The end of JJTrek, finally?

How about a story with an adventure that actually does what the intro narration said in the original series.

I've had it with all the time travel stories. It's a dead and buried horse being whipped in it's grave.
 
Dan, Roddenberry did indeed call Trek a wagon train to the stairs
That was how Roddenberry pitched it to the networks -- "Wagon Train to the stars" -- and it's still handy shorthand. Western were all the rage with the networks in the early '60s, and Wagon Train (the show, not the real-world settlement tactic) was the closest parallel he could draw for them. The most effective way, then and now, to get a network to go for the new thing one is hoping to have picked up is to liken it to something else successful already on the air. "Like _____, but _____."

And Star Trek was a goodly bit like the show Roddenberry cited. Expanding civilization into the unknown, ranging out to chart the uncharted, checking up on the settlers, occasionally having to protect them from Indians...

And BSG TOS was more refugee column than wagon train. The Twelve Tribes wandering in the desert, looking for the Promised Land.
 
There was a scene in The Immunity Syndrome, a great ep where they are truly dealing with the strange and unknown, where McCoy and Spock always at odds of course, were again fighting over who was going to go out on the shuttlecraft to learn about that giant organism they were trapped in, basically a suicide mission, not just to maybe help save the ship, but to LEARN, to execute the mission of the Enterprise.
Kirk tortured with deciding which of his friends to send to their likely death. Also the quiet discussions of the nature of this organism, the possibility that our purpose was
to be the antibody for the galaxy. Effin' cool stuff! Damn them for abandoning such things. Sure Trek had action episodes and war episodes and silly episodes, I get it, of course drama and entertainment are critical but always exploration and thoughtful episodes. Not to mention the optimism of depicting a leveled up humanity.

I still remain stunned, that all that cool Sci Fi, that makes you think in a different way for a little bit but STILL enjoying all the drama and entertaining stuff, is just clearly a nuisance to them apparently. Was it all just saucer sections, vector insignias, pointed ears and zap zap bang to them? :angry

I feel like Dr. Zaius pounding on the sacred scrolls sometimes criticizing JJ Trek. Protecting some holy lie that we should have moved on from for the new generation. But no, it happened!
 
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I still remain stunned, that all that cool Sci Fi, that makes you think in a different way for a little bit but STILL enjoying all the drama and entertaining stuff, is just clearly a nuisance to them apparently. Was it all just saucer sections, vector insignias, pointed ears and zap zap bang to them? :angry

I believe it was Chris Pine who, during the release of Beyond, said that you can’t make a cerebral Star Trek nowadays as it just wouldn’t work in today’s marketplace. This despite the fact that Interstellar made almost 700 million two years before.
 
I believe it was Chris Pine who, during the release of Beyond, said that you can’t make a cerebral Star Trek nowadays as it just wouldn’t work in today’s marketplace. This despite the fact that Interstellar made almost 700 million two years before.

Source Code, a much smaller budget film of course still turned a big profit comparatively to it's budget.
The Martian, also did very well with a very science-centric approach but very human.
Arrival, made four times it's budget.
Roddenberry didn't underestimate the intellect of the audience, he took a risk and it payed off beyond anyone's expectations.
 
Ok I'll say it. I thoroughly enjoy the new JJ Trek, I never could get into the old with the exception of TWOK.
Pine embodies a young Kirk perfectly IMO. Impossible to replace. The studio will fork out the cash to make it happen.

I enjoyed the new JJTrek movies as well. While I have seen ALL of Star Trek...and definitely have my favourite things among the classics, nevertheless i quite like the new ones as well.

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I hate it because it has no clue what Trek is supposed to be about and is empty calories.


According to whom?
 
Are you perhaps confusing the original Battlestar Galactica -- which creator Glen A. Larson literally described as "A wagon train in space" -- with Star Trek TOS? Because TOS has squat to do with wagon trains, spacebound or otherwise.

I'm not a hardcore Trekkie, but I know enough to recognize that your description of the old series has sod all to do with reality.

Here is an article detailing Roddenberry's original vision.

https://www.newsweek.com/wagon-train-stars-410030

In it, the phrase is mentioned as Star Trek's original high concept:

Screenshot (879).png
 
Here is an article detailing Roddenberry's original vision.

https://www.newsweek.com/wagon-train-stars-410030

In it, the phrase is mentioned as Star Trek's original high concept:

View attachment 836631

Huh. I always thought it was BSG that was the "Wagon train in space." Certainly, old school BSG pulled that off a lot better (and felt a lot closer to 1950s westerns in its sensibilities and characters).

Trek never seemed to resemble that at all, even if that's what Gene originally thought of way back when.
 
I enjoyed the new JJTrek movies as well. While I have seen ALL of Star Trek...and definitely have my favourite things among the classics, nevertheless i quite like the new ones as well.
...and regarding the "empty calories" of the new films...
According to whom?

TOS -- except for a couple episodes -- didn't require you turn your brain off to enjoy them. Even "Spock's Brain" isn't that bad. The ones that stand out the most for me as "skippable" from TOS are "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", only because of the uninspired costumes and obvious facepaint of the aliens -- the message was good; "Day of the Dove", only because the writer of the episode had no idea what was where on the Enterprise -- Main Engineering is in the secondary hull, but everyone was supposed to be sealed in the saucer; and "The Way to Eden"... the Space Hippy episode... That one does bug me. The Federation -- and especially the core worlds -- of Star Trek have eliminated hunger and want. Anyone who wants to can make something of themselves, and those who don't aren't stigmatized for not (but most people do). I can't say more without invoking politics. And there's always the "opt-out", for those who want to try it the old-fashioned way, out on the frontier, braving the unknown, proving that they can*. So why the heck were Doc Severin and his followers trying to find someplace better than the pretty limitless options open to them?

[*Gene himself mused that Starfleet was a great mechanism for isolating the more "primitive" types in the otherwise utopian society who would chafe under such lack of challenge, and putting them to useful purpose -- both keeping them happy and keeping them from causing problems on the ground.]

The first two of those I still watch, even if I more listen to than watch "Battlefield". "Eden" I just can't stand. It hurts. In a way no other third-season episode does.

Next Generation started out a bit clunky, but by the end of the first season and through the second, that was some of the best Star Trek I've seen. Third season on, after Maurice Hurley left, it got dull. I'll still watch them if they're playing, but they don't really grip me the way season 2 does. They got better uniforms and higher production values, and there are good scripts in there, well-acted, but... *shrug* It's missing something for me. All the way through to the end of DS9's season 2. Then that show started dealing with hard concepts again, and I adore it.

Voyager and Enterprise were flawed from original premise and, while they have good stories, they still require the viewer to not think too hard. With ever more options one can pursue in life, the notion by the time of Voyager that anyone would get into Starfleet without really wanting to doesn't work. I'm not talking about B'Elanna or Wesley, who quit while at the Academy, only to come back after they'd grown up a bit. I'm not talking about Chakotay, who chose his family and home over his Starfleet oath. I'm not talking about the Maquis, who never signed on for the mission, but weren't given much in the way of options. I'm talking about the Starfleet crew who whinged about being out where no one had ever been before. The first couple seasons being "Gilligan's Island" in space, where the newest shortcut home ended up not working, got old fast. And even though DS9 (and Babylon 5 before that, and a dozen other shows all the way back to the '70s and further) had proved audiences will follow longform stories and that you don't need to preserve the status quo from episode to episode, things remained far too static on that ship over its run. And Enterprise was just schizophrenic about what era it was in. But I've argued that point before.

Even the movies weren't mindless entertainment. TMP (and here I mean the Director's Cut, after Bob Wise got to go back and properly finish what had pretty much been released as a rough cut due to being waaaaay over-schedule and having the studio committed to an opening day etched in stone and delivered from on high) was pure Star Trek, with a couple minor missteps (the uniforms, Gene forgetting the Lt., j.g., and Commodore ranks existed, the uniforms, the protocol of a flag officer in command of the mission while the Captain retains command of the ship, the uniforms...). I take Star Trek II and III together with an intermission, as "The Genesis Incident", doing my best to pretend Robin Curtis is Kirstie Alley. The two together are a terrific story, also not mindless. TVH is a time-travel story, which I hate, since no one ever does it right, but it's a good one, for all that. TFF had studio problems that saw its budget cut, then cut again, then cut again, so the entire last act was done on hope and a shoestring compared to what Shatner originally scripted. I feel it has some of the best character moments out of the films, and the story is, again, pure Star Trek -- actually lifted from the first draft of what would eventually become TMP. TUC was a good first draft, but needed someone looking over Nick's shoulder during the writing and set design to nudge him in the right direction. And I love the first act of Generations -- especially helped by the novelization and the subsequent book "The Captain's Daughter" (focusing on Hikaru and Demora Sulu, with strong presences from the Excelsior and Enterprise-B).

From the first teaser for Trek09, I was hopeful but worried. If they were building the TOS Enterprise, some of the details were off. And... were they building it in shirtsleeves? Okay, the saucer was built on the ground, in graving docks in San Francisco, then boosted up to be mated to the stardrive section that had been assembled in the synchronously-orbiting dockyards. The finished ship wasn't meant to enter atmophere or land except in emergencies (that would likely render the spaceframe unusable after). But those were the warp engines seen peeking up from behind the saucer. Maybe it's in a space station...?

But then we saw. No, it was being built on the ground, in its entirety. A ship the size of the Enterprise-D. Under full Earth gravity. And in Riverside, Iowa, no less. For no reason anyone can determine apart from getting it on ne'er-do-well Jim Kirk's radar. Then we see the guy who was originally conceived of and shown as Horatio Hornblower in space, the perfect Starfleet officer, driven and competant and dedicated to his calling... blowing off his studies, cheating, sleeping around, getting put on academic probation, stowing away, being put off the ship, and then because he saved the day, this Starfleet cadet on suspension was rewarded by being promoted directly to Captain and given the newest and best ship in the 'fleet... instead of working his way up to it in his 30s, through years of hard work and no dates.

Never mind the worse-than-bad science. A supernova that will destry the entire galaxy? Really? And whose blastwave propagates faster than light? A pea of this "Red Matter" will snuff so massive a sun, so why does the Vulcan Science Academy have a huge beach ball of the stuff that they send out in this ship? If it'll snuff out a supermassive sun if thrown at it, why does Nero need to drill down to a tiny little planet's core to drop it? And if he's at synchronous orbital altitude, how will dropping the mining laser a mile or so closer to the planet help? And what happened to the Romulans' bumpy foreheads between Nemesis and whenever Spock left? Considering we never found out how they got them in the half-century between TUC and TNG...

And that isn't even getting into the warp beaming, interstellar beaming, complete could-not-be-more-wrong misunderstanding of what "cold fusion" means, and so on and so on... Story implausibilities, ignoring canon (I mean universal things, like Vulcan having no moon, but an equally hot but smaller trojan planet, and Delta Vega being on the edge of Federation space -- those don't change just because of altered timeline), and so on. No, it's not an objective metric of "badness", but within a certain standard of what Star Trek should be, those three movies fail more than they succeed. Plus JJ's damn Mystery Box again. We shoudln't have to read the tie-in comics to know those are ritual Romulan mourning glyphs, and Nero and his crew tattooed them on, as an indicator their grieving will be unending; that they augmented their mining ship with Borg weapons to go after Spock; that they realized they'd overshot and Nero calculated when and where Spock would be coming through, and made sure he was there; that Admiral Marcus surgically altered Khan's appearance so no one would recognize him; etc.
 
I enjoyed the new JJTrek movies as well. While I have seen ALL of Star Trek...and definitely have my favourite things among the classics, nevertheless i quite like the new ones as well.

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According to whom?

Was it not obvious?
Pretty sure mindless entertainment was not on the agenda.
Everything was thought out, right down to the design of the ship by veterans of military and aerospace.
 
Inquisitor. Amen to all of your post. If I may be so bold to add about Trek 09. Knowing what we know of Klingons and their culture, what should have happened
directly after their prison planet was attacked with 30 klingon vessels destroyed by a massive Romulan ship ?. Forgive me , but these guys don't know what the hell their doing.
They had the perfect set up for a sequel explaining the tension in tos between all those cultures. Forcing Kirk to earn those stripes. Instead we get in to douchness then beyawned. (spelled in correctly on purpose). Seriously, come on.
 
Hemsworth was in the first jar jar abrams one in 2009 for like 5 minutes. Cheesy acting and just embarrasing all round.
If they want to bring anyone back from that movie, it should be Captain Robau, at least he was believable as a captain unlike Hemsworth.

If i was paramount, i would recast. I mean, both of these actors, Pine and hemsworth are hardly box office A listers, the only movies they are in that make money are the generic disney blockbusters or other similar stuff.

They don't have the charisma or star power of say a Tom Cruise to warrant such high salaries.


It's been awhile since I have seen Trek 09, but as I recall, Hemsworth wasn't the captain, but rather the only senior officer left alive, and thus, the only one who could take command.
I didn't hate his role, or his acting of it. It felt very similar to the scene in Captain America: TFA, where cap is plummeting to certain death, to save millions of people, while talking to Peggy over the radio. The scene in ST09 fell short because it was the beginning of the movie and we didn't know or care about the characters, so it didn't matter.

Pine is a forgettable actor. Hemsworth is only memorable as Thor, but you lost me at Tom Cruise. I don't see any appeal in who he is or what he does.

Hemsworth they could recast, easily. Pine, not so much as he is the central actor/ character to this film series. I don't know what they did to Chekhov's character after Anton Yelchin died, whether he was recast or written out (nor do I really much care), but it's easier to do that to a supporting character.

So if, and that's a big if, Paramount goes forward with JJTrek4, they should give Pine his contracted salary, and dump Hemsworth, one is critical to the franchise, the other isn't. Recasting Kirk at this point would be devastating to the series, and would most certainly bomb.
 
Was it not obvious?

I thought it was. It was rather a rhetorical question...the point of which was to illustrate that while you may well believe that the new Trek is worthless, not everyone shares that opinion.

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...and regarding the "empty calories" of the new films...


TOS -- except for a couple episodes -- didn't require you turn your brain off to enjoy them. Even "Spock's Brain" isn't that bad. The ones that stand out the most for me as "skippable" from TOS are "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", only because of the uninspired costumes and obvious facepaint of the aliens -- the message was good; "Day of the Dove", only because the writer of the episode had no idea what was where on the Enterprise -- Main Engineering is in the secondary hull, but everyone was supposed to be sealed in the saucer; and "The Way to Eden"... the Space Hippy episode... That one does bug me. The Federation -- and especially the core worlds -- of Star Trek have eliminated hunger and want. Anyone who wants to can make something of themselves, and those who don't aren't stigmatized for not (but most people do). I can't say more without invoking politics. And there's always the "opt-out", for those who want to try it the old-fashioned way, out on the frontier, braving the unknown, proving that they can*. So why the heck were Doc Severin and his followers trying to find someplace better than the pretty limitless options open to them?

[*Gene himself mused that Starfleet was a great mechanism for isolating the more "primitive" types in the otherwise utopian society who would chafe under such lack of challenge, and putting them to useful purpose -- both keeping them happy and keeping them from causing problems on the ground.]

The first two of those I still watch, even if I more listen to than watch "Battlefield". "Eden" I just can't stand. It hurts. In a way no other third-season episode does.

Next Generation started out a bit clunky, but by the end of the first season and through the second, that was some of the best Star Trek I've seen. Third season on, after Maurice Hurley left, it got dull. I'll still watch them if they're playing, but they don't really grip me the way season 2 does. They got better uniforms and higher production values, and there are good scripts in there, well-acted, but... *shrug* It's missing something for me. All the way through to the end of DS9's season 2. Then that show started dealing with hard concepts again, and I adore it.

Voyager and Enterprise were flawed from original premise and, while they have good stories, they still require the viewer to not think too hard. With ever more options one can pursue in life, the notion by the time of Voyager that anyone would get into Starfleet without really wanting to doesn't work. I'm not talking about B'Elanna or Wesley, who quit while at the Academy, only to come back after they'd grown up a bit. I'm not talking about Chakotay, who chose his family and home over his Starfleet oath. I'm not talking about the Maquis, who never signed on for the mission, but weren't given much in the way of options. I'm talking about the Starfleet crew who whinged about being out where no one had ever been before. The first couple seasons being "Gilligan's Island" in space, where the newest shortcut home ended up not working, got old fast. And even though DS9 (and Babylon 5 before that, and a dozen other shows all the way back to the '70s and further) had proved audiences will follow longform stories and that you don't need to preserve the status quo from episode to episode, things remained far too static on that ship over its run. And Enterprise was just schizophrenic about what era it was in. But I've argued that point before.

Even the movies weren't mindless entertainment. TMP (and here I mean the Director's Cut, after Bob Wise got to go back and properly finish what had pretty much been released as a rough cut due to being waaaaay over-schedule and having the studio committed to an opening day etched in stone and delivered from on high) was pure Star Trek, with a couple minor missteps (the uniforms, Gene forgetting the Lt., j.g., and Commodore ranks existed, the uniforms, the protocol of a flag officer in command of the mission while the Captain retains command of the ship, the uniforms...). I take Star Trek II and III together with an intermission, as "The Genesis Incident", doing my best to pretend Robin Curtis is Kirstie Alley. The two together are a terrific story, also not mindless. TVH is a time-travel story, which I hate, since no one ever does it right, but it's a good one, for all that. TFF had studio problems that saw its budget cut, then cut again, then cut again, so the entire last act was done on hope and a shoestring compared to what Shatner originally scripted. I feel it has some of the best character moments out of the films, and the story is, again, pure Star Trek -- actually lifted from the first draft of what would eventually become TMP. TUC was a good first draft, but needed someone looking over Nick's shoulder during the writing and set design to nudge him in the right direction. And I love the first act of Generations -- especially helped by the novelization and the subsequent book "The Captain's Daughter" (focusing on Hikaru and Demora Sulu, with strong presences from the Excelsior and Enterprise-B).

From the first teaser for Trek09, I was hopeful but worried. If they were building the TOS Enterprise, some of the details were off. And... were they building it in shirtsleeves? Okay, the saucer was built on the ground, in graving docks in San Francisco, then boosted up to be mated to the stardrive section that had been assembled in the synchronously-orbiting dockyards. The finished ship wasn't meant to enter atmophere or land except in emergencies (that would likely render the spaceframe unusable after). But those were the warp engines seen peeking up from behind the saucer. Maybe it's in a space station...?

But then we saw. No, it was being built on the ground, in its entirety. A ship the size of the Enterprise-D. Under full Earth gravity. And in Riverside, Iowa, no less. For no reason anyone can determine apart from getting it on ne'er-do-well Jim Kirk's radar. Then we see the guy who was originally conceived of and shown as Horatio Hornblower in space, the perfect Starfleet officer, driven and competant and dedicated to his calling... blowing off his studies, cheating, sleeping around, getting put on academic probation, stowing away, being put off the ship, and then because he saved the day, this Starfleet cadet on suspension was rewarded by being promoted directly to Captain and given the newest and best ship in the 'fleet... instead of working his way up to it in his 30s, through years of hard work and no dates.

Never mind the worse-than-bad science. A supernova that will destry the entire galaxy? Really? And whose blastwave propagates faster than light? A pea of this "Red Matter" will snuff so massive a sun, so why does the Vulcan Science Academy have a huge beach ball of the stuff that they send out in this ship? If it'll snuff out a supermassive sun if thrown at it, why does Nero need to drill down to a tiny little planet's core to drop it? And if he's at synchronous orbital altitude, how will dropping the mining laser a mile or so closer to the planet help? And what happened to the Romulans' bumpy foreheads between Nemesis and whenever Spock left? Considering we never found out how they got them in the half-century between TUC and TNG...

And that isn't even getting into the warp beaming, interstellar beaming, complete could-not-be-more-wrong misunderstanding of what "cold fusion" means, and so on and so on... Story implausibilities, ignoring canon (I mean universal things, like Vulcan having no moon, but an equally hot but smaller trojan planet, and Delta Vega being on the edge of Federation space -- those don't change just because of altered timeline), and so on. No, it's not an objective metric of "badness", but within a certain standard of what Star Trek should be, those three movies fail more than they succeed. Plus JJ's damn Mystery Box again. We shoudln't have to read the tie-in comics to know those are ritual Romulan mourning glyphs, and Nero and his crew tattooed them on, as an indicator their grieving will be unending; that they augmented their mining ship with Borg weapons to go after Spock; that they realized they'd overshot and Nero calculated when and where Spock would be coming through, and made sure he was there; that Admiral Marcus surgically altered Khan's appearance so no one would recognize him; etc.

I certainly do appreciate your point of view.

However, the point of my post was two fold:

1. to state that i rather like the new ones... AS WELL as having watched and loved all of the older Trek.

2. To post a rhetorical response to CessnaDriver's assertion that Nu Trek is "empty Calories" but asking "according to whom?"...the point of which was to illustrate that we don't all share the same opinion of Nu Trek.
 
It would be ironic if JJ Kirk fans got upset at JJ Kirk being recast.

How would that be any different to Old School Trek fans being upset that original Kirk has been recast? It's literally the same scenario...the only difference being the viewpoint of the individual fans.

Look... i don't dislike The Shat at all. And I don't dislike any of the Trek we've been given so far, except that I must admit I really haven't been thrilled by Discovery.

What DOES seem a bit ironic to me is that I am really liking The Orville....which isn't even technically Trek but it captures 90's era trek for me very well, albeit with the addition of humour...which i will admit is hit or miss.

But--as before--these are my OPINIONS, and they are not being stated as fact, and they are also not being stated as an invitation for anyone to try to change my mind, or "show me the light" so to speak.
 
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