Discovery Showrunners fired; Kurtzman takes over

[jaime]

If you want a crossover of interests that seems weird to some other people but perfectly normal to me, take a bunch of tabletop RPG players, some board gamers, some Civilization players (board and computer games), toss in several collections of science fiction and fantasy books and memorabilia, a small Star Trek club, and then realize that all of these people belong to the same branch of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and you end up with a group in which women made up the majority of the numbers, both in the larger group and in the smaller sub-groups. And back then, "cosplay" was not a word, or at least not one any of us had ever heard.

Or at least that's how it was for me in the decade following TNG's premiere. The way I explained it to people was that "We like science fiction, fantasy, history, computers, and doing things as traditionally as possible... we're just a group of people who can't make up our minds which century we want to live in."

I own the first 12 Star Wars action figures, as well as the TMP figures and most of the first 6" TOS figures. I never got into collecting kits or ships; books have always been my thing. I have a friend in Calgary who has duplicates of some of the large TNG figures... as she put it, "One set to keep in the box and another set to play with." So she's had Beverly Crusher sitting on Picard's lap on her computer desk for years, now, while their counterparts are still in their unopened boxes.

I don't collect many action figures anymore - they got too expensive and it was difficult to find a place to put them anyway. I think the last one I bought was Lily, from First Contact, and I've got Quark and Chief O'Brien around somewhere.

As for other stuff... I've got a ThinkGeek account, and have a few things on my "someday, if the exchange rate ever improves, if I've got the money, and if it's on sale, just maybe..." list. For the most part I prefer the more practical things. The TARDIS blanket they sell is really very cozy in the winter months. As for the fun stuff, I've got the plush Jupiter and Pluto, and it looks like they didn't sell well enough to offer the rest of the solar system.

It just depends on what gets offered. All the t-shirts in the world won't mean a thing if they're not offered in sizes that non-average people need, and there are some items I want but they're not available for Canadian customers.


Do we have transparent aluminum yet?


Thank you for clarifying. The title meant nothing to me because I just don't remember the titles of most Trek episodes other than the TOS/TAS ones, and some of the first-season TNG episodes, though I may have seen the episode itself several times.

We have Gorilla Glass 7 or something. XD

 

[Arpy]

As for "chicks in miniskirts"... I have yet to see any baby chickens running around a barnyard, wearing any sort of skirt.

chick.

I thought it was obvious that I was playing at snark with both the miniskirt and tank top comment, in my post lamenting the gender inequalities.... Let's be able to laugh at ourselves, yes?

 

[jaime]

chick.

I thought it was obvious that I was playing at snark with both the miniskirt and tank top comment, in my post lamenting the gender inequalities.... Let's be able to laugh at ourselves, yes?

I find it intriguing that Trek has twice gone with outfits that in the time of production were seen as linked to female empowerment and feminism, only to have those exact outfits decried later for being sexist. (The Mini in the Sixties, the Catsuit in the Nineties.)
But we are in a strange world now, and quite literally have Puritan outfits being used as these things (the adoption of the handmaids outfits at protests, yet to bleed into mainstream fashion thank goodness.)

 

[cultcross]

Do we have transparent aluminum yet?

Kind of yes

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Keep in mind that actual transparent aluminum composed according to the formula from the future is classified most secret.

 

[jaime]

Kind of yes

Nice. I want sunglasses made from it now.

 

[Donker]

I mean look at Dr Who's Cybermen being repeatedly ruined, not once, not twice, but in like three attempts at rebooting them... none have remotely captured that "Tomb of the Cybermen" feeling...

Hahaha, Nightmare in Silver is what finally made me drop Doctor Who, after screwing up the Cybermen for so long, they were hyping up this episode as a return to form, for literally months, for the Cybermen. "The Cybermen have never been this creepy and dangerous since Tomb of the Cybermen we have Neil Gaiman as the writer, NEIL GAIMAN AND CYBERMEN, IT'S SO CREEPY" and the episode followed a bunch of annoying little kids as they outsmart the Cybermen who act like clutz.
The final straw for me. Steven Moffat Who went straight into the trash.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

And ET did it’s walkie talkie thing in 2002. Backlash followed.
Like I say, it’s very plausible, and in keeping with those times. Lucas walked back the Greedo shooting first in the final ones he touched, reversing the sanitisation he had been putting in with edits. I am not saying ‘Lucas definitely intended’ I am saying ‘it’s possible Lucas intended, based on what we see happening’ and ‘some viewers will have that interpretation, based on what they see on screen’.
Rebels is the only thing that on screen shows what is now status quo. If we went and dug a hemit up, and showed him the episodes in order, he would likely assume that the troopers are clones, because in order, it’s clear that the republic became the empire, and that the republics army became the empires army, and that since the clone troopers are clones, the storm troopers are the same clones. (Even in non screen canon...some of them still are.) All of them. Stormtroopers get few enough lines that are gruff enough to make the accent drift barely noticeable.
The fact we know Lucas was sanitising the films in the late nineties (when the prequels were gearing up) by removing human empire deaths (the prison block) makes it extremely plausible. His reason for walking back? Also easily deduced, because of the backlash to walkie talkies in ET (his buddy Spielberg) and to Greedo shooting first. It’s likely, and not impossible. *shrug*
I feel like I am in ‘is deckard a replicant’ territory here, only that’s more clear cut. XD

Maybe.

Even if you're right, and I'm not saying you are, because again there's no hard evidence before us, it would be something that Lucas backtracked on well before the sale to Disney, yes? So, this whole line of, "But Rebels was made after the transfer to Disney" is really just a red herring. In fact, it's just the opposite. If what you're saying is true and I'm reading you correctly, then Rebels merely canonized what Lucas had in the end already settled on.

 

[jaime]

Hahaha, Nightmare in Silver is what finally made me drop Doctor Who, after screwing up the Cybermen for so long, they were hyping up this episode as a return to form, for literally months, for the Cybermen. "The Cybermen have never been this creepy and dangerous since Tomb of the Cybermen we have Neil Gaiman as the writer, NEIL GAIMAN AND CYBERMEN, IT'S SO CREEPY" and the episode followed a bunch of annoying little kids as they outsmart the Cybermen who act like clutz.
The final straw for me. Steven Moffat Who went straight into the trash.

It was still better than steel cyber men in flares with pneumatic legs. Which isn’t much. But I’ll take it, even if they went all Raston.

 

[jaime]

Maybe.

Even if you're right, and I'm not saying you are, because again there's no hard evidence before us, it would be something that Lucas backtracked on well before the sale to Disney, yes? So, this whole line of, "But Rebels occurs after the transfer to Disney" is really just a red herring. In fact, it's just the opposite. If what you're saying is true and I'm reading you correctly, then Rebels merely canonized what Lucas had in the end already settled on.

I don’t think he had settled, and frankly we will never know. Battlefront was C canon at best, and we never got the end of The Force Unleashed resolved either.
Rebels settles the new canon and acts as a bridge via TCW. I quite like Rebels, but it is what it is. (It went too dark for its audience too quickly...my little one went right off it as it started catering to older fans and punishing its heroes)

Had Lucas finished the 3D releases, that were almost certainly building to his own new trilogy, I think we would have our answer. But he remarried and sold the shop.

 

[Refuge]

I find it intriguing that Trek has twice gone with outfits that in the time of production were seen as linked to female empowerment and feminism, only to have those exact outfits decried later for being sexist. (The Mini in the Sixties, the Catsuit in the Nineties.)
But we are in a strange world now, and quite literally have Puritan outfits being used as these things (the adoption of the handmaids outfits at protests, yet to bleed into mainstream fashion thank goodness.)

I have no problem with a catsuit, it IS empowering to wear one.

 

[jaime]

I have no problem with a catsuit, it IS empowering to wear one.

That is my understanding of the situation also, but then, I lived through nineties, when Lara Croft wasn’t a gap year sixth form student with PTSD and other issues. Nor was she objectified as a form to be battered and tortured.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Had Lucas finished the 3D releases, that were almost certainly building to his own new trilogy, I think we would have our answer.

That seems plausible.

 

[Refuge]

That is my understanding of the situation also, but then, I lived through nineties, when Lara Croft wasn’t a gap year sixth form student with PTSD and other issues. Nor was she objectified as a form to be battered and tortured.

It was a tad before my time but if you watch the original 'Avengers' Mrs Peel is divine wearing a cat suit. As for Angelina's Lara... good for her.

 

[jaime]

That seems plausible.

There’s a part of me that wishes we had seen it. The Prequels has their problems, but they also had their upsides. Star Wars is now in a sort of Dune or LOTR sequels situation, only without the authorial notes or even a successor situation. And Lucas is alive, so it just seems sad not to see it under his aegis, for good or ill.

 

[jaime]

It was a tad before my time but if you watch the original 'Avengers' Mrs Peel is divine wearing a cat suit. As for Angelina's Lara... good for her.

Angelina Lara was the thing that made me truly believe in Lara as an icon, so many of my female friends absolutely loved that film, and suddenly the video game I had assumed was something me and friends at my all boys school had enjoyed solo, became something open to a wider and better-smelling audience of actual grown up people. So sad that it’s now seen as sexist, or somehow inferior. The second film in particular has some insanely good action scenes, and yet we have to pretend it didn’t happen so Wonder Woman or similar can take the crown. The first film did extremely well, as did Resident Evil, but it’s more de rigour to mock these female led action films to build up our current crop, than to realise what they were.

I am aware of Mrs.Peel thanks to Re-runs and my fathers generation going on about Avengers. Who would think such a character could exist before our enlightened TV golden age we now live in? /S xD

Ah, ‘‘twas a golden era gone too fast.

Also...La Femme Nikita was better than we get now too xD

 

[Takeru]

Also...La Femme Nikita was better than we get now too xD

If you liked that check out the CW "Nikita" starring Maggie Q, it was awesome.

 

[jaime]

If you liked that check out the CW "Nikita" starring Maggie Q, it was awesome.

I did.

It didn’t keep me coming back.

Peta ftw.

 

[INACTIVERedDwarf]

It was still better than steel cyber men in flares with pneumatic legs. Which isn’t much. But I’ll take it, even if they went all Raston.

Even when they made them look more classic, supposedly to bring them closer to the more organic originals, they kept that horrible cartoonish pneumatic piston sound for the legs... talk about fucking missing the point

 

[lawman]

There's a clear distinction between that and "The City on the Edge of Forever," in which the objective is to get the timeline back to the way it is in the real world.

No, it's to get it back to the way it is in Star Trek's world. That's not the same as ours.

No one says that Star Trek takes place in an alternate reality (except when the characters temporarily go over to an alternate reality). The conceit is that it takes place in the future. In the case of DISCO and TOS, it's taking place in the 23rd century. It's a lie as big as any fairy tale, but that's the conceit.

No one needs to say it. To repeat myself, it's glaringly self-evident and always has been — just as it is for any SF that takes place in the future. All any such story can ever offer is a take on a possible future, one that's destined to diverge from reality from the moment it's first published or aired.

And that's fine. It diminishes the stories not one whit. Does anyone find Asimov's robot stories less compelling because we don't actually have intelligent humanoid robots doing our bidding? Are Heinlein's "future history" stories devalued because the first moon landing was actually in 1969 and sponsored by the government, rather than in 1978 sponsored by private business?

In Star Trek's case as well, this ship has long since sailed. It's not just the absence of genetic "supermen" and the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, as already mentioned. It should also be self-evident that nobody tried to launch nuclear weapons platforms into orbit in the late 1960s; that transparent aluminum has not yet been invented; that the computer revolution of the late 20th century was not spearheaded by Henry Starling's company Chronowerx; that we never launched any additional Voyager probes after number two, nor a Nomad probe in 2002; that sleeper ships have not been plying the solar system, much less been replaced in 2018 (ooh, this year!) by more advanced propulsion systems; that no manned Earth-Saturn probe is readying for launch any time soon; that major American cities (thankfully) do not look at all likely to be hosting "Sanctuary Zones" within the next half-dozen years; and that we (equally thankfully) are apparently not on the path to having a series of genocidal global nuclear wars in the next few decades, much less to developing FTL propulsion in those same decades.

Yet all these things and more are part and parcel of Star Trek's fictional history. Seen in context, it's hardly surprising that Trek's future tech has developed along different lines from our own. Try to wipe all this away, and what would be left? Just a generic show about people on a spaceship in a generic future, devoid of depth or context, with nothing to distinguish it from any number of other such shows. Trek's reality is a complex tapestry; much would be lost and nothing gained by trying to poke holes in it or unravel it. Pretending that it's extrapolated forward from 2018 (or later) rather than from 1964 would do it no favors.

If that's really what you want, then what you want is a wholesale reboot. But the result would be so different from anything that's recognizable as Trek that it might as well just be a completely new show, rather than trying to market itself under the established brand.