I have to give Discovery credit, they've taken Trek drudgery to a whole new level.
Would Star Trek Discovery have benefited from an episodic format?
- Thread starter Yassa Justice
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I have to give Discovery credit, they've taken Trek drudgery to a whole new level.
It wasn't so much the writers "didn't care." Quite the contrary, attempts were made to do long term story arcs. Indeed, Year of Hell was originally pitched as a season long story arc. It was UPN that rejected the idea of long term arcs and told the writers they couldn't do a story any longer than a two-parter.
Disco's doing fine, otherwise CBS wouldn't be developing five other Trek shows.
Especially since many shows these days are pulling the plug after the fifth season.
Right, I'd consider 3-4 seasons pretty good for a streaming series with this kind of price tag, and 5 would be amazing. I have no expectation that this will go 7 years.
To be clear, I am not saying fanwank is necessarily a bad thing. But there were a ton of it in Season 1. We're both talking about plot-critical elements (Klingons, MU) and little Easter eggs (Lorca's tribble, Gorn skeleton, a Starfleet vessel named Shran, etc). Arguably the only thing really unique was the characters - and even a few of them - like Sarek and Mudd - we have seen before.
There was lots of history that people we identify as being black today had prior to slavery and colonialism. But they didn't self-identify as black. Even today, in Africa, most people do not self-identify as black in many countries, because 99%+ of the people they meet day to day are also black. Things like tribal affiliation and home language are far more salient. I think it is pretty likely that even in Trek's 24th century people will self-identify as say Yoruba or Xhosa or something of the sort. But to find salience in black identity is a much different question.
Basically, when you look at all of human history, when the barriers of discrimination drop between groups of people, they pretty quickly cease being discrete ethnic groups. In the U.S. for example you can look at how Jewish Americans (and increasingly second/third generation Americans of Asian descent) outmarry into the white majority more than half the time. Or in the UK, where black people have not faced the same levels of historic racism, the intermarriage rate between blacks and whites is much higher. The UK had a major influx of people of Afro-Caribbean descent in the mid 20th century, and there are now more biracial people with some Caribbean ancestry than people of fully Caribbean background. Most British blacks now are African immigrants, who tend to skew middle to upper-middle class and also intermarry into the white majority.
In the Trekverse there would still be a lot of people who would look one race or another, provided their families came from say Central Africa or China or Poland or something. But if you're talking about future Americans, one would presume the majority of people would be some shade of brown. This is probably doubly true in Starfleet, because so many people come from multi-generational Starfleet families, which leads to one meeting individuals from very different backgrounds from yourself.
Basically, Trek has always shown way, way too many white people to be plausible. Fans have tried to square this away with some weird logic that the Eugenics Wars killed off most people outside North America and Europe. But the idea that there was a genocide of nonwhite people in Trek's past is so horrific I don't want to consider it. Better to just accept Trek needs a retcon. Discovery did better on the racial diversity angle from a contemporary standpoint, but it's interesting/sad to note in all of Trek's history, there have been more hybrid individuals from two or more species than biracial or multiracial human characters.
Supposedly the Voyager writers decided to never have Seven and Tuvok engage in one-on-one dialogue because they felt two characters with a stilted diction would just bore the audience. It's not like Saru is unemotional, but I do feel that he's not an incredibly verbally expressive character - thus if he and Burnham are in the room together it's a bit of a bore.
I will give the writers props for at least taking risks with Burnham's character. It's better to attempt to make something great which has a very polarized response than it is to just shoot for slightly above average and inoffensive, like say Voyager did.
ORLY?
- They remade TOS - "The Naked Time" as TNG's - "The Naked Now" (in with they also mentioned the original 1701 and Kirk) as its first regular one hour episode after the two hour pilot TNG - "Encounter At Farpoint"
- The original concept for TNG -"Too Short A Season" was that it would actually BE "James T. Kirk" and not "Admiral Jameson" (Yes, they were talking to Shatner during teh concept phase, he turned them down immediately.)
- Take a look at ALL the TOS era ship and Shuttlecraft models in the backgrounds of various Conference and Ready Room scenes.
- In TNG Season 2 - they PURPOSELY brought in the character of Dr. Katherine Pulaski who was a female clone (right down to being "an old country doctor" annd believing the Transporter would "scatter one's atoms across space"; and further tried (unsuccessfully) to revive the TOS Spock/McCoy dynamic between Data/Pulaski; but because Data was naive about hummanity in a way that Spock was not, it came across more like she was verbally abusing a child, so it was dropped
So yeh - don't give me that - "...NG was very conscious not to be heavily referential regarding TOS..." bit as it's BS.
They were VERY conscious of wanting to appeal to TOS fans because that was there base audience starting out - in Season one (as a TOS fan who hung out with many other TOS fans) they failed. Many TOS fans didn't bother giving TNG a shot again UNTIL it's third season and TNG - "Yesterday's Enterprise".
I prefer arc based shows because I like seeing small details pay off later. I don't understand why some prefer episodic, a lot of it seems like wasted storytelling. I'm glad it's dying out. Discovery would have actually benefitted from being released in one or two batches instead of weekly. The story works better when binged.
That's precisely the trouble. We are shown her fall (though awkwardly), and then she is simply at point B and then at point C et cetera. She does not get herself from A to B to C to D, those things simply happen, some of it at the contrivance of Lorca, some at the contrivance of Sarek, and some at the contrivance of the writers without making sense in-universe. the movement between these points is dictated, not shown at all. Which is exactly why it "works on paper" when summed up: yes, there is a redemption arc as she falls and then she gets back. But the failure to dramatize is in the utter lack of any discernable change in the character. Some actions are different from beginning to end, some motivations shift, but mostly they simply exist. Same with the War. Describe it on paper and it sounds kind of epic, but that's not what we actually see, and barely hear about in the show itself.
Huh? She was never simply at 'Point A' then 'Point B', etc.
- She was convicted and just wanted to die.
- Mirror Lorca HAD a real relationship with Burnham in the MU and decided he wanted to use her (eventually) when he returned (which was always his plan.)
- Once she got on Discovery she wasn't just welcomed with open arms (she really didn't want to be there at all, and took some coaxing to get her involved)...she did things and helped the crew in many dangerous situations and still not everyone trusted her.
[And hell, had this been the TNG era, what they spread over episodes would have been fast-tracked into 20 minutes of one episode]
- She went through a lot on the MU side, and I think earned the 'respect' she got from certain members of the crew after all that.
And again, Star trek is and has always been first and foremost - ENTERTAINMENT. TOS was never 199% topical or allegorical; and IMO when they tried to focus on that for TNG, the show suffered for it more often then not. I will agree with you that 'The War' as depicted was depuicted VERY poorly - and it seemed just 'there' as a big focus was put on the MU portion of the story. The end of the war' did seem just tacked on as a 'we have to end it' and the Season 1 finale on that was just piss poor and unsatisfying and over the top with the "let's drop the ship inside the planet...'
.
Your point here is that it DOES work fine on paper. But that isn't dramatized. We see her act fundamentally the same on the Shenzhou and then throughout S1. This would be fine if her arc wasn't the main story of the whole season. Her circumstances change, but she acts like the same Burnham. One may "see" differences in her character, but what one is seeing is actually context shifting around a solid, and wonderfully human performance. Any notions that she has learned anything by the end of S1 are supported only by inference (and supporting extra-textual material) and not by the dramatization (in terms of writing) itself.
I don't agree at all. Burnham changes and learns significantly throughout the course of S1. She learned to be a trusted friend and mentor to Tilly, where she had always been the "mentored" one herself. She grew out of her guilt and realized she can be part of something again. She was contrite, and humbled by her experiences. She dealt with and accepted her unique relationship with Sarek. She fell in love for the first time with Tyler, and then had to cooe with unfamiliar emotions upon learning his true nature, and ultimately find some small space to forgive.
I'd say it was a pretty rich arc that was relatively well executed (not perfect...but satisfying). To say it didn't work well dramatically doesn't ring true with me.
That particular rumor was shot down.
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Too_Short_a_Season_(episode)
Yeah. That would've been a shitty way to bring Kirk into TNG. My impression was they always operated under the edict that Kirk was probably dead by the 24th Century. In 1991, months before "Unification" was released, DC Comics put out a crossover mini-series where Spock and McCoy show up on the Enterprise-D. "The Modala Imperative". And even there, when Kirk was referenced, he was referred to in the past tense.
In "Too Short a Season", I have to ask: How hard would it have been for them to find an older actor and a younger actor who look enough alike to play the same part? Clayton Rohner was really bad at playing old.
I remember those comics!
Had to be tough with that makeup. It seemed as overdone as the Discovery Klingons.
Indeed. Good writing is good writing, regardless of serial or episodic format. We already had one TV show that had an episodic first season but was plagued with problems due to behind the scenes drama. It's called TNG Season 1.
Theey also ran out of scripts to film in that first season after TNG - "Datalore" - and were furiously scrambling to get ANYTHING they had ready to go after that point up to the end of the first season.
The sooner DISCOVERY has a stable writing staff with a showrunner that has a clear idea of what to do with the series, the better its chances. It's also a matter of figuring out the dynamic of the cast and playing up to their strengths. As the first season progressed I felt I was at least getting a better handle on the characters, even if the main arc was not as good as it could have been. It's important for any Trek show to feature a cast of characters that you want to see regardless of what storyline is playing.
As Ron Moore put it: "It's the characters, duh!"
As Ron Moore put it: "It's the characters, duh!"
I'm just interested in good stories. But the idea that only arc-based shows present details that can have payoff later on is just plain wrong.
Arc-based shows have only one necessary virtue, and that's from the POV of the studio/network: they encourage habitual viewing.
Whether they have any particularly good qualities as storytelling depends on the story itself. STD's first year was trite, poorly plotted, arbitrary and just generally bad.
It doesn't have to be one or the other, both serial and episodic formats are perfectly valid storytelling methods depending on the premise of the shows. TOS and TNG both had the concept that allowed episodic storytelling, while the latter dabbled onto ongoing storylines like Worf's dishonor, but at a very limited rate. DS9's premise was ripe for serialized storytelling, as we saw that veer further into that format as it went on. VOYAGER had the benefit of working as both episodic and serialized given its premise as a lone ship always on the run, but the show primarily stuck to one format and didn't even do that as well as TOS or TNG.
No, actually. I just want stories were things matter. If that can be done in episodic shows great and more power to them. But, I generally see it in arc shows. So, give me that in whatever format it does.
By that argument, episodic shows are great from a studio POV because it allows for syndication.
My only complaint regarding episodic shows, especially Star Trek, is when things don't matter.
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