quote: Speaking at a British convention held by SFX, and to the BBC, the actor said that executive producer Brannon Braga would be taking a step back next year and letting Coto assume his duties
Coto?
quote: In his talk with the BBC Keating also said he's pessimistic about ENTERPRISE's prospects at reaching a seventh season like all the other post-TOS TREK series have accomplished. "I would say no," said Keating to the Beeb, "it's an expensive show, and UPN seems to want to try and nix it.
Doesn't say much about the cast's faith in the network, does it?
Posted by Captain Boh (Member # 1282) on :
UPN doesn't seem to do alot that I'd have faith in if I was on the cast
As for Manny Coto, he wrote: The Council Chosen Realm Similitude
And Co-Wrote and or wrote the Teleplay for: Azati Prime Harbinger
He has also worked on the shows: Odyssey 5 Strange World The Outer Limits Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
Manny Coto. IIRC, he's new to the franchise starting with Enterprise's third season as part of the writing staff.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
So Coto's a good writer!
Yeaaah!
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
Hopefully, Braga wasn't the one who slipped those Nazis into the end of "Zero Hour". Or, if he is, hopefully he's already told them how to resolve it. Because to throw something out there like that and then leave it to someone else to think up an ending... That wouldn't be very nice.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
I had the smae thought: mabye it was a parting shot.
Still, there's plenty of backdoors out of the story: An alternate reality that NX-01 got zapped into to prevent their further interference in the Temporal Cold War- after the Sphere blew.
The Nazi Vampire could be some TCW agent sent to retrieve the Enterprise crew and preserve/restore the timeline (assuming no one sees him as he really looks, that is).
Archer's dreaming the whole Nazi Vampire thing after watching Salem's Lot on movie night.
You name it.
Posted by Lee (Member # 393) on :
I thought the problem wasn't so much Braga's writing, it was the fact that he gained control of the storylines in general. . ? Voyager's storylines were crap anyway, but under his stewardship they either got worse, or stupider, or both. . . And then he got to actually think up a series of his own, and look where that got us. . .
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
If Braga was responsible for the pussification of the Borg, it's good he's leaving the writing of Enterprise to others.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
I will have to take some of my largely unwished for leisure time and write some sort of Braga apologia.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
I always kind of thought he wrote good stories, as long as someone kept him in check. I mean, look at his TNG episodes. The problem with VOY was that there was no-one telling him things like "no, the Borg don't suck that bad" or "Q is arrogantly meddlesome, not just obnoxious" or "'Threshold' is really really awful".
And I realize he didn't actually write all those episodes, but, if someone else had been in charge, they may never have been produced.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
quote:Originally posted by TSN: Hopefully, Braga wasn't the one who slipped those Nazis into the end of "Zero Hour". Or, if he is, hopefully he's already told them how to resolve it. Because to throw something out there like that and then leave it to someone else to think up an ending... That wouldn't be very nice.
*cough*MICHAELPILLER*cough*
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
What did he do?
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
He wrote "Insurrection".
And I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but just in case...
He started to make his mark on Star Trek with season 3 of TNG, and was the Brannon Braga of his day. Except that he wrote stuff like "The Best of Both Worlds", and other goods stuff. He probably got the best dialogue anyone ever could out of the TNG crew. And his stories were usually pretty good.
He did do Insurrection though...
Posted by machf (Member # 1233) on :
I heard Piller did exactly that with "Best of Both Worlds", when he thought he wouldn't work on TNG the following season...
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
I think it was Trek's first cliffhanger (not counting The Menagerie) so I don't think there was any precedent for writing cliffhangers then.
Insurrection might have been good - if it wasn't hacked to pieces - but we'll never know.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Mabye someday we'll get a complete version of Insurrection as a SE.
It was still far better than STII, V nad Generations IMHO. The story flows much better and visually, it was great to see on the bigscreen.
quote:He probably got the best dialogue anyone ever could out of the TNG crew.
Oh, I wouldnt say that: Shelby is a completely diffrent character in BOBW pt. II and Dr. Crusher's lines (and delivery) in pt.II are just...painful.
Picard urgently grabs Data's arm: "Sleeep...Data." Dr Crusher: He's exhausted!"
Calculon would be proud of her.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Insurrection isn't particularly bad, in the sense that it's...you know, competant. Workmanlike. It's just so very, very boring.
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Well, if they had'nt chopped the starship fight scene to nothing......
Might've been nice if the VFX guys did'nt make the Son'a commndship fly backwards too... Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
For those who didn't realize, Michael Piller wrote the first part of "The Best of Both Worlds" with the intention of leaving the staff and moving on to other projects, thus sticking his co-writers with the job of figuring out how to resolve the cliffhanger. Obviously, things turned out differently...
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
I think there is just a slight difference, thematically, between having The Bad Guys™ threaten to assimilate Earth and Life As The Average Utopian Knows It™ and stranding The Good Guys™ in some bizarro alternate reality populated by blueskinned freakazoid alien overlords posing as nazi officers. But maybe that's just me.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Well, it's got everyone wondering I guess. If he HAS dicked around with/sabotaged the whole thing buy leaving such an amibugous and baffling ending - he should be fired into the sun.
Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
TBoBW1 had already established what was going on. If someone else had written part 2, all they had to do was have the crew sneak onto the cube, rescue Picard, and do something to blow up the cube. Which is what Piller ended up writing anyway.
On the other hand, in the alien Nazi story, nothing has happened yet. Whoever would write the next episode has to write the whole story. Except for certain constraints: the ship is suddenly in the '30s/'40s and there are blue alien Nazis. That seems like a much more difficult responsibility than the second half of "The Best of Both Worlds", don't you think?
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Well, not necessarily. Since, as you say, almost anything could happen next, even within the bounds of quality. (Which is to say, I don't mean "almost anything could happen next" to be a veiled insult of some kind.) Finishing a more established plot presents its own set of problems, but I wouldn't say they are more or less difficult, really.
Posted by Elim Garak (Member # 14) on :
*is still waiting for Sol’s Braga apologia* (because I more or less agree with TSN and want to see what Sol says) Posted by Futurama Guy (Member # 968) on :
I'm with TSN. "TBoBW1" and "Zero Hour" are two very different forms of cliffhangers.
There were almost defined questions at the end of "TBoBWs" of what might happen. The way "Zero Hour" played out, sans the blue Nazi thing, it would have made for a better premiere than a finale, especially had they instead made "Countdown" the finale (with some retooling of course). "Countdown", at least, left you wondering how or if they were going to stop the 'weapon'...muchmore of the suspenseful "TBoBW" element to it than "Zero Hour" had.
"TBoBWs" was set up so much differently...with the cliffhanger leaving you wondering if Locutus will lead the Borg to defeating the Federation or will the deflector weapon work when the Enterprise fires it at the beginning of next season? Suspense, not confusion.
Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
Oh, I agree about the "suspense, not confusion" issue. I was just pointing out the similarities in writing a cliffhanger and then sticking someone else with the job of writing the conclusion. Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :
"'Countdown', at least, left you wondering how or if they were going to stop the 'weapon'..."
Well, not "if". I don't think there was much doubt, really.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Well, I don't know about that. No doubt that the Earth would somehow wind up undestroyed eventually, sure. But blowing up Earth only to have it be more crazy (and temporary) time travel/parallel universe fun to be resolved in the season premiere did not seem like an impossibility to me. (Though, to be fair, I didn't really expect that to happen.)
Re: Braga: I really need Tom here to back me up, but, in short: The only Star Trek writer willing to indulge in weirdness for weirdness' sake, in what has been otherwise a talented but fairly stolid writing staff over the years. Now when you work like that not all of your efforts are going to succeed, but the effort itself is valuable, in my opinion.
He was also the closest thing Star Trek has had to a writer with punk sensabilites, and I tend to respect that. (OK, so a pretty tame kind of punk, but come on.)
I have less to say about Braga as an executive producer, but to be honest I haven't seen many of his critics (including myself) display much knowledge of what an executive producer can really do or not do on something like Star Trek. Is he really responsible for the general lacklusterness of Voyager? Well, maybe. Personally I liked the last few seasons a lot more than the first, overall, but it was still a terribly underwhelming show. So I don't know. I don't think Enterprise has most of Voyager's problems (though it does seem to have a few), so make of that what you will.
Posted by japol (Member # 1149) on :
Something to consider when thinking about what they'll do with the cliffhanger ending of season 3.
When asked if they knew who the mystery dude from the future was who was engineering the Suliban part of the temporal cold war was, the producers replied we have some very promising ideas or something along those lines.
Take that information any way you want.
Posted by Guardian 2000 (Member # 743) on :
Recommended first scene of S4 premiere:
INTERIOR - Nazi hospital
Archer, drifting in and out of consciousness, his face bloody and burned, looks up at his captors.
(Show pan of Nazis that ended Season 3)
ARCHER: "Ack! Blue Alien Nazi! WTF!?!?!?"
Archer wipes his eyes. Show pan of Nazis again, with the blue one replaced by your average run of the mill Nazi.
wow. Bernd is pissed at "Zero Hour"
Posted by Futurama Guy (Member # 968) on :
Quite a rant...
Posted by TheWoozle (Member # 929) on :
Isn't he going to feel foolish if it WORKS, in the next episode. heck, the WESTERN episode worked pretty well.
Posted by machf (Member # 1233) on :
But he is right, this one introduced Nazis *in the last minute*, which implies they'll be back for at least one more episode. I wonder if Godwin's Law has some variant for TV shows, indicating that introducing Nazis in a TV show that doesn't relate to WW2 and/or politics may be the same as "jumping the shark"...
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:"...the things that lovers or uptight rivals use to say to each other are rarely well-phrased in reality (although I'm not so familiar with the latter situation)"
For some reason, I find that sentence enormously funny.
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
(because I more or less agree with TSN and want to see what Sol says) ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)