And your body: that of a Seth MacFarlane-obsessed bonobo.
Spoilers Strange New Worlds General Discussion Thread
- Thread starter NewHeavensNewEarth
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Rama, is that you?
I sorta agree with points 3 & 6. Everything else can go bite meGood article. I think its totally on point. Too many characters in the cast is diluting our time with the original main cast. We dont get much time with number one and getting less time with pike than we should.
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For those who don't want to give GFR clicks (I get it), the list is as follows:
1. Narrow the ensemble - I enjoy the cast, and it really isn't that large. Certainly not DS9 sized.
2. Tell stories about ideas, not characters - For one, I like the character-centric episodes.
3. Stop involving Spock in romance - I have no problem with the Spock romance angle. Spock had his moments of lady-killing in TOS, so don't see the issue there.
4. Stop being silly, think of the audience - While I don't think ALL the silly ideas have worked, I do appreciate them taking big swings.
5. Visit some planets, brighten up and build - This season alone, they've spent time on a Gorn ship, Starbase One, a zombie planet and a mysterious archaeological planet. Silly complaint.
6. Come up with your own ideas - I didn't think we needed Trelane, I did note the BOBW comparison to "Hegemony, Part II" and sure the holodeck episode has been done to death, but that was not the point of the episode. The point however is, SNW, like TOS before it, is an anthology show. They're going to take ideas from different places and put them on the screen. Again, a silly complaint and one that doesn't understand the point of the series.
1. Narrow the ensemble - I enjoy the cast, and it really isn't that large. Certainly not DS9 sized.
2. Tell stories about ideas, not characters - For one, I like the character-centric episodes.
3. Stop involving Spock in romance - I have no problem with the Spock romance angle. Spock had his moments of lady-killing in TOS, so don't see the issue there.
4. Stop being silly, think of the audience - While I don't think ALL the silly ideas have worked, I do appreciate them taking big swings.
5. Visit some planets, brighten up and build - This season alone, they've spent time on a Gorn ship, Starbase One, a zombie planet and a mysterious archaeological planet. Silly complaint.
6. Come up with your own ideas - I didn't think we needed Trelane, I did note the BOBW comparison to "Hegemony, Part II" and sure the holodeck episode has been done to death, but that was not the point of the episode. The point however is, SNW, like TOS before it, is an anthology show. They're going to take ideas from different places and put them on the screen. Again, a silly complaint and one that doesn't understand the point of the series.
Yeah. I agree with point 3 and sympathize with point 6, but the rest of it is nonsense. Especially point four.
I am enjoying (sort of) the dance angle with Spock and La'an, but I swear to god, if they have to do an interpretive dance to communicate with a "new civilization" I'm going to lose it.
Nah, Gene '66 said tell your story about people. (See sig) Star Trek is about the characters first and foremost. The grand statement or idea and the oh boy tech is nothing with out interesting characters.
I wanna be honest, I don't actually think TOS is about people 90% of the time. I think it was a conceptual sci-fi show, with the individual characters meaning little.
This is the way I think about it: Imagine if, instead of Kirk, there was another captain on the show (Pike or whoever), or one of the other Connies. Would the story be different? Would the alternate captain make different choices, which in turn resulted in a different story? Generally speaking, I think the answer is no - that the story would have been "ported" over to allow for the existing main cast to make sense into it, and it was moving towards a predetermined conclusion, that neither the character nor the past experiences of the characters mean little in. And when the past experience did mean something, it was just invented for the character on the spot, and could have just as easily been used for something else.
Now, was this a universal? Absolutely not. The actors brought their own spin into the roles, which in turn helped to flesh out dialogue as the show went on. Spock, in particular, got to have several episodes built around his Vulcan heritage. But I don't think there was that much Jim Kirk on the page. He was just the Captain - the main character - the guy who gave the big speech, and got the love interest of the week. Anyone else would've gotten them too who happened to be in the lead.
I think the characters in Star Trek are important, but SNW writers tend to assume that writing about characters means writing about romance or tragic backstories or trauma or whatnot, when all you really need is someone who is fairly likeable and/or acts in a consistent way that can work with any story (eg Spock, Seven, Data, Worf).
A lot of good Star Trek is "how do these well-defined, predictable characters react to this strange event", making the focus mostly external and on the idea/planet of the week, while SNW has a tendency to only engage with sci-fi if it can result in a Discovery-esque emotional revelation or "processing" of a past trauma, which I think is what people are complaining about when they say it's too character-based.
A lot of good Star Trek is "how do these well-defined, predictable characters react to this strange event", making the focus mostly external and on the idea/planet of the week, while SNW has a tendency to only engage with sci-fi if it can result in a Discovery-esque emotional revelation or "processing" of a past trauma, which I think is what people are complaining about when they say it's too character-based.
I agree with this, Kirk is definitely very vague on paper, and his personality changes a lot between episodes. I think he works in part because of Shatner, but also because he's often just treated by scripts as a representative of the Federation - Arena, Errand of Mercy, Devil in the Dark, and others don't really rely on James Kirk being personally impulsive, but rather the Federation being bullish and overconfident and him being emblematic of that.
Let's see:
Worf - Entire immediate family killed during Romulan attack - Raised by Humans.
Dr. Crusher - Husband died under Picard's Command; was only survivor of a Colony epidemic that killed everyone around her.
Data - Only survivor of a Colony wiped out by an Alien lifeform.
Riker - Has no memory of his mother as she dies when he was very very young. Father's response was to put himself into his work and ignore Riker, and shack up with a younger Dr. Pulaski. while leaving Riker with relatives.
Picard (ultimately) - Mother was mentally ill and ultimately killed herself; and Father blamed Picard to a degree.
^^^
Yep, no personal trauma here...oh, wait...
I would disagree. TOS is usually about people, just not always the main characters.
Isn't that the plot of "A Quality of Mercy"?
Yar -- Rape gangs.
Troi-- Lost father at young age.
The only crew member who had a seemingly trauma-free childhood would be Geordi, and he was born blind.
He caught up as an adult. His mom is missing , probably dead.
And later found out she had lost a sister as well.
^^^
And the revelation almost killed her mother.
I'm not sure you read what I wrote. I didn't say "no personal trauma", I said SNW's writers tend to focus on trauma, messy doomed romances/love triangles, and emotional volaltility to the exclusion of most other forms of character work, and that science fiction occurs mostly as a thin lens through which to examine these stories, rather than something to be engaged with for its own sake. This was not typically the case in previous Star Trek shows, outside episodes dedicated to these specific themes.
Kirk survived Kodos' massacre as a kid but it doesn't recur constantly in every episode that focuses on him as a character - in fact, it doesn't reappear ever outside CotK, as far as I know. Riker, similarly, is not defined by his parental loss, it's only raised a couple of times over seven years. TOS Spock is not generally defined by his dual heritage and relationship with his parents, though the theme does obviously recur. This works because people are not necessarily defined, or even strongly affected in day-to-day life, by events like these.
Like Riker, my own mother died when I was relatively young, and it's not a core aspect of my personality or identity. I wouldn't class it as a "tragic backstory" or "personal trauma", it's a common experience that the majority of people deal with sooner or later. If I was being written in Discovery or SNW, though, it would likely be among my central traits, and the lens through which I interact with the world.
Is anyone going to genuinely argue that the cultural currency placed on ideas like trauma is no different between Disco/PIC/SNW and TOS/TNG, or that characters relate to emotional difficulty in the same ways across all those series? You could watch fifty random Riker-heavy episodes of TNG and never know about his parents. You'd have a much tougher time watching a La'an episode and not hear about the Gorn or Khan, or watching a SNW Spock episode (especially post-S1) and not seeing him act like an aggressive thirteen year old boy over Chapel, because the writers seem to believe that suffering and displays of emotional pain are the hallmarks of mature character writing.
Except in TOS day one season was 30 episodes, TNG's day it was 26; so yeah 50 episodes of TNG isn't even two seasons (of 7 seasons); and now with SNW we're at 10 per season - so yeah, there's going to be a LOT less filler and focus on 'guest star of the week episodes and they are going to focus on the main cast and really involve them.
Hell, if they'd done that with TNG, Denise Crosby probably wouldn't have quit.
Also, the WAY they write the SNW characters make them way more relatable then the stoic mannequins the TNG characters were for the majority of TNG episodes. The dialogue on TNG was often so generic, you could have any character (excepting maybe Data and Worf) say it.
I'll take SNW character writing and story plotting over TNG's any day.
YMMV of course.
"Narrow the Ensemble." This from the same people who complained Disco was "The Michael Burnham Show."
^^ Fair enough, I think I can see two areas of subjective disagreement:
There isn't really any non-filler in TOS that I can think of, because it's a catalog of things the Enterprise encounters. If you were to cut out standalone adventures from TOS, I'm not sure what'd be left - it's not like Kirk or Scotty have some traceable character arc, nor really does Spock.
I'm still staggered over the line in the last episode where (I think) La'an asks Chapel if she can "trust Spock to behave around Korby". We're adults! We're all like forty! And we're astronauts entrusted with rank and responsibility! It's not a high school playground!!!
Those episodes aren't filler to me - they're Star Trek! They're the show! What are "guest star" episodes like Doomsday Machine, The Squire of Gothos, and Balance of Terror if not the core of Star Trek?
There isn't really any non-filler in TOS that I can think of, because it's a catalog of things the Enterprise encounters. If you were to cut out standalone adventures from TOS, I'm not sure what'd be left - it's not like Kirk or Scotty have some traceable character arc, nor really does Spock.
I agree with you that TNG's characterisation was generally bland, but where I'd disagree is that the SNW characters are more relatable. This is subjective and a case of YMMV, as you say, but while people like Riker and Troi are boring, I think they're relatively believable in-universe as professional astronauts who are calm under pressure, emotionally controlled, and good-natured. SNW characters, especially after season one, are increasingly hard to take seriously either as professionals or as adults.
I'm still staggered over the line in the last episode where (I think) La'an asks Chapel if she can "trust Spock to behave around Korby". We're adults! We're all like forty! And we're astronauts entrusted with rank and responsibility! It's not a high school playground!!!
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