jimbtnp2 said:Kirk's parents are minor - to ay story we've seen in TOS or ST1-6. what do they have to do with exploring strange new worlds. can they make a story with them?sure but exploring strange new parents? zzzz
Well, I'm gonna have to 100% disagree with you here.
We have literally HUNDREDS of "same ol' same ol'" shows about "exploring strange new worlds."
Some are terrific. Some are horrific.
Take a mo' and think about which are which, willya?
The GOOD ONES weren't actually about "strange new worlds." They were stories about PEOPLE. The stories that were being told might have been made possible by virtue of their being in "strange new worlds" (that's the reason that Sci-fi, if DONE WELL, can produce great epics beyond that which we can see in "real life"), but the stories, ultimately, were PERSONAL STORIES.
They were about PEOPLE. And about people in ways that we can relate to the story and feel an emotional connection to what's happening.
Name any of the BEST Star Trek stories.
Was what made it "best" the fact that they had a cool dune buggy chase on an alien planet? Or was it that our leading character had to let the woman he loved die in order to save millions of lives?
If you get what you want, I WON'T get what I want. I don't want bleepy lights and AWESOME SFX and phasers shooting back and forth. I want a story that draws me into caring about the characters.
All this inward looking trekian stories are what killed TNG, go bold and big i say
No, what "killed TNG" is that it became stale and staid and overused. There's a reason that marriages almost always end up in trouble at about seven years in... they even have a name for it, the "seven year itch."
By the time TNG wrapped up, we'd simply seen TOO MUCH of those people... there was nothing really interesting left to learn about them, and the attempts to tell new and interesting stories about those characters, in most cases, gave us "wonderful" stories like "A Fist Full of Datas" or other such sub-par offerings.
TNG COULD have kept going for years. But the way they could have done that would have been to cycle characters in, and out. Had they let Picard go at "The Best of Both Worlds," make Riker the captain, and brought Shelby in permanently, we'd have had a totally new dynamic. Had they left Crusher off the ship permanently... had they brought in new "permanent characters" in that same situation, cycled in and out over time (like REAL LIFE tends to do), we'd have gotten to see new situations, and they wouldn't have had to resort to the pathetic "reaching" that they inevitably fell into during the final two seasons.
DS9 got this largely right. Introducing new characters, and having the existing ones evolve and change, was part of what made it entertaining to me. Had the situation remained staid and stale and unchanged from the first episode to the final episode, I'd never have been brought back into the show at all!
