Is it time to put Star Trek to rest?
- Thread starter Dar70
- Start date
What it should be about is 'Star Trek IS Star Trek, but it's ok to not like ALL Star Trek'.
I never cared much for Voyager.
The new stuff looks incredible, but the stories aren't as good. It's like folks picked spectacle over story. Then, they dug their heals into making it far more political in a time when we're extremely polarized at least on social media. And Doctor Who did the same thing.
So I'm watching older stuff now.
DSC in almost every way, shape and form is visually more interesting than VOY. But storywise it just wasn't as good, and that's painful to say given the talent involved in DSC and the lead actors hired to play those roles in that series, but man, DSC was more eye candy than food for thought, at least in the first two seasons or so. By the time it got a lot better DSC had languished for too long to earn a ranking with the Legacy Era series.
And VOY is the nadir of Classic Trek, at least for me.
And VOY is the nadir of Classic Trek, at least for me.
"Hollywood just spent sixty years building one of the greatest science fiction franchises in human history and then handed it to a bunch of people who could not be bothered to watch the show before they started running it."
Change "sixty" to "twenty-five" and you are literally describing the hand-off between seasons two and three of The Next Generation. I stopped watching after that.
Haven't watched the video but, tentatively, I think there is a fair debate to have about the extent to which Star Trek's coherence has been stretched beyond recognition.
Like, at this point "Star Trek" genuinely does communicate almost nothing as a label. It doesn't consistently refer to any character, or location, or setting, or theme, or tone, or storytelling model, or target demographic, or production style.
Obviously someone could very reasonably argue that this predates Kurtzman and even happened as early as TNG/the films, but I think even someone who enjoys everything labelled "Star Trek" would have trouble defining what the name actually means at this point, other than "a production from CBS/Paramount that has the name Star Trek on it".
If anyone has ever read the "Star Trek is..." document from 1964, this has arguably been a feature, not a bug, from the very beginning. The point was always to do an anthology series with the cost-saving features of a regular cast and standing sets. That's going to result in a great degree of malleability in what the thing ultimately is, and the more of it there is, the more malleable it's going to be.
I think TOS feels like it has a strong enough identity even if the plots are completely standalone and wildly different: obviously, the same characters and actors recur each time which is the big one, but also a consistent production style, and some narrative aspects applied relatively consistently across stories - phasers have stun, Spock is telepathic, etc.
You could say TNG is merely the next entry in the anthology, but it starts to break down a bit - the characters and the world they occupy feel essentially unrelated to TOS, and the Federation they serve feels almost inverted from Kirk's at times, so Star Trek at that point has to mean "one of two tonally distinct TV series, plus an animated series of the first TV series aimed at kids, plus a film series with a totally different look and tone".
It mostly holds together through TNG because the structure is essentially the same as TOS and it debatably feels like a spiritual successor, but it starts to get gradually more and more difficult after that. By the time we're at Star Trek: Scouts, Starfleet Academy, and whatever Picard S2 was, I think it gets incredibly difficult to pin down any specific thing that the name "Star Trek" promises when it appears in a title.
You could say TNG is merely the next entry in the anthology, but it starts to break down a bit - the characters and the world they occupy feel essentially unrelated to TOS, and the Federation they serve feels almost inverted from Kirk's at times, so Star Trek at that point has to mean "one of two tonally distinct TV series, plus an animated series of the first TV series aimed at kids, plus a film series with a totally different look and tone".
It mostly holds together through TNG because the structure is essentially the same as TOS and it debatably feels like a spiritual successor, but it starts to get gradually more and more difficult after that. By the time we're at Star Trek: Scouts, Starfleet Academy, and whatever Picard S2 was, I think it gets incredibly difficult to pin down any specific thing that the name "Star Trek" promises when it appears in a title.
There’s a lot of distinct bodily, physical “dark grittiness” in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, after all — 1982 — and in the popular view, TWOK has generally been seen the best, most iconic exemplifier of “good” Trek that saved the franchise. (Yes, I know many of us would disagree, and though I like it it ain’t my favorite either; I’m talking about the popular conception.). However tame it may seem now, there’s plenty in TWOK that was shocking to a young person used to TOS and TMP — blood, a slit-throats jumpscare, a gory Khan-face near the end (seems like nothing much now, but people definitely reacted in the theater audience I saw it with in 1982). (Just imagine if they’d kept the stuff about Khan’s baby dying on the Reliant!)
To quote Phil Farrand, who wrote the Nitpickers Guide for Next Generation Trekkers in the '90s, "They made [TNG] enough like the original series to still feel like Star Trek, but different enough to avoid rehash syndrome."
I basically looked at TOS, TNG, and VOY as "normal" traditional Star Trek. DS9 was Star Trek in a different type of setting and ENT was "Star Trek before everything Starfleet took for granted!"
It's probably safe to say that almost all of us are here because either TOS, TNG, or one of the movies was our first exposure to Star Trek. So, liking that format is what we all have in common. And once you move past that format, then our tastes become more fragmented. DS9 might work for one person, but it doesn't for another. Same with SFA. It might be one person's cup of tea, but not another's. And then there's S31, where in theory it's "We break Starfleet's principles so Starfleet can afford to keep having its principles" and then we're philosophically moving pretty far away from what brought us to Star Trek in the first place.
With SFA, I'm not spoiling anything by saying while I don't think the show is bad, watching a show about school is just not my thing. So, it doesn't matter how good or bad it is, I gave it five episodes, but it's just not for me.
My feeling on current trek is it's very mediocre that should be compared to other contemporary shows that are airing with it, not what came in the past. I look at the things I watch (Silo, Severance, the Star Treks, The Pitt, For All Mankind, etc) and put Star Trek near the bottom of what I look forward to each week. I feel like Star Trek can be so much more than what is being put out currently and (whether this is true or not) it's stuck in the same pattern. It's 10 episode seasons and when the season ends that's it, time to move on. There really isn't anything "there" when all is said and done. Maybe I just don't feel it like I do with shows like The Pitt or Fallout. Heck, this week I checked to see how much longer the episode had with Starfleet Academy a few times, despite liking it. With the Pitt I checked one time and I had 17 minutes left and still felt like the episode just started.
I guess I just want Star Trek to be so much more than it is. Maybe it plays things too safe, but I don't feel much of anything when a season ends compared to some of the other shows I watch. Star Trek should strive to be as impactful as those other shows, whether for good or bad. It's basically going through the motions, and I'm not sure it really says much of anything in the long run.
I guess I just want Star Trek to be so much more than it is. Maybe it plays things too safe, but I don't feel much of anything when a season ends compared to some of the other shows I watch. Star Trek should strive to be as impactful as those other shows, whether for good or bad. It's basically going through the motions, and I'm not sure it really says much of anything in the long run.
I would disagree — there is a kind of basic, considered morality that runs throughout everything in the franchise (in that when it’s broken, as it often is, the shows or the protagonists present it as wrong or unfortunate and usually end or oppose it by the end). (Possible exceptions are Scouts, which I’ve never seen more than thirty seconds of, and possibly the execrable Section 31, though even that has Georgiou realize or admit that the sort of thing she used to be was wrong.). This is pretty much the point in PIC S2, as elsewhere. That is the specific Trek promise. If we ever get a Trek show that plays more like either version of Battlestar Galactica (both of which I like, btw, so this is not a slam on them) — either a yay-we-blew-em-up approach against anyone other than the classic Borg or a hard-and-often-monstrous-milSF approach, rather than what we saw in DS9 or ENT — that would be a break from it.
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This is such a weird sentence to me, though I get what you’re saying. I grew up in an era when, per common Internet usage which still makes sense to me, Classic Trek was TOS, TAS and the first six movies, period — everything TNG+ was something else. The latter was New Trek, sometimes actually called that.
But then, I’m an old. It’s even more surreal to me that significantly more time has now passed from that period (the late 80s/early 90s) than had then passed since 1966.
Yeah, there's a part of my brain that still considers TOS ,TAS and the first six movies "Classic Trek" and everything else Modern.
And that’s where I am, yeah! Though of course “Modern” is necessarily always a moving target.
Modern is a long time then. TNG came out in 1987, which is 40 years next year. Back in the 90s, I was thinking everything that came out in the 60s and before was considered "classic" and that was only about 30 years.
Modern Phase 1 = 1987-2005
Modern Phase 2 = 2009-2016
Modern Phase 3 = 2017-present
Modern Phase 2 = 2009-2016
Modern Phase 3 = 2017-present
I'm more like:
* TOS + TOS films
* TNG/DS9/VOY/ENT + TOS/TNG Films
* DISCO/PIC/SNW/SFA
That's how I mentally think about it in three eras.
The rebooted films (Kelvin Timeline), I think, as something separate from the whole.
I don't click vids unless they're in the music forums.
I don't click on Xhitter links period.
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