Close second to "Second star to the right and straight on til morning".
I was always more interested in video games than television as a kid, so I found Star Trek something of an nuisance (it was my mother's favorite show at the time, and she could obviously pull rank on use of the TV), so this is the first time I'm noticing that Riker is holding damn near every chip on that table.
holy shit I never noticed this before either and I can't even count how many times I've watched that finale.
That is really fucking funny, thank you for pointing that out lol
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
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MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
I'm trying to get into the head space of whomever programmed Vic Fontaine.
Imagine being so obsessed with ensuring that everyone gets laid properly that you spend actual thousands of hours becoming a holography specialist and then devote like a ton of your craft to building a personality dislocated in time by four hundred years specifically for that purpose.
... hmm ok yeah I'm pretty much there now that I write it out like that, that actually seems completely rational for some reason.
I'm trying to get into the head space of whomever programmed Vic Fontaine.
Imagine being so obsessed with ensuring that everyone gets laid properly that you spend actual thousands of hours becoming a holography specialist and then devote like a ton of your craft to building a personality dislocated in time by four hundred years specifically for that purpose.
... hmm ok yeah I'm pretty much there now that I write it out like that, that actually seems completely rational for some reason.
Seeing how obsessed some people get over their digital waifus, it's a damn sure bet you'll get obsessively detailed virtual persons the moment it's possible
+10
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
I'm trying to get into the head space of whomever programmed Vic Fontaine.
Imagine being so obsessed with ensuring that everyone gets laid properly that you spend actual thousands of hours becoming a holography specialist and then devote like a ton of your craft to building a personality dislocated in time by four hundred years specifically for that purpose.
... hmm ok yeah I'm pretty much there now that I write it out like that, that actually seems completely rational for some reason.
Someone dedicated their life to creating a program designed to ensure that everyone is having a good time and enjoying themselves. They're a saint among men and probably the real reason the Q Continuum hasn't wiped out humanity.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
+12
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AuralynxDarkness is a perspectiveWatching the ego workRegistered Userregular
I'm trying to get into the head space of whomever programmed Vic Fontaine.
Imagine being so obsessed with ensuring that everyone gets laid properly that you spend actual thousands of hours becoming a holography specialist and then devote like a ton of your craft to building a personality dislocated in time by four hundred years specifically for that purpose.
... hmm ok yeah I'm pretty much there now that I write it out like that, that actually seems completely rational for some reason.
Seeing how obsessed some people get over their digital waifus, it's a damn sure bet you'll get obsessively detailed virtual persons the moment it's possible
Obsessively-detailed, sure, but obsessively-detailed and appealing to anyone other than the Lieutenant Barclay (because, come on) who programmed them? Apparently that's Bynar-only.
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
Dark_Side on
+6
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
The line of Hollywood thinking regarding cult status is that that's all nice and pretty if it gains some cult following later but that doesn't pay the bills now. Media lives and dies on the opening week especially nowadays, so at the end of the day they are going to do what they think will get the most asses in seats and the most faces away from their phones, even if it means the content goes in a direction the nerrrrrds don't appreciate.
The line of Hollywood thinking regarding cult status is that that's all nice and pretty if it gains some cult following later but that doesn't pay the bills now. Media lives and dies on the opening week especially nowadays, so at the end of the day they are going to do what they think will get the most asses in seats and the most faces away from their phones, even if it means the content goes in a direction the nerrrrrds don't appreciate.
Why even bother paying Patrick Stewart's salary if you don't care about what the nerds think? Calling your generic scifi action series Star Trek because that brand has very wide name recognition, OK I get it. Returning to a beloved character at his best when not an action hero...?
I feel there had to be some change in plan at some point.
The line of Hollywood thinking regarding cult status is that that's all nice and pretty if it gains some cult following later but that doesn't pay the bills now. Media lives and dies on the opening week especially nowadays, so at the end of the day they are going to do what they think will get the most asses in seats and the most faces away from their phones, even if it means the content goes in a direction the nerrrrrds don't appreciate.
Why even bother paying Patrick Stewart's salary if you don't care about what the nerds think? Calling your generic scifi action series Star Trek because that brand has very wide name recognition, OK I get it. Returning to a beloved character at his best when not an action hero...?
I feel there had to be some change in plan at some point.
I'm mainly talking about movies, they only need to get you in the seat in that instance and they have your money. A series can be a different situation because once someone has made a decision(usually in the first couple of episodes) that they don't like it it's highly unlikely they'll ever come back for the rest of it(since they're budgeted based on total views/maintained subscriptions, this is a bad thing).
But there's definitely proven money in general pandering to nostalgia - that's why Star Trek and Star Wars even continue being things to begin with. And what better way to try and bring attention back to a series that has been getting a lukewarm reception for a while now than to feature the person who's basically the flagship character for Star Trek?
I'd even put forward the idea that it's Stewart himself that doesn't care what the nerds think. A lot of what went on in Picard I'm sure he absolutely had a final say on as both an executive producer and as a condition of finally acquiescing to even return to Star Trek, his track record with regard to wanting to become John Picard, action hero(hi dune buggy) and the implication that the hard shift into space cynicism is part of the reason he came back and not the idealistic "what we could become" utopia TNG once represented.
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
I haven't got around to Discovery yet, but Picard suffers from a lot of problems we see all over the TV landscape with cargo cult prestige television. Especially in streaming shows. Poor episodic plotting, too much concern with 1 big plot, over-reliance on Big Huge World Ending Problems and so on.
I'm not even sure I'd say the problem is spectacle because little of Picard is in any way focused on big set pieces. Except maybe the very end and the having your whole season culminate with 1 big action set piece is fine. The problem with that bit is the silly artificial-feeling stakes.
Given that the Enterprise-D computer created a sentient holographic entity that could out think Data based on a single verbal command, a 1960s self aware Las Vegas stage performer does not seem like a big stretch. The computer does all the heavy lifting.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
+11
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
I haven't got around to Discovery yet, but Picard suffers from a lot of problems we see all over the TV landscape with cargo cult prestige television. Especially in streaming shows. Poor episodic plotting, too much concern with 1 big plot, over-reliance on Big Huge World Ending Problems and so on.
I'm not even sure I'd say the problem is spectacle because little of Picard is in any way focused on big set pieces. Except maybe the very end and the having your whole season culminate with 1 big action set piece is fine. The problem with that bit is the silly artificial-feeling stakes.
I'm sorry, I was probably unclear because I was posting on my phone, but I agree. I don't think Picard's problem was spectacle, explosions, etc. (Not in a Michael Bay way, anyyway; the show did visibly run out of money and I do think that's because they wanted to do all these glossy, HD locations and have lots of extras in makeup milling about, etc, and didn't want to have stories just take place in...a room.)
Rather, I think it's kind of the negative - not the opposite, but the negative. I think (part of) the reason they keep trying to wrench Star Trek into that cargo-cult prestige TV pretzel shape is because they have no faith that traditional talky thoughtful Star Trek will work, because nobody goes to see talky thoughtful movies anymore. Like, Picard isn't like the JJ Abrams movies - it's not. But I think both it and the Abrams movies and Discovery are all beginning from the premise that the Star Trek-ness of Star Trek is a problem that has to be solved, instead of its core strength, and they keep trying to find ways to jazz it up or subvert it instead of just...rolling with it. Does that make sense?
+9
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Basically they're trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.
+5
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Something that I don't think gets brought up often enough, probably because people frequently skip TNG S1, is that the Enterprise holodeck only starts doing bananas things after the ship's computers are given an experimental upgrade by the Bynars in "11001001," which they allude to at the start of "The Big Goodbye." (If you look on an episode list, "The Big Goodbye" aired before "11001001," but it was written after, and was intended as a semi-sequel to that episode; Memory Alpha mentions this.)
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
Something that I don't think gets brought up often enough, probably because people frequently skip TNG S1, is that the Enterprise holodeck only starts doing bananas things after the ship's computers are given an experimental upgrade by the Bynars in "11001001," which they allude to at the start of "The Big Goodbye." (If you look on an episode list, "The Big Goodbye" aired before "11001001," but it was written after, and was intended as a semi-sequel to that episode; Memory Alpha mentions this.)
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
That'll be about the time they took out the whale navigation.
+9
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Something that I don't think gets brought up often enough, probably because people frequently skip TNG S1, is that the Enterprise holodeck only starts doing bananas things after the ship's computers are given an experimental upgrade by the Bynars in "11001001," which they allude to at the start of "The Big Goodbye." (If you look on an episode list, "The Big Goodbye" aired before "11001001," but it was written after, and was intended as a semi-sequel to that episode; Memory Alpha mentions this.)
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
That'll be about the time they took out the whale navigation.
I personally feel that the #1 priority for any new Star Trek series should be showing the whale navigators and maybe having a dolphin character.
Something that I don't think gets brought up often enough, probably because people frequently skip TNG S1, is that the Enterprise holodeck only starts doing bananas things after the ship's computers are given an experimental upgrade by the Bynars in "11001001," which they allude to at the start of "The Big Goodbye." (If you look on an episode list, "The Big Goodbye" aired before "11001001," but it was written after, and was intended as a semi-sequel to that episode; Memory Alpha mentions this.)
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
That'll be about the time they took out the whale navigation.
I personally feel that the #1 priority for any new Star Trek series should be showing the whale navigators and maybe having a dolphin character.
Didn't we get that already? I think it was called Seaquest
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
Sadly I think this is part of CBS going on it's own. When you have little to no new content and want to drive folks to your streaming platform that requires yet another fee, I'm sure everyone from CEO's, marketing folks, etc, all think that flashy action will sell people more than traditional Trek.
If CBS just sold this show or the rights to Netflix, HBO, or Hulu, we'd probably have a larger chance of traditional Trek.
I caught Gattaca on TV and kept thinking "this is what Picard should have been". It's not necessarily a cinematic masterpiece or anything, but there's no half-baked *shocking twists* and the universe is never suddenly in jeopardy...it's just a good, solid, well-thought-out sci-fi story about prejudice and technology.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
I haven't got around to Discovery yet, but Picard suffers from a lot of problems we see all over the TV landscape with cargo cult prestige television. Especially in streaming shows. Poor episodic plotting, too much concern with 1 big plot, over-reliance on Big Huge World Ending Problems and so on.
I'm not even sure I'd say the problem is spectacle because little of Picard is in any way focused on big set pieces. Except maybe the very end and the having your whole season culminate with 1 big action set piece is fine. The problem with that bit is the silly artificial-feeling stakes.
I'm sorry, I was probably unclear because I was posting on my phone, but I agree. I don't think Picard's problem was spectacle, explosions, etc. (Not in a Michael Bay way, anyyway; the show did visibly run out of money and I do think that's because they wanted to do all these glossy, HD locations and have lots of extras in makeup milling about, etc, and didn't want to have stories just take place in...a room.)
Rather, I think it's kind of the negative - not the opposite, but the negative. I think (part of) the reason they keep trying to wrench Star Trek into that cargo-cult prestige TV pretzel shape is because they have no faith that traditional talky thoughtful Star Trek will work, because nobody goes to see talky thoughtful movies anymore. Like, Picard isn't like the JJ Abrams movies - it's not. But I think both it and the Abrams movies and Discovery are all beginning from the premise that the Star Trek-ness of Star Trek is a problem that has to be solved, instead of its core strength, and they keep trying to find ways to jazz it up or subvert it instead of just...rolling with it. Does that make sense?
This seems to be the path of all the TNG movies sadly. They want to leverage the property's cultural cache but seem to be actively ashamed of what that property actually was.
The line of Hollywood thinking regarding cult status is that that's all nice and pretty if it gains some cult following later but that doesn't pay the bills now. Media lives and dies on the opening week especially nowadays, so at the end of the day they are going to do what they think will get the most asses in seats and the most faces away from their phones, even if it means the content goes in a direction the nerrrrrds don't appreciate.
Why even bother paying Patrick Stewart's salary if you don't care about what the nerds think? Calling your generic scifi action series Star Trek because that brand has very wide name recognition, OK I get it. Returning to a beloved character at his best when not an action hero...?
I feel there had to be some change in plan at some point.
I'm mainly talking about movies, they only need to get you in the seat in that instance and they have your money. A series can be a different situation because once someone has made a decision(usually in the first couple of episodes) that they don't like it it's highly unlikely they'll ever come back for the rest of it(since they're budgeted based on total views/maintained subscriptions, this is a bad thing).
But there's definitely proven money in general pandering to nostalgia - that's why Star Trek and Star Wars even continue being things to begin with. And what better way to try and bring attention back to a series that has been getting a lukewarm reception for a while now than to feature the person who's basically the flagship character for Star Trek?
I'd even put forward the idea that it's Stewart himself that doesn't care what the nerds think. A lot of what went on in Picard I'm sure he absolutely had a final say on as both an executive producer and as a condition of finally acquiescing to even return to Star Trek, his track record with regard to wanting to become John Picard, action hero(hi dune buggy) and the implication that the hard shift into space cynicism is part of the reason he came back and not the idealistic "what we could become" utopia TNG once represented.
Yeah, I love Stewart. He's a great actor and seems like a genuinely good person but I don't really think he's ever had the best ideas for what Picard, the character, should be or do. But the structure of how this project came together put him in the driver seat.
As characters become beloved and well known there's often this tendency to credit the actor with knowing what the best way to look after that character is but I really don't think that's actually accurate a lot of the time.
Something that I don't think gets brought up often enough, probably because people frequently skip TNG S1, is that the Enterprise holodeck only starts doing bananas things after the ship's computers are given an experimental upgrade by the Bynars in "11001001," which they allude to at the start of "The Big Goodbye." (If you look on an episode list, "The Big Goodbye" aired before "11001001," but it was written after, and was intended as a semi-sequel to that episode; Memory Alpha mentions this.)
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
That'll be about the time they took out the whale navigation.
I personally feel that the #1 priority for any new Star Trek series should be showing the whale navigators and maybe having a dolphin character.
Didn't we get that already? I think it was called Seaquest
If CBS just sold this show or the rights to Netflix, HBO, or Hulu, we'd probably have a larger chance of traditional Trek.
That's what depresses me. I've come to believe CBS is simply incapable of making good Star Trek again, and haven't been able to since basically Voyager. For whatever reason good writing and letting Trek do what Trek is good at can't pierce the entrenched corporate thinking around that place. Basically CBS needs to give a really good writing and production team a blank check to make a slow, cerebral show, and they're just never going to do that. I mean..what VP is going to risk their position greenlighting that?
That's a great episode. But man, they did Denise Crosby dirty
In that episode? They brought her back and have get a staring role.
I mean, they sorta teased that they were going to, but when they did bring her back it was as the product of rape and she was only there for a flash, when she really could have been a continued villain in the vein of Dukat.
In other news, this is cool. I haven't actually watched any Discovery yet, but hearing all of the themes together really does make it seem like Discovery has one of the better themes in recent years.
Edit: Ok this sounds like a really great interview, I've never heard of The Alpha Quadrant podcast, and I'm a little miffed it requires a subscription fee when I can get The Greatest Generation for free, but I may have to pay it once I have a new job:
Among the juicy bits are that Nana Visitor wanted to audition for Janeway, telling Berman she could do both Kira and Janeway at the same time (which is nuts), and that she missed out on a really, really good role in The Orville.
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That's a great episode. But man, they did Denise Crosby dirty
In that episode? They brought her back and have get a staring role.
I mean, they sorta teased that they were going to, but when they did bring her back it was as the product of rape and she was only there for a flash, when she really could have been a continued villain in the vein of Dukat.
In other news, this is cool. I haven't actually watched any Discovery yet, but hearing all of the themes together really does make it seem like Discovery has one of the better themes in recent years.
Edit: Ok this sounds like a really great interview, I've never heard of The Alpha Quadrant podcast, and I'm a little miffed it requires a subscription fee when I can get The Greatest Generation for free, but I may have to pay it once I have a new job:
Among the juicy bits are that Nana Visitor wanted to audition for Janeway, telling Berman she could do both Kira and Janeway at the same time (which is nuts), and that she missed out on a really, really good role in The Orville.
If I am remembering what I read properly, Crosby said they offered to bring her back on the show after that episode but she opted not to. I think the stated reason was she felt it cheapened Tasha's death. That reads to me like there were some behind the scenes shit that we will never know about. It wouldn't surprise me if bad stuff continued to happen and she chose to stop showing up as a villain.
I finished my rewatch of specifically just season 1 of TNG so as to refresh the memory for potential future arguments (arguments are fun!) and because I hate myself.
Season one actually had an underlying arc with the finale of the arc being the absolutely batshit insane episode (in retrospect) of Conspiracy. I had seen it when it first aired, I've seen it after that, but it never fails to shock at the violence / gore / implications of what's going on. Characters from prior episodes come back (one of which, having so recently watched his first appearance, had him wanting to go to the Enterprise after his role as inspector general was done....makes me think they hadn't planned his part in the finale yet). It never receiving a follow-up given the nature of the ending of the episode has always annoyed me, even if I understood the why.
The FINAL episode of the season has Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat) being awesome as always as a Romulan, but my favorite part of the episode, like my favorite part of season one, is just how much of an ass Picard can be. Picard is pissed at Data for bringing the three cryogenically frozen people over to the Enterprise. Data, understandably, defends himself with pointing out he couldn't leave them there as the ship they were on was falling apart / would be destroyed. Picard, hilariously, responds by saying they were already dead and that would have been fine.
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In other news, this is cool. I haven't actually watched any Discovery yet, but hearing all of the themes together really does make it seem like Discovery has one of the better themes in recent years.
That's a great episode. But man, they did Denise Crosby dirty
In that episode? They brought her back and have get a staring role.
I mean, they sorta teased that they were going to, but when they did bring her back it was as the product of rape and she was only there for a flash, when she really could have been a continued villain in the vein of Dukat.
eh TNG just wasn't that kind of show, I think they did an amazing job with her, with yesterday's enterprise, and with all the Sela stuff.
Hell, Tomalak, which was probably the biggest baddest TNG Romulan villain, and one that people remember, was only in the show for 4 episodes.
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holy shit I never noticed this before either and I can't even count how many times I've watched that finale.
That is really fucking funny, thank you for pointing that out lol
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if they’re all playing cards then who is flying the spaceship???
Imagine being so obsessed with ensuring that everyone gets laid properly that you spend actual thousands of hours becoming a holography specialist and then devote like a ton of your craft to building a personality dislocated in time by four hundred years specifically for that purpose.
... hmm ok yeah I'm pretty much there now that I write it out like that, that actually seems completely rational for some reason.
Not to fear, my favorite Star Trek comic (and Robot Chicken, of course) has you covered.
Seeing how obsessed some people get over their digital waifus, it's a damn sure bet you'll get obsessively detailed virtual persons the moment it's possible
Someone dedicated their life to creating a program designed to ensure that everyone is having a good time and enjoying themselves. They're a saint among men and probably the real reason the Q Continuum hasn't wiped out humanity.
Obsessively-detailed, sure, but obsessively-detailed and appealing to anyone other than the Lieutenant Barclay (because, come on) who programmed them? Apparently that's Bynar-only.
It's a pretty apt comparison. A movie that's shot simply and austere, with limited sets, and a small budget, but is excellent anyway because of the strength of the writing and acting. Probably also worth noting it was a box office bomb and has only gained a cult following since for the strength of the hard science fiction screenplay.
this is ture and I think it points up a distinction that eludes a lot of people on both sides of the screen, audiences/fans and creatives alike.
since the rise of TV, movies have increasingly become about spectacle. most people only go to 3-4 films a year and they usually go to the big event things that the people in their circle will be talking about - a new superhero movie, a new animated movie, a big hard-R comedy or whatever
so I think creatives go "oh, people just want noise and explosions and spectacle" without considering the context. So we have all this modern TV that tries to deliver movie-like experiences but it turns out that a) movies cost $200m for a reason, your 13-hour show will not look as good and will suffer for trying to have that level of nonstop stunts and CGI, and also b) it's just fucking exhauting. It's wearying. Even people who love action movies don't necessarily binge every Fast and the Furious movie in two days. You'd get shell chock.
TV, even massively-budgeted TV like The Mandalorian or CBS Star Trek, will never have enough money to really compete at the movie level. But what TV does have is time. Time to establish a world carefully, with love, and time to flesh out your characters and give them room to breathe and show them in all the quiet moments that movies don't have room for.
And the thing is, people like it that way! I mean, people still enjoy spectacle and big action, but it doesn't dominate everything the way it does in the theaters. There's room for CW superhero shows and for Atlanta and Terrace House an all this other stuff. Not to mention all the classic TV that's available at a single click and which, metrics suggest, people still wholeheartedly enjoy. Folks are perfectly happy to just...watch people talk for sixty minutes, and bask in mood and atmosphere, or wrestle with complicated ideas or nuanced emotions.
I wish the folks responsible for modern Star Trek could see that. I wish they'd stop fighting against the things that TV is best at and start embracing them.
Why even bother paying Patrick Stewart's salary if you don't care about what the nerds think? Calling your generic scifi action series Star Trek because that brand has very wide name recognition, OK I get it. Returning to a beloved character at his best when not an action hero...?
I feel there had to be some change in plan at some point.
I'm mainly talking about movies, they only need to get you in the seat in that instance and they have your money. A series can be a different situation because once someone has made a decision(usually in the first couple of episodes) that they don't like it it's highly unlikely they'll ever come back for the rest of it(since they're budgeted based on total views/maintained subscriptions, this is a bad thing).
But there's definitely proven money in general pandering to nostalgia - that's why Star Trek and Star Wars even continue being things to begin with. And what better way to try and bring attention back to a series that has been getting a lukewarm reception for a while now than to feature the person who's basically the flagship character for Star Trek?
I'd even put forward the idea that it's Stewart himself that doesn't care what the nerds think. A lot of what went on in Picard I'm sure he absolutely had a final say on as both an executive producer and as a condition of finally acquiescing to even return to Star Trek, his track record with regard to wanting to become John Picard, action hero(hi dune buggy) and the implication that the hard shift into space cynicism is part of the reason he came back and not the idealistic "what we could become" utopia TNG once represented.
I haven't got around to Discovery yet, but Picard suffers from a lot of problems we see all over the TV landscape with cargo cult prestige television. Especially in streaming shows. Poor episodic plotting, too much concern with 1 big plot, over-reliance on Big Huge World Ending Problems and so on.
I'm not even sure I'd say the problem is spectacle because little of Picard is in any way focused on big set pieces. Except maybe the very end and the having your whole season culminate with 1 big action set piece is fine. The problem with that bit is the silly artificial-feeling stakes.
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I'm sorry, I was probably unclear because I was posting on my phone, but I agree. I don't think Picard's problem was spectacle, explosions, etc. (Not in a Michael Bay way, anyyway; the show did visibly run out of money and I do think that's because they wanted to do all these glossy, HD locations and have lots of extras in makeup milling about, etc, and didn't want to have stories just take place in...a room.)
Rather, I think it's kind of the negative - not the opposite, but the negative. I think (part of) the reason they keep trying to wrench Star Trek into that cargo-cult prestige TV pretzel shape is because they have no faith that traditional talky thoughtful Star Trek will work, because nobody goes to see talky thoughtful movies anymore. Like, Picard isn't like the JJ Abrams movies - it's not. But I think both it and the Abrams movies and Discovery are all beginning from the premise that the Star Trek-ness of Star Trek is a problem that has to be solved, instead of its core strength, and they keep trying to find ways to jazz it up or subvert it instead of just...rolling with it. Does that make sense?
I don't think even future Trek writers remembered this but it is 100% meant to be the case that the Enterprise's computer was weird and different from other ships, which is why it could be an avenue for stories about things breaking/going wrong/behaving weirdly.
That'll be about the time they took out the whale navigation.
I personally feel that the #1 priority for any new Star Trek series should be showing the whale navigators and maybe having a dolphin character.
Didn't we get that already? I think it was called Seaquest
Sadly I think this is part of CBS going on it's own. When you have little to no new content and want to drive folks to your streaming platform that requires yet another fee, I'm sure everyone from CEO's, marketing folks, etc, all think that flashy action will sell people more than traditional Trek.
If CBS just sold this show or the rights to Netflix, HBO, or Hulu, we'd probably have a larger chance of traditional Trek.
This seems to be the path of all the TNG movies sadly. They want to leverage the property's cultural cache but seem to be actively ashamed of what that property actually was.
Yeah, I love Stewart. He's a great actor and seems like a genuinely good person but I don't really think he's ever had the best ideas for what Picard, the character, should be or do. But the structure of how this project came together put him in the driver seat.
As characters become beloved and well known there's often this tendency to credit the actor with knowing what the best way to look after that character is but I really don't think that's actually accurate a lot of the time.
That's a great episode. But man, they did Denise Crosby dirty
Don't forget Johnny!
If/when TNG is rebooted, I hope Yar gets a better arc and Crosby is a part of it.
That's what depresses me. I've come to believe CBS is simply incapable of making good Star Trek again, and haven't been able to since basically Voyager. For whatever reason good writing and letting Trek do what Trek is good at can't pierce the entrenched corporate thinking around that place. Basically CBS needs to give a really good writing and production team a blank check to make a slow, cerebral show, and they're just never going to do that. I mean..what VP is going to risk their position greenlighting that?
In that episode? They brought her back and have get a staring role.
I mean, they sorta teased that they were going to, but when they did bring her back it was as the product of rape and she was only there for a flash, when she really could have been a continued villain in the vein of Dukat.
In other news, this is cool. I haven't actually watched any Discovery yet, but hearing all of the themes together really does make it seem like Discovery has one of the better themes in recent years.
Edit: Ok this sounds like a really great interview, I've never heard of The Alpha Quadrant podcast, and I'm a little miffed it requires a subscription fee when I can get The Greatest Generation for free, but I may have to pay it once I have a new job:
https://trekmovie.com/2018/04/10/nana-visitor-says-she-wanted-to-be-captain-janeway-explains-why-shes-not-on-the-orville/
Among the juicy bits are that Nana Visitor wanted to audition for Janeway, telling Berman she could do both Kira and Janeway at the same time (which is nuts), and that she missed out on a really, really good role in The Orville.
If I am remembering what I read properly, Crosby said they offered to bring her back on the show after that episode but she opted not to. I think the stated reason was she felt it cheapened Tasha's death. That reads to me like there were some behind the scenes shit that we will never know about. It wouldn't surprise me if bad stuff continued to happen and she chose to stop showing up as a villain.
Captain Kira Nerys of USS Deep Space Nine. Screw it, the whole station is a ship now. They've moved it before.
Season one actually had an underlying arc with the finale of the arc being the absolutely batshit insane episode (in retrospect) of Conspiracy. I had seen it when it first aired, I've seen it after that, but it never fails to shock at the violence / gore / implications of what's going on. Characters from prior episodes come back (one of which, having so recently watched his first appearance, had him wanting to go to the Enterprise after his role as inspector general was done....makes me think they hadn't planned his part in the finale yet). It never receiving a follow-up given the nature of the ending of the episode has always annoyed me, even if I understood the why.
The FINAL episode of the season has Marc Alaimo (Gul Dukat) being awesome as always as a Romulan, but my favorite part of the episode, like my favorite part of season one, is just how much of an ass Picard can be. Picard is pissed at Data for bringing the three cryogenically frozen people over to the Enterprise. Data, understandably, defends himself with pointing out he couldn't leave them there as the ship they were on was falling apart / would be destroyed. Picard, hilariously, responds by saying they were already dead and that would have been fine.
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I adore Kira, but I'm not willing to give up Sisko for her.
That reminds me of another thing I didn't like about Picard: the music sucked imo.
Hell, Tomalak, which was probably the biggest baddest TNG Romulan villain, and one that people remember, was only in the show for 4 episodes.