News More on Fuller’s Departure From Discovery

[Triskelion]

Billie Piper.

Oh, the topic:

Just as a rough comparison, Gaiman's name gets 23.9 million Google hits, while Fuller's gets only 9.2 million, Nicholas Meyer gets 19 million, Alex Kurtzman gets a bit over half a million, and even Michelle Yeoh gets less than a million. American Gods gets 13 million hits, while Star Trek Discovery gets barely a million. Granted, a lot of that would be false positives, but even so, it's safe to say that American Gods is not some obscure, unknown thing in the SF/fantasy community. It's a major, prestigious project.

Just as a side note, 杨紫琼 (Yáng Zǐqióng, better known here as Michelle Yeoh) gets 6,800,000 hits on China's fake Google Baidu.
Neil Gaiman: 459,000
Nicholas Myer: 218,000
William Shatner: 334,000

I may be wrong but I'm just guessing we won't be seeing any plots in Discovery that cause any issues streaming through China's Golden Shield Project (Great Firewall).

Kumbaya.

 

[donners22]

Round the Twist (its a national treasure, dammit!),

That it is. I have the set on DVD, and it's quite jarring going between seasons.

In addition to the big changes in the comeback (from limited practical effects and mostly adaptations of Paul Jennings stories to CGI and original, though far weaker, stories, and a whole new cast), half the cast changed from season 1 to season 2.

It was rebooting before rebooting was cool!

 

[jaime]

If we have this many 'special cases', are they truly 'special' anymore?

Yeah. Because as I said Animation is a different ball game, Japanese animation even more so, and I have always said you can't really reboot an adaptation..it's already one removed from the original anyway. That's aside from them being a niche of a niche. I am talking about TV shows, where the return is rare enough that we talk about it when the X files manages it.

The problem is, so many people forget that some things are adaptations. People mention Batman or Superman screen reboots, but as they are adaptations...they can't be reboots, only different versions. Otherwise every adaptation of Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice etc are suddenly reboots. Which isn't the case. The Durrells isn't a reboot of My Family and Other Animals, it's a different adaptation from the same source material. Stage plays are not rebooted every time a new production is made.

TV series that started as TV series (or widening it to screen in general to a extent) are not adaptations...and when they end, they tend to stay ended. Reboots are a different thing to the original, spin offs are basically not (depending how that is handled.) usually...we see the 'cheers' universe continue through Frasier for example. Almost every example you mention is an adaptation, a reboot or an animation. Actual TV series going away and coming back again is rare enough to comment on.

 

[jaime]

Billie Piper.

Oh, the topic:



Just as a side note, 杨紫琼 (Yáng Zǐqióng, better known here as Michelle Yeoh) gets 6,800,000 hits on China's fake Google Baidu.
Neil Gaiman: 459,000
Nicholas Myer: 218,000
William Shatner: 334,000

I may be wrong but I'm just guessing we won't be seeing any plots in Discovery that cause any issues streaming through China's Golden Shield Project (Great Firewall).

Kumbaya.

I'm ok with that. I wonder if the Borg trip the rules around undead creatures.
Whilst I recognise the questions and problems with it, the core idea of the Golden Shield Project is a sensible one. More pertinently...this proves Michelle Yeoh is cool.

 

[Christopher]

Just as a side note, 杨紫琼 (Yáng Zǐqióng, better known here as Michelle Yeoh) gets 6,800,000 hits on China's fake Google Baidu.
Neil Gaiman: 459,000
Nicholas Myer: 218,000
William Shatner: 334,000

Thank you -- I think that actually makes my point better than the American Google hits alone. That point being that different subsets of fandom -- and of humanity -- have different areas of interest and are exposed to different bodies of knowledge, which is why one mustn't assume that one's own unfamiliarity with a work or an author is a universal thing. I'm sure there are plenty of things that are famous to the general public but that I've never more than vaguely heard of -- including famous athletes or popular musicians, say. And there are things I know well that other people may have never heard of.

When I was in 7th grade, a classmate was asking me what rock groups I liked, and I said The Beatles, and he said "Who?" I thought he was joking. Who hasn't heard of The Beatles? But in retrospect, he probably wasn't joking. He was a 12-year-old in 1980, so a band from the '60s and '70s might as well have been ancient history to him. I was the same age, of course, but I'd been exposed to different influences. (Although Yellow Submarine showed on TV frequently back then, so I don't know how he would've missed it.)

I may be wrong but I'm just guessing we won't be seeing any plots in Discovery that cause any issues streaming through China's Golden Shield Project (Great Firewall).

I think we might. IIRC, the reason they had to be circumspect about Sulu's husband in Star Trek Beyond was due to the desire to tiptoe around the sensibilities of Chinese audiences, since the film had a couple of Chinese corporations as financing partners. And we know there's a major gay male character in Discovery, something that presumably will not be glossed over.

 

[Aeronnaex]

So it sounds to me like Fuller doesn't really understand (or cannot figure out) how to do religion and immigration in Star Trek, and that the network isn't interested in Star Trek as social commentary. Admittedly, Gene Roddenberry had to fight network censors to get the religious statements into Trek that he did and while it would not be surprising to find a network today being as hard to fight in that respect, it's clear that Fuller felt muzzled and that's something Trek does not need. TOS challenged a lot of beliefs - more than I ever realized (listening to the Mission Log podcast has revealed a lot of nuance to me), and was fairly subversive despite the action adventure trappings. TNG played it far safer overall, as did VGR and ENT. DS9 was closer to TOS in questioning religion.

And if I'm being honest, it's really not hard to create a situation in Star Trek that mirrors today. Heck, if they'd set Discovery past Nemesis they could use the Romulans to explore both religion AND immigration. If the network was truly locked into the pre-TOS timeframe (as I suspect given their zeal in fighting Anaxar), they could have used a different race, or created one. The Federation in early days would easily have some of the same problems we have today.

I will say Congratulations to CBS, though. They've managed to completely destroy my enthusiasm for this show. Oh, I'll watch it at the start to see what happens and in case it surprises me - it just might. But in terms of expectations, I'm thinking this is just more network garbage in a Star Trek wrapper for sake of starting CBS' streaming service by luring in Star Trek fans.

 

[Christopher]

So it sounds to me like Fuller doesn't really understand (or cannot figure out) how to do religion and immigration in Star Trek

That's needlessly insulting to Fuller. Star Trek has always been a secular future. American Gods is a story about actual divinities living in the present-day United States. Of the two, it's obvious which one is a better choice for someone who wants to tell stories about religion and immigration in contemporary America. Why settle for filtering it through vague allegories about alien societies in the future when you have the opportunity to address it more directly? If Trek were Fuller's only option, I'm sure he could figure out ways to work religion in there -- but it's not his only option. He's a successful TV producer who's working on multiple projects and is free to pick and choose among them according to his needs and interests. And again, he's been working on American Gods for over two and a half years and was brought onto Discovery less than a year ago. It makes no sense to expect him to give up a project he's been working on for so long in favor of one that's a poorer fit to his interests. Sure, yes, he's a lifelong Trek fan who's wanted to do a Trek show again, but he's also an important industry figure with a lot of responsibilities that he has to weigh against each other. In this case, the timing of the two projects just couldn't work out for him (because of the delays on Discovery), and he had to make a choice, and he chose the project he's been working on longer and has more personal control over, which makes perfect sense to me.

and that the network isn't interested in Star Trek as social commentary.

As I said already, we don't know that -- we just know that Fuller doesn't think it's as good as American Gods for the specific category of social commentary he's interested in. The show may be perfectly free to do social commentary about all sorts of things, but in Fuller's opinion, it just isn't as well-suited for exploring the impact of religion in 21st-century America as a show that is actually about gods in 21st-century America. Which, really, is not that hard to understand.

 

[Tenacity]

And we know there's a major gay male character in Discovery, something that presumably will not be glossed over.

I wonder how hard it would be for government censors to "remove" the gay character?

The dialog will be translated into the main Chinese language, so altering a few words would change the meaning of what the characters say. And any scenes that make clear that the character is gay could be deleted, or the entire episode not shown.

And would CBS have any say in this, or would they ignore it in order to have access to the Chinese market?

 

[Christopher]

And would CBS have any say in this, or would they ignore it in order to have access to the Chinese market?

I don't think the makers of a work of fiction can necessarily control how it's edited and censored in other countries. But that wouldn't have to affect the original work itself.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I don't think the makers of a work of fiction can necessarily control how it's edited and censored in other countries. But that wouldn't have to affect the original work itself.

Wasn't TOS changed into a kid's show in Germany?

 

[Beagleman]

Wasn't TOS changed into a kid's show in Germany?

Not really, but Patterns of Force wasn't broadcasted back in the day and the first dub of Amok Time had the dialouge changed to remove Spocks need to "mate" and instead gave Spock some kind of "space fever".

 

[USS Triumphant]

Whomever wrote up that list of Gaiman's prominent works left out "Coraline", which is a pretty hideous oversight given its popularity.

I love Star Trek, AND I also love Neil Gaiman (both for his own works and in his capacity as the official biographer of Douglas Adams). Why are mommy and daddy fighting?

Which one will be remembered 20 years from now can be addressed in two ways. If you mean by *more* people (the general audience), then probably Discovery, yes, and especially yes if it makes it (even in re-runs) to a broader platform like Netflix, CBS, or the CW. But if you mean by *our* people (those of us that indulge deeply in nerdy niche fandoms ), then I'd say all bets are off. Because yes, Discovery is Trek, but we can't predict the quality of either at this point, and who'd have thought a show with just one season ("Firefly") would inspire a level of devotion to rival Trek? And Gaiman may not create a LOT, but he consistently creates *quality*.

 

[jaime]

Whomever wrote up that list of Gaiman's prominent works left out "Coraline", which is a pretty hideous oversight given its popularity.

I love Star Trek, AND I also love Neil Gaiman (both for his own works and in his capacity as the official biographer of Douglas Adams). Why are mommy and daddy fighting?

Which one will be remembered 20 years from now can be addressed in two ways. If you mean by *more* people (the general audience), then probably Discovery, yes, and especially yes if it makes it (even in re-runs) to a broader platform like Netflix, CBS, or the CW. But if you mean by *our* people (those of us that indulge deeply in nerdy niche fandoms ), then I'd say all bets are off. Because yes, Discovery is Trek, but we can't predict the quality of either at this point, and who'd have thought a show with just one season ("Firefly") would inspire a level of devotion to rival Trek? And Gaiman may not create a LOT, but he consistently creates *quality*.

I was talking only about his adult works, which is why I skipped Coraline, the day I swapped my dad for two goldfish, wolves in the walls and Odd and the frost giants. Did I miss anything now? XD

And once I would have agreed with you, but Oceans really left a bad taste in the mind.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I was talking only about his adult works, which is why I skipped Coraline, the day I swapped my dad for two goldfish, wolves in the walls and Odd and the frost giants. Did I miss anything now? XD

"Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", and I can't recall if you mentioned "Stardust".

 

[jaime]

"Don't Panic: Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", and I can't recall if you mentioned "Stardust".

Ah yes. I did miss Stardust...adult, but originally an illustrated prose sort of comic cum fairy tale story. He does publish the same things two or three times. It's frustrating. I only sort of count his Adams biography...wasn't it just as he was leaving journalism? He also did some boy band or another..
I would like him to return to his earlier form TBH, even if it's in a different way.

 

[gamer1]

As a whole, Star Trek is EXTREMELY formulaeic and centered on current western european/american civilization. Even in its diversity it offers nothing but cliches. I completely understand him.