There are other good Christmas movies. The Muppet Christmas Carol Krampus National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation Bad Santa Home Alone
I've heard it said that 2001 is a Christmas movie... Oh, the weather outside is frightful And the Monolith is so delightful Discovery has no place to go Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow HAL doesn't show signs of stopping And he's brought Frank Poole for popping The AE-35 is turned way down low Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow
I'll be hopelessly uncool and cop to still getting choked up at "It's a Wonderful Life" and some version of "A Christmas Carol" every year. And even got teary-eyed at a stage production of "A Christmas Story" a few years back. And the classic movie version of "A Christmas Story" (which I got sucked into again last night) remains Darren McGavin's second-greatest performance. (After Kolchak, of course.) ADDED LATER: Not a movie, but Marvel's new HAWKEYE tv show could end up as another staple of the season.
Darn.... I did leave out A Christmas Story. I remember TBS doing a 24-hour A Christmas Story marathon.
As a whole, Coda was interesting, but it did seem to be unnecessary. Not because the Litverse would continue, but because the Star Trek universe really didn't need to be "reset". I appreciate the effort by the writers, and see their love for the world they and so many others molded, but, using the imagery of the sandcastle from the end, the wave comes no matter what... why kick and stomp the castle before the tide arrives?
The tide already arrived, when Picard premiered. At that point, the 24th-century Litverse was over. This was just an opportunity to give it some degree of closure on the way out rather than just leaving it dangling.
I know it's splitting hairs on a metaphor, but the tide had not come in. The fact they could knock over the castle means it still stood. The tide is inevitable, but how you deal with it is a choice. The writers had the opportunity to tend the castle in its final moments. They leveled it. Another approach could have been to shore it up, make it as perfect as they could before the tide. I don't know if circumstances allowed for that. This is not to condemn. I was an observer, who had stepped away from the beach and wandered back, having heard about one last go at the castle. I accept it is not my choice. Having watched the sculptors tear it down, I wonder if I would have made a different choice.
Of course you would. So would I. So would anyone. That's the whole reason they call it choice -- because it's individual. Other people will always make choices we wouldn't have, and that's the entire point of choice. The value of art is that every artist makes different choices. No other authors would've told this story the same way. And Dayton, Jim, and Dave have explained why the choice they made felt right to them.
As a nation, we have made choices that have made large segments of the population dependent on automobiles, we have made choices that have wasted valuable hydrocarbons by burning them as fuel, choices that have fouled our air and our climate, and we made a choice that put a doofus who was "born with a silver spoon in his mouth" into the White House for thankfully only four years, a doofus who, in his final year in office, made choices that exacerbated the effects of a rotten, stinking virus we've all come to know and loathe. But we are also beginning to make choices that are starting to undo the damage. Star Trek novelists made a collective series of choices that produced a lot of really good books, but unwittingly, they also made choices that amounted to building a castle on a sand dune, putting even the best of those books in the unenviable position that even the works of Marshak & Culbreath are less vulnerable to being contradicted by new canon. The Lucasfilm people chose to treat SW novels as quasi-canonical. Until (after Disney bought Lucasfilm, and started making new movies) they chose not to, and chose to abruptly deprecate everything that wasn't on film. Three ST novelists saw what happened in SW, didn't like it, and made a choice to end the now-untenable "First Splinter" continuity in a spectacular way instead. For some reason, I find myself thinking of The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis.
I agree with the idea that though the Litverse had to end, actually going ahead and having it destroyed in narrative, and not just destroyed but having its existence prevented was taking things way too far, and as I've commented before, I really don't see how wholesale slaughter and destruction is a more comforting alternative to simple abandonment like what Star Wars did with its Legends continuity. Though as I've thought the matter over, I suspect this option was taken partially because Star Trek is a fandom which really doesn't seem to get subtlety at times, therefore the best option is to kill everyone and destroy and negate the timeline in order to really ram it into their heads that the Litverse is over. After all, just take a look at how many people believed after Disco's second season ended that their journey to the 32nd century would only be temporary. Even now, despite the fact the ship has been refitted with future tech, the crew settled in the future and the fact that they've been erased from the official record in the 23rd century, and that time travel is illegal in the future, there's still a lot of people who believe it's inevitable they will return to the 23rd century before the series is over. That combined with how many people believe the novels should be free to do as they wish despite what's on the shows because of the Enterprise novels ignoring TATV and I begin to see the logic in making the decision that was made. It sends a firm and definitive message, this continuity is over and we will not be revisiting it ever.
Nobody ever said the point was to be comforting. The point was to give things a resolution, and many endings are sad or painful. They didn't ignore TATV. They just took advantage of the fact that TATV only showed us a holosimulation, which left wiggle room to say the reality happened differently.
Regardless, it seems to me Star Wars Legends fans got the better end of the deal. Sure, there's no resolution, but should they desire they can still pretend those versions of the characters are still having their adventures on some other plain of existence. The Star Trek Litverse's resolution is basically "they're all dead and their universe is destroyed." I of course know that. The point I was making was that many fans don't given how often you can see posts here from people saying things like "can't the novels just ignore that like they did TATV?" in reference to things in the new shows they don't like. Which relates to my larger point about how Trek fans don't seem to get subtlety.
No matter what approach they took, it wouldn't have satisfied everyone. They made the choice that felt right to them, and they've explained why. And you could always keep in mind what I said before, that my DTI series establishes the novel timeline continuing through at least the 3050s. My understanding is that the First Splinter is called that because a bunch of other Splinters split off from it later, and that the Devidians were going through them in reverse order, with some Splinters being cut off centuries in the future relative to the First (like Ducane's 29th century in the first book). Presumably the future seen in DTI: The Collectors is one of those longer-lived Splinters. Which means that, from an objective chronological standpoint, those timelines did continue to exist centuries beyond 2387, and their versions of the characters would indeed have lived out their full lives, even if the Splinters were eventually ended some centuries later. So you can still believe that happened.
You can't please everybody. As you can plainly see from any of the "worst episode" or "favorite episode" threads.
I think my biggest gripe is the fact that Star Trek aaa series always tried to emphasize peaceful resolutions to issues. Yes, there were plenty of times for violence, but the best results were due to dialogue. The Borg were literally ended by compassion and hope. The Lit-verse ended in a screaming firefight with hero’s and villains being disintegrated and maimed left and right. You had a mentally 6 year old given a rifle and being forced into that firefight for some reason, which seemed like an odd choice to me. I know, it’s the writers choice how things went, and I credit it them for doing it. But goddamn, when did optimism and potential turn into cynicism and despair?