Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over

[lawman]

This is also why I said "reboot the borg", they need to go back to being a terrifying, completely alien unstoppable force of nature that just leaves a path of destruction in it's wake.

Their popularity baffles me, and always has. I don't care for zombies, and ultimately the Borg are nothing but techno-zombies. They lack any interesting motivations, and any allegorical power. What are they a metaphor for? Unless they represent something that's actually relevant and relatable in thematic terms, they're just a race of Scary Monsters, and fighting monsters has never been the focus of what Trek is about.

Harry Potter is definitely set in the 'present day', well the 90s at any rate. That's not only explicit in the Muggle characters like the Dursleys but part of the whole attraction of the series, that the fans can imagine there might really be a wizarding world hidden from view...

The Harry Potter books were set in the 1990s, yes... of a world clearly different from our own, just like any fantasy world — one where magic not only works but is the basis of a large and thriving subculture. It was obvious — and the movies made it even more so — that there was no plausible way the "wizarding world" could conceivably exist "hidden from view" of the rest of us. (The impact on real-world political and cultural affairs would be unavoidable. If you're an author and you want to write about a fantasy world, you need to either give up on using characters with "real world" connections, as Tolkein did, or you have the characters transit from here to there, as C.S. Lewis did. While I admire much of what Rowling achieved, her attempt to pretend that "there" was the same as "here" never really worked, and was always one of the most awkward things about those books.)

Angelina Lara was the thing that made me truly believe in Lara as an icon, so many of my female friends absolutely loved that film...

Perhaps I've gotten old sometime when I wasn't paying attention, but to me something from the '90s still feels about as recent as last Tuesday... and then as now, movies based on video games are things I try hard to avoid. They tend to be about as entertaining as, well, watching someone else play a video game. (Though apparently that's actually a popular and even profitable thing these days, so what do I know?...)

Meanwhile... there have always been catsuits worn for personal expression and/or empowerment, and also catsuits worn for more exploitative reasons. Even in the '90s, the kind they had Jeri Ryan wear on VOY were pretty clearly in the latter category.

 

[jaime]

Their popularity baffles me, and always has. I don't care for zombies, and ultimately the Borg are nothing but techno-zombies. They lack any interesting motivations, and any allegorical power. What are they a metaphor for? Unless they represent something that's actually relevant and relatable in thematic terms, they're just a race of Scary Monsters, and fighting monsters has never been the focus of what Trek is about.


The Harry Potter books were set in the 1990s, yes... of a world clearly different from our own, just like any fantasy world — one where magic not only works but is the basis of a large and thriving subculture. It was obvious — and the movies made it even more so — that there was no plausible way the "wizarding world" could conceivably exist "hidden from view" of the rest of us. (The impact on real-world political and cultural affairs would be unavoidable. If you're an author and you want to write about a fantasy world, you need to either give up on using characters with "real world" connections, as Tolkein did, or you have the characters transit from here to there, as C.S. Lewis did. While I admire much of what Rowling achieved, her attempt to pretend that "there" was the same as "here" never really worked, and was always one of the most awkward things about those books.)


Perhaps I've gotten old sometime when I wasn't paying attention, but to me something from the '90s still feels about as recent as last Tuesday... and then as now, movies based on video games are things I try hard to avoid. They tend to be about as entertaining as, well, watching someone else play a video game. (Though apparently that's actually a popular and even profitable thing these days, so what do I know?...)

Meanwhile... there have always been catsuits worn for personal expression and/or empowerment, and also catsuits worn for more exploitative reasons. Even in the '90s, the kind they had Jeri Ryan wear on VOY were pretty clearly in the latter category.

Actually, the books do a pretty good job of hiding the wizard in world in our own. This was an era pre smart phones and cameras everywhere. It was also Britain. The best bit of tying the two together occurs when we see a Prime Minister who is basically Tony Blair, meeting the Wizrding Worlds equivalent. The point is, there’s magic. So you can hide a high street behind a pub. Given that you can hide streets behind or under things already in Britain, (go to Edinburgh, see the one under the ground...) it’s not so big of leap, especially back then. The thing the books eventually downplayed following the lead of the films, was the extremely mixed or anachronistic dress...leading to slightly anachronistic, and wizards at large in the muggle world basically looking like the older attendees of the New Age festivals that did the rounds in the nineties.
Maybe it’s not plausible now, maybe the nineties was about the last time you could set a story with hidden worlds, but it was that mix of real and unreal that really worked. (See also St.Mungos)

 

[jaime]

Even when they made them look more classic, supposedly to bring them closer to the more organic originals, they kept that horrible cartoonish pneumatic piston sound for the legs... talk about fucking missing the point

I guess Earthshock to Nemesis is their,golden era.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

If that's really what you want, then what you want is a wholesale reboot.

I'm just going to stop you, right there. I'm perfectly capable of deciding what I want, thanks!

 

[jaime]

I'm just going to stop you, right there. I'm perfectly capable of deciding what I want, thanks!

A zigazigur?

 

[INACTIVERedDwarf]

The original appeal of the Borg, best seen in "Q Who", and which was already starting to get watered down as early as "Best of Both Worlds", was the ultimate fear of a technological alien society, which conquers absolutely everything in it's path, using the most direct and logical means. They were not zombies. They were instead a humanoid civilization that cared nothing for individual costs, and would take the most direct path to accomplishing an objective, even if it meant sacrificing individual members of their race.

Maybe their culture had even been voluntary. But, in "First Contact", they explicitly became zombies infected with a plague, no longer a sophisticated culture, so while that was TNG's most entertaining film, I can certainly see why some people think it was also the film that ruined the Borg, making them into a common trope.

The Cybermen in Doctor Who were originally likewise a civilization, not a mere character-bereft plague of locusts. They had a planet that was entering an ice age. To overcome this, they embarked on a coldly logical and clinical replacement of more and more of their organs, to cope with the increasingly sterile climate. They gradually, without knowing, lost their ability to feel essential emotions. Then, their civilization entombed itself in cryo-stasis, to wait out the freezing of their planet and when they awoke embarked on a campaign of conquest to aquire a new world for themselves. Under those flexible masks were unfeeling humans bereft of any passion, but not corpses. I remember reading a Doctor Who comic where a scientists was literally encased and rendered into an unfeeling face under the mask.

Then in the Doctor Who revival, they were turned into mere slabs of meat inside a metal shell, with stupid over-the-top buzz-saws cutting them up. No longer the unfeeling remnant faces of a long-sterile people under the hood. They completely abandoned that high-sci-fi concept of a civilization that had undergone organ-replacement that was so interesting, in favour of some shite analogy for upgrading phones/PCs. The Cybermen were much closer to Warhammer 40,000's Necrons, but even that is not an exact comparison, since the encasement of individuals was an essential part of their symbolic appeal; that it could be your sister under that mask.

I have never ever liked villains that are seen as a mere plague - civilizations are infinitely more interesting than zombies. Both the Borg and Cybermen were a civilization, with a culture. Then they were turned into mere locusts.

The problem with nanoprobes is that it renders them no longer a culture with defined parameters for their victory, but instead an infection, and once they can 'spread' by means other than political conquest, the door is open for any ridiculous and boring idea for spreading the infection - like Borg Land Mines - Borg Mosquitos - Borg Lawn Sprinklers. Why modern writers don't get this, and keep stepping over cultural limitations, boiling every technical civilization down into plagues, I have no idea. It has never been particularly interesting.

 

[BillJ]

Roddenberry did it in "The Cage" with his line basically saying "GOSHWOW, a woman on the bridge!" That was something that Pike never would have said in-universe, at least in any conception of Prime Universe continuity that is generally accepted today.

In fairness, that line was excised from "The Menagerie."

The line doesn't make any sense, in any context. Not a minute later, Pike is standing by another woman manning a bridge station.

 

[Longinus]

In Star Trek's case as well, this ship has long since sailed. It's not just the absence of genetic "supermen" and the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, as already mentioned. It should also be self-evident that nobody tried to launch nuclear weapons platforms into orbit in the late 1960s; that transparent aluminum has not yet been invented; that the computer revolution of the late 20th century was not spearheaded by Henry Starling's company Chronowerx; that we never launched any additional Voyager probes after number three, nor a Nomad probe in 2002; that sleeper ships have not been plying the solar system, much less been replaced in 2018 (ooh, this year!) by more advanced propulsion systems; that no manned Earth-Saturn probe is readying for launch any time soon; that major American cities (thankfully) do not look at all likely to be hosting "Sanctuary Zones" within the next half-dozen years; and that we (equally thankfully) are apparently not on the path to having a series of genocidal global nuclear wars in the next few decades, much less to developing FTL propulsion in those same decades.

We know that Eugenics War was the same as WWIII, and that was retconned to mid 21st century in TNG, space ships tech should probably be considered to be retconned to the later date too. Rest of those are minor details. And we have transparent aluminium.

Considering your remarks about Harry Potter, you seem to understand 'our world' much more strictly than most people here. It is roughly our world. If we ever get a new Star Trek time travel episode where they travel to 2018, it will look like today, it will not be some post Eugenics War alternate timeline.

 

[cultcross]

The Harry Potter books were set in the 1990s, yes... of a world clearly different from our own, just like any fantasy world — one where magic not only works but is the basis of a large and thriving subculture. It was obvious

The whole point of the concept was that this magical world existed alongside ours, amongst it, hiding in plain sight. That's the fiction that JK Rowling is telling. If one puts on one's "I think you'll find" voice and points out that it isn't true, well of course it isn't, it's fiction, but that completely misses the point in my view. The imagination generates the magical culture tied in alongside ours, contrasting the familiar with the absurd and accepting the extension of reality to enjoy the story. It loses that if the Muggle world is also just some parallel universe, because the familiar grounding of Harry and Hermione's prior experience is lost, and the magical connection to our world, the entertaining idea that it could all be real is destroyed. You say it is "obvious" a story like Star Trek is set in a different universe to ours, but you are literally the first person I've ever known to make that argument. When most people say "it's set in the future" they mean ours, naturally with the imagination engaged. The producers clearly think so too, and always have.

 

[BillJ]

...it will look like today, it will not be some post Eugenics War alternate timeline.

Which is where they are creatively dropping the ball. Star Trek is Star Trek. If you're going to ignore huge chunks of its story, then what's the point? Spock says "1996", Khan says "1996", Enterprise alludes to it being two centuries prior, so the tail end of the 20th century.

With all the other things fans are supposed to look the other way on to accept this is some kind of consistent whole, why should we ignore the Eugenics Wars happening in the 1990's?

 

[Tuskin38]

Apparently some of the new canon novels show clone troopers still making up a chunk of the stormtroopers well into the empires run too.

They really don’t. There are a handful left, some as Academy instructors, but they’re a very very very tiny amount.

The Tarkin novel, which is only 5 years after ROTS, Tarkin was surprised to see a clone trooper.

They started being phased out only a few years after ROTS.

 

[Longinus]

Which is where they are creatively dropping the ball. Star Trek is Star Trek. If you're going to ignore huge chunks of its story, then what's the point? Spock says "1996", Khan says "1996", Enterprise alludes to it being two centuries prior, so the tail end of the 20th century.

With all the other things fans are supposed to look the other way on to accept this is some kind of consistent whole, why should we ignore the Eugenics Wars happening in the 1990's?

All facts cannot be reconciled anyway. In Space Seed Spock describes Eugenics Wars as "the era of your last so-called world war" and says it was two hundred years ago. Both of those make EW to take place in mid 21st century as TNG established that the World War III took place then, and it must be the same as EW (because EW cannot be 'the last world war' if it happened before WWIII.) So you must ignore some of the stated facts anyway, and I rather jettison that inconvenient 90s date and keep Trek (roughly) as our future. Why are you willing to ignore the other stated facts I mentioned?

 

[BillJ]

All facts cannot be reconciled anyway. In Space Seed Spock describes Eugenics Wars as "the era of your last so-called world war" and says it was two hundred years ago.

Spock says "1992 through 1996"...

SPOCK: From 1992 through 1996, absolute ruler of more than a quarter of your world. From Asia through the Middle East.

Khan says "1996"...

KHAN: Captain! Captain! Save your strength. These people have sworn to live and die at my command two hundred years before you were born. Do you mean he never told you the tale? To amuse your Captain? No? Never told you how the Enterprise picked up the Botany Bay, lost in space in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-six, myself and the ship's company in cryogenic freeze?

For me, hard dates carry more weight than general estimates. TNG dropped the ball by inserting a World War III into the timeline that obviously wasn't the same as the Eugenics Wars.

 

[Longinus]

For me, hard dates carry more weight than general estimates. TNG dropped the ball by inserting a World War III into the timeline that obviously wasn't the same as the Eugenics Wars.

Or it was an intentional retcon in TNG to keep Trek as 'our future'. Decades ago. Get over it.

 

[BillJ]

Or it was an intentional retcon in TNG to keep Trek as 'our future'. Decades ago.

Or someone simply forgot Spock's line and Khan's declaration. Which is far more likely.

Get over it.

Why be rude because I interpret things differently than you? For me, Star Trek is the standard. Other folks feel differently.

 

[Tuskin38]

DS9 also gave a wrong estimate for the war.
Only they said the 22nd century, not 21st

 

[BillJ]

DS9 also gave a wrong estimate for the war.

Pretty sure that Behr openly admitted it was a mistake on their part.

 

[Longinus]

Why be rude because I interpret things differently than you? For me, Star Trek is the standard. Other folks feel differently.

Sorry about being rude, but in this context, i.e. discussing one of the spin of series, we must consider the preceding continuity as a whole, not just TOS.

 

[Tuskin38]

Did ENT give a date for the war?

 

[BillJ]

...we must consider the preceding continuity as a whole, not just TOS.

Or we can openly admit the later shows simply got it wrong. I doubt any real consideration was given to keeping Trek as "our future". That train left the tracks a long time ago. Do we delete The Motion Picture because there was no Voyager 6? Deep Space Nine because there are no Sanctuary Districts? Even Voyager nodded to the Eugenics Wars with a model of the DY-100 on Rain Robinson's desk in "Future's End".