That is the important question posed at Tech Republic.
The Borg Queen single-handedly diminished the Borg from a personification of everyone’s secret fear of the dehumanizing power of technology and conformity run amok into two-bit techno-zombie henchmen of everyone’s un-fondly remembered codependent ex-girlfriend. (It’s worth noting that in First Contact, the Borg assimilate you vampire-bite style, rather than through the slow, tortuous process seen in “The Best of Both Worlds.†These are B-movie monsters now, not powerfully terrifying metaphors for identity-stripping monoculture.)
By the time Voyager comes along, the uber-scary Borg are getting pwned by giant preying mantis aliens, outwitted on a weekly basis, and then eventually domesticated into vapid plot-device-sprouting eye candy in the form of Seven of Nine. The Borg aren’t a force of nature anymore, they’re cube-dwelling morons working for an easily duped pasty-faced dictator who has devolved into unknowing self-parody. In other words, the Borg are Dunder-Mifflin, minus Jim and Pam.
I thought the actress was the same as the one who portrayed the Ice Queen in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” but I was wrong.
Dan – How could you forget Jeri Ryan? Her “sex scandal” with her ex-husband derailed his US Senate bid against Barack Osama.
Plus, she was a high school teacher on Boston Public. Right. Like lots of high school teachers have porn-star-hot bodies. Just sayin’
I wasn’t forgetting Jeri Ryan, was I?
So, for you, the domestication of the Borg was okay, because of the breasts, JD?
She only rates 7 of 9? Tough crowd.
ST jumped the ship with DS9’s third season.
Voyager? Humphth. Alien stew brewers and a bovine Borg. Starring the wife of a liberal Democrat. Her character is bipolar and yet has command of very destructive machinery. Just like Hillary will be as president.
Dan – I can honestly say that I have never watched an episode of Star Trek that Denny Crane was not in.
“Jumped the ship” should be “jump the shark”, although I kind of like the twist of the former.
I’ve barely watched all Spawn of ST. Cheesy and dated as the original series is, it is still my favorite and I’ve never been able to get completely involved in any of the spinoffs. Probably because they still followed the “everything back to status quo in 60 minutes”
On the other hand, Battlestar Galactica is what good sci-fi should be.
It was for me.
Hey, it could’ve been worse, the franchise could have tried to stick with the Ferengi.
Can you picture one of those in a catsuit trying to bring the horny male demographic back into the fold?
When did Star Trek jump? Q.
(really, with those really lame Saturday morning cartoons)
Sorry, ST jumped the shark with the third season opener of ST:TOS, “Spock’s Brain”. What a crappy episode. Downhill from there.
Dan and McGehee
You guys cannot possibly imagine the number of times I have heard that phrase in my lifetime.
A truer & scarier example of the dehumanizing power of technology and conformity run amok I’ve never seen…
As I sit here in my 6×6 cubicle at the phone company.. the center of universal mediocrity.. I realize it’s too late for me.. I’ve been assimilated.. Not 7 of 9.. just one of a million ashen faced zombies.
Someone please shoot me.
In your defense Dan, at a cursory glance the similarity is enough to deem her the Ice Queen clone…
Nipples?! THERE’S NO NIPPLES IN STAR TREK!…
The White Witch was Tilda Swinton, which looks nothing at all like the Borg babe… but she has her own unique allure.. Very sharp as Rebecca Dearborn in Vanilla Sky (2001)
“Someone please shoot me.”
Ouroboros,
I could probably do that, except that I am going to have to shoot myself first, so I don’t know if it would be technically feasible.
Darleen nails it. Star Trek has always been too prissy, too clean, too moralistic, too contrived in its packaging of moral dilemma. A whole universe created in which evil always devolves into a sad misunderstanding, and mostly it has been better sci-fi – Farscape, BSG, Firefly – which has diminished Star Trek, which has at best stood still. Jeri Ryan though. That’s not nothing.
I’m not sure if I could put a finger on a ‘jump the shark’ moment – perhaps all of Voyager, but that’s really just the last few turns of the spiral which ends with the franchise on the floor in a pool of its own vomit called ‘Enterprise’.
Things started to go downhill with TNG. Once the therapist showed up on the bridge nest to the captain, it should have been clear that it was doomed. Sappy, insipid stories, techno-babble ‘plotting’, holodeck fan-fic wet dreams, Wesley Crusher/Marty Sue, Q, horror after horror after horror. There were a few shining moments, but the arc was clear.
DS9 tried, it really did. And for the most part, it did a good job. But in the end, we’re still left with a messiah/ascension story arc (echoing Wesley’s embarassing departure). Not that these are necessarily bad – Bab5 did it relatively well, and SG1 revels in it’s own cheese – Daniel’s dead again? But with the preponderance of god-like aliens in the ST setting, having this happen again is a bit much. And it detracted from the efforts of mere mortals in the conflicts of the series. On the whole, I’d say DS9 was a step up from TNG.
It didn’t matter, though – if DS9 was a step up, Voyager was a leap off a cliff. Both the primary chute and reserve failed to stop the descent. Poor casting, poor writing, poor acting. The worst abuse of the techno-amnesia of ST (holographic lungs? Why do we bother having bodies, then?), and technobabble replacing plot in the last 5 minutes of the second episode. Superadvanced aliens in episode 1, and time travel in episode 3. From the beginning, it was out of ideas; seven seasons followed. Like TNG, there were a few brighter moments (see above links), but they both panned out; the first was erased, and the second, while threatening, was forgotten after the second appearance.
Jeri Ryan was nice to look at in that glitterly costume and heels, don’t get me wrong – but Seven of Nine was embarassing. It was outright pandering; we’re not even trying for an excuse, really, just putting up a hot chick in a skin-tight outfit. Don’t you like it? What, aren’t all ST viewers drooling fanboys in their parents basement? She was the epitome of the waste of Voyager – so much potential for good storytelling, thrown away for more of the same drek. What is life like for a ‘liberated’ Borg drone? Especially one who was assimilated before puberty, and released after…she could have been used to show us the attempt at rebuilding of a truly broken human being – but no. We get T&A with a metal eyebrow. This is Voyager in a lifted-and-separated nutshell.
Then, Enterprise.
I think Berman set out to try, to really try something new. There were good moments, several of them – relatively complex characters, some intimations of a real military, demonstrations of what life was like before the Federation. Huge potential there, and some of it exploited. But we get time travel, more time travel – oooh, a WW2 crossover, never seen that in ST before! – and in the end…the holodeck. It devolved into more of the same. It was stuck – Berman wanted something new, and some of the fans wanted something new…but he didn’t really go anywhere new, and the segment of the fans that wanted ‘TOS The Early Years Just Like The First Show’ were mightily unhappy no matter where he went. If you’re going to throw out canon, what replaces it had better be good, because you’re going to lose viewers. And it just wasn’t good enough.
(Side note: Enterprise was plotted out of order. One of the points of TOS was that we were going out just to see what’s out there. Enterprise put the ‘going out’ as a reaction to the Xindi attack. The attack should have been a consequence of the exploration later in the series, pushing humanity towards the idea of a larger organization to counter such threats.)
I don’t hold out a lot of hope for any new ST efforts. For serious scifi, I’ve got BSG. For ‘explosions and cheese’, the Stargates. For humor, Eureka.
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was Tilda Swinton. An appealing enough woman in her own way, until she opens her mouth and you find out she’s a ridiculous Marxist harpy. Ah well.
I take it that Noah is a fan.
The whole series jumped the shark and became unbelievable as soon as the Holodeck appeared.. Once they had the holodeck why the hell would they do anything else? At that point they became as God.. masters of their own self created billion universes with the freedom to be and do anything they wanted.. why waste it exploring and fighting in a world no more subjectively real than the ones they created in the Holodeck?
I was always disappointed that they weren’t more creative in their Holodeck fantasies.. Riker seemed to be the only only that even attempted to milk the deck to it’s potential.. and he was pretty much limited to acting the superfreak with genderqueer aliens..
In some sense, yes. I’m a huge scifi fan in general. With ST I have a love-hate relationship. It’s filled with potential, consistently wasted. As a good part of my recreation is about storytelling, it frustates me to no end to see that happen.
“Once they had the holodeck why the hell would they do anything else? ”
Yep. ST postulated utterly transformational tech – matter/antimatter power, fine control of gravity, matter transmission and reconfiguration, fast FTL, strong AI…they’ve won the game.
A main character killed? No problem. We just fire up the doodly-widjammifier to reverse time and then make a few historical adjustments.
The transporter and the food replicator work identically. So why aren’t there multiple copies of people wandering around, arguing over which of them is “real”?
You’d think somebody would have tackled ST’s central inconsistency by now.
Far as I’m concerned, television jumped the shark quite a while back. I’m guessing that even Hollywood admitted that StarTrek had jumped when Galaxy Quest came out.
Still, let’s remember that we’re talking about Hollywood. Expect nothing and they’ll somehow manage to deliver. From that perspective StarTrek, in all its iterations, has been a good deal better than nothing and even occasionally delightful.
My single favorite scene of all time (which has implications for the current election) was in The Voyage Home, when Kirk explains Spock’s strangeness as “too much LDS in the ’60s”. Could be because I saw the flick in the theater in Rock Springs, Wyo. Half the audience roared while the other half sat there steamed. Seems ‘too much LDS’ is a common malady in them parts.
If you want to explore social/economic/political consequences of techo change, read someone like Larry Niven.
The Holodeck was a major security risk to the ship. I would imagine, if all starships had them, fully a third of the fleet would be disabled at any given time with holodeck-related casualties and problems.
Then I guess Mitt Romney is screwed in Wyoming, huh?
” and then eventually domesticated into vapid plot-device-sprouting eye candy in the form of Seven of Nine.”
I agree. I think that a more intellectually stimulating angle would be to have Seven of Nine play a villain who seduces other characters every episode. For instance, maybe she could have an ongoing thing with that half-Romulan (or whatever) babe from the other spin-off series….although the censors would probably compromise my artistic vision for such a series. Fascists!
That’s why you go to the media where scifi is still constantly evolving. Even if Singapore doesn’t like it.
Not to say that Sturgeon’s Law doesn’t apply everywhere, though.
On the contrary, he’ll probably get close to 50% of the democratic vote in Wyoming. But then there are only half-a-dozen democrats in Wyoming (got to keep a few around as object lessons).
While we’re discussing the cinematic qualities of StarTrek and other navel gazing, you might like to know that Graham Barker of Perth, Western Australia, is the world record holder for collecting navel lint. He’s been collecting about 3.03 mg per day since January 1984. That’s only 26.5 grams, which doesn’t seem like much when you consider how much Michael Moore must produce every day.
True, but they can’t. They’re incapable of writing it. A Federation that followed it’s own technological postulates would be a terrifying (for the neighbors), unstoppable post-human chimera.
Back on topic, you’ve got to admit that those are some awfully nice.. um, plot devices.
Some of the finer “plot devices” I have seen today.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
There’s a Brit writer named Iain Banks (Iain M. Banks for the SF stuff) who has at least attempted depicting such a thing with his “Culture” series. Hint: Humans, while a large and important part of The Culture, are definitely not in charge.
I would love if someone could pull off some kind of Asimov style Sci-fi but I seriously doubt they could.
Banks’ stuff is fun; the ships are delightful characters.
And a post-human Federation would be terrifying – for the neighbors. But that would be part of the fun or writing such a thing.
All my scifi geek rants aside, they are spectacular plot devices.
I like the ROU’s myself (Rapid Offensive Unit), with names like “So Much For Subtlety” and “What Part Of No Was Unclear”…
The best we can hope for is that HBO “Original Content” will produce future ST spin offs.The story arc would be a whole lot quirkier and those great “plot devices” will go all full frontal.. (maybe with 7 of 9 doing splits ala Carnivale)
They should also manage a few non-humanoid aliens. The four-limbs-and-a-head layout is hardly a universal constant.
Large & pendulous Plot Devices seem to be all the rage.. I noticed even Doom 3 Resurrected on XBOX worked in a hot, large breasted Project Director.. sure beat the previous creepy old mad scientist antagonist..
No nipples in Star Trek?!?!!! Two names: Marina Sirtis, Jeri Ryan.
You actually meant “no visible panty line.”
.. and dont even get me started on Cortana in Halo..
Is there any genre that cannot be improved, exponentially, with extra large plot devices?
The real question: Are the nipples hers or the suit’s?
Ohhh, geek heaven!:
The definitive list of Culture ship names.
C’mon! The Space Hippies!
I don’t think they’re so much plot devices as props.
“Props” is too cold a term.. It implies an inanimate object (or objects in this case) while these devices clearly sway, bounce and jiggle with a life of their own..
Well, it’s a kind of a crutch, isn’t it?
Jonathan Frakes by rights should have topped out at Days of Our Lives. The only reason that Babylon 5 show worked to the extent it can be said to have worked is cause they fired that sad little captain guy man they accidentally built the show around. Frakes was quintessential Boy Scout Troop Leader in Space first, and then he evolved into Boy Scout Troop Leader in Space with Gratuitous Facial Hair. Gack, really.
The thing about Star Trek is, no matter how badly the ship gets damaged in battle, gravity still works.
The Borg as a plot device began their shark jump on TNG with the episode “I Borg,” where they capture that solitary Borg and find that he has a soul, and then give up on their quest to vaporize them with a virus and instead “infect” them with individuality. It was a morality lesson on the dehumanization of the enemy, starring a scowling, righteously indignant Dr. Crusher who refuses to leave the dying Borg on the planet with his dead companions.
The only redeeming part about that episode is that their whole experiment in sparing the enemy made things worse, when they went rogue and Data’s Evil Twin Lore turned them into gangstas, and Picard got a royal dressing down from an admiral who wasn’t all that impressed with Picard’s having decided to take the “high ground.”
You will notice in “The Best of Both Worlds” part 1, that Guinan describes them as “the Ultimate Consumers,” as if to revive the notion that Evil Capitalism is what ails us (after having failed miserably at making the Ferengi into valid threats).
But then we learn later in Voyager that the Borg lost their humanity when they went on a Quest for Perfection and didn’t know where to stop. So they become the Ultimate Collective, unfeeling, without mercy or compassion, all in their zeal for Utopia.
Ha. So you see, even the writers at ST couldn’t avoid showing the truth event though they tried their damndest not to.
I second that gack.
Another fan, I see. I really must watch these sometime, just so’s I know what in the hell you guys are talking about.
And, boobies.
I hated Voyager because I couldn’t stand
most ofany of the characters (especially Janeway), but they did have a really good two-parter. “Year of Hell,” I think it was called, in which a guy keeps going back into the past to change history so that his wife and family don’t die this time around, and the consequences of wiping out this or that race turn out to be worse and worse. The best part of it is that Voyager gets thrashed, people die, and all the things they can’t do on the series happen, because they can hit the reset button at the end.I hated all that time travel shit. Even the original one with Teri Garr speaking on behalf of all the hip kids from the ’60s.
Good, complex sci-fi (outside of books) exists in two places: “Firefly” and Japan.
I’m serious about Japan though. Check out “Ghost in the Shell” or “Akira” for prime examples.
God, I’m such a nerd.
It’s fair to say that the series has always been both inspired and stunted by Gene Roddenberry’s Utopian imperative. TOS was G. R.’s ode to utopian ideals of perfect racial harmony, an open economy with no poverty or want and a benign military that “explored” and “did diplomacy” and only used their (rather frightening) weapons when pushed to the brink and then only against non-humans.
Apparantly he was a real prick about it. Arguably the best episode was the Harlan Ellison written “The City on the Edge of Forever.” It won a Hugo for dramatic presentation but ultimately bore very little resemblance to Ellison’s original story. First Roddenberry and then D.C. Fontana rewrote and “purged” the story of some of Ellison’s uglier elements, like drug dealing and smuggling. Ellison was reportedly so unamused by this that he showed up in Roddenberry’s office, fashioned a noose, attached it to the ceiling and his neck and then bluntly asked Gene, “Tell me you didn’t rewrite my script!” Ellison’s version won a short story Hugo.
DS9 was notable for finally breaking the restriction on “evil” federation types (the famous secret organization that made up the virus deadly to the Dominion) and intercharacter conflicts. Utopia developed some cracks and dusty places which made for better characters and, often, better drama.
Both Voyager and Enterprise were unwatchable with very few exceptions.
Another fan. I have literally not watched this show since Denny Crane was in his 20’s.
Sometimes I think I’m too much of a geek because I know too much about Science Fiction and I get sort of self-creeped-out…then I read the comments here and I feel much better about myself.
Watching a few episodes of TNG killed ST for me forever. The therapist and geek kid at the controls made me want to commit acts of gratuitous violence. OTOH, that gal with the eyebrow jewelry is kinda smoking hawt.
Some things to miss from the original show:
– Expendable security guys in red shirts, you KNEW they were fazer-bait
– Mini skirts, missile tits and gauzy close-ups
– Shatner-brand canned ham
Dude.. I watched ST as a child in the 60s.. Reruns in the 70s.. and casually caught a few TNG later.. Thats the extent of my Star Trek experience.. but I stumbled upon a Star Trekkie Convention at a local hotel a couple years back.. It was surreal.. There were grown adults dressed as Klingons and speaking in Klingon gibberish.. It was very strange… but they seemed to be enjoying themselves.. Come to think of it, they weren’t nearly as strange as the slackers and neo-hippy lie abouts that protest the war here in Seattle..
Oh yea.. and I saw the movie where they rescued the whales..
I have to admit that I haven’t explored too much contemporary sci-fi… my reading was much of the Old Masters (heinlein, asimov, ac clarke, etc) but too much of sequels and spinoffs smacks of repeatedly using the copy machine..and copying the copies that were copied from copies…. eventually it all looks like a mess.
My fave ST:TOS is “Trouble with Tribbles” mostly due because it because the writers didn’t try to give Important Moral Lesson(tm) and gave some of the best humor of the series.
January starts the last season of BSG and in the meantime there is going to be a separate set of episodes covering the Pegasus called BSG:Razor starting in Nov.
I hope that this isn’t a “jump the shark” moment for BSG.
Ouroboros
ST conventions are grand fun! It’s been years since I went to one, last one was a threeday marathon in Pasadena years ago. My friend and I went, in regular clothing, and walking around all the Klingons, Borg, etc made us feel really normal!
(I’ve also been to Dr. Who and X-files conventions … smaller affairs … nothing quite gets the true obsessives out of the closet like the ST conventions)
Nurse Chapel causes a stirring of the loins for some strange reason. Wasn’t she the Mrs. Roddenberry?
There was a Convo-Con or something like that here in Indy. One of the really creepy alien things thought it would be funny to scare me by jumping out in front of me unexpectedly. I had to apologize many many times for slugging him in the gut, in between telling him how stupid he was for doing that.
Darleen – Did you say a 3-way in Pasadena ?
Yes. Eleven she was and is! She is also the gatekeeper for the entire franchise and made a few appearances in TNG as Troi’s crazy mother.
My eyes are up here, gentlemen.
And you are right, I do go commando.
An even bigger question.. why aren’t there multiple copies of Klingon Qagh wandering around battling over who is “real” ?
Interesting, and not entirely surprising, that no one mentioned another Roddenberry by-product, Andromeda.
It was a show that took an interesting premise, a detailed history, fascinating details, varied cultures, a serious philosophical conflict, and a huge budget, AND hot babes, and managed to piss the entire thing down its legs with bad writing, half-assed continuity, the 30% flashback theory, and terrible premise abuse.
So, how much of this is the fault of the Roddenberry Legacy, and how much just bad choices in production, writing, etc.
I’m part of the jury that’s still out on BSG, but IMHO what worked about B5, Farscape, Firefly, and even SG1 was a production team that stuck to the core premise, but trusted good writers with the details. Obviously, each series had moments of error or failure, but remain good examples.
But Voyager? Euch. Half of Exnterprise was crap, and they were trying HARD to be good. TNG? Sturgeon’s law. I only watched a small part of DS9, but it was like TNG was trying to copy B5 without actually watching it (yes, I know DS9 started before B5, but Paramount had seen and rejected the proposal for B5 before they started DS9).
I admit I missed some other small modern series, like Space: AAB and Lexx. Maybe I’ll catch up someday. Until then, let’s hope some of the successful teams get new shows going, hopefully something epic (I’m the mood, as much as I loved Firefly, for mass and high drama).
I was going commando long before that 7 of 9 attention whore ever got here..
Just so we’re clear on that.
Friend of mine and I were in SF several years ago, downtown, and decided to wander over to the Hyatt Regency to check it out.
As it happened, there was a convention. Of SWIMSUIT MODELS. Oy. Eye candy heaven.
Free lunch, too – although Larry and I did have a little trouble convincing the wait staff that we were with the convention. Larry finally had to show off his totally pumped pecs, which mollified the critters and allowed us to dine in relative peace.
Darleen – Did you say a 3-way in Pasadena ?
Did I mention my fave sci-fi author was/is Heinlein?
heh.
It’s been “Star Trek Voyeur” forever. Though she does rock that costume. I couldn’t make it through half of TNG series due to all the built-in agenda, though, and I am a sci-fi fanatic. Absolutely loved Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Serenity because they seemed genuine. I miss Mulder and Scully terribly. (Pre the “alien-invasion-human-alien-hybrid: days.) That got old really fast.
When I was in high school (68-72) there was two distinct groups … those reading The Hobbit and those reading Stranger in a Strange Land. As bright a line as disco vs rock.
At least Farscape had Pilot and some others.
DS9 had some really good episodes. Their merge with the “Tribbles” episode was pretty funny, and there was the one where Miles O’Brien was sentenced to 30 years in a virtual prison, and when Jake grows up to be a writer and his dad keeps sproinging back into his life (Tony Todd is an amazing actor) and Garek provided some interesting perspectives (the moral of the story of the boy who cried wolf is “don’t tell the same lie twice”), but the Odo/Kira ship made me gag for weeks.
I have a much harder time with TNG now after 9/11. Somehow that idyllic notion that most wars are caused by “misunderstandings” and xenophobia and that the biggest heroes are negotiators and diplomats is hard to take anymore. Any of that touchy-feely stuff from Trek is hard to take, for that matter, but it was the worst in TNG.
When Kirk was nailing that green bitch and slinging intergalactic cock all over the place, Star Trek rawked!!
Now it’s all about “feelings” and “would it be moral to get involved” and stupid shit like that.
You want Swede back, Star Trek, huh? Do ya?
Then you had better re-commence with the intergalactic cock slinging.
That’s truth. And, to get ready for Al Gore’s climate-change meltdown, read Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer (written with Jerry Pournelle, of course). Get a van, fill it with pemmican, liquor, spices, coffee, more liquor…and try not to lose it!
My friends and I all referred to 7 of 9 as 2-36D. And we hated Voyager. DS9 was dreck although watching Nana Visitor bounce her tits walking down stairs was always fun. I tried to watch Enterprise, but it got icky, despite some glimmers of hope. STNG was usually laugable in a MST3K sort of way. We made big fun of that episode where the alien race speaks in metaphors.
We used to muse on what the maintenance circulars in Starfleet must have said about the holo-deck and the problems with it. Basically, we figured that if Starfleet was anything like a real organization, after the first time it malfunctioned, they all should have been turned off, and the manufacturer sued by Starfleet for malfeasance. I mean, can you just imagine what the usablility testing would have been like for a holo-deck. Would ‘holo-deck maintenance technician’ have been an MOS in Starfleet? The mind boggles.
The same with data the Android. “Yeah! Let’s put an artificial intelligence, which we don’t know is going to behave on our trillion-credit starship, where it can cause all sorts of chaos if it wants to. That’s a great idea!”
Funny though, although I liked B5, The Terrans actually had ships with no gravity! I couldn’t care less for Firefly. Ick.
Those who recommended Ian Banks are right on. The Culture is the shit. The ships are too much fun.
Alistar Reynolds’ stuff is also worth a look.
Firefly is fun.
Firefly seemed to borrow adventure ideas from the old Traveller Sci-Fi roleplaying game.
But yes, it was fun.
When did Star Trek jump the shark? Long before the first season of TNG, which added a skidmark when that bald-headed Captain Dude refused to take his pick of the lovelies. And Worf shows up, finishing ringing the ‘Political Correctness’ bell. Klingons on the Enterprise….I’m with McCoy. Blast ’em…
Ahhh, the old, original, campy Star Trek…I guess the actual event-jump happened after ST III: The Wrath of Khan. The best of the 5 movies, it seems it was downhill ever after.
Oh, yes – and wonderfully so.
Yeah, I’m a gamer geek as well.
It’s on my list of things to read. Apparently, I’ve also missed Benford’s ‘humanity against the AIs across the galaxy’ series, too.
Niven’s “Lucifer’s Hammer” is a pared-down, valmorphanized version of his novel “Footfall”, minus the interesting aliens ‘n stuff.
Eric: Darmok and Jilad, at the Outhouse, on Taco Night.
Season 3 TOS was the point of no return, it had one or two so-so eps and then “Spock’s Brain”, “And the Children Shall Lead”, “The Way to Eden”… so much for “The Doomsday Machine”, “Balance of Terror”, and “Conscience of the King” (yes genocide and justice in ST:TOS… not the ‘oops, I lost the civilization in the time stream’ sort of deal. Now coming back in hi-def remastered versions, which will be about as good as Lucas adding in an armada of fighters to go after the Death Star… not just the valiant few but legions of them… *bleah*
I sat through three eps of TNG and would only be dragged back for a couple of time-travel eps, which were passable… the holodeck, however, was not. As nothing was ‘really dangerous’ everything became ‘really dull’: a space opera would have been better suited to TNG instead of episodic television. At least make it *into* soap opera if that is all you have to work with.
What is interesting is TOS transporter malfunctions showing up which could have opened up that can of worms, but didn’t. For that you have to go to Fred Pohl’s stories for that and very well done as a person who gets transported both stays at the original site *and* a duplicate shows up at the receiver. You don’t know which you are until you step out of the room… even with an STL travel set-up, but using quantum physics for the information transport, you do get a few individuals driven to let folks know that *this* is not a good idea. Mind you that started with a story written in 1957…
While I do enjoy Asimov, Clarke, Piper, Laumer and Heinlein, my main reading after those concentrated on Saberhagen, Drake, Anderson, Foster, Dickson, Niven, Pournelle… as SF TS:TOS makes the grade, with a middling score. I really have not watched much else in series, although B5 is a standout due to non-episodic nature of the series – they build upon each other and events early on influence later ones and strongly so. The change of lead character would later be incorporated into the story arc, in which Bruce Boxleitner would ask of JMS (writer/producer): ‘Why do I get beaten to a pulp and he gets to be Jesus?’
Outside of those my viewing habits are rare and eccentric: The Prisoner, Max Headroom, X-Files (what a lovely disaster!), and now mostly whatever is on the History or Discovery channel (how do these folks come up with programs that could have been made at any time in television? really, the most inventive work is on the non-fiction side from what I can see).
One of my prime arguments for the problems of ST is that they have missed the continuity factor of their timeline… by destroying that (really by second season of TOS) they lost creative control of events and the opportunity to offer interesting stories to fill in the timeline to new writers. It is so bad now that even JMS couldn’t straighten the damned thing out and so the interest in the actual society presented wanes as it has no backing. Without a history you can have a few good stories, but they do not grow; with a history your past (good and bad) comes back to haunt you and adds overall depth as keeping track of side-events allows the viewer to try and figure out what is going on.
Time travel is not, of necessity, a ‘killer’ for continuity, and has been handled well by: Piper (Paratime), Anderson, Niven, Saberhagen, Drake/Flint, Foster, Dickson (the entire Childe Cycle hinges on that), Pohl…. each a different vision of time and how it works, and yet done with an idea of how to handle it. ST? At least four entirely different frameworks for time travel are presented (and possibly more) which means there is no idea of what they are doing. Great for fairy tales, not so good for SF.
As an attendee of both media cons and SF cons which center around the written word, the one thing coming from both is that: continuity matters. Soap operas thrive on that and the conceptual framework for stories driven by the timeline and the characters makes for audiences that will watch through mediocre episodes because they know something better is coming and later things will be built on the one they are watching. That, within an SF universe framework, is ‘space opera’. Episodic television dies by the ‘reset button effect’ where everything must end right where it started (save for those ‘cliff hangers’ which can often kill a program as well as make it) and viewers have no reason to actually ingest wha they are seeing – it is popcorn to the mind.
Now with cheap video, decent CGI at consumer prices and a bit of ingenuity and prop making, the fans are the future. I hope the Hollywood strike continues on just long enough to get some decent stories told by the true, next generation of video and film folks – it will be all digital and done for the story, not the money.
I loved the Mirror Mirror episode on TOS with the evil bearded Spock. I was delighted by the In A Mirror Darkly episode of Enterprise with the evil Terran Empire. That’s what they should go with: Evil Star Trek
As someone who has been a ST fan since the very first episode aired in September of ’66 (“The Man Trap”, with the shape-shifting salt sucker beast), I could not help wading in here. I think the problem with some of the critics around here is that they are forgetting that Star Trek, in all it’s iterations, is television, with all that that implies. (Although I would have to agree that if there was any “shark jumping”, it was with Voyager. It had a handful of decent episodes, but most of it was crap.)
Even the later shows like Babylon 5, BSG, Firefly, Farscape, etc (or some of the very popular shows that predated ST, like Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, for that matter), all had their stinker episodes. Star Trek was no different in that sense.
Clearly Roddenberry’s premise had a lot of appeal, given that here we are 40 years and five series later, and it’s still around. At least I understand they are making another ST movie. So clearly Roddenberry got something right with the basic premise of Star Trek. I could write a book on the good, the bad and the ugly of the various ST iterations, but that would take more typing than I would care to do here. Let it suffice to say that Star Trek was, on balance, good TV science fiction, and damn near everything that has come out since has drawn on it in some way (plot elements, characterizations, technology, etc.). Just remember it was TELEVISION, not this or that magnum opus written by one of the Triumvirate (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein).
As an aside, I have to laugh every time someone brings up “The City on the Edge of Forever”, and Harlan Ellison’s subsequent temper tantrums about what Roddenberry did with his original script. I’ve read the script, and of course have seen the finished product many times. I’ve also heard what Gene Roddenberry had to say about it later. The biggest part of the problem was that Ellison, who is an arrogant asshole way out of proportion to his talent as a writer, got his knickers in a knot because the stuff about the drug smugglers and whatnot was cut out of the story. The thing is, none of that really contributed to the central plot of the story, and it made the episode too damned long. In TOS, there was only one two-part episode ever made (“The Menagerie”); for whatever reason (cost most likely, as each TOS episode cost about $100,000 to make, which was not TV chump change back then), and Roddenberry did not feel the story warranted being a two-parter. Of course, for all his bitching Ellison did not make them take his name off the credits and replace it with his “Cordwainer Bird” moniker; Ellison claimed he almost did, but I think that’s bullshit. He’d seen the finished product and knew it was damn good, in spite of (or because of) the changes Roddenberry made, and it would not hurt his career to have his real name on it.
Star Trek lost its worth when they abandoned the original concept of the series for a flying Howard Johnson’s full of diplomats. Star Trek was a fascinating twist on the Twilight Zone in space with humor and a great cast that had terrific interaction and chemistry. Everything after that failed to understand this pattern and concept and turned it into a space soap opera with many unlikable characters. The only one that got close was Deep Space Nine, but it went off the deep end with some huge messianic story line. By the time they got to Voyager, they’d gotten so steeped in PC crap it was knee deep. I mean please, an asian, a woman, a native American, a woman captain? Where was the crippled lesbian african american wiccan?
That was the holographic doctor. She was a crossdresser who had her virtual skin bleached.
Oh wait. Romney claims to be a Republican doesn’t he? All those empty suits look alike to me. Guess I was just distracted by those plot devices.
As a Republican he’ll probably do quite well in Wyoming.
serr8d: The Wrath of Khan was the second movie. And it rocked in ways that nothing else Star Trek ever did. Ricardo Montalban was awesome. They should have called the movie Star Trek II: The Chest of Khan, though.
They actually tried to explain that on a TNG episode, where a ship of Klingons, the Enterprise, some Romulans, and I think some Vulcans followed a signal out to some far distant planet and they found a message left for them from billions of years ago claiming they all came from the same ancestors. I thought that was idiotic.
Alice Krige played the Borg Queen in the movie. She also played a villain in the movie adaptation of Silent Hill. I thought she was real good in that, though the movie was pretty horrid. She is South African.
Susanna Thompson played the Borg Queen on Voyager. I never had much interest in Voyager. Honestly, the only Trek I like are the first two seasons of TNG, the entire original series, and the first couple seasons of DS9 (before they brought in the whole Jem Heddar crap with the Dominion and all).
Wow…just looked Alice Krige up on IMDb. She was in Chariots of Fire.
Maybe we’d all be better off if we just upped our daily intake of flurazepams.
I think they’re disturbed as well as bioturbed.