8 ms·

Celebrating Gene Roddenberry's 100th Birthday

44 points by _Microft 5y ago

tjpnz 5y ago
>Gene Roddenberry's vision of a better future for humanity in Star Trek is a hopeful message that is more relevant than ever today. I wish Kurtzman had gotten the memo.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Are you talking about Discovery? I mean, the first season was rough but doesn't every first season of Star Trek get a mulligan?
  - johnlorentzson 5y ago
    Season 2 started off better but quickly deteriorated (shortly after lots of positive reviews were in), and I completely forgot about Season 3 after I'd heard it existed.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Unfortunately for Discovery, they fucked up 3 seasons in a row. They almost made Season 3 work, then threw away everything in the last episode. I, for one, am done giving that show chances.
  - ragingrobot 5y ago
    I thought S2 was at least tolerable. The character of Christopher Pike seemed far more stable and realistic than the rest, and made it enjoyable. Somehow Mount appeared to have brought the crew to the same, more even, level. Then (ughh) they brought the Enterprise back for a 2 episode Star Wars wannabe. That should have been my clue things were going back down hill. Season three was just intolerable, IMHO.
- robotmay 5y ago
  Honestly the only Star Trek I've enjoyed since Voyager is Lower Decks, which is the first one that actually captures some of the fun again. The Orville feels more like Star Trek than any of the recent films or Discovery. Maybe it's just because I grew up with TNG/DS9/Voyager, but I really don't care about rehashes of TOS timelines, prequels, or any of that rubbish. Or, honestly, pretty much any Star Trek movie. I'm all about the episodic setup that worked so well in the 90s and gave us so many amazing ideas (albeit offset by far too many holodeck malfunction episodes). I'd love to see some wide-eyed wonder again, and see a true sequel to those 90s shows set in that timeline. Even if it means more holodeck episodes.
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    We should mention The Orville here. Of all modern sci-fi, including the Star Trek series', it's the most comparable.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      I'd agree with that. Once you get past the Seth MacFarlane "humor"[0] it is obvious that they have a better understanding of what people liked about Star Trek than the Abrams movies, Discovery, or even Picard. [0] Which actually does manage to be funny on occasion. The leg gag, the cigarettes, a few others come to mind.
      - okamiueru 5y ago
        Anything JJ Abrams produces is entirely made to be visually effective, rather than philosophically interesting or even internally congruent. Occasionally, I want to watch something more for the visual and coolness factor, and I can appreciate when productions don't take themselves too seriously. However JJ takes it too far, and I've ended up despising everything he has ever had a hand in writing and producing. Aside from the visuals, every single story element is so devoid of any logical coherence, that they are an affront to the mind or anyone who would care about things making sense. Take a look at some of the amusing "pitch meeting" videos on JJ movies, and you'll quickly see the common thread of nothing ever making any sense. He's a great visual composer, but his story writing abilities is worse than that of an average 10 year old.
- johnlorentzson 5y ago
  I don't think anything has ever disappointed me quite like Star Trek Discovery did.
- decremental 5y ago
  Kurtzman is a hack fraud but even if he wasn't attached to it there's basically no way TNG-era Trek was going to get made today. It was a product of its time. That said, Roddenberry gets too much credit compared to people like Dorothy Fontana and Rick Berman who had a huge hand in what we think about when we get nostalgic about Star Trek.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    One aspect of TNG-era Trek was that it was mostly episodic. I'm not sure, outside of maybe procedurals, how much mid/high budget drama TV these days isn't serialized given time-shifting and streaming. (I imagine syndication is less of a driving force as well.) Heck, even a comedy like Ted Lasso is serialized.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      DS9 demonstrated that season-long and even multi-season-long major plot arcs can work in Star Trek setting. It's a matter of execution.
      - ragingrobot 5y ago
        I think that worked because it didn't consume the show. The Dominion existed, but not every episode was centered around that war. The show remained pretty much episodic, with reminders of "hey, we have this going on", without being forefront every episode. Once in a while I rewatch an episode, and I am just blown away by the fact the "war" with the Dominion started so early in the show's run. It was a major plot point yet so subtle at least I could forget until it became prominent in the last season.
        ghaff 5y ago
        I think DS9 could have worked even in more serialized form--and, as you say, latterly it was pretty serialized. I'm not arguing that episodes good, serialized bad. I'd maybe come closer to arguing the opposite. I'm mostly agreeing that the mostly episodic TNG probably wouldn't get made today.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Everyone has different preferences; for me, the first few seasons of Enterprise were so bad I never bothered watching anything after the introduction of the Xindi (except the time travel to alt-WW2, which I kinda regret wasting time on), and likewise Into Darkness was so bad I didn’t bother with Beyond. However, I have enjoyed Discovery, even though season two was 50% “what if Borg under a different name only even less competent than they were in Voyager?” and the elevator fight in season 3 was even more nonsense than the elevator flight in The Final Frontier, and I’m kinda done with stories where one magical child accidentally breaks all of civilisation even though it’s well within the realm of Trek cannon wibbly-wobbly-subspace-nonsense since the first Traveller episode of TNG.
  - api 5y ago
    They missed such an opportunity with that show. The first Enterprise should have been even more “early” with artificial gravity that didn’t work well and consequentially Velcro everywhere like in the ISS. It might have looked a bit like a bigger ISS. When power came on the bridge display would show a GRUB boot loader and Linux kernel boot output. Their experiences should have been total immersion in the frontier. Long range subspace had not yet been mastered, so they are cut off after going much beyond our solar system… or maybe they can by stopping and boosting power achieve like 300 baud text links under proper conditions. No transporters. EVAs and shuttles only. When they wanted to look at something in space it would be like the space walk scene from 2010 (the underrated 2001 sequel). … and no weapons worth crap against anyone advanced. Maybe a railgun and a primitive phaser. Weak shields. This is way before the federation so dark forest and Wild West vibes.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      I forget where I heard this suggestion (Ex Astris Scientia, perhaps?), but I like the idea that the NX-01 should have been the first time humans made an antimatter powered warp drive, and everything before that was fusion powered warp drive. The possibility of main power being something other than antimatter also gives a reason why the TOS Romulan warbird was powered by “simple impulse” (which elsewhere seems to be fusion), and how on Earth Lily Sloane and Zefram Cochrane were able to power the Phoenix given the post-WW3 apocalypse and “six months to scrounge up enough titanium just to build a four-meter cockpit”. I think your worldbuilding would suit something earlier than Enterprise, but Enterprise was just before the foundation of the Federation, so I think they needed roughly the level of imbalance in the show — that said, one of my pet peeves is the way differences in skill/biology/technology/industrial output get squashed in narratives; the usual example I give is that Hawkeye and Thor shouldn’t be in the same battlespace in the same way that an olympic archer and a main battle tank shouldn’t be, but a developmentally realistic depiction of space battle with Vulcans and NX-01 (given time since becoming interstellar) ought to be similar to putting King Polydorus and his army in a fight with the entirety of all branches of the USA armed forces.
- vimy 5y ago
  I don’t know anyone who likes modern trek. Except Lower Decks, which comes the closest to that 90s trek feeling. Makes me wonder what the demographics are of Picard and Discovery’s viewership. Is it mainly younger viewers who didn’t experience trek before? For reference I’m early 30s and so are my friends. They should have just let Seth McFarlane be showrunner.
  - colanderman 5y ago
    My Trekkie friends (also mid 30s) are into Picard for the nostalgia factor. At least, during our pre-COVID watch parties, the talk before each episode was almost always about which TNG and VOY stars were appearing and in what capacity.
    - robotmay 5y ago
      I really like the bits of nostalgia in Lower Decks. Riker is hilarious in it and Frakes seems to have had fun with it.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        Wait, that's actually Frakes? It sounds so much like an imitator I just assumed...
  - amalcon 5y ago
    I (mid 30s) think Picard actually works -- but only with the first season taken as a unit and including the finale. The entire season basically needs to be thought of as a single long movie. I don't want to spoil anything, but to me, the way the big threat was resolved perfectly captures that idealism that is synonymous with Star Trek. Short Treks also felt strong to me. It showed that the people making Discovery can make Star Trek work, if freed from the constraints of having to build a season long plot and appease the right focus groups. Discovery itself, on the other hand... It can be enjoyable at times, but one needs to forget that it's supposed to be Star Trek.
    - 5y ago
anotherhue 5y ago
Discovery feels like someone misread "life support systems" to mean "emotional support systems". Every other scene has characters empowering and affirming each other.
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  Thank you, I'm going to remember how you expressed that! This is what finally turned me off during season 3. It got way out of hand. Somebody got a standing ovation every chance possible, and it got sickening. What initially drew me to Discovery was that darkness it had, while not being overly dark. Fortunately S3 reminded me I had yet to catch up on The Expanse, and once I got back into season 4 I couldn't stop.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Ovations I could live with, it's the crying fests that kill me. I initially appreciated Discovery getting more serious about emotional life of the crew, particularly around traumatic events - but Burnham is overdoing it in an immersion-breaking way.

44 points by _Microft 5y ago

>Gene Roddenberry's vision of a better future for humanity in Star Trek is a hopeful message that is more relevant than ever today. I wish Kurtzman had gotten the memo.

vanderZwan 5y ago
Are you talking about Discovery? I mean, the first season was rough but doesn't every first season of Star Trek get a mulligan?
- johnlorentzson 5y ago
  Season 2 started off better but quickly deteriorated (shortly after lots of positive reviews were in), and I completely forgot about Season 3 after I'd heard it existed.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Unfortunately for Discovery, they fucked up 3 seasons in a row. They almost made Season 3 work, then threw away everything in the last episode. I, for one, am done giving that show chances.
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  I thought S2 was at least tolerable. The character of Christopher Pike seemed far more stable and realistic than the rest, and made it enjoyable. Somehow Mount appeared to have brought the crew to the same, more even, level. Then (ughh) they brought the Enterprise back for a 2 episode Star Wars wannabe. That should have been my clue things were going back down hill. Season three was just intolerable, IMHO.
robotmay 5y ago
Honestly the only Star Trek I've enjoyed since Voyager is Lower Decks, which is the first one that actually captures some of the fun again. The Orville feels more like Star Trek than any of the recent films or Discovery. Maybe it's just because I grew up with TNG/DS9/Voyager, but I really don't care about rehashes of TOS timelines, prequels, or any of that rubbish. Or, honestly, pretty much any Star Trek movie. I'm all about the episodic setup that worked so well in the 90s and gave us so many amazing ideas (albeit offset by far too many holodeck malfunction episodes). I'd love to see some wide-eyed wonder again, and see a true sequel to those 90s shows set in that timeline. Even if it means more holodeck episodes.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  We should mention The Orville here. Of all modern sci-fi, including the Star Trek series', it's the most comparable.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I'd agree with that. Once you get past the Seth MacFarlane "humor"[0] it is obvious that they have a better understanding of what people liked about Star Trek than the Abrams movies, Discovery, or even Picard. [0] Which actually does manage to be funny on occasion. The leg gag, the cigarettes, a few others come to mind.
    - okamiueru 5y ago
      Anything JJ Abrams produces is entirely made to be visually effective, rather than philosophically interesting or even internally congruent. Occasionally, I want to watch something more for the visual and coolness factor, and I can appreciate when productions don't take themselves too seriously. However JJ takes it too far, and I've ended up despising everything he has ever had a hand in writing and producing. Aside from the visuals, every single story element is so devoid of any logical coherence, that they are an affront to the mind or anyone who would care about things making sense. Take a look at some of the amusing "pitch meeting" videos on JJ movies, and you'll quickly see the common thread of nothing ever making any sense. He's a great visual composer, but his story writing abilities is worse than that of an average 10 year old.
johnlorentzson 5y ago
I don't think anything has ever disappointed me quite like Star Trek Discovery did.
decremental 5y ago
Kurtzman is a hack fraud but even if he wasn't attached to it there's basically no way TNG-era Trek was going to get made today. It was a product of its time. That said, Roddenberry gets too much credit compared to people like Dorothy Fontana and Rick Berman who had a huge hand in what we think about when we get nostalgic about Star Trek.
- ghaff 5y ago
  One aspect of TNG-era Trek was that it was mostly episodic. I'm not sure, outside of maybe procedurals, how much mid/high budget drama TV these days isn't serialized given time-shifting and streaming. (I imagine syndication is less of a driving force as well.) Heck, even a comedy like Ted Lasso is serialized.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    DS9 demonstrated that season-long and even multi-season-long major plot arcs can work in Star Trek setting. It's a matter of execution.
    - ragingrobot 5y ago
      I think that worked because it didn't consume the show. The Dominion existed, but not every episode was centered around that war. The show remained pretty much episodic, with reminders of "hey, we have this going on", without being forefront every episode. Once in a while I rewatch an episode, and I am just blown away by the fact the "war" with the Dominion started so early in the show's run. It was a major plot point yet so subtle at least I could forget until it became prominent in the last season.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I think DS9 could have worked even in more serialized form--and, as you say, latterly it was pretty serialized. I'm not arguing that episodes good, serialized bad. I'd maybe come closer to arguing the opposite. I'm mostly agreeing that the mostly episodic TNG probably wouldn't get made today.
ben_w 5y ago
Everyone has different preferences; for me, the first few seasons of Enterprise were so bad I never bothered watching anything after the introduction of the Xindi (except the time travel to alt-WW2, which I kinda regret wasting time on), and likewise Into Darkness was so bad I didn’t bother with Beyond. However, I have enjoyed Discovery, even though season two was 50% “what if Borg under a different name only even less competent than they were in Voyager?” and the elevator fight in season 3 was even more nonsense than the elevator flight in The Final Frontier, and I’m kinda done with stories where one magical child accidentally breaks all of civilisation even though it’s well within the realm of Trek cannon wibbly-wobbly-subspace-nonsense since the first Traveller episode of TNG.
- api 5y ago
  They missed such an opportunity with that show. The first Enterprise should have been even more “early” with artificial gravity that didn’t work well and consequentially Velcro everywhere like in the ISS. It might have looked a bit like a bigger ISS. When power came on the bridge display would show a GRUB boot loader and Linux kernel boot output. Their experiences should have been total immersion in the frontier. Long range subspace had not yet been mastered, so they are cut off after going much beyond our solar system… or maybe they can by stopping and boosting power achieve like 300 baud text links under proper conditions. No transporters. EVAs and shuttles only. When they wanted to look at something in space it would be like the space walk scene from 2010 (the underrated 2001 sequel). … and no weapons worth crap against anyone advanced. Maybe a railgun and a primitive phaser. Weak shields. This is way before the federation so dark forest and Wild West vibes.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    I forget where I heard this suggestion (Ex Astris Scientia, perhaps?), but I like the idea that the NX-01 should have been the first time humans made an antimatter powered warp drive, and everything before that was fusion powered warp drive. The possibility of main power being something other than antimatter also gives a reason why the TOS Romulan warbird was powered by “simple impulse” (which elsewhere seems to be fusion), and how on Earth Lily Sloane and Zefram Cochrane were able to power the Phoenix given the post-WW3 apocalypse and “six months to scrounge up enough titanium just to build a four-meter cockpit”. I think your worldbuilding would suit something earlier than Enterprise, but Enterprise was just before the foundation of the Federation, so I think they needed roughly the level of imbalance in the show — that said, one of my pet peeves is the way differences in skill/biology/technology/industrial output get squashed in narratives; the usual example I give is that Hawkeye and Thor shouldn’t be in the same battlespace in the same way that an olympic archer and a main battle tank shouldn’t be, but a developmentally realistic depiction of space battle with Vulcans and NX-01 (given time since becoming interstellar) ought to be similar to putting King Polydorus and his army in a fight with the entirety of all branches of the USA armed forces.
vimy 5y ago
I don’t know anyone who likes modern trek. Except Lower Decks, which comes the closest to that 90s trek feeling. Makes me wonder what the demographics are of Picard and Discovery’s viewership. Is it mainly younger viewers who didn’t experience trek before? For reference I’m early 30s and so are my friends. They should have just let Seth McFarlane be showrunner.
- colanderman 5y ago
  My Trekkie friends (also mid 30s) are into Picard for the nostalgia factor. At least, during our pre-COVID watch parties, the talk before each episode was almost always about which TNG and VOY stars were appearing and in what capacity.
  - robotmay 5y ago
    I really like the bits of nostalgia in Lower Decks. Riker is hilarious in it and Frakes seems to have had fun with it.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Wait, that's actually Frakes? It sounds so much like an imitator I just assumed...
- amalcon 5y ago
  I (mid 30s) think Picard actually works -- but only with the first season taken as a unit and including the finale. The entire season basically needs to be thought of as a single long movie. I don't want to spoil anything, but to me, the way the big threat was resolved perfectly captures that idealism that is synonymous with Star Trek. Short Treks also felt strong to me. It showed that the people making Discovery can make Star Trek work, if freed from the constraints of having to build a season long plot and appease the right focus groups. Discovery itself, on the other hand... It can be enjoyable at times, but one needs to forget that it's supposed to be Star Trek.
  - 5y ago

anotherhue 5y ago

Discovery feels like someone misread "life support systems" to mean "emotional support systems". Every other scene has characters empowering and affirming each other.

ragingrobot 5y ago
Thank you, I'm going to remember how you expressed that! This is what finally turned me off during season 3. It got way out of hand. Somebody got a standing ovation every chance possible, and it got sickening. What initially drew me to Discovery was that darkness it had, while not being overly dark. Fortunately S3 reminded me I had yet to catch up on The Expanse, and once I got back into season 4 I couldn't stop.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Ovations I could live with, it's the crying fests that kill me. I initially appreciated Discovery getting more serious about emotional life of the crew, particularly around traumatic events - but Burnham is overdoing it in an immersion-breaking way.