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Lower Decks S2 teaser trailer
somtaawkhar
Member Posts: 10,222 Arc User
in Ten Forward
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSLcErfzHucAgents of Yesterday Arc issues, Klingon War Arc issues, Spectres Arc issues, Wasteland Arc issues, Romulan Mystery Arc issues, Cloaked Intentions Arc issues, Cardassian Struggle Arc issues, Lost Dominion Arc issues, Cold War Arc issues, Borg Advance Arc issues, New Romulus Arc issues, Solanae Dyson Sphere Arc issues, Delta Quadrant Arc issues, Iconian War Arc issues, Yesterday's War Arc issues, Future Proof Arc issues, New Frontiers Arc issues, Gamma Quadrant Arc issues, Age Of Discovery Arc issues, J'Ula's Discovery Arc issues, Klingon Civil War Arc issues, Terran Gambit Arc issues
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Oooo...Miranda-class love. They gave red bussard collectors to those TOS film nacelles. A nice customization option for us to look forward to here.
Agreed. First season was awesome, and the short teaser already is lots of fun
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The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Wow. Well, if you think LDS is bad, just wait until they give female space hitler her own show and try to make her a good guy
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
In times likes these, anything which brings a laugh or a smile should be celebrated.
Oh, I thought you had an issue with the racist/bigot stuff? If so, you're definitely not going to enjoy Mrs. Space Hitler. She's a major racist/bigot who eats people.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
The fact of the matter is the current shows are all different styles of storytelling, and different settings.
-Lower Decks is more comedy based, following the least important crewmembers on the least important ship in the fleet, and is more episodic like classic Trek.
-Picard is more of a look at the civilian side of the Star Trek universe, following a retired Admiral Picard who gets mixed up in something bigger than him, and is a bit more of a long arc story.
-Discovery is a long arc story that tends to lean towards big mysteries these days. First we had the Klingon War and Lorca, then we had the Red Angel and Control, then The Burn. Now we have some kind of Gravity Anomaly.
-Strange New Worlds is reportedly going to be more episodic like classic Trek.
Fact of the matter is all of it is Star Trek. Just told from different angles. The style doesn't make it any less Trek than what came before. Star Trek is not just about exploration. Its a whole universe full of stories that can be told. It is a setting. There's room for everyone, and all kinds of methods of storytelling. If someone doesn't like an element of Star Trek, that's fine. There are other elements they may like. But everyone has an opinion, and are free to express said opinion. But for the love of Q stop trying to act like one opinion has more merit than another! To each their own!
Very, very excited for that show!
100% agree. That's why when someone says 'X show feels like Trek' to them, someone else doesn't need to jump in and say "I disagree!". Some people need to learn to let someone else simply express how they feel about something without always trying to prove them wrong.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Lower decks is a good example of a comedic deconstruction done right. It lampshades and pokes fun all the gray areas in Trek without destroying the overall feel of Trek. That is almost certainly why it has had more acceptance from traditional Trek fans.
DSC and PIC are a completely different animal, they are trying to make Trek movies disguised as serials, with all the lazy inattention to cross-story continuity details that movies are plagued with (notice how no two DSC seasons are anything at all alike). It is not intrinsically a bad thing, there is a lot of potential there, but so far they have not taken much advantage of it, fumbling around trying to get a grip on what it is that makes something Trek instead.
In fact, the bad part comes in things like that very strong impression that Kurtzman and company don't even like Trek and are just presenting a shallow, highly generic production hoping that no one will notice that they have no idea what Star Trek is all about or why it looked and felt like it did.
Just to be a bit OCD here: technically they are not "arcs" long, short, or anything else, they are full-blown narrow-format serials. Arcs are separate but linked stories with a definite order/progression despite the self-contained aspect, usually in an arc-episode format and often mixed with non-arc-episodes (Babylon5 is still the platinum standard for that format).
As disguised movies, DSC and PIC only have one story per season (sometimes with a complication or two that almost looks like a separate story but is not actually self contained) divided up into arbitrary segments of about an hour. Since every segment (they are not usually called "episodes" in serials) is part of the main storyline or a non-self-contained complication of that storyline, it is what is known as a "narrow format" serial.
For contrast a "wide format" serial is usually lot like the arc-episode format but more tightly threaded in a less self-contained way and often a tighter focus on the central themes, or at the other extreme can even actually be separate episodic scripts mashed together with the beginnings and endings blended and carrying over a few minutes into the next segment as a sort of easily separable faux-serial. The original Lost in Space did exactly that, and the 1960s Batman series took it even further by blurring hour-long stories together and then chopping them up into half-hour segments which aired twice a week (usually Tuesday and Thursday).
One problem with DSC is that it takes its cues from the movies and actually isn't part of a "whole universe full of stories" because its epic focus pushes all other stories out of that "universe". Every time, the heroes are ONLY ones who can do whatever is needed to save the universe/galaxy/federation/whatever and everyone else is just set dressing or part of the problem. That is good for action movies but not so hot for what was traditionally a thinking person's sci-fi series.
In fact, in TOS the Enterprise was more infamous than famous while TOS was still being made. She was what is known as a "hard luck" ship, way too likely to find dire peril in the most innocuous of places, with a charismatic loose cannon of a captain with a definite grasp of the grifter skillset and other extremely talented but variously "difficult" officers in a sort of "black sheep saves the day" setup.
While the movies kept a lot of the "cooler" aspects of that they dumped the hard luck ship idea and instead put the ship and crew on a silly fanservice pedestal and dropped the "one of the fleet" aspect for a sort of "above the fleet" one even when slapping Kirk down for his actions or ordering the ship to the breaker yards. Since DSC started with The Undiscovered Country as their Trek base model they inherited that epic format pedestal and pushed it even further.
DSC and PIC would work perfectly well as alternate timelines like the Kelvin (except for the melodrama in place of drama thing and some of the worst plot and SFX nonsense like the "turbolift cavern" I actually like DSC in a generic sci-fi way, though I don't care for PIC so far), but there are just too many incompatibilities with the Traditional Treks for it to feel like it belongs with the others.
See how easy that is?
Pretty much, yea. Hence why I'm not watching picard or discovery...left a bad enough taste in my mouth.
Lower Decks, like Beyond, only post 2005 Trek I've liked so far.
Speaking of Lovecraft stuff, the crazy robot octopus at the end of Picard S1 was the most interesting part of the entire show, to me. I hope that gets explored more at some point.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
I am not so sure you can lump DSC into that "bad first season" mythos with the rest of them. DSC comes across more like an anthology that just happens to have the same cast and similar (but not identical) circumstances, rather like The Three Stooges or The Monkees did but season by season instead of episode by episode resets like those two shows did.
If fourth season does manage to settle down and follow third's conventions closely enough it would be the equivalent of a second season in a way.
On top of that, the whole bad first few seasons thing is a combination of myth and viewer impatience, though like most myths it has a little core of truth. Roddenberry liked to push boundaries, often quite hard, which is why TOS had to go though two pilots before being accepted, and it took two or three episodes beyond that to get settled in.
TNGs massive level of first season trouble was unique in Trek and stemmed from Roddenberry getting pushed completely out of the loop for most of the movies (except in name only) which caused him to push the boundaries of TV sci-fi too hard when he got back in the game. Paramount came to him to do a show about a Federation/Klingon war set sometime in the late 23rd or early 24th century, which he was totally against, so he convinced he could come up with something spectacular that no one had ever tried before. Unfortunately, having been burned too often by the movie division he insisted on having his lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, installed in the production office for protection against getting pushed out again, and Maizlish was a toxic troll who got off on making everyone around him (except his client) miserable.
The series concept Roddenberry came up with was a very complex multi-threaded ensemble-cast show set up very much like the Macross colony animes that came out later, in that it had distinct civilian and (para)military parts and a ship that would break up into a small city (of a thousand or so scientists and crew dependents) saucer section and its more combat oriented protector. Picard was supposed to be the overall mission commander, a crochety old explorer/scientist who did not get along well with people but had to deal with both the civilians and the tactical side (Riker was more independent originally and was in charge of that tactical section). The duplication and gaps in the cast was due to the idea that the ship sections would be separated more.
The problem is that the writers were having considerable problems doing anything with that setup, especially within the limits of an hour long series of episodes, so much so that the concept was simplified but by then they were so close to the deadline that they had to scramble to have something to shoot. One thing they did to catch up was to quickly adapt TOS scripts (and novels, Diane Duane adapted her Wounded Sky novel as the episode Where No One Has Gone Before for instance) like how Niven did in TAS with one of his Known Universe stories (which is how Kzinti ended up in Trek) when he hit the deadline.
Maizlish was responsible for a lot of that chaos and failure of the original concept as it turns out. Long after the series ended, David Gerrold ran into another one of the original TNG writers and they started comparing notes, noticed something and started asking the other writers and production people involved in the first year. It turns out that a lot of the erratic (and downright insane at times) instructions and rewrites "from Roddenberry" were actually Maizlish illegally tampering with the production (he was not a guild member and not qualified to write or plot for the show or make any of the other changes he was supposedly "just passing along").
In fact, one incident were Roddenberry had supposedly taken a script and made changes to it before returning it to the writer's desk after hours wasn't even physically possible because Roddenberry wasn't even in town when it happened and the people who were with him on that trip verified that he wasn't writing anything during it. Even without the discovery of the illegal tampering Maizlish was toxic enough that he was banned from the studio after the first season, but by then almost all of the original writers left in disgust so the next season had an entirely new pool who had to find their footing, which took about a quarter season or so.
Voyager also had a last minute change of concept (because Berman thought the pilot was too dark and too far outside of the TNG formula safety net), so it had a rough first half season or so but it settled into its long bland but functional period until Garrett Wang shook things up a bit by going to the fans about the "humans have to be boring to make the aliens seem quirky" rule the show was being smothered by up until then.
DS9 and ENT both hit the ground running, the only thing "wrong" with them at the start was that they were different enough from TNG that they had to lay down a lot of background for the viewers and some fans just don't the kind of widely ranging "random" stories which get those foundations across the quickest.
Trying to strawman the issue again, eh?
I never said anything about a "singular narrative", what I said was that each season is so wildly different in feel and circumstance that it comes across like an anthology series with the same cast, like the two I mentioned. In fact, chapter two of the first season, the second season, and the third season all give the impression of damage control with all the changes that implies, regardless of whether CBS meant it as such or not. While a series does need to shake things up from time to time there are reasonability limits to that, and DSC does not do a good job of staying within them.
All series have a few rough spots, especially in the beginning, but with the exception of TNG and possibly VOY Star Trek did not have the length and depth of them that you seem to think. Of course opinion varies and if that is what you see then that is what you see, but you are not everyone, nobody is. There are people who see the entire first season of Babylon5 as a complete trainwreck because of the same laying of foundations, but more who see it as simply having some good episodes and some bad just like anywhere else in the series.
And no, I was not "just trying to defend Roddenberry", he had his flaws like anyone else, I was pointing out why the first season of TNG and part of second turned out the way they did. If you do not believe me, fine, look it up yourself, it is documented well enough to be a trivial search. And TNG was not the only series to have trouble like that either, the 2002 Birds of Prey had an even worse behind the scenes environment for example.