Amph [NERRRD] Observations, rhetorical questions, comments & 55 Years of Star Trek (General Thread)

One show having it's fourth season in production and the other two being soon to air their second, while a fourth and fifth show are about to air, all while TPDB deciding to expand their involvement with him, does not strike me as "little evidence" of popularity.

Well, anecdotally *I'd* say the opposite; everyone I know (and most people I've talked to) love Disco and Picard.

Heck, worst I can remember was back when Season 1 of the latter show was airing and we were all talking about it it was just a couple people in the relevant thread who weren't enjoying it.

Anyway, if the people in charge didn't think the shows were successful they wouldn't be as confident in them as they; clearly they must feel like the audience and the interest is their because not only do they keep giving them more seasons, but they keep putting new shows in production.

Even if that's the case, it's not mutually exclusive; Rick Berman ended up running Trek because he had the right connections (with who, precisely, depends on whose BTS accounts you believe), and it didn't stop us from getting a lot of good years out of his time in charge.

 

Big corporations love sunk cost fallacies. CBS (now CBS-Viacom) invested a ton of cash not only in its streaming service but in Star Trek. They don't have much in the way of IP, as the industry likes to call it, to draw in subscribers to its C-tier, recently rebranded Paramount+, so they're hoping that throwing more money onto the bonfire will help.

And I don't mean that people I know hate it. (Season 3 of Discovery was more of the same so I never saw it.) Most people I know never watch it and aren't Trek fans. I mean that the buzz died down a lot on social media and in the mainstream.

 

Maybe I ought to do a Georgiou - that is treat K2 like crap, slag him off frequently, be totally dismissive of him again and again. And then, after I totally ghost him, he gives this monologue about how great I was to him.

Yep, that is Disco S3's Georgiou arc.

 

Yeah, I never really liked Georgiou, which is a shame because an MU character permanently stranded in the prime timeline should be a great idea. IDK, maybe if they had continued Lorca’s arc instead of killing him, perhaps that idea would have worked better?

 

All it needed was them not indulging her crap to the degree they did.

Having someone say at the end of Disco 3.10 "she was a total bawbag" would have made all the difference.

 

Yeah, or give her a more dramatic character arc.

 

I kinda liked mirror Georgiou "It's a Wonderful Life" flipping back to the mirror verse, I'd get more of a kick out of her proposed series if it was less Section 31 and more Carl takes Georgiou on alt-verse travels. Oddly, I don't really get sick of the Mirror Verse being constant jerks all the time.

 

They seem very confident in Trek, it's future and Kurtzmen. It doesn't look at all like what your making it out to me (that their actually failing and are choosing to respond by...deliberately wasting money on a failing franchise and service?)

I dunno. My observation is that Trek-centric news seems to get focused on pretty regularly still and the relevant social media circles still seem pretty excited and engaging. The buzz certain doesn't seem to have died down here, either.

(though I would be remiss if I didn't mention that "how much something is talked about on social media" is not in-and-of-itself a metric of whether or not it's successful or not; nobody was viewing TNG's quality by how many letters people wrote in to fanzines or DS9 on how often people were talking about in on AOL messenger, after all).

Did I miss something?

 

Yes, social media buzz wasn't a metric of success in the 1990s when the internet was a microscopic, slow-as-molasses, barren version of what it is today. Back then we also had publicly released ratings, which declined for the franchise from TNG's finale all the way to Enterprise's cancellation a little over a decade later. We have no publicly released viewing numbers for Kurtzman Trek. The opacity of ratings is very convenient development for every streaming service, particularly those that may be struggling to match the titans of Netflix, Amazon, and Disney.

 

Look, the simple fact is if Star Trek wasn't doing well they wouldn't be ordering new shows, wouldn't keep giving the existing shows new seasons and wouldn't have such apparent faith in Kurtzman and the franchise.

No offense Guy, but I don't see what your seeing here.

 

I see things like Time Warner or whatever the parent company is called now trying to shore up HBO Max by paying Zack Snyder $100,000,000 to rework a middling film from 2017-- money they could not have possibly made back. This sort of throw-more-onto-the-money-fire-until-we-succeed type of thinking is more common than you seem to think, especially in Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

 

Well the fact they're throwing money at more Trek shows and not less, and not exactly making like Season 2 of The Stand (yes, I know it's a miniseries adaptation but still if they wanted to they could), I'm gonna assume Paramount doesn't think it's just a useless dumpster fire. (Basically the most important thing about new Trek is Brand Advertising for Merchandising, Merchandising, where the real money from da movie is made!)

Still, like I said, take some of that P+ money bit and instead of something nobody watches make HD DS9/Voyager dammit.

 

It seems more like they saw a chance to turn a quick profit; irregardless of the quality of the Snyder cut (I've heard mixed things) it was so widely-demanded by the people who wanted it and had so much interest surrounding it from causal observers that it was *always* going to draw in the audiences and make money.

Fact of the matter is I don't really see any evidence that would lead me to see what you see; and a *lot* that would lead me to see the opposite.

You know that means you'd get HD Move Along Home and HD Threshold, right?

Now *that* is spending money on useless dumpster fires

 

I'll take HD Threshold over another season of Why Women Kill or Interrogation any day!

 

Wanting an anything Threshold over anything else makes you a worse monster then Gul Dukat, I just want you to know that, Al

 

Well, technically right now I was going to put on Dexter S1e2 and Once Upon a time in Hollywood (although I had OUatiH on just 5 days ago and seen it repeatedly). But I just saw that Threshold is on at 10 PM and I actually fully intend to put that on instead. So yes I am chosing Threshold over something else. But to be fair it won't get my full attention! (I didn't think I'd sit down and watch Threshold fully when there's other eps of anything I'd rather rewatch)

Am going to watch the heck outta the last 5 minutes though. Lizard babies!

Also I just had 2001: A Space Odyssey on there so I appreciate the tonal whiplash. And technically both Threshold and 2001 have breaking some sort of barrier in space and then becoming something different so there's a thematic connection at least!

 

I watched Threshold the other day, it had some good Tom Paris character moments buried in there.

 

Honestly, the whole thing only really falls apart in the last 10 minutes but it just spectacularly falls apart is the whole reason it's infamous. It's not like a, say, Spock's Brain that's just kinda awful from the jump. (But good awful, brain what is brain!)

 

I wouldn't go quite that far in forgiving Threshold's sins. The whole "we're going to do what the best minds in Starfleet have been unable to do, and we're going to do it on a resource starved starship" is a flimsy premise to build an episode on, since, like two or three episodes earlier in Resistance they were minutes from losing warp forever because they lacked macguffinillium or something. Threshold is bad in the ways a lot of bad Trek is bad. But it's not Code of Honor or Tattoo-level offensive.

 

Here's a question; now the reason why going to warp ten never mutated anyone in TOS can be chalked up to the (speculated/BTS) change in warp scales, but why didn't the crew of the Enterprise-D all get turned into horny lizards in Where No One Has Gone Before... - did they not go past warp ten in that episode?

Well, it's an experience, I'll grant you that.

Do you think their was ever an awkward talk were Tom had to tell Miral about her half-siblings that he abandoned to fend for themselves in the Delta Quadrant after turning into a lizard and knocking up Auntie Kathy?

 

Eh; I'm sure it will happen to the other shows eventually (especially as Star Trek continues to get more and more prominent once more in the public eye as it seems to be) - it's only a matter of time, I feel.

 

I mean, it wasn't as bad as, say, "Starship lost in the Delta Quadrant somehow ends up in present-day Earth, not that it matters or helps them get home in any way"

 

Whether or not it’s commercially successful is frankly irrelevant to Guy’s point, and should be seen as a criticism of the industry generally. From a critical standpoint his work is definitely not top tier stuff. Why they don’t give one of their biggest franchises to someone who is critically successful is beyond me, since that would be a better long term investment.