That Star Trek thread somebody was talking about

[hallicks]

Leonard Nimoy's "Australian" accent

 

[air_raid]

On 12/14/2020 at 2:50 PM, johnnyboy said:

If you heel turn the Federation Star Trek is over.  Maybe have an individual officer or department (ala Section 31) who are wrong uns.

Insurrection was enough for me in that direction. And it was bad.

[Jazzy G]

There's one with a couple of Enterprise cast members as well. My friend got his wife a Cameo from Nana Visitor for her 40th birthday. She seems like she's having a great time. I guess it further establishes that they're really a big unified Trek family. 

[hallicks]

Be interesting how honest the Voyager doc is. By all accounts, Robert Beltran despised the show, and Jeri Ryan was hated by the other cast early on. 

[Merzbow]

I started Voyager after re-watching DS9 and it's a tough slog to get through, the cast and characters never really click with me and a return to the older style of episodes puts me right off now.

What was the deal with Jeri? A case of an "oh, they've got her on here for T&A" type thing?

[air_raid]

Finally started watching Picard tonight, and any thoughts I might have shared about the first episode were obliterated by that money shot right before the end credits. Wow.

[Jazzy G]

Watch it in one, possibly two sessions. I watched it week by week and it felt awful, but I have a feeling it'll feel less bad if you watch it over a day or two.

[air_raid]

22 hours ago, jazzygeofferz said:

Watch it in one, possibly two sessions. I watched it week by week and it felt awful, but I have a feeling it'll feel less bad if you watch it over a day or two.

Two episodes deep and the similarities to Discovery have enabled me to finally put my finger on the reason the latter didn’t grab me as I hoped it would. Yes, the “modernisation” doesn’t help, but I forgive the more cinematic production, over-reliance on a score, clunky exposition dialogue etc, the only thing I really have a problem with (again) is the unnecessary swearing which while doesn’t offend me, is just.... not Star Trek. However the biggest problem is that for my tastes with Star Trek, I’m stuck in the 90s. Or more accurately I’m stuck between Shatner and Bakula, and while certain elements gave the first five Trek serials a “big picture”, short of pilots and one or two significant events, the episodes were “plug and play” to be watched without context whenever you fancied a specific one.
 

TNG for instance started and finished with Q, made several longer storylines interwoven with his, of the Borg stuff, Data and Lore, latterly the Maquis etc, but ultimately apart from a small number of multi parters, you could just watch your favourite episode by itself and not feel like you were in the middle of something. If TNG were made today you simply wouldn’t have a Lower Decks or Inner Light you could just watch without numerous “this started last week” and setting stuff up you’d have to watch pan out next week. Maybe it’s the nature of streaming TV/binge watching but they just can’t write TV when you tune in this week because you want to see what happens, they need to artificially create it by (example) telling you one story with nine cliffhangers instead of ten stories over the course of a 10 episode series.

I dunno. Maybe it’s my age but I wish they’d have made another Star Trek like a Star Trek, rather than Game of Thrones in space.

[Jazzy G]

 

At least we've got The Orville. 

[air_raid]

3 episodes in and while I’m still grudgingly enjoying it, despite such nonsense as phrases like “my ass gets fired”, I have a feeling that Picard EVER allowing a subordinate, however fond he is of them, to call him “JL” will probably be the point I look back at and think I should have got off. And that’s based on 7 series of Captain Picards character, never mind the fact he’s a fucking admiral.

I won’t put a spoiler here but there was one line of dialogue in particular that stretched my patience for this show telling me something about the history of its universe that contradicts everything that’s logical to assume since one particular episode of TNG and about EVERYTHING that happened with a certain enemy since. Like grade A “Well that’s bullshit”.

Still, I persevere.

[CavemanLynn]

I maintain that some struggling teamster writer kept trying to pitch his dream sci fi masterpiece but nobody would bite. Then one day he blurted out "But it's... got Jean Luc Picard in it!" and suddenly producers' ears pricked up. "Go on..." He was then up on Wikipedia til 4am trying to replace the names of his characters with Star Trek TNG lore. It's not Star Trek, doesn't feel like Star Trek, doesn't espouse any of the values of Star Trek, and Picard is Picard insofar as he's played by Patrick Stewart.

Edited March 10, 2021 by CavemanLynn

[Jazzy G]

There's an episode towards the end with some TNG cameos in it, and it really does feel like the cast members involved took the writers to one side and said "that isn't how these characters would act and behave in these situations, leave us to it." it's comfortably the best episode of the series. We need more of them, and we get more of them. 

[air_raid]

Five episodes deep now and I’m struggling. I will again overlook the swearing, the camera work and production, the casting of actors that look, act and sound nothing like the same character (or often the same species) from TNG, the allusions to modern life, the overt bloodshed, the non-linear scene sequence of several episodes, the over the top moral ambiguity of essentially every character except Picard, and the reliance on exposition, twists and flashbacks, and simply reaffirm that it’s just not Star Trek. Entire species simply aren’t what they were depicted as for decades. I wouldn’t care if it was a reboot but they’re telling me this is the same universe as TNG and it simply isn’t. That said, the ending of e4 did prompt a “holy shit” from me, but that goodwill was wiped out in e5. The pop ups probably did the most damage.

Speaking of the flashbacks, I watched The Long Goodbye earlier - not TNGs finest hour admittedly - where Picard tells Data they don’t need to re-watch what happened the last time there was a misunderstanding with the Jarada. It struck me that if I was watching Picard, those events would have been explicitly described in the previous episode, and not only would Picard be watching it, we would be too.

[hallicks]

E5 was where we tapped out, for all the reasons you’ve expressed there and previously.

I wonder if fans of TOS felt the same way about TNG when it first aired. I think bbc 2 aired TOS in the same 6pm slot before or in between TNG series in the early 90s, and it never felt too much of a stretch that TNG was an evolved continuation of the existing universe.

Picard is not a continuation of the existing universe. 

[air_raid]

I’m 8 episodes into Picard now and I’m still enjoying it on some level but it’s getting harder and harder to pinpoint the thing I hate most. Possibly “why did you have to do X to Y characters”. Maybe the (at least) three instances in two episodes of saviour ex machina - I have no idea how you got here and because we didn’t see it, it’s implausible that you survived the journey. A real strong candidate is Starfleet higher-ups with an unflinching propensity for using the F word. But I think my current winnner is the touch screen interfaces of the Trek universe being transformed into the Minority Report. Which is almost as jarring as was the Discovery having better tech than the Enterprise D/E.

I get the impression the positive critical reaction is based on people considering it good TV, who might not necessarily be big Star Trek fans to begin with. And it probably is good TV if you’re able to stop yourself going “A Romulan wouldn’t do that” every five minutes, but I can’t.