Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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ZMOT said:
not his fault shitty writers are so shit they can't copy his style properly.
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The MCU and Star Trek are made for kids with the attention span of a goldfish. There’s no room for real conversation or any adults.

I’ll give Joss his due: the man never condescended to his audience. Beneath the layers of snark and melodrama, there was always something raw. A sense that the stakes mattered. (But then came Dollhouse. Jesus Christ.)
 
ZMOT said:
it is fine for what it is. the problem is these days you drown in the poor copy of it EVERYWHERE, whereas back then it was easy to ignore his stuff if you didn't like it.
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Thank you.

This is something I've noticed increasingly whenever I dig into sources. That you'll have something be a trend setter. Then everyone and their cousin tries to get in on the trend. Everyone gets sick of it, so then they all get mad at the original and declare it awful.

Well no. If you go back and look, the original source is - almost all of the time - actually really good and complex and nuanced. It was all the imitators who didn't want to put in the work to be as quality which ruined it.

One obvious example would be Tolkien. How after LotR got popular and every fantasy book after that had to have a group of characters on a quest, a lot of people started getting sick of it. Now I don't think LotR ever got quite the hate stuff does now, but this would have also been right before the Internet so it can be tough to gauge public sentiment. (Thankfully we seem to have weathered through the churn and now it has resumed its proper place as a legit classical work.)

I'm not going to defend Whedon as a human being or anything, but his original stuff was a lot better than the imitators who have tried to ape his style after him without properly understanding why it worked.

Captain Syrup said:
I’ll give Joss his due: the man never condescended to his audience. Beneath the layers of snark and melodrama, there was always something raw. A sense that the stakes mattered. (But then came Dollhouse. Jesus Christ.)
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What do you mean? Dollhouse played into important stakes even more than Firefly. (I understand why some people may not have enjoyed it, but it works much better on a binge.)
 
Flexo said:
What do you mean? Dollhouse played into important stakes even more than Firefly. (I understand why some people may not have enjoyed it, but it works much better on a binge.)
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I watch the fall TV lineup these days, and you could slap Joss Whedon’s name on any of it and it would fit just fine. It’s all been absorbed.

Dollhouse was crippled from the get-go, but watching Alpha turn into a pale imitation of Warren felt like a joke. It worked with Buffy, it made sense there. But in Dollhouse, it was desperate.
 
OrionBalls said:
It's official: I finally have faith of the heart. So far, Enterprise isn't awful, but I'm not thrilled about the idea of this temporal cold war thing. Timey bullshit have always been my least favorite plots in Trek.
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Get used to seeing a bunch of shitty mystery box storylines that don't pay off. You never get to see the Earth-Romulan War, you get another stupider more confusing "war" in its place. Enterprise peaked in season 1.

Flexo said:
Love Burn Notice.

IMO Voyager should have done its story like BN. Where every week you had a random anomaly or alien to deal with in the A plot, and then the B plot was the arc related stuff, which in Voyager's case should be related to keeping the ship running and character stuff.

Then for sweeps and season opener/closers you would get an all focus arc episode. Like "oh on our way home we've reached Borg territory. Well shit."
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The problem is that there wasn't a "story arc" in Voyager aside from it being brought up sometimes that the Voyager brings death and destruction everywhere it goes. Also Janeway randomly shoving her fist up the ass of the nearest Borg cube because she left her morning coffee on her desk for too long and it got tepid and poured all over Ensign Kim's face because he looked at her wrong.

Captain Syrup said:
They spend like half the show jamming time travel into Enterprise—and then refuse to use it to fix glaring inconsistencies like the Romulans suddenly showing up on viewscreens like they’ve been pals with Starfleet for centuries.

It’s not like Enterprise is alone in this madness. Kazon, Discovery and the Burn... starting to think Star Trek should get the hell away from these season-long arcs. Leave it to shows can handle them.
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Well the Romulans never show up on viewscreens. When they were shown they were cool, mysterious, and calculating, actually good villains. The Klingons are outright stated to be in a Dark Age, and the Vulcanians are smarmy assholes because they *are* smarmy assholes.

Captain Syrup said:
Oh, the Andorians... I expected more from them. They blend right in with the Klingons—or, even some of the minor war-loving races that Picard and Janeway tried to redeem. It’s like they’re just one anger management seminar away from being a Federation footnote,
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They hired Jeffrey Combs to be the rival Andorian to Archer, and as it turns out you'd rather watch Shran's adventures, to the extent he was going to be part of the main cast in season 5. There's a whole lot of ideas for season 5 that never worked out.
 
The Borg were Janeway's stress ball.

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Captain Syrup said:
Dollhouse was crippled from the get-go, but watching Alpha turn into a pale imitation of Warren felt like a joke. It worked with Buffy, it made sense there. But in Dollhouse, it was desperate.
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Um... I assume you mean Warren from Buffy.

Sounds like you didn't make it to Epitaph One?

(I do love Alan Tyduck though and Alpha had one of my favorite lines ever: "We're not bluffing - well some of us are bluffing.")

TaimuRadiu said:
The problem is that there wasn't a "story arc" in Voyager aside from it being brought up sometimes that the Voyager brings death and destruction everywhere it goes. Also Janeway randomly shoving her fist up the ass of the nearest Borg cube because she left her morning coffee on her desk for too long and it got tepid and poured all over Ensign Kim's face because he looked at her wrong.
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Yes that's what I mean - Voyager should have done more ship focused arcs examining the struggle. Practically all the best episodes of Voyager are when they actually engage with its premise.
 
To be fair Joss Whedon is responsible for the one of the worst writting advice I’ve ever heard:

“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”​

― Joss Whedon
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I agree it works for his style. I can’t deny The avengers was a massive succes. And he helped make superheroes more accessible (he wasn’t the first, not even in the MCU, but he did help create Marvel‘s style). Quips do have their place. But I think my issue is that nowadays you aren’t trusted to be an adult and have any other emotion that isn’t laughter.

Sometimes you do need to feel emptiness, or sadness. I just wished writers trusted you to be an adult again.
 
Mystery Spy said:
To be fair Joss Whedon is responsible for the one of the worst writting advice I’ve ever heard:
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Whedon is just riffing off Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

Find those little cracks in the wall where humor leaks through, and you can breathe.
 
Reinhardo-sama said:
They themselves don't know what that means in the first place. They're manchildren and edgy manchildren bullshit is all they know.
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Even the most wide-eyed, Pollyanna filmgoers know the industry is a mess of nepotism and questionable decision making.

These rich old fucks are out here telling us they're "lifelong Trekkies." But every example they drop is some tone-deaf quantity over quality garbage. They can't even tell you why it's good, it's just whatever the shareholders wanted.
 
iirc the original idea was that Shatner was doing it like weird avant garde spoken word poetry, but by Rocket Man he was in on the joke
 
Flexo said:
I have Patrick Stewart's cowboy album and can get a copy of Shatner's Christmas one.

Don't make me upload them....
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I WANT TO MAKE YOU! DO IT BITCH! DO IT YOU FUCKING PUSSY!
XYZpdq Jr. said:
iirc the original idea was that Shatner was doing it like weird avant garde spoken word poetry, but by Rocket Man he was in on the joke
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So far as I know, he was actually really pissed off and NOT in on the joke when he was being made fun of.

But there was a later album, called Has Been, where he actually was in on the joke, and collaborated with Ben Folds and actually did a version of "Common People," by Pulp, that was actually better than the original.
 
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