Lit Era's of the Legend's EU

Hey, I'm still new to this whole being more-than-a-casual Trek fan thing. I've been slowly discovering the fandom's secrets over the past few months, like that The Motion Picture is great.

I mean... for years I've heard the party line that TMP is crap and that Trek movies don't begin until Wrath of Khan, but I watched The Motion Picture a few months ago and liked it a lot. That it's actually great must be some closely-guarded secret that the fandom uses to keep people out? I dunno.

 

Wait until you discover that the famous "even numbered movies are good, odd numbered movies are bad" thing is a load of malarkey. Also, if you haven't already done so check out the TMP novelization (supposedly written by Roddenberry himself) one of these days. It's a trip.

 

I think that being based on a TV script is actually a strength for TMP --- it may be why it really feels like an actual Trek movie down to its core. Like, Wrath of Khan is a great Star Wars movie, but The Motion Picture is a great Star Trek movie. The final encounter with V'Ger, done on a cinematic budget, was breathtaking. It felt like seeing an excellent episode of The Original Series done the way Roddenberry had always envisioned it being done. And I didn't think there were bad pacing problems either; the slow build in the first half allowed the Trekverse to really come alive on the big screen for the first time without rushing into things. That drydock sequence with the TNG theme playing... magnificent.

As for the odd/even thing: it largely has merit. Wrath of Khan and Voyage Home are fantastic. Search For Spock and The Final Frontier are... not. Not terrible but kinda middling. Undiscovered Country is pretty good. Generations, which I watched a few weeks ago, was a little better than it was when I watched it on TV in 2005 but still pretty blegh. It was an average episode of TNG with Kirk awkwardly stuck on at the end, and honestly was probably only "a little better" because I was familiar with the Klingon sisters this time around and their subplot felt less random. First Contact was top-class. Haven't watched the last two TNG films yet but know of their reputations.

Some axioms about the franchise are true, after all --- the first seasons of TNG and DS9 are, in fact, pretty bad. I've been checking the latter out recently and ah man I really just want to skip to the Dominion War already.

 

The Motion Picture is the very first Star Trek product I ever saw, as a kid (largely because I'd just discovered Star Wars and gone wild over it, and now wanted to see the other big franchise with "Star" in the title). I also was a big fan, and it led me to discover the other movies, and later the rest of the franchise. It's not the best of the movies, but it's really a perfectly good one as far as I'm concerned.

It may help that I saw it without having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey (which I still haven't seen, in fact). Some of the criticism of TMP I've heard is that it's too similar to that movie while being less good.

 

I don't know.

Among other things, The Wrath of Khan is a fairly pointed deconstruction of the superman concept (in the person of Khan) and almost as much of the Lone Individualist Hero Who Plays By His Own Rules concept (in the person of Kirk), and an ode to the virtues of bureaucracy, regulations, and boring old training and experience. That's already pretty unusual for Star Trek, but it feels really un-Star-Wars-ish.

 

I dunno if it's an ode to regulations and training when Kirk's maverick reprogramming the Kobayashi Maru is celebrated, and when his reasoning behind doing so goes on to help him win the day in the end. But I just meant that it was a movie with a scary villain that uses a space battle as a climax, really. It doesn't feel un-Trek at all. I was just positing that The Motion Picture is the most Trek of the Trek films.

And yeah, Conspiracy was good. I haven't been watching every episode --- been doing about ten or twelve eps. per season --- and it was the highlight of what I saw of Season 1.

 

I'd argue that Motion Picture, Voyage Home, Final Frontier, the entire TNG run, and Beyond are the Star Trek movies that feel the most like actual Star Trek... both in a good way (TMP, Voyager Home, First Contact, Beyond) and bad (the rest).

I know Ron Moore has said he thought that Yesterday's Enterprise should have been the first TNG movie instead of Generations, but I just don't see how that would have worked. Especially as, being an episode, it works very well in that format and context already.

This may be controversial but I think the last season of Enterprise was actually very solid and I really wish it had gotten a fifth season because some of the stuff I've read for what was planned (assuming it was actually true) seems like it would have been a lot of fun. Especially more Mirror Universe-exclusive episodes.

 

Weren't they planning on making Jeffrey Comb's character a regular if that had happened?

 

This was a interesting video detailing the various Authors who shaped EU Legends