That's redundant. "It is because it is" isn't much of an argument. Be specific.
Star Trek's Troubling 50th Anniversary
- Thread starter MakeshiftPython
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That's redundant. "It is because it is" isn't much of an argument. Be specific.
^ It's a 'panic button' they could have pushed a lot earlier IMHO. 
See, I don't get this. When I look at the Abrams movies, I see the 'core' of Star Trek very much front and center. These films have got Star Trek in their very heart and soul. Which is more than I can say for the modern Doctor Who, which made substantive changes to the core of the show when they brought it back (namely, turning a character who had previously and consistently been portrayed as a asexual gentleman adventurer into a lovesick puppy who wants to bounce Rose Tyler on his sonic screwdriver).
The core of the Abrams' movies are 100% Star Trek. I had my reservations before I saw the 2009 movie, but it won me over instantly. The new Doctor Who still hasn't done that nine years later.
See, I don't get this. When I look at the Abrams movies, I see the 'core' of Star Trek very much front and center. These films have got Star Trek in their very heart and soul. Which is more than I can say for the modern Doctor Who, which made substantive changes to the core of the show when they brought it back (namely, turning a character who had previously and consistently been portrayed as a asexual gentleman adventurer into a lovesick puppy who wants to bounce Rose Tyler on his sonic screwdriver).
The core of the Abrams' movies are 100% Star Trek. I had my reservations before I saw the 2009 movie, but it won me over instantly. The new Doctor Who still hasn't done that nine years later.
Because so much of it was driven by catering to pre-existing fascination with old continuity. Whoa, look - Romulans whose faces no one sees! Yeah, if you already know Star Trek forward and backward that's...fun. Otherwise, that kind of reveal was a big "meh."
Much as I enjoyed them, there wasn't anything in stories like the Mirror shows or the Augments stuff or all the foolishness about secret Romulan spies and Surak's ghost that would have attracted and excited a large number of new viewers - "hey, you've got to see this" - and it didn't. The show just bumped along the bottom, ratings-wise, for a few last months while some celebrated every marginal uptick in a given week's ratings as the beginning of a resurgence that just wasn't in the cards.
To a channel-surfer the fourth year would have been at best average, okay TV action-adventure with a little visual style, a more ponderous Stargate with stiffer characters. "Okay" was not enough.
What it was, was a fresh approach. Sure it was fanwanky, but it wasn't boring. It was like somebody had stuck a needle of vitality in the arm of the franchise, they had a willingness to go for broke and say "Bugger it, we're gonna make something of this, we're gonna entertain people".
The trouble with all the Berman/Braga Trek that had preceeded ENT Season Four is that it had gotten so very tired feeling.
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Dennis already answered, but it really is because they started focusing on popular canonical history in order to beef up viewership. It was targeted more solely to longtime fans rather than a general audience, which isn't a bad thing inasmuch as it was an indicator that they had given up on new stories, and had decided to do a recitation of Star Trek history.
There clearly was a large audience open to a new Trek series in 2001, but we got a weak series opener called "Broken Script" and the rest is history.
^ The premise fascinated people, but I recall vividly that "another Star Trek series" was not exactly welcomed with open arms by everybody (most pertinently, I can recall an Onion article which expertly eviscerated them for pressing the 'prequel' button on this one).
Enterprise struggled to get out of the gates, but "Broken Bow" certainly didn't do it any favors.
Enterprise struggled to get out of the gates, but "Broken Bow" certainly didn't do it any favors.
I disagree - just can't see anything about it that would have made the show unmissable for anyone but a long-time fan. It may have been "fresh" in Star Trek terms but only in those terms, much as DS9 apparently represented ground-breaking drama to people who didn't pay attention to what had been going on for a decade with programming on the networks and cable. The rest of the potential audience had no trouble giving these things a miss in favor of more novel programs presented in more contemporary terms.
Nope - Enterprise couldn't hook six million people for its premiere, well short of expectations. It's not like people knew what they thought of "Broken Bow" before premiere night and chose not to tune in, you know.
There pretty clearly was not "a large audience open to a new Trek series" at the time - for a couple of weeks UPN pulled back a few million more curious fans than Voyager's final episodes had attracted. Eh - despite national media like USA Today thinking that the reveal of the "new starship Enterprise" merited front page coverage, the desired audience never really showed up to check the series out.
The whole series was like that. The fact that it was all prequel made this inevitable.
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Yet they avoided most of that for a good majority of the show's run, instead focusing on things no one had heard about. Towards the end, though, they started hitting on things that Trek fans were interested in. It felt like they saw the end coming and said "fuck it, let's do everything from the Chronology."
Well, except for TATV, which was shit.
Whatever the case, Moore and Braga was clearly right that Trek needed a break on TV after VOY
Lin is pretty much the perfect choice for continuing the path they chose for the 2009 reboot.
That said, I don't think STID revealed any limitations of that path that weren't already well on display in the first movie, so I can't really agree with the "promise of the reboot" stuff or the harshing on STID by comparison with it; the material's limitations and short-term commercial advantages were both equally obvious from the outset to anyone who cared to look. And I do think it's evident that the lack of a guiding vision that really understands and cares about the franchise does make the major difference between contemporary Trek and something like the MCU.
OTOH maybe Lin will shock the hell out of everybody and become the Second Founder of Trek that Abrams had the potential to be. You never know.
Not at all. In fact one of the complaints for years by a lot of hard core fans was that the series was ignoring or somehow rewriting established continuity. As one example, Enterprise's Vulcans were more dramatically useful than the preferred fan version...but when the series didn't pan out Coto's folks devoted three freaking episodes to "explaining" how they'd gone astray and beginning to bring them back into line with the TOS presentation - name-checking T'Pau along the way for a little fannish frisson. Aside from that, the Vulcan's Forge trilogy was about...nothing, going nowhere.
Really, the Xindi arc was Enterprise's most ambitious stab at doing something gripping and remarkable with Star Trek at the time. It was not successful - not wholly successful as serial storytelling and not successful at growing the audience.
As for Justin Lin - he's probably the best qualified on that short list to make a movie that lots of folks will want to see next summer.
It's like I said, I remember the coverage even before the premiere being mostly along the lines of "Meh, so what, another Star Trek show, *yawn*". Nobody was engaged in it, the audience was already lost, but Berman and Braga failed to deliver on the premise anyway. The few 'casual viewers' who did tune into "Broken Bow" probably never watched it again.
Yeah, it's not like TV Guide did cover features on it or a national newspaper gave it precious front page space... Oh, wait, they did.
Well, it did take some weeks to descend to previous Star Trek levels.
And much of the remaining viewership checked out after "A Night in Sickbay." (I was one of those.)
To me, IMO, it felt like it was running on the spot for three years, and then it went all fanwanky in the fourth season, but at least it started to pay some lip service to the premise as being a prequel to Star Trek.
I do appreciate that the fourth season was very inward looking (Augments, Klingon Foreheads, Vulcan Philosophy, Andorians and Tellarites, the Mirror Universe, etc etc etc), but in some ways I do wonder if that's the sort of material they should have been hitting out of the park in the first season, instead of all that dull filler.
I do appreciate that the fourth season was very inward looking (Augments, Klingon Foreheads, Vulcan Philosophy, Andorians and Tellarites, the Mirror Universe, etc etc etc), but in some ways I do wonder if that's the sort of material they should have been hitting out of the park in the first season, instead of all that dull filler.
The Vulcan trilogy was about Archer's arc. Through that whole thing he grows a much better understanding of the Vulcan way, solidified at the end where he gives that Vulcan jesture for the first time. It was a nice story for Archer, because I really grew tired of his childish attitude towards Vulcans in the earlier seasons "they wouldn't let my daddy fly a ship!".
I thought there was improvements starting with S3, at least character wise. The start of the Xindi arc was flawed (why would they "test" a prototype on Earth?) but I like that it gave the characters something to do, whereas the previous two seasons played them too much as archetypes like Trip being the boring southern charmer. The arc helped add a lot of needed depth for the characters that by S4 I finally cared about them. Certainly helps that the writing improved greatly in S4, fanboy dribble or not, all I care about is whether it worked for me and it did. It would have been nice to see the series continue from that, but the phrase "too little too late" was evident.
I thought there was improvements starting with S3, at least character wise. The start of the Xindi arc was flawed (why would they "test" a prototype on Earth?) but I like that it gave the characters something to do, whereas the previous two seasons played them too much as archetypes like Trip being the boring southern charmer. The arc helped add a lot of needed depth for the characters that by S4 I finally cared about them. Certainly helps that the writing improved greatly in S4, fanboy dribble or not, all I care about is whether it worked for me and it did. It would have been nice to see the series continue from that, but the phrase "too little too late" was evident.
Why? Why would a single viewer who wasn't already sold on Star Trek be interested? The "Augments arc" was dull filler, for gods' sake. But hey, it explained those bumpy foreheads that trekkies had been arguing about for a decade or so, Appointment television.
More like wrong stuff altogether.
The problem wasn't that the show was a prequel - that was promising, since it provided an entry point into Star Trek before any of the fanwank continuity stuff would happen. It's pretty much the approach that J.J. Abrams took to the first nuTrek movie, and it was tremendously successful.
The thing is, in retrospect it's obvious that the prequel premise for Enterprise should have been handed off to an entirely new creative team that had some demonstrated success at making adventure drama more oriented to a younger audience. Let them do with it whatever they would.
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