star trek thread

[kaysixteen]

Now there used to be a Star Trek thread on the old fora, but it does not appear that there has ever been one started on these.   So I will go for it.   Trek universe shows are what has motivated me to pay the $4.99/mo for Paramount+.   I have passed on the obviously comedic cartoon one, and the 'Short treks', but have seen the others, including, most recently, the current seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, and ST: Picard, and just last week the first ep of 'Star Trek: Brave New Worlds'.   I was wondering if anyone cared to comment?

[traductio]

I've been thinking about starting this thread for a long, long time!

I live in Canada, so to get the new Star Trek shows, I have to subscribe to a fairly expensive service that also includes everything from HBO. (I was annoyed at first because I just wanted Trek, but the premium cable stuff is worth it after all.)

I watched all the seasons of Star Trek: Michael Burnham Discovery, and I've watched one season of Picard. I like the serial structure, rather than the old episodic structure of the shows from the 1990s/2000s. I think season 1 of Picard has been my favorite of those.

But I'm also rewatching DS9 and confirming, as a friend of mine mentioned to me years ago, that it's the soul of the franchise. In part it's because I'm interested in depictions of religion on TV, and DS9 has not just Bajor but also the Ferengi with their countless rules of acquisition. Those two religions play in counterpoint with each other, adding a level of depth that's unusual in most commercial TV (The Good Life being an interesting exception). Either one on its own would have fallen flat for me, but in a dynamic relationship (especially in the final seasons with the Dominion war), they pushed the boundaries of what episodic TV could do.

[Larimar]

Thanks for starting this thread. I'm a fan too. DS9 is my favorite, followed by Voyager.

I gave Discovery and Picard a try, and found them too violent.


Larimar

[clean]

I will have to try to restart them too.  Now that they are out, I wont have to remember to keep up.  On the other hand, seeing several hours of shows to watch and thinking about the other things that I should be doing, is discouraging me from watching TV (not that it is encouraging me to do the other tasks, though!)

[lightning]

I referenced Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek as "the old original Star Trek." I went on for five minutes discussing its innovations, before realizing that the students thought "the old original Star Trek" meant Star Trek NG. I think I may be too old for this thread.

[kaysixteen]

Random thoughts:

1) I am not at all sure I like the season-long stories Discovery and Picard are using, since, well, sometimes they get bogged down.   That said, Picard S2 was really quite good, and Discovery S4 was also probably the best of that show (it got much better when they sent it into the 32d c., though I still think that the tech and cultural changes depicted in the 32d c, as opposed to the 23d, demonstrate insufficient changes as having occurred.   930 years is a long long time.  Discovery is also something which took a great deal of liberties with existing canon, which can be annoying to a real fan.
2) I found the first ep of Strange New Worlds very good, and esp like the fleshing out of the Pike character, and the actor chosen to play him-- the Pike depiction was clearly based directly on Jeffrey Hunter's character.  What I do not like is the view of the Enterprise, which is very non-canonical.   I get that a series made in the 2020s is going to have many more avenues for special effects than one made in the 1960s, but this Enterprise, well...it is much much too big.   The original Enterprise was very cramped, with even the captain only getting two very small rooms as his quarters, and the ship as a whole was very cramped, with many crewmembers almost falling all over each other-- think the very much more accurate DS9 version of Kirk's ship depicted in 'Trials and Tribbleations'.   The galaxy was also far less developed in the original series, with the Enterprise regularly being essentially out of touch with the Federation.   This made sense when compared with NG, where the ship was much bigger and less crowded, the tech was higher, and the Federation larger and more densely populated, etc.
3) That said, it remains true that DS9 and Voyager are perhaps the best written Treks, as it took TNG a few years to get going and the time constraints of the special effects and filming schedule 35 years ago were pretty stark.   ST: Enterprise was an underrated show, but by the time of its airing, Trek had been overplayed in that era.