The Star Trek Thread

[Upthorn]

(though my main takeaway from this show continues to be that Starfleet's mental health resources are woefully inadequate)

Literally one counselor in the entirety of starfleet.

[Thad]

Who managed to go seven seasons and four movies without ever finding out Picard's mother committed suicide and he blamed himself for it.

[Büge]

Literally one counselor in the entirety of starfleet.

Nyehhh, ackshully Ezri Dax was a terrible counselor too

[Thad]

Picard Season 3 Episode 8: "Oh no! Not what's-her-name!"

I read Redshirts a few months back, and its thesis, in a nutshell, is that there's nothing inherently wrong with killing off a character, but there should be a point to it, it should be meaningful in some way; if it's just there to be a dramatic moment right before the commercial break, then you're doing it wrong.

I watched "The Big Goodbye" the other day and I was struck by how the rando we've never seen before gets shot but lives. That guy absolutely would have died if it were TOS. It's an early sign that the writers of TNG are taking a look at the hoary old sci-fi tropes Star Trek has used in the past and trying to do something a little more thoughtful and sophisticated.

So anyway, in Picard season 3 episode 8, they kill a minor character off so there's a dramatic moment right before a commercial break. There's something about that that feels like a pure distillation of how big a step backward Picard is.

For God's sake, this show doesn't even have commercials.

[Friday]

My theory about TNG is that they cut back on killing off redshirts so that they could instead beat up Worf again

[Thad]

Paramount+ follows Warner and Disney on the "let's just yank stuff off our streaming service" bandwagon, cancels and yanks Prodigy (among other shows).

Apparently season 2 will be completed and shopped to other networks.

Kinda curious where this trend will ultimately lead. The trend right now suggests that popular stuff will continue to be siloed on the studios' individual streaming services while less-popular stuff will filter back to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, but that doesn't solve the real problem here, which is that the big splashy shows that people sign up to watch cost more than they bring in.

Oh and also there's the ongoing WGA strike and an increasingly-likely SAG strike, so if the studios don't get their shit together they're going to find out what it looks like when they don't have big splashy shows that people sign up to watch.

[Thad]

...though I must admit I'm pleased with the realization that this means six months from now Stan Lee: How I Created Everything All By Myself and Why I Am Great is going to be buried deep in the recesses of Amazon Prime where no one will ever find it unless they're trying to watch Stand By Me.

[Mothra]

Godddddddd fuck Paramount

[Thad]

I will probably go back through the thread to see everyone's thoughts on Picard, but my initial reactions to the finale are:

1. "Anton Chekov"? AYFKMRN?

2. I am a new father. I am the absolute easiest mark for schmaltz like Picard's "You changed my life" speech. If the season leading up to that moment had done even the absolute bare minimum of making it feel earned, my eyes would have responded in some other way besides rolling.

[Thad]

I will probably go back through the thread to see everyone's thoughts on Picard, but my initial reactions to the finale are

I have gone back through the thread to see everyone's thoughts on Picard and no, I don't really have anything to add to those initial reactions.

[Thad]

...okay so my wife gently pointed out to me that Anton Chekov (Star Trek character) is very definitely named after Anton Yelchin, and not a twee reference to Anton Chekov (playwright). I withdraw my criticism of his name.

[Thad]

Okay, one more thought.

Vadic follows what's-her-name from Discovery season 3 in being a villain I really liked until they kept her around long enough for her to become annoying.

I enjoy the hammy, over-the-top acting. It really feels like a throwback to TOS where the guest stars' job was often to make William Shatner's performance look restrained.

(Aside: Shatner is not a bad actor. He's not a great actor, either, but he's a perfectly solid representation of a heightened, stagey style of acting that has fallen out of favor in movies and TV but was still common back when TOS was made. Especially in science fiction and other genres that depicted a sort of heightened reality; fire up a Twilight Zone at random and odds are pretty good you'll see some exaggerated, Shatner-style performances even if it's not the one with Shatner in it.)

[Friday]

I'm not the biggest fan of the stagey/hammy style you describe, but you know what? I'll take it over the fucking mumblecore and quipcore that's everywhere now.

It's like

Is this a superhero movie?

If yes, write it like a Millennial who went home after the party and thought of just the absolute best witty remarks and comebacks hours later but the Millennial isn't actually that funny or clever but he does sometimes elicit a smirk or a chuckle after all they've had hours to come up with it

if no, have all the actors mumble unintelligibly

[Thad]

I think it depends a lot on the material.

Shatner and the even-more-over-the-top guest stars really made a meal of those TOS scripts. And I'm a huge fan of old cheesy science fiction and horror movies. Fuckin' love me some Bela Lugosi or Vincent Price or Peter Lorre.

But it sure as hell ain't naturalistic. And that's why it's fallen out of favor, except for comedy and children's entertainment: because it's inauthentic. It's not relatable. In a very real sense, it's opera.

It's interesting to bring up mumblecore, because I think you've got the right idea that it's basically the opposite extreme. It's realistic to a fault. And as a result, its failure mode is being boring and forgettable.

I won't say mumblecore doesn't have interesting things to say, because it certainly can! But given the choice between something that fails because it's too over-the-top and something that fails because it's too mundane, well, there's probably a joke here involving the phrase "the most...human" but anyway I'd rather watch the silly thing.

[Thad]

so does picard ever explain the mystery of how this guy is twenty years old

oh right it takes place in a universe where prepubescent children look like this

[Thad]

(I think Miri is the worst episode of TOS. I think it's, like, several perfectly-okay premises, possibly from different drafts or even entirely different scripts, smooshed together until you get an episode where the hook is "What if children stopped physically aging? They'd just keep playing ring-around-the-rosie for 800 years!" which is just so bizarrely, fundamentally wrong as to seem like it was written by an actual alien. It's like the line from The 40-Year-Old Virgin about how breasts feel like bags of sand, except some people really haven't had the experience of touching a titty, whereas literally everyone has had the experience of being a child, so how is it possible to get it that wrong?)

[Thad]

I watched the premier of Strange New Worlds and enjoyed the fuck out of it except the part where the medical staff do drugs and turn into action heroes; what the fuck was that?

Aside from that, it's impressive how *confident* this show is. They just sidelined their main character for the entire first episode of the season, and they pulled it off.

"Let's do an arc about Spock trying to deal with emotions" is the kind of thing that I would have dismissed as hacky in less capable hands, but so far it's actually working really well! It legitimately feels like they're looking at Spock from a different perspective instead of it just feeling like cheap tropes (like when he got angry and knocked over the chessboard on Discovery did).

And you know how this writing staff isn't trying too hard? There's the scene where they tell Spock that M'Benga and Chapel are willing to sacrifice themselves to avert a war, and he just says "Logical." It is the perfect setup for "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and they have the good sense not to have him say that.

[Mothra]

M'Benga's fight juice was VERY bizarre and like, it didn't ruin anything but it was a pretty dumb idea to write into the ep!

But yeah otherwise, great ep. I was talking to my brother the other day about how Strange New Worlds has like, the worst possible premise: a prequel series to TOS with yet more recasting of Spock, Uhura, and Kirk, adding a character that is the fucking descendant of Khan Noonian Singh.

In even slightly worse hands, this would be the worst Trek yet, but because the writing's top-notch, it's been fantastic.

[Mothra]

Another perfect ep of SWN. Give me all the hijinx eps you can.

[Thad]

Haven't caught this week's yet but looking forward to it.

Did not care for the trial episode.

Liked the time-travel episode a lot. I'm not so sure about this Kirk, but he was (again) playing an alternate-timeline version, so that works as an excuse, at least. He was a lot of fun, he just didn't seem very much like Kirk. (Well, Shatner Kirk. He definitely had a Pine Kirk thing going on.) I do kind of like the idea of only having Kirk show up in alternate timelines (notwithstanding his brief appearance in the Prime timeline at the end of the episode).

I don't have a whole lot of love for the "would you kill baby Hitler?" trope, but I love the explanation that there's a whole Time War constantly swirling around the Eugenics War with different factions constantly trying to kill Khan and other factions saving him to reset the timeline (and I also love that they explicitly use this to explain the frequent retcons on when the Eugenics War actually happens). And I like how it's the inverse of City on the Edge of Forever -- instead of "to preserve the timeline, a good person must die" it's "to preserve the timeline, a terrible person must live."

Got some bad news for Kirk about the whole "if I restore the timeline, my brother will live" thing, though.

I really liked "Among the Lotus Eaters", too. A very TOS-style "planet with a gimmick" setup, but I thought it was a good gimmick used for effective character work.