Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

I was able to view the second episode of the newest program with Star Trek in its title, “Strange New Worlds”.
It’s not for me.
Although I will probably view more at some time, I’ll pass.
I have my reasons but won’t bore you with them.

However, I am happy for those who enjoy the show and wish it great success!
 
Almost finished with the second episode and while I am wholly committed to the actors who are truly wonderful, the writing is just really really bad. There are moments when I just cringe. The timing of humor is so jarring that at moments I am left baffled by how bad it is sometimes...most of the time.

Plus the plot devices are so contrived and so manufactured that I can't believe what I am watching. I am aghast at the writing at times.

Love Trek so I will continue watching. Just like I will always watch Star Wars even though the Prequels and JJ era were so bad. But eventually we end up with shows like the Mandalorian and movies like Rogue One. Even as flawed as BOBF has been its still watchable and it did have its moments. But with shows like Obi Wan coming out I am hopeful the franchise is headed in the right direction.

So hopefully someday we will get proper showrunners that will give us great Trek...with better timed humor and truly better writing.
 
Almost finished with the second episode and while I am wholly committed to the actors who are truly wonderful, the writing is just really really bad. There are moments when I just cringe. The timing of humor is so jarring that at moments I am left baffled by how bad it is sometimes...most of the time.

Plus the plot devices are so contrived and so manufactured that I can't believe what I am watching. I am aghast at the writing at times.

Love Trek so I will continue watching. Just like I will always watch Star Wars even though the Prequels and JJ era were so bad. But eventually we end up with shows like the Mandalorian and movies like Rogue One. Even as flawed as BOBF has been its still watchable and it did have its moments. But with shows like Obi Wan coming out I am hopeful the franchise is headed in the right direction.

So hopefully someday we will get proper showrunners that will give us great Trek...with better timed humor and truly better writing.
What we need is and Dare I say it, We may have some But the less studio interference the better...

More of the Alan Ladd jnr's

Less.. INSERT VILLAN OF CHOICE

We know its, a money game but how else is the talent going to find its way.

Anyway off to watch Onibaba..

Credo
 
There were two problems with his video. First, he says that canon doesn't matter. It absolutely does when you're trying to appeal to fans of the old school show, which is all that SNW is doing. It's why they brought the Enterprise back in the first place. Secondly, where he complains that the Enterprise just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. Welcome to all sci-fi everywhere. This has been a trope since the very beginning of science fiction. Most space exploration would be terribly dull. We only get to see the exciting bits, otherwise nobody would watch.

Otherwise, he's right. SNW is barely tolerable but it's better than anything on Discovery or Picard. Being better than crap really doesn't make the show good though, we need to have higher expectations. I'd rather have no Trek at all than bad Trek.
 
He complains that the Enterprise just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. Welcome to all sci-fi everywhere. This has been a trope since the very beginning of science fiction. Most space exploration would be terribly dull. We only get to see the exciting bits, otherwise nobody would watch.
Enter Stage left

Star Trek the Motion picture


Enough said..
 
There were two problems with his video. First, he says that canon doesn't matter. It absolutely does when you're trying to appeal to fans of the old school show, which is all that SNW is doing.

That’s not what he said. He said that he personally is no longer getting hung up on canon because he just wants good stories.

That in itself speaks to how dire things have become. And why mediocre-to-bad shows and movies are now praised as great. Because expectations have sunk SO low.


Meanwhile, I see that Paramount is offering the pilot episode for free on YouTube, as a desperation movie to try and hook subscribers. This is no surprise, since they’ve done it before, for STD, along with dumping the first season of STD on broadcast CBS, where reruns of game shows beat it in the ratings.

So, the question is, do I waste an hour of my life actually watching this thing to give it “fair” assessment? Or perhaps to indulge in the fun of giving it a proper hardcore-fan examination, and to point out just how many problems there are? I have the feeling I’d either die of a stroke, or want to smack myself in the head with a brick afterwards, so as to kill what few brain cells were still alive.

That being said, I also came across a random clip from the second episode of Not-Spock’s disguised ear starting to revert to its normal, pointy shape. Cringefest. CW-level music and CGI. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
 
What the hell is so damn hard about writing good stories being contained within canon?

It's a big universe, the entire bloody universe is your canvas with Star Trek and even any era! Good God you could have had a series
with a team that explores through the Guardian of Forever. Hello... Aged Professor Picard and his brave team of space archeologists exploring the greatest mysteries of the universe. There is nothing restrictive unless of course you want to make Star Trek into something else.
 
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What the hell is so damn hard about writing good stories being contained within canon?

Because that would require actual work, instead of them just acquiring a franchise, writing absolute pap, then slapping familiar names, ideas, and references into it to try and get it to sell.

You can rest assured that, as with the Abrams films and STD and so on, that if these shows were put out as GENERIC SPACE ADVENTURE, with no connection or references to a beloved franchise like STAR TREK, that absolutely no one would care. Destined for the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart, with the occasional write-up in books and articles about trash sci-fi shows from the 2010s and 2020s.

Stripped of those familiar elements, the stories and characters would be seen as as the poorly-written, gobbledygook trash that they are, and would not even be a blip on the radar.

As it stands, they are only a very small blip on the radar because they have the STAR TREK name attached to them, and people actually care about STAR TREK, its characters, and its legacy. The only reason I’m wasting time talking about this stuff is because of how personally offended I am by what has happened to this thing I love so much. It’s a deeply sad thing to see the franchise fall so far into the gutter. But that’s par for the course, these days.

If and when the pop-culture war is over, there will be few legacy franchises left standing. BACK TO THE FUTURE is safe so long as the Bobs (Gale and Zemeckis) are still alive. That’s about it. Everything else is burning to the ground, and nothing is safe or sacred.
 
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Came across this elsewhere. It speaks to how easily people are roped in by things that are new and shiny.

As the years have gone on, I’ve come to really understand just how influential and definitive Matt Jefferies’ TOS designs are. There’s been a gradual shift away from his clean, elegant, and futuristic style as TREK has more and more been designed by people who just…design things for TV and movies, rather that having actual life experience and experience in aviation and engineering and whatnot. Beginning with the TOS movies, we started to see that influx of excessive detailing (resulting from the influential one-two punch of 2001 and STAR WARS) which actually made the designs look less futuristic.

Just look at the real world for an example of how far ahead of the curve Jefferies was: Personal computers have gone from big and clunky to handheld tablets with touchscreens and two buttons. While the TMP Enterprise entranced me in my youth (and still does, mind you), I’ve really come to understand and appreciate the fact that Jefferies’ original Enterprise is the single greatest spaceship design of all time, inside and out, and that everything else which came after is a derivative and lesser version of it.

Fast-forward to the NuTREK movies, and the Abramsprise is a mish-mash of the TOS and TMP ships that looks like it was thrown into a microwave, with no understanding of the function of the design elements being mixed together. For example, they ripped off the general look of the TMP Enterprise’s Bridge dome, with the three slots housing spotlights that illuminate the name/registry on the upper saucer. However, on the Abramsprise, the front “spotlight” is now the front “window”/viewscreen on the Bridge (which in itself is a dumb literalization of the viewscreen from the interior set).

Jefferies’ designs had form follow function, with the very smooth and plain exterior, since EVAs to repair greeblies on the outside of the ship would be hazardous. Same with the subtle details, like the Sickbay walls being painted green, just as they are in real hospitals (so surgeons can have a contrasting color to aid their eyes when confronted by all that organic-red during operations). There was a logic to the how and why of everything, and the result was sleek and functional, rather than everything just being there to look cool and flashy and expensive.

Again, flashforward to the Abrams and Kurtzman stuff, and the sets are over-designed and over-detailed, with lots of bright lights and greeblies and whatnot everywhere. And that’s not even getting into things like the ridiculous lens flares and camera moves. The NuTREK ships may look “cool” and “flashy” for the purpose of watching an hour of TV, but they in no way look like comfortable, efficiently-designed places where hundreds of people live and work for years at a time. And the exterior of NuPike’s ship is just an over-designed, clunkier version of Jefferies’ classic original, with elements from TMP and NX-01 mixed in. To say nothing of pointless, flashy-for-flashy’s sake elements like the slots in the nacelle pylons.

But, because it’s new and shiny, people are happy to use the opportunity to knock the “cardboard sets and rubber monsters” of TOS, as usual. Sad.
 
View attachment 1575937


Came across this elsewhere. It speaks to how easily people are roped in by things that are new and shiny.

As the years have gone on, I’ve come to really understand just how influential and definitive Matt Jefferies’ TOS designs are. There’s been a gradual shift away from his clean, elegant, and futuristic style as TREK has more and more been designed by people who just…design things for TV and movies, rather that having actual life experience and experience in aviation and engineering and whatnot. Beginning with the TOS movies, we started to see that influx of excessive detailing (resulting from the influential one-two punch of 2001 and STAR WARS) which actually made the designs look less futuristic.

Just look at the real world for an example of how far ahead of the curve Jefferies was: Personal computers have gone from big and clunky to handheld tablets with touchscreens and two buttons. While the TMP Enterprise entranced me in my youth (and still does, mind you), I’ve really come to understand and appreciate the fact that Jefferies’ original Enterprise is the single greatest spaceship design of all time, inside and out, and that everything else which came after is a derivative and lesser version of it.

Fast-forward to the NuTREK movies, and the Abramsprise is a mish-mash of the TOS and TMP ships that looks like it was thrown into a microwave, with no understanding of the function of the design elements being mixed together. For example, they ripped off the general look of the TMP Enterprise’s Bridge dome, with the three slots housing spotlights that illuminate the name/registry on the upper saucer. However, on the Abramsprise, the front “spotlight” is now the front “window”/viewscreen on the Bridge (which in itself is a dumb literalization of the viewscreen from the interior set).

Jefferies’ designs had form follow function, with the very smooth and plain exterior, since EVAs to repair greeblies on the outside of the ship would be hazardous. Same with the subtle details, like the Sickbay walls being painted green, just as they are in real hospitals (so surgeons can have a contrasting color to aid their eyes when confronted by all that organic-red during operations). There was a logic to the how and why of everything, and the result was sleek and functional, rather than everything just being there to look cool and flashy and expensive.

Again, flashforward to the Abrams and Kurtzman stuff, and the sets are over-designed and over-detailed, with lots of bright lights and greeblies and whatnot everywhere. And that’s not even getting into things like the ridiculous lens flares and camera moves. The NuTREK ships may look “cool” and “flashy” for the purpose of watching an hour of TV, but they in no way look like comfortable, efficiently-designed places where hundreds of people live and work for years at a time. And the exterior of NuPike’s ship is just an over-designed, clunkier version of Jefferies’ classic original, with elements from TMP and NX-01 mixed in. To say nothing of pointless, flashy-for-flashy’s sake elements like the slots in the nacelle pylons.

But, because it’s new and shiny, people are happy to use the opportunity to knock the “cardboard sets and rubber monsters” of TOS, as usual. Sad.

Part of the reason why these shows cost a bomb to make per episode. Funny thing is, when shows like DS9 and Enterprise revisit the TOS era, they went back to the same original aesthetics without feeling the need to "update" the look. As Robert Meyer Burnett often pointed out, there's nothing wrong with those older sets, its how you light them, that would make them feel more modern. I just wish they'd spend that money less on the glitz and more on the writing talent... can you imagine what kind of stories we'd be getting if those who've written Trek novels were directly involved (instead of in a consulting role like Beyer for Discovery and Mack for Prodigy)? I'd also love to see the likes of Naren Shankar or Marc Zicree write for the shows.
 
Enter Stage left

Star Trek the Motion picture


Enough said..
although this time, i was able to watch the directors version of the first movie...you could really hear the 'i need you, badly' line, with crystal clarity - definitely was worth watching just for that
 
For those of you complaining that Lt. Ortegas looked completely out-of-line wearing 21st century gym gear to a dinner in the Captain’s mess…

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…I will remind you that in the TOS episode “Arena” Captain Kirk also beamed down to Cestus III wearing his workout gear for a meal with Commodore Travers.

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For those of you complaining that the girl with the severe haircut looked completely out of line wearing 21st century gym gear to a dinner in the Captain’s mess…

View attachment 1576030

…I will remind you that in the TOS episode “Arena” Captain Kirk also beamed down to Cestus III wearing his workout gear for a meal with Commodore Travers.

View attachment 1576032
Wow people are complaining about that?? I think there are a lot more problems with the show than the attire worn by a bridge officer. Plus it was casual attire per the captains request.
 
For those of you complaining that the girl with the severe haircut looked completely out of line wearing 21st century gym gear to a dinner in the Captain’s mess…

View attachment 1576030

…I will remind you that in the TOS episode “Arena” Captain Kirk also beamed down to Cestus III wearing his workout gear for a meal with Commodore Travers.

View attachment 1576032

First thing that crossed my mind when I saw that scene was... where the hell is her Smartgun?
 

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