Star Trek Thread

That must be it!

So how are people feeling about Strange New Worlds?

I'm looking forward to it. Aside from Lower Decks, Anson Mount's Pike has probably been the highlight of the current Trek era. I'm hoping it's just a straightforward exploration show. Star Trek can get away with having its other shows be about whatever, but if there's not an exploration show going, then it's missing something.

To go back to the other thread's discussion of serialization in Star Trek and why this isn't working for DSC and PIC.

Watching S3 of ENT makes the strong case to me that the problem with DSC and PIC is just that the writers have not clearly defined the problem and solution ahead of time (DSC), nor is the problem they've selected complex enough to sustain the kind of serialization they are doing (PIC).

If you look at PIC, the problem there is they are writing a movie plot, but trying to make that work over 10 hours instead of 2. The problem is that Soji is being hunted by Romulans for some unknown reason. And the finale reveals that the Romulans believe - correctly! - that these particular androids are going to attempt to destroy all sentient life in the universe.

Okay, super. That is a very simple story that could have been told in a two-part Trek episode. The other episodes don't really do anything to build on that story. They are mostly used as distractions. The writers create all these side stories that seem like they are going to tie into the main story but they don't. Like, to the point of having our heroes steal a Borg cube in one episode, only to crash it on a planet in the next episode, rendering it inert. So, in essence, PIC was doing "problem of the week" storytelling, but the writing made it seem like it was serialized. The audience expects this stuff to matter, but the writers obviously never intended it to matter. This made the story feel incoherent, as though there were many plot threads and the show was jumping from one to the other. But that wasn't true. The whole story was just find out why the Romulans are attacking androids, which was set up in the premier episode.

DSC has the other problem, which is that it feels like every season starts out with one problem, but the story shifts so many times that by the end of the story, the initial problem doesn't seem to matter anymore. Even in S3 this happened. All the promotional materials leading up to S3 made it seem like Burnham and Crew were there to restore the Federation! But then as the episodes went on, we see that the Federation still exists. And actually Earth itself is fine. And then it was "What caused the Burn?" but, like, zero other characters from that time are concerned about solving this "mystery", and the actual solution was ridiculous. And they solved it 2 episodes before the ending. So the ending became, "Kill this random villain" who isn't really connected with the Federation, or the Burn in any meaningful way.

DS9's serialization worked because that show had 7 seasons to build up a complex story. They did the world building in the background of the "problem of the week" episodes. S2 isn't a great season of DS9 but it does a LOT of heavy lifting in terms of world building. Info about the Dominion is dropped in the background of "Rules of Acquisition", "Sanctuary" and "Shadowplay". The political instability on Cardassia is what is driving the stories in "Cardassians" and "Profit and Loss". The Maquis are a story thread imposed on DS9 by Rick Berman, and are introduced in this season. The writers ended up using them as a way to create further internal political instability on Cardassia.

S3 does similar work, with a look at Cardassian politics in "Second Skin", "Defiant", and "Destiny" and a peek at the Romulan interest in the Gamma Quadrant in "Visionary" which all help explain what happens in "Improbable Cause" and "The Die is Cast". Similarly, prior to "Improbable Cause" and "The Die is Cast" we've already seen "Heart of Stone" which shows us the actual capability of the Changelings. That shape-shifting ability seen in "Heart of Stone" and "the Die is Cast" then set up what happens in the S3 finale "The Adversary". And so on.

DS9 wasn't all written in advance. They didn't know their story from beginning to end. The writers there just looked at what came before and wrote what the logical next step would be. That's why DS9 feels so much more strongly built. Everything in S5-7 is just the logical outcome of all the steps we'd previously seen. A show like DSC thinks they can just do the last 10 episodes of DS9 without doing any of the 6+ seasons that came before it. The war in DS9 was built slowly over time. DSC just starts with it and expects the audience to care.

But this watch of ENT S3 shows me that it is entirely possible to do a serialized story in one season with zero prep. ENT did it in S3 *mostly* successfully. The story was successful, if not the characters. When I counted up the episodes in ENT S3 that actually matter, I came to about 12-15. There are some borderline cases that are bad episodes that are mostly pointless but which do include one crucial development. And something like "Carpenter Street" which is beyond terrible, but which does provide Archer with the tangible evidence he needs to solve the problem at the end.

What ENT S3 has that DSC and PIC don't is a genuinely complex problem which stems from the ship going into a completely unknown area of space and trying to deal with aliens they know nothing about, while having zero help available. This LACK of information is what makes the story able to be told in this type of serialized format. DSC easily could have pulled this off in S3, going to a time where everything would be new to them. Alas, no.

What makes ENT's S3 story work is that the characters don't even understand the true scope of the problem when they start out. And this isn't like DSC's habit of *changing* the problem halfway through. The ENT characters may be ignoring the evidence that something bigger is happening, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. (Which is why, in fact, I was getting so mad at the characters.) In fact, our characters discover info in S3 E2 "Anomaly" that hints at the bigger problem. They just choose, as ever, to ignore this.


ST: PIC has the characters discover the true problem in E9 and then solve it in E10, the finale, where the problem is solved essentially by Picard making a passionate speech and sacrificing himself.

Both DSC and PIC could be doing stories like this. ENT was a PREQUEL that ran this big story and had essentially zero conflicts with canon. Because it didn't matter that ENT was featuring this crazy area of space riddled with distortions we'd never seen before, since the point of the story was to rid that area of spatial distortions. And it didn't matter that we'd never heard of the Xindi before, because the point of the story was to make them NOT a villain species anymore, and there are loads of Alpha Quadrant aliens we know nothing about in the 24th century.

There is honestly no excuse for DSC not running this type of story in S3. Sending the ship into an area of space that due to the enormous time jump they knew nothing about, where they had no assistance, and no idea really of what the problem really was.

Just got through the What’s Up With Tom/Kazon Mole b-plot arc on Voyager. One thing I’ve noticed is how good Robert Beltran is at conveying how incredibly competent Chakotay is at his job. I wish the show would have done a little more with the idea that they are incredibly lucky this guy was the one commanding the Maquis. On the surface, I can see it reading as just being boring and all-business compared to the more affable Riker. But early on you get a lot of great scenes where he shows a real genius for understanding people and how he needs to press different buttons with each one for this crew to function. It’s good stuff.

Yea, he's not a terribly exciting character so I understand why the writers drifted to Seven and Doctor so much as the series went on.  But you can tell from the first parts of the series that he can be a GREAT complementary character.  

Not to keep harping on this, but he's also a character that would have greatly benefitted from more of a bench of recurring crewman types.  I'm thinking of one of the season 1 episodes where a bunch of former maquis are whining to him about wanting to do things "the maquis way" and he says 'fine', punches the guy, and tells him to get his ass in line unless he wants to keep doing it 'the maquis way'.  That's a scene that could have made Chakotay look awful, but the way he plays it, it's so clear that he takes no pleasure or pride in it.  He's just intuited that this is how it's gotta be with this clown, so let's get it over with and move on.  TNG Lower Decks kind of just made Riker look like a jerk who wanted to get back to palling around with officers on his level, but a few episodes in that ilk would have made Chakotay shine, imo.

Have they just decided that too much time has passed now to do another Kelvin timeline movie?

Honestly, this is the case where the laziest, least creative option might be the best one: just ride that COVID comfort nostalgia wave and do a TNG crew reboot.

I think this might be a variant of  the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to movie-making - get a bunch of ideas out in the public domain, hope one gathers real momentum.... profit? I doubt anything is even at full-script level but hey, Abrams has another idea, Tarantino had his thing, uh I guess someone from Discovery want to be involved... how long before Shatner is pitching The Final Frontier Pt 2: The Finaler Frointer? Owlie is quite right that Trek has never been a film-first franchise but the problem is the TV shows aren't exactly setting the world on fire either. And to think Star Trek fans used to complain about franchise exhaustion when DS9 and Voyager overlapped...

Imo Owl, they should do a new alternate timeline of Star Trek where Starfleet is wiped out by the Borgs, and it's just Picard flying around in his Borg Cube assimilating new planets, and call it Star Trek:  Borg Cube.

But what is your opinion of the extremely fake-looking rock-climbing jet boots scene from The Final Frontier?

I'd certainly say that Star Trek V is defensible if - in fact I already have - and in some ways I prefer its failed ambition to Khan's bland military boys-own story (where I'm about as far away from fan consensus as can be) but it's pretty much the last scrap of Star Trek to get anything approaching a redemptive reading.  But you couldn't be more right when you say that every opinion is held somewhere. 

I'm in agreement with liebkartoffel up to a point too. It's definitely true that cinematically Star Trek tends towards working best when it's another-genre-but-also-Star-Trek (genre collision, in other words) but I'd actually go a bit further and say that Star Trek in any medium works best when it's written for the general public, a subset of whom are Star Trek fans and are also included, rather than being written for the narrow focus of Star Trek fans and then maybe also thinking about something that might appeal to a broader audience. Certainly, both TOS and TNG were constructed primarily with the general public in mind far more than Star Trek fans.

My opinion is that 7 year old Owl thought they were fucking awesome.