Personally, I don't see anything wrong with going for an alternate timeline and a modern take on starship design. As long as they don't turn Star Trek into an action franchise, I'm okay with it.
As much as it's often panned, Insurrection is the most Star Trek of Star Trek movies. It's about the Prime Directive at it's core. The Undiscovered Country is also a great example of a movie about diplomacy.
Sure, every movie is going to be action-packed for film screens, but those two I felt stuck to Star Trek's ideals more than the rest, where the movie focused on stopping a specific evil villain.
It's been a while since I saw Insurrection and Undiscovered Country, but you could make a similar argument about Star Trek into Darkness. It was about the struggle between a militarized starfleet and a starfleet about discovery and exploration.
I honestly just feel Into Darkness is a movie about Khan. I've never felt the new Trek movies put out this discovery and exploration vibe. They certainly haven't attempted to do so as of yet.
I've seen this said a lot, and I mean... the original Star Trek was a TV series in the late 60s, so in terms of what the effects were capable of on a TV budget and what standards and practices would allow, I think they were as action-oriented as they could be. The original run of Star Trek is filled with as many fistfights, space battles and fights to the death with the Vulcan Lirpa as the budget would allow. Trek was about much more than JUST action (Conscience Of The King is one of my favorite examples of this), but they did a lot of it.
Unless they put it in the alternate timeline, which it doesn't sound like they will given this quote:
>The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.
...they'd have to some serious retconning to place it anywhere before Voyager. Too much existing canon to take into account when writing the scripts.
> Given they have the head writer from the last two movies, I can't see them sticking with the old, tired canon
What is "tired" about existing canon? What stops people from writing new stories with new characters in the "old" canon? How, for example, was Voyager burdened by the old, tired canon in TNG or DS9?
As best I can tell, the only reason they don't do it is because they would prefer to cash in on the popularity of the pre-existing characters and the pre-existing stories without actually having to write as though they exist.
Star Trek is a series based on exploration. There are plenty of new worlds and new peoples to see, without throwing away the old canon, while at the same time not relying on it very much.
I honestly can't understand why people like the idea of resets and reboots. To me, it just feels lazy and unsatisfying.
I can see where you are coming from and I acknowledge that my comment was cleary meant to denigrate "the canon" of older Star Trek works.
You may be right, a new team of writers may be able to author a new show that adheres to these stories and still comes off as fresh and exciting.
To my mind, the Voyager series (which I did enjoy) was meant to do what you recommend: use exploration of new worlds as a way to introduce new storylines and, to some degree, to distance the show from the storylines of the past. While I enjoyed that show, I don't think it was entirely successful. Specifically, it didn't appear to generate enough interest to warrrant more films, which seem to be what keeps this series alive.
The last series, Enterprise, seemed to be trying to accomplish the same goal by going back into the past, before many of these storylines took place. To my mind, it was wholly unsuccessful. I watched every episode and felt unsatisfied after the majority of them.
In my opinion, the failure of the last two series to generate enough interest for more films was a big reason why the "reboot" idea is more attractive.
Enterprise was just badly written for much of it's run. Season 4 was an excellent example of how Enterprise could've been done very well, but unfortunately it was way too late to save the show.
That quote really doesn't explain anything, since they could put it in the 24th or 25th century in the new timeline, and not have it impact the upcoming movie.
The big joy of Star Trek is speculating about the future, in these times especially I think we could use more optimism about a future we haven't thought of yet, not just a dramatic retcon of stories we already know.
I think they do this very deliberately. Short of making an alternate timeline, they'd have to "play-out" the universe we know as part of TNG/VOY/ENT/DS9.
Sure, they could leave it vague and have us all guessing what happened in those intermediate years, but that wouldn't be the StarTrek we know as we'd have no idea how they got to that point.
Also, they'd essentially lock themselves into an intermediate storyline that somehow leads to the universe they portray.
Hopefully ,if they do decide to make the setting "post" all the other shows by a long stretch of time, they work around some of these pitfalls and come up with a great story and addition to the franchise.
Any word on the setting and how the alternate timeline reset of the of 2009 movie fits into the cannon?
It seems like there are couple possibilities. 1) They act like the reset in the 2009 movie didn't happen, and the new show is just set sometime after TNG/DS9/Voyager, with the same continuity.
2) Everything is reset and we get a new show set sometime after the reset.
I guess there is this:
>The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.
Since the new series is being exec-produced by Alex Kurtzman, who was a producer and co-writer on both the 2009 Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, it seems pretty safe to assume the series will be set in the new timeline/continuity those movies established. I'd read "not related to Star Trek Beyond" more as them saying it won't be tied in any specific way to the plot/characters of that film than that it'll be completely outside the rebooted continuity.
I have always been interested in watching Star Trek, having watched some of Deep Space Nine with my dad and thinking it was okay when I was really young in addition to enjoying the new movies. I figure now is a good time seeing as this is coming out in a little over a year. Any suggestions as to what order I should watch it in or if I should avoid any of the series?
There's no order to see it in or order to avoid seeing it in. The writing is strong for each series (though which one is best is debatable). Also every series's episodes largely work as standalone, though Deep Space 9 and Voyager have some overall stories (a war and getting home respectively). My advice is start with Next Generation, it's the best, and most any episode works on it's own. Voyager is my soft spot. Never saw the original, seeing it isn't necessary to enjoy the later ones.
Dive in, have fun, my personal suggestion is any episode that deals with time travel or the mischievous life form called Q. You can't go wrong there.
DS9 needs to watched in sequential order, TOS doesn't, TNG to a certain extent should be watched in order, but doesn't have to be. Some major arch's rely on character points or what has happened with say the borg.
Voyager and Enterprise aren't as sequential as DS9 but should be watched in order. There are a significant number of episodes in each you can drop from your watching order, but I couldn't tell you which ones. They both have very low points in my opinion.
As for the movies I'm sure there's a watching order. Some of the movies are very meh. If you look online you might find a good order, but if you get really into just watch them in order.
I'd second this suggestion. The first season definitely has some ups and downs - excellent writing but the cast hadn't found the chemistry that really brings the show to life in the later seasons.
A lot first season scripts were recycled TOS scripts or ideas for the abandoned "Star Trek Phase II" show. The later seasons' writing was geared more for the TNG characters & actors, which helped them feel more natural.
The original series doesn't hold up very well from either a narrative perspective or a visual perspective, I'd skip them. The original series movies are a little better and may be worth watching.
Other than that I'd start with The Next Generation and go in chronological order.
The correct viewing order for Enterprise is: watch the last episode of Season 2 and continue from there. Pretend the first two seasons never happened. Also skip the last episode.
It's a funny arc, especially since it goes from the start of the season "torture everything that moves!" 24 style, to more classic Star Trek "are we justified in doing this" by the end of the season.
DS9 only really gets its legs starting in the third season with the introduction of The Dominion. The Dominion War has some of the best Trek episodes ever (In the Pale Moonlight), and some of the worst (The baseball episode), but overall the story arc is awesome.
The Original Series (TOS) has a level of camp that people either love or hate. The original films (1-6) don't rely too much on the series, though I do recommend watching the TOS episode "Space Seed" before The Wrath of Khan. If I recommend a single episode out of all of TOS, it would probably be "The City on the Edge of Forever".
The Next Generation (TNG) took a few seasons to really hit its stride, some will recommend starting at season 3 - though I personally recommend suffering through the first two seasons at least once. Like TOS, TNG is highly episodic is mostly devoid of major story arcs. My favorite series, but probably more for nostalgia than anything else. "Best of Both Worlds" is a fan favorite episode, though I will recommend "The Inner Light" for anyone - even someone who has never even heard of Star Trek.
Deep Space Nine was a bit controversial when it came out, as it moved away from Roddenberry's idealistic "Wagon Train to The Stars" model of a show and more into conflict and gritty geopolitics set in the same era as TNG. There's a story arc and the characters experience far more development throughout the show than the cast of TNG ever did. I've come to enjoy it more as an adult than when I first watched it on the air as a kid.
As for Voyager or Enterprise, I haven't really watched either of them.
The original series is probably worth watching all of, just because there aren't that many episodes, and a few of them are real gems; it also sets the stage for some other things that are worth watching.
Read a summary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (actually if you can, read a summary of a summary, the pacing of the movie is so ponderous). The even numbered movies are the best, but it's probably worth watching the 3rd one as well for continuity. The majority of the fandom pretends that the fifth movie never happened, and is well worth skipping.
The Next Generation (TNG) and Deep Space Nine (DS9) are the two that seem to have the strongest following with Voyager being a bit divisive among the fandom (depending on who you ask it either sucks or is good).
You will have to suffer through the first season of TNG and just trust that it will get better.
DS9 can stand on its own fairly well, but if you want continuity you can watch any time after season 5 of TNG. DS9 enters a fairly significant tone shift around season 4, and season 1, like TNG, is not necessarily representative of the entire series.
[edit] Here's a super-short summary of the above:
TOS
Movies: 2,3,4,6
TNG: at least first 3 seasons, if you don't like after season 3, drop. If you're impatient, you can watch just the pilot than skip to season 3 and not miss too much.
DS9: Seasons 4 and 5 of TNG develop some of the races that are prominent in DS9, so it's best if you wait until at least season 5 of TNG to watch, if you really didn't like season 3 of TNG, then this will stand on its own though.
Voyager: It was not my cup of tea; some fans liked it though.
There are lists of episodes that hit the "classic" ones, but the original series was remarkably suitable to binge-watching on Netflix, partly because there were few seasons. Many of the episodes are retellings of classic tales, some are downright lame or campy. However, the main characters' development is good. There are some interesting discussions of ethics and philosophy in there, as well.
There are certainly episodes that suck, but the better ones are things that you will find have informed our pop culture lexicon, and are referenced in many other things. Watch it for the characters, more than the individual shows, IMO.
TOS is definitely YMMV; my wife flat-out can't stand it, while she will watch TNG with me. And as you point out there just weren't that many episodes, and they establish a base that all of the other series refer back to, so I agree it's worth watching all of for all but the most minimal run-through of Star Trek.
Yes it is slow. But space is big and the slow pace gave the characters time to bond again and work-out the puzzle. I prefer the movie to the later ones because there is no fire-torpedoes quick-solution which wraps-up the story in time for the ad break...
The characters started off awkward and cold but slowly rediscovered who they really were, just as V'Ger did.
You can start almost anywhere; all of the continuities are self-contained. I personally find The Original Series hit-or-miss, but there are a few must-watch episodes; worth seeing, but don't let the quality of the "average" episode put you off from the franchise. Next Generation starts out rough but gets quite good later on; worth watching all the way through. DS9 is exceptional, particularly for marathon watching; it has more story arcs with continuity, and more long-term character development. Voyager is a bit more "anomaly of the week", but it has some particularly good episodes, and it's worth watching all the way through as well. Enterprise is...Enterprise; personally I skipped most of it.
For movies: see the Original Series movies Star Trek II, IV, and VI (watching the series first not required), see Generations once (watch some of TNG first), see First Contact (watch most of TNG first), see Insurrection (surprisingly good), skip Nemesis entirely.
If you have to pick one series to start with, I'd say either DS9 (as a marathon) or TNG. Note that you'll get a very different flavor from both; TNG presents a lovely idyllic future with occasional hiccups, while DS9 presents a darker and grittier 24th century, for better or worse.
I will attempt to analyze the multiple series from a hard/soft sci fi perspective.
Enterprise is probably the hardest. Very RPG-like how they operate to their self made rules in what compared to later series is extreme limitations. Life is a lot different when the fastest transport ship flys at warp 1 and everything isn't deus ex machina away with AI or technobabble. On the other hand they overdo the "wooden ships and iron men" thing a little and there is too much "pew pew" action.
Next up is DS9. Some technobabble for dramatic license but still reads like a paper and pencil RPG fiction (which is good). Some "crewman of the week" cheesy soft filler episodes but mostly hard science fiction story. Has a reasonably hard science overall story arc. Arguably the best overall series. Has the best "hard" written "soft" character in all of trek, the Cardassian "tailor". He's not really a tailor, hope this isn't too much of a spoiler. Best sci fi on TV, maybe.
TOS is all over the map. Sometimes they did a good job of both hard and soft sci fi at the same time. Then there's "space hippies" or "spocks brain" or "spock needs to get laid" which we'll pretend never happened. There is an unrealistic (by hard sci fi standards) fixation on alien planets being the wild west desert. You NEED to watch certain individual episodes, like the doomsday machine.
TNG is the softest series, its General Hospital soap opera, on a space ship. Toward the middle either its a short story arc, sometimes halfway decent, or "crewmember of the week special story". The Wesley character is kind of the series Jar-Jar and you'd do best to skip episodes where he is "crewman of the month". Also the romance episodes read like fanfic from /r9k/. The alien civilizations are bad caricatures.
Generally across all the series from a hard sci fi viewpoint if an episode involves space nazis, time travel, Ferengi, romance, or a holodeck accident, it can be ignored with little to no loss with very few exceptions.
They have actors from the "professionally produced" shows. I am perfectly willing to sit through non-blockbuster-budgeted series for a chance to see my favourite actors playing their roles, the ones I grew up watching and had a huge influence on who I am as an adult.
Renegades was nigh godawful.
Prelude to Axanar reminded me of the real-action adverts that big budget games have these days was very HALO 3-eque, not good or bad persay, but it was just a relative short (20min) for their kickstarter so not much to judge it by, the VFX looked professional but very un-Star Trek like which was some what disappointing but unless you have the DS9 effects team that managed to make 3D-CGI look like filmed scaled models or the team behing BSG/Firefly you won't probably get the realistic look either.
Renegades I won't dispute. But I felt like Prelude was exactly what it set out to be and did quite well for that too. Both are doing remarkably well considering the budgets they've been given (even Renegades).
In this day and age we have the privilege to pay for what we want to see, if we feel like it. People love to complain, but seriously, if we aren't willing to pony up the cash for something, why should we expect to studios to produce what we want to see? Even paying for a Netflix subscription will split your money so many different ways that the studios aren't going to be getting that much at the end.
> The brand-new Star Trek will introduce new characters seeking imaginative new worlds and new civilizations, while exploring the dramatic contemporary themes that have been a signature of the franchise since its inception in 1966.
Although the series is aimed more at the US than the rest of the world, What if they decided to tackle the current migration issues? Those will only become bigger in the future as climate change will provoke more mass migrations.
Aside from being contemporary, the topic is a great source of material for dramatic stories too.
EDIT: Could tie in neatly to the Vulcan planet being destroyed in the new timeline.
I'm really hoping its not set in the new timeline. My hope is that it is a continuation of the Post Deep Space Nine/ Dominion War/ Voyager timeline. I would hope they look at whats happened in the books set in that period. The final borg invasion, the rise of the typhon pact, and Dr.Bashir from DS9 becoming sort of a Ed Snowden character.
Oh that sounds fantastic. Yes, surveillance and privacy is also a Big Theme these days.
(I only mentioned the new timeline because a Star Trek centered around the troubles of the migrating remainders of Vulcan civilization is just about the only thing that sounds like an appealing hook in that setting. Like others have mentioned, it's an Space Action Movie timeline, not a cerebral Star Trek timeline)
As it happens, Doctor Who is right in the middle of a story about this.
What's really surprising is that as of the first part of the story, Doctor Who seems to, for the first time ever, be taking a more right-wing than left-wing approach to the political metaphor. It turns out that letting twenty million shape-shifting Zygons settle on Earth actually was a terrible idea after all! Not all of them are bad, but a sufficient number are, and you can't tell the bad ones from the good ones.
They'll probably find a way to twist it back to a leftism-compliant story in the latter part, but it's interesting that the first part of the story at least is a pretty convincing argument against letting large numbers of potentially-dangerous foreigners into your planet/country.
For the concurrent distribution, I believe they are referring only to international distribution. For example, House of Cards was broadcast on traditional TV channels in countries that did not have Netflix (like Australia, New Zealand, and India).
> The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast on the CBS Television Network. The premiere episode and all subsequent first-run episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access
> will also be distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms around the world by CBS Studios International.
- CBS Television Network first, then
- United States - exclusively CBS All Access
- International, except United States - multiple other platforms
Kinda worried that this will be a "web-only" series, Star Trek needs quite a good production to work well, The budget for a TNG episode was 2M$ which was pretty unheard off back then and is even considered expensive these days (GOT which is currently the most expensive running show has about 6M per episode and when you count the fact that TNG had 24-25 episodes per season the overall season budget was almost the same).
I'm really hoping that the web production will be more akin to Netflix or Amazon Studios quality and budget rather than the usual network webseries tie in.
Also anyone has any ideas about the cast? there was a very long standing rumor / pre-production "Captain Worf" show that was supposed to happen but never did, I really hope that this won't be in the rebooted universe because it was well kinda meh.
Enterprise wasn't great (4th season was amazing tho), if this will be of the same quality as TNG/DS9 or even "mom we got stuck in the holodeck again" Voyager this would truly blow my mind, but as of now I am pessimistic beyond hope until I can see the cast, writers, and canonical premise.
Sci Fi shows are expensive to make period - which is why there aren't usually a lot of them on TV. Just think about it: for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.
Everything on a Sci Fi (or fantasy) show has to be custom-made; from the costumes to the wall decorations to the light fixtures to the furniture. Custom making these things isn't easy, because they first have to be designed so they look like they "fit" stylistically, then built. A show like Star Trek will also have extensive makeup / prosthetics to depict the many different races.
Besides, Star Trek is an active franchise with two recent, very successful movies. No studio exec would ruin a franchise like that with a half-assed, underproduced web series. Because you can't do Sci Fi cheaply without becoming B-movie quality, this show will have to have at a minimum Stargate Atlantis levels of production value. They may just be putting it on the web because the Star Trek demographic doesn't watch network TV and the web is a better way to reach the core audience for the show.
So never saw the Dr. Who series int he 1970s and 1980s :)
Personally I loved the campy Dr Whos a lot.
BBC - "Your almost Out of Budget and you have 3 part series to finish"
Producer - "No problem we will put a trash can over that guy and tape up a few trash bags, throw some kids paint on it and there is our new monster." "We will also call the gravel pit see if we can use it as a location during there lunch breaks."
Yeah; I'm excluding the campy Sci Fi from this -- any of the low-budget movies that the Syfy channel made, for example. They weren't intended to be good or even draw a large audience, and they did pretty well considering their budgets. But they didn't have the baggage or expectations that the "Star Trek" name brings with it.
And even with Dr. Who, most of the action takes place in the present day -- which helps with saving money on costumes and sets.
Let's not forget all the Doctor Who episodes that take place in the past, which effectively means they can raid the wardrobes of whatever BBC period drama is being filmed that week...
My friends' fathers (plural) worked on the "SFX" in Dr Who in the 70s and Blake's 7. The ray guns were from an old chandelier they had in their living room. Good times.
Shows are expensive to make period it just depends what is your "catch", drama's can be also very expensive to make especially historical ones Broadwalk empire has nearly the same budget as GOT, Rome (the HBO & BBC one) was the most expensive show ever made besides friends which had a budget of over 10M$ per episode because much of the cast was being paid over 1M per episode.
It's not always the budget it's also the production Firefly managed to make very good use of VFX with relatively "small" budget, BSG didn't had an explosive budget either, Star Gate had also a relatively small budget with the VFX heavy episodes having less than 400,000$ effects budget they just used it rather well.
On the other hand you can have very high budget shows looking like B-movie quality, Terra Nova, Falling Skies and Fox's attempts at scifi Almost Human (which was a freaking amazing show and Fox exec's need to pay in blood) and their current Minority Report shows are very expensive but have very low quality looking effects.
And if you want the best example of how budget can easily be misused well then Agents of Shield had a 14M budget for the pilot and even the per episode budget was considerably lower it was still pretty damn high and they still managed to completely cock it up both in the visuals and the story/plot departments.
IF they'll build a solid production team hopefully there are some folks at Paramount Television that worked on previous shows and are still either alive and or working in TV production and give them budget and creative freedom to work then we might get a good product, if this is going to be brand managed like AOS then it's going to be completely bonkers.
AOS is tethered to the cinematic Marvel's universe and it's it's biggest flaw, it's plot is completely dictated by the movies and it spoiled Cap 2 for me and just became a running joke.
Agent Carter was considerably better because it was set back enough in the past that they can do anything without having to tie it in with the movies.
And this is my biggest must have for this show, either put it in the original canon, reboot it again, or throw it so far away from the movies that it couldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole or don't make it at all.
Yeah; any period dramas, fantasy or sci fi shows are just going to be ridiculously expensive. Sitcoms and ensemble dramas are a little cheaper; but eventually if the show gets popular, the cast will demand to be paid. But at least for the first couple seasons the show is cheap to produce, and if it builds an audience, it's easier to justify the increased cost.
Sci Fi shows are the most expensive in their first season, because you have to design the universe up-front. A network exec doesn't know if the show is going to pull an audience, but he does know he's got to drop a whole lot of money to even find out. Which makes other options a lot more attractive, and explains the lack of high-quality Sci Fi on TV right now.
And like it or not, the cinematic tie-ins and continuity within the universe are what make Marvel appealing as a brand. DC has done a terrible job at this; the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie has different actors and takes place in a different universe than the last (or really, any) Batman movie. Having multiple Batman characters confuses audiences, and Marvel has done a really good job keeping things consistent.
>> for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.
Worth noting: for sitcoms, staff costs are often as high/higher than the SF shows that make it to the screen. For example, actors on _The Big Bang Theory_ are rumored to earn $1m per episodeeach. Ditto other shows like _Modern Family_.
Likely there are relatively few Sci Fi shows because the Sci Fi writ large has yet to figure out how to connect with audience sizes beyond a niche. If they achieve mainstream reach, the cost of the sets will not matter as much.
The staff costs for sitcoms don't get to be that high until the show has already established itself as a ratings draw. So as a network, you can invest in 10 shitty sitcoms, pay tons of money to the 2 or 3 shows that actually build an audience and come out ahead. You have to invest a lot of money into a Sci Fi show before it even makes it in front of an audience, which means it's a riskier bet. TV executives hate risk, so there aren't a lot of Sci Fi shows on TV right now.
Yeah, tying this to an unproven web streaming service seems like the modern equivalent of giving a show a time slot in the middle of the night.
Maybe worse, actually.
The "Captain Worf" show was AFAIK never in serious consideration. Michael Dorn was a huge fan of the idea and kept proposing it everywhere he went, which is the only reason it gained as much publicity as it did, but as far as I can tell it was never taken very seriously in the studios.
And I'm kind of glad for it - Worf is great, and Michael Dorn seems like a great guy, but Trek has always been about the ensemble crew and not revolved around any singular character. "Worf feat. crew" would've been a huge thematic departure.
In any case, I'm pretty sure this will be in the alternate universe (JJ Abrams-verse). It just doesn't make sense to have something in the Prime universe anymore, commercially at least. This makes me sad. The fact that Kurtzman is involved IMO suggests this is definitely a reboot-universe thing, as does the rumor that Bryan Singer might be producing.
That said, Brannon Braga and Rick Berman not being involved might be a good thing...
> Yeah, tying this to an unproven web streaming service seems like the modern equivalent of giving a show a time slot in the middle of the night.
This is just standard operating procedure for CBS/Paramount, who have viewed Star Trek as a big enough draw to attract audiences to new distribution channels for decades.
Then in the '80s they used Star Trek: The Next Generation as the flagship for a new, syndication-only system of network-unaffiliated TV stations.
Then in the '90s they revived the dream of a Paramount network in the form of UPN (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPN), and created Star Trek: Voyager to attract viewers to that.
These efforts have had varying degrees of success, but they've never failed hard enough to shake CBS/Paramount from the conviction that new Star Trek is something people will want to see so badly that they'll be willing to change their viewing habits to get it.
I don't know that a post-TNG Worf would be all that interesting anyway. He largely overcame his struggle between his Klingon and Star Fleet self, which is where most of his appeal lay (for me at least).
> I really hope that this won't be in the rebooted universe because it was well kinda meh
I'm not a hardcore Star Trek fan, but was very disappointed with the new films. They're mostly generic action in space with some familiar names and Starfleet uniforms.
Every little thing that made Star Trek entertaining has been stripped away.
Not too surprising considering JJ Abrams told in an interview that "I would watch episodes but it always felt too philosophical to me".
I'm not a hardcore fan either I watched TNG, DS9 and Voyager as just another Scifi show back when MGM, Paramount and 20cent Fox still wanted to make television we had Stargate, Babylon 5, Star Trek, then Scifi was pretty much left to in the hands of syndicated TV productions and basic cable which resulted in well meh.
Shows like BSG are pretty much unicorn's these days no one seems to want to make serious scifi the best we can hope for is for the random Canadian show to be picked up by SyFy and not being shredded (Continuum was good, Dark Matter seems interesting but very goofy).
SyFy is also trying to get of their asses together I'm still hoping that they'll pick up Ascension it's backdoor pilot / mini-series was one of the most interesting Scifi concepts of late and if they don't screw up 'Childhoods End' (which from the trailer looks like an HBO show which is great) I might actually believe that they still can produce something besides fake reality shows and wrestlemania.
I've seen the first "season" of black mirror it was OK is just don't like that type of Scifi I like my Scifi more bigger than life, and while i don't mind some "futuristic earth" shows Black Mirror has the same issue I have with most UK shows and that they produce too little episodes to even fill an afternoon, but Black Mirror just took it to a whole new level with having like what 2-3 episodes?
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.
It was never a series it was a backdoor pilot produced as a mini-series.
Battlestar Galactica was made in the same manner it was just intended to be a mini-series / made for tv movie and it was't picked up for a show until the overseas ratings came in and Sky pretty much offered Syfy to help produce it.
I didn't like Dark Matter initially, but it won me over by the end of the first season. I think it felt more Sci-Fi as the show went on.
I will fully admit that if there was any other legit Sci-Fi on TV I might not care as much about Dark Matter, but since there is slim pickings in that genre I await season 2.
They're mostly generic action in space with some familiar names and Starfleet uniforms.
You've just described the Wrath of Khan, considered one of the finest films in the franchise.
Hell, a good number of episodes in every series in the franchise were just action in space... the Best of Both Worlds is literally just Us vs The Borg.
Fans have incredibly rose tinted glasses regarding ST. For every City on the Edge of Forever or The Inner Light there's at least one The Doomsday Machine or, worse, Spock's Brain...
Edit:
BTW, I actually think Into Darkness was pretty interesting. It reminded me of The Drumhead or similar, where they used an enemy or a crisis to examine the nature Star Fleet itself. It's just a pity they, once again, didn't actually use someone of Indian descent to play Khan...
Wrath of Khan is only good because of Mantalban. The movies didn't really pick up until the fourth one, when they stopped taking them so seriously and just had some fun making a movie.
And at least a handful of good episodes exist. There are no such specimens among the (two) new movies.
Wrath of Khan is only good because of Mantalban. The movies didn't really pick up until the fourth one, when they stopped taking them so seriously and just had some fun making a movie.
So you're a "Trouble with Tribbles" kind of a guy/girl.
Nothing wrong with that at all, everyone has different tastes!
But we'll agree to disagree. While Khan is clearly an action film first, it's an exploration of Kirk as a character, which is interesting. And that ending...
Frankly, I'll put myself in the minority by stating that I personally think The Voyage Home was frickin' awful... really, a fish-out-of-water tale (well, mammal-out-of-water...) via time travel? sigh
Star Trek IV is definitely a lazy, dumb (object) story serving as a thin layer to make some point about 80ies environmentalism. But it's still a lot of fun, and thus one of my favorites.
To call "The Wrath of Khan" generic action is pretty unfair, especially when compared against it's clone/reboot "Into Darkness". TWOK opens with Kirk pondering his own mortality and some of the universal concerns of aging. ID opens with a Spock apparently deciding to off himself, with no real motivation or development of that decision given. We can quibble about the intervening parts but for my part I find the action and suspense in TWOK much better, and more importantly, logically motivated. What was the point of the entire battle on Q'onos in ID, other than to just look cool? What sort of character development occured between Kirk and Spock?
Finally, we get to the end, and the most egregious difference between the two. In TWOK we get a tense cat and mouse chase through the nebula, which is won, CRUCIALLY, by out-thinking your opponent. The whole "2d thinking" thing and what not. I admit it's probably not the most air-tight of plot points, but it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two movies, because ID ends with a loud (visually and sonically) fist-fight that is won by the person who punches hardest. Yay I guess.
Anyway, Star Trek is definitely not all sunshine and rainbows but it is crucially several things that the new movies are not: It prioritizes communication and curiousity over violence and dominance. It is not trying to be cynical or "edgy" in an attempt to be mature. The struggle of people working together to overcome a problem and find a positive solution or compromise can and is every bit as exciting as a phaser battle. And finally, that it is fundamentally optimistic, not in a the sort of "magic technology makes everything awesome" way that the new series seems, but that humans can come together and make things better for each other, the no-win scenario does not exist (mostly) and that we have to work hard to make this come true, but it is do-able.
It prioritizes communication and curiousity over violence and dominance.
In the context of the series, sure, where you have an hour a week to wax philosophical.
The movies are far more uneven in that respect. They attempted it in The Motion Picture. Result: total snoozer.
Khan is an action/revenge flick.
Search For Spock is another action/revenge flick.
Voyage Home is far more in the original mold, humans trying to make peace with an unknown alien force. But it also wavers between comical and absurd... no character development to be found here.
The Final Frontier... I'm not even sure where to begin. It's terrible. :)
The Undiscovered Country is, to me, the best mix of the lot... a bit action, a bit politics, the origin story of the Federation and the Klingon peace, commentary on racism, etc...
But that's one film out of five.
So be fair: you're comparing two movies to an entire franchise and then complaining they aren't what you want them to be. If you more fairly compare them to just their film contemporaries, my opinion is that they stand up reasonably well.
That's not to say they aren't clearly designed for more mass-market appeal. The Undiscovered Country, for example, is pure fan service, whereas Star Trek or Into Darkness are clearly aimed at a broader audience. I just don't think they're significantly worse than their peers simply because they don't talk it out... ;)
How could The Drumhead remind you of Into Darkness? It is a incoherent action movie with plot points that function as an "homage" (read: shameful copy) to the original movies or they serve as a plot device, versus a courtroom drama. The only connection between them is that they both happen mostly in space and on a spaceship.
It seems you aren't diffentiating between the narrative structure versus the narrative themes.
Structurally, yeah, obviously they're very different.
However, thematically, they share a lot of similarities.
In The Drumhead, Starfleet begins a witchhunt to track down a suspected spy they believe is working with the Romulans.
Into Darkness involves a group of people who attempt to manufacture a war with the Klingons, whom they perceive as a fundamental threat to the Federation.
Both examine racism, fear, and xenophobia in the context of the Star Trek universe, and the lengths people will go to if they feel they're morally justified based on those perceived fears.
The movie doesn't examine anything. There are some themes are shared, but they are in no way addressed in the same depth as in the episode. A plot device about racism in an action movie does not equal developing that theme an hour long well written court drama. And the punctuation just makes it even more clear, the episode is ended by a moral speech while the movie ends with an action scene.
Best of both worlds also showed Picard becoming the enemy, riker as captain having to try to stop the Borg at the cost of his friend, and some more good background on the Borg.
Plus the effects of that episode lasted into ds9 and first contact.
I suspect they will give this a fat budget because this is meant to be a driver for subscriptions to the $6 / mo plan for one network (CBS) which is closer to a premium HBO subscription than anything else.
>"This new series will premiere to the national CBS audience, then boldly go where no first-run Star Trek series has gone before – directly to its millions of fans through CBS All Access,” said Marc DeBevoise
They are definitely putting it on TV. This is like when games are advertised "Only on Playstation" when there's also a PC version, since it's a console exclusive. They just really want people to subscribe to their streaming service instead of Netflix, so their app will be the exclusive (legal) streaming destination.
This sentence annoys me more every time I read it:
>"This new series will premiere to the national CBS audience, then boldly go where no first-run Star Trek series has gone before – directly to its millions of fans through CBS All Access,”
Why can they not simply write in a way is comprehensible?
"The first episode will be on CBS. Subsequent episodes will be on "CBS All Access"”.
It's obviously written to be a promotional piece for CBS All Access. Really the only response that will benefit them financially at this point is for people to get interested in the service because Star Trek is coming. Depending on what other countries and services it is available in, it might be possible to use a VPN to stream it on competing services in the US.
Although it says that it will only premiere on TV and then move to the streaming service, I wouldn't be surprised if it is later added to the TV schedule, maybe once the second season starts, in a reverse trend of the current TV->streaming release delay.
Web-only may be a great choice for a scifi series these days though. Nielsen ratings are harsh on traditional TV scifi shows since so many of us watch online.
They'd better just blow out the stops, go like 4000 years in the future and start imagining some out there stuff. I don't need people in makeup and masks fondling iPads and acting all utopian cause Roddenberry said so.
They had the PADDs on star trek more than decades before tablets where released, yet another example of star trek being ahead of its time
as for your "Utopian" comment, in the last few decades we have entered the era of plenty, the main problem encountered by startups we see here in HN is not that they are not innovative its that their products/services get drowned out in a sea of plenty
Given a few hundred years and plentiful+cheap energy it is not beyond the realm of imagination to imagine replicators, hell on a recent cruise i nicknamed then soda vending machines "the replicator" because the thing could spit out hundreds of different drinks with a few taps.
So a world of the future would be fairly "socialist" as machines and cheap energy allow people to devote their times towards science, exploration, art etc, we are already seeing this happening today and further mechanization and robotics will only speed up the trend
I'll grant them 15 years ahead of the iPad, but the show was supposed to be hundreds of years advanced.
My utopian thoughts aren't really around the economics. Star trek humans are all pure of motive and work to do the right thing in all circumstances, modulo plot-necessitated black hats. I'd prefer a bit more humanity there. Humans are far more complex than the black-and-white morality plays star trek tends to be.
If they make a show that has "wrath of Khan" level pathos to the characters, I'm in. If it's action schlock or morality plays, the star trek brand isn't enough to attract me, particularly if the technology alternates between "stupidly unreal" and banal.
Yeah the real part of the tech that kicks me out of the show is how shitty the computers are. Having manual pilots doing anything seems absurd. In some episodes, rigging the computer up to do something is seen as something tricky and complicated.
Even in-universe, it doesn't make sense. The Holodeck is sophisticated enough to fly ships through physically real environments. (They do physics tests in the deck.) So just use whatever great AI system powering the Holodeck to do whatever advanced maneuver you need.
Also, the biggest fake tech: The communicators. The show clearly shows a person hailing another on the comm badge. BUT there's no delay in the response. "Captain to LaForge" - "LaForge here". We see that the recipient always hears the entire message. We also see there's no delay in the reply, much less than "Captain to" takes. I suppose this is easily solved by the commbadge just reading neural patterns and determining who you're gonna call. But there's no mention of that, and the badges don't seem to function that way.
When watching Star Trek, I wonder what kind of science fiction the characters would read in the 24th century. I think 64th century would certainly cover that. :)
Far too many characters are (conveniently) interested in Shakespeare or 20th century culture.
I'm skeptical. TV shows in general have taken a turn for the worse lately, with the best series not even really airing on cable. Here's to hoping it's not just another cobbled-together excuse for showing you an ad every 10 minutes.
Yes, CBS has this weird notion that you will pay $5.99 a month AND watch commercials that you can't skip.
I get that they "think" its like this now, they get paid by the cable company for their channel (the $5.99) and they send them content with commercials (which they have sold), but the new world is NetFlix which charges monthly, but has now commercials.
Given the quality of digital broadcast and tendency for it to overlap cable service areas, it's pretty ridiculous that they manage to get anything. It wouldn't be so hard for a consumer friendly TV to transparently switch between sources (well, except for the cable companies making sure not to put consumer friendly features in their now required boxes).
It's not a weird notion, considering it works fairly well for Hulu. Even their "commercial-free" tier features commercials on select episodes because "reasons"
Perhaps 'weird' is the wrong word, I think ultimately it is an unsupportable position. It seems irrational to me in the face of alternatives (Amazon, NetFlix) with higher customer satisfaction.
Reasons like they couldn't get out of it, would be my guess. They are up front with that limitation, and I expect they will push to get rid of the rest of the ads.
I wouldn't say they're very upfront about it. If it's not truly ad-free, they shouldn't be marketing it as such. Including it in tiny text nobody reads isn't being upfront.
People love to make the Netflix comparison, but it's generally silly. First-run, current-season material is vastly more expensive than the backlogs and cheap movies Netflix buys.
You couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free. Netflix works because they only buy cheap content.
Largely irrelevant. Netflix shows are at a budget Netflix controls, rather than the pricing maze of licensing content from major networks. Many more shows, often with higher budgets. And with a price premium because Netflix would be competing with their own services if Netflix was given earlier access to them.
My point was that they are actually producing "First-run, current-season material". They have several shows that have gotten attention for their quality.
You say "you couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free.", but a show with a 10 million dollar budget and a million viewers would cost $10, not a lot more than Google Play for current season stuff (per episode), so apparently people are paying about what it would take.
For just that show. And when you look at the hundreds of shows these streaming services offer, at a potential cost of $10 a pop per user, per show, you start to understand why you still see ads when you pay to subscribe. ;)
I think you are mistaken, the cost per episode of the shows that NetFlix has produced are on a par with anything on Network Television or Cable. What changes is the number of people with fingers in the pie. Certainly the production values of Daredevil were as good as anything on TV at the time. The combination of better CGI (lowering location costs and the costs of set dressing) and streamlining the number of people who want to make a nickel, changes the game with respect to getting new shows on to the viewer's screen.
I was a big Trekkie when I was younger...but I'm surprised at how poorly the show has held up when rewatching on Netflix. I think what spoiled me was the revamped Battlestar Galactica. It's not the dated special effects that bother me, it's the way the utopia of Star Trek's future and technology began to provide way too many plot crutches. By the end of TNG, it seemed like every crisis resolution involved reversing the polarity of some piece of equipment or weapon at the last minute. DS9 was my favorite series up until the latter seasons, where again, fancy technobabble would save the day over well-written plots. I never watched much of Voyager or Enterprise...but it seemed the technobabble only increased, with time travel being thrown in for variety. With Voyager, the absurdity of tech continued from the beginning...IIRC, even though Voyager was banished in the middle of nowhere with purportedly limited resources, some technicality about how the holodeck worked allowed them to basically use the holodeck all the time, as if it ran on magic and dreams (which is basically what the holodeck stood for in all the new series). Even the utopian future of no-currency was rendered a bit absurd with DS9 and the introduction of Ferengi as main characters, and constant mentions of "gold-press latinum"
BSG spoiled me because it showed, credibly that a space-faring future is unlikely to be clean and sanitized. I think one of my favorite aspects of BSG were the mundane ones, such as how having everyone spread out on different ships hampered logistics and communications. In Star Trek, of course, this was solved with instant communication devices, though the impact of instant communication in TNG-and-on seems rather limited compared to what we experience in the Internet-age.
Since the OP states that the new series shares the same writers as the rebooted movies, I'm assuming that the altered timeline will be adopted by the new TV series? The reboot Star Trek films were flashy and entertaining in the way that modern action films are entertaining...but they took up the technology-as-deus-ex-machina to the next level...Scotty created a teleportation device that rendered starship travel moot and, of course, life-giving Tribbles.
> former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
> He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
> "It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
> Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
> La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
> Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
> La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
> Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
> "And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
I feel with Netflix making watching episodes in order and re-watching shows much easier, DS9 is holding up pretty well. If you ignore some of the techno-bs and make a leap of faith on the religion stuff, the dialogue (while theatrical) is tight, the acting (besides the doctor) is pretty good, there's some suspense between the characters. The story evolves. Rewatching I especially like Quark, Garak, Odo - the characters that are not human and their different perspectives.
DS9 was in many ways the best of Star Trek. Season-long plot arcs worked really well (Gul Dukat was a villain for the whole series! Oh, how he evolved!), and the focus not just on characters, but the relationships between characters, was fantastic. The Season 5 finale, when the Federation abandons the station and families are torn apart? Incredible.
I think Odo is probably the best "outsider" character Star Trek has ever had. Data was always a little stiff - understandably. Seven of Nine was eye candy for the autistic crowd for the first few seasons. Odo actually got to do some complex stuff, after awhile - he didn't just have sex with a crew member a few episodes in and then totally ignore romance for five seasons.
Bashir is supposed to be lame for the first while. It's part of his arc that he starts out as a talented, but arrogant doctor and inexperienced officer but grows up as the series grows.
BSG is in many ways a response to the happiness and ease of Voyager, with pretty much everyone leading a good life with plentiful resources despite being marooned far from any help. Terribly lazy writing had the Voyager crew constantly destroy shuttlecraft and fire photon torpedoes they weren't supposed to be able to replace. The ship started out with 38 torpedoes and no way to replace them (stated explicitly in dialogue!) and by the end of the show they had used something like 85 of them.
Total internal consistency isn't necessary, and can actually be harmful to a show if you take it too far. Sometimes it's better to conveniently paper over an earlier mistake. But this is just plain laziness in writing, and it hurt the show by removing a lot of material for conflict and drama.
Ronald Moore was a big driving force behind the new BSG and previously did a lot of work on various Star Treks, including a brief stint with Voyager. In many ways, BSG is "how Voyager should have been."
>The ship started out with 38 torpedoes and no way to replace them (stated explicitly in dialogue!) and by the end of the show they had used something like 85 of them.
I get where you're coming from, and they definitely would have been better served to a) not say that, or b) resolve it at some later time. That said, part of what made Voyager interesting (to me) was that they had basically taken house cats and thrown them into the wild. In Federation space there was never a need or desire to make new photon torpedoes on the fly, but in the Delta quadrant for seven years they probably figure something out.
That is kind of my point. What made Voyager interesting was the dire situation they put everybody into, but then they chickened out and often just punted on the whole question.
How you cope with conflict when your supply of weapons is inherently limited can make for interesting stories. How to find a new supply of weapons could make for interesting stories. But they couldn't be bothered to go either way, and just went straight for "the characters figured it out somehow, offscreen, and implied."
To stretch your house cat analogy way too far, it's like if the show constantly had the cats eating kibble, but without ever addressing the question of where it came from, even though that's a pretty important part of surviving in the wild and has lots of potential for good stories.
Except they never explored the problems they faced. The maquis had about 3 episodes worth of issues integrating perfectly into the crew. They had to ration things apparently, no one ever seemed to mind. Damage wasn't a problem, lots of spares I guess. Oth r than he Doctor it was 7 years of the same people (which is true for most series, except ds9).
Voyager is definitely the worst offender with "reverse the polarity" plot devices, but it also doesn't take itself so seriously. It was very much the polar opposite of BSG in that regard.
I didn't find DS9 picked up that problem in the later seasons though, so I've got to disagree with you there.
They're different sub-genres. I really enjoyed BSG, but for me it didn't take away anything from TNG. The only criticism I have with TNG is that tech isn't the solution to all their non-philosophical problems -- they are a civilization with, to a first-order approximation, complete mastery over energy and matter, with even the Q wary about their further potential. Yet the pattern buffers can't store swathes of human backups because reasons? TNG is at its best when it's philosophical, that aspect is essential to its sub-genre.
As for DS9, it was great, but it wishes it was Babylon 5. B5 was superior in every way except budget.
Hopefully this would be based after the end the war with the Dominion at the end of Deep Space Nine. Enterprise and the new movies have made me tired of Star Trek, not interested in prequels and origin stories any longer.
It would be perfect to introduce a new crew and follow them through the Academy years. They could either do the backstories of existing characters to introduce new ones. You can combine the fun of Hogwarts-eque school, with younger drama, and still throw in lots of science and adventures.
Enterprise was set before Starfleet existed, where nobody knew what they were really doing. The idea was for the crew to make the mistakes that set the precedent for future Starfleet's regulations.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned Star Trek Continues http://www.startrekcontinues.com/ yet. It's financed by donations and has imho very good acting and dramaturgy.
James Doohan's son Chris even impersonates Scotty. (Stays in the family, I guess...).
I, for one, am optimistic. Even though the JJ Abrams reboot movies sucked, he's not the only one who can do the work. There are hordes of people in Hollywood who grew up on Star Trek, love it properly, and want to bring back the spirit of exploration and optimism and the ensemble cast work that make the older series so compelling. I think the world needs a new Star Trek - one that isn't just shiny effects, but holds true to the sense of hope and courage that I loved and still love. And I know it can be done.
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
What did you dislike about the reboot films? I really liked them, I thought they were cast well, and were over-all pretty good.
edit: others in the comments have noted that the reboots are basically just action sequences with none of the underlying social themes that made Star Trek significant in the first place.
They're fine movies (and I think people sometimes forget that Trek movies are, on average, not great), but they're not particularly "trek"-y, aside from reusing the broad strokes of some historical characters.
And personally, I have zero interest in seeing Captain Kirk again. I feel like it was a backwards step to take a broad universe and refocus on the original iconic characters. There are a lot of stories to be told, the Borg are still one of the most fascinating sci-fi creations in years, etc. etc.
Basically my objection is that they don't really "boldly go" anywhere, they just retread.
They were fine action films, but they totally lacked the heart and soul of the tv series, particularly the tv series' focus on exploration and diplomacy and resolving conflicts without violence.
Granted, this has often been the case with Star Trek films (First Contact was sort of an action movie for example).
> Granted, this has often been the case with Star Trek films (First Contact was sort of an action movie for example).
This is a point Trek fans rarely acknowledge.
Star Trek the TV show is often more thoughtful and deals with social commentary well. However Star Trek movies rarely are.
Let's look at the classic Star Trek movies: Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and The Undiscovered Country are all action films. The Voyage Home is a comedy.
Which leaves just two: The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier which both reviewers and audience alike pan for being some of the worst classic Trek films.
Next Gen isn't much better: Generations, First Contact, and Nemesis are all action films and Insurrection is extremely borderline.
So when people say "JJ Abrams ruins Star Trek by producing an action-adventure" they're really ignoring the history of Star Trek films which are full of only that.
I thought "First Contact" was not a very good Trek movie. It always struck me as a movie that was made from a non-Star Trek script that was retroactively made into a Star Trek script. I also thought Captain Picard's behavior was wildly inconsistent with how he was portrayed in the show... not where he went all "Goodfellas" on the Borg in the holodeck, that was a fine character moment, but when he "mercy killed" one of his crew. This was something the TV Picard would never have done. He would have risked his life and the whole ship to save that one crewman and not just given up so early one... after all, he was dragged off and assimilated himself, but he was rescued and recovered.
"First Contact" also played fast and loose with established canon a lot more than any other movie had done. I didn't care for the portrayal of Cochrane as a drunk loser (although this has no bearing on James Cromwell's performance... he is always great).
There's nothing wrong with action in Trek... it's built into the concept, but the action was always less important than the Big Ideas... at least until some of the movies, and especially the vapid JJTrek reboots came along.
First contact was a story people wanted to see and was well done.
Into darkness was a shallow action movie that tries to bludgeon the audience with its themes about the military then devolves into a shitty ripoff of a classic moment from a different movie. I don't actually hate into darkness, but tossing it and first contact into the same bucket as action movies is ridiculous.
As action films, they were mediocre. But taking the surfaces of the characters without the depth of the characters - it was the worst sort of hipster irony. That scene in Into Darkness where they role-reversed Spock's death from Wrath of Khan? I wanted to beat JJ Abrams to death with a rock for that. It was awful. It completely ditched the concept of Spock's sacrifice and Kirk's love for his best friend. It was like a Halloween costume version of one of the greatest scenes in Star Trek history.
And just in general, it failed to move with any heart. Now, I'm broadly critical of JJ Abrams in general - I don't think he ever thinks through the consequences of his writing decisions, which is why his tv shows always jumped the shark in season 2. But Star Trek is just more proof that he doesn't get it, as a writer or as a fan.
I'm a bit disappointed how pessimistic this thread is. They're bringing Star Trek back! There are 1000 reasons it might fail, but it's GREAT to see them trying. The ideals are timeless.
"CBS All Access"? Nobody wants to buy individual streaming services from every studio/network. Stop trying to make it happen. Just sign a deal with Netflix or Amazon[1] and accept you missed the boat.
[1] And really Amazon is only acceptable because it's free.[2]
[2] Given that having Prime is pretty much non-negotiable anyway.
Netflix and Amazon don't seem to be interested in becoming the Comcast or direct tv of the Internet.
The amount of content Netflix and Amazon can create is limited. They cannot pay for every tv show for 100-120 bucks a year. Look at what a mature company like HBO produces for 180 a year. 3-5 hour long prestige dramas. 5-8 half hour comedies. Some low expense reality tv like Bill Mayer or Real Sports.
Netflix may be able to scale better, if they get 80% of households they can go cheaper. But they aren't going to be q total replacement for all media.
And you don't want them too. One company with control over all media would be a disaster.
1. Isn't afraid of being slow, talky, and philosophical (Sorry J.J.). TNG had many excellent episodes specifically because it was willing to risk being "boring", while DS9 evolved Trek into the homogeneous "action" formula that has dominated Voyager, most of Enterprise, and the recent movies.
2. Is a force for idealism. The captains of Star Trek are paragons of humanity, and are supposed to find the high ground when tackling murky issues. The original series featured the first on-screen interracial kiss. TNG dove into many thorny ethical issues. While TNG took a hard stance against torture, Enterprise portrayed it as a useful tool.
3. Boldy goes to new places. Star Trek (2009) did nothing new geographically, but at least it went off the reservation by destroying a storied and beloved Trek locale. Not everyone liked that, but at least it was daring. Into Darkness (2013) aped Khan badly, completely missing out on what made the original character and movie special. In general, the Trek movie franchise has been chasing Khan for too long, and needs to focus on other aspects of Trek.
4. Is smart about technology, and self consistent. Nerds pay attention to this stuff. Khan beaming directly from Earth to the Klingon homeworld functionally obliterated the vastness of space in the rebooted Trek universe. Trek doesn't need to blow previously imagined sci-fi tech out of all proportion to be interesting. It's strength, historically, has been inventing new technologies and examining their impact on humans. Is there anything in the new Trek movies that, in a few decades, we're going to be saying, "Hey, Trek predicted this!".
5. Doesn't solve everything by modifying the deflector dish. (Corollary to 4) Voyager, I'm looking at you. All of the series occasionally penned "tech" into their scripts to lazily magic their way out of situations. At some point this became standard practice and as much a part of the formula as always having at least a few minutes of "action trek", no matter how inappropriate it was to the episode. This is a crutch that should be used as sparingly as possible.
6. Features interesting, well-developed alien cultures. The original series may have debuted the Klingons, but it was TNG that fleshed them out into a living, breathing culture. TNG debuted the Cardassians and Bajorans, but DS9 benefited greatly from exploring the cultures of both these races. The formula of Voyager forced a return to shallow portrayals of "species of the week", and the show suffered greatly as a result.
One addition in terms of how Trek becomes great, from a behind-the-camera perspective:
7. Results from a tension between competing visions between writers and creators. Examples: TNG was campy and unwatchable, mostly, until Michael Piller took over as head writer in the third season and started focusing on characters and more traditional drama. Piller had an inclination to be too soap opera-y but was held in check by Roddenberry's presence and later, spirit. DS9 was the result of the tension between Ira Steven Behr and Berman aided by Ronald D Moore, and worked well until it became the all-war-all-the-time series. Voyager is the result of Berman, Braga and Jeri Taylor running wild without any counteracting force. Enterprise is the same (minus Taylor).
A TNG episode was censored in the UK for about a decade too, where the character Data talks about the "Irish Reunification of 2024" as an example where terrorism as a strategy worked. JJTrek doesn't need to worry about censors there's nothing of substance in love triangles set in space.
As for relying on tech deus-ex-machina TNG writers used to send off scripts to physics professors and have them fill in gaps about nanotechnology and other unknown late 80s technology. They were replaced in Voyager by studio cronies which is why everything is solved by "re-polarizing the deflector dish".
DS9 had to deal with the "grey" areas of civilization and military organizations in the latter seasons and they did it very well, as well as what happens to society when it has been griped by fear (e.g. shapeshifter agents on earth).
Enterprise started kinda ok (not great) but then 9/11 happened (which happened technically like a week or 2 before the 1st season aired, but it was too fresh to touch) which meant that it had to deal with that thing with it's very own 9/11 in the 3rd season.
With the 4th season they pretty much went into "concept-album" fan service type of self containing arcs and it was pretty damn freaking good, they brought allot of excellent talent specifically Manny Coto which pretty much made the biggest fan service production once he was made the executive producer and the exclusive writer of the show.
With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions i put every episode of Season 4 of Enterprise in my personal hall of fame both in terms of Star Trek and general Scifi episodes.
Episodes like In a Mirror, Darkly, These Are the Voyages, United are what Star Trek should look like and they had a full season of them.
Currently re-watching the Next Generation on Netflix. The remastering is wonderful; you can really see the film-level quality in things like Geordi's visor, etc. What I miss most about the Star Trek universe is its optimism; particularly during The Next Generation days. Sci-fi has largely mirrored the militarism of the past decade. If the new series brings back some of that optimism, I'd be excited.
Star Trek is a franchise that was slowly being crushed by the mass of its own canon--five television series, ten feature films, books, comics, video games, and a devoted fanbase will do that.
That is likely why the Abrams films rebooted the universe--restarting from the Captain Pike era--with a big enough change to justifiably say it changes everything that the previous continuity ever did.
And that is rather fortunate, because if they had made first contact in 2016 rather than 1996, people might conceivably be throwing money into the Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter interfaces to the Borg-net, rather than foolishly engaging in any futile resistance. The cube-ships would be ruthlessly harvesting our most shareable lolcat videos, and everyone would be walking around in identical jeans-and-hoodies outfits and calling everything "amazing".
A reboot is really the only way to restore the franchise to its original mission to simplify today's social issues and frame them up against the backdrop of a more progressive starfaring society, so that people can get some perspective on those things that might otherwise be too close to home in a somewhat entertaining way.
For instance, given the South China Sea situation, I would guess that at some point, the new Star Trek series would introduce some alien species as proxies for China, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and maybe even Brunei, and the China-aliens would be constructing artificial dwarf planets out of hazardous nebulae using unlicensed Genesis devices, and using them as bases to harass passing scientific and mercantile traffic. Then some of the people watching would obsess over details and completely miss the broader point.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadOh god, that would be tragic.
That being said I thought it was quite good when you didn't think of it as 'star trek'
Sure, every movie is going to be action-packed for film screens, but those two I felt stuck to Star Trek's ideals more than the rest, where the movie focused on stopping a specific evil villain.
Spock was okay at times. Kirk was okay at times. Scotty was comic relief, with very little of him being a badass
>The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.
...they'd have to some serious retconning to place it anywhere before Voyager. Too much existing canon to take into account when writing the scripts.
It could be that they need to be clear that they aren't associated with the next film. Different characters, etc.
What is "tired" about existing canon? What stops people from writing new stories with new characters in the "old" canon? How, for example, was Voyager burdened by the old, tired canon in TNG or DS9?
As best I can tell, the only reason they don't do it is because they would prefer to cash in on the popularity of the pre-existing characters and the pre-existing stories without actually having to write as though they exist.
Star Trek is a series based on exploration. There are plenty of new worlds and new peoples to see, without throwing away the old canon, while at the same time not relying on it very much.
I honestly can't understand why people like the idea of resets and reboots. To me, it just feels lazy and unsatisfying.
You may be right, a new team of writers may be able to author a new show that adheres to these stories and still comes off as fresh and exciting.
To my mind, the Voyager series (which I did enjoy) was meant to do what you recommend: use exploration of new worlds as a way to introduce new storylines and, to some degree, to distance the show from the storylines of the past. While I enjoyed that show, I don't think it was entirely successful. Specifically, it didn't appear to generate enough interest to warrrant more films, which seem to be what keeps this series alive.
The last series, Enterprise, seemed to be trying to accomplish the same goal by going back into the past, before many of these storylines took place. To my mind, it was wholly unsuccessful. I watched every episode and felt unsatisfied after the majority of them.
In my opinion, the failure of the last two series to generate enough interest for more films was a big reason why the "reboot" idea is more attractive.
The big joy of Star Trek is speculating about the future, in these times especially I think we could use more optimism about a future we haven't thought of yet, not just a dramatic retcon of stories we already know.
Sure, they could leave it vague and have us all guessing what happened in those intermediate years, but that wouldn't be the StarTrek we know as we'd have no idea how they got to that point.
Also, they'd essentially lock themselves into an intermediate storyline that somehow leads to the universe they portray.
Hopefully ,if they do decide to make the setting "post" all the other shows by a long stretch of time, they work around some of these pitfalls and come up with a great story and addition to the franchise.
Hopefully more like most of the series and less like the new movies.
It seems like there are couple possibilities. 1) They act like the reset in the 2009 movie didn't happen, and the new show is just set sometime after TNG/DS9/Voyager, with the same continuity.
2) Everything is reset and we get a new show set sometime after the reset.
I guess there is this: >The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.
I say they open up another timeline. Earth explodes and Vulcan survives.
I would sort of be surprised if they decide to heft all the baggage from TNG et al.
Dive in, have fun, my personal suggestion is any episode that deals with time travel or the mischievous life form called Q. You can't go wrong there.
Voyager and Enterprise aren't as sequential as DS9 but should be watched in order. There are a significant number of episodes in each you can drop from your watching order, but I couldn't tell you which ones. They both have very low points in my opinion.
As for the movies I'm sure there's a watching order. Some of the movies are very meh. If you look online you might find a good order, but if you get really into just watch them in order.
The Motion Picture (#1) is basically an elongated TOS episode. Doesn't really influence any of the other films. Some enjoy it, some find it dull.
The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home (#2-4) form a trilogy and must be watched in order.
The Final Frontier (#5)...I loved it when I was nine. Skippable otherwise.
The Undiscovered Country (#6) should be watched after #2 through #4. It and The Wrath of Khan are typically tied for the favorite Trek film.
But imo, star trek TNG with Captain Picard is the best one. Deep space nine is good but is a bit slow, I think TNG is easier to watch.
I'm from the mid eighties and can't watch the original, it's too dated for me. So take that for what it's worth.
They maybe hadn't quite found their footing yet.
Other than that I'd start with The Next Generation and go in chronological order.
The Next Generation (TNG) took a few seasons to really hit its stride, some will recommend starting at season 3 - though I personally recommend suffering through the first two seasons at least once. Like TOS, TNG is highly episodic is mostly devoid of major story arcs. My favorite series, but probably more for nostalgia than anything else. "Best of Both Worlds" is a fan favorite episode, though I will recommend "The Inner Light" for anyone - even someone who has never even heard of Star Trek.
Deep Space Nine was a bit controversial when it came out, as it moved away from Roddenberry's idealistic "Wagon Train to The Stars" model of a show and more into conflict and gritty geopolitics set in the same era as TNG. There's a story arc and the characters experience far more development throughout the show than the cast of TNG ever did. I've come to enjoy it more as an adult than when I first watched it on the air as a kid.
As for Voyager or Enterprise, I haven't really watched either of them.
Read a summary of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (actually if you can, read a summary of a summary, the pacing of the movie is so ponderous). The even numbered movies are the best, but it's probably worth watching the 3rd one as well for continuity. The majority of the fandom pretends that the fifth movie never happened, and is well worth skipping.
The Next Generation (TNG) and Deep Space Nine (DS9) are the two that seem to have the strongest following with Voyager being a bit divisive among the fandom (depending on who you ask it either sucks or is good).
You will have to suffer through the first season of TNG and just trust that it will get better.
DS9 can stand on its own fairly well, but if you want continuity you can watch any time after season 5 of TNG. DS9 enters a fairly significant tone shift around season 4, and season 1, like TNG, is not necessarily representative of the entire series.
[edit] Here's a super-short summary of the above:
TOS
Movies: 2,3,4,6
TNG: at least first 3 seasons, if you don't like after season 3, drop. If you're impatient, you can watch just the pilot than skip to season 3 and not miss too much.
DS9: Seasons 4 and 5 of TNG develop some of the races that are prominent in DS9, so it's best if you wait until at least season 5 of TNG to watch, if you really didn't like season 3 of TNG, then this will stand on its own though.
Voyager: It was not my cup of tea; some fans liked it though.
There are certainly episodes that suck, but the better ones are things that you will find have informed our pop culture lexicon, and are referenced in many other things. Watch it for the characters, more than the individual shows, IMO.
Yes it is slow. But space is big and the slow pace gave the characters time to bond again and work-out the puzzle. I prefer the movie to the later ones because there is no fire-torpedoes quick-solution which wraps-up the story in time for the ad break...
The characters started off awkward and cold but slowly rediscovered who they really were, just as V'Ger did.
Real problem is the standalone episodes were not good
https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/wiki/where_should_i_start
For DS9 in particular, this link was helpful for me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/1fkijc/ive_m...
There are 3 episode lists in there and a user named Algernon_Asimov has a "Hmph!" comment with a link to detailed episode lists for TNG + DS9
For movies: see the Original Series movies Star Trek II, IV, and VI (watching the series first not required), see Generations once (watch some of TNG first), see First Contact (watch most of TNG first), see Insurrection (surprisingly good), skip Nemesis entirely.
If you have to pick one series to start with, I'd say either DS9 (as a marathon) or TNG. Note that you'll get a very different flavor from both; TNG presents a lovely idyllic future with occasional hiccups, while DS9 presents a darker and grittier 24th century, for better or worse.
Enterprise is probably the hardest. Very RPG-like how they operate to their self made rules in what compared to later series is extreme limitations. Life is a lot different when the fastest transport ship flys at warp 1 and everything isn't deus ex machina away with AI or technobabble. On the other hand they overdo the "wooden ships and iron men" thing a little and there is too much "pew pew" action.
Next up is DS9. Some technobabble for dramatic license but still reads like a paper and pencil RPG fiction (which is good). Some "crewman of the week" cheesy soft filler episodes but mostly hard science fiction story. Has a reasonably hard science overall story arc. Arguably the best overall series. Has the best "hard" written "soft" character in all of trek, the Cardassian "tailor". He's not really a tailor, hope this isn't too much of a spoiler. Best sci fi on TV, maybe.
TOS is all over the map. Sometimes they did a good job of both hard and soft sci fi at the same time. Then there's "space hippies" or "spocks brain" or "spock needs to get laid" which we'll pretend never happened. There is an unrealistic (by hard sci fi standards) fixation on alien planets being the wild west desert. You NEED to watch certain individual episodes, like the doomsday machine.
TNG is the softest series, its General Hospital soap opera, on a space ship. Toward the middle either its a short story arc, sometimes halfway decent, or "crewmember of the week special story". The Wesley character is kind of the series Jar-Jar and you'd do best to skip episodes where he is "crewman of the month". Also the romance episodes read like fanfic from /r9k/. The alien civilizations are bad caricatures.
Generally across all the series from a hard sci fi viewpoint if an episode involves space nazis, time travel, Ferengi, romance, or a holodeck accident, it can be ignored with little to no loss with very few exceptions.
http://www.startrekaxanar.com/
http://startrekrenegades.com/
I, for one, am really looking forward to Axanar as much or even more than these official series.
Edit. Typo.
In this day and age we have the privilege to pay for what we want to see, if we feel like it. People love to complain, but seriously, if we aren't willing to pony up the cash for something, why should we expect to studios to produce what we want to see? Even paying for a Netflix subscription will split your money so many different ways that the studios aren't going to be getting that much at the end.
Although the series is aimed more at the US than the rest of the world, What if they decided to tackle the current migration issues? Those will only become bigger in the future as climate change will provoke more mass migrations.
Aside from being contemporary, the topic is a great source of material for dramatic stories too.
EDIT: Could tie in neatly to the Vulcan planet being destroyed in the new timeline.
(I only mentioned the new timeline because a Star Trek centered around the troubles of the migrating remainders of Vulcan civilization is just about the only thing that sounds like an appealing hook in that setting. Like others have mentioned, it's an Space Action Movie timeline, not a cerebral Star Trek timeline)
Though actually, that would have made a decent episode of tng
What's really surprising is that as of the first part of the story, Doctor Who seems to, for the first time ever, be taking a more right-wing than left-wing approach to the political metaphor. It turns out that letting twenty million shape-shifting Zygons settle on Earth actually was a terrible idea after all! Not all of them are bad, but a sufficient number are, and you can't tell the bad ones from the good ones.
They'll probably find a way to twist it back to a leftism-compliant story in the latter part, but it's interesting that the first part of the story at least is a pretty convincing argument against letting large numbers of potentially-dangerous foreigners into your planet/country.
> will also be distributed concurrently for television
So, is it on TV or not?
> will also be distributed concurrently for television and multiple platforms around the world by CBS Studios International.
- CBS Television Network first, then
- United States - exclusively CBS All Access
- International, except United States - multiple other platforms
I'm really hoping that the web production will be more akin to Netflix or Amazon Studios quality and budget rather than the usual network webseries tie in.
Also anyone has any ideas about the cast? there was a very long standing rumor / pre-production "Captain Worf" show that was supposed to happen but never did, I really hope that this won't be in the rebooted universe because it was well kinda meh.
Enterprise wasn't great (4th season was amazing tho), if this will be of the same quality as TNG/DS9 or even "mom we got stuck in the holodeck again" Voyager this would truly blow my mind, but as of now I am pessimistic beyond hope until I can see the cast, writers, and canonical premise.
Everything on a Sci Fi (or fantasy) show has to be custom-made; from the costumes to the wall decorations to the light fixtures to the furniture. Custom making these things isn't easy, because they first have to be designed so they look like they "fit" stylistically, then built. A show like Star Trek will also have extensive makeup / prosthetics to depict the many different races.
Besides, Star Trek is an active franchise with two recent, very successful movies. No studio exec would ruin a franchise like that with a half-assed, underproduced web series. Because you can't do Sci Fi cheaply without becoming B-movie quality, this show will have to have at a minimum Stargate Atlantis levels of production value. They may just be putting it on the web because the Star Trek demographic doesn't watch network TV and the web is a better way to reach the core audience for the show.
So never saw the Dr. Who series int he 1970s and 1980s :)
Personally I loved the campy Dr Whos a lot.
BBC - "Your almost Out of Budget and you have 3 part series to finish"
Producer - "No problem we will put a trash can over that guy and tape up a few trash bags, throw some kids paint on it and there is our new monster." "We will also call the gravel pit see if we can use it as a location during there lunch breaks."
And even with Dr. Who, most of the action takes place in the present day -- which helps with saving money on costumes and sets.
Seriously I think I would have loved working on those shows, or really really hated. I can't decide which.
It's not always the budget it's also the production Firefly managed to make very good use of VFX with relatively "small" budget, BSG didn't had an explosive budget either, Star Gate had also a relatively small budget with the VFX heavy episodes having less than 400,000$ effects budget they just used it rather well.
On the other hand you can have very high budget shows looking like B-movie quality, Terra Nova, Falling Skies and Fox's attempts at scifi Almost Human (which was a freaking amazing show and Fox exec's need to pay in blood) and their current Minority Report shows are very expensive but have very low quality looking effects.
And if you want the best example of how budget can easily be misused well then Agents of Shield had a 14M budget for the pilot and even the per episode budget was considerably lower it was still pretty damn high and they still managed to completely cock it up both in the visuals and the story/plot departments.
IF they'll build a solid production team hopefully there are some folks at Paramount Television that worked on previous shows and are still either alive and or working in TV production and give them budget and creative freedom to work then we might get a good product, if this is going to be brand managed like AOS then it's going to be completely bonkers.
AOS is tethered to the cinematic Marvel's universe and it's it's biggest flaw, it's plot is completely dictated by the movies and it spoiled Cap 2 for me and just became a running joke.
Agent Carter was considerably better because it was set back enough in the past that they can do anything without having to tie it in with the movies.
And this is my biggest must have for this show, either put it in the original canon, reboot it again, or throw it so far away from the movies that it couldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole or don't make it at all.
Sci Fi shows are the most expensive in their first season, because you have to design the universe up-front. A network exec doesn't know if the show is going to pull an audience, but he does know he's got to drop a whole lot of money to even find out. Which makes other options a lot more attractive, and explains the lack of high-quality Sci Fi on TV right now.
And like it or not, the cinematic tie-ins and continuity within the universe are what make Marvel appealing as a brand. DC has done a terrible job at this; the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie has different actors and takes place in a different universe than the last (or really, any) Batman movie. Having multiple Batman characters confuses audiences, and Marvel has done a really good job keeping things consistent.
Worth noting: for sitcoms, staff costs are often as high/higher than the SF shows that make it to the screen. For example, actors on _The Big Bang Theory_ are rumored to earn $1m per episode each. Ditto other shows like _Modern Family_.
Likely there are relatively few Sci Fi shows because the Sci Fi writ large has yet to figure out how to connect with audience sizes beyond a niche. If they achieve mainstream reach, the cost of the sets will not matter as much.
But yeah as soon as you introduce alien worlds, having high quality on a small budget does get difficult.
Maybe worse, actually.
The "Captain Worf" show was AFAIK never in serious consideration. Michael Dorn was a huge fan of the idea and kept proposing it everywhere he went, which is the only reason it gained as much publicity as it did, but as far as I can tell it was never taken very seriously in the studios.
And I'm kind of glad for it - Worf is great, and Michael Dorn seems like a great guy, but Trek has always been about the ensemble crew and not revolved around any singular character. "Worf feat. crew" would've been a huge thematic departure.
In any case, I'm pretty sure this will be in the alternate universe (JJ Abrams-verse). It just doesn't make sense to have something in the Prime universe anymore, commercially at least. This makes me sad. The fact that Kurtzman is involved IMO suggests this is definitely a reboot-universe thing, as does the rumor that Bryan Singer might be producing.
That said, Brannon Braga and Rick Berman not being involved might be a good thing...
This is just standard operating procedure for CBS/Paramount, who have viewed Star Trek as a big enough draw to attract audiences to new distribution channels for decades.
Back in the '70s they planned to use a Star Trek: Phase II series to launch a new network that never got off the ground (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Phase_II).
Then in the '80s they used Star Trek: The Next Generation as the flagship for a new, syndication-only system of network-unaffiliated TV stations.
Then in the '90s they revived the dream of a Paramount network in the form of UPN (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPN), and created Star Trek: Voyager to attract viewers to that.
These efforts have had varying degrees of success, but they've never failed hard enough to shake CBS/Paramount from the conviction that new Star Trek is something people will want to see so badly that they'll be willing to change their viewing habits to get it.
Berman and Piller were a much better team.
I'm not a hardcore Star Trek fan, but was very disappointed with the new films. They're mostly generic action in space with some familiar names and Starfleet uniforms.
Every little thing that made Star Trek entertaining has been stripped away.
Not too surprising considering JJ Abrams told in an interview that "I would watch episodes but it always felt too philosophical to me".
Shows like BSG are pretty much unicorn's these days no one seems to want to make serious scifi the best we can hope for is for the random Canadian show to be picked up by SyFy and not being shredded (Continuum was good, Dark Matter seems interesting but very goofy).
SyFy is also trying to get of their asses together I'm still hoping that they'll pick up Ascension it's backdoor pilot / mini-series was one of the most interesting Scifi concepts of late and if they don't screw up 'Childhoods End' (which from the trailer looks like an HBO show which is great) I might actually believe that they still can produce something besides fake reality shows and wrestlemania.
The Christmas special in particular was pretty mind bending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jROLrhQkK78
The new season on Netflix will hopefully be at least 10 episode long so I might actually take another spin at it, waiting 10 years for another 3 episodes of Luther or Sherlock is bad enough I'm not going through this again.
With US TV shows I usually wait until at least the mid season or the 9 episode pickup because lately US TV shows especially from the bigger networks have less job security than the offspring of JRR Martin novels and the Walking Dead characters.
So far we had quite a "decent" year, 12 Monkeys has been renewed, Childhoods End and Westworld are coming, the CW actually managed to make comic book shows (never was a huge comic fan, infact i never had a chance to read a single book i think) cool, we are bloody getting The Man in the High Castle show on Amazon and Marvel's Netflix production is in full gear.
yup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_%28miniseries%29#Pot...
I will fully admit that if there was any other legit Sci-Fi on TV I might not care as much about Dark Matter, but since there is slim pickings in that genre I await season 2.
You've just described the Wrath of Khan, considered one of the finest films in the franchise.
Hell, a good number of episodes in every series in the franchise were just action in space... the Best of Both Worlds is literally just Us vs The Borg.
Fans have incredibly rose tinted glasses regarding ST. For every City on the Edge of Forever or The Inner Light there's at least one The Doomsday Machine or, worse, Spock's Brain...
Edit:
BTW, I actually think Into Darkness was pretty interesting. It reminded me of The Drumhead or similar, where they used an enemy or a crisis to examine the nature Star Fleet itself. It's just a pity they, once again, didn't actually use someone of Indian descent to play Khan...
And at least a handful of good episodes exist. There are no such specimens among the (two) new movies.
So you're a "Trouble with Tribbles" kind of a guy/girl.
Nothing wrong with that at all, everyone has different tastes!
But we'll agree to disagree. While Khan is clearly an action film first, it's an exploration of Kirk as a character, which is interesting. And that ending...
Frankly, I'll put myself in the minority by stating that I personally think The Voyage Home was frickin' awful... really, a fish-out-of-water tale (well, mammal-out-of-water...) via time travel? sigh
But that's just my opinion. :)
Finally, we get to the end, and the most egregious difference between the two. In TWOK we get a tense cat and mouse chase through the nebula, which is won, CRUCIALLY, by out-thinking your opponent. The whole "2d thinking" thing and what not. I admit it's probably not the most air-tight of plot points, but it perfectly demonstrates the difference between the two movies, because ID ends with a loud (visually and sonically) fist-fight that is won by the person who punches hardest. Yay I guess.
Anyway, Star Trek is definitely not all sunshine and rainbows but it is crucially several things that the new movies are not: It prioritizes communication and curiousity over violence and dominance. It is not trying to be cynical or "edgy" in an attempt to be mature. The struggle of people working together to overcome a problem and find a positive solution or compromise can and is every bit as exciting as a phaser battle. And finally, that it is fundamentally optimistic, not in a the sort of "magic technology makes everything awesome" way that the new series seems, but that humans can come together and make things better for each other, the no-win scenario does not exist (mostly) and that we have to work hard to make this come true, but it is do-able.
In the context of the series, sure, where you have an hour a week to wax philosophical.
The movies are far more uneven in that respect. They attempted it in The Motion Picture. Result: total snoozer.
Khan is an action/revenge flick.
Search For Spock is another action/revenge flick.
Voyage Home is far more in the original mold, humans trying to make peace with an unknown alien force. But it also wavers between comical and absurd... no character development to be found here.
The Final Frontier... I'm not even sure where to begin. It's terrible. :)
The Undiscovered Country is, to me, the best mix of the lot... a bit action, a bit politics, the origin story of the Federation and the Klingon peace, commentary on racism, etc...
But that's one film out of five.
So be fair: you're comparing two movies to an entire franchise and then complaining they aren't what you want them to be. If you more fairly compare them to just their film contemporaries, my opinion is that they stand up reasonably well.
That's not to say they aren't clearly designed for more mass-market appeal. The Undiscovered Country, for example, is pure fan service, whereas Star Trek or Into Darkness are clearly aimed at a broader audience. I just don't think they're significantly worse than their peers simply because they don't talk it out... ;)
Structurally, yeah, obviously they're very different.
However, thematically, they share a lot of similarities.
In The Drumhead, Starfleet begins a witchhunt to track down a suspected spy they believe is working with the Romulans.
Into Darkness involves a group of people who attempt to manufacture a war with the Klingons, whom they perceive as a fundamental threat to the Federation.
Both examine racism, fear, and xenophobia in the context of the Star Trek universe, and the lengths people will go to if they feel they're morally justified based on those perceived fears.
Well, I can tell you're open minded and not too critical. I'm sure continuing this conversation will be incredibly productive and enlightening...
Best of both worlds also showed Picard becoming the enemy, riker as captain having to try to stop the Borg at the cost of his friend, and some more good background on the Borg.
Plus the effects of that episode lasted into ds9 and first contact.
[emphasis mine]
Sounds like it is going to be on TV.
It's the old drug dealer sales approach: you always want to make the first hit free.
When I first read it I thought it was going to be US exclusive. Luckily I managed to calm down and re-read before I went on the rampage.
This sentence annoys me more every time I read it:
>"This new series will premiere to the national CBS audience, then boldly go where no first-run Star Trek series has gone before – directly to its millions of fans through CBS All Access,”
Why can they not simply write in a way is comprehensible?
"The first episode will be on CBS. Subsequent episodes will be on "CBS All Access"”.
Although it says that it will only premiere on TV and then move to the streaming service, I wouldn't be surprised if it is later added to the TV schedule, maybe once the second season starts, in a reverse trend of the current TV->streaming release delay.
I'd bet money that it will be. The potential for movie tie-ins alone will make it irresistible. (also the producer of the movies is involved)
I watch way too much TV but am finally getting sick of it, the commercial requirements end up favoring safe stuff.
as for your "Utopian" comment, in the last few decades we have entered the era of plenty, the main problem encountered by startups we see here in HN is not that they are not innovative its that their products/services get drowned out in a sea of plenty
Given a few hundred years and plentiful+cheap energy it is not beyond the realm of imagination to imagine replicators, hell on a recent cruise i nicknamed then soda vending machines "the replicator" because the thing could spit out hundreds of different drinks with a few taps.
So a world of the future would be fairly "socialist" as machines and cheap energy allow people to devote their times towards science, exploration, art etc, we are already seeing this happening today and further mechanization and robotics will only speed up the trend
My utopian thoughts aren't really around the economics. Star trek humans are all pure of motive and work to do the right thing in all circumstances, modulo plot-necessitated black hats. I'd prefer a bit more humanity there. Humans are far more complex than the black-and-white morality plays star trek tends to be.
If they make a show that has "wrath of Khan" level pathos to the characters, I'm in. If it's action schlock or morality plays, the star trek brand isn't enough to attract me, particularly if the technology alternates between "stupidly unreal" and banal.
Even in-universe, it doesn't make sense. The Holodeck is sophisticated enough to fly ships through physically real environments. (They do physics tests in the deck.) So just use whatever great AI system powering the Holodeck to do whatever advanced maneuver you need.
Also, the biggest fake tech: The communicators. The show clearly shows a person hailing another on the comm badge. BUT there's no delay in the response. "Captain to LaForge" - "LaForge here". We see that the recipient always hears the entire message. We also see there's no delay in the reply, much less than "Captain to" takes. I suppose this is easily solved by the commbadge just reading neural patterns and determining who you're gonna call. But there's no mention of that, and the badges don't seem to function that way.
Far too many characters are (conveniently) interested in Shakespeare or 20th century culture.
You have * Fargo * Boardwalk Empire * Mr Robot * Suits * True Detective
These are stellar shows with high production qualities.
There's generally no ads on web streaming during the show.
I get that they "think" its like this now, they get paid by the cable company for their channel (the $5.99) and they send them content with commercials (which they have sold), but the new world is NetFlix which charges monthly, but has now commercials.
http://www.thestreet.com/story/13181362/1/cbss-tough-stance-...
Given the quality of digital broadcast and tendency for it to overlap cable service areas, it's pretty ridiculous that they manage to get anything. It wouldn't be so hard for a consumer friendly TV to transparently switch between sources (well, except for the cable companies making sure not to put consumer friendly features in their now required boxes).
You couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free. Netflix works because they only buy cheap content.
You say "you couldn't/wouldn't want to pay for how much current TV shows would cost in commercial free.", but a show with a 10 million dollar budget and a million viewers would cost $10, not a lot more than Google Play for current season stuff (per episode), so apparently people are paying about what it would take.
BSG spoiled me because it showed, credibly that a space-faring future is unlikely to be clean and sanitized. I think one of my favorite aspects of BSG were the mundane ones, such as how having everyone spread out on different ships hampered logistics and communications. In Star Trek, of course, this was solved with instant communication devices, though the impact of instant communication in TNG-and-on seems rather limited compared to what we experience in the Internet-age.
Since the OP states that the new series shares the same writers as the rebooted movies, I'm assuming that the altered timeline will be adopted by the new TV series? The reboot Star Trek films were flashy and entertaining in the way that modern action films are entertaining...but they took up the technology-as-deus-ex-machina to the next level...Scotty created a teleportation device that rendered starship travel moot and, of course, life-giving Tribbles.
some tech the tech solution that works one week is ignored the next week.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/why_i_ha...
> former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.
> He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
> "It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
> Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
> La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
> Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
> La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
> Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
> "And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
Also Alexander siddig is a pretty good actor.
Total internal consistency isn't necessary, and can actually be harmful to a show if you take it too far. Sometimes it's better to conveniently paper over an earlier mistake. But this is just plain laziness in writing, and it hurt the show by removing a lot of material for conflict and drama.
Ronald Moore was a big driving force behind the new BSG and previously did a lot of work on various Star Treks, including a brief stint with Voyager. In many ways, BSG is "how Voyager should have been."
I get where you're coming from, and they definitely would have been better served to a) not say that, or b) resolve it at some later time. That said, part of what made Voyager interesting (to me) was that they had basically taken house cats and thrown them into the wild. In Federation space there was never a need or desire to make new photon torpedoes on the fly, but in the Delta quadrant for seven years they probably figure something out.
How you cope with conflict when your supply of weapons is inherently limited can make for interesting stories. How to find a new supply of weapons could make for interesting stories. But they couldn't be bothered to go either way, and just went straight for "the characters figured it out somehow, offscreen, and implied."
To stretch your house cat analogy way too far, it's like if the show constantly had the cats eating kibble, but without ever addressing the question of where it came from, even though that's a pretty important part of surviving in the wild and has lots of potential for good stories.
So much wasted potential.
I didn't find DS9 picked up that problem in the later seasons though, so I've got to disagree with you there.
As for DS9, it was great, but it wishes it was Babylon 5. B5 was superior in every way except budget.
It would be perfect to introduce a new crew and follow them through the Academy years. They could either do the backstories of existing characters to introduce new ones. You can combine the fun of Hogwarts-eque school, with younger drama, and still throw in lots of science and adventures.
James Doohan's son Chris even impersonates Scotty. (Stays in the family, I guess...).
On the plus side, the quality of ensemble-cast science fiction tv writing has exploded over the past 15-20 years, starting with how Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer built season and multi-season story arcs that depended on character growth. I would love to see the sort of rich, passionate writing that made Firefly, Walking Dead, and other shows so effective applied to Star Trek!
And I'm a little biased toward the development of web-only series - some friends of mine are doing Cartoon Network's first web-only series, and I'm really hoping it succeeds spectacularly and points a new direction for CN. Fixed timeslots in general are a dated way of doing shows now. Timeshifting is the norm.
So yeah, hope for a bright future. And screw the Prime Directive.
edit: others in the comments have noted that the reboots are basically just action sequences with none of the underlying social themes that made Star Trek significant in the first place.
And personally, I have zero interest in seeing Captain Kirk again. I feel like it was a backwards step to take a broad universe and refocus on the original iconic characters. There are a lot of stories to be told, the Borg are still one of the most fascinating sci-fi creations in years, etc. etc.
Basically my objection is that they don't really "boldly go" anywhere, they just retread.
Granted, this has often been the case with Star Trek films (First Contact was sort of an action movie for example).
This is a point Trek fans rarely acknowledge.
Star Trek the TV show is often more thoughtful and deals with social commentary well. However Star Trek movies rarely are.
Let's look at the classic Star Trek movies: Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock, and The Undiscovered Country are all action films. The Voyage Home is a comedy.
Which leaves just two: The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier which both reviewers and audience alike pan for being some of the worst classic Trek films.
Next Gen isn't much better: Generations, First Contact, and Nemesis are all action films and Insurrection is extremely borderline.
So when people say "JJ Abrams ruins Star Trek by producing an action-adventure" they're really ignoring the history of Star Trek films which are full of only that.
"First Contact" also played fast and loose with established canon a lot more than any other movie had done. I didn't care for the portrayal of Cochrane as a drunk loser (although this has no bearing on James Cromwell's performance... he is always great).
There's nothing wrong with action in Trek... it's built into the concept, but the action was always less important than the Big Ideas... at least until some of the movies, and especially the vapid JJTrek reboots came along.
Into darkness was a shallow action movie that tries to bludgeon the audience with its themes about the military then devolves into a shitty ripoff of a classic moment from a different movie. I don't actually hate into darkness, but tossing it and first contact into the same bucket as action movies is ridiculous.
And just in general, it failed to move with any heart. Now, I'm broadly critical of JJ Abrams in general - I don't think he ever thinks through the consequences of his writing decisions, which is why his tv shows always jumped the shark in season 2. But Star Trek is just more proof that he doesn't get it, as a writer or as a fan.
[1] And really Amazon is only acceptable because it's free.[2]
[2] Given that having Prime is pretty much non-negotiable anyway.
The amount of content Netflix and Amazon can create is limited. They cannot pay for every tv show for 100-120 bucks a year. Look at what a mature company like HBO produces for 180 a year. 3-5 hour long prestige dramas. 5-8 half hour comedies. Some low expense reality tv like Bill Mayer or Real Sports.
Netflix may be able to scale better, if they get 80% of households they can go cheaper. But they aren't going to be q total replacement for all media.
And you don't want them too. One company with control over all media would be a disaster.
1. Isn't afraid of being slow, talky, and philosophical (Sorry J.J.). TNG had many excellent episodes specifically because it was willing to risk being "boring", while DS9 evolved Trek into the homogeneous "action" formula that has dominated Voyager, most of Enterprise, and the recent movies.
2. Is a force for idealism. The captains of Star Trek are paragons of humanity, and are supposed to find the high ground when tackling murky issues. The original series featured the first on-screen interracial kiss. TNG dove into many thorny ethical issues. While TNG took a hard stance against torture, Enterprise portrayed it as a useful tool.
3. Boldy goes to new places. Star Trek (2009) did nothing new geographically, but at least it went off the reservation by destroying a storied and beloved Trek locale. Not everyone liked that, but at least it was daring. Into Darkness (2013) aped Khan badly, completely missing out on what made the original character and movie special. In general, the Trek movie franchise has been chasing Khan for too long, and needs to focus on other aspects of Trek.
4. Is smart about technology, and self consistent. Nerds pay attention to this stuff. Khan beaming directly from Earth to the Klingon homeworld functionally obliterated the vastness of space in the rebooted Trek universe. Trek doesn't need to blow previously imagined sci-fi tech out of all proportion to be interesting. It's strength, historically, has been inventing new technologies and examining their impact on humans. Is there anything in the new Trek movies that, in a few decades, we're going to be saying, "Hey, Trek predicted this!".
5. Doesn't solve everything by modifying the deflector dish. (Corollary to 4) Voyager, I'm looking at you. All of the series occasionally penned "tech" into their scripts to lazily magic their way out of situations. At some point this became standard practice and as much a part of the formula as always having at least a few minutes of "action trek", no matter how inappropriate it was to the episode. This is a crutch that should be used as sparingly as possible.
6. Features interesting, well-developed alien cultures. The original series may have debuted the Klingons, but it was TNG that fleshed them out into a living, breathing culture. TNG debuted the Cardassians and Bajorans, but DS9 benefited greatly from exploring the cultures of both these races. The formula of Voyager forced a return to shallow portrayals of "species of the week", and the show suffered greatly as a result.
7. Results from a tension between competing visions between writers and creators. Examples: TNG was campy and unwatchable, mostly, until Michael Piller took over as head writer in the third season and started focusing on characters and more traditional drama. Piller had an inclination to be too soap opera-y but was held in check by Roddenberry's presence and later, spirit. DS9 was the result of the tension between Ira Steven Behr and Berman aided by Ronald D Moore, and worked well until it became the all-war-all-the-time series. Voyager is the result of Berman, Braga and Jeri Taylor running wild without any counteracting force. Enterprise is the same (minus Taylor).
As for relying on tech deus-ex-machina TNG writers used to send off scripts to physics professors and have them fill in gaps about nanotechnology and other unknown late 80s technology. They were replaced in Voyager by studio cronies which is why everything is solved by "re-polarizing the deflector dish".
Enterprise started kinda ok (not great) but then 9/11 happened (which happened technically like a week or 2 before the 1st season aired, but it was too fresh to touch) which meant that it had to deal with that thing with it's very own 9/11 in the 3rd season.
With the 4th season they pretty much went into "concept-album" fan service type of self containing arcs and it was pretty damn freaking good, they brought allot of excellent talent specifically Manny Coto which pretty much made the biggest fan service production once he was made the executive producer and the exclusive writer of the show. With maybe 1 or 2 exceptions i put every episode of Season 4 of Enterprise in my personal hall of fame both in terms of Star Trek and general Scifi episodes.
Episodes like In a Mirror, Darkly, These Are the Voyages, United are what Star Trek should look like and they had a full season of them.
That is likely why the Abrams films rebooted the universe--restarting from the Captain Pike era--with a big enough change to justifiably say it changes everything that the previous continuity ever did.
And that is rather fortunate, because if they had made first contact in 2016 rather than 1996, people might conceivably be throwing money into the Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter interfaces to the Borg-net, rather than foolishly engaging in any futile resistance. The cube-ships would be ruthlessly harvesting our most shareable lolcat videos, and everyone would be walking around in identical jeans-and-hoodies outfits and calling everything "amazing".
A reboot is really the only way to restore the franchise to its original mission to simplify today's social issues and frame them up against the backdrop of a more progressive starfaring society, so that people can get some perspective on those things that might otherwise be too close to home in a somewhat entertaining way.
For instance, given the South China Sea situation, I would guess that at some point, the new Star Trek series would introduce some alien species as proxies for China, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, and maybe even Brunei, and the China-aliens would be constructing artificial dwarf planets out of hazardous nebulae using unlicensed Genesis devices, and using them as bases to harass passing scientific and mercantile traffic. Then some of the people watching would obsess over details and completely miss the broader point.