Star Trek

[Buster's Uncle]

Now, Enterprise, I liked better than most people who like this stuff at all. Seven of Vulcan was a truly bad idea, though, being far, far, FAR too obvious what they meant to go for. Scott Backula and whatisname who played Trip were a couple of charismatic turd-polishers who were not holding back - decent TV acting for that kind of thing. The writing was no better than the other revivals, worse in that they had a helmsman on the bridge my sister tells me was pretty - who was barely on the show at all, and they really could have done more with Hoshi, who was pretty golden. Their Nelix-type Denobulan doctor was much easier to take than Neelix, wassisname the security guy needed work but was --- good enough, I guess.

 The aliens and adventures were the same old kind of junk Voyager had just worn out, so that part was weaker, even with a somewhat better cast of characters. And there was Seven of Vulcan, w/ the director in the room telling her to read that line like Jerry Ryan. You couldn't look away or forget for a second how stupid the writers and producers must have thought we were to expect us to accept such an obvious refried character. She was nearly good-looking enough to get away with it. I do not think the least of how season four was so much better than the others was her gradual transition away from the grating speaking style of her template. She was ruining the whole thing a lot less by the end - and still as nice to look at.

[Elok]

I only saw a bit of Enterprise, but my memories are:

1. Rolling my eyes at T'Pol and the dudes wiping each other down with decontamination lotion in their undies.
2. Rolling my eyes at the terrible theme song.
3. Finding the general action of the show uninspired but tolerable.

This is different from the JJ Abrams reboot, which seemed to go out of its way to be terrible, but I've almost certainly griped about that multiple times in earlier pages in this thread.

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm not sure you have.  Rings no bells.  Gripe, baby, gripe.

[Elok]

One of the many things that TOS did that nobody had done before was give prosaic roles to minorities.  Famously, Nichelle Nichols was ordered not to leave the show by MLK Jr., who said she was the only black person on TV whose job could have been done by a white person with nobody batting an eye.  Sulu, likewise--George Takei is still just about the only Asian man who got famous for doing something that could not be described as "chop-socky."  Sulu didn't know kung fu or ninjutsu or karate, he didn't talk about the honor of the samurai, he just piloted the damn ship, and he did it well enough that they later promoted him to captain of his own ship, and everybody was cool with it.  He did, in one episode, fight with a sword, but it was a western-style fencing foil.

JJ Abrams saw this, said, "A-ha!  That's a thing in the show!  I should reference that and it will make me cool!"  And he did.  But because Sulu is Japanese, he got a damn katana.  A space katana.  That's the only memorable thing Sulu does in the movie, swing a Japanese sword around.  The only other thing he does is forget the parking brakes on the ship, which does at least go against stereotype because Asians are supposed to be smart.

There are more things I could yell about, but that's one of them, and generally encapsulates why JJ Abrams sucks.

[Buster's Uncle]

That beautifully encapsulates/articulates my own first-that-comes-to-mind objection to that movie.  I read To The Stars, George's autobiography, and he talked about that foil and why and the identity politics of it - and what you say, yes.  Exactly.

There's considerable to be said about Star Trek and how it got the Positive Image thing very right, in a time that that probably saved quite a few lives.

[Elok]

There's also the bit where Nero's ship is imploding in a black hole, he's explicitly refused to budge, the whole enemy ship is clearly doomed with all souls aboard, and Kirk decides to hang around wasting torpedoes shooting this doomed ship instead of getting clear.  Moments later, this nearly gets the Enterprise sucked in, so he basically narrowly averted a totally unnecessary and self-created danger to his entire command sparked by his own brainless machismo.  Next shot is of him getting a commendation.  YAAAAAAAAY

[Elok]

Also transwarp beaming, Scottie being stationed right next to where Kirk landed, etc. and that's just in the first movie, I never watched either sequel.  I think there were two sequels.  Okay, yes, there were two.  At least by the time the reboot came along Star Trek movies had gotten bad enough that I couldn't remember if the second bad sequel was actually a blurry recollection of Nemesis or whatever.

[Syn]

The season three finale for Star Trek: Discovery was rather disappointing after such a promising start.

[Buster's Uncle]

[ninja'd -    SYNNER!]

And Vulcan has what has to be a twin planet -huge visible disk, naked eye from the surface- that is habitable atmosphere even to humans and w/ plenty of water.  And you could presumably get there with Apollo technology.  And it hasn't been filled full of Vulcans for 10,000 years.

[nonsense].

[DrazharLn]

Star Trek Discovery is the latest reboot and (in my humble opinion) it really misses the point and tone of star trek.

Spoilers

(click to show/hide)

The federation in TOS and TNG aren't perfect, but they're trying to be basically good. In Discovery, the first episode features a starfleet officer mutinying against their captain in order to try and launch a pre-emptive assault on some Klingons.

Later, an alternate dimension version of a star fleet captain is revealed to have been able to set up his own ship with hand-chosen personnel and no oversight. His crew are apparently happy to do all kinds of questionably ethical things.

Even later, the dictator of the alternate dimension is defeated and then offered a high-ranking job in starfleet in what's basically the dirty tricks unit of the CIA but in space (why does this even exist!?). They continuously trade others' liberty for very dubious security and exercise essentially unchecked power within starfleet.

Misguided or dated writing makes the morality in TOS and TNG very hollow in some episodes, but it's worse in Discovery because it happens almost continuously and the show takes itself a lot more seriously.

Also it looks pretty generic and boring. Hardly any of the ship looks lived-in. It's all just glossy sci-fi silliness and bad lighting.

[Buster's Uncle]

I see similar points made even moreso about Picard all the time.

Agreeing w/ the spoilered points - Shiny Happy People stories tend to be a less-sophisticated level of writing, sure - but real Star Trek is straightforwardly an optimistic future.  Full stop.  Rodenberry explicitly intended Star Trek in a Swiftian mode -part of my definition of SF, the Swiftian political metaphor/allegory/whatev category- and THAT'S part of the ST package.  Go away with your crapsack Game of Thrones-type stories that belong anywhere else, not MISlabled as Star Trek.

(DS9 was way off-track for its last years on the same lines.)

[Elok]

It was from the Sixties, conceived of before everything went totally to hell.  All art is the product of a particular time and place, and it's hard to bring back that same mindset now that RFK, MLK, and Lennon all got shot.  Which isn't to say one shouldn't try.

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes.  Consider, though, that the civil rights movement goes back, as a serious thing getting on the news, about ten years before ST.  -And I don't know just when the billy clubs, attack dogs and firehoses action peaked, but I think a bit earlier.

And here this show, and the Nichelle Nichols MLK story that she told like it was her middle name for the rest of her life.  And Whoopy Goldberg talking about as a child, the importance of seeing Lt. Uhura on TV -it was the only thing that said we existed in the future- or a quote close to that.  And LeVar Burton and Michael Dorn saying similar.  Uhura was IMPORTANT.  It MATTERED.

-And it wasn't just her; Dr. Daystrom and the Admiral at Kirk's court marshal, and a few others.  -Attractive black guest stars that, in that good timeline, nobody seemed to notice/care they were Black.  I think that's EXcellent.  That's how I want to be shown on TV as a "southerner".


The Jon Swift stuff, you know, has a lot of freakin' merit.  I think it's ST's only real claim to being science fiction in a worthwhile way, aside from the Spock stuff exploring multi-ethnicity and his emotional issues...

[Buster's Uncle]

To make sense of parts of this:  I got into a fight elsewhere for saying I thought no one on Voyager was a good actor, and I used to act for a living.  Doesn't matter, who, the details and grotesque hypocrisy - just that my renfair background was attacked and I won the quarrel -hardcore- by dropping out of it after protesting twice and refusing thereafter to even acknowledge or engage any of the grudge-bearer's on-topic replies to on-topic ST points I raised.

I had to change the subject several times to do that, which is the origin of those out-of-the-blue Voyager and Enterprise posts I copy/pasted here this morning in quick succession because AC2!  AC2!  AyeCeeTwooo!

I'd also thrown out that I think Shatner was a somewhat better actor than he gets credit for, and two other people made joke replies, which was good enough for me to react with:



 (I'll note that my degree is in Broadcasting - and my fair bit of amateur theatrical background [on top of my years doing it for money] is not any serious part of the authority I'm claiming to Know What I'm Talking About. )

 Bill Shatner had these odd mannerisms when Kirk. - Wasgiving a. Speech! -Yes, he did. And any scene where an alien was torturing him was just painful to watch.

 But in all fairness, that gross overwrought James Dean-style acting was considered top drawer stuff at the time, alas, by actors and people in the biz at the time, and by the public, too. It was the sixties, and society was still wrong about lots of stuff.  He wouldn't have eaten THAT much ham if it wasn't what he was cashing the checks to DO.

 Beyond all that, you have to look at all the acting and not just the parts he was grotesque at. He was capable of playing it down, witness Kirk's profound grief when Joan Collins was run over by a truck in City on the Edge of Forever. -With his back to the camera.

 Look at any time Kirk was charming/hitting on a woman, example Conscience of the King. Straight up, Kirk would light it up charming and smoooth. You could kind of believe she might buy it, when he was on his A game. And that episode ended with another pretty effective grief performance, though I never saw what he did in her, but that part's not on Shatner.

 -I'll hit post now to do it in a more manageable bite before I move onto what I think is his greatest obvious strength as an actor - comedy.


What was that lawyer show he played Denny Crane on? I never saw it, but that certainly did everything to rehabilitate him as a worthy performer, playing a crazy (senile?) fellow for yukz.

 Kirk. was. funny. Now, nobody can poo-poo my renfair background for I know comedy performing, which I was basically doing standup/improv w/o benefit of a stage separating me from the drunks. They laughed. Full stop.

 And comedy is hard.

 (Though you try kissing a strange woman's hand/hired flattery on another straight man - and make them cry, which I did more and more with experience. Try doing it with people who work there and have seen everything - still, I did, and that's what I'm proudest of doing of everything I did performing in the faires. [And somebody ask me the nun story sometime, but maybe not in this Star Trek thread...])

 Look at, for best example, A Piece of the Action, the one on the gangster planet. Everybody in that one looked to be having an indecent amount of fun, but especially Shatner. Funny, funny episode, and not one that was Kirk-light; he sold it. He nailed the jokes.  See also The Trouble With Tribbles.

 Mark Leonard, who played Spock's dad Sarek, said in an interview that he thought Star Trek was much better for Shatner's penchant for humor, compared with Jeffery Hunter, Captain Pike in The Menagerie. Now, I luvs me some Captain Pike, as do we all, but Hunter was playing the exact same character w/ name changed -he was- like Lesley Neilson in Forbidden Planet. ST still wouldn't have been as good in the long run without the soft touch of the humor they wrote for jocular Shatner. I'm with Sarek; it's logical.

 I always thought it was a doggon shame that Shatner never did a sitcom, and play to his greatest strength, especially while he was still faintly young. -And that was before he was funny on a lawyer show, to general acclaim. Barbary Coast ought to have done better, for that matter.

 -But all that's still somewhat a matter of subjective opinion and YMMV. Sorry for my arrogance in asserting authority, but, you know...


My renfair acting credentials were scurrilously attacked is what they knew...

[Buster's Uncle]

-The Voyager and Enterprise posts have generated more and higher-quality conversation here, as it happens, so good on y'all!

You can ask me the nun story at this more reasonably-run forum, too.