelle Nichols about the time she met Dr. Martin Luther King. I'm sure people on this board are familiar with it. Look it up if not. It made Gene Roddenberry cry.

It's tangential to this discussion; I only mention it to illustrate that it was a very different time. 

[SpaceChampion]

 

[Cas Stark]

29 minutes ago, felice said:

Uhura was also totally human looking, but the colour of her skin was considered a problem by racists at the time. And most people were still watching in black and white in the 60s, so green skin would just look dark.

This isn't a hill I want to die on, but Uhura was a black, African American woman playing a black African woman, I would imagine that would have hit the 1960s American public very differently than a white woman wearing green paint playing a green alien from 'Orion'. 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I didnt believe they would call each other 'friend' although appreciated the inference about 'in another time'.

That's straight from the "Balance of Terror" episode, however, as you see in @SpaceChampion's video.

[Jaxom 1974]

I truly believe if Manny Coto had been given a fifth season with Enterprise, he would have made the Romulan War work, make sense with existing canon, and NOT altered anything in a crazy way.  His approach to the fourth season and trying to tie up loose ends created by the first three seasons was wonderfully done.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

2 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

...Wrath of Farrakhan...

Who?

Strange New Worlds indeed.

[Annara Snow]

1 minute ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Who?

Strange New Worlds indeed.

An old parody of Wrath of Khan.

Kind of like the last page of this thread being a parody of serious discussions about racism. It's been pretty hilarious reading about potential racism against green painted people  (weird though it was to see it put right next to mentions of actual racism against black people in the 1960s). 

[DaveSumm]

37 minutes ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

I truly believe if Manny Coto had been given a fifth season with Enterprise, he would have made the Romulan War work, make sense with existing canon, and NOT altered anything in a crazy way.  His approach to the fourth season and trying to tie up loose ends created by the first three seasons was wonderfully done.

I dunno, people always say it’s a shame we didn’t get to see it, but constantly having to work around the no-video-communication rule would’ve got really tiresome. 

[IheartIheartTesla]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

That's straight from the "Balance of Terror" episode, however, as you see in @SpaceChampion's video.

Yes, I knew that. It was just that the Pike/Rom Cap interactions were somewhat compressed compared to the Kirk interactions with the same, and so I would find the latter more believable in that they interacted substantially with each other. In this particular episode i didnt feel the connection as much (they had maybe 2 conversations with each other and the car-and -mouse game was quite abbreviated).

[Lord Varys]

By the way, the Shatner-Nichols kiss wasn't the first kiss between Shatner and a non-white woman.

In season 2 we get this episode: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Elaan_of_Troyius_(episode) (see picture).

At least on the character level. The actress wasn't black but, apparently, half-Vietnamese.

[Lord Varys]

Oh, and the issue with the Orions is the whole exoticism of the sexy greenskinned slave girl ... not so much any in-universe racism nonsense.

Of course, the Orion slave girls are racist in the sense that a racial stereotype was taken from the real world and used to create a fictional stereotype based on the lusty and seductive African or Asian femme fatale.

But when it is not only fiction but also a fictional species and you have to basically deconstruct everything then it is not that big of deal.

It is more or less the same problem as Watto the Winged Alien Jew. Which I still think is more a problem in the eye of the beholder than something that's actually on the screen, so to speak.

Edited July 12, 2022 by Lord Varys

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

1 hour ago, Annara Snow said:

Kind of like the last page of this thread being a parody of serious discussions about racism. It's been pretty hilarious reading about potential racism against green painted people  (weird though it was to see it put right next to mentions of actual racism against black people in the 1960s). 

Not just racism per se. If memory serves, in JJ's Star Trek, a somewhat clothed Kirk is alone in a room with an Orion Lady in her underwear. In SNW, Pike twice makes breakfast for a woman who isn't his wife and who very obviously spent the night with him. Put that on the Tee Vee back in 1968 in America, There'd be protestors outside the studio the next day. 

There was a show back in the late '70's early '80's called Three's Company.  The central conceit was that a single man with two female room mates was so scandalous to their boomer landlord that the man (John Ritter) had to pretend to be gay to avoid getting kicked out. Being homosexual was still a problem for the landlord, but actually less of a problem than the possibility this guy might be getting familiar with one or both of these women. 

[Annara Snow]

52 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Not just racism per se. If memory serves, in JJ's Star Trek, a somewhat clothed Kirk is alone in a room with an Orion Lady in her underwear. In SNW, Pike twice makes breakfast for a woman who isn't his wife and who very obviously spent the night with him. Put that on the Tee Vee back in 1968 in America, There'd be protestors outside the studio the next day. 

There was a show back in the late '70's early '80's called Three's Company.  The central conceit was that a single man with two female room mates was so scandalous to their boomer landlord that the man (John Ritter) had to pretend to be gay to avoid getting kicked out. Being homosexual was still a problem for the landlord, but actually less of a problem than the possibility this guy might be getting familiar with one or both of these women. 

Kirk did have sex with a few women on TOS, none of whcih were green.

And you still haven't explained how that means he was totally the type to get down with green alien ladies while the SNW Kirk is not.

Let me see: the best argument you can make is people's headcanon that Kirk had sex with green alien ladies in TOS, even though he did not m canon, while the SNW Kirk is not headcanoned by the people in this thread to have sex with green alien ladies, or any women, because he didn't try to have sex with any woman while dealing with an emergency and as a guest on a ship (where there were no green ladies) where he mostly talked to Pike. Gotcha!

Edited July 12, 2022 by Annara Snow