If this is the wrong place for this, I apologize in advance and it’s okay if it gets removed.
First, it was bad enough for Elon Musk references, but now…
The real life Paul Stamets, for which the character is named, hired union busters at his business, Fungi Perfecti.
https://www.thestand.org/2024/05/fungi-perfecti-workers-joining-together-with-liuna-252/
But rather than recognizing and respecting these workers’ right to join together free from management interference, the union reports that Fungi Perfecti has responded by hiring the union-busting firms of Littler Mendelson P.C. and the American Labor Group. These firms represent clients such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks, all of which have faced multiple Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board for illegally interfering in their employees’ freedom to unionize.
These firms have attempted to slow the momentum of Fungi Perfecti workers’ organizing drive with typical union-busting tactics like “unrequired” meetings that are heavily encouraged.
“ALG has been distributing anti-union propaganda that, in some cases, are outright lies,” said Derek Sewell, a warehouse worker for Fungi Perfecti. “But we will not be discouraged. It’s just unfortunate that they are spending thousands of dollars on union-busting to try to discourage us rather than investing in making Fungi Perfecti and better and more sustainable place to work.”
Anyway, my opinion is firmly that if they’re going to make references, it needs to be about people who are already dead, whose negatives are known, and who can’t come back and fuck your reference up by becoming a horrible person as your life goes on.
Because these living people keep revealing how Un-Star-Trek they are, imho.
Yea generally, AFAICT, it’s a problem with Discovery that the writers tried to be just a bit more “present”. Same with the Stacey Abrams cameo that was just a bit too “front and center” when it would have worked better in the background. I get it, it’s weird for TNG era starfleet to all be into classical music and jazz and Leonardo Da Vinci (Janeway), but you know, it prevents it from aging in the long run.
It’s difficult to even evaluate this level of complaint against Discovery when there are so many more fundamental issues with the writing . Like yeah okay this is fair criticism but I would care a lot more if it was well written to begin with.
It’s really a pile of garbage. And I’m angry at myself for watching so much of it. It’s clearly not written by anybody interested in the star trek universe.
My go-to example is also this one episode where one young character decides to from now on go by the pronouns “they/them”. I’m all for the inclusion of nonbinary characters - that’s what star trek always stood for - inclusion and the shared humanity that we all have. But that episode had basically nothing else going for it and the pronouns were the plot.
The new, great series “strange new worlds” on the other hand had a great episode with a very interesting non binary character (that BTW never was explicitly pointed out as one) who helped spock deal with his own problems of navigating his own two identities (human/vulcan). It was so clever and the nonbinaryness was integral, to the plot, but it wasn’t the plot. The actual plot was that the non binary character basically fooled everyone and turned out the villain. It’s such a great comparison between those two series. One makes a compelling show and the other one has nothing to say other than ticking a list of “woke” virtue signalling points.
Hmmm I can’t quite pinpoint which episode this was … which was it? It’s interesting because I may have missed the non-binary character!?
well discovery criticism is well trodden by now and I didn’t want to trigger a dive into it (which I say as a Disco critic). This part though, however minor it might seem, I think goes beyond being a critique of the show and more of a strong lesson that writers should know and shouldn’t fuck around with, especially in sci-fi.
It may also highlight how Disco writers are maybe just not good trek writers and maybe didn’t get the show … where it’s not so much about the “right now” like social media but about the bigger questions of the present.