Star Trek The General Star Trek Thread - From TOS to Corporate Schenanigans
- Thread starter bullethead
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"But remember, with Paramount+, you have more than 30,000 episodes and movies to choose from, along with live sports like the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League! In addition, we've added programming from BET, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV/VH1 and Smithsonian Channel, with even more on the way."
Translation, "We don't care if the show you want to watch is missing. Watch this other stuff and get woke!"
Translation, "We don't care if the show you want to watch is missing. Watch this other stuff and get woke!"
Bet you five bucks they are being shouted down and accused of nazi-apologia.
Reason #7649 why streaming is a bad idea and you should just buy physical copies of whatever it is.
bintananth
behind a desk
Depends on the price difference.
Streaming: see if you like it enough to buy a copy. Sorta like watching network TV.
Physical Copy: I like it enough to fork over <<insert number here>> for the series.
When TNG/DS9/VOY were first coming out on DVD it was $140/season (B5 was $100/season).
Typhonis
Well-known member
Jaenera Targaryen
Well-known member
Back when Star Trek was good.
...so, what are everyone else's opinions on when the franchise's quality began to slide? Personally, I consider it to have started with Voyager, but admittedly a lot of this comes in the context of coming right after DS9, which to me is the peak of the franchise. If nothing else, The Doctor and later on Seven remain among the best characters to ever have appeared in the franchise.
DS9 was fortunately its own thing, but it kind of slipped in the last season or so when it came to Dukat, at least, and for very stupid reasons at that. Basically, they'd made this nicely nuanced antagonist who was very much in a moral grey zone, and apparently it alarmed the writers that people actually liked him, so they decided to lose the nuance and just make him straight-up evil.
As for the rest of the franchise, honestly season 7 of TNG was where it was apparent that they were running out of ideas. VOY just made things even worse, because as much as the series was sold on being different, it became very apparent that the show really just wanted to be a continuation of "safe" TNG, which ENT then continued.
As for the rest of the franchise, honestly season 7 of TNG was where it was apparent that they were running out of ideas. VOY just made things even worse, because as much as the series was sold on being different, it became very apparent that the show really just wanted to be a continuation of "safe" TNG, which ENT then continued.
Val the Moofia Boss
Well-known member
I'd say that the decline began in late TNG and DS9, when the Federation and overall tone of the narrative began moving from an idealistic future nation in space, to just the United States but in space. The Federation was interesting not because it was yet another morally bankrupt state in space, but because it was really was this idealistic space nation where people were overall good. That really dampened my enthusiasm for the setting.
Voyager was when production trouble started becoming blatantly obvious (bad scripts, bad directing, meh music, meh acting), and by that point the franchise was becoming a zombie as they started rehashing what had already been done before. Voyager and ENT squandered their premises to just be rehashes of TOS and TNG. You also had the TNG movies, which were just bad action movies with the Star Trek aesthetic painted on. At least the TOS movies did vaguely feel like Trek, particularly 4 and 6.
Voyager was when production trouble started becoming blatantly obvious (bad scripts, bad directing, meh music, meh acting), and by that point the franchise was becoming a zombie as they started rehashing what had already been done before. Voyager and ENT squandered their premises to just be rehashes of TOS and TNG. You also had the TNG movies, which were just bad action movies with the Star Trek aesthetic painted on. At least the TOS movies did vaguely feel like Trek, particularly 4 and 6.
The problem is 24th Century Humanity was never the Evolved Humans they pretended to be. When put in life and death situations. When faced with enemies that give jack and shit about their ideals and would exploit those ideals for tactical advantage. the vaunted highly evolved better than all other humanity came before. Became the same old humans that humanity has always been. As Captain Sisko said best............
The TOS Era Humanity was actually more accurate to how Humans would always behave not the TNG era.
The TOS Era Humanity was actually more accurate to how Humans would always behave not the TNG era.
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Voyager was when things started going to shit, because Paramount had more direct control, via UPN, and they could force bad ideas to go through.
The lack of character conflict on Voyager was due to test screenings of DS9's pilot, but I suspect they focused on existing Trek fans and didn't do proper root cause analysis to figure out why people didn't like the character conflict.
Then the UPN execs basically told the writers "Make TNG 2.0," with many of the same TNG writers, and they burned the fuck out, because you can't make 20+ episode seasons all that interesting if you don't allow for either A) plot based story arcs, or B) long form character arcs. You can make specific episodes that are really good, but when you barely allow anything to be built up in your sandbox, you're not going to get a lot of gold.
Then Enterprise got fucked over by UPN demanding it be "TNG 3.0" and insisting "future elements" be part of a prequel to a burned out writing staff fresh off of Voyager.
The lack of character conflict on Voyager was due to test screenings of DS9's pilot, but I suspect they focused on existing Trek fans and didn't do proper root cause analysis to figure out why people didn't like the character conflict.
Then the UPN execs basically told the writers "Make TNG 2.0," with many of the same TNG writers, and they burned the fuck out, because you can't make 20+ episode seasons all that interesting if you don't allow for either A) plot based story arcs, or B) long form character arcs. You can make specific episodes that are really good, but when you barely allow anything to be built up in your sandbox, you're not going to get a lot of gold.
Then Enterprise got fucked over by UPN demanding it be "TNG 3.0" and insisting "future elements" be part of a prequel to a burned out writing staff fresh off of Voyager.
Even with all that pressure though, Voyager had some great episodes, including what is arguably the best two-parter in the entire franchise: "Scorpion".
Yeah, yeah, I know, sacrilege, "Best of Both Worlds" is the greatest two parter blah blah. But here's the thing. "Best of Both Worlds" isn't a two-parter. Not really for a few reasons. From a production standpoint "Best of Both Worlds" was two separate episodes, including writing. This means that there's not as good thematic continuity through the two episodes and the second part is actually quite mediocre when you actually pay attention. Scorpion, meanwhile, was written to be a single cohesive narrative, there are clear set ups in part 1 that are paid off in part 2 and it was shot as, it is thematically consistent through the entire story and is functionally a TV movie rather than two separate episodes and that shows with the episode having better pacing overall.
But then, I've always been a person who thinks TNG is overrated anyway, Picard is the mediocre middle captain when you rate them, and if it wasn't for a few bad episodes I'd rate Janeway higher than him (and, just so we're clear, my Captain rankings go Kirk > Sisko >> Picard > Janeway >>> Archer)... but that's just me...
I actually agree, I think despite BoBW's reputation, Year of Hell comfortably holds its....wait, what? Scorpion?
I grant that it was written a bit more cohesively than BoBW, but I'd argue that's the case for most ST two parters. Way of the Warrior, In a Mirror Darkly, Homefront/Paradise Lost, Time's Arrow, Basics, Shockwave, and Favor the Bold/Sacrifice of Angels all have that same "good TV movie" vibe (Equinox comes close but it does have a bit of the BoBW "wasn't written as one story" issue), and while not all of those are equally good, in terms of narrative and pacing, set up, etc they all seem fairly solid.
Scorpion is good on that front, but I cannot stand the "let's take the overpowered one dimensional villain we never should have created and then set them against another, even more over powered and even more one dimensional villain* we never should have created, and make them fight!" aspect to it, an aspect they doubled down by having the resolution to conflict be "let's beat the Borg with a nerf bat repeatedly to the point they're so stupid they can no longer employ basic reasoning and logic, so that our crew can out do them somehow". And then they followed it up with "The Gift" where they resolved all of Scorpion's loose ends by having Kes just gain godlike psionic powers out of nowhere, which in my mind damages Scorpion retroactively because Scorpion enabled that lunacy.
In contrast, Year of Hell also a clear, cohesive story with good pacing and and a good story arc over the course of the episode, and it's a great twist on the usual star trek time travel plot that's explored in a really great way. The worst you can say about is that it ends on a reset button where none of the crew remembers anything that happens and never mentions it again, but the usual ending for a time travel story is a reset button where the crew remembers everything and then never mentions it again, so.....not really that different.
In vaguely connected but largely unrelated news, I recently discovered that Tim Russ was the famous "We ain't found shit" guy from SpaceBalls. Also good heavens, could Wikipedia not find a better picture of Russ for that article?
*Yes, 8472 got more stuff done with them in "In the Flesh", but given that episode was dumb, I'm not sure it's an improvement over how they were in Scorpion, and also it doesn't really line up with how they were shown in Scorpion.
I wish Q would've shown up to make a joke about Baltar being Picard's most infamous ancestor.
No, they go with Picard seeing his dad as an asshole.
The story is about Picard reexamining personal shit he just refused to look at and realizing, "Maybe my dad was not as big an asshole as I thought, and maybe my mom wasn't as great as I thought either."
We're just making Baltar jokes because:
- James Callis as Picard's dad is hilarious casting
- Young Jean-Luc Picard seems to have been Kirking/Baltaring his way around the galaxy