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To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

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LeeC:
I think its weakest point was trying to retcon things instead of just having fun with it. There are still great episodes, archs, and characters.

edit: another thing that bugged me: vulcan mind melds are taboo and work like a HIV/AIDS proxy. Just...why?!

I was re-reading my earlier post on TNG (located in the spoiler) and it really does seem like The Orville would be the natural sequel to it. I mean just look at my terrible Netflix style descriptions. These are real episodes in a "serious" star trek show!

Case:

--- Quote from: Castlerook on 29 Jan 2019, 16:03 ---Voyager felt a lot like Lost In Space but with photon torpedoes and a bipolar captain (Kate Mulgrew's own interpretation of Janeway).
--- End quote ---

I hate Mulgrew's Captain Janeway with a passion. Every time she leans on Chakotay I want to scream and throw things. First female Captain and of course she needs a strong, silent type at her side.  :x


--- Quote from: Castlerook on 29 Jan 2019, 16:03 ---Enterprise had the same problem as Voyager, the writers and showrunners not having a clue of what to do. We could have seen Starfleet's first contacts with some of the classic Star Trek races. Instead we got 2 and a half seasons of "Vulcans are Jerks, but they're actually Romulans" and the Xindi season. I wasn't against the Xindi arc, but it dragged on. And then we get a finale focusing on Troi and Riker, which felt like a cheap shot.
--- End quote ---

I seem to be one of the few people who genuinely enjoyed that show. I loved the time devoted to the exploration of Vulcan history and the evolution of their philosophy and mental discipline. I didn't feel them to be jerks - thought there were the strong hints that individual Vulcans were being jerks who can't admit to their jerkitude, which in turn enables the jerkitude - but rather still dealing with the collective trauma of their near self-extinction, and projecting those memories of failure, guilt and loss onto the humans they keep patronizing (also their struggle with the compromised reproductions of Surak's teachings). Which totally makes sense to me as a German, as there is a school of criticism alleging we are doing pretty much the same. I felt that Trip & T'Pol broke those underlying currents nicely, since initially, Trip was the bumbling, bubbly sum of all Vulcan fears about humanity, and T'Pol's struggle with her complex loyalties and later with her attraction to Trip gave nuance to the Vulcan Jerkitude. To me, Trip was initially the male version of Firefly's Kayleigh - the adorable, cheerful hornball genius mechanic. He gets more shadows and depth later on (especially during the Xindi-arc), but initially, he was the guy who manages to get himself preggers the second the adults let him out of their sights.

I felt that Flox was a genuinely new character rather than a reference or contrast to a character that had already appeared earlier in the franchise. Enjoyed his screentime very much.

Archer's character was a bit ... like Pre-ROTS Luke Skywalker: Originally destined for romance with T'Pol (Leia), the writers suddenly had shifted much of the emotional exploration onto Trip, so Archer became 'just the (American) Captain' (That face really screams American "Leadership!" McSpaceshipCaptain). I thought that Jolene Blalock did a great job in Season 1 subverting her own role as SevenOfNine Mk.2 (especially that uniform :facepalm:) and through that gained a lot of freedom to develop the character later on.

The Xindi-arc was long, true, but I felt that appropriate, as it put into question the entire character-development of the nascent Federation (that has largely been taken for granted in most franchises. See below). Initially the humans' attitude was like that of the FBI-team in The Kingdom: 'We will kill them all' - totally un-Trek. It wasn't at all clear how they'd go from that to the do-gooder Federation of Picard's times.

And I liked the Enterprise's Enterprise - how weak and vulnerable it was initially. They spend the bulk of the first season shouting 'We come in peace!' to the Universe and getting the shit kicked out of them for their trouble, mostly barely surviving conflicts with grumpy impoverished traders. And I loved how utterly unimpressed the other races were with the wide-eyed newcomers - just as T'Pol had told them.

The first contact with the Klingons was disappointing, true, but methinks that may have been down to continuity concerns - a lot of that had already been explored in earlier series. Otoh, we got a nice first contact and conflicted relationship with the Andorrans, who ... haven't been anything but a redshirt race since that one episode in TOS?

And the Vulcans being (tamed) Romulans? That felt more like an idea that TOS never managed to flesh out.


--- Quote from: Castlerook on 29 Jan 2019, 16:03 ---Then there's Discovery, which to be fair, I haven't seen, but from what I gather, its too dark and too grim to be a Star Trek.

--- End quote ---

Ok, now I have to watch it. Post-TNG Trek always felt a little bit too heavy on the "UN in space"-side to me - which is the biggest criticism I have of everything except Enterprise (The only series that featured humans actually having to work against their dark impulses when in a state of shock and fear, instead their innate goodness just being taken for granted, courtesy of some mythical historical process: "'We have moved past all that' - Shiny! HOW?"). TOS was a cold-war series. Humanity in the 1960s genuinely and reasonably feared extinction at its own hands. TOS is an unabashedly unrealistic utopian fantasy - Roddenberry had to 'dream big', because reality was so horrible. That pressure was much weaker after the Cold War, and I felt that later franchises, especially Voyager (Ugh!) were far too sugary in their sweeping assumptions about human ethical standards.

TheEvilDog:
As much as I dislike Voyager (and believe me, I really dislike the show), I have nothing but sympathy for most of the cast, as out of any series in the franchise, they ended up being royally screwed over by the writers and executives.

- Kate Mulgrew wasn't the first choice to play Janeway. She was only brought in because Genevieve Bujold quit after a day and a half of production (due to being a film actress, she was unused to the intensity of television production). A lot of the tension reported during the production was down to Mulgrew being slowly shifted to the sideline in order to promote Seven of Nine (which totally had nothing to do with Jeri Ryan dating Brannon Braga during production). Considering that the face of the show is the Captain, it is disgusting that they did this with the series' first female captain.
- Garrett Wang was basically left on the conn because the producers wanted someone to be the ensign, basically the low man on the totem pole.
- Robert Beltran made it clear that he had signed on to star with Genevieve Bujold and not Kate Mulgrew. Because the producers wouldn't let him out of the contract, he was forced to be in a show he didn't want to be on. (Now, granted he was a dickhead a lot of the time, but they could have easily let him go. They didn't)

Really, the list goes on. But there was a lot of potential that was wasted because of the producers, writers and executives.

LeeC:
Holy shit.  :psyduck:

I just watched another episode of the Orville and the plot was similar and executed better than a particular TNG episode. A crew member develops feelings for the Robot crew member and they start a relationship. I was tearing up watching this because it felt so...good. It was done better than the Data's girlfriend episode. It was just wonderful and sparked feelings and wonder like when I was a kid watching TNG.

This show has no right to be this good but Fox has really outdone themselves and got their own Star Trek show. Its really weird that they pitched or advertised the show initially as family guy star trek because the last two episodes I've watched is really different from that.  I may be a bit biased as I have only seen 2 episodes but it just makes me want to watch more. I look forward to Thursdays now to watch it.

Case:

--- Quote from: LeeC on 30 Jan 2019, 04:06 ---I don't know, he always seemed exacerbated when performing in Enterprise. Maybe its just the episodes I watched, but it just felt off with him. He didn't seem to standout from his subordinates like previous captains. Felt more like a civilian boat rather than pulling from earth naval traditions like the other series.

But that's just one little bear's opinion.

--- End quote ---

No, I had the same feeling - though I find it hard to pin it down why, and can readily come up with counter-examples of why it shouldn't feel that way - e.g. an entire season spent on the Big-E basically operating as a warship - but still, it does.

I think it's in the little things - e.g. the way he is contrasted with Malcolm Reed, the self-professed Navy Man. Mostly though, I think its down to Archer being "Air Force rather than Navy" - the flashbacks to the NX-programme felt like the screenwriter's bookclub had just chewed through Yeager's The Right Stuff.

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