Trek XI to be alternate timeline, according to AICN

[Samuel T. Cogley]

UWC Defiance said:

Samuel T. Cogley said:

UWC Defiance said:
In fact, it's this level of fascination and insistence on obeisance to every bit of Trek continuity that killed the Franchise.

Well, that and years of mediocre product, but who's counting.

One begets the other.

Oh, please.

You've been saying for years -- and rightly so -- that Paramount isn't answerable to the hard-core fans.

And now you expect us to believe this:

If the studio can't successfully find a way to just ignore most of the 1966-2005 Trek Franchise in favor of concentrating on the core entertainment values of the thing, then they're screwed as far as making Trek movies or tv shows are concerned. They can not and will not go back to the old version of Trek because they're not a charitable organization for obsessives.

So, for just how many of the last 40 years have they been a charitable organization for obsessives? Just how long have the obsessives held them hostage, unwilling slaves to fanboy continuity? None, of course.

TPTB are going to do whatever they think is profitable and the fans will just have to deal. That's how it has always been.

Continuity has almost never been the problem.

Let's take the series one by one...

TOS: It set the stage. It made the rules. It had nothing to conflict with but itself.

TNG: Set 80 years in TOS' future. It had a blank slate. It only had to connect the dots that it chose to connect. How often does "Boston Legal" refer to events that happened in 1927?

If continuity was an issue, it was because they chose to make it an issue.

DS9: Aside from the set-up in the first episode, we're now on the far side of the quadrant, away from existing continuity. Blank slate all over again. The rules are different here. It only had to connect the dots that it chose to connect. How often does "Jericho" refer to events that happen in deep space?

If continuity was an issue, it was because they chose to make it an issue.

VOY: We flung ourselves into a whole new quadrant just to get away from all the old stuff. Everything is new again. Blank slate. It only had to connect the dots that it chose to connect. How often does "Lost" refer to events that happen at the edge of our galaxy?

If continuity was an issue, it was because they chose to make it an issue.

ENT: Prequel. One hundred years in TOS' past. (Or was it 150? Don't answer. I don't really care.) Sure, whatever happens here will eventually link up with the events of TOS, but not for a long, long time. Essentially, anything can happen here. After the series ends, there's still 90+ years to go til TOS. Fanboys can connect the dots, no matter what happens on ENT (especially with a Temporal Cold War to smooth out any wrinkles). It only had to connect the dots that it chose to connect. How often does "Deadwood" refer to events that happen in 2007?

If continuity was an issue, it was because they chose to make it an issue.

So, in summary, they've been doing "soft reboots" (whatever the hell that means) pretty much every time they make a new series.

The only difference with Trek XI is that they are laying that soft reboot right on top of one of the old series.

Continuity has never been the problem. If anything, the writers have done a great job of distancing themselves from continuity with each new premise, only to get lazy and drag the old stuff back in, little by little, often as cheap stunts or gimmicks.

Good storytelling has always been the answer.

Bad storytelling has always been the problem.

 

[xortex]

The creative constraints led to the crappy writing. Too many cooks all in bed with each other. Even Rick Berman acknowledged that. He and Brannon became interchangeble - as in up each other's brass.

 

[EJA]

If Leonard Nimoy is in it, then he should only appear at the beginning and end of the movie, narrating the adventure to someone long after the TOS era. Absolutely no time travel please, there's been enough of that. It should be a TOS movie, albeit with perhaps just a tiny, little, itsey-bitsey pinch of post-TOS thrown in.

 

[ancient]

Samuel T. Cogley said:

ENT: Prequel. One hundred years in TOS' past. (Or was it 150? Don't answer. I don't really care.) Sure, whatever happens here will eventually link up with the events of TOS, but not for a long, long time. Essentially, anything can happen here. After the series ends, there's still 90+ years to go til TOS. Fanboys can connect the dots, no matter what happens on ENT (especially with a Temporal Cold War to smooth out any wrinkles). It only had to connect the dots that it chose to connect. How often does "Deadwood" refer to events that happen in 2007?

If continuity was an issue, it was because they chose to make it an issue.

Good storytelling has always been the answer.

Bad storytelling has always been the problem.

Quoted for truth, especially for ENT. Continuity forced them to do nothing in ENT. The ship could look totally different, but instead they chose to recycle a design. The uniforms could look totally different, yet they chose to keep several TNG elements. They also chose to do a Borg episode, umpteen trillion more Klingon episodes, a Ferengi episode, etc, etc. Maintaining continuity is not an excuse for not having new ideas, as ENT's problems clearly showed.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The storytelling didn't get worse on every Trek series, every week, starting with DS9. Nor was the storytelling of TNG consistently superior to that of DS9 or Voyager or Enterprise.

If anything, a lot of people seemed to prefer the Behr/Coto eras of DS9 and "Enterprise" to the Piller/Braga beginning years of those shows.

What did go down steadily for ten years, regardless of show content, was the viewership.

People got bored.

TNG at its most successful didn't represent the best storytelling on the tube. It was, however, still reasonably novel in the experience of most of the folks watching it.

All of modern Trek sounds and looks and plays ridiculously alike; the whole "franchise" has not evolved nearly enough to compete with all the kinds of entertainment that people can choose to watch instead.

Trek died because people got bored with seeing the same kind of thing week after week for thousands of hours.

Insistence that everything be consistent with what had come before was and is a huge part of that sameness.

Quite the opposite of trek fans' insistence that the Trek milieu represents a "universe" of vast possibilities, in fact it's rather a narrow crevice that's been long since mined out and which makes good storytelling far more difficult than is worth the effort. Despite the fact that a couple of million devotees remain committed to sightseeing in that ditch, it has to change or the thing's not worth reanimating.

 

[xortex]

The production values sucked. Brannon was still the only one breaking new ground with big ideas. Coto was recycling. Noone was willing to take risks. If you were crazy and different and bold you were probably fired because of that. Politics in hell.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

xortex said:
The production values sucked.

Yeah, sure, okay.

Pretty much the same group of people who'd been doing the same things - with many technical improvements - since "Encounter At Farpoint." All of it based on what had been done on TOS.

By the end of "Enterprise" everything was done in a great deal more detail and at greater expense than it had been in TNG.

But, you know, there are only certain ways that Starfleet ships are allowed to look, that aliens are allowed to look, etc etc and so forth.

 

[xortex]

UWC Defiance said:

xortex said:
The production values sucked.

Yeah, sure, okay.

Pretty much the same group of people who'd been doing the same things - with many technical improvements - since "Encounter At Farpoint." All of it based on what had been done on TOS.

By the end of "Enterprise" everything was done in a great deal more detail and at greater expense than it had been in TNG.

But, you know, there are only certain ways that Starfleet ships are allowed to look, that aliens are allowed to look, etc etc and so forth.

Huh ? It didn't look at all like TOS. I even liked the Special effects way back when better. I suppose you're gonna tell me the music for one was better.

 

[ancient]

UWC Defiance said:

The storytelling didn't get worse on every Trek series, every week, starting with DS9. Nor was the storytelling of TNG consistently superior to that of DS9 or Voyager or Enterprise.

If anything, a lot of people seemed to prefer the Behr/Coto eras of DS9 and "Enterprise" to the Piller/Braga beginning years of those shows.

What did go down steadily for ten years, regardless of show content, was the viewership.

People got bored.

TNG at its most successful didn't represent the best storytelling on the tube. It was, however, still reasonably novel in the experience of most of the folks watching it.

All of modern Trek sounds and looks and plays ridiculously alike; the whole "franchise" has not evolved nearly enough to compete with all the kinds of entertainment that people can choose to watch instead.

Which is poor storytelling. Telling the same story 120 times is certainly poor storytelling, regardless of the content of the story.

You've shown that graph 1000 times, but the point was: Continuity does not restrict new ideas.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

ancient said:
You've shown that graph 1000 times...

And I'll show it 1000 times more.

Because...

People can argue forever about tastes and value judgments, but the facts are stubborn and haven't changed any.

Much of what Trek fans hanging around places like this consider great storytelling for Trek didn't intrigue enough people to even keep the audience numbers steady.

If one really dislikes DS9 - I casually dislike it, but I recognize that's just personal taste rather than the word of God - one might assert that all or most of the stories on all the shows following TNG were bad. That begs the question, though: were all or most of the stories on TNG good?

You can't make that assertion - "TNG stories were generally better than DS9 stories" - without starting quite an argument.

One can't honestly reconcile the good story/bad story hypothesis with what demonstrably happened to "Star Trek" commercially. It was at most one factor among several, and not the most reliable indicator.

 

[I Grok Spock]

Stylistically, TV changed a great deal from 1987 to 2005. The Trek spinoffs didn't. This disconnect is compounded by the fact that they were based on a storytelling style from the 1960s. TNG, DS9, and VOY are astonishingly similar in style and tone. Certainly, plenty of folks beyond the hardcore Trek fans tuned in to sample each TNG spinoff, but many of them they didn't find what they saw compelling enough to tune in week after week. I don't know if it was because the product wasn't as tasty as it used to be, or just past it's sell-by date.

I can only relate my own experience: I never cared much for TNG, but I stuck with most of it (at least through season 5, then skipped most of 6 and tuned in again at the end of 7). However, I saw nothing new or different enough in DS9 or VOY to motivate me to watch. ENT did seem to try to make an effort to change, but at it's core it didn't come close to breaking the mold. (Though ironically, and probably frustratingly to the producers, what little was changed seemed to piss off a vocal faction of the hardcore Trekkie fanbase). Ultimately, for me, the 4 modern Treks are one big pastel-beige-grey blur. I don't know if the confines of Trek's hundreds of hours of continuity contributed to this, but I don't see that it would help.

I don't know that saturation is the answer either. There are what, three CSI series running concurrently, plus various Law & Order series over the past couple decades? I don't watch any incarnation of these shows, so I don't know how much they've changed over the years to keep up with changing TV styles, but if dwindling ratings was primarily saturation based, you'd think they'd be played out by now (and maybe they are, I don't know the ratings history). Has the writing quality been maintained, improved or declined? A subjective question, so not much insight to be gained there.

I think that to have any hope of interesting enough people to make a profitable movie, TPTB are going to have to bring something new to the table. I am mildly surprised that "something new" involves old TV actors and convoluted character/show history-based story drivers, but then I ain't the one writing the scripts (or cheques).

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I Grok Spock said:
Stylistically, TV changed a great deal from 1987 to 2005. The Trek spinoffs didn't. This disconnect is compounded by the fact that they were based on a storytelling style from the 1960s. TNG, DS9, and VOY are astonishingly similar in style and tone...

...I think that to have any hope of interesting enough people to make a profitable movie, TPTB are going to have to bring something new to the table.

Exactly!

 

[Samuel T. Cogley]

UWC Defiance said:

I Grok Spock said:
Stylistically, TV changed a great deal from 1987 to 2005. The Trek spinoffs didn't. This disconnect is compounded by the fact that they were based on a storytelling style from the 1960s. TNG, DS9, and VOY are astonishingly similar in style and tone...

...I think that to have any hope of interesting enough people to make a profitable movie, TPTB are going to have to bring something new to the table.

Exactly!

Don't confuse consistency with continuity.

I'll agree that the consistent "flavor" of Trek got old, but I disagee that continuity hampered TPTB in any meaningful way. And if it ever did, it was their fault for allowing themselves to be constrained. They steer the ship. We don't.

I'll ramble more on this subject after I've finished defending a few more falsely-accused starship captains. Damn this job!

 

[Warped9]

Ghostface1701 said:
An article from "Moriaty" on Ain't It Cool News says that the new trek could use an alternate timeline as a way to reboot the series. For those who don't know him, Moriaty is a professional screenwriter, and got this information during a dinner with someone who has "a nice office on Melrose".

Link here

One quote from the article:

"Picture an incident that throws a group of Romulans back in time. Picture that group of Romulans figuring out where they are in the timeline, then deciding to take advantage of the accident to kill someone’s father, to erase them from the timeline before they exist, thereby changing all of the TREK universe as a result. Who would you erase? Whose erasure would leave the biggest hole in the TREK universe is the question you should be asking.

Who else, of course, but James T. Kirk?"

This wouldn't surprise me in the least. It is EXACTLY the type of shit that I expect from Trek producers today no matter who they are.

Watch it happen. Just watch and pretend to be surprised.

 

[ancient]

UWC Defiance said:

ancient said:
You've shown that graph 1000 times...

And I'll show it 1000 times more.

I don't dispute the graph, I just don't think it says anything meaningful about canon/continuity's effect of the franchise. I don't think that canon/continuity has any real effect on their ability to tell new stories, especially considering that some of the shows were set hundreds of years apart.

The Temporal Cold War was a device that was set up to let them 'reset' continuity to a degree, though in the end...there was no point in doing that anyway, since canon & continuity had almost nothing meaningful to say about the ENT time-period, aside from a vaguely described romulan war and a bunch of random trivia I don't remember.

Why did they even think that they needed the TCW in the first place? So they could include the Klingons? Yippee, Klingons!

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Samuel T. Cogley said:
Don't confuse consistency with continuity.

I consider visual and stylistic continuity part of the whole deal, though. And there's a conceptual aspect to continuity as well - the whole way in which non-human characters are treated in "Star Trek," for example.

 

[Cary L. Brown]

UWC Defiance said:

ancient said:
You've shown that graph 1000 times...

And I'll show it 1000 times more.

Because...

People can argue forever about tastes and value judgments, but the facts are stubborn and haven't changed any.

Much of what Trek fans hanging around places like this consider great storytelling for Trek didn't intrigue enough people to even keep the audience numbers steady.

If one really dislikes DS9 - I casually dislike it, but I recognize that's just personal taste rather than the word of God - one might assert that all or most of the stories on all the shows following TNG were bad. That begs the question, though: were all or most of the stories on TNG good?

You can't make that assertion - "TNG stories were generally better than DS9 stories" - without starting quite an argument.

One can't honestly reconcile the good story/bad story hypothesis with what demonstrably happened to "Star Trek" commercially. It was at most one factor among several, and not the most reliable indicator.

There are a number of factors behind the decline your chart shows, not the least of which is the fact that, at the start of TNG, there was still as sense of it being something fresh. By the time ENT went off the air, the shows had become somewhat generic-feeling. The "A-story/B-story" structure, set up by the same number of acts with the same timing structure... the multitude of aliens who reflect nothing more alient than the level of diversity of Southern California... the tendency to beat the audience over the head with "morals" rather than being subtle (as the original "Jonathan Swift" style was supposed to have given us)... it just became BORING.

We could tell how an episode would wrap up at the end of the first fifteen minutes... every single time.

Now, would this have "killed" the show if there hadn't also been what I think we all have to admit was an oversaturation of the market? Maybe not, but it sure didn't help.

Still, the oversaturation was the real killer. The show simply stopped being anything SPECIAL. It ceased being an adventure and became, instead, a PRODUCT.

It became the Kraft Macaroni and Cheese of Sci-Fi. Not unpleasant in small quantities, but nauseating if consumed regularly, and lacking in either significant substance or even significant flavor.

I think we ALL can agree on that.

The issue here is that some people... including you, D... seem to think that it's CANON that caused that. Others... including ME... think that blaming CANON is a cheat. It's a lie that people tell themselves because if you can blame "canon" you can avoid putting the blame where it belongs... on the producers that drained the well, and on the writers who stopped giving us exciting stories and started giving us boxed instant Macaroni and Cheese.

I blame the production staff. I find the allusions that it's somehow "canon" as the bogeyman behind the problems that the show encountered over the B&B era to be laughable.

A decent writer can come up with a compelling story while working within ANY setting. That setting can be contemporary America, or ancient Greece, or a future Federation, an alternate reality... or anyplace else. Blaming the "setting" as being restrictive and thus being behind the failure of the storytellers to tell good stories is just an ABSOLUTE JOKE.

 

[xortex]

Even Rodenberry thought he could do better than TOS.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Well, Roddenberry did half-succeed at modernizing Trek, with TNG. If reviews from the time are any indication, audiences of the late 1980s didn't perceive it as so completely stodgy and out-of-touch despite the fact that it was a bit old-fashioned even then.

Nimoy has said, with some reference to Abrams' other work and modern movies that he often has difficulty following what's going on. It didn't seem to be a negative commentary on his part. Presumably this extends to the Trek script to some degree - that is, he seems to have been commenting upon how different the story structure and style are from what he was used to.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Just going back to the graph, has anyone ever compared in to other shows with spinoffs. It seems like Trek is a special case.

Law and Order hasn't changed since the early 1980's, at least not in its main formula. It's been the same format.
Find a corpse, interview a bunch of random people in the area, bring in one or two for further questioning, the chief suggests checking out somebody's story, then arrest the guy who the chief suggested checking out. On to the trial -- the lawyers moralize, there's at least one "surprise", the prosecutor will be called into chambers and chewed out by the judge. Eventually, the right person gets convicted.

Yet, they can still draw an audience. And it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

CSI has several spinoffs, yet they don't seem to be going anywhere. I haven't noticed much of a dip in viewership.

So whatever is "wrong" with the Treks, it can't be just oversaturation. If it was, L&O and CSI should be gone, as well as the Simpsons (20+ years of the same cast -- with continuity), SG-1 and SG-Atlantis, and so on. It doesn't seem to work anywhere else.

I think the problem is "safe" storytelling. Not really cannon, just that everything is sort of like McDonald's -- don't risk having someone not like what Trek is saying. Well, it can't atract more people that way. People don't seek out McDonald's for good food, they eat it if it's all that's out there.

And maybe part of the story was more competition -- in the early 1990's there were two scifis -- B5, and DS9. I'm not sure of the first showing of SG-1, but by 2001, you had Farscape, and SG-1. Now we have Heros, Lost, Battlsestar, SG-1, and SG-Atlantis. Simply showing up isn't good enough. I suspect the formulaic writing is probably the biggest factor.