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Star trek discovery to end with season 5
lazarus51166
Member Posts: 646 Arc User
in Ten Forward
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/star-trek-discovery-end-season-220000014.html
Somehow i'm not surprised. Though it should open up the possibility of some new series being produced
Somehow i'm not surprised. Though it should open up the possibility of some new series being produced
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I'm disappointed it's finishing, but considering the extended time it has taken them to produce this series, with long breaks between each season, 8 to 9 years since inception to finish is a decent amount of time that has been dedicated to it. They're missing a huge trick in 32nd Century exploration though, and could've made a good number of more seasons....unless they're shifting the focus to another ship and another crew in that time period.
I finished season 2, and then my friend told me about how in season 3 it turned out the galaxy's dilithium was blown up by a child's temper tantrum.
At that point I concluded the entire writing room had OD'd on Stamets's product and noped out for good.
Strange New Worlds was really damn good though.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Season 2 was better than 1 in my opinion, but by the time it had finished it was clear the people writing the show just had no idea what they wanted to do.
Hence why it started out exploring the time just before Kirk (also to include the possibility of some cheap fan servicing of course, only to upset a significant part of the fanbase at the same time for no good reason at all), then the mirror universe, the mycelial realm or whatever it was called, then the far future.
A new captain each season, killing off characters for no good reason only to bring them back later and so on.
It was a mess. At times it seemed the show merely existed to have a platform to launch spin-offs from. Some other shows also changed the main storyline a few times of course (ENT after season 1, DS9 after season 3), but not as often. And those shows at least kept the crews and setting more or less the same.
At least from what I've heard Picard's season 3 is better than that series' first two seasons. Given that that is also going to be that show's last season, it does make me wonder what they're actually planning to do after these shows have finished and what will be prioritised.
Unification of the fanbase, as everyone will finally agree on something. Namely, that it sucks to have no Trek at all.
I understand your concern, especially given what happened at HBOMax, but I'm not sweating bullets - yet.
I haven't seen it myself yet (don't even think it's available without some extra subscription where I live) but it seems to be the one show liked by both older and newer fans.
What I do know: Pike is certainly the most handsome captain of them all. Yes, I care about those things.
"Another long rest period" would almost certainly make the situation worse, not better, since that is what has happened every time there has been a gap where there has been no Trek being made. The track record is that it always loses some of what made it unique every time and it takes another step towards the center of the generic pack.
(Emphasis added)
And why did they choose Star Trek for that? Probably because they knew there are long-time and loyal fans who wanted to see more and new shows being produced.
If original content was required, they could have developed anything. They wouldn't have had to resurrect a supposedly 'dead' franchise.
Now we have Paramount Plus, with several Star Trek shows, and the few other series that are native to the platform not the tea that Star Trek fans connect to. Sure P+ is good. is it worth the subscription? to me, not if they kill off the ST franchise. it would be if you could see all the episodes of shows past, but anyone try to watch season 2 of NCIS LA?
Like UPN, paramount plus will fail, if the short sighted executive kill off the existing Star Trek Series, and /or continue on Hollywood's penchant for injecting Woke TRIBBLE into everything.
On the contrary, if looked at objectively the drift towards genericity during each long gap is a real and noticeable effect. In fact, if you have access to scholarly article libraries (which I had only a few years ago but not any longer with my current budget) social science papers have been written on the subject which point out that loss of uniqueness with well documented evidence, it is literally demonstrably true.
It's root cause is the tendency for Hollywood to pigeonhole everything to make it easier to tell stories in a compact way along with the lemming effect of trying to coattail whatever is the most popular thing and those coattailing elements building up over time and eventually pushing out the unique elements.
Generally, the movies are the biggest offender because the storylines have to be very tight to fit into the time allowed, and the Trek movies are no exception to that. The biggest loss of uniqueness happened between TOS/TAS and the early movies. Not only did they change from soft-sci-fi to space opera (which is Hollywood's favorite and most used sci-fi subgenre), they also went from the single field-effect drive school where lightspeed is just a seamless point on the speed scale of the same engines, to a semi-jump two-drive school where FTL mostly just becomes a way of changing scene locations (the drive thing might seem minor on the surface, but it contributes a lot to the feel of the setting and even to some degree dictates how stories have to work).
Paramount Pictures, used to the movie industry assumption that they didn't have to worry too much about the kind of continuity that a TV series has to have were surprised at the backlash from Trek fans over what the movie division considered trivial points and flailed around trying to figure out what was going on. That the fans seemed to only like every-other Trek movie and would not tolerate much of the kind of spoofiness of other TV-series movies (like Green Hornet) that the industry liked to do really baffled them.
Paramount Pictures eventually turned to Paramount TV to fix the situation and PTV turned to Roddenberry to create TNG in an attempt to mollify the soft-sci-fi fans, but it suffered from the baggage inherited from the movie division, the same way that SNW suffers under the load of baggage from early DSC. Of course, having a writer's room that was constantly harassed by a troll (Roddenberry's lawyer who was installed in the production because he didn't trust Paramount) to record levels of toxicity didn't help either, but even if it didn't have that additional problem in the first season the baggage would have triggered a lot of the same ire from the fans anyway.
How does it supposedly disprove it?
I see the problem: we are talking about two entirely different things.
The loss of unique elements and encroaching genericism is a style, writing, and worldbuilding issue, along with which segments of the viewership prefer which particular series (or the movies, etc.), not whether or not a particular series has its own significant, award-worthy moments. The fact is that all of the Treks have their own moments, even the much-maligned NuTreks, but that fact is completely independent of the fact that each iteration of Trek has lost more of its uniqueness and moved further towards the center of the generic pack.
And one of the major dangers of genericity is that as it slides down that slope it becomes more and more replaceable. That leads to the kind of situation that Jonsills points out, that if Trek stops being made then it is more likely to be dead instead of just dormant because any of the other shows in that generic pack could take its place.
The direction of that expansion is important though. Ever since the TOS/TAS era ended it has mainly "expanded" towards the middle of the pack while simultaneously losing touch with more of its unique aspects, and that is precisely the genericity problem that could make the difference between coming back from dormancy or just staying dead if active production were to end.
Star Trek started out as a very unusual show, even by today's standards but even more so in the mid 1960s. It was soft sci-fi at a time when most sci-fi shows were either horror crossovers or were (and still are) space operas, it used a totally different set of aesthetics than most of the other sci-fi shows and deliberately avoided the rocket flames and industrial look that Hollywood has nearly always preferred.
It also pushed both the social and technical limits of TV at the time hard, something that none of the others have done except for the technical aspect.
TOS was even more scientifically based than most sci-fi shows nowadays (including its own spinoffs), it used warp for everything (unless the warp drive was down from damage or sabotage of course) which made the turning-in-space way it moved sensible since it was not subject to the usual limitations of normal physics (unlike impulse drive, which in theory would vector instead of turn), it used real chromotherapy theories of the time to try and minimize stress caused by being trapped in a big can in space for months on end (and yes, the Navy disproved chromotherapy's effectiveness for that in submarines later, but it was a valid theory at the time).
Also, despite the "window like lights" on the hull (a fan theory was that they are sensor patches like the sensor domes and the big square sensor patches on the dorsal side of the saucer) the ship was actually windowless (just check the interior shots, even in places where it is obvious that one of the walls is the inside of the hull there are no windows and dialog explicitly says that the only windows looking out on space are the ones in the shuttlebay catwalks, and those are separated from the bulk of the ship with emergency airlocks according to the door shape). Also, everything was supposed to be serviceable from the inside so people would not have to go outside to repair things.
There were a lot of other unique touches, but those were some of the most noticeable.
And yes, TOS did borrow some stuff, but it was mostly from sources that were in themselves unusual for sci-fi movies of the time, mainly from Forbidden Planet (mostly production techniques but also some archetypes and other stuff) and The Day The Earth Stood Still (where the minimalist look in general that TOS had, especially for the bridge, came from) which were probably the two best of the very few soft-sci-fi movies made up to at least the 1970s (some would argue that 2001: A Space Odyssey would make that "two of the three best" though personally I don't care for it).
Hate to break it to you but Trek's always been progressive ever since TOS
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
This. The complaints that "Star Trek's gone WOKE!!!11!eleven!" always confused me, as that has been Star Trek's bread and butter since the start. Hell, I've seen people complain about Disco having trans characters when TNG had the amazing "I am female" speech and DS9 had Kor and Jadzia's wonderful exchange with Kor correcting the name he was using like it was nothing.
Star Trek's always been "woke" and complaining about it now just makes me believe that people either never watched the older series, or just missed the point entirely.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.