Year of Trek

Rat Boy wrote:

I love this trailer so much.

.... I cannot watch this trailer in my country. *sigh*

Spoiler:

Yes, I have a VPN. Still.

As sci-fi and Trek have specifically been settings for writers to explore social issues of the current age, it looks like Saturday Night Live wanted to vent about millennials entering the workforce.....

"Literally toxic."
"Stop gaslighting me!"
"My truth."

Also. From the YouTube comments section.

"This was so accurate, half the audience felt bullied."

This was comedy gold!

Still, better than Gen Xers...

Mixolyde wrote:

Still, better than Gen Xers...

Excuse me, motherf*cker?

Millenials entering the workforce? The oldest millenials are turning 40 this year, I think they've been in the workforce for a while.

Keithustus wrote:

As sci-fi and Trek have specifically been settings for writers to explore social issues of the current age, it looks like Saturday Night Live wanted to vent about millennials entering the workforce.....

NSMike wrote:

Millenials entering the workforce? The oldest millenials are turning 40 this year, I think they've been in the workforce for a while.

By "current age," Keith of course meant "20 years ago," which is how long it takes a lightspeed radio signal to travel to Boomerworld and back.

In just a few months we'll get to see SNL's hot take on 9/11.

NSMike wrote:

The oldest millenials are turning 40 this year...

No. Millennials aren’t that old yet. If you mean folks born right around 1980, we are Xennials—we hate Gen Xers for being antiquated but hate Millennials even more for traits parodied in this skit.

https://www.good.is/articles/generat...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...

Edit:
Adding an even better article, the one that dubbed us the “Oregon Trail Generation”....

IMAGE(https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-05-25-1432593856-4405809-aOREGONTRAILGAME200x150.jpg)

...If you can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into your weekly computer lab session and seeing a room full of Apple 2Es displaying the start screen of Oregon Trail, you’re a member of this nameless generation, my friend....

....Did you come home from middle school and head straight to AOL, praying all the time that you’d hear those magic words, “You’ve Got Mail” after waiting for the painfully slow dial-up internet to connect? If so, then yes, you are a member of the Oregon Trail Generation. And you are definitely part of this generation if you hopped in and out of sketchy chat rooms asking others their A/S/L (age/sex/location for the uninitiated)....

So, as demonstrated by that first article, generations are kinda arbitrary, so you could argue that those turning 40 this year aren't Millenials, but I was born in 1982 and have never heard the term "Xennial," let alone applied it to myself. I've always been a Millenial. And there are alternate sources that put me in that group as well. So as I said, arbitrary.

And that SNL skit... Aside from being older generations looking down on younger ones, which happens every generation, it's just a tired, straw-young-person trope that has already been overused. I'm more impressed by the uniforms and set, because there was more craft and thought put into those than the skit.

I was just going to overlook it but Keith is right. It's bullsh*t to lump '80-85 kids in with '90-95 kids. The early 80s babies have a lot more in common with Xers, but are still different. Not having internet in school or home until at least high school is a huge life difference from kids who had it in elementary school. Plus everyone who was in high school or college during Columbine or 9/11 has a vastly different experience than those younger kids. We remember "at the gate" pick up and drop off at the airport, and never experienced active shooter drills.

Thats why terms like Xennial popped up because we are not the same. Hell I'd be happy if they called it Gen Y again and just cut it down to 77-87 ish.

This isn't really the thread for this tangent though.

Even if you draw that specific nonsense line instead of the other nonsense line, the oldest Millenials turn 36 this year. Still far too old to be considered just entering the workforce.

In short, y'all are older than you think you are. The oldest Zoomers should've been entering the workforce 2 years ago.

Well no one said how recently it has been that they’ve been entering the workforce. The skit makes sense as up to a decade of frustration.

The other thing that always kills me about Gen-Xers complaining about Millenials is -- they're your f*cking kids! You raised them! Maybe take a closer look at your parenting methods if you're unhappy with how your kids turned out.

I don't hate Gen Xers for being antiquated. I hate them for being cynical miserable sh*ts who complained about everything as kids, but then did almost nothing to fix the society they railed against as they got older.

Stele wrote:

I was just going to overlook it but Keith is right. It's bullsh*t to lump '80-85 kids in with '90-95 kids.

It's always bullsh*t to lump %1% kids with %2% kids. We still do it.

Keithustus wrote:

Well no one said how recently it has been that they’ve been entering the workforce.

It... It was your caption for the video. Millenials entering the workforce. And the skit was posted a few days ago. Unless this skit was performed a while back and is only now being posted, Millenials aren't entering the workforce right now. They've been there. Many of them for 10+ years.

"Ah, sweet! A whole bunch of new Star Trek posts! I wonder what's new?"

NSMike wrote:

It... It was your caption for the video. Millenials entering the workforce. And the skit was posted a few days ago. Unless this skit was performed a while back and is only now being posted, Millenials aren't entering the workforce right now. They've been there. Many of them for 10+ years.

There are still plenty of millennials entering the workforce in the last few years, particularly those born in the later 90s and early 2000s and those who may have attended graduate school. There isn’t a rule that SNL skits have to be current that very year.

Yeah, fair enough.

It's still a pretty tired joke, and has been the basis of the complaints of recent older generations about younger generations since before the "Millenials are ruining everything" articles started coming out.

Also I find the whole Xennial thing kind of ironically hilarious, in that it is an extension of the very "I'm special!" attitude that the skit is making fun of.

Exclusive: T’Pol, Phlox, And Other Star Trek: Enterprise Characters Are Coming Back (rumor, in talks)

....Will Star Trek fans be enthusiastic to see these characters on their screens one more time?...

Most of them: yesolutely! Except Malcolm Reed, and Trip only if to make the events of The Good That Men Do cannon.

Should we make a Star Trek Misc. Catch-all thread instead of this one?

Really funny description of DS9 here:

https://twitter.com/frenegi/status/1...

I've tried to watch Enterprise 3 times now -- the first back in 2001 when it released and I always end up abandoning it after a few episodes while yelling at my TV screen. T'Pol suggests scanning a new planet for potential viruses before beaming down and Archer's like "Nah, that's boring. Let's just beam down now and have some fun!". Hours later they nearly kill each other due to a rage virus. It was infuriating to watch characters be so god damn stupid and ignore the one voice of reason in the room. On Stargate, they would send a robot through the gate before each planet to check soil samples and the air quality before any manned missions, so no excuses about Archer not knowing any better. I had to stop watching to control my blood pressure.

Yet, for some reason, I would be interested in a revival. Seeing the adventures of the first President of the UFP could be interesting and outside of the god awful writing I didn't hate the characters. I'll give a hesitant thumbs up to a revival.

That’s the fun. Watching Enterprise is like if Elon Musk invents warp engines tomorrow; humanity isn’t going to create a Kirk-proficiency fleet on the first try. He resents Vulcans for having told his father—correctly— that they’re not ready to explore a dangerous galaxy. Over time he starts learning. In some later episodes he has to be the one making that assessment for other species. Before The Force Awakens, people used to like growth in fictional characters.

Enterprise is also heavily involved in this amazing analysis-through-clips:

Its amusing (I stopped about 2 minutes in) but its the product of not having a real 'franchise' owner after Roddenberry died and Paramount being lazy.

IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oo4H-u3UVhY/maxresdefault.jpg)

Djinn wrote:

I've tried to watch Enterprise 3 times now -- the first back in 2001 when it released and I always end up abandoning it after a few episodes while yelling at my TV screen. T'Pol suggests scanning a new planet for potential viruses before beaming down and Archer's like "Nah, that's boring. Let's just beam down now and have some fun!". Hours later they nearly kill each other due to a rage virus. It was infuriating to watch characters be so god damn stupid and ignore the one voice of reason in the room. On Stargate, they would send a robot through the gate before each planet to check soil samples and the air quality before any manned missions, so no excuses about Archer not knowing any better. I had to stop watching to control my blood pressure.

Yet, for some reason, I would be interested in a revival. Seeing the adventures of the first President of the UFP could be interesting and outside of the god awful writing I didn't hate the characters. I'll give a hesitant thumbs up to a revival.

I recently (within the last year or so) tried to rewatch the series - I'm a huge Trek fan so not watching it when it aired wasn't really an option, so I have seen the whole thing before. Since those days, I have gotten much more open to critically looking at the things that I love and seeing the problems with them. Aside from the obvious horniness of Enterprise, a lot of it just makes absolutely no sense in exactly the way you identify.

Trip is a beloved character, but if you pay attention to everything he does and says before season four, the number of times he makes absolutely terrible decisions or arguments, or takes the absolute worst possible position on something is astounding. The guy shouldn't be able to leave the house, let alone the planet.

I did not finish the rewatch.

polypusher wrote:

Its amusing (I stopped about 2 minutes in) but its the product of not having a real 'franchise' owner after Roddenberry died and Paramount being lazy.

IMAGE(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/oo4H-u3UVhY/maxresdefault.jpg)

I think it's really the decline and death of Majel. TNG and DS9 are both post Roddenberry.

I'm more saying that the lack of such an owner means there is no one to ask about simple things like whether a 200 year old Earth colony would have subspace comms or not. The continuity errors come from new writers being unaware of, or just not caring about the details laid out in TOS

Here’s a video of continuity errors, some of which I didn’t know. Like women not being able to be captains?!

In any franchise as long-running as Star Trek, I'm usually pretty willing to accept that continuity is a broad-strokes thing.

It's fun to run down all the little (and sometimes big) contradictions that crop up.

It would be less fun to be so slavishly devoted to avoiding such contradictions that it closed off story possibilities.