Yes.TOS is my gold standard. It is star trek. Its what every show after is based on. Its the foundation. So of course it is. Lol. Not every episode was a hit but so many were excellent and Kurtzman Trek has not hit that excellence.
Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
Yes.TOS is my gold standard. It is star trek. Its what every show after is based on. Its the foundation. So of course it is. Lol. Not every episode was a hit but so many were excellent and Kurtzman Trek has not hit that excellence.
"And what will you have, sir?"
"No eggs...I don't want bacon or sausage on the side."
"Okay, will you have hash browns or home fries?"
"Nope."
"Wheat toast or white?"
"Neither. And I don't like juice or coffee."
Not impressed.
If that works for you that's fine but I see TOS as Star Trek in its most unrefined form, lacking key context and development for pretty much all of its characters (apart from Spock, Mr Nimoy was the runaway star) and too much of it has to be ignored whether due to a lack of care and attention or just because of outdated ideals shining through. I don't believe in ignoring as much of it as Roddenberry did.
I just don't see TOS as strong enough to be considered the standard to judge everything else by, it was exceeded before I was even born.
It also doesn't really work comparing Star Trek shows to each other considering they all do something slightly different. The only one you can realistically compare to TOS is TNG and there's no competition there since TNG vastly outclasses TOS.
That's actually usually the case for musical episodes. They have a reputation as fluff, but in fact they're often key events in the story and character arcs and the resolution of major conflicts. People tend to give Buffy's musical episode credit for starting the trend, but Xena: Warrior Princess's "The Bitter Suite" beat it to the punch by three years, and that was a crucial story arc episode, the climax of an intense conflict between the lead characters.
Those aren't conflicting goals. It's a myth that imagination is about pulling things out of thin air. It's really about taking things you know and seeing new ways to put them together and draw out their potential -- like how a chef creates new recipes based on an understanding of how existing ingredients taste, how to prepare them, and what their possibilities are. Applying imagination to an understanding of a setting's rules can produce more creative results than applying imagination without that understanding, because you have more raw material to work with, and conversely because working within constraints can inspire creative ideas to work around or within them. As a science fiction writer, I've always gotten my best ideas from understanding the rules, whether the real laws of physics or the continuity of a fictional universe like Star Trek, and exploring the possibilities they suggest.
Yes. It should really depend on the approach and intent of the universe. Gene Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be more grounded and plausible than other SFTV, scientifically literate and believable except where dramatic license or budgetary and logistical limitations required going a more fanciful route (e.g. with humanoid aliens, Earth-parallel planets, or magic instant translators). Other creators have frequently fallen short of that, and Roddenberry himself certainly did more often than he probably realized, but it was the original intent, and it was part of what set Star Trek apart from the rest of SFTV from the '60s through the '90s (since, while it often fell short on the plausibility front, it was virtually the only show that even tried to have any trace of scientific literacy or credibility at all). These days, we have other shows that do plausible science fiction pretty well (e.g. The Expanse and For All Mankind), so it bugs me that ST no longer stands out from the pack in that regard.
"Subspace Rhapsody" was a pretty good episode, but the handwave for why the characters were singing was utterly nonsensical, and I wish they'd come up with something better.
Interestingly going for grounded and plausible wound up generating a lot of criticism for Starfield. I'm pretty certain if it were more fantastical it would have generated criticisms too and probably from the same people since we live in the age of social media where people must complain about everything for contradictory reasons.
I had to look that up -- I'm not into computer games. But yeah, most mass-media sci-fi is so utterly fanciful that if you show plausible science, a lot of people will assume it's wrong. And not just sci-fi -- there's a lot of nonsense in mainstream fiction too, like people getting blown backward by bullet hits, cars inevitably exploding when they crash, or pretty much any depiction of a defibrillator.
And we shall co-exist in our harmonious dissonance
Except it can't be the gold standard because Star Trek has some ridiculous plots that and literal magic by humans. TOS only gets involved as a gold standard with the high tier episodes. The standard conveniently ignores the ridiculous.
They won't be. It's chasing a nostalgia feeling not something tangible and no Trek will fulfill it.
Surely this is a strength, not a weakness; the fantasy elements are part of what make it work so well.
Kirk's world of fallen empires, ancient gods, magic, psionics, and planets of adventure is generally more interesting than, say, Sisko's world of standing in grey briefing rooms pointing at strategic maps. To me, anyway.
Hang on Sisko's entire life was orchestrated by weird gods wiith magic powers and supernatural artefacts. His world was all that.
Picard, Burnham and even Archer faced a fair bit of that.
Janeway probably faced the least fantastical stuff and she still had Q shenans to deal with.
Both are aspects of Star Trek as Kirk pointed at maps too. Everyone has their preferences but something isn't more or less Star Trek especially looking at TOS and TAS and their use of space magic and strange aliens.
Yeah, but Kirk got chased through a haunted castle by a giant cat who turned out to be a tiny woman made of pipe cleaners.
SNW has been all but ruined by its depiction of Spock, and the premature introductions of the Gorn, Trelane, the Metrons, et. al. It began with great potential but has been hit-and-miss for the most part, with a precipitous decline in season three.
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I might be misreading your post, but you seemed to be pointing to TOS' use of magic and fantastical elements as a weakness, rather than a deliberate aspect of the setting and a source of its appeal. It felt like someone saying "Lord of the Rings was pretty good, it's just a shame it had that silliness with the magic ring".
I am not saying it is a weakness at all.
I'm pointing to it as an indication that Star Trek has always done fantastical things and a musical or puppets is hardly offensive to Trek's sensibilities.
Star Trek: Spock’s New Women
Star Trek is not and has never been fantasy. It often plays fast and loose with credibility, but it postulates a secular, humanistic universe where everything has a rational, scientific explanation grounded in physical law, even if it's fictitious physics. It has no gods or magic, only advanced aliens who impersonate gods or possess technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic. Even the Prophets are alien intelligences that the Bajorans worship as deities but that the Federation understands on a secular level. Depicting religious belief is not the same as saying it's objectively true.
Fallen empires are hardly fantasy; it is a basic fact that the galaxy is immensely more ancient than the human species, so it follows from that scientific fact that a galaxy where aliens exist would include many, many ancient and fallen civilizations. As for psionics, that was believed at the time TOS was made to have possible scientific merit, or at worst was fictional science for the sake of the story, like warp drive or universal translators. It was certainly never postulated to have any supernatural or "magic" element to it.
Yes, a lot about ST is fanciful, but it's hard science fiction compared to its contemporaries or successors like Lost in Space or Space: 1999 or Battlestar Galactica. Gene Roddenberry consulted with scientists and engineers to make ST as plausible as he could within the limits of dramatic license and budgetary necessity, probably the first time a TV show had employed scientific consultants since Tom Corbett, Space Cadet in the early 1950s, and the last time until TNG itself came along and did even better on the science front than TOS had. The last thing Roddenberry wanted ST to be was fantasy, since every other sci-fi show of the day was fanciful nonsense and he wanted ST to stand out from the pack, to be a grounded and believable adult drama. Although admittedly his own ability to recognize the difference between plausible and implausible ideas was not as great as he evidently believed.
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