Production Quality Of Picard
- Thread starter TRON JA307020
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Simple, logic.so when you move away from one end of a spectrum you don't get closer to the other?
A move to the middle is not a move to the far side.so when you move away from one end of a spectrum you don't get closer to the other?
in relative terms, you are moving closer to the other side.
So is ENT dystopian then ?
Why would more of one thing not mean less of its opposite? It's logical.
so when you move away from one end of a spectrum you don't get closer to the other?
To say that something is "more dystopian" because it is not perfect is deceptive and inaccurate language. "Dystopia" is not a synonym for "any fictional society where bad things happen." It is not even a synonym for "a setting where terrible things happen" or "a setting where crimes against sentient beings" happen. Dystopia refers specifically to societies primarily characterized by authoritarianism and/or oppression. (If we're talking YA dystopia, my girlfriend likes to say that a YA dystopia is one in which an authoritarian society is broken in a very specific way that can be fixed by a 16-year-old.
)The Federation in PIC is just not dystopian. It is a society that committed a terrible sin of inaction (failing to help save the Romulans), and which has discriminated against and fostered widespread prejudice against an out-group (synthetic lifeforms). But it is not a society primarily characterized by authoritarianism or oppression. Federation citizens have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Federation citizens still vote for the Federation Council and Federation President. Nobody is living in poverty in the Federation; the unemployed soon-to-be grad student Dahj Asha has an apartment that today would go for thousands of dollars per month, and even Raffi, living off the grid, has adequate shelter, access to the planetary internet, and seems to have enough to eat.
If anything, VOY portrayed a Federation that was closer to dystopia than PIC -- because VOY depicted the Federation as using slave labor from sentient EMH Mark I holograms. There is, perhaps surprisingly, no indication that that is still the case in PIC; the only synthetic laborers we see are the F-series androids who were clearly not sentient. As far as we know from PIC, the synth ban only prevented further development of artificial intelligence; we have no indication (so far) that sentient holograms like the EMHs were affected, and all previous synths that we know of died before the ban.
You can reasonably say the Federation is depicted in darker terms than in TNG. That would be a defensible position, particularly with regards to the development of widespread (but not universal!) prejudice against synths. But it's really not reasonable to use the word "dystopian" for a society that, while deeply flawed, is still not fundamentally oppressive.
If he wasn’t for him you would not have Star Trek.
That does not make him the arbiter of what makes for good Star Trek or for good storytelling. In point of fact, many of the elements that made Star Trek more than just another 1960s sci-fi show were introduced by other people, including Gene L. Coon, D.C. Fontana, and Leonard Nimoy. Auteur theory simply does not apply to TOS.
sure and that’s why tos is far superior to std and stp. They utilized actual science fiction writers and people that knew how to write. They were able to make entertain gone hour stories following Genes rules for the most part. Writers today just dont have that kind if talent. Everyone has to have a moral grey scale. It’s frankly getting tiring and boring,
Yeah, Michael Chabon who's won the Pulizter, the Hugo and the Nebula is talentless and doesn't know how to write. Kristen Beyer who's been writing Trek in prose and on screen for over a decade doesn't know how to write.
Genes rules for TOS
A TV PROFESSIONAL, YOU ALREADY KNOW THE FOLLOWING SEVEN RULES:
I. Build your episode on an action-adventure frame- work. We must reach out, hold and entertain a mass audience of some 20.,000,000 people or we simply don't stay on the air.
II. Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry. Joe Friday doesn't stop to explain the mechanics of his .38 before he uses it; Kildare never did a monologue about the theory of anes- thetics; Matt Dillon never identifies and dis- cusses the breed of his horse before he rides off on it.
III. Keep in mind that science fiction is not a separate field of literature with rules of its own, but, indeed, needs the same ingredients as any story -- including a jeopardy of some type to someone we learn to care about, climactic build, sound motivitation, you know the list.
IV. Then, with that firm foundation established, inter- weave in it any statement to be made about man, society and so on. Yes, we want you to have some- thing to say, but say it entertainingly as you do on any other show. We don't need essays, how- ever brilliant.
V. Remember always that STAR TREK is never fantasy; whatever happens, no matter how unusual or bizarre, must have some basis in either fact or theory and stay true to that premise (don't give the enemy Starflight capability and then have them engage our vessel with grappling hooks and drawn swords.)
VI. Don't try to tell a story about whole civilizations . We've never yet been able to get a usable story from a writer who began... "I see the strange civilization which...".
VII. Stop worrying about not being a scientist. How many cowboys, police officers and doctors wrote westerns, detective and hospital shows?
Bad example. Friday rarely used his gun, and even more rarely missed an opportunity to engage in an infodump monologue.
Exhibit A:
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If you move to the middle, you have moved away from all sides equally.
Michael Chabon is the recipient of the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novel and 2008 Nebula Award for Best Novel for his science fiction novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, as well as the recipient of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and a 2012 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is not only an actual science fiction writer; he is an actual science fiction writer who has achieved the highest levels of artistic and professional recognition a science fiction writer may receive in that field.
Kirsten Beyer has been writing Star Trek novels for around a decade and a half, and her novels were consistently among the best-reviewed and most beloved of the novel line, particularly her Voyager novels Full Circle and Children of the Storm.
TOS had an episode written by Sherri Lewis, the creator of Lamb Chop.
Spare me this weaksauce.
You have every right to find moral ambiguity boring; that is a subjective aesthetic reaction, but please do not frame your subjective taste as rationally superior. And writing morally ambiguous works is not a violation of genre rules; if it were, "The Cold Equations" would not have become a science fiction classic, nor would The Martian Chronicles.
It wasn’t the writers’ jobs to come up with ‘science fiction’ stories for the Abrams films. It was their job to come up with action stories set in a science fiction setting, in order to put asses in theater seats, because those movies were meant to be action films. Why? Because that’s what gets people to buy movie tickets.
And really, comparing 80 episodes of a science fiction show to 2 two-and-a-half hour action films is a completely invalid comparison.
And...? That doesn't make him the perfect arbiter of all Star Trek either.
You would rather have the black and white moralizing rather than acknowledging that life isn't black and white?
Impossible.
You're saying that if you leave NY and move towards Kansas City, you're moving away from LA as well.
The simple and obvious fact is that you approach LA as well, as both are in the same direction you're traveling. You're clearly getting closer to both KC and LA, and away from NY. Draw it out and prove me wrong XD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia
I found a nice sentence in the Wiki article about Minority Report:
That's what we see in most cases: a combination of both.
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I know the topic has shifted from shirts -- where it originally was -- but one thing stood out to me while I was re-watching "Et in Arcadia Ego" and you can blame this thread for my noticing something I wouldn't have noticed before. The shirt Picard's wearing for most of the episode wouldn't have looked out of place on TNG. It's toned down a little, but I chalk that up to the difference between the 2360s and the 2390s.
Back to your regularly scheduled Utopia vs. Dystopia, already in-progress.
Back to your regularly scheduled Utopia vs. Dystopia, already in-progress.
I agree. That is a big part of my thing with the fashion in PIC-it looks like a more subdued update to the colors of TNG. I would expect that, especially after the whole "Dominion War" kerfuffle that probably severely impacted Federation culture as a whole.
Cool. Where's the part in PIC that I should be scared of that reflects the Federation?
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