Klingons and Canon - How CBS shifted the conversation to bigotry

I'd like to take a detour today and talk about something that I think is important - Star Trek fans are divided and that division is escalating into ugliness. 

Then...

My earliest memory of Star Trek were the movies. I was born in 1983, almost 20 years after The Original Series premiered. The first film I remember seeing was the Search for Spock on VHS. When The Next Generation premiered in 1987, I remember watching episodes in-between Nickelodeon and Fox Kids programs as a kid and really liking Data. By the time I grew up in the early 2000s, I had caught up with everything Star Trek. I was really into the idea of a peaceful Earth as well as the (mostly) peaceful exploration of space and was saddened that Nemesis had pretty much been the final TNG movie. Enterprise would last for a few more years but would be done by 2005. 

I actually was lucky enough to see William Shatner, Avery Brooks, Scott Bakula and Patrick Stewart in panels at the San Diego Comic Con in around 2011 and the following year, I stole a kiss from Mr. Shatner (A Hershey's kiss - That's another story). The title of my history book, Before First Contact is a nod to my favorite Star Trek movie. Also, I hate flying and so I wear my TNG communicator badge when I do (Talk all the shit you want). So why am I telling you this? Because before getting into the point of this article, I thought it would be important to lay out my background and views on Star Trek, since I've been accused of being a few things lately (Russian troll, etc). 

When the JJ movies came out, I accepted them when my friends did not, specifically because they went out of their way to separate that timeline from the prime timeline. Then at around 2017, I heard they were coming out with a new Star Trek show that was set in the prime timeline and I was excited. I had assumed they'd make a few changes, but mostly stay loyal to canon, and that was it. The first episode I saw of Star Trek Discovery left me full of confusion: Why does the tech look more advanced than the Enterprise D? How come Spock had never mentioned having an adopted sister? And WTF did they do to the Klingons? 

My questions went on as I went through the next few episodes: Why is there a mutiny by Spock's sister 10 years before TOS where Spock once said nobody in Starfleet had ever mutinied? Why is there so much animosity between the crew? And what is up with this giant tardigrade plot? It all started to become a distraction. I began to realize that I really didn't like this iteration of Star Trek and went online to see if people were agreeing that this Trek was all wrong and noticed that there were a lot of comments that were asking the same questions I had asked. Then I went to Forbes and read about how the critics of Discovery were saying racist things, giving many examples. Ok, that's not my problem with Discovery, so I moved on and found an EW article with the lead character responding to the critics... no wait... she's responding to the "racist critics".

I started to see a strange pattern. I'm seeing a lot of comments on Facebook and YouTube about what I will call "Klingons and canon", but I'm reading a lot of articles about racism, and sexism. I'm reading things like "​Haters are gonna hate, and “Discovery” detractors will continue to heap abuse on the show. Ignore them. I’m not for a moment suggesting this is a great “Star Trek” series, but it is a good one. It might even turn out to be great."

​What? How is it gonna be great when they resort to stealing plot points from an unreleased video game?

The racism and sexism always felt like a bullshit argument. Who literally thinks people who have been Trek fans since the 60s (or in my case the 80s), through 5 iterations of diverse casts and the first interracial kiss in television history, are all of a sudden angry about a black female main character?

I started thinking to myself, "Why does this feel like a political campaign?" It only took leaving a few comments on Discovery's page to realize that it essentially was. The media had seen the small amount of legit sexist and racist comments out there on the internet and decided to pick up on it, knowing it would receive more clicks and interactions than stories about Klingons and canon. Once they turned that molehill into a mountain, it was easy for CBS to look like the hero for having a diverse cast, even though the history of Trek always held diversity.  It was now also easy to dismiss the Klingons and canon arguments as also from racists or sexists. After getting responses to my comments from people who obviously didn't understand canon, and after forcing myself through the entire first season, I decided that the higher ups at CBS simply didn't care about their older Trek fans and was doing their best to tap down legit criticism by mixing them with the racist criticisms. 

That was a sad day for me. Coming to that realization was a punch in the gut. I had loved Star Trek all my life and now, the very entity that owned it was not only disrespecting its own canon, but its own fans. I gave up that day, tried to make peace with it and decided to just settle on liking the Orville. 

Now...

​About 3 months ago, I started getting heavily spammed by CBS and Discovery's YouTube and Facebook pages about the new second season. I had already heard that Discovery's first season didn't perform as well as it was predicted to, that Netflix had paid for that season and were not satisfied with the results and that the Short Treks were a failed attempt at raising extra money. Still hurt from the way CBS treated people who didn't like Discovery for legitimate reasons, I tried to remove their ads from my page and surprise! They still came back after a few days through the Star Trek and CBS pages and even the Discovery page came back after a while. 

Not even wanting to think about the show anymore, I realized that I'm getting all this spam because I have identified myself as a fan of Star Trek. So I figured that the algorithms would get the hint if I just left negative comments about the show, so I began to actively leave negative comments. I don't remember exactly, but it was stuff like, "This show doesn't follow canon", "The aesthetics and lighting is all wrong" or "Now you're bringing in Spock and the Enterprise when you originally said you wouldn't? And he now has feelings?!"

I didn't attack anybody personally, just talked about why I didn't like the show. Soon, I started receiving negative and disrespectful personal comments in return, as well as people telling me to go away. There was this account named "Jawan Kasfartan" who claimed to be an expert in canon, but kept getting things all wrong. When I called him out on it, he began following me to other pages and harassing me. 

Eventually, something woke up in me. I had joined a few Star Trek fan pages and had since been muted or booted from those groups over my disgust for Discovery. The thing that awoke in me, saw what was going on and decided, "I don't need to take this shit". I soon joined a few anti-Discovery pages and decided that if these trolls were gonna be combative, then I had better come prepared for such combat:

"Watching Discovery is like going to the Hawaiian islands to have fun, when all of a sudden volcanoes start erupting, but instead of lava, they release the Earth's secret reserve of poo-poo. You try to run from the poo-poo, but it's too late. Because the poo-poo is moving as fast as a pyroclastic flow, this "poo-pooclastic" flow quickly catches up to you and you not only get poo-poo all over yourself, you also suffocate in the poo-poo, and because you cannot breathe the poo-poo, you die. 

Billions of years later, alien archaeologists dig up the now hardened coprolite fossils that incase you and put it on display in the museum, like you were from Pompey, calling you "The Poo-poo person" This is what it is like to watch Star Trek Discovery."

Mind you, I still didn't really take any of this seriously. Dealing with actual life and death stuff in the real world, I found this stuff a fun diversion from my activism. It didn't even bother me when Discovery's page blocked me from commenting on their posts (I still get their ads). I didn't really began to take this seriously enough to write an article about until recent events motivated me to. As a guy who now simply hated Discovery, I fell into that crowd and started following YouTube pages like Doomcock and MechaRandom42, who are huge critics of the show. 

MechaRandom42 started off as a gamer channel until this stuff with Discovery started splitting the fans. She then changed her format into a commentary channel. Last week, she posted a video speculating about whether or not Discovery would return for a third season. In it, she predicted that it wouldn't based on a few suspect tweets from cast members. This triggered Chris Hunter - the son of Jeffery Hunter, who played the original Captain Pike in the 60's pilot - to write a Facebook post asking for people to go to her page and attack her. 

​Surprised that the son of a Star Trek actor would act this way, MechaRandom42 went live to talk about it. Hunter went to the comments section of that video to leave a threatening comment:

He did apologize for these comments the following day, claiming that it wasn't him who made the comments... I don't know what he means by that, but it doesn't change the fact that those comments came from his account and that he had possibly put this woman in danger. He also tarnished his fathers name in the process. All of this because he didn't like what she had to say about the show. 

While I thought this would be a decent example to show that Discovery fans are maybe too passionate about a TV show, I soon learned that other fans applauded Hunter's actions. I will leave an example here:

(You can find the full conversation here) He continues after I mention that they're commentary and not news:

Now we've gone full circle. Instead of talking about Klingons and canon, we're once again talking about "racists and bigots". Predicting this, I lay it on them.

I think he knew he was on the ropes at this point, so he tried to throw a curve ball and accuse MechaRandom42 of something specific and in turn I ask for evidence:

I call him out as full of BS and his response was:

Surprise, surprise! Lots of anger and passion, but no evidence or substance. He even changes the story to say that it's now YouTube deleting the videos. This person basically gave me an empty rant about how this woman was a racist and a bigot but gave me no evidence of this. In my activism, I have dealt with local politics and life and death situations with the understanding that violence is a line that I should never cross and here is this dipshit who wants this woman jumped because she doesn't like a fucking TV show.

I blame CBS for taking advantage of the earlier media reports and allowing fans to dismiss other fans who dislike Discovery as bigots or trolls. They sent cast and crew members to the media to address the racism instead of Klingons and canon, and now that's all this shit has become. Because of that I have absolutely no intention of returning to the franchise unless CBS acknowledges this, nor will I return for any Picard series or whatever else comes and I'm now even boycotting the Late Show, even though I love Stephen Colbert, because CBS obviously doesn't care about losing viewers. I also will continue to talk shit about STD online because fuck those haters, I have the freedom to say whatever I want as long as it doesn't promote violence. 

The saddest part about it however is not my departure from something I have loved so much, but the fact that the heads of CBS would probably read this article coming from a guy who was a diehard Trek fan since the 1980s and would probably respond with a "Good Riddance". That truly hurts - but not as much as their wallets will hurt, now that mine and many other wallets are closed. 

-Rot in hell, Discovery.