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Why are Treks fans so……

David Hanley

Lieutenant Junior Grade
Red Shirt
Difficult!
And as one of the biggest I include myself in that bracket. We should be supporters, encouragers,a backbone to the series and yet….the fans are arguably the biggest problem.
TOS needed a complete refit after the pilot and survived by the skin of its teeth. Spock was a “satanic looking fella” etc etc etc
TNGs first season were not exactly Emmy winning but they certainly did not diserve the disdain they received just because they were not TOS (as much as they tried to be)
Voyager caused a stink from the off and recieved such criticism as being forced to take a hot woman and put her in a cat suit.
DS9 was not real trek because there was no exploring and it was all on one station etc etc
Ent lasted just four seasons because fans did not engage
Nutrek…well I do not need to rehash those criticisms here

this is before I get into the canon critiques which would take an entire new site never mind thread

why are trek fans so fickle?
 
kOHinlB.gif


;)

Be nice, everyone.
 
I take them one series and one film at a time, and judge each on their own merits.

Some I like a lot (DSC and PIC)
Some I like, but they're off my radar right now (TOS and DS9)
One I like superficially, and is also off my radar at the moment (LD)
Some I'm in the middle about (TNG, VOY, and Kelvin)
One of them I'm not a fan of overall but parts of it are okay (ENT)

Although the Niners seem determined to do their hardest to make me want to knock DS9 off of where I currently have it. But I don't because I know that doesn't have anything to do with the actual series itself, but external factors. I like DS9 too, but not everything is DS9. And those other series don't all need to be constantly bludgeoned over it.
 
A lot of TOS is silly. TNG hasn't aged well at all. DS9's my favourite, Voyager's not very good and neither are seasons 1-3 of Enterprise. I dislike the Kelvinverse movies, like Discovery and Picard. I loathe Lower Decks.

I've everything released on DVD and Bluray. I'll get whatever else comes out.

Even Lower Decks...
 
A lot of TOS is silly. TNG hasn't aged well at all. DS9's my favourite, Voyager's not very good and neither are seasons 1-3 of Enterprise. I dislike the Kelvinverse movies, like Discovery and Picard. I loathe Lower Decks.

I've everything released on DVD and Bluray. I'll get whatever else comes out.

Even Lower Decks...
 
And that’s how you get to vice admiral :)
kOHinlB.gif


;)

Be nice, everyone.
uh oh, only my second thread and I’ve got a mod in already, I didn’t mean too.
I wasn’t there, it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. :)
I actually posted a similar thread about DSC as I was simply shocked to see all the vile hate thrown it’s way and terms like “nuTrek” bandied about. Then when looking into something else I found this has actually been the case on release for nearly all of trek, and it only ever becomes popular on reruns (see the requests for more ENT).
I just wonder what causes this phenomenon.

(it might be worth relating here that I do not have any social media, but have heard about the Twitter sphere factor. That can’t have been relevant for the older series though….can it?)
 
...I was simply shocked to see all the vile hate thrown it’s way and terms like “nuTrek” bandied about. Then when looking into something else I found this has actually been the case on release for nearly all of trek, and it only ever becomes popular on reruns (see the requests for more ENT).
I just wonder what causes this phenomenon.
Beats me. I'm not a big fan of Voyager and three quarters of Enterprise, but I watched them all as they were broadcast and still enjoyed them to some extent.

The only show I've struggled to watch is Lower Decks. I've managed six or seven episodes and it's pretty enjoyment free. I'll probably get a copy for completeness sake when it comes out, but I will try to watch the rest.

I love Trek. I'm always pleased to see more - I'm old enough to remember a couple of long stretches when there was no new Trek on the air.

If I don't particularly like it, someone will.
 
A lot of TOS is silly.

In what way(s)?

The flagrant sexism and inconsistency is definitely something that dates the show badly. But how is it "silly"?

TNG hasn't aged well at all.

How so? Its visuals hold up great and aren't excessively splattered on screen. Or do you mean storylines? I can think of a few, but the whole series?

DS9's my favourite,

It's aged well for me as well. I didn't really get into it until they brought in their own starship; reviewing older episodes later on I'll admit I missed out, but the days with the Defiant are still definitive.

Voyager's not very good and neither

Seasons 1-3 are a real mixed bag and largely paint-by-numbers. Add in too many big epic events for characters we know nothing about - e.g. Harry Kim dying and being replaced by some treknobabble alternate world double that stays for the next six years or whatever. If TNG had jokes back in the day where "Data was the most human", VOY outdoes that claim by a country mile. Or parsec, how many country miles are in one of those? Oh okay, twelve...

are seasons 1-3 of Enterprise.

Despite enough franchise burnout that they turned to the trope of "prequel" (BSG did the same thing and it didn't last very long either), the Xindi were an interesting idea, but the prequel format-- we all know everything would turn out as expected and I don't recall an alternative timeline at the end of their temporal cold war. Just being a prequel made it difficult, and stuff like "Reed alert" was just lame. Season 4 was loaded with fanservice, but prequels are generally aimed at fans to begin with. Just my two cents, each of Trek's outings has something that will be adored by someone and that's not a bad thing.

I dislike the Kelvinverse movies,

The alternate timeline idea was great on paper. Making the characters shallow caricatures was not. That said, "Beyond" is a surprisingly strong outing. But the first Kelvin movie was just a nostalgia trip and STID took all the wrong things about nostalgia trips and made them worse.

like Discovery and Picard. I loathe Lower Decks.

DSC had some good individual scenes, Tilly (and Killy) were awesome, I like the idea of Lorca being a mirror plant (but, again, too soon in the show's run for this to have any real payoff except 'limpy fanservice exploit') ,Mudd was nicely reinvented (so for me, fanservice that worked marvels)

Seven as the Queen was cool, I sorta see what they were trying to do with Picard and the one character who's the alcoholic and drug user (who's well-acted, the casting for both shows has been pretty great)... Hugh was awesome. But as a whole the sequel and character focus on Picard himself didn't do much, and the finale felt needlessly hokey, particularly with the contrived android body but in retrospect that sorta fits into some of PIC's themes too in a way or two... YMMV, next week I might give it another go and find a different perspective. Can't have too many of those...

But the bulk of these shows did little for me and some go so far over the top. The visuals being dank in teal/orange is just too over the top as well, which is amazing considering more and more shows have done the teal/orange puke palette since the early-2000s. (To be fair, it's easier to blend in CGI but the same colors are also used to simulate monochrome b/w and why shows like "All in the Family" got criticized for looking so dull. But that show used the palette because they wanted to do b/w and were told by the network they had to film it in color. Didn't stop the critics back in the day but they had a greater artistic reason for doing so. Makes one wonder how the show would be perceived if everyone and the sets were more realistic than dull brown/blue...

I enjoyed LD from the start. A few bad moments but no bad stories. I sorta gravitate to off-the-wall character combinations and LD is chock full of them. The finale floored me with surprises that worked as well as being completely unexpected. Should have been 15 minutes longer too in order to appreciate it that much more. Being full color palette helps a lot as well. Of course, it's an animated show so it'd look even more goofy if it was teal/orange...

I've everything released on DVD and Bluray. I'll get whatever else comes out.

Even Lower Decks...

:techman: That's cool.
 
In what way(s)?
TOS ? Giant space hands, Roman Earth, Gangster Earth, Spock's Brain.

TNG ? Councillor on the bridge, Worf's S1 haircut, lots of very 1980's style choices, somewhat dated story premises. Yes, I still love it.

Voyager ? Well documented abandonment of internal strife, rationing, reset button, several unlikeable characters.

Enterprise ? Hit and miss first two seasons and stronger third but I just didn't like the arc.

Lower Decks ? Can't find a single thing I like about it. I'd forgive it most things if I found it funny, but I didn't even smile once in the six or seven episodes I watched.
 
It might appear people are against some things because aren't people more likely to moan about something they don't like rather than telling what they do like?
 
TOS needed a complete refit after the pilot and survived by the skin of its teeth.
That had nothing to do with the fans. How could it? No one besides NBC Suits even saw The Cage in 1964, and the fandom of the 1960s didn't even see the footage from it until it was featured in The Menagerie as a flashback.
Spock was a “satanic looking fella” etc etc etc
Again, and already touched upon above, that was a studio concern, not the fans.
Ent lasted just four seasons because fans did not engage
Fandom should not be blamed for a show's cancellation.

But to address your larger point, a franchise's harshest critics are usually its die-hard fans. It's the same in all franchises besides Star Trek. Certainly you see similar attitudes in the fandoms of Star Wars and Doctor Who. Nature of the beast, I suppose. Maybe it has something to do with loving something so much you become too invested in it and feel a sense of ownership, or maybe some people just set the bar too high after feeling the franchise had previously delivered Complete Perfection and consider anything with even the smallest flaw a complete and total failure.

I'm sure philosophers will ponder this matter for many years to come.
 
New shows have to be different in some way to justify making them and also to make them interesting for the audience.
Some fans then don't want things to be different, and that's why those differences are attacked.
That's why much criticism comes in the form of "not Trek" ;)
 
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