I feel like Trek has already done " we enter the thing because we're picking up an SOS and turns out to be our own SOS and we need to break the cycle" a couple of times
Ahtman wrote: Finally, the young adult romance CW channel like romance series we've always dreamed of in Star Trek. Who amongst us wasn't watching something like Dawson's Creek or The OC and said "this should take place in Starfleet"? And it is in the good hands of the Discovery team so I've got all the confidence in it as a quality ST product.
Hell yeah. This is gonna be great! I haven't been this excited for a new Star Trek program since Star Trek Scouts was announced!
On the bright side, it can't be any worse than Section 31.
Ahtman wrote: Finally, the young adult romance CW channel like romance series we've always dreamed of in Star Trek. Who amongst us wasn't watching something like Dawson's Creek or The OC and said "this should take place in Starfleet"? And it is in the good hands of the Discovery team so I've got all the confidence in it as a quality ST product.
Hell yeah. This is gonna be great! I haven't been this excited for a new Star Trek program since Star Trek Scouts was announced!
On the bright side, it can't be any worse than Section 31.
It is going to be gold Lathe, GOLD!
If this doesn't work out like we hope... you can always watch this:
To be honest? I’m willing to give Starfleet Academy a fair shake.
Disco going to the far future irritated me, because it felt like a cop out when they realised Absolutely Nobody Asked For Another Prequel. And then they horribly botched it, because the design aesthetic was ridiculous (programmable matter is silly. Your result floaty nacelles are silly. A crew used to now frankly archaic tech just….not having a problem catching up was silly).
But.
Doing a further forward future setting of course removes a lot of baggage compared to prequel and contemporaneous sequels in terms of Established Events and having to negotiate your plots around strongly established canon.
So the writers have greater freedom, which we can only hope (and/or pray if that’s your jam) they put to good use.
This is actually why I (not you, Into Darkness) give the J J Abrams ones a softer time. They at least had the sense to be a separate timeline, freeing them up somewhat.
Also encouraging is the focus being on Cadets, we can move past The Michael Burnham show and All Action All The Time and get back to Light Weight Philosophy Which Sometimes Does Heavy Weight Really Well.
One of the dumbest things they did in future Discovery was the space station that separated into cross section discs and then each individual disc went to warp. Just… so stupid. If Academy is by the same people as Discovery I have Very little hope for it to be any good.
So instead of lifts that move you to different floors physically; lets build lifts that teleports you in stagger motions through a pocket dimension that's bigger than the whole ship.
Don’t forget the whole future setting was caused because one baby was born on a planet rich with spaceship fuel, became empathically connected to all the spaceship fuel in the galaxy due to this proximity, and when he had a temper tantrum it caused all spaceships in the galaxy to explode.
Up until "I must save the objectively evil genocidal empress and bring her back my Universe because she looks like my adopted mom, who I knocked out in the first episode because I had a feeling".
Up until "I must save the objectively evil genocidal empress and bring her back my Universe because she looks like my adopted mom, who I knocked out in the first episode because I had a feeling".
Gah! I had forgotten about that.
I would say that I need to rewatch them all back to back.... like I did with Voyager... but I don't hate myself that much.
Discovery really was the worst Star Trek show. (I'm including animated and fan made shows in this list too).
Enterprise and Voyager might not be great, but at least they understood what made Star Trek what it was. Discovery was just generic action sci-fi with a thin veneer of Trek layered on top. Orville was better Star Trek than Discovery.
Enterprise started out really great with Trek themes - I feel like the whole dive into the temporal war was a mistake as was shoe-horning in things like the Borg and such. Old Trek had more than enough iconic aliens and such to explore the early days of without going for temporal wars and factions that weren't supposed to appear yet.
But yeah it at least tried to be Star Trek at its core.
The Mirror universe in Star Trek Burnham was not bad - its nowhere near as awesome as the Enterprise two parter - again because its not as over the top and basically mad fun and of course its still all about Burnham - now if they had had her alt as a layabout, useless bottom feeder - that might have shown some self awareness but nope...
Also I always wondered why Voyager did not have a Mirror Episode?
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I’ve never got on with Enterprise. No affinfity for any of the characters.
Might look up its mirror eps and watch those in isolation though,
Oh its hugely over the top if you like that sort of thing - I do
Honestly, the whole season 4 of Enterprise is one of the best seasons in all of Trek, easily tied with other outstanding seasons like DS9 4 or 6, Voy 4, TNG 6th. I'd add SNW season 1 to the list as well and maybe Lower Decks Season 3. Honorable mention to both Prodigy seasons, because they had the best continous writing of New Trek.
So, if you don't want to watch all of it, maybe watch the pilot and then season 4 of Enterprise. But even the worst parts of Enterprise are sill leagues above anything Discovery where it's hard to find even a single good episode, I think the very first one is okay because of the nice klingon speach.
Disco going to the far future irritated me, because it felt like a cop out when they realised Absolutely Nobody Asked For Another Prequel. And then they horribly botched it, because the design aesthetic was ridiculous (programmable matter is silly. Your result floaty nacelles are silly. A crew used to now frankly archaic tech just….not having a problem catching up was silly).
But.
Doing a further forward future setting of course removes a lot of baggage compared to prequel and contemporaneous sequels in terms of Established Events and having to negotiate your plots around strongly established canon.
So the writers have greater freedom, which we can only hope (and/or pray if that’s your jam) they put to good use.
This is actually why I (not you, Into Darkness) give the J J Abrams ones a softer time. They at least had the sense to be a separate timeline, freeing them up somewhat.
Also encouraging is the focus being on Cadets, we can move past The Michael Burnham show and All Action All The Time and get back to Light Weight Philosophy Which Sometimes Does Heavy Weight Really Well.
No, that's true. It definitely better to be in the far future than the far past prequel era. I didn't have a problem with the far future setting (other than magnetized nacelles - that's stupid) it actually freed up the writers to do interesting things with the species we know. I guess I'm just hesitant becasue this really puts it in the Disco-verse. However, SNW succesfully escaped the Disco funk so you never know.
While Enterprise and Voyager were very frequently not very good, at least they seemed to understand Star Trek. Generally, they tried to keep to the essence of Trek, but often failed due to bad writing or, in Enterprise's case, an attempt to crowbar in the Temporal Cold War far too often.
In Voyager's case, my biggest problem is the missed opportunities in dealing with the tension between Starfleet's principles and the need to get home. Yes, there's a few episodes where it comes up but I always felt the resolutions were complete cop-outs. Speaking of cop-outs, making "Year of Hell" a couple of episodes instead of an entire season was one of the biggest misses of the whole series.
With Discovery, I always felt it just didn't understand Star Trek. It didn't try. You could transpose it to any generic SF universe and it would still work (i.e. be just as bad). Trek was always an ensemble show, even when the focus was mainly on Kirk, Spock and Bones. Discovery rapidly became tiresome and never recovered, even after it seemed to realise its mistakes.
I’m going to be a bold old Sosig, and suggest Star Trek is now defined by TNG more than TOS.
That’s the one I grew up with. That’s the one that has the really excellent episodes which ask interesting moral questions in sane and considered ways. And actually explores them.
And that, more than TOS, was an ensemble. Not a single main Bridge Crew character goes without often significant character development.
Discovery had its moments (Mirror Universe, Tilly’s over excited and unexpectedly sweary reaction to some cool new solution). But they’re very few, and incredibly far between.
Academy will, I’m sure we all hope, be a proper ensemble. A class of new recruits begs for that, as they get used to each other and what each brings to the table.
TNG, DS9, Voyager and honestly also Enterprise all followed very similar themes, concepts and styles.
The first 3 really cemented a style of true Trek.
TOS always stood as an outlier because cheaper budgets; less serious stories; far less continuation elements of story telling etc....
Heck I would say that Lower Decks is actually the only real time that something major in the ST continuity has tried to really bridge the Original Series into more main-line trek elements at large. The rest of the time you get the very odd throwback episode (eg the Tribble one in DS9) and some references; but predominantly a lot of TOS stuff is quietly ignored.
Not in a snide way just in a respect that whilst it established a lot it was also generally just a different style.
I grew up watching vhs copies of the Original Series (that and Peter Davidson Dr. Who).
I still go back and watch TOS (it's on TV 6 nights a week)... but I have trouble with the newer Star Trek series.
I just can't get into Discovery/SNW. I'm not like a lot of people who can't get past the giant USS Discovery (why is it bigger than the Enterprise-E?) - or the fluctuations in size of the Enterprise... that's all just nitpicky redditisms.
My issue is that the writing didn't feel like Trek. It felt like a generic shoot-em-up mobile game where the developers picked up the Star Trek license at the last moment and slapped some pretty Trek graphics on top and pushed it out on an unsuspecting fan base.
To me, the best written Trek, was Season 2+ of the Orville. Once the balance between humor and seriousness was balanced a little better, the show came into its own and told some really good Morality plays. Which at its heart is Roddenberry Star Trek.
Oh it’s definitely not fair to judge TOS by TNG standards.
Not only did you have much better budgets and effects? Sir Patrick Stewart just had no contemporary in TOS’ cast.
He’s an Actor, through and through. And so willing and able and I understand it actively encouraging more nuanced plots and moral quandaries.
Which is also why I like Picard, the series. I see it through the lens of Picard being as much a relic at that time as Kirk would’ve been in TNG. Both the Captains and personalities needed at the time, but very much of their time. And when The Federation and Star Fleet moved on? There just wasn’t the same call for their skill sets.
Kirk was more a man of action, one to whom the ends justifies the means.
Picard was a man of ethics, and would use that to guide him and his crew, and be able to articulately defend their actions, again based on ethics. The spirit, rather than the letter of the law.
Picard series suffers from the same problem the 7th Jedi film suffers from - all the changes to Picard/Luke happen "off screen" in a long time jump.
So a huge chunk is trying to reconnect to character who has changed. It's just like going to find an old friend from a few decades ago - yes they are still the same person but loads has changed and shifted.
The first season was a bit of a waste to be honest, as that should’ve focussed more on Picard and what he’s lost.
Instead we get a not terribly convincing story of everyone just suddenly trusting Romulans in position of power, and secret paranoia over Androids. Despite not a single Romulan ever trying to specifically target Data in the past. Which you’d think would be top of their list?
Automatically Appended Next Post: The other thing?
Modern Trek has the same problem as Modern Dr Who. Both are trying to be different shows.
Whilst of course classic Dr Who has plenty of utter guff? It’s still noted for paced, serialised story telling, often with a history listen bent and some kind of moral message.
Modern Dr Who is more about building to a big (inevitably unsatisfactory “oh, he reset the universe. Again”) Grand Finale.
And honestly? Modern Trek is doing the same thing. Sod the individual episodes and actual lasting character development, when can we do the massive shoot out?
Picard Season 1 had some interesting stuff, characters and ideas - it also had some awful stuff - Oh look another super powerful robot alien race that might destroy the Federation - whats that about 30 of them who never interact with each other.
Agreed - they tried to create a new ST background and make a dark Federation - but not the Mirror Universe - although at least that's still there and Discovery did not suck all the fun out of it - not quite.
And it also introduced one of the most awful ST characters - Raffi.
The end episode was a great disappointment - especially the - hey you are old and dying - lets remake you in a robot body and give you all the awful side effects of ageing etc - thanks....
Season 2 limped along - sadly bringing back Raffi to ruin every episode she was in - seriously Seven - is your taste in women that bad! To make matters worse it bought back Guinan - another character I hate and the stupidly dumb idea that her race - who were assimilated by the Borg are somehow a threat to the Q.....
Series 1 is the dark side of the Federation that we got a hint at in DS9
Series 2 is a move to wrap up Q, the Borg (for about the 3rd time) and Data in one go. My only complaint is that after cleaning up the Borg we don't revisit them in season 3
Series 3 is basically the fan-service one that everyone kinda wanted the first time around.
Also 3 ends with Seven flying off as a captain and I freaking want that to happen as a series.
The biggest issue is that Paramount was so desperate for a Picard show to hoover up hype spending that Patrick Stewart gave them a long list of demands that he fully expected to be shot down, and then they just flat out weren't.
It wasn't to be a TNG reunion show, Picard wasn't going to be wearing a uniform as his main costume, some other stuff that escapes me but is in Sir Patrick's autobiography.
And the studio was just like "Yeah OK man hurry up and get on set so we can start".
The story was still abysmal but it didn't start in the right place and it wasn't unit S3 that Patrick loosened the noose and ok'd the nostalgia fest.
If we'd had a series or even a few episodes between the end of Nemesis the film and Picard Season 1 I think it would have gone over smoother.
I still really enjoyed it, but I also fully accept that there's a lot of story gaps that you have to fill in and that there's a huge amount of off-camera change.
Heck even Picard just living with two romulans and building up to a relationship with one is a massive change of character.
It's not impossible, we just miss the connecting dots at the onset of the story. It also then is compounded by the fact that he's decades out of starfleet; he's much older and he's not the hero we recall from the TNG days.
So for a lot of people who just wanted a nostalgic trip it doesn't deliver.
That's not inherently a bad thing but yeah we should have seen his rise as Admiral and then all the fallout for the Romulans first hand followed up by him walking away. That would have made a killer season/twoseason series ending on a powerful low-note to then charge into "decades later" with the Picard series.
And yeah sometimes when you're asked to create something you need a healthy amount of pushback on ideas to sound off. I recall some hints that this was a problem with George Lucas and the newer starwars films he worked on. That everyone was afraid to challenge him; whilst with the original first 3 there was a lot more back and forth and pushback.
Honestly I think going for older jaded Picard is absolutely fine, given the age Patrick Stewart is and all that.
It also did one thing I thought was done almost to perfection with his degenerative disease similar to dementia. That hit real close to home and the scenes where we see him at his most vulnerable are brilliant.
I think the main problem was that literally everyone we met was absolutely dog dirt miserable, not just Picard. The Rikers? Dead kid. Rafi? Depressed with substance abuse problem. Seven? Depressed because her pseudo-child got murdered. Rios? Depressed for reasons I can't remember. Jurati? Depressed because her lover is dead or something. The Romulan ninja is the only cheerful bugger among them and he's a bloody Romulan.
I'm not saying don't tell sad stories, it needs to happen, but hells horses pick a few not literally all of them all in one go.
I can see why folk enjoy those seasons more. Certainly the other crew get a bit more to do, and they’re free of the shackles of Established Occurences.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: I can see why folk enjoy those seasons more. Certainly the other crew get a bit more to do, and they’re free of the shackles of Established Occurences.
And they don't need to try and worry about their huge fething supership that can outclass anything the galaxy can throw at it.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Let me put on the asbestos suit before I say this but...
Disco gets better after the time jump and season 4.
Not quite good, but so much better.
ALL of Disco's problems would have been solved by having it START there. It certainly would have prevented all the resentment that fomented due to it breaking canon left and right.
Kid_Kyoto wrote: Let me put on the asbestos suit before I say this but...
Disco gets better after the time jump and season 4.
Not quite good, but so much better.
It totally does. I actually think the worst ST Series is Picard. I guess that's my hot take.
Please excuse my Old Man Voice but you at apparently far too young to remember the horrors of ST The Animated Series.
Do you like recycled animation? Overwrought voice acting? Painfully terribad music? And occasional hints of potential that stop you from turning this off forever?
V'ger is bad, Enterprise forgettable, Disco a train wreck, but only TAS caused me physical and emotional pain only enhanced by the fact that it involved many of the same actors and creators, including the original cast!
It was clearly not just the worst animated Trek, not just the worst Trek but among the worst things I ever watched.
Of course I'm not counting Star Trek Scouts, because that... that degrades humanity as a whole.
Orville. It’s that smug git that brought us The Simpsons But With Swearing, The Simpsons But With Swearing 2, Teddy Ruxpin But With Swearing.
I cannot stand him. I watch the first couple of episodes of The Orville, and all I remember is his idiot, moronic, hack face standing slack jawed until it’s time for his line. And it was indeed…..Star Trek/Galactic Quest But With Swearing.
Because he’s so talented and original.
Lower Decks I can’t get past the terrible character design and awful voice acting.
I know I’m way behind on Star Trek, watching series one of Strange New Worlds, but I find it amusing that one piece of ST law they thought worthy of mining was Sybok!
I thought that as well but it doesn't look nearly as bad in the videos, such as in this hands on review. Some discussion about the previous brick company that had the license talked about how they were nice but required supports whereas this thing not only doesn't need supports the saucer and body separate with no issues. Some serious design work went into it. I'm not buying it but I think it is kind of neat. It is still block, because LEGO, but not as bad as pictures make it out to be.
Well not being JJ is a boon but honestly I don't know quite where they'd go with a new Trek film.
The classic series are basically a no go. TNG already left us several times and Picard series also gives them yet another ending. DS9 and Voyager strike me as actor/creative teams that won't come back together plus we've lost several very key actors.
Enterprise and a lot of the series that follow I feel don't quite have a unified audience to really pull in for a film - plus things like Discovery and such are very messy and highly polarising.
So it feels like a film would work best with a new cast; a prequel could be done but by heck are they generally messy. Plus we already have prequels of Original series going on. TNG, Voyager and DS9 were all fairly new crews setting up anyway and whilst you could argue that you could do a TNG you'd be missing a chunk of the key character cast unless they do that "Well they actually all met before and had many adventures and saved the universe and then forgot about it/alternate timeline funky stuff
I feel like something fresh set after the Picard series would be nice to see, perhaps a film that opens up into a new TV series type deal with a freshish crew. Just not pushing into prequel or "we went stupidly far forward in time".
I still don't get why creative writers today seem to think of the ST universe as being in some kind of "completed story and explored" state. Voyager hardly explored much of the Delta Quadrant and DS9 didn't really touch much of their alternate Quadrant either. Mostly just a little bit around the Wormhole - there's huge areas to explore there.
Or if they REALLY want a fresh slate use that trans-galactic wormhole from season 2 of Picard
Personally I would say new ship, new crew, post Picard era.
Writing for TV and movies is different, in TV you need a deep bench of characters because you have 25 episodes to fill, in a movie they end up sidelined because you've only got 2 hours.
So do it from the ground up with your crew of like 3 main characters and 4-5 supporting characters.
Honestly I don't want anything between Kirk and Picard - cause you just know they will want to throw some whole Federation level threat that just feels forced in that never gets referenced again following it.
Post Picard tv series works best - you can do stuff fresh and it doesn't impact the core stories nor settings.
I'd love to see a continuation of Seven getting her own ship+crew and such and at least it would have some characters we know to start the film off.
Overread wrote: Honestly I don't want anything between Kirk and Picard - cause you just know they will want to throw some whole Federation level threat that just feels forced in that never gets referenced again following it.
Post Picard tv series works best - you can do stuff fresh and it doesn't impact the core stories nor settings.
I'd love to see a continuation of Seven getting her own ship+crew and such and at least it would have some characters we know to start the film off.
Or they'll throw in a "surprise cameo" a la Marvel movies to strongly hint at either Old Kirk or Young Picard showing up.
Why stop there - Section 31 resurrects and clones copies of the greatest captains! Pike, Kirk, Sisco, Picard, Janeway - all resurrected alongside their respective seconds,
So we also get Spock, McCoy, Riker, Kira, Chakotay.
All put onto a single ship to deal with the BorgQ threat - a Q that got infested by a Borg and is thus causing all kinds of timeline/temportal madness whilst in a weakened state after its recent corruption.
Just rewatched The Measure of a Man. Not just an episode from the season TNG Grew Its Beard, but actually the episode It Grew Its Beard.
Picard’s moment, when through Guinean’s careful prodding, he finds the surprisingly glaring issues in the prosecutions case is just about perfect.
As a story of Futurism, and when AI kinda loses the A part? It works.
As a story about racism? It works.
It’s a truly powerful episode. Sure the writing doesn’t delve too deeply, but then they’ve 45 minutes of screen time to get the message done. And boy did they!
I think you probably could’ve done it with Kirk, but to a lesser degree. Because it’s Patrick Stewart’s tone and absolutely smouldering anger at Maddox that really makes this land.
Kirk I feel would’ve looked smug. Picard looks vindicated. Where Kirk would see it as a personal victory, Picard sees it as a victory for a nascent species.
Not a criticism of Shatner like. Because boy did Trek mature at this point. Only a character comment.
To me, the ultimate point of maturity of Trek comes in Chain of Command, when you learn that Gul Madred really did break Picard and Picard admits to seeing 5 lights at the end of the episode.
That was a wow moment that you never saw in TV up to that point.
Chain of Command rivals In The Pale Moonlight for me in terms of thought provoking quality.
CoC of course came first, and in its later stages is pretty much a Two Man Stage Show between two very accomplished Shakespearean actors. That the B Plot is also really good is very impressive.
Pale Moonlight however goes that little bit deeper, delving into exactly where The Federation might draw the moral line. Made all the more fascinating when Garak calls Sisko out on his BS, to his face…..and Sisko has no answer - because Garak is absolutely right.
Not just in his brutal calculus, but why Sisko chose to involve him in the first place.
Which echos Sisko’s chronologically earlier comment on “It’s easy to be a Saint in paradise”.
Which is an undershared scene, and a poignant one in the modern world.
Lathe Biosas wrote: I think we need one set in the Lost Era between Kirk and Picard.
I'd love to know what happened to the Enterprise-B.
Yes, that could be intererting. Their only claim to fame is that the famous Admiral Kirk was killed on their shakedown run. That's got to be tramatizing and a bad omen. They could start off the series with everyone thinking the ship is cursed and having difficulty recruiting crew.
Trek is Futurism. For my money? The rot really set in with Enterprise and its mission to fill in the blanks in the least interesting way possible.
Discovery is guilty of many, many sins. But one thing it did do right, kinda, was the massive time jump. And having writers incompetent enough to not really even hint at any in-between events.
So series following on from Picard S3 still have a blank slate. A slate which can refer to and reflect modern anxieties and moral quandaries. Because that is where Trek finds its real strength. And DS9 showed the setting and story telling can indeed bear some grey areas there, provided the Captain (so not you, Janeway. Sorry Kate Mulgrew, we know it’s not you at fault) is able to articulate their reasoning on screen.
Trek is Futurism. For my money? The rot really set in with Enterprise and its mission to fill in the blanks in the least interesting way possible.
Discovery is guilty of many, many sins. But one thing it did do right, kinda, was the massive time jump. And having writers incompetent enough to not really even hint at any in-between events.
So series following on from Picard S3 still have a blank slate. A slate which can refer to and reflect modern anxieties and moral quandaries. Because that is where Trek finds its real strength. And DS9 showed the setting and story telling can indeed bear some grey areas there, provided the Captain (so not you, Janeway. Sorry Kate Mulgrew, we know it’s not you at fault) is able to articulate their reasoning on screen.
Ok. So if we want to copy the success of Deep Space Nine, we need to find a nicely written show and then rip off all the story beats for the next 4 years...
That was the DS9 formula.
Miss an episode of Babylon 5? Just watch it when it repeats six months later as a DS9 episode.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Not actually true. B5 was rejected as a Trek show because DS9 was already underway, at least at the early stage.
It’s like saying Dredd ripped off The Raid, when you don’t know Dredd was in production before The Raid,
I’m not saying DS9 didn’t learn lessons from B5, but it’s not a carbon copy rip-off.
Ehhhh.... not quite.
JMS had written his Babylon 5 Bible during the mid 1980's (and was referenced in Captain Power). He took the pitch and the series Bible scripts for the first season, and concept art with him to every major studio.
Among those was Paramount, which JMS approached in the summer of 1986.
5 years later (as JMS and company thought Paramount was going to turn Babylon 5 into a show), Paramount ghosted JMS, so he approached Warner Bros. with the project and they were the ones to eventually pick it up for their new Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN). This was announced formally in 1991 November. The same year that JMS was the head writer for Murder, She Wrote.
However, 1991 was also the year that things got rolling for Deep Space Nine. Recently hired President Motion Picture Group for Paramount Brandon Tartikoff approach Star Trek writer and producer Rick Berman about the idea of expanding the show to another series to run parallel and after Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Now, Jeri Taylor and JMS were friends and had worked together professionally.
JMS believes that Taylor had no working knowledge of Babylon 5, but the studio obviously did.
JMS would learn of the similarities from Walter Koenig (aka Chekov, later Bester)....
Walter Koenig:
Joe, it's about an Earth-sponsored space station, identified by a name and a number, located in neutral territory that serves as a meeting place for alien races, with a bar, a casino, a female second-in-charge, and a shape-changer.
JMS:
During the 5 years spent pitching Babylon 5 we'd given Paramount all of our developmental material. This led to several discussions with the executives that seemed to be going in a positive direction when suddenly they went radio silent. It never occurred to us that someone within Paramount might have looked at that material and thought, Hmmm... a companion series to NextGen about a space station, that's a great idea.
But why do we need theseguys?
And to misquote Kurt Vonnegut... and so it goes...
I don’t remember a shapeshifter as a main character on B5? Also DS9 wasn’t a meeting place for aliens. It was specifically just a Bajoran thing. I don’t even believe it was a neutral space.
AduroT wrote: I don’t remember a shapeshifter as a main character on B5? Also DS9 wasn’t a meeting place for aliens. It was specifically just a Bajoran thing. I don’t even believe it was a neutral space.
The shape-shifter was the villain in the first episode of Babylon 5.
JMS has only ever claimed that Paramount knew about B5 by 1989, and he only ever commented on similarities in regards to the pilot episode. His claims that Paramount somehow manipulated the show runners into ripping off his material didn't hold water even 20 years later given we have ample access to the production of DS9 and it wasn't a show being directed by Paramount from above. The show's similarities are superficial. Berman has extensively commented on how the team adapted the premise of DS9 from the western series The Rifleman, which is far more similar to DS9 than B5 is.
Even the complaint about how 'they both have a shape shifter' is superficial. B5 had a shapeshifter as a throwaway villain for one episode. DS9 had one as a central character. Neither were the first shows to have shapeshifters as characters. You might as well accuse SG-1 of ripping off B5 at that point.
Let it go. We get it. B5 fans can't stand their show didn't hold up very well while DS9 enjoyed a revival of popularity in the age of streaming. Your show is still there. You can like it without being bitter that a similar dueling Sci-fi series ended up more popular in the long run.
I'm not bitter about the show or popularity contests. If I only cared if a show was popular I wouldn't have enjoyed watching Time Trax (and wouldnt have spent time hunting down a bootleg copy of the series), and would assume that the pinnacle of fantasy must be Hercules and Xena (due to worldwide popularity).
Also Karl Rove and President George Bush said Babylon 5 is the best science fiction show ever.
The only true similarities to me are that they are both space station shows and B5 happens to coincide with DS9 being the first truly serialized Trek series.
Outside of that there overall arcs are pretty distinctly different.
Trance not being purple and with a tail was certainly a turning point!
Also they lost the guy doing the Magog who was great, though that was more due to allergy issues with the extreme amount of makeup. Same as the Blue alien in Farescape.
It wouldn't surprise me. That or potentially allergy buildup and she wanted to get out of that before it actually reached the allergy point.
Also now I think on it I think the Magog guy might have had more of a claustrophobia reaction to it all. Kinda like what Jim Carry had to the Grinch costume he had to put on. Though he only had to do it for one film not a prolonged series.
I think the story behind Andromeda is that after season 1 Kevin Sorbo, like, took over the show and got the orignal writer ousted. Indeed I only like Season 1 and think its got some high-minded concepts and the rest of the seasons are mostly Kevin Sorbo getting it on with hot chicks
Oh Kevin Sorbo, I liked Hercules and such growing up, and now it’s just a name I shake my head at and wonder what idiocy he pulled this time. I do enjoy Lucy Lawless constantly dragging his arse though.
Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.
The weirdest thing about Andromeda from what I remember is that it kept changing its premises. Like each season was suddenly a somewhat different kind of show and none of them were bad exactly but it was jarring that the formula constantly changed.
I must have watched about 2or 3 seasons of Andromeda back in the day, then I missed some episodes or seasons, whatever and whenever I tried to come back to the series I just didn’t know what was going on. Basically the opposite of Stargate, where no matter if you were in season 1 or 10, you could bet they're running around on some middle ages planet doing the same stuff .
Kid_Kyoto wrote: I gave up on Andromeda when after a few episodes it was still like 5 of them in a mile long ship.
Baffled why they didn't recruit all the kids from that space station who clearly had trained themselves up and wanted to be in that military, and otherwise were being horrifically predated on.
Probably cause all the budget went onto CGI and two or three high costume characters. I seem to recall in latter seasons they did have enough to have a whole crew.
But yeah it was odd that Andromeda was running around needing a captain and a crew all the time and yet had enough robots to, you know, actually do all the crew stuff week to week.
Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.
The weirdest thing about Andromeda from what I remember is that it kept changing its premises. Like each season was suddenly a somewhat different kind of show and none of them were bad exactly but it was jarring that the formula constantly changed.
Yes, at first it was about rebulding The Commonwealth as a beacon of hope and then....they sort of just forgot about that.
On the battles? I think the biggest weakness was never really expressing just how large the Andromeda was.
Sure, we know the Maru* could land inside it, which does help.
But when it comes to other warships? I don’t think they really got it across.
If I was to remake it? I think I’d just add a space battle to the initial scene setting, and have the Andromeda as this true titan of forgotten/lost technology suddenly returned. Bigger, better armed, more accurate etc.
The scaling is important. Star Wars nailed it (literally the opening scene, and of course the excellent Battle of Endor). Star Trek had some flaws (Klingon Birds of Prey being a scaleable design hurt it) and BSG did it really well by only having limited ship designs.
Heck, even SG-1, which only really featured space battles late on did that well.
I think I’d also give the Andromeda Ascendant more obvious energy weapons.
Its reliance on Missiles was of course more modern, but in terms of cinematic spectacle doesn’t really compare to blaster bolts, phaser beams, Minbari Beam Weapons or Particle Beams.
Cheaper to animate of course, so entirely fair enough when you’re working to an early 2000’s unproven tv show sci-fi show budget.
General O’Neill Yes I can. I just choose not to be….some of the time.
The the Golfgate episode is terrific. And I think there are more than a few military personnel that would love to use such an opportunity to muck around and be silly.
It had what was quite possibly the worst Final Season in sci-fi history. It really frakked up the lore and was basically a giant stroke off for Sorbo's force lance. Though it did give us another hot android chick that wasn't married to Daniel Jackson.
It had what was quite possibly the worst Final Season in sci-fi history. It really frakked up the lore and was basically a giant stroke off for Sorbo's force lance. Though it did give us another hot android chick that wasn't married to Daniel Jackson.
It had what was quite possibly the worst Final Season in sci-fi history. It really frakked up the lore and was basically a giant stroke off for Sorbo's force lance. Though it did give us another hot android chick that wasn't married to Daniel Jackson.
Hot android chick? Can't be all bad then.
Brandy Ledford, former Penthouse pet. Yeah, her and Lexa Doig together was def the best part of that season.
It had what was quite possibly the worst Final Season in sci-fi history. It really frakked up the lore and was basically a giant stroke off for Sorbo's force lance. Though it did give us another hot android chick that wasn't married to Daniel Jackson.
It had what was quite possibly the worst Final Season in sci-fi history. It really frakked up the lore and was basically a giant stroke off for Sorbo's force lance. Though it did give us another hot android chick that wasn't married to Daniel Jackson.
I was watching it on Prime then it just disappeared with like 11 episodes to go. What did end up happneing?
Man I love that Klingon Bird of Prey. It’s a pretty timeless design, and looks like a proper predator.
Outside of the designs I’ve seen YouTube video about Star Trek Online ships? Modern Trek is quite disappointing in updated ship designs. Though, to be fair? Perhaps the issue is we never really get a proper look at any - and when we do, there’s little done to properly set their scale.
Well, most of the STO ships they ported to Picard seem kind of... superflous to me. Just like the whole season 3 they're just useless Fan Service that doesn’t get the feeling right. Give me a proper Galaxy and not a strangely distorted Ross-class. Give me a proper federation and not the grimdark crap you made up because some androids went rogue.
The cool little smuggling ship that they used as their shuttle, rather than, like, the squads and squads of fighters sitting in their hanger bays. OK, whatever. And for short they'd called it "The Maru".
But, (pretentious 'I speak Japanese voice') -Maru is the suffix applied in Japanese for ships, the equal of the SS- prefix.
Combining a Greek word and Japanese suffix is... a choice. But then referring to the ship as "The Maru" is like calling the SS Minnow "The SS".
Star Trek's Kobayashi Maru is the SS Grove, and you can't abbreviate it by calling it SS!
The cool little smuggling ship that they used as their shuttle, rather than, like, the squads and squads of fighters sitting in their hanger bays. OK, whatever. And for short they'd called it "The Maru".
Or how they never used the massive ground assault mechs more than once or twice which were also on the ship.
One of my favourite bits of SG-1 (I think it was over the end credits of the second Wormhole Extreme! episode) was having the fake cast of that show complaining about the obvious plot holes caused by various “real” things in the SG universe (Zat guns, etc.)
It was a nice in-joke / mea culpa from the writers of “yeah, what seemed like a good idea in the writing room turns out to be really dumb and/or game breaking if you think about it for more than a minute”.
I always feel VI is underrated, and it's also my favourite of the Kirk movies. The characters are nicely worked out, the story ties well in to Next generation, the action is solid, the real life allegory is great (though Starfleet is a tad too much US in that movie for my taste) and Chang ranks high as one of the best Trek villains, right next to original Khan and Dukat.
The cool little smuggling ship that they used as their shuttle, rather than, like, the squads and squads of fighters sitting in their hanger bays. OK, whatever. And for short they'd called it "The Maru".
Or how they never used the massive ground assault mechs more than once or twice which were also on the ship.
Well thre's only a crew of 5 of which only 1 is an engineer for a ship that was designed for like 1,000. So maybe they just all broke down?
Never got the objection to that theme song, I had it played at my wedding I'd say Enterprise overall is similar to Voyager season 6 and 7, it's all not really bad, but the writers didn't know what to do anymore, so the stories are a little uninspired. Season 3 and 4 are strong, though.
And in the light of Discovery, section 31, Picard and Abramstrek, Enterprise is great. You just need to know what to compare it to.
Hell, after section 31 ST V and even Into Darkness look like masterpieces...
Sgt. Cortez wrote: Never got the objection to that theme song, I had it played at my wedding I'd say Enterprise overall is similar to Voyager season 6 and 7, it's all not really bad, but the writers didn't know what to do anymore, so the stories are a little uninspired. Season 3 and 4 are strong, though.
And in the light of Discovery, section 31, Picard and Abramstrek, Enterprise is great. You just need to know what to compare it to.
Hell, after section 31 ST V and even Into Darkness look like masterpieces...
With the exception of that crap time travel/Temporal War season, I rather liked Enterprise.
Enterprise had a strong outset - the temporal war was the problem because it was trying to push this massive mega event in and have it mean nothing later cause Enterprise couldn't make massive waves like that.
Meanwhile true fans just wanted to see the Federation forming; diplomacy; negotiations; learning new cultures and honestly fleshing out a lot of the background races that form the Federation, but which honestly don't get much screen time.
They should have looked at DS9 and how the Cardassians and Ferengai were fleshed out. Both were very minor factions in TNG, with the latter being what two or three episodes?
By the end of DS9 not only did we have a lot of understanding of them, how they interact with other races and the Federation but also all the turmoil that interacting with the Federation brought to them. By the end one is ready to start the road toward formally joining whilst the other has crippled itself for generations and is engaging in a rebirth.
What makes me sad was the missed opportunities. Reading the Romulan War novels that were written using the unfilmed scripts for the show are something I highly recommend.
It would've been awesome to see Doug Drexler's Enterprise Refit and the Introduction of the Daedalus class ships as the NXs quickly became outdated as the nuclear conflict with the Romulans escalated.
The show is, admittedly, much better than I remember it. But the themes really stick in my craw.
Anyways. Plot and character wise my main gripe is that the Vulcans seem overly antagonistic. Like they resent humans entirely.
Please don’t spoil a 25ish year old show like, but I’m hoping we get some greater context for that.
I mean, I get not just dumping all the tech we’ll ever need in our lap. Humanity needs help, not a handout. But the attitudes just seem really….racist. Which doesn’t feel especially Vulcan to me.
The show is, admittedly, much better than I remember it. But the themes really stick in my craw.
Anyways. Plot and character wise my main gripe is that the Vulcans seem overly antagonistic. Like they resent humans entirely.
Please don’t spoil a 25ish year old show like, but I’m hoping we get some greater context for that.
I mean, I get not just dumping all the tech we’ll ever need in our lap. Humanity needs help, not a handout. But the attitudes just seem really….racist. Which doesn’t feel especially Vulcan to me.
The Vulcans as a race have a character arc too.
You can look forward to two episodes in season 4 when the theme becomes really frigging awesome.
I liked Enterprise. The first half had a good bit of exploration and earthlings finding their way around, which I should think is an integral part of Star Trek. And the expanse season delivered on a similar promise Voyager never made good on with the isolated ship on a mission from which there is no escape. And if I recall correctly, while the Prime Directive is yet to be invented (and frequently ignored), Archer's character has the integrity to make up for it. I was happy enough with that mix. And yeah, far, far happier than what J.J. Arbrams did, because that was enough to get me to stop following Star Trek.
The temporal war thing was a dud, but I don't like time travel in general, so that's hardly surprising.
I never liked the title song, but in retrospect it doesn't feel as bad as it did at the time. Enterprise was made fairly late, and after DVD sets and streaming became established along with the ability to binge watch, I can't be bothered with intros like all Star Trek shows have anymore. In that regard Enterprise doesn't stand out too much anymore. For me the gold standard has been set by The Bad Batch. Short, to the point, recognizable, and in fact it is so short that it's not even worth the effort to skip. I prefer something like that these days.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Anyways. Plot and character wise my main gripe is that the Vulcans seem overly antagonistic. Like they resent humans entirely.
Please don’t spoil a 25ish year old show like, but I’m hoping we get some greater context for that.
I mean, I get not just dumping all the tech we’ll ever need in our lap. Humanity needs help, not a handout. But the attitudes just seem really….racist. Which doesn’t feel especially Vulcan to me.
It's been a good long while, so feel free to correct me, but isn't the Vulcan motivation covered in the pilot episode? Since first contact the Vulcans had a really long, really close look at mankind and got acquainted all too well with the volatile and violent nature of humans, which didn't change enough for their liking in the hundred years or so that have passed.
That's why they wanted to smooth things over with the Klingons themselves. The longer they can prevent mankind from leaving Earth, the longer they prevent adding another, potentially unstable species that might provoke interstellar incidents to a quadrant that already has Klingons and Romulans to worry about.
I think something missing from the Vulcans (which honestly has been missing for a long time) is a sense of magical mystery about them.
You really only get that feeling in a few of the Original series and the films. Hints at it in TNG, but by DS9 and Voyager Vulcans are just "really stern serious people who might share a joke with you after you've beaten them down over several seasons"
I think that's one issue in Enterprise, they aren't "mysterious" they are just really stern and almost selfish. Indeed you do wonder why they are part of the Federation setup when they keep holding back so much.
Also I liked the intro song, I think it fit the idea of Enterprise really well. The issue was Enterprise kinda shifted from exploring the foundation of the Federation to temporal wars and stuff.
Sorry to keep banging on about the theme? But of all the streaming shows not to have “skip intro”, it would have to be this, wouldn’t it!
Automatically Appended Next Post: Something I am enjoying is the tech exploration. The crew clearly understand how it should all work, but the early ironing out of bugs and fine tuning works. After all, unlike La Forge or Chief O’Brien, they don’t have centuries of trial, error, refinement and improvement to fall back on.
The problem of the Temporal War was that the writers didn't really know where to go with it until they finally just scrap it to never talk about it again. In that way it's a little bit similar to the DS9 pilot where they open up all the conflicts with the Cardies and Bajorans only to come back to them 20 episodes later. The Bajoran arc never really clicked because despite Winn's character and outstanding acting, the bajorans themselves kept being boring, with the provisional government being some faceless and often useless institution overruled by the religious fanatic of the week.
Well, sticking to Enterprise, it's the 4th season that shows everything people actually wanted to see, and it's a shame that the series ended right when the first steps to building the federation began.
And while the Enterprise theme didn't have to grow on me, the Discovery theme certainly had to, and it did. I'd say it's the only good thing about the series, but still the weakest of all post-TOS intros (quite fitting for the weakest series...).
Thing is in DS9 a major story picked up fast to overshadow the Bajorans and did so in a "real" way that wasn't a temporal war or such. Heck the very fact that it did overshadow them was even part of the plot
Enterprise got seriously hobbled by studio interference as well.
Every Trek before it had many of the cast doing their own episodes (or y'know, Jonathan Frakes doing a whole movie), and by the time Enterprise rolled around, Paramount wanted that program dead so they could be evil corporate overlords.
There was a lot of trouble behind the scenes at the studio as well, which led to Trek as a product being shelved as well.
Enterprise just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Honestly when you look at how studio executives seem to often make a hashup of things you'd think they'd realise that just trusting creatives to create awesome stuff works better than the suit-top-down approach
You a see the heavy studio hand in the opening credits: the Akiraprise. One of the most important decisions in preproduction was taken from the creatives and made by the dumbest person in the room.
The USS Akira was the most popular ship design from Star Trek First Contact.
They took Alex Jaeger's design and handed it to the Enterprise design team and said, make the Enterprise look like this, because the fans think this design is cool.
The design team balked as it didn't fit the esthetic of the Era, but the powers that be won out.
Overread wrote: I think something missing from the Vulcans (which honestly has been missing for a long time) is a sense of magical mystery about them.
You really only get that feeling in a few of the Original series and the films. Hints at it in TNG, but by DS9 and Voyager Vulcans are just "really stern serious people who might share a joke with you after you've beaten them down over several seasons"
There was an episode of SNW which really highlighted the flanderisation of Vulcans over time.
Members of the SNW crew get turned into Vulcans and immediately start acting emotionless and logical. Vulcans are not biologically emotionless or logical, it is a philosophy they follow and a lifetime of practice that leads to their devotion to logic. In fact, their emotions are much stronger than those experienced by humans.
We've seen what happens when a human feels how a Vulcan does, it reduced Picard to tears and uncontrolled emotional outbursts when he took on the burden of Sareks emotions.
Yeah they've forgotten that Vulcans are closer to Eldar from 40K. They REALLY engage like crazy.
Heck remember when Spock took off his shirt and fought hand to hand whilst in a mating ritual or something like that?
Something that on the surface looks more Klingon than Vulcan. Take away that dynamic and they are just that co-worker with a rod up their backside.
Include it and they are a race fighting against their own instincts; a boiling raging sea of emotions just bubbling away beneath the surface as they work hard every single day to hold back and keep themselves tamed.
That and things like mind-melds and nerve pinches. Which these days are treated like a video game ability (and everyone took a class point in nerve pinch). Remove the religious magical mystery from them - and - again you water them down to just that by-the-book guy.
Yeah, the Vulcan episode was so far the low point of SNW, pretty sad as the series had a nice start, but season 2 and even more so 3 were pretty rough. The writers established a nice crew but don't know what to do with them.
I'm currently watching DS9/Voy chronologically and 1996-98 really shows as the golden age of Trek. DS9 season 5 and 6 are just without comparison and Voyager at the same time reaches its zenith, too, with Distant Origin, Skorpion and year of hell. Also First Contact and Insurrection air at the same time.
There may be some head canon in this but my memory is that in the Star Trek universe most of the space faring races reached the warp drive/transporter tech level and then stalled, for like thousands of years.
Humans jumped from chemical rockets to warp drive in no time and kept pushing. And given our tendency to sometimes evolve into godlike psychic beings we ain't done yet.
This is a great old screed on the horrors of human technology in Star Trek along with some Vulkan thoughts on it all that I’ve always loved. Warning for some profanity.
Ahh yeah I recall reading that and it does seem to make a kind of sense in the setting!
And yeah the Federation for the longest time was the big pusher on new technology; new frontiers and territory and more. Even the big empires like the Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans - all basically expanded and then came to a grinding halt. Meanwhile the Federation keeps pushing new boundaries!
Patton Oswald also being an irresistibly hot Vulcan in that episode tells us it's not a case of the writers misunderstanding Vulcans, but a conscious, active effort to mock them.
AduroT wrote: This is a great old screed on the horrors of human technology in Star Trek along with some Vulkan thoughts on it all that I’ve always loved. Warning for some profanity.
lord_blackfang wrote: Patton Oswald also being an irresistibly hot Vulcan in that episode tells us it's not a case of the writers misunderstanding Vulcans, but a conscious, active effort to mock them.
It wasn't that he was irresistibly hot, it was that he and Una had a chemistry that "clicked" far more than it should have. I've personally known women in my life that are most assuredly less than pretty but were able to reduce me to instant give-in just by virtue of showing up, so I get where they were coming from. I just think Patton Oswald was a piss poor choice to illustrate that.
AduroT wrote: This is a great old screed on the horrors of human technology in Star Trek along with some Vulkan thoughts on it all that I’ve always loved. Warning for some profanity.
AduroT wrote: This is a great old screed on the horrors of human technology in Star Trek along with some Vulkan thoughts on it all that I’ve always loved. Warning for some profanity.
How did she gain rank faster than any other Trek character ever?
Because Starfleet is based on merit and skill, especially in the post-collapse era of the later Discovery seasons.
3 years with combat experience in the Klingon War (a recipient of the Starfleet Medal of Honour), a very high level of engineering skill, and an aptitude for command would make anyone a candidate for rapid promotion.
Discovery has its flaws, but a main character getting promoted for being good at their job isn't one of them.
How did she gain rank faster than any other Trek character ever?
Because Starfleet is based on merit and skill, especially in the post-collapse era of the later Discovery seasons.
3 years with combat experience in the Klingon War (a recipient of the Starfleet Medal of Honour), a very high level of engineering skill, and an aptitude for command would make anyone a candidate for rapid promotion.
Discovery has its flaws, but a main character getting promoted for being good at their job isn't one of them.
Well, except for Burnham of course who did nothing but screw up and cry all the time and even started a war, yet they made her a Captain of all people. (Yeah, I dropped the series after that, it couldn't really get any worse).
