Difference with every Star Trek that came before and what we have now:
Every first season of Star Trek after TOS was pretty bad. When you have just the first season of a Trek series to go off on then the reaction to something mediocre is pretty normal.
Season 1 TNG had… problems.
Season 1 DS9 is boring as fuck.
But these series got better and earned the respect of the fans with later seasons.
NuTrek has had 17 or so seasons across 5 series and it’s STILL trash! The current executives have chosen quantity over quality and don’t give a damn about improving anything.
TNG, DS9 are heavyweights with countless great (and a number of not so great) episodes. The characters are very likable and example figures in life. The stories were mostly good, loads of great and awesome stories. The cinematography was just nice and calm, the ships were places where people could actually live and looked beautiful. The techno babble was at least rooted in something. It was positive.
What we have now is quite literally opposite of all that. The cinematography is now all quick cuts, weird angles and basically “edgy”. The characters are egocentric and just plain awful, especially in discovery. Ships are no longer places where people would actually live, it’s all dark and broody, swearing is common because reasons and remember that time that in TNG someone said merde? That is the exact same! Now we do visible torture, character histories are cherry pick optional so characters that were on an arc of redemption and show wisdom are now lesbian dual pistol wielding ninja mass murderers… not that I care about anyone’s sexual preferences, seriously don’t, but if a character is one don’t make it another just to tick a checkbox. If you want to have a ship full of transgenders, then by all means do that, just don’t use existing characters for that (except maybe dax?)
And who can be surprised by any of it? All classic trek was always made by people who loved trek and who were with it for long times. Nu trek is made by people who self professed never even eat he’d star trek, don’t really care about it, and prefer to use the show to shoehorn their political views, so we get whatever the hell those things were that they called Klingons but we’re actually trump fans, I sht you not.
Another show came along, called the Orville. It was created by a huge fan of classic trek and it frigging shows. Its a ship where I want to live and work. Lighting is actually normal, wow! It has nice and relatable characters in story lines that actually make you think about morals and ethics… Sounds familiar? It’s an awesome show, though even there season three kinda suffers from the cgi over storyline… It’s sad that a non trek show does trek better than star trek itself now.
This looks and reads like it is from a grocery store gossip rag. Look, I’m sure fans were upset, but I’m old enough to recall the hype for TNG and people were excited AF generally.
I think it's mostly still TOS fans who tend to look down on the newer series as never quite living up to the original. We are of course right to do so.
I’m a TOS fan. It was my first love and will always be my favorite Star Trek. But I cannot disagree with you more. There is a line running all through Star Trek- the ideals of the Federation and why they should be upheld. And that is what is most important about Star Trek to me in terms of living up to the original.
It so reminds me of Rod Stewart “Sailing”, Which was used for a TV show in the late 70’s. I hated that song more than 40 years ago and I still do, and I hate the theme song to Enterprise sounding like something from the 70’s. It seemed to me everything about Enterprise was to make humanity seem backwards and primitive but in a future SciFi setting. Like when one of the first episodes, they are totally surprised that bacteria can contaminate a planet. Something that has been well known and considered already for several decades.
It reminds you of a Rod Stewart song because… it’s a Rod Stewart song!
He did it originally. They couldn’t afford the rights to his version for the show so they re-recorded it with a guy who sounds kind of like Rod Stewart.
You might, but it was a Rod Stewart song. It was also originally in the movie Patch Adams before it was in Enterprise. I don’t know why, but I think that’s amusing.
Maybe it’s because, apparently according to my searching, the songwriter also wrote songs for Bryan Adams?
I was wrong about one thing though: it wasn’t on a Stewart album, it was just on the Patch Adams soundtrack album.
I guarantee you that not only were there plenty of people who loved it the first time they heard it, there were plenty of people who loved it the first time the heard it on the Rod Stewart album they already owned when the show came out.
Now me, I hate Rod Stewart and I hate that song, but different strokes…
I occasionally sneak that into a playlist while my wife and I are listening to something, and then I leave the room for a bit. I don’t do it too often, though, because I don’t want a divorce.
Happy if JJ never gets near a Trek set again, but as far as the new series are concerned, I’d rank them all between “pretty good” and “excellent”. Except Picard, but even that mess was at least a better send off than Nemesis.
Berman? Best thing he ever did was stay away from DS9, and that just because he was too busy making Voyager worse.
Several of the scripts were adapted from the aborted Star Trek II TV series, which was going to have most of the original crew return. Spock being the notable exception.
Yeah, it really should’ve read “Levar Burton - The New Scotty?” To which people would’ve been like “a black Scotty, WTF?” It’s kind of interesting how much the original dynamic was broken apart with the TNG crew, and glad they tried doing something different instead of just a carbon copy reboot. Some just don’t translate or were completely new “roles” that just didn’t exist in TOS.
There’s a (poorly named) documentary called “How William Shatner Invented the Future” which features a bunch of scientists talking about how Star Trek inspired them. Including the inventor of the cell phone.
During the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation, there was never a full-time chief engineering officer for the Enterprise-D. Originally the producers thought that most of the action would take place on the bridge and would rarely go to other areas of the ship, including engineering. The bridge officers would call over the intercom to the other areas and have some voice actor say “Yes sir!” and so forth to save money on new sets. Gene Roddenberry disagreed with this idea and had a change made to the shooting script for the pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint” to include a scene in engineering; otherwise no engineering set would have been built at all. That set the stage to bring in a new character to act as the chief engineer. Well, it didn’t quite work out as planned at first.
My edit must not have gone through. I forgot to add that I was wrong and it wasn’t Roddenberry and edited my comment, but it didn’t go through to you fast enough I guess. Sorry.
Okay. The idea that they didn’t want to film in Engineering really confused me. Because Encounter At Farpoint made a big show of Picard walking the entire set from top to bottom.
It makes a lot of sense that Roddenberry himself vetoed that idea.
I’m guessing Paramount producers in this case, but it’s hard to know. It seems to me that Maizlish was more about just doing things his way rather than saving the studio money.
And in the end, they just redressed one of the movie sets as Enterprise-D Engineering and saved money anyway.
I really liked that! It accurately demonstrates that when you are building a new team, leadership roles are especially challenging to fill. It made it feel like a believable workplace.
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