Incomparable in that without it, there's nothing that could've come from it. Contrast it with 'Lost in Space', which was CBS's attempt to do their own sci-fi show by trying to rip off Roddenberry before he formally launched Trek. That show's early eps (the pilot especially, with its dark mood) was great sci-fi until it veered into the absurd. Aside from the bomb of a reboot movie, it went nowhere. That could've easily been Trek, but wasn't. You refer to subpar episodes, but even those are still considered memorable today (and quotable). Can't say that about LIS. The first season was largely excellent and had a huge budget for the time. Second was still good. Third was a decline (in large part due to the fact that it had to make considerable budget cutbacks) and Roddenberry was not an active participant (of course, sometimes not always a bad thing). The fourth season that they were planning for was to prominently feature William Campbell's Koloth character as a running foil for Kirk. Had it received support and the ample budget from the first season, that could've been memorable (but alas, not to be).
"The animated series was cute. For saturday morning fair, especially in that era, it wasn’t too terribly stupid."
It was a bit too sophisticated for children. At least they held to canon. ;-)
"TMP is atrocious."
I'd expect you'd disagree with me. Of course, it was meant as the launch episode for a 2nd Trek series. It was going to pale to Star Wars being released 2 years after. One wonders if they'd have done better to have gone ahead with that series. I know I'd have loved to have seen it (the downsides is that Nimoy would not have been in it and Goldsmith wouldn't have done the score for a tv series).
"Search, terrible. “Klingon BASTARD you killed my son. Klingon bastard you KILLED my son. Klingon bastard you killed my SON.” Nuff said."
The Klingon bastard did kill his son. I liked the end of the world fight scene, too. The destruction of the original Enterprise was also thoroughly shocking and packed an emotional wallop which has never been matched (who mourned for the Ent-D when Riker crashed it in GEN ?).
"Whales, terrible. The ultimate proof of that the myth that even numbered Treks are good is wrong. One even numbered Trek is good, and this ain’t it."
It was still funny to see them go to San Francisco circa 1986 (what threw me off was that marine museum, not located in Sausalito but way down in Monterey -- minus the whales, which I visited a few years after the movie). It brought in a lot of non-Trek fans to see, which made for good box office (with Eddie Murphy, would've done even better, back when he wasn't box office poison). Injecting some humor after 3 deadly serious prior films probably helped some (one thing that had been missing that had been in the series).
"TNG has so many issues. Start with Roddenberry wanting there to be no conflict (the source of all drama), and then the terribly thin characters. Second half of season 4 really shows the problem, there’s a lot of “single character” (industry term for a story that primarily involves one character, others are obviously present, but one person will have most of the screen time) eps there, and you quickly learn the only characters that can actually carry a show are Pickard and Data. Got better in the final 3 seasons... after Gene died and they could have conflict."
I'll readily admit I was not a Rick Berman fan. I thought it was a big mistake for Denise Crosby to leave the show when she did, as hers was a much more interesting character than most of the others. Of course, had she stayed, we wouldn't have gotten gems like "Yesterday's Enterprise" for her to make a guest appearance in. The worst character, bar none, was Wesley Crusher. Having him in a regular position to save the ship did serious credibility damage. Kirk would've dropped the kid off at the nearest starbase. Unfortunately, I believe Wesley was one of Roddenberry's bad ideas (and that was named after him, his middle name).
"UC, the only reason people like this one is that FF is so bad UC seems good. It’s not. By this point it’s obvious they’re running out of ideas and Gene could very well be insane."
Gene died during production of TUC. Still, I thought it was a good film (though I'd add I also didn't care for the weirdly reworked Valaris character, who was clearly supposed to be Saavik).
"DS9, to me the ultimate proof of what a good show DS9 was is the holodeck episodes with Vic. They’re actually good. Every other episode of Trek that revolved around the holodeck has always been crap because as a story hook it exists only for lazy storytellers. The fact that they could actually make good holodeck eps shows that was a writers room of skill. Sure they still clunked a few, no Trek show would be complete without a few episodes that make you feel shame. But clearly the best of the spinoffs."
It gave James Darren an opportunity to show off his Sinatraesque singing talents, although it seemed a little weird such a character from that era would hold such fascination for the DS9 crew.
"Generations... ugh. I love Malcolm MacDowell but even he couldn’t save it. The problem is they took everything that made TOS dumb and everything that made TNG boring and made a dumb boring movie."
Naah, it wasn't that bad.
"The tragedy of Voyager is they actually probably wrote their best character ever for this turkey, the holo-doctor. And it’s then completely wasted. I’ve been on a “watch all the Treks” mission lately and am up to V and very well might abandon the mission. I’ve got 4 1/2 more season to go and it’s just so bad. If anything ever “ruined” Trek, as so many claimed JJ did, it was this."
I might rewatch it myself at some point, even though I know it was a bit of a letdown. Having watched Mulgrew on "Ryan's Hope", it was hard for me to see her as anything other than Mary Ryan Fenelli.
"My biggest beef with FC is that nobody explained to Frakes that movie screens are big. He directed the movie just like an episode, which means it’s all closeups and extreme closeups. I remember seeing where the Borg Queens makeup was peeling in the corners of her mouth on every extreme closeup (which is 90% of the time she’s on screen). This was the last Trek I paid to see until JJ, I simply couldn’t take it anymore."
At least he didn't have lens flares going off everywhere... *cough*
"ENT - since I’ve always thought the whole canon worship was dumb I never worried about their “violations”. It was really my indication of how retarded the majority of Trek fans had become. Their constant harping about the communicators being smaller completely ignoring that by that time cellphones were smaller than TOS communicators just really made me question their sanity. I kind of enjoyed the show all the way up until the temporal cold war plot started. Didn’t bother to stick it out."
...and neither did a lot of the audience. For reasons unrelated to the show, I missed a lot of it. And we obviously disagree on canon. There's a difference between worship of it and respect for it. You sorta sneer at it in the same way the left does when we on the right insist upon trying to stick to the Constitution. They think it's something old and outdated and worth flaunting, precisely why our culture is in the disastrous shape it's in now.
"All you need to do is look at the size of our two posts to see why the reboot was absolutely necessary. Should have been done before. The fact of the matter is Trek has WAY too much canon, and it’s often contradictory, and it’s a prison for story telling. Especially with the way fans obsess on it."
And I completely disagree. So many stories have not been told and they can be done well within the framework of canon.
"Why not take beloved characters and recast them? It’s a normal part of movie and TV story telling. Look at how many versions of Sherlock Holmes there have been. Bond. Dr Who. Spartacus. Reboots, recasts, and just plain redos are a part of the industry."
For some things, it makes no particular difference. For others, it does. This is one instance where it just plain doesn't work, because it has a direct and negative effect on the entire starting point of the franchise. It would be like having a character nuke London in Sherlock Holmes's time, or having James Bond's parents not die in a skiing accident at Chamonix. With those alterations, you've completely remade them. Abrams just not only did that, but the casting itself was so damn bad. These actors looking like high-schoolers playing dress up. Changing the basic motivations of the characters, too, it's just one bad thing after another. The ludicrous Spock-Uhura 'romance' as another example.
"They’ve been around forever, they used to be the norm. Nobody expected the Batman TV show to have anything to do with the serials that had come before, new show, new people, new stuff. Trek had broken that model when they kept TNG in the same world, and then with 25 years of same canon story telling added into it they proved why the old model existed.
It’s not a prequel, it’s a separate timeline. Which is convenient if anybody is ever dumb enough to want to try to tell stories in the old canon again. All that crap is still there completely unaffected by the events in the JJ movies."
Call it "separate", it still doesn't change the fact that the characters, their motivations and some other basic alterations Abrams inserted simply don't work and don't make sense. One other question, this was Captain Pike's ship, so where in the hell was his crew ? Those people should not have been where they were at the time they were there.
"Paramount has even talked about putting a new show in the old world, just to satisfy the gripers."
Us "gripers" who actually want it to make, y'know, sense ?
"Your complaints show EXACTLY why they wanted to reboot. The only reason those things aren’t “correct” is because they break a canon that was overwrought, over complex, and over analyzed."
They tossed out everything that made Star Trek, Star Trek. The basic framework, the motivations, even the characters characters. Instead we get children playing adults that have no discernable resemblance to the characters other than the names. Like Justin Bieber playing George Washington or Kim Kardashian playing Margaret Thatcher. Actually, it's worse... those would be memorable for how ludicrous such a casting is, in the case of the Faux Trek, it's that they're so utterly forgettable.
"Sorry but the reviewers disagree. They find the movie well constructed, and entertaining. And I agree. Really the ONLY people that don’t like it are the canon worshipers. And they bitch and moan about EVERY new Trek that comes out, that’s where they get their actual pleasure from Trek, complaining about it."
Nope. I'd love to have a Trek film I could enjoy with good actors, a good script, no f*ing lens flare, and history and motivations that fit the characters. Instead I got JJ Abrams taking a great big dump on the whole thing.
"I don’t care if you don’t like it. Your happiness is not on my concern list and never will be, and really it’s all opinion and opinion isn’t worth discussing because everybody has their own and who really cares about anybody else’s. The problem is when you start saying it’s not really Trek or it ruined the franchise that’s talking about absolutely, discussable non-opinion items. Which is when I start pointing to the long history of DREK in Trek’s history. I see no way anybody could do anything after Voyager that ruined Trek. If Trek was ever ruined that’s when it happened, if it didn’t happen then it can’t happen."
Problem is, and we know there was subpar Trek, but that TNG/DS9/Voyager didn't flagrantly rewrite over the basic history and characters of TOS. If they had a bad episode/bad writing or lousy character, it only effected that show. Enterprise started to go in the revisionist history direction, which was bad enough, but these were at least new characters. What Abrams did was chuck it all in the toilet and completely ruin established characters. You're entitled to your own opinion if you like it, but I and many many others don't. It was completely unnecessary and wrong.
"No JJ absolutely should NOT have done anything in the post Voy canon, for exactly the reason I’ve said. That much canon is a story destroying albatross on the neck of story tellers."
Absurd. If he was to be let loose, and he should never have been, let him do the distant future of Trek beyond what was already there. It's a weak argument to call canon an albatross.
"A lot of writers didn’t want to have anything to do with it. That was demand number one from JJ and his people, they didn’t want anything to do with that canon, they either got to reboot or Paramount had to hire somebody else. And all indications are they weren’t the first to make that demand."
In which case, he should never have been hired. Period. I think what he did was outright malicious. We'll see if he shows a similar trend with SW.
"Again remember he DIDN’T rewrite established history."
Yes, he did. I've said that from jump street. From the moment Kirk's mother was on a starship giving birth, that was revisionist history.
"All that history is “preserved” in that other timeline, available for the creation of new content as soon as Paramount finds somebody dumb enough to want to wear the albatross."
Oh, quelle horror ! A set frame, established characters, motivations that make sense !
"He didn’t destroy Trek he SAVED it."
Naah. He made FAUX Trek. It's not Star Trek. Trek for dumb, horny teenagers with short attention spans, low IQs and who are distracted by shiny lens flare.
"It was dead before he and Paramount finally came to terms, and if had followed the old canon people would have stayed away from it in droves in much the way they stayed away from the last 4 movies, and there wouldn’t be another movie, and there wouldn’t be talk of doing something new in the old canon. If he had followed your path there’d be no new Trek, it would actually have been destroyed."
Baloney. I could've done a helluva lot better with a film than that no-talent hatchet man. I'd certainly have shown a lot more respect for it than he has. It was insulting, and now with this second abomination in the pipe, he's kicking us in the balls and thumbing his nose at us again. But hey, so long as YOU like it, why not ?
First season of TOS is hit or miss. Some are good, some are junk. Season 2 is really when it hit stride, mostly good to great eps. Season 3 of course had tons of issues. But it’s still not incomparable, you can tell because we’re comparing it.
I enjoyed TMP when it first came out. It was great, Trek was back and on the big screen. It was a dream come true. Unfortunately on subsequent viewings I realize it’s mostly fanboy porn, with tons of pregnant pauses so we can (as we did) cheer the first appearance of every main cast member, and the ship, and the first time the ship moves, etc etc. Again given its audience and timing those were probably necessary and good, but without the audience it’s stilted and slow.
I mock the Klingon bastard line because it’s emblematic of the problem with the movie. It lacked proper direction, when faced with trying to decide which reading to go for they said “yes”, once through the line would have sufficed, 3 times with the emphasis on a different word every time, silly. And then there’s the problem with him only having met his son one movie ago, and barely knowing anything about him, but now we get to go through the line 3 times. Blowing up the Enterprise was pretty cool though, I’ll give them props for one (1) unexpected story turn there, which is more than we’d get in the next 7 movies combined.
There was some fun jokes in saving the whales. But Trek time travel plots are always problematic, and it was just a thin stew, felt like an episode that got stretched.
Yeah the DS9 crew was probably over fond of Vic, but he is a cool character, and the writers leveraged him for some good stories. Unlike every other holodeck episode.
Honestly Generations so did not impress me I’d forgotten Malcolm was even in it until last year when one of my co-workers brought in a bunch of trading cards from the movie he was selling. I saw the card with Malcolm and I was stunned, had to go look it up on wiki. I remember next nothing about that movie.
One of hte big problems with Janeway is they decided their first female captain needed to be their smartest captain. So where the others would ask for options and the supporting characters would spew technobabble Janeway did all the spewing. Had to really suck for the actors since all they got to do in those scenes was say they’ll do their part in 4 hours. Really wasted a perfectly good Vulcan too, once the captain is the one that knows all the science your Vulcan gets stuck being security chief.
I don’t see any problem with the casting. Actually I quite like them. Sylar is an excellent Vulcan, and there’s nothing wrong with him having a romance, we know Vulcans do that (else no Spock) and he’s only half Vulcan anyway. Urban is great. Yeah everybody has that hyper youth look, but that’s modern Hollywood, nobody is allowed to look over 30 until the character needs to look over 60.
Trek has a whole galaxy so yes obviously there’s “more stories”. But the problem with the canon is it chokes it off. You gotta make sure you’re not combining races wrong. What you want a betazoid? Remember they got trashed during the Dominion War. That Gorn seems to smart. And that’s not he right button for that. It’s why other franchises scrub constantly. There’s no indication the current Bond had his parents die ever, different set of canon.
It’s not “call it separate” it IS separate. Both internally (as explained by old Spock) and externally (as shown by Paramount talking about doing new stuff in the old canon).
It DOES make sense, that’s part of the problem you have with it. Frankly it makes more sense than most of the Trek.
The problem with Trek fans is there is no difference between worship and respect. The Trek fans that care about canon WORSHIP it, that’s the crowd that has given Takei crap for pushing the “wrong” button for decade, that’s the crowd that whined the ENT communicators were smaller than TOS communicators. If they could actually stop at just respecting canon it wouldn’t be such an albatross. But thanks to the button obsessors Trek canon is a trap, it’s a source of preventing stories where canon should be the fountain of new stories.
Every time you throw out that “faux trek” crap you show you’re just another canon worshiper whining. It’s Trek, it’s REAL Trek, that really is honestly (you can check the reviews) better than at least 60% of the Trek that came before it. Better than 2 entire 7 season SERIES of Trek (TNG and Voy). Maybe it doesn’t align with your favorite parts of Trek, but that doesn’t make it faux, it just makes it not your favorite. I wouldn’t call Voyager faux Trek, because it’s just as Trek as the rest, it’s CRAP Trek but it’s still the genuine article.
No they didn’t toss what made Trek Trek. They brought Trek BACK from the oblivion of debate club hyper-liberalism that had ruined it. It’s back to TOS Trek, fun, adventurous, kind of silly, decent messages, and not bogged down by a need to push a political agenda. It’s the Trek I grew up watching, and that by and large we haven’t had since TMP brought it back.
It is quelle horror, because they’ve had a hard time getting people to want to work in the old canon. If the old canon was so desirable to work in the job never would have been offered to JJ because somebody else would have signed on. Nobody did. Finally they had to accept the fact that most filmmakers with a history of success don’t want to be in that old world, they want to work from scratch, so they gave into the demand. Mock it all you want, the empirical evidence says Trek canon is an albatross that people don’t want to wear.
If you could do such a better job DO IT. Get an agent, get in front of Paramount AND DO IT. They want something in old canon. Go ahead. Meanwhile out here in reality JJ saved Trek whether you will admit it or not. I’m going to see the movie this weekend, with my mom, just like the old days. We’re both excited for new Trek. Sorry you can’t enjoy it, but that’s on you. 88% fresh, you’re the outlier.
Voyager would have benefited from a more attractive actress playing the Captain.
Just like you’d want the first female President to be hot.