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Star Trek XI .. after all?

1972.

...no, seriously, I could rise above the scenery, but the plots...? I know for a fact that some are quite good, but after B5 and BSG and Buffy, some things would either irk me or make me laugh. Mostly, I guess I've been spoiled.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic.

Eh...I love the 60s. It's the early to mid 70s when things look horrible to me on film.

I have to LOL about you bringing Buffy into the conversation saying that after watching that some things in TOS would irk you. Buffy was about as out there as you can get. I enjoyed some of it, but, alot of just went too far, IMHO (Although alot of the humor was pretty good).
 
I'm the last person to be idealistic about the 60s, but part of the fun of revisting original Trek is to experience a completely different mentality- aesthetically and stylistically- than that of today. Any movie/TV show, especially sci-fi, now has to be "gritty," "dark," almost cynical. People praise DS9 for being the "darkest" of the Treks. BSG gets heaps of praise for being harder and darker. The Matrix is the template for modern sci-fi, where everyone is bad-ass and too-cool-for-the-room and beautiful but they don't care about it. Sometimes that gen-Y fake-hipster bullshit can be a bit overwhelming.

Let's all remember the context of sci-fi in the 60s- it was the most inspiring time for space exploration in real life. Space travel wasn't just some geek thing- everyone cared.

The 60s, and therefore original Trek (and an equal old-school favorite, The Prisoner), may look "cheesy," and people "overact" (not just Shatner), but it's genuinely enthusiastic, energetic colorful, and bold. Kirk and his crew do something that no other Trek crew could- constantly convey the wonder and adventure of imaginary space exploration.

Picard noted everything like a boring scholar- "well, quite fascinating, bip bip." He should've been wearing a goddamn smoking jacket, puffing on his pipe and stroking a beard. Kirk would rant 'n' rave, fuck the hottest alien chick on the planet, and drop kick the toughest enemy. How can anyone not love that? Picard was a talker/observer, while Kirk was a doer. He lived the adventure.

That's why it rang true in the movies when they tried to turn him into a bureaucrat and it failed, wereas in some of the Next Gen future-flashes we see Picard as one and it's totally believable. Oh great, we had 7 yrs of a TV show about a perfect future bureaucrat. zzzzzzzz....

At least Sisko has some of the qualites of Kirk. I actually really like him as a character. And to the credit of Farscape and Firefly, they, at their best, infused the spirit of 60s wonder and adventurism with modern sensibilities. Farscape found a new way to convery the experience of the ultimate explorer- an Odysseus-like lost character. Unfortunately, that could ony work for a couple of seasons until they too fell under the trap of the ridiculous arcs and absurdly convuluted stories.

Babylon 5 mastered the politcal-story-arc thing, and then, with the success of 24, everyone feels they need to do soap-opera-like serials. But, you know, the JMSes of the world are few and far between, and that shit just ain't Trek. Enough with the continuity and the trivia.
 
For those who see a Rodennberry/Non-Rodennberry dichotomy, consider this: The spin-offs were increasingly lame starting with TNG., and TNG was arguably the series the best fit Gene R's vision of Trek. PIcard was Gene's version of a starship captain - at the least the Gene of the 80s and 90s. Kirk was the kind of character he knew he had to give the network in order to get a show on the air. But Gene himself clearly preferred Spock. He'd promised NBC "Hornblower in space" and "Wagon Train to the stars" that's what he had to deliver - after having deviated from that idea in the pilot and delivered a much more cerebral commanding officer in the original pilot, one whose more violent moments seemed forced.

The santiized, "we've solved all mankind's problems", "we don't have money in the future" uptopianism is right there in TNG. So is the search for "god" or something like him in the universe (though never a transcendent God), which Harlan Ellison once said was somewhere in everything Gene wrote. And so was the Pnnocchio character - the non-human who wants to be a real person. That later shows just took these elements from TNG and beat them until nothing was left. (Thus Voyager got two non-humans who learned to be more human than the real thing - the Doctor and T of A. The problem was they were far more interesting as characters than any of their human cohorts.)

Later Trek often sucked, but not only because of Berman and co. Arguably part of what made the original as good as it was is that Gene didn't have as much control over it as he would have liked. Others were able to contribute to the final result and make up for his weaknesses and mistakes.

Regards,

Joe
 
Joe,

I actually am fully aware of that point, and it is a good one. Another detail supporting that is that Gene's first captain was not Kirk, rather was Christopher Pike. He was not as completely placcid as Picard, but certainly not a Kirk either. I do understand that the decline to "non-Roddenberry" Trek actually started with TNG, not after it, but to me there was a clear point of differentiation that I have felt.

When I rewatched TOS, what captivated me most about it, was the sense of complete unknown, exploration, and being on the "new and final frontier." It literally was about discovering what could possibly be out there. The show was itself adventure personified, and Kirk brought that spirit into a characer.

TNG started off being very much about exploration and "finding out what is out there." But it wasn't long into the series (a few seasons, probably when Gene started getting away from it on a day to day basis) that the galaxy "got a lot smaller."

The show seemed to focus less on exploration, discovery, and the human condition, and it started its change into a political show. The Federation was very much an active bureaucracy that the characters had to deal with more and more. It became a more active part of plots of various episodes. Subspace communication improved (seemingly) and warp travel was so much faster you could get everywhere quicker. Basically: The galaxy seemed pretty crowded and already discovered.

In TOS there were plenty of episodes where Uhura was telling Kirk "it will be 2 weeks before Starfleet gets our message" and Kirk would have to act on his own judgement. Two weeks before a message is received, now THAT gives you the feel of being out there on the edge and completely on your own. That is what TOS had that caught my interest, and TNG didn't.

By DS9 Trek had really converted to having far more political plots than anything, patterning themselves after some real life events. The TNG movies did much of the same thing (although in fairness, so did Star Trek VI). In fact there is a line in Nemesis where Picard, after talking about all their Federation-related assignments coming up, said "remember when we use to be explorers?" No. I really can't. Its pretty far back in the TNG show where that really took place.

An interesting point you made about the Captains. Yes, Picard was the captain that Gene originally wanted. This is one instance where I think that the networks made the right call. I don't see TOS Trek being the same with a Picard-like commander. Picard was made out to be the more straight-laced, think things completely through, talk in committee before making a decision, captain. Kirk, in later Berman-Trek episodes, was always painted to be the reckless captain who seemingly broke the rules all the time. Ironically, watching TOS, it really didn't happen that way or that often. Yes, he had to make decisions on his own and do what he thought was right, but with Starfleet being 2 weeks away from responding, he had to! It wasn't until Star Trek III when he stole the Enterprise that he really BROKE the rules. Its also ironic, that when it came time for TNG to hit the bigscreen, Berman, the guy who seemed to be Anti-Kirk and Anti-TOS Trek, started turning Picard into a more Kirk-like captain. I think he broke rules and disobeyed the chain of command in EVERY TNG movie, which is more than Kirk ever did.

But the heart of things I think really lies with the feel of the two shows, and it wasn't long after Gene became less and less involved, that Trek seemed to move to far more political and bureaucratic plotlines. That is also probably more of the 80s/90s influence on story telling, but it definitely did a lot to change the feel of the entire series. I really do believe that Berman never had a lot of respect for TOS Trek and it cannot be a coincidence in my mind that when he became more involved, that Trek became less and less recognizable.

Not that I haven't ranted on enough, but I'll leave with one final point. I am not criticizing ALL of the Trek series for taking this direction. To make a successful spinoff, you HAVE to make things different. TNG it made sense to try to keep the same feel as the original (it almost did). DS9 was the political/story arc Trek. As a spinoff, that was the right call and its a DIFFERENT show. However Voyager really did try to get back to the original sense of adventure and being out there and alone (on the other side of the galaxy!) that the TOS series had....they just couldn't hit their mark. Then their last attempt at capturing that same sense of adventure with Enterprise failed as well. How can you mess that up? A show that takes place even before TOS Trek, and they still couldn't make it work. Such a shame.

So yea, spinoffs do need to be different in their own right, but the overall appeal of what Trek was I do believe left, possibly never to return.
 
However Voyager really did try to get back to the original sense of adventure and being out there and alone (on the other side of the galaxy!) that the TOS series had....they just couldn't hit their mark.

That's because Voyager was, fundamentally, a cheat. Because of the Paramont "franchise rules" (and don't forget, this is where the cosmic reset button really came from) Voyager could never be a really dramatic show where anything interesting happened because a) no major changes were allowed and b) their primiary mission, first, last and always, was to get back home. They were handed a situation in the pilot that could only be resolved by their returning home. So that was the predetermined end-point. And since Paramount's "protect the franchise' rules said they couldn't change much (except for losing gaining characters as any TV show will over five or seven years) everything in between was - and had to be - filler.

Voyager was a "puzzle-box story" writ large. David Gerrold wrote about "puzzle-box stories" in one of his books about ST:TOS. The p-b story is fake drama because it traps the hero in some unpleasant situation from which he wants to escape, and then puts obstacles in his path to slow him down. Since we know he's going to escape (if he doesn't there's no show next week), the writers just try to make the puzzle seem interesting by adding some phony jeopardy or giving the hero a love interest to worry about for the hour. Remember the TOS episode where everyone disappears into the past of a world that is about to be destroyed? Spock somehow reverts to a primative form of Vulcan and falls for a cave girl in an ice age of the alien planet's distant past. But there's no real question that Spock is going to stay there with her. She's a roll in the hay to him, and when he returns to the "present" all those messy emotinos are going to go away anyhow. In "The City on the Edge of Forever", on the other hand, essentially the same device is used to put Kirk into the real dramatic story the episode has to tall: This one about Earth's past (and future) and a genuine choice that Kirk has to make with devastating consequences (personal or universal) no matter which path he choses. (Personally, I preferred Ellison's orginal ending where Kirk can't bring himself to do what needs to be done and Spock kills Edith, but that's just me.)

But Voyager was the bad kind of puzzle box, the kind that simply stalls the inevitable for 7 years. There was never the sense of exploring the unknown because they weren't exploring it. They were looking for the shortest route out of the place.

This is the opposite of Crusade, which also seemed to be a puzzle-box show to many outside observers, who thought it was going to be about curing the Drakh plague. If anything it seemed to have less going for it than Voyager, because while we could assume the ship would make it home, there was always the small chance they'd pull a Quantum Leap on us and leave them out there after 7 years. But with Crusade we not only knew they had to find a cure, we knew that a cure had been found, because varous episodes of B5 had already given us glimpses of Earth long afert everything on the planet would have died if the plague hadn't been cured. The difference, of course, is the JMS never intended the show to remain the same series in the same situation for 5 years. By the end of year one it would already have taken one serious detour and been well on its way to another. (Just as he'd sold B5 as "Casablanca in space", but by the thrid season had turned it into Seven Days in May, as he mentions in one of the script books.)

I once posted a proposed reimagining of Voyager where the crew is forced pretty quickly to accept that they are never going home and that they'll simply have to build lives for themselves in some quiet corner of the Delta Quadrant, avoiding contact as much as possible and keeping the Prime Directive in spirit, if not to the letter. That would last about 1 season, during which they'd keep hearing about this really evil force that dominated the whichever quadrant they were supposed to be in. The Macqis woud naturally want to fight the oppresors, and this would be a major source of contlict between them and the Federation types. Until the bad guys came after Voyager, which would turn out to be one of the most advanced ships in the region. Then Capt. Kate would quietly tear up the Prime Directive and decide to do the RIght Thing instead by, in effect, conquering the entire quadrant herself, welding the disparate races into a single government and taking the Bad Guys down once and for all.

(The model I had in the back of my mind was John Carter of Mars, who starts out just fighting in self-defense on a planet where every group is perpetually at war with every ohter group, then to help his friends and gradually keeps turning vanquisehd foes into allies until he's Jeddak of Jaddaks, Warlord of Mars and in charge of pretty much the whole shootin' match.)

After which the Federation would invent some sooper-dooper warp drive that allowed them to send ships to the area - at which point loyalteis would be tested again as various people had to decide whether or not to go "home", the Federation has to decide what to do criminal violators of the Prime Directive and Capt. Kate has to decide if she's ready to pit her Empire against the Federation. :)

it could have been fun. :)

Regards,

Joe
 
The villian didn't even need to have his super duper evil plan, he could have done it a lot easier. Just a bad, bad, bad movie

I cannot express how much I loathe Generations. McDowell's character reminded me of no one so much as Marvin the Maritan from Looney Tunes. That damned rocket should have had "ACME" stamped on it in 10 foot high letters. And did you notice how we never so much as saw one of the aliens that were about to get wiped out? None of them spoke to Picard, none of them beamed aboad the ship, we never heard one of their voices. As someone said, "One death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic." That's what the screenplay gave us to care about in this film, a statistic. That's what motivated Picard. That's what Kirk died for. A statistic. If they had at least put a face on the looming tragedy it mgiht have meant something. But whoever was responsible for the paint-by-numbers script simply didn't know enough about empathy or motivation to realize that you had to give both the characters and the audience someone to care about. Otherwise the story has no heart and the victory and sacrifice are hollow. Kirk died to save 10 million or a billion sentients or whatever the number was. Sure, if you say so. But it would have meant a lot more if he had died to save one scared alien child who we knew and liked and who had found herself on that rope bridge with Soren. For all that his death was felf, Kirk might have given his life for the Number 3 on Sesame Street.

I do sorta like First Contact for all that it pissed all over the previous continuity and made Cochrane an asshole. (That might have worked better if we hadn't met Cochrane in TOS - and if it weren't strongly implied that Cochrane was a native of a colony on Alpha Centauri established with sublight ships who discovered warp drive 50 or 100 years after man went to the stars.)

The next one (I don't remember titles) just pissed me off, much the way The Phantom Menace did. I left wanting my money and two hours of my life back. In both cases I refused to see the next film in the seies and haven't to this day. (I did alllow myself to be dragged back to see SW: Episode III, only because I was curious how the married the prequels up to the orginal films. I saw it opening week in the theater, and haven't seen it since. I don't own any of the prequel films or the last two Trek features on DVD.

Regards,

Joe
 
I'd add the Avengers to your top 60's shows. You summed up the Kirk/ Picard thing nicely!

Hmmm.... Emma Peel. :)

emma4.jpg


emma5.jpg
 
Considering how the name "Emma Peel" was invented... I'm not sure that it matters.


Joe, I'd watch your reimagining of Voyager in a heartbeat. (I'll leave aside the fact that in a few small ways, I already am, via BSG.) But all this discussion has made me realize just why it is that Trek has never really appealed to me: the Almighty Reset Button gets pushed just about every week, and it's all about ideals. Let's face it, Picard isn't even interesting until he's up against the Borg -- i.e, when he stops being idealistic. The Federation is "perfect." And so on.

Ideals are interesting for about one episode. Then they're done, and you have to look at the violation of those ideals.
 
Staying with the off-topic portion of the thread ... anyone else noticed that the DVD sets of The Avengers (certainly the ones in our local library anyway) all have a big pic of Mrs Peel on the cover?

They certainly know their audience ... :D
 
Trek gets criticised for presenting a utopian future for humanity, especially in the nihilistic sensibilities of current pop culture, but that element of Trek was the core of Trek's "mission" (heh) to present progressive social values in a science-fiction context. Trek operated under the presumption that material comfort and wealth are crucial to establishing peace, prosperity and the realisation of human potential.

It's just that TNG didn't strike as good a balance between an improved society while remaining true to our natures as TOS did.

Its also ironic, that when it came time for TNG to hit the bigscreen, Berman, the guy who seemed to be Anti-Kirk and Anti-TOS Trek, started turning Picard into a more Kirk-like captain. I think he broke rules and disobeyed the chain of command in EVERY TNG movie, which is more than Kirk ever did.

Yeah, but that's probably as much due to the sheer number of hours that TNG produced as opposed to TOS as anything else.
Insurrection really showed Picard being rebellious. It was hard to swallow after 89 years of his primping his uniform while rambling on and on about the Prime Directive.


As for City on the Edge of Forever, I do like Ellison's idea for the ending (Spock kills Edith), but that moment where Kirk stops himself in the episode is so memorable (and- yes- acted well by Shatner!) that I'm glad it turned out the way it did.

Voyager- I just assumed that they schtipped them in the other side of the universe so that they wouildn't have to deal with continuity and explore new stuff. The problem is that it's just not possible to come up with 182 original, interesting, exciting stand-alone stories. So enter the Kazons and pretend-Nazi hunter aliens and beating the crap out of the Borg until they're no longer cool (nothing I hate more than overplaying a great villain- it's like watching Friday the 13th part 19, where you wonder why you ever found that clown scary).

Generations sucked, but the thing that really stands out for me is, of course, Kirk. He's making eggs, smiling and joking, and it's like sunshine enters a cave, a damp icky cave where Picard is putting me to sleep and I want to punch Guinan's stupid hat off her patronising head.

I disagree that they needed to put a face on the innocents at risk. We've had a million of hours of watching these characters risk and sacrifice for innocents, we already know they're heroic. Putting a kid on the bridge or something might be hacky and cliched.

I find it pretty telling that in your run-down of TNG flicks, Joe, that you complete forgot Insurrection. That's Ok- we all like to forget Insurrection.

Believe it or not I've actually never watched The Avengers.
 
I'll agree with a lot that has been said about Generations. But I'm with GKE on the human face thingy - I don't watch science fiction to have everything everywhere always have a "face", let alone a "human face". I didn't need to know anything about life on Alderaan for it to show that Darth Vader is one bad-ass bastard when it went boom. Shoe-horning a "human face" into Generations would have turned a bad movie bad and corny.

But yeah .. bad, bad movie. The villain was not convincing. And though I'm not generally a good science fascist, the entire concept of the Nexus was utter tripe - "once you're there, you're always there, you only leave when you want to, bla bla bla.." .. yeah, whatever. Why is Soran not in it in that case?

He can't fly into the nexus .. because .. er .. why again? Not good for the ship? Didn't stop anyone else from getting into the Nexus like that.

And I did love how he fired the rocket .. and within 10 seconds, the sun explodes. Hmm, that sun is an orb hanging a few kilometers over the planet's surface, is it? Explains how the chain reaction happened so quickly ..

It all seemed like one great big collection of BAD plot devices, all meshed together sloppily in order to get Kirk and Picard to meet. At the end of the day .. who gives a fuck about that, aside from the helpless fanboys?

I must be one of the very few people that didn't *hate* 9 .. mind you, I didn't love it either. It mostly just seemed like an over-extended regular episode of TNG, and not a very good one at that. It mostly left me wondering if they couldn't come up with anything better in the time they had.

10 on the other hand .. I banned it completely from my memory within 10 minutes of leaving the movie theatre, it was such a load of rubbish.
 
I wasn't using "face" or "human face" literally. The aliens could have looked like ambulatory rocks for all I cared, the important thing was that they be something other than unseen abstractions the writers moved onto the chessboard to give the heroes for sleepwalking through their pre-determined steps.

I didn't need to know anything about life on Alderaan for it to show that Darth Vader is one bad-ass bastard when it went boom.

But you're forgetting that you knew a lot about life on Alderaan already - because of the presence of Princess Leia. That would have just one more big anonymous explosion if it weren't the home world of a character we'd been introduced to in the first minutes of the film and for whom we'd been rooting ever since. That's why Lucas (who when you come right down to it is a very poor writer, but who gets the basics right) didn't have the Death Star destroy some anonymous planet. It had to be Leia's homeworld because that raised the stakes enormously - whether you conciously noticed that or not.

I stand by my criticism. It was just a basic failure of Storytelling 101 not to give the audience watching this story (which, this being a theatrical film, was not composed 100% of people who'd seen these characters "do this a thousand times") an emotional connection to the supposedly threatened millions or billions on the planet. It isn't enough that the characters do the noble thing because they're noble guys, the audience has to be invested in the outcome, the audience has to care not only about weather the hero "wins" but about the people he's defending. Otherwise we're not watching a drama, we're watching a sporting event the the innocent lives at risk are just a way of keeping score.

Sheridan could have just announced to the League worlds that he'd sent a White Star with phony data on a suicide mission to lure the Shadows to Corianna 6. JMS didn't have to show us the conversation with Erickson, nor Sheridan listening to the results later. He did it the way he did to make it personal, to make us see who was about to die and see Sheridan give the order to the man's face. That's what makes it drama - and a big part of what made Generations crap. They kept forgetting such elementary rules of storytelling all the way through the picture.

Regards,

Joe
 
Sheridan could have just announced to the League worlds that he'd sent a White Star with phony data on a suicide mission to lure the Shadows to Corianna 6. JMS didn't have to show us the conversation with Erickson, nor Sheridan listening to the results later. He did it the way he did to make it personal, to make us see who was about to die and see Sheridan give the order to the man's face. That's what makes it drama - and a big part of what made Generations crap. They kept forgetting such elementary rules of storytelling all the way through the picture.

I guess it's a matter of different people's desires in story telling - as the whole Erikson deal was one of the very few JMS-written moments that make me cringe every time I watch it. It just seems so tacked on for the sake of additional drama. I would have found it a lot more powerful if they had shown how difficult the decisions were for Sheridan without having to tack on a face.

Having extremely random people/societies threatened for me is just part of Star Trek .. in such a big universe, you just can't know everyone.

I didn't feel that "The Doomsday Machine" was diminished by the fact that the star systems obliterated by the planet killer were completely unknown to the viewer - it was still the most thrilling Trek episode ever for me, eventhough noone we actually know dies for the first ~30 minutes of the script. We didn't need to have a face on any of the destroyed planets in "The Changeling" to establish Nomad as a seriousley deranged nutcase.

You are right about the fact that it's a basic facet of standard storytelling. I don't believe things always have to stick to standard storytelling though - especially not in Trek - if one can manage to tell stories effectively outisde of these boundaries, as Trek has done in many cases.

As Spock said in "The Immunity Syndrome" .. "I've noticed that about your people, doctor; you find it easier to contemplate the death of one than the death of a hundred. You speak of the comparative hardness of the Vulcan heart... but oh, how little room there appears to be in yours."

I don't mind siding with Spock there from time to time.
 

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