If the block quotes are his reflections, I do agree with a lot of his concerns. When you look at the online articles that are being pushed on the ânerdâ new sites. Right they keep making the same types of arguments:
The first half of Discovery was not the Star Trek you were hoping for, but the mirror content will appease fans. And we got it wrong in Season 1 but bringing in Spock and Pike are what the fans wanted.
Now they say Discovery wasnât your trek but we are âlisteningâ to fans SNW will be the Star Trek you hope for.
Meanwhile the audience scores for Discovery on Rotten Tomatoes got worse as the series went on. And the Audience response to Picard is little better.
I donât think we can go back to TOS even if we wanted to, but the CBS propaganda is not correctly gauging the Trek audience.
Do I think SNW will have a lot of things I donât like? Yes. But I doubt I will hate it. I donât hate Discovery even though I disagree with a lot of the writingâEspecially when I feel the producers are not respecting the legacy that they inherited.
Schneider is very bold to raise these concerns honestly. Although CBS owns the brandâthey canât control the zeitgeist of fan interpretation of what Star Trek should be...
Marx once wrote âThe tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.â
I think if the producers fight the Ghost of Roddenberryâs History âthey cannot expect to have a Star Trek that is financially successful in the way they envisionâunless the All Access Trek is generating a new fan base that will carry it forward for the next 50 years.
Rotten Tomatoes is notoriously easy for a disgruntled minority of fans, of whatever show, movie, franchise, or concept, to bend to their will - it somehow managed to rate The Force Awakens at around 25% or so before the movie even came out.
I'd take those ratings with several grains of salt. By preference around the rim of a margarita glass.
Rotten Tomatoes is notoriously easy for a disgruntled minority of fans, of whatever show, movie, franchise, or concept, to bend to their will - it somehow managed to rate The Force Awakens at around 25% or so before the movie even came out.
I'd take those ratings with several grains of salt. By preference around the rim of a margarita glass.
I agree; RT scores have become completely untrustworthy and are manipulated both by fans and the website itself(owned by Fandango). No, the low audience scores for Discovery/Picard do not "prove" those shows are bad. And no, the high audience score for The Force Awakens does not "prove" that movie is good. If we aren't going to trust RT anymore(which I definitely don't) then that applies across the board, not just to specific examples that people selectively choose to support their preferred opinion.
Yeah. The question is this: will NOT making interiors have any significant (key word) impact on the number of people that will buy (or gamble to get) a ship? If the answer is "no", then they have no actual incentive to invest the budget into making them.
That said, no this issue does not actually have anything to do with the topic of this thread.
But...they AT LEAST need to do the Disco-Prise Bridge now.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Rotten Tomatoes may not be the most reliable source, but on the other hand, the general feel of the DSC situation does correspond with the low numbers fairly well so the tug of war could be inadvertently right (even a broken clock is right twice a day). Even Picard, the show that so many were waiting for as a return to traditional Trek ended up being a rude surprise for many, very nearly as mind numbingly shallow and "morally bankrupt" as DSC according to the talk on a lot of the boards.
And Schneider does bring up some good points, like the fact that despite DSC easing back on the TOS bashing and the lip service to the idea of making it more TOS compatible, most of the people in CBS's Star Trek team are still the same ones Moonves gathered to destroy the TOS he hated so much in the first place.
And the fact is, they never made any attempt to actually update TOS, they started with The Undiscovered Country instead, threw bits of ENT and the Abrams movies into the mix and leavened it with gobs of uninspired generic sci-fi and called it Star Trek Discovery.
Just watch the special features with the interviews and other behind the scene stuff but pay attention to the body language and vocal cues instead of just taking what they say at face value and you can see a very distinct lack of any liking for TOS. Most of them who actually say they are Trek fans are clearly talking about later series, not TOS, and the set designer practically drips contempt for Star Trek, not only does she call the TOS ship "the cardboard Enterprise", she goes on to say that the only Star Trek worth anything at all was The Undiscovered Country movie.
Writers and other creative people do best when they are doing something they are passionate about, and CBS clearly does not have anyone on the projects that has that for the TOS era (or at least not any with any say in the show). That shows in Discovery strongly (even second season though it was toned down a bit), and CBS has the choice of either letting them do what they want to do and continue with anti-TOS bulldozer DSC was supposed to be or force them to make a TOS compatible show they do not want to make. Neither option is likely to produce the best results unless they get some new people in there who actually like TOS and make a real effort to UPDATE instead of tear down and replace it.
My wife and I watched every episode of DSC and PIC - and the only "disappointment" we felt was having to wait a week for the next plot point. (In fact, we held off watching the PIC season finale until we could watch both parts back to back.)
I'm sure you know what they say opinions are like, and just because you had a poor opinion of a show and sought out like minds on the internet does not mean the show was "objectively bad", whatever that might mean.
And I'm really looking forward to SNW (don't know if that's the official acronym, but if not it should be, Qdammit!).
My wife and I watched every episode of DSC and PIC - and the only "disappointment" we felt was having to wait a week for the next plot point. (In fact, we held off watching the PIC season finale until we could watch both parts back to back.)
I'm sure you know what they say opinions are like, and just because you had a poor opinion of a show and sought out like minds on the internet does not mean the show was "objectively bad", whatever that might mean.
Certainly. And the opposite is equally true (just because you enjoy a show does not mean it is "objectively good"). At this point in my life I don't even bother trying to debate subjective preferences; it's a complete waste of time.
There is pretty much only 1 standard by which you can factually measure success: revenue. For a movie, that means box office. So if a movie makes a ton more than it cost, then it was a success regardless of whether you think it was good or bad. For a TV show the measure of revenue is based on viewership. The higher the viewership, the more the channel can charge for commercials, or the more customers are drawn to the streaming platform (both of which are directly related to revenue).
So as to Discovery and Picard: the fact that they are both renewed for upcoming seasons is a sign of success (in viewership/revenue) that simply cannot be dismissed even if someone hates the shows. That said, if either of those shows wind up getting cancelled after only a few seasons, that is another sign that simply cannot be dismissed unless (unless it is due to something like the main actor dying, which I certainly hope doesn't happen, but am just citing a big possible reason for cancellation unrelated to the success of the show).
At this point, we can only say Disco/Picard are successful. In a few years depending on whether each are renewed again we can re-assess that position.
At this point, we can only say Disco/Picard are successful. In a few years depending on whether each are renewed again we can re-assess that position.
That however brings us to a very interesting point. Financial success matters more than "fan" outrage. Well from the PoV of enraged fans. The studio execs probably define "fan" as people who give them money to make more Star Trek. So, by their standard most of the people whining about "canon inconsistencies" and "too modern" visuals aren't actually fans at all.
"But, but, I LOVE Star Trek!" .... yeah well the people who think the KT films are better than TOS would probably say the same thing.
At this point, we can only say Disco/Picard are successful. In a few years depending on whether each are renewed again we can re-assess that position.
That however brings us to a very interesting point. Financial success matters more than "fan" outrage. Well from the PoV of enraged fans. The studio execs probably define "fan" as people who give them money to make more Star Trek. So, by their standard most of the people whining about "canon inconsistencies" and "too modern" visuals aren't actually fans at all.
"But, but, I LOVE Star Trek!" .... yeah well the people who think the KT films are better than TOS would probably say the same thing.
*Grabs popcorn and retreats to bunker.*
Okay, in all seriousness... I wasn't actually going to share my views on Picard, largely because overall I really liked it, am excited to see more of it, and don't want anyone ruining it for me. That said, there was one decision taken with the finale that I find just idiotic (and I can't remember how to do the spoiler tag so...)
SPOILERS!
The whole "brain abnormality" thing. I appreciate them bringing that forward from AGT, but boy did they make a hash of it. Firstly, AGT suggests that Picard's condition should cause delusions, not a loss of mental capacity (I'm avoiding the word 'stroke' but that's what it looked like to me). Then there's the heartfelt scene of Picard's death, only for him to be brought back within the next ten minutes as an android golem! It's cheap! If they'd built it up for a few episodes, that would have been better, but they rushed everything into those last two episodes. And it's weird to me, because otherwise the series felt pretty well-paced.
Anyway, that's my 2p. Really excited for SNW. I'll give a +1 to Mount being the best part of DSC S2. And the DSC Enterprise looked fantastic both in and out.
Things change due to current technologies and situations. To think anything seen or said is immutable, I think of a simple thing like Mt. McKinley (ENT: 'Silent Enemy', 'First Flight').
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Things change due to current technologies and situations. To think anything seen or said is immutable, I think of a simple thing like Mt. McKinley (ENT: 'Silent Enemy', 'First Flight').
Except for an even worse than usual beam angle gaff, what was wrong with the "Mt McKinley" scene? At various points Star Trek ships have blown up asteroids bigger than that, and the D bored an approximately thirty foot wide tunnel to the core of a planet in a minute or less using a fraction of the phaser's power for the sake of precision.
Whatever the end up doing with the show, I hope they take the next step in convergence with TOS and dump the spurious Star Wars-isms that Paramount insisted on sneaking in to coattail Lucas's films and the later Abramsisms (though I am sure they will not).
Concepts like WWII analog carrier battles and filling space with missed shots and all is old hat nowadays. Going back to a more modern style of combat like TOS used, if done with dramatic quick cuts and other tricks, would actually be a refreshing departure from the current lemming-trail of Star Wars/Buck Rogers style space combat that Hollywood has been stuck on for decades.
Drama and tension based combat (as opposed to the frenetic eyecandy stuff they use in DSC) can work if done right. The show "The Last Ship" proved Hollywood can actually still do it in an exciting manner if they put their minds to it. The main problem is that they would probably have to show the enemy ship's bridge more often which might be a set-building problem if they did combat with a lot of different enemies (not to mention the DSC Klingon makeup is too thick to properly emote through or even speak rapidly in), though they could probably solve that with CGI (the Discoprise bridge itself has a lot of CGI, that is how they get all that annoying neon fluff lighting though the stations and walls themselves are hardware).
It would be great if they dropped the "hyperspace jump" style warp nonsense too (and no, I do not mean the spore drive). Warp drive in TOS was seamless, they did not "jump to lightspeed" ala Star Wars or "drop to sublight" in the middle of an asteroid field they could not see from warp. In fact they even used it at sublight speeds for things like entering and leaving orbit and whatnot (as Kirk says in Where No Man Has Gone Before the impulse drive was meant for emergencies rather than regular use, though Kirk used it when they wanted to go very slow to stall for time, like in "Elaan of Troyius".
If you listen to the dialog and the sound of the engines a lot of the scenes that many think were done at impulse (like chasing the Denevan ship towards the sun in "Operation Annihilate") were done at warp (which is how they pulled off that hairpin turn btw). And they went through an entire episode in ENT establishing how they learned how to fight in warp, only to have DSC ignore that too.
Last but not least, they could get rid of a lot of the uptight eighties feel by getting them out of the uniforms that look like felted cardboard. I know they made a little progress in that since Pike's teaser uniform, but they still have a long way to go to get to the comfortable working uniform look/feel that TOS started out with (though the shrinking of the velour tunics degraded that look over time).
CBS supposedly tacked on all the ridiculous delta bedazzling on the DSC uniforms because high def made ordinary cloth look boring and detail-less and they wanted something to catch the eye. For that they could have used velvet, the real stuff not the cheap velour TOS did that deteriorated (and shrunk) so quickly, the shimmer as actors move would have provided a lot more surface detail than the scratchy and nasty looking deltas. And can you guess what was really hot in the fashion scene at the time they were putting DSC together? Velvet. Also miniskirts were back in vogue too so the TOS skirted uniform was a lot more "modern" than the '80s Nehru-collared unisex fashion disaster they went with for the show.
SNW would be perfectly positioned to act as a bridge between the retro '80s style DSC and a more modern take on the TOS uniforms by changing the cuts slightly and using richer colored, shimmery velvet. They could even use both options for the women's uniform (skirt or pants, though the skirts were so much more popular with the actresses the pants option was rarely seen) and if they really want to get crazy they could have a kilt option of sorts for the men (though hopefully not the horrible skants briefly seen on TNG) as an alternative to the pants.
In there it quotes Pike from âThe Cageâ as saying âI cannot get used to Women on the bridge.â And of course, the âTurn About Intruderâ says women cannot be Star Fleet captains.
And Discovery breaks âcanonâ with these pointsâand that is a good thing.
And another quote from Discovery Pike:
âStarfleet ⊠is a promise. I give my life for you. You give your life for me. And nobody gets left behind.â
I rewatched Discovery season 2 this month, and although there were still a lot of points I did not care forâespecially the Mycilial Network episodeâseriously were the writers dropping acid when they wrote that?
I was, however, a few times really struck by the dialogue. Especially some of Saruâs dialogue was very poignant.
And I guess the order not to discuss Michael Burnham ever again was necessaryâbecause I tell all of my coworkers about my siblings. Now I am just being sarcastic.
But really there is a lot to like about Discovery, and certainly some things too about TOS that we should leave behindâ
Although I like the idea of some velvet uniformsâmaybe for Season 3!
In there it quotes Pike from âThe Cageâ as saying âI cannot get used to Women on the bridge.â And of course, the âTurn About Intruderâ says women cannot be Star Fleet captains.
And Discovery breaks âcanonâ with these pointsâand that is a good thing.
And another quote from Discovery Pike:
âStarfleet ⊠is a promise. I give my life for you. You give your life for me. And nobody gets left behind.â
I rewatched Discovery season 2 this month, and although there were still a lot of points I did not care forâespecially the Mycilial Network episodeâseriously were the writers dropping acid when they wrote that?
I was, however, a few times really struck by the dialogue. Especially some of Saruâs dialogue was very poignant.
And I guess the order not to discuss Michael Burnham ever again was necessaryâbecause I tell all of my coworkers about my siblings. Now I am just being sarcastic.
But really there is a lot to like about Discovery, and certainly some things too about TOS that we should leave behindâ
Although I like the idea of some velvet uniformsâmaybe for Season 3!
Actually Discovery does not break canon with those two points since they were both misleading outliers to begin with.
In The Cage the crew were out on deployment way too long, and they took a serious mauling in their last mission (they were heading back to base for a belated rest and refit when they intercepted the distress call in fact) and Pike especially was worn down to the bone and questioning everything he did. If you watch the scene were he says that he is obviously not talking about women in general so much as one particular goofy but hyper competent female yeoman.
The "women cannot command starships" thing is not what it sounds like at all. The script suffers from the fact that due to pressure from NBC to stop using military terms like "heavy cruiser" or even "capital ship" for the hero ship, Justman decided to use the odd convention of calling capital ships like the Enterprise "Starship" with a capital "S" while all other intersteller ships would be called "starship" with a small "s".
One notable officer who bucked that trend was Number One, who Roddenberry always said accepted command of a destroyer rather than some sort of science or support ship sometime after The Cage.
Another clue to that glass ceiling is Uhura. If you watch the first episode she was in she started out in operations (the avocado colored tunic) but transferred to services (red tunic) shortly thereafter. She may have done that to get out from under the glass ceiling by going to a division that is not dominated by that particular frat-boy minded admiral's clique when it comes to being offered promotions. And apparently it only existed for a decade or two at the most.
The writer of the article seems to have fallen into the common assumption that Pike and Kirk were supposed to be the same character with different names, when the reality is that they were completely different to begin with. Roddenberry based Pike on captain Hornblower from the tall ship novels of the same name and was supposed to a sort of paragon who never lost touch with his humble beginnings, while Kirk was cut from a rougher, more pragmatic cloth and who, if his father's old friends did not get him into the academy would have probably ended up a grifter similar to Mudd.
Roddenberry initially compared Kirk to generals like Sherman (and in fact Kirk paraquoted Sherman in "A Taste of Armageddon"), though in the late seventies Roddenberry would start comparing him to another fictional sailing ship captain, the tricky and brilliant loose canon Richard Bolitho from the Bolitho novels.
The captains were never supposed to represent the zeitgeist of the time the shows were made or any of that nonsense.
Remember that the only person who said women can't command starships was Janice Lester, who was clinically insane. Not exactly a reliable narrator there, y'know?
Remember that the only person who said women can't command starships was Janice Lester, who was clinically insane. Not exactly a reliable narrator there, y'know?
Remember when Spock said there had never been a mutiny on a Starfleet vessel, despite the fact he had committed, and was tired for, having committed mutiny in the Menagerie?
Remember when Laforge said holodecks were "new" in TNG, despite the Enterprise having one in TOS?
You should never trust anything people saw in the shows. They are often wrong.
Again, that is misleading terminology. The mutiny reference is from "The Tholian Web" as part of speculation about what happened to the Defiant to make the crew all kill each other, and Spock does not say that there has never been a mutany exactly:
[Defiant Bridge]
(The crew are dead. One man is in the act of strangling another.)
CHEKOV: Has there ever been a mutiny on a starship before?
SPOCK: Absolutely no record of such an occurrence, Ensign.
MCCOY: Jim. The Captain's neck is broken.
SPOCK: The ship is still functioning, Captain. It is logical to assume the mutineers are somewhere aboard.
In his usual somewhat literal precise way he is apparently leaving out a refusal to take unlawful orders (Garth's crew when he ordered them to burn off a friendly world), actions by a single individual instead of the crew at large (his own hijacking of the Enterprise) or anything except the kind of deadly violent mass struggle they were sanding in the results of. "Such an occurrence" in that context was not about disobedience, it was about some theoretical all out bloody struggle kind of mutiny, which probably never did happen in Starfleet.
Laforge was referring to the holomatter type holodeck, which were indeed brand new devices at the time. In fact the Enterprise-D had the old-style optical hologram plus forcefield and tractor type holodecks too, like the one Tasha Yar took a guest to for a demonstration of combat, which had been around since TOS.
Lot of good points as always. I just found two points suspicious. Of course, my read may be off. If two historians cannot agree on the past, what hope is there for agreeing about the future?
> @phoenixc#0738 said: > (Quote) > Another clue to that glass ceiling is Uhura. If you watch the first episode she was in she started out in operations (the avocado colored tunic) but transferred to services (red tunic) shortly thereafter. She may have done that to get out from under the glass ceiling by going to a division that is not dominated by that particular frat-boy minded admiral's clique when it comes to being offered promotions. And apparently it only existed for a decade or two at the most.
I havenât heard or read about this point, specially. But my inclination is to speculate her uniform changed for cosmetic reasons. Just like Data, as the proxy for Spock, was intended to be a science officer but with his yellow skin the blue clashed.
I assume someone just thought Nichols would look better in red.
> @phoenixc#0738 said: > (Quote) > The writer of the article seems to have fallen into the common assumption that Pike and Kirk were supposed to be the same character with different names, when the reality is that they were completely different to begin with. Roddenberry based Pike on captain Hornblower from the tall ship novels of the same name and was supposed to a sort of paragon who never lost touch with his humble beginnings, while Kirk was cut from a rougher, more pragmatic cloth and who, if his father's old friends did not get him into the academy would have probably ended up a grifter similar to Mudd.
Roddenberry called Picard, Hornblower, too. I have never read a Horacio Horseblower novelâbut Nicholas Meyer also calls Kirk, HornblowerâIf Kirk was not supposed to also be Hornblower, it is odd that Meyer would have made that comparison independently.
Back in the day pretty much everybody wore the mustard uniform from time to time. The divisional colors weren't settled on until several episodes in, because back then nobody really cared that much.
Lot of good points as always. I just found two points suspicious. Of course,
my read may be off. If two historians cannot agree on the past, what hope is there for agreeing about the future?
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
> Another clue to that glass ceiling is Uhura. If you watch the first episode she was in she started out in operations (the avocado colored tunic) but transferred to services (red tunic) shortly thereafter. She may have done that to get out from under the glass ceiling by going to a division that is not dominated by that particular frat-boy minded admiral's clique when it comes to being offered promotions. And apparently it only existed for a decade or two at the most.
I havenât heard or read about this point, specially. But my inclination is to speculate her uniform changed for cosmetic reasons. Just like Data, as the proxy for Spock, was intended to be a science officer but with his yellow skin the blue clashed.
I assume someone just thought Nichols would look better in red.
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
> The writer of the article seems to have fallen into the common assumption that Pike and Kirk were supposed to be the same character with different names, when the reality is that they were completely different to begin with. Roddenberry based Pike on captain Hornblower from the tall ship novels of the same name and was supposed to a sort of paragon who never lost touch with his humble beginnings, while Kirk was cut from a rougher, more pragmatic cloth and who, if his father's old friends did not get him into the academy would have probably ended up a grifter similar to Mudd.
Roddenberry called Picard, Hornblower, too. I have never read a Horacio Horseblower novelâbut Nicholas Meyer also calls Kirk, HornblowerâIf Kirk was not supposed to also be Hornblower, it is odd that Meyer would have made that comparison independently.
I suspect Nicolas Meyer has not read a Hornblower novel either if he thinks Kirk is anything like Hornblower. In a navy often composed of egomaniacs and rife with graft he was a paragon of the "gentleman officer" idea, which was seen as ironic since he was of "humble beginnings" (in other words he was a commoner who worked his way up instead of being able to buy rank). That is not to say he was absolutely squeaky clean though, and in fact he even had a scandal of his own in some of the later novels.
Picard actually is kind of like a crochety old version of Hornblower, though in a more science oriented way. The both have that solid moral foundation, exceptionally strong sense of duty, and things that haunt them from their pasts at times (Horblower not so literally since he did not have Q actively digging them up).
Meyer was probably thinking of Pike and April (they were the same person originally), Kirk was made new for TOS because without the Spock/Number One dynamic Roddenberry thought the captain should be more pragmatic and even slightly shady to put things back in balance.
As for Uhura, yes the real world reason was that she looked better in red than she did in avacado, but in-setting she did change departments just like Sulu did (Sulu first appeared as science division, something they actually mentioned in passing in a later episode).
Back in the day pretty much everybody wore the mustard uniform from time to time. The divisional colors weren't settled on until several episodes in, because back then nobody really cared that much.
True, they were a bit fuzzy about what exactly the divisions consisted of at first. One interesting thing is that the uniform colors were supposed to be red, green, and blue, the optical primary colors. The problem was that the velour they used did not come in a normal green, only a bright florescent green that looked ridiculous and that avocado gold-green that they ended up using but looked that goldenrod yellow color on camera.
> @phoenixc#0738 said: > (Quote) > > Except for an even worse than usual beam angle gaff, what was wrong with the "Mt McKinley" scene? At various points Star Trek ships have blown up asteroids bigger than that, and the D bored an approximately thirty foot wide tunnel to the core of a planet in a minute or less using a fraction of the phaser's power for the sake of precision.
Sorry so long in response but it was the fact it was Mt. McKinley and not Denali. Even simple things like that can change in the present and cause 'issues' in the future.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
> @phoenixc#0738 said: > And Schneider does bring up some good points, like the fact that despite DSC easing back on the TOS bashing and the lip service to the idea of making it more TOS compatible, most of the people in CBS's Star Trek team are still the same ones Moonves gathered to destroy the TOS he hated so much in the first place.
> Writers and other creative people do best when they are doing something they are passionate about, and CBS clearly does not have anyone on the projects that has that for the TOS era (or at least not any with any say in the show). That shows in Discovery strongly (even second season though it was toned down a bit), and CBS has the choice of either letting them do what they want to do and continue with anti-TOS bulldozer DSC was supposed to be or force them to make a TOS compatible show they do not want to make. Neither option is likely to produce the best results unless they get some new people in there who actually like TOS and make a real effort to UPDATE instead of tear down and replace it.
They need to hire James Cawley and Vic Mignogna.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
>
> Except for an even worse than usual beam angle gaff, what was wrong with the "Mt McKinley" scene? At various points Star Trek ships have blown up asteroids bigger than that, and the D bored an approximately thirty foot wide tunnel to the core of a planet in a minute or less using a fraction of the phaser's power for the sake of precision.
Sorry so long in response but it was the fact it was Mt. McKinley and not Denali. Even simple things like that can change in the present and cause 'issues' in the future.
It wasn't even particularly hard to foresee - the name has been argued over ever since Mt. McKinley National Park was designated in 1917, and the idea of restoring the Native name regained strength after the region was officially renamed "Denali National Park" in 1980. Should have been easy to assume that in the period between 1980 and 2151, particularly after the collapse of the United States government during/after WW3, the mountain would regain its original name.
(And now I'm wondering if the future still calls it Mt. Rainier, or if it's known as "Takhoma" then...)
DSC season 3 has all the earmarks of an extreme damage control story. Either they are trying to distance DSC from the other shows by shoving it off into a totally different "world" where it is easy to forget that it is Star Trek, or as part of setting up a paradox solution to the compatibility problem it has with even an updated TOS.
An example of the paradox solution would be something like Burnham, in her continuing search for the "domino" event, discovers something that will (or is in the process of) unravelling time or whatever and has to reluctantly use a gambit that fixes the damage but changes everything, possibly even herself. If they went that route the last scene of the season (or even the series if they decided to cut it there) would probably have her in a 'modernized' TOS/Cage style uniform on an updated TOS style ship as a teaser/loop closer.
The problem with DSC has always been that Moonves intended for DSC to destroy the TOS that he hated so much and to coattail the then still popular Kelvin universe stuff with even more Star Wars-isms thrown in along with a "Fast and Furious" style shallow action format.
A lot of the stuff they did to break away from TOS was easy enough to back off from, like renaming their "version" of the D7 as the Sech and ignoring the earlier dialog along with bringing out a more normal looking D7 to replace it, saying that the Cage/TOS uniforms were reserved for heavy cruisers during the 2250s, and other minor fixes, but some of it is not so easy to fix. Also, they have to decide on exactly what path they want to take very soon because the longer it stays on the current one and the more series they produce that uses it the harder it will be to connect back up with TOS (if they even choose that route of course).
If they play their cards right SNW could be a tremendous help in that reconciliation.
Comments
https://www.audible.com/pd/Star-Trek-Discovery-The-Enterprise-War-Audiobook/1508283192
It was fun.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
> Oh dear - this news seems to have slightly upset Bernd Schneider, of Ex Astris Scientia
> https://ex-astris-scientia.org/new-series.htm#20200515
If the block quotes are his reflections, I do agree with a lot of his concerns. When you look at the online articles that are being pushed on the ânerdâ new sites. Right they keep making the same types of arguments:
The first half of Discovery was not the Star Trek you were hoping for, but the mirror content will appease fans. And we got it wrong in Season 1 but bringing in Spock and Pike are what the fans wanted.
Now they say Discovery wasnât your trek but we are âlisteningâ to fans SNW will be the Star Trek you hope for.
Meanwhile the audience scores for Discovery on Rotten Tomatoes got worse as the series went on. And the Audience response to Picard is little better.
I donât think we can go back to TOS even if we wanted to, but the CBS propaganda is not correctly gauging the Trek audience.
Do I think SNW will have a lot of things I donât like? Yes. But I doubt I will hate it. I donât hate Discovery even though I disagree with a lot of the writingâEspecially when I feel the producers are not respecting the legacy that they inherited.
Schneider is very bold to raise these concerns honestly. Although CBS owns the brandâthey canât control the zeitgeist of fan interpretation of what Star Trek should be...
Marx once wrote âThe tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.â
I think if the producers fight the Ghost of Roddenberryâs History âthey cannot expect to have a Star Trek that is financially successful in the way they envisionâunless the All Access Trek is generating a new fan base that will carry it forward for the next 50 years.
I'd take those ratings with several grains of salt. By preference around the rim of a margarita glass.
I agree; RT scores have become completely untrustworthy and are manipulated both by fans and the website itself(owned by Fandango). No, the low audience scores for Discovery/Picard do not "prove" those shows are bad. And no, the high audience score for The Force Awakens does not "prove" that movie is good. If we aren't going to trust RT anymore(which I definitely don't) then that applies across the board, not just to specific examples that people selectively choose to support their preferred opinion.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
But...they AT LEAST need to do the Disco-Prise Bridge now.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
And Schneider does bring up some good points, like the fact that despite DSC easing back on the TOS bashing and the lip service to the idea of making it more TOS compatible, most of the people in CBS's Star Trek team are still the same ones Moonves gathered to destroy the TOS he hated so much in the first place.
And the fact is, they never made any attempt to actually update TOS, they started with The Undiscovered Country instead, threw bits of ENT and the Abrams movies into the mix and leavened it with gobs of uninspired generic sci-fi and called it Star Trek Discovery.
Just watch the special features with the interviews and other behind the scene stuff but pay attention to the body language and vocal cues instead of just taking what they say at face value and you can see a very distinct lack of any liking for TOS. Most of them who actually say they are Trek fans are clearly talking about later series, not TOS, and the set designer practically drips contempt for Star Trek, not only does she call the TOS ship "the cardboard Enterprise", she goes on to say that the only Star Trek worth anything at all was The Undiscovered Country movie.
Writers and other creative people do best when they are doing something they are passionate about, and CBS clearly does not have anyone on the projects that has that for the TOS era (or at least not any with any say in the show). That shows in Discovery strongly (even second season though it was toned down a bit), and CBS has the choice of either letting them do what they want to do and continue with anti-TOS bulldozer DSC was supposed to be or force them to make a TOS compatible show they do not want to make. Neither option is likely to produce the best results unless they get some new people in there who actually like TOS and make a real effort to UPDATE instead of tear down and replace it.
I'm sure you know what they say opinions are like, and just because you had a poor opinion of a show and sought out like minds on the internet does not mean the show was "objectively bad", whatever that might mean.
And I'm really looking forward to SNW (don't know if that's the official acronym, but if not it should be, Qdammit!).
Certainly. And the opposite is equally true (just because you enjoy a show does not mean it is "objectively good"). At this point in my life I don't even bother trying to debate subjective preferences; it's a complete waste of time.
There is pretty much only 1 standard by which you can factually measure success: revenue. For a movie, that means box office. So if a movie makes a ton more than it cost, then it was a success regardless of whether you think it was good or bad. For a TV show the measure of revenue is based on viewership. The higher the viewership, the more the channel can charge for commercials, or the more customers are drawn to the streaming platform (both of which are directly related to revenue).
So as to Discovery and Picard: the fact that they are both renewed for upcoming seasons is a sign of success (in viewership/revenue) that simply cannot be dismissed even if someone hates the shows. That said, if either of those shows wind up getting cancelled after only a few seasons, that is another sign that simply cannot be dismissed unless (unless it is due to something like the main actor dying, which I certainly hope doesn't happen, but am just citing a big possible reason for cancellation unrelated to the success of the show).
At this point, we can only say Disco/Picard are successful. In a few years depending on whether each are renewed again we can re-assess that position.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
"But, but, I LOVE Star Trek!" .... yeah well the people who think the KT films are better than TOS would probably say the same thing.
My character Tsin'xing
*Grabs popcorn and retreats to bunker.*
Okay, in all seriousness... I wasn't actually going to share my views on Picard, largely because overall I really liked it, am excited to see more of it, and don't want anyone ruining it for me. That said, there was one decision taken with the finale that I find just idiotic (and I can't remember how to do the spoiler tag so...)
SPOILERS!
The whole "brain abnormality" thing. I appreciate them bringing that forward from AGT, but boy did they make a hash of it. Firstly, AGT suggests that Picard's condition should cause delusions, not a loss of mental capacity (I'm avoiding the word 'stroke' but that's what it looked like to me). Then there's the heartfelt scene of Picard's death, only for him to be brought back within the next ten minutes as an android golem! It's cheap! If they'd built it up for a few episodes, that would have been better, but they rushed everything into those last two episodes. And it's weird to me, because otherwise the series felt pretty well-paced.
Anyway, that's my 2p. Really excited for SNW. I'll give a +1 to Mount being the best part of DSC S2. And the DSC Enterprise looked fantastic both in and out.
Trials of Blood and Fire
Moving On Parts 1-3 - Part 4
In Cold Blood
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Except for an even worse than usual beam angle gaff, what was wrong with the "Mt McKinley" scene? At various points Star Trek ships have blown up asteroids bigger than that, and the D bored an approximately thirty foot wide tunnel to the core of a planet in a minute or less using a fraction of the phaser's power for the sake of precision.
https://en-us.eaglemoss.com/hero-collector/star-trek/star-trek-discovery/offer/DISCO
You can cancel via email after the order ships and never be charged for any other ships.
More info on the ship and it's regular price:
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The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Concepts like WWII analog carrier battles and filling space with missed shots and all is old hat nowadays. Going back to a more modern style of combat like TOS used, if done with dramatic quick cuts and other tricks, would actually be a refreshing departure from the current lemming-trail of Star Wars/Buck Rogers style space combat that Hollywood has been stuck on for decades.
Drama and tension based combat (as opposed to the frenetic eyecandy stuff they use in DSC) can work if done right. The show "The Last Ship" proved Hollywood can actually still do it in an exciting manner if they put their minds to it. The main problem is that they would probably have to show the enemy ship's bridge more often which might be a set-building problem if they did combat with a lot of different enemies (not to mention the DSC Klingon makeup is too thick to properly emote through or even speak rapidly in), though they could probably solve that with CGI (the Discoprise bridge itself has a lot of CGI, that is how they get all that annoying neon fluff lighting though the stations and walls themselves are hardware).
It would be great if they dropped the "hyperspace jump" style warp nonsense too (and no, I do not mean the spore drive). Warp drive in TOS was seamless, they did not "jump to lightspeed" ala Star Wars or "drop to sublight" in the middle of an asteroid field they could not see from warp. In fact they even used it at sublight speeds for things like entering and leaving orbit and whatnot (as Kirk says in Where No Man Has Gone Before the impulse drive was meant for emergencies rather than regular use, though Kirk used it when they wanted to go very slow to stall for time, like in "Elaan of Troyius".
If you listen to the dialog and the sound of the engines a lot of the scenes that many think were done at impulse (like chasing the Denevan ship towards the sun in "Operation Annihilate") were done at warp (which is how they pulled off that hairpin turn btw). And they went through an entire episode in ENT establishing how they learned how to fight in warp, only to have DSC ignore that too.
Last but not least, they could get rid of a lot of the uptight eighties feel by getting them out of the uniforms that look like felted cardboard. I know they made a little progress in that since Pike's teaser uniform, but they still have a long way to go to get to the comfortable working uniform look/feel that TOS started out with (though the shrinking of the velour tunics degraded that look over time).
CBS supposedly tacked on all the ridiculous delta bedazzling on the DSC uniforms because high def made ordinary cloth look boring and detail-less and they wanted something to catch the eye. For that they could have used velvet, the real stuff not the cheap velour TOS did that deteriorated (and shrunk) so quickly, the shimmer as actors move would have provided a lot more surface detail than the scratchy and nasty looking deltas. And can you guess what was really hot in the fashion scene at the time they were putting DSC together? Velvet. Also miniskirts were back in vogue too so the TOS skirted uniform was a lot more "modern" than the '80s Nehru-collared unisex fashion disaster they went with for the show.
SNW would be perfectly positioned to act as a bridge between the retro '80s style DSC and a more modern take on the TOS uniforms by changing the cuts slightly and using richer colored, shimmery velvet. They could even use both options for the women's uniform (skirt or pants, though the skirts were so much more popular with the actresses the pants option was rarely seen) and if they really want to get crazy they could have a kilt option of sorts for the men (though hopefully not the horrible skants briefly seen on TNG) as an alternative to the pants.
https://apnews.com/0c42f4bba742fe63e67f6aa3e6f6020e
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
In there it quotes Pike from âThe Cageâ as saying âI cannot get used to Women on the bridge.â And of course, the âTurn About Intruderâ says women cannot be Star Fleet captains.
And Discovery breaks âcanonâ with these pointsâand that is a good thing.
And another quote from Discovery Pike:
âStarfleet ⊠is a promise. I give my life for you. You give your life for me. And nobody gets left behind.â
I rewatched Discovery season 2 this month, and although there were still a lot of points I did not care forâespecially the Mycilial Network episodeâseriously were the writers dropping acid when they wrote that?
I was, however, a few times really struck by the dialogue. Especially some of Saruâs dialogue was very poignant.
And I guess the order not to discuss Michael Burnham ever again was necessaryâbecause I tell all of my coworkers about my siblings. Now I am just being sarcastic.
But really there is a lot to like about Discovery, and certainly some things too about TOS that we should leave behindâ
Although I like the idea of some velvet uniformsâmaybe for Season 3!
Actually Discovery does not break canon with those two points since they were both misleading outliers to begin with.
In The Cage the crew were out on deployment way too long, and they took a serious mauling in their last mission (they were heading back to base for a belated rest and refit when they intercepted the distress call in fact) and Pike especially was worn down to the bone and questioning everything he did. If you watch the scene were he says that he is obviously not talking about women in general so much as one particular goofy but hyper competent female yeoman.
The "women cannot command starships" thing is not what it sounds like at all. The script suffers from the fact that due to pressure from NBC to stop using military terms like "heavy cruiser" or even "capital ship" for the hero ship, Justman decided to use the odd convention of calling capital ships like the Enterprise "Starship" with a capital "S" while all other intersteller ships would be called "starship" with a small "s".
The script originally used the term "heavy cruiser" but when it was "corrected" to "Starship" it caused problems since the capitalization is not something one can hear in spoken lines. What Lester meant was that the admiralty was playing favorites and putting their (almost invariably) male protégés in the choice capital ship command slots (which is actually something that happens in the real world more than you would think). Female officers on the command track typically went on a more science or medical oriented path (possibly due to obstruction by that small clique of admirals), most of the female admirals in TOS were from that kind of background for instance.
One notable officer who bucked that trend was Number One, who Roddenberry always said accepted command of a destroyer rather than some sort of science or support ship sometime after The Cage.
Another clue to that glass ceiling is Uhura. If you watch the first episode she was in she started out in operations (the avocado colored tunic) but transferred to services (red tunic) shortly thereafter. She may have done that to get out from under the glass ceiling by going to a division that is not dominated by that particular frat-boy minded admiral's clique when it comes to being offered promotions. And apparently it only existed for a decade or two at the most.
The writer of the article seems to have fallen into the common assumption that Pike and Kirk were supposed to be the same character with different names, when the reality is that they were completely different to begin with. Roddenberry based Pike on captain Hornblower from the tall ship novels of the same name and was supposed to a sort of paragon who never lost touch with his humble beginnings, while Kirk was cut from a rougher, more pragmatic cloth and who, if his father's old friends did not get him into the academy would have probably ended up a grifter similar to Mudd.
Roddenberry initially compared Kirk to generals like Sherman (and in fact Kirk paraquoted Sherman in "A Taste of Armageddon"), though in the late seventies Roddenberry would start comparing him to another fictional sailing ship captain, the tricky and brilliant loose canon Richard Bolitho from the Bolitho novels.
The captains were never supposed to represent the zeitgeist of the time the shows were made or any of that nonsense.
Again, that is misleading terminology. The mutiny reference is from "The Tholian Web" as part of speculation about what happened to the Defiant to make the crew all kill each other, and Spock does not say that there has never been a mutany exactly:
In his usual somewhat literal precise way he is apparently leaving out a refusal to take unlawful orders (Garth's crew when he ordered them to burn off a friendly world), actions by a single individual instead of the crew at large (his own hijacking of the Enterprise) or anything except the kind of deadly violent mass struggle they were sanding in the results of. "Such an occurrence" in that context was not about disobedience, it was about some theoretical all out bloody struggle kind of mutiny, which probably never did happen in Starfleet.
Laforge was referring to the holomatter type holodeck, which were indeed brand new devices at the time. In fact the Enterprise-D had the old-style optical hologram plus forcefield and tractor type holodecks too, like the one Tasha Yar took a guest to for a demonstration of combat, which had been around since TOS.
my read may be off. If two historians cannot agree on the past, what hope is there for agreeing about the future?
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
> Another clue to that glass ceiling is Uhura. If you watch the first episode she was in she started out in operations (the avocado colored tunic) but transferred to services (red tunic) shortly thereafter. She may have done that to get out from under the glass ceiling by going to a division that is not dominated by that particular frat-boy minded admiral's clique when it comes to being offered promotions. And apparently it only existed for a decade or two at the most.
I havenât heard or read about this point, specially. But my inclination is to speculate her uniform changed for cosmetic reasons. Just like Data, as the proxy for Spock, was intended to be a science officer but with his yellow skin the blue clashed.
I assume someone just thought Nichols would look better in red.
> @phoenixc#0738 said:
> (Quote)
> The writer of the article seems to have fallen into the common assumption that Pike and Kirk were supposed to be the same character with different names, when the reality is that they were completely different to begin with. Roddenberry based Pike on captain Hornblower from the tall ship novels of the same name and was supposed to a sort of paragon who never lost touch with his humble beginnings, while Kirk was cut from a rougher, more pragmatic cloth and who, if his father's old friends did not get him into the academy would have probably ended up a grifter similar to Mudd.
Roddenberry called Picard, Hornblower, too. I have never read a Horacio Horseblower novelâbut Nicholas Meyer also calls Kirk, HornblowerâIf Kirk was not supposed to also be Hornblower, it is odd that Meyer would have made that comparison independently.
I suspect Nicolas Meyer has not read a Hornblower novel either if he thinks Kirk is anything like Hornblower. In a navy often composed of egomaniacs and rife with graft he was a paragon of the "gentleman officer" idea, which was seen as ironic since he was of "humble beginnings" (in other words he was a commoner who worked his way up instead of being able to buy rank). That is not to say he was absolutely squeaky clean though, and in fact he even had a scandal of his own in some of the later novels.
Picard actually is kind of like a crochety old version of Hornblower, though in a more science oriented way. The both have that solid moral foundation, exceptionally strong sense of duty, and things that haunt them from their pasts at times (Horblower not so literally since he did not have Q actively digging them up).
Meyer was probably thinking of Pike and April (they were the same person originally), Kirk was made new for TOS because without the Spock/Number One dynamic Roddenberry thought the captain should be more pragmatic and even slightly shady to put things back in balance.
As for Uhura, yes the real world reason was that she looked better in red than she did in avacado, but in-setting she did change departments just like Sulu did (Sulu first appeared as science division, something they actually mentioned in passing in a later episode).
True, they were a bit fuzzy about what exactly the divisions consisted of at first. One interesting thing is that the uniform colors were supposed to be red, green, and blue, the optical primary colors. The problem was that the velour they used did not come in a normal green, only a bright florescent green that looked ridiculous and that avocado gold-green that they ended up using but looked that goldenrod yellow color on camera.
> (Quote)
>
> Except for an even worse than usual beam angle gaff, what was wrong with the "Mt McKinley" scene? At various points Star Trek ships have blown up asteroids bigger than that, and the D bored an approximately thirty foot wide tunnel to the core of a planet in a minute or less using a fraction of the phaser's power for the sake of precision.
Sorry so long in response but it was the fact it was Mt. McKinley and not Denali. Even simple things like that can change in the present and cause 'issues' in the future.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
> And Schneider does bring up some good points, like the fact that despite DSC easing back on the TOS bashing and the lip service to the idea of making it more TOS compatible, most of the people in CBS's Star Trek team are still the same ones Moonves gathered to destroy the TOS he hated so much in the first place.
> Writers and other creative people do best when they are doing something they are passionate about, and CBS clearly does not have anyone on the projects that has that for the TOS era (or at least not any with any say in the show). That shows in Discovery strongly (even second season though it was toned down a bit), and CBS has the choice of either letting them do what they want to do and continue with anti-TOS bulldozer DSC was supposed to be or force them to make a TOS compatible show they do not want to make. Neither option is likely to produce the best results unless they get some new people in there who actually like TOS and make a real effort to UPDATE instead of tear down and replace it.
They need to hire James Cawley and Vic Mignogna.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
(And now I'm wondering if the future still calls it Mt. Rainier, or if it's known as "Takhoma" then...)
An example of the paradox solution would be something like Burnham, in her continuing search for the "domino" event, discovers something that will (or is in the process of) unravelling time or whatever and has to reluctantly use a gambit that fixes the damage but changes everything, possibly even herself. If they went that route the last scene of the season (or even the series if they decided to cut it there) would probably have her in a 'modernized' TOS/Cage style uniform on an updated TOS style ship as a teaser/loop closer.
The problem with DSC has always been that Moonves intended for DSC to destroy the TOS that he hated so much and to coattail the then still popular Kelvin universe stuff with even more Star Wars-isms thrown in along with a "Fast and Furious" style shallow action format.
A lot of the stuff they did to break away from TOS was easy enough to back off from, like renaming their "version" of the D7 as the Sech and ignoring the earlier dialog along with bringing out a more normal looking D7 to replace it, saying that the Cage/TOS uniforms were reserved for heavy cruisers during the 2250s, and other minor fixes, but some of it is not so easy to fix. Also, they have to decide on exactly what path they want to take very soon because the longer it stays on the current one and the more series they produce that uses it the harder it will be to connect back up with TOS (if they even choose that route of course).
If they play their cards right SNW could be a tremendous help in that reconciliation.