Recently I've been watching Star Trek with my wife, who could reasonably be said to be a big fan of it. I can also, reasonably, be said to now be a fan of it. When Star Trek is good it is *good*. It operates on a different paradigm than a lot of the american mass media that I have been exposed to (noting that my cultural background can be reasonably said to be "an ESL caribbean immigrant") because it displays some kind of optimism, and ostensibly, it is about adult professionals my age or older who are generally trusted to be competent, ethical and mature about things.
A good episode of Star Trek just feels so different to other American TV shows I've watched. The cast has this warm chemistry, humor between them feels natural, and everything that happens, everything the characters feel, is treated like it matters and like the show is not ashamed of it, or needs to distract from it. The best episodes of Star Trek to me are about how hard it is to be an ethical person when something challenges you, and it's a good ethos even when I completely disagree with the outcomes in an episode. Good episodes are also about Klingons being raw as fuck and real as shit. My favorite character is Worf because he is a Klingon hotep. Seriously Klingon culture is so fucking cool. Watch every Klingon episode.
Anyway.
Star Trek was also a syndication show. Having seen all of TNG I can say that as much as I love the show and the characters, how much I looked forward every episode to seeing what Worf and Data and Troi etc were getting up to-- most episodes of TNG were very bad. Particularly the final seasons treated us to a lot schlocky plots that relied on the characters being naive, incommunicative or otherwise going against what they were like at their best (or how I felt they were, at their best). Or being put into really stupid or tasteless situations that simply could not be taken seriously, while being treated with the same gravity as everything else. I still had a lot of fun with them because on some level you have to laugh at Beverly Crusher's haunted pussy or the nonbinary aliens wanting to touch Ryker's dick or the genetically devolved Worf/Troi ABO because, well, those things are *laughable*. By the way the plots the women get handed on this show are criminal. What do you *mean* there's *another* episode that's a rape metaphor victimizing Troi? You did *multiple* ones of these?
At any rate, this has led my wife and I to have a running gag.
At the end of an episode, if I disliked it, I shout STAR DRECK! and throw up a fist (for some reason).
Otherwise, we acknowledge that we just watched an episode of Star fuckin' Trek babyyyy.
Right now we're watching Deep Space 9, which I think is my wife's favorite of the shows. I can see why, the cast is brilliant, the decisions on what characters to have as part of the "crew" are really interesting, and there is a lot of good setup for politics and schemes. I thought this would mean it would have less STAR DRECK in it, but thankfully, I've had many occassions to shout STAR DRECK! at the screen. Like the episode about Kira adopting a sad dumpy old man homesteader (what is it with Star Trek and episodes about homesteading guys who refuse to evacuate from certain planetary destruction?) and almost giving up her career and life for an awful mysoginist she met yesterday, until Sisko shows up to remind her that shes a character on a syndicated show.
Anyway, sometimes I think of having a list of what is and isn't Star Dreck but that's boring. Getting mad at television on the other hand, is fun.
(And no, I had not really watched Star Trek until now-- so it was not really an inspiration for Unjust Depths.)
(Though I did mention it once or twice as a cultural touchstone. A crew in a ship on missions etc etc.)