This thread's still open?
This topic always feels like a hamster wheel when it comes up. People restate their priors. Parliamentary debate games are played to see who slips up and who can creatively stay within the letter of the lines. No one changes their mind.
In broad strokes, the Berman era is the product of the broadcast TV era and Kurtzman is the product of streaming (and a credit bubble). Berman produced almost three times as many episodes per season as Kurtzman with half the writing staff. The audience was a broader coalition instead of theoretically targeting different market segments.
I think those first two episodes make some really bad choices that left the show doing damage control trying to course correct after the backlash, and it put a bad first impression that set the tone for the criticisms against the series. And what made it worse is that CBS rolled out the red carpet for the show, and premiered the pilot on over-the-air CBS Network in prime-time to give the series a boost.
Many people forget just how much mainstream coverage DISCOVERY received when it initially debuted. It had the potential to really break through the way Trek did in the 1990's. Lots of writeups, various YouTube aftershows. It started to drop off after the fourth episode and 80% vanished during the mid season hiatus.
- The show should have never been set in the 23rd century. It would have made much more sense for it to be post-Voyager in the 25th century, and the aesthetic of everything should have been closer to an extension of the TNG era. At the very least, that would have allowed synergy with Picard and had a forward momentum to Star Trek, instead of trying to wedge it in-between TOS' The Cage and Where No Man Has Gone Before.
One of Kurtzman's part of NuTrek's flaw from launch was this half reboot, half continuation framing.
- The antagonists should have NOT been the Klingons. Create a new race and don't try to redo the Klingons into something that stands out so badly it becomes a distraction when people collectively say: "Those are Klingons?"
What's really frustrating here is they could have used the new makeup just for T'Kuvma's group. Some ancient breakaway group with a built in explanation for the difference. So many of the things they wanted to do could have fit within existing continuity with just some minor tweaks.
- Make the Spore Drive weird. Make it something that works if it's needed, but has serious consequences. Maybe travel causes odd perceptions of reality and time that come close to breaking people's minds. Maybe some people disappear in jumps. Maybe it works but some crew member has some form of body horror at the destination. Make the Spore Drive dangerous, but a tool that is there if things are absolutely necessary.
Or just stay with Fuller's original idea of the spores being for terraforming instead of having something too powerful plot wise.
So if it was such a successful artistic expression, why did they change it?
If the powers that be thought it was working, that the fans didn't care, they wouldn't have changed it.
They saw the backlash from fans who thought it sucked and started changing them back in season 2.
This is one major difference between the Berman and Kurtzman eras. Kurtzman era manages to be both far more arrogant, while also constantly showing their belly.
From TNG season 3 until the end of ENT, just how often did the Berman era show its belly?
There were minor tweaks in DS9, downplaying the Bajoran politics and bringing in Worf with the Klingon war arc. At the same time, a great deal of the fanbase considers season 4 the strongest episode by episode season of the series, so even if the Klingon war was a distraction from the longer Dominion arc, it wasn't a write down. So aside from Bajoran politics, DS9 just went more DS9 as it went along.
VGR? It looked like there might be a u-turn in season 6 with the arrival of Ron Moore, but Moore was out within a few weeks and VGR double downed on being VGR.
ENT? Ok now we're talking. After season 2, UPN finally allowed serialization. So Brannon Braga gets to do the Year of Hell, albeit adapted to ENT. And then season 4 really is a u-turn with Coto bringing in all the overt TOS elements.
TNG film wise? INS to NEM was a u-turn, but a failed one.
So the Berman era has a few minor tweaks in DS9, a major tweak followed by a u-turn in ENT, and a u-turn in the TNG films from INS to NEM.
Now consider the Kurtzman era. Just how many u-turns does DISCOVERY have? 6? Each season was its own u-turn, with internal season u-turns in seasons 1 and 2 with internal writing staff upheaval. Reversing some Klingon stuff, bringing in more TOS elements, the time jump...
Each season of PICARD was a u-turn. PS2 started off well than fell off a cliff, does that count as well?
On the one hand, people will argue that Star Trek needs to try new things and expand in order to get new viewers. Fine. Do new things! And yet, what they end up defending is a reimagining of old things that have been done before, instead of trying to do something new to bring in new viewers.
What we've gotten is a mix of new and legacy characters in reimagined settings from the franchise's past, with many of the same story elements, just with different makeup. Or lets use Section 31 and Captain Garret from TNG's "Yesterday Enterprise," but in a way that's unrecognizable. Or let's go to a 32nd century where we use the progenitors from TNG's "The Chase" and the Breen from DS9, but do it in a way that doesn't really fit with the tone or the story of how they were originally envisioned.
NuTrek wants to move fast and break things, while also using the past as a crutch. If some of its respective series just stayed in their lanes, there'd be less complaints.
So we need change. We need to go in new directions. We can't do the same old Star Trek that people know as Star Trek and is distinctive to many people as Star Trek. But... God forbid anyone suggest these new versions of Star Trek exist in their own universe as their own story that stands on its own!
If you want to change things, and you're changing them in a way that many fans feel is arguably incompatible with the rest of the continuity, there is nothing wrong with doing your own vision and letting it be its own story if you feel like it needs to change for a new audience. But let it be its own thing and acknowledge that this is not the same.
And, in my opinion, I think that's why Mike McMahon put a certain joke in the Lower Decks finale. And why he hasn't shot down any of the various interpretations of it. It points out the absurdities of this whole thing all around.
This BBS is not a representative cross section of Star Trek fandom. There's a survivorship bias with people that have given up on NuTrek and left. Many people are here mainly for the off topic discussions. You have others that long burned out on Star Trek and seem to be more "extremely online" fans of the TrekBBS itself. So it's hard to navigate the topic without account for these factors.
Just how much about Star Trek can you change until it no longer is Star Trek? Some elements of NuTrek oversampled elements of Star Trek and then mixed it with more generic space sci-fi.
Depending on where things stand, I could see either a continuation, or some form of reboot. If they see Kurtzman's strategy as working, they'll continue what's being done and build off of it. If CBS/Paramount and the person that replaces him wants to go in a different direction, I think what is or isn't continuity for the Prime Timeline becomes an open question.
This also dips into the question that Secret Hideout might own a portion of the Star Trek they produced. Marvel had to buy out Netflix to fully incorporate elements of DAREDEVIL etc into future projects. Unless a follow up Paramount administration wants to pay Kurtzman royalties, it might make sense to just sidestep this going forward depending on when they'd want to set a new series.
If you brought in someone like Ronald Moore, he'd probably want to do a square one reboot.
Moore has been advocating that since First Contact, where he's given interviews saying the lore of Star Trek is too much now for writers. That you shouldn't have to remember what happened in an episode 30 years ago when pitching an idea in the writer's room, or conversely the audience shouldn't have to go back and watch an episode of TOS or TNG in order to fully understand the significance of something.
Star Trek has already had one (or two!) reboots in the last 15 years. Why not just stick with what worked and build on that with a real continuation? But a full reboot might be an easy lever to pull.
I think Alex Kurtzman, like Rick Berman before him, serves Trek better when he's acting as a more managerial producer, and stays away from the creative side of things.
The most he was involved with was DISCO and perhaps the first season of PICARD. Beyond that, he seems to have left LOWER DECKS, PRODIGY, and STRANGE NEW WORLDS to others and I can feel the difference.
Depending on the project and season, Kurtzman has either been far more involved than Berman ever was, or much less. Berman was always heavily involved in physical production and postproduction. No writers on the set, supervising editing, picking the music etc. For some NuTrek projects, once the shows begin, Kurtzman was essentially just one more executive on the org chart line. No one really talks about David Stapf or Julie McNamara. One reason PICARD season 2 is such a mess is that multiple executive teams came in and went. Some higher up had to approve going forward with the version of the season that was "too Star Trek", then a new group came in and pulped it, then in the middle of the season filming yet another group came in and ordered even further changes.
To some degree, Kurtzman is just the visible face of franchise management, and several decisions that people dislike might very well come down to executives we have no idea exist.
