STAR TREK You Know It-You Love It-Let's Talk About It!

“This guy I’m dating is Patrick Stewart.”?

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Trek-related and everyone needs this in their lives, so I’m dropping it here. Read the first response thread. :rofl:

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There is a novel, penned if I’m not mistaken by John DeLancie (AKA Q himself), or if not him, by Peter David. Making it essentially canon by default.

Edit: Whoops, should’ve read the rest of the thread before I responded. That’ll learn me.

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My first thought of him is always Roxanne.

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Hopefully, Kirk doesn’t feel the need to break out the windows of the Enterprise.

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I’m a big Deep Space Nine, The Motion Picture, and Original Series fan, so the last few years have been extremely painful to watch.
Great casts and terrific SFX teams, all wasted on some of the most hateful, cluttered, un-Trek like meandering stories I’ve ever seen, written by people who have clearly never watched the previous shows, nor understand how to plan out a story arc, nor seem to understand actual science in general; It physically hurts to watch, it’s like if stereotypical 90’s Sports Jocks tried to write an Asimov story based on cultural osmosis alone.
The current rights owners of the Star Trek franchise should be ashamed, if they had any capacity to feel human emotion.

I don’t want to go on too much, but I just wanted to drop in to say this:
My mother, the most Trekkie Trekker that ever existed, watched the original series first-run as a kid, went to conventions, a person who found aspects of enjoyment and true utopia Trek-ness in everything since, even Nemesis, actually said in a mid-2020 phone call:

If Picard hadn’t of had “Star Trek” tacked on in front of it… I wouldn’t have watched it. It was Star Trek in name only. …It was grotesque.

I can take severe disappointment from having watched this drivel myself, but I’ll never forgive the morons in charge of Trek for giving my mother’s lifetime love of Star Trek a “grotesque” chapter near the end. It was the first time we talked about the latest Trek either of us had watched that didn’t include any joy whatsoever.

Kurtzman & Co. need to stop being handed Sci-Fi shows to run, they’re incompetent, so obsessed with wistful faith nonsense, gore for the sake of gore, and don’t care in the slightest about the various good causes they namecheck to avoid negative feedback; They’re the complete antithesis of inventive utopia-exploring Sci-Fi, it’s draining.

I’ll be sitting in my corner remembering the embers of the fun, wonderful days of Sisko, Kirk, and so on.

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Have you seen an episode or two of Strange New Worlds?

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I love Star Trek. My first fandom now and always. I find something to love in all Trek.

And seriously, have you seen Strange New Worlds? It’s GLORIOUS.

EDIT: And I’ll admit, Lower Decks makes me giggle hysterically. It’s refreshing!

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Not until all of the episodes for Strange New Worlds are released. Anything with Kurtzman & Co.'s hands on it is guaranteed to end in disappointment, as far as the previous shows I have seen have gone, so like pulling an impacted tooth, it has to be done, but I’ll do it in one go instead of needlessly spreading out the potential pain.
(Fool me once, shame on them. Fool me five times, with the utterly agonizing Picard & Discovery, find me a crematorium.)

I’m not a fan of Rick & Morty’s brand of “nothing matters so just be awful” shtick (I’m more of a “”if nothing matters, then that’s more reason to do better” type), so I haven’t watched Lower Decks yet due to Mike McMahan creating it. I don’t mind the character deisgns I’ve seen, but I can’t comment on LD without having watched it.

(To be clear, I did watch the first season of R&M, first few episodes were alirght, but the latter half was completely dissapointing and not my bag.)

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Ouch! I’m sorry you seem to have so much ire for Trek right now, because there really is some wonderful stuff in there and I love that the Trek Universe is expanding so much!

Discovery has its problems, I will not deny. But it has given us wonderful characters in Saru, Georgiou, Jett Reno, and Book. It also helped kick off a whole new era of Trek.

Picard also may be darker than I really wanted / needed it to be, but Patrick Stewart’s gravitas is still mesmerizing, and getting to see Q again? chef’s kiss

Lower Decks makes me laugh, because it pokes gentle fun at Trek Tropes and bullseyes it more often than not.

Prodigy is for a younger audience, but is heartwarming in that way.

And I’m telling you, Strange New Worlds is just wonderful. A callback to TOS in every way.

I really, really hope you can get back to loving the Trek Universe. There’s something for everyone, and I’m looking forward to what’s coming next!

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Don’t get me wrong, I love the Trek Universe, the pain I feel is because I do, I’m waiting for it to return.
Kurtzman & Co. do not have the interest or ability to write or construct something as cohesively spellbinding as the entirely of Deep Space Nine, or as perfectly, ideally Trek as The Motion Picture is.
At this rate though, I’ll be long dead before anything like those is ever greenlit, if at all.

I wouldn’t be watching still where I can if I didn’t have a sliver of hope remaining, that’s continually been beat down by veritable scripted abuse every step of the way.

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I’m probably your mom’s age, I watched TOS when it first aired, was a total Trekkie up until Insurrection - figured, like you, that Trek was essentially dead at that point (your poor mom stuck it out longer than I did, more power to her)

And I tell you and your mom, right now, that you will LOVE Strange New Worlds with the light of ten million galaxies. It has reignited my love of Star Trek - as LadyStarblade said, it is GLORIOUS. It is everything Trek ever was or should have been. The writing is great, the characters are great, the SFX are great. Even the weakest episodes are miles ahead of any other incarnation of Trek since TOS. It is hopeful, it is bright, it is just wonderful.

Don’t wait. Watch it now.

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I don’t mean to be too morbid, but I hope you noticed I spoke of her in the past-tense.

If Strange New Worlds ends up being fantastic, great, I’d like to finally watch something new under the Star Trek name that dosen’t make me regret living.

However, her lifelong Trekkie journey ended with a slow loss of will in Discovery, and finishing with the "grotesque* abomination that is Picard; Kurtzman & Co. can forever rot for causing that.

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I’m sorry about your mom. I understand how grating it can be to see something you love ground down into nothing.

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We weren’t exactly close, but shows like Trek were a common way to talk and stay in touch. Not everyone gets to hang around to wait to see if the incompetent oafs running a show are going to suddenly actually make something watchable.

I’m not a fan of the slapdash way shows are being farmed out, drawn out unfocused mini-series that waste your time. Every episode is someone’s first or last, and should have more care taken in the writing. They desperately need a JMS-type in their midst.

I’m not saying previous series were perfect throughout, or that long-form stories in series don’t work. I can still watch Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, or the recent seasons of Doctor Who and be throughly entertained in a myriad of ways. Kurtzman & Co have no excuse for their waste of the Trek franchise, and should not be commended for minimum effort.

Again, I’ll keep watching each show in turn, if one of these shows is even remotely like actual Star Trek, I’ll be happy to sing it’s praises like any other show I love. But I’m not going to pretend like the same idiots running it into the ground are going to suddenly produce gold while they’re still involved.

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The advantage you’ll have with SNW is that it is an episodic format like the old shows used to be. There are character arcs, sure, but if for some reason you don’t like an episode there’s a different one coming up next.

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Is there an actual four-to-five-Act structure in each episode?
I know we don’t need commercial breaks anymore to cement them (and good riddance too), but is that basic framework of building episodic storytelling there?

Actually curious btw. I’m very fond of the original Cage/Menagerie episodes, so if you’re trying to say it carries that on well, I’m interested.
However I’ve been beaten in the face with pain from the previous two & three seasons of P & D, so I hope you understand my hesitancy to trust yet another show from the same showrunners.

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Yes. Moreover, the first six episodes have tracked specific TOS episode types. The seventh is a bit more like some later Trek, but it still fits in the traditional structure. The show is explicitly and deliberately Star Trek as we once knew it.

The episodes take place post Talos IV.

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I see Kurtzman & Goldsman’s names all over it, so I have 0.1% hope it’ll get the utopian atmosphere and in-universe rules Roddenberry was all about realised correctly.
I know the cast and sets and music and effects are going to be fine, the crews do their jobs well on all the previous seasons I’ve seen, it’s the content itself that I’m dreading.

But again, I’ll give it watch, maybe one of the episodes not co-written or tampered with too much by those two clueless idiots that don’t deserve the series will be enjoyable, maybe the third showrunner Lumet will be a good influence, her track record seems to be better, and moreso marred by Kurtzman’s co-writing on her stuff than anything else. (I’ve been watching some of The Man Who Fell To Earth cause of Ejiofor, and I can bet the enjoyable aspects are all down to his lead acting and Lumet’s share of the writing. All the unpleasant parts are guaranteed Kurtzman nonsense.)

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I was apprehensive about SNW, too, because I totally detested Discovery - except for Capt. Pike in Season 2.

And Pike was awesome.

And he continues to be awesome on SNW - even more so because it’s his show, and because his superpower is empathy. We’re seeing new sides of characters like Uhura and Chapel (not to mention Spock) that are both totally new and yet true to the characters you already know and love. We’re meeting new characters who also have a lot to offer (ask LadyStarblade how much she loves Erica Ortegas!) and yes, visiting Strange New Worlds.

I knew more about the crew of Enterprise after TWO EPISODES than I did in 3 seasons of Discovery. The spotlight is definitely on the characters and not on the action, even though there is action.

I don’t know how much Kurtzman and Goldman have to do with the every day show running, but I doubt it’s very much because this show is very different than what we’ve seen in their other shows (still mad that Bryan Fuller left Discovery before it got off the ground, damn it!)

As someone who fell out of love with Trek decades ago, all I can say is Trek is back and I’m back in love again.

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