usernamefactory
@usernamefactory@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Which shows are worth watching? 1 week ago:
Always striking to me how many Star Trek fans are so dismissive of Star Trek. I know its of it’s time, but TOS didn’t take its place in history by accident. Wonderful storytelling, iconic characters - absolutely a must to watch, at least to try it out.
Voyager, by comparison, is pretty mid. The writing is super inconsistent and it absolutely squanders its own premise. Notable for Janeway, Seven, and the Doctor, but it’s definitely rough going.
But it’s still a good watch. The only ones I don’t think I could enthusiastically recommend are TAS, Enterprise, and Picard.
- Comment on Just Finished Lower Decks 3 weeks ago:
I’m old enough to remember the premiere of DS9, but I did appreciate Discovery’s move to the future. I liked the political aspects of the rebuilding of the Federation. I have always been a little bugged by how Earth centric Trek tends to be, so I especially appreciated the fact that Earth had seceded by the start of season 3. Not sure how much I can expect Academy to pick up on any of that, though.
- Comment on Just Finished Lower Decks 3 weeks ago:
Yeah, I hate to say it, but it makes sense from a bean-counter’s perspective. Lower Decks seemed to mostly target hardcore fans, and hardcore fans will already be subscribing to watch SNW. If its not gaining them any extra subscriptions, they don’t care about it.
Section 31 and Academy are both trying to court people outside of the existing fandoms. Certainly not very successfully in the case of Section 31, but the reasoning at play is pretty clear.
- Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Wraps Filming 3 weeks ago:
The Daddykins to someone’s Ronny as it were.
- Comment on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Wraps Filming 3 weeks ago:
Nice patch, nice pennant. I hope they’re planning some solid merch for this. Even if the show turns out to be a disappointment, I’d be happy to buy some Starfleet Academy gear.
- Comment on "Star Trek is dying." How would you sell it to a younger audience? 3 weeks ago:
Season 4 has been confirmed as well. It’s true that there was a longer gap between seasons 2 and 3, but that’s when the Hollywood strikes fell, so it’s not surprising.
- Comment on Alex Kurtzman Gives Live-Action Comedy Update, Says Star Trek Can “Broaden” 5 weeks ago:
You forget the option of puppetry! The best aliens have always been puppets.
- Comment on Interview: Alex Kurtzman on Section 31 and the "evolution" of Star Trek 5 weeks ago:
Honestly, I think this has more consistently been Star Trek’s approach. Early TNG was the exception. It really pushed for an “evolved humanity” model for Star Trek, where something has fundamentally shifted in our collected psychology. Examples like Dr. Crusher speaking like its remarkable that people used to fear death, or Picard dismissing religion as childish superstition come to mind as particularly strong hints that we’ve changed a lot.
But later Trek pushes against this: DS9 with it’s murky way arc, Voyager with episodes like Equinox and Scorpion, and even late TNG with Pegasus and Journey’s End. They are all more likely to see the “evolved human” as something to be tested by the story, with the drama coming from the possibility that it might fail that test.
And I think this is for the best. If humanity is too evolved and too perfect, the series can feel a bit heavy on U.S. exceptionalism - with the very American coded Starfleet going around to other worlds to fix and moralize about other peoples’ problems, but never needing to self-reflect or improve on themselves. I think a healthy balance is needed to actually model the qualities that allowed humanity to improve in the first place (and that we really need to see more of in the world now).
- Comment on Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation 2 months ago:
The Orville was never funny, and it got much better when it stopped trying to be. Star Trek has a pretty good track record with humour. Especially where Newsome is concerned.
- Comment on Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation 2 months ago:
Huh, I thought I’d heard Netflix cancelled it, but according to everything I see on Google they just haven’t announced anything one way or the other. It’s been long enough that I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
- Comment on Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation 2 months ago:
Sure, I’d understand your sentiment more when all those shows were being announced, rather than after they’ve all been canned. Right now we’re looking at ten episodes plus the Section 31 special in the coming year, which doesn’t seem like over doing it to me. But I was raised on seasons of twenty-plus episodes, so maybe I’m spoiled.
- Comment on Tawny Newsome Says Live Action Star Trek Workplace Comedy Will Explore Life Outside The Federation 2 months ago:
They’ve cancelled Discovery, Prodigy, Picard, Lower Decks, and you’re worried they’re going to over-do it? If they do it much less, there wont be any Trek left!
- Comment on 25 Years Ago, A One-of-a-Kind Movie Captured the Hearts of Star Trek Fans Everywhere 2 months ago:
Yup. We also laughed at Shatner’s get a life sketch, and dozens of gags from Futurama and Family Guy.
The ways humans engage with their personal fascinations are often inherently ridiculous, and everybody ought to be able to laugh at that.
- Comment on Where to start? 3 months ago:
Yeah, definitely not. Picard and Discovery were very serialised, as were the later seasons of DS9, but outside of those you can pretty much dip your toe in to almost any episode and not worry about getting sucked into a whole arc. It’s probably best to keep a low-commitment mindset and skip around a bit until something really works for you.
- Comment on Where to start? 3 months ago:
Since you’ve already watched the relevant parts of Discovery, I’d recommend SNW. It spins off directly from Disco season 2, but it’s more episodic and has a wider tonal range. Some episodes are dark and serious, some are plain goofy. Overall you’ll find it much more light hearted and adventurous than Disco.
Otherwise, I’m a big supporter of starting at the beginning. Give a few episodes of TOS a try. Yes, it’s a product of it’s time, but it still holds up as great TV. It’s also one of the few Trek shows that really hits the ground running quality wise - the '90s series tend to take a few seasons to rev up.
- Comment on Wagon Train to the Stars 4 months ago:
Maybe not literally, but the season 3 episode where Discovery arrived in the future went hard on the western vibes. I think they even included swinging saloon doors at one point.
- Comment on Anyone here play the Super Star Trek terminal game? 4 months ago:
I grew up with this variation on my C64. Good times. gaming.trekcore.com/startrekc64-1/
I’ve also come across this mashup with 25th Anniversary, which looks like great fun: emabolo.itch.io/super-star-trek-25th
- Comment on I just finish to see all TNG movies. 5 months ago:
Now see, if they’d had Jokester Data drop that pun right before the credits rolled, I’d have forgiven the whole thing.
- Comment on I just finish to see all TNG movies. 5 months ago:
I thought the crossover element of Generations really brought it down. The original cast had a far better farewell in Star Trek VI, and I don’t think the writers of Generations had enough to say about Kirk’s character to justify the tortured story logic that brought him in.
Give me a Kirkless cut and I’ll be so much happier. All the pure TNG elements work fine for me, McDowell is great, and the D looks beautiful with cinematic lighting.
- Comment on Happy Star Trek Day! What was your first contact? 5 months ago:
I was raised a Trekkie, can’t rightly say what my first contact was. My earliest memory of it was me expressing a preference for “the one with Spock” over TNG, the only other option at the time.
- Comment on ‘Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V’ Audio Drama Podcast Is Currently Casting 6 months ago:
Canon is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Canon is a pretty flower… which smells bad.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
That footnote points to an uncredited trekplace article from 2004 that itself has no citations. There was never an “original vision" that Klingons have bumpy heads, that was an idea entirely original to TMP.
Anyway, how do we feel about the Star Trek III redesign? In TMP it was one hairless bump that was supposed to represent a spinal column, running all the way from the back over the cranium. TSFS and onward, suddenly it was a flatter, wider set of ridges that was localized only to the forehead, with a full head of hair behind it. For some reason I’m always seeing people act like those are the same design, but to me the differences are glaringly obvious.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
TV and movie productions are collaborative efforts undertaken by a huge number of creative people, and I don’t think any of them make their decisions for no reason. The “original creator” of the Klingons was Gene L. Coon, who had nothing to do with their portrayal in TMP.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
Who wanted a visual reboot of the Klingons?
Gene Roddenberry, I guess. IMO the guy really fell off when he turned Trek into a saturday morning cartoon show. But yeah, sweaty orc is right, just look at these monstrosities:
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
Yeah, I’m facetiously comparing the 1979 arguments over bumpy headed Klingons to the 2017 arguments over cone headed Klingons. What’s “new” keeps on changing, but the arguments about it stay eerily familiar.
- Comment on What are the biggest red flags when talking with a Trek "fan"? 6 months ago:
NuTrek started when they did a full visual reboot, including completely changing the look of the Klingons: TMP.
Then it got worse, when they followed that up with a grimdark shoot-em-up that felt nothing like Trek. These people aren’t even fans of the show!
- Comment on Extended Clip | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - Season 3 7 months ago:
Last season’s Charades also supports the genetically encoded notion. Which goes against everything we know about Vulcans, but makes for fun comedic episodes, so they’re probably going to just keep doing it. Psychosomatic is as good an explanation as any.
- Comment on Cillian O'Sullivan To Play Roger Korby in Strange New Worlds – Trek Central 7 months ago:
I agree completely, and it really didn’t help that they introduced him in an episode that took place during an alternate version of the TOS timeframe. I’m can deal with him as a younger Kirk, but as a version of Kirk in his prime? No way.
- Comment on Meet the New Class of Cadets in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 7 months ago:
In 1997 adding a sexy Bord crew member to Voyager reeked of desperation. But the writers told to make it work actually gave a shit and whoever was in charge of casting took the time to find someone who could actually act, so in the end Seven Of Nine became one of the best things to come out of Voyager (nevermind the cringe worthy marketing and costume).
End of the day, I don’t care about the mental state of the exec signing off on an idea, because even a bad one can turn out good with the right talent. And I don’t even see why Star Trek as a teen drama is a bad idea. Star Trek can work with all sorts of genres, and we’ve still got SNW holding down the fort as the old school exploration series.
- Comment on Meet the New Class of Cadets in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 7 months ago:
It’s weird. It’s a weird show. It doesn’t fit in. And it doesn’t want to fit in.
