Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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I just want to make a point about the Vulan/Romulan talk a few days ago. I don't check in on this thread often enough to reply on time.

I agree that the Romulans should have been the anti-Vulans. Hot headed, emotional, temperamental and prone to rash outbursts.

That would have made sense but sadly by the time the Romulans show up in TNG we have the Klingons filling that role.

So with the Klingons beings the emotional children of the galaxy what defining characteristics could they assign the Romulans? I guess Berman went with smug paranoid assholes for...reasons?

Really they should have given the Klingon's a different treatment but we all know that old Ricky has a hard on for the Klingons. In the long run the Romulans would have made much better antagonists then the Klingons who would have been a match for the Federation rather then just an annoying little brother that the Klingons were made into.
 
Trek is all just ugly generic action bullshit now with increasingly mind numbing stakes (Omg, X villain is going to blow up the omniverse super duper hard x1000!) There’s no thought or nuance to anything, the only commentary they can muster is the usual braindead “orange man bad” type stuff. The franchise has been raped possibly even harder than Disney Star Wars.
 
Drag-on Knight 91873 said:
While you are right that open submissions are necessary, I'm not as optimistic on getting good writers because of how the typical English BA is taught. They're not really the Shakespeare autists they used to be, but full SJWs. Writing prose is also an art form that I increasingly see people be bad at outside of ideology. When an example of non-woke novelists is Razorfist, that's a serious lack of seeds.

This problem spills over to acting too. We don't have good character actors anymore. No Andrew J Robinson, No Robert O'Reilly, no James Sloyan, etc. Actors that can melt into roles. They're either meant to be celebrities like Zendaya or overpaid extras without the gravitas.
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Even beyond that, there is the problem that writers leaving those MFA programs don't have any life experience beyond reading and watching other stuff. Look at people like Roddenberry or Heinlein or Sprague de Camp or Hemingway or any of the greats of the mid-20th century. They lived life. They went to war, spent time living in Paris with other American ex-pats, got married, got divorced, had kids, lived in Cuba, flew planes, were cops, were gamblers, they had to confront their positions by seeing the world in action, they lived life and saw the world before they put pen to paper. Compare that to writers today who know everything there is to know about popular culture and have seen every tv show and movie and read every novel that matters but they've never been outside of school.

There is something to be said for seeing the world and doing stuff before becoming a writer. Unfortunately, series today have writers rooms full of people who all think exactly alike because that's how they were educated. Because they have never done things like be in the military, they don't know how people really act on a ship or in a ground unit. They don't know you don't stop in the middle of a battle to discuss your feelings on the bridge or you throw in a comical quip during high stress situations because they have never been in one, but they read Whedon's' take on the subject and have seen the Marvel movies and Firefly. The simply don't know how to write adults because they never have been one.

That's at least part of why current Star Trek is so bad.
 
Iron Jaguar said:
The dumbest and most annoying thing about this is not that they have an elderly Chinese woman playing a character with an obviously Greek name; no, it's that they are deliberately using the word "Emperor" to describe a woman.
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Also she's the Japanese Emperor, since arr asians rook same.

@William Murderface

If you look into who actually wrote episodes of TOS these people all had life experience before writing for TV. Hell even Shari Lewis had some life experience before writing an episode of TOS. They also mostly had experience in the military; the Enterprise might have been an exploration vessel, but it was also very much a powerful heavy cruiser and the Federation Starfleet is most definitely a military. (You get to see some of what a Constitution class can do in the ST Enterprise mirror episodes, and it's pretty badass.)

Star Trek TNG had... much less of this, but it also fit the tone. The Enterprise was still an exploratory vessel, but it was mostly in known space and ferried rescue missions. But the rot of people whose only experience is writing for television was there, and it showed in later installments.
 
William Murderface said:
That's at least part of why current Star Trek is so bad.
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The part about the military is pretty on-point to me. The Original Series had guys, not just Roddenberry but the production staff and crew, who had been in the military. They knew what it was supposed to look like when you're on a military vessel. Starfleet might be ostensibly an exploratory service but they are without a doubt a military organization. Even as late as DS9 and Voyager, there were still people who maybe weren't military themselves, but had a general grasp of what a military vessel should look like.

One of my biggest issues with Soy Trek is that everyone is unprofessional and unbecoming of military officers. STD was particularly egregious on this front.
 
I am too shocked that this project failed. Like many other non ST projects we've seen, it sounds so good in theory, but it's developed by idiots who don't know the material.

I think it was Cullen who said years ago it was likely that S31 would be a future project because it had that edgy vibe people think Stat Trek is about.

Travoltron said:
True, but I bet he was indeed told to lose weight by Berman.
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They could have used Riker's weight to show how complacent he had become with being Number 1 and giving up his goals of becoming a captain. Would have been a good take on the character.
 
teriyakiburns said:
It's a great show, if you just pretend it was cancelled at the end of season 3.
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I couldn't watch that show. I disliked the genderswapping of Starbuck and her subsequent proto-girlbossing. But what really killed it for me was Mary McDonnell; she's a poor actress and completely, utterly miscast and unbelievable as a high ranking political figure. Any woman who sounds like she's about to start crying and talks like a patronising kindergarten teacher would never be in such a role.
 
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Get the rope Macaulay! said:
non-american actors are all taught to take any role you can get and aren't paid as well or as respected so they never usually get the huge egos that american actors do. Anthony Hopkins basically says yes to anything, most of them do. they do it for the love of the game.

and no angst? another thing about trek is that somehow very little socially or culturally changes in the span of a quarter millennia. which is ironic considering Abe Lincoln's own faux pas when he too went 250 years into the future. ( i know thats not technically what happened but still)

its crazy how few streaming shows the last 5 years have managed to knock out more than an 8 episode average. another funny thing is that despite there being triple the amount of tv shows as there were in 2010, the episode count average is a quarter of what it was. its common to see 5 or 6 episode seasons now, and to take 2 years to make them.

at that point why not make a fucking movie!
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I'm not gonna lie, I don't inherently hate the rise of the 8-10 episode a season format. It makes it a lot easier to binge/rewatch. Obviously if the show is shit then there's no point rewatching, but I digress.

Old trek in particulate can be a slog to go back and rewatch because every season is like 20 hours long, and there's a good chance of it being filler or maybe even bad, depending on the show/season.
 
Iron Jaguar said:
I couldn't watch that show. I disliked the genderswapping of Starbuck and her subsequent proto-girlbossing. But what really killed it for me was Mary McDonnell; she's a poor actress and completely, utterly miscast and unbelievable as a high ranking political figure. Any woman who sounds like she about to start crying and talks like a patronising kindergarten teacher would never be in such a role.
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I mean she literally was a teacher in the show before she became the education secretary and she's not supposed to be president as she's like 50th in line of succession.

She did go a bit crazy though.
 
Iron Jaguar said:
I couldn't watch that show. I disliked the genderswapping of Starbuck and her subsequent proto-girlbossing. But what really killed it for me was Mary McDonnell; she's a poor actress and completely, utterly miscast and unbelievable as a high ranking political figure. Any woman who sounds like she's about to start crying and talks like a patronising kindergarten teacher would never be in such a role.
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She gets a punch in the face in the 1st episode and without spoilers, she ends up the most abused character in the programme.
 
I don't honestly think Section 31 has a place in Star Trek.

Grim Dark political shit really isn't what Star Trek was built on. It was supposed to be a prosperous future where humanity has grown and evolved past the need for so much of the bullshit we in current year just deal with as part of life.

Star Trek is the opposite of Grim Dark, it's Noble Bright and a backrooms, stealthy, dirty dealing Section 31 who really protects the Federation is a idea that certainly reflects the current year attitudes of nihilism towards the future we may see but it hardly fits Roddenberry's vision of our future.

Ethical conflicts? Hell yes, lets talk about tough choices we have to make to either win a fight or abandon our ethics!
Super Sekret Spies doing evil deeds in the name of protecting the Federation? No moral quandaries just the ends justify the means?

Not so much.

Sure it's a interesting idea but I don't think it fits Old Trek.
 
Sweeter and Savoury said:
Grim Dark political shit really isn't what Star Trek was built on.
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No kidding.

It's basically nu star wars but with a star trek flair.

Old trek was about science, aliens and exploration. New Star trek is nothing like that and the writing is horrible. The dialogue of star fleet ships is along the lines of a high school drama and not what you would expect on a disciplined star ship. Just compare the dialogue of the characters on TNG, they spoke as mature adults. Then watch strange new worlds or discovery and it's all sarcasm and silly jokes. Like I said, it's like watching some kind of highschool teen drama.
 
Gaëtan Dugas said:
Old trek was about science, aliens and exploration. New Star trek is nothing like that and the writing is horrible. The dialogue of star fleet ships is along the lines of a high school drama and not what you would expect on a disciplined star ship. Just compare the dialogue of the characters on TNG, they spoke as mature adults. Then watch strange new worlds or discovery and it's all sarcasm and silly jokes. Like I said, it's like watching some kind of highschool teen drama.
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I generally agree although a couple of episodes of SNW are obvious retellings of Hornblower stories, which I appreciated.
 
Sweeter and Savoury said:
I don't honestly think Section 31 has a place in Star Trek.
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I think it does, as a concept, but not as a standalone thing, and frankly the less they're shown the better. In DS9 it was perfect: this ambiguous shadow government that no one is really sure if they exist or not, which exists organizationally in the same manner as a terror cell where each little face is their own thing. The guardians of paradise. Sloan was a perfect character for this. You don't doubt his loyalty to the Federation, and that in his own way his ideals are "righteous." He is defending the Utopia, by any means necessary. The Changelings are an existential threat to their way of life, and in his mind, they have to be eliminated. But he exists in his own plot thread, and it is only really "supporting" the main thrust of the narrative rather than its own thing. And the show itself does not tell you to like Sloan, or agree with him. In fact it makes it pretty clear that you're not supposed to like him or agree with his methods.

But this suffers by "showing" more. Michelle Yeon's character is garbage, and every appearance that they had in STD was worse than the last. Not only did they fundamentally "undermine" the very premise of Trek by making "le glowniggers...good!?" but the whole mystique is ripped away.

For what it's worth I think Roddenberry took the "Utopia" vision too far. TOS is tonally totally different than TNG. TNG is, at least early on when Roddenberry was really piloting the ship, totally utopianistic in a way that really drags the whole thing down. I mean, Kirk talks about credits and currency and pay in TOS and in the first season of TNG Picard is lecturing (schoolmarm hectoring, really) an American corporate type that they live in gay race communism. I think Star Trek CAN do "grim dark-esque" but it cannot make it the emphasis. DS9 is grim, and it gets pretty grim at times, but there's always the backdrop of "it doesn't have to be like this."
 
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