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What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

I'll take TNG (except for the bad episodes), First Contact, and Picard.

Generations, Insurrection, Nemesis, and the "not this episode!" episodes of TNG can stay somewhere else.
 
I like FC and NEM quite a bit.

GEN, while not a great story, looks beautiful, has a great soundtrack, and has some great scenes with the TOS cast. Shatner is charming and magical in all his scenes.

Although they are not great films, I for one am glad we got them.

PIC was fine...not sure why someone would wish that away either.

The only post- “...All Good Things“ TNG production that I feel was truly not worthwhile was INS.
 
This is my wife's opinion, which I certainly do not share.

She likes "PROFIT AND LACE". She says to view it as a comedy and it works. I just can't do it. Even I can't defend that episode, and I can defend a lot of episodes many don't like.



Opinion by me... "LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN..." is worth it for the character insight and background into Worf. The rest of the episode is riddled with issues, but learning why he is the way is was some great development. And it was a genuinely good scene between him and Dax.
 
My controversial opinion is that all Star Trek series and movies are made up by Benny Russell in the 1950s. And within that, the Kelvin-timeline movies are made up by coma-Riker from Shades of Grey.
 
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So who DOES “get Star Trek?”
Gene Coon, Nicholas Meyer, Ira Steven Behr. A few others.
I think the real reason for Gene not wanting to include the Post-TMP Films was because he wasn't included in them. The real reason he didn't want to acknowledge the third season of TOS was because he stepped away from it. And, even though licensing rights with Filmation may have had something to do with ignoring TAS, I think he built Star Trek up so far in his mind that he wanted to pretend it was never a cartoon.
YUP. GR not acknowledging those aspects of Trek had a LOT of sour grapes in the mix. "Well, that's not how I would've done it!" Well, sorry Gene, but you weren't involved in those versions of Trek. Yeah, you were eased out of the movies after the creative failure of TMP, but you chose to step away from TOS' third season and TAS, so not much sympathy there.
Gene's Vision™ was best left politely ignored given how many episodes and films in his own franchise he insisted should be ignored or treated as apocryphal. Yeah, he created Star Trek but by the late '80s he wasn't the only person who had created Star Trek and allowing him to have the ultimate say on anything regarding canon status and what was and wasn't acceptable story and character material would have been a colossal mistake.
Chris Carter has a similar sort of thing with The X-Files, it seems. He gets very territorial about the show and resents the fact that the standalone "Monster of the Week" episodes written by others like Darin Morgan are more popular than the arc storylines he favored. On one hand, I get it. It's got to be galling when the most popular elements of your creation came from other people. But on the other... Grow the F up. Once you create something and release it out into the world, it's never entirely yours again. Especially when you've had collaborators on the project.
 
Gene Coon, Nicholas Meyer, Ira Steven Behr. A few others.
Good choices.

It's unfortunate Gene Coon died in 1973. If anyone could've stood up to Gene in early-TNG, it would've been him. If any TOS writers could write TOS Films, it would've been him. Gene Roddenberry may have created Star Trek, but the reason we're all here posting about it today is because of Gene Coon. He's the one who took the show and perfected it. He really made it work and the characters came alive under his watch.
 
Good choices.

It's unfortunate Gene Coon died in 1973. If anyone could've stood up to Gene in early-TNG, it would've been him. If any TOS writers could write TOS Films, it would've been him. Gene Roddenberry may have created Star Trek, but the reason we're all here posting about it today is because of Gene Coon. He's the one who took the show and perfected it. He really made it work and the characters came alive under his watch.

Does that make Gene Coon the Bill Finger to Roddenberry's Bob Kane? (Star Trek/Batman creators comparison)
 
Controversial Opinion 1: TNG is the best Berman-era show and, with the exception of a few really awesome stand-alone episodes here and there, the others largely fall short. DS9 only has a handful of truly GREAT episodes, and Voyager has even less. TNG, however, knocked the ball out of the park so many times it's not even funny. Enterprise had great potential in the first two seasons, but the Xindi war kinda took the wind out of their sails.

Controversial Opinion 2: With the sole exception of Nemesis, the TNG movies are better than everyone says (Generations was good aside from the loss of the Enterprise-D, and Insurrection was harmless fun)

Controversial Opinion 3: "These are the Voyages" was a good enough finale for Enterprise, and genuinely made me sad that there would be no more Trek from that era.
 
YUP. GR not acknowledging those aspects of Trek had a LOT of sour grapes in the mix. "Well, that's not how I would've done it!" Well, sorry Gene, but you weren't involved in those versions of Trek. Yeah, you were eased out of the movies after the creative failure of TMP, but you chose to step away from TOS' third season and TAS, so not much sympathy there.
Double down with regard to TAS - unlike the original series Gene was offered full creative control but instead passes the show runner duties onto D C Fontana instead.
And she did a good job.
But this was his opportunity to put HIS vision up on the screen and he declined to do so
 
Can we keep First Contact?

The rest, along with Picard, can be shoved down the waste disposal. :lol:

Much as I like FC in its own right as a 'zombies in spaaaaace' movie, it simply is not the TV Picard I have grown to love, a Picard that already had shown in the series he could distance himself from his past trauma more, in episodes such as I, Borg.
 
Double down with regard to TAS - unlike the original series Gene was offered full creative control but instead passes the show runner duties onto D C Fontana instead.
And she did a good job.
But this was his opportunity to put HIS vision up on the screen and he declined to do so

I wonder how it might have turned out if DC Fontana were given showrunner duties on one of the live action series.
 
Canon isn’t our decision to make, that is in the hands of the IP holder.
Speaking of which, in 2007 CBS Consumer Products' Senior Director of Product Development Paula Block was asked about the topic of Star Trek canon for IDW Publishing's "Focus on... Star Trek" issue:

'Canon' in the sense that I use it is a very important tool. It only gets muddled when people try to incorporate licensed products into 'canon' – and I know a lot of the fans really like to do that. Sorry, guys – not trying to rain on your parade. There's a lot of bickering about it among fans, but in its purest sense, it's really pretty simple: Canon is Star Trek continuity as presented on TV and Movie screens. Licensed products like books and comics aren't part of that continuity, so they aren’t canon. And that's that. Part of my job in licensing is to keep track of TV and Movie continuity, so I can help direct licensees in their creation of licensed products. It gets a little tricky because it's constantly evolving, and over the years, Star Trek's various producers and scriptwriters haven't always kept track of/remembered/cared about what's come before.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Canon#The_history_of_defining_canon
 
It's unfortunate Gene Coon died in 1973. If anyone could've stood up to Gene in early-TNG, it would've been him. If any TOS writers could write TOS Films, it would've been him. Gene Roddenberry may have created Star Trek, but the reason we're all here posting about it today is because of Gene Coon. He's the one who took the show and perfected it. He really made it work and the characters came alive under his watch.
Agreed 100%. I would've absolutely loved to see a TMP that was written or rewritten by Gene Coon.
Does that make Gene Coon the Bill Finger to Roddenberry's Bob Kane? (Star Trek/Batman creators comparison)
Yep. Coincidentally enough, I wrote about my feelings for both GR and Bob Kane a few years ago in a column you can read here.
 
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