Re: David A. Goodman, I have a question about kill
Just weighing in with a few thoughts here:
1. Any writer who's going to succeed needs to develop some emotional armor. If Goodman is avoiding this place because of some online whackiness, it does not bode well for some actual drama in Enterprise. If a fellow can't handle some conflict in r/l, how's he gonna write about it? That's all I got to say about 'the Incident.'
2. The first problem with modern Trek is that the idiots in charge are NOT Trekkies. They don't understand the formula that made Trek great. Trek was not going from conference to conference like corporate weenies doing intergalactic networking; Trek was landing on some weird planet and meeting aliens who were either gonna sleep with you or scare the living Jesus out of you. Vulcans were weird because they didn't have emotions, Klingons were rude and farted in elevators, and Romulans would maybe let you get a glimpse of them while they were shooting off your sensor dish. There were monsters on the starboard bow and you sometimes had to be a total badass and blow the living hell out of somebody if your crew was to live to see another shore leave. And what kept the crew going was their sense of wonder and a burning curiousity to see what the hell was gonna happen next.
Modern Trek has little of that. The NX-01
has no goddamn mission! Archer and crew are like a bunch of kids who've stolen Daddy's station wagon and are going on an aimless joyride through the countryside. Archer meets an alien and right away they're having seminars; whatever happened to overcoming suspicions, learning about weird alien customs and in the process learning something about our own humanity?
3. Here comes the discussion about death and mayhem while traveling around on a starship. The politically correct, pacifists and other weenies should skip over this post now.
I mean it.
Okay. Someone shut the door. Okay.
Space is dangerous. It's really goddamn dangerous. Just a month ago, in real life, we had seven people die during re-entry. And no matter what, if we keep going into space more people are gonna die. Don't like the idea? Stay in your parent's basement. Space is a dangerous business.
TOS showed us this. When Kirk's ship got shot at, people died. When he went down to a planet, people died. More than once he had to go clean up where other ships had died. The Constellation. The Defiant. The Exeter. "Risk is our business," Kirk said. And it was.
But now here comes "Enterprise." 100 years before Kirk. Where most of Starfleet is blundering along at Warp 2 or less and there's no Federation to make the aliens play nice.
Theoretically, you'd think space would be more dangerous, wouldn't you?
Not according to Berman and Braga. The B&B Universe is, to put it very bluntly...(looks to make sure the fainthearts have left the room)...pussified. Risk can't be a business here because risk doesn't exist. The worst an alien race will do is scratch the paint on your ship. More likely they'll invite you to a seminar. And no matter how hard an idiot like Archer tries to muck things up, everything comes out all right in the end and the Klingons just wander off and will never bother the village again.
And through it all, nobody, incredibly, ever gets killed. No security guards with the salt sucked out of them. No Deckers driving shuttles into Doomsday Machines. Nobody turned into a puddle of goo by the transporter. No starships filled with empty uniforms with powder spilling out of them.
Know what this translates into, all you so-knowledgeable alleged writers out there?
A BIG GORRAM YAWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where the hell did these writers go to school? Even Berkeley teaches writing students that the FIRST Law of Drama is CONFLICT. People don't always get along and usually nobody is willing to give peace a chance, not unless they're forced to at gunpoint.
On Enterprise, everyone gets along. That's why the ratings are falling. Take away conflict and you have no drama. And oh yeah, the Klingons will come back to the village and they goddamn will kill everyone off, including the cute kid. The only way to prevent this is to kill them or take them prisoner. Scaring Klingons only guarantees they'll be back and this time they'll be collecting villager skins. This is how it works in Real Life. Sure, it's not a pleasant decision for Archer...but hey, that's conflict. That's DRAMA. USE IT!
Which brings us to:
4. Plausibility!!!!!! Know why Nemesis was such an overpowering piece of crap that had even some of the hardest-core Trekkies throwing up? Because it made no frellin' sense! So Shinzon grew up abused by Romulans...is that a reason to blow up Earth? If anything, it would have been an excuse to blow up ROMULUS. Why go kill a perfect stranger when you parents have been the ones abusing you?
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You think Archer would let the Ferengi go without finding out who and what they are? And what about that night in Sickbay? What commander drags his dog along on a first contact?
I, for one, am getting really sick and tired of the Trek writers insulting my intelligence. So are a lot of fans. Berman is a lying sleaze when he says that fans are getting burned out on Trek; what we're getting burned out on is the writers foisting complete and utter crap on us and thinking that we'll swallow it just because "oh, they're just Trekkies!" That's why the ratings are tanking and that's why Nemesis crashed and burned. Because the fans are getting tired of being fed crap.
Quit feeding us McTrek!
), Shiban, Strong, Sussman, and Bormanis (people complain about him, but he's written some damned good eps) write the shows, and concentrate on executive producing (which title, IIRC, does not have "write every episode" or "come up with the idea for every episode" in its job description), we might see an improvement in the episodes.