Regarding the Kobayashi Maru test. In TWOK, both Spock and McCoy were familiar with it. McCoy referenced it again in TUC. Kirk was the only one specifically stated to have taken it. If all Command-track officers have to, Spock would have, as well. If it's anything like what was in TNG -- as the wonderful novel "The Kobayashi Maru" (Julia Ecklar's one, not the similarly-named "Kobayashi Maru" by Martin & Mangels) draws from -- anyone in the Command Division has to take it, and anyone in the other service departments who serves as a regular bridge officer (and thus might have to take the conn in an emergency) has to take it. Advisory officers like the CMO or other Science or Medical staff most likely wouldn't. There's some inference from TOS put into the Bridge Officer Exam in TNG that Starfleet officers tend to not progress beyond Lieutenant Commander without taking some form of the test. We can speculate at length what this might mean for various of the principals we know from the Prime universe shows and films (other timelines play by different rules).
But depending on how far off the screen one goes, Scotty, Sulu, Spock, Chekov, and McCoy took or likely took it at some point. Per the Star Trek Star Charts, the real Kobayashi Maru was lost in 2245. Also a story proposal was flown during Enterprise to show the events that would lead to the test, but it ultimately wasn't pursued. Make of that what you will regarding the timeline. Which is irrelevant anyway, because Enterprise wasn't Prime timeline, despite what many cling to. It just. Doesn't. Work.
I can't buy that. There are two mutually-nearly-exclusive models of temporal mechanics. Either one mutable (within certain nonparadoxical constraints), or nigh-infinite diverging. Trek far more strongly supports the latter, the Multiverse model. Toting up the episodes just in TOS, TAS, TNG, and DS9 that deal with the time travel and such (and not counting a few oddballs involving Q or the Prophets), the raw numbers definitely support the Continuum model (22) over the Multiverse model (9 -- fully half in DS9)*. But the Multiverse episodes are all fine and workable as they stand, while many, many caveats are involved in the Continuum episodes to try to rationalize how they could possibly work. Local effects (TOS "The Naked Time", TNG "Time Squared" and "Cause and Effect") are relatively small-scale and work okay, the Guardian of Forever gets special dispensation because no one knows how it works, and several do good jobs of depicting the model (TOS "Assignment: Earth" and TNG "Captain's Holiday"), but way too many fall prey to temporal paradoxes, and the writers are way too cavalier with it. The coda of Voyager's "Timeless" is a case in point of what I hate about Trek trying to do those types of "save the timeline" stories.
[*Plus one exception that doesn't fit into any of the above: In TNG "We'll Always Have Paris", Dr. Manheim broke time and the effects were a far-reaching but limited time loop in this one continuum, but he himself was caught between dimensions, implying Multiverse. Antimatter was used to patch the breach. One wonders if he was close to re-creating Lazarus' process from TOS "The Alternative Factor"...]
For all the temporal meddling, the respective Enterprises are visually and technologically relatively unchanged in their respective series. If Picard & Co. affected things in their own timeline by interfering in First Contact (the film and the event), the changes would have propagated downstream instantaneously. They would have gotten back to their present to find Starfleet's tech a good hundred years more advanced. But their own ship would have been affected by that, along with the rest of Starfleet, so that encounter with the Borg would potentially have gone differently, not to mention earlier ones, not to mention how things would have played out differently with all those advancements in the first place so who knows if those people would even exist, let alone in those places and... *sigh* The "people in the past miraculously protected from the effects of their own temporal meddling" trope makes me sooo tired. I can only accept it in Back to the Future because of the handwaving of the flux capacitor dilating the temporal effects long enough to (hopefully) undo the damage before the change is "permanently logged".
So I cannot, do not, and will never accept that Enterprise leads to TOS. No problem with Captain Jonathan Archer being in Starfleet in the 2150s, etc. Dump the Temporal Cold War. More time travel won't make things better. Per stuff logged in the Prime timeline, the first unified Starfleet ship, NX-01, was the Dauntless. There was an Enterprise in service at the time, launched some time earlier using Vulcan warp tech. This one:
As it was a non-combat vessel, it was presumably in service until well after the unifying of the Human Starfleet and the Founding of the Federation. It was likely finally lost or retired circa the 2220s or '30s, and the first production hull of the in-development Constitution class was named in its honor.
Or if one were to maintain that anything in any episode or film only counts until overwritten by later events, might as well immediately flush each episode and film after viewing, as nothing it showed has any permanence. For that matter, why bother watching at all if all the growth and struggles Our Heroes go through can be undone at any future point by time-traveling frippery?
As for Enterprise being cancelled despite giving us some good Trek? Enh. Like Voyager, its near-contemporary, it suffered from identity crisis and "period-fixing". For the most part, I can watch most of TOS, TNG, and DS9 and the episodes feel "timeless" in a way. Voyager and Enterprise, on the other hand, feel very '90s/'00s. Something about the storytelling, not just production values. Most of those show's episodes don't hold up as well, and feel more dated, even though they're newer than the previous stuff.
Good storytelling can make me easily forgive weak, period, or financially-constrained production values. Contrariwise, lackluster storytelling/characterization can kill otherwise wonderful production values for me. And there is just too much bad in Discovery for me to look past. The good is there, but it is so outweighed by stuff that makes no sense or just doesn't work. I think Sonequa Martin-Green got some bad direction on how to play Michael. I get that she's supposed to be a bit of a fish out of water, trying to do the right thing while finding balance between her Human emotions and Vulcan upbringing, and making mistakes along the way... But she has the same main flaw of almost all of the supporting characters: too credulous, never seeming to learn from those mistakes, unable to project the consequences of her actions. Too many instances in this show of Idiot Plot™, and the main character has utterly failed to make me root for her.
Which leads me to...
There is plenty of positive discussion of things on the RPF. Pick a property, there will be those who love it and those who hate it and many who fall somewhere in between. Things become polarized when one feels one's viewpoint is being ignored, or being sought to outright invalidate... @SpyderDan, it's not about elitism. You made some good points abotu Trek not being "high art" and definitely having its flaws. I personally reject the "even-odd rule" for the films. I like all of the first six to varying degrees for their own reasons. I love TMP (the Director's Edition even more) because of the character moments. Ditto TFF. TSFS has about the most perfect mix of visuals and music and is, to me, the epitome of the Star Trek Experience, as a visceral thing.
What it comes down to, IMO, is not "high STIQ" or like that, but that -- when done right -- Trek presents the timeless melodrama tropes in interesting and absorbing ways, with compelling and human characters (human in the universal sense, not the speciesist sense). It's when Trek drops the ball on that that I feel we the viewers have every right to diss those episodes, even if it constitutes an entire series to that point. First-season TNG had a hard time finding its legs due to all the back-office crap going on. It didn't start getting good until about halfway through, and then was still hit or miss up until about the last four episodes of the season. But one thing I think The Powers That Be of various properties need to understand is that when something becomes popular enough to become a cultural icon, like Star Trek or Star Wars, it falls on them to respect and reinforce the integrity of that fictional universe, as more and more, people will revisit it again and again and find the chinks in the structure. It is very possible to construct a solid and internally-consistent Star Trek universe and hang light, fluffy action-adventure morality-play melodramas on that scaffold. Doing the former doesn't mean you can only tell stories full of callbacks to various fan-service data points, just as doing the latter doesn't mean you should feel free to ignore all that's come before for the sake of the immediate story you're wanting to tell (the Braga Effect).
I believe in writing on multiple levels simultaneously, to satisfy any degree of familiarity or fandom in the audience, an approach I began studying in earnest thanks to Animaniacs.
I'll keep watching (on a delay) in hopes it does get better, but I'm sour on Discovery not because it's bad Trek (which it is), but because it's weak storytellign and characterization in general. I would have problems with the characters in any series being so clueless, but it's worse for me with Trek. I hate any "figure it out" story where the audience knows the answer and solution before the end of the teaser and we have to endure an entire episode of waiting for Our Heroes to figure it out. I would have problems with any series that had the characters you were supposedly supposed to be rooting for torturing another person to make the engine go, but it's worse fo rme with Trek. Instance after instance through every episode so far. Would I be this nitpicky if it were some other sci-fi series? Probably, although I admit not as adamant. Because of the half-century of established setting and tone, they should have already had that part ironed out, and instead mucked it up. And then hung overly flawed characters and weak stories on that already-undermined scaffold.
I'm not saying one shouldn't enjoy Discovery. I just don't see how one can. :lol Trek fan or not. And I say this as someone who liked The Cloverfield Paradox, basic story, simple characters, and by-the-numbers plot and all. I don't come here and gripe after every episode. I was disillusioned enough by the pilot to reserve comment unless and until there's enough of a turnaround in the series that it, basically, doesn't resemble what we've gotten so far at all. But I think I can speak for those that do in that we keep hoping it will get better and more resemble the Trek universe we had known previously. I don't mean it can never be changed up. I don't mean the characters can't be flawed. I don't mean we can never get a different interpretation of things. I just mean that TOS, TNG, and even DS9 established a certain "Star Trek-y-ness" that later offerings have lacked more and more. There comes a point where things are too changed up, where the characters are too flawed for it to fit.
Basically, "if I didn't care, I wouldn't say anything".
Enh again. Speculative fiction goes back a long way. Depending on how one defines it, perhaps as far back as the second century. Certainly by the time Kepler wrote his Somnium in the seventeenth century. I would argue there have always been those who "get it" and those who don't. About the clearest trait of the genre is self-examination through the safe remove of fantastical setting or circumstances. Epiphanal morality plays. Notice that even in the actioniest of TOS episodes, the crisis was resolved through dialogue, not blowing stuff up. I personally feel Sir Alec's gripe with Star Wars was that a whole new generation was only seeing him as that and utterly ignorant of his entire career's worth of work. He'd been thirty years in films by that point, with more before that on the stage. Prior to VCRs, most of the people recognizing him on the street toward the end of his life wanted to meet Ben Kenobi. They hadn't seen The Ladykillers or Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago. He didn't mind playing the Merlin figure in a space-fantasy movie. But then that was all people kept caring about, even as he did things like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Passage to India. So yeah, he got bitter.
I'll wrap this up with some hardcore starship porn in counterpoint to the series finale:
...Sometimes you don' tneed to reinvent the wheel. Just film it better...
--Jonah
But depending on how far off the screen one goes, Scotty, Sulu, Spock, Chekov, and McCoy took or likely took it at some point. Per the Star Trek Star Charts, the real Kobayashi Maru was lost in 2245. Also a story proposal was flown during Enterprise to show the events that would lead to the test, but it ultimately wasn't pursued. Make of that what you will regarding the timeline. Which is irrelevant anyway, because Enterprise wasn't Prime timeline, despite what many cling to. It just. Doesn't. Work.
I didn't mind the enterprise, its further truth that the timeline has changed, thanks to time travel in voyager and enterprise.
I can't buy that. There are two mutually-nearly-exclusive models of temporal mechanics. Either one mutable (within certain nonparadoxical constraints), or nigh-infinite diverging. Trek far more strongly supports the latter, the Multiverse model. Toting up the episodes just in TOS, TAS, TNG, and DS9 that deal with the time travel and such (and not counting a few oddballs involving Q or the Prophets), the raw numbers definitely support the Continuum model (22) over the Multiverse model (9 -- fully half in DS9)*. But the Multiverse episodes are all fine and workable as they stand, while many, many caveats are involved in the Continuum episodes to try to rationalize how they could possibly work. Local effects (TOS "The Naked Time", TNG "Time Squared" and "Cause and Effect") are relatively small-scale and work okay, the Guardian of Forever gets special dispensation because no one knows how it works, and several do good jobs of depicting the model (TOS "Assignment: Earth" and TNG "Captain's Holiday"), but way too many fall prey to temporal paradoxes, and the writers are way too cavalier with it. The coda of Voyager's "Timeless" is a case in point of what I hate about Trek trying to do those types of "save the timeline" stories.
[*Plus one exception that doesn't fit into any of the above: In TNG "We'll Always Have Paris", Dr. Manheim broke time and the effects were a far-reaching but limited time loop in this one continuum, but he himself was caught between dimensions, implying Multiverse. Antimatter was used to patch the breach. One wonders if he was close to re-creating Lazarus' process from TOS "The Alternative Factor"...]
For all the temporal meddling, the respective Enterprises are visually and technologically relatively unchanged in their respective series. If Picard & Co. affected things in their own timeline by interfering in First Contact (the film and the event), the changes would have propagated downstream instantaneously. They would have gotten back to their present to find Starfleet's tech a good hundred years more advanced. But their own ship would have been affected by that, along with the rest of Starfleet, so that encounter with the Borg would potentially have gone differently, not to mention earlier ones, not to mention how things would have played out differently with all those advancements in the first place so who knows if those people would even exist, let alone in those places and... *sigh* The "people in the past miraculously protected from the effects of their own temporal meddling" trope makes me sooo tired. I can only accept it in Back to the Future because of the handwaving of the flux capacitor dilating the temporal effects long enough to (hopefully) undo the damage before the change is "permanently logged".
So I cannot, do not, and will never accept that Enterprise leads to TOS. No problem with Captain Jonathan Archer being in Starfleet in the 2150s, etc. Dump the Temporal Cold War. More time travel won't make things better. Per stuff logged in the Prime timeline, the first unified Starfleet ship, NX-01, was the Dauntless. There was an Enterprise in service at the time, launched some time earlier using Vulcan warp tech. This one:
As it was a non-combat vessel, it was presumably in service until well after the unifying of the Human Starfleet and the Founding of the Federation. It was likely finally lost or retired circa the 2220s or '30s, and the first production hull of the in-development Constitution class was named in its honor.
Or if one were to maintain that anything in any episode or film only counts until overwritten by later events, might as well immediately flush each episode and film after viewing, as nothing it showed has any permanence. For that matter, why bother watching at all if all the growth and struggles Our Heroes go through can be undone at any future point by time-traveling frippery?
As for Enterprise being cancelled despite giving us some good Trek? Enh. Like Voyager, its near-contemporary, it suffered from identity crisis and "period-fixing". For the most part, I can watch most of TOS, TNG, and DS9 and the episodes feel "timeless" in a way. Voyager and Enterprise, on the other hand, feel very '90s/'00s. Something about the storytelling, not just production values. Most of those show's episodes don't hold up as well, and feel more dated, even though they're newer than the previous stuff.
Good storytelling can make me easily forgive weak, period, or financially-constrained production values. Contrariwise, lackluster storytelling/characterization can kill otherwise wonderful production values for me. And there is just too much bad in Discovery for me to look past. The good is there, but it is so outweighed by stuff that makes no sense or just doesn't work. I think Sonequa Martin-Green got some bad direction on how to play Michael. I get that she's supposed to be a bit of a fish out of water, trying to do the right thing while finding balance between her Human emotions and Vulcan upbringing, and making mistakes along the way... But she has the same main flaw of almost all of the supporting characters: too credulous, never seeming to learn from those mistakes, unable to project the consequences of her actions. Too many instances in this show of Idiot Plot™, and the main character has utterly failed to make me root for her.
Which leads me to...
I'm interested, and quite excited for the season finale. I just don't see much point in discussing it here. Too many Debbie Downers who can't seem to enjoy much of anything. I wish it wasn't so.
There is plenty of intelligent discussion elsewhere, with plenty of like-minded people who are capable of enjoying the show, so you just have to go where the getting is good.
Where are these positive discussions taking place? All RPF now is Debbie downers. It’s depressing to come here lol but it has always been my one stop for movie stuff.
Point me in a positive direction
There is plenty of positive discussion of things on the RPF. Pick a property, there will be those who love it and those who hate it and many who fall somewhere in between. Things become polarized when one feels one's viewpoint is being ignored, or being sought to outright invalidate... @SpyderDan, it's not about elitism. You made some good points abotu Trek not being "high art" and definitely having its flaws. I personally reject the "even-odd rule" for the films. I like all of the first six to varying degrees for their own reasons. I love TMP (the Director's Edition even more) because of the character moments. Ditto TFF. TSFS has about the most perfect mix of visuals and music and is, to me, the epitome of the Star Trek Experience, as a visceral thing.
What it comes down to, IMO, is not "high STIQ" or like that, but that -- when done right -- Trek presents the timeless melodrama tropes in interesting and absorbing ways, with compelling and human characters (human in the universal sense, not the speciesist sense). It's when Trek drops the ball on that that I feel we the viewers have every right to diss those episodes, even if it constitutes an entire series to that point. First-season TNG had a hard time finding its legs due to all the back-office crap going on. It didn't start getting good until about halfway through, and then was still hit or miss up until about the last four episodes of the season. But one thing I think The Powers That Be of various properties need to understand is that when something becomes popular enough to become a cultural icon, like Star Trek or Star Wars, it falls on them to respect and reinforce the integrity of that fictional universe, as more and more, people will revisit it again and again and find the chinks in the structure. It is very possible to construct a solid and internally-consistent Star Trek universe and hang light, fluffy action-adventure morality-play melodramas on that scaffold. Doing the former doesn't mean you can only tell stories full of callbacks to various fan-service data points, just as doing the latter doesn't mean you should feel free to ignore all that's come before for the sake of the immediate story you're wanting to tell (the Braga Effect).
I believe in writing on multiple levels simultaneously, to satisfy any degree of familiarity or fandom in the audience, an approach I began studying in earnest thanks to Animaniacs.
I'll keep watching (on a delay) in hopes it does get better, but I'm sour on Discovery not because it's bad Trek (which it is), but because it's weak storytellign and characterization in general. I would have problems with the characters in any series being so clueless, but it's worse for me with Trek. I hate any "figure it out" story where the audience knows the answer and solution before the end of the teaser and we have to endure an entire episode of waiting for Our Heroes to figure it out. I would have problems with any series that had the characters you were supposedly supposed to be rooting for torturing another person to make the engine go, but it's worse fo rme with Trek. Instance after instance through every episode so far. Would I be this nitpicky if it were some other sci-fi series? Probably, although I admit not as adamant. Because of the half-century of established setting and tone, they should have already had that part ironed out, and instead mucked it up. And then hung overly flawed characters and weak stories on that already-undermined scaffold.
I'm not saying one shouldn't enjoy Discovery. I just don't see how one can. :lol Trek fan or not. And I say this as someone who liked The Cloverfield Paradox, basic story, simple characters, and by-the-numbers plot and all. I don't come here and gripe after every episode. I was disillusioned enough by the pilot to reserve comment unless and until there's enough of a turnaround in the series that it, basically, doesn't resemble what we've gotten so far at all. But I think I can speak for those that do in that we keep hoping it will get better and more resemble the Trek universe we had known previously. I don't mean it can never be changed up. I don't mean the characters can't be flawed. I don't mean we can never get a different interpretation of things. I just mean that TOS, TNG, and even DS9 established a certain "Star Trek-y-ness" that later offerings have lacked more and more. There comes a point where things are too changed up, where the characters are too flawed for it to fit.
Basically, "if I didn't care, I wouldn't say anything".
Once upon a time, anybody interested in science fiction would have been described as "undiscerning" by many. I'm betting Sir Alec Guinness would have been just as likely to have a low opinion of Star Trek as he did when filming that silly space fantasy movie that became Star Wars.
Enh again. Speculative fiction goes back a long way. Depending on how one defines it, perhaps as far back as the second century. Certainly by the time Kepler wrote his Somnium in the seventeenth century. I would argue there have always been those who "get it" and those who don't. About the clearest trait of the genre is self-examination through the safe remove of fantastical setting or circumstances. Epiphanal morality plays. Notice that even in the actioniest of TOS episodes, the crisis was resolved through dialogue, not blowing stuff up. I personally feel Sir Alec's gripe with Star Wars was that a whole new generation was only seeing him as that and utterly ignorant of his entire career's worth of work. He'd been thirty years in films by that point, with more before that on the stage. Prior to VCRs, most of the people recognizing him on the street toward the end of his life wanted to meet Ben Kenobi. They hadn't seen The Ladykillers or Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago. He didn't mind playing the Merlin figure in a space-fantasy movie. But then that was all people kept caring about, even as he did things like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or A Passage to India. So yeah, he got bitter.
I'll wrap this up with some hardcore starship porn in counterpoint to the series finale:
...Sometimes you don' tneed to reinvent the wheel. Just film it better...
--Jonah
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