What has the new series done to ruin Star Trek this time?
- Thread starter Ray Hardgrit
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You actually think Buffy's "magic" and Trek's "science" are different. Or that all the weird anomaly crap that happens on Star Trek have "natural" explanations.
So your problem is "I don't know where the music came from" and "there is no way music could appear on the Enterprise"? We see things being creating out of nothing by aliens all the time on Trek, yet somehow extra-dimensional beings, who are are already causing our heroes to express them selves in song, can't create music for those songs as well????
Bro, do you even Trek?
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I mean, yes? Obviously.
You actually think Buffy's "magic" and Trek's "science" are different. Or that all the weird anomaly crap that happens on Star Trek have "natural" explanations.
Star Trek goes out of its way to trick a willing audience into suspending disbelief for 40 minutes and going along with what is happening. Buffy literally says "a wizard did it".
I like the musical episode. This is a franchise where we spent an entire episode of TOS on a planet where android recreations of Don Juan, a samurai warrior, a tiger, a knight on horseback and one of Kirk's past lovers appeared out of nowhere, and I didn't even mention the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland as well as Alice herself until just now - AND THEY BOTH APPEARED IN JUST THE FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF SAID EPISODE, BEFORE EVEN THE OPENING MUSIC.
I'm willing to let goofy Star Trek "science" be just that: goofy Star Trek science.
I'm willing to let goofy Star Trek "science" be just that: goofy Star Trek science.
And that's different than "an anomaly did it" how? And technically it was a Demon in the Buffy episode. IIRC they confront him directly.
I think I can explain it as one of those "options" that looks cool at first, but in practice really doesn't add much to communicating. So it fell out of favor and became like videophones. One of those things that's a cool futuristic concept that's existed for decades, it's viable if you want to use it, but in practice no one really FaceTime's all of their calls. Most calls just use the regular phone audio the same way we've been using it for over a century, or they text.
Does it make that big of a difference whether you see the other person as a 3D hologram walking on your bridge, or you see them in their setting on a giant 300-inch viewscreen when you're trying to talk to them?
Also, the standard viewscreen image is not supposed to be a flat image.
In TNG's "The Defector," when Picard and Tomalak argue on the bridge, they show the viewscreen from different angles and the image on the viewscreen changes to give the appearance of the viewscreen being a 3-dimensional environment that changes with perspective. Because Tomalak and his setting exist on the viewscreen almost like a holodeck projection across from the bridge.
In some ways, that's more impressive than Star Wars-esque holograms.
You don't get much more of a mundane explanation than "it's a theme park, they're all animatronics". Granted the mind-reading is a bit sci-fi and I'm not sure why anyone thought it was okay for them to (temporarily) murder the guests, but it's basically just Westworld.
Anomalies aren't people. If the episode had ended with the line "We can only theorise that some intelligence set this up for their amusement, and they found us sufficiently entertaining" I would've been able to go along with it.
Spoon feeding is for infants.
I like it when Trek's just plain weird and even the explanation is weird and makes no sense.
That's what's powered much of Trek since 1964.
That's what's powered much of Trek since 1964.
I never thought the Star Wars holograms as impressive and more just meant as something to differentiate the setting and make it different.
Yup. It's wacky and wooly. It has space communists, space Americans, and aliens who say thought is the basis of reality.
Keep Trek weird, as a bumper sticker might say.
Why is Omega III a parallel development of Earth right down to communism, the United States Constitution and the American flag? Why do the Asiatic natives have names like Wu? Do we need a "scientific explanation"? Nope.
Just roll with it. Enough in Trek is bizarre and ridiculous even before the E Pleb Neesta enters the conversation.
Just roll with it. Enough in Trek is bizarre and ridiculous even before the E Pleb Neesta enters the conversation.
But, we can speculate on quite a number of things, like Hodgkins law of planetary development, The Preservers, and Earths relocated from an alternate universe for whatever reason we can make up. Its a completely different type of oddity or weirdness or unsettled coincidence then spontaneous musical numbers.
Basically, the Twilight Zone is not a comedy nor a musical.
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I think this basically becomes an argument between people who like some rules and limits to give the setting/story more believability (which grounds something fantastical like breaking out into song in some "realism"), but also helps with the stakes of the story, and others who are like let's just have episodes where they go for it and we don't worry about that stuff.
I lean more to the former than the latter. But I understand the argument for the latter. There are some episodes that are just supposed to be fun episodes where you just don't think about it too hard, like the logistics and magical realism of a musical.
On the other hand, I re-watched Back to the Future over the weekend, and what helps the story along and makes you go along with the story is that they lay out the limits and requirements as exposition right at the start. You got to be driving at 88mph and you need 1.21 gigawatts (or plutonium) to make it work.
How does a flux capacitor work? It fluxes and makes time-travel possible. But because they ground it in rules and necessities, it give the story a certain level of realism that makes the stakes for the characters believable. If the movie existed in a world where Doc Brown's time travel was more "magical" and unexplained, the events at the end of the movie don't carry as much weight for Doc and Marty, since the audience would be asking why are they having to go through all of this to get back to 1985 if they were able to get to 1955 because "a wizard did it."
We can speculate about the fake science behind a subspace or spatial phenomenon that makes humans, Vulcans and Klingons break out into song. Which is what the episode makes us do.
Weirdness apparently must confine itself to the appropriate Trek parameters at all times .
But is it any different than any other "out of character" things various anomalies, artifacts and aliens have made our heroes do?
If the episode had ended with the line "We can only theorise that someone used their sufficiently advanced technology to set this up for their amusement, and they found us sufficiently entertaining" I would've been able to go along with it. Well, mostly.
I mean it'd take some pretty damn impressive technology to do what happened in that story.
Seriously, do you even Star Trek? You think creating music and having our heroes sing their inter most feelings is beyond the abilities of aliens we've see in Star Trek since 1966?
The only differentiation is whether a viewer subjectivity likes it or not.
It reminds me a bit of when The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out, and some people moaned that it was unrealistic because Indiana Jones shouldn't be about aliens and it took them out of the movie.
As if someone the Arc of the Covenant and the Holy Grail were more grounded and believable than extraterrestrials.
But I get the wider point. A lot of people hate musicals in general, and many Trekkies don't like when the show satirises itself, so this episode was always going to be divisive.
But really it's no different to that virus that made the DS9 crew re-enact an ancient power struggle, or Picard experiencing Kamin's life.
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