> @phoenixc#0738 said: > Kirk? Anson Mount plays Pike, who was always a completely different character from Kirk. According to Roddenberry, Pike was loosely based on Horatio Hornblower (from C. S. Forester's novels), an officer of "humble beginnings" but with great natural talent for command.
As always I appreciate your nuanced read on the difference between Pike and Kirk in relation to Hornblower. But I think Roddenberry wouldn’t have recognized that difference. Roddenberry told Patrick Stewart Picard was also Hornblower. The fact is that those stories had a profound influence on a lot of Roddenberry’s thought about the series.
Nicholas Meyer also thought Kirk was related to Horacio Hornblower.
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> Kirk? Anson Mount plays Pike, who was always a completely different character from Kirk. According to Roddenberry, Pike was loosely based on Horatio Hornblower (from C. S. Forester's novels), an officer of "humble beginnings" but with great natural talent for command.
As always I appreciate your nuanced read on the difference between Pike and Kirk in relation to Hornblower. But I think Roddenberry wouldn’t have recognized that difference. Roddenberry told Patrick Stewart Picard was also Hornblower. The fact is that those stories had a profound influence on a lot of Roddenberry’s thought about the series.
Nicholas Meyer also thought Kirk was related to Horacio Hornblower.
Nicholas Meyer may have thought Kirk was based on Hornblower, but Meyer and Roddenberry never saw eye-to-eye on anything.
In fact, of the things in the movies that Roddenberry objected to, the ones he objected to the most were usually Meyer's ideas, and the disconnect between the ideas of the two had mounted to the point where Roddenberry was suing Meyer over points in The Undiscovered Country that Roddenberry considered revoltingly racist and against the spirit of Trek, such as making Saavik the traitor which would play into the old "bad blood" stereotype via her Romulan heritage even though she was mostly raised on Vulcan.
The ScreenRant article presents a nice theory, but it ignores statements made by Roddenberry over the years (at conventions, in articles, and in The Making of Star Trek) in favor of that theory. An example of that is in this statement from the ScreenRant article:
The Kelvin Timeline Kirk, while still a brash man of action, is perhaps the only Star Trek captain to truly embody Hornblower’s insecurites and self-doubt.
Pike (who was the one called Robert April in earlier drafts, not Kirk) was the first captain to show those insecurities and self-doubts, in The Cage, because he was the captain that Roddenberry modeled after Hornblower.
Things did not go well for that though, the introspective nature of the captain made it necessary to balance him with/play him off of his advisors (Spock and Number One) to keep him from seeming broody and fading into the background, so when NBC told Roddenberry to "Lose the ears (Spock) and ditch the broad (Number One)" he did his usual stubborn and deliberately obtuse interpretation of the orders (of course he did not phrase it that way) and switched to a tougher, more freewheeling character as the captain (Kirk) who in many ways was almost the exact opposite of Hornblower, and kicked the timeline forward a little so the original characters became part of the history as far as he was concerned (and what NBC didn't know wouldn't hurt the show), which was later canonized in The Menagerie.
At conventions later on Roddenberry would say that he originally based Kirk on those generals but that the (then) recent Bolitho novels by Alexander Kent (a pen name of Douglas Reeman) were very close to how he imagined Kirk.
Double-check your data, Phoenix. You have demonstrated repeatedly a tendency to say things with absolute authority that are either unprovable or incorrect.
In this particular instance, while Meyers recounts that Roddenberry did object to certain things in the final script of TUC, Gene wasn't suing anyone. Quite frankly, he wasn't in shape to sue anyone over anything - the movie came out only a few months before he died, and by that point he was on constant supplemental oxygen. (And since Saavik wasn't the traitor, that can't have been one of the things he was objecting to. I can think of five or six others that it might have been...)
Double-check your data, Phoenix. You have demonstrated repeatedly a tendency to say things with absolute authority that are either unprovable or incorrect.
In this particular instance, while Meyers recounts that Roddenberry did object to certain things in the final script of TUC, Gene wasn't suing anyone. Quite frankly, he wasn't in shape to sue anyone over anything - the movie came out only a few months before he died, and by that point he was on constant supplemental oxygen. (And since Saavik wasn't the traitor, that can't have been one of the things he was objecting to. I can think of five or six others that it might have been...)
I did check the facts.
I remembered that there was some talk about lawsuits at the time that was quickly glossed over, and when I looked Meyers up on Memory Alpha to refresh my memory there was this about the lawsuit (I bolded the most relevant part):
The situation, however, came to a head with The Undiscovered Country when Roddenberry was angered by the racism he perceived in the production in regard to the Klingons. A charged meeting between the two parties followed: "His guys [Roddenberry's legal staff, headed by the in Star Trek-lore reviled Leonard Maizlish] were lined up on one side of the room, and my guys were lined up on the other side of the room, and this was not a meeting in which I felt I'd behaved very well, very diplomatically. I came out of it feeling not very good, and I've not felt good about it ever since. He was not well [an ailing Roddenberry would indeed pass away only a short time later], and maybe there were more tactful ways of dealing with it, because at the end of the day, I was going to go out and make the movie. I didn't have to take him on. Not my finest hour," Meyer later recounted. [3](X) After the avant-premiere screening of the nearly finished movie on 22 October 1991, Roddenberry ordered Maizlish to start legal proceedings against Meyer and Writer/Actor Leonard Nimoy to have fifteen minutes of the more militaristic aspects cut from the movie. This came to naught however, as Roddenberry died two days later. (Star Trek Movie Memories, 1995, p. 394) Meyer remained regretful of his behavior as he reiterated the incident as recent as 2016 when he retold the story in Roger Lay, Jr.'s 50th anniversary documentary Star Trek: The Journey to the Silver Screen (Chapter 5: "End of an Era: Charting the Undiscovered Country").
so I mentioned it as fact (normally if I include rumors I say they are rumors) since what I could find about it mostly paralleled what is said in Memory Alpha and they all treated it as such.
As for Saavik, earlier there was quite a bit of media interest in the leaking arguments between Roddenberry and Meyer over the script and quotes from both of them eventually made the entertainment industry news. And the earlier drafts of the script did indeed have her as the traitor, though that part was not part of the lawsuit since they already made that change and brought in a new character as the traitor when they filmed the movie, possibly at the urging of Harve Bennett who had his own objections to it on the basis that she was too popular for the idea to fly with the fanbase.
The lawsuit itself was later, after the movie was done filming as recounted in the quote from Memory Alpha above, and was about the remaining issues, what Roddenberry considered the over-militarization of Starfleet and rest of the racism (the part concerning the Klingons) that was not already fixed the way the Saavik issue was. And yes, by that time he was very sick but since his part of the lawsuit was just telling his lawyer to file the suit the oxygen probably would not hamper filing that much.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,167Community Moderator
Ultimately TUC became one of the most popular movies. And if you think about it... it fits in with Star Trek as a whole because Star Trek has never been shy about addressing controvertial issues in any incarnation.
However Roddenberry's idealized Starfleet conflicts with other things as... who defends the Federation? If Starfleet is not in any way a military, then who defends the Federation? Like it or not Starfleet is essentially the de facto military arm of the Federation. They just cover a far wider range of duties that include humanitarian and scientific endeavors.
Its not wrong to compare Starfleet to elements of the Coast Guard, fulfilling duties like law enforcement and even search and rescue.
Times change. Gene Roddenberry's initial vision did not. But without it, we would not have Star Trek at all. It is a universe that has been built upon since the 1960s, probably becoming something far greater than Roddenberry ever thought possible. And I believe his son has said positive things about Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
When you have a franchise that has endured as long as Star Trek has, you gotta grow and even branch out. And while some things may change... its not out of spite. You may get someone who doesn't understand some things involved, but you also have those people who do care that get involved. That's how things tend to be with long running franchises. You can see this playing out with Star Wars and Doctor Who.
Ultimately TUC became one of the most popular movies. And if you think about it... it fits in with Star Trek as a whole because Star Trek has never been shy about addressing controvertial issues in any incarnation.
However Roddenberry's idealized Starfleet conflicts with other things as... who defends the Federation? If Starfleet is not in any way a military, then who defends the Federation? Like it or not Starfleet is essentially the de facto military arm of the Federation. They just cover a far wider range of duties that include humanitarian and scientific endeavors.
Its not wrong to compare Starfleet to elements of the Coast Guard, fulfilling duties like law enforcement and even search and rescue.
Times change. Gene Roddenberry's initial vision did not. But without it, we would not have Star Trek at all. It is a universe that has been built upon since the 1960s, probably becoming something far greater than Roddenberry ever thought possible. And I believe his son has said positive things about Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
When you have a franchise that has endured as long as Star Trek has, you gotta grow and even branch out. And while some things may change... its not out of spite. You may get someone who doesn't understand some things involved, but you also have those people who do care that get involved. That's how things tend to be with long running franchises. You can see this playing out with Star Wars and Doctor Who.
True, though Roddenberry's view of Trek in the '70s and '80s seems to have changed quite a bit from TOS in the '60s, and not for the better. According to anecdotes he was always a bit possessive and also tended to take things others would mention and run with them, and it gradually got worse over time.
That combined with his tendency to write mainly think pieces stuffed with humanist ideals until he got them written and out of his system and made way for more pragmatic considerations (which is probably why so many of his pilots flopped) made him almost impossible to work with as far as the movie division was concerned with its "one strike and you're out" mentality. Unfortunately, his being essentially shut out of the movies despite being credited as "executive consultant" probably meant that he was both frustrated and stuck in that odd first pilot mode, not a good combination at all.
TOS was no utopia (though it was one of their goals), and while humanity had moved beyond some of the contemporary flaws and problems there were still cliques in the admiralty (mostly in Turnabout Intruder though it is hinted at in other episodes too, like The Ultimate Computer), interservice rivalry as seen in The Trouble With Tribbles, vigilante (and probably other kinds of) conspiracies like the one Kirk and Riley were involved with to hunt down Kodos the Executioner in The Conscience of the King (and the one in TNG), internal strife and politicking in the Federation (seen in several eps, but most visible in Journey to Babel, and many other things.
I suspect that a lot (but not all of course) of the more 'utopian' and anti-military things he said later were actually things he picked up from the fans at conventions and claimed as his own.
According to various articles, convention talks, and The Making of Star Trek, Roddenberry envisioned Star Trek as mainly a Victorian naval setup projected into the future (complete with its own Hornblower equivalent) where ships were pretty much on their own due to slow communications and captains therefore had very weighty decisions to make since they could not just phone home for orders like the movies and everything after generally did. Also, back in sailing ship days the regular navies routinely did perform many roles like exploration, trade policing and S&R and whatnot like today's Coast Guard, and even as engineering/infrastructure builders, floating remote embassies, etc. in addition to their wartime duties. This was his initial vision, it was only in later decades that it became so clouded with peaceful rainbows, unicorns, and butterflies.
TUC was so popular, not because of darker tone or more accurate military rendition (which it wasn't btw), but rather that of the movies featuring the TOS crew it was the one that attracted the most action hero movie fans, and they are a much larger (and spendier) demographic than mainline sci-fi fans. It is the same reason why the 2009 movie is in the top spot on most Trek movie rating charts (and probably a big part of why Moonves wanted to concentrate on grabbing that demographic instead of the traditional Trek fans). If you drill down in the statistics and look at the boomers (which tend to be more sci-fi fans than action hero) TUC was not incredibly popular, in fact with them it comes in at the bottom three with Nemesis and Into Darkness.
The downside is that action movie fans tend to be rather flighty, get bored quickly, and generally flock to whichever movie has the most eyecandy and adrenalin-fuel action, which, according to an analysis I read, is also why Beyond flagged, not only were the action fans getting bored (probably because the JJTrek movies did not snowball the action from movie to movie enough) it was also sandwiched uncomfortably between even bigger adrenalin extravaganzas.
I will say that the writers dropped the ball a bit in this last episode. Spock's DNA may be half-Human, but his cultural matrix from birth has been almost entirely Vulcan. Both he and T'Pring should certainly be logical enough to understand the difference. (I haven't finished the episode yet, and am hoping they realize this eventually, but at the halfway point it's not looking great.)
Agree. I thought at first it was going to be a cringefest of "look how embarrassed M'Benga is at not understanding anything," or worse "nobody can understand that the doctor is hallucinating". Except then it turned out he wasn't hallucinating, there were no major jokes at his expense, and the whole thing had on the whole a non-stupid explanation.
Also the name of the author was a nice Easter egg. I guess Benny went into fantasy after he got out of the hospital.
I just finished episode 4.. I REALLY liked the hints of the Enterprise themes in the end of the show. they are not only duplicating TOS, but including some hints of the prequel
And so ends season 1 of Strange New Worlds.
What a grand ride it has been, And a nice way to finish the season with a look at pikes alternate future tying in with the original series episode of Balance Of Terror..
Looking forward to season 2..
I am a bit late but I continued watching with episode 8 tonight and it was fantastic. I wanted to give a standing ovation in front of my TV. I don't love everything SNW does, the Gorn rewrite is especially silly, yet the show is full of creativity and spirit and has a lot of heart for classic stories and a very sympathetic cast. Episode 8 is the highlight of the show so far in my opinion.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,167Community Moderator
You do have to consider there is next to nothing in alpha canon that is known about the Gorn. Yea we have a lot of stuff from games and books, but unless it is considered canon, its not on screen canon. We've only had 2 live action appearances and I think 2 animated (one of which was an exagurated retelling of events by Rutherford under pressure so realistically not reliable information).
I don't mind the changes to the Gorn because... it doesn't really change anything. Just adds because we know so little.
ENT episode in a mirror darkly showed what a Gorn looked like (even if it is an alternate reality) and SNW just confirmed it in the prime timeline. Gorn are nothing more than highly evolved, highly territorial and savage dinosaurs. We even seen some of their oddly shaped ships and the tactics they employ and the psychology they have as sentient beings.
We now know a lot more about then than we did the past 65 years of Trek with that one episode with Kirk fighting a Gorn, but even that episode showed the same type of aggressive creature. We also know the Gorn have a rapid reproduction cycle depending on the host they use (a lot of alien vibes around that one, even when the Aenar dropped to his death, very Ripley'esque).
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
My complaint about the new Gorn isn't really about canon, although I do not at all see the dinosaur raptors as a logical continuation of the true TOS Gorn. My complaint is that it is really silly to begin with. It's not just Alien vibes, they are straight rip-offs. Throw in some Predator heat view sequences - squeal, I bet a hundred quatloos if we ever see an adult new-Gorn they're Predator rip-offs now, complete with tribal antics and armours.
The horror episodes aren't even bad, I just don't get why they couldn't just make up something new. The show has so many creative ideas, their Gorn however are the low point of creativity as they're just imitations of something else.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Comments
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
> Kirk? Anson Mount plays Pike, who was always a completely different character from Kirk. According to Roddenberry, Pike was loosely based on Horatio Hornblower (from C. S. Forester's novels), an officer of "humble beginnings" but with great natural talent for command.
As always I appreciate your nuanced read on the difference between Pike and Kirk in relation to Hornblower. But I think Roddenberry wouldn’t have recognized that difference. Roddenberry told Patrick Stewart Picard was also Hornblower. The fact is that those stories had a profound influence on a lot of Roddenberry’s thought about the series.
Nicholas Meyer also thought Kirk was related to Horacio Hornblower.
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-picard-kirk-captains-horatio-hornblower-different/amp/
Nicholas Meyer may have thought Kirk was based on Hornblower, but Meyer and Roddenberry never saw eye-to-eye on anything.
In fact, of the things in the movies that Roddenberry objected to, the ones he objected to the most were usually Meyer's ideas, and the disconnect between the ideas of the two had mounted to the point where Roddenberry was suing Meyer over points in The Undiscovered Country that Roddenberry considered revoltingly racist and against the spirit of Trek, such as making Saavik the traitor which would play into the old "bad blood" stereotype via her Romulan heritage even though she was mostly raised on Vulcan.
The ScreenRant article presents a nice theory, but it ignores statements made by Roddenberry over the years (at conventions, in articles, and in The Making of Star Trek) in favor of that theory. An example of that is in this statement from the ScreenRant article:
Pike (who was the one called Robert April in earlier drafts, not Kirk) was the first captain to show those insecurities and self-doubts, in The Cage, because he was the captain that Roddenberry modeled after Hornblower.
Things did not go well for that though, the introspective nature of the captain made it necessary to balance him with/play him off of his advisors (Spock and Number One) to keep him from seeming broody and fading into the background, so when NBC told Roddenberry to "Lose the ears (Spock) and ditch the broad (Number One)" he did his usual stubborn and deliberately obtuse interpretation of the orders (of course he did not phrase it that way) and switched to a tougher, more freewheeling character as the captain (Kirk) who in many ways was almost the exact opposite of Hornblower, and kicked the timeline forward a little so the original characters became part of the history as far as he was concerned (and what NBC didn't know wouldn't hurt the show), which was later canonized in The Menagerie.
At conventions later on Roddenberry would say that he originally based Kirk on those generals but that the (then) recent Bolitho novels by Alexander Kent (a pen name of Douglas Reeman) were very close to how he imagined Kirk.
In this particular instance, while Meyers recounts that Roddenberry did object to certain things in the final script of TUC, Gene wasn't suing anyone. Quite frankly, he wasn't in shape to sue anyone over anything - the movie came out only a few months before he died, and by that point he was on constant supplemental oxygen. (And since Saavik wasn't the traitor, that can't have been one of the things he was objecting to. I can think of five or six others that it might have been...)
I did check the facts.
I remembered that there was some talk about lawsuits at the time that was quickly glossed over, and when I looked Meyers up on Memory Alpha to refresh my memory there was this about the lawsuit (I bolded the most relevant part):
so I mentioned it as fact (normally if I include rumors I say they are rumors) since what I could find about it mostly paralleled what is said in Memory Alpha and they all treated it as such.
As for Saavik, earlier there was quite a bit of media interest in the leaking arguments between Roddenberry and Meyer over the script and quotes from both of them eventually made the entertainment industry news. And the earlier drafts of the script did indeed have her as the traitor, though that part was not part of the lawsuit since they already made that change and brought in a new character as the traitor when they filmed the movie, possibly at the urging of Harve Bennett who had his own objections to it on the basis that she was too popular for the idea to fly with the fanbase.
The lawsuit itself was later, after the movie was done filming as recounted in the quote from Memory Alpha above, and was about the remaining issues, what Roddenberry considered the over-militarization of Starfleet and rest of the racism (the part concerning the Klingons) that was not already fixed the way the Saavik issue was. And yes, by that time he was very sick but since his part of the lawsuit was just telling his lawyer to file the suit the oxygen probably would not hamper filing that much.
However Roddenberry's idealized Starfleet conflicts with other things as... who defends the Federation? If Starfleet is not in any way a military, then who defends the Federation? Like it or not Starfleet is essentially the de facto military arm of the Federation. They just cover a far wider range of duties that include humanitarian and scientific endeavors.
Its not wrong to compare Starfleet to elements of the Coast Guard, fulfilling duties like law enforcement and even search and rescue.
Times change. Gene Roddenberry's initial vision did not. But without it, we would not have Star Trek at all. It is a universe that has been built upon since the 1960s, probably becoming something far greater than Roddenberry ever thought possible. And I believe his son has said positive things about Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
When you have a franchise that has endured as long as Star Trek has, you gotta grow and even branch out. And while some things may change... its not out of spite. You may get someone who doesn't understand some things involved, but you also have those people who do care that get involved. That's how things tend to be with long running franchises. You can see this playing out with Star Wars and Doctor Who.
True, though Roddenberry's view of Trek in the '70s and '80s seems to have changed quite a bit from TOS in the '60s, and not for the better. According to anecdotes he was always a bit possessive and also tended to take things others would mention and run with them, and it gradually got worse over time.
That combined with his tendency to write mainly think pieces stuffed with humanist ideals until he got them written and out of his system and made way for more pragmatic considerations (which is probably why so many of his pilots flopped) made him almost impossible to work with as far as the movie division was concerned with its "one strike and you're out" mentality. Unfortunately, his being essentially shut out of the movies despite being credited as "executive consultant" probably meant that he was both frustrated and stuck in that odd first pilot mode, not a good combination at all.
TOS was no utopia (though it was one of their goals), and while humanity had moved beyond some of the contemporary flaws and problems there were still cliques in the admiralty (mostly in Turnabout Intruder though it is hinted at in other episodes too, like The Ultimate Computer), interservice rivalry as seen in The Trouble With Tribbles, vigilante (and probably other kinds of) conspiracies like the one Kirk and Riley were involved with to hunt down Kodos the Executioner in The Conscience of the King (and the one in TNG), internal strife and politicking in the Federation (seen in several eps, but most visible in Journey to Babel, and many other things.
I suspect that a lot (but not all of course) of the more 'utopian' and anti-military things he said later were actually things he picked up from the fans at conventions and claimed as his own.
According to various articles, convention talks, and The Making of Star Trek, Roddenberry envisioned Star Trek as mainly a Victorian naval setup projected into the future (complete with its own Hornblower equivalent) where ships were pretty much on their own due to slow communications and captains therefore had very weighty decisions to make since they could not just phone home for orders like the movies and everything after generally did. Also, back in sailing ship days the regular navies routinely did perform many roles like exploration, trade policing and S&R and whatnot like today's Coast Guard, and even as engineering/infrastructure builders, floating remote embassies, etc. in addition to their wartime duties. This was his initial vision, it was only in later decades that it became so clouded with peaceful rainbows, unicorns, and butterflies.
TUC was so popular, not because of darker tone or more accurate military rendition (which it wasn't btw), but rather that of the movies featuring the TOS crew it was the one that attracted the most action hero movie fans, and they are a much larger (and spendier) demographic than mainline sci-fi fans. It is the same reason why the 2009 movie is in the top spot on most Trek movie rating charts (and probably a big part of why Moonves wanted to concentrate on grabbing that demographic instead of the traditional Trek fans). If you drill down in the statistics and look at the boomers (which tend to be more sci-fi fans than action hero) TUC was not incredibly popular, in fact with them it comes in at the bottom three with Nemesis and Into Darkness.
The downside is that action movie fans tend to be rather flighty, get bored quickly, and generally flock to whichever movie has the most eyecandy and adrenalin-fuel action, which, according to an analysis I read, is also why Beyond flagged, not only were the action fans getting bored (probably because the JJTrek movies did not snowball the action from movie to movie enough) it was also sandwiched uncomfortably between even bigger adrenalin extravaganzas.
Also the name of the author was a nice Easter egg. I guess Benny went into fantasy after he got out of the hospital.
What a grand ride it has been, And a nice way to finish the season with a look at pikes alternate future tying in with the original series episode of Balance Of Terror..
Looking forward to season 2..
I hope we get the Romulan beauties in game, too.
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I don't mind the changes to the Gorn because... it doesn't really change anything. Just adds because we know so little.
We now know a lot more about then than we did the past 65 years of Trek with that one episode with Kirk fighting a Gorn, but even that episode showed the same type of aggressive creature. We also know the Gorn have a rapid reproduction cycle depending on the host they use (a lot of alien vibes around that one, even when the Aenar dropped to his death, very Ripley'esque).
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
The horror episodes aren't even bad, I just don't get why they couldn't just make up something new. The show has so many creative ideas, their Gorn however are the low point of creativity as they're just imitations of something else.
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