In hindsight do you wish TNG had ended with "All Good Things"?

No, it's to motivate Picard's Nexus fantasy.

 

My first thought in response to T-Girl's In all honesty, I think Q did it. Was when the Q eliminated that girls parents with a tornado in Kansas.

 

Who were also Q. And couldn't resist using their powers. They had no real interest in the girl until she started showing signs of having the power of the Q.

 

Well, first of all John DeLancie's Q didn't do that; other members of the Q Continuum did. And they did it because those parents were former renegade Q who became human, which went against the Continuum's laws. So there was justification for their actions; it wasn't like they killed the girl's parents for no reason.

I'm pretty sure Robert and Rene weren't former Qs.

 

But that girl's parents were also Q. And as Q explains in the episode, they broke the rules and were punished according to the rules of the Q. Q murdering Picard's family just to cause Picard anguish is too cruel even for him. It's also out of character because everything Q did was to teach Picard a lesson in order to expand his mind, and to be a giant dick.

 

Wow, 3 posts in a row, and you're all actually agreeing with what I was trying to say, Q doesn't just go around burning down the house.

The only ones that might have been in that situation were rebelling Q. And even though those 17 props, er people were "killed", actually assimilated, the Borg did that, Q just watched.

 

Well in my defense, I didn't think you made that very clear.

 

This. It was a bit fuzzy.

 

Agreed. I get more attention that way.

 

Simple question, simple answer:

YES

 

I think in hindsight I wish they would have ended the films with AGT. However, I both understand and yet do not understand how they ended up cranking out 2 mediocre films, one strong one, and one rather bad one.

I understood the politics and studio demands of GEN, and how it ended up kind of weighing the whole thing down. But in FC you had the studio giving Braga and Moore free reign to do the film, and it turned out fantastic.

And then you have TNG's showrunner writing INS, and in retrospect I don't know how Michael Piller turned in such a tedious film. Given his talent and expertise on the material, he should've hit that one straight out.

And then we had Nemesis, and TPTB chose Logan to write, and a director with one mediocre film under his belt.

I don't get it. But alas that is how it is.

 

Hiring directors of commercials (because they make nice commercials), newbie directors (because they have a "fresh" point of view), and directors who don't know the franchise (because they are not blinded by being too too close) is something of a trope for studios. I don't understand the thinking.

But one thing I understand least of all is why anyone would choose to not try, meaning they'd rather have no movie at all than give it a chance.

 

^^ This thread is simply asking a question in a different way. Another way to ask it is to pose a hypthetical situation: in 1994 if you knew what the films would turn out like ahead of time would you still go ahead with them?

 

I know. It doesn't change my answer. I would have asked, what would you change? And encourage the movies to still be made rather than not, even if unchanged.

 

Easy: Hell no.

I'm not a big fan of "revisionist history," especially where Star Trek is concerned (which is why I usually hate prequels done after the fact, like ENT.) And these movies had revisionist history in spades.

GEN: Guess what? We find out that, instead of Kirk dying normally in the course of time, he was actually whisked away to the 24th century where he cooks eggs, meets Picard, pines over some woman we've never heard of before, and dies in the most contrived way possible. Oh, and there's this Nexus thingy that we're only just learning about now but Guinan knew about the whole time and never told Picard, despite their long and trusted friendship, and the effect the Nexus had on her life.

FC: Guess what? We find out that the Borg are now controlled by some individual, horny queen bee, even though Picard should have known this when he was Locutus, never mind that we've never seen this queen before. So instead of actions dictated on pure logic, the Borg now do what queen bee wants. And guess what else? We find out that Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the human warp drive, was really just some old drunk asshole in some hick town who built warp drive to get rich and fuck girls. Which was the complete opposite of how he was portrayed in TOS.

INS: Guess what? Not exactly revisionist history per se, but we find out that the Enterprise crew have no problems disobeying the direct orders of Starfleet Command and making a mini-insurrection to save a few people because a planet that isn't even theirs is being stolen to use to help save untold billions of people instead of finding a more logical way to deal with the problem.

NEM: Guess what? We learn all kinds of shit we never knew before! All this time Picard had a clone! But we aren't actually sure why. For the last several hundred years, Romulus's sister planet was inhabited by evil space vampires! Even though this is the first time they're ever mentioned or seen despite seeing Romulans many times in TOS and TNG. Data has yet another brother! Even though we don't know how it came into Shinzon's possession. Would Dr. Soong really be that careless? We learn that Picard has always wanted to be like Mario Andretti! Even though Picard as depicted in TNG would never have been interested in that, especially considering the fact that ground vehicle usage is a thing of the past.

TFF: Guess what? Spock has a half-brother that he knew about all along but never told anyone! (Sorry, it was too good to pass up.)

 

Let's go even further and end it with "The Best Of Both Worlds Part 1"

 

A common response I've seen here to not liking a movie is to be told not to watch it; don't buy a ticket. I.e., if I said I didn't like the Abramsverse, I would be reminded of the free market and to vote with my lack of purchase.

So what's the difference between not making the movie, to which Dukhat answers in the affirmative, and simply not watching it? Why not make it anyway for the people who do want to see it? Why is wishing it wasn't made seemingly better than criticizing it? Is it a matter of retroactive film abortion so we can pretend it doesn't exist? That's possible anyway - retcon. Or even retcon the retcons from Dukhat's examples. It's not immutable physics; we are in control of our own creations. If it didn't weaken my position on JJ's alternate reality, and if I didn't agree with most of Dukhat's examples (dammit), I'd lament the regrettable tendency of today's audience to hold universal continuity uber alles.

 

Good points on all. The revision in FC had me hating that movie for years. Now that they've completely dumped on the backstory so much that that is hardly a bump, I don't mind it so much, but I think I was the only one that hated that movie.

 

I disliked what they did with Cochrane when I first saw FC and I still don't like it. In previous time travel stories the crew went out of their to keep a low profile, but in FC there is no such caution whatsoever.

That and the Borg queen idea.

Stupid, stupid, stupid and more stupid.

 

What they did to the Borg bothered me more than what happened with Cochrane. Tough for me to get a handle on exactly what type of person Cochrane was from "Metamorphosis", he was a couple hundred years removed from his last real contact with people.

As far as caution goes, could they really afford to be cautious in that particular situation? I'm not a fan of First Contact, but if they go tiptoeing around they're more likely not to be ready for the warp launch which the Borg attempted to stop.

You do have to wonder why the Borg didn't beam a few drones down to Montana? The people there didn't look like they'd be much of a match for them.

YMMV.

 

^ Instead of sending down a group of drones, the Queen thought it better to use weapons with the explosive yield of a single stick of dynamite.

Apparently the Queen never heard of nuking a site from orbit.