Star Trek: How many follow any of the franchises?

[TheHighwayMan3561]

I thought Discovery season 2 was mixed. I enjoyed the relationship between Spock and Burnham even with the retcon, but I thought the "evil rogue sentient AI"  was a tired plot device that brought nothing new to that overused concept. Because of the mention upthread about how little development the secondary characters get in the show, it was immediately obvious when they suddenly thrust one to the foreground as a main character that they were planning to kill her off and thus failed to create any emotional attachment to her as they progressed through the episode.

[triplemultiplex]

This is a good thread bump since a lot has happened since Disco started up.

Disco's use of the mirror universe (or the "Evil Parallel Universe" as I call it thanks to South Park ) has provided a crutch to kill off prime universe characters while leaving the window open to bring them back at some point.  But I must admit to being excited about taking a several-episode arc thru there.  I like it for the reason they pointed out in Disco; the mirror universe is the other possible future for humanity if we allow our more primitive instincts to guide our development as a species.

Jumping Disco 900 years forward was a decent creative choice and I liked the concept of a galaxy of fallen empires in the wake of The Burn, but I was left with the impression the writers underestimated how much they should have advanced the 23rd-24th Century tech their audience is familiar with.  Think back to what human technology was like 900 years ago from right now.  Seems like there should have been several fundamental developments in that time on the order of gunpowder or heliocentrism, right?  Instead all we got were slightly upgraded versions of the same tech we are used to. Holograms, transporters, weapons, user interfaces, ship designs; it all feels like maybe 100-200 years beyond the Next Generation series.  They would have been better served leaping forward half as far and ignoring the Enterprise canon about a Temporal Cold War.

I recognize the writing 'get out of jail free' card they made with the "Infosphere Data".  That's what I call that huge archive they took on from the mysterious ancient alien probe in season 2 in homage to Futurama.  (It's true; stamp glue is made from toad mucus!)  They are going to cheat their way out of dead-ends with that Infosphere Data for the rest of the run.

On to Picard; I'll admit, most of the appeal of that series so far as been "Hey remember this character!?!"  Seven of Nine especially killed it; she was kick-ass.  I do have to roll my eyes at the central plot of season 1 being a predictable false flag operation about artificial intelligence.  But I'm left wanting to know more about these super-old AI lifeforms that were about to fuck shit up.  That seems interesting enough to explore without gumming up the Prime Universe with excessive canon if you have Picard and Seven and the others jet off on some rouge diplomatic mission to investigate.   The consummate diplomat with his no-nonsense half-cyborg compatriot figure out how to get a supreme AI to calm the fuck down about organic life; there's at least a season there.

There's also Lower Decks.
This is a goofy, "PG13" animated show focusing on characters who are not bridge officers.  Clearly, someone at Paramount watched the first season of The Orville and noticed "Hey, Star Trek totally works as a comedy.  Let's do this, but cheaper."

As an aside, The Orville, in my opinion, has a tone that makes it a more direct descendant of the three Next Generation series than any of the new official series.  Several of their episodes would be immortal classics if they were on TNG.  Particularly the one where they encounter a generation ship where the people living on it don't know they are on a space ship and the one where they visit a planet where the people persecute those born under a certain astrological sign.  Those two would have made excellent TNG episodes. I guess any series, really, but you can just feel that they were written with Picard and Riker and Data and Troi and so on in mind.

[OCGuy81]

This is a good thread bump since a lot has happened since Disco started up.

Disco's use of the mirror universe (or the "Evil Parallel Universe" as I call it thanks to South Park ) has provided a crutch to kill off prime universe characters while leaving the window open to bring them back at some point.  But I must admit to being excited about taking a several-episode arc thru there.  I like it for the reason they pointed out in Disco; the mirror universe is the other possible future for humanity if we allow our more primitive instincts to guide our development as a species.

Jumping Disco 900 years forward was a decent creative choice and I liked the concept of a galaxy of fallen empires in the wake of The Burn, but I was left with the impression the writers underestimated how much they should have advanced the 23rd-24th Century tech their audience is familiar with.  Think back to what human technology was like 900 years ago from right now.  Seems like there should have been several fundamental developments in that time on the order of gunpowder or heliocentrism, right?  Instead all we got were slightly upgraded versions of the same tech we are used to. Holograms, transporters, weapons, user interfaces, ship designs; it all feels like maybe 100-200 years beyond the Next Generation series.  They would have been better served leaping forward half as far and ignoring the Enterprise canon about a Temporal Cold War.

I recognize the writing 'get out of jail free' card they made with the "Infosphere Data".  That's what I call that huge archive they took on from the mysterious ancient alien probe in season 2 in homage to Futurama.  (It's true; stamp glue is made from toad mucus!)  They are going to cheat their way out of dead-ends with that Infosphere Data for the rest of the run.

On to Picard; I'll admit, most of the appeal of that series so far as been "Hey remember this character!?!"  Seven of Nine especially killed it; she was kick-ass.  I do have to roll my eyes at the central plot of season 1 being a predictable false flag operation about artificial intelligence.  But I'm left wanting to know more about these super-old AI lifeforms that were about to fuck shit up.  That seems interesting enough to explore without gumming up the Prime Universe with excessive canon if you have Picard and Seven and the others jet off on some rouge diplomatic mission to investigate.   The consummate diplomat with his no-nonsense half-cyborg compatriot figure out how to get a supreme AI to calm the fuck down about organic life; there's at least a season there.

There's also Lower Decks.
This is a goofy, "PG13" animated show focusing on characters who are not bridge officers.  Clearly, someone at Paramount watched the first season of The Orville and noticed "Hey, Star Trek totally works as a comedy.  Let's do this, but cheaper."

As an aside, The Orville, in my opinion, has a tone that makes it a more direct descendant of the three Next Generation series than any of the new official series.  Several of their episodes would be immortal classics if they were on TNG.  Particularly the one where they encounter a generation ship where the people living on it don't know they are on a space ship and the one where they visit a planet where the people persecute those born under a certain astrological sign.  Those two would have made excellent TNG episodes. I guess any series, really, but you can just feel that they were written with Picard and Riker and Data and Troi and so on in mind.

Lower Decks was also a season 7 episode of TNG, and a rather good one to boot.

[Mr_Northside]

The thing about DS9 is that it was doing an ongoing, serialized story way before that was the norm on TV. At the time it was this strange new thing a lot of people couldn't get into. Now, because of things like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, a TV show doing an ongoing rather than episodic story is an idea viewers are more comfortable with, so DS9 shines more than it did at the time it came out.

..............but in her opinion DS9 just didn't commit to serialization as much as she would have liked.

I will note that a lot of the more heavily serialized shows mentioned (among others) also have much fewer episodes per season (really, shorter seasons is a pretty common thing now for even non-serialized shows).
But DS9 was still expected to produce ~25 episodes per season (I think season one was just a little shorter), so there were a lot more hours to fill.

[SP Cook]

Jumping Disco 900 years forward was a decent creative choice and I liked the concept of a galaxy of fallen empires in the wake of The Burn, but I was left with the impression the writers underestimated how much they should have advanced the 23rd-24th Century tech their audience is familiar with.  Think back to what human technology was like 900 years ago from right now.  Seems like there should have been several fundamental developments in that time on the order of gunpowder or heliocentrism, right?  Instead all we got were slightly upgraded versions of the same tech we are used to. Holograms, transporters, weapons, user interfaces, ship designs; it all feels like maybe 100-200 years beyond the Next Generation series. 

Excellent points.  I find the whole jump to the future theme unrealistic, even by science fiction standards.  It seems lifted from the Kevin Costner bomb "The Postman".  So people jump 900 years into the future.  So they expect Star Fleet and all of these natural law/19th century liberal values to still exist.   And they do.  Right.  So a time traveling sailor from the 13th century would just naturally expect to sail into his country's harbor and find everyone is pretty much the same. 

[triplemultiplex]

Star Trek is generally supposed to be a hopeful vision for humanity where we figured out how to balance our innate empathy with cold hard empirical science.  But they are annoyingly persistent at legitimizing whatever trendy pseudo-science was permeating Hollywood culture at the time each series was on.

It started right in the beginning with telepathy and Vulcans mind-melding with other species.  Completely rooted in 1960's esoteric ideas about consciousness and that kind of hippie bullshit.  Jump ahead to Next Generation and you can tell how much Hollywood had embraced therapists with the inclusion of not only a ship's counselor, but making that a bridge officer.  Worf does his Klingon yoga; Tuvoc does his Vulcan meditation; all right around the same time those became trendy in Hollywood.  The most egregious example though is Enterprise's Dr. Flox.  Jumping on the alternative medicine bandwagon, they have their future doctor using all sorts of new-agey 'natural' sounding modalities in a blatant endorsement of every Hollywood douchebag's kook witch doctor.

Those elements do not age well, I must say.  In an franchise with numerous technological cheats like faster than light travel and matter transporters, adding even more implausible elements like telepathy, aliens with god-like powers, and space leeches that even out your space humors makes it harder to immerse oneself in the fiction.

[kkt]

Star Trek is a product of its time just like any other form of literature.

If someone had written a story in Chaucer's time including travel in heavier-than-air machines from just about any place on earth to just about any other place on earth, usually within 24 hours, he probably would have been locked up in his relatives' attic as a danger to himself.  And then there's radio.  And an entire population of many large countries where too much food is a bigger health problem than too little.

[Rothman]

Star Trek is generally supposed to be a hopeful vision for humanity where we figured out how to balance our innate empathy with cold hard empirical science.  But they are annoyingly persistent at legitimizing whatever trendy pseudo-science was permeating Hollywood culture at the time each series was on.

It started right in the beginning with telepathy and Vulcans mind-melding with other species.  Completely rooted in 1960's esoteric ideas about consciousness and that kind of hippie bullshit.  Jump ahead to Next Generation and you can tell how much Hollywood had embraced therapists with the inclusion of not only a ship's counselor, but making that a bridge officer.  Worf does his Klingon yoga; Tuvoc does his Vulcan meditation; all right around the same time those became trendy in Hollywood.  The most egregious example though is Enterprise's Dr. Flox.  Jumping on the alternative medicine bandwagon, they have their future doctor using all sorts of new-agey 'natural' sounding modalities in a blatant endorsement of every Hollywood douchebag's kook witch doctor.

Those elements do not age well, I must say.  In an franchise with numerous technological cheats like faster than light travel and matter transporters, adding even more implausible elements like telepathy, aliens with god-like powers, and space leeches that even out your space humors makes it harder to immerse oneself in the fiction.

This was a good rant to start my day off with.  Someone angry at the legitimizing of therapists through fiction is a new one.

[kphoger]

Star Trek is generally supposed to be a hopeful vision for humanity where we figured out how to balance our innate empathy with cold hard empirical science.  But they are annoyingly persistent at legitimizing whatever trendy pseudo-science was permeating Hollywood culture at the time each series was on.

It started right in the beginning with telepathy and Vulcans mind-melding with other species.  Completely rooted in 1960's esoteric ideas about consciousness and that kind of hippie bullshit.  Jump ahead to Next Generation and you can tell how much Hollywood had embraced therapists with the inclusion of not only a ship's counselor, but making that a bridge officer.  Worf does his Klingon yoga; Tuvoc does his Vulcan meditation; all right around the same time those became trendy in Hollywood.  The most egregious example though is Enterprise's Dr. Flox.  Jumping on the alternative medicine bandwagon, they have their future doctor using all sorts of new-agey 'natural' sounding modalities in a blatant endorsement of every Hollywood douchebag's kook witch doctor.

Those elements do not age well, I must say.  In an franchise with numerous technological cheats like faster than light travel and matter transporters, adding even more implausible elements like telepathy, aliens with god-like powers, and space leeches that even out your space humors makes it harder to immerse oneself in the fiction.

Star Trek is a product of its time just like any other form of literature.

Exactly.  It's almost as if the arts are influenced by culture or something.

[TheHighwayMan3561]

Star Trek is generally supposed to be a hopeful vision for humanity where we figured out how to balance our innate empathy with cold hard empirical science.  But they are annoyingly persistent at legitimizing whatever trendy pseudo-science was permeating Hollywood culture at the time each series was on.

It started right in the beginning with telepathy and Vulcans mind-melding with other species.  Completely rooted in 1960's esoteric ideas about consciousness and that kind of hippie bullshit.  Jump ahead to Next Generation and you can tell how much Hollywood had embraced therapists with the inclusion of not only a ship's counselor, but making that a bridge officer.  Worf does his Klingon yoga; Tuvoc does his Vulcan meditation; all right around the same time those became trendy in Hollywood.  The most egregious example though is Enterprise's Dr. Flox.  Jumping on the alternative medicine bandwagon, they have their future doctor using all sorts of new-agey 'natural' sounding modalities in a blatant endorsement of every Hollywood douchebag's kook witch doctor.

Those elements do not age well, I must say.  In an franchise with numerous technological cheats like faster than light travel and matter transporters, adding even more implausible elements like telepathy, aliens with god-like powers, and space leeches that even out your space humors makes it harder to immerse oneself in the fiction.

The show would be pretty boring if faster than light travel wasn't allowed and aliens were restricted to purely physics-as-we-know-it and human qualities/limitations.

[NWI_Irish96]

My dad was a huge fan of the original TV series. I never could get into it, but I enjoyed the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th movies involving the original cast.

I absolutely loved The Next Generation TV series and the movies with that cast.

Never got into anything after that, until recently I watched and really enjoyed Discovery and Picard. Anxiously awaiting new seasons of both.

[Avalanchez71]

I always found the episodes with Keiko O'Brian as laborious to watch.  She was just so annoying and off-putting.  Too bad O'Brian could not find a more suiting woman.  She always acted like she was better than everyone else.

[US71]

I always found the episodes with Keiko O'Brian as laborious to watch.  She was just so annoying and off-putting.  Too bad O'Brian could not find a more suiting woman.  She always acted like she was better than everyone else.

IMO, Rosalind Chao wasted her talents on DS9. I saw her in Joy Luck Club and thought she ws decent.

[OCGuy81]

I always found the episodes with Keiko O'Brian as laborious to watch.  She was just so annoying and off-putting.  Too bad O'Brian could not find a more suiting woman.  She always acted like she was better than everyone else.

I really wasn't a huge fan of O'Brien both on TNG or DS9.  He was okay, but I didn't really care for his storylines.

Odo was easily my favorite.

IMO, Rosalind Chao wasted her talents on DS9. I saw her in Joy Luck Club and thought she ws decent.

[kkt]

I always found the episodes with Keiko O'Brian as laborious to watch.  She was just so annoying and off-putting.  Too bad O'Brian could not find a more suiting woman.  She always acted like she was better than everyone else.

I like the way the O'Briens were shown in DS9.  They were like a real life couple - they love each other but also have different interests, and different things that would be good for their careers.  Keiko is not going to be a 1950s sitcom wife who just says "Yes, dear, whatever you say" and gives up her botany career without a whimper.  Neither does she ask Miles to ask for a transfer away from DS9 to wherever Keiko could do some botany.

[Avalanchez71]

I did like that they did show O'Brian as they had a non commissioned officer character.  They should have had a little more grunt written into his character though.  I liked Constable Odo's character.  I wished that they would have designed a proper uniform for him to denote that he was a constable.  He looked just like any other Bejouran.

[nexus73]

For those who would like to stay in a Star Trek-themed motel room, check out the Itty Bitty Inn in North Bend OR.  This motel has just five rooms but the Star Trek room is numbered 1701.  You can get a commemorative t-shirt, Romulan soap and other neat things from the check-in desk too.

Rick

[OCGuy81]

For those who would like to stay in a Star Trek-themed motel room, check out the Itty Bitty Inn in North Bend OR.  This motel has just five rooms but the Star Trek room is numbered 1701.  You can get a commemorative t-shirt, Romulan soap and other neat things from the check-in desk too.

Rick

Oh that's awesome! I think I might need to plan a trip!

[kkt]

I did like that they did show O'Brian as they had a non commissioned officer character.  They should have had a little more grunt written into his character though.  I liked Constable Odo's character.  I wished that they would have designed a proper uniform for him to denote that he was a constable.  He looked just like any other Bejouran.

He was wearing a Bajoran militia uniform, a lot like Kira's only a different color.  When we saw Bajoran civilians their clothes looked looser and often with a pattern or more colors.

[OCGuy81]

I did like that they did show O'Brian as they had a non commissioned officer character.  They should have had a little more grunt written into his character though.  I liked Constable Odo's character.  I wished that they would have designed a proper uniform for him to denote that he was a constable.  He looked just like any other Bejouran.

He was wearing a Bajoran militia uniform, a lot like Kira's only a different color.  When we saw Bajoran civilians their clothes looked looser and often with a pattern or more colors.

Thing is, that was all part of Odo's shape shifting as well.  He could easily have shifted into any type of clothes/uniform he wanted.

[kkt]

Sure, he could.  But the uniform identifies him as a security officer.

[Avalanchez71]

Sure, he could.  But the uniform identifies him as a security officer.

He was a constable which is different from a security officer.  He was the law enforcement entity aboard the space station.

[kkt]

Sure, he could.  But the uniform identifies him as a security officer.

He was a constable which is different from a security officer.  He was the law enforcement entity aboard the space station.

"Constable" was a nickname that Odo didn't really like, even though it was meant affectionately.  He introduced himself as chief of security.

[hbelkins]

One thing I didn't like that deviated from the original was how the appearance of the Klingons changed. I hated the ridged foreheads.

[triplemultiplex]

One thing I didn't like that deviated from the original was how the appearance of the Klingons changed. I hated the ridged foreheads.

That was alright.  For crying out loud, the OG Klingons were just dudes with beards. That's doing aliens on a budget.
But what was really groan-worthy was devoting a two part Enterprise episode to explain why it changed. (or maybe it was just one episode; whatever.  The point is ret-con is bad.)