Ad Astra Per Aspera & Momento Mori come to mind immediately.
Strange New Worlds disappointment
- Thread starter just2wicked
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Ad Astra Per Aspera & Momento Mori come to mind immediately.
Sure it did. TNG happened AFTER TOS. SNW happens BEFORE but now the writers have taken things that were first in TOS and have made the crew of SNW encounter them all first.
There was a point I expected SNW to be the heir apparent to the franchise, but while I like it a lot, it certainly hasn't surpassed Discovery, which I think I still the flagship of post-2017 Trek. It's the one all are measured by.
There's something very weird about Season 3. Season 1 and 2 had very clear character arcs for Pike, Spock, Una, and La'an. They were about dealing with future destinies, hidden pain, and struggling to become more than they were.
And Season 3....doesn't do any of that.
It's like they suddenly stopped in everyone's journey. Pike doesn't think about the fact he's doomed, Una doesn't do anything about Augment rights anymore, La'an has stopped trying to humanize herself, and Spock's plot with his brother and T'Pring is gone.
Just gimmick episode after gimmick episode.
And Season 3....doesn't do any of that.
It's like they suddenly stopped in everyone's journey. Pike doesn't think about the fact he's doomed, Una doesn't do anything about Augment rights anymore, La'an has stopped trying to humanize herself, and Spock's plot with his brother and T'Pring is gone.
Just gimmick episode after gimmick episode.
How are we defining "gimmick"?
"Hegemony, Part II" What's the gimmick?
"Wedding Bell Blues" Is God like alien effs with crew a gimmick? Are callbacks a gimmick
"Shuttle to Kenfori" What's the gimmick?
"A Space Adventure Hour" Is a holdeck adventure a gimmick at this stage of Trek?
"Through the Lens of Time" What's the gimmick?
"The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail" What's the gimmick here? Our heroes help out on a damaged ship?
"What Is Starfleet?" Doco format is a gimmick
"Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" I guess comedy might be a gimmick.
"Terrarium" What's the gimmick?
It reminded some people of zombies, kind of. GIMMICK!
Definitely. It holds my interest and makes me anticipate the next episode, unlike anything live action has since DS9. The Orville was better Trek than DIS.
I define gimmick as being focused around a overt concept versus character interaction. It doesn't have to be a bad episode but a musical is a gimmick episode versus an episode about exploring the characters or world of Trek.
And yes, Space Adventure Hour is a gimmick of not only a holodeck episode but a holodeck episode set around the production of Star Trek: The Original Series.
The musical episode was very much an episode about exploring the characters.
This seems strange, given a concern about science fiction, since most outstanding examples of the form feature lots of gimmick storytelling and damn little characterization.
And yes, "Subspace Rhapsody" revolves entirely around character interaction and arcs.
"Arena," from TOS, is totally gimmick-driven. It's all plot.
That's a lot of TOS though is the gimmick planet of the week.
Hardly. One bad episode doesn't equal a nose dive.
The musical episode was a character episode.
How much time needs to be passed for a gimmick to not be considered a gimmick? Taking out any of Picard's use of the holodeck, since it was used as additional set more than anything else, it's been a solid 20+ years since Trek did a live-action holodeck episode. Sometimes I think we all just rewatch Trek too much that these long-past episodes feel fresher in our minds than they actually are.
We disagree on the number of poor episodes this season. From my personal perspective, the previous two seasons had a much better ratio of good to poor episodes than season three does.
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Pike does refer to them as zombies, and even the title itself is a dual reference to Ken Foree and Train to Busan.
I probably wouldn't call it a gimmick episode because the zombies are totally incidental to the plot and just sort of there to fill out the runtime until the Klingon confrontation, but still, the evocation of zombies was definitely the goal of the production team.
I otherwise partly agree with you but this definition is tricky; I think most of TOS is about overt concepts. Kirk in particular is totally elastic and exists to serve the needs of each plot rather than be a well-drawn character in his own right, his personality and worldview changing entirely between stories.
Potentially the trouble with SNW is that it often tries very hard to adhere to the genre it's imitating on any given week, and also has a very self-aware drive to posit itself as a successor to older genre TV. That's different from TOS where you'd get "gimmicky" ideas like "trapped at the OK Corral" or "meeting Apollo" or "Moby Dick but the whale is a planet-killer", but it generally used the ideas as platforms to tell unique stories, rather than to echo or play with existing genres. The only exception I can think of is "A Piece of the Action", where the finale involving Kirk becoming the best gangster on the planet (including funny accent) and orchestrating his own territory takeover feels like something SNW might do. "A Piece of the Action" is one of my favourite TOS episodes, so it's definitely not a bad thing, maybe SNW just gets the balance wrong.
"Gimmick" is kind of a nebulous term...what we're really seeing with most of SNW is standard tropes in action. I guess you could call the musical a gimmick because it's a radical departure from typical storytelling format. The same will be true of the upcoming puppet episode. But other than that there aren't really "gimmick" episodes of SNW, just common TV or Star Trek tropes.
Even the musical is a variation on the weird anomaly makes the crew behave oddly trope.
I’m just going by poll numbers and thread posts on this website. The majority have liked most of the episodes, 7 and 8 have the most low ratings, but most votes are still above 5
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