Spoilers Star Trek: Lower Decks 3x01 - "Grounded"

and for disco, and for pic, and for prodigy...

 

Yeah, but they didn't mess up the international releases of those, whereas LD season 1... all we poor Brits had for months was that YT release and they took it down after two days.

 

You'd be in for a treat! It's influenced in part by "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" involving certain aspects, but RD clearly does its own thing instead and there's no real direct parallel, only the occasional aura. Mostly due to the dry nature of some of the jokes. Yeah, it could be described as "THHGTTG on acid".

I might have a suggestion, which may seem odd, but then again a lot of my posts seem odd so this one will be less odd by comparison... or more, depending on what qualifies as "odd", apart from me but I'm getting into recursive tautology and I digress:

Start with series two and move forward in sequential order. Some people do dare to slog through series 1, which isn't bad, but as series 2 (commissioned via technicality, fortunately!) starts every episode with a basic premise recap so there is no real continuity, only something for anyone new to the series to understand the gist of so they can get right to the good stuff.

Continue from series 2 sequentially through series 6, then go back to do series 1.

From there, I can only say that series 7 through 9 are different beasts, often experimental, and the most robust format of the show wouldn't return until series 10.

You might want to try series 7's opener, which started years after 6's ended - if you don't like the tone, then maybe skipping to season 7's 2-part finale as it ultimately sets up the format for series 8. Series 8 - which IMHO is better, but not perfect. Series 9 was made ten years after 8 was, is decent, but good enough at the time to warrant a proper renewal for the fairly glorious series 10 - present. Any episode skipped can be returned to; at the time I kept watching but some people didn't. It's hard to gauge interest, but if you have the stamina and dexterity, doing them all in order but skipping to the next series if an episode feels so awful...

I forgot to mention, Red Dwarf does its own mini-reboots. Series 2 is almost a reboot. Series 3 is and that's when everyone says the show got big. Series 5 is also a minor reboot. Series 6 is a big reboot. Series 7's is huge. Series 8 tries to go back to basics. 9 is its own thing. 10 takes the best of all the different styles and perfects them all. Even the crap ones.

If you do want to watch in order, maybe the first two episodes of series 1 then move on. The others are okay, but they're not really needed as they don't add much to future continuity. Rarely is there any and, yep, the mini-reboots will change stuff too. Especially between 5 and 6 when they attempted to make the show in the USA. The DVD features on that debacle are a must-see. They chose the right people for the job, especially if you're a fan of a certain Dan Fielding, Harold T Stone, Roz Russell, et al... but the right production people can't guarantee a workable translation either. A bit of a shame, some of the new jokes worked wonders. Others didn't. Loved both Cat characters. Am I digressing on a digression's digression from the other digression again? Oops...

From memory, episodes from the (IMHO) least-effective seasons include:

Future Echoes
Waiting for God

Tikka to Ride
Blue
Beyond a Joke (this episode has Don Henderson's final role. A great performance already, it's made even more amazing when you realize he was suffering from throat cancer at the time... he did do some great villain roles...)
Epideme/Nanarchy

Cassandra
Krytie TV
Only the Good

The others from 1, 7 and 8 are "there" and might do more for you. The making-of documentaries go into some of the behind-the-scenes turmoil as well.

 

It's not really a reboot, it's more of a retool. This is like saying Deep Space 9 rebooted itself by adding the Defiant and Worf. A reboot is reinitialising the show from first principles. The Abramsverse movies are a reboot of Star Trek: The Original Series, and that is definitely not what Red Dwarf is doing. They're the same characters, on the same ships, with the same histories; they just shake things up a bit and find ways to tell stories that they couldn't or didn't tell before.

(Sorry, but people using the word "reboot" as an umbrella term to describe any slight modification or revival or update to a show is a pet peeve of mine.)

 

Thank you much for the clarification! It is appreciated. "Retool" is definitely a more appropriate term, and I've been on the same bandwagon with reuse or redefining of words as well. (A biggie for me is "drop" supplanting "release". Or "tech" replacing "technology", "technician", "technique", "technophile", "technicality", "techy", etc... (on a fun note, I just remembered how Dave Lister went on about hating words than end in "ible", LOL... ))

 

Reboot is one of the most abused and misunderstood terms in popular entertainment. Most things called reboots aren't but they'll continue to call the new version that because that's what we expect a revival or sequel or spinoff to be called.

 

Ugh, I might watch this… I’ve been putting it off as I don’t like ‘comedy’.

I don’t believe in reboots any more. I don’t think that they *actually* exist.

My friends took me to the cinema this weekend to see a movie, they are broadening my horizons as they think that I need to start watching more than only Star Trek. The film that I watched was ‘Spider Man No Way Home’. We watched it in the 4DX cinema which was a lot of fun. When Spider Man was swinging on his spider webs the seats that we sat on moved with him, a bit like a rollercoaster. When Spider Man went somewhere cold, such as Khan’s house, the whole cinema went cold too. There were lots of extra flashes and smoke effects, as well as splashes of water if anybody in the film ever got wet. It was quite the sensory experience.

Anyway, I digress. In this film I assume that all of the Spider Men who interacted via the subspace anomaly were different actors playing the same role in previous films or series.

Perhaps Star Trek can have a Star Trek film one day in the same vein, it can star William Shatner, Christopher Pine, Paul Wesley and James Crawley. They could all *be* Kirk and accept it amongst themselves and work as a team to defeat ‘something’ or ‘someone’.

 

That would be correct.

 

But.. they do.

 

James Bond movies were rebooted. The 1962-2002 continuity with the first five cinematic Bond actors as the same in-universe 007 was laid to rest so that the Daniel Craig timeline could be produced. But most "reboots" are just sequels, spinoffs retaining in-universe connections or revivals launched years later.

 

Why do I love this show? I think the below sum up my feelings well. But also... it reminds me of being a younger, more enthusiastic person, hanging with my friends and making jokes and speculating about all the things we loved.

Kinda like being here.

 

They're all the same continuity if you assume he's a Time Lord

 

They were booked to play Rom-aid and when they were cancelled there were riots from Rigel 7 to Gannordan Core

 

I've come back to this on a lull and WOW, I'm grateful it didn't go how I thought it would go. I'm back onboard TLD train for sure.

Godspeed, Captain Gavin.

 

8 / 10

After re-watching STLD seasons 1-2 on Blu-ray (season 2 especially has some very insightful episode commentaries) and catching up on Prodigy on Paramount+, I'm now seeing season 3 of this show for the first time. Considering how weak the previous two season openers were, I was pleasantly surprised just how nice this one was.

The Bozeman theme park was amazing. It actually gets the tone right at laughing with the audience and not at them... obviously it's not the literal historical site so it's fun just running with it, FC theme and all, and builds off Cochrane's reaction to his future fame. The old transporter chief bit also actually works with situational subtly and not cringe anviliciousness. The obligatory cringe sex joke with the reproducing electric zapping space creatures at least passes quickly enough and it's like ok that box is checked and quickly moved on from.

Subverting the trial works with Starfleet actually having it's shit together, complete with the Bateson and Tuvok non-cameos, and the Pakleds samaritan snaring themselves into false flagging their own planet makes predictable sense in hindsight but was a good creative choice.

Character wise, Lower Decks' weakest link has always been Mariner. As someone that only started watching the show earlier this year, her initial portrayal as an incredibly toxic, codependent, and abusive "friend" that seems to bend the universe around her... is a glaring problem. But in fits and starts, later season 1 and parts of season 2 did further develop her character away from the Rick archetype, especially with "Crisis Point" -- although with major backsliding in "We'll Always Have Tom Paris". And this episode does a good job further hinting about what went wrong in her past, and making sense of how she could still be in Starfleet, at least in her post-season 1 state. Realizing that she's a lot like that brother or sister of a friend that grew up in an upper middle class professional family that was bright and capable and could have gone onto a major university and career success, but just fell off the path through no single point of failure but instead parents setting too high of expectations and then trying to rescue their kid from small failure just setting off a chain that then self sustainingly fed on itself into greater and greater disfunction. Captain Freeman seems to finally realize this when she asks Ransom to take over as Mariner's direct report, trying to find a middle ground to finally break this cycle. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it least it does seem to help realistically ground the character.

Finally, about the uniform variety that kept coming up when I skimmed the earlier posts... The First Contact uniforms just don't look that good in animation. Too much black and gray, too little distinguishing color. I can see why they went with something different, although having the in-universe explanation be that Starfleet has an outcast fuck up and shit jobs division with a distinct uniform so people can be visually identified as second class is a major problem! That said maybe the Dauntless uniforms in Prodigy a few years later can be an evolution away from this mentality. I haven't seen Picard season 1, but maybe that show's crica 2380s uniforms can be established as being used just by the officers working on the Hobus star evacuation project?

 

No, because hey were worn by officers who definitely had nothing to do with the evacuation effort, including two who were wearing the uniforms after the supernova occurred.

And it's not Hobus anymore. Picard retconned it to the star in the Romulus system.

 

not exactly: now it’s “the romulan star”, which could be the star in the Romulus system but also something else.

 

No, the intent is that it’s the Romulan home star.

 

And how do you know that, exactly?
Also, what was Spock’s plan then?

 

Well, even if you change the name and location of the star that goes supernova Spock's plan remains to save Romulus - in the direct path of destruction from the resulting shockwave - using revolutionary Red Matter to create an artificial black hole that can suck up the shockwave before it reaches the planet. Retconning the star from Hobus to the Romulan Sun doesn't really change anything about Trek 2009 other than the shockwave allegedly threatening the entire galaxy.