We like to think of Trek as fine dining, but at best it's a reasonably priced family restaurant.
Kurtzman gets 5 1/2 year deal with 3 new shows in the works
- Thread starter RAMA
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I’ve never thought of it as fine dining, only that it could and should be since the franchise history has been that inconsistent, with many different chefs and riffs on the menu, referencing ideals of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” and “boldly going where no one has gone before”. Star Trek doesn’t have a tight brand continuity like McDonalds (think TOS vs TMP for starters), and that’s what makes it possible to present a vision of the franchise moving in a direction where it very seriously does what it says on the tin.
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There’s high brow sci-if like 2001. There’s low-brow like Transformers. And then there’s middle-brow that has mostly been Star Trek, occasionally swinging from one pendulum to the other depending on who’s making it.
The only time I felt anything in Kurtzman’s run that screamed DUUUUMMB was the idea that there was this secret that was SOOO terrible that it crippled a Borg cube and drove a few Romulan cultists to suicide. I’ve accept a ton of silly crap in Trek like Abraham Lincoln showing up in a chair out in space, but that idea in PIC is just so silly it clashes against the somber and contemplative tone that the first season mostly aimed for.
The only time I felt anything in Kurtzman’s run that screamed DUUUUMMB was the idea that there was this secret that was SOOO terrible that it crippled a Borg cube and drove a few Romulan cultists to suicide. I’ve accept a ton of silly crap in Trek like Abraham Lincoln showing up in a chair out in space, but that idea in PIC is just so silly it clashes against the somber and contemplative tone that the first season mostly aimed for.
Lol, I love rule VI. I just watched the one with the strange civilisation which is Chicago mobs of the twenties, and next it’s the strange civilisation which is Nazis. Later I’ll do the strange civilisation of Romans.
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Dare I hope that the second season of PIC will not involve a disposable reality showing where characters could’ve been if only things had gone differently? No?
What you're describing is the majority of content done under Berman and Braga -- especially the TNG feature films.
I don’t agree
Braga wasn’t running TNG films under Berman, merely co-writing the first two. Besides, why on earth would you settle for Star Trek being stuck in its 90s approach? Again, every iteration of the franchise should try to reduce all previous iterations into relative insignificance. You should be able to say, for example, that characters like Culber or Reno are so much more developed than even the supporting characters on DS9. You should be able to take an opening shot and wonder who thought of that and why nobody tried to implement something like it before. Every time you think you’ve identified a classic trope of network television, the story should do a 180 instead. It can be done, and that’s why such shows get a ton of Emmy nominations.
It always amazes me the Berman era largely ignored those rules.
And then there's literary science fiction, with Star Trek -- and most filmed SF -- being more or less comparable to what written SF was doing in the 1940s and 1950s.
I love Star Trek and have since the early 1970s, but it has never been the cutting edge of science fiction, or of television in general. As a TV series created in the 1960s that has become a huge cultural touchstone, it has had to be accessible and welcoming to a broad audience. It is not the product of a wildly creative auteur, it's a commercial product and always has been, and there's nothing wrong with that. To quote the Rozz-Tox Manifesto, "Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim, and stocks the supermarket."
Star Trek's producers and writers have always answered to the suits who have their own corporate checklists. If anything, Kurtzman Trek seems to have more freedom than UPN Berman Trek had. Voyager and Enterprise were under much more pressure to cater to the lowest common denominator. Kurtzman Trek clearly has the freedom to do more than imitate TNG and add a little T&A.
But the current iterations with all their references and safety nets seem tweaked (if not always designed) to identify Star Trek and sci-fi fans among streaming subscribers worldwide, rather than try to bring in a broader audience (like The Incredible Hulk series obviously attempted, to the point where a Hulk-out in that show is more of a bonus you’ve almost forgotten about). And again, there is no need for fans to be on the same page as the property owners on how far Star Trek can reach beyond its prior iterations. I just want to see more of “Star Trek has pretty much been A, but I as a fan believe it really should be N.”
I love how the given example in #5 was violated heavily by the Berman Gang with the NX Enterprise grappler.
That kinda blew the whole Roddenberry premise out of the water long before Mr. Kurtzman came along.
More like Strip Steak smothered in A1 Sauce with a side of a Bloomin' Onion.
(occasionally a little tough to chew on, but always a tasty dish)
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I love how the given example in #5 was violated heavily by the Berman Gang with the NX Enterprise grappler.
That kinda blew the whole Roddenberry premise out of the water long before Mr. Kurtzman came along.
No, because they obviously meant the kind of grappling hook that goes with a sword.
Because they're guidelines not rules; hard to write thinking about those things, best for the showrunners and story editors work and polish the piece as they read the 1st draft.
OH Yeah, right ...
Cause TOS never, ever went there....
No, because they specifically meant the notion that you’d give an alien race interstellar capability and swords as primary weapons just because, without even hinting at an explanation. We know what happened here.
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