I cannot agree with this more. I hear "grimdark" and "betraying GR's vision" but honestly struggle to see what its doing that is so different than some episodes of various shows.
I can't like this enough
Let's talk about the elephant in the room, this series violates Roddenberry's vision big time
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BINGO! I feel the same way. I'd also add a big difference between DISCO and other Star Treks of the past is that these aren't problems on some far away planet that the high and mighty "heroes" on the ship can come, pass judgement and solve, and then forget about it by the next episode. These are everyday issues that the crew has to actually live with and may come back to haunt them.
This is why I enjoy it. I want to see the consequences and the characters work within them, not just fly off to the next adventure.
If this is what is meant by "Game of Thrones" in space is exploring actual consequences, I not only fully support it, but want to see more.
Gene Roddenberry getting the credit for creating Star Trek does not mean he created it on his own in a vacuum. Other people made significant contributions. Star Trek as we know it wouldn't exist without Roddenberry but it wouldn't exist without a ton of other people either.
Or because I like to be blunt:
Roddenberry was a hack writer who was lucky other people shaped his idea into something poeple loved.
Without Solow, Coon, Justman etc. TOS would have never been the show it became and Berman and Piller are the reason TNG is remembered as more than a crappy TOS sequel.
^^^
Um, the main story of ST:TMP already HAD been a Star Trek TV episode. ST:TMP was basically a $40 million dollar remake of TOS - "The Changeling" (from the second season) at it's core.
Quite a lot of articles recently have been arguing that Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a greatly overlooked film, perhaps on par with other classics of hard science fiction. TrekBBS's Christopher has been an advocate of it, and wrote the sequel novel Ex Machina. After Star Trek: Continues ended last week with a perfect tie-in between TOS and TMP, I gave it a re-watch, and approaching it with the right mindset, found a lot of value.
This is perhaps the most Roddenberry-like of all the Star Trek films, so again, when people say with absolute confidence or certainty that Gene's approach was wrong, I must point out that this opinion is not shared by everyone, and may lie in what expectations and philosophical opinions the viewer brings to the table. Even among critics, the film finds ardent defenders, and works of ambition like The Motion Picture get re-examined and re-appraised, with renewed philosophical interest sometimes only long after the fact.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture | Criminally Underrated
- Why Star Trek: The Motion Picture is Secretly a Great Film
- Looking back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture
- Why STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE is an Underrated Masterpiece
It also fits surprisingly well with Discovery's aesthetic.
One of the things I did like about DSC from its beginning is how well it fits with TMP, aesthetically speaking. And ENT...apart from the Klingons. Though...add some hair and change their skin tones, it might work better. And the ugly photoshop chop shop ships.
I cannot agree with this more. I hear "grimdark" and "betraying GR's vision" but honestly struggle to see what its doing that is so different than some episodes of various shows.
I can't like this enough
Part of it is that ‘some episodes’ part of your statement. There’s the odd outlier of NOT family friendly in previous Treks, but DSC has something in alsmost every episode, and many times cannot bed edited out. The pilots are even skewed older. I do wonder how that would have worked had terrestrial channels got ahold of the rights around the world...would the BBC be trying to give us safer edits, as they did in the past? Would there be alternate takes to get rid of frozen corpses, open corpses, inside out corpses....because as is discussed elsewhere, they don’t add much. And this ain’t about ‘well xy and z was scared to me’ back in the day, this is about quantifiable objective screen detail. It’s also about a sustained level.
Now, I like DSC fine now, after nine episodes, with some caveats for things I still don’t like about it, but...it is not in keeping with Star Trek has been before, and not in a ‘well it’s a new century, it’s fresh, it’s trying new things’ way. It is tonally different, with a very narrow audience focus, that will do it more harm than good, ultimately, I suspect. They needed a new TNG, but they have aimed at a new Ds9 then turned the grimdark up a notch or three. I don’t think that will work, and I don’t know if it’s highs will reach those of DS9.
It was actually a mash up of that and the Doomsday Machine, complete with a Decker to boot.
Don’t forget ‘what are little girls made of’ or...whatever that episode with Andrea and Ruk was...Decker was the son of the Commodore wasn’t he?
To be fair synthesising a story out of three others, plus all the setting changes really says that no...it’s not exactly the negative ‘rip off’ of those earlier episodes people say. If anything, yes, it’s a more refined riff on The Changeling, but it’s just that, a refinement. Otherwise I can point to a ton of ‘this is just that’ in every version of Trek, (DSC is swimming in small scene call backs, had its time-loop episode already, and has its main character synthesised out of at least three others....Paris, Spock and Worf.) and many things besides (I just watched Robbie the Robot turn up in Lost In Space...in a story that is extremely similar to one Dark Matter did a year or so back...it’s not fair to say one is the other) but these things are more than the sum of their parts.
There's a lot in TMP I like and a lot I don't. I love the redesign of the ship, but I don't need a six minute scene dedicated to Kirk just eye-fucking every part of the ship, and I don't need characters staring at the view screen in awe for huge stretches of the film.
That's why it hasn't been embraced on the same level as Blade Runner outside of Trek circles. Star Trek was not anything like 2001: A Space Odyssey before 1979, and it never was after. Even if it were a movie totally unrelated to Trek it still wouldn't stand on its own because it's still lacking in places.
I feel if TMP had more humanity in it, like the sick bay scene with Spock and Kirk holding hands, it would have better connected with audiences in the way TOS did. The Director's Edition comes closer to that regard, but it's still plagued with other issues.
That's why it hasn't been embraced on the same level as Blade Runner outside of Trek circles. Star Trek was not anything like 2001: A Space Odyssey before 1979, and it never was after. Even if it were a movie totally unrelated to Trek it still wouldn't stand on its own because it's still lacking in places.
I feel if TMP had more humanity in it, like the sick bay scene with Spock and Kirk holding hands, it would have better connected with audiences in the way TOS did. The Director's Edition comes closer to that regard, but it's still plagued with other issues.
Good catch. I'd almost forgotten about that.
Makes me wish they managed to pull off the Memory Wall sequence from Spock's original EVA.
OTOH, when you read the original script for TMP, you discover that the last fifth of the movie isn't even there because they never actually finished it. If you've ever wondered why the movie seems to kind of fall apart right around the time Decker merges with Ilia... it's because that's exactly as far as the movie was written and they really had no idea what to do for an ending so they kind of just threw something together and said "Hey, that's pretty good. Let's go with that."
I do too, but I'm also kind of glad they aren't spending time building up background characters who will never be fully developed. It's sort of the Harry Kim effect: given a half-assed and unproductive characterization, one would almost prefer they just give him a few good lines and leave the rest up to the imagination.
Most of the time, I don't either. But sometimes that slow pace and focussed emotion appeals to me, like going on a nature hike or safari. When I'm in the mood for that, I watch TMP.
The whole POINT of the sickbay scene was that it was the moment that Spock did a 180 from his pursuit of pure logic and re-embraced his humanity. Remember, his whole reason for coming aboard the Enterprise was to find V'ger, who had finally achieved everything he had always sought. He mind-melds with V'ger, and instead of discovering the serenity of pure logic and extreme knowledge, he finds that V'ger is consumed with despair and can no more reconcile its own existence than Spock can.
Which is why the first thing Spock does when he wakes up is laugh. "Jim. I should have known!"
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The memory wall would have been cool. I rather like the opening sequence of Alien with the captain, first officer and navigator going out together. Maybe Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Uhura, and Ensign Redshirt could have made a fivesome to inject more supporting cast interaction.
Relatively speaking, its first 9 episodes are significantly better than the first 9 of DS9. So, anything is possible with regard to DSCs legacy at this point.
Episodes aside, I am talking about the characters and how well they are drawn. The DSC characters are not quite as...rounded...after 9 episodes as many of the Ds9 characters are. Emissary alone gives us more character moments than the first four episodes of Destiny. Comparing Sisko to either Lorca or Burnham, we know more about who he is, what drives him, and what brought him to where he is. This is because Emissary is very focused on doing that...but we also get a good handle on Kira, Bashir, Quark...even Odo. The characters continue to grow, but they grow from a strong start. The only focus in DSC Of even comparable note is Burnham...and after nine episodes, even she is not as strongly fleshed out. I think it’s because in episodic story’s traditionally, you have to get your characters in place, then tell story after story using them..whereas in the serial approach DSC is taking, you basically know bugger all until the writers decide the story needs it...the characters are more defined by plot, than the other way round (here’s a story, things are happening, how do our characters react, which characters make the most interesting choice in this story...or the story is built around the characters, like for instance...Hippocratic Oath depends on it being OBrien and Bashir, whereas literally any other character can be in that cell with Mudd and get Tyler out with very little changing.)
Sure once all is said and done, we should have more, and in some ways it’s comparing apples and oranges, but that’s why I chose Ds9, because it is so serialised, even more than it’s given credit for, to compare to DSC. It’s not even about counting episodes...by percentage we are what, fifty percent through season one...where were we fifty percent through season one on Ds9 with our characters?
Again, I disagree. 9 episodes was not 50% through the DS9. It was about 30%. And the character approach of DS9 was immature and cookie cutter at the beginning. They were the standard "fully developed" "batteries included" characters, because the idea of serialization didn't really hit until S3ish.
I love DS9...it's my second favorite series. But to be honest with myself...DSC is vastly more effective when looked at relatively. I can barely slog through most of the S1 DS9 episodes. It's truly an awful season. I find TNG's much-maligned S1 to be superior to DS9's start.
I really mean beyond just the sick bay scene and any previous scene with Spock. Everything else just feels sterile in a way no different from the Star Wars prequels. Too solemn. And it doesn't help that the bits we get here and there feel stock, like Decker and Ilia in the corridor. It's like from a bad Airport sequel that not even Goldsmith's music can save.
A favorite trope of mine from TOS is when Kirk and Bones have a heart to heart. In TMP it's just lacking, cold. It may have helped a little to just have Bones pour some drinks but since this is Roddenberry's "true" vision and that TOS was just "dramatization", I guess not.
I do think TMP has far more character stuff than it sometimes gets credit for. The whole story was more about the journey of the characters to rediscover those relationships. Spock is out of sorts. Kirk is out of sorts. McCoy is in conflict with Kirk because of Kirk's mindset. But, as the movie played on, they work back toward who they were
I don't feel they accomplished that with Kirk well enough, or at least the only resolution I got out of his arc was "well, now that Decker is 'missing', I got my ship back!"
Contrast that with TWOK basically redoing that arc and more effectively (and with Romulan ale!)
Contrast that with TWOK basically redoing that arc and more effectively (and with Romulan ale!)
TMP is a deeply flawed film but I still love it. It comes the closest of any Star Trek film in the franchise to actual science fiction and being a story devoted to exploration of the truly and frighteningly unknown. I will rewatch TMP over more than a few of the other films released since and the Jerry Goldmsith score remains my all-time favorite Star Trek movie soundtrack.
