Star Trek: The Wrath of Fans

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

I forget what the situation is with CBS/Paramount, are the films and TV series still separate? So are they basically looking to create a self sufficient movie universe, while CBS carry on cranking out Picard/Discovery? Feels like they really need to get on the same page and have films and TV working in tandem. 

CBS and Viacom re-merged on 4 December 2019, so they're back under the same umbrella.

At the moment, though, the CBS and Paramount sub-entities still have individual control over the Star Trek TV shows and films, respectively.

[Jaxom 1974]

Lower Decks - It didn't blow me away. But I didn't hate it.  I'm trying to, at the moment, divorce myself from thinking of it as a canon show (as it hasn't in one episode shown it is), even as it used existing canon.  If that makes sense.  It wasn't funny. It wasn't dramatic in a classic sense.  It felt like, in some ways, the creators were taking that Rick & Morty, or Teen Titans GO ascetic and make The Orville...

[SpaceChampion]

Well this makes sense now why Tarantino would be appropriate for a Star Trek movie, but kind of disappointing he wasn't stretching his repertoire beyond this kind of thing:

Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Idea Is an ‘Earthbound’ 1930s Gangster Movie, and It’s Not Dead Yet

Yep, a concept based on the episode "A Piece of the Action".

[RumHam]

In some alternate universe Inglorious Basterds (did I spell that wrong correctly?) bombed and Tarantio eventually made his Star Trek movie. I don't see it happening here though. 

They should have him EP a limited series though. and if he wants it to be about space gangsters who like earth feet who are we to judge.

 

 

[Jace, Extat]

Tarantino is an artist. He should not sully his hands in this intellectually bankrupt franchise.

[maarsen]

I am watching Star Trek Discovery. Has anyone ever mentioned that the music during the closing credits is basically The Maple Leaf Forever? Alexander Muir is rolling in his grave I imagine. 

[Corvinus85]

51 minutes ago, maarsen said:

I am watching Star Trek Discovery. Has anyone ever mentioned that the music during the closing credits is basically The Maple Leaf Forever? Alexander Muir is rolling in his grave I imagine. 

umm, no? I don't have a good musical ear, but I don't hear it. Even if you speed up The Maple Leaf Forever, I don't think the rythms would be the same.

[maarsen]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

umm, no? I don't have a good musical ear, but I don't hear it. Even if you speed up The Maple Leaf Forever, I don't think the rythms would be the same.

Sorry, I meant Enterprise. My bad. 

[Aemon Stark]

Finally watched the first two episodes of Lower Decks. The first episode got a bit too over the top for me, but the second was more fun. And they at least made light of the "gown" aspect to those TNG-era dress uniforms (especially from earlier seasons). Plus it's nice to see familiar looking Klingons. I'll keep watching. It's also nice to watch a Trek show that doesn't have a wildly ambitious galaxy-threatening plot or anything involving sinister AI systems. 

[red snow]

First episode of lower decks was poor for me although i often find this with the premier of comedies so will try a couple more.

There's a bit too much dissonance for me between live action trek but i imagine the whole point of this show is that it's not canonical a bit like the stargate cartoon vs tv show/film. I imagine i can get around it if i just take the whole thing as a spoof.

Otherwise there's some serious societal class gaps and it suggests we've always seen the world of trek through elites who willfully ignore those less fortunate.

[Caligula_K3]

A question for all you serious Trekkies, as someone who's really watching Star Trek for the first time in his life, and who's a bit confused about the hostility to a lot of new Trek.

I'm close to the end of Season 6 of DS9 now. It's a great show, and this season in particular has been excellent. But I think it goes without saying that DS9 has a lot of very bad episodes, and that the first season in particular was very bad, with a few exceptions, until around the end. From what I understand, DS9 has one of the best first seasons of any Trek show; I've seen some episodes from early TNG and they were awful (though I know they were probably better in the 90s). And I've also heard that once DS9 gets into the swing of things in season 3, it's also the most consistent show on an episode to episode basis, which means the other shows had bad episodes pretty consistently.

So I guess I'm pretty confused at the hatred for the Kurtzman shows. I saw a season of Discovery. I can't say I loved it, and there were parts I really didn't like, but the first season was still overall fine; I'd re-watch it over re-watching DS9's first season any day. I've seen parts of Picard; again, it doesn't seem amazing, but it seems like a perfectly decent show. My friends who are big TNG fans seem to like it a lot more than I did, because they have attachment to Picard and Data, which makes sense. I also get that the tone of the Kurtzman shows is probably different from the other shows, but then again, DS9's tone is apparently very different from other Treks, and it usually gets praised as being the best Trek show.

So it just seems strange to me that the new shows get such derision, given how inconsistent old Trek seems to have been, how bad first seasons of these shows have tended to be, and how much each show changed the focus of the Trekverse. What's the deal?

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Caligula_K3 said:

So it just seems strange to me that the new shows get such derision, given how inconsistent old Trek seems to have been, how bad first seasons of these shows have tended to be, and how much each show changed the focus of the Trekverse. What's the deal?

Mmh... as one of the most vocal deriders of 'new Trek' on this board I am going to try to sum it up as succinctly as possible.

DS9 was tonally very different to Star Trek by trying to deconstruct it, but it was aestethically faithful (it looks like it takes place at the same time as TNG) and very well written. I should note that I don't like DS9 either though. I can appreciate the writing and the underlying ideas of questioning Star Trek's view on utopia, but I absolutely hate everything about Section 31, the Eddington arc and Sisko being a villain protagonist at times and the story framing that as a good thing. The fact that modern Trek writers seem to have a raging boner about Section 31 should be telling enough.

Discovery now is very tonally different to Star Trek by being the most generic modern Sci Fi flic ever, but also tries to distance itself aestethically from Star Trek and on top of that is very badly written throughout.

Picard is basically the same, though I'd argue it looks a little bit more like Trek, but doubles down on the infantile "everybody has to be a miserable failure to be dramatic" writing.

DS9 isn't as uplifting and idealistic as Star Trek should be, but it tells a good story and tries out interesting new ideas with the setting, while modern Star Trek feels very much like it's just being made to justify a streaming platform.

[RumHam]

Discovery definitely had the best first season of any Star Trek show, only because all the other shows had terrible first seasons.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

A question for all you serious Trekkies, as someone who's really watching Star Trek for the first time in his life, and who's a bit confused about the hostility to a lot of new Trek.

I'm close to the end of Season 6 of DS9 now. It's a great show, and this season in particular has been excellent. But I think it goes without saying that DS9 has a lot of very bad episodes, and that the first season in particular was very bad, with a few exceptions, until around the end. From what I understand, DS9 has one of the best first seasons of any Trek show; I've seen some episodes from early TNG and they were awful (though I know they were probably better in the 90s). And I've also heard that once DS9 gets into the swing of things in season 3, it's also the most consistent show on an episode to episode basis, which means the other shows had bad episodes pretty consistently.

So I guess I'm pretty confused at the hatred for the Kurtzman shows. I saw a season of Discovery. I can't say I loved it, and there were parts I really didn't like, but the first season was still overall fine; I'd re-watch it over re-watching DS9's first season any day. I've seen parts of Picard; again, it doesn't seem amazing, but it seems like a perfectly decent show. My friends who are big TNG fans seem to like it a lot more than I did, because they have attachment to Picard and Data, which makes sense. I also get that the tone of the Kurtzman shows is probably different from the other shows, but then again, DS9's tone is apparently very different from other Treks, and it usually gets praised as being the best Trek show.

So it just seems strange to me that the new shows get such derision, given how inconsistent old Trek seems to have been, how bad first seasons of these shows have tended to be, and how much each show changed the focus of the Trekverse. What's the deal?

A lot of people are very blinkered and selective in their nostalgia about the older Trek shows. When they think of Trek they think of Yesterday's Enterprise, The Wrath of Khan, The Inner Light, The Visitor, City on the Edge of Forever, Chain of Command and the several dozen other very good-to-classic episodes that the franchise accumulated out of making some 700 hours of television and conveniently forget about Code of Honour, Angel One, Up the Long Ladder, Spock's Brain, The Final Frontier, and the several hundred other outright terrible (and occasionally racist and misogynistic) to desperately mediocre episodes that made up a large chunk of the show's run (to be fair there's also a good couple of hundred other episodes which fall into the "good if you like Star Trek, but not if you don't" category). If you look at Voyager, about 80% of that show, maybe closer to 90%, is completely disposable, made up of episodes that are badly-written, clunky, poorly-characterised and almost schizophrenically inconsistent. Enterprise isn't quite as bad but is still up there (and arguably lacks the few classic episodes Voyager managed to deliver).

I think there's also a disconnect between people who grew up with early TNG - where Roddenberry had basically gone completely off the rails and wanted to tell stories with effectively no dramatic impetus in them whatsoever, which lasted until the studio realised that was nuts and wrestled Roddenberry off the project in favour of people who could actually write - and those who came up with reruns of TOS and the original cast movies, which were much more traditionally action-adventure oriented and could be surprisingly dark and violent at times, although with a positive outcome. I think there's different views of what Star Trek "should" be in the minds of different generations of fans and those views often clash.

That's not to excuse Kurtzman - a poor writer at best - for the various mistakes and problems he and his team have made on Discovery and Picard. I think they've used a very small well of story ideas (effectively the same "what if AI was evil?" trope in both shows), they've not made the best use of good actors (after two seasons we know virtually nothing about the supporting cast on Discovery which is crazy) and they've insisted on a high level of serialisation when they haven't had the story to justify it. I also think there's been some serious hubris in not bringing on board some of the good writers from TNG and DS9 (or Manny Coto from Enterprise); most of those writers were relatively very young and are only middle-aged today, like Ronald D. Moore and Naren Shankar. Those guys could give good advice from experience on what works and what doesn't work. Instead it fees like Kurtzman's teams are making a lot of mistakes as they learn on the job, which feels like it could have been  avoided.

The other thing worth noting is that none of this new. The current moaning about the new shows is as nothing to the frothing fanboy rage about The Next Generation when it started in 1987, which was impressive in its vitriol and how it was communicated given the Internet effectively did not exist and it had to be communicated mostly through magazines and fanzines.

[Jace, Extat]

 

[Aemon Stark]

3 hours ago, Caligula_K3 said:

I'm close to the end of Season 6 of DS9 now. It's a great show, and this season in particular has been excellent. But I think it goes without saying that DS9 has a lot of very bad episodes, and that the first season in particular was very bad, with a few exceptions, until around the end. From what I understand, DS9 has one of the best first seasons of any Trek show; I've seen some episodes from early TNG and they were awful (though I know they were probably better in the 90s). And I've also heard that once DS9 gets into the swing of things in season 3, it's also the most consistent show on an episode to episode basis, which means the other shows had bad episodes pretty consistently.

Well, DS9's first season was slow but definitely not "very bad", starting with the strong 2-hour pilot (no space jellyfish like Encounter at Farpoint) and has good character work and world-building throughout. There are some clunkers, definitely, but it's aged well in comparison to TNG's first two seasons and especially the first. All these shows had 20-26 episode seasons, which makes for a lot more... variation and risks. Sometimes it doesn't work out. Contrast that with most newer shows which have 10-13 episodes and don't deviate from season long arcs. 

2 hours ago, Toth said:

DS9 was tonally very different to Star Trek by trying to deconstruct it, but it was aestethically faithful (it looks like it takes place at the same time as TNG) and very well written. I should note that I don't like DS9 either though. I can appreciate the writing and the underlying ideas of questioning Star Trek's view on utopia, but I absolutely hate everything about Section 31, the Eddington arc and Sisko being a villain protagonist at times and the story framing that as a good thing. The fact that modern Trek writers seem to have a raging boner about Section 31 should be telling enough.

Section 31 appeared as a thing in exactly three DS9 episodes and was always treated as shocking and UnStarfleet (particularly by Bashir). Then in Discovery they somehow have whole ships and operate out in the open. It's just not good. We'll agree to disagree about Eddington (his last episode Blaze of Glory especially is really strong) and Sisko as a "villain" protagonist (literally one episode...). 

57 minutes ago, RumHam said:

Discovery definitely had the best first season of any Star Trek show, only because all the other shows had terrible first seasons.

Discovery has super scattershot writing and ponderous long scenes of subtitled Klingon dialogue. It's also super uneven. And hard to compare a 15 episode season with any older show which had completely different formats. Anyway, strong disagree here. 

[red snow]

I think others have sort of nailed the difference/blinkered memory of TNG era and Kurtzman era. The older shows had a lot of different stories so there were usually 5+ strong episodes and several decent ones in amongst the rubbish. Discovery and Picard essentially have one story for the entire season so if it's mediocre/rubbish the entireity of the season is rubbish with no highlights to enjoy. For me the premier of Picard was great then it went downhill and failed to live up to the promise. Same with Discovery there were some good episodes (the groundhog day one and a planet of the week one) but everything was part of one big story and both ended in lacklustre ways. So even though I'd agree that Discovery and to a lesser extent, Picard had better first seasons than the other trek shows I think all the of them had single episodes that I enjoyed more than any single episode of Discovery. But I guess that's a pro/con of different storytelling formats. I suspect one of the reasons the short treks are popular is because they are largely stand-alone. Any word on where the short treks from season 2 will appear in UK yet?

 

[Corvinus85]

I think it was at the virtual ConZealand that someone said one reason why the new shows are so different is that what the world's views on an optimistic future have changed from the 80s-90s. This is clearly not true at individualistic levels, but society as a whole, maybe. 

[Werthead]

Yeah, DS9's first season was pretty decent, and it had one stone-cold classic in it (Duet) and several other episodes that are pretty decent, not to mention the best pilot of any of the Trek shows (although still flawed). When the weakest episode of the season is maybe Move Along Home, which is pretty inoffensive, and the worst episode of TNG's first season is Code of Honour, an episode so racist that the writer was fired for gross incompetence after turning it in and the cast almost refused to film it, there's no real comparison.

DS9 arguably only had three "awful" episodes out of its entire 176-episode run (the Quark sex-change episode, the Risa episode where Worf turns into a terrorist for literally no reason, and that one where Bashir ages a lot). It did have a lot of "eh" MOR episodes though, particularly in the first two seasons. And YMMV considerably if you're not at least neutral towards 1960s lounge music in the final season.

Quote

I think it was at the virtual ConZealand that someone said one reason why the new shows are so different is that what the world's views on an optimistic future have changed from the 80s-90s. This is clearly not true at individualistic levels, but society as a whole, maybe. 

Trek has always reflected the time it was made in. That's why TNG is so beige and has a counsellor on the bridge so everyone can access their inner self, DS9 had a more Bosnia/Yugoslavia-like underpinning and Voyager seemed to be channelling that mid-to-late 90s end-of-history meh everything will always turn out okay vibe. Star Trek VI was basically glasnost in space, and TOS was effectively a cold war pastiche in its Romulan and Klingon episodes. Star Trek 09 had a distinctly iPhone aesthetic which was very in in 2009.

[Caligula_K3]

Thanks for the responses. It does seem the Kurtzman shows are doing something different and especially serialized which may not be classic Trek. I can see how the serialized nature of these shows does make it more all or nothing- I hated the Klingons in Discovery and don't much like most Klingon episodes in DS9, but at least not every episode's a Klingon episode. But it also seems to me (as an outsider) that there are some rose-coloured glasses on, and that every new generation of Trek is going to have its detractors claiming that the newest show isn't True Trek. It's interesting to hear how badly Next Generation was originally received by Trekkies, for example.

I'll have to disagree on DS9 season 1 being good. Absolutely, there were a few great episodes (the first Garak episode is very good, along with any episode dealing with Bajorans and Cardassians, especially Progress and Duet). There were a few averagely entertaining ones too. But those early Ferengi episodes... and Move Along Home... and the Dax episode where she barely speaks... and the second half of the Pilot where Sisko explains linear time to the Prophets... and the one where Odo and Deanna Troi's mom get stuck in an elevator... and the one where Bashir is possessed by a serial killer and speaks verryyyyyy slooooooowly... I will be very happy to never watch any of these again. I will agree that over the course of the season some of the characters are fleshed out well, especially Kira, but I'd say it's not until season 2 that Dax, Bashir, and a few others really come into their own.

I only watched (the first, I assume) Section 31 episode recently. I thought it was a fantastic episode and a great twist on Starfleet. But I can see how that very much wouldn't fit into the idealistic federation.