Star Trek Thread

I am still convinced that the writers of Discovery have not actually watched much Trek. Heard the writer of Season 5, episode 5 on Cirroc Lofton's Trek podcast last week saying they were so excited to show the inside of a Breen ship because that's never been seen on Star Trek. He references how they got their inspiration for the ships from Star Trek Online.

I'm now pretty convinced these people only ever encountered the Breen through the online game. If they'd watched DS9 they'd know we do indeed see the interior of a Breen ship. Gotta love them giving themselves credit for doing something never before done in Trek, when it was definitely done on DS9. We didn't see the bridge, but we definitely saw the interior in S7.

Too bad Cirroc didn't correct him on that. Cirroc recently watched all of DS9 for this very podcast!

I'd be okay with the "rare enough that it's hard to remember" excuse if the Star Trek wiki didn't exist. Took me 1 minute to verify this. I knew exactly which episodes to check. S7 E17 & E18. Not hard to remember which episodes, because the Breen were only seen in about 10 episodes total. Nine of which were the 9 at the end of the series!

And yes, you are correct that we've never seen the Breen outside their suits. At one point Worf comments that *no one* ever has. Though this cannot be true, as in the earlier episode with the Breen, Kira and Dukat swipe two of their suits.

But, yeah, they can say showing what a Breen actually looks like is something never seen on Trek. Feel free to take credit for that! But, no, we've seen the inside of the ship in S7 E17-E18 of DS9. Not that DSC is using those ships. As this guy said, they took their design inspiration from STO.

Yeah, we saw a holding cell. But my point is, you can't go around saying "We're doing something that's never been seen on Trek before!" if it has been. You can say, "We were so excited to finally get to see more of the Breen ship! We get to show parts of their ship that have never been seen before!" As far as I'm concerned, if we've seen ANY part of the inside of the ship then you as a writer don't get to claim credit for showing something never before seen on Trek.

And yes, Ira Steven Behr said he always envisioned the Breen as non-humanoid. He wanted that snout on the helmet to represent that the Breen maybe had a long snout, one of the alien designers said he had a mock up of a creature with some kind of duck-bill, but it never got used. It is disappointing to have them be so normal.

I think this is reflective of a general fandom thing now across basically every franchise—one’s kind of expected to be a good consumer and lap up everything. I think it’s partly in reaction to the hypercriticism/wall-building that typified fandoms, idk, 15? years ago, but positivity towards everything’s been successfully seeded by the studios.

I think one does need to wall off stuff not just to avoid couch potato-dom but also to refine one’s own taste, though, there’s just too much stuff, it’s fine to dislike things and, so long as you’re not a total jerk, to talk it over with other people to offer/receive new perspectives and develop a critical eye. If storytelling is stupid you don’t have to make yourself stupid with it! (I’m not specifically thinking of Trek here).

The thing is, though, I can only do this sort of meta-talk about Trek now—I can’t talk about Trek itself because I either haven’t liked the new Treks enough nor had time to get around to them. I really don’t talk about old Trek that much anymore either because everything’s so interconnected. When they were laying the groundwork for Voyager it was seen as a big crossover thing at the time, but the Maquis only appear in a DS9 two parter, another DS9 episode, and one TNG episode. That’s it! I think the viewing environment was different—lots of reinforcement with reruns—but TNG and DS9 really did follow their own paths, and VOY was designed explicitly to be a departure. Even though DS9 and TNG were closer to one another, but even though we think of DS9 as an outgrowth of TNG the Cardassians—who, in retrospect, were a major antagonist on TNG—only appeared once in the fourth season, once in the fifth, and then in a “The Chain of Command” as sort of a thematic preview for DS9 (but still very much its own story).

That’s not the case now—Trek was a shared universe before, but a spacious rather than an interconnected one. You could leave the Breen as a loose end before (which is where a lot of fun in discussing things as a fan was) but now they’re going to be tied up, as with the Breen. Oddly despite being more interconnected it’s a less coherent one, too, which makes it even harder to talk about because everything’s canon but everything contradicts.

They really should have just let there be a bunch of new departures or let things stand on their own. The creative honchos seem to think “canon” means good (it doesn’t, the first season on TNG is canon, after all, it was just a way of establishing what the writers had to keep in mind and what they could ignore). From a commercial standpoint, though, I think they’re right.

Meh, it's in the Discovery timeline. That in and of itself isn't terrible. But even the hint of a continuation of Discovery makes me leery. I hope it has entirely different writers than Discovery.

I, too, have accepted that there is some Trek that just isn't for me. A Starfleet Academy show has never appealed to me, for as long as it's been rumored to be a thing.

But I really like Holly Hunter, and I hope the show is good.