Star Wars has transporters (for objects) now, it's just that they're people.
Rise of Skywalker is a pathway to many decisions some would consider to be unnatural
Same here. Watching TOS and TAS cements the idea that Star Trek has space magic. We see it early on with Charlie X and the Thasians. It's wild and wooly and crazy. Treating it as hard sci-fi is asking for disappointment.
In the early 1990s there were tentavive moves to showcase TREK as a full-blown opera, as opposed to merely a space one. Could that time now come?
On a sliding scale of "What shows ARE a grounded science fiction series"? Often!
Compare the Trek shows where they at least gave lip service to the idea that they were (TOS, TNG at least) and the look at when the showrunners start saying "Well, that's never REALLY been Star Trek, has it?"
Yeah, but super powered "magic" aliens has also been in the realm of what most had considered "serious" sci-fi for a long time now.
As usual when I hear this push-back I ask "compared to what"?
I just can't consider evil transporter clones, a magic space-time donut, Captain Kirk facing off against the god Apollo, space hippies hijacking the Enterprise, and Captain Kirk meeting Abraham Lincoln as being that grounded.
Making new IPs is always the creatively better option. But they’re currently statistically less likely to attract a “big enough, soon enough” audience… with occasional very heartening exceptions.
The only purpose a total reboot serves is to not mess with the source material. Or at the least, using concepts from the source material to create your own similar universe but taking it in a different direction (e.g. nuBSG, The Orville.) But the thing is, not messing with the source material was the furthest worry from CBS/Paramount's mind. The 'Discoverse' is a retcon of the prime universe and TOS, no matter how anyone wants to claim that it's not. So who cares if Skydance makes some new production that contradicts what came before? Saying it's a 'reboot' only matters to the super hardcore nerd fans like the people who post on the TrekBBS.
There have only ever been two times that I genuinely felt pissed off at a Star Trek production. TATV (and this came from a guy who wasn't even a huge ENT fan), and the Section 31 movie. The issues with TATV have been discussed ad nauseam, so there's no need to bring it up again. But S31 made me genuinely feel that the current producers are so ridiculously out of touch with what Star Trek is supposed to be about, and that making vanity projects to cater to an actor's ego has become more important than the actual show itself. Yeah, Section 31 made me angry. But it made me angry because I love Star Trek. So I can kind of understand why this particular fictional show isn't something people can easily take less seriously than they do, because the show has different meanings for different people.
probably the only less grounded sci fi franchises are Star Wars and Dr Who. and maybe not even Who until that "the moon is an egg" crap. There is no scientific premise for telepathy, esp etc and that is front and center part of the heart of the show and has been since the pilot and the first aired episode. Apart from inventing elements that don't exist (and therefore can't exist) and particles that no one's ever heard of as a basis for the gizmos and stuff they use, there just isn't a scientificc basis for anything in star trek. And that's fine. It was never attempting to go that. There are only a handful of sci fi shows that have, and even they cheated now and then, because of course they do. It just be a completely dry Greg Benford novel otherwise.
To be fair, once you know how to do the calculations for time travel, meeting Abraham Lincoln should be easy!
"A sliding scale" will, of course, support whatever position you want to hang on it. However tenuous.
TOS made some gestures at maintaining what might be better called "narrative plausibility," but if you read The Making of Star Trek enough times it starts to sink in that their default approach to research was to seek advice and then thoroughly ignore whatever didn't work for them dramatically or visually.
Star Wars and Doctor Who. But that leaves Lost in Space, Stargate, The Invisible Man, Space: 1999, The X-Files, Automan, Salvage 1, Babylon 5... All more grounded than Star Trek.
The Expanse? Oh, damn it, protomolecules and Epstein drives. Dune? Ohhhh, no, I guess not. Foundation?
Are we just left with The Martian? (Ignore the dust storms that can blow over a space ship on Mars.)
"A sliding scale" will, of course, support whatever position you want to hang on it. However tenuous.
TOS made some gestures at maintaining what might be better called "narrative plausibility," but if you read The Making of Star Trek enough times it starts to sink in that their default approach to research was to seek advice and then thoroughly ignore whatever didn't work for them dramatically or visually.
As above: What beats Star Trek? There's surely some. But there's not a lot. That's what I mean by sliding scale. It's TV. Or movies. Or just sci-fi in general. Almost all of it starts making stuff up either a little or a lot.
So compared to "all that": Yes, Star Trek started out as grounded sci-fi.
On absolute terms? There is no grounded sci-fi. Certainly not on film.
There was zero time travel in meeting Abraham Lincoln. Also: They didn't meet Abraham Lincoln.
This is a common issue with historical feature films depicting historical events or eras as well. (I’m currently prepping a new course called Film as History and discussions of how historical accuracy is often sacrificed at the altar of drama or aesthetics forms a core element of the course).
Hell, it applies to almost any depiction of something the creators are not experts in—in film and television. I’ve lost count of all the times my wife mocks labs, especially in pharmaceutical companies, portrayed on screen.
If “realism” is so rarely applied to things that actually exist, it seems absurd to be holding speculative fiction to a higher standard than depictions of the world as it actually exists.
Lost in Space: since we never really have a good idea of where they go or how fast, and since it's essentially a kid's show, I'm not including it. Stargate basically involves a precursor civilization that figured out how to make stable wormholes, not counting the later FTL spaceflight, which I wish they'd left alone. I'm sure we can keep coming up with sci fi shows that had physics violating tech. I mentioned that previously. But Star Trek is founded on it.
Again, that's fine. We're all fans here. but the show is space opera, not any kind of grounded sci fi. The only sci fi TV franchises I can think of offhand that have tried to have some kind of real scientific grounding are For All Mankind, The Expanse, Westworld, Severance, Ghost In the Shell, and maybe Firefly. I'm not including shows in that which are only sci-fi due to being alternate universe series. I'm sure there are others, that just what I can think of. Interestingly non of those shows include any kind of FTL drive.
Admittedly the protomolecule and the things it does violate physics. It's operating under Clarke's Law. The Epstein drive does not: its just some breakthrough in fusion propulsion. They still fly "tea kettle" a lot of times. Likewise they don't have FTL communication.
Ghost in the Shell can't resist periodically indulging in the Gibsonian conceit that people may somehow upload themselves into cyberspace. Or at least paying lip service to the idea, though I suppose it's never been proven to have "worked" in any meaningful sense.
Your wife seems to be holding depictions of the world as it exists to a high standard too.
Here's another example of a series that's not grounded: Red Dwarf.
Red Dwarf has luck viruses and justice fields. Someone got sick once and manifested actual fish, raining from the ceiling, along with the personification of their confidence. You can literally walk into photos to travel into the past. You can edit someone's DNA to turn them into a cyborg. But it doesn't have aliens. Not one single alien has ever shown up in the series, because it wouldn't be Red Dwarf if they did and the writer understands this.
Being grounded or not isn't really the whole story.
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Hard to ignore that when an implausible dust storm is the inciting incident that kicks off the entire story. Mars just doesn’t have that kind of atmospheric pressure.
I adore The Martian, but it gets fanciful to spin a yarn.
This. Historical dramas play fast and loose a lot. MASH, my favorite TV show of all time is a prime example.
So we're done to pretty much 0 in the "grounded sci-fi on film" arena then. Star Trek for the win!
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