What are your top 3 Star Trek television shows?
- Thread starter Trelane_Squire_of_Gothos
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Perhaps over time you'll find new love for TNG after what has been told you about it just gets old.
It has not endeared itself to me despite attempted rewatches.
I've tried.Give it time.
Is there anything for you to like about TNG?
Poisoning yourself watching the dreck from Alex Kurtzman can do that. Another case of enjoying SPECTACLE over SUBSTANCE.
Not really, no. I am not really engaged with the characters, I don't find them very likable, and sometimes they come across as a bit thick.
Which is why I watch TOS more often than any other show? Yup, definitely spectacle over substance there.Poisoning yourself watching the dreck from Alex Kurtzman can do that. Another case of enjoying SPECTACLE over SUBSTANCE.
I only give 3.
When asked who were the three greatest directors in cinema, Orson Welles once replied: "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
Give it time.
I found myself liking a lot about TNG when I re-watched the entire series before Picard.
A lot of the episodes, if not most of them, I hadn't seen since high school and that was -- it irks me to say 25 years ago!
-- but anyway, my impression of the show overall came out better than what my faded memory hardened by a quarter-century of Internet Arguments told me.My trick was to just skip the first season and then circle around back to it afterwards.
I'm working from Season 3 forward. "Ensigns of Command" was hard one to get through.My trick was to just skip the first season and then circle around back to it afterwards.
Yeah, it's really bizarre. DIS and PIC are the clear descendants of DS9 in terms of creative influences, characterization, serialization, etc.
Only if you've never actually watched a teen drama.
Yes, because nobody ever accused the DS9 cast -- especially Avery Brooks -- of being "overly dramatic."
I don't even know what this means. But I look at the DIS cast, and I see people who didn't like each other very much at first, but learned to see the best in each-other and in themselves, and came to love each other as they endured profound trauma. DIS is very much a show about people leaning to heal together.
And frankly, I think that's pretty similar to the journey the DS9 cast went on.
Poisoning yourself watching the dreck from Alex Kurtzman can do that. Another case of enjoying SPECTACLE over SUBSTANCE.
As opposed to TNG, which never put spectacle before story. For instance, the sheer intellectualism of the one where they fight time-traveling aliens with Mark Twain, or the one where Picard turns into a little kid, or the one where the ship blows up over and over again, or the one where a space virus turned them all into animals, or the one where Data became every character in the Old West, or the one where Q makes them play Robin Hood.
I think "teen drama" is a pretty apt description of Discovery, especially in comparison to other series, because that's what it is. No offense to the show, it's great, and drawing from the rich cultural history of teen dramas helps that. Another term for teen drama, to tie both genres together, would be coming-of-age story.
That's what we see in Michael. She's becoming a fuller person. Discovery isn't about a crew or a ship. It's about one person, and her personal discovery of who she is during a very harrowing time of tribulation. Much like the best teen dramas.
And, as the show progresses, Michael isn't the only going through this discovery. Tilly is working her way up from a socially awkward cadet. Saru literally has his adolescence. Georgiou learns to love and feel. Tyler finds out who he truly is, and deals with conflicts stemming from that. And all sorts more with Culber, Lorca, Pike and his fear of the future, and eventually, the actual teenagers they bring into the show (Adira and Gray).
Denying Discovery's ties to teenage drama is just another way of ridiculing an entire field of valid fiction, because you can't admit to yourself that you can actually enjoy programming that deals with the conflicts that arise during perhaps the most important period of a human's life.
That's what we see in Michael. She's becoming a fuller person. Discovery isn't about a crew or a ship. It's about one person, and her personal discovery of who she is during a very harrowing time of tribulation. Much like the best teen dramas.
And, as the show progresses, Michael isn't the only going through this discovery. Tilly is working her way up from a socially awkward cadet. Saru literally has his adolescence. Georgiou learns to love and feel. Tyler finds out who he truly is, and deals with conflicts stemming from that. And all sorts more with Culber, Lorca, Pike and his fear of the future, and eventually, the actual teenagers they bring into the show (Adira and Gray).
Denying Discovery's ties to teenage drama is just another way of ridiculing an entire field of valid fiction, because you can't admit to yourself that you can actually enjoy programming that deals with the conflicts that arise during perhaps the most important period of a human's life.
So, I don't see how Odo/Kira from the third season of DS9 up through "His Way" isn't teen drama. Bad teen drama if Tim Thomason thinks I'm knocking teen dramas (plus I'm not directing this post towards him).
Or how is Worf getting uppity about Bashir even looking at Ezri not a teen drama?
How about Sisko's "I fear no evil"? That sounds like something from out of a comic book. That's not adult at all. Then Sisko RAGING LIKE ANGRY TEEN in "For the Uniform"? "YOU BETRAYED YOUR UNIFORM!!!!!"
How about Sisko running to the Prophets in "Sacrifice of Angels" to bail him out of obliteration from the Dominion? Please don't let them kill us! Can you imagine the reactions if Discovery were to ever do something like that? Let's be honest here.
Or in The Final Chapter when Sisko blows off The Prophets and basically says, "I don't care what you think! I'm getting married anyway!"
I was an actual teen when DS9 was on and that looked teen-ish to me even back then. I'm sure it would look even worse to me now in my 40s. I can probably think of a whole lot more examples if I really want to dig into it.
Or how is Worf getting uppity about Bashir even looking at Ezri not a teen drama?
How about Sisko's "I fear no evil"? That sounds like something from out of a comic book. That's not adult at all. Then Sisko RAGING LIKE ANGRY TEEN in "For the Uniform"? "YOU BETRAYED YOUR UNIFORM!!!!!"
How about Sisko running to the Prophets in "Sacrifice of Angels" to bail him out of obliteration from the Dominion? Please don't let them kill us! Can you imagine the reactions if Discovery were to ever do something like that? Let's be honest here.
Or in The Final Chapter when Sisko blows off The Prophets and basically says, "I don't care what you think! I'm getting married anyway!"
I was an actual teen when DS9 was on and that looked teen-ish to me even back then. I'm sure it would look even worse to me now in my 40s. I can probably think of a whole lot more examples if I really want to dig into it.
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There are indeed many excellent, sophisticated teen dramas, but I don't think that's what @Trelane_Squire_of_Gothos meant when he used the term.
I think you're using too broad of a definition. "Coming-of-age" isn't just about becoming a fuller person -- many, many stories would be "coming-of-age" stories under that definition, even if their characters were in fact elderly. Like, The Old Man and the Sea would be a "coming-of-age" story under that definition.
"Coming-of-age," as I have always understood the genre, refers to the transition out of immaturity into maturity. Michael is already 30 years old when we met her in "The Vulcan Hello" -- she's not kid and hasn't been for 12 years at that point.
You could certainly make an argument that DIS is a redemption story about a person who's becoming a fuller person. You could make an argument that Tilly's arc is a coming-of-age story, or Adira's arc in DIS S3 is a coming-of-age story. But I really don't think DIS is about Michael coming of age. I think it's about Michael redeeming herself for her arrogance and prejudice, and about healing from her trauma.
I agree that DIS certainly focuses on Michael first and foremost, but I also think characters like Saru and Paul are pretty damn essential to the show. I mean, just look at how different Paul is at the end of S3 compared to the start of S1!
I hear what you're saying, and I did not intend to disrespect the teen drama genre. And I think you make a valid point about certain parallels between what Saru and Ash go through and what teens go through -- but I don't think it quite applies, because Saru and Ash are, well, not teenagers. They're not people who have little life experience to draw upon when the show begins the way teens by definition are.
To me that's the key difference: Teen dramas are about people who do not have life experiences to draw upon, having those life experiences for the first time. DIS is about people with life experiences realizing they need to keep growing and changing.
I suppose another way to say this is that DIS, to me, seems more to be about the transition between young adulthood (college-age, early-to-mid 20s) to prime adulthood (late 20s to early 40s).
I mean, I'm in my mid-30s and I didn't find DS9 teen-drama-ish when I rewatched it last year. Some of the arcs -- Bashir's and Ezri's, mostly -- felt to me like they were about the transition between young adulthood and prime adulthood. (Ezri's to me feels like a mix of that and coming-of-age, since, well, Ezri is in an unusual position in terms of having been a very young Trill forced to host a Symbiont with no preparation.) But mostly to me, DS9 feels like the story of people in prime adulthood trying to wrestle with the problems that part of life brings -- dealing with mortality and grief, raising children, the conflicts between individual and group identity, wrestling with your conscience, being angry at God/the Universe/life.
ETA:
Actually, I think this just might be the common denominator of DIS thematically: It's a show about learning to heal from your childhood traumas.
I think Michael, and to a lesser extent Saru, fit into the teen drama niche for sci-fi reasons because of their alien upbringing. Michael being raised by Vulcans, and her emotional maturity was deliberately stunted and only seems to develop during the show. Another term would be something akin to a manchild, like an old movie featuring a pampered or lazy adult who suddenly has to grow up for whatever reason.
Odo was possibly even a teenager during early DS9, technically, if we accept the novelverse supposition that he first formed around 2353. Granted, it's not quite the same thing, since he was learning very quickly. But maybe his emotional maturity was highly stunted.
Odo was possibly even a teenager during early DS9, technically, if we accept the novelverse supposition that he first formed around 2353. Granted, it's not quite the same thing, since he was learning very quickly. But maybe his emotional maturity was highly stunted.
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