Mine is that Discovery should have been a series taking place in the Picard era.
Keiko wasn’t that bad of a character. She wasn’t a great character, but the biggest problem was that her actress, Rosalind Chao, had very poor chemistry with Colm Meaney, who in turn had great chemistry primarily with Alexander Siddig, and also with several other actors. This wasn’t a problem when she was cast in “Data’s Day” as the bride to be with nervous bride energy, if anything that’s an asset in such a short time frame. But then expecting that to work in what is supposed to be a long-term marriage is what led to perception of her being all MIIIIIILES all the time.
Now, I don’t know that mid to late 90s Star Trek producers would have been on board, but they should have written an amicable divorce plot for the O’Briens. Miles and Keiko clearly grew apart from each other over the course of the show. Between her extended trips to Bajor and the way she all but threw Miles at Kira, they were already about 85% of the way there anyway. A divorce would have been a great way to resolve that issue, and use Star Trek as it was always intended: to explore real life issues in a scifi universe.
Wow that is hot.
They need to actually give a full look into the economics of the federation. Yeah, it’s space communism. But I want more specifics.
There’s a recent episode in Lower Decks where they liberate a planet from capitalism… by essentially taking all the “worthless” gold and jewels and giving it to Space Pirate Royalty to broker a peace deal between them and the Federation.
I don’t doubt that the majority of the occupants of said planet are now happier not having to grind for capital…, but apparently having capital is still an immensely useful resource that the Federation is happy to, uh, quietly commandeer in lieu of payment for its, uh, services to the planet(?)
I still need to catch up on the latest season(s?) of lower decks. And given the fact that lower decks is a comedy, and borderline non-canon, I’d take that with a giant grain of salt.
Energy-to-(organic)matter conversion + futuristic power generators makes feeding your population a triviality. That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
But Star Trek is a fictional utopia, much like Communism.
In reality, corruption would still mess up government in a “real world” Star Trek. I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares? It’s not really relevant to the themes of the shows.
Star Trek is founded on liberal ideas popular in the mid-20th century that humanity could achieve unity and peace if it just cast aside superficial differences like race and gender, allowing us to focus on exploring the universe once we’d gotten over fighting each other. That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s like how the force is best left a mystical property of the universe in Star Wars, rather than science-ized with medichlorians.
That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
Right, but they very clearly don’t get all of their food out of a replicator, nor do they use the holodeck for things like hair cuts. There is still people who serve as cooks, waitresses, barbers, etc despite the technology being there to not need those jobs.
And that’s what I want explored in more depth.
I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares?
I’ve been dipping my toe in the books. At least in the first book for PIC, The Last Best Hope, they very clearly still have political struggles for power, corruption, tribalism, and voting. It ain’t a dictatorship, but the goals and views of the government leaders aren’t wholey benevolent.
A particularly good example was the Federation council member Olivia Quest. She’s a rep from a border planet, whos been facing some issues with the romulan star going supernova, and all the immigrants that are mayhaps being sent their way. So she raises a big stink over any and all help towards the romulans. It’s self serving, selfish, and tribalism, but she was voted in and she wasn’t alone.
All of this is very familiar to real life. But it’s the exact kind of details I want, but on one of the shows. They made it interesting in the books, they could just as easily make it interesting in the show.
That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Maybe the tech of replicators/transporters/holodecks should be left unscrutinized, because ultimately it relies on technobable for it to be compatible with a suspension of disbelief. But I don’t think the same goes for the societal structures of the federation. It worked in the Last Best Hope, I think it could work on the screen.
As much as it is fun to revisit legacy characters and settings, they need to do a complete break, TNG style, and set a show somewhere where we can have new adventures with new characters. Lower Decks is somehow the closest to doing this and it’s a member berry show. The constant revisiting (and retconning) is slowly suffocating the franchise.
Yeah, somewhere in the 26th century when time travel is the final frontier would be cool. An entire ship of historians infiltrating alien history.
Could be a combination of Loki and Dr Who.
Lower Decks deserves 7 seasons x23 episodes per season, with better quality animation for the space-based visuals
Picard should have died in season 1 of PIC and the rest of the seasons should have concentrated on the new crew gallivanting across the galaxy in their newly christened ship, “The Picard”.
SNW should never have killed off Hemmer.
Cumberbatch was miscast as Khan.
Totally agree about Cumberbatch.
Cumberbatch should have been Gary Mitchell. He’s got the right vibe for a man losing touch with his humanity as he’s consumed by his godlike abilities, and a movie expanding on Mitchell would cover more new and interesting ground than plagiarizing Wrath of Khan.
oh boy. here we go.
Faith of the Heart is great. the arrangement is a little weak but the tune itself rules and the words capture Archer so well i was shocked to learn it was a cover and not purpose-written for that
The Wrath of Kahn is just ok. it’s less Star Trek and more an action movie celebrating the characters that we love, which makes it just the same as the later movies everyone hates. the only ones that are really feature-length Trek are Motion Picture and The Undiscovered Country. Into Darkness would be listed there too if the plot didn’t keep getting hijacked by Wrath of Khan nostalgia baiting, ironically
the soap opera vibes in Discovery make sense in universe. they never really got a chance to be a peacetime exploration vessel and then it turned out their captain was secretly a space Nazi. compare and contrast how Pike treats them and the Enterprise crew- he seems to be aware of this and treats them with kid gloves. whether or not that was intentional and/or if it makes for good TV is left as an exercise to the reader
Dear Doctor was a good episode. they didn’t condemn those people to die, they offered them a multigeneration treatment that just kicked the can down the road. it’s not about the decision so much as the decision to not make a decision (which granted, Rush tells us is still a choice). it’s messy but that’s the point. Cogenitor is the episode that deserves the hate. it may very well be the single worst episode in all of Trek
The problem with Dear Doctor is that the premise is pure gibberish. Evolution isn’t an intelligent force that makes decisions, it’s not a predetermined path, species don’t go extinct to benefit others, and evolutionary changes don’t affect the entire population simultaneously. However, every one of those is treated as true for the episode and then they made it clear that the events were the inspiration for the creation of the Prime Directive. If not for that last part, it would probably be dismissed as yet another bad take on evolution from Trek, but that it’s specifically intended to be one of the most important moments in Starfleet history is what makes it stick out.
A few quibbles.
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I would argue that Insurrection also qualifies as a feature-length Star Trek episode. It has good moral quandaries, an interesting sci-fi premise, all the hallmarks of classic Trek.
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Code of Honor is the worst Trek episode.
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“Spock’s Brain” has been memed as the worst episode ever, one of the ones we pretend doesn’t exist.
My hot take is that it’s not actually that bad. It’s not a top tier episode, but it’s perfectly serviceable. The worst actual thing in the episode is the sound effect used for the medical device to keep brainless Spock alive. I’ll grant that. Otherwise, the central conflict is average Trek stuff. The scene where McCoy gets an ancient medical database downloaded into his brain is actually really neat.
I am convinced the legacy of an especially bad reputation of this episode is because it appeared on a few “Worst Episode” lists because of the personal taste of the authors and very few people actually watch TOS for themselves, but instead absorb it through articles. So it just became accepted that the episode was outlandishly bad.
Porgs > Baby Yoda
Moopsy > both
I love that famous quote from Teal’c, “Get off your encountersuited butts and Remember the Cant!”
The Tholians are the scariest alien race in the series.
More exposition! Explain yourself.
For me, the Borg were boring until First Contact, where they became scary. Invasive. Not just lumbering Frankenstein’s monsters with good shields.
But I want to hear more about your thoughts on the Tholians.
The Borg came about when I was very young, so they were incredibly scary to me.
I recall the Tholians from a Game Boy game I had, but they were no big deal. It was when they were featured on Enterprise that they became scary to me. They’re so different and we don’t know a whole lot about them (I haven’t seen any Trek after Enterprise, no spoilers please). That’s what makes them scary to me.
That’s because Tholians originally came from ST:TOS, and TOS had a relatively large number of non-Sapien races. TNG made bumpy-foreheads a standard, and later retconned it into the universe with the Progenitor storyline - probably as a cost-saving measure - but TOS was full of truly alien races which looked nothing like humans. Most were one-off encounters, and the recurring aliens tended to be humanoid: Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans. Cost, a recognition that viewers were going to struggle with identifying with non-humanoid body plans, and probably realizing that fleshing out a truly alien psychology was a lot of hard work; easier when the Enterprise has only a brief, single-episode encounter with a race.
TNG, and later series, went hard-core on the bumpy foreheads, and most of the few non-humanoid aliens were some sort of nebula or energy creature - far cheaper to render. At one point I hoped that with how much of new series were CGI, and his cheap it had become, that new series would ditch the Proginator-dominated interactions and re-introduced alien aliens. Lower Decks did, a bit, and The Orville (ST-adjacent) did a little better than the usual live-action ST. Bab5 was still mostly humanoid, although two major, recurring species were very inhuman.
Anyway, TOS did a commendable job of populating the universe with really alien aliens, and did so long before CGI. It’s one reason why I think TOS is still the best ST.
Bab5 was still mostly humanoid, although two major, recurring species were very inhuman.
B5 also had almost no budget. A lot of the sets are TOS quality despite being made in the '90s.
My hot take is that the dominion war was hot garbage. Just episode after episode of the least fun parts of trek for me. It has some stand out episodes, but it drags and I basically stop rewatches in the late seasons. I also think Sisko’s ending sucks, he should have stayed with Jake. Lastly, the prophets were way better before they introduced Pah-Wraiths and made them way more mystical.
It think the Dominion war works but as a framework for some of the more complicated choices the characters need to make. It also give us a chance for decisions to not play out in an hour episode.
It gave us the most interesting human klingon stories since TOS. Allies with different views and where the klingon perspective has more value.
I agree the actual battle scenes and episodes are usually week.
I also agree Sisko and the wraith / prophets stuff was terrible though. Though I always hated the prophet stories not just the end. I would have loved to see a better ending to Dukat and Winn than blasted with space magic.
Star Trek just isn’t good at big wars. Single battles where “Oh shit there’s a borg cube coming” can be tense and exciting but I’m way more into the ethical dilemma or space mystery mind screw episodes.
I think that’s the main problem with Enterprise. Someone fresh out of Voyager’s writing room said the phrase “temporal cold war” without thinking about what those words meant first, and then they said “Fuck it, let’s go full Starship Troopers.”
Star Trek should not be as expansive as it is, because the sheer volume discourages new viewers from engaging with it more than casually. It’s the same problem as one piece.
New IP pls
Oof.
If the Borg ever watch The Matrix, the galaxy is theirs.
wouldn’t they just laugh/smirk at the idea of enslaving humanity as a power resource? Or do you mean conquering their enemies by placing them into pleasant simulations before assimilating them?
The pleasant simulation thing. If word got out that the Borg were handing out you own personal Holodeck, planets would be seeking them out for assimilation.
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country really does a lot of the original cast dirty.
In what way?
Both Uhura and McCoy display shocking incompetence in their jobs. As a comms officer, Uhura should know basic Klingon, something that has been retconned in later iterations of comms officers. McCoy should have the medical knowledge to treat Klingons the same way he should be able to treat a lot of other aliens on Enterprise.
Scott and Chekov are slumming it on the Enterprise. Scott has been shown to be a great engineering marketing, so it doesn’t make sense that he is still chief engineer on the Enterprise. Maybe Starfleet still doesn’t trust Scott after Scott disabled the Excelsior, but Scott should be doing something bigger. Chekov was a first officer on another ship before coming back to the Enterprise as second officer. Chekov should be a captain by now.
Spock is going some high admiralty shit in this movie while being a captain, since he can’t get promoted over Kirk. At this point, Spock should have transitioned to being an ambassador as part of this movie.
Kirk is really washed up career wise in this movie. He’s only bring drug along because of Spock. He also is set up as a patsy for the bad admirals. It shows how low his star has fallen when he was used as a pawn rather than be an active participant in the politics of what is going on.
I never liked Star Trek and never will.
TNG is boring as hell, genuinely, and a complete abandonment of the space opera formula that gave TOS its charm. The entire TNG cast is dull and equally as robotic as Data, who gets far too much emphasis every episode. It’s exhausting and repetitive to constantly show Data making the same head and eyebrow movements, demonstrating emotions like irritation while everybody pretends he doesn’t have emotions, and everybody prefacing every sentence with “Captain…” Frankly I think TNG was written to appeal exclusively to nerds who get off on watching people do things robotically. The only interesting character is Q because everybody else’s dead performance makes him look like a superstar.
