Well, the Axanar v. Discovery topic is fully running so I think it's starting again.
Spoilers Yeah... I give up - Star Trek has abandoned philosophical naturalism - it's depressing/juvenile
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
- Start date
Guess I'll have to be an outlier data point for you, then. I'm enjoying DSC reasonably well, but I absolutely loathed the Abrams films... ST09 and STID were some of the worst so-called Star Trek I've ever seen. However, I am also not a huge TNG fan... to my mind, TOS remains the bar by which all later Trek is judged. (And in second place, I'd put DS9.)
I'd reckon it's a safe bet they've read up on this guy, at least:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Stamets
(I just discovered him today. Had no idea the character was named after a real scientist!...)
Yup. But in Discovery, it's ridiculous... lol
I made the same find earlier today
I'm impressed he's more famous on Google than the fictional version.
Reverse the feelings on Discovery and the Abrams films, and this is where I'm at.
I dislike Discovery far more than 2009 and Beyond. I would but Into Darkness and Discovery on the same level for me as Dislike, the show/movie itself is just bleh and mediocre, the Production is legitimately great, but it's fucking awful Star Trek. 2009 and Beyond actually did capture the optimism of Trek and they were at least like, adventurous.
For me though DS9 is the peak of Trek, followed by TNG. Though I also love TOS. I think Voyager and Enterprise are both mediocre, but are still Trek.
For me though DS9 is the peak of Trek, followed by TNG. Though I also love TOS. I think Voyager and Enterprise are both mediocre, but are still Trek.
I really liked Into Darkness (my favorite of the Abrams films), and I liked that they openly criticized US policy on drone warfare and extra-judicial killing. The Enterprise rising out of the ocean is one of the coolest scenes in all of Star Trek, I don't care how dumb the reasoning behind it is!
I can't stand the JJ films. The first two anyway. It felt to me crudely derivative of TOSmovie Trek with Spock yellin' this time, the plots confused me on first viewing, didn't like the breakneck blowing up of planets which gave me a blasted migraine and I've long running dislike of "coming of age" "what were our heroes like as kids?" type prequels whatever the genre they happen to occur in. Coming of age stuff went out with the 80s in my view. And Cadet to Captain in one week? Bah!
JJTrek was everything I hate in cinema and they managed to stick it all into my favourite franchise!! I was-not-one-little-bit-impressed boys and girls! Not a happy camper!
Now, there's *some* silliness in Discovery. Burnham and then Sarek floatin' around in space communicatin' with each other. C'mon now. And I'm gonna say it, I wish the *look* of the series sailed closer to the TOS model then it does. But I enjoy Lorca, the plot twists engage me sufficiently to get me coming back for more and I'm rating most of these episodes 8/10. I've got my reservations but I'm pleased with the series sofar.
JJTrek was everything I hate in cinema and they managed to stick it all into my favourite franchise!! I was-not-one-little-bit-impressed boys and girls! Not a happy camper!
Now, there's *some* silliness in Discovery. Burnham and then Sarek floatin' around in space communicatin' with each other. C'mon now. And I'm gonna say it, I wish the *look* of the series sailed closer to the TOS model then it does. But I enjoy Lorca, the plot twists engage me sufficiently to get me coming back for more and I'm rating most of these episodes 8/10. I've got my reservations but I'm pleased with the series sofar.
Personally I hated Into Darkness more and more as it went on, but really enjoyed the original and Beyond a lot though. That said, whilst the Enterprise rising out of the water was very cool, they barely showed it. Such wasted potential showing it from the natives POV so much, another angle/few seconds would have been nice.
Don't hold back-tell us how you really feel
Sorry, couldn't resist. But, man I appreciate the fact that you can put such a solid label on what you don't like in cinema. Here's hoping the next Trek film is more to your liking.
I don't know, you could try actually reading his complaints first instead of having a kneejerk reaction to his choice of pictures and skipping over the context for them while making ugly assumptions about his motives. While I don't agree with his complaints about the show, none of those complaints were about a gay couple being featured, and I've never seen USS Einstein make any kind of bigoted post. They're usually very long, thoughtful posts full of lots of pics about the history of Trek or certain species or ships.
I think the analogy of "Gene's Vision-TM" to a religion, with adherents of different stripes, including crazed fundamentalists, is spot-on.
I wish I could find the post to credit the guy, but someone on Facebook coined the term "Straw Trek," meaning that what many of us think is the essence of Trek includes a heavy dollop of what we have come up with in our own heads to reconcile decades on inconsistency in the canon. So it's your Straw Trek that's being violated when some film or TV producer creates a new part of the franchise.
Much as a foundational religious text will have omissions and contradictions that the faithful will work out through a process of ignoring or explaining. Problem is, one adherent may choose to ignore an element that another considers essential. And that's how we get bloodshed and online campaigns over imaginary space people.
I wish I could find the post to credit the guy, but someone on Facebook coined the term "Straw Trek," meaning that what many of us think is the essence of Trek includes a heavy dollop of what we have come up with in our own heads to reconcile decades on inconsistency in the canon. So it's your Straw Trek that's being violated when some film or TV producer creates a new part of the franchise.
Much as a foundational religious text will have omissions and contradictions that the faithful will work out through a process of ignoring or explaining. Problem is, one adherent may choose to ignore an element that another considers essential. And that's how we get bloodshed and online campaigns over imaginary space people.
I agree with a lot of the criticism of the series I've read here. I think much of the blame would have to be placed on the writers and more importantly the show runners Berg and Harberts. I guess we'll never really know what the original arc of the show was supposed to be from Fuller's point of view and one can only wonder if there would have been more cohesiveness to the story had he stayed on. What we've been left with has had entertaining moments to be sure, but on the whole feels like a disjointed attempt to patch a narrative that started as something else totally. Sometimes it's hard to contain my disappointment with the show.
Those I mentioned actually predate P. Stamets by a number of years in that subject
I thought tng was one of the best tv shows ever, I hated the jjtrek films but I think disco is top notch
/shrug
We reach, brother.
The show has gone down the road of pseudo-"visions", talks with "dead" people inside a character's head, character "reveals" that are handled poorly, and other trite modern schtick. This was innovative only once, in the mid-1990s, when people like Joss Whedon did it, and used it far more judiciously, with self-awareness of how ridiculous it is. It has become a sickly cloying symbol of hack writing in other people's hands. What's next, maybe the show can incorporate psuedo-prophets having visions that nobody is sure whether to trust? A person inexplicably returning from the dead with a prophetic warning? Cara Thrace leading the Federation to it's destiny? The USS Destiny journeying to the center of the universe in search of "god", encountering will-o-whips that take the form of their deceased family members. Perhaps entire episodes can be dreams in future?
I wanted to like Discovery, I really did, and I gave it the benefit of the doubt, as you all know, for so long, but it's cringeworthy watching this. Perhaps io9's unremitting criticism was right.
Star Trek used to be a show which was grounded in a naturalistic view of the world. Society was what we made of it, not contingent on supernatural forces. Puzzles could be understood with observation/thought. Problems could be overcome or engineered, if society was wise and careful enough. Social issues could be solved with enough understanding. It was, at it's most popular, an unabashed moral sermon too. The two most popular shows, TOS and TNG, were the most earnestly formatted this way. Everything that history tells us makes civilization good - reason, science, humane ethics, realism, the ability to forgive, or to exercise discipline - Star Trek was a partisan for - like some collection of entertaining analects disguised behind an action show.
It has now turned into something decadent in the worst sense of the word, with Discovery. It's like watching the ideas that a writing class in a school might come up with, "miss, what if they communicate via space fungus, meet each other in a dream world, and his dead boyfriend gives him a message". No attempt to clad it in a veneer of science any more, the audience has to perform constant gymnastics to justify it. What a pity; the show has hints of great ideas, the show could have been Star Trek's most diverse statement in favor of naturalism, instead it feels like we are slipping back into the dark ages.
Perhaps given enough time, the show will change and become something else, worth watching. But right now, I'm done defending it or giving it the benefit of the doubt. I don't think we should accept this standard of quality from such a popular franchise, when there are shows as thoughtful as Westworld on TV, or Blade Runner 2049 in the cinema, and when other old science fiction franchises are being handled so reverently.
It's depressing to watch Star Trek become a mystical soap opera. On the positive side, recent attempts at Star Trek have, as many people have noted, brought the 'colorfulness' back into Trek - more things can happen than in the latter days of Voyager, when the colorfulness had been washed away - but the problem is that every bad juvenile trend in storytelling from the last ten years has been present to some degree too.
Textbook hater that I cannot stand. A poster trots out a bunch of stuff from DISCO saying it has abandoned Star Trek's true*whatever*ness and they fail to see that the list they provide has been done before by the true Trek they revere.
Also known as IOKIYAToS (or TNG/DS9/VOY).
Prophetic visions bother you? Sisko had them all the time. Data had weird visions in his dreams. Troi did as well when under alien influence, I believe. I bet there are other examples.
Talks with dead people? What, you didn't see Generations? Or Yesterday's Enterprise? I seem to remember a couple TNG episodes with talking to the dead: the alien that emulated the kid's parents and Geordi and his mother. Or the VOY episode with the Goo Crew. Not to mention time travel. Mirror universes.
Trek to center of universe to talk with God. With Spock's brother who had never been mentioned. Done that already. V.
But the whole spore network thing, despite being a real, actual scientific theory, is a bridge too far?
Please. Your arguments are hypocritical. Are you trolling?
Nothing about his comments were trolling, but this is. If you have a problem with someone's post, notify on it. Do not call out anyone for trolling yourself or you will earn an infraction. Though I will say nothing in the OP would have merited any mod action if you had notified on it. Criticism of the show is not trolling just because you don't like it.
If you have any comments in response to this, take it to PM.
Last edited:
Similar threads
