Is star trek as we knew it in the 90's dead? lets ask the spirit guides.

[Orphalesion]

I mean it's true that you can't make shows that are outdated int heir design, sensibilities and narrative. One big reason why the 1st season of TNG is so awful and awkward is because it tried to be a 1960s show in the late 80s.

So it would be unreasonable in many ways to expect "90s trek with 2020s special effects". Changed and updates had to be made. I just personally don't agree with some of the specific changes and creative choices they made, particularly in PIC.

Though really, while 90s Trek is my favourite Trek (at least TNG and DS9) it was far from perfect and could be pretty dumb on ocassion. Sarkonna has already pointed out many of the problems, but there's also the frequent lack of gravitas and consequences to stories. You just now that most of the time, no matter what happens to the main characters it will be reset next episode. Plus there's also those episodes where they insist on making a complete genre shift for absolutely no reason and those episodes were nothing much of anything happens at all.
I mean as much as I dislike PIC it's hard to argue that, for example, Stardust City Rag isn't both a better episode and better SciFi than "The Big Goodbye" At least SCR gave us an interesting scifi location and a pretty interesting alien crimelord in Bjayzl instead of just dumping the characters in a simulacrum of 1940s San Francisco. It incorporated elements of crime movies into the SciFi setting, instead of shifting that setting to a 1:1 copy of Film Noir. Imho, that's at least the better and more interesting approach.

Of course modern Trek isn't perfect either and has just as many problems as 90s Trek and 60s Trek. But well, no work of fiction is perfect, just different.

 

[Lord Garth]

Thanks to all the down-time, I'm re-watching ENT. I promised I would before, so I figured "Why not now?" I think '90s Trek kind of ended on its own. Even with the beginning of ENT, it feels like Star Trek was beginning to move in another direction. It didn't completely get there, IMO, but even while still under Rick Berman, it was already starting to move away from the general look and feel of TNG, DS9, and VOY.

 

[fireproof78]

I just think that in twenty years or so most recent Star Trek will be remembered as the "Star Wars Holiday Special" or Star Trek.

I highly doubt that. The Holiday Special feels like the Threshold of Star Wars. Despite how much people don't like newer iterations of Trek it still has elements of Trek to it.

The SW Holiday special is far from SW.

Of course modern Trek isn't perfect either and has just as many problems as 90s Trek and 60s Trek. But well, no work of fiction is perfect, just different.

/thread

 

[Bad Thoughts]

By the way, people used to criticize DS9 for the same thing as Picard. Now it's the go-to show for showing how far from Trek Picard is. How ironic.

And it's still darker than Picard. Go figure.

 

[Jayson1]

Not as long as we have The Orville around. Treasure it like the golden gift from the past it is.


Jason

 

[Tim Walker]

"...the characters never had conflict with each other...." I believe this has been attributed to Roddenberry's influence on TNG. This tended to make the show dull to watch when it was new.

 

[Qonundrum]

I loved DS9 like crazy, but I have to admit, for all the greatness we witnessed in the 90s, there was a heck of a lot of meh as well. By its latter seasons TNG had arguably lost a fair amount of its spark. As patchy as the first couple of seasons were, they had a spirit of exploration, adventure and danger which in later seasons was replaced by a tendency to do middle of the road soap opera combined with a technobabble ‘jeopardy’ B-plot. It got too comfortable, too safe.

^^THIS

That, and season 5 was the highest rated of the show's run but sometimes that still boggles my mind. Season 5 definitely dealt with topics few (if any) were at the time and that might be why.

And then Voyager was quickly moulded into ‘TNG lite’ (due in large part, I gather, to executive meddling). I gave Voyager the benefit of the doubt for five seasons before I eventually jumped ship and only caught up with the remaining eps a decade later. (My conclusion: I didn’t miss that much).

Season 4 is the best but the show was trying to reflect its TNG roots after going off-the-rails (yet not unsuccessfully) with DS9. But the late-90s were so different to the first half of the 90s... VOY, as with ENT, were niche. DS9 was, albeit off the coattails of TNG - which miraculously brought in wider audiences, in part due to being more generic soap opera as main plot points.

Heck, I'm still amazed "The Simpsons" gets more than 5 viewers and it's been that way since season 22, 18 or 12.

90s Trek is dead. It barely survived the 90s itself if I’m honest. If something is to survive, it has to constantly reinvent itself and stay fresh for contemporary audiences while hopefully retaining the essence of what made it great.

^^this

Ironically I saw more of that in DSC, though attracting "contemporary" audiences by using a prequel and prequels generally cater toward the nerds since general audiences don't care. Even then, "Caprica" was a prequel few wanted too...

60s Trek necessarily died to create movie Trek in the 70s/80s. Both were then reincarnated into TNG and then evolved into 90s Trek. 90s Trek heaved and spluttered into Enterprise/early 00’s Trek before ending up six feet under for several years.

JJ Abrams Trek reinvented the narrative for a whole new generation

Similarly to how the 1990s Brady Bunch movies revitalized the dead 70s TV show - taking known "best-of show" set pieces and juggling them around popsicle stick figure flanderized archetypes (Kirk = screws anything female or green, McCoy = catchphrase, Spock = logical...) with actors that look vaguely like the originals. Complete with cameos. "Beyond" was the best, in part because it was trying its hardest to feel truest to the franchise as people knew it, without taking a nap off of big names such as "Khan". The character didn't need to be Khan (John Harrison was good enough on his own, though I did like the rekerjiggering of the origins, FWIW) and Leonard Nimoy created the neck pinch because Spock would never do violent fist fights...

and, while fans were understandably divided, this opened the door for a whole new resurgence of new Trek with Discovery, Picard, etc.

Until the prospector goes to cash in all that iron pyrite freshly mined.

(Which is not to say all of 21st century Trek is rubbish; Beyond was good and a few clips of PIC I'd seen really were good. Riker was by far the best thing and most Trek-like, bunnicorn crap that's unbecoming an "adult" series... Hugh's reintroduction was pretty cool but felt more like a 4th wall analogue with actors being happy to reunite. What happened in two decades for Hugh to turn from being angry at Picard at the end of "Descent" to be all super-friends and pally... that's impressive. What next, another prequel, "The Hugh and Jerry Show"?!)

I understand that some have the fondest memories of 90’s Trek, with that added element of nostalgia. But anyone who thinks Trek shouldn’t have moved on from that is deluded and simply doesn’t understand that Trek has only survived and thrived all these years by constantly reinventing itself. Outside of a core fandom, the general audience would NOT be tuning in each week to a 90’s styled show any more than they’d be tuning into the show if it was still made to a 1960’s style and sensibility.

Trek is always dying and reinventing itself. Let it!

That’s the source of its longevity and power.

General audiences loathe paying tons of money. Why would several hundred million do a paywall, even the commercial edition? Canadian viewership also showed a third of the audience being quick to stop tuning in. One can hypothesize similar patterns in many regions, but not all. How come the US viewing figures haven't been released?

Let's be lucky the core audiences that cherished it in the 1960s and reruns enjoyed en masse the early-80s changes and tolerated the hiccups in early-TNG, which was also first-run syndication (no network would have renewed it) and also free of competition (regardless of budget).

Indeed, there's a lot in PIC (even despite the androids with lazy-eye) that look like this could have been its own show. All it did was slap Star Trek branding on it, took a lot from other shows, but didn't make any of it really feel its own.

No wonder news articles came out where producers said PIC is not a sequel. It honestly isn't. Despite the need for needing those characters to directly lean on. Could the show have worked in its own right? Possibly; a lot of people who dislike the show are more often saying it's a (perceived or real) misuse of characters that's putting them off and little else.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Not as long as we have The Orville around. Treasure it like the golden gift from the past it is.


Jason

Even Orville is different than 90s Trek. It has contemporary sensibilities with a 90s coat of paint. Even the "epic battle" in Identity was an onslaught of CG comparable to most spectaculars.

 

[RandyS]

The 90’s. You will never find a period more overrated.

"I know something of those years, remember. It was a time of great dreams, great aspirations".

 

[WildManWizard]

It's A-koo-chee-moy-a. Try that and tell me if the spirit guides answer.

I see you must have watched voyager with the closed captioning on

 

[BillJ]

Dead. Each show is dead the moment it goes off the air. Each new iteration is exactly that, new. You can’t ever again capture what made that particular show great.

Doesn’t mean new iterations can’t be good, they just can’t be what came before.

 

[Lord Garth]

During my recent re-watch, I realized that by the seventh season of TNG, I started noticing everything I didn't like about the Berman Era popping up and multiplying. Over the course of VOY, it became stale. Seven injected some fresh blood into VOY for a little while, but it didn't last. My point is '90s Trek was running out of steam by the end of the actual '90s. DS9, especially late-DS9, was more of a precursor to the '00s.

I think if they made a new Star Trek series in the exact same style of Star Trek from the third season of TNG to the end of VOY, the complaints about it from 20 years ago would pick up right where they left off. The complaints would be that it's not as good as before. "Why can't they make them like they used to?" So going back to the Old Formula, exactly the way it was, won't do anything. It'll give some people what they think they want but then, when they'd actually see it, they'd realize it would've been better off leaving well enough alone. At least right now, the people who want that particular type of Trek back have their memories. And they want more of it. If they actually have it, they won't want it anymore. "Always leave them wanting more" as they say.

How often does reviving a show exactly as it was 20 or 30 years ago actually work? How long does it really last?

 

[wayoung]

Anyone else old enough to remember how much everyone on these boards hated 90's style B&B trek when it was airing?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Not as long as we have The Orville around. Treasure it like the golden gift from the past it is.


Jason

This. The Orville is warm fuzzy 90's Trek nostalgia, with added dick jokes.

 

[Jayson1]

"I know something of those years, remember. It was a time of great dreams, great aspirations".

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Jason

 

[AlanC9]

How come the US viewing figures haven't been released?

Streaming services almost never do that

 

[RandyS]

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Jason

Actually, my post was a quote from "Space Seed". Khan was talking about the very years we are talking about here.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

My point is '90s Trek was running out of steam by the end of the actual '90s.

** This. DS9 aside, Trek got very stale, bland, and formulaic in the 90s.

Anyone else old enough to remember how much everyone on these boards hated 90's style B&B trek when it was airing?

YUP. What's past is prologue.

 

[uniderth]

During my recent re-watch, I realized that by the seventh season of TNG, I started noticing everything I didn't like about the Berman Era popping up and multiplying. Over the course of VOY, it became stale. Seven injected some fresh blood into VOY for a little while, but it didn't last. My point is '90s Trek was running out of steam by the end of the actual '90s. DS9, especially late-DS9, was more of a precursor to the '00s.

Anyone else old enough to remember how much everyone on these boards hated 90's style B&B trek when it was airing?

Exactly. This is why so many of us hated (still hate) Enterprise. It was just the same old thing, but more bland. The series had everything the TNG era Trek had just labelled differently sometimes. The Enterprise era should have shown us a completely different era of primitive space vehicles. But it was just more of the same, but with worse characters and stories.

I think if they made a new Star Trek series in the exact same style of Star Trek from the third season of TNG to the end of VOY, the complaints about it from 20 years ago would pick up right where they left off. The complaints would be that it's not as good as before. "Why can't they make them like they used to?" So going back to the Old Formula, exactly the way it was, won't do anything. It'll give some people what they think they want but then, when they'd actually see it, they'd realize it would've been better off leaving well enough alone. At least right now, the people who want that particular type of Trek back have their memories. And they want more of it. If they actually have it, they won't want it anymore. "Always leave them wanting more" as they say.

That's why I laugh when people say they want Rick Berman back. No, you don't. Trek was stale same old same old by the end of Voyager.

But my complaint against newer shows isn't that it's not the same as TNG. My complaint has always been that's its not consistent with existing Trek and the writing isn't good. That was my complaint for Enterprise, clear through Picard. I don't want the B&B era back. I want new bold and adventurous Trek that is written well and actually fits with what's already been established in the four Trek series. Star Trek was one large, 99.9% consistent universe, there weren't any alternative timeline series, or visual reboots. (No, I don't consider TMP a visual reboot, becasue it's not incompatible with existing Star Trek)

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Star Trek was one large, 99.9% consistent universe, there weren't any alternative timeline series, or visual reboots.

No.