I guess I’m a Herbert, because it doesn’t reach me.
Granted, I’ll watch The Way to Eden before a lot of the other series’ duds. Even TOS’ duds have something to offer, no matter how small.
What the frell happened?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
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Granted, I’ll watch The Way to Eden before a lot of the other series’ duds. Even TOS’ duds have something to offer, no matter how small.
It has some excellent world building around the idea of the Federation and the colonies. It's really interesting in reaction to new technology. It's fascinating in a sociological sense.
Kurtzman-era Trek is full of unforced, easily avoidable errors where they tried to "fix" what wasn't broken. The Kling-Orcs, making such a mess of continuity they abandoned a series' original premise, many of the PICARD season 1 backstories where characters fell into grim-darkness... For me anyway, the "JL" thing is an example of them not getting the Picard character, or at the very least not appreciating just how many people it would ruffle feathers with.
Fair enough. But, for what it's worth, James Duff wrote the final draft of the "Remembrance" teleplay, rewriting Akiva Goldman's earlier draft. Chabon just has co-story credit. Shame James Duff didn't stay in the writing staff.
I find most of those cringe as well, but I would swap out "The Way to Eden" with "And the Children Shall Lead". TWTE is more "Spock's Brain" level of being somewhat bad but still watchable and enjoyable.
Really?
How so? I feel like it's a natural outgrowth of the fact that these people went through some horrible things and there are actual consequences to these events, and require some work on the part of the characters. There may be the occasional error, but it's not trying to "fix" anything. It's trying to explore thematic things relevant to the current age in a scifi setting.
Perhaps we need a "Don't do Drugs, kids" PSA to make it feel better?
That isn’t how writing on a TV show works. While Duff may have gotten the sole credit for writing the basic draft that was approved for pre-production and filming, everyone on the writing staff had hands in punching the script up for successive drafts and revisions. No TV script is ever the work of a single person these days.
The only “fix” I thought was pointless was Goldsman changing the time placement of the Eugenics Wars from the 90s to the 21st century. I’m not upset over the change (I couldn’t care less when the Eugenics Wars happened) I just think it’s weird that it bugged him so much that he was compelled to have an episode “fix” that. Like, guy, you only get ten episodes a season. Why does the Eugenics War even matter for a show set in the 23rd century?
I think they planted that, so they'd have the option to make further changes, potentially, and blame it on the Temporal War. It's along the lines of what I was already leaning towards anyway.
This is only speculation on my part.
To bring it in line with our history m
None of these were errors; they're legitimate creative choices you didn't like. And I don't see any reason to think they moved DIS into the 32nd Century because of continuity issues.
I think that's a very myopic view of the episode. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" was not an episode dedicated to changing the date for the Eugenics Wars. That was not the dramatic core of the story. The heart of the episode was taking La'an and putting her in a situation where she had to learn to trust someone and open up to them, where she falls in love and then loses the person she falls for and copes with that loss -- and then has to endure seeing the Prime Timeline version of him alive and well and not in love with her. She fell in love with a ghost and must now keep on living. Having it be a time travel story with an alternate version of Jim is a sci-fi way of literalizing the idea of wasted time and wasted potential.
The Khan business was an add-on, a little bit of continuity sprinkling that isn't what the episode was really about or why it was made. Instead of Khan, the time travel McGuffin could have been any one of a million plot devices without changing the real substance of the story. "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" was no more about changing the date of the Eugenics Wars than Casablanca was about letters of transit.
Discovery has been a series about escalating stakes. Those stakes can only be escalated so high and only so much can be shaken up when the show takes place right before TOS. For DSC, TOS was like a glass ceiling. Which is why I agree with the time-jump, besides loving "Calypso" so much. I like the time-jump because I think it freed up the series to reach its true potential. The premise is the Spore Drive and Discovery making discoveries as it's travelled through space, time, and dimension.
The Klingon makeup is the easiest thing to work around. Klingons hate having smooth foreheads. I refuse to believe that they didn't try anything to fix the smooth foreheads before TMP. The Disco Klingons were an attempt to fix the Augment Virus that went too far, so the Klingon Scientists and Doctors went back the drawing board. "What took so long?", you might ask. Martok said it himself, "Klingons make excellent warriors but terrible doctors." He said it, not me. So I don't view it as a continuity error. If you want something to work, you'll find a way to make it work. If you don't want to to work, you'll reject explanation after explanation after explanation, because you don't want it to work. You want what they did to be rejected.
I became a fan of Star Trek in 1991. They didn't explain the Klingon Forehead Issue until 2005. So, for 14 years, I was a fan without any official explanation. I didn't think, "Oh! I can't watch this! This is terrible! They changed the Klingon makeup! Oh no!" That's not how I thought during the '90s or early-'00s.
If I don't like something in Star Trek, it's not going to be because of anything like that. It's going to be either because I don't like the writing of an episode, or the premise of the series doesn't interest me, or -- in the case of the late-Berman Era -- I think it became stale. My yardstick is, "Does this make me sound like Comic Book Guy?" If the answer's yes, then I'm on the wrong track.
EDITED TO ADD: IMO, the peak of the Berman Era was the 1997-1998 TV Season. VOY's fourth season was its best. Period. No other season in that series came close to it. DS9 had a great sixth season. Insurrection hadn't come out yet, so -- after First Contact -- it still looked like the TNG Movies would turn out just as well as the TOS Movies. Then, except for DS9 S7, it was all downhill from there. Until ENT S4, by which point it was "too little, too late".
The Klingon makeup is the easiest thing to work around. Klingons hate having smooth foreheads. I refuse to believe that they didn't try anything to fix the smooth foreheads before TMP. The Disco Klingons were an attempt to fix the Augment Virus that went too far, so the Klingon Scientists and Doctors went back the drawing board. "What took so long?", you might ask. Martok said it himself, "Klingons make excellent warriors but terrible doctors." He said it, not me. So I don't view it as a continuity error. If you want something to work, you'll find a way to make it work. If you don't want to to work, you'll reject explanation after explanation after explanation, because you don't want it to work. You want what they did to be rejected.
I became a fan of Star Trek in 1991. They didn't explain the Klingon Forehead Issue until 2005. So, for 14 years, I was a fan without any official explanation. I didn't think, "Oh! I can't watch this! This is terrible! They changed the Klingon makeup! Oh no!" That's not how I thought during the '90s or early-'00s.
If I don't like something in Star Trek, it's not going to be because of anything like that. It's going to be either because I don't like the writing of an episode, or the premise of the series doesn't interest me, or -- in the case of the late-Berman Era -- I think it became stale. My yardstick is, "Does this make me sound like Comic Book Guy?" If the answer's yes, then I'm on the wrong track.
EDITED TO ADD: IMO, the peak of the Berman Era was the 1997-1998 TV Season. VOY's fourth season was its best. Period. No other season in that series came close to it. DS9 had a great sixth season. Insurrection hadn't come out yet, so -- after First Contact -- it still looked like the TNG Movies would turn out just as well as the TOS Movies. Then, except for DS9 S7, it was all downhill from there. Until ENT S4, by which point it was "too little, too late".
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That is fair.
So then why dedicate any production time to “fixing” the Eugenics Wars time placement, if that’s not supposed to be the point? I do know WHY they did it, they answered that themselves in interviews. I get it, they wanna keep things in “our future” and think it’s silly to refer to the Eugenics Wars as taking place in the 1990s… but why would that matter in a show set in the 2250s when the Eugenics Wars is something long ago in the past? When Enterprise got into the topic, and even Into Darkness, they simply avoided mentioning the 90s and kept the idea of that event as something in their past.
I like the La’an character, but I don’t think the show has ever really made a strong enough justification for making her Khan’s several times great grand daughter. It’s a weird creative tangent on their part that seems pointless beyond “hey, remember Khan?”. I was weary of her character announcement during pre-release, but Christina Chong really stepped up.
(Edit: Sorry for double reply, just replying to Lord Garth)
To be fair, the original conceit for why the Klingons looked the way they did in Disco didn’t have anything to do with canon, but was simply a creative decision to make that look the show’s standard for Klingons, much like how Pike’s Enterprise looks the way it does rather than being a recreation of the 60s set. It was the same thing with TMP saying “this is what they look like in our production, there’s no canon explanation”. The filmmakers wanted to present their own take and didn’t expect fans to be so vocal about it, or at least underestimated how vocal they would be. And I think that’s fine. It’s their show. They aren’t obligated to take Okuda’s documentarian approach from the Rick Berman era of “if it looked like that, then it is like that”.
But then Kurtzman pivots and makes up a lie about “oh, they’re bald because they shave their heads during a time of war, I totally forgot to mention that in S1, my bad.”
I don't like accusing people of lying. But Kurtzman’s explanation just doesn’t work with what was presented in his show and I’m dismayed he even thought his explanation would be sufficient. He could have simply said “we tried something different and creatively fulfilling, but the fans spoke up and didn’t like it, so we’re backing away from that aesthetic”. I would have respected that kind of answer. Honest and humble. But he does these doubling downs of “oh I meant to do that”, and then SNW presents war flashbacks with the Klingons looking like traditional Klingons rather than the bald elongated head guys.
So, how do I resolve these canon discrepancies? Simple, I just don’t. They’re not really that important to me. I never even needed that Enterprise two-parter. I always felt that was a waste of time there done for the Ex Astris Scientia folks who want to treat the Trek world as if it’s as tangible and consistent as our own reality.
To be fair, the original conceit for why the Klingons looked the way they did in Disco didn’t have anything to do with canon, but was simply a creative decision to make that look the show’s standard for Klingons, much like how Pike’s Enterprise looks the way it does rather than being a recreation of the 60s set. It was the same thing with TMP saying “this is what they look like in our production, there’s no canon explanation”. The filmmakers wanted to present their own take and didn’t expect fans to be so vocal about it, or at least underestimated how vocal they would be. And I think that’s fine. It’s their show. They aren’t obligated to take Okuda’s documentarian approach from the Rick Berman era of “if it looked like that, then it is like that”.
But then Kurtzman pivots and makes up a lie about “oh, they’re bald because they shave their heads during a time of war, I totally forgot to mention that in S1, my bad.”
I don't like accusing people of lying. But Kurtzman’s explanation just doesn’t work with what was presented in his show and I’m dismayed he even thought his explanation would be sufficient. He could have simply said “we tried something different and creatively fulfilling, but the fans spoke up and didn’t like it, so we’re backing away from that aesthetic”. I would have respected that kind of answer. Honest and humble. But he does these doubling downs of “oh I meant to do that”, and then SNW presents war flashbacks with the Klingons looking like traditional Klingons rather than the bald elongated head guys.
So, how do I resolve these canon discrepancies? Simple, I just don’t. They’re not really that important to me. I never even needed that Enterprise two-parter. I always felt that was a waste of time there done for the Ex Astris Scientia folks who want to treat the Trek world as if it’s as tangible and consistent as our own reality.
I don't think Alex Kurtzman was lying. I think they fully intended for DSC to be a visual reboot, but then realized that would be a problem when they decided to do PIC, if they ever had Worf. The chances of Worf looking like a Disco Klingon were exactly zero. So the backtracking began as early as DSC S2. Michael Dorn never would've agreed to it.
Disgruntled fans, vocal as they are, don't have as much power as they think. Outraged Fans only make up a tiny, though vocal, minority of the total viewership. And a good thing too, because otherwise nothing would get made.
Worse still for them, they can be counted on to keep watching no matter what. Most of them lack the ability to stop. They'll keep watching long after the point where I'll have stepped away.
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I mean, how did fans resolve canon discrepancies before? I don't think Discovery did anything new in that regard. If anything, they to the TMP approach and said "It just is." And then it got changed, and changed again. So, to me, this whole backtracking just feels like par for the course in Star Trek. You have this attitude and then they pivot to another to make up for the previous one, and on and on.
And it's largely because fans treat it as literal history. It has to have every single thing explained. So they pivot because it's expected to have an explanation.
And it's largely because fans treat it as literal history. It has to have every single thing explained. So they pivot because it's expected to have an explanation.
I only say Kurtzman lied because his “it was always planned” line during S2 doesn’t align with what we see in S1 where ALL Klingons seem to be naturally bald, rather than shaved. Even flashbacks to T'Kuvma‘s childhood strongly imply that this is simply a visual reboot. I’m not against the visual reboot, I just think it’s weird that he would try to then frame it as “oh I have a canon explanation”. And unlike the Berman era, there’s not really a production supervisor like Michael Westmore or the Okudas trying to align the different productions visually. This is why Glenn Hetrick’s Tellarites differ from whoever did the Tellarite featured in SNW. That’s not a criticism, that’s just how these newer productions are.
It is interesting that after S2, for a few years live action productions of Trek decidedly avoided featuring Klingons at all. None featured in the first two years in PIC, none in S3 and 4 of DISCO, and none in SNW S1. It’s like an embargo was placed until Worf returned. Makes me wonder if we’ll see them in S5 of DISCO finally. I’m curious of what the state of the Klingons is in the 32nd century.
Man, I hope not.
The Klingon furor with Discovery soured me on the whole thing. Just let it go. It's ok they don't look the same and we don't need to knw where they are in the future. They went to UTOPIA: look it up and find the map to it.
Whether they look like DISCO Klingons or SNW Klingons, I’m just curious to see if they had changed much during the centuries. DISCO’s whole premise since S3 has partly asked “what have they been up to?” which we already got with Vulcans and Romulans, Klepian and Ba’ul, etc. Klingons have always been a very notable species in Trek, so it is peculiar that they’re essentially absent for the entirety of the 32nd century. At least, so far.
I hope the peculiarity persists.
I'm persnickety that way
I'm persnickety that way
A lot of people have stepped away though... reference the informal viral campaign to get people that were burned to come back and give PICARD season 3 a chance.
This isn't the era of grumbling over VGR or ENT. From 1987 till 2005 Star Trek varied in quality, storytelling approach (serialized vs episodic), and syndicated vs UPN interference, but still ostensibly targeted the same audience. That isn't the case though with NuTrek. Kurtzman has been very open about having different series targeting different segments... which doesn't make sense considering the budgets involved.
Personally, I like about 75% of PRODIGY and 50% of STLD, so I kept watching them. DISCOVERY and SNW? Maybe 20%? So I dropped both of them. No point giving ratings numbers from "hate watching".
Some YouTubers recently made the point that the opposite of loving a franchise isn't hate... it's apathy and indifference. I'm at that point now with live action NuTrek. PICARD season 1 hits much closer to home because you have the actual Berman era actors involved. 23rd century NuTrek? It's just ST09 2.0.
Does Legacy happen? Will the two animated show make it past 2024?
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