I feel like I missed something significant in the finale.
Leyland's death seems to indicate the death of control, according to all of the Section 31 ships just going inactive. So, at that stage, why does the sphere need to be thrown into the future? Hasn't the entire motivation for that plan just been removed?
Time isn't linear and nothing stops control from continuing to exist int he future and send back more attacks and threats until the sphere is put out of reach
But if control exists into the future, then what is throwing the sphere 930 years into the future going to achieve?
The goal was to throw it further past the point control existed.
Basically Control exists because of the Sphere data and growing from being Section 31's AI.
Any time one of those things is threatened it can use time travel to try and correct it.
The plan is to both reveal Control's threat and get it dismantled and also remove the Sphere data from the current day so it can't be used to accelerate the threat.
At least that's how I viewed it, admittedly the answer is just 'time travel, don't think about it'
so the borg reference seems to have had no pay off? Was it just a red herring?
I imagine it wasn't intended to be the Borg, just the combination of nanobots and the typical "you can't fight me" villain spiel when placed in a Star Trek setting makes us all jump to Borg, when honestly both elements are sort of basic "powerful, technology-based indoctrination" things
I feel like I missed something significant in the finale.
Leyland's death seems to indicate the death of control, according to all of the Section 31 ships just going inactive. So, at that stage, why does the sphere need to be thrown into the future? Hasn't the entire motivation for that plan just been removed?
Time isn't linear and nothing stops control from continuing to exist int he future and send back more attacks and threats until the sphere is put out of reach
But if control exists into the future, then what is throwing the sphere 930 years into the future going to achieve?
The goal was to throw it further past the point control existed.
Basically Control exists because of the Sphere data and growing from being Section 31's AI.
Any time one of those things is threatened it can use time travel to try and correct it.
The plan is to both reveal Control's threat and get it dismantled and also remove the Sphere data from the current day so it can't be used to accelerate the threat.
At least that's how I viewed it, admittedly the answer is just 'time travel, don't think about it'
I think that's basically it
Future Control seems to stop existing at a certain point for whatever reason, and Dr. Burnham's point along space-time is after that
Present Control needs to get the data to progress to it's more capable future self, and while powerful isn't an extinction level threat.
Future Control only seems capable of interfering within the temporal boundaries its own existence, for whatever reason (as it never attempts to kill Burnham in her future anchor-point), and manages to revert or route around any change Dr. Burnham makes within that space of time.
Therefore: Throw the data to a point where even the Future Control seems to have ceased existing, and then neither incarnation can get it. Future Control seems to have no agency where Dr. Burnham is, therefore go there.
I guess the next question is: is Dr. Burnham still going to be there and if so in what state of being and memory will she exist in? Will time simply change around her or will she too be changed as now the razing of non-Control life has (hopefully) never occurred?
1. They don't stay in the future for long and they abandon Discovery. Had a Shower Thought today that Georgiou was on the ship when it went through the wormhole, but she's slated to lead the Section 31 series next year. I doubt they set that show 930 years in the future.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
(from Way of the Warrior):
They are about to be boarded. Quark is saying he's going to fight to protect his bar using his old disruptor pistol: Quark: If the Klingons try to get through these doors, I'll be ready for them.
Quark opens the box, there's only a piece of paper inside. Odo reads it. Odo: "Dear Quark. I used parts of your disruptor to fix the replicators. Will return them soon. Rom. " Quark: I will kill him. Odo: With what?
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Well, at least Quark can replicate something and keep it on the counter until Rom gets back.
1. They don't stay in the future for long and they abandon Discovery. Had a Shower Thought today that Georgiou was on the ship when it went through the wormhole, but she's slated to lead the Section 31 series next year. I doubt they set that show 930 years in the future.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
Kurtzman’s saying in interviews that
They’re sticking with it, and one of the benefits is that they’re freed from the continuity issues being a prequel causes
1. They don't stay in the future for long and they abandon Discovery. Had a Shower Thought today that Georgiou was on the ship when it went through the wormhole, but she's slated to lead the Section 31 series next year. I doubt they set that show 930 years in the future.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
Kurtzman’s saying in interviews that
They’re sticking with it, and one of the benefits is that they’re freed from the continuity issues being a prequel causes
Well, all the people who've been saying forever that Trek should do that will be happy.
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
Also shades of them slingshotting around the sun in 4
Wait *checks notes*
It didn't look like this at all? It didn't have the intergalactic time and space whale!?
DAMN YOU DISCOVERY!
Hardtarget on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited April 2019
I rewatched The Motion Picture over the weekend. I grow more convinced every time I see it that it is lowkey one of the best Star Trek movies, it just has serious problems. Like it has big pluses and big minuses, whereas many of the films have almost no pluses at all, or they're very anemic.
There are a lot of kind of inexplicable choices and outright dumb shit in the movie and they're unfortunately almost all frontloaded in the first 30-40 minutes of the film, which I think makes people less receptive to the better stuff that follows.
- The early scene at Starfleet Command serves literally no purpose. Kirk arrives by train, says about four words to his new science officer, then leaves for a briefing that we never see, and the scene immediately cuts to him after the meeting, beaming into orbit. It's nice to see Starfleet Command and a big "first" from a Trek history perspective but they do so little with it, and Kirk speaking to his superior could have been a chance to deliver the necessary plot exposition and also give us more of an idea of his state of mind and set up the journey he's supposed to be on. Instead, what actually happens is that he breathlessly tells Scotty "they gave her [the Enterprise] back to me" when we weren't aware until literally about sixty seconds earlier that he didn't already have her.
- The genuinely horrific transporter accident scene. Why is this here? From a plot perspective, it just kills the new science officer, clearing the way for Spock, but he only needs to be written out because a writer decided he should be there to begin with! The bit casts a really grim, unpleasant pall on the early parts of the movie which are already laboring under various other grim, unpleasant palls.
- When they go to warp, there's this incredibly tedious, protracted scene where the engines go off wrong and trap them in "a wormhole" with an asteroid (???) that they have to destroy to escape (???????). From a character perspective, this gives the story a chance to show that Decker is competent and quick-witted and more knowledgable about the new ship than Kirk, deepening the conflict between them, but the actual execution is awful. There's all this blurry Vaseline-on-the-lens stuff and distorted audio that makes it nearly impossible to tell what's going on - I never got all of it until the DVD came out 15 years ago and I could finally watch it with subtitles on - and the worst part is that the scene never ends. it goes on for minute after minute after minute. I think it's still happening right now, even as I speak.
- Both the transporter and the warp drive scene come out of this whole recurring plot point (there are other scenes about it too, like Spock having to write new "fuel equations") with the Enterprise being kind of busted and half-assed and it's like...why. The mystery of V'Ger, a giant cloud that eats spaceships, is enough drama! It's an artificial raising of the stakes that a) doesn't actually raise the stakes, because the stakes are already set at spaceship-eating cloud, b) isn't executed well, and c) takes up valuable running time that ought to have been taken up by dialogue and characterization.
- Dialogue and characterization. It's not that it's bad, and some of it is really great, but there isn't enough of it. The emotional arc of the movie is actually very solid. Kirk has aged and fallen out of touch with the state of the art, and is also kind of macho-competing with Decker, who is both more up to date, younger, and seems poised to replace him. Decker has unresolved feelings for Ilia. Spock has tried to purge all emotion and is now so cold and robotic that it alarms his shipmates. McCoy has a beard. The others are...there. Over the course of the film, Kirk reaches rapproachment and mutual respect with Decker and gets his mojo back, Spock realizes that there's more to life than pure logic, and McCoy shaves. These are solid emotional journeys but what we get is kind of a skeleton: the dialogue is incredibly sparse. People say one (often very terse) line, then there's a pregnant pause of as long as 30 seconds, then someone else says another terse line in reply. For a franchise that has a reputation for being talky and overwritten, TMP is exactly the opposite, to its detriment.
- On the other hand, we don't need more lines like Ilia stepping onto the bridge and immediately, in response to seemingly nothing at all, declaring "my vow of celibacy is on the record, Captain."
- This isn't actually a flaw in the sense of a thing that is bad, but it's maybe kind of a bad choice in context, and that's the characters' emotional journey. This film has a serious tone problem. It begins with Klingons dying to a space horror, and then there's this grotesque transporter accident, and then we watch a whole space station full of screaming people die, and at the point where the movie could offer a shred of comfort by seeing our space friends back in the saddle again, instead...they're all kind of cold and pissed at each other. McCoy is grouchy about everything and Spock is just kind of dead behind the eyes and we watch Kirk futilely trying to connect to both of them and while none of it is bad and is actually a pretty effective character arc it means the entire first half of the movie feels relentlessly grim and dour and drab.
- The 70s set design and costumes with lots of baby blues, beiges, tans, and taupes lacks a certain excitement. It's not sterile, exactly, but it feels like an empty convention room in a hotel on a lonely stretch of Iowa highway and adds to the sense that there's something human missing from the proceedings.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
- It is the most beautiful Star Trek movie ever made. The visuals are still breathtaking. The often-mocked six-minute love shot of the Enterprise is utterly convincing and totally gripping. The immense scale of V'Ger is one of the most impressive spectacles in sci-fi history. Movies packed with flashy CGI with thousands - no, tens of thousands! - no, millions! - of moving objects still don't feel a tenth as genuinely vast as those long shots of a tiny, tiny Enterprise silhouetted against this massive ship.
- V'Ger is one of the only godlike aliens in Trek that actually feels godlike and alien. Its nature and motives seem completely opaque and peeling away its layers of mystery is an interesting journey and makes TMP one of the like, two Trek movies ever to be actually about exploration! This is hardly the first story about a robot trying to find God/its creator (that shit goes all the way back to Frankenstein, really) but the movie actually does something pretty interesting with the idea, where the big problem is that V'Ger is robotically incapable of feeling faith or an intuitive sense of its purpose in the world, but at the same time is aware that it's missing something and is desperate to fill the void. It's an interesting existential problem and the gang's solution means the inevitable special effects lightshow at the end of the movie has a feeling of genuine moral gravitas rather than just the wheels of the plot rolling to a stop.
- Spock's mind-meld with V'Ger is one of the most interesting character shifts in Trek. It kind of puts the whole "damn cold-blooded Vulcan" thing with him to bed for the remainder of the franchise and in the course of that single scene he metamorphoses into the warm, wise old man he'll be for the rest of the films.
- As mentioned, the emotional journey of the characters begins in kind of an offputting place, with them all wound up tight in different ways and not speaking to each other, but the movie does pay that journey off. Seeing them bantering on the bridge in the final minutes you can feel all the old warmth and light flooding back into the film, like a numb extremity waking up, and it provides real catharsis. However kind of weird or unpleasant or dull or alienating some parts of the movie might have been, it's hard not to grin when the credits roll.
- I don't know if you guys knew this but Persis Khambatta is a real pretty lady and her space bathrobe leaves very little to the imagination
so the borg reference seems to have had no pay off? Was it just a red herring?
I imagine it wasn't intended to be the Borg, just the combination of nanobots and the typical "you can't fight me" villain spiel when placed in a Star Trek setting makes us all jump to Borg, when honestly both elements are sort of basic "powerful, technology-based indoctrination" things
I think it’s stuff like
”Struggle is pointless.”
that makes people jump to that particular conclusion.
1. They don't stay in the future for long and they abandon Discovery. Had a Shower Thought today that Georgiou was on the ship when it went through the wormhole, but she's slated to lead the Section 31 series next year. I doubt they set that show 930 years in the future.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
Kurtzman’s saying in interviews that
They’re sticking with it, and one of the benefits is that they’re freed from the continuity issues being a prequel causes
That does kind of raise the question why they didn't just do that to begin with.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
so the borg reference seems to have had no pay off? Was it just a red herring?
I imagine it wasn't intended to be the Borg, just the combination of nanobots and the typical "you can't fight me" villain spiel when placed in a Star Trek setting makes us all jump to Borg, when honestly both elements are sort of basic "powerful, technology-based indoctrination" things
I think it’s stuff like
”Struggle is pointless.”
that makes people jump to that particular conclusion.
1. They don't stay in the future for long and they abandon Discovery. Had a Shower Thought today that Georgiou was on the ship when it went through the wormhole, but she's slated to lead the Section 31 series next year. I doubt they set that show 930 years in the future.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
Kurtzman’s saying in interviews that
They’re sticking with it, and one of the benefits is that they’re freed from the continuity issues being a prequel causes
That does kind of raise the question why they didn't just do that to begin with.
The prequel idea was Brian Fuller's, iirc, but he left before S1 was even done (or had even started?) with production. This is effectively a soft revamp.
Oh boy if they're going that far into the future I can't wait for the bit when they let Kevin Sorbo run the show.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
I like Andromeda and I would be legit excited if they just turned this into it. My issue is this should have happened during like episode 3 of season 1! I get the whole Brian Fuller thing but he left so early on I don't get why they just didn't retool it right away, very bizzare
I have a LOT of thoughts about this but it has been made clear to me and this thread does not like it if I'm "mad" about Discovery, even if I post why. I'll just say instead I look forward to seeing where the hell this show goes in Season 3.
Oh boy if they're going that far into the future I can't wait for the bit when they let Kevin Sorbo run the show.
Was that a thing that happened to that show? Was that why it got weird in the last (two? i forget) seasons?
Yep.
They fired the head writer sometime early-ish in S2 as I recall. The show was never that good but you can tell it completely loses it's way around that point.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
Oh boy if they're going that far into the future I can't wait for the bit when they let Kevin Sorbo run the show.
Was that a thing that happened to that show? Was that why it got weird in the last (two? i forget) seasons?
Yep.
They fired the head writer sometime early-ish in S2 as I recall. The show was never that good but you can tell it completely loses it's way around that point.
IIRC they also ran out of money half way through the season and had to come up with a bunch of filler to shoehorn in on the cheap. I'm only a couple of episodes into season 2 but the budget cuts are already apparent.
I remember my mom being real excited about Andromeda because it was based on Roddenberry's idea. I watched a few episodes and decided some ideas deserve to die.
Nah, the premise was actually really strong. Good setup, interesting setting, solid character ideas, etc, etc.
The problem was, well, everything about the production. The actors, the budget, the writing to some extent. It was a much better idea then that level of production deserved.
The other "based on Gene Roddenberry's ideas" show Earth: Final Conflict had some similar issues, although it was overall better. It wasn't, like, good though. Especially by the end.
Nah, the premise was actually really strong. Good setup, interesting setting, solid character ideas, etc, etc.
The problem was, well, everything about the production. The actors, the budget, the writing to some extent. It was a much better idea then that level of production deserved.
The other "based on Gene Roddenberry's ideas" show Earth: Final Conflict had some similar issues, although it was overall better. It wasn't, like, good though. Especially by the end.
Yeah, this was the era of the Action Pack. Shows and made-for-TV movies that were all made on really tight budgets and filmed in almost exactly the same way. While Andromeda wasn't technically an Action Pack show, it's essentially made like one. That's why it feels a lot like Hercules, or Vanishing Son, or TekWar, or....
Some of the shows had interesting ideas. Hercules was the first for-adults swords and sorcery program in forever (if not ever) and was really popular, and it spawned the superior Xena and gave us Lucy Lawless. Vanishing Son actually tried to tackle the issues facing Chinese immigrants (albeit in a likely cliche way).
On the flip side, TekWar was William Shatner acting like he invented cyberpunk, and Andromeda had Kevin Sorbo trying to be a slightly angsty Hercules in space.
But, yeah, the visual language of these shows - the lighting, framing, spacing, editing - are more or less the same. The same goes for the casting and acting. It was all homogeneous.
Yeah the basic premise of Andromeda was good. What I really liked is that they created a huge backstory and universe full of history and it's basically the opposite of the usual trope of a human led intergalactic federation. In Andromeda, it was the other aliens that created the federation and humans were just regular boring ole members. Of course, because of makeup budget limitations, humans were always everywhere in the show instead of the aliens.
Sorbo is the guy who's moderately attractive and somewhat physically fit that soccer moms swoon over while everyone else is amazed by how generic he is. He's the Train of leading men, and Hercules was his "Drops of Jupiter."
Watched the first six episodes of season 2. So far it's so much better than the first season. Not perfect by any stretch, but it's a lot more consistent.
And this may be a controversial opinion, but I love the interior sets. It's approachably futuristic, and everything feels thick/durable. It feels legitimate and coherent in a way JJ Trek's Enterprise doesn't.
Sorbo is the guy who's moderately attractive and somewhat physically fit that soccer moms swoon over while everyone else is amazed by how generic he is. He's the Train of leading men, and Hercules was his "Drops of Jupiter."
Hey now, what's with this slandering of Drops of Jupiter?
Yeah the basic premise of Andromeda was good. What I really liked is that they created a huge backstory and universe full of history and it's basically the opposite of the usual trope of a human led intergalactic federation. In Andromeda, it was the other aliens that created the federation and humans were just regular boring ole members. Of course, because of makeup budget limitations, humans were always everywhere in the show instead of the aliens.
Just crappy execution...and Sorbo sucks.
I think a lot of the technology. And also the Nietzscheans were tons of fun. When they wrote them write, they struck a good balance with their practically amoral desire for winning and them actually being kinda likeable. There's a few scenes where you just wish it had better actors in a better show cause there was some great little touches there. Like with Dylon's former second-in-command (a terrible terrible actor) where Dylon finds out he's been cheating in their games of Go basically always.
Nah, the premise was actually really strong. Good setup, interesting setting, solid character ideas, etc, etc.
The problem was, well, everything about the production. The actors, the budget, the writing to some extent. It was a much better idea then that level of production deserved.
The other "based on Gene Roddenberry's ideas" show Earth: Final Conflict had some similar issues, although it was overall better. It wasn't, like, good though. Especially by the end.
I would say that Earth: Final Conflict definitely started off pretty good but I'm a real sucker for the Childhood's End setup.
Oh hey someone has a playlist of all 110 episodes on youtube. I will report back as my fond memories of season 1 are destroyed/confirmed.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I watched Final Conflict back when it was on TV originally and again last year when it was on some streaming service or other.
Was completely unable to finish the series either time. It goes pretty far off the rails, but in a "oh shit, this train is flying off into the dump site for retired sewage treatment plants" way, not a "oh man, can you believe how crazy awesome this shit is?" way.
I still want those communicators, though. We've got the camera tech easy, but it seems like the roll-up screen thing is still in the works.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I remember thinking that Earth: Final Conflict's first season (the only one that counts, imo) had its ups and downs, as any kind of zero-budget Canadian sci-fi show would, but one thing I remember really respecting about it was that it didn't reach beyond its grasp. Instead of being kind of hampered and constrained by being a Vancouver production, it tried to find clever ways to tell a sci-fi story within the confines of basically only having "clean generic modern city" and "grassy field" as options for exterior locations. The special effects weren't mindblowing but they didn't have to be because they were used sparingly. 90% of the show was human beings in rooms talking to each other.
First 2 eps really good. It's very book 2 of the Tripods trilogy and I love it. You can see the cheapness and some of the casting isn't great but stuff like that has never bothered me (I think Blakes 7 is fucking great). There's little moments too where you can see that they know what they're doing with limited resources. Like a very natural feeling cut to a reaction shot when the shuttle first lands in ep 1 that puts a bit of space between the cgi shuttle and prop shuttle so the difference isn't as jarring.
Sandoval is creepy as fuuuuuuuuck and the Companion makeup is excellent.
The sort of fakeout on who killed Boone's wife is executed really really well too. Like people aren't just acting suspicious to fake out the audience, they have reason to act the way they do.
Fuck it I'mma watch all of it even though it's kinda soul crushing how it goes downhill like OG V. (If you've never seen the original V go watch it. The first miniseries is a masterpiece. V: The Final Battle is ok at best. The tv series is a trainwreck.)
In a drought of available Sci-fi content in the early days of Netflix I watched all of Andromeda, every episode.
It’s largely terrible, but there are some neat ideas that it constantly trips over.
The ship design itself is pretty good. It’s kind of intresting that despite whatever the federation equivalent was called being based on peace and exploration the ship is very explicitly a warship (It has fighter squadrons, hell in one episode it drops battlemechs into a planet). It raised some questions the show never bothers to answer.
The Magog are an intresting alien race, but the show was never equipped to handle a voracious all consuming horde that procreates by rape in any way at all. The one friendly Magog monk guy crewmen they get was a decent attempt but even that wasn’t handled great.
The FTL engine was neat, I’m always a sucker for restricted jump points in a military sci-if because it’s the only way space combat makes any kind of sense. A universe wide invisible network that requires a human being to pilot is cool (Which typing this, I realise is just the spore drive. Uh, they really are making Andromea 2.0 aren’t they.)
At the end they just straight up start ripping off the shadows and the vorlons from B5.
The sort of fakeout on who killed Boone's wife is executed really really well too. Like people aren't just acting suspicious to fake out the audience, they have reason to act the way they do.
Yeah and it turned out it was a legionnaire that sold her to slavery all along and then my favorite, get the ass hat responsible in front of the dinosaur, put on a baret and BOOM! ... Wait what are we talking about?
The sort of fakeout on who killed Boone's wife is executed really really well too. Like people aren't just acting suspicious to fake out the audience, they have reason to act the way they do.
Yeah and it turned out it was a legionnaire that sold her to slavery all along and then my favorite, get the ass hat responsible in front of the dinosaur, put on a baret and BOOM! ... Wait what are we talking about?
Earth: Final Conflict
I am continuing the long standing tradition of using the Star Trek thread to talk about other sci fi shows.
Posts
Basically Control exists because of the Sphere data and growing from being Section 31's AI.
Any time one of those things is threatened it can use time travel to try and correct it.
The plan is to both reveal Control's threat and get it dismantled and also remove the Sphere data from the current day so it can't be used to accelerate the threat.
At least that's how I viewed it, admittedly the answer is just 'time travel, don't think about it'
Future Control seems to stop existing at a certain point for whatever reason, and Dr. Burnham's point along space-time is after that
Present Control needs to get the data to progress to it's more capable future self, and while powerful isn't an extinction level threat.
Future Control only seems capable of interfering within the temporal boundaries its own existence, for whatever reason (as it never attempts to kill Burnham in her future anchor-point), and manages to revert or route around any change Dr. Burnham makes within that space of time.
Therefore: Throw the data to a point where even the Future Control seems to have ceased existing, and then neither incarnation can get it. Future Control seems to have no agency where Dr. Burnham is, therefore go there.
I guess the next question is: is Dr. Burnham still going to be there and if so in what state of being and memory will she exist in? Will time simply change around her or will she too be changed as now the razing of non-Control life has (hopefully) never occurred?
Now I want to see a short where Control wins but now has to deal with Q.
2. They get a new ship--call it the Discovery-A if they really want to keep name--and it'll be a more familiar ship like a Constitution or Miranda-class.
(from Way of the Warrior):
They are about to be boarded. Quark is saying he's going to fight to protect his bar using his old disruptor pistol:
Quark: If the Klingons try to get through these doors, I'll be ready for them.
Quark opens the box, there's only a piece of paper inside. Odo reads it.
Odo: "Dear Quark. I used parts of your disruptor to fix the replicators. Will return them soon. Rom. "
Quark: I will kill him.
Odo: With what?
He could call it Ferengi Vengeance.
Kurtzman’s saying in interviews that
Wait *checks notes*
It didn't look like this at all? It didn't have the intergalactic time and space whale!?
DAMN YOU DISCOVERY!
There are a lot of kind of inexplicable choices and outright dumb shit in the movie and they're unfortunately almost all frontloaded in the first 30-40 minutes of the film, which I think makes people less receptive to the better stuff that follows.
- The early scene at Starfleet Command serves literally no purpose. Kirk arrives by train, says about four words to his new science officer, then leaves for a briefing that we never see, and the scene immediately cuts to him after the meeting, beaming into orbit. It's nice to see Starfleet Command and a big "first" from a Trek history perspective but they do so little with it, and Kirk speaking to his superior could have been a chance to deliver the necessary plot exposition and also give us more of an idea of his state of mind and set up the journey he's supposed to be on. Instead, what actually happens is that he breathlessly tells Scotty "they gave her [the Enterprise] back to me" when we weren't aware until literally about sixty seconds earlier that he didn't already have her.
- The genuinely horrific transporter accident scene. Why is this here? From a plot perspective, it just kills the new science officer, clearing the way for Spock, but he only needs to be written out because a writer decided he should be there to begin with! The bit casts a really grim, unpleasant pall on the early parts of the movie which are already laboring under various other grim, unpleasant palls.
- When they go to warp, there's this incredibly tedious, protracted scene where the engines go off wrong and trap them in "a wormhole" with an asteroid (???) that they have to destroy to escape (???????). From a character perspective, this gives the story a chance to show that Decker is competent and quick-witted and more knowledgable about the new ship than Kirk, deepening the conflict between them, but the actual execution is awful. There's all this blurry Vaseline-on-the-lens stuff and distorted audio that makes it nearly impossible to tell what's going on - I never got all of it until the DVD came out 15 years ago and I could finally watch it with subtitles on - and the worst part is that the scene never ends. it goes on for minute after minute after minute. I think it's still happening right now, even as I speak.
- Both the transporter and the warp drive scene come out of this whole recurring plot point (there are other scenes about it too, like Spock having to write new "fuel equations") with the Enterprise being kind of busted and half-assed and it's like...why. The mystery of V'Ger, a giant cloud that eats spaceships, is enough drama! It's an artificial raising of the stakes that a) doesn't actually raise the stakes, because the stakes are already set at spaceship-eating cloud, b) isn't executed well, and c) takes up valuable running time that ought to have been taken up by dialogue and characterization.
- Dialogue and characterization. It's not that it's bad, and some of it is really great, but there isn't enough of it. The emotional arc of the movie is actually very solid. Kirk has aged and fallen out of touch with the state of the art, and is also kind of macho-competing with Decker, who is both more up to date, younger, and seems poised to replace him. Decker has unresolved feelings for Ilia. Spock has tried to purge all emotion and is now so cold and robotic that it alarms his shipmates. McCoy has a beard. The others are...there. Over the course of the film, Kirk reaches rapproachment and mutual respect with Decker and gets his mojo back, Spock realizes that there's more to life than pure logic, and McCoy shaves. These are solid emotional journeys but what we get is kind of a skeleton: the dialogue is incredibly sparse. People say one (often very terse) line, then there's a pregnant pause of as long as 30 seconds, then someone else says another terse line in reply. For a franchise that has a reputation for being talky and overwritten, TMP is exactly the opposite, to its detriment.
- On the other hand, we don't need more lines like Ilia stepping onto the bridge and immediately, in response to seemingly nothing at all, declaring "my vow of celibacy is on the record, Captain."
- This isn't actually a flaw in the sense of a thing that is bad, but it's maybe kind of a bad choice in context, and that's the characters' emotional journey. This film has a serious tone problem. It begins with Klingons dying to a space horror, and then there's this grotesque transporter accident, and then we watch a whole space station full of screaming people die, and at the point where the movie could offer a shred of comfort by seeing our space friends back in the saddle again, instead...they're all kind of cold and pissed at each other. McCoy is grouchy about everything and Spock is just kind of dead behind the eyes and we watch Kirk futilely trying to connect to both of them and while none of it is bad and is actually a pretty effective character arc it means the entire first half of the movie feels relentlessly grim and dour and drab.
- The 70s set design and costumes with lots of baby blues, beiges, tans, and taupes lacks a certain excitement. It's not sterile, exactly, but it feels like an empty convention room in a hotel on a lonely stretch of Iowa highway and adds to the sense that there's something human missing from the proceedings.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
- It is the most beautiful Star Trek movie ever made. The visuals are still breathtaking. The often-mocked six-minute love shot of the Enterprise is utterly convincing and totally gripping. The immense scale of V'Ger is one of the most impressive spectacles in sci-fi history. Movies packed with flashy CGI with thousands - no, tens of thousands! - no, millions! - of moving objects still don't feel a tenth as genuinely vast as those long shots of a tiny, tiny Enterprise silhouetted against this massive ship.
- V'Ger is one of the only godlike aliens in Trek that actually feels godlike and alien. Its nature and motives seem completely opaque and peeling away its layers of mystery is an interesting journey and makes TMP one of the like, two Trek movies ever to be actually about exploration! This is hardly the first story about a robot trying to find God/its creator (that shit goes all the way back to Frankenstein, really) but the movie actually does something pretty interesting with the idea, where the big problem is that V'Ger is robotically incapable of feeling faith or an intuitive sense of its purpose in the world, but at the same time is aware that it's missing something and is desperate to fill the void. It's an interesting existential problem and the gang's solution means the inevitable special effects lightshow at the end of the movie has a feeling of genuine moral gravitas rather than just the wheels of the plot rolling to a stop.
- Spock's mind-meld with V'Ger is one of the most interesting character shifts in Trek. It kind of puts the whole "damn cold-blooded Vulcan" thing with him to bed for the remainder of the franchise and in the course of that single scene he metamorphoses into the warm, wise old man he'll be for the rest of the films.
- As mentioned, the emotional journey of the characters begins in kind of an offputting place, with them all wound up tight in different ways and not speaking to each other, but the movie does pay that journey off. Seeing them bantering on the bridge in the final minutes you can feel all the old warmth and light flooding back into the film, like a numb extremity waking up, and it provides real catharsis. However kind of weird or unpleasant or dull or alienating some parts of the movie might have been, it's hard not to grin when the credits roll.
- I don't know if you guys knew this but Persis Khambatta is a real pretty lady and her space bathrobe leaves very little to the imagination
That does kind of raise the question why they didn't just do that to begin with.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
The prequel idea was Brian Fuller's, iirc, but he left before S1 was even done (or had even started?) with production. This is effectively a soft revamp.
Was that a thing that happened to that show? Was that why it got weird in the last (two? i forget) seasons?
Yep.
They fired the head writer sometime early-ish in S2 as I recall. The show was never that good but you can tell it completely loses it's way around that point.
IIRC they also ran out of money half way through the season and had to come up with a bunch of filler to shoehorn in on the cheap. I'm only a couple of episodes into season 2 but the budget cuts are already apparent.
The problem was, well, everything about the production. The actors, the budget, the writing to some extent. It was a much better idea then that level of production deserved.
The other "based on Gene Roddenberry's ideas" show Earth: Final Conflict had some similar issues, although it was overall better. It wasn't, like, good though. Especially by the end.
Yeah, this was the era of the Action Pack. Shows and made-for-TV movies that were all made on really tight budgets and filmed in almost exactly the same way. While Andromeda wasn't technically an Action Pack show, it's essentially made like one. That's why it feels a lot like Hercules, or Vanishing Son, or TekWar, or....
Some of the shows had interesting ideas. Hercules was the first for-adults swords and sorcery program in forever (if not ever) and was really popular, and it spawned the superior Xena and gave us Lucy Lawless. Vanishing Son actually tried to tackle the issues facing Chinese immigrants (albeit in a likely cliche way).
On the flip side, TekWar was William Shatner acting like he invented cyberpunk, and Andromeda had Kevin Sorbo trying to be a slightly angsty Hercules in space.
But, yeah, the visual language of these shows - the lighting, framing, spacing, editing - are more or less the same. The same goes for the casting and acting. It was all homogeneous.
Just crappy execution...and Sorbo sucks.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
And this may be a controversial opinion, but I love the interior sets. It's approachably futuristic, and everything feels thick/durable. It feels legitimate and coherent in a way JJ Trek's Enterprise doesn't.
Hey now, what's with this slandering of Drops of Jupiter?
Sorbo is like pure soap opera level actor imo.
I think a lot of the technology. And also the Nietzscheans were tons of fun. When they wrote them write, they struck a good balance with their practically amoral desire for winning and them actually being kinda likeable. There's a few scenes where you just wish it had better actors in a better show cause there was some great little touches there. Like with Dylon's former second-in-command (a terrible terrible actor) where Dylon finds out he's been cheating in their games of Go basically always.
I would say that Earth: Final Conflict definitely started off pretty good but I'm a real sucker for the Childhood's End setup.
Was completely unable to finish the series either time. It goes pretty far off the rails, but in a "oh shit, this train is flying off into the dump site for retired sewage treatment plants" way, not a "oh man, can you believe how crazy awesome this shit is?" way.
I still want those communicators, though. We've got the camera tech easy, but it seems like the roll-up screen thing is still in the works.
Sandoval is creepy as fuuuuuuuuck and the Companion makeup is excellent.
The sort of fakeout on who killed Boone's wife is executed really really well too. Like people aren't just acting suspicious to fake out the audience, they have reason to act the way they do.
Fuck it I'mma watch all of it even though it's kinda soul crushing how it goes downhill like OG V. (If you've never seen the original V go watch it. The first miniseries is a masterpiece. V: The Final Battle is ok at best. The tv series is a trainwreck.)
It’s largely terrible, but there are some neat ideas that it constantly trips over.
The ship design itself is pretty good. It’s kind of intresting that despite whatever the federation equivalent was called being based on peace and exploration the ship is very explicitly a warship (It has fighter squadrons, hell in one episode it drops battlemechs into a planet). It raised some questions the show never bothers to answer.
The Magog are an intresting alien race, but the show was never equipped to handle a voracious all consuming horde that procreates by rape in any way at all. The one friendly Magog monk guy crewmen they get was a decent attempt but even that wasn’t handled great.
The FTL engine was neat, I’m always a sucker for restricted jump points in a military sci-if because it’s the only way space combat makes any kind of sense. A universe wide invisible network that requires a human being to pilot is cool (Which typing this, I realise is just the spore drive. Uh, they really are making Andromea 2.0 aren’t they.)
At the end they just straight up start ripping off the shadows and the vorlons from B5.
spaceships made of wood, etc
Yeah and it turned out it was a legionnaire that sold her to slavery all along and then my favorite, get the ass hat responsible in front of the dinosaur, put on a baret and BOOM! ... Wait what are we talking about?
Earth: Final Conflict
I am continuing the long standing tradition of using the Star Trek thread to talk about other sci fi shows.