Also, Dr. T'Ana from Lower Decks lost her tail sometime in the past.
On my third rewatch of the Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. Might contain spoilers
Also, Dr. T'Ana from Lower Decks lost her tail sometime in the past.
Individuals such as FPAlpha like to publicly identify with the messages of tolerance that are espoused in the various Trek productions, yet when discussion arises around an individual with socio-political viewpoints that differ from their own they immediately resort to immature insults.
I have been deeply offended by recent comments made by Tim Russ, but I have no desire to troll the Voyager boards by calling him "batshit insane stupid" because I'm here for discussion about Trek (and related subjects) and not the political opinions or personal behaviors of entitled actors.
It's perfectly normal to be put off by an artist's contributions to a project when you know they also publicly espouse beliefs that bring pointless harm to innocent people, especially when it's a known jackass like Kevin Sorbo.
At the very least he should be mocked for his interventions being at least the partial cause of Andromeda's intellectual/creative collapse for the rest of it's run.
That got me wondering. Sorbo was involved with the development of the show from day one, so I'm not sure it would even have been made in the first place if Tribune hadn't been looking for a starring vehicle for him. (At the time, he was still seen as the appealing and popular star of Hercules, since the attitudes he's known for now hadn't yet become evident.) Although I suppose it's possible, since they were also looking for a starring vehicle for Keith Hamilton Cobb and specifically asked Robert Hewitt Wolfe to create a character for him. So if Sorbo hadn't been involved, maybe the show would've been made as a Cobb vehicle.
Still, without Sorbo, it would probably have been profoundly different, as it was Sorbo who wanted to do it as a space-based series even though it was derived from the Earth-based Genesis II/Planet Earth premise.
And I don't think Sorbo can be presumed to carry too much of the blame for the dumbing down of the show, since the same thing happened to Earth: Final Conflict. It was more a function of what the Tribune/Fireworks executives demanded -- their prioritization of low budget and lowbrow action, their constant micromanaging, their tendency to fire showrunners and replace them with cheaper, less talented ones. Sorbo may have fit in well with their approach, but he didn't create it.
People like Kevin Sorbo deserve everything they've been called on here. If someone is an asshole and an idiot, they deserve to be called an asshole and an idiot, and we have every right to call them assholes and idiots. If a conversation about a show comes up and someone doesn't like an actor or someone else involved with the show, then there's nothing wrong expressing that dislike.
Hell, you kind of have to with people like Sorbo or JK Rowling or it could look to other people like you agree with what they've said.
Oh JK Rowling. She's a bit of a know it all
Thanks for posting that -- some good stuff there.
"We actually got along great with new show runner Bob Engels and the other third season writers. Bob is a brilliant guy but didn't really have a sci-fi brain...but also wanted the trains to keep running on a 22 episode a season show and Ash and I were idea machines so he pretty much let us do our own thing. Which means you have this odd situation in season three where Ash and I did a little mini-season that was more or less in continuity with Robert Wolfe's original vision and then there were...whatever those other episodes were."
I guess that kind of explains why season 3 felt like 2 or 3 different shows depending on who was writing it, but I think he's being diplomatic toward Bob Engels, whose dialogue writing bore little resemblance to how speakers of English usually form sentences and convey ideas. Still, it sounds as if the studio brought in the wrong guy for the job and dumped him into a situation he was ill-prepared for, so it can't all be blamed on him.
I'm reminded of Fred Freiberger's situation taking over Star Trek in season 3, when most of the previous writers had left, so the new staff didn't really get any training in how to write for the show. In this case, at least Zack & Ash were still on board, but as Zack says, they were doing their own show independently of what the other writers were doing. (And that included two other veteran staffers who'd been there from the start, the duo of Matt Kiene & Joe Reinkemeyer, so there's not much excuse for why their episodes didn't feel of a piece with the previous seasons the way Z&A's stuff did.)
Others have already addressed this pretty well. I will add another angle:
Kevin Sorbo is not a poster here. For that reason, it's perfectly fine for a person on the board to refer to Kevin Sorbo as a jackass, asshole, or, heaven forbid, a terrible actor. The same would be true if you were to make similar comments about Tim Russ, even if you have no desire to.
I suggest being careful about how you refer to fellow TrekBBSers, though. This skirts the line of the "post, not poster guidance." You can make the point without singling anyone out.
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