Went to my uncles cabin in the woods for a few days to relax, he's got the box set of the show and decided to give it a rewatch, was a pretty big fan in college. Got through like 3 episodes and shut it off.
Yes, Whedon is a creepy and maybe knowing that affecting my judgment, but honestly does feel like I'm noticing things my younger brain didn't. A lot of the dialog seems overwritten, some of the "quirky" shit the characters do comes off more obnoxious than endearing, also the story is giving me weird AnCap vibes. I mean yeah the Alliance clearly is pretty evil but we never get much explanation as to what the Brown Coats political program is, why did they want to succeed? Them being confederate coded sure as shit doesn't help.
Also, it almost leans TOO much into the whole western asethic sometimes, to the point I find it unbelievable. Okay, sure, humanity hastily colonized some planets and now some have regressed into SciFi Deadwood, I can dig that. But like, people on horses with cowboy hats seems a bit too comic for me.
Idk, just some random observations.
Edit: oh yeah and the intro song fucking sucks. That was something I thought even back when I liked the show.
it's literally not the military. the federation president was some alien guy. you're stuck in a 20th century mindset.
Starfleet is among several other things a sort of paramilitary reserves. the primary function of it is not military but when a hostile external force tries to start shit they already have the organizing and logistics to engage on that level. They are not professional warfighters nor do they seek to be.
There's not much real world equivalent to this but we could imagine the primary missions of the US military being NOAA, NASA, search and rescue, and the corps of engineers i.e. doing science and maybe building things rather than killing brown children and serving capital. It starts to not look like "the military" pretty quick the same way post-abolition "prisons" would still exist because you've got to protect society from serial killers, but that "prison" would be so different from what we have now that calling it with the same term is misleading as fuck.
I'm well aware of the in-universe justifications of Starfleet's function, that is part of the problem but not the main issue though there were very notable exceptions to this, DS9 Homefront is an attempted coup by the ~~military~~ science and peace loving civilian organization.
Imagine working for NASA and you're court martialed because you looked at the director funny and didn't follow your "orders".
NASA did not call the Space shuttle craft "USS Columbia". Small things like that requires suspension of disbelief and they all add up. In the real world we know why, its all because of early TOS lore wasn't as developed and it actualy was very much based on "USA in Space" theme of the cold war and 50s sci-fi, almost everything we think of the Federation today was established later specially on TNG.
I love that, just like I love competence porn. But it is sure damn convenient everything is in English and every ship is USS something isn't it? Again it is peak liberalism to think everyone is just going to forget the actual meaning of "USS Enterprise" when you see it, specially the Vietnamese/Chinese/Koreans lol.
Again in-universe, I'd love it, just press a magic button and everything is perfect, we have space communism*(terms and conditions apply). Trek is comfort food and its ok. But I know exactly what they did and why and it is hard to completely ignore.