Amph JJ Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness

A new Trek TV show may be some way away. Enterprise seemed rather flat from what I saw of it, that and the last couple of series of Voyager suggested that the franchise had run out of steam and was lacking in fresh ideas. The last two Trek movies did the same, the reboot was a shot in the arm but I'm not sure how that will happen with TV.

There are endless possibilities for a Trek show, but they might not work.

 

Voyager had a good premise, but it was badly run. It was treated like a TNG clone set in the Delta Quadrant, but with many more bad episodes. It should've been about how the crew's Federation ideals and morals would be tested alone in a vast, unfamiliar environment close to Borg space, without a drydock to flee to for repairs and supplies, without Earth or Risa or Vulcan or any Federation world to go to on leave, without Starfleet to back them up and tell them what to do, and with half the crew being Maquis. Instead it was about a captain who had psychotic episodes and her boring (except the Doctor and Seven), inconsistent crew with the reset button nonsensically at the ready after every episode or two-parter. The producers/studio chickened out of things like a gay or bisexual main character whose orientation no other character would care about (which would've been ****ing revolutionary for U.S. TV in 1994), or doing a whole "Year of Hell" season where the ship would be constantly attacked and harassed by hostile aliens. Enterprise had a pretty lazy prequel premise, but it could have been better if they'd kept the pre-Federation vibe of everything being unfamiliar, transporters being seen as dangerous for living beings, abandoned the stupid "Temporal Cold War" thing a lot earlier, etc.

Yes, a TV show is not going to happen soon, but Rick Berman isn't running the franchise anymore, so a new show would be different than the last two. My biggest fear is that a showrunner would want to blindly follow a modern "gritty" trend or something.

 

Ivanova would like a word with you...

 

I'd want to see a Trek show set in the Far Future Federation, where the characters deal with the problems of being godlike beings.

 

It's almost like you're trolling me to post more B5 pictures...

Actually, I would love a thread where I respond to questions and musings with pictures from B5... be like a JCC Kosh...

 

Nothing wrong with grit, Star Trek has generally tried to be grounded in realism as much as possible within the fantasy of the sci-fi genre. It can do grit and still hold true to what Roddenberry made it.

 

I figured there'd be an example somewhere-- and it was on a fairly obscure program and according to Wikipedia it was only "word of God" that confirmed it was a lesbian relationship. Trek taking that step still would've been revolutionary for a country where the majority of the population believed that gay people were hellspawn and for a format that capitalized on camp gay caricatures heavily even in the late 1990's and 2000's.

 

Well, I would hope that it would be without the silly characterization, mediocre writing, and ubercrappy 3d graphics of B5.

Keep the pretentious episode titles though.

 

Just for the record, you realize that a) B5 did what it did with like 40% of the budget per episode of TNG or DS9 and b) DS9 used what B5 pioneered in order to do all of their space battles once they started ramping up?

Look, I don't want this to desolve into a pissing match though -- I love both DS9 and B5 for different reasons.

 

B5 is apparently so crappy that two of their episodes won hugo awards before it was split into long format and short format (with The Coming of Shadows beating out Apollo 13)

 

The thing I like about TOS, which none of the other shows ever captured, is how chaotic the ST universe seemed. Nearly every TOS episode involved Kirk and crew getting into some wacky space opera adventure. The politics were (and I mean, at best) a background. The rules of the universe were so unwritten that basically anything could happen, and it made Star Trek seem the all-purpose universe of exploration and adventure. TNG still had some of those moments, but it began the trend towards increased systematization of the world.

 

Didn't mean to offend, Mr. Straczynski

 

You mean something like this thread?

 

No, I know the B5 thread.

 

Description of the new movie:
Lens flare, lens flare EVERYWHERE!

 

just read the new yorker review of this film..............

my reactions:



I don't need to go any further than just... he doesn't understand the plot. He says they went to the planet to open the photon torpedo for no reason. no reason? If it wasn't clear before they took that action, the thing almost blew McCoy back to earth. Meanwhile, his hand hits some Klingon in the face. no reason?

I hate it when people refuse to follow the story or make the logical leaps between plot points (and that is not the case here, as it was all very well spelled out, but just wanted to hit that one, too, while in the neighborhood with my bat out and all the boxes look so shiny...).

 

Yeah, I mean I don't necessarily like the film but it seems like some people just flat missed some of the things they claim as "plot holes" or "not explained" in a lot of cases, or miss a decently simple explanation... the film is bad enough on it's own, it doesn't need help.

 

Sci-fi movies are full of plot holes because they do fantastical science things that aren't really entirely possible, plus they also have something called artistic license. A stick-to-reality sci-fi would not be as interesting fun as movies like Back to the Future or Star Trek or Star Wars or most of the comic-book superhero movies.

 

The New Yorker reviewer is wrong if that post is correct, but that's not what plot hole means.

 

Yeah... generally when people refer to plot holes, that's not what they mean.

And, to be fair, I can't think of many "plot holes" in the BTTF series off hand that sets people off...

 

Yeah, like Reverse Time Travel.
Nerds are so picky

 

but, within the plot of the movie, in which that science does work.....

a plot hole is like if someone says they have the technology to do something and then, later, in a bind, they don't. It's just a lapse in logic or things literally don't work... one guy is on planet x and ten minutes later, movie-time, he's on planet y, and his hyperdrive is broken or something...

from wiki:

*within the context of the plot (see: earlier in the sentence)

edit2: I could be misreading what you're saying, there, SLDR.

Anyway, here's the article for you all to read for yourselves, if you so desire:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/05/20/130520crci_cinema_lane

*goes off to look for that SNL clip*

 

Dramatic License fixes most issues.

Look at one of the big problems people have with Dark Knight Rises - when Bruce Wayne gets out of the pit prison and manages to get hundreds of miles back to Gotham in like a day or two despite having no apparent money or transport. Yes this is never explained in the movie, but it's dramatic license because if it took him 3 weeks to get back then Gotham would have been destroyed already.
Also, you can explain away almost everything by the fact he's Batman and Batman can do whatever Batman wants to do because he's freakin' Batman.

Either way, things like that don't make a movie bad, it didn't affect my enjoyment because I just ignored it and was engaged in the overall conflict and story.


You can find Plot Holes in the Star Wars OT no doubt, but that doesn't make them bad movies.

 

I'm still not too thrilled with how Adm Marcus managed to tame Khan so quickly and get him to go along with this convoluted plot. "Space Seed" showed that Khan was no pushover and was VERY independant, even when it wasn't in his best interest to do so. The whole "wake Khan, get him to join Section 31 until this dreadnaught can be built and then go to war" plot doesn't strike me as something he would go for. Of course, when you enter the mind of one of the writers (Bob Orci, a conspiracy nut AND a 9/11 truther) it all makes total sense despite it being somewhat contradictory to the character's previously established pattern of behavior.