TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.

To be fair, it would be a boring show if they didn’t.

Ship enters orbit of a planet

‘Spock, what do our scans show?’

‘Intense geologic activity, no atmosphere, no life signs.’

Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data, moves on to the next target

‘Spock, what do our scans show?’

‘Planet is frozen, no geologic activity, no life signs.’

Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data

Realistic sci fi is waaayyy too boring for a general audience.

Just watched an episode where they literally went to a section of space completely absent of all energy and matter and still somehow met this

Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks

I mean the original line was "where no man has gone before" which at least made sense, although it didn't represent the female crew very well.

It was a list:

• to explore strange new worlds
• seek out new life and new civilizations
• boldly go where no one has gone before

Well, it was supposed to be where no 'man' has gone before, but people had to whine about it, and here we are.

There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn't a good story

I mean, isn't this basically what every European did in the Americas and Africa?

Columbus: "Look, I'm the first human being ever to set foot here!"

200 Taíno people staring at him wondering WTF was going on

Columbus: "Look, I planted a flag, that way if anyone else ever comes here, they'll know this is Spanish land now."

They said no "one". They can go places as long as there are many things there.

TBF in the ToS it was ”Where no man has gone before”, not “Where no one has gone before.”

So if it was aliens then the statement was correct, we’d just have to skip all the weird human populated worlds they found.

The people who were already there didn’t go there if they were always there

As progressive as the show was for its time, it is informed by narratives of the settler imperialism that helped Europeans "conquer the new world".

There's a reason why the intro casts space as "the final frontier." The frontier myth and its accompanying ideology of Manifest Destiny still formed the widely accepted version of U.S. history. Not the land-grabbing, genociding, slavery-spreading version we know today.

Bonus thought: Exploring space was obviously a big thing back then so it's understandable how Roddenberry came up with this line. But when you really think about it, time is the final frontier that we haven't managed to break through yet. Not space.

Just empire things.

There wasn't even coffee in the nebula

Huh...

...

huh...

The further we go the more we find ourselves.

Look, they are trying.
They just keep getting distracted on the way and where overtaken.

And not just natives (who are invariably human shaped), they often have entire databases of info on them from presumably when they were "discovered".

Mass Effect was a better sci fi universe and I'll die on that hill.