Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[tekering]

Geez, I didn't even recognize her.  

[Thom]

Still hawt!

I binged STP yesterday, and I liked it. No, it sadly did not feel like Trek, at least not until the middle and onto the end, but it was still an good show. Felt weird watching a Star Trek show from the civilian side, but I'll be on board for a season 2.

[Dynaman]

I just saw the first episode yesterday and while I don't think it was great I had fun.  My only real complaints are the interview should never have happened that way (trap interview question should lead to getting beamed out...) and in ST if you want to kidnap someone you transport them into a cell - since the transporters obviously were working in the areas in question.

 

[Dynaman]

Finished episode 3 today and like it.  Besides the fact that Romulan super secret police are idiots (beam THEM up ya morons) it is a decent critique of modern culture.

[Lexomatic]

If you're still wondering what Cristobal Rios's ship La Sirena looks like, it's been added to Star Trek Online. There's a forward 3/4 view at the top of the announcement post, plan and profile in the middle, and an aft 3/4 view at the end -- keep scrolling past the other 23 ships. Under game-style lighting conditions, three rows of windows are visible -- upper edge of the central hull, and along the flanks. (I'm still wondering what function is served by those pontoon/prongs, since they're not the warp nacelles, and are too narrow for cargo.)

[Atheonyirh]

35 minutes ago, Lexomatic said:

If you're still wondering what Cristobal Rios's ship La Sirena looks like, it's been added to Star Trek Online. There's a forward 3/4 view at the top of the announcement post, plan and profile in the middle, and an aft 3/4 view at the end -- keep scrolling past the other 23 ships. Under game-style lighting conditions, three rows of windows are visible -- upper edge of the central hull, and along the flanks. (I'm still wondering what function is served by those pontoon/prongs, since they're not the warp nacelles, and are too narrow for cargo.)

It's scaled up to be a viable ingame ship, with changes to windows and such to match.

[sh9000]

 

[EastwindS2k]

This is not Star Trek to me

[tekering]

2 hours ago, EastwindS2k said:

This is not Star Trek to me

I remember when a significant portion of the fanbase were saying the same about Enterprise back in 2001...

I'll bet they'd have been far more forgiving if they'd known just how far the apple would fall from the tree in the decades that followed.

• The Kelvin timeline? 
• Discovery? 
• Picard? 

Knowing the depths the franchise has sunk to, we should've fought a lot harder to #SaveEnterprise back in 2005.  

[TangledThorns]

3 hours ago, EastwindS2k said:

This is not Star Trek to me

Star Trek stopped being Star Trek over a decade ago. I blame JJ Abrams, he sure knows how to ruin franchises. JJ Abrams and Harmony Gold should partner up!

[myk]

4 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Star Trek stopped being Star Trek over a decade ago. I blame JJ Abrams, he sure knows how to ruin franchises. JJ Abrams and Harmony Gold should partner up!

We've had enough of that, thanks...

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, EastwindS2k said:

This is not Star Trek to me

The frustrating part is that CBS showed that they absolutely know how to make real Star Trek - as seen in the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's second season - but for whatever reason they seem unwilling to actually DO it despite the very vocal demand for it.  Maybe Secret Hideout sees having to fall back on making real Star Trek as a sign of defeat for their racist, sexist, xenophobic, pessimistic, action-centric take.

 

7 hours ago, tekering said:

I remember when a significant portion of the fanbase were saying the same about Enterprise back in 2001...

I'll bet they'd have been far more forgiving if they'd known just how far the apple would fall from the tree in the decades that followed.

To be fair, Enterprise not following the classic Star Trek look and feel was a deliberate creative choice intended to respect the original.

The entire goal there was to show the formative years of Earth's space exploration as the newly Utopian Earth took its first steps into the greater galaxy and laid the foundation for the United Federation of Planets to become a force for peace.  It was rougher, less principled, and so on intentionally.  Some of its best episodes revolved around Archer and crew learning the lessons that would become some of the Federation's oldest principles.  The problem is that it was undermined by executive meddling at every turn, same as Star Trek: Voyager was.

 

7 hours ago, tekering said:

• The Kelvin timeline? 
• Discovery? 
• Picard? 

Knowing the depths the franchise has sunk to, we should've fought a lot harder to #SaveEnterprise back in 2005.  

Wouldn't have worked... audiences were burned out on Star Trek before Enterprise even launched. 

Star Trek been on the air almost continuously for nearly 14 years when Enterprise made its debut.  It needed a break, and the franchise heads argued it needed a break, but the senior execs at the network demanded yet another Star Trek show that immediately fell victim to the same burnout-induced ratings tailspin that afflicted Voyager.

 

7 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Star Trek stopped being Star Trek over a decade ago. I blame JJ Abrams, he sure knows how to ruin franchises. JJ Abrams and Harmony Gold should partner up!

Franchise fatigue is a very real thing... they should've spaced their releases out more, took a few years off between shows, etc.  Instead, they wore their audience out and the talking heads in the boardrooms blamed everything except their own failure to listen to the franchise's creative team.

[sketchley]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The frustrating part is that CBS showed that they absolutely know how to make real Star Trek - as seen in the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's second season - but for whatever reason they seem unwilling to actually DO it despite the very vocal demand for it.  Maybe Secret Hideout sees having to fall back on making real Star Trek as a sign of defeat for their racist, sexist, xenophobic, pessimistic, action-centric take.

(...)

I think Jammer (of Jammer's reviews) touched on the main problem in almost every single episode review: the show seemed to bend over backwards to have some kind of plot twist to set up a cliffhanger—no matter how crazy or at what cost (E.g. characterization or jumping over plot points).

How much of the blame for that falls on Secret Hideout?  How much on CBS?  How much on the binge-watching audiences with short attention spans that the streaming services are supposedly marketed at?

[kalvasflam]

10 hours ago, myk said:

We've had enough of that, thanks...

I like it, with a bit of Harlock thrown in too.  Let's rip up more of the childhood heroes.

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, sketchley said:

I think Jammer (of Jammer's reviews) touched on the main problem in almost every single episode review: the show seemed to bend over backwards to have some kind of plot twist to set up a cliffhanger—no matter how crazy or at what cost (E.g. characterization or jumping over plot points).

In my assessment, that the writers felt compelled to have every episode end in a cliffhanger to keep the audience watching is only a symptom of a much more pervasive problem.

Namely, that the writers currently working on Star Trek for CBS All Access are absolutely and demonstrably crap at their jobs.

They did no research or prep work at all.  Star Trek: Discovery's first season was a pretty amateurish offering all around, but it had some pretty severe continuity errors WRT the rest of the Star Trek franchise.  Putting aside the plethora of issues related to costume and makeup design, pretty much everything relating to the Klingons in Discovery is a mess... like there being a woman Supreme Chancellor when women aren't allowed to serve on the high council at all, the Klingons staging for an attack on Earth when Martok had previously asserted that his people had never been brazen enough to consider it, the anachronistic extent of surgical alteration of Klingon spies, the Klingons possessing cloaking techology that works in exactly the manner described in "Balance of Terror" years before the Federation first encountered in on Romulan ships, etc.  Fifteen minutes on Memory Alpha is enough time to poke dozens of holes in Discovery's first season just with respect to the Klingons.  Never mind that the whole tardigrade thing was plagiarized from an indie video game and the bit about it engaging in horizontal gene transfer was based on a scientific study that'd been retracted some years earlier when it was discovered their test results were contaminated and had led them to falsely conclude tardigrades engaged in horizontal gene transfer.  Zero fact-checking went into that season.

Star Trek: Discovery's second season's issues are rather more glaring and obvious.  Much of the plot was simply plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse's Section 31 series, and what wasn't taken from there was taken from Mass Effect.  The entire second half of the season is predicated on a massive misunderstanding of how computers work, as so many reviewers pointed out at great and tedious length, and the entire plot about Control wanting an alien data archive to evolve into an artificial sentience makes no sense given that the plot makes it clear Control is already self-aware and exercising self-determination.

Star Trek: Picard is probably the worst critical research failure of all.  If you've never seen Star Trek before, the premise of the series might seem sound... but as soon as you know that the Romulan Star Empire was a galactic civilization rivaling the Federation in scale and power it immediately stops making any sense at all.  Why is the entire Romulan Empire thrown into disarray and dissolved because they lost one of the hundreds of planets they control?  It's a bigger version of the same problem they narrowly avoided discussing at the end of the first season of Discovery... when the writers forgot the Klingon Empire was also an interstellar empire with more than one planet.  Why would the Romulans, whose starfleet is as big as the Federation's, need the Federation to handle evacuating their capital for them?  Why are they living as refugees in camps inside Federation territory when there are dozens of developed M-class planets under their control? 

The writing is sloppy, amateurish, and fraught with internal contradictions and continuity problems.  It reads like a bad fan fiction... and I think that every episode needed to end with a "To Be Continued..." cliffhanger is a product of that.  The Twitter-level social politics of the writing don't help either, the whole "humbling of Jean-Luc Picard" makes as little sense in context as the Romulan Empire's collapse.

 

 

[myk]

On 3/31/2020 at 7:06 AM, tekering said:

Geez, I didn't even recognize her.  

 

 

................................would still smash...

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, myk said:

 

 

................................would still smash...

Seconded.

[David Hingtgen]

Seriously, I'd watch TNG all over again if we could get all the alternate versions:

 

 

[Thom]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Seconded.

That sounded so wrong...

[Thom]

38 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

Seriously, I'd watch TNG all over again if we could get all the alternate versions:

 

 

Oh that was precious! I agree, they should re-edit the entire series will little nuggets like that!

Edited July 7, 2020 by Thom

[fortynickel]

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

In my assessment, that the writers felt compelled to have every episode end in a cliffhanger to keep the audience watching is only a symptom of a much more pervasive problem.

Namely, that the writers currently working on Star Trek for CBS All Access are absolutely and demonstrably crap at their jobs.

They did no research or prep work at all.  Star Trek: Discovery's first season was a pretty amateurish offering all around, but it had some pretty severe continuity errors WRT the rest of the Star Trek franchise.  Putting aside the plethora of issues related to costume and makeup design, pretty much everything relating to the Klingons in Discovery is a mess... like there being a woman Supreme Chancellor when women aren't allowed to serve on the high council at all, the Klingons staging for an attack on Earth when Martok had previously asserted that his people had never been brazen enough to consider it, the anachronistic extent of surgical alteration of Klingon spies, the Klingons possessing cloaking techology that works in exactly the manner described in "Balance of Terror" years before the Federation first encountered in on Romulan ships, etc.  Fifteen minutes on Memory Alpha is enough time to poke dozens of holes in Discovery's first season just with respect to the Klingons.  Never mind that the whole tardigrade thing was plagiarized from an indie video game and the bit about it engaging in horizontal gene transfer was based on a scientific study that'd been retracted some years earlier when it was discovered their test results were contaminated and had led them to falsely conclude tardigrades engaged in horizontal gene transfer.  Zero fact-checking went into that season.

Star Trek: Discovery's second season's issues are rather more glaring and obvious.  Much of the plot was simply plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse's Section 31 series, and what wasn't taken from there was taken from Mass Effect.  The entire second half of the season is predicated on a massive misunderstanding of how computers work, as so many reviewers pointed out at great and tedious length, and the entire plot about Control wanting an alien data archive to evolve into an artificial sentience makes no sense given that the plot makes it clear Control is already self-aware and exercising self-determination.

Star Trek: Picard is probably the worst critical research failure of all.  If you've never seen Star Trek before, the premise of the series might seem sound... but as soon as you know that the Romulan Star Empire was a galactic civilization rivaling the Federation in scale and power it immediately stops making any sense at all.  Why is the entire Romulan Empire thrown into disarray and dissolved because they lost one of the hundreds of planets they control?  It's a bigger version of the same problem they narrowly avoided discussing at the end of the first season of Discovery... when the writers forgot the Klingon Empire was also an interstellar empire with more than one planet.  Why would the Romulans, whose starfleet is as big as the Federation's, need the Federation to handle evacuating their capital for them?  Why are they living as refugees in camps inside Federation territory when there are dozens of developed M-class planets under their control? 

The writing is sloppy, amateurish, and fraught with internal contradictions and continuity problems.  It reads like a bad fan fiction... and I think that every episode needed to end with a "To Be Continued..." cliffhanger is a product of that.  The Twitter-level social politics of the writing don't help either, the whole "humbling of Jean-Luc Picard" makes as little sense in context as the Romulan Empire's collapse.

 

 

Your criticism is on point but I believe that the audience has changed. I think the new Trek shows are trying get more younger viewers by having a less involved plot but still try to appeal to OG Trekkies by having characters such as Picard, Riker, Pike and Spock.

TNG had decent ratings but the studio executives were always trying to find a way to make it more mainstream. I don’t know if a TNG or DS9-type show would be able to net the kind of ratings that the studio require to stay viable.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Thom said:

That sounded so wrong...

 It does a bit, in hindsight, doesn't it?

 

 

 

18 minutes ago, fortynickel said:

Your criticism is on point but I believe that the audience has changed.

All told, isn't that premise kind of obviously untrue?

Clearly CBS, Bad Robot, and Secret Hideout were fervently hoping that Star Trek's audience had changed.  They gambled on being able to sell Star Trek as a brand they could slap on any generic or heavily derivative sci-fi/action "thriller" and lost... REPEATEDLY.  They took everything Star Trek out of Star Trek except for a vague visual aesthetic and tried to reinvent the story as a standard issue summer action movie, resulting in something that was a very poor Star Trek story and a very poor action movie at the same time.  Predictably, making it more generic in the name of broadening its appeal just made it forgettable and it ended up failing to launch a brand reboot AND failing to break even at the box office.  Discovery's bleak, lifeless take on Star Trek was celebrated by the industry press and predictably loathed by most of its audience and especially by Star Trek's merchandising partners.  It doesn't sell.  CBS had to play fast and loose with what counted as "subscriptions" to make the picture rosier for their stockholders, and there's almost no merchandising support for it.  They had to threaten legal action to stop Netflix from bailing on the show after its second season, and got a heavily slashed budget due to the show's poor performance.  They tried it all again with Picard, except they tried to cloak the same dystopian setting and garbage writing in familiar names and faces, and it did even worse.  The licensees walked.  The show did terribly even on CBS All Access, and gave Amazon Prime a hefty case of buyer's remorse outside the US.  The fact that none of these attempts to appeal to that changed audience were commercially successful is a pretty strong argument the audience didn't actually change much, if at all.

Really, the biggest and most telling sign that the audience hasn't changed is their latest and last attempt to save Secret Hideout's take on Star Trek is... to go back to the classic Star Trek formula.  It's a massive admission of defeat.

 

18 minutes ago, fortynickel said:

I think the new Trek shows are trying get more younger viewers by having a less involved plot but still try to appeal to OG Trekkies by having characters such as Picard, Riker, Pike and Spock.

Oh, they're trying... the problem is that audiences young and old think this new take on Star Trek is crap.

The reason they're bringing back characters from older Star Trek shows in greater and greater abundance is that the new characters Secret Hideout dreamed up for these shows are testing INCREDIBLY poorly.  

The closest anyone came to investment in Discovery's characters was purely representational.  Sylvia Tilly got some positive press for being Star Trek's first (explicitly) autistic character and the duo of Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber as Star Trek's first openly gay couple.  Even that ended up backfiring, since a lot of viewers predictably put Tilly up there with Wesley for obnoxiousness because of her autistic behaviors and the studio got blasted with accusations of trying to bury their gay couple after they killed Culber off partway through the show's first season.  Bringing in Spock and Pike was an author's saving throw intended to salvage the series by diverting attention away from Burnham and onto characters the audience was already predisposed to like.  They tried the same tactic in Star Trek: Picard, and it got worse as the show went on.  You can see right around halfway when the studio clearly decided it wasn't going to be able to sell the audience on new characters like Rios, Musiker, Dr. Jurati, and co. and decided to shift the story's focus to established characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and yet another identical damn Dr. Soong.  The new characters don't even really contribute to saving the day... Picard, Riker, Seven of Nine, and Doctor Soong save the day while the new kids largely just sit around.  Their participation trophy is that they're planned to be pushed even farther out of focus as CBS plans to throw in more walk-on roles for TNG veterans if season two gets made.

 

18 minutes ago, fortynickel said:

TNG had decent ratings but the studio executives were always trying to find a way to make it more mainstream. I don’t know if a TNG or DS9-type show would be able to net the kind of ratings that the studio require to stay viable.

Star Trek in general had pretty damned good ratings from around season three of TNG in '89 to the end of season three of VOY in '97.  You don't stay on TV continuously for fourteen years unless you're doing SOMETHING right.

If going back to the classic formula doesn't work, then they're screwed... because the last-ditch attempt to make Star Trek profitable again is Strange New Worlds, which is billed as a return to classic form in the most literal sense possible.

[JB0]

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The closest anyone came to investment in Discovery's characters was purely representational.  Sylvia Tilly got some positive press for being Star Trek's first (explicitly) autistic character and the duo of Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber as Star Trek's first openly gay couple.  Even that ended up backfiring, since a lot of viewers predictably put Tilly up there with Wesley for obnoxiousness because of her autistic behaviors and the studio got blasted with accusations of trying to bury their gay couple after they killed Culber off partway through the show's first season. 

Don't forget how they were hyping the show as having Star Trek's "first black female captain", the press kept insisting that meant both first black captain and first female captain, the studio did NOTHING to correct that misperception, and Sisko and Janeway fans just seethed in rage(not that either of them was technically first either).

Edited July 7, 2020 by JB0

[fortynickel]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 It does a bit, in hindsight, doesn't it?

 

 

 

All told, isn't that premise kind of obviously untrue?

Clearly CBS, Bad Robot, and Secret Hideout were fervently hoping that Star Trek's audience had changed.  They gambled on being able to sell Star Trek as a brand they could slap on any generic or heavily derivative sci-fi/action "thriller" and lost... REPEATEDLY.  They took everything Star Trek out of Star Trek except for a vague visual aesthetic and tried to reinvent the story as a standard issue summer action movie, resulting in something that was a very poor Star Trek story and a very poor action movie at the same time.  Predictably, making it more generic in the name of broadening its appeal just made it forgettable and it ended up failing to launch a brand reboot AND failing to break even at the box office.  Discovery's bleak, lifeless take on Star Trek was celebrated by the industry press and predictably loathed by most of its audience and especially by Star Trek's merchandising partners.  It doesn't sell.  CBS had to play fast and loose with what counted as "subscriptions" to make the picture rosier for their stockholders, and there's almost no merchandising support for it.  They had to threaten legal action to stop Netflix from bailing on the show after its second season, and got a heavily slashed budget due to the show's poor performance.  They tried it all again with Picard, except they tried to cloak the same dystopian setting and garbage writing in familiar names and faces, and it did even worse.  The licensees walked.  The show did terribly even on CBS All Access, and gave Amazon Prime a hefty case of buyer's remorse outside the US.  The fact that none of these attempts to appeal to that changed audience were commercially successful is a pretty strong argument the audience didn't actually change much, if at all.

Really, the biggest and most telling sign that the audience hasn't changed is their latest and last attempt to save Secret Hideout's take on Star Trek is... to go back to the classic Star Trek formula.  It's a massive admission of defeat.

 

Oh, they're trying... the problem is that audiences young and old think this new take on Star Trek is crap.

The reason they're bringing back characters from older Star Trek shows in greater and greater abundance is that the new characters Secret Hideout dreamed up for these shows are testing INCREDIBLY poorly.  

The closest anyone came to investment in Discovery's characters was purely representational.  Sylvia Tilly got some positive press for being Star Trek's first (explicitly) autistic character and the duo of Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber as Star Trek's first openly gay couple.  Even that ended up backfiring, since a lot of viewers predictably put Tilly up there with Wesley for obnoxiousness because of her autistic behaviors and the studio got blasted with accusations of trying to bury their gay couple after they killed Culber off partway through the show's first season.  Bringing in Spock and Pike was an author's saving throw intended to salvage the series by diverting attention away from Burnham and onto characters the audience was already predisposed to like.  They tried the same tactic in Star Trek: Picard, and it got worse as the show went on.  You can see right around halfway when the studio clearly decided it wasn't going to be able to sell the audience on new characters like Rios, Musiker, Dr. Jurati, and co. and decided to shift the story's focus to established characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and yet another identical damn Dr. Soong.  The new characters don't even really contribute to saving the day... Picard, Riker, Seven of Nine, and Doctor Soong save the day while the new kids largely just sit around.  Their participation trophy is that they're planned to be pushed even farther out of focus as CBS plans to throw in more walk-on roles for TNG veterans if season two gets made.

 

Star Trek in general had pretty damned good ratings from around season three of TNG in '89 to the end of season three of VOY in '97.  You don't stay on TV continuously for fourteen years unless you're doing SOMETHING right.

If going back to the classic formula doesn't work, then they're screwed... because the last-ditch attempt to make Star Trek profitable again is Strange New Worlds, which is billed as a return to classic form in the most literal sense possible.

You make good points. I am just making conjectures on why the people in charge would make the decisions that they did. I just figured that the types of stories I grew up watching are no longer vogue.
 

I knew that the new Star Trek shows were unpopular but I did not know they had performed that poorly.

Edited July 7, 2020 by fortynickel

[pengbuzz]

Let's be honest here: CBS tried twice to make an un-Star Trek "Star Trek", and failed miserably both times. If they don't do it this time with ST:SNW, they may as well sell the rights to Paramount and fire the staff who were trying to make this mess happen. Admittedly, my sentiments echo much of what Seito Kaiba was saying, but he has a point, and I also think that ST:DSC and ST:P should serve as warnings to the sci-fi (as well as other) fiction communities as well of what not to do to make a new series in a well-known franchise.

 

At this rate, they may as well do an animated series using the same computer program as South Park...

[renegadeleader1]

3 hours ago, JB0 said:

Don't forget how they were hyping the show as having Star Trek's "first black female captain", the press kept insisting that meant both first black captain and first female captain, the studio did NOTHING to correct that misperception, and Sisko and Janeway fans just seethed in rage(not that either of them was technically first either).

Most Trek fans could tell you the first black female Captain was the captain of the Saratoga from the beginning of Star Trek IV the Voyage Home. 

[tekering]

5 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Most Trek fans could tell you the first black female Captain was the captain of the Saratoga from the beginning of Star Trek IV the Voyage Home. 

Yeah, but the entertainment press aren't going to consult Trek fans, much less do their own research; some of them can't even be arsed to string a coherent sentence together.  

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I also think that ST:DSC and ST:P should serve as warnings to the sci-fi (as well as other) fiction communities as well of what not to do to make a new series in a well-known franchise.

At this rate, they may as well do an animated series using the same computer program as South Park...

Or, you know, let Quentin Tarantino make a Star Trek film.  

[Mommar]

30 minutes ago, tekering said:

Or, you know, let Quentin Tarantino make a Star Trek film.  

It wouldn't be good but at least it would be made by someone with an idea who can execute on it.

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, JB0 said:

Don't forget how they were hyping the show as having Star Trek's "first black female captain", the press kept insisting that meant both first black captain and first female captain, the studio did NOTHING to correct that misperception, and Sisko and Janeway fans just seethed in rage(not that either of them was technically first either).

Yeah, it didn't help... especially since Sonequa Martin-Green kept shooting off her mouth about what an unprecedented coup it was for her, a black actress, be the lead on Star Trek.  Nor did it help that CBS kept crowing about how diverse the show's cast was, and immediately tried to make any discussion about the poor quality of the writing into accusations of racism.

It's like everyone involved was so busy virtue signaling they collectively forgot Star Trek's first black lead logged 173 episodes and its first female lead logged 168.  

 

6 hours ago, fortynickel said:

I knew that the new Star Trek shows were unpopular but I did not know they had performed that poorly.

CBS put a lot of effort into keeping that one quiet, yeah.  It helps that they own several of the hobby news sites like ComicBook.com, and can push their own narrative about how well the show's doing through them in defiance of anything resembling objective reality.

One of the biggest red flags was that new Star Trek has almost no licensee support.  The J.J. Abrams Star Trek soft reboot movies had some halfhearted support but things didn't sell well, since the movies didn't appeal to fans and didn't create new fans of their own.  A lot of licensees took a pass on Star Trek: Discovery because of its aesthetic similarities to the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies that performed so poorly.  So Discovery has some apparel, some cardboard standees, a bit of glassware, a novel or two, and that's about it.  No toys, replica props aside from a few Starfleet badges, model kits, games, or anything like that.  Star Trek: Picard has even less... it's mostly cheap CafePress-style apparel branded "Chateau Picard", some wine glasses, a cutting board, canvas totes, and some pathetically cheap wine from Sonoma County, CA bottled as a "Chateau Picard" bordeaux or a Federation Reserve vine zinfandel.  

 

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Let's be honest here: CBS tried twice to make an un-Star Trek "Star Trek", and failed miserably both times. If they don't do it this time with ST:SNW, they may as well sell the rights to Paramount and fire the staff who were trying to make this mess happen. Admittedly, my sentiments echo much of what Seito Kaiba was saying, but he has a point, and I also think that ST:DSC and ST:P should serve as warnings to the sci-fi (as well as other) fiction communities as well of what not to do to make a new series in a well-known franchise.

By all accounts, they've done so much damage to the Star Trek brand that their own recovery plan from their spiraling debt doesn't even consider selling it... it's not worth enough to sell anymore.  Their valuation has fallen SO MUCH that they're in danger of violating the terms the US Government set for their merger agreement.  They were counting on Star Trek, and especially Star Trek: Picard, to save their bacon.

 

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

At this rate, they may as well do an animated series using the same computer program as South Park...

Oh yeah, there's Lower Decks coming too... I'm sure THAT will succeed where everything else has failed, right?

 

26 minutes ago, tekering said:

Or, you know, let Quentin Tarantino make a Star Trek film.  

Do we really need a Starfleet captain with a foot fetish, though?

[Mommar]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Oh yeah, there's Lower Decks coming too... I'm sure THAT will succeed where everything else has failed, right?

Have you seen the ship yet?

[pengbuzz]

53 minutes ago, Mommar said:

Have you seen the ship yet?

Looks like a saucer with a couple of car cigarette lighters and a squinty eye between the nacelles.

[tekering]

15 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Looks like a saucer with a couple of car cigarette lighters and a squinty eye between the nacelles.

This one, you mean?

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, Mommar said:

Have you seen the ship yet?

Yes.  It looks like one of the rejected Enterprise-D designs from the TNG Technical Manual.

[sh9000]

 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

Thanks for posting the larger image... the version of this I've seen is only like the size of a postcard.  

This ship looks oddly familiar...

Specifically, it looks like the Helios-class tugboat seen on the far right of these shot.  The CG model was kitbashed together out of parts of the Edison, Clarke, and Shenzhou for use in the Star Trek: Discovery series, in which they towed the USS Enterprise back to spacedock for repair.  I guess you could say that ship looks like someone tried to kitbash a Helios-class together out of spare Galaxy-class parts.

Like the Oberth-class before it, one has to wonder how the hell you actually get to the engineering section... do you have to walk through the warp nacelles while they're running?  Is it transporter access only?  Do they just shoot turbolifts across the gap?