There's a difference between "I don't like this form of musical expression" and "this has no business existing". Not everyone understands this.
Does the current state of Star Trek say anything about what fans want?
- Thread starter Citiprime
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Fans don't know what they want. They care less about the setting than they think they do.
2019: "No more prequels! We want to go past Nemesis!"
2022: "The show that went past Nemesis sucks! We like the prequel!"
2023: "That show that went past Nemesis is awesome now!"
That's my take-away from what's happened recently.
2019: "No more prequels! We want to go past Nemesis!"
2022: "The show that went past Nemesis sucks! We like the prequel!"
2023: "That show that went past Nemesis is awesome now!"
That's my take-away from what's happened recently.
Star Trek fans want something that's new and fresh and exactly like what they remember.
Fans are just sensation seeking. They don't want something new-they want a sensation. They are capricious at best in what they love and hate.
Nothing's 100%. I just pointed out the general sense I'm getting from others. They don't fully reflect my own views.
Oh, they're not, and I don't expect them to be. The very prescriptive language I run across is more amusing than anything else.
IO9/Gizmodo once had an article which asked: "Is Star Trek a religion?"
There have been times where I've felt different aspects of Trek fandom took on the appearance of being adherents to different denominations within a single faith. Everyone likes/believes in the same starting text (TOS) but either interprets it differently or picks and chooses what extra material beyond the original they like or don't like for a myriad of "reasons."
- The Old Testament - TOS
- The New Testament - TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT
- The Book of Mormon - Kelvin Universe movies and Paramount+ shows
- Apocrypha (exists between canon and not canon) - TAS
I don NOT like TOS. There's some episodes I like, but I don't like the overall show.
And while yes, people tend to mellow out about stuff over time. I could life to age 150 and have it re-evaluated fifty times over and I will never like PIC.
It's funny. Over on another Trek site, there are two concurrent threads running on the "best" and "worst" STAR TREK episodes.
One can't help noticing how many episodes are turning up on both lists, depending on who is posting, demonstrating once again that one fan's "best" episodes are another fan's "worst." Because we all have different tastes, preferences, and expectations when it comes to Trek.
"What the fans want" almost always just means "what me and like-minded fans want."
There is no consensus.
One can't help noticing how many episodes are turning up on both lists, depending on who is posting, demonstrating once again that one fan's "best" episodes are another fan's "worst." Because we all have different tastes, preferences, and expectations when it comes to Trek.
"What the fans want" almost always just means "what me and like-minded fans want."
There is no consensus.
Ah, glad to see that I'm a True believer after all. That is, I read... I mean, I watch TOS, but those parts that give me an uneasy feeling or don't match up well with what I see in TNG/DS9/VOY and ENT, I'll simply ignore. I'll watch the other shows too, but much more guarded, for fear of being corrupted and straying from the straight and narrow path.
Stuff like this keeps getting repeated again and again and it is without merit.
NuTrek is much more comparable to Star Trek 5(a movie I love) clearly not on par with past efforts.
Whether or not you want to get into subjective argument objective statements still exist.
You can use pretty basic armchair psyc and figure out that the behaviors of star fleet officers in old and nu trek's are fundamentally different.
Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being careful, or diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to be efficient and organized as opposed to easy-going and disorderly. They exhibit a tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; they display planned rather than spontaneous behavior; and they are generally dependable. It is manifested in characteristic behaviors such as being neat, and systematic; also including such elements as carefulness, thoroughness, and deliberation (the tendency to think carefully before acting).[1]
You can pretty much use this to describe almost every trek character we like, and you can point to neelix as examples of characters we do not like as fans.
Discovery said, yeah about that ......
You can subjectively claim that new trek is awesome, but you can't redefine the science of human behavior.
When a behavioral pattern is so incredibly hard wired into something, you can't just waltz in and remove it.
This isn't some minor passive difference, you'd have a hard time mentioning any show or franchise where nearly all characters display such strong behavioral patterns. Like Star Trek is pretty much conscientiousness fiction. It's pretty much the point of the thing.
Discovery isn't at the radical opposite in TV terms, but most of the characters would rate pretty low.
Please. Read some old Best of Trek issues, or Interstat (much of which is online here), and you'll see that the only thing that's changed is that we can say this stuff on the toilet.
You're just looking for confirmation bias because you don't like it. But it's okay not to like things. It just doesn't make you objectively right.
It's not. Bennett and Meyer received death threats for killing Spock. Meyer doubled down on the military feel of Star Trek over TMP's more exploratory/2001 feel. It's not without merit if you read accounts from that time.
Well, you can. People just might not like it. Let's not sit there and pretend that Discovery should be uniformly praised because I will never, ever, advocate that. However, I will state firmly that it is Star Trek, belongs in Star Trek because it explores a fundamental human experience-trauma, in a way that speaks to a lot of people, on this board alone. That makes it worth doing.
Interesting, I hadn't looked at the show that way yet.
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Amaris
Guest
Yeah, it's all Star Trek. All of it, even the stuff most people don't like. Even the stuff I can't stand is Star Trek, so I just watch my favorite Star Trek, and that's all there is to it.
LOL
Interesting. I am always fascinated by these strong visceral reactions as I don't feel that agitated by bad Trek.
Bolding mine. Back when ENT was in first run and the beginning of the Xindi arc had episodes like North Star and Rajinn which had no connection to the bigger story, we were all frustrated with the wide open episode counts leading to such filler and were afraid they really are not committing to story arcs. Absolutely nothing of value was lost when ENT's 3rd season saw an episode count reduced from 26 to 24 mid-season and further reduction to 22 for S4 led to the tightest writing in the series' run.
Even apart from that, those runs were hell for the actors, who were putting in 18 hr days.
You're just not gonna see that run for any show again and having watched foreign media long before streaming made it accessible, our model of network TV shows that run endlessly for years was a global outlier. Ask the Brits on what the BBC considers to be a season
MacFarlane being the TNG fanboy he is, who's to say that wasn't inspired by Trek too?
Yes absolutely and no absolutely not.
For the last 20ish years you'd be entirely correct, but star wars seems to show that the narrative is breaking.
In a 12 month span, star wars is releasing 3 mini series with overlapping plot elements. It's a total of 24 episodes.
Obviously the 3 shows are different and they need to be different because they happen to be using plot elements from different timelines. Star wars is fundamentally a saga and so you need longer drawn out narratives to please the fans.
But the key detail is why they're focused on the model. It's quite simple they need the perks of episodic year round television. Streaming services need constant release cycles to maintain subscriber bases. Otherwise they have intermittent subscribers who only show up once a year.
Paramount is doing something similar, but their issue is finding a vehicle that connects to a broad fan base.
From a production perspective it'd be way cheaper to make one nutrek show rather than having picard/std/snw all running at the same time.
Once they find the vehicle/branding of trek fans will gravitate towards, it's very plausible they might end up doing 20+ episodes a season.
Keeping in mind there's a massive benefit of 26 episode seasons, you can release total filler crap and if it is released biweekly, people will watch just because they enjoy the not knowing of whether or not it'll be a bad episode.
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