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Star Trek: Pick A Plot
Vinnie_333 writes "This article on the New York Times sounds out on the often repetitive plots of the 10 Star Trek films to date (this include ST: Nemesis, coming soon). It refers to the film franchise as '10 films with 5 plots' and lays them all out in front of you. This does have a ring of truth. As a fan of Sci Fi (but not particularly Star Truck), I have to admit that there are only so many unique plots out there, and most of them have been well used by HG Well's time. Star Trek is, after all, a genre franchise and the story lines are held back by certain restrictions of the genre." I personally would pay Berman/Braga et al $20 if they never have a holodeck or time-travel-based plot ever again.
Not trying to flame. I used to be a big fan of the original as well as TNG. :-)
However, the plotlines in B5 were far superior to anything on StarTrek, IMHO of course.
Also, no Wesley Crusher type characters
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
The writers of Star Trek aren't held back by anything other than their own incompetence. There are a million potential plots out there. For that matter, well-written characters and dialog can make a trite plot into a fine film.
Granted, many plots were used by Wells or Bradbury or Burroughs long ago, but if you simplify things down to that level everything starts to look the same. If you wrote a 1-paragraph summary of all of the romantic comedy films ever made, for example, it would look like this:
"Two characters who at first seem to have insurmountable differences meet and, through a series of comic moments, fall in love. A complication threatens to dash their hopes, but at the last moment everything works out."
That doesn't mean all of these films are without value. Just most of them.
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
... it's about character. A good deal of both DS9 and TNG (arguably both really good shows, whether you like Trek or not) was about character interaction. I'll give you an example:
There's an ep of DS9 where Will Riker's duplicate (transporter accident in an ep of TNG) stole the Defiant and went off to give the Cardassians hell.
One could very easily dismiss that ep as "Oh geez, dude steals a ship, fires the guns a few times, and gives up when he's outnumbered. What an original plot. *sarcasm*"
However, that wasn't the interesting part of the episode. The interesting part was WHY Riker's duplicate did this. He was stranded alone on a planet for 8 years. When he was recovered, he couldn't live up to success that the Riker that made it off the planet enjoyed.
When you watch this ep, you're lead to believe that the Riker duplicate was going for the 'greater good' trying to uncover some Cardassian plot. What was really going on was he was hoping to quickly turn himself into a hero, even if it meant death for him.
There were other interesting details of the episode, but I just wanted to make that little point: Plot isn't everything. Here's a case where scifi gave birth to a situation not likely to happen in reality, and gave the audience an interesting glimpse into a fictional world.
Frankly, I think Enterprise would be a lot more popular if people understood this concept. The 'plot' of the episodes isn't the strong point, the development of the characters is. That's what it's all about.
...that there are only five basic plots worth writing about in existence. They boil down to Romance (good person meets true love), Redemption (bad man turns good), Justice (good person is elevated), Tragedy (good person is fallen), and Quest (good person saves everything). Whether the person in question is in conflict with one other, many others, nature, or himself, they all come down to that.
So "Star Trek" tends to be formulaic. So what? So's everything else that's ever been written; it's a matter of how well it's written that draws or repels us, which is why "The Wrath of Khan" is so popular and "Generations" is less so.
He takes a ship out with a training crew, doesn't follow Mr. Savik (Kirstie Allie's) advice about raising deflectors when the Grissom doesn't respond and gets the guts tore out of the Enterprise. We then find that the Federation has some kind of gadget they shouldn't be messing with, and the designer is the progeny of Kirks chronic "fooling-around" having caught up with him, who is as bloody-minded as the old-man Kirk himself. And to straighten out the whole mess, Kirk ends up sacrificing his best friend Spock.
This thing with Kahn is sort of like Bush and Saddam -- we know that Kahn is crazy, but if you think about it, Kahn has some legitimate grievances that Kirk has on his conscience.
There is no other Star Trek that gives that level of character development to either Kirk or Kirk's nemesis.
On the subject of the decline of Trek, the technobable bugs me the worst -- I saw this promo piece with Levar Burton explaining that they write "technobable" as a line in the script to call on a consultant to fill something in.
Classic Trek didn't have techno-babble. Enterprise would get enveloped with some kind of multi-color thing, Kirk would bark "Spock, what is that?" and Spock would stare into his science station Tektronix terminal hood and say "I don't know, it isn't registering on our sensors." Compared to NG, Classic Trek was high concept -- they wouldn't try to explain it like one shouldn't try to explain the Monolith in 2001.