Xaila

TURN ON V-SYNC

Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.

Moreover, a lot of kids watched this show. MLK himself contacted Nichelle Nichols and asked her to stay on the show when she was considering leaving, because “you don’t have a Black role, you have an equal role,” and there wasnt many Black role models on tv. I can only imagine how Black kids, Asian kids, and mixed race or mixed culture kids felt seeing people like them on tv. Hell, seeing Uhura on screen is what inspired Whoopi Goldberg as a little girl.

Like, all the years of anti-Chinese racism in the US? Sulu. Anti-Japanese sentiments left over after WW2? Sulu. Korean War in 1950-52? Sulu. The Vietnam War, with Johnson in 1965 (a year before TOS started airing) choosing to start sending American troops into the conflict? Sulu.

Sulu was Roddenberry’s desperate attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human, and yeah, he probably put kind of too much on Sulu’s shoulders, but it was the 1960s and Roddenberry fucking cared about representation, so he did what he could.

human: here is birds in water

When it hits you, that raising a shape-shifting baby of a different species might not be as easy as you thought 

vs 

When you find out that your new child is the coolest baby you’ve ever held

“Past Tense, Part I” and “Past Tense, Part II” aired on January 2 and January 9, 1995. They’re part of a long line of Star Trek time travel episodes, but only a few of those time travel episodes visit an Earth that is in the characters’ distant past but the audience’s near future. As such, they are among just a handful of Star Trek stories that take place during the part of the Star Trek mythos where humanity had to overcome its differences to get to the utopia awaiting us in the 2300s.

[…]

Since he wrote that episode of Star Trek, “the militarization of police has gotten even more advanced. They have even more weaponry and seemingly more willingness to use it,” Wolfe told me. “As the SWAT team was coming in [to the Sanctuary District during the riots], they were somewhat careful at least. Today, we probably wouldn’t portray that the same way.”

Yet even if “Past Tense” didn’t predict the future with 100 percent accuracy (which, again, shouldn’t have been its goal to begin with), it remains a chilling look at our present by a TV show looking out its own window in the past and seeing the problems we’re still dealing with today. In many cases, those problems have even gotten much, much worse.