tastes differ of course
Spoilers Does it feel to anyone else that SNW is cynically mining Trek's past glories?
- Thread starter zzz
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As early as "The Menagerie, Part I" in 1967 Trek was mining its past. And it had the cojones to mine a past that nobody outside NBC executives had yet seen!
Nah, that would be Picard season 3. It completely relied on TNG’s past glories as nostalgia bait.
I enjoy some fan service as much as the next guy, and the shared continuity of the Trek world is one of its great joys (see Picard S3) but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing - I wish Trek would stop with the prequel series in general which are based on exploiting that past and try to balance it out with some original characters, stories, and developments in the history of the future.
To me its more entertaining to not be limited by certain known factors in the timeline - no matter how fast and loose you're comfortable with flexing "canon" there are still some areas that are off limits for the story to go, thus keeping the options fewer and stakes always somewhat lower than if the story was taking place in a time not yet explored by previous shows. Not to mention the possibilities for exploring new characters - as much as I love Spock there's only so much "ooh, he's emotional now!" they can keep feeling fresh. (having said that, I love almost every TOS era Trek novel I've read, so it can be done!)
Hey, they spent $1 million on a not aired pilot and they needed to get some use out of that expenditure. Only took them another 50 years to make Spock's motivations for his actions in The Menagerie (and many other plot points of that story make sense.)
For that matter, a lot of TOS episodes were pastiches of popular culture. "Balance of Terror" was a pastiche of the 1957 film The Enemy Below. "The Enemy Within" is a pastiche of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "The Conscience of the King" wears its Shakespearean influences on its sleeve -- it's a sci-fi pastiche of Hamlet. "Court Martial" is a pastiche of every naval trial story ever told. "A Piece of the Action" is a pastiche of 1930s gangster films. "The Cage" is a pastiche of Forbidden Planet, which is itself a pastiche of The Tempest. "Elaan of Troyius" is a mash-up of The Taming of the Shrew and Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.
Here's a controversial take: all franchises mine their pasts and if the idea for what they want to mine to recycle with a new skin is worthwhile then they should. All entertainment franchises go back to the well to relive past glories. That's part of their nature and it's baked in to the very fabric of those films and/or television series.
Andor Season 1 proved this isn't really required
Indeed. If a franchise does it too much its bad. If it does it too little it's not real "Trek/Wars/Who/etc."
Andor proves this as many didn't treat it as real Star Wars because it lacked aliens, droids and had too many humans.
Only the movie and TV snobs care so much about "originality" and "freshness" that they'll make or break their desire to watch something over those factors. Most people don't care nor should they.
But even it reuses some elements from the rest of the franchise and in far smarter ways than streaming Trek. There aren't many callbacks and Easter eggs but the ones they use - Mon Mothma, Melshi, Saw Gerrera, Colonel Yularen - are all well-used, organic to the overall narrative and not just thrown in there as continuity wank.
And its prequel to a previous movie and makes use of a whole slew of movie tropes.
Yeah, but Andor came out sandwiched between Obi-Wan Kenobi (an exercise in Aughts-era nostalgia) and season three of The Mandalorian (an exercise in 70s/80s-era nostalgia), with Obi-Wan immediately preceded by The Book of Boba Fett (an exercise in 80s nostalgia). Andor is very much an outlier for not being based on nostalgia for older Star Wars films.
There are fans I see who let it impact that enjoyment too. It's amazing how one little thing derails the enjoyment.
This has actually happened to Star Wars even more extreme:
The original Star Wars was inspired by tons of stuff - Flash Gordon, Westerns, Samurai movies, WW2 movies, French cinema, adventure serials...
The recent Star Wars movies were inspired by... previous Star Wars. And this became extremely incestous, lacking new & diverse input and ideas, and instead reinforcing it's own tropes, clichés and bad habits.
Now Trek has a wider base - purely because of the large number of episodes it already has. But it is an issues, as most new shows seem to draw from the same "best of's" as well (farming the Dominion wars, S31, everything Khan & Augments...) and thereby limiting their input and becoming more narrow in their scope and topics.
That's why I absolutely appreciate if you can see input from OUTSIDE previous Trek (e.g. the aforementioned "Day the Earth stood still", "Aliens", books...). There's a large body of sci-fi ideas out there, which aren't Star Trek. Get inspired & put your own spin on it!
