What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[ananta]

SNW really suffers from its lack of any proper story arcs. The arcs we do get are pretty much just about the crew’s “romances” and they are not particularly good. The Spock/Chapel thing, as a fan of TOS, does not work for me in any fashion. In fact, I can safely go on record as saying I hate it. I also don’t care that La’an has a crush on Kirk or about Pike’s boring girlfriend. Knowing the future of the characters, none of it will work out anyway and thus feels a bit pointless. I guess that’s the problem with prequels.

The show doesn’t need to be serialised but in the current tv landscape it needs some kind of overall arc; it needs to feel like it’s purposefully headed somewhere. DS9 did this perfectly back when such things were seen as risky and bold for television.

The second season was all over the map in my opinion. No cohesion.

 

[Imaus]

SNW really suffers from its lack of any proper story arcs. The arcs we do get are pretty much just about the crew’s “romances” and they are not particularly good. The Spock/Chapel thing, as a fan of TOS, does not work for me in any fashion. In fact, I can safely go on record as saying I hate it. I also don’t care that La’an has a crush on Kirk or about Pike’s boring girlfriend. Knowing the future of the characters, none of it will work out anyway and thus feels a bit pointless. I guess that’s the problem with prequels.

The show doesn’t need to be serialised but in the current tv landscape it needs some kind of overall arc; it needs to feel like it’s purposefully headed somewhere. DS9 did this perfectly back when such things were seen as risky and bold for television.

The second season was all over the map in my opinion. No cohesion.

I feel like a prequel does best when it focuses on a medium-threat to a place you can develop and connect to, so the stakes are there. This also applies to characters: maybe, sometimes, the new guys don't all die but just gets promoted/moves on with their career/gets wounded/retires.... Gotta actually keep the audience on their toes with tension and varied results.

Like, for a Trek example, what's happened to Alpha Centauri, or any medium colony; could get some world builders together to whip up a whole scenario, there's stuff we can look into like the FRIGGIN SHELIAK WAR, which we can surmise was brutal but ends with a masterstroke of diplomacy, stuff like that....

I dunno, I'm a bit inspired by the prequels of the Legends of the Galactic Heroes series, the Gaiden, which were almost perfectly executed: medium stakes stuff, we know the war isn't going to be won back then or that the main characters are going to die, but we see the heroes of the last two generations, more world building, the only glaring issue is just that no one from the main series referenced anything about it, since the Gaiden was written up after the main series wrapped up. That's a bit fine, that's reality getting in the way. But! Trek does have things going on in the 2250s-2260s and what not that other series have referenced that could be explored, but no....

 

[Michael]

Knowing the future of the characters, none of it will work out anyway and thus feels a bit pointless.

Not going to comment on how you feel about the various romantic pairings on the show, since that’s obviously a matter of personal opinion, but I’d like to point out that no, we don’t really know how any of them will play out, even if we know some of the characters’ fates. Spock and Chapel could be married for decades after we last saw him in The Undiscovered Country and before he turns up again on The Next Generation. Same for La’an and Kirk: We know basically nothing about what relationships Kirk had before and after the events shown in the original series and the movies. And why does knowing how Pike ends up with the Talosians matter in regards to his romantic relationship with Batel? It doesn’t tell you anything about how long they stay together, how close their relationship gets, if they start a family etc.

So if Spock marries Chapel after Star Trek VI and they stay together until she dies of old age … does that mean “they didn’t work out”?
If La’an and Kirk get together and she dies a heroic death in season 7 of Strange New Worlds … does that mean “they didn’t work out”?
And if Pike loses Batel due to her getting attacked by the Gorn … does that mean “they didn’t work out”?

My point is, we don’t actually know a lot about how any of these peoples’ lives play out. We basically just got glimpses of it through the various shows and movies they appeared in. There’s plenty of blank spots in all of their biographies.

The second season was all over the map in my opinion. No cohesion

Just coming off a fresh rewatch I’ll have to disagree with this, as I thought there was plenty of cohesion. It’s not necessarily big story arcs that form the connective tissue, but certainly character arcs. Uhura coming to terms with her parents’ and Hemmer’s deaths and how she wants to approach her role on the Enterprise are a throughline in the show and are touched upon in various episodes. Same with Pike’s and Batel’s relationship, Spock’s and Chapel’s relationship, M’Benga’s PTSD, La’an learning to be more open, Spock leaning into his human side …

Sure, there’s not some universe-ending, time-bomb ticking mystery MacGuffin floating above their heads in every episode to make it feel like it’s one big overarching storyline. But I found their approach much more multifaceted, rewarding and entertaining.

 

[Rahul]

I feel like a prequel does best when it focuses on a medium-threat to a place you can develop and connect to, so the stakes are there. This also applies to characters: maybe, sometimes, the new guys don't all die but just gets promoted/moves on with their career/gets wounded/retires.... Gotta actually keep the audience on their toes with tension and varied results.

Actually.... not just for prequels.
I think this is true in general.

Like, at no point during PIC or future DISCO did I ever think "you know what, maybe this time the tentacle robots, Borg, angry Q, 10-C or Orions will really DO destroy all of human life!"

However - "will Data betray his friends to save the only other artificial life he knows?", "Which side will win the Klingon civil war? Will Worf come back to Starfleet?" "Will Riker kill Picard to save Earth from the Borg?" - those are all stakes that, even while they don't, feel like they actually could change the status quo dramatically, and such work much better.

(This is not exclusive to Trek - Superhero movies have the same problem of ever-increasing stakes to the point of ridiculousness)

 

[Shawnster]

That is one of the big problems I have with the serialized Treks of DISCO and PIC. Each season is a fate of the Federation/Galaxy concept

Now, SNW did end with a potential Gorn invasion, but not every episode was an all or nothing quest.

 

[fireproof78]

Controversial opinion time: I do not mind galaxy ending threats, and do not find them ridiculous.

 

[Lord Garth]

I don't have time to weigh in the way I would like, so I'll have to reluctantly sit this round out.

I'll wait until the next time it comes up. Captain Harriman says it's going to come up again on Tuesday! It's his favorite day. Always has been, since he was born. His mother complained when she went into labor that he wasn't born until Tuesday.

 

[ananta]

we don’t really know how any of them will play out, even if we know some of the characters’ fates. Spock and Chapel could be married for decades after we last saw him in The Undiscovered Country and before he turns up again on The Next Generation.

Yikes that would be one HELL of a retcon—and not in a good way, in my opinion, as it doesn’t fit with what we know of the TOS characters…even though it probably would fit with the SNW characters. Which I suppose is part of my problem with SNW. I don’t really see them as the same characters. They’re somebody else’s vision. At this point, I actually wish they’d leave the original characters be and create more of their own.

But that’s just my two cents and I know it’s controversiiial. I do get what you are saying about missing parts of the characters’ biographical history and it’s a legitimate take. I just feel I don’t want or need to know every part of their biography. I like that there are missing gaps and don’t want everything spelled out.

Which is maybe why SNW is not working for me as well as it is for most of the fandom.

 

[fireproof78]

Especially with Picard's line about attending Sarek's son's wedding. It would be interesting to fill in those gaps.

 

[Farscape One]

Especially with Picard's line about attending Sarek's son's wedding. It would be interesting to fill in those gaps.

About that line...

Given how tight-lipped that family is about their members, I wonder if it is another son of Sarek that isn't Spock or Sybok. He did marry another human woman, Perrin... maybe that's their son.

 

[Nerys Myk]

The second season was all over the map in my opinion. No cohesion.

That's a feature not a bug.

 

[Ovation]

That's a feature not a bug.

It’s machine washable, dahling. That’s a new feature.

 

[Mage]

No matter how nonsensical, as in how fast the Enterprise-A got to the Great Barrier at the center of the galaxy. Sure, the movie novelization explained how it was done,

It did? Kinda curious as to how.

 

[cooleddie74]

The Sha-Ka-Ree entity telepathically transmitted engineering knowledge to Sybok that he passed on to his followers that allowed them to radically modify the Enterprise-A's engines, thus making the journey amazingly brief.

 

[Tallguy]

The Sha-Ka-Ree entity telepathically transmitted engineering knowledge to Sybok that he passed on to his followers that allowed them to radically modify the Enterprise-A's engines, thus making the journey amazingly brief.

First the Kelvins and now this. Don't these people ever take notes? Or pictures?

 

[BK613]

First the Kelvins

For the longest time, it was in my head canon that the Kelvan engineer was why the Enterprise in TMP became what it was.

 

[Forbin]

Re: Speed of Plot™ - I may be misremembering this, but I recall an episode of Alias, where Sydney, at HQ (in LA?), received a distress call from someone in Eastern Europe who was being attacked, hopped on the company business jet, and arrived to help while the fight was still going on. A shorter distance than from the Neutral Zone to Earth during a Borg attack, but still... I mean... Wha??

 

[fireproof78]

First the Kelvins and now this. Don't these people ever take notes? Or pictures?

No.

 

[Tallguy]

Re: Speed of Plot™ - I may be misremembering this, but I recall an episode of Alias, where Sydney, at HQ (in LA?), received a distress call from someone in Eastern Europe who was being attacked, hopped on the company business jet, and arrived to help while the fight was still going on. A shorter distance than from the Neutral Zone to Earth during a Borg attack, but still... I mean... Wha??

See? THAT'S speed of plot. EDIT: Just realized: That's a JJ show, isn't it?

 

[cooleddie74]

Technically that species was Kelvans. With an a.

[*Pedant hat comes off*]