Roads to Safe Places

Yeah, the magic schools are definitely the most attractive, but I am not sure if I have enough of what it takes to make it through your average school year at Hogwarts. :D

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You know, for all the Star Trek talk about how unprejudiced everybody is in the future it has always annoyed me that no Star Fleet cadet has a gut, is balding (OK, so there's Picard) or wears glasses. They probably scienced all them "deficiencies" away ...

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So that's why there're no plain women there. ... And no gays. :P

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I remember a NG episode in which Dr Crusher fell in love with an alien ambassador who used a male human body as a vessel for the symbiont that was really him. When the body was mortally injured, they transferred the symbiont into a female body. Dr Crusher cancelled their relationship. Interesting dilemma. I wonder whether they'd handle a similar episode differently today, from a story perspective.

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I doubt it. The moment a series like Star Trek tackles a lesbian couple before even considering introducing a male-male relationship, my opinion of US TV-shows is going to turn upside down, explode into space and eat up all living creatures on the planet.
It's one thing to ask them to get over their general homophobia towards gay couples. But noticing the existence of lesbian love or *gasp* sexuality is not something I trust the US media with at present. For obvious reasons.

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I would mildly contradict that. There are shows which touch on the subject, however briefly. What annoys me about the treatment of the theme in mainstream entertainment is that whenever homosexuality comes up it is a story gimmick. I don't know of any series or movie with homosexuality in it that doesn't make a big deal out of the fact that two persons of the same sex have a romantic relationship. Gay people on comedy shows are usually unbearably placative, gay people in dramas usually suffer until their suffering is resolved and we're treated to some unctuous morality lesson. Is it good that the topic isn't a total taboo anymore? Yes. However, being gay is not treated as normal, not even when the overall message about it is a positive one. Homosexuality gets thematically singled out as an interesting plot point, something that is always emphatically noteworthy. To me that contradicts the naturalness of being homosexual in a way.
Does that make sense?

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Absolutely. I feel the same.

Rest: what Moth posted.
I should maybe have said "the moment a lesbian couple isn't portrayed seen only through the male gaze (in the sense of the technical term, obviously) I'll be very surprised". Like you, I feel that homosexuality should just be there and normal, full stop. Without the angsting, without being comic relief.

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Well, they did have some ~innuendos~ (read: hawt female cast members making out on screen - and even that raised the wrath down South). I should be very much surprised if we have anything like permanently gay crew members on Star Trek before we raise little Trekkies, though, and lesbians - pshaw, yeah, dream on. Although, we might get a Seven-like bisexual character who makes out with a hot cast member in some episodes and then becomes a good girl and marries ~~Foreman~~ a man.

There are still a couple of things that severely bug me with this Utopia - Lesbian characters or, indeed, female characters come to mind, because as much as I love Star Trek and its women - gender equality is not exactly a strong suit of the canon, and its ethnocentricism isn't funny, either.

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I wonder whether they'd handle a similar episode differently today, from a story perspective.
They wouldn't. In the Star Trek utopian universe, we're not supposed to exist (on screen, that is, the fan-created comics/books/videos are completely different and have always contained LGBT characters - unsurprisingly, perhaps, as there are a fair few LGBT-identified creative fans out there). The LGBT crowd have been upset about the lack of inclusion since the late eighties, when the topic of LGBT crew members first arose. Gene Roddenberry - who said he had to overcome his own homophobia - is quoted on several occasions, saying that he'd think about including gay characters, in one interview shortly before his death even saying that the fifth season of ST:TNG would include gay crew members somewhere - but then he died and it never came to pass, until today - and the discussion and subsequently petitions and letter writing campaigns have addressed this issue with the last three shows which have been produced.

Of course there have been interludes, always relating to particular species, like in the case you mentioned: Trill. The episode in which Beverly falls for Odan, or the episode in which Jadzia is visited by her ex-wife Lenara - those made a lot of people very hopeful. Some people even go so far as to read Ezri as a representation of queer femininity (and this is because: she has short hair. I wish I were making this up, but some queer studies professor somewhere seriously sat down and wrote an essay and went ahead and published it in a book on gay science fiction characters) - but so far, the Star Trek universe is gay-free, and even though the godawful new series apparently contains some half-baked attempts at creating some lesbian subtext for added quota, it will most likely stay that way.

One reason may be the homophobia of the creators, but another factor seems to be the feared reaction of the US audience, and this is where I fail to get the entire discussion - the series which showed the first interracial kiss back in the day when they had to compete for their audience at their screen time with another popular series, were constantly on the brink of being shut down and had a microscopic budget, scared of angry phone calls from the South - today...? With "Star Trek" being what it is today? I simply don't get it.

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Plausible.
Which new Star Trek series is the godawful one? My captain is Picard so I hope it's not TNG. Deep Space Nine apparently tried to add an element of everyday life to the franchise which, in my opinion, failed. It degenerated into a terrible soap opera, meekly held up by some returning characters from TNG, most prominently Worf. The only mildly interesting character, Quark, was just comic relief. The only interesting episode was the one in which Sisco relived his past in a vision which I found interesting mostly because all the alien actors had human roles.
Voyager was a mess. I must admit I disliked all the female characters - the captain was a preachy matron whose heartiness never felt genuine, the doctor's assistant was a bland space elf child woman, I didn't buy the half-Klingon engineer's anger and heritage issues for one second and the borg girl was cheap fan service when the space elf failed to appeal to male audiences. Not that the male characters were better - generally bland, the only one to stick out was the holo doc and even he was just a ridiculously overdone Data rip-off. And let's not talk about Tuvok and Neelix, or "Space Abott and Costello" as I like to call them.
I have seen next to nothing from Star Trek Enterprise. I hated T'Pol for the same reason that I hated Seven-of-Nine and, surprise, surprise, they had another "funny" doctor.

That said, I'm not particularly looking forward to the new Star Trek movie. I hope Simon Pegg brings some humour back into the Star Trek universe. The trailer I've seen speaks a different language. Looks like your average "rogue kid finds his path in life" story, plus a lot of sexual tension between attractive young actors. That's not what I watch Star Trek for.

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My god. I just saw the trailer.
Bleh. I wanna see it, but it's gonna make me so angry that I don't think I should.

The godawful new series is the very new series with the sissy starting theme, Jab. Not TNG or DS9 or Voyager.

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As Crocky already said, the godawful series is ENT. Which I didn't even watch past the first three episode. Curiously enough, even though I have watched every single rerun of every Star Trek series since 1990, I gave this one a pass - as did practically every German Trekkie I know. No one seems to like it much - and the unimaginative, unlikeable characters are probably at fault. No wonder it was cancelled. They came dangerously near the line with Voyager, but this one took things too far.

I am not sure what they were going for, but it seems as though they had just taken a bunch of US minorities and put them on a ship together in the hope of creating something interesting - with little success. Janeway always felt to me as though she was meant to but completely failed to replace a Picard-type character as a mentor figure, what B'Elanna was supposed to achieve is beyond me, and the entire story around Neelix and Wossname was too boring for words, too. The doctor I disliked, my love for Vulcans didn't stop me from being bored by Tuvok, and most of the cultures and species they encounter on their travels were not too fascinating, either. Not my favourite series.

I must say that DS9 is probably my favourite in spite of the soap opera elements - and, indeed, because of some of them. It's possible that I've simply watched TNG too often and this one still hasn't lost its appeal, but I also enjoy the setting a lot. It was nice to see someone try to depict everyday life in the Star Trek universe. I also love Ferengi, the Quark/Odo dynamic never ceases to amuse me, and I think that the Dominion war makes for some really interesting episodes. Sisko I could never really take to - while I enjoy the episodes featuring him as a father, he is too far from my ideal of a Starfleet Commander for my taste. My ideal series would probably combine the TNG treknobabble, TNG missions and DS9 space for character development and insights into the everyday life.

I am not sure what to think of the trailer, but I am not too happy with what I am seeing (it causes too many Episode 1 flashbacks for my taste). Didn't Jim meet Spock only when he became Captain of the Enterprise in 2265...? And also - we've had James T. Kirk as a womanizing hotspur -that's what he's doing for the majority of TOS, so why the need for this movie...? Still, on the off chance of being able to watch a young Spock and actually seeing Kirk cheat at the Kobayashi Maru test, I'm willing to put up with what already looks like a ton of canon violations.

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Well, the glasses are indeed fixed by possibilities of treating practically everything, and I guess the lack of guts are explained by the training that cadets undergo before and after joining up - as well as the fact that I doubt that food from the replicator is food exactly as we know it, so that should take care of spare calories which are synthesised away.

But yes, on the whole, today's undesirable features are clearly not a part of the Star Trek universe.

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I think they had a little joke about glasses in Wrath of Khan. Apparently Kirk has age-related hyperopia but is allergic to the medication preventing it so he needs a pair of reading glasses in one scene to read a targeting computer's screen. I'm not sure about the movie, could've been The Search for Spock as well.

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The above was me.

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They sell those glasses in IV to obtain contemporary money, so I can imagine them being featured in III.

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Memory Alpha (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Glasses) has this to say on the matter:
Captain James T. Kirk was allergic to Retinax V, the conventional ways of correcting vision, so Dr. Leonard McCoy provided him with a pair of antiquated glasses. However, the glasses broke following the conflict with Khan Noonien Singh and his followers. (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) Kirk would end up selling the glasses at an antique shop on 20th century Earth in exchange for currency needed to accomplish their mission to save Earth in the future. (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

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I want to teach at Hogwarts. Does that count?

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