Is SNW getting too goofy?

[Greg Cox]

Yep.

It didn't help that as time went on technical dialogue on those shows was, increasingly, gibberish - as you say. "We've detected an anomalous surge of verteron particles" is exactly the same as "a wizard did it."

Exactly. Going back to TOS and "The Enemy Within," I don't remember entire paragraphs of technobabble about imaginary particles and "multiphasic quantum anomalies" to explain why the transporter split Kirk in two. They just got on with the plot -- and how the characters reacted.

 

[Donald G]

Exactly. Going back to TOS and "The Enemy Within," I don't remember entire paragraphs of technobabble about imaginary particles and "multiphasic quantum anomalies" to explain why the transporter split Kirk in two. They just got on with the plot -- and how the characters reacted.

While I enjoy a smattering of good technobabble for flavoring, I always come back to Roddenberry's words in TMoST that "Joe Friday doesn't explain how a .38 revolver works before shooting it."

 

[Mid Mod]

Now, I do think SNW is looser with their language & interactions on the bridge than the other shows. That was an adjustment for me, and I can see why it bothers some folks.

Berman-era Trek was written and acted in a highly stylized way. (TOS as well, though it’s before my time so I’m not sure if it was meant to be stylized or just seems that way due to the era it was filmed in.) That tends to give the impression that the interactions are more formal, like how slang in Shakespeare sounds formal to the untrained ear.

Modern Trek is written and acted in a more naturalistic way. It was jarring to me at first, but I actually prefer it now. It makes the characters more relatable and is one of the reasons why I grew attached to the SNW cast right away whereas it took a few seasons for me to feel the same way about the TNG cast. (I liked the DS9, VOY and ENT casts well enough but never really felt attached to them the way I am with TNG and SNW.)

Trek was heading in a less formal direction anyway. In TNG, people only listened to classical music and jazz. The TNG movies and the Kelvinverse brought rock music to Star Trek.

 

[Unique]

Berman-era Trek was written and acted in a highly stylized way. (TOS as well, though it’s before my time so I’m not sure if it was meant to be stylized or just seems that way due to the era it was filmed in.) That tends to give the impression that the interactions are more formal, like how slang in Shakespeare sounds formal to the untrained ear.

Modern Trek is written and acted in a more naturalistic way. It was jarring to me at first, but I actually prefer it now. It makes the characters more relatable and is one of the reasons why I grew attached to the SNW cast right away whereas it took a few seasons for me to feel the same way about the TNG cast. (I liked the DS9, VOY and ENT casts well enough but never really felt attached to them the way I am with TNG and SNW.)

Trek was heading in a less formal direction anyway. In TNG, people only listened to classical music and jazz. The TNG movies and the Kelvinverse brought rock music to Star Trek.

I enjoyed Steppenwolf in First Contact as much as the next girl, but I think classical and jazz in TNG were the only elements that felt timeless, contrasted with the hairstyles, makeup, clothing, and decor, which were all very much products of the era in which they were filmed. <shudder>

 

[Greg Cox]

Berman-era Trek was written and acted in a highly stylized way. (TOS as well, though it’s before my time so I’m not sure if it was meant to be stylized or just seems that way due to the era it was filmed in.) That tends to give the impression that the interactions are more formal, like how slang in Shakespeare sounds formal to the untrained ear.

My impression has always been that the dialogue in TOS was intended to be more colloquial and naturalistic, by the standards of the time, than TNG's more formal diction. "In a pig's eye!" "You've earned your paycheck this week, Scotty." "Let's get the hell out of here." That kinda thing.

Granted, this varied depending on the characters and situation. Spock speaks more precisely than McCoy whose dialogue is folksier than Sulu's, etc. And Kirk's speech patterns are going to vary depending on whether he's casually bantering with Bones or delivering some big inspirational speech.

 

[Mudd]

My impression has always been that the dialogue in TOS was intended to be more colloquial and naturalistic, by the standards of the time, than TNG's more formal diction. "In a pig's eye!" "You've earned your paycheck this week, Scotty." "Let's get the hell out of here." That kinda thing.

Granted, this varied depending on the characters and situation. Spock speaks more precisely than McCoy whose dialogue is folksier than Sulu's, etc. And Kirk's speech patterns are going to vary depending on whether he's casually bantering with Bones or delivering some big inspirational speech.

This is exactly it. If you watch other network TV produced in the 1950s until at least the mid-1960s, characters spoke more carefully than what we consider natural now - just as they did in many movies.

A lot of what was wrong with the Roddenberry/Berman era was that they started out mimicking the style of the original Star Trek. They seemed to think that having the characters speak as people of the era actually did would date the show somehow.

All of it seems pretty dated now, partly because it's stiffly imitative of even older television. Funny how that works.

Parenthetically, I'm not sure to what extent the stilted attributes of actors performances and speech patterns in those days was influenced by the production limits of relatively low budgets and limited equipment. As was pointed out on last week's Ready Room, for a long time actors were recorded with boom mikes and filmed with ponderously heavy cameras and lights. A big-budget movie might allow for a lot more time to do camera set-ups, tracking, ADR etc. than a lot of television productions could manage.

Exactly. Going back to TOS and "The Enemy Within," I don't remember entire paragraphs of technobabble about imaginary particles and "multiphasic quantum anomalies" to explain why the transporter split Kirk in two. They just got on with the plot -- and how the characters reacted.

The TOS approach to technical dialogue was generally to use common language or to boil it down to analogies and comparisons - witness Sulu's explanation of exponential growth in the second pilot - "It's like if you have a penny and double it" - or Scotty's explanation of Riley's dicking around with the warp drive in "The Naked Time:"

SCOTT: He's turned the engines off. Completely cold. It will take thirty minutes to regenerate them.
UHURA [OC]: Ship's outer skin is beginning to heat, Captain. Orbit plot shows we have about eight minutes left.

How many made-up particles and invocations of nonexistent technology would that have involved in the 1990s?

 

[Commander Richard]

I thought that the acting from the 60s was due to the actors being trained for the stage and so they were used to projecting their voices and being clear.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I thought that the acting from the 60s was due to the actors being trained for the stage and so they were used to projecting their voices and being clear.

Depends on the actor. But guys like Shatner or Loren Green, sure.

 

[Greg Cox]

Speak of colloquial dialogue, just this afternoon I was trying to decide if "on my bucket list" was too contemporary a phrase to use in a TOS story. (Haven't made up my mind yet.)

I can certainly imagine someone saying it on SNW.

 

[Mudd]

McCoy would say it.

 

[drt]

I enjoyed Steppenwolf in First Contact as much as the next girl, but I think classical and jazz in TNG were the only elements that felt timeless, contrasted with the hairstyles, makeup, clothing, and decor, which were all very much products of the era in which they were filmed. <shudder>

I always had the feeling the use of classical music and Shakespeare was less about timelessness and more a shorthand means to make future humans seem erudite to the viewing audience. It had the secondary benefit for the production of being cheap, since it's all in the public domain. At least the producers realized that attempting to depict future music is always a disaster, a lesson they unfortunately didn't learn with future fashion.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I always had the feeling the use of classical music and Shakespeare was less about timelessness and more a shorthand means to make future humans seem erudite to the viewing audience. It had the secondary benefit for the production of being cheap, since it's all in the public domain. At least the producers realized that attempting to depict future music is always a disaster, a lesson they unfortunately didn't learn with future fashion.

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[Noname Given]

I always had the feeling the use of classical music and Shakespeare was less about timelessness and more a shorthand means to make future humans seem erudite to the viewing audience. It had the secondary benefit for the production of being cheap, since it's all in the public domain. At least the producers realized that attempting to depict future music is always a disaster, a lesson they unfortunately didn't learn with future fashion.

It was more of that during production they picked stuff that was in the public domain, or something they wouldn't have to pay a mint for to get the rights to use in a broadcast production.

 

[Sci]

I enjoyed Steppenwolf in First Contact as much as the next girl, but I think classical and jazz in TNG were the only elements that felt timeless, contrasted with the hairstyles, makeup, clothing, and decor, which were all very much products of the era in which they were filmed. <shudder>

I mean, everything is of its time and its culture. One of the reasons ancient Greek plays can be so hard to read is that they reflect the dramatic form, aesthetics, and cultural presumptions of the cultures and eras they were written in -- and some of those things have changed so profoundly since c. 400s BCE Athens that it's hard to become emotionally invested in the dramatic tensions the authors intend to create. Nothing is timeless, and nothing escapes its origin.

Classical music and jazz are not timeless. They originate from specific times and cultures, and they reflect those times and cultures. Jazz reflects the African American culture of the late 19th and early 20th Century U.S. South. What we call "classical music" generally reflects European cultures of the early-to-mid Modern Eras. They are rooted in particular eras and particular concerns.

I always had the feeling the use of classical music and Shakespeare was less about timelessness and more a shorthand means to make future humans seem erudite to the viewing audience. It had the secondary benefit for the production of being cheap, since it's all in the public domain. At least the producers realized that attempting to depict future music is always a disaster, a lesson they unfortunately didn't learn with future fashion.

I'm pretty sure the music being in the public domain was the primary reason they were used, not the secondary reason. And it's amusing to think that jazz music is used as a shorthand for being erudite to 1980s/1990s audiences, since jazz had the same sort of reputation in the 1910s and 1920s that hip hop had in the 80s and 90s. An analogous situation would be if a sci-fi show in the 2060s used 1990s hip hop as shorthand for cultural sophistication.

 

[Unique]

Classical music is timeless in that, like Shakespeare, we’re still studying it and appreciating it hundreds of years of years after it was written. It clearly has a timeless appeal, and projecting that it will still be studied and appreciated in a few hundred more years isn’t that much of a stretch.
As for jazz, it’s a flexible and diverse musical form that lends itself to endless improvisation and requires only a small ensemble; it’s quite plausible it would be popular on a starship with a diverse crew from many cultures. I can easily envision a completely alien jazz band using instruments from their home world. It fits.

 

[Vger23]

A bit.

I think if it felt more organic I’d appreciate it, but instead SNW sometimes feels like the producers spent a weekend reading online reviews of gushers praising The Orville and decided that is what they need to appeal to.

 

[Mr J]

As much as it pains a small portion of ST fans to admit it - SNW is no goofier than ST has ever been. The only time that ST came close to "pure sci-fi" was TMP, and actually even that wasn't really. The blend of the absurd and the serious is what good ST does best (as long as it does either well when it tries)

 

[TerryTrek]

The tone of SNW works. It needs to be mostly goofy and light-hearted.

For the first time in Nu Trek, there's tonal brand consistency between the shows (SNW, LD, STD S5, and likely Academy) all have this light-hearted approach, looking at past Trek through a post-modern lens.

The S2 finale will be heavy on the darkness, carnage and drama. We've already seen promo clips that indicate there's going to be a bodycount.

 

[drt]

And it's amusing to think that jazz music is used as a shorthand for being erudite to 1980s/1990s audiences, since jazz had the same sort of reputation in the 1910s and 1920s that hip hop had in the 80s and 90s. An analogous situation would be if a sci-fi show in the 2060s used 1990s hip hop as shorthand for cultural sophistication.

I didn't say jazz was shorthand, only classical.

I always thought that Riker was written to like jazz because he's the charming rogue character, which is also probably why Paris and Kelvinverse Kirk are the only ones who like rock-and-roll.

 

[Mudd]

I didn't say jazz was shorthand, only classical.

I always thought that Riker was written to like jazz because he's the charming rogue character, which is also probably why Paris and Kelvinverse Kirk are the only ones who like rock-and-roll.

Apparently Frakes plays jazz trombone and they wanted to use that.

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