What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

SNL skit from 1994 Love Boat The Next Generation featuring Patrick Stewart.

You wouldn't think so at first, but there are a lot of similarities between the Love Boat and Star Trek : The Next Generation television shows, for example...

https://gsllcblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/st-love-boat.jpg
Similarities between Love Boat and TNG
1. Bald Captain
2. Black Bartender
3. Teenage crew member child of senor staff member
4. Ship's doctor main character
5. Julie/Troi is sexy but annoying
6. Gopher/Data Socially awkward crew member has name as job description
7. Julie/Beverly one crew member inexplicably replaced then returns
8. Captain straightens uniform when frustrated, angry, or nervous
9. Visits exotic ports of call
10. Is syndicated

 

Love Boat was an ABC show, paired with Fantasy Island. They even crossed over at least once.

 

My all-out favorite SNL/Trek gag is when Dana Carvey's conventioneer brings up the Kirk's safe in THIS SIDE OF PARADISE and asks Shatner ''What was the combination?'' Priceless facial reply from the Shat.

 

"Get a Life!" is one of the all-time greatest SNL skits.

 

Lemme pull out the old starmap from the NL -

The Vulan system is 40 Eridani, labelled sometimes as Omicron 2 Eridani...
The Andorian system is Procyon,
The Tellar system is said to be 61 Cygni....

Uh, nah, it wouldn't really work, it forms a triangle of sorts. Tellar is also 'above' us, toward the core, and trailing 'behind' us, being antispinward, Procyon and 40 Eridani (Omicron 2 Eridani) are on the same rough 'plane' as us but are Rimward, with Procyon racing ahead of sol a bit, being more spinward.

One of the stars would have to be off to the side, at least. Here they are with Sol, all highlighted in green:

Maybe it's a POV of the Federation from Romulus or wherever Charon is? Haha...

 

Sternbach et al in the art department did do this. And it was promptly ignored by the writers. Even if we did a total reset, the first time the writers would be told they couldn't tell a 2-day story because it would take months to get somewhere, it would get tossed again. Modern writers are far too used to the modern world being accessible within 24 hours by plane, and it comes across in their stories. If they put themselves in the same mindset as a 17th century explorer where parts of the world were months away and you were truly cut off from home, we might get better results.

 

So by "modern" you mean writers from the 80 and even the 60s? These stories are always going to move at the speed of plot. Which was probably even true in Homer's day.

 

We might. But (speaking with the experience of being a historian and teaching history for over 30 years) it’s just as likely that others besides the writers (producers, directors, studio executives) would show impatience and interfere. Even historical dramas that make a serious attempt at accuracy (albeit never close to perfectly) most frequently compress time, ahead of other compromises, to advance the narrative.

 

This will be my favorite post today.

While I totally accept that ships have always "moved at the speed of plot" I disagree a bit about this happening the same way in TOS. (I'm sure there's an episode that will contradict me.) Not because there were better or more disciplined writers, but because they didn't have anyplace to go that we'd heard of. Plus, in most TOS episodes where there was serious travel within the episode, the time was a feature, not a bug. "We can't possibly get there by then!"

You want them to go far away? They started out far away. They certainly didn't have "We're exploring the Romulan Neutral Zone when we were called back to Earth. So that afternoon when I walked into Admiral Hoodydood's office..."

TOS even made a point (most of the time) of having them far enough away to be unable to even have real time communication with HQ. I can't think of the last time that even TNG did that.

That's another thing: Modern TOS (and modern Doctor Who) really has a hangup with the crew being able to go home at the end of the day. (There are only TWO Star Trek movies that don't have scenes on Earth!)

 

Which is the very definition of "Speed of Plot".

Very true, TNG abandoned the " exploring the unknown" early on in favor of a lot of known space stories. Even DS9 fell victim.

Totally needs of plot. In Amok Time the communications are pretty real time, because the plot required Starfleet to override Kirk.

I think Kirk real timed with four admirals: Fitzgerald, Fitzpatrick, Komack and Komack's twin/clone/cousin Westervliet and at least one Commodore, Barstow. Interacted with more Commodores either face to face or on short range comms.

 

Not really. I mean, there's a drug deal going down in Tokyo this morning and all Our Heroes are in London. "We can't possibly get there by then!" There's nothing "speed of plot" about that.

Speed of plot is the above scenario and then scene two is Our Heroes getting off the plane, maybe one of them looking comically airsick and saying "Don't EVER do that again!" The chief then says "Pull it together Tycho. We only have an hour until this goes down."

 

Speed of plot is when something happens at the speed needed for the plot to work.

 

Star Trek:Discovery should have been more akin to Star Trek:Federation from the get go, instead of basically ending up there eventually.

 

SNW really suffers from its lack of any proper story arcs. The arcs we do get are pretty much just about the crew’s “romances” and they are not particularly good. The Spock/Chapel thing, as a fan of TOS, does not work for me in any fashion. In fact, I can safely go on record as saying I hate it. I also don’t care that La’an has a crush on Kirk or about Pike’s boring girlfriend. Knowing the future of the characters, none of it will work out anyway and thus feels a bit pointless. I guess that’s the problem with prequels.

The show doesn’t need to be serialised but in the current tv landscape it needs some kind of overall arc; it needs to feel like it’s purposefully headed somewhere. DS9 did this perfectly back when such things were seen as risky and bold for television.

The second season was all over the map in my opinion. No cohesion.

 

I feel like a prequel does best when it focuses on a medium-threat to a place you can develop and connect to, so the stakes are there. This also applies to characters: maybe, sometimes, the new guys don't all die but just gets promoted/moves on with their career/gets wounded/retires.... Gotta actually keep the audience on their toes with tension and varied results.

Like, for a Trek example, what's happened to Alpha Centauri, or any medium colony; could get some world builders together to whip up a whole scenario, there's stuff we can look into like the FRIGGIN SHELIAK WAR, which we can surmise was brutal but ends with a masterstroke of diplomacy, stuff like that....

I dunno, I'm a bit inspired by the prequels of the Legends of the Galactic Heroes series, the Gaiden, which were almost perfectly executed: medium stakes stuff, we know the war isn't going to be won back then or that the main characters are going to die, but we see the heroes of the last two generations, more world building, the only glaring issue is just that no one from the main series referenced anything about it, since the Gaiden was written up after the main series wrapped up. That's a bit fine, that's reality getting in the way. But! Trek does have things going on in the 2250s-2260s and what not that other series have referenced that could be explored, but no....