Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

It's the annoying dissonance people now have towards celebrities. They're just people reading other people's words. They're fantastic at that job, but that doesn't give them any special insight in anything that ISN'T acting.

Ancient Rome was correct; treat them like prostitutes.

 

[tigergrinder]

No sorry he was a sperg when alive. He was the first star trek actor in fact that I found out was a sperg by simply going on his Twitter account.

Compared to people like Armin who write essays of how bad Orange Man was, Rene's Twitter is tame.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

It's the annoying dissonance people now have towards celebrities. They're just people reading other people's words. They're fantastic at that job, but that doesn't give them any special insight in anything that ISN'T acting.

Ancient Rome was correct; treat them like prostitutes.

Actors generally have less insight into anything that doesn't involve reading a script than cab drivers or hairdressers or guys who work on a landfill. For one thing, most of them are a lot dumber and less emotionally mature (normal people grow out of being attention-craving narcissists who like to play dress up by the age of 7).

For another, they're living in the fakest and gayest bubble known to humanity - the entertainment industry. Which has always been a notoriously wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The Buddha says that actors will be reincarnated as animals or go to Hell, which is pretty based and/or dharmapilled if you ask me.

Not Bill Shatner obviously, because he's a pretty cool guy.

 

[White Devil]

I've always said I could give a fuck less about actors or sports stars political opinions. Your jobs are to dance on strings, not tell me how a country should be ran you overpaid asshats.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Wheaton is the worst offender.

At least the rest of them have careers.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Compared to people like Armin who write essays of how bad Orange Man was, Rene's Twitter is tame.

I've always found the irony of Armin Shimerman playing a Union-busting ultra-capitalist to be delicious.

 

[White Devil]

I've always found the irony of Armin Shimerman playing a Union-busting ultra-capitalist to be delicious.

I've always thought that his character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was his real personality. Just less jewish.

 

[JamesFargo]

I've always found the irony of Armin Shimerman playing a Union-busting ultra-capitalist to be delicious.

IIRC, in a long-deleted interview, Armin said he read Ayn Rand's novels. Not to get into character, but because he reads books voraciously. He's like a medieval monk who just happened to get into acting.

The point of Andrew Ryan isn't that he is a capitalist but an idealist. He had plenty of opportunities to squash Fontaine, but didn't. His philosophy presumes that people are rational actors when they're not. If plasmids are harmful and addictive then people will be less likely to buy them!

I've always thought that his character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was his real personality. Just less jewish.

"Whoa Summers, you drive like a spaz!"

As is often the case with actors who play bad guys, he is terribly nice off-camera. The only time someone got a rise out of Armin was when he guest-starred on Charmed.

 

[UnKillShredDur]

I've always thought that his character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was his real personality. Just less jewish.

Principal Quark would have been a funny character...

"Buffy, why are you and the hu-mon females Willow and Cordelia wearing clothing? You're all expelled, unless you can beat the Mayor's price of 10 bars of gold pressed latinum."

 

[UnKillShredDur]

Hold up... When I made that post, I'd forgotten that Joss Whedon has been shown to be a creeper now. To me, that's even funnier XD. He probably *would* have written Principal Quark that way if he could have.

 

[JamesFargo]

I've always said I could give a fuck less about actors or sports stars political opinions.

The Presidency is well-suited for professional actors. Alas.

"Buffy, why are you and the hu-mon females wearing clothing?"

Funny, I had that same thought every time Cordy was on-screen.

 

[Miller]

Honestly with all of the DS9 cast that seem to be social media spergs , I'm willing to bet Brooks is the sanest one.

Marc Alaimo is based.

 

[Blamo]

What blows my mind it's the fact that professionals can't get the spirit and the core of Star Trek right.
It's basically either The Twilight Zone connected with a constant cast or Gulliver's Travels in space with a streak of optimism for human nature and progress.

You make a good crew and put them into weird and brainy situations where they can't just blast their way out.
Hard mode: nobody gets their eyeball pulled out.

I grew up with the fruits of the 90s Star Trek spam, I had TNG, DS9 and VOY. Even Voyager could do good things when they let the cast to have chemistry. I mean DS9 and TNG really were the strongest of the three. And thank goodness for DS9 for fixing the Ferengi. Their TNG iteration was extremely dumb.

Enterprise was okay, but it had the usual problem with prequels. I simply don't get why they had to backwards on that. Sure the 24th century was full, but making a prequel to TOS just messes up things. I think ENT was unnecessary. They should have let DS9 and VOY mature as brands so they could have taken up the movie mantle (at least as a one off) from TNG which was really stretched thin with the movies.

I could have imagined direct to home video or tv movies. Maybe it would have been too expensive and nobody would have watched them, who knows. But the brand should have been handled more smart.

Instead of the JJ stuff, we should have been in time for a Next Next Generation or Next Phase 2 or something. Get some SF writers and actual tech guys, close them into a room and just let them come up with crazy stuff. A fresh century or whatever without being bogged down with the past too much, and you can refresh the formula.

 

[JamesFargo]

What blows my mind it's the fact that professionals can't get the spirit and the core of Star Trek right.

I suspect those in charge are infected with the Obama mindset of "nothing will fundamentally change." They either a) can't relate to Gene's vision, or b) don't want to give viewers any funny ideas about helping the underprivileged, or the consequences of ignoring them (ex: Bell Riots).

We'll probably get a post-mortem years after the fact. Darren Mooney does good work in that area. He wrote pieces covering the behind-the-scenes attitudes of VOY and ENT. Really shed light on what went hideously wrong.

 

[YankeeTrader]

They didn't. You're thinking of Voyager.


Yes, they were introduced in TOS. According to canon, the Federation never got a glimpse of the Romulans' faces during the war. They always wore helmets.

Hence why ENT had such a difficult time with the Romulans. They could never share a screen with Archer.

It wasn't them wearing helmets, but they didn't have visual communications during the Romulan War, even the treaty was "signed" by subspace radio

 

[Oats12345]

Marc Alaimo is based.

Good to hear another star trek actor isn't a LOLcow

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

Enterprise was okay, but it had the usual problem with prequels. I simply don't get why they had to backwards on that. Sure the 24th century was full, but making a prequel to TOS just messes up things. I think ENT was unnecessary.

Idk, I liked Enterprise even though it wasn't great.

The premise was pretty good as a change of pace from TNG, with its luxurious pastel carpets and overpowered flagship.

Humans as scrappy underdogs in an tin can with an experimental warp drive attached, trying to find their place in a galaxy full of alien weirdos who don't necessarily like or trust the new guys. MacGuyvering their way out of problems, because they couldn't count on being the biggest and baddest ship in the fleet. Could've been a fun remix of Roddenberry's original vision. A wagon train to the stars / Horatio Hornblower in space kinda thing. Which is what the opening credits seemed to promise.

Maybe the writers or the producers didn't fully commit to it, or the budget just wasn't there, but it felt like they soon turned it into another Voyager / TNG-lite with contrived plot points and technobabble. The first thing they got wrong is the sets - the NX-01 interior should've looked like a nuclear submarine or a destroyer, not an industrial reskin of previous Star Trek sets.

Dim the lights, increase the claustrophobia, visually remind the audience that this is a show about space pioneers doing a difficult and dangerous job venturing into the unknown. Stuff that the BSG remake got right.

That kind of show could've afforded a slightly harder sci fi approach, because there's enough crazy natural phenomena such as magnetars and neutron stars and primordial black holes that you don't need time traveling nazis or spacial anomaly of the week to tell an interesting story.

Hoshi, Mayweather and the rest of the crew also got completely cucked out of their potential and spent most of the show's run as glorified extras. But you absolutely could tell good stories about the guys who aren't senior officers. Compare Garibaldi on B5 with the forgettable British guy in Ent, or Phlox (one of the better characters) with Doc Cottle from BSG.

 

[JamesFargo]

it felt like they soon turned it into another Voyager / TNG-lite with contrived plot points and technobabble

These guys are supposedly based on Buzz Aldrin and John Glenn.

Meanwhile, the stakes are quite low, and the pace is leisurely. You can almost smell the self-indulgence behind the camera; as though they knew it was going to be renewed, no matter what. Ratings-wise, it was doing well enough: It was consistently the highest-rated show on UPN, right behind Buffy. They cancelled it after the network went in a different direction.

Farscape often used WWII bunkers for sets. Pegasus and Galactica are on skeleton crews. There is a pretty obvious disparity in tone and quality.

 

[Flexo]

Voyager is one of those shows that I think the TNG fans despise disproportionately to the rest of the Trek fans floating around. Even DS9 fans seem to unconsciously acknowledge that Voyager was a neccesarily evil to keep the producers distracted and allow DS9 to have an actual plot and characters instead of the soap opera shit Voyager was devoured by.

Voyager's problem relative to TNG is that its not deep and intellectual enough. Or at least its not percieved to be. As I mentioned before TNG definitely had its sillier aspects and the idea that it was way more sophisticated than even TOS is mostly an internet thing. While TNG's good episodes are leagues above anything Voyager could manage, the truth is that Voyager's average episodes are about on par with TNG's average episodes. Though this is more a product of quantity than quality. Its basically just TNG 2: With A Younger Cast.

Voyager's problem was always it never living up to its potential.

SFDebris went into this in even more detail with his last 2 reviews but every once in awhile, when Voyager really tries to be as good as it can be, you get a glimpse of a show that might have been equal to DS9.

Instead we have something that is quite forgettable if it wasn't for Jeri Ryan's rockin' body.

(reviews in question time stamped to his rants)

 

[L50LasPak]

Got a little long winded with this one.

The first thing they got wrong is the sets - the NX-01 interior should've looked like a nuclear submarine or a destroyer, not an industrial reskin of previous Star Trek sets.

Dim the lights, increase the claustrophobia, visually remind the audience that this is a show about space pioneers doing a difficult and dangerous job venturing into the unknown. Stuff that the BSG remake got right.

This. This right here is everything wrong with Enterprise. The producers went into Enterprise thinking it would be a cheaper show to film than the rest of Star Trek, but they were wrong. I think in any reasonable circumstance you would need to spend more money on a futuristic show with technology closer to what we have today than Star Trek's fantasy era where everything can be magically epxlained away with rayguns and forcefields.

To do Enterprise properly, it would undoubtedly need to be the most expensive Star Trek to date in order to capture the look and feel of pre-easy automation that TOS established, where you can control the whole ship from just two consoles. It would need to both look like real control and engineering rooms while at the same time looking somewhat more futuristic, something that is easier said than done. The writing would also have an intense amount of baggage attached to it because Hard SF is a very tight genre with a strong legacy. Simple Asimovian-style high technology stories are no longer permissible, you need to pump those rookie numbers up to Niven and Heinlein quality, which is a feat most writers couldn't do back then let alone today.

Fully commiting to this though presents a very serious problem: Star Trek would lose all of its wide appeal. Now, your average normie can't just flip on an episode that's rerunning on TBS and immediately understand who everyone is and get into the action. They wouldn't be able to just tune out the technobabble, they would need to actually understand what the characters were talking about and also grasp the basis of things like physics, interia, reaction mass, gravity, nuclear fission, etc, real-world concepts that a lot of people found difficult to wrap their heads around in school. There would also be, god help us, math involved.

Additionally you would need to hire really good talent to work on the show. People with experience who can play very, very professional characters but also still show emotion through little subtleties. You may notice this acting style is dead as fuck as we haven't even seen it come back in war movies. So now you're not just shelling out for a better set, better writers, professional consultants, but you need to pay for better actors too, and you need to keep them interested.

If you somehow managed to bullseye this it would probably be the greatest television show ever put to screen. It'd blow DS9 straight out of the water for sure; the Dominion War would look like candyland compared to the Earth-Romulan War. Trouble is no network would ever be crazy enough to greenlight a huge undertaking like this, and its not hard to blame them becuase there is so much that could still go wrong even if you had a really good team on it.

Voyager's problem was always it never living up to its potential.

I don't know, I'm somewhat skeptical of this theory. Given the above I'd honestly say Enterprise had the higher potential than Voyager. But either way, often its just not practical for a TV show to fully live up to its premise. We did get a Ron Moore show about a group of science fiction humans with limited resources traveling to a distant destination, you know, it was the remake of Battlestar Galactica. And we all know how that ended.

I'm not saying I disagree with the overall idea that Voyager didn't live up to its potential, but in my opinion I could better ignore that if the show was able to just stand on its own. Kind of like DS9's plot having an embarassing seizure with Demon Lord Dukat complete with terrible CGI; that was stupid, but at least the rest of the show made up for it. Same with TOS being cut short when there were so many good scripts for Season 4 we never got to see; its unfortunate, but it doesn't ruin the show because there are still plenty of great and timeless episodes in the three seasons we did get.

Voyager's problem isn't neccesarily that it abandoned its gimmick. Its that it never acquired another, better one to replace it, and also never had strong enough writing to make the show succeed in spite of that. Star Trek replicator technology is so fucking broken and overpowered that yeah, I'm fine with Voyager not being a post-apocalyptic scrap heap always running out of ammo and barely held together by duct tape and hope. My problem is the shallow characters, cliched storylines, and shitty writing. When you actually give Voyager a good plot to work with it totally succeeds regardless of whether or not its living up to the potential of its premise, it doesn't need to be serialized either. Fixing the show would really have been as simple as doing that honestly.