What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[Guy Gardener]

Someone else was picked – Geneviève Bujold. All the pre-Mulgrew footage indicates that Mulgrew really was hugely, hugely better.

But Susan Gibney!

I saw Susan on a The Larry Sanders Show rerun a few days ago, but I did not recognize her from Star Trek, however I was drawn to her, I assumed that... WTF is The Fearing Mind?

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[Finn]

I'm not a big fan of the TOS movies. Too often they changed canon just because it was either expedient or they were too lazy to either respect canon or even look it up. Again, that's my controversial opinion.

They don't need to follow canon. It isn't really something they have to "respect". Even TOS contradicted itself.

 

[Mudd]

Voyager is a bore, pretty much from beginning to end. An SUV takes a wrong turn and everyone frets about being lost in a neighborhood that must be strange and dangerous because the people look different and dress funny. Mulgrew is as interesting as dry, toasted Wonder Bread.

 

[Farscape One]

Mulgrew is as interesting as dry, toasted Wonder Bread.

Add butter?

 

[Tallguy]

Mulgrew is as interesting as dry, toasted Wonder Bread.

Then who is four fried chickens and a Coke?

 

[eschaton]

Voyager is a bore, pretty much from beginning to end. An SUV takes a wrong turn and everyone frets about being lost in a neighborhood that must be strange and dangerous because the people look different and dress funny. Mulgrew is as interesting as dry, toasted Wonder Bread.

The weirdest thing about VOY is I've never seen a show jettison its original premise so quickly.

I mean, I know it was mostly due to BTS conflict - that the showrunners wanted to try something new, but UPN was risk-averse, particularly after the somewhat mixed reaction to early DS9, and just wanted TNG 2.0. But it's shocking that they spent so much time setting up the Maquis - planting the seeds in TNG's Journey's End and Preemptive Strike, and a two-parter late in Season 2 of DS9 - only to basically completely neuter any Federation/Maquis conflict past the pilot of Voyager.

This is just the most extreme example, but there are of course others - like usually downplaying the idea that there were any issues which could be cause from being far from repair/resupply, and finding various ways to include Alpha/Beta quadrant plots over time rather than explore something new.

The need of the series to have "recurring" enemies like the Kazon was also pretty head-scratching, given the ship was generally speaking traveling in a straight line across tens of thousands of light years. Alien of the week made total sense under these circumstances. I really wish that VOY had done more to flesh out the secondary crew on the ship - added more people like the Wildmans and Vorik who we would see frequently, not not every week. But if anything, the show moved away from this over time.

 

[Mudd]

Then who is four fried chickens and a Coke?

Pike?

Hell, Ortega.

Kirk's a quarter pound cheeseburger.

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

I kinda wish someone other than Mulgrew had been picked for Janeway. Maybe we wouldn't have got some of those awful holodeck storylines.

I like the Voyager holodeck episodes. They show that the crew has actual hobbies and interests outside of work (Janeway and Gothic romance novels, Paris and retro automobiles, etc.).

 

[Tallguy]

@eschaton I feel like I could have written that myself. Especially the Kazon part.

As I've said often, I feel like no small part of the new Battlestar Galactica was Ron Moore's response to Voyager. "HERE'S a ship in peril and low on supplies, folks!"

 

[Tallguy]

Pike?

Hell, Ortega.

Kirk's a quarter pound cheeseburger.

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[Richard S. Ta]

I kinda wish someone other than Mulgrew had been picked for Janeway. Maybe we wouldn't have got some of those awful holodeck storylines.

I think that’s something to lay at the writer’s doors, not Mulgrew’s.

 

[eschaton]

I think that’s something to lay at the writer’s doors, not Mulgrew’s.

Trek producers just love an excuse to use cheap sets and props just hanging around on the Paramount back lot.

 

[Weyoun 251]

A relic of the former pre-ENT continuity that somehow jumped over from that timeline to now? Sounds like an interesting reason to have a TOS style ship at the museum.

Much easier for me to explain away an outlier than it is for me to believe the Discoprise will one day be retrofitted EXACTLY into the TOS 60's style.

If in doubt, the Tholians did it

 

[Snowdrop82]

Enterprise was one of my favorite series in Star Trek, by far.

 

[Ovation]

Enterprise was one of my favorite series in Star Trek, by far.

It’s my third, behind TOS and SNW.

 

[Tallguy]

Enterprise was one of my favorite series in Star Trek, by far.

Serious question: Why? And what other Star Trek do you like? I'm fascinated!

 

[Guy Gardener]

Enterprise was the first Star Trek I watched as an adult (from the beginning).

 

[Snowdrop82]

Serious question: Why? And what other Star Trek do you like? I'm fascinated!

I like all of them with the exception of Picard and Discovery. I like the more down to Earth approach to humanity, showing the more savage and violent aspect of humanity - coupled with the hopeful idealism. Archer and the crew feel more like Astronauts and explorers, rather than the more militaristic approach I see Starfleet taking in the future.

 

[Holopat]

Because strict literalism and black and white thinking are more common than people like to admit.[/QUOTp

That's quite a passive aggressive dig.

I submit to you that it isn't black and white thinking. Having watched Star Trek from the first season of TOS. I was hooked at age 11. At the end of season two, I wrote to the network, one of many thousands who did, to urge the network to renew the series. I went to conventions in the early 70s and 80s, and bought every early fanzine I could find, and had a few boxes of them by the time I was 14. During the long period between the end of TOS and the first movie, fans like us kept the flame alive by attendance at cons and fan activities, and supported the creators with a built in audience for their hopeful future productions. If no one showed any interest, Star Trek would not have continued with a "franchise".

During that time, much of the writing in those zines, etc., and the editors thereof, were careful to follow canon or they would label their zines etc., AU, for alternate universe. A lot of that writing was far superior to what later series creators splashed against the wall, ignoring canon because they were too lazy to familiarize themselves with it, weren't familiar with the series, thought it was campy or bad, and didn't bother to learn what they were supposedly continuing.

Now did the owners of Star Trek have the right to do this? Sure they did. Regardless of the support for the series that allowed the continuation of it to become a "franchise", they owed the fans nothing. We got our own satisfaction from our activities. But where they disrespected or dishonored the series in their later productions, it is supremely egotistical for them, showrunners or later fans, to expect TOS fans to swallow whatever sloppy mess was thrown over the wall regardless of what had been established before. Star Trek became a valuable property in part because of the built in audience that comes from the prior canon. And there's a lot of hubris and stupidity in hating the fanbase because not everyone laps up whatever they produce, whether it follows canon or not, especially those that took a direct shot at the original fanbase in disrespecting TOS and its canon, or who thought that a bigger budget gave them license to change it. Why not create new shows if they can't be bothered or have so much hubris, they believe they can improve Star Trek by retconning the past. But then they wouldn't have that built in audience would they? Or be able to deliberately disappoint the expectations of the fanbase to show their disrespect.

Again, do show runners or movie producers have the right to do this? Sure they do. But some fans recognize laziness, indifference, hubris, gilding the lily because the have the budget to do soregardless of whether it starts to become ludicrous, or down right spitting in the eye of those fans whose dollars they expect to collect for their endeavors, even as they disrespect the very material they are trying to capitalize on.

It's sure not black and white. Or devotion to strict literalism. That's shallow thinking.

 

[Holopat]

They don't need to follow canon. It isn't really something they have to "respect". Even TOS contradicted itself.

If they can't respect it, then they should create their own original series. Oh, but that's hard, isn't it? And there's no built in audience for their efforts to aid in bankrolling a production. Don't think the reasons why poor writers can't respect canon aren't completely understood.