Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

And what about Transporter Chief Pitcairn? Or C.P.O. Garrison? Gosh, I bet those two got up to some wacky hijinks! I sure would hate to miss out on seeing them!

that was one thing that always got me about having an Ash Tyler... nothing happens by accident in this generation of Trek.

gonna make for a scene if those two cross paths.

@The Ghost of Crazy Horse @We Are Borg vs. USS Crazy Horse this is couple of pages back now but knock it off.

EDIT: Never mind. Don't want to further the derailment of this thread.

I've said all I will say in the Help Desk thread.

https://wordforge.net/index.php?posts/3296130/

Who the hell put you in charge anyway? All I said is that it looks like SNW will be following in the footsteps of Discovery with wokeness. That's not against the rules of this forum and it specifically addresses what I think the tone and direction of the show will be.There's nothing inherently political or misogynistic about it that. Just because you've got a personal vendetta against me doesn't mean you get to dictate things around here.

Dear God what an intellectually lazy take. I disagree with a great many people about a great many issues that I do not think are Nazis, and that are "racist" on in the latent politically advantageous way that is built into Republicanism. For example, I'm absolutely certain Cindy Hyde-Smith is a knowing and enthusiastic racist, while her fellow MS Senator Roger Wicker is most likely not - but politically they are basically identical because racist rhetoric and assumptions are just built into movement conservatism.

And I think the folks who are self-aware Nazis in their mindset and worldview are a surpassingly small group - but they are well outnumbered by those who are NOT self-aware that they share a lot of overlap in worldview with those who are. THAT'S the folks that I'm saying maybe should pause for some self-reflection.

Noted but I was thinking more that the character was written as a Caribbean.

Stupid image search - it was there when I posted.

The picture is the actress who played Sam on icarley, Jennette McCurdy

Nothing more Trek than a dude with a Hispanic name looking entirely Irish.

Whoa... just reading some of the back ground (and scripts) regarding the yeoman casting in TOS.

or

followed up with the info that:

Yep. That was Gene alright.

so long as we can accept that he was a Weinstein level predator and that moving away from a lot of "his vision" isn't just better sci fi, but further evidence that we're already surpassing it.

I’ve never once given any credence to any supposed “vision” that Gene had.
He knew how to tell some good stories here and there and imagined a decently interesting universe more or less but that’s as far as I care about Gene’s “vision”.

It seems like there are relatively few characters who are explicitly or implicitly written as non-American.

Off the top of my head:

Chekov is Russian.

Picard is French (at least nominally. We all know he's really British).

Scotty is a Scottsman.

Reed is British.

Eddington from DS9 is Canadian.

O'Brien and Kyle from TOS are Irish.

Keiko and Hoshi were born in Japan according to Memory Alpha. It never seemed to matter for Hoski. Keiko at least had some memories affiliated with Japanese culture and dressed up in Japanese garb for her wedding.

The implication is that Uhuru is African based on her name and her speaking Swahili, but we never got her first name in TOS or the original movies as far as I know let alone a place of birth, and she never showed did the "I'm so proud of my heritage that I will boast and reminisce about it" thing that the rest of the people listed above did. Similarly, M'Benga and probably other characters presumably had roots in Africa but again, they never were like, "Africa is the root of human civilization" or anything like that.

And Geordi was born in the African confederation, but there was never an instant where his national origin or ethnicity played a role that I can think of in TNG or the movies.

Given that (as far as I know) there has not been a Starfleet character canonically from China (indeed, I don't think from any other place in Asia besides Japan), Germany, Spain, Italy (or any place in Europe besides France and the U.K.), the Middle East, India (yes, I know there was a Chief Engineer Singh in TNG and Khan), Latin America, I can't get too beaten up about there not being an explicitly Carribean character.

There was an Indian captain in TVH.
Think he was the Yorktown captain.

Star Trek's writers make one of two assumptions about national cultures in the 23rd Century: either (1) they persist and are integrated into a worldwide community while still retaining their identities; or (2) they've been subsumed into a single Earth culture that is essentially Western and that speaks English.

For (1) you get Chekov with English as a second language and his preoccupation with Russian national glory, or Keiko with adherence to Japanese tradition; for (2) you get Geordie LaForge with no hint whatsoever of "African-ness" or Hoshi Sato with no trace of "Japanese-ness."

If I have to reconcile this, I'd say that the 23rd Century is mostly (2) but that there are a significant number of people who hold onto national traditions, kinda like how you'll find varying degrees of cultural retention among immigrants in the modern world.

The actor who played him is of Indian descent. The character is "Joel Randolph" accroding to Memory Alpha. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Joel_Randolph

He clearly spoke with an Indian accent, so I will accept that the character is also born in India (although it's not the only possibility),

But this encouraged me to put on ST:IV. It's been a long time since I last watched it. And in scene 1, there is Madge Sinclair as the captain of the Saragtoga.

Her character isn't given a name or a place of birth, but again, given that she speaks like Jamaican-born Madge Sinclair, it's fair to assume that the character is Carribbean until proven otherwise.

I'd go with 1 as it spirals into what I've said about Disco sort of reflecting where it's shot. Canada has long tried to create itself as a mosaic of cultures vs the American melting pot where cultural distinctions are preserved within a pluralistic society. That the UT malfunction made Saru a rosetta stone would suggest that "Federation Standard" is for the benefit of the audience and that even the humans are speaking myriad languages to each other. About the only time we ever seen cultural uniformity is in a star fleet uniform.

It sounds to me like you just described the exact same thing twice but in two different ways that mean the same thing.

clunky sentence structure, but I'd expect that you cold string together the jump. I mean, you picked out and underlined the matching parts of the point

Canada has long tried to create itself as a mosaic of cultures ( vs the American melting pot ) where cultural distinctions are preserved within a pluralistic society


there.
Happy?

Ok. I think I get you now.

I initially took it as you saying:

Canada: "Mosaic of cultures"
America: "melting pot where cultural distinctions are preserved within a pluralistic society" (which didn't make much sense TBH, which added to my confusion).

But now I see you meant:

Canada: "Mosaic of cultures (where cultural distinctions are preserved within a pluralistic society)"
America: "melting pot".

The problem, I think, is that they're trying to show how blended the society is while giving out "fan service" to various groups by making cultural references that appeal to present-day groups. So, you have the bit about Chekov referencing the Garden of Eden being just outside of Moscow (the idea being that the US and the Soviet Union are no longer enemies and part of a unified Earth, yet still retaining some of their cultural identities) or Uhura speaking Swahili.

The problem with this is that it assumes certain things will remain static and those cultural identities don't really change. But they do if the societies aren't isolated. When Israel allowed Ethiopian Jews to immigrate to the country, they were shocked to discover that the Ethiopians were performing rituals in ways that hadn't been done by the rest of Jewish society for centuries. In some cases, the rituals would have changed due to exposure to other cultures, in other cases, the rituals would have changed due to social mores changing, and in others, they would have changed because it was discovered that the original reason for the rituals was bullshit. They also assume that those people will look like we expect them to. Forget the whole ethnic blending we'll no doubt have had by that point in time, I have a Facebook friend who is Latino, as an infant, he was adopted by an immigrant Chinese family. While he doesn't consider himself to be Chinese, he does consider the aspects of Chinese culture that he was raised with to be as much a part of his identity as he does being Latino and American.

Assuming that humanity in the 23rd Century still holds to some of the same traditions that it does now, you will have people practicing those traditions who look nothing like we would expect them to. So, you could have someone who was ethnically Incan, but because their family had lived in Japan, they consider themselves to be closer to Japanese society than Latin American society. Or, if we ever do become a unified planet, you'll have people tossing out customs and rituals they've held onto for centuries and adopting ones from other societies or creating new ones.

There was a character on a viewscreen in one of the TOS movies, don't recall the rank, that was clearly Indian (ethnically, suppose one could argue they were born elsewhere) but to be clear, I'm not emotionally invested in the area per se, it was just the cultural "type" that first occured to me when I tried to think of one that I was pretty sure had never been written into a trek character. By no means was I trying to say "they've covered everything but..."

Dicky mentioned the commander, who was from Voyage Home.

And yeah, I didn't read you as saying that Trek had covered most things. It just got me thinking about how few characters Trek has portrayed as anything besides essentially generic American.

The flip side being that if/when they link a character to the Carribbean, it's most likely going to be something relatively minor like him having dreadlocks, being a reggae fan and talking about how he grew up on jerk chicken an d rice and peas.

I mean, Picard's Frenchness was pretty much limited to
1. Defending the French language as once the epitome of culture when Data referred to French as a minor language in "Code of Honor"
2. Saying a handful of words in French, including French for "shit,"
3. Having a French vineyard and an appreciation for wine
4. Enjoying breakfast croissants
5. Singing a couple of French songs (Frere Jacques in Disaster to keep the kids' spirits up and Sur Le Pont D'Avignon when he was being tortured in Chain of Command)
6. Being teased by/flirted with by Q as "mon capitaine"

Where was Fleet Admiral Shanti from (Redemption, Part 2 - she's the one who Picard goes to to request his fleet to blockade the Romulans - had a pretty distinctive accent)?

according to the actor's bio, Arkansas.

Neither the character's name nor accent strike me as "Carribbean." If I had to guess based on both, I would say she is supposed to be from somewhere in Africa, but i could be wrong.

ETA: I also have to rant about how the plan in Redemption Part 2 to blockade the Romulans from getting supplies just doesn't make any sense in three-dimensional space where there is warp capability. No matter how far the net could be extended, the Romulans could always warp at the farthest edge of it.