I for certain see the context. It’s just frustrating watching from a contemporary lens, especially as a woman. Many of us, including me, have experienced unwanted advances that escalated into harassment, verbal abuse, assault (an entire range of physical contact). As much as I’m enjoying the show, but this aspect makes me feel uncomfortable and somewhat angry.
Therein my frustrations with older Trek. I see and appreciate what they were trying to do, but their inherent biases were on full display despite creating a show about a better progressive future.
For one, I consider understanding human anatomy to be basic knowledge for adults. It’s a huge turn off when I run into people (overwhelmingly men) who think menstruation is taboo and refuse to learn or hear about it. Everyone should know about biological functions that happen to human beings. It’s natural and it happens to most women once a month. That’s a lot! And it’s literally essential for the continuation of our species.
As for dating purposes, if a (prospective) partner responds to mentions of menstruation with disgust and comments like “ew, I don’t want to hear about that,” that’s a huge red flag for a lack of maturity. Unfortunately, it is incredibly common. However if my husband, who went to Catholic school his entire life, can figure it out through research and having basic empathy, it’s not an excuse for any adult male to be ignorant on this subject.
As someone who actually enjoyed Discovery, that’s one of the things I couldn’t stand about it. And it really disappoints me that they used it here. You can’t have the stakes of every damn episode be that high, so it really bothers me that we get it in the first episode of the season. I really hope it’s not a sign of things to come.
I understand if I get a slew of downvotes, but I thought that episode was pretty bad. The pacing was weird and many of the sequences involving the mining planet felt poorly written (what’s with the Witcher potion?). I feel like I’m the only person not into the whole Spock/Chapel thing, so seeing that pushed harder was cringe for me.
I guess I’m one of the few voices of dissent again… I enjoyed last week’s episode, but this episode is disappointing again. The romance between La’an was very unnecessary and unnatural. They had no chemistry and it felt incredibly awkward. I still can’t stand their choice for Kirk. Feels like I’m watching Darrin from Bewitched (or some other “ordinary working man” type character) doing cosplay and not a star ship captain, and certainly not a captain like Kirk. Not only does he not have “the look,” but I hated the way he delivered all his lines.
The only breath of fresh air for me is that a disaster takes place someplace other than New York, LA, or the US in general. However, they definitely didn’t hire enough extras for Toronto. Everywhere looked too under populated and not enough racial diversity (ie: where were all the Asians? Toronto is filled with East, South, Subcontinental Asians). I’ve never seen the streets of Toronto so sparse.