quote:Originally posted by WizArtist: It's amazing in such a vast universe to have so quickly run out of good story options.
38 years is "quickly"?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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They are not out of ideas. It's just a matter of getting More Trek out there so they can rake in the $$$. Why bother with somthing new and original when you can recycle plot-lines ad nausem?
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Well, I wasn't advocating my idea as an immediate successor to Enterprise. I was suggesting a way in which a starship-based series could perhaps capture some of the story elements which made DS9 (in my opinion) a hit - long term involvement with Bajor, Cardassia, and the Gamma Quadrant. Obviously, my concept would have been for substantially smaller arcs, but I think might have allowed for greater emotional envolvement on the part of the audience with whichever planetary crisis of the half-season the ship was dealing with at the time.
If it came across that I thought this idea would solely "save" Trek, or that I wanted to see it on the air anytime even remotely soon, please accept this clarification: no. I think Star Trek is in a grave (and, er, yes I do) need of a long hiatus - ten years sounds good as a minimum, and a completely new "imagining" team if it ever is brought back to the small/big screen.
-------------------- Graffiti decorations/under a sky of dust/a constant wave of tension/on top of broken trust/the lessons that you taught me/I learned were never true Now I find myself in question, Guilty by association,
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I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
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recycling plots is acceptable as long as you can maintain interest with the variation. How has James Bond lasted for as long as it has with the exact same formula to EVERY movie? why did we watch Pinky & The Brain?
because we KNEW they were recycling the same plot again, we just want to see how impressively they do it. the problem is that Trek rarely tries to do anything impressive when it is recycling story ideas that are tired to begin with... did "The Naked Time" deserve to have "Naked Now" made from it? was there anything about "Shuttlepod One" that was more impressive than "The Galileo Seven" ?
-------------------- "Are you worried that your thoughts are not quite.. clear?"
Registered: Sep 2001
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quote:recycling plots is acceptable as long as you can maintain interest with the variation. How has James Bond lasted for as long as it has with the exact same formula to EVERY movie? why did we watch Pinky & The Brain?
Then there's the ULTIMATE RECYCLING!....
THE A-TEAM
I love it when a plan comes together....
-------------------- I am the Anti-Abaddon. I build models at a scale of 2500/1
Registered: Aug 2003
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Short-term, yes. Long term, you need to shake up the status quo from time to time to keep from stagnating, and do it well. That's where Trek has been fumbling recently.
You had three years of the Original Series, then they shook things up with the Animated Series -- and it was about as good as it could be for a mid-'70s half-hour kids' cartoon.
Then you had a movie that shook things up a lot, but suffered from insufficient post-production time.
Then you had a trilogy of movies that shook things up a whole lot more, and quite nicely, too, as long as you ignored the finer details that got in the way of the story *heh*.
Then we got Next Generation, which jolted the status quo in a big way, and continued to do so through its first four years before it started sliding down the slope of sameness.
DS9 was a radical departure, and reinvented itself several times more in pretty huge ways, and thanks to a story arc lasting through the latter five seasons, it was able to mostly avoid the dangers of status quo.
In there, Next Generation whimpered its way through a depressingly bad movie, and Voyager started off on the wrong foot, stumbled through its first two seasons, then fell flat on its face and slid through the next five, serving as the discordant drone punctuated by the sharp screeches of two more increasingly bad Next Generation movies.
Once Voyager ended in its disgustingly predictable way, we were treated to an occasionally-well-written series that seems to be about nothing in particular, and in the midst of that, we got a final Next Generation movie that was the viewing experience of stepping on a set of inflated bagpipes.
By this point, the status is very quo.
To go from here, things would need to be shaken up but familiar. The problem with Enterprise is the same one faced if you were to go the other direction. We already know the ships from the 2150s, like the ones from the 29th century, are too divergent from what we recognise as Star Trek. There are a lot of stories still waiting to be told in the 23rd and 24th centuries, as the novels have recently proven quite dramatically.
If you must have an Enterprise, the stories of the -B and -C are all but untold. Pike commanded the Enterprise for eleven years before Kirk got it, and April before him. I personally think Enterprise would have been a much better show if it centered around the origins of the Constitution class and Captain Robert April. Then the stories might have worked better.
Also might be nice to go forward a decade or two from the timeframe fo Nemesis and see the turn of the 25th century. I think I'll go ove rinto Starships and Technology and start a thread about what technologies Our Heroes discovered to go fast or far that were utterly ignored after that one instance, and see if we can hammer out a good scope of travel, propulsive technological base, and what sorts of stories that new frontier makes possible. And to do that, we'll have to figure out what it was about the four (yes, I said four) series so far that worked and what it was that didn't...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: You had three years of the Original Series, then they shook things up with the Animated Series --
What? By drawing yellow lines around people so they could go into space and by replacing SUPER CHARACTER Chekov with SUPER CHARACTER A'Rex (or whatever his name was)?
quote:Then we got Next Generation, which jolted the status quo in a big way, and continued to do so through its first four years...
What? By adding collars on to the uniforms? Yeah, "Farpoint" was different to what had come before, but the next few seasons were about refining the show, not "shaking things up".
quote:In there, Next Generation whimpered its way through a depressingly bad movie, and Voyager started off on the wrong foot
Generations wasn't great, but it was hardly "depressingly bad". And Voyager started off fantastically. "Caretaker" was great as a standalone, while still containing lots of potential. Which they failed to realise.
quote:two more increasingly bad Next Generation movies.
Er, so "First Contact" is worse than "depressingly bad"? Jesus...
quote:And to do that, we'll have to figure out what it was about the four (yes, I said four) series so far that worked and what it was that didn't...
Great. Er, so which one are you leaving out? Because even the oh-so-amazingly-woopee DS9 had problems.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: You had three years of the Original Series, then they shook things up with the Animated Series --
What? By drawing yellow lines around people so they could go into space and by replacing SUPER CHARACTER Chekov with SUPER CHARACTER A'Rex (or whatever his name was)?
Well, golly. Forcefields instead of spacesuits, and even more distinctly alien crew members I thought did kind of represent a noticable shift from the previous three years...
quote:
quote:Then we got Next Generation, which jolted the status quo in a big way, and continued to do so through its first four years...
What? By adding collars on to the uniforms? Yeah, "Farpoint" was different to what had come before, but the next few seasons were about refining the show, not "shaking things up".
No, dippo. By jumping 75 years forward from the time period we'd been mucking about in. By giving us a ship over twice as long and many times more massive than the one we were familiar with, that held a crew of over a thousand instead of the ~430 of the original. With families and children and so on. Jesus.
And I think the introduction of the Borg, and their later abduction of Picard, were a bit beyond "refinement of concept".
quote:
quote:In there, Next Generation whimpered its way through a depressingly bad movie, and Voyager started off on the wrong foot
Generations wasn't great, but it was hardly "depressingly bad". And Voyager started off fantastically. "Caretaker" was great as a standalone, while still containing lots of potential. Which they failed to realise.
Generations played like a mediocre TV episode with better lighting and sets. Kirk's death felt cheap. I don't know anyone who accepts a 20-year-old BoP destroying the Enterprise... I have a big list of major story gripes, and that doesn't even get into minor nits like Scotty being there.
Voyager wrote itself into a corner early on without realizing it, and by the time they saw the mistake the characters had become too well-established. The pilot was reasonably well-written, with two significant holes. I never got a satisfactory explanation of what the tumors were supposed to do to help the Ocampa. And Janeway needed to blow up the Array only after circumstances proved beyond any hope of pulling a last-minute miracle out of their asses to use it to get home and then destroy it after (timed explosives, or whatever).
From there, we were subjected to a couple years of Gilligan's Island in space. Week after week of "we found a way home! Aw, it didn't work..." wore a bit thin. And while getting home was indeed an important consideration, and something to keep in mind -- didn't these retards join Starfleet in the first place so they could explore? The mood needed to be more "We're on our own... Cool!" rather than "We're on our own... Angst!"
quote:
quote:two more increasingly bad Next Generation movies.
Er, so "First Contact" is worse than "depressingly bad"? Jesus...
Yes. I don't like the new Enterprise. I hate the new Borg. I hate the Borg Queen. I don't like the new uniforms. I hate the way they portrayed Cochrane. I hate the bad narrative jumps. I liked the Phoenix, the spacesuits, and the phaser rifles, and that's about it.
quote:
quote:And to do that, we'll have to figure out what it was about the four (yes, I said four) series so far that worked and what it was that didn't...
Great. Er, so which one are you leaving out? Because even the oh-so-amazingly-woopee DS9 had problems.
I leave out Enterprise, the show that isn't really about anything. First there's the Temporal Cold War, and then that sort of fades away. Then they're heading out ot explore, then they're not. Now they're hiding out in the middle of nowhere. We'll see how long that lasts.
And I know each series had its problems, but I'm looking at the overall structure of the way they played out, rather than nitpicking them into oblivion on an episode-by-episode basis.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
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I too, felt Kirk's death was CHEAP. What got me was that when they choose to leave the Nexus, Picard chooses the LAST MINUTE to stop Alex and his rocket Droogie rather than going to a point WELL before that when there would be no rush to stop him. It also flew in the face of Kirk's statement in V that "I always knew I would die alone". Though, technically speaking, having Picard there is equivalent to a lonely death.
I also feel Voyager fell into the abyss known as the Brennan-Braga Nebula where, if you can't find your way through a story line, you stick some babe in a skin-tight suit and turn the thermostat down 30 degrees
-------------------- I am the Anti-Abaddon. I build models at a scale of 2500/1
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quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Well, golly. Forcefields instead of spacesuits, and even more distinctly alien crew members I thought did kind of represent a noticable shift from the previous three years...
That's not shaking up a series. That's making minor tweaks that don't amount to anything at all. There were no story avenues that the forcefields allowed that would have been prevented if they'd have used spacesuits. And having alien crew members would have been interesting if they'd actually had personality. They didn't. They were eye candy, such as it was. The "status quo" remained well and truely static.
quote:No, dippo. By jumping 75 years forward from the time period we'd been mucking about in. By giving us a ship over twice as long and many times more massive than the one we were familiar with, that held a crew of over a thousand instead of the ~430 of the original. With families and children and so on. Jesus.
Yes, and all that was done in the pilot. But, again, you're listing stuff that had no relevence on story. If the ship had been half the size, would it have affected a single story of the seven season run? No. If it had had a crew of 430 instead of 1014, would it have made a difference to a single story? No? Hell, even the families only provided, what, about 7 stories in total? That's hardly earth shattering for a series that numbered over 150. Especially since most of the kid ones were, well, crap.
quote:And I think the introduction of the Borg, and their later abduction of Picard, were a bit beyond "refinement of concept".
No. It was a story element. Picard was a borg for two episodes. It was mentioned again in "I, Borg". It was touched upon in "Decent". That's it. 5 episodes. That's not shaking up the status quo. Not like the Dominion, who were in a large number of episodes, and who eventually ended up shaping the course that the series took. Season 6 of DS9 would have been very different if the Dominion hadn't been introduced. Season 6 of TNG would have been identical without the Borg.
Shaking up the status quo would have been killing Picard. Shaking up the status quo would have been devestating the Federation (and no, a handful of mentions of a weakened Starfleet in season 4 don't count). Shaking up the Status Quo would have been having Riker turn evil for a season, turning Troi into a witch while making her have a lesbian relationship and then making HER turn evil, or introducing Picard's sister who is actually a key to, er, something or other.
quote:And while getting home was indeed an important consideration, and something to keep in mind -- didn't these retards join Starfleet in the first place so they could explore? The mood needed to be more "We're on our own... Cool!" rather than "We're on our own... Angst!"
Are we watching the same show? Because a large number of ones I saw didn't even mention the fact that the crew were a billion quillion miles away from home. And everyone seemed to be pretty happy, too.
quote:Yes. I don't like the new Enterprise. I hate the new Borg. I hate the Borg Queen. I don't like the new uniforms. I hate the way they portrayed Cochrane. I hate the bad narrative jumps. I liked the Phoenix, the spacesuits, and the phaser rifles, and that's about it.
*shrug* You have different taste. I'd point out that the Borg were scary and the uniforms were much cooler than the old ones, but it's just a matter of taste. Obviously, yours is wrong.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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