I should very much like to watch the Tom Baker seasons again, Sadly, I can see only the 1965 season 3 videos on the channel. The Shada link (and presumably all the rest of it) are "The uploader has not made this video available in your country" :-(
For me, I see things like https://imgur.com/a/ekehKDx on the page. If I didn't have access to it, I'd be tempted to hunt down a VPN that would allow me to watch it.
Thanks for posting that. Good to know the BBC is moving on from Davies, and investing in a full season with a new production company.
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
Main line Star Wars is a train wreck, unfortunately. I was one of the apparently few people who was looking forward to something new, even deconstructive, in the sequel trilogy. I'm so sick of Palpatine vs. Skywalker chosen bloodline nonsense you can't even imagine, and the last thing I want is to have my nostalgia pandered to.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
Development on ‘09 started after production wrapped on enterprise in March 2005, although there wasn’t a lot in it. Production in earnest was certainly underway 18 months after.
There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
I love Star Trek, I love Star Wars, and I love Doctor Who. I have very fond memories of watching Tom Baker's episodes on PBS back in the day.
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
> Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite a red flag, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
I'll be honest, I think Dr Who is due for a 1989-style shelving for a while. I've loved watching the show since I was young, but I think the quality has fallen off significantly recently. Capaldi was the last "great doctor" in my opinion. Whittaker is a good actress, I thought she performed well in Broadchurch (ironically also written by Chibnall), but her writing was just awful, and it feels like they've just spent the last couple of seasons nostalgia-baiting the fans, like with the Midnight episode
Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.
IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.
I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.
The Chibnall episodes sucked but then Russel T David came back as showrunner. If you haven't seen the first three episodes he did, with David Tennant returning as the doctor, you're missing out.
I liked the regular season that followed too, it had good and bad episodes just like the last time RTD was showrunner.
Chibnall episodes most certainly did not suck, neither did his writing. It was simply s different take on Doctor Who. A good one.
What killed it for good was what came (back) after. Bad decision. Bad precedent set. Bringing the RTD and Tennant gang back was the single most important and devastating mistake ever made on this show.
All of the big franchises are collapsing under the weight of nostalgia and self-reference. Reboots like Picard are shockingly, almost insensitively, retrospective.
It deserves a "1989-style shelving" more than it did in 1989. The viewing figures are tumbling off a cliff at a time when the BBC needs them more than ever.
I recoved a 3/4” studio broadcast VCR/P that when checked, contains a tape that says Doctor Who.
I also at once recovered a wire recorder, with a wire spool inside, and another time wax cylinder recorder, with cylinders.
All sitting there as minor mysteries.
;)
One thing with some modern sci-fi shows is that it's more of a message with a disguise of a story rather than a story with a disguised message.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is accepted as the price.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) religious-adjacent themes.
Nah, politics in shows is great. It's like CGI. It can really make a show pop if it's well thought out, subtle, and feels realistic.
People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.
Everything is political. If you think it's not, you're just benefiting from the status quo and blind to it.
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
There's a striking difference between telling and tone deaf preaching and when people complain about politics they always, without fail, mean the latter.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
So is Casablanca art or propaganda? IMO 'art' and 'propaganda' are largely orthogonal concepts. Something can be art but not propaganda, propaganda but not art, neither, or both.
"Everything is political" is the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy beloved by the most obnoxious politics pushers. The fact that it's impossible to remove all traces of politics from fiction does not excuse subjugating art to ideology. When people complain about "political" works they're complaining about works where the author appears to care more about how you vote than the story.
I’ve found when people complain about something being “political” 9 out of 10 times they’re complaining that they dislike the author’s politics.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
its usually not good though. If it was good they would not market it as Christian. Lots of bands have Christian lyrics without Christian marketing - U2 for example. I suppose that is the equivalent of the SF story with the disguised message.
Please go back and re-read some pulp scifi from, say, 70 years back and then spend some time scrolling through microfilm copies of newspapers from the same era.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
No, there's a massive difference. Taking Star Trek as an example: most of the time (not all the time, I am well aware), old Trek series were careful to present social commentary in a way that trusted the viewer to draw his own conclusions. The writers may have had an opinion, but they avoided obviously taking a side and tried to present reasonable points of view all around even if they did gently nudge things to make one side seem better. By letting the viewer come to a conclusion naturally, they actually had persuasive power because they didn't antagonize the audience. New Star Trek, on the other hand, has the writers openly preaching to you. They have one side of an issue represented by paragons of virtue, the other side represented by the scum of the earth, and have characters say what a bad person one must be if they come down on the wrong side of this. There is no subtlety whatsoever, and it has no persuasive power because the writers are more interested in flipping the bird to those whom they consider evil than actually trying to educate or persuade the audience.
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Which Star Trek was "trusting the viewer to draw their own conclusions"?
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
It was probably the one where Picard refused to play god for an alien race because religion was a primitive superstition.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
Can someone give me examples of beloved, well written and respected sci-fi that was not overt political/social commentary to go along with all the discoloration of the above comment or is this just the standard "I like Rage Against the Machine because they're angry, but hate that they get political" nonsense?
Frankenstein: Political AF.
Asimov: So fucking political.
Dick: It's nothing BUT politics.
Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
Asimov had plenty of stories with little to no politics, did you just read Foundation and skip his other works? Some of them are basically logic puzzles. Sure, Frankenstein has social and political commentary, but that's not what people remember it for (to me it's more philosophy than social commentary, but YMMV). Dick is more famous for being weird than being political, but that's just my own experience and how I was introduced to him, so again, YMMV. I’d say cyberpunk is in a similar position. Sure, it’s political, but you can enjoy the story without really engaging with the politics, and tbh, something like Snow Crash is so aggressively satirical and over-the-top that calling it a straightforward political statement feels like missing half the joke.
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
I think we're disagreeing on what "politics" means, perhaps. I'm going with something to the effect of "Politics is the process by which people and groups make decisions, rules, and laws to govern society and share resources" and you seem to be thinking "the affairs of nation-states and how they, specifically, govern". For example, Frankenstein being "social commentary" firmly makes it political to me, but seems to somehow exclude it for you.
Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!
As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.
In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...
Part of the problem, as always, is what types of people and activities are defined as "political".
Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.
You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.
You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.
And so on.
What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.
I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.
But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.
So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?
As someone with "Don't Panic" tattoo'd on my left forearm, and as I pointed out in another comment: Adams' Magnum Opus is in no avoiding its messaging, the politics/author's opinion is extremely clear.
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
Don't forget the Twilight Zone. The whole show existed because Serling wanted to make political statements and felt sci-fi might give him enough cover to make them. It's almost like...that's the point of the genre, to give enough of a fig leaf that the reactionaries will be lulled into allowing it...
The part that they generally leave out is that Shada is mostly terrible (although Christopher Neame's delivery as Skagra is very funny and over the top), and Douglas Adams's run on Who was mostly terrible. Adams himself was embarrassed by it, and a remember reading a quote somewhere with him saying that he dodged a bullet by Shada never getting out there.
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.
I just recently read the novelisation of "shada"[0]. it was altogether delightful, and reminded me of the time in college when I was a huge fan of dr who novels despite never really getting into the TV show.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 88.7 ms ] threadI feel like the animated version filled in gaps I hadn't even realized were there in the old one that just had the voice overs.
If you like classic who, Adams, or both, and haven't seen it buy the blu-ray!
https://whospecialfeatures.fandom.com/wiki/Shada_(2017_Anima...
If you've seen the old VHS version of Shada where Tom Baker narrates the missing pieces, you'll probably enjoy the animated version replacements more.
https://www.primevideo.com/region/na/detail/0RNSB5JYFHDMUJ0U...
Shada | FULL EPISODE with BONUS Animation | Doctor Who: Classic - https://youtu.be/Qt7JdpWXmtE
The channel is https://www.youtube.com/@ClassicDoctorWho
I've been enjoying going through the Tom Baker series... you never forget your first Doctor.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c621ln7vx7qo
Star Trek is in far worse shape these days. According to Riker, this is the first time in decades where there is no TV or movie even in the planning phase.
The ancillary stuff is a lot better however. I hear good things about Star Wars Visions but I haven't seen it.
Star Wars Jedi Survivor was also highly enjoyable.
The big films have been sad except for Rogue One.
But there is some Star Wars stuff that is out there and is really good.
"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."
https://www.darkhorizons.com/next-star-trek-film-tackles-cor...
But once you have nothing to draw on but nostalgia I think it's time to move on. I liked the Doctor better when they were just an outlaw Time Lord in a stolen car doing good and getting into adventures, and not the eldritch abomination they've become, whose mere name causes the galaxy to shiver in terror. I liked Star Trek better when the humans weren't the most powerful force in the galaxy, one-shotting Borg cubes, but they were an upstart species getting a foothold in a universe bigger, stranger and far more dangerous than they imagine. In both cases, nostalgia leads to a sort of narrative power creep.
Star Wars has the same problem. Everything has to be about the Palpatines versus the Skywalkers. It would have been such a better story if it turned out Rey really was a nobody, if the entire plot had the courage to examine its own mythology from the outside and establish that the universe really is bigger than these two players, but we don't dare subvert tropes when the viewer has the media literacy of a mollusk and can't accept a protagonist who isn't Space Goku.
There's no wonder left to any of it. No mystery, no awe. No sense that the universe is bigger than you can imagine. God forbid something take a risk with the fucking franchise. Maybe we should just let it all die.
This isn't anything to do with "media literacy" - that as a criticism is quite a red flag, I think. The actual reason is because the two directors were fighting to undo each others' work, and spend hundreds of millions to do so.
Much like the show in the latter years of its first run it collapsed under the weight of its own canon, and writers/showrunners that enthusiastically embraced that canon and alienated the casual audience.
IMO they should never have brought back the Time Lords. That was the genius stroke of the 2005 reboot. Just make the Doctor an intergalactic oddball, let the adventures run from there. What's weird is that Russell Davies was the one who understood this... then when he came back to the show he shoveled nostalgia on top of nostalgia and sank the thing.
I never even watched the Chibnall era so I'm not fully informed but from reading about the Timeless Child arc it just sounds like a show disappearing up its own arse. It's supposed to be a family show, younger kids don't care about that kind of stuff. Just make it fun.
I liked the regular season that followed too, it had good and bad episodes just like the last time RTD was showrunner.
What killed it for good was what came (back) after. Bad decision. Bad precedent set. Bringing the RTD and Tennant gang back was the single most important and devastating mistake ever made on this show.
In all seriousness we clearly have very different taste! I just found the Chibnall episodes boring. I wanted to like them!
I think GGP shares my taste though, based on their comment.
Mr Eccleston was right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shada_(Doctor_Who)
The tie in between Shada and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective agency is worth noting.
There was also a partial BBC attempt in late 80s/90s that was released on VHS with Tom Baker narrating the missing scenes.
The writers justify the change by saying (correctly) that the message is important and that right now is the most important time to say the message. The message became more important than the vehicle that it travelled in so poor story writing is accepted as the price.
It's like Christian rock music, it's okay and if you are Christian you might enjoy it both for the message and the music but if you just want good music you are likely not going to enjoy it as much as regular "secular" rock.
But there's also rock music that everyone can enjoys which contains (not sure the word to describe it) religious-adjacent themes.
People complain about it when it seems to be used as an excuse for a lack other aspects of the show, or it makes everything seem unrealistic because they were more keen on putting it in than actually caring about whether it was realistic or at least made things feel realistic to the viewer.
Is this a joke?
To me both CGI and politics have the same issue which is aging poorly. Nobody thinks The Phantom Menace looks better than A New Hope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7F5bMFSYPvE
Even ignoring that history loves to repeat itself, plenty of politics in all forms of media has aged excellently, and plenty of politics that haven't aged well are still insightful into the period of the piece.
The stance of "everything is political" itself is extremely tone deaf.
"Everything is political" is the classic motte-and-bailey fallacy beloved by the most obnoxious politics pushers. The fact that it's impossible to remove all traces of politics from fiction does not excuse subjugating art to ideology. When people complain about "political" works they're complaining about works where the author appears to care more about how you vote than the story.
The dictionary definition of “politics” (as in, what the word actually means) would support the statement that “everything is political” to be at worst a smidge hyperbolic. No motte, no bailey, no rhetorical fallacy.
Thing is, most art has ideology, it’s the weirdo reactionaries that try to pretend otherwise.
its usually not good though. If it was good they would not market it as Christian. Lots of bands have Christian lyrics without Christian marketing - U2 for example. I suppose that is the equivalent of the SF story with the disguised message.
You will find that SciFi has been mostly social commentary for quite a long time; what tends to throw us is familiarity!
"Uhura" comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning "freedom"
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyota_Uhura
On Star Trek, Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. Her prominent supporting role as a bridge officer was unprecedented.
She was once tempted to leave the series; however, a conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. changed her mind.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nichelle_Nichols
And while I'm speaking specifically of Trek, this happens a lot with modern sci-fi. There is so much bad, preachy writing out there. And while that may have always existed to some extent, it wasn't the norm. Now it is the norm and it sucks.
Was it the one where Kirk used "half-breed" as an insult so horrible and hurtful that it would reveal an android as an imposter (in a period where segregation was still legal in the US)?
Was it the one about a long-standing war between two peoples based entirely on the color of their skin?
How about the one with the Nazi planet?
Surely you're not referring to the one with the first interracial kiss - something so political that the network debated censoring it and caused Shatner to intentionally ruin takes of an alternative version?
Are you talking about the one which involved Kirk explicitly promoting contraception and calls out the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" alien race?
No, perhaps you're thinking of the one involving the torture of the leader of a revolutionary group.
Or the one where they recover cryogenically frozen people from the 20th century and Picard shits on a venture capitalist.
Or the one where an alien race is outcast because they don't conform to gender norms and this is a bad thing.
Or the one where an admiral starts a witch-hunt on board the Enterprise trying to weed out a conspiracy and Picard goes into an anti-fascist rant.
Or the episode of DS9 that takes place during the 1950s where Sisko experiences racial segregation, and Star Trek is a sci-fi story he can't sell about a future he wants to live in.
Or the one that establishes the Bell Riots, a widespread anti-capitalist revolt that takes place among the homeless and immigrant populations.
It wasn't. Neither NBC nor the producers expressed any concerns over interspecies kisses.
Because apolitical they were not. Like, emphatically. Sometimes they were subtle, other times they were pretty heavy-handed.
Sci-fi has never, ever, been apolitical.
Frankenstein: Political AF. Asimov: So fucking political. Dick: It's nothing BUT politics. Anything in the cyberpunk genre: Why do you still need me to spell this out?
As for current stuff? The Martian has some politics w/ NASA and the cooperation with China, but it's certainly not what the book is about.
And I think you're not engaging with the actual complaint: poor, overly preachy writing is a terrible way to communicate a political point, much less persuade anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
So you're not actually complaining about politics in sci-fi. You're complaining about bad writing in sci-fi.
Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!
As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.
In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...
Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.
You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.
You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.
And so on.
What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.
I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.
But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.
So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?
Can you give an example of the old, subtle (that's the word you were looking for, it's a subtle reference/theme) sci-fi show that was a "story with a disguised message" instead of the current "message with a disguised story"? I'm just trying to level set here.
The way the message is being told is changed because the message is so important.
As someone else pointed out: you’re complaining that some media is poorly written and other media is well written.
There are past and current examples of overtly opinionated shows that people love and message-less media that nobody cared about.
Star Trek exists because Gene Roddenberry's military drama was cut for making political statements[0], so he moved the political statements to be in space in the future.
[0] https://collider.com/gene-roddenberry-the-lieutenant-series/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.
[0] https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Shada_(novelisation)