Could Fuller Take Trek Back To TV? 444
bowman9991 writes "Bryan Fuller, creator of the TV show Pushing Daisies and a former Star Trek writer and producer, is geared up to make it happen. The new Star Trek TV show would be based on "old style" Star Trek, rather than the more recent incarnations and variations: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There hasn't been a Star Trek TV series since Enterprise was canceled after four seasons in 2005. Fuller wrote twenty one Star Trek episodes over four years, two in Deep Space Nine's final season, and the rest for Voyager. He also produced Voyager's last season. If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost. The new Star Trek movie featuring a young Kirk and Spock is in cinemas May 2009." Besides his work on many episodes of Trek, Fuller's work includes Dead Like Me and some of the best of Heroes. (He's one of the names I actively seek in the writing slot.) Between him and JJ Abrams, the era of Rick Berman looks to finally be at an end. Cross your fingers.
Let the grim reaper do his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things:
1. Brent Spiner would have to lose some weight
2. They've got to get rid of Data's emotion chip. That's when Data lost his charm, I feel.
Otherwise, bring it on.
I hope not? (Score:4, Insightful)
Voyager? Wasn't that the worst one of all? That machine should have been a little more banged up at the end but yet they had even more resources than when they started out. I know trek is BS but damn the same stories over and over get old after a while.
Let it die for a few more years at least.
Re:All I know (Score:1, Insightful)
Rick Berman: reason Enterprise failed and responsible for Nemesis
They need to get Manny Coto back for the show!
Star Trek is in "The Future" (Score:5, Insightful)
Star Trek was always a fantasy to me as an engineer about what 'could be'. Just over the progression of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY you could see incremental improvements in technology. Voice controls actually worked, bio-neural networks, etc. STOP recreating (and fucking up) the original story line.
TOS happened, it's done with. Quit going before it. Stop milking the lives of Scotty, Kirk, or the beginning of the beginning of the federation.
Set something 90 years out from the end of VOY. Put the first Cardassian (or other former enemy) on the bridge (Worf). Maybe bump up Warp speed or another method of going fast (But not Warp 10 retarded shit VOY broke out). Invite some scientists writers, the writers of Futurama, to the initial writings and get some pseudo-science based technologies. Just make up some new shiny tech. Don't fill it with too much technobabble. (Stargate was a good balance in my mind).
You could easily make it dark too. DS9 is hands down my favorite series.
Federation Civil War?
Fall of the Federation?
STOP GOING BACK IN TIME.
How do you reinvent Trek? (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd have to change the animal so much that it wouldn't seem recognizable. The old formula has become such a cliche that there's absolutely nothing you can reuse from it. Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots, everything that makes Trek Trek is what's been killing it. It's like asking "Can we make a healthy Big Mac?" Yeah, and by the time you're done removing everything that's bad about that burger, you're left with nothing but lettuce and sesame seeds.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else. But aside from that, Firefly gave us a space show that was like Trek only in so much as there were spaceships -- everything else was as different from Trek as it was from other shows. Even the basic premise -- "Imagine you made a TV show about Han Solo before he and Chewie joined the Rebellion" -- even that description carries certain assumptions the show blew away.
Galactica has good production values and good acting but the writing is a crime. Half of the uber-plot of the show is a mystery, what's the Cylon's angle? What are their motivations? Why did they do what they did? And a good mystery writer needs to know how it happened before the first chapter's written because support for the whodunnit has to be written in to every subsequent chapter. Not having a clue and just pulling it out of his ass at the end is cheap and unsatisfying and that's the approach Galactica's taken. Heroes as well for that matter, and Heroes season 1 was completely awesome, it was only the later post-Fuller seasons that turned into a giant crap sandwich. But as far as BSG goes, the original was completely derivative of Star Wars and the remake seems to draw a lot more from network dramas in terms of pacing and feel.
I'd say Babylon 5 was the true post-Trek show. You could see the inspiration from Trek but it also drew on a hell of a lot of other sources, really steeped in scifi goodness. It moved beyond what Trek was and DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, they were all muddling around at the same level. They never really rose to the challenge. The times they tried, they were just ripping off B5 plots instead of doing something bigger, better, and smarter. And that's sad because for all of the greatness that was B5, there was still room for improvement.
I remain in the "stick a fork in Trek and call it done" camp. I'll take a look at the new movie just to be charitable but my expectations are extremely low. I'm willing to be surprised. I just feel that if they really want to do a wonders of space exploration and discovery show, they should really nix the whole Trek thing and come up with something brand new. The CGI has come so far these days, they can get away with stuff that couldn't have been imagined.
Re:I hope not? (Score:3, Insightful)
Voyager? Wasn't that the worst one of all?
If you honestly believe that, then I envy your ability to completely erase Enterprise from your memory.
Does the world really need more Trek sequels? If we have to make sequels, couldn't we at least make one in the Babylon 5 or Blake's 7 universe?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things:
1. Brent Spiner would have to lose some weight
2. They've got to get rid of Data's emotion chip. That's when Data lost his charm, I feel.
3. They've got to rip off the Spock story from "Search for Spock" to bring him back to life.
Fixed that for you ;) Alternatively they could pretend that "All Good Things..." was the last real TNG story and all of the crappy movies never existed. I'd be just fine with that.....
Re:Star Trek is in "The Future" (Score:2, Insightful)
Federation Civil War?
Fall of the Federation?
Andromeda was, apparently, originally meant to be the sequel to ST:TNG. The Federation would be betrayed by one of its allies and collapse into a civil war and the story would follow an attempt to rebuild it.
The folks at Paramount didn't want it. They felt it would be too dark for Star Trek and not have the hopeful feel that the rest of the series had.
citation needed
It'll fail (Score:5, Insightful)
One more point of many more I could make. Science fiction has taken the depressing direction of the failure of humanity. Star Trek I was about the success of mankind. Get back to that. Apparently "serious" series makers did not feel very adult making a story in which mankind succeeds. Ok, do it again. Get them lost. Get them destroyed. Get them wandering around. Make the characters "real" by making them mean, nasty, slutty, jerks. Make them inferior and struggling. Have the female characters engage in comments about how stupid, inferior, ridiculous, juvenile male motivations and behavior are. Fail as a series.
Oh, and don't engage in the ridiculous, like making a holographic doctor or having an alien doctor who knows more about human medicine than humans. Jeesh, who came up with that grating piece of nonsense? Someone making a job for a friend? And the sick bay should not be bigger and more technologically advanced than the bridge. etc etc etc.
The future will be more of the same, only different. Remember that.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Were all of them crap?
Yes. Generations utterly ruined Data's character for the sake of an "Oh.... shit!" joke, destroyed the Enterprise-D for the sake of an action scene and killed off Picard's family for the sake of a cheap shock and never bothered to explore the ramifications of this.
First Contact was an enjoyable standalone film but utterly destroyed whatever continuity we had from TNG for the sake of creating a single villain for the audience to focus on. It also didn't really do justice to Troi or Crusher. Actually come to think of it, none of the movies did them justice.
and Insurrection was pure Trek, albeit perhaps a bit too cheesy.
Perhaps? It was incredibly cheesy. And don't even get me started on Nemesis. This guy [stardestroyer.net] summarizes Nemesis way better than I could ever hope to.....
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Deep Suck 9 was just that...
Oh please. DS9 was decent-to-poor in the early goings, much like TNG, but once the Dominion War plot arch started up, it went from good to truly great. No other Trek has been as dark and gritty as DS9 was, actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's attendant ugliness, while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted. Pity it seems to get such a raw deal from a certain subset of the Trek fanbase.
Re:How do you reinvent Trek? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads?
Well, at least they devoted a TNG episode to explaining that. Haven't you seen "The Chase"?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
but once the Dominion War plot arch started up, it went from good to truly great
Yes, if by "truly great" you mean bailed out with a plot device (wormhole aliens) and don't stop to question why Captain Sisko seemed to be single-handily running the Federation's war-effort, ranging from commanding a fleet of some 600 ships on his own to commanding a ground battle that could have been ended in two minutes if any of the Trek powers had the equivalent of machine guns or artillery. Are there really no infantry weapons bigger than rifles in the 24th century?
actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's pretty special effects
Fixed that for you.
while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted
That was actually one of the redeeming things about it. My favorite DS9 episodes were In the Pale Moonlight [memory-alpha.org] (Sisko and Garek assassinate a Romulan Senator to bring them into the war) and the various Maquis/Eddington episodes. Garek had the best character in the series (IMHO) and Eddington's critique of the Federation particularly damning:
"Why is the Federation so obsessed with the Maquis? We've never harmed you. And yet we're constantly arrested and charged with terrorism. Starships chase us through the Badlands and our supporters are harassed and ridiculed. Why? Because we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation. Hell, you even want the Cardassians to join. You're only sending them replicators because one day they can take their "rightful place" on the Federation Council. You know In some ways you're even worse than the Borg. At least they tell you about their plans for assimilation. You're more insidious. You assimilate people and they don't even know it."
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
A bad actor he may be (who had his ass handed to him by Ricardo Montalban in that movie), but every captain of every TV or movie spaceship since has, and always will be, compared to Shatner's Kirk.
Sometimes you don't need talent to achieve immortality; you just need to be recognizably unique.
Where no Sci Fi show has gone before (Score:3, Insightful)
We've done the five year mission, then went forward several hundred years to the next generation, did the space station thing, got lost in a new sector of the galaxy and then went back to the beginning. Now we go back to the beginning, again?
I'm sorry but Star Trek has got boring. It follows a formula, new technology, new badder enemy, war, combat, new technology, beat bad guys - go home. Every ST after TNG followed the exact same formula, days of our lives in space.
The only hope for ST is what made it interesting in the very beginning TOS and TNG, science fiction Forget all the lame 'b' grade effects, effects are the only thing that have made trek pleasing to watch, it was the imagination that filled in the gaps when I first watched TOS, and at the time it was the most ground breaking thing on TV - fuck IT WAS TV - and the story was king!!!
but, no no no these shows are seen as 'franchises', not a craft that sparks the imagination of the viewer, as one lame idea after another is tried. I'm sure I'm not the only sci fi fan that is banging their head in frustration. Now I'm sure that the new Star Trek movie will work, but it will work in the way that when a Chinese artisan copies a work of art faithfully and skill fully, yet they still don't understand the idea that brought the art into being in the first place.
For Star Trek to work in the future (are you listening Star Trek producers) you need to get back to what Star Trek was and should be a vehicle for hard science fiction. Go read Greg Bear Eon, Eternity (get Greg Bear to write the episodes) then call on Allister Reynolds and Robert Reed or half a dozen other sci fi writers that other slashdotters could name. Better yet, make the entire story Open Source or Creative commons and start asking for submission for stories from the fans. Two words Paramount BIG FUCKING IDEAS.
For fuck sake make Star trek in your face science fiction again, or just say it's over, cause the way it's being killed is just sad.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you serious? DS9 was The Care Bears Fussy Day compared to the ugliness of a real war. The producers didn't have the budget or the political will from the network to add any real ugliness.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you serious? DS9 was The Care Bears Fussy Day compared to the ugliness of a real war
Heh, alright, fine, *some* of the attendant ugliness. Obviously there's no way they could do it "properly", Saving-Private-Ryan-style, but they at least *tried* (hell, one of the main characters got his leg blown off, for god sake!).
Re:Star Trek is in "The Future" (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why many people like 'dark' Trek. If you like dark sci-fi, watch something else. Star Trek is optimistic, and if you change that, it is no longer Star Trek.
trek is a multi-generational series (Score:3, Insightful)
The original Trek was military culture familiar to the WWI and Korean era veterns of the 1960s.
The New Generation was 'yuppies in space' - well-healed baby boomers, team organization, yada, yada, yada.
The newer Treks never quite caught the pathos of the younger generations. The GenY's are individualistic and artistic, sort of like "herding cats in space" - not your corporate team players. Another Roddenberry scifi show called Andromeda captured this pathos better.
I cant really characterize the newest adults - the 9/11, Iraq War, and Second Depression generation. The generation always plugged into electronic communication and networks.
The New Generation made an interesting prediction that seems to be coming true - the death of television. I recall one episode where some 21st century types were revived from hibernation and asked about television and money and the crew said they didnt do those any more. Roddenberry's uptopia did not have money or TV.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
although, it makes sense in the context of the show... the aliens are supposedly a) all-powerful
But they weren't all-powerful. There were at least two [memory-alpha.org] episodes [memory-alpha.org] where it was revealed that you could use a plot devic^W^W"chroniton beam" to kill them. Yet the Dominion never thought to do this?
Then again, was Data's solution to the Borg problem in "Best of Both Worlds" any less contrived
Not in the context of that episode and what we knew about the Borg. It got pretty lame afterwards and I personally wish that Best of Both Worlds had been the last we saw of the Borg. At least DS9 stayed away from them, expect for the Pilot Episode, which was actually a good use of the existing back story IMHO.
And as for Sisko's role, well... you could just as easily level the same criticism against Picard in TNG leading the charge in any number of engagements.
Picard never commanded a fleet of 600+ ships or set Federation policy. Sisko seemed to be doing both as the war progressed. The size of the battles seemed at odds with continuity too. In the Best of Both Worlds Starfleet was only able to scrape together 40 ships to defend Earth but ten years later was regularly losing hundreds of ships at a time and was still able to continue the war effort? WTF?
It should be to use the setting as an environment in which one can then explore the human condition in a way that would otherwise be impossible. DS9 attempted to do that, exploring the decisions and compromises one must make during a time of war, and it did so better than, I think, any other other Trek, save for TNG.
Hey I'll grant you all that. And don't get me wrong -- I did enjoy DS9. It just got pretty hard to take seriously towards the end. For all the nit and grit of the war it still seemed too contrived -- Bajor never got devastated (indeed, after the first two seasons we forgot all about Bajor besides the wormhole aliens and some one-off episodes), the Dominion neatly withdrew from all of the Federation planets that it occupied without a fight and never made a second attempt at taking DS9 or ending the blockade of the wormhole. Then the female founder went from "We'll fight to the last man" to "I'll surrender and stand trial for my war crimes" after a three minute discussion with Odo.
I would have written it a lot differently. Have Bajor forced to pick sides -- maybe it even sides with the Dominion in the same manner that Finland sided with Nazi Germany in spite of being a Democracy -- have a Stalingrad fought on Federation soil (Betazed maybe?), have the Federation start conscripting it's citizens to try and offset the manpower advantage, have a pacifist Federation member try and sue for a separate peace (Vulcan maybe?) etc, etc, etc. There are many ways you could have done it better I think.
Re:I vote for Kirk and Spock (Score:3, Insightful)
And frankly, I'm sick of all the darkness in present science fiction. Science is advancing more all the time and if there was ever a time for optimism based on a scientific society, NOW is it. Humanity can improve, and will improve, and having a series that reminds us of what our future could be, if we chose to do it, and reminds us of our ongoing moral obligations, is a damned fine thing.
Autonomous computers happened. Before, technology was more or less always operated by humans. To "Go where no man has gone before" got the addendum "but where a workforce of robots have photographed the landing site, built the base, commmunicated with any natives and so on." Look at the Mars rovers, when do you think we'll ever get there? By the time humans come along it'll have been poked, prodded and probed in pretty much every way and the passengers close to tourists (ok, so I'm exaggerating a bit).
While leaders have managed to rally the people into committing great atrocities before, but computers are obidient to a fault, never corrupt, never work against the system from the inside and has no moral problems doing anything. When people controlled people there'd always be a ratio of controllers to the controlled, but with computers you can have thousands of computers controlling each person.
Nobody would believe you could have people listening in to every phone conversation. It'd require absurd amounts of manpower just recording and putting it all together before armies of analysts would work on it. But hooking up a supercomputer to the network backbone to do all that is credible. According to some sources, the NSA might already have done it.
Technology makes our lives incredibly convienient which is why we we're giving it all up to computers more or less under our control. I like that I can carry a piece of plastic instead of fiddling with change and have it mapped right into my online bank where I can pull it right into some financial planning. My cell phone tracks me everywhere I go because I find the ability to make or recieve calls convienient. Honestly I'd be seriously creeped out if anyone knew exactly where I was at all times, so in ways I trust the cell phone operator more than I trust any person.
The more I've seen of technology, the more I think it'd be like Star Trek minus the Enterprise, just the replicators and holodeck back on earth. Or the "I, Robot" movie before the takeover or "Well-E". Technology does the hard stuff and most humans are perfectly happy just enjoying life without making any significant contribution to anything. The only interesting story is someone turning all that convienience against us, which leads to dark sci-fi.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Star Trek for me was supposed to be an idealized future, and we are the good guys. It had to tread carefully to avoid becoming overly preachy (and failed on occasion), but I'm not sure I like a darker or more warlike federation.
Ah, but that's not what DS9 ever portrayed. What they portrayed was an idealized future where the good guys were forced into war because, guess what, sometimes you have to fight to survive. And the minute your goal is survival, well surprise surprise, it's suddenly a lot harder to be idealistic.
I find this fascinating, though. To me, the entire reason Trek was flawed was because it's idealistic future was so wildly unbelievable. I'm sorry, but even in a world of limitless energy, food, and freedom, with perfect, idealized human beings, there's still going to be individuals/groups/races out there try to eat the good guys' lunch... you know, like the Dominion. And the minute you admit that, you have to be open to the idea of conflict with those people. And who would believe in a real, war-like conflict that didn't involve compromising one's ideals on occasion? At minimum, odds are you're going to have to kill on occasion, and last I checked, that's not a terribly nice, idealistic thing to do.
Then again, at least in my mind, this is the difference between sci-fi, as entertainment, and sci-fi as an actual intellectual genre. IMHO, Trek, in its idealized form, can only succeed in the former. To truly examine the human condition, a prerequisite to achieving the latter, you actually have to admit that humans are not, and will never be, perfect, idealized creatures living in a perfect, idealized world.
Or they could re-ignite Star Trek like this (Score:3, Insightful)
They could make a show named 'Star Trek' which shows the exploration of space, first contact with an alien civilization, how faster-than-light travel was developed, etc. And slowly progress towards the 24th century, to the level of Star Trek we know.
In this new show, the characters will watch Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9) just for fun. Actors from previous series could make cameo appearances as themselves, being interested in space travel.
The show could be serious, almost a documentary, which shows the dramatic side of space exploration, the politics, the international competition, the effects on people' lives, the change of culture. It could also have a side like X-Files, with conspiracies about UFOs etc, which are later resolved.
Re:It'll fail (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, yeah.
I enjoy strong female characters. Wishy-washy girls are damn boring. Give me a woman who can kick my ass when I try to grab hers and I'm hers. She needs to be intellectually and emotionally bad-ass too. Hell, if she can understand the DCTs behind that JPEG and adjust the DoF for optimum bokeh while she takes a picture of her kickboxing team, then I'll make my case to be her man.
It's one thing to be with a gentle little thing just out of college... It's another thing entirely to get down with a woman who knows what she wants. Want to make an unsure adolescent male confident? Don't let him wrestle with rabbits (hah, like the recent Heroes episode).. Give him tigers.
I agree with the rest though. Television has been emasculated. I enjoy Dystopia though... Against the backdrop of crumbling civilization, the gems that are the future of mankind stand out.
Re:Star Trek is in "The Future" (Score:3, Insightful)
The folks at Paramount didn't want it. They felt it would be too dark for Star Trek and not have the hopeful feel that the rest of the series had.
That is because they were idiots and didn't see the potential for more realistic stories along the lines of the sixth and seventh seasons of DS9. The final seasons of DS9 were really among the best Star Trek stories ever produced because they reminded us that despite advanced technology and an "evolved understanding" (never really understood how that was supposed to work, human nature is human nature no matter how evolved we might become in our understanding) there were still wars, petty squabbles, treachery, and all of the other things which make the good guys just a little bad and the bad guys just a little good. As much as I enjoyed Star Trek, I always disagreed with the optimal "we have evolved beyond all human weaknesses" view of the future. After Gene passed, they began to take more risks with Star Trek and DS9 showed us how far they had come and could still go with a Star Trek series, but even then it does not begin to approach the sort of gritty no-nonsense reality that we see in Firefly and Serenity. The following recollections from Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore, two of the DS9 writers, really sums it up best concerning the conflict between the "optimistic we have overcome all need for violence" people and the "humans are humans 24th century and technology or not with flawed characters, relationships, wars, and all of the other gritty and real stuff" fans:
Ira Steven Behr and Ronald D. Moore were the writers most involved with the creation and development of the Dominion War. Rick Berman wanted the war to be over within three or four episodes at the most. Behr and Moore knew the series would never be able to wrap up the war in that many episodes. Berman also criticized the "depressing" and "violent" stories. Moore later said "It's a fuckin' war! What do you mean it's too violent?!"
In fact, my favorite Star Trek episode of all time is season 6 episode 19 of DS9: In the Pale Moonlight [memory-alpha.org] because it shows how tough situations can bring out the worst in people, even highly evolved Star Trek perfect people, and reveals some flaws in the DS9 characters that had always before that episode remained beneath the surface, often hinted at but never before fully exposed. The episode also makes really good use of the character Garek (one of my favorite Trek characters) and his unique Obsidian Order experience, training, and assassin/espionage talents.
"That's why you came to me, isn't it captain? Because you knew I could do those things that you weren't capable of doing. Well, it worked. And you'll get what you wanted: a war between the Romulans and the Dominion. And if your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal... and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain." -Garek
Re:Hmmmm. (Score:3, Insightful)
(I'd take orders from Janeway any day!)
If the primary selling point of the show is that some people have the hots for the Captain, and those people aren't nerds' girlfriends, the show is fucking over before it began.
Voyager was more of everything Trek - they found out that it was too much. The only thing they didn't have enough of was camp. You have to be able to laugh! Personally, I've never enjoyed Trek so much as I did in Season 4 of Enterprise, so I may be the wrong guy to talk to... but seriously, you are not allowed to use story as a bullet point in the positive column if the main story arc is stupid.
Re:I vote for Kirk and Spock (Score:3, Insightful)
Please give me directions to the world you live in, because it doesn't sound a lot like mine, where scientific discovery is telling me that the chlorinated organic chemicals we've been spewing out for the last half century are polluting most of our dwindling supply of fresh water, resulting in the next generation of people having shorter life expectancies than their parents for the first time, where advances in genetics are used by giant companies to patent life forms to use to engineer pesticide-resistant crops for the main purpose of encouraging industrialized farmers to use more pesticide (produced by those same companies) and to introduce terminator genes into agricultural crops so farmers will be forced to buy seed every year instead of replanting, where the rapid advances in computer technology encourage users to buy new computers and cell phones at least once a year, generating huge amounts of electronic waste that end up clogging landfills or causing dangerous levels of air pollution in the third world, and where the biggest proponent of climate science has half the world convinced that an incremental increase in global temperature is the worst thing we have to worry about.
I'd really like to live in a world where science gives people a real reason to be optimistic, because it seems to be doing the opposite in this world.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Deep Suck 9 was just that...
Oh please. DS9 was decent-to-poor in the early goings, much like TNG, but once the Dominion War plot arch started up, it went from good to truly great. No other Trek has been as dark and gritty as DS9 was, actually showing a real, unsanitized war with it's attendant ugliness, while portraying a federation that was, for a change, flawed and multifaceted. Pity it seems to get such a raw deal from a certain subset of the Trek fanbase.
Also, the limitation the original series, TNG and Voyager is that every member of the cast is all part of the same crew, with the same background (Starfleet Academy). They're all on the same team, playing by the same rules, which means any conflict (which is what makes things interesting) must be external - it's us vs. them, or us vs. some inexplicable spatial phenomenon, or some alien influence is affecting our people. You can't have any conflict between members of the cast, and there's no opportunity for character development.
DS9 fixed this. You have a Cardassian-built space station, owned by Bajor (which is not a member of the Federation), operated jointly by the Bajoran military and Starfleet. In the pilot, we learn that Commander Sisko, who has his own personal demons (he's a widower raising a son on his own), really doesn't want to be there and strongly dislikes and deeply mistrusts our hero, Captain Picard. Station security is operated by the Bajorans, headed by a guy who isn't really sure who he is or where he came from. There are independent businesses who lease space and pay rent, including a bar owned by a Ferengi and a tailor's shop operated by a witty Cardassian who speaks in lies and double entendres and who might or might not be a spy.
Voyager tried to set up the same kind of conflicts: in the pilot, the crew of Voyager is chasing an enemy ship, aboard which is a Federation spy. Both ships get sucked across the galaxy and lose half their crews, so it becomes necessary to join forces; they also pick up a couple of locals (one of whom even has his own ship). However... now they're all on the same team, forced to work together (and the two locals become friends with everybody). Most of the Maquis have had at least a little Starfleet training, so even though they're not Starfleet officers, they at least have some sort of common ground. There were a couple of times when they tried to stir up some sort of conflict between the Federation crew members and the Maquis crew, but it didn't really work. The first few seasons of Voyager were pretty lame, but when they traded Tess for 7 of 9, the writing improved dramatically - I'm not sure why. 7 was an interesting character, but everything else seemed to get suddenly better at that point too.
Enterprise had a Vulcan science officer before the Federation existed, so there was some very interesting conflict there. Dr. Phlox also wasn't from Starfleet, but like Neelix and Tess he's friendly with everybody. Like the Original Series, the crew doesn't have that bland Federation perspective; there's more of a wild frontier feel, and an opportunity for the crew to have disagreements between themselves. I thought the infamous pointy-nipple rubdown [youtube.com] scene in the pilot was completely inappropriate, but T'Pol's later relationship with Trip was great (and her nudity there WAS appropriate). I was also annoyed that when T'Pol decided to join Starfleet, she wasn't given a Starfleet uniform, because her Vulcan catsuit looked sexier (same issue with Counselor Troi's asymmetrical cleavage in early seasons of TNG).
Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with sex on Star Trek, but it needs to be well-written plot-driven sex, instead of gratuitous "let's put a hot chick in something revealing so people who don't care about the show will still like to look at it". 7 of 9's catsuit was just fine, because it was plot-driven (she was never a member of Starfleet, and the Doctor expla
Re:Star Trek/Lost Mix (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think I'm the only one, either.
No, there's loads of other slashdotters who miss their mommies.
Re:Hmmmm. (Score:2, Insightful)
you are not allowed to use story as a bullet point in the positive column if the main story arc is stupid.
Why not? Where were the writers supposed to go with that? A starship lost in the Delta Quadrant. Of course every so many episodes are going pretty much have to be about some hair-brained attempt to get back home that fails miserably. The only way to get around that is to either not have a show based on this premise, or to establish, early on, that getting back home was not an option and they were just going to have to make the best of life in the Delta Quadrant. As long as there was any hint that they were going to try to get back home, the main story arch was doomed to failure.
With Voyager the only Trek show on for many years, the only thing a Trek fan could do was to suck it up and look passed the stupid story arch.
Yeah, glad that Berman's gone (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, everyone knows that only the first two seasons of TNG were any good (The Naked Now deserved a frigging Emmy!), after which Roddenberry died and Berman shitted it up with characters like Reginald Barclay, Gowron, and Locutus of Borg. Berman could never help create a character as perfect as Wesley Crusher and he should've stopped trying. And then he comes out with that boring, actionless piece of fluff called Deep Space Nine, which was so awful that it ran for only seven seasons in an oversaturated market. Some Cardassian tailor with a mysterious past? Who cares? An all-out war between the Federation and some major dominion in the Gamma Quadrant, filled with intrigue and plot twists? Who wants to see that?
Sarcasm aside, I think what CmdrTaco meant is that we should hope for the end of the era of Brannon Braga [wikipedia.org]. He's the one primarily responsible for Voyager and Enterprise, and the only things he did that were good for the franchise were because of Ronald Moore.
Rob
Re:Lost interest (Score:3, Insightful)
Babylon 5 we appreciated the serial nature but couldn't get past how bad each individual episode was
How far in did you watch it? It gets seriously better about half way through the second season. Some of the season 1 episodes are painful to watch (I'm primarily thinking of TKO here), but by the time you get to season 3 that just doesn't happen any more.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like you never saw ANY Star Trek. It never was about fighting, it always was "diplomacy whenever possible."
How many times Kirk had to discuss with some alien race (well, most of the time, Spock) about our "old, barbarian ways" and how we learnt how to be civilized.
How many times Q called humans "barbarians" to Picard?
Star Trek was always "brains over power", fight only when it really needs.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
In a way, the wormhole aliens were simply a logical extension of the ideas they began exploring with the character of Q. Q chose to present himself as easily relatable, essentially a human with boundless control over space and time. However, it was easy for Picard to dismiss Q as a god due to his human appearance, which included such flaws as hubris and a willingness to pass judgment. The Prophets, on the other hand, had a completely different non-linear perspective that was not friendly to human comprehension (or easy writing). Thus Sisko and co. had a much harder time dismissing them.
The theme of relating to superhuman intelligences is found throughout Star Trek. It's just too bad that later attempts at exploring it failed so miserably, such as the Q episodes of Voyager.
Re:Lost interest (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
hell, one of the main characters got his leg blown off, for god sake!
I think Nog's shift from goofy comic relief at the beginning of the show to bitter war veteran was one of the better highlights of the show.