Star Trek

Not that I'll ever watch the next season of Picard but they should make Q a baddie again. Go back to when he was proper sinister and not trying to impregnate Janeway.

Picard’s Trekiness mostly extended to its cameos and casting, Discovery had episodes with TNG-y premises at least. Even if the resolutions were mostly everyone crying about how great Burnham is.

the first two episodes of Lower Decks were the weakest - give it a chance. The latest episode in S2 was brilliant.

I've completely given up with Star Trek. It's just so bad. I don't like the aesthetic and the writing is, well, it's hard to say just how bad it is.

Every single character in Discovery makes me want to either be sick or punch them in the face.

Picard wasn't much better either. Complete sentimental tosh for the most part.

The thing that annoys me the most is how you can tell every season of new trek is just made up as they go along. The whole structure of the series and the plot is just bouncing from one nonsense to the next.

I didn't watch Disco S3, and I won't ever. Same for Picard season 2. As much as I love the character, I ain't spending 10 hours of my life watching that dribble.

The new movie they're making is being written by Lindsey Beer, whose writing credits include such hits as fuck all and nothing, and Geneva Dworet, who has co written Tomb Raider reboot and Captain Marvel, and that's it. Doesn't sound promising to me.

Maybe I've outgrown it, and I'm being a cynical old boomer, but it seems like the franchise was better off in a coma than watching it slowly have its eye pulled out of its head like that poor borg lad in Picard.

I could never get past feeling it was Seth McFarlane cosplaying TNG. Maybe if he wasn't the lead it would be bearable.

The whole injoke thing annoys me. It's too present day and a total Rick and Morty rip off so far. So American.

Ok. I'll try Episode 3.

So I've finished reading the accompanying novel to TMP, the aptly named Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Novel, which happens to be the only Trek novel written by Gene Roddenberry. For anyone who's excited about a longer, more detailed version of the story without the actors and VFX, be warned that it is... not very good. It may be entertaining if you enjoy cringe, it may be very interesting if you're a psychoanalyst, but most people can safely skip it to put it mildly.

The main reason I read it was because in all these "debates" about what is real Trek, about Gene's Vision™ and if he was this sacred Great Bird of the Galaxy, or a deeply flawed person who could be quite an arse actually and shouldn't really be in charge of Trek, I found it interesting to read the one book he actually wrote. I think he's a bit of both; don't get me wrong, of course Trek wouldn't even exist without him, and the push for racial diversity, progressivism, the idealistic, optimistic nature especially of TNG that inspired millions of people, that was his doing and I honour him for that.

At the same time, he essentially stole half the royalties from the TOS theme composer ("I can explain: I needed money"), he tried to get sole writing credits for scripts that he only contributed to, he was a big fan of the casting couch, he installed his affairs (Nichols and Barrett) in his TV show, he bragged about an affair in the presence of both his wife and the woman in question. He was quite an arsehole so I don't feel bad about giving him shit either.

As for the quality of his own contributions, he wrote some of the dumbest scripts (e.g. "The Omega Glory" with the Yangs and Kohns and the US constitution), the TNG season he was most involved in was the first, the only film he was actually in charge of was TMP--in these cases, while clearly not all was bad, there were good reasons for taking control away from him which proved beneficial both to the films and TNG.

So, back to the book. In its opening chapter, Kirk insists that only this book gives the real account of everything that happened, implicitly casting doubt on the accuracy of the film, which is... unusual. He also addresses "speculations" that he and Spock might be a couple, to which he clarifies that he has no prejudice against anyone's sexual orientation but that he always found his "best gratification in this creature called woman".

Much of the film is weirdly about sex and in the book you can plainly see who was behind that, it's actually massively toned down in the film. In an early hologram chat with his ex,

It's not the only time he's talking about erections, the most attention Sulu is given in the book is when he desperately tries to hide his as Ilia is entering the bridge (not that I can blame him). But Ilia is alright with it,

Prior to this scene, Gene goes to great lengths to explain the overwhelming sexual attraction people feel to Deltans because, of course, their alien pheromones. That's where that "oath of celibacy" line comes from that is pretty confusing in the film without any context given.

Generally, attractiveness seems to be the most important feature of most women appearing in this book. Most are described as an "attractive female", or in the case of Uhura, "her fine-boned Bantu face". During the transporter incident, the shape of one of the two is that of an "attractive female", the woman on the Epsilon 9 space station is "the pretty lieutenant" as she speaks her last words before the station's destruction. The most notable exception to this is, interestingly, Janice Rand--but "Kirk always liked Rand". No kidding. Probably she hadn't aged well enough for Gene's taste.

After taking over the Enterprise from Decker, "He had also had that look which comes into some men’s eyes when they’ve just won a woman and she lies there ready to be taken". Later, "Decker slid out of the center seat, making room for Kirk."

One of the passable sections is when the author describes the strange interior of the alien ship (which may or may not be inspired by drug trips), but then he remembers it's time to talk about sex again. After the Ilia-probe appears on the Enterprise in Ilia's sonic shower,
Persis Khambatta refused to appear nude in the film. But of course, Decker has sex with the Ilia-probe.

But enough of this, let's talk about the quality of writing. It's terrible. The writing style is amateurish, pacing is way off the mark, the author rambles about whatever comes to his mind when he should be focussing on what's just happening, for example he evaluates if Ilia is correctly following protocol when she's jumping to injured Chekov's help while that plasma energy probe is messing around with the bridge. In the opening chapters, he spends way too much time describing some sort of alert implant in Kirk's head which transmits pictures of the destroyed Klingon ships into his mind, which is as nonsensical as it is uninteresting and it's never mentioned again.

He tries to use thou/thee on Vulcan without knowing how that works, hence we get "Are thee prepared...". And he throws around sciencey words without a clue what they mean ("the first human-made object to enter a time continuum")--although to be fair, the TV show was very guilty of that too.

Characters don't feel like characters, they feel like mouthpieces and mindpieces for the author's thoughts and ramblings, without much consideration for their personality. Non-central characters feel like furniture, Kirk may ramble about how he likes the youthful Russian or the "Asian romantic", but they feel like objects rather than people with any agency of their own. Generally, Kirk feels very out of character.

Way too much time is spent on Kirk's rivalry with Decker. Much of the time this seems more important to Kirk than the mission to save Earth, it is insufferably self-obsessed. And I find it difficult to ignore the parallels between Kirk trying to regain control of the Enterprise after the pause and Gene trying to regain control over Star Trek after the pause.

TOS and TNG writer David Gerrold ("The Trouble with Tribbles") said Gene had no humour whatsoever, and sure enough, there is no humour in this book, which feels strange considering this is TOS we're talking about.

I'll stop now. Much of the above points were exactly my criticisms of the film. While I don't know much about what went on behind the scenes there, the similarities are striking, and I'm not surprised how character work returned to top form in the sequel after they got Gene out of the way. Terrible pacing plagued not only TMP and this book, but also early TNG. Coincidence?

I would never recommend this book, but I hope I could give a little impression if you may want to read this book for whatever reason. It's not very long, but again, it is longer and slower than the film.

In the second episode of S2 it kinda has the show you want...

Rewatched TNG S2E13 "Time Squared" again recently, and then again. It seems to be a controversial episode, most either love it or hate it. I love it.

The ending is unsatisfactory, no doubt. But the 40 minutes leading up to it are imo among Trek's finest. It's great space horror/mystery. The soundtrack to this episode is probably my favourite of all Trek TV soundtracks, and Deanna actually gets to do something and has an agency of her own. Stewart is fucking spot on.

Apparently, Maurice Hurley wanted this to tie into "Q Who", as in Q revealing some 3 or so episodes later that he was behind this. Telling Picard how he thought he gave him a "fun" puzzle to solve. Q is often played halfway comedic/harmless, but I think this fits the character very well. It shows Q's more sinister side, how he finds amusement in tormenting the crew and especially Picard like this. I mean... if you take this episode as Q playing with Picard, it makes a lot of sense.

Picard is tested in this episode like he rarely is. Memorable dialogue:
Picard: "Release him."
Pulaski: "Do you know what you're doing?"
Picard: "No. Release him."

But apparently Gene shut down Hurley's plans, and so the episode ended and that was that.

Title sequence for new Star Trek Prodigy, will feature an animated Janeway too.
I really enjoyed the intro, might watch if it's not too much of a kids show.

Count me in with those criticisms, though I still watch it. I just put up with any old shite nowadays.

Random thought but I remember watching Voyager on a Sunday afternoon/evening (pretty sure this was the slot on BBC back in the day?). All my family used to take the piss out of me for watching Star Trek, but I used to defend it. Guess which episode it was on this day.

"GET THE CHEESE TO SICKBAY".

I couldn't really stick up for it after that point.

Ha yes, those episodes even make my toes curl. You can fully understand why most people think "Star Trek Fan" is a pejorative classification.

Wrong thread... Carry on talking about the millennium falcon.