Joined the Mayqueeze.
Maybe it will be for the best that in the future we’ll all create our own holodeck stories. It will rid us of having to separate artists (or co creator/producer) from the work. Reading Berman’s name in the credits is a bit like Weinstein’s in movies. Immediately lessens the enjoyment. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
Thanks for writing that. It’s quite long but I can see your point. I’m relieved that you didn’t just read two headlines and sent him to the digital gallows. Personally, I don’t reach the same conclusion as you. If you’d say in reply my standards were perhaps lower I would not disagree with you. As I wrote before, this is not enough for me. Weir is not a saint. I heard hin trash talk his own follow-up to the Martian in an interview when Hail Mary came out. He knows he’s not Asimov or Dick. Or Shakespeare.
In terms of what science fiction is best at doing, we don’t appear to be that far apart. Allegorical storytelling is great. That’s why I mentioned Picard S2 where there is none of that. They have characters sit in ICE detention or looking at the burning mountains in 2020 and say this is shit (which, of course, it is). Zero allegory, all in our face virtue signaling. Virtues that I find valid but in a sci-fi story told in a very literal (read: shit) way. Politics overrode good story telling. (Then again, it was the pandy, there are extenuating circumstances.)
You don’t have to answer this; I’m just curious. How is your enjoyment of 90s Trek knowing that Rick Berman was involved? I’d argue he’s a far bigger sob than Weir.
He is a huge hypocrite in your opinion. Which I don’t find convincing.
I just read up on the woke comments. What do you find so terrible there? That he writes avoiding an agenda? Or that he criticizes works that plainly have one?
It’s his opinion. I don’t wholly disagree with him. Science fiction often works best when they don’t hang a giant lantern on what the lesson to be learned is. When the politics override good storytelling. Like in Picard S2. ICE is shit and so are climate change denial and the burning mountains around contemporary LA. But to me that came across as preachy, not a great story.
If anything you have to respect the man for not mincing his words at all. That doesn’t mean I agree with him but in this outrage driven world that’s almost a baller move.
I don’t think he has alienated as many people as you suggest. And I haven’t heard enough to be worried. He might be a prick but these two stories are not enough to build a case just yet IMO.
The man has a vested interest to be in the headlines. Media take an interest in him because of the movie. It’s the perfect climate to turn a statement of not much importance into a news headline.
I haven’t listened to the podcast. If anybody has, maybe they can comment on the tone of the conversation. Seeing it just in writing makes him seem a bit petty and adversarial. But the way it happened it could just as well be isolated, throwaway jovial comments where the “fuck them” could be much less pointed and we are left feeling this was a nothing burger.
This is of the same quality journalism as any actor of the fantasy lightsaber universe being asked if they world return to the franchise. Sure, if the script looked promising, said Daisy Ripley. “Ripley to return to Star Wars!” reports niche media site struggling to get eyeballs in front of their ads.
I would start by suggesting we look at fewer youtubers and their views on the subject. I’m tired of dumb facial expressions on thumbnails and exaggerated video titles that do not aim for calm, measured critique but to please the algorithm. And the algorithm likes controversy. So this linked video may be the outlier - I wouldn’t know because I refuse to click through. These video links are more often than not efforts to increase views and thus nudge the video up in the ranking.
Is the death of the franchise nigh? Maybe. It wouldn’t be its first. We have had deaths after TOS S3 and ENT S4/Nemesis. There was stuff in print or in games but nothing on screen until Star Wars became a success and the arrival of the binge streaming age/Star Wars again respectively. We may be on the verge of another lull. We are very dedicated fans of a franchise that needs to be bigger to be financially viable long term. But we are a big enough chunk of the market that executives will be tempted to bring it back.
Can Star Trek tell more stories? Sure it can. It depends on the writers. I was personally disappointed with the stories Disco and PIC told. They thought Star Trek storytelling needs to be Breaking Bad’s mixed with Game of Thrones’s and that equalled universe destroying threats that need to be fought every season. For SNW they learned that you can have a season long plot but you want to be more episodic. Academy is like that as well. There is a lot of fan service in them by design and references only a subset of viewers will catch. But I don’t think that makes the shows less good or accessible to new audiences. And Marvel has established the easter-eggification of storytelling in modern franchises so a lot of viewers will want that.
Many scripts that became Star Trek stories were just sci-fi ideas that were then molded around the universe. There are still good sci-fi story ideas out there that can be told.
My fear is that we are at a ENT S3 point in time. It’s a good season but not enough people are watching. Same with SNW or Academy. That’s partially pissed off fans but also people not paying Paramount to watch it for reasons unrelated to the fandom. And the maneuvering around the Warner deal makes me fearful that all new projects will be shelved very soon for lack of funding and projected economic success. If the third lull is upon us, it’s for economic reasons, not the lack of stories to be told.
I didn’t hate it when I saw it in theaters. Thought it was better than IX and VII but not VIII. It was a hit heavy on wanting to be star wars. The buggy ride, fighter ships, fights on gangways above huge chasms on the ship, the humorous banter while pew pew. Didn’t like the death of Data. Didn’t we learn anything from Spock? I liked the world building for the Roms and the Rems. I liked Hardy in it.
I don’t mind rewatching this movie. I feel it benefits from aging a bit like III doesn’t (but V does for me). And I’d argue it’s definitely better than PIC S2, if not the whole show.
The general vibe around this movie is bad because the box office take wasn’t great and then we learned all these little tidbits from BTS: Wesley (the boy?!) being cut out of the wedding scene or the director thinking Geordie was an alien. I think Frakes in the chair would have done a better job with it.
I learned about her Cardassianess on this podcast. There is also a deeper meaning behind it because the Cardassians are great record keepers and that’s why she would be entrusted with keeping Jake’s unpublished book! A lovely touch that completely escaped me because I didn’t recognize her as a Cardassian until I heard Tawny talk about it with the Greatest Trek boys, subscribe today on the Maximum Fun network.
I was, initially, because I’m a fan, mad when it was revealed that Tawny Newsome’s character was supposed to be Dax. I later learned she was also supposed to be Cardassisn, which I totally missed as well. But I was mad in a “here we go again, new writers pulverize the canon of old, Trill synbionts can live a gazillion years now” way. But when I put the phone down before firing off a number of senseless hot take posts, I came to the conclusion that the Burn would have probably necessitated a system of hibernation or cryo storage for symbionts in need of a new host but unable to get back to Trill. In my head canon, the Dax symbiont was on ice for a couple of centuries.
I like the idea of the symbionts having an influence over their life span. And that Dax would cling to life no matter what for the off chance to meet The Sisko again makes sense to me too.
We’ll see which theory holds because I’m sure we’ll see Tawny in makeup again somehow.
Trouble with Tribbles! Worf just says they don’t discuss it with outsiders. ENT does more of the heavy lifting if you ask me.
Spoilers galore for PIC
They created a spin-off Borgs collective with one of the main characters from S1 as the queen. They were powerful but looked to cooperate with Starfleet to deal with a big space anomaly. And the season ends and nobody really knows what’s up. Are they now the only Borgs? Is this a hard reset and it was all a dream? There are some timeline shenanigans that could explain away everything.
And then S3 happens and we eventually find out the OG queen is hiding and masterminding a new plan that isn’t sending one cube to earth for a change. I think they never even question how the S2 Borgs fit into this. It is as though they never existed. What’s worse, they seemed to imply this old queen is the one Picard and Data defeated in First Contact and not the one that Janeway dealt with after that.
Swiss cheese is remarkably dense compared to the story PIC tells.
And it’s Star Trek. They will always find a way to expand on the Klingons. They’ll find a way to bring back the Borgs if they want to. What did the Burn do to whatever was left of them? That’s not an uninteresting question if you ask me. Their STSA-current facebook status? It’s complicated.
We are all confused. I feel they wrote themselves into a corner in PIC S2 and airlifted out of it without addressing the little unpainted corner they left behind. From a writers’ room perspective, it keeps their options open. From a fan POV it’s maddening. I don’t think it’s all that clear that the OG Borgs are dead after S3; they could return as well because they caused a subharmonic regression in the 500 Cochrane range that traveled back a transwarp corridor in time. Or something like that.
This is a Klingon makeup problem. For the longest time, it wasn’t addressed why the movie Klingons looked different from the TOS ones. Then ENT tried to fix this. And then DISCO came in and completely obliterated that fix. It doesn’t make sense. It cannot make sense. We mustn’t be so Vulcan about it.
I don’t think this was “blistering.” At the time watching it as a kid I thought it is weird that nobody ever talked about the Cardassians or the war before. But things get introduced like that in Star Trek. And it is a big universe. I don’t think this is the worst or the most pivotal of retconning because it fit into the story and quickly got expanded on.
Chekov hadn’t met Khan. WW3 didn’t happen in the 90s. Mark Leonard was both a Romulan AND Soock’s daddy. Picard meets versions of his parents during TNG that are nothing like the ones in PIC. Virtually all main TNG main characters lost at least one parent early in their life (or their sight). There is no way in hell that Riker can just stay #1 after Wolf 359 and not get his own ship. There wasn’t a queen but baby borgs! Scotty knew Kirk was dead already. And there are plenty of cases when beaming through shields is possible.
That’s just a few examples that grind my gears more than the introduction of the Cardassians. But I love Trek and am willing to forgive a lot.
Trek is a statue that many sculptors work on at different times. Inconsistencies must happen as a result. It’s not like The Expanse where the story has been written down before in great detail before they started filming. They took liberties from the original but would’ve succeeded at sculpting their piece of marble as planned if it hadn’t been for the assholery of a certain Mr. Anvar.
I was under the impression that they do exactly the opposite of what fans want. So, Paramount, if you’re listening, we want a TOS reboot, more Section 31, and everything as movies, please. Under no circumstances do we want an episodic Captain Una show! Please do a prequel to Enterprise instead, but with Borgs. And I mean the ones from Picard S2, of course.
In Japan, this is the norm. They’ll throw each drug in its own zip lock bag but piecemeal like that is all you’ll get. And people grow really old over here.
I don’t find this mildly infuriating. I think this is a responsible way to deal with a precious resource.
Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.
Unless you were present at the time, you are in the metaphorical arm chair as well.
I’ll take your points under advisement but I’m most certainly done arguing about this.
You clearly have a different take on the situation. A bunch of dipshits showing deepfakes around on a bus, ostensibly with other people around who are not party to this dispute and a grownup in the driver’s seat, does not convince me that even your interpretation applies here. But neither one of us was present, we are both arm chairing this, we are just sitting in different arm chairs. Let’s leave it at that.
I have a feeling if he had always turned into a Tarkasian bear for battle, fans would have complained that he is too much like the Hulk.
I think they landed on this idea and the sufficiently large budget for the CGI too late but the tentacle throwing golden blob is an interesting battle form.
Isn’t it funny how the production technology informs the storytelling? I heard that TNG in the first two seasons had a price tag of something like 5000 dollars per hand phaser beam so they used almost none. In S7 they shoot 100 times willy nilly in Gambit and hit almost nothing, no problem. Odo in S1 morphs in the pilot and then almost never on screen for a long time. And by S6 or 7 they’re like, sure, morph him into fire, fog, or an emu, wgaf!