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Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread

Perhaps "showrunner" wasn't the correct technical term, but the powers behind the show are exactly the same.

As Keith said, they're all from the same production company, but their creative teams are distinct. It's the same situation as the Arrowverse shows. They're all from Berlanti Productions, but Legends of Tomorrow is completely different in tone and style from Batwoman or Supergirl. For that matter, Deep Space Nine and Voyager were from the same "powers" -- Paramount and Rick Berman -- but their distinct showrunners and staffs made the two shows extremely different from each other. So why would you expect things to be any different here?

Running even one show is a full-time job, so any executive who runs a production company making multiple shows is in more of a supervisory capacity than a hands-on, micromanaging position. It's like being the admiral that multiple starship captains report to, issuing their orders and setting their policies but leaving the day-to-day operations to the captains and crews.
 
Perhaps "showrunner" wasn't the correct technical term, but the powers behind the show are exactly the same.
As Christopher said, that doesn't mean much.

For a Star Trek example, the 'powers' behind most of the 90s Trek were the same, but the shows differ quite a bit in tone and style at times.

Also heck for current Trek, Discovery Season 2 was almost an entirely different tone from Season 1. Picard felt completely different from Discovery.
 
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There were some pretty massive changes behind the scenes between the start of Season One of Discovery and Season Two, so it wasn't really the same team.
 
Just watched all of season two of Discovery for the first time. It's made me appreciate the writing of the novel-verse even more. Compare the world building we see in "The Sound of Thunder" vs what CLB does in book after book. Compare the Klingons and their culture to what K.R.A.D. or John M. Ford did with them. Compare the tightly plotted stories of Gene DeWeese to the "script in a blender " style plotting of this show. And is there a single subject (Section 31, MU, A.I.) that was handled better on the show than what David Mack did in his novels?


I could go on and on listing how the current of modern Trek tv could learn from the TrekLit authors, but I wont. I just find it funny that the folks who "only" work on the non-canon tie-in stuff are much better writers than the big time Hollywood guys.


P.S. And, yeah, I know that KB is heavily involved in the show.
 
Yup.

It's worth noting that KB doesn't have much creative control at this point. Based on her Voyager novels, I'm sure the shows would be better if she did!
 
Just watched all of season two of Discovery for the first time. It's made me appreciate the writing of the novel-verse even more. Compare the world building we see in "The Sound of Thunder" vs what CLB does in book after book. Compare the Klingons and their culture to what K.R.A.D. or John M. Ford did with them. Compare the tightly plotted stories of Gene DeWeese to the "script in a blender " style plotting of this show. And is there a single subject (Section 31, MU, A.I.) that was handled better on the show than what David Mack did in his novels?


I could go on and on listing how the current of modern Trek tv could learn from the TrekLit authors, but I wont. I just find it funny that the folks who "only" work on the non-canon tie-in stuff are much better writers than the big time Hollywood guys.


P.S. And, yeah, I know that KB is heavily involved in the show.

I agree
 
Yup.

It's worth noting that KB doesn't have much creative control at this point. Based on her Voyager novels, I'm sure the shows would be better if she did!
Based on comments made for Picard, she had a lot of input on the backstory of that.
 
And commensurately I thought Picard was enormously better than Discovery, at least until the finale. Maybe something just went wrong at the end.
 
And commensurately I thought Picard was enormously better than Discovery, at least until the finale. Maybe something just went wrong at the end.
The finales are also the weakest episodes of Disco's two seasons. For some reason, these new shows just can't do a finale worth a damn.
 
I really enjoyed the second season of Discovery, I thought it was a big improvement over Season 1. I'd put the majority of it up there with the Novelverse.
 
That felt more like a series-premiere than a season-premiere, but if it were, it would easily be the best Trek series-premiere since "Emissary."

If the first two seasons felt way too advanced at times for a pre-TOS story, the world of this premiere felt significantly more advanced than Star Trek: Picard while still feeling like an evolution of what came before. At the same time, there are new constraints: without a United Federation of Planets pooling resources and allocating them with maximum efficiency, having enough gas for your car is suddenly a real concern again.

I'm reading a book right now, and it included the following statement:
"Ideas are wilder than memories. And I can be wild. I can be stubborn as the weeds, and you will not root me out."
The Federation, as a organizational entity, has effectively ceased to exist. Memories of what it was are fading. But ideas are wilder than memories, and the idea of the Federation -- what it stood for and what it aspired to -- still perseveres. I find that somehow really inspiring, that the stories we tell about ourselves can echo down through the generations, that even in times of great turmoil, the idea of something better can light the way through the darkness.

Heading into this premiere, I had assumed that Burnham and the U.S.S. Discovery were separated by great distances. But I had forgotten about the 2009 Star Trek film, and how Spock Prime arrived in the Kelvin-reality 25 years later despite less than a minute's difference in entering the temporal anomaly. The starship Discovery was directly behind Burnham, so presumably it won't be 25 years, but it might well be half-a-dozen years for all we know.

The show really feels liberated by no longer being trapped into such a tight space in the continuity. It even provided a nice explanation in a throwaway-line that, by the late 32nd Century, the temporal wars were so devastating that all time-travel technology was outlawed and destroyed, to take further time-travel off the table (in a clever and unexpected tie-in to ENT).
 
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So, prequel novel with ENT crossover featuring Timot Danlen aka Agent Daniels living throug (until?) The Burn? :devil:
Just had a similar thought on this very subject the other day myself. He'd certainly be in rough proximity to "The Burn," lifetime-wise, at the very least (in the 31st Century, with it occurring c. 3068 A.D. or thereabouts).
 
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