The problem I would have with rebooting the franchise and moving forward along the timeline is that Star Trek's technology is getting a little too advanced for my tastes. We know before too long, they establish a time travelling division of Starfleet, I really have no desire to see MORE time travel episodes.
The tech is just getting so high up there that they'd need even more technobabble to justify it all if they advanced the timeline to the point that we couldn't relate.
That was what was so appealing when I first heard about Enterprise. They were going to roll it all back and take us back to the beginning. I rewatched the pilot episode of Ent the other day and I remember that just the simple fact that some the engineering crew wore baseball caps put a smile on my face. Just those little things that linked our time with their time.
Star Trek's main strength has always been that it's a character drama set in a sci-fi universe, not that it's a hardcore sci-fi story where the crew is just there to press buttons. So long as they keep the characters front and center I think they can avoid going crazy with the technobabble. One of Voyager's major weaknesses was that they relied too much on the tech stuff and didn't develop the characters much. Harry Kim was basically the same person at the end as he was in the first episode, to give one example.
The best episodes of all the series' were the ones that dealt with the characters directly; the sci-fi elements were essentially plot devices, and never the main concern. City on the Edge of Forever is about Kirk, Inner Light was about Picard, In The Pale Moonlight is about Sisko and Garak. And so on.
My biggest issue with Nemesis is that I would have liked to see a final movie with some kind of real closure, outside of Data dying in the dumbest way possible.
Also, I kept praying that the stupid Data prototype was actually Lore in disguise.
Oddly enough, the thing that bothered me the most with Nemesis wasn't in its bad writing and characters, but the fact that the Scimitar had like 50 plasma torpedo tubes, which, going by the Technical Manuals, can totally punch through the Enterprise-E's shields and disintegrate its hull five times over. For comparison, the Enterprise-E had 10, and that was split between the fore and aft (6 fore, 4 aft). I just found the fact that a Romulan ship would contain 50 plasma torp tubes absurd. I mean, the power requirements for turning those torp tubes on, not to mention the disruptors, plus a cloaking field on a ship that large, would be so enormous that I don't even think their mini-black hole power sources could deal with it.
Star Trek's main strength has always been that it's a character drama set in a sci-fi universe, not that it's a hardcore sci-fi story where the crew is just there to press buttons. So long as they keep the characters front and center I think they can avoid going crazy with the technobabble. One of Voyager's major weaknesses was that they relied too much on the tech stuff and didn't develop the characters much. Harry Kim was basically the same person at the end as he was in the first episode, to give one example.
The best episodes of all the series' were the ones that dealt with the characters directly; the sci-fi elements were essentially plot devices, and never the main concern. City on the Edge of Forever is about Kirk, Inner Light was about Picard, In The Pale Moonlight is about Sisko and Garak. And so on.
The issue with tech escalation in a series like Star Trek is that without firm rules on what they can and can't do any technical solution is just going to be Deus ex Machina and not make for a good story.
Where did B4 come from? Soong had to be the one who made him. Why haven't we heard about this third 'brother' before? (B4. haha.)
Pretty sure B4 was an incomplete prototype. It's likely he wasn't considered to be one of the brothers in the same way Lore and Data were, thus not mentioned.
At least, that's how we make it piece together. In reality they just wanted another Data brother and didn't care how much oversight to the backstory it meant. For more on this technique see: Star Wars Episode I, II, and III!
Now that no new movies or episodes are being made, are they still holding Star Trek conventions regularly?
They most likely do.
One of my (nerd) friends told me he went to a Star Trek convention once, where a fight broke out between people who thought Enterprise was a good show and people who didn't
You know what I always loved about Star Trek, primarily TNG? The characters and stories were centered around a positive and optimistic philosophy. They avoided conflict as much as possible, they always learned from their experiences, they were fair and open-minded. It's the ultimate ideal to raise kids on, as far as I'm concerned. It's entirely unrealistic, but it's based on hope.
Star Wars is about chosen people, killing anyone who stands in their way. I think Jean-Luc could have disassembled the Empire, convinced Darth Vader to reconcile with his kids, and shown Chewie the real meaning of Christmas all through diplomacy and, at the most, one fistfight.
I dunno, torso boy, the best TNG episodes contain torture and phaser fights. I'm not hoping the bad guys reconcile - I'm hoping Picard doesn't crack between shocks to his heart and admit there are five lights.
Inner Light is one of the better episodes of star trek and it doesn't have a single fight scene in it. I don't think they even showed a phaser the whole episode.
They made a big deal about how the superweapon destroyed living tissue, but the radiation was so dangerous that it needed a targeting system so complex that it took several minutes to deploy.
So why didn't Data just active the superweapon without deploying the targeting system, flooding the ship with radiation which he would (presumably) be immune to?
And then after they killed Data they replaced him with a retarded version of him.
That was just seventeen liters of what the fuck in a ten liter bottle.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Oh, never you mind then - I now want to see what 'retarded Data' looks like. I can imagine it was bad enough when they killed such a likable character but replacing him is like dancing on his grave. I mean, how would the general audience feel if Spock died and then a 'retarded Spock' took over his shift in the third movie?
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her continuing mission to explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Oh, never you mind then - I now want to see what 'retarded Data' looks like. I can imagine it was bad enough when they killed such a likable character but replacing him is like dancing on his grave. I mean, how would the general audience feel if Spock died and then a 'retarded Spock' took over his shift in the third movie?
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her continuing mission to explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Best intro to a television series. Ever.
Uh, I think you kinda fused the TOS and TNG versions of the opening into a single bizzare hybrid there.
tng's was much better just because patrick stewart has one of the sexiest voices ever
Fixed.
Is he married? 'Cause I would not mind being Mrs. Patrick Stewart. Or Mrs. Patrick Stewart's voice even.
*ahem* ANYWAY I was watching some NASA video in my Astronomy class today (I'm in college by the way) and about ha;fway through I realize it's John Billingsley, aka Dr. Flox, aka the awesomest character from Enterprise (and really one of the show's few good aspects). So yeah, little happy nerd moment there.
By the way, does anyone have picture of that silly "Star Trek" - "X-men" crossover comic?
By the way, does anyone have picture of that silly "Star Trek" - "X-men" crossover comic?
they did this?! was there confusion over who was prof x and who was jean luc picard?
Man, it's ridiculous that no one's done a Star Trek/Dr. Who crossover yet. This seems like it'd be a no-brainer to me. The Borg vs. Cybermen and/or Daleks!
Hah. I could see it now. The Borg being 'Cyberfied' and then 'Dalekised'. Then made into Borg again.
The question is, what kind of story would it be? Would it be a Star Trek type of story with the Doctor in it, or would it be a Doctor story with Star Trek characters in it? If you know what I mean.
I've always wanted a "Star Trek: Origins" series that followed many of the different races up to their "modern" state. You could do one race per Season, and focus on pivotal times in that race's development. Since almost every star trek race is an exaggerated version of a human trait, it would be a good way to get Star Trek back to doing 'sci-fi as self-exploration'.
Take the Borg, a race of what once was most likely near-humans who (it seems) converged completely with their technology and answered the liberty vs. equality dilemma by abandoning liberty entirely. Now look at modern Western civilization: we're faced with unprecedented diversity, a global economy, and we are asked again to balance liberty interests with equality interests in a world we would have never expected even 50 years ago. At the same time, high technology pervades our lives like never before, and advancements are moving at a breakneck pace. The world is already connected by information, we're well on our way to building replacement parts for humans that rival or exceed in some way the organic original, and advanced human-computer interface technology exists (albeit in its infancy).
Watching the pre-Borg near-humans in a society almost identical to ours, making the choices that lead them to full-on assimilation would be, I think, an incredible cautionary tale.
That's fine but it should focus on the alien of the week species from TNG and VOY.
IAmSoKawaii on
"If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I'd call."
I was going to post that Star Trek fell down the same hole that Star Wars did, but then I remembered that Episodes 1, 2 and 3 came out after the worst of Star Trek so I was getting it backwards..
Star Trek and Star Wars both failed in the same way. They started off as commentaries about humanity with the technology as a tool to move the story. This probably has something to do with the special effects technology to each when they were made. Star Trek was all about finding civilizations and learning cultures and usually had a healthy subtext of social commentary in it. Star Wars was an old fashioned underdog story. If it hadn't been sci fi movie they wouldn't have done the Death Star fight, but they'd have done it on an old frigate at full sale with too many canons for the rebellion to count. The technology was just a tool to move the story. But then comes along Episodes 1, 2 and 3 and the technology and effects become the story and the story becomes the device to move to new effects. Rewatching Episode 3 of Star Wars was painful, there were so many instances either me or my gf would just ask out loud, why didn't he do X instead. They wanted to show off the pretty effects and so the logic of the movie had to be fudged to make it happen. The ending was rushed feeling just because Lucas realized he was already long on his movie and the volcano planet didn't have much else to offer, so make Anakin out to be a retard who couldn't go downstream 15 feet to get to solid ground.
In Star Trek they did the same thing with the movies, and the shows. It became how will the ship survive this week. You started waiting to hear how this machine or that will be jury rigged until it saves the day. It just so happened that you had an engineer who could apparently work miracles when consoles without fuses were blowing up around her, but couldn't invent a fuse when nothing exciting was happening. The movies went that same direction only worse. Like said before in Nemesis Data had plenty of ways out alive but chose the only steps that could get him killed. The only logical reason for this is that they needed a big hook to catch the geek fandom and killing Data was it. Whatever had to happen to make Data die was ok, no matter how illogical or dumb.
Reset it, lock the tech down somewhat. Sure they'll invent new things, but they shouldn't be blowing through the trek universes impossible barriers every couple of weeks. Ex, at the end of Enterprise, the first warp 5 ship, they talk about a new Warp 7 ship coming online soon. Somehow they went from Warp 1 to 5 in a couple decades, up to Warp 7 in about 10 years and it wasn't until TNG that they hit Warp 9.9 They have either got very inspired engineers or they reassign them after every big break to making better toilets (must be amazing since we never see one).
In BSG we see them pushed to the limits, yet they don't invent a new technique for building ships or anything in space. Everything they have now was there when it started. I don't expect them to find a randomizer engine from Hitchhikers Guide that takes em everywhere instantly. They have their FTL drives, do some spinning, and they go X distance at best, a little further if they hotwire a Cylon navcomp in.
Anyways.. to sum up this rant... the technology has to move the plot, not be the plot. Star Trek forgot this in Enterprise and Voyager. Star Wars forgot it in Eps 1, 2, and 3.
Space. The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her continuing mission to explore strange, new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Best intro to a television series. Ever.
Uh, I think you kinda fused the TOS and TNG versions of the opening into a single bizzare hybrid there.
It's the official one as of the "These are the Voyages..." episode of Enterprise, I believe.
Wasn't the only difference btween TOS and TNG that they changed "no man" to "no one"?
You know what I always loved about Star Trek, primarily TNG? The characters and stories were centered around a positive and optimistic philosophy. They avoided conflict as much as possible, they always learned from their experiences, they were fair and open-minded. It's the ultimate ideal to raise kids on, as far as I'm concerned. It's entirely unrealistic, but it's based on hope.
Yeah, thus my issue with people going "making it dark and political is cool!". It's not really what Trek was originally concieved to be; even with TNG's darker episodes it was always individuals that were assholes, not Federation as a group.
I fucking hate the concept of Section 31, I really do. I can't even remember (thanks to the final season of DS9 being forgettable bar the battle scenes), did they turn out to be officially sanctioned or not? They were going back and forth with that throughout the storyline.
You know what I always loved about Star Trek, primarily TNG? The characters and stories were centered around a positive and optimistic philosophy. They avoided conflict as much as possible, they always learned from their experiences, they were fair and open-minded. It's the ultimate ideal to raise kids on, as far as I'm concerned. It's entirely unrealistic, but it's based on hope.
Yeah, thus my issue with people going "making it dark and political is cool!". It's not really what Trek was originally concieved to be; even with TNG's darker episodes it was always individuals that were assholes, not Federation as a group.
I fucking hate the concept of Section 31, I really do. I can't even remember (thanks to the final season of DS9 being forgettable bar the battle scenes), did they turn out to be officially sanctioned or not? They were going back and forth with that throughout the storyline.
Was there some explanatory line about Section 31's authority being written into the Federation charter? Or am I just making that up?
Plus: What about a show that's dark a political wherein Section 31 has taken over? And one remaining "rogue" ship vows to stand up for the Federation's lost ideals?
Posts
The tech is just getting so high up there that they'd need even more technobabble to justify it all if they advanced the timeline to the point that we couldn't relate.
That was what was so appealing when I first heard about Enterprise. They were going to roll it all back and take us back to the beginning. I rewatched the pilot episode of Ent the other day and I remember that just the simple fact that some the engineering crew wore baseball caps put a smile on my face. Just those little things that linked our time with their time.
Sadly, Enterprise didn't live up to that promise.
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
The best episodes of all the series' were the ones that dealt with the characters directly; the sci-fi elements were essentially plot devices, and never the main concern. City on the Edge of Forever is about Kirk, Inner Light was about Picard, In The Pale Moonlight is about Sisko and Garak. And so on.
Oddly enough, the thing that bothered me the most with Nemesis wasn't in its bad writing and characters, but the fact that the Scimitar had like 50 plasma torpedo tubes, which, going by the Technical Manuals, can totally punch through the Enterprise-E's shields and disintegrate its hull five times over. For comparison, the Enterprise-E had 10, and that was split between the fore and aft (6 fore, 4 aft). I just found the fact that a Romulan ship would contain 50 plasma torp tubes absurd. I mean, the power requirements for turning those torp tubes on, not to mention the disruptors, plus a cloaking field on a ship that large, would be so enormous that I don't even think their mini-black hole power sources could deal with it.
Yeah, I'm a nerd.
The issue with tech escalation in a series like Star Trek is that without firm rules on what they can and can't do any technical solution is just going to be Deus ex Machina and not make for a good story.
Pretty sure B4 was an incomplete prototype. It's likely he wasn't considered to be one of the brothers in the same way Lore and Data were, thus not mentioned.
At least, that's how we make it piece together. In reality they just wanted another Data brother and didn't care how much oversight to the backstory it meant. For more on this technique see: Star Wars Episode I, II, and III!
Warframe: TheBaconDwarf
One of my (nerd) friends told me he went to a Star Trek convention once, where a fight broke out between people who thought Enterprise was a good show and people who didn't
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Sargeras&n=Rubycurse
Also, Measure of a Man and the Moriarty episodes.
They made a big deal about how the superweapon destroyed living tissue, but the radiation was so dangerous that it needed a targeting system so complex that it took several minutes to deploy.
So why didn't Data just active the superweapon without deploying the targeting system, flooding the ship with radiation which he would (presumably) be immune to?
And then after they killed Data they replaced him with a retarded version of him.
That was just seventeen liters of what the fuck in a ten liter bottle.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I need to stop reading this thread, it's bringing back memories I worked long and hard to suppress.
its been a looong time but my time is finally here....
:whistle:
Oh.
Best intro to a television series. Ever.
Well. He got better.
Uh, I think you kinda fused the TOS and TNG versions of the opening into a single bizzare hybrid there.
Fixed.
Well, yeah. It's just, sometimes, you want to have your ear made love to in a different way.
Is he married? 'Cause I would not mind being Mrs. Patrick Stewart. Or Mrs. Patrick Stewart's voice even.
*ahem* ANYWAY I was watching some NASA video in my Astronomy class today (I'm in college by the way) and about ha;fway through I realize it's John Billingsley, aka Dr. Flox, aka the awesomest character from Enterprise (and really one of the show's few good aspects). So yeah, little happy nerd moment there.
By the way, does anyone have picture of that silly "Star Trek" - "X-men" crossover comic?
they did this?! was there confusion over who was prof x and who was jean luc picard?
No it was the TOS Enterprise with Kirk & Co.
Worf and Wolverine got all hot and sweaty with each other.
In the forest.
In a combat simulation.
I've shouted this numerous times at actual sporting events. Only once was I given a knowing thumbs up.
Man, it's ridiculous that no one's done a Star Trek/Dr. Who crossover yet. This seems like it'd be a no-brainer to me. The Borg vs. Cybermen and/or Daleks!
The question is, what kind of story would it be? Would it be a Star Trek type of story with the Doctor in it, or would it be a Doctor story with Star Trek characters in it? If you know what I mean.
That's fine but it should focus on the alien of the week species from TNG and VOY.
"If I ever woke up with a dead hooker in my hotel room, Matt would be the first person I'd call."
www.PatriceOneal.com
Star Trek and Star Wars both failed in the same way. They started off as commentaries about humanity with the technology as a tool to move the story. This probably has something to do with the special effects technology to each when they were made. Star Trek was all about finding civilizations and learning cultures and usually had a healthy subtext of social commentary in it. Star Wars was an old fashioned underdog story. If it hadn't been sci fi movie they wouldn't have done the Death Star fight, but they'd have done it on an old frigate at full sale with too many canons for the rebellion to count. The technology was just a tool to move the story. But then comes along Episodes 1, 2 and 3 and the technology and effects become the story and the story becomes the device to move to new effects. Rewatching Episode 3 of Star Wars was painful, there were so many instances either me or my gf would just ask out loud, why didn't he do X instead. They wanted to show off the pretty effects and so the logic of the movie had to be fudged to make it happen. The ending was rushed feeling just because Lucas realized he was already long on his movie and the volcano planet didn't have much else to offer, so make Anakin out to be a retard who couldn't go downstream 15 feet to get to solid ground.
In Star Trek they did the same thing with the movies, and the shows. It became how will the ship survive this week. You started waiting to hear how this machine or that will be jury rigged until it saves the day. It just so happened that you had an engineer who could apparently work miracles when consoles without fuses were blowing up around her, but couldn't invent a fuse when nothing exciting was happening. The movies went that same direction only worse. Like said before in Nemesis Data had plenty of ways out alive but chose the only steps that could get him killed. The only logical reason for this is that they needed a big hook to catch the geek fandom and killing Data was it. Whatever had to happen to make Data die was ok, no matter how illogical or dumb.
Reset it, lock the tech down somewhat. Sure they'll invent new things, but they shouldn't be blowing through the trek universes impossible barriers every couple of weeks. Ex, at the end of Enterprise, the first warp 5 ship, they talk about a new Warp 7 ship coming online soon. Somehow they went from Warp 1 to 5 in a couple decades, up to Warp 7 in about 10 years and it wasn't until TNG that they hit Warp 9.9 They have either got very inspired engineers or they reassign them after every big break to making better toilets (must be amazing since we never see one).
In BSG we see them pushed to the limits, yet they don't invent a new technique for building ships or anything in space. Everything they have now was there when it started. I don't expect them to find a randomizer engine from Hitchhikers Guide that takes em everywhere instantly. They have their FTL drives, do some spinning, and they go X distance at best, a little further if they hotwire a Cylon navcomp in.
Anyways.. to sum up this rant... the technology has to move the plot, not be the plot. Star Trek forgot this in Enterprise and Voyager. Star Wars forgot it in Eps 1, 2, and 3.
It's the official one as of the "These are the Voyages..." episode of Enterprise, I believe.
Wasn't the only difference btween TOS and TNG that they changed "no man" to "no one"?
I fucking hate the concept of Section 31, I really do. I can't even remember (thanks to the final season of DS9 being forgettable bar the battle scenes), did they turn out to be officially sanctioned or not? They were going back and forth with that throughout the storyline.
The Worf song is also very good.
:whistle:Gl- Gl- Gl- Glory to the Empire!:whistle:
Was there some explanatory line about Section 31's authority being written into the Federation charter? Or am I just making that up?
Plus: What about a show that's dark a political wherein Section 31 has taken over? And one remaining "rogue" ship vows to stand up for the Federation's lost ideals?