• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

News Season 2 will be the last (show cancelled)

Some people just do not make you want to be in the same room with them, nor even country. :lol:
And sometimes even country isn't enough...
live_on_this_planet_futurama.gif


Fun fact searching for this quote had google's shitty ai bombarding me with suicide prevention hotlines.
 
Well if I was a betting man I would guess we won't be seeing anyone puking sparkling glitter, an over abundance of crying and feels and no more focus on relationships and dating in so many episodes. I suspect we'll get back to the core of trek.
This is something fans of old properties really need to come to grips with. The reason you see modern Trek shows getting more in touch with the feelings of the characters is because that's what film and television as a whole has evolved into. It's not a trend that Trek is chasing. The days of static characters just doing jobs or missions without big emotional arcs is just not a thing anymore. Star Trek is just a rare example of a franchise that has been around long enough that you can actually see how writing styles have evolved within that franchise rather that just looking at the broader scope of film/tv medium. It's why DS9 was heavily criticized as being too soap opera-ish for its time.

The one other franchise you can point out to is the James Bond films. At first the films were largely episodic and the protagonist rarely ever actually had emotional story arcs in any film, because he was just a cool unflappable spy that was on a mission. Then the 80s happened. That's when a lot of films started to delve more into the emotional arcs of its characters. Indiana Jones. Rambo. RoboCop. John McClane. A sea change was happening. That's when Timothy Dalton stepped in and suddenly there's a push for Bond to show more emotional depth than prior (with exceptions like OHMSS). Pierce Brosnan would continue that, always having a personal stake in each of the films. Craig pushed it even further. I see Bond fans lament over how the films are no longer like they used to be in the 60s, without realizing why that happened in the broader scheme of things.

SNW is probably about as close as we'll ever get to a classical style Trek made in the 21st century. It has its episodic storytelling we would expect from TOS, but there was no chance that the characters would not undergo some type of growth. The writers took a smiling Spock from "The Cage" and decided this younger Spock is someone who's attempting to be more open emotionally with Pike's crew, before he ultimately ends up at the beginning of TOS as seemingly more cold and logical.
 
This is something fans of old properties really need to come to grips with. The reason you see modern Trek shows getting more in touch with the feelings of the characters is because that's what film and television as a whole has evolved into. It's not a trend that Trek is chasing. The days of static characters just doing jobs or missions without big emotional arcs is just not a thing anymore. Star Trek is just a rare example of a franchise that has been around long enough that you can actually see how writing styles have evolved within that franchise rather that just looking at the broader scope of film/tv medium. It's why DS9 was heavily criticized as being too soap opera-ish for its time.
The part that makes it tough to swallow is that it's so frequently done in one monotonous register. As people on this board never tire of pointing out, Kirk was very emotionally expressive and often emotionally vulnerable, but in a way that broadly felt like an actual person (or at least, an exaggeration of one), and was reactive to the specific situations he found himself in.

With Discovery, SNW, and the back half of SFA, everyone just sort of enters a default therapy-speak-ish voice (which infamously has the reality-warping ability to pause whatever crisis is occurring so as to give the characters more time to demonstrate this style of writing), that almost feels like it's free-floating separate to the characters and plot, like it's some metafictional layer that keeps intruding.

La'an might be the main victim of this phenomenon I can think of, she's established early on as a protocol-obsessed hardass which is a fun character archetype, and by the third season there's essentially no trace of that left and she's just been homogenised into the same beige-ness as everyone else (complete with a love triangle and several weepy DSC-esque "processing" scenes).
 
And others are free to tell themselves that what they wanted to see would also have lasted 10 years and created half a dozen shows and then been immune to studio politics.
I've not come across anyone expressing that sentiment. What is known is the reality of the current situation: the Star Trek franchise is--for now--dead, and its in such a condition that no one can even predict a likely future for it.

If the Kurtzman era is a smoking pile of rubble, then Voyager and Enterprise are steaming piles of dog shit.
Well, you can take up the VOY matter with its biggest cheerleader--Samuel Cockings from the Trekyards YouTube channel. He's the guy who once referred to VOY as a "legend". Yep. :lol:

Hell, TOS lasted just 79 episodes that aired on NBC for three seasons and was a series that never got higher than 52nd in the year-end ratings. :shifty:
The truth of TOS true appeal while on NBC (when the network replaced the Neilsen rating system) has been a matter of record for some time. Moreover, NBC was interested in getting any kind of Star Trek back, in the early 70s, leading to the network airing TAS, while TOS had already ascended to cultural phenomenon in syndication. There is no parallel to the TOS case with any other ST property, and that is most certainly not happening in the Kurtzman era. I seriously doubt SFA is going to come roaring back to become a cultural phenomenon, with mass audience demand for more.
 
I've not come across anyone expressing that sentiment. What is known is the reality of the current situation: the Star Trek franchise is--for now--dead, and its in such a condition that no one can even predict a likely future for it.
Of course but to ascribe that it's current state is a direct result of the choices made comes with the implication that an alternative would have yielded a better outcome an alternative to the preference of the one making the implication.

To say the decisions made by Kurzman are the direct and only cause of the franchise's impending hiatus has the connotation that one believes they could have done better and what they wanted would also have lasted the same 10 years and been so wildly successful that it would have negated or survived company sales and mergers.

If this is not the intent, then to say Kurzman has damaged the franchise and caused its state of non production is nothing but hollow words and nonsensical hate.
 
What is known is the reality of the current situation: the Star Trek franchise is--for now--dead, and its in such a condition that no one can even predict a likely future for it.
Good.



. I seriously doubt SFA is going to come roaring back to become a cultural phenomenon, with mass audience demand for more
No one is expecting this. This is a straw man that basically takes the newest Star Trek and demands it be just like the old.

It's bullshit, pure and simple. Not even the TNG films did like TOS, yet today they would be celebrated as a failure. Imagine cheering on failures.
 
In the glitter vomit discussion *checks post dates* last week, I was thinking that the absurd Cheron black-on-one-side-white-on-the-other aliens would be the perfect example to bring up, for how silly alien characteristics often occur in Star Trek, and, lo and behold, @Michael was on the same wavelength and brought it up.

If Star Trek aliens were meant to be taken seriously as such, we wouldn't, couldn't even have Spock; alien interbreeding would not be a thing. I'm not willing to toss that baby out with the bathwater, not even close.
 
If Star Trek aliens were meant to be taken seriously as such, we wouldn't, couldn't even have Spock; alien interbreeding would not be a thing.
People say this a lot, but I've never understood why. Humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals were all compatible in that way, I wonder why a species as close to humans as Klingons or Vulcans wouldn't work.
 
People say this a lot, but I've never understood why. Humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals were all compatible in that way, I wonder why a species as close to humans as Klingons or Vulcans wouldn't work.
Especially as most humanoid races were cut from the same cloth by the Preservers/Progenitors whathaveyou. That distant relation probably does allow for hybridisation, fertile hybridisation at that. Plus as they intended for all the races they made to come together and be united being able to interbreed would probably be a deliberate part of the design.
 
People say this a lot, but I've never understood why. Humans, Denisovans, and Neanderthals were all compatible in that way, I wonder why a species as close to humans as Klingons or Vulcans wouldn't work.

So, your real-world counterexample is three species of the same genus from the same planet. OK. :guffaw:

Especially as most humanoid races were cut from the same cloth by the Preservers/Progenitors whathaveyou. That distant relation probably does allow for hybridisation, fertile hybridisation at that. Plus as they intended for all the races they made to come together and be united being able to interbreed would probably be a deliberate part of the design.

Never mind that in real life humans can't interbreed with all mammals, let alone all vertebrates or animals.
 
So, your real-world counterexample is three species of the same genus from the same planet. OK. :guffaw:
Well, that's that, then - the verisimilitude of Star Trek has yet again been reduced to tatters.

I like the idea that being from a different planet would be the crucial cutoff point here. Bajorans and humans are so similar that Kira's capable of carrying a human baby after a transplant, but any sperm who reach a Bajoran egg would just think "actually, nah, this egg's from the wrong floating rock."
 
Never mind that in real life humans can't interbreed with all mammals, let alone all vertebrates or animals.
True but in real life human evolution wasn't artificial and designed to grow into the same model as pretty much every other race in the galaxy. One assumes based on Salome's monologue that animals existed throughout the galaxy just not sapient species. So it's a very different rulebook in play. It just stands to reason that human-alien interbreeding was something planned for.
 
La'an might be the main victim of this phenomenon I can think of, she's established early on as a protocol-obsessed hardass which is a fun character archetype, and by the third season there's essentially no trace of that left and she's just been homogenised into the same beige-ness as everyone else (complete with a love triangle and several weepy DSC-esque "processing" scenes).

There are literally episodes about her realising she's got a stick stuck where the sun don't shine, and warming up, over the past several seasons.
 
I mean, I've already admitted that I'd not want to part with Spock. The same goes for other interspecies characters, like K'Ehleyr and B'Elanna. There is nothing to dismiss here on the level of character or fictional value.

But scientifically plausible they are not. To think that glitter vomit is somehow less plausible than something completely implausible like the way Star Trek treats extraterrestrial species is not actually rational. It's so far away from what's scientifically plausible, it's all just crowded together at the endpoint of completely made up.
 
There are literally episodes about her realising she's got a stick stuck where the sun don't shine, and warming up, over the past several seasons.
That's my point; by S3 she's arrived at the same tone as the rest of the characters. Same for Una, who we were told was terrifying and stern in S1, but talks and acts like more or less everyone else on the crew by S3.

That doesn't feel like character development to me, it feels instead like a flattening where any interesting or identifying aspects a character has are removed to ensure they fit the emotional house style that we've seen since Discovery.

Any personality traits that could actually make a character feel human and fun to watch are treated as something they have to overcome, or something they only do to hide THE PAIN or w/e.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top