Just making sure I understand the timeline here.
Enterprise
Discovery
Strange New Worlds
The Original Series
The Animated Series
The Next Generation
Deep Space Nine
Voyager
Picard
I realize there’s some overlap with some series taking place during the same time but is this essentially correct?
Okay, I’ve subscribed to CBS access.
I think that’s mostly right, but fwiw season 2 of Discovery ends with them going 900ish years into their future, which would place them something like 750ish years after Picard? The math gets all fuzzy when you use mushrooms and tardigrades to jump through time and space.
They’ve already gone to the well too often, but they’re going back again.
WEll, have they? “Next Generation” was one of the greatest shows ever made. DS9 and Voyager were good. I never saw Enterprise. There will always be a market for this stuff, which is why The Orville is popular.
Discovery was a BAD SHOW. So was Picard. Make a good Star Trek show and I’ll watch it.
I folded and bought CBS pay for access. Picard isn’t bad yet. I am disappointed that Stewart’s voice is gone.
I’ll admit I only watched the first episode of Discovery. And I probably wasn’t paying as much attention as I could have been. So I had always thought it was set later than the previous series and wasn’t supposed to be taking place before Next Generation much less than original series.
I think it was the sets that misled me. This does not look like the future version of this. And I realize the first set was built over fifty years before the second set. But I feel that Enterprise faced the same issue and they at least tried to make their sets look like something that was an earlier version of the original Enterprise.
Yes, they did.
I hated Discovery, but loved Anson Mount as Pike. He’s now my second-favorite Star Trek captain, after Kirk.
All the actors are fine. Romijn makes a good Number One, and Ethan Peck isn’t bad as a young Spock. The re-imagined Enterprise looks very much like the original, only modernized. The bridge has the same layout. There will be NO holodeck, as Pike hates them (as do I). So all the pieces are in place for a great show.
The wildcard, of course, is the writing. The original series was firmly rooted in science fiction, and many of the scripts were written by actual science fiction authors like Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, David Gerrold, etc.
If the new show has scripts written by the same studio hacks who wrote Discovery, it will fail. They know nothing about actual science fiction, which is why everything had to boil down to character conflicts in space. And every time they tried to ‘science it up’ the result was technobabble and silliness like faster-than-light travel on a mushroom highway.
Hopefully this show will be episodic, and the episodes will draw from science fiction short stories as the original did. If so, it could be the best Trek since TNG or even the original series.
Discovery has a solid cast, and half the characters are okay. Pike is fantastic, Saru is fantastic, Tilly is fun. Michael Burnham is bad and Ash Tyler is the worst character on TV, but it’s not the actors’ fault. I agree Peck is great as Spock.
TNG was better, but it was good for the same reason the original series was. Roddenberry’s vision was just incredibly appealing; a future that is really optimistic, a universe you’d like to actually live in. Most episodes were not super violent the way Picard and Discovery are, in part because they were written on the assumption the characters were trying to avoid violence. Of course, when violence did happen - “Balance of Terror,” Borg battles, “Wrath of Khan” - the fact it was sparingly used made it striking and meaningful.
There is an episode of TNG where there’s this young woman who is secretly an assassin, bent on missions of revenge, who can kill people with her touch. At the end of the episode, Riker is forced to shoot her dead; he stuns her and begs her to surrender but she won’t so he has to kill him. It’s a moment that feels tragic because it doesn’t happen very often. There is weight to it. In Picard, people are being killed fucking left right and center. The robot girl knows kung fu. There is a character whose only purpose is to murder people with a sword; he serves no other purpose, does not advance the plot in any way. It just starts to be meaningless.
Episodic television imposes discipline. It forces you to come up with beginnings, middles and ends. Discovery and Picard have so many plot holes it’s difficult to list them all.
The first 2 seasons of Enterprise were largely episodic and they largely sucked, so I’m not too sure about holding it up as a virtue.
Don’t let Ellison catch you saying that.
What a horrible, cluttered, inefficient waste of space! Yeccch! :mad:
Also, Deep Space Nine should be noted for having longer arcs towards the end, though still interspersed with the episodic plots from time to time. And it went dark, finally acknowledging that, yes, Star Fleet is the military, and no, all those offensive weapons aren’t just there to perform biopsies on crystalline entities and whatnot.
I can’t say much about Discovery other than what I’ve seen reviewed of it makes me think I wouldn’t like it for the same reasons I don’t much care for the last three Star Trek films.
Did the Enterprise ever come upon a new world, take some readings, and decide to give it a miss because it was too ordinary?
Probably, but those stories would never have been shown.
Captain Kirk: “Beam me up, Scotty. This place sucks.”
Wait 'till I tell him that the show’s rewritten script was better than his earlier one.
The last seasons of Enterprise were long story arcs, and they sucked.
I think I’ve found the common thread. Enterprise sucked.
Can I have your DVDs?
