Unpopular Trek Opinions — What Are Yours?

[Luther Sloan]

I figured my own explanation around that years ago, so it doesn't get to me.

Anwar:

I like crazy explanations sometimes. Out of curiosity, what is your theory behind explaining it, friend?

Galaxy Class:
I think I have seen it and I really disagree on most points.

Sometimes getting a re-fresher on things helps. Especially when our tastes in movies and TV changes over time.

In fact, I used to like Insurrection despite a few minor speed bumps. However, now I think it is just gosh awful. But that's just me.

Unfortunately for you, though, this never was the intention of anything we saw on screen. Nor was it the intention of the producers, who (you'll agree) are the only reliable source, when it comes to the actual intentions of the series.

NCC-1701:

You have to take what the creators say and their intentions with a grain of salt. Sometimes the creators say things that contradict themselves. Also, the creators never said it wasn't an alternate time line, either.

Enterprise was never clearly defined on what it was exactly. It starts off with that Temporal Cold War garbage and never really ties that up properly. Then we get some major not minor conflicts with canon within the other Star Trek series and the only way to explain the stupidity is to take the other previous shows out of it's original context or meaning.

However much you like to consider Enterprise to be an alternate timeline doesn't change the fact that for all intents and purposes it was always meant to portray the 22nd century of the known Star Trek universe; not an alternate one. Of course you can (and will) believe what you want. Who am I to stop you from believing something wrong?

...And you can continue to believe in a series that is seriously of low quality and flawed in comparison to the other Trek series. You can force that square peg into a round hole and be happy to stand by something that was never spelled out all that clearly in black and white to begin with.

Besides, even if Star Trek Enterprise's existence was spelled out with absolute clarity by the creators. Just because the creators declare something doesn't mean that their statement or declaration would make any normal sense that I would have to blindly accept without question. The creators are after all human and are bound to make mistakes. So when that happens... coming up with your own theories or explanations is neither wrong nor right. Especially when there is canon that is in question or is being broken.

I didn't know that you have to believe in a series to enjoy it. What does that even mean?

In just about every movie and TV series you watch, there is an element that is called "Suspension of Disbelief". However, there are things that are just too stupid to ignore or to put out of your head. Thus, why we dislike certain movies and shows and why we like others. It is your belief in the things that happen within a movie or TV show that partially determines your enjoyment of it.

And you can say that with a straight face?

Yes I can. The issues on Voyager were no where near the retardedness that was on Enterprise. Not even close, my friend. No way.

I'm afraid you are misinformed about the TV numbers for Voyager.

No. I was not misinformed. If you were to look at the bar a little more closely. Voyager on average had 4 million viewers. Enterprise had 2.5 million viewers on average and continued to drop. That is almost half the viewers that Voyager had.


Side Note:

Oh, and by the way, on a positive note, my friend. I like your Sliders avatar. Very cool, man. Very cool.

 

[Marten]

If the Enterprise finale is worse than Endgame, perhaps I should stop buying those DVD:s. Endgame was one of the most embarrasing episodes I've seen.

 

[Luther Sloan]

If the Enterprise finale is worse than Endgame, perhaps I should stop buying those DVD:s. Endgame was one of the most embarrasing episodes I've seen.

Marten:

I usually rent stuff before I buy something nowadays. It's always the safest bet.

...And seriously people. Endgame wasn't all that bad either. Really. I can think of a dozen episodes across the board that are a lot more embarrassing. Seriously.

 

[RandyS]

...And seriously people. Endgame wasn't all that bad either. Really. I can think of a dozen episodes across the board that are a lot more embarrassing. Seriously.

Agreed. Endgame wasn't that bad. It wasn't the finale I was hoping for, and I can understand why some fans believe it was a rip-off of All Good Things, but it wasn't too bad.

 

[Anwar]

Well Luther, my reasoning on "Darmok" was that eons ago those guys DID have a normal language and thus those stories came into being. Then after some civilization-ending disaster they started over again and this time the language created was based on the old stories of the past civilization, thus the metaphor language.

 

[nick1983]

Endgame wasn't all that bad as a finale. Adding to some of the opinions earlier, I also like Star Trek V, didn't like Neelix and didn't mind Wesley.

 

[Luther Sloan]

Agreed. Endgame wasn't that bad. It wasn't the finale I was hoping for, and I can understand why some fans believe it was a rip-off of All Good Things, but it wasn't too bad.

Randy:

Thank you. I am glad you didn't think "End Game" wasn't all that bad.

Anyways, if your interested, here are my quick thoughts on Star Trek's last episodes...

"Turnabout Intruder" doesn't really count as a finale because it wasn't really planned as a final episode.

"All Good Things" was actually a bit boring to me.

"What You Leave Behind" had potential. In fact, I really think it missed the mark big time.

"End Game" was actually rather entertaining and satisfying for me.

"These Are The Voyages" was the worst Star Trek episode ever made.

Well Luther, my reasoning on "Darmok" was that eons ago those guys DID have a normal language and thus those stories came into being. Then after some civilization-ending disaster they started over again and this time the language created was based on the old stories of the past civilization, thus the metaphor language.

Anwar:

Ah, very interesting. Good hypothesis. I like.

Thank you.

Endgame wasn't all that bad as a finale.

Nick:

I appreciate you for joining the cause, my friend. I really liked the final episode for Voyager quite a bit, actually.

Did you like it or did you simply think it was just okay or something?

 

[RyanKCR]

ST:TMP SLV is the best Star Trek movie with Nemesis being the best of the TNG films.

The Galaxy class is the ugliest of all the main ships.

 

[Warped9]

Here's some more opinions:
- Star Trek was never meant to be an realistic depiction of the future.

- Even before Star Trek XI, Star Trek already took place in its own universe that was separate from ours. In that universe, the Eugenics Wars did take place some ten years ago and deep space sleeper ships are fairly common, and there are currently Human colonists living on the Canopus planet presently.

- The designs and fashions in TOS are appropriate to the era in that fictional universe and don't have to be justified to our standards today.

- The TMP uniforms are the most "realistic" Starfleet uniforms.

- Star Trek XI did not make Star Trek "cool" again, but it did reintroduce it.

Yes.

 

[Luther Sloan]

There is a lot of love for Star Trek 5 and Nemesis. This is really disturbing.

 

[Gepard]

-Trek XI sucks. And it's not some silly canon thing, I just think it's badly made.

-I like the DS9 Ferengi episodes. A lot. They're a pleasant and amusing break from a series that treats inherently silly Trek concepts with more faux-gravitas then they deserve.

-TATV is bad, but no worse then a lot of what Enterprise produced; thus, I don't understand the level of hate it receives from fans.

-The Enterprise-D is the Hilton in space? Cool!

 

[Warped9]

There is a lot of love for Star Trek 5 and Nemesis. This is really disturbing.

Also yes.

 

[muzzleflash]

really long post

Hey, buddy. This is an opinion thread. Not a, "prove your opinion is right and everybody else's is wrong" thread. Unless you are of the opinion that your opinion is the only correct one. In which case, it is an unpopular one indeed.

 

[Zameaze]

Well Luther, my reasoning on "Darmok" was that eons ago those guys DID have a normal language and thus those stories came into being. Then after some civilization-ending disaster they started over again and this time the language created was based on the old stories of the past civilization, thus the metaphor language.

Good, so far, but when they started over again, how could they know the metaphors without knowing the language that they were told in?

 

[Luther Sloan]

Hey, buddy. This is an opinion thread. Not a, "prove your opinion is right and everybody else's is wrong" thread. Unless you are of the opinion that your opinion is the only correct one. In which case, it is an unpopular one indeed.

Muzzleflash:

Please don't take this the wrong way: But I must have said something you didn't like (otherwise you wouldn't have said anything if you agreed with my opinion). Also, I am not the only one who questioned other people's opinions in this thread either dude.

Besides, you just validated my post with your last line.

...Anyways, moving on.

Also yes.

Warped 9:

Yeah, it is funny how many folks can like something we absolutely hate. And Nemesis and Final Frontier are definitely hard to like, that's for sure.

 

[Luther Sloan]

Star Trek 5

• Star Trek 5 is not as good as people think it is.
  
  • Klingon with poodle hair and his 2nd rate cronies was stupid.
  
  • Sybok was a happy go lucky guy in a pope outfit.
  
  • Sybok had to find the most dumbest army to command.
  
  • Why didn't Sybok have a larger group of followers from the beginning?
  
  • Kirk ends up stopping the cat women alien by throwing her in water.
  
  • Uhura is a little too old to be flaunting herself.
  
  • Some of the guards men outside the fence would have stayed behind instead of drooling over Uhura.
  
  • Starfleet must have the worst engineers and designers in this period. The ship doesn't run after it gets handed over to Kirk and crew. Then Scotty can't even find the problem within weeks either.
  
  • Supposedly it is a big deal to get thru the great barrier to the center of the galaxy. But Kirk and crew make it seem like an effortless trip.
  
  • God like being should have killed Kirk. There is no way Kirk would have been able to out run it, unless we were given some type of information that this being was slow and retarded.
  
  • Enterprise's phasers didn't kill the God like being, but a Klingon Gun did?
  
  • The movie was just cheesy over all.

 

[Teiwaz]

The only problem with that is that any science fiction series set in the future will become obsolete relatively fast because certain things will advance far quicker in the real world than the writers anticipated, while other things won't happen for many more decades (if not centuries or millennia) later.

Not obsolete surely, just a little anachronistic.
Also not if it is a non-tech vision of the future i.e. a second Dark age inspired story.
And Dune doesn't have that much to worry about (The year 10191 being some way away an all)(apart from some confusion over the form of the old Empire and some revisionism between the Dune Encyclopedia and Brian Herbert/Kevin J Andersons later novels) But that's ot.

You'll constantly have to keep pushing dates forward in that regard to keep it in line with the real world.

Er, I wasn't actually seriously suggesting re-editing the time-line of all sf shows every time a writer decided to ignore canon (we'd be at it all the time for a start). I thought it might be obv given my suggestion of having the eugenics war next friday. Course, come friday, I'd then have to re-edit the post if it didn't happen then we'd be on the cusp of constant re-visionism and we'd be members of INGSOC before we knew it. DOUBLEPLUSGOOD (1984 - geddit!)

Not so much in its own self-contained fictional universe where it doesn't matter if things don't line up because it isn't real anyway.

Most things in the universe aren't real anyway. Most things we think are immutable and have substance exist only because we (as in a large percentage of humanity) believe in them. Money, law, even civilisation itself are good examples. They usually don't line up either a fair amount of the time.

 

[Teiwaz]

Well Luther, my reasoning on "Darmok" was that eons ago those guys DID have a normal language and thus those stories came into being. Then after some civilization-ending disaster they started over again and this time the language created was based on the old stories of the past civilization, thus the metaphor language.

Good, so far, but when they started over again, how could they know the metaphors without knowing the language that they were told in?

Interesting idea Anwar.
I think that a language based in metaphor doesn't need some civilisation-ending catastrophe to bring it into being. The culture merely has to evolve tightly knit to the same mythological cycle for long enough.
Perhaps the people started out with the normal constructs of language then the stories began to be used as a method of teaching as the entire civilisation began to reference them in everyday communication. Instead of being shown a stylised picture of a cat or a ball and learning those building blocks as we currently do they probably told the stories again and again to their young, probably with accompanied gestures (gestures might well have been the first types of communication) to symbolise rivers and oceans etc. and later perhaps pictures or pictograms (Did we ever get a clue to the aliens writing in the episode? I'd guess at an ideagram based writing.)

Or perhaps they moved into this naturally from an early stage of development. They have the structure of language to form the short phrases they use to communicate but they don't seem to be aware of them in component form (they're a highly sophisticated race after all, more than sophisticated enough to invent a universal translator but they don't appear to be aware of adverbs and such). I certainly not, I can't remember the names of components of language off the top of my head either.

Stories are important to cultures (Terry Pratchett suggests we should be called pan narans(the storytelling ape) instead of homo sapiens in 'Science of Discword2' because of our love of stories).

As the crew on Enterprise begin to match the names in the metaphors to entries in their database it would seem that the mythology exists on several planets.

You really have to step sideways outside the box you were born and brought up in to get your head around this episode and that's why I love it.

 

[Cheapjack]

Well, if you want an extreme in the other direction, there's always Ron Moore's BSG where he positied....actually forced down our throats (til it came out our ass) that humanity was an evil bunch that isn't worth saving.

But when it comes to Trek, I don't want either extreme. I don't mind optimism...I just mind when the optimism is so extreme. Because then it stops being optimism and starts being delusional. It stops being science-fiction and moves into space fantasy.

And...RobertScorpio...

Why? GR's been dead for (almost) 20 years. Trek was never entirely his, anyway. No TV series ever is one person's. He only gets creator credit for all the spinoffs because of WGA rules anyway, as I understand it.

What makes his revisionism (and that's frankly what it is - the differences in tone between TOS and TNG are stunning; he even admitted it was revisionist, if I recall correctly) Holy Writ?

Because it's Gene Roddenberry? Not even remotely an answer! Never mind the way it puts someone very, very flawed on a sort of pedestal, what makes him different from every other TV producer?

If Star Trek is anybody's, I'd argue it's the fans' creature by now; you can't even call it Paramount's or Viacom's, really, given that the IP's been split up like a Solomonic baby and doesn't really have one entire owner.

The way I see it, TNG's producers and writers should have sat down and explained to Roddenberry (who was not, I've understood, particularly involved, especially after season 2 or so), very diplomatically and politely, that Trek could not both accommodate his oft-changing views and be a viable property in the long run. That they had a fiduciary duty to the folks who actually owned Trek (Paramount, at the time) to focus on it being a viable property...And that would mean that the obvious Writer on Board stuff (see: The stuff I've mentioned) had to go byebye.

I mean, all due respect to the guy, but that's the thing. He was not clever about it, it didn't make for good TV...It wasn't even very subtle. It was beating-you-over-the-head unsubtle, it leaves massive holes in the setting, and it kills so much drama for so many plots.

To be fair, I have had problems with the Paradise thing.

I think it just means RELATIVE paradise. Relative to 20th Century people. California is referred to as the 'paradise' state. Relative to rainy England, that is. But people are killed every day in California. Of course, you would want to live in a relative paradise, and I don't understand this concept of people wanting to leave 24th Century Earth go elsewhere. I bet, if it all went haywire, they wuold be calling for help real soon.

TOS had loads of episodes where they lived in a 'Paradise', and Kirk shot them out of it! Gene Roddenberry's thinking seemed to have changed since then, though that might have been because at the time, if you said anything was better than working 9 to 5 in a capitalist system, you were in danger of being labelled a communist.

I think that they had to put something in it to make it exciting to 20th Century audiences and I think that GR was hoping for a more mature audience by the 90's.

You could have a ST series just based on exploration and character relationships and new concepts, but it's audience would be drastically reduced to all those who go into science because of ST. What's wrong with that? If the fans are going to write the new ST, why not have a splinter group that just write for all the scientists that love ST and took it as their inspiration? I'd watch it. I think SF has something to do with this, as well as depicting how our weapons will become more powerful, though one would have hoped a nuclear weapon would have been powerful enough.

I watched DS9 yesterday and it seemed to me that it told you a lot about human politics as it is, and has been, but not a lot about our hopes for the future. It's hardly SF in that respect. It's excellent as a series of human history lessons, but there's nothing there that will make people want to watch it in 50 years.

Improving yourself isn't 'new age' guff. I'm hoping to do a degree, go into research and get a black belt. Life seems fairly pointless to me without doing something to improve yourself and working 9 to 5 for forty years, to be put in a hole at the end of it, or burned into ashes, and put in pot, and that makes me unbelievably depressed. There must be more to life than that and surely Science Fiction is about exploring it. Even just reading SF gives you some meaning to your life, I would have thought, becuase you're imagining something better, or at least different, and that makes us distinct from animals and is something we have been doing since we were cavemen.

 

[C.E. Evans]

The only problem with that is that any science fiction series set in the future will become obsolete relatively fast because certain things will advance far quicker in the real world than the writers anticipated, while other things won't happen for many more decades (if not centuries or millennia) later.

Not obsolete surely, just a little anachronistic.

My point, however, is that it is something that will happen to every sci-fi show or film set in "the future". Everything will eventually become anachronistic in time because they'll never be completely accurate depictions of the future no matter how hard they try. Every futuristic show or film are really products of the real-world times they are actually made in and are based on what their creators think the future could be at that particular time. TOS was set in a future as perceived in the 1960s, TNG did the same thing from an 1980s perspective, and so on.

You'll constantly have to keep pushing dates forward in that regard to keep it in line with the real world.

Er, I wasn't actually seriously suggesting re-editing the time-line of all sf shows every time a writer decided to ignore canon (we'd be at it all the time for a start). I thought it might be obv given my suggestion of having the eugenics war next friday. Course, come friday, I'd then have to re-edit the post if it didn't happen then we'd be on the cusp of constant re-visionism and we'd be members of INGSOC before we knew it. DOUBLEPLUSGOOD (1984 - geddit!)

Um, I wasn't talking about canon but really about continuity, and how having to constantly revise the history in a fictional futuristic universe to match today's ever-changing real-world events can be a never-ending task...and also somewhat unnecessary really in a universe that is separate from ours anyway.

Not so much in its own self-contained fictional universe where it doesn't matter if things don't line up because it isn't real anyway.

Most things in the universe aren't real anyway. Most things we think are immutable and have substance exist only because we (as in a large percentage of humanity) believe in them. Money, law, even civilisation itself are good examples. They usually don't line up either a fair amount of the time.

Uh...yes?

My point there was really just "don't sweat the small stuff," but okay.