I strongly doubt your understanding, based on this comment. That ot you have extreme bias.
Is Spectacle better than character development?
- Thread starter T'Boggan
- Start date
I strongly doubt your understanding, based on this comment. That ot you have extreme bias.
I'll go with (main characters only):
Riker
Kira
O'Brien
Ummmmmm........ Trip?
Mix in recurring characters and gets much better.
Examples:
Ro
Reg Barclay
Keiko
Garak
Forester
Shran
Dukat
Martok
Several more I'm not thinking of...
That's what always frustrated me. The recurring characters end up being more dynamic than the main cast characters.
Most of the ready conflict and drama from the show's premise was lost within a few episodes as writers got comfortable with writing more TNG stuff in new locations with new forehead ridges. It never got to be the show it could have been because it couldn't get out from under that shadow. They wanted encapsulated morality plays where the carpet was clean and the hull still shiney after every episode. They didn't want to put any demands on the audience as DS9 had done. Voyager wasn't going to get the same level of character development because there was a reset button once the end credits hit. I can see why it does well on Netflix. It's not a demanding show. It doesn't matter what order you watch it in. Most of it is not bad, and you can continue to do whatever that other thing is you're doing while it's on in the background.
And when that didn't work, showrunners poured Jeri Ryan into a catsuit and saved the show. Admittedly 7 and EMH were two of the few Voyager characters who did get real development.
DSC had 15 episodes to throw you into a vaguely familar setting that turned out to be jarringly different, with characters who sometimes weren't what they seemed or what viewers assumed they would be without knowing. It needs more time to continue that process, but we did see character development, quite a lot of it. Not as much as seven long seasons of DS9, but certainly more than we did with the crew of ENT after a year (or TNG, or TOS, or..)
I do enjoy VOY in that way. It is light, almost "comfort food" entertainment. It's cool to fire up on Netflix on a Tuesday night for 2-3 episodes and just relax.
The only mistake they made with 7 is that she was not just being "developed," she was the focal point of about 80% of the episodes after she arrived. I found that to be jarring.
Funny thing about Voyager is I think Berman's circumspect attitude has helped it keep its age a bit. That's not to give it a glowing endorsement or anything, but I think most of it is much more watchable nowadays than the other two series of the era. I've been trying to chew some TNG episodes that I haven't seen in [many] years and there were a couple of times I wanted to gouge my eyes out with the green Sharpie I keep in the TV cabinet.
Use the blue Sharpie. The green one is for marking the edge of CDs to make them sound better.
(Look it up--there are real, actual people who believe that driv...advice.
)
I'll have responses to individual posts in this thread in a bit, but one thing it's important to note is the difference between character development and character arc. Briefly, character development helps to explain who a character is at a particular point in time in the story. A character arc, in contrast, is the narrative arc which examines how a character changes over the story. You need character development to have a character arc, because if you don't clearly know who a character is, you can't determine who they are changing into.
I would say that Discovery had very little of either one of these outside of Micheal Burnham - and in that particular case both the characterization and the arc was very muddled and confused.
As was noted in another thread, any dialogue in a show is put there for a reason. Generally speaking the reason is one of two things - either to move along the plot, or to give us further insight into the character. Thus one way to determine the "character moments" in Discovery is to subtract all of the plot-critical discussion and see what's left. There are a few notable examples of pure character-related dalogue - Stamets brushing teeth with Culber, Tilly and Burham talking about burritos, etc - but these moments were for the most part in the first half of the season, and fell to the wayside for pretty much pure action once Discovery went to the Mirror Universe.
As for character arcs, It's very hard to say. I guess Saru was a coward until he wasn't. And Stamets was a grump until he wasn't. And Tilly was socially awkward except when the plot required otherwise (like in Madness...). None of this came across so much as character growth as it did retooling the characters, or perhaps even just inconsistent characterization - because very little evidence was given onscreen for why the characters may have changed.
Regarding Burnham, she got the most development, but her arc became pretty tortured as the series went on. Act 1 seemed to point to a straight-ahead arc for her. Basically the prologue implied that she acted the way she did ("mutiny" and all) because of fear of the Klingons, brought on both by childhood trauma and being raised in a shitty way by Sarek. As a result, she was under the false belief she was acting logically when she was really making gut-level emotional decisions. Act 1 slowly shows her getting out of her shell. By Into the Forest I Go it seemed like she had conquered her fear of Klingons, facing down Kol (almost too easily it seems). Then Act 2 is basically emotionally torturing her. Worse yet, she makes the rash decision to save MU Georgiou for no other reason than because she looks like her dead mentor - again making a split-second decision on emotion. The season ends with her again "mutinying" and making more rash decisions (trusting Georgiou not to kill her, and L'Rell to go along with her plan) only now hey, it works, and everyone gets a medal. The only realization/growth seems to be her understanding that she was racist towards Klingons due to childhood trauma - a thread that DIS totally dropped after the prologue only to come roaring back in the back half of the last act.
I would say that Discovery had very little of either one of these outside of Micheal Burnham - and in that particular case both the characterization and the arc was very muddled and confused.
As was noted in another thread, any dialogue in a show is put there for a reason. Generally speaking the reason is one of two things - either to move along the plot, or to give us further insight into the character. Thus one way to determine the "character moments" in Discovery is to subtract all of the plot-critical discussion and see what's left. There are a few notable examples of pure character-related dalogue - Stamets brushing teeth with Culber, Tilly and Burham talking about burritos, etc - but these moments were for the most part in the first half of the season, and fell to the wayside for pretty much pure action once Discovery went to the Mirror Universe.
As for character arcs, It's very hard to say. I guess Saru was a coward until he wasn't. And Stamets was a grump until he wasn't. And Tilly was socially awkward except when the plot required otherwise (like in Madness...). None of this came across so much as character growth as it did retooling the characters, or perhaps even just inconsistent characterization - because very little evidence was given onscreen for why the characters may have changed.
Regarding Burnham, she got the most development, but her arc became pretty tortured as the series went on. Act 1 seemed to point to a straight-ahead arc for her. Basically the prologue implied that she acted the way she did ("mutiny" and all) because of fear of the Klingons, brought on both by childhood trauma and being raised in a shitty way by Sarek. As a result, she was under the false belief she was acting logically when she was really making gut-level emotional decisions. Act 1 slowly shows her getting out of her shell. By Into the Forest I Go it seemed like she had conquered her fear of Klingons, facing down Kol (almost too easily it seems). Then Act 2 is basically emotionally torturing her. Worse yet, she makes the rash decision to save MU Georgiou for no other reason than because she looks like her dead mentor - again making a split-second decision on emotion. The season ends with her again "mutinying" and making more rash decisions (trusting Georgiou not to kill her, and L'Rell to go along with her plan) only now hey, it works, and everyone gets a medal. The only realization/growth seems to be her understanding that she was racist towards Klingons due to childhood trauma - a thread that DIS totally dropped after the prologue only to come roaring back in the back half of the last act.
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It's even simpler than that.
Her character arc sees her start from a point of pure logic. Then, when the logic completely fails her, she does a complete 180.
Her choice to free Ripper was purely an emotional one. Then she falls in love. Then she maneuvers her way through the MU by following her emotional intuition and, as you said, save Mirror Georgiou. But she - almost instantly - realizes that was a mistake. At the same time, she is completely devastated by her love. So running on emotions fails her too. And in the end, her "ultimate" plan relies upon merging histrionic theatrics with logical stratagem.
Her 'growth' sees her evolve from a wannabe Vulcan - a Spock facsimile (and not a very good one) - to a person comfortable in her own skin, who is human first with a touch of Vulcan stoicism and prudence. The end product is basically the antithesis of Spock.
Her character arc sees her start from a point of pure logic. Then, when the logic completely fails her, she does a complete 180.
Her choice to free Ripper was purely an emotional one. Then she falls in love. Then she maneuvers her way through the MU by following her emotional intuition and, as you said, save Mirror Georgiou. But she - almost instantly - realizes that was a mistake. At the same time, she is completely devastated by her love. So running on emotions fails her too. And in the end, her "ultimate" plan relies upon merging histrionic theatrics with logical stratagem.
Her 'growth' sees her evolve from a wannabe Vulcan - a Spock facsimile (and not a very good one) - to a person comfortable in her own skin, who is human first with a touch of Vulcan stoicism and prudence. The end product is basically the antithesis of Spock.
This is true, but then that's the problem when you don't give your characetrs real flaws or room for development. Most of the 90's Trek cast are post character development at best. We hear about how Riker learned about real loyalty. We hear (well, see through Q-magic) how Picard learned to take risks. We hear how Worf was afraid of hurting fragile humans. TNG was almost as bad as TOS when it came to main character develoment in Trek (though the TOS movies are perhaps the best).
Saru and Tilly, even by your strict definition, have the same. Arguably Stamets also gets development although not really an arc because they decided he didn't care his partner died. Lorca is developed, again by your definition of understanding who someone is, and gets an arc. The arc just sucks.
That's pretty good for 15 episodes.
Well that depends on whether you consider ethics a purely emotional thing; I'd say the Vulcans would disagree.
I'm sorry, I don't see that at all. How SMG played Burnham changed over the course of the series. But character isn't about how the actor plays a role, or even about what a character says. It's about what a character does. And Burnham, from start to finish, makes these split-second decisions based upon emotional gut checks.
This isn't even getting into the setup being very improbable. We're given the backstory that Burnham served with Georgiou for seven years. Yet in that time, her fake Vulcan facade never cracked, she never developed any sort of interpersonal relationships, and was essentially the exact same person as when she graduated the Vulcan Science Academy.
My feeling is basically that for most of the cast, character development really ended after the 9th episode.
- Saru stopped being a coward, but he basically became "The XO." 95% of his dialogue was something that any Starfleet XO could have had from that point on.
- Stamets basically ceased to be a character entirely and just became a plot device to further along the "spores plot arc." The absolute worst was when they decided to have spore-ghost Culber talk to him and went back to the tooth-brushing scene - which was one of the best parts of the first season because it was so inconsequential and normal. It made the whole thing feel contrived and small.
- Tilly still got to be comic relief, but the idea of her as a character was pretty much gone. They came up with implausible reasons to keep her in the center of things (making her impersonate Captain Killy, then be the "spore expert" when Stamets was unconscious (what happened to everyone else in the lab we saw in the third episode?)
- I suppose you could say Lorca had an arc, just an arc that sucks. Though up until the reveal, he really wasn't acting all that differently than his introduction in the third episode. Maybe a bit more weary, and starting to get a little handsy with Burnham, but that was about it.
- Ash did get an arc, but as with Burnham, he had so much fucking backstory crammed in that it was pretty tortured (no pun intended). I mean, I suppose you could argue that he doesn't know who he is, so it's no surprise we don't either. But his arc was shit, and it only worked as well as it did because Latif is a great actor.
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Spectacle has little rewatch value. At least with models one can applaud the work to set up camera and whittle detail into models. CGI is just CGI, no?
Deeper characters and character interaction and nuance to situations, not necessarily about each other (e.g. soap opera), does.
Deeper characters and character interaction and nuance to situations, not necessarily about each other (e.g. soap opera), does.
Might be why I like Saru's character. He does seem more traditional in some ways. He anchors the potential chaos. Been enjoying Fear Itself, so far. Interesting to see Trek from Saru's point of view.
IMHO there's a difference between looking good and being overblown.
The first movie I saw which seemed to go too far in terms of visuals was Van Helsing back in 2004. They used expensive, gaudy CGI effects for the vampires which were totally unneeded, and nearly ruined the film singlehandedly. Of course, it was otherwise a total shitshow, but still, the spectacle didn't help it.
Many modern action movies have fight sequences so long I get bored midway through.
Van Helsing did plenty to ruin itself.
And the CGI was gawd-awful, even by 2004 standards.
And the CGI was gawd-awful, even by 2004 standards.
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