#561–have you been living in a cave with zarabeth for the past 30 years? wtf? PC= POLITICALLY CORRECT

The more I see of this movie, and the more I hear from Abrams, the less I like. I’ve tried to keep an open mind, but apparently I was being more open-minded about Abrams and his effort than he’s been toward Trek itself. Abrams reeks of “I know better” arrogance.

“Phase II,” “Exeter” and those efforts are and apparently will be real Trek for me from here on, not this bastardization. And it hurts to say that given Leonard Nimoy’s participation.

But the conflicts within the crew, the tensions and camaraderie, were much more…sterile. I think that for me, and I am stating this for me alone, TNG was too diffused with the number of characters. With TOS, you had a classic triad and then the other characters were there, but not really the focus. I prefer the classic triad, because it provides better drama and better interplay for themes. With TNG, you had one main character and then everyone else took a turn as the secondary focal point. As a result, you get much more a feeling of things being done by committee.

TNG was the first inkling of the PC insanity that would go on to create the inanity that was Voyager.

ST:TMP got him booted to a back office and we got TWOK, the strength of which was specifically that it tied into the humanity that you mention as making TOS so memorable. As I recall, he later went on to being more of an impediment to the franchise by doing petulant things designed to ‘get back’ at Paramount for handing the reins to others. (Legend is that the Kobayashi Maru sequence came out of him leaking the plot point of Spock’s death at the end while they were still in production. I read that in a very unofficial book, but it sounded like the guy knew what he was talking about.)

It took several seasons until there was even any “conflict” amongst the characters and/or Federation citizens which wasn’t a result of some sort of sickness or other external factor. This “Roddenberry Box” was a product of GR’s later ‘revisionist” look at what he wanted the TOS Universe to be seen as having evolved into.

I found it utterly boring.

It wasn’t until after GR was no longer involved with the series that elements like The Maquis (and Ensign Ro) or Jean Simmons character in “The Drumhead” were introduced. Unfortunately, that was just about the extent of real human conflict portrayed in TNG.

TOS, by contrast, did a memorable job in depicting humans as being simply a little bit wiser versions of the same flawed species. It was still humanity.
Bones was always willing to tell Spock, or even his captain, what to go do with himself.
The TOS Universe was full of people like Harry Mudd, Cyrano Jones, rogue men (even within Starfleet) like Garth of Izar, R.M Merik, or the brilliant (yet twisted) teacher John Gill. Human beings were still very recognizable to me.
Scotty was never above pulling out a bottle of scotch from his quarters, Kirk was very vulnerable to—shall we say—Earthly pleasures?
And there were always those whose ideas and philosophies sometimes did not mesh with the current state of society, like Mr. Stiles, for example. Kirk did not even seem surprised that he would have to call him out on his bigotry
. People still had breakdowns, like Commodore Decker.
There were still heroes.

And even ‘Spock’ was willing to break the rules at times…

These were people we could identify with, yet that had managed to achieve so much which is really achievable. I couldn’t identify with the TNG characters. Who were those guys?

In my estimation, they were people who spent far too much time on the “holodeck” (so did the writers).