Hating Star Trek and arguing with other fans is every Trekkie's Gene Roddenberry given right. I'm looking forward to the show though. At worst there will at least be a few interesting episodes and there are worse ways of passing the time.
Though you may not have paid for it with cashy money, you did with your own time by being forced to watch advertisements designed to make you want to buy things you don't want/need. I suppose it might be different for those of us outside the US where Discovery will be coming to us on Netflix, which is a service that offers an abundance of films and TV series that many already pay for before Trek, now the monthly subscription has an added perk. Roll on May!
It's pretty common with literary work, TV and movies for newer material to supplant the old. In Star Trek this is not acceptable to the small minority that thinks "canon"(and all the connotations that word invokes) is inviolate. While especially in Hollywood, no one expects newer stories in a franchise or series to be off limits and hamstring creativity. So essentially, people who dislike Enterprise for "canon violations" are looking at it from a totally different POV.
In my experience, the haters tend to be a vocal minority ... often amplified by complaining about them. I say let them hate in peace, as long as they're polite about it; while their premature disgust may be less enriching than our excitement, it is no less legitimate. vIjIn. ("I wish.")
The number of fluent speakers has increased quite a lot over the past few decades (from about 12 fluent speakers to about 30-50), and in recent years Facebook and other social media have helped a lot of people gain some experience with the language. If the language is used prominently in Star Trek: Discovery, it could probably gain quite a boost. That's why I love the fact that Bryan Fuller has said that they have somebody working on fleshing out the Vulcan language. Star Trek has long had a very on-again-off-again relationship with conlangs, but I suspect recent trends of taking creating full languages for movies (such as Avatar, John Carter and Man of Steel) as well as TV series (such as Game of Thrones, Defiance and The Shannara Chronicles) might have rubbed off on the creators of Star Trek: Discovery. This will probably show up in other ways than languages, too. While Star Trek was ahead of its time with extensive world-building in a shared cinematic universe, the bar has been raised over the past decades, largely thanks to wikis and internet communities gathering every piece of information and pointing out every contradiction. We'll probably start seeing more attention paid to things such as the relative locations of star systems and the real-speed equivalence of the warp scale (which have previously been very hand-wavy). If traversing the distance between Earth and Tellar Prime takes 12 days, 21 hours and 31 seconds at warp factor 7,4 in one episode, then it will take 12 days, 21 hours and 31 seconds at warp factor 7,4 in the next episode as well, because they know some person on the internet is going to cry foul otherwise. So, that's one more reason for those of us obsessed with minutiae (and that's probably a decent percentage of us forumites) to be hopeful about Star Trek: Discovery
Simple answer: no, how could I hate it when I've not seen it? And I hope every bit of loghaD's post comes true
I don't hate it. But I can't say I'm enthusiastic about what I've seen and read so far. I think the ship is ugly -- even moreso than the Edselprise -- and I have a tough time imagining this show following around a single Lower Decks character. I'll give it a shot for an episode or two when it premieres because it's Star Trek, but I'm starting to feel like it's a different kind of Star Trek for a different kind of audience, leaving me to my Netflix marathons of pre-2009 content and the novelverse.
I suppose that's always a possibility. But I'll anyway hold out some hope that the producers have taken note of fan response to this ship and will make some alterations prior to the premiere.
I don't think that should be too hard to do, given that it's only it's external appearance. Nothing on the inside will have to change, I guess.
But is that necessarily a good thing? Making a show by constantly looking to the reactions of the fanbase and altering it to suit whatever the mood of the day seems to be? Whatever decisions they make will inevitably be quite vocally objected to by some part of the fanbase (we are, after all, hardly a united group) and the end result will be an inconsistent mish mash of failed attempts to please a crowd who are notoriously unpleasable. That will leave the show mediocre and lacking in direction whilst dispiriting the creative staff who will feel they can do nothing right. Far better to have a clear vision and work towards that, hopefully pleasing a sizeable part of the fanbase along the way than to falter with futile attempts to get everyone on board.
How much the people behind the scenes can ignore audience reaction is a function of how good their instincts are. If you're really talented, your stuff will be well received without having to go through any sort of previews or test-screenings. There is such a thing as a lack of talent. The production design on nuTrek, IMHO, is atrocious. And JJ's inability to realize this and simply serve it up again and again isn't about upholding some sort of ideal of artistic integrity as much as it's Dunning-Kruger style arrogance. I would hate for Bryan Fuller and co. to fall victim to that same problem. If everyone is telling you the ship looks like crap, it probably does.
That's assuming he WANTS it to be a thing of beauty, bear in mind we know very little about the ship, her role, etc. or Fuller's intent with the show. It's one thing to have the Enterprise be the image of perfection, but that would have been out of place for DS9 or the Defiant for instance. Not every vessel in the fleet is a prestige ship, top of the line with no expense spared, many are by definition functional workhorses, older, less capable, etc. Agreed about Nu Trek, absolutely, but the fundamental difference there is that JJ is not creating something new within the franchise per se, he's working with a known set of characters, mission, vessel (more or less). The execution of that is (in my view) poor and the response has been fairly negative as a result. Fuller on the other hand is presenting us with a new vision, another part of that very large universe we haven't seen before and the ship "looking crap" may well be entirely appropriate to that vision.
I wonder if it will be told primarily from her point of view (à la Lower Decks), or if it will be more of an ensemble show and she just get the most screen time and is at the center of the most plotlines (much as Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway and Archer got the most screentime on their shows but there was still plenty of time for the others). I'm hoping for the latter, because to me a Star Trek series should be about a crew, not about one person. Still, I'll certainly give it a go either way. Perhaps they'll step all over my every expectation of what a Star Trek series should be, and perhaps I'll love it even more for it. Maybe that's what Meyer was talking about when he said we should keep our minds open.
Well, she'll be a bridge officer, so not technically "lower decks"... One thing I am anticipating is that this will enable the show to explore the ship's captain as a genuine, fallible human being. The Trek tradition is that lead captains are basically walking awesomeness. They tried updating that with ENT, but the reaction was a shitstorm. Overtly moving the series POV to another character (let's call her Mary Sue ) could paradoxically allow for a rounder characterisation of the captain. (No jokes about Shatner and "rounder characterisation", please.)
Everyone isn't saying the ship looks like crap though. I certainly don't think it does, and I've seen several others on here say they like it too. Don't speak for me, I'm perfectly capable of speaking for myself, thank you. And let's not forget, this board is not the entire Star Trek fanbase. I can't believe the amount of negativity towards the show coming from some supposed Trek fans. This is the first new Star Trek on television in over a decade. I'm excited for it, at least give it a chance before condemning it.