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sorry for the reupload… there were some details that were bugging me so i went back to fix them 😭

something that really irks me about star trek now is how blase it gets about the science part of science fiction.

say what you will about the old shows, but you can watch episodes like devil in the dark in tos, the terratin incident in tas, unnatural selection in tng, or once upon a time in voy and get real scientific theories and ideas out of them which have been part of speculation in both fiction and literature for decades. and even with episodes like genesis in tng, where we now know introns aren't evolutionary holdovers, these episodes serve as a time capsule for what the prominent ideas of stem fields were at the time. it's worth remembering that tos was written in a time where watson and crick's now widely accepted central dogma was still a controversial idea in scientific circles.

so for me, the new shows are frustrating because half the time, it's passing off pseudoscience as science fact (grounding in beta test for example) or just is plain factually incorrect if you bother to go look up what they're talking about (most blatant example i can think of is in the vulcan hello, but it keeps happening). part of what I love about the old shows is that they were willing to play with speculation and prominent theories of the time, and you could go look them up and see what people in these fields were actually thinking about and how that inspired the writing on these shows. if you look the ideas these shows discuss up now, you're not going to get much of anything (and i know because i'm the type of nerd to go and check </3).

and then the other half of the time, when the science does have some basis in reality such as quantum mechanics influencing macromolecular events as is described in context is for kings, the characters deliver the information in a really condescending and rude way, as if both the characters and the audience should have known better (+ i know this character and event in particular is meant to be condescending, so i'll also mention this happens in a few episodes of snw as well). which is also frustrating!! when characters explain these concepts in the older shows, it's also assumed the characters being explained to wouldn’t know, but the delivery is usually a little more understanding of that fact or even full of excitement for getting to explain that concept. which i think does better generally for getting these ideas across for a modern audience who is (sadly) already distrustful of science and who largely view scientists as out for themselves and arrogant.

and then on top of all of that, shows like snw (especially in a space adventure hour) like to mock and make fun of the science of shows like tos. historically the older trek shows have had science consultants and oftentimes were better at disseminating scientific ideas to the public than the new shows are (even with science consultants still being on the show).

I think it's frustrating! I loathe that the common perception star trek as a franchise, especially in the older stuff, is that it is completely worthless as a text for trying to introduce scientific concepts or somehow riddled with inaccuracies. it's been a mirror of the science of its times, and usually a pretty good mirror! not to mention that a lot of the things we think about now in terms of science across all disciplines was at least in part inspired by some of what shows like tos envisioned for the future. I wish the new shows would take advantage of the science part of science fiction more! we know so much more and still have so much to learn, so there's a lot of room here!

The episode does a great job at explaining the concept and thus also shows the audience why the crew is so fascinated by the construct.

(It also made me read a hell of a lot of physics Wikipedia articles that I'd never had read otherwise.)

I really loath that they dropped the "science" part so much in the newer shows. Sorry, not sorry, but I think it's part of the inferior writing. The authors don't come up anymore with scientific problems, solving them with scientific solutions. Instead, they twist and turn the "science" until it fits their writing.

Otherwise, I can't explain what the heck the science consultants are doing on the newer shows.

(To be honest, I had assumed there weren't any science consultants anymore. I mean, why bother, if you don't listen to them anyway?)

I really liked Starfleet Academy for many reasons and think that the character writing and plot development was very solid again but the science aspect was, unfortunately, still more than lacking.

In many of the newer Star Trek episodes, the depicted technology is so far removed from any real life science that they might as well use magic - which isn't Star Trek for me.

If I had to pinpoint the beginning of the decline, I think the problem started with the Kelvin films and the bubble of "red matter" that destroys a whole planet.

"Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow..."