And there was Klingon music in DS9. (Worf's Klingon operas, the Klingon restaurant owner.) Also at least once in TNG, in "Unification I", when Worf asks for "Aktuh and Maylota" in that bar.
Your honest opinion on the Berman era
- Thread starter Starflight
- Start date
What kind of other visuals for aliens would have been better (but still affordable)?
What other contemporary sci fi shows do you think did better with that?
That could have worked/been better but also could have seemed a little too geeky. I did like Parrises squares and Anbo-jyutsu as later though somewhat familiar kinds of sports.
In the original Cogley even complained that their old physical books were really rare/pretty disappearing (but shouldn't be).
I'll be honest here: The Berman era might be THE definition of "Star Trek".
Yes, Kirk & Spock are pop culture icons. But the TOS storytelling... not so much.
Very much everything that defines modern Trek is rooted in the Berman era, from the tropes, to the rules, to the aesthetics.
So much so that even the streaming era is more like an homage to the Berman era, than really a creative era on it's own.
Even SNW - the closest to the original TOS we ever got - is essentially a Berman era show with a TOS coat of paint on top.
No. Not really. Especially not initially (if you’re talking about TOS).
Fan of DS9. I rewatch it once a year or so, plus jumping to an episode I particularly want to see in between times.
TNG, not really so much. I saw a little bit of it as it was coming out and finally did a full watch a couple of years ago. There are some good episodes, but a lot of not-so-good episodes too. I think the decision to have no internal conflict was a serious mistake. Conflict drives drama. On TOS you had the Spock-McCoy rivalry going on. On DS9 you had all sorts of rivalry: Odo-Quark. Bajoran-Starfleet. Dukat-everybody. To some extent Kira-Quark. Garak-Kira. Sisko-Winn. And that's all without going to the Dominion War.
It really surprised me that (way back there) one of the posts said DS9 wasn't fun. I think it's the most fun Trek show. It dares to go outside the box. We had all Starfleet regulars before - now we have Kira in most episodes and Garak and other Cardassians popping in and out all the time, and the Maquis. They were brave enough to put a holosuite 1964 lounge singer on as a recurring character. They go to their strongest female actor and tell her "You hate Cardassians? Guess what! You're gonna BE one!" and it works. And "You hate collaborators? Guess what! Your mom WAS one!" and make that work too. They take one of their strongest characters and send him to prison for 20 years and he suffers PTSD from it. They do loss of a limb and PTSD from that. DS9 has families, like TNG had but didn't really didn't use much.
Voyager's premise should have had a lot of potential for dramatic conflict... and they quickly changed their mind and became one happy family, no disagreements here, no sir. There should have been episodes about Maquis vs. Starfleet parts of the crew, about staying on a habitable planet vs. continuing towards Earth, about continuing on at high warp vs. stopping to hunt for coffee everywhere they go, about what the heck Neelix was doing on the ship since he was a disaster as a cook. These are supposed to be two crews who don't get along forced onto one ship, a ship faced with spending a lifetime getting home. But they act like it's a pleasure cruise. The 1700s story of HMS Wager, shipwrecked in the Pacific, makes a great shipwreck story, and nobody confused it with a pleasure trip. Lots of them didn't make it back, most from scurvy which they did not yet know to prevent with citrus fruits.
I don't like the Star Trek movies much. TMP was pretty good, except that the plot was a retread. The necessity of movies is so many people need to see them for them to be a success, that they have to do lots of exposition to explain who people are and what's going on... which is boring for people who have seen the shows. And I suppose it gets hard to find a plot that hasn't been used before.
TNG, not really so much. I saw a little bit of it as it was coming out and finally did a full watch a couple of years ago. There are some good episodes, but a lot of not-so-good episodes too. I think the decision to have no internal conflict was a serious mistake. Conflict drives drama. On TOS you had the Spock-McCoy rivalry going on. On DS9 you had all sorts of rivalry: Odo-Quark. Bajoran-Starfleet. Dukat-everybody. To some extent Kira-Quark. Garak-Kira. Sisko-Winn. And that's all without going to the Dominion War.
It really surprised me that (way back there) one of the posts said DS9 wasn't fun. I think it's the most fun Trek show. It dares to go outside the box. We had all Starfleet regulars before - now we have Kira in most episodes and Garak and other Cardassians popping in and out all the time, and the Maquis. They were brave enough to put a holosuite 1964 lounge singer on as a recurring character. They go to their strongest female actor and tell her "You hate Cardassians? Guess what! You're gonna BE one!" and it works. And "You hate collaborators? Guess what! Your mom WAS one!" and make that work too. They take one of their strongest characters and send him to prison for 20 years and he suffers PTSD from it. They do loss of a limb and PTSD from that. DS9 has families, like TNG had but didn't really didn't use much.
Voyager's premise should have had a lot of potential for dramatic conflict... and they quickly changed their mind and became one happy family, no disagreements here, no sir. There should have been episodes about Maquis vs. Starfleet parts of the crew, about staying on a habitable planet vs. continuing towards Earth, about continuing on at high warp vs. stopping to hunt for coffee everywhere they go, about what the heck Neelix was doing on the ship since he was a disaster as a cook. These are supposed to be two crews who don't get along forced onto one ship, a ship faced with spending a lifetime getting home. But they act like it's a pleasure cruise. The 1700s story of HMS Wager, shipwrecked in the Pacific, makes a great shipwreck story, and nobody confused it with a pleasure trip. Lots of them didn't make it back, most from scurvy which they did not yet know to prevent with citrus fruits.
I don't like the Star Trek movies much. TMP was pretty good, except that the plot was a retread. The necessity of movies is so many people need to see them for them to be a success, that they have to do lots of exposition to explain who people are and what's going on... which is boring for people who have seen the shows. And I suppose it gets hard to find a plot that hasn't been used before.
Did they? Navy shoulderboards extend all the way from next to the collar to the shoulder seam. TMP straps looks more like US Army officer's straps of the 19th century, and I think have been reintroduced to current Army dress uniforms.
Perhaps initially in TNG. But it definitely was not his initial vision for Star Trek, as TOS portrayed no such thing. It was somewhere during his touring of the lecture circuit in the 70's when Roddenberry bought into all the "he was a visionary" bullshit.
Oh TOS absolutely already was a visionary Utopia. A unified humanity where race didn't matter, a colored woman in a uniform & high rank, no nation states, no classes, absolutely post-scarcity society without hunger, without crime, with miracle cures for almost all illnesses.
The big difference to TNG was - TNG was very proud of this vision & characters directly talked into the camera how great it is.
Whereas in TOS it's clearly "only" background worldbuilding, where they imagined I'd humanity has spaceships & other magic technologies, it's only logical that society has also involved, but the details didn't really matter for the story - just that the future is in general better than the present in pretty much every way.
Where in TOS do you see evidence of a "post-scarcity society"? Where do you see evidence of it being a society "without crime"? I don't find that in TOS at all. In TOS, I see a universe in which humanity has improved itself and done some pretty amazing things, but where fundamentally we are still the same basic fallible human beings. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy have more than one conversation about how man is not meant for paradise, and that it's a constant struggle to fight our more base instincts. They also have some great fights with one another.
Only in TNG do we get the idea that the Federation is some sort of paradise, that humans have perfected themselves, and where Roddenberry didn't even want the characters to have an argument or grieve over the death of a loved one because humanity was now so "perfect."
In short, I see two very different philosophies -- in fact, diametrically opposed ones in many ways -- on display in TOS vs. TNG.
TOS did have utopian themes, but I have to point out - Star Trek wasn't necessarily leagues ahead of other progressive television in terms of representation. I'm sure people could name a lot of other examples, but even within Desilu, there were series like Mission: Impossible where race and sex didn't enormously matter within the IMF (in fact, the IMF appears more progressive than the TOS Federation half the time, since male characters don't randomly stop to talk about how much they hate women, as sometimes happens in post-S1 TOS). They even had a black woman as an agent in a 1966 episode, played by Eartha Kitt.
I think the truth's in the middle; TOS does style itself as a progressive future, but it's not really approaching the creepy "utopian" project of TNG either. It's more like 60s American liberalism projected into a fictional world, same as a lot of other media of the era.
What? Not TOS I remember. McCoy even notes no cure for the common cold. No crime? Why did they have penal colonies? Rehabilitation for criminals of questionable efficacy?
There's not a lot that screams post scarcity to me.
No. In fact, TOS was frequently voicing opinions against utopia, believing it could only lead to stagnation.
Uhura didn't have that high a rank, and indeed, out of the ones who are basically considered TOS's core cast these days, there was only one who she outranked, Chekov. And he didn't join the show until the second season.
Nothing in TOS indicates they were post-scarcity.
I mean, Kirk witnessed a massacre during his childhood as a measure invoked in order to deal with hunger.
Harry Mudd says hi.
Huh?
TOS Earth and humanity were simply way better than late 20th century Earth. That's about it. Racism had largely been eradicated and people no longer fought wars on Earth or went hungry, but otherwise mankind was still recognizably mankind even in the Federation of the 23rd century.
Hell, the whole idea that there was no money wasn't even introduced until the fourth movie, twenty years after TOS premiered.
And then ignored two movies later when Scotty declares that he just bought a boat.
Which is irrelevant to the point I was making which was there was nothing in TOS itself to indicate money was no longer a thing and that the very first time such an idea was introduced was in 1986. What a movie from 1991 said on the matter is completely immaterial.
And in-universe one can always conjecture that Scotty buying his boat for retirement may have involved credits or other non-Earth or -Federation currency and from an alien seller who had the kind of boat he wanted.
TOS showed humanity had improved a bit from the 20th century.
But a utopia? Absolutely not.
No crime? Harry Mudd and Tantalus V both say hi.
Post scarcity without hunger? Kodos, killing 4,000 people because of food shortage, says 'what's up'.
Miracle cures? From McCoy ("THE OMEGA GLORY", I believe): "Who knows, it may cure the common cold."
The point I was making, whether relevant to your initial point or not, was that TVH's reference to there being no money seems to me to have been a one-off thing that was not consistent with what came before or after in the TOS era.
Maybe he bought it with grain.
Crime hadn't been completely ended but both the depictions and attitudes of the colonies suggested that it had been greatly reduced and the response was now about rehabilitation (and yes some would say that having rehabilitation focus now would be or is pretty close to utopia) and the show ended with suggesting violent insanity was cured.
Last edited:
Similar threads
