How desperate are you for a new Trek TV series?
- Thread starter Jedi_Master
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It still hurts...
I'm so sorry. Good dog!
Oh - I didn't go see Man of Steel because of the smashing noises and violence it seemed to contain, but knowing you wrote the novel makes me want to read it. I'll try and check it out.
My work here is done.
Speaking of smashing, I believe my Godzilla novelization goes to press this week. And, to stay OT, I believe that Godzilla's continuity has been rebooted six or seven times by now, not counting the cartoons and comic books, but nobody insists that it isn't really Godzilla unless his continuity stays intact!
Clark Terrell
Lieutenant Commander
It's CGI-zilla.
Godzilla should always be a guy in a rubber suit, stepping on little plastic tank models and knocking over cardboard buildings. That's what made that old batch of Japanese monster movies so much fun in the first place.
And you don't think that they would have used CGI back then if they could have?
Suits don't get charm. "Let's just make it bigger and louder and more realistic [sic] and kewler!!"
Cannot compare to watching it on WXON on a Saturday afternoon with your buds on a black and white TV in the basement. Then going outside and stomping on hot wheels.
Don't tell anyone I said this, but as kewl as JJ-Trek aims for, I think it has some charm, actually.
Cannot compare to watching it on WXON on a Saturday afternoon with your buds on a black and white TV in the basement. Then going outside and stomping on hot wheels.
Don't tell anyone I said this, but as kewl as JJ-Trek aims for, I think it has some charm, actually.
nobody insists that it isn't really Godzilla unless his continuity stays intact!
Speak for yourself. Any Godzilla that doesn't take into account the growth of the character in his battle with SuperMechaGodzilla is dead to me.
(I mean, but really, of course continuity isn't important to franchises that never really built much continuity to begin with. That's not surprising.)
Clark Terrell
Lieutenant Commander
*ding* *ding* *ding* *ding*!!! Thank you!
But there's no harm in establishing a new continuity for Star Trek, provided that it's done in way that's faithful to the concepts and ideas that made the genre successful in the first place. Look at the Myriad Universes series. People loved those books even though they deviated from canon.
A series based on the same concept-- this is how things would've turned out if...-- could work as long as it still has the feel of Star Trek. It might be jarring for fans (at first) to see an Enterprise commanded by Will Decker rather than James Kirk or first contact with the Cardassians presided over by the crew of the USS Reliant after a successful trip to Ceti Alpha VI. But the ideas could work if they were written well enough. There would, of course, be a stable of fans who rejected the idea and refused to watch, but that shouldn't spoil things for everyone else.
Which sounds like TOS to a tee. The over-reliance (importance) of continuity is something that came around in the late-80's/early-90's.
For as much as TOS tried to be strictly episodic, it generated plenty of continuity despite itself. Its picture of how Starfleet worked and what rules it operated under, the broad strokes of backstory it establishes for its characters (in particular Kirk and Spock), the setting and the eventual ad hoc creation of the Federation: those things are all continuity. For that matter, we even got a recurring villain in Harry Mudd.
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I didn't really do that. I think every series has had its continuity issues, just some more than others. And the longer the universe continuity went, the more it started to fray. It doesn't help that Enterprise was a prequel and likely more prone to the problem, but the longer they went with that continuity, things would just sort of fall apart. Broad strokes for too long just doesn't work out.
As for the subject elsewhere that no property is sacred, I don't agree. I mean, there's a possibility that somewhere down the road Star Wars, Back to the Future, Stargate, Indiana Jones, etc will be rebooted. But right now it seems like they won't be having a clean slate that soon. And what's wrong with that? While I don't mind a reboot necessarily, I think it's nice that certain properties can stay true to their continuity or just end when it's appropriate and not go on, especially because of the seeming desire to cash in on the familiar parts of the franchise in such reboots.
Okay, thanks for clearing that up. You made it sound at first like a much more extensive tossing out of everything and starting from scratch, with just a few borrowed terms plus the name Star Trek.
What? It's still Star Trek. By this logic, why call the New Doctor Who, Doctor Who? What I was describing is no different than the Time War, or setting TNG nearly a century after TOS. It would be the backdrop to establish a new world and to get the show off on the right foot for new and old audiences. Without having to do a hard reboot or to go into an alternate reality. It would creatively free the writers to do whatever they want, as they would have a hundred years between them and previous continuity, they could reinvent anything in anyway they saw fit. You want to turn the Klingons into a race of mystics who have turned away from their violent warrior culture? Go ahead, you have a hundred years to establish why that could have happened, and give the show an entirely new future-history.
All the key races are there. Time and devastation have changed them dramatically enough that a sense of surprise and mystery is in the air when our heroes go out to meet them again. The old can still be referenced, but the audience does not need to be in the know about 50+ years of Trek canon to understand things.
Reclusive in the sense that Starfleet, the defensive and exploratory arm of the Federation, does not venture much further beyond patrolling the Federation borders and policing Federation planets. That the cataclysmic events (whatever they were) may have even been the fault of Starfleet itself, and as a result the modus operandi was changed from deep space penetration and exploration to defending our own borders.
Strictly speaking, Kirk didn't so much travel 80 years forward, as he was suspended in time for 80 years - like Scotty spent 75 years in the transporter buffer.
Oh, I'm waiting... it's ridiculous that I can get a book from the UK in less than a week, but it takes a month or more to get one from the U.S.Wait until you see the next one . . .
But it wasn't faithful to the concepts of the original series. Original Uhura was a professional. She didn't bring personal problems on-duty with her, and she never shushed Kirk so she could bitch and whine at her boyfriend - a fellow officer - on duty.
TOS Uhura was a respected, respectful officer. NuUhura is a whiny shrew.
For me it's not enough to have the hardware and setting. You have to get the characterization right. The Abrams movies didn't do that.
As for the Myriad Universes books, that's not the same thing as putting something on TV or in a theatre and saying, "THIS is what is true and correct - we've retconned what came before, so that's no longer valid."
The books are not saying that the stories in them are what is now the true reality. It's not a retcon for the entire body of Star Trek - it's only for that one novel, story, or series of stories. That's why I can enjoy many different kinds and styles of Star Trek fiction - whether professionally written and published, or fanfic.
If the characters were written and acted properly, I'd give it a chance.
But even if you believe the characterizations are wrong, the movies come with a built-in explanation - that they led slightly (or less slightly, in some cases) different lives as a result of temporal tampering. Like the mirror universe, or Tom Riker, or Picard and Shinzon, it's the same people under different circumstances.
^ Though the estimable K-DIDdy is technically correct, the other question that will tend to follow from changing, ignoring, rebooting or re-jigging continuity is: is it an improvement? Or if it's doing something entirely new, does the new thing it's doing make sense?
So, the NuTrek characters* are deliberately non-professional: presumably not because Abrams can't direct military professional characters (he can), but because it was felt they'd be relatable to the modern audience this way. But being represented as part of a Navy-esque Starfleet -- even a cartoony version thereof -- that comes at the expense of believability as professionals in their setting. So, it comes down to a question of whether that trade-off works for you.
[* Well, the core trio of Kirk, Spock and Uhura, anyway.]
So, the NuTrek characters* are deliberately non-professional: presumably not because Abrams can't direct military professional characters (he can), but because it was felt they'd be relatable to the modern audience this way. But being represented as part of a Navy-esque Starfleet -- even a cartoony version thereof -- that comes at the expense of believability as professionals in their setting. So, it comes down to a question of whether that trade-off works for you.
[* Well, the core trio of Kirk, Spock and Uhura, anyway.]
This is probably a contributing factor to why I didn't like ST09 that much (among other reasons). The only person on the Enterprise who seemed to know what he was doing without turning into a basket case was Pike. I've still not seen Into Darkness.
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