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 chromedog wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
TOS starts strong, but gets weaker as it goes along. The third season is as bad as TNG’s first.

I tend to rewatch TNG and DS9 the most and TOS when I want to show my son a particular episode for some reason.

TOS third season is when they got a producer who hated science fiction. This is documented.

TNG's second season (mercifully the shortest) was made during the 1980s Hollywood writer's strike (so they could use scripts they already had, tweaked and updated, but not get new stuff) but yeah, it took that show about 3 seasons to find its feet. Just like DS9. Enterprise started to settle in during the latter half of season 3. Voyager had a rough first 3 seasons, too - but then kept on sucking like a hoover.

I've seen most of Voyager with a friend with whom I'm no longer on good terms, and for that reason I'll probably never finish the show. It's definitely not a good first Star Trek experience; if I didn't have fond memories of TNG as a kid I would probably never have decided to revisit Star Trek as an adult. But even so there were a lot of really good ideas in there. I liked the episode where Chakotay is on the planet of ex-Borgs, especially in dialogue with Descent Pts 1 and 2. The episode where Seven of Nine reverts back to her childhood memories is really well-acted. The Doctor's character progression was actually handled very well; it could easily have been just a copy-paste of Data but he was a distinct enough character. I genuinely liked Janeway, Kes, B'elanna Tores, and Tom Paris. The Phage and Hirogens were both great recurring villains, and goofy as it is I really liked the episode where the Hirogens use the holodecks to reenact occupied France, and the one where the outpost keeps recreating time to try and restore their lost empire. Lots of good ideas and characters that were often overshadowed by everything else.

I think I started to lose patience with the introduction of Species 8472, and I don't think I've seen anything past Season 5. At some point I'll probably watch the last episode and get some closure that way, but of all the series it's one I'll probably never finish.

As far as new Trek goes, I really have no interest in season two of Picard. I'll get around to watching the first few episodes of Discovery eventually, but I'm in no hurry. I want to give it a fair chance and not be biased by the bad press I've heard about it - but I've heard a lot of bad press. Blip blorp. No need to overthink these things, I suppose.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
The Motion Picture is an odd film. It’s not my favorite Star Trek movie by a long way, but it is the one I rewatch the most.

Personally I think the early Kirk films perfectly captured the sense of space-fantasy-mystery-wonder that the Original series would have liked to do but never had the budget to really achieve in any "realistic" sense. To me they are ST at about its best in a sense of wonder and exploration and the strangeness of space and other races. Vulcans in them are really so much more than just "that really serious guy/gal in the crew who ever so often solves the weekly plot by mind reading". They retain that mystical edge and strange culture to their own; same as other alien elements (Eg we never find out anything really about the whale probes story - it remains a mystery).


Just like DS9 is Startrek at its political and character growth and development best.

The worst part of Voyager is how it ended... there were some decent ideas there, but the execution was bad.

Discovery Season three to debut 15 October, provided 2020 doesn’t 2020 any harder, one presumes.

This is the sink or swim season for me. I’ve enjoyed the first two, and as always, Trek often takes a bit for each new setting to bed in.

Training wheels are off, show me what you got!

Given up on Start Trek: Burnham - rather watch the Expanse...and pretty much anything else now - enjoyed Picard much much more than Season 2 of ST:B - apart from the last crappy episode.

Sometimes it’s just fun to reminisce.

Here, RLM discuss their favorite TNG episodes. The topics of STicard and Discovery come up a few times...

Some funny parts in that episode. I especially love them calling out the set details that are now visible in 1080p that previously were blurred out in standard definition TV.

So who checked out Lower Decks? I thought it was decent enough. A little over the top, but not in any particularly bad way given the style. It’s obviously going to get compared to Final Space, and I’ll be curious to see how it does in that regard.

I saw the trailers and have no interest personally.

Is it player anywhere other than CbS All Access?

If you're in Canada, it's on some scifi cable channel. They don't have any international distribution yet as apparently both Netflix (STD) and Amazon (Picard) passed on it.

I'm confidently predicting RLM's top two episodes of TNG will be "Data meets his father" and "Picard lives an alternate lifetime in a society that is being destroyed by drought. IIRC there's a flute or a harmonica or something". Also, Voyager was the best Star Trek series.

I know Cause and Effect will be up there.

 warboss wrote:
I saw the trailers and have no interest personally.

Same. It's everything that initially put me off about the idea of The Orville, except this actually is that rather than just being the perception of it tainting an actually good show, and also this is an actual branded Star Trek production that they're at great pains to insist is totes deffo canon which compounds the dumbness of it.

Ensigns "mucking out" the holodecks is now canon. Turbolifts going through the housing of active warp nacelles like that's NBD is now canon. Painting their ships with gofaster stripes in division colours is now canon. Starfleet being an aspirational vision of a better version of future selves? Nah, now it's canon that it's crammed full of just as many bumbling, incompetent, venal feth ups as any modern office environment, only until now we were just shown the "good" crews.

Honestly I thought they'd beaten it out of me, but I find I still managed to be utterly baffled how the people in charge of making this stuff can know so many thing about Star Trek but still fail so catastrophically to understand what it is and why it became a brand successful enough for them to latch on to in the first place.

Looks like the mainstream media (Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline) is reporting that the Noah Hawley movie reported on last year is paused after a new person came to head up the Paramount movie division so don't expect it anytime soon.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/star-trek-noah-hawley-halted-paramount-1234729172/

JWBS wrote:
I'm confidently predicting RLM's top two episodes of TNG will be "Data meets his father" and "Picard lives an alternate lifetime in a society that is being destroyed by drought. IIRC there's a flute or a harmonica or something". Also, Voyager was the best Star Trek series.

surely Dr Crusher and the Sex Pest Ghost (thats not at all from those Anne Rice books), or that one when free love space hippys try to kill Wesley have to be in the running

Knowing how Mike feels about the elderly, he’ll have to choose the episode where Lwuxana’s boyfriend has to commit suicide for turning 60.

 Mr Morden wrote:
Given up on Start Trek: Burnham - rather watch the Expanse...and pretty much anything else now - enjoyed Picard much much more than Season 2 of ST:B - apart from the last crappy episode.

The expanse is a genuinely awesome show, just watched all four seasons in less than a month. Best sci fi i've watched in years, i'll take it over all the alternatives at this point. I've got such little interest in Star Trek anymore it's just depressing.

Did no one here watch Final Space? That show is so much better than I expected it to be based on how it looked. You should definitely check it out. There’s only been one episode of Lower Decks so far, but the comparisons are glaring. It’s a very similar sort of humor, just need to see if they can match the surprisingly deep actual drama from Final Space, but they’ve already started to set up some things there for that. I can’t judge too harshly for people watching the trailer for these and nopeing out, because I initially did the same for Final Space. They really do Look stupid. It was after a few episodes and some friends told me I really needed to check out Final Space and I relented and I do not regret it.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I saw the trailers and have no interest personally.

Same. It's everything that initially put me off about the idea of The Orville, except this actually is that rather than just being the perception of it tainting an actually good show, and also this is an actual branded Star Trek production that they're at great pains to insist is totes deffo canon which compounds the dumbness of it.

Ensigns "mucking out" the holodecks is now canon. Turbolifts going through the housing of active warp nacelles like that's NBD is now canon. Painting their ships with gofaster stripes in division colours is now canon. Starfleet being an aspirational vision of a better version of future selves? Nah, now it's canon that it's crammed full of just as many bumbling, incompetent, venal feth ups as any modern office environment, only until now we were just shown the "good" crews.

Honestly I thought they'd beaten it out of me, but I find I still managed to be utterly baffled how the people in charge of making this stuff can know so many thing about Star Trek but still fail so catastrophically to understand what it is and why it became a brand successful enough for them to latch on to in the first place.

I'm not sure I'd call anything from a comedy cartoon series canon myself. that said sounds like the comedy is mostly low brow "lol his pants fell down" type humor?

 Thargrim wrote:

 Mr Morden wrote:
Given up on Start Trek: Burnham - rather watch the Expanse...and pretty much anything else now - enjoyed Picard much much more than Season 2 of ST:B - apart from the last crappy episode.

I've got such little interest in Star Trek anymore it's just depressing.

I skipped everything Picard and most of Discovery, so I'm not super depressed about the state of Star Trek. I mean yeah, Enterprise was a little bit of a bummer but I'm sure I'd be a lot more depressed about what happened to Star Trek if I'd watched any of the stuff from the past five or so years.

To be fair - following OS

Next Gen was very hit and miss - some good - some total gak.
DS9 was mostly excellent
Voyager was more miss than hit
Enterprise was the same.
Discovery had good stuff but was ruined by becoming cetnered aorund one "super awseome character who (in universe only) not only everyome inexplicably love but the actuall universe revolved around
Picard was pretty good - if you skip the last episode.

 AduroT wrote:
Did no one here watch Final Space? That show is so much better than I expected it to be based on how it looked. You should definitely check it out. There’s only been one episode of Lower Decks so far, but the comparisons are glaring. It’s a very similar sort of humor, just need to see if they can match the surprisingly deep actual drama from Final Space, but they’ve already started to set up some things there for that. I can’t judge too harshly for people watching the trailer for these and nopeing out, because I initially did the same for Final Space. They really do Look stupid. It was after a few episodes and some friends told me I really needed to check out Final Space and I relented and I do not regret it.

For a second I thought you were referring to "Other Space" and I was going to... question your analysis.

 Just Tony wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
Did no one here watch Final Space? That show is so much better than I expected it to be based on how it looked. You should definitely check it out. There’s only been one episode of Lower Decks so far, but the comparisons are glaring. It’s a very similar sort of humor, just need to see if they can match the surprisingly deep actual drama from Final Space, but they’ve already started to set up some things there for that. I can’t judge too harshly for people watching the trailer for these and nopeing out, because I initially did the same for Final Space. They really do Look stupid. It was after a few episodes and some friends told me I really needed to check out Final Space and I relented and I do not regret it.

For a second I thought you were referring to "Other Space" and I was going to... question your analysis.

Also not to be confused with Inner Space.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 warboss wrote:
I saw the trailers and have no interest personally.

Same. It's everything that initially put me off about the idea of The Orville, except this actually is that rather than just being the perception of it tainting an actually good show, and also this is an actual branded Star Trek production that they're at great pains to insist is totes deffo canon which compounds the dumbness of it.

Ensigns "mucking out" the holodecks is now canon. Turbolifts going through the housing of active warp nacelles like that's NBD is now canon. Painting their ships with gofaster stripes in division colours is now canon. Starfleet being an aspirational vision of a better version of future selves? Nah, now it's canon that it's crammed full of just as many bumbling, incompetent, venal feth ups as any modern office environment, only until now we were just shown the "good" crews.

Honestly I thought they'd beaten it out of me, but I find I still managed to be utterly baffled how the people in charge of making this stuff can know so many thing about Star Trek but still fail so catastrophically to understand what it is and why it became a brand successful enough for them to latch on to in the first place.

I'm not sure I'd call anything from a comedy cartoon series canon myself. that said sounds like the comedy is mostly low brow "lol his pants fell down" type humor?

I'd prefer not to call it canon either, unfortunately what is and is not canon is decided by whoever owns the IP and the people running LD certainly seem to believe they're making additions to the canon.

Now of course people will say "why let a company define your enjoyment, just ignore the bits you don't like!" - which is rather the issue, the only Trek I've actually liked for the last decade was Beyond, and even that was qualified enjoyment.

Like, even with all of the many, many, many issues I have with modern Star Wars, they still managed to make 2 out of 5 films that were pretty good(the ones not in the Sequels, to be clear), a lot of the peripheral materials were decent & a few excellent, and even among the meh or outright eww stuff, there were cool things mixed in, ship designs, general ideas that were lacking in execution but fine in concept and so on. NuTrek is a wasteland by comparison, just one nutpunch after another interspersed with dullness and endless cynicism. Even the ships & props have managed to make one of the most iconic design languages in sci-fi seem painfully generic, wavering between "it's not modern enough, make it dull and angular and add greebles!" and needless change-for-the-sake-of-change "reinterpretations" of classic designs that often miss the point of the original(like the STD Grimdarkprise, which rushes to make the TOS vessel look "kewl" and "more detailed" without grasping that the classic look with its spindly rigid pylons and mostly smooth exterior was *intentional* and meant to convey how advanced the ship was compared to our own technology). Gah, there's no point ranting on about this for hours, it is what it is. Star Trek - the essence of it, the core - ended in 2005. All that's left is a brand name.

 AduroT wrote:
So who checked out Lower Decks? I thought it was decent enough. A little over the top, but not in any particularly bad way given the style. It’s obviously going to get compared to Final Space, and I’ll be curious to see how it does in that regard.

After giving it a watch? Honestly the best thing to come out of Star Trek in...a long time. It's thoroughly average really if I have to be totally honest, but I'm a sucker for animation and the active parody of other Star Trek shows and total disdain for the typical heroes (the command staff) worked well, and scratches my animation itch perfectly. The opening scene being a drunk ensign mucking around with a Bat'leth...and it ending poorly, was great.

Also, I loved Final Space, so given that it basically felt like it came straight out of that show didn't hurt.

More to the point, it actually feels more coherent than Discovery or Picard, and it's a goddamn parody cartoon


EDIT: It is definitely *not* going to be everyone's thing however. If you watch it, watch it like you would Futurama set in actual Star Trek, don't expect a new DS9.

Part 2 of this is up. I haven't watched it yet but I'm curious to see if I guessed any right (or if the molesting ghost episode made it!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlUyVq5RmaI

It did! Sort of...

So about halfway through the third episode of Lower Decks I went ahead and cancelled my CBS All-Access. Despite a few very genuinely funny moments ("How much flesh?" "All the kindergartners were ejected into space"), it overall wasn't funny enough and the science fiction concepts were more played for laughs than anything. A lot of the character stuff was telegraphed from pretty far away and didn't particularly interest me. Despite all the great comedy that comes out of Star Trek I think it's best left to the fanbase; let the original text stay serious and play it straight. Then someone comes along and makes Galaxy Quest, which is awesome; but arguably wouldn't have been as funny if it was actual Trek actors. I happen to think that the O'Brien's marriage is actually fairly wholesome - but it also was written at the beginning very oddly and led to some great fan-made humor (O'Brien at Work, Greatest Gen, and so on). When you're working for the Star Trek Industrial Complex, you have to pull your punches a bit - so there's a limit to how far you can take the comedy concepts. Just my two cents, anyway. If I hear that Lower Decks gets better I'll dip back in; but for now I'm happy to let it go.

In contrast, I'm two-thirds of the way through Season 2 of TOS and am sorry that it will be done soon; I think the writers really hit their stride. The characters are all very consistent, and although I am not the first by a long shot to recognize this, the Kirk-Spock-Bones relationship is such a strong scaffold around which to build a story. Particularly good episodes so far have been The Changeling, The Apple, Journey to Babel, and Wolf in the Fold. The latter was written by Robert Bloch and was a straight-up horror story. Really effective; good creeps when the mechanical laughter takes control of the ship. And a fun solution: "to keep the crew from getting scared and feeding the creature, we'll get everybody high." And of course Mirror, Mirror. Uhura gets a lot to do this season, and as a whole we're getting a sense of the bridge crew's personalities beyond just delivering exposition; Sulu and Chekhov feel like real characters. Looking forward to the marathon re-watch of the movies, although at the rate I'm turtling through the series that will probably be a while from now.

I might rewatch TOS as well and did the same (cancel CBS) before my free month was even up and only partly through the short treks. I don't have any negative feelings towards TOS (it's my favorite era to RPG/tabletop game in) but I haven't done a full series rewatch since I was a pre-teen and it was on daily reruns. Outside of a few famous episodes, my knowledge of it is based on distant memory and nostalgia and I'm curious if the more cynical and jaded 2020 version of me will enjoy it.

I rewatched DS9 a few years back and really enjoyed it. It definitely cemented its position for me ahead of TNG. I also stopped watching Enterprise after the first season (due to the hit or miss nature of that season as well as corporate shennanigans that put it in my area at the exact same timeslot as Stargate SG-1 during its prime) and it changed my previously negative opinion of that. It still had plenty of warts early on (I didn't like either the Xindi or Temporal Cold War arcs) but I think it really hit its stride in the 4th season with a great mix of multipart and independent episodes.