Is Trek obsolete?
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
Apparently, you didn't read the remainder of my post past the first sentence which you quote.
The basic concepts of Star Trek had been on television before Roddenberry came up with his space adventure. Once again:
Therefore, the concepts weren't original to television but how they were presented were and who they were targeted at -- adults. After all, NBC proclaimed Star Trek as the "first adult space adventure." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_E3...08637E7E7&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1)
No, they are fair observations. They factor into what made the show; the origins of the concepts. They do have a bearing on Star Trek's originality on television. Art does not exist in a vaccum or solely in one medium. It is informed by its contemporaries or its past, regardless of whether or not it's television, movies, or print.
I think you have a pejorative connotation to the term of "pulp fiction."
Pulps were quick, cheaply produced magazines because of the quality of the paper. That didn't necessarily mean the quality of the stories were lesser than the wood pulp paper they were printed on. Now there are some truly "dreadful penny" stories out there, fo'sho, but mostly they were entertaining and innovative stories. Most of them being more innovative than Star Trek. After all, a lot of the Titans of Science Fiction came from the pulps.
What's wrong with Tarzan, The Shadow, Sherlock Holmes, etc.?
Holmes is considered to be one of the greatest literary characters, and some of his stories are the most sophisticated of its time. Contemporary literary authors, those considered of "serious literature," have a fondness for Holmes. Take Michael Chabon, who wrote a "story of detection" featuring an aged Holmes. He's even edited two collections for McSweeny's that are a throwback to those pulp magazines. In them, the current crop of "serious lit" writers contributed their own crafted "pulp" stories.
Star Trek is adventure fiction. It is romantic. It is space opera.
Sure there is that underlying current of "social consciousness" but it's pedestrian, not nearly as sophisticated as the other art of the 60s zeitgiest. Star Trek is great entertainment that occasionally challenges the mind, but it's far from a "serious" piece of high art even though it stands above the rest.
However, it was written and crafted by its creators in the hopes of making a hit that appealed to a mass audience.
When Star Trek takes itself too seriously, when it eviscerates the fun and adventure, then it becomes dull, plodding, and pointless. It works best when it's a simply a good story with good characters, thus allowing for themes and ideals to be properly dramatized and not pontificated on.
One thing I think is probably obsolete is Trek's broad demographic focus as a traditional "prime time" general audience program.
Berman-era Trek incorporated action-adventure, space opera/politicking, morality and ethics dilemmas, "technobabble", ensemble character drama, romantic/soap operatic subplots, 'pulp' sci-fi, and so on. To some extent, it was trying to be Everything For Everybody and the results were inconsistent at best.
Modern television seems too fractured for such an approach, even the most successful programs have tiny ratings compared to the prime-time hits of 15-20 years ago. As a result, programs tend to be very focused and rigorous in their consistency (i.e CSI is always about solving crimes, never about a character's relationship with their mother).
So, the first step in making the Trek franchise relevant beyond a single summer blockbuster would be to determine who the core audience is, and what those people want to see from Star Trek, and then focus in tightly on that.
(And not all existing fans will be happy with the results. A program targeting the traditional younger male sci-fi audience might not be appealing to older females, for example.)
Berman-era Trek incorporated action-adventure, space opera/politicking, morality and ethics dilemmas, "technobabble", ensemble character drama, romantic/soap operatic subplots, 'pulp' sci-fi, and so on. To some extent, it was trying to be Everything For Everybody and the results were inconsistent at best.
Modern television seems too fractured for such an approach, even the most successful programs have tiny ratings compared to the prime-time hits of 15-20 years ago. As a result, programs tend to be very focused and rigorous in their consistency (i.e CSI is always about solving crimes, never about a character's relationship with their mother).
So, the first step in making the Trek franchise relevant beyond a single summer blockbuster would be to determine who the core audience is, and what those people want to see from Star Trek, and then focus in tightly on that.
(And not all existing fans will be happy with the results. A program targeting the traditional younger male sci-fi audience might not be appealing to older females, for example.)
Yay me!
I don't really agree...I think a utopian (which ST stictly isn't) vision like Roddenberry's is just as valid as a dystopian one, in fact, many of the movies of the 80s and 90s predicted a rapid dystopia for the early 2000s, and if anything, Blade Runner is looking less and less likely. If you are to look at it from a story point of view, ST's milieu in the past has often been a springboard for allegories that use the utopia to make a commentary on society...now this part of ST might be somewhat out of date, but if that doesn't mean they aren't valid stories...DS9 took a different tack, but to me they all co-exist in a perfectly satisfactory storytelling universe. In terms of hardware and tech, a lot of the specualtions in STNG have had some breakthroughs in recent years: warp speed, transporters, lasers/phasers--almost to the point where some of the tech looks quaint by comparison: cell phones, lap tops, hand held and wi-fi tech.
RAMA
TOS is no more "obsolete" than "Gone With the Wind" for my mileage, even if the two are about as far apart as one can get in terms of content and purpose. Actually, a better comparison for TOS might be the "Our Gang" comedies of the 30s-40s, which in their own way were progressive for the era, yet now, to modern audiences, are somewhat difficult to comprehend without a little patience. Still, if you ignore what doesn't work, a lot of it still does.
Also, it might be comparable to the way comic books keep reinventing their origins to update every few years. Compare the details of Superman's classic origin tale to his modern one, for example. Or Golden Age Green Lantern to Silver Age Green Lantern.
But that's just TOS. For how I feel about the franchise as a whole, I'd say Jitty pretty much nailed it:
Especially the Orwellian double-talk stuff, and the way the Prime Directive was almost used as an excuse at times to justify inaction. Ever wonder why I have a Romulan-inspired screen name? I find the Federation a tad hard to relate to, nor, frankly, would I really want to live in it. (Nor would I want to live in an overly fascistic Romulan Empire, but I digress...)
For the most part, latter Trek was very cautious in adhering to the "formula," which if you ask me was what led to its undoing/reboot.
Also, it might be comparable to the way comic books keep reinventing their origins to update every few years. Compare the details of Superman's classic origin tale to his modern one, for example. Or Golden Age Green Lantern to Silver Age Green Lantern.
But that's just TOS. For how I feel about the franchise as a whole, I'd say Jitty pretty much nailed it:
Especially the Orwellian double-talk stuff, and the way the Prime Directive was almost used as an excuse at times to justify inaction. Ever wonder why I have a Romulan-inspired screen name? I find the Federation a tad hard to relate to, nor, frankly, would I really want to live in it. (Nor would I want to live in an overly fascistic Romulan Empire, but I digress...)
For the most part, latter Trek was very cautious in adhering to the "formula," which if you ask me was what led to its undoing/reboot.
This post is such a mess of confusion that it's hard to know where to start. The conclusion, I think, not least because none of the preceding material actually supports it.
First, the problem with trying to simply define Star Trek as fun pulp adventure is that this evades the problem of what is fun and adventurous. Actually playing around with science speculations is fun. Stupid made up science isn't. An adventure story that makes sense in its own fictional terms (even if it's nonsense compared to daily experience) is more exciting than an incoherent series of action scenes. Trying to define Star Trek as merely pulp adventure doesn't justify the remake (I'm guessing that's the real issue for some of the nonsense posts I've been reading.) It unfairly denigrates the pulp stories that had real imagination and competent plotting. And, the notion that watching the original Star Trek is mental slumming is irrelevant. You can defend the remake as mindless action all you want.
Second, the attack on Star Trek's social and political ideals falsely poses as a simple judgment about entertainment value. The notion that it was Spock's Brain or A Piece of the Action or Obsession or The Lights of Zetar that made people love the show strikes me as factually very, very doubtful. It may not show high esthetic judgment but people generally rate something "serious," more highly, because it's more relevant to their lives. Adventure tends to be about the hero winning, but most of daily life is about getting along instead. The spinoffs and/or the remake may have more congenial messages than Star Trek. That doesn't mean there are no messages. Fiction always says something: Absentmindedly assuming conventional wisdom is a message too.
Backing up, the notion that Star Trek is devalued because the creators wanted to make a hit series is irrelevant. I think this is the genetic fallacy?
Backing up more, the notion that Star Trek's social consciousness was pedestrian surreptitiously blends television with the movies and novels and popular music. Sure, compared to John Lennon lyrics or Allen Ginsburg's poetry or avantgarde film, Star Trek was indeed pedestrian. Since this has been true of almost all television for decades, this is also misleading. I repeat, when Star Trek was on air, Westerns were still one of the dominant television genres, despite the modern Civil Rights movement, which began in the Fifties! Even today, when the US has been fighting a war leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths for over a decade, you can watch your television screen for hours, seeing nothing in the drama. This is particularly true of broadcast series. Trying to devalue Star Trek's social consciousness by removing the context speaks more to a resentment of its particular consciousness than its real nature as a Sixties television series, I think.
Backing up again, the statements that Star Trek is adventure fiction, romantic and space opera are not even necessarily correct. They do not even necessarily overlap! A Piece of the Action is space opera? A Balance of Terror or Galileo Seven are adventure stories? Charlie X or A Squire of Gothos are romantic? I think these statements are meant to be dismissive, not descriptive.
The defense of pulp stories is quite beside the point. The poster who brought up Thirties and Forties pulp did so to dismiss the originality of Star Trek. The pejorative attitude is his, so please address him with your complaints. I will point out something I didn't trouble to before, something which I would have thought that obvious to a person knowledgeable about the pulps. Which is that Star Trek did not borrow just the notion of spaceships and aliens, but a lot more. Reducing Star Trek's concepts to a bare handful of ideas found in Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials is assuming the conclusion that Star Trek was just repeating old ideas. The implication that it was merely spaceships and aliens that made Star Trek successful is doubtful, to say the least.
And, as everyone knows, a lot of Star Trek was influenced by Forbidden Planet. But that's the Fifties! And Fredric Brown's Arena and Robert A. Heinlein's The Rolling Stones were the Fifties as well! (Gorns and tribbles, respectively, in case anyone didn't remember.) Tarzan, which was the example of pulps actually cited by one of the more deranged posts, of course, dates back to 1912! The whole point of limiting the concepts and backdating the sources, as near as I can make out, is to denigrate Star Trek. Also, real discussion of originality, as opposed to rhetorical ploys to dismiss Star Trek's claims, should mention The Outer Limits, shouldn't it?
I repeat, it's all very well and good to dislike Star Trek's outdated social consciousness, but that doesn't mean the series wasn't original for Sixties television, or that it wasn't distinctively idealistic for Sixties television. And the general notion that the remake's conspicuous lacks can somehow be justified by tearing down the original is nonsense.
I have used quotes from a primary source in my previous post to support my conclusion. Moreover, the above post was an addition to that post, reiterating what I said previously and adding to it.
You may find it a mess, but I stand by my statements and feel that I have properly made my point.
And since I am currently pressed for time, I'm going to make this quick and dirty.
Yet Star Trek is fun and adventurous, and is part of why some people, like me, gravitated to it. '
As to what I've marked in bold, Star Trek has always been filled with "stupid made up science," technobabble if you will. Star Trek is not Hard-SF. It's a space opera, an adventure story. Oh, and that's not a dirty description no matter how much you claim it is.
And here is the problem. You feel that I'm attacking the show. I'm merely making observations and presenting my informed opinion. After reading this, it's almost pointless to provide a counterpoint to any of your statements. For it will be seen as "an attack."
There is a "don't critique Star Trek" tone to your posts. No one is attacking anything. Certainly, I'm not.
That's putting words in my post that were never there. I never made any "factual" claim that those episodes are what made the show be loved by fans.
I never suggested that it was devalued nor was that my conclusion. That's the conclusion you infer, colored by this notion that I am attacking the series.
Trek is valued by us and those who created it. In this need to uplift the television series into some piece of high-brow art, it gets forgotten that Roddenberry and Solow and Justman and the rest wanted to create a series that was smart, fun, and appealed to a mass audience. That their intent was similar to those of J.J. Abrams and cohorts even if the film is perceived as "bad" by some.
I think we have a failure to communicate, or rather a failure of understanding. Therefore I'm reposting something I wrote on the thread in the TREK XI forum, What's the big lesson of Trek XI?
I'm not being dismissive. I'm being observant. Star Trek is embedded in the traditions of romantic, adventure fiction. It is space opera. The beauty, however, of the format is that it allows for a variety of stories to be told for BoT (a World War II riff), Galileo Seven (a Lifeboat drama), Charlie X (a teen angst), etc.
But, at the end of the day, Star Trek is space opera.
It was not besides the point. The point had already been pointed out and I was continuing the discussion, arguing my own perspective on the subject.
Moreover, I did not conclude that it was "just repeating old ideas." I stated:
The tone here is so defensive that it's pointless to further discuss anything with you. It will be seen as a "deranged post" or an "attack on Star Trek". It's obvious that you don't want to have your point of view challenged.
No one is tearing down the original. No one is disliking Star Trek's "outdated social consciousness." TOS is my favorite series. I've watched it since I was two years-old. My love for the series, however, doesn't mean that I can't critique the series and argue my observations in an open forum.
Your posts have a "holier than thou" tone. And if you think tone doesn't carry in prose, think again. I see that it's pointless to further try and discuss things with you, for you'll only take further offense.
Connotations can often influence one's perspective. I've never personally liked the term "space opera" because I make this emotional connection the the phrase "soap opera" which obviously isn't the same thing. There is good space opera and that is generally what TOS was. I suppose my own perceptions compel me to usually refer to Star Trek as space adventure because to me it sounds more positive even though I know you can have bad space adventure just as easily as bad space opera.
I think the essential idea of Star Trek--a group of travelers aboard a starship and finding adventure on strange worlds--is still a valid one today. For me I believe it comes down to the details and overall execution.
You can regurgitate a lot of things in film and television as long as you bring something fresh to the materiel. But every so often I think we need a significant step forward, much as TOS was in its day.
TOS' technical and scientific ideas weren't new in regard to SF literature, but they were still reasonably fresh to the broader television audience. And TOS' accomplishment was that it was all packaged in a cohesive whole that was rather easily accessible to that broader audience.
I'm beginning to feel, though, that Trek's depiction (and space adventure's in general) of its basic idea may need that significant step forward again. Today's there's little excuse for the decades long disparity between SF in literature and the visual mediums. I think we can do better and in the process contribute to making the subject matter more interesting and perhaps even more relevant again.
I think the essential idea of Star Trek--a group of travelers aboard a starship and finding adventure on strange worlds--is still a valid one today. For me I believe it comes down to the details and overall execution.
You can regurgitate a lot of things in film and television as long as you bring something fresh to the materiel. But every so often I think we need a significant step forward, much as TOS was in its day.
TOS' technical and scientific ideas weren't new in regard to SF literature, but they were still reasonably fresh to the broader television audience. And TOS' accomplishment was that it was all packaged in a cohesive whole that was rather easily accessible to that broader audience.
I'm beginning to feel, though, that Trek's depiction (and space adventure's in general) of its basic idea may need that significant step forward again. Today's there's little excuse for the decades long disparity between SF in literature and the visual mediums. I think we can do better and in the process contribute to making the subject matter more interesting and perhaps even more relevant again.
I think part of the problem (if it's a problem) is that Star Trek has moved from TV to movies. On TV, you have a greater freedom and a greater variety of possibilities.
Frankly, I think the exploration of a sci-fi idea (episodes like "Devil In The Dark", "City on the Edge", "For the World is...", "Naked Now" etc.) is never going to happen in the movies. It makes the success or failure of your movie hang on the audience's reaction to an entirely new, original concept (we hope that the idea's new and original, anyway). Not that Trek was always blindingly original, but last week's episode was rarely interesting for the same reason as next week's. The rejection of a formula was one of the appealing ideas of original Trek, and it's long since been replaced (on and off) with a formula (as early as TOS S3, arguably).
Each of the Trek series has started with far more concept-of-the-week episodes, and finished with far more "What about Worf's brother/Spock's heritage/the Bajorans/7's humanity" episodes.
I think for now, especially if Trek remains movie only, we are in for a long spell of Kirk vs. Villain rather than the classic "What if?" episodes. More James Bond than Solaris. It's a shame we can't have both, as we did originally.
^^ I think you have a good point. But I can argue that moving beyond formula is not an inherent flaw of Trek but fault of the creators and writers. A television series is preferable because it allows for more creative freedom. But that doesn't mean a film cannot be about something other than the most obvious elements of the subject matter.
Indeed I think Trek would be much better served if it could get out of its self-referential rut and be about something other than its most familiar elements. I think Star Trek worked better when it did this as best evidenced in episodes of TOS and TNG. When it was strictly about the characters it could get banal, but when it used the characters effectively to address something else then it was better.
Indeed I think Trek would be much better served if it could get out of its self-referential rut and be about something other than its most familiar elements. I think Star Trek worked better when it did this as best evidenced in episodes of TOS and TNG. When it was strictly about the characters it could get banal, but when it used the characters effectively to address something else then it was better.
Therefore, stupid, made up science in the remake is equally acceptable?Note the outright statement was that Star Trek was filled with stupid.
And how can they be trying to be smart when they fill the show up with stupid, made up science? Because in this context it's being compared with the remake?
I can see taking one position but not both. Which is it? I insist such a flagrant contradiction shows these posts are indeed hopelessly confused.
I'm afraid I've understood very well the insinuation: The original Star Trek was stupid, backward looking pulp, therefore the remake can be stupid, backward looking pulp. Someone has misunderstood my objections that calling the original Star Trek stupid and backward looking pulp is misleading at best, and that the remake can be defended as stupid, backward looking pulp without talking about the orginal Star Trek.
This concedes that The Outer Limits should have been brought up if the real purpose was to discuss Star Trek's originality?
Seriously, I think your defensiveness over the remake has seriously impaired your judgment. Do you really think that, when discussing Star Trek's science fiction, and social consciousness, and origin in the pulps, that Tarzan is in any shape, form or fashion relevant? Except, just as I said, as a way of making pulps in general look really stupid It's not even like you personally said that. You have been indignantly beating the drum for the postion that Star Trek is just stupid, backward looking pulp while claiming at the same time you don't think so. I repeat, your posts here are terribly confused. If you have your own positions, you should defend them, not someone else's. And, being so knowledgeable, shouldn't it have fallen to you to point out that backdating Star Trek's pulp origins to the Thirties and Forties was misleading? At least, if you were just saying
Tone seems to be like beauty, depending on the observer. Bluntly, if you think my tone has come remotely close to the snottiness and nastiness of "Peter Pan is forever a boy," you're tone deaf. Perhaps you're unintentionally dismissive? For what it's worth, your posts haven't offended me personally one bit. The open hostility in the Peter Pan remark is offensive in a general way. But those posts make boys looks good.
As for the claim that you're not attacking Star Trek's social consciousness, I read this.
Since I already said explicitly that there are always messages, plainly I don't believe they get in the way of the storytelling. That is code in my experience for thinking that dissident messages are unacceptable, but the conventional wisdom carried like so much baggage by simple "storytelling" is.
As for themes and ideas evolving "organically" from the characters, there is nothing organic about made up worlds. That's why a lot of science fiction and fantasy are nothing but daydreams, which either suit the personal taste or not, but about which there is nothing to be said.
Lastly, the strange misuse of "ambiguous" is a dead giveaway. Ambiguity avoids giving an answer to hard questions. In fact, hard questions you don't answer are not hard at all. What you mean is the common desire to see characters acting in ways that once were regarded as blatantly immoral. Which attitude I think completely confirms I correctly read your posts.
I was going to prepare a long rebuttal, going through and taking each instant where you put more into my previous posts than is there, where you assume more than what I wrote, but that would take time I don't really have or want to spend. So I'll keep it short and sweet.
The insinuation that you seem hell bent on attributing to me is based on your own negative connotations of space opera (or space adventure) and the pulps. I've demonstrated by my posts that, for me, calling Star Trek a pulp, space opera is not insulting. I hold the subgenre and medium in high regards as I stated here:
You continually try to put words in my mouth. Not once did I say, and I'm quoting you here when I use the quotations, "Star Trek is stupid, backward looking pulp." Not once did I state that nor was that my inference.
Once again, you are imposing your own worldview onto my own -- i.e. I (stj) don't care for pulps or space opera, but do care for Star Trek and if someone compares the two as being similar in someway then they are insulting it.
Moreover, your posts are continually defensive and dismissive. Yet you transfer those traits upon those you disagree with.
Your syntax and diction are continually insulting and aggressive:
"hopelessly confused"
"deranged posts"
"attacks on Star Trek"
"you're tone deaf"
Your tone is snottiness and nastiness.
Also, you continually confuse me for Dennis, who is more than capable of defending himself. He does not need me to defend him, as you say I'm doing. I was arguing my own position not his.
You attribute his comment "Peter Pan is just a boy" to me; a statement taken out of context, imao.
I'd go into your whole take on storytelling vs. messages vs. theme vs. characters and debate them with my own. However, you're no longer "worth the powder," as I know you'll only take it as further opportunity to twist and slant my words to suit your own position.
Usage of the term "pulps" instead of literary or written science fiction is usually meant to be disparaging.
Star Trek's concepts were tacitly reduced to very little more than space travel and aliens. The ways in which those or other science fiction concepts of Star Trek were updated were ignored. The claim was that Star Trek was as notorious for silliness and juvenile writing as the "pulps." as the only pulp writing referred to were (by one) Tarzan (which is nuts even in terms of the claims made, since Tarzan dates back to 1912!) and Captain Future. (The Captain Future reference was supported solely by an appeal to the supposed authority of George Clayton Johnson.)
Also, the simple notions of space travel and aliens didn't come from pulps of the Thirties and Forties, but date back to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Falsely attributing them to the Thirties and Forties was meant to put their origins in the disrespected pulps than acknowledged classics like Wells and Verne.
Further, Star Trek borrowed from science fiction of the Fifties. This was ignored because the purpose was to falsely characterize the original Star Trek as backward looking and unoriginal. Noting the more recent contributions would have been inconvenient to the thesis offered.
The claim that Star Trek's concepts had all been on television depends solely upon arbitrarily limiting them to such basics as space travel and aliens. This is not true. Star Trek's originiality in updating older concepts and in bringing more recent literary science fictions ideas and stories to television was ignored, not even to suggest that The Outer Limits or Dr. Who did that first.
Star Trek was better because it updated old concepts and imported new ideas and stories from written science fiction. Any new Star Trek should do the same. Any sensitivity on the retro remake is somebody else's problem.
The quote was not attributed at all. It wasn't even quoted in response to this person. Not only was it not out of context, when it was quoted, the context made it clear that it wasn't addressed to this poor soul who's completely lost it.
Star Trek's concepts were tacitly reduced to very little more than space travel and aliens. The ways in which those or other science fiction concepts of Star Trek were updated were ignored. The claim was that Star Trek was as notorious for silliness and juvenile writing as the "pulps." as the only pulp writing referred to were (by one) Tarzan (which is nuts even in terms of the claims made, since Tarzan dates back to 1912!) and Captain Future. (The Captain Future reference was supported solely by an appeal to the supposed authority of George Clayton Johnson.)
Also, the simple notions of space travel and aliens didn't come from pulps of the Thirties and Forties, but date back to H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Falsely attributing them to the Thirties and Forties was meant to put their origins in the disrespected pulps than acknowledged classics like Wells and Verne.
Further, Star Trek borrowed from science fiction of the Fifties. This was ignored because the purpose was to falsely characterize the original Star Trek as backward looking and unoriginal. Noting the more recent contributions would have been inconvenient to the thesis offered.
The claim that Star Trek's concepts had all been on television depends solely upon arbitrarily limiting them to such basics as space travel and aliens. This is not true. Star Trek's originiality in updating older concepts and in bringing more recent literary science fictions ideas and stories to television was ignored, not even to suggest that The Outer Limits or Dr. Who did that first.
Star Trek was better because it updated old concepts and imported new ideas and stories from written science fiction. Any new Star Trek should do the same. Any sensitivity on the retro remake is somebody else's problem.
The quote was not attributed at all. It wasn't even quoted in response to this person. Not only was it not out of context, when it was quoted, the context made it clear that it wasn't addressed to this poor soul who's completely lost it.
And there's the core of the problem. Originality does not consist of destroying Vulcan early in Spock's life because "OMG! That's so different from established canon!", which as you say is self-referential. Originality would have been rethinking Starfleet as the setting of the fictional universe so that the structure of the rebooted universe allowed for the franchise to expand in new ways. For the last 15 years Trek has been about boldly going exactly where we've gone before and XI was more of that sameness, no matter how cute the jokes or how quickly cut the battle scenes were.
There also seems to be a raging argument, not just here but in general around XI - should Trek be defined by its best episodes or by its worst? There is no question that a great deal of Star Trek is bad. It was quite regularly stupid and campy. But I object to the usual word also attached to that idea, which is fun. I never found "That Which Survives" fun, nor "Spock's Brain", nor "Menage A Trois", and I seriously doubt anyone else did either. If there were great episodes which were purely adventure, I'd like someone to name some. You can go to "Arena" and say a guy in a rubber lizard man outfit is stupid - but that's a production value issue, not a storytelling one. The story is actually pretty good and it does have a message, which is overtly show mercy to one's enemies. (A concept that was turned into a cheap joke in XI - the moment when I thought, "oh well, I guess I never expected it to be good") and the episode goes further to "preach" acceptance of difference. "The Devil in the Dark" is fun. Is it particularly smart? Probably not, but it's tense, and then touching when you discover something alien is a mother defending her children. Not radical concepts for SF - just basic ones, told well in ways that explore interesting characters.
What seems strange to me these days is that someone apparently thinks that's too much for a mass audience. Or that these basic ideas are no longer interesting. Or maybe in our crowded little world we've forgotten how to even imagine the unknown. Maybe Trek is just too much a modernist construction that needs a monolithic morality in order to tell stories and it just can't adapt to a post-modernist relativism that would allow for diversity in its storytelling. Which again seems bizarre - it managed that for the first two years of TOS, and that was 40 years ago. Why is it so hard now? Have audiences regressed? Or is it the issue of broad appeal versus niche appeal?
In my mind, the difficulty is from moving from a format where 26 one-hour shows needed to be filled every year, into a format where your multi-million dollar investment needs to be demonstrably a good investment. In addition, 1960's TV was much more an auteur milieu than today's movies - that is to say, many Trek episodes got made because *one* person thought they were a good idea. How many people do you think signed off on each element of Trek 11?
I think there's also an unwillingness to move off the central characters with the movies. With the TV show, you can swing the spotlight around, and feature the characters this week, and feature the Horta or the Gorn next week. With the movies, there is - for some reason - more drive to show the characters in conflict, to give them that "arc" that everyone goes on about.
(Hugh Laurie once said that TV and movies are opposites, because in a movie, you want your main characters to change, and in TV, you want them to stay the same from week to week. I think the sci-fi episodes of Trek generally subscribe to Laurie's theory that the character's journey is not the focus in a TV episode - which makes them unsuitable in many people's eyes.)
Last, I think a good one-off idea is *hard* to come up with, and certainly doesn't happen on a time table. If I were a scriptwriter with four months to draft Trek 12, I would roll up my sleeves and ask "Which character has an evil brother? Daddy issues?" because I wouldn't trust myself to devise an interesting, original concept that would hold up a two-hour movie.
So, in short, I think the move to movies has brought a lot of change and predictability to the franchise.
Full disclosure: I enjoyed the recent movie, but I can see what disappointed fans are missing. I imagine they've been missing it since TWOK.
That's true of the Star Trek episodes that really engaged me. I didn't identify with Kirk, Spock or McCoy. If anything, I identified with O'Reilly. Some of the most gripping episodes centered on guest characters, like Mark Lenard or Barbara Anderson or Jeffrey Hunter. Or they were about something abstract but relevant, as A Taste of Armageddon was about MacNamaraesque "rationality."
But for a series, where the characters keep coming into your living room, some sort of investment has to be made. Once made, that investment into one or more characters commits the viewer to the series despite the weaker episodes. That is exactly why television usually broadcasts series, instead of anthology programs. Memory tells us that the successful episodes of anthologies have more impact than the successful episodes of a series. For a successful series, memory dwells more on the characters than the stories.
I think the problem is character development, the stories about the people. If they're stories at all: Many shows now are little more than a series of sensational scenes with loosely organized interstitial material setting up the Big Moments. The notion of character development as seeing what the character decides, what he or she does, as opposed to seeing them emote, or verbalize emotions in confrontations, seems to be decidedly out of fashion.
Again I agree. Deciding that there won't be computer directed traffic is one thing. But putting a cop (on the empty roads of Iowa?) on a flying motorcycle, when an ordinary one will do just fine, screams irrelevant to some of us. But to others a confrontation between a kid and cop is interesting.
I happen to agree. But in my opinion that discussion is always confused by claims that this or that isn't fun being really objections to Star Trek's social consciousness. (Which is kind of scary since Star Trek was only progressive by comparison!) And, conversely, what is considered fun is a function of social consciousness. For example, executing enemies is considered just punishment, therefore seeing Kirk torpedo Nemo is fun, in a way that seeing him "kill" Nemo by releasing the red matter isn't.
The Star Trek remake, whether the real one or the one this thread is dreaming about, is not immune to the influence of the contemporary situation. The audiences haven't really changed so much, except perhaps in their sexual mores, which explains why the remake Spock has to be getting some. But it's not just a matter of pandering to the general audience. Otherwise, all the producers would be making easy money by making porno. Some parts of the audience count for more, just as they do in every other part of life. The elite in this country is much further to the right than it has been for decades, and it is much narrower in the range of acceptable opinion. These people are deeply committed to the proposition that the way things are is human nature and will never change. This may be nonsense, but it is profitable nonsense and their money and influence will go to buy more of it. This attitude is death to science fiction.
The problem is that obsolete is dependant on what makes the object good to begin with. And at least at the original concept, it's still perfectly good. The structure is sound -- you can do plenty with a ship in space concept, especially if you aren't trying to tell traditional stories.
For example:
Ship in space goes through a portal to another universe in which the laws of physics don't work the same way
Ship in space meets cannibals
Ship in space damaged by asteroids
Disease
Crew boardom
...
I think you get the idea. As long as the basic idea is simple enough, you could probably do just about any story you wanted. The only thing really holding back the Trek is the imagination of the writers. Not to get to "Zen" but they've got all of these ideas about what Trek has to have, yet it's really a case of overcomplication and added formulae. You don't NEED the alien/robot/borg trying to understand humanity. You don't need holodecks, you don't need funny-nosed aliens. Go back to the root -- a ship in space, exploring with no help near at hand. Then, go nuts.
I think I've posted it before, but if you're interested, Bruce Lee's essay about Classical Karate pretty much sums up my thoughts on Trek. http://tkdtutor.com/00QuickAccess/Counterpoint/LiberateYourself/Liberate01.htm
The more Dogma you add on top, the worse it gets.
For example:
Ship in space goes through a portal to another universe in which the laws of physics don't work the same way
Ship in space meets cannibals
Ship in space damaged by asteroids
Disease
Crew boardom
...
I think you get the idea. As long as the basic idea is simple enough, you could probably do just about any story you wanted. The only thing really holding back the Trek is the imagination of the writers. Not to get to "Zen" but they've got all of these ideas about what Trek has to have, yet it's really a case of overcomplication and added formulae. You don't NEED the alien/robot/borg trying to understand humanity. You don't need holodecks, you don't need funny-nosed aliens. Go back to the root -- a ship in space, exploring with no help near at hand. Then, go nuts.
I think I've posted it before, but if you're interested, Bruce Lee's essay about Classical Karate pretty much sums up my thoughts on Trek. http://tkdtutor.com/00QuickAccess/Counterpoint/LiberateYourself/Liberate01.htm
The more Dogma you add on top, the worse it gets.
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I think you've supported and fleshed out my essential point well. Thanks.
Far too often I feel many people can only seem to see the surface trappings without being able to look deeper and grasp the meaning of what they're seeing. Yes, a guy in a lizard rubber suit is a production limitation and not a deliberate attempt at camp. Starfleet and Vulcan are elements that "dress up" or detail a fictional universe and are not major components that need to be fawned over. The characters are most interesting (and are made interesting) when they're given something interesting to do.
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