Something I don't understand about "Shades of Gray"
- Thread starter indycar
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Wow, I must be the only person in the world who doesn't mind this episode.
As Christopher said, clip shows are a tried-and-true staple of American television (not so much here in the UK). The Simpsons has them; Friends did several times; The A-Team also ran one (coincidentally, also it's second season finale, with even less episodes behind it than TNG!)
I give Shades Of Grey kudos because at least it avoided what many of those other shows tend to do which is "Character X might leave or die, and everyone else remembers all the happy times they had."
The whole sci-fi angle of certain memories providing different responses to the infection was, at least, an effort to do something a little more unique.
As Christopher said, clip shows are a tried-and-true staple of American television (not so much here in the UK). The Simpsons has them; Friends did several times; The A-Team also ran one (coincidentally, also it's second season finale, with even less episodes behind it than TNG!)
I give Shades Of Grey kudos because at least it avoided what many of those other shows tend to do which is "Character X might leave or die, and everyone else remembers all the happy times they had."
The whole sci-fi angle of certain memories providing different responses to the infection was, at least, an effort to do something a little more unique.
In an era where you can watch any episode of any tv show whenever or wherever you want clip shows are irrelevant. Even in 1989 we had the ability to watch every episode of Star Trek on VHS. I understood the need for them long ago but I'll never see them as anything other than a pointless waste of an episode.
I love the idea that was suggested somewhere of having the episode being just Data and Q in a black void, with Q asking Data why he so admires humans and the clips being related to Data's answers. That could have been lovely.
A lot of series do clip shows in their first or second seasons, and sometimes they're even good. Stargate SG-1 did "Politics" toward the end of its first season, and it introduced a major character who'd be a recurring antagonist for the next several years. They generally did a good job of making their clip shows significant parts of the arc. There's also the underappreciated 2007 Flash Gordon series, which did a clip show about 2/3 of the way into its first season, but in a way that advanced the narrative meaningfully and made sense in context (a supporting character discovered the big secret and needed to be filled in on the background), and the clips were brief enough that it never felt tiresome. And at the time, I kind of appreciated being reminded of the major story threads up to that point, although it's less important on DVD.
I honestly don't think I've rewatched it since its original 1988 broadcast. Maybe once.
Depends on the clip show. As I said, some shows manage to make the frame stories meaningful and important to the arc of the series. A lot of Stargate SG-1's clip shows depicted important changes in the status quo. The '88 Superboy series did a good job using its clip shows as character studies. CSI's "Lab Rats" also made pretty good use of the clip/bottle-show format to give a focus episode to the underdeveloped supporting cast, as they reviewed an ongoing unsolved case and tried to crack it themselves.
One of the best clip shows ever is Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda's "The Unconquerable Man," which ingeniously incorporated its clips not as flashbacks, but as part of an alternate-timeline version of the events of the series's first year and a half. In the pilot, the hero had been betrayed by his first officer and had to kill him, but "The Unconquerable Man" showed a timeline where the first officer had won the fight and had to deal with the same events of the series in terms of his own rival philosophy, and we got to see how the universe unfolded differently as a result. Some of the incorporation of the clips with the new footage was a bit clumsy, but in general it was the most creative and seamless approach to a clip show I've ever seen. It hardly even felt like a clip show, more like just an alternate history in which a few of the same events occurred but had different outcomes.
Then there were the crazy clip shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess did. Hercules did a couple where the main cast played cartoonish caricatures of the show's own production team arguing about the show, with the conceit being that Kevin Sorbo was actually the real Hercules pretending to be Kevin Sorbo playing Hercules. Xena's first clip show, instead of relying solely on clips from past Xena episodes, used clips from Spartacus and old gladiator movies and the like to represent the stories that various bards were telling (with Gabrielle recounting Xena's adventures in flashback). And various other clip shows featured the main cast as historical or modern descendants or reincarnations or clones of the original characters.
I think that "Shades of Gray" was one of the last ordinary, disposable clip shows in TV history. Ever since, TV producers who've had to make clip shows have tried their best to make the framing material interesting or important.
(Although not all of them have been good or effective. I'm still boggled that Showtime's Outer Limits revival -- an anthology series! -- had annual clip shows clumsily knitting various unrelated stories into an attempt at a shared universe.)
That's essentially what TOS: "The Menagerie" was -- using the show's rejected pilot as a flashback. Gilligan's Island did much the same with leftover footage from their unaired pilot in their first-season Christmas episode, when the castaways reminisced about their first day on the island. Then there was the Xena episode "Lifeblood," a flashback to the "origin" of the Amazons which was actually footage from a failed spinoff pilot called Amazon High. I'm sure there are other occasions, since TV producers welcome opportunities to save money.
I didn't think the episode was too terrible, a lot of the Riker clips were good, though some were certainly goofy, and a number somehow (maybe from being good enough) felt pretty fresh. But too many were too uninterrupted rather than brief and Riker "remembering" scenes in which he hadn't been in felt really dumb.
Perhaps just get Colm Meaney in for the day, and film http://chiefobrienatwork.com/?
Or a story of how his paperwork caught up with him and they found out he wasn't really an officer?
Or they could have done a clip-show instead of Sub Rosa!
I wonder how Shades of Grey could have worked better, perhaps they could have chosen to use a different character?
I'd have loved to see a grandiose Picard speech to Pulaski causing her to resign, or be fired. Or both. They wouldn't have the budget for Q, but more picard moralising and fewer clips would have been a better option.
How about Picard doing a one-man-Shakespere play on the bridge, I bet Patrick Stewart would have done it for free. Or 40 minutes of him doing speeches, from Hamlet to Richard III to Whitmore, in the Ready-Room set.
Intersperse with shots (all on the Bridge) of
* Data and Wesley playing pong on the viewscreen
* Worf snarling at a rubik cube
* Geordi picking petals of daisies with "she loves me, she loves me not"
* Pulaski hiding something and Troi complaining that she's hiding something.
* Riker eating a burito at the start of the episode, then entering the never-used door at the back of the bridge, coming out at the end of the day
Call it "day off" or something.
...well, if they really needed to save cosrts they could have just re-used an old ToS script and done it with the TNG cast.
A few episodes would work:
The Naked Time (ah...wait they did recycle that)
Space Seed (ah...right they already thawed some 20th century people in that season)
ok...umm...Spocks Brain. there. Yes. Wesleys brain is removed and left in a box, everyone shrugs and leaves.
A few episodes would work:
The Naked Time (ah...wait they did recycle that)
Space Seed (ah...right they already thawed some 20th century people in that season)
ok...umm...Spocks Brain. there. Yes. Wesleys brain is removed and left in a box, everyone shrugs and leaves.
No, that's not the way it works. The writer's salary is a minuscule part of the total budget. At the time of TNG, it might've been on the order of a few tens of thousands of dollars out of an episode budget of maybe $1.5 million -- a fraction of a percent of the total cost. So reusing an existing script would make a trivial difference to the cost of filming the episode. To save money on production, the most urgent thing is to save time, because time is money, as they say. All the dozens of people involved in the production have to be paid by the day or by the hour, the film costs money, the electricity costs money, the food and beverages needed to sustain the cast and crew cost money, etc. You can also cut back on costly things like new sets, location filming, visual effects, stunts, guest stars, and the like, but the most important thing is to shorten the shooting schedule, to spend less time making the episode. That's why they do clip shows -- because if you can film less than a whole episode's worth of material, you need less time and money to make it.
After "Shades of Gray," when the Trek producers resolved never to do another clip show, they found alternative ways to do money-saving shoots. Look at "The Drumhead," one of the prime examples. It was a "bottle show," using only existing sets, so they didn't have to build more. It had no location shooting. Some sets were only partially shown -- for instance, the Klingon scientist's guest quarters were unseen except for the door and part of the adjoining wall, so that only that part had to be lit and the setup was much faster and cheaper. It had only one new special-effects shot, the warp core explosion, and otherwise used stock footage. It didn't have much action, just people talking. All of that saved money and time. DS9 did the same thing with "Duet."
(My first DS9 spec script was written as an attempt at a money-saving bottle show that was more of a science fiction story than the dramatic, character-driven stuff they'd done in "Duet" and "The Drumhead." It involved several characters arriving on the station to find it completely deserted and having to solve the mystery of where everyone went. So it was an idea-driven SF mystery, but one that could be told on standing sets with minimal cast and extras, only stock effects, etc. I think the economy of it was probably what got me invited to pitch to the show, because it proved I understood the logistical issues of doing science fiction on TV. Which was what I was going for.)
If they could have waited, sometime in Season 4 would have been a good time for a clip show. In that season they achieved two noteworthy benchmarks: Passing the number of TOS episodes, and reaching their own 100th episode.
The 100th was in fact the season finale, when Worf was leaving the ship. That would have been a great excuse for a clip show right there. As would have Picard recovering from the Borg incident and Wesley really leaving the ship.
Seinfeld's clip specials (not really episodes that fit into the storyline) were pretty good and still worth watching in syndication...just a concentrated collection of "greatest hits" moments.
The 100th was in fact the season finale, when Worf was leaving the ship. That would have been a great excuse for a clip show right there. As would have Picard recovering from the Borg incident and Wesley really leaving the ship.
Seinfeld's clip specials (not really episodes that fit into the storyline) were pretty good and still worth watching in syndication...just a concentrated collection of "greatest hits" moments.
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The thing about cost cutting is that it's way easier to write a great bottle episode than a great clip show.
There are so many pluggable tropes that are cheap to do and will at least result in something okay. Behavior changing sickness spreads around the crew. Disaster occurs on the ship and traps people together to work out their issues. Computer virus turns ship against crew. Or just have a character work through some personal crisis.
There are so many pluggable tropes that are cheap to do and will at least result in something okay. Behavior changing sickness spreads around the crew. Disaster occurs on the ship and traps people together to work out their issues. Computer virus turns ship against crew. Or just have a character work through some personal crisis.
I think some series do clip shows because they feel obligated to meet a quota of action and excitement that they can't get with people just sitting around talking. For instance, Power Rangers often does clip shows where most or all the action is in the flashbacks (usually as their holiday specials these days). Of course, the entire Power Rangers franchise is one big clip show, since it's based on building stories around existing action and effects footage from the Japanese Super Sentai franchise, so it's weird that they feel the need to do flashback-based clip shows on top of that.
Worf: ``Jean-Luc, you're in charge, I demand you do something about this!''
Picard: ``FINE! Lockdown! Data, seal the doors. Nobody leaves until this pen shows up. We're doing a bottle episode!''
When did Worf ever call him "Jean-Luc"? I can't hear the words coming out of his mouth.
And what's "...until this pen shows up"?
And what's "...until this pen shows up"?
He never did and I'm guessing that they're saying that it could use a cheap effect for the plot or something that sounds ridiculous.
I liked Power Rangers when I was 10, but I stopped watching when some of the original cast were still around. Even at 10 it annoyed me that they stopped doing anything interesting with the zords after the first few episodes and just played the same stock footage.
I remember in the first few episodes they had fights where the zords acted individually before combining into Megazord. But after the first few episodes they stopped doing this and immediately formed Megazord. This bothered me. And I was 10.
Some shows do feel the need to show action and excitement, and TNG is not one of them. A lot of TNG episodes ended the major conflict just by having people dramatically read things off their consoles. Both TNG and DS9 had some great bottle episodes. And frankly, "Shields at 20%...30 seconds left Captain!" is still much more exciting than "Riker feel bad emotions. Oooh Riker get better!"
The pen thing is a Community reference. There is an episode where they spent the entire episode in the study room because Annie lost her pen and needed to find out who took it, and Abed made a meta-reference to it being a bottle episode.
I remember in the first few episodes they had fights where the zords acted individually before combining into Megazord. But after the first few episodes they stopped doing this and immediately formed Megazord. This bothered me. And I was 10.
Some shows do feel the need to show action and excitement, and TNG is not one of them. A lot of TNG episodes ended the major conflict just by having people dramatically read things off their consoles. Both TNG and DS9 had some great bottle episodes. And frankly, "Shields at 20%...30 seconds left Captain!" is still much more exciting than "Riker feel bad emotions. Oooh Riker get better!"
The pen thing is a Community reference. There is an episode where they spent the entire episode in the study room because Annie lost her pen and needed to find out who took it, and Abed made a meta-reference to it being a bottle episode.
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Which is why they were able to get away with doing pure-drama bottle shows like "The Drumhead" and "Duet" to save money rather than having to do more clip shows.
Or a Shades of Grey style show focusing on all the times Deanna stated the obvious? It could be a two parter.
Or a The Menagerie episode, with William Shatner. Kirk's on trial by a alien species for a past mistake, the majority of the episode is the TNG crew, Kirk, and a alien prosecutor sitting in a room with a large view screen watching selected scenes from TOS.
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