Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

[peter]

Has  this been post here yet?

 

[pengbuzz]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If we're REALLY picking nits, there isn't even really an agreed-upon universal definition of "utopia" beyond "a perfect society"... there've been lots and lots of different takes on the idea over the years since the term was first coined in 1516.

Star Trek's utopia fits into a few of the broad categories that've been defined in literature since the term was coined.

First and foremost, the Federation is a Socialist Utopia, in a style similar to the ones described by Wells, Efremov, and Morris.

• It's free of capitalism and consumerism, and in retrospect regards them as disruptive influences on society.
• The egalitarian distribution of food and goods, as well as essential services like education and medical care, made money a societally-irrelevant concept and led to its abolition.
• Citizens only do work they enjoy and which is for the common good, leaving them more time for the pursuit of the arts and sciences.

The Federation also has characteristics of a Scientific Utopia, similar in nature to the idea first toyed with by Francis Bacon.

• Advanced medical technology has greatly extended the human lifespan and has generally freed humanity from things like disease, disability, and untimely death.
• Advanced manufacturing technology (matter synthesizers, replicators) has displaced humans from menial manufacturing roles and other advanced technology had taken over the majority of other kinds of menial labor.
• Education is ubiquitous, and everyone has unrestricted access to humanity's collective achievements in the arts and sciences.
• The expansion of humanity's collective body of scientific knowledge is a primary cultural goal.

It's also an Egalitarian Utopia, as the Federation has true social and legal equality among all species, races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and what have you.

You could also say it's a Democratic Utopia, in that the government is set up in such a way that it truly represents the interests and collective will of the people.

True...very true. Now if we could just get that for Macross collectibles

[peter]

 

[Dobber]

On 8/19/2020 at 4:03 AM, peter said:

Has  this been post here yet?

 

Yuuuuup.

Chris

[sh9000]

 

[Chronocidal]

I'll say only one thing about the CBS panels...

A critique noting how low the viewership of all those panels was at about the 20 hour mark received almost twice the number of views of the highest rated panel in its first hour, and easily ten times the views of most of them.

I'm honestly not even sure what that says about the fanbase, because I can't quite separate the quality of the entertainment from the amusement of watching someone giving a running commentary of a trainwreck recorded about about 1000 frames per second.  

I did think it was funny that the most-watched one was the Voyager panel, though, at least at the time of the commentary.  

Edited September 10, 2020 by Chronocidal

[EastwindS2k]

 
 

Edited September 11, 2020 by EastwindS2k

[Seto Kaiba]

On 9/10/2020 at 12:12 AM, Chronocidal said:

I'll say only one thing about the CBS panels...

A critique noting how low the viewership of all those panels was at about the 20 hour mark received almost twice the number of views of the highest rated panel in its first hour, and easily ten times the views of most of them.

I'm honestly not even sure what that says about the fanbase, because I can't quite separate the quality of the entertainment from the amusement of watching someone giving a running commentary of a trainwreck recorded about about 1000 frames per second.  

To be honest, I'm fairly certain what that says about the fanbase is that there really isn't much of one anymore.

Alex Kurtzman, Bryan Fuller, Michael Chabon, and the other drooling incompetents currently running the Star Trek franchise (into the ground) boldly doubled down on the mistakes of J.J. Abrams and created a new kind of Star Trek that appealed to nobody.  That's why they have almost no third-party merchandising support for the new flagship Star Trek series.

Seriously... look at the audience scores from Rotten Tomatoes:
Star Trek: 88%
Star Trek: the Animated Series: 80%
Star Trek: the Next Generation: 90%
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: 86%
Star Trek: Voyager: 75%
Star Trek: Enterprise: 77%
Star Trek: Discovery: 42%
Star Trek: Picard: 56%
Star Trek: Lower Decks: 36%

Now, my two degrees might only technically be in mathematics but I'm pretty sure I see a trend here... all-original Kurtzman Trek does frankly terrible, and Kurtzman Trek that leans on beloved characters from much better previous shows do significantly better but still nowhere near as well as Star Trek shows made by people who actually "get" Star Trek.

When a video about a cat who'll be guest-starring on the latest season of Discovery has TWENTY TIMES the number of views as its new main cast member, that should tell the creators something about how well-received their work is.  Even Garrett Wang and Ethan Phillips, the actors behind two of Star Trek's most loathed characters, have almost three times the view count of the new leading man in Star Trek: Discovery, and the two of them played characters so unpopular they were almost killed off to appease the audience.

[Chewie]

I saw this thread and was like "ooh, I just watched and enjoyed that show, let's go see what...oh, nope, better avoid this thread too." 

FFS. 



 

[kaiotheforsaken]

3 minutes ago, Chewie said:

I saw this thread and was like "ooh, I just watched and enjoyed that show, let's go see what...oh, nope, better avoid this thread too." 

FFS. 



 

Pretty much how I feel about being a fan of anything these days. It feels even more bile filled than in years passed. I've found my enjoyment of these things is magnified greatly if I don't engage in discourse about it. Which, ultimately, is pretty sad, since I enjoy sharing that enthusiasm with people.

[Focslain]

35 minutes ago, kaiotheforsaken said:

Pretty much how I feel about being a fan of anything these days. It feels even more bile filled than in years passed. I've found my enjoyment of these things is magnified greatly if I don't engage in discourse about it. Which, ultimately, is pretty sad, since I enjoy sharing that enthusiasm with people.

Then you should. Seriously if you like something speak your mind. Nothing wrong with a difference in taste, just be able to explain why outside of just wanting to buck the trend.

[Chewie]

1 hour ago, kaiotheforsaken said:

Pretty much how I feel about being a fan of anything these days. It feels even more bile filled than in years passed. I've found my enjoyment of these things is magnified greatly if I don't engage in discourse about it. Which, ultimately, is pretty sad, since I enjoy sharing that enthusiasm with people.

I stopped reading the Star Wars thread here for that exact reason too. I don't even necessarily disagree with some or maybe even most of it, but don't people ever get tired of shitting on the things they supposedly like?

I went into Picard and Disco cold. Voyager was the last show I watched when it was on TV, and have obviously watched the JJ movies. I enjoyed the hell out of Picard, and dare say I think it was nearly flawless. And Disco, I drank that show up and can't wait for the next season. 

 

[kaiotheforsaken]

29 minutes ago, Chewie said:

I stopped reading the Star Wars thread here for that exact reason too. I don't even necessarily disagree with some or maybe even most of it, but don't people ever get tired of shitting on the things they supposedly like?

I went into Picard and Disco cold. Voyager was the last show I watched when it was on TV, and have obviously watched the JJ movies. I enjoyed the hell out of Picard, and dare say I think it was nearly flawless. And Disco, I drank that show up and can't wait for the next season. 

 

I really liked Picard and I'm very excited to see where they take it. Those characters mean a lot to me and it meant a lot to see some of them again. I also like Disco a great deal. About my only complaint with it is that I am really enjoying all the characters and I wish it spread the love out a little more. Season 2 was a bit better in that regard. Even Lower Decks, which I was immensely skeptical about, has been a really fun ride so far. In a format that's half the size of a typical Trek episode, they are giving us some pretty solid stories and giving us time with our cast.

But I'm the Trek fan who has been able to find things to enjoy in basically every Trek show and film.

Edited September 11, 2020 by kaiotheforsaken

[Chewie]

1 minute ago, kaiotheforsaken said:

I really liked Picard and I'm very excited to see where they take it. Those characters mean a lot to me and it meant a lot to see some of them again. I also like Disco alot, about my only complaint with it is that I am really enjoying all the characters and I wish it spread the love out a little more. Season 2 was a bit better in that regard. Even Lower Decks, which I was immensely skeptical about, has been a really fun ride so far. In a format that's half the size of a typical Trek episode, they are giving us some pretty solid episodes.

But I'm the Trek fan who has been able to find things to enjoy in basically every Trek show and film.

Agreed, I really enjoyed them spreading out the character building a little more in S2. 

I hope with S3 seemingly being the crew spread out throughout the galaxy or maybe even time, we see more character central episodes. They've added a lot of depth to every character they focused on and it was nice. 

[tekering]

2 hours ago, Focslain said:

Nothing wrong with a difference in taste, just be able to explain why outside of just wanting to buck the trend.

I appreciate the expression of differing opinions, and alternative points of view.  As a lifelong fan of Trek in most of its incarnations, I have followed each new iteration with interest (with the exception of Star Trek Beyond, which I held out no hope for after the excretable Into Darkness)...

Discovery won me over early on, and didn't completely lose me until its disastrous descent into the mirror universe; second season started out better, but ended worse.  

Picard I was cautiously optimistic about, but quickly disillusioned me with its apocalyptic tone and nonsensical plot; I only finished the series out of morbid curiosity.  

Lower Decks was as obnoxious as the trailers indicated it would be, but it's actually starting to grow on me.  I find the characters more tolerable with each episode, and the tone much more consistent with classic Trek... not to mention its overall aesthetic (which Picard and Disco sadly abandoned).  Thank heaven for small mercies.  

3 hours ago, kaiotheforsaken said:

I've found my enjoyment of these things is magnified greatly if I don't engage in discourse about it.

That sounds a little self-deluding...  I think it's important to consider majority opinion (critical as it may be), and be prepared to defend shows you see merit in.

Nonetheless, I often enjoy a little self-deluding myself, and find it uncomfortable when somebody knocks off my rose-colored glasses.  

2 hours ago, Chewie said:

I stopped reading the Star Wars thread here for that exact reason too.

Despite the depths to which Trek has sunk of late, I don't actually expect anybody can screw it up as badly as The Rise of Skywalker screwed up Star Wars.  That was a truly unprecedented disaster.  

[Seto Kaiba]

7 hours ago, Chewie said:

I saw this thread and was like "ooh, I just watched and enjoyed that show, let's go see what...oh, nope, better avoid this thread too." 

Eh... I don't mean to come off as confrontational, but if you came to a thread about a series that was so poorly received that it suffered a mass walkout of its franchise's merchandising partners before it ever aired, left its star openly reluctant to return for a second season, gave its financial backers buyer's remorse so severe they're talking about taking a loss on it and walking away after just one season, and was widely panned by the franchise's devoted fanbase, and were expecting positivity... well... that one might be on you.

Just sayin'.

 

7 hours ago, kaiotheforsaken said:

Pretty much how I feel about being a fan of anything these days. It feels even more bile filled than in years passed. I've found my enjoyment of these things is magnified greatly if I don't engage in discourse about it. Which, ultimately, is pretty sad, since I enjoy sharing that enthusiasm with people.

5 hours ago, Chewie said:

I stopped reading the Star Wars thread here for that exact reason too. I don't even necessarily disagree with some or maybe even most of it, but don't people ever get tired of shitting on the things they supposedly like?

To be brutally frank, I don't think there has been any increase in the average amount of vitriol involved in fandom-type discussions in general.  That people are going to disagree, and sometimes vehemently so, is just part and parcel of being passionate about a subject.  This isn't even confined to fandom, really.  You get this all the time in academia too.  Everyone bags on the lit majors as taking a soft option, but goddamn if there aren't some areas of that field that are more like a fight club than anything.

There is, on the other hand, admittedly a marked increase in the negativity surrounding certain long-running franchises that have suffered under the hands of new creative teams who don't really understand what made those properties so successful and iconic in the first place.  These new creatives are either deliberately hostile to the franchise's fans to no useful end, trying to pass virtue signaling off as a substitute for character and story development, or simply so beholden to the design-by-committee process that the end result is something fans and even general audiences found unpalatable.

It's not that fans are shitting on things they supposedly like... they're expressing their understandable frustration that the owner(s) of the series they so love is letting someone crap on it on a professional basis, seemingly heedless to the fact that it's demonstrably hurting the franchise narratively and monetarily. 

 

For instance, I've been a lifelong Star Trek fan.  Even when the franchise occasionally stumbled and released something less than great, I stuck with it because even those failures were true to the spirit of the series and enjoyable in their own way, whether it was watching Shatner go full ham in Star Trek V or seeing the creators discreetly bag on their own failures in-series like Voyager's "Threshold".  

Star Trek: Discovery's promotional materials left me feeling more than a little wary, given how blatant the virtue-signaling was and how the lead actress's own manic self-promotion ignored that Star Trek had already had both black and female leads (whose combined episode count makes up half the franchise).  I gave it a fair shake, and was almost immediately put off by the blatant attempt to rewrite Star Trek's bright future into a dystopia.  I probably could've forgiven that if the writing had been solid, though.  I'll forgive a LOT if a show's writers can make me invested in the characters and their journey.  Discovery couldn't get me engaged in the characters, because the characters were almost exclusively written to be blatantly horrible people who often made no secret of the fact that they despised each other.  Starfleet's characteristic bonhomie was missing entirely, and in its place was a crew of miserable souls who were together against their will and took every opportunity to remind each other and the audience of that fact.  It says a lot that the main character's one brief moment of self-awareness was wondering if she fit in too well in the mirror universe where everyone's a murderously xenophobic fascist.  I stuck with it into season two because we were promised a return to form, and they actually had me on board for the first couple episodes where Anson Mount's Captain Pike briefly managed to bring back the spirit of high adventure.  They lost me against almost as quickly when the show decided that the female cast should treat Starfleet legend Captain Pike like crap "because feminism" (which is not exactly what feminism is about) and then saw the plot devolve into a totally nonsensical action movie premise torn from the pages of a Terminator sequel/reboot.  Until they banish Burnham, I'm not going to be able to watch Discovery anymore.  I'm all for representation, but dear gods she's just an objectively awful human being.  She's incredibly manipulative, disrespectful, unapologetically xenophobic, and the writers bend over backwards to try and force the audience to see her as heroic instead of for the shitty person she is.

Star Trek: Picard kind of had me deeply concerned from the outset because of what'd happened with Discovery.  I finished the first season, but promised myself I will never watch it ever again because the entire plot was nonsense.  It was incoherent gibberish start-to-finish, and the fact that the show's entire plot seemed determined to unnecessarily "humble" someone who'd been essentially a paragon of Starfleet virtue for no reason apparent in the show itself (creator interviews explicitly indicate it's for him being a privileged white man, which makes less than zero sense in a postracial utopia like the Federation) just made it a miserable slog.  Like Discovery, these characters were horrible people who didn't want to be there and that made it really impossible to like or sympathize with them.  They're not relatable in any way, and in most cases their issues don't even make sense in context... like Raffi being upset about losing her Starfleet career as though it was a significant hardship on her, despite the fact that she lives in a post-scarcity society with universal basic income and universal housing, and the fact that all the family problems she blames on it were actually caused by her substance abuse problems and the ensuing paranoia.  It says a lot that the Romulan super-secret police - the Zhat Vash - are arguably the actual heroes of the piece since they're the ones risking everything (sanity included) to try and prevent a galactic genocide while our protagonists are kind of aimlessly wandering the galaxy so Picard can be a sad old man until they bump into a pointlessly-evil android and hand her what she needs to obliterate all organic life in the galaxy.  Even if the character writing were spectacular (and it was quite the opposite), I doubt I'd be able to get invested in it simply because the plot is an incoherent mess that doesn't make any sense in context.

I haven't watched Lower Decks, and I don't think I ever will... fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  That adage doesn't contain a case statement for three or more times.

[Mog]

4 hours ago, tekering said:

Despite the depths to which Trek has sunk of late, I don't actually expect anybody can screw it up as badly as The Rise of Skywalker The Last Jedi screwed up Star Wars.  That was a truly unprecedented disaster.  

Fixed that for ya'.

Semi-back on topic:  there's a local channel here that airs old eps of TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, and Ent every weeknight.

If I'm channel surfing/vegging and see a good TOS, TNG, or DS9 ep listed, I'm likely to tune in.  Voy and Ent, not so much.

[Chronocidal]

"Heroes and Icons" is it?  I was surprised to see it pop up, think my parents just got that channel.  They have a fairly crazy/unconventional weekly schedule as I recall.

I know I've contributed a fair bit to the negativity, so I get the frustration.  This day and age, it gets harder and harder to just form your own opinion of something, because you're bombarded with what everyone else thinks about everything nearly 24/7.  Everything is assumed to instantly have a (not so) hidden agenda behind it, and it becomes harder and harder to form a truly independent opinion of anything.

I admit, I have not watched any of the new Trek series, though I did watch Beyond, and thought it wasn't all that bad.  I've reached a point personally where I don't care about spoilers anymore, so I read everything I can find, and it's probably turned me off to a few things I might have enjoyed more had I not known so much about them.¹

Honestly though.. if I didn't have to jump through hoops and pay extra to watch them?  I probably would have, just out of curiosity.  Would I have enjoyed them?  I don't know.  There's probably bits I would have enjoyed.  Maybe someday I will.

1. TROS is a hilarious exception to this, and I do not regret one moment of all of the time I spent spoiling myself on that with every rumor I could find.  In a backwards way, I'm actually very glad that movie exists, because while the movie itself wasn't anything I really enjoyed, I have spent countless hours this year laughing until my sides hurt at all of the crazy discussions surrounding that movie.  I'm glad that movie exists just because it meant I could watch all of the content based on it, and that has brought me an immeasurable amount of joy this year, when I sorely needed it.

 

[renegadeleader1]

Anyone that thinks ST:Picard was good should just play Mass Effect. It's the same plot without the self loathing.

[pengbuzz]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Eh... I don't mean to come off as confrontational, but if you came to a thread about a series that was so poorly received that it suffered a mass walkout of its franchise's merchandising partners before it ever aired, left its star openly reluctant to return for a second season, gave its financial backers buyer's remorse so severe they're talking about taking a loss on it and walking away after just one season, and was widely panned by the franchise's devoted fanbase, and were expecting positivity... well... that one might be on you.

Just sayin'.

 

To be brutally frank, I don't think there has been any increase in the average amount of vitriol involved in fandom-type discussions in general.  That people are going to disagree, and sometimes vehemently so, is just part and parcel of being passionate about a subject.  This isn't even confined to fandom, really.  You get this all the time in academia too.  Everyone bags on the lit majors as taking a soft option, but ***damn if there aren't some areas of that field that are more like a fight club than anything.

There is, on the other hand, admittedly a marked increase in the negativity surrounding certain long-running franchises that have suffered under the hands of new creative teams who don't really understand what made those properties so successful and iconic in the first place.  These new creatives are either deliberately hostile to the franchise's fans to no useful end, trying to pass virtue signaling off as a substitute for character and story development, or simply so beholden to the design-by-committee process that the end result is something fans and even general audiences found unpalatable.

It's not that fans are shitting on things they supposedly like... they're expressing their understandable frustration that the owner(s) of the series they so love is letting someone crap on it on a professional basis, seemingly heedless to the fact that it's demonstrably hurting the franchise narratively and monetarily. 

 

For instance, I've been a lifelong Star Trek fan.  Even when the franchise occasionally stumbled and released something less than great, I stuck with it because even those failures were true to the spirit of the series and enjoyable in their own way, whether it was watching Shatner go full ham in Star Trek V or seeing the creators discreetly bag on their own failures in-series like Voyager's "Threshold".  

Star Trek: Discovery's promotional materials left me feeling more than a little wary, given how blatant the virtue-signaling was and how the lead actress's own manic self-promotion ignored that Star Trek had already had both black and female leads (whose combined episode count makes up half the franchise).  I gave it a fair shake, and was almost immediately put off by the blatant attempt to rewrite Star Trek's bright future into a dystopia.  I probably could've forgiven that if the writing had been solid, though.  I'll forgive a LOT if a show's writers can make me invested in the characters and their journey.  Discovery couldn't get me engaged in the characters, because the characters were almost exclusively written to be blatantly horrible people who often made no secret of the fact that they despised each other.  Starfleet's characteristic bonhomie was missing entirely, and in its place was a crew of miserable souls who were together against their will and took every opportunity to remind each other and the audience of that fact.  It says a lot that the main character's one brief moment of self-awareness was wondering if she fit in too well in the mirror universe where everyone's a murderously xenophobic fascist.  I stuck with it into season two because we were promised a return to form, and they actually had me on board for the first couple episodes where Anson Mount's Captain Pike briefly managed to bring back the spirit of high adventure.  They lost me against almost as quickly when the show decided that the female cast should treat Starfleet legend Captain Pike like crap "because feminism" (which is not exactly what feminism is about) and then saw the plot devolve into a totally nonsensical action movie premise torn from the pages of a Terminator sequel/reboot.  Until they banish Burnham, I'm not going to be able to watch Discovery anymore.  I'm all for representation, but dear gods she's just an objectively awful human being.  She's incredibly manipulative, disrespectful, unapologetically xenophobic, and the writers bend over backwards to try and force the audience to see her as heroic instead of for the shitty person she is.

Star Trek: Picard kind of had me deeply concerned from the outset because of what'd happened with Discovery.  I finished the first season, but promised myself I will never watch it ever again because the entire plot was nonsense.  It was incoherent gibberish start-to-finish, and the fact that the show's entire plot seemed determined to unnecessarily "humble" someone who'd been essentially a paragon of Starfleet virtue for no reason apparent in the show itself (creator interviews explicitly indicate it's for him being a privileged white man, which makes less than zero sense in a postracial utopia like the Federation) just made it a miserable slog.  Like Discovery, these characters were horrible people who didn't want to be there and that made it really impossible to like or sympathize with them.  They're not relatable in any way, and in most cases their issues don't even make sense in context... like Raffi being upset about losing her Starfleet career as though it was a significant hardship on her, despite the fact that she lives in a post-scarcity society with universal basic income and universal housing, and the fact that all the family problems she blames on it were actually caused by her substance abuse problems and the ensuing paranoia.  It says a lot that the Romulan super-secret police - the Zhat Vash - are arguably the actual heroes of the piece since they're the ones risking everything (sanity included) to try and prevent a galactic genocide while our protagonists are kind of aimlessly wandering the galaxy so Picard can be a sad old man until they bump into a pointlessly-evil android and hand her what she needs to obliterate all organic life in the galaxy.  Even if the character writing were spectacular (and it was quite the opposite), I doubt I'd be able to get invested in it simply because the plot is an incoherent mess that doesn't make any sense in context.

I haven't watched Lower Decks, and I don't think I ever will... fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  That adage doesn't contain a case statement for three or more times.

I'm just going to agree with everything you've said here, as it sums up quite a bit of how I feel as well on this topic. It's not that we've grown to hate the franchises we love; rather, it's that we've grown to hate what those who have been entrusted with the reins to those franchise have done to them, and how they've been warped from what we loved about them.

[sketchley]

10 hours ago, Mog said:

Fixed that for ya'.

Semi-back on topic:  there's a local channel here that airs old eps of TOS, TNG, DS9, Voy, and Ent every weeknight.

If I'm channel surfing/vegging and see a good TOS, TNG, or DS9 ep listed, I'm likely to tune in.  Voy and Ent, not so much.

Nah, Rise of Skywalker is correct.  Last Jedi tried to tell a coherent story (whether it succeeded or not is a debate for other venues).  RoS was... well, saying that they succeeded in making a movie that not only walked back the changes made in TLJ (instead of building on them), and then cramming 3 film's worth of content into 1 movie is... putting it politely. 

Back on topic: while I don't mind Discovery, it's highly forgettable, and not something that I want to rewatch anytime soon.  The best part of it was the characters, the worst part is the plot, which—among other things—didn't slow down to focus on anything else, such as the characters!

Due to that (and the hyper-kinetic pacing and editing of the action scenes where it is impossible to figure out what's going on), I'm not bothering with Picard or The Lower Decks.

On the other hand, I am currently (re)watching Voyager.  While that show leaves a lot to be desired, it is more memorable than Disco, while giving the plot (and characters!) time to breathe.

Edited September 12, 2020 by sketchley

[Dynaman]

For me ST hit the nadir with Voyager and Nemesis.  The one took the preachy factor of ST and turned it up to 11 (showing my eighties teenage roots) and the other tried and failed miserably to turn NextGen to an action movie series.  The first 2.5 seasons of Next Gen was just as bad but finally figured out TOS was twenty years prior and things had changed.  The problem for ST today is that the fans want it to be the sixties still but it is now 2020 and we should not need to hide the moral story behind the alien of the week.  On the other hand ST action movies can't compete with Super Heroes that bend physics to say nothing of reality.

[Mog]

3 hours ago, sketchley said:

Nah, Rise of Skywalker is correct.  Last Jedi tried to tell a coherent story (whether it succeeded or not is a debate for other venues).  RoS was... well, saying that they succeeded in making a movie that not only walked back the changes made in TLJ (instead of building on them), and then cramming 3 film's worth of content into 1 movie is... putting it politely. 

Last Jedi is the film that really split the franchise:  folks either liked it or hated it.  There isn’t much “in between” opinions out there.

Prior to that film, you could say that the fandom was this massive united monolith (even if you had a few stubborn EU supporters like me ).  But the splitting/fracturing really kicked into high gear after Last Jedi was released.

 

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

For me ST hit the nadir with Voyager and Nemesis.  The one took the preachy factor of ST and turned it up to 11 (showing my eighties teenage roots) and the other tried and failed miserably to turn NextGen to an action movie series.  The first 2.5 seasons of Next Gen was just as bad but finally figured out TOS was twenty years prior and things had changed.  The problem for ST today is that the fans want it to be the sixties still but it is now 2020 and we should not need to hide the moral story behind the alien of the week.  On the other hand ST action movies can't compete with Super Heroes that bend physics to say nothing of reality.

I can agree with you about the nadir comment.  Part of what’s been bugging Trek since then is what is the show (or film) at its core?

It’s this strange mix of sci-fi adventure; within a naval tradition/military background; that tries to show the audience a hopeful, better future (either through the growth of the characters or the aliens they encounter).

Unfortunately, a lot of that core has been mucked up by shoddy execution or too burdened and buried by all the history/backstory it has to navigate through.

[pengbuzz]

2 hours ago, Mog said:

Last Jedi is the film that really split the franchise:  folks either liked it or hated it.  There isn’t much “in between” opinions out there.

Prior to that film, you could say that the fandom was this massive united monolith (even if you had a few stubborn EU supporters like me ).  But the splitting/fracturing really kicked into high gear after Last Jedi was released.

 

I can agree with you about the nadir comment.  Part of what’s been bugging Trek since then is what is the show (or film) at its core?

It’s this strange mix of sci-fi adventure; within a naval tradition/military background; that tries to show the audience a hopeful, better future (either through the growth of the characters or the aliens they encounter).

Unfortunately, a lot of that core has been mucked up by shoddy execution or too burdened and buried by all the history/backstory it has to navigate through.

An idea for a new series then: the Federation has been destroyed, and they have to start all over. New ships, new structure, basically rebuild Starfleet from the bare bones up.

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I'm just going to agree with everything you've said here, as it sums up quite a bit of how I feel as well on this topic. It's not that we've grown to hate the franchises we love; rather, it's that we've grown to hate what those who have been entrusted with the reins to those franchise have done to them, and how they've been warped from what we loved about them.

Yup... and this all started because Paramount made a hilariously ill-advised decision to try to reboot Star Trek and entrusted it to the famously inept J.J. Abrams, who wasn't interested at all in Star Trek or making a Star Trek movie.  He wanted to make Star Wars, so he tried to turn Star Trek into Star Wars.  Specifically, he tried to make Star Trek into a bad remake of Episode IV, with a Romulan Death Star destroying the peaceful/defenseless planet Vulcan and then Earth as a stand-in for Yavin IV.  (Whether this is necessarily any more palatable in hindsight than his attempting to pass a bad remake of Episode IV off as Episode VII is up for debate.)

 

 

5 hours ago, Dynaman said:

The problem for ST today is that the fans want it to be the sixties still but it is now 2020 and we should not need to hide the moral story behind the alien of the week.

Really, it isn't... that allegorical writing style works just fine today and is still widely used in many different genres of storytelling.  

Star Trek's problem today is that the showrunners and writers currently working on it were/are so caught up in trying to make Star Trek the next Game of Thrones that they've never really stopped to think about why either of those things was popular.  They were initially convinced that all they had to do was spend big on special effects and set design and fill it with dark, depressing, violent content, and that'd bring everyone and their dog to CBS All Access.  That didn't work, because the story they wrote was a steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were all written to be unlovable and unrelatable a-holes who hate themselves and each other.  Then you had Star Trek: Picard, which still believed that what you needed to succeed was to spend your entire budget on special effects, but compounded that by trying to appeal to Twitter SJWs by repeatedly "humbling" Picard for the crime of being a white male and therefore privileged... in an explicitly postracial society where that privilege hasn't been a thing for hundreds of years.  Consequently, the story was yet another steaming pile of incoherent garbage and the characters were a pack of utterly forgettable stock characters or cringeworthy racial stereotypes such as a cigar-chomping hispanic smuggler (because every hispanic is Cuban, right?), a "strong" black woman struggling with the loss of her job and substance abuse problems trying to go straight and get her family back (a racial stereotype if ever there was one), every character Zooey Deschanel has ever played, cringeworthy overly literal Space Ninja Legolas that absolutely sounded cooler in a writer's head, Great Value Benedict Cumberbatch, predatory femme fatale with vaguely incestuous overtones, and butch lesbian straw feminist Seven of Nine.

Who are they writing this crap for anyway?  Literally nobody asked for this.

In short, the problem with Star Trek today is that it no longer has a message or a moral... it's just a bland, generic, lifeless cash-grab sequel that doesn't know what it wants to be other than "profitable".  So it's a designed-by-committee mess that's hemorrhaging money because it has nothing to offer its audience besides substanceless VFX sequences and shallow, hypocritical virtue signaling.  It's the same problem the Star Wars sequel trilogy had, embodied in its fullest by The Rise of Skywalker's committee-driven endless cycle of rewrites during production.

[Mog]

38 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

An idea for a new series then: the Federation has been destroyed, and they have to start all over. New ships, new structure, basically rebuild Starfleet from the bare bones up.

Wasn’t that the initial idea behind Andromeda?

[Dobber]

41 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

An idea for a new series then: the Federation has been destroyed, and they have to start all over. New ships, new structure, basically rebuild Starfleet from the bare bones up.

Andromeda?

[Seto Kaiba]

15 minutes ago, Mog said:

Wasn’t that the initial idea behind Andromeda?

Not specifically Star Trek's Federation, but close enough... it was one of several sci-fi series concepts Roddenberry pitched around the time Star Trek's original series was being developed.

It's also the entire premise of Star Trek: Discovery's third season, in which the Discovery and Mary Sue Burnham have jumped into a distant future where the Federation apparently no longer exists and is now going to be re-founded by the worst crew Starfleet has ever had.  (Even though previous shows established that the Federation was still very much around at that time... which IMO confirms that STD has always been a bad future alternate reality.)

Edited September 12, 2020 by Seto Kaiba

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

(Even though previous shows established that the Federation was still very much around at that time... which IMO confirms that STD has always been a bad future alternate reality.)

Or Commander Riker's holodeck adventure...

 

 

No, I'm not still mad about how Enterprise ended. What makes you think that?

[pengbuzz]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Not specifically Star Trek's Federation, but close enough... it was one of several sci-fi series concepts Roddenberry pitched around the time Star Trek's original series was being developed.

It's also the entire premise of Star Trek: Discovery's third season, in which the Discovery and Mary Sue Burnham have jumped into a distant future where the Federation apparently no longer exists and is now going to be re-founded by the worst crew Starfleet has ever had.  (Even though previous shows established that the Federation was still very much around at that time... which IMO confirms that STD has always been a bad future alternate reality.)

Yeah...forgot about Andromeda.

 

Maybe they should just make a series then where every other star trek series hates Discovery, and everyone from TOS to Enterprise is trying to kill the Discovery crew. Star-Trek: Whackamole.

[Seto Kaiba]

20 minutes ago, JB0 said:

No, I'm not still mad about how Enterprise ended. What makes you think that?

... no comment.

 

16 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah...forgot about Andromeda.

I've been trying to forget it for a while... it wasn't very good.

 

16 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Maybe they should just make a series then where every other star trek series hates Discovery, and everyone from TOS to Enterprise is trying to kill the Discovery crew. Star-Trek: Whackamole.

They could always take the "Threshold" approach, where a future series very definitively established that That Never Happened, It'd Just Be Stupid If It Did.

Or the ENT Relaunch approach, where the whole thing is dismissed as an obviously fake cover story for something else entirely... hopefully something less stupid than Charles Tucker III going to Romulus to sabotage their Warp 7 program as a Section 31 spy.

[Mog]

Kirk would infect them with all the space herpes he’s gotten over the years.

Picard would speechify and “diplomacy” them to death.

The Sisko would get pissed off, fire off a barrage of upgraded torpedos, and go back to finishing off his morning raktajino.

Janeway would try to be friendly with them and then have her future self come back to blast them with a Batmobile-armored Voyager.  (Something about having their cake and eating it too? )

And Archer would send his beagle to run amok time onboard the Discovery.

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Mog said:

And Archer would send his beagle to run amok time onboard the Discovery.

That's just silly. A time-travelling Porthos was Scotty's doing, not Archer's.

[Mog]

A yappy beagle trying to hump your leg is no joke.

Though, Discovery’s time-jumping shenanigans resulting in the destruction of all java beans and Earle Grey tea leaves in the Alpha Quadrant would cause almost all of those captains to declare all-out war.

[Chronocidal]

See.. can we just abandon any attempt at a serious plot, and turn Discovery into the Star Trek version of Tag and Bink?  I'd actually pay to watch that.