Slashdot Mirror
Should Star Trek Die?
securitas writes "The New York Times Television reporter William S. Kowinski writes about questions of the Star Trek franchise's viability due to overexposure, audience fatigue and creative exhaustion. Star Trek actor and director LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) is in favor of a hiatus, and is quoted as saying, 'Star Trek's just not special enough, not anymore.... They need to shut the whole thing down, wait five years, create an interest, an excitement, a hunger for it again.' Also quoted are Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and executive producer Rick Berman. The article is particularly salient given the recent announcement of Star Trek Online, a massively multiplayer online game scheduled to launch in 2007. Remember that Activision sued Viacom over the Star Trek franchise last year, ending the license despite a 10-year licensing agreement that originally expired in 2008. So the question is: Should Star Trek die?"
The question is, should we bury it, or spritz it with Fabreeze and see how long we can milk it "Weekend at Bernie's" style.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you don't already know who Levar Burton and Leonard Nimoy are, you:
A) Shouldn't be on Slashdot
iii) Aren't qualified to talk about any Trek, because you missed the only two good series in the franchise
Enterprise is a great show. They just need to divorce the Star Trek name from it. Great sci-fi, but it doesn't belong anywhere in the Trek timeline.
Yes, Star Trek should die. Right before one series ends an other begins. between TOS and TNG There was a good time frame difference and plenty of time to rethink new ideas new planets and alien creatures. Then DS9 came along DS9 wasn't to bad either it many ways it was a lot better the TNG. But after DS9 Voyager and Enterprise (although Enterprise is better the voyager) are still just kinda sucking the franchise dry. Give them some time for the nature of politics to change and for some of the issues of today be different. Also some time to revaluate our technology that we have in the future to really make a good guess what the future will be like. But the franchise is still struggling to match the ideas of the future of the 1960s and trying to loosely follow that time frame. I Think they need to make a new franchise that will make more sense.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I watched them all, and I remember a campy western set in space, a all-to-perfect soap opera buried in technobabble, a total fluke in the Trek saga in the form of DS9 when the show sucked until they dropped any semblance of it actually being like "Trek", and went much darker and was far better than the prior series. Voyager shouldn't even be commented on. It was the worst part of all the sci-fi shows on TV all mushed together in a shocking display of suck. Enterprise has been entertaining, I suppose. The acting is horrid, but its never been good in the Trek franchise.
In all of those, however (even being a Trek fan), I fail to see any semblance of a cerebral root.
I like Enterprise as well, although season 2 was a bit thin. I can't help but to agree with the original post that Berman is part of the problem, if not the whole problem. His approach has become too predictable, too formulaic. He seems to have lost his way.
;) Oh, and lots more Hoshi, who is sexier than T'Pol anyway. Hoshi doesn't have to look like a slut to be hot. Once they found out more people like Hoshi than T'Pol, I noticed Hoshi became a lot more scarce. That is just dumb.
They do focus on technobable entirely too much, and they forget what the hell ST really is: A soap opera for nerds, with social commentary that questions the status quo. Once you get away from that, it gets weak. Its not about taking sides on current issues, its about raising issues and letting the viewers debate it. Also, just ONCE I would like to see them shut the Autodestruct down with more than 1 second left... Showing dumb luck as just dumb luck would also be more realistic.
The Xindi thing was good, although I agree its about time to move on. I DO really like the way Archer has to face a bunch of moral questions, and the response is usually realistic. IE: Yes, what we will do is wrong, but the world is not so black and white, and we have to survive. Again, its the story, not the do-dads and special effects that make the show.
Oh yea, and although I am a bit insulted by the overt sexuality of T'Pol, I would still savor the opportunity to bring out a little emotion in her, if ya know what I mean
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
What made DS9 the best (my opinion) was how it didn't ignore what was happening around it. In TOS and TNG I got the feeling like as soon as some good issues got raised, they were off to some other planet (usually EXACTLY LIKE EARTH except for ONE CRAZY DIFFERENCE).
Maybe ENT shouldn't have created the Xindi. Maybe they should have focused on the important events happening to the people of Earth? Things are changing quickly in their world just like ours. And they wouldn't have to shit all over Star Trek lore to do it.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
This is why I sometimes think that aquiring the prestige of a cultural icon should kick you over into public domain faster. Otherwise, it's only natural that people will spend far too long "milking" it, when, justifiably, they've already made their money- Star Wars being another good example.
I think, if your goal was not to milk the series, but to create the best conditions under which an interesting Star Trek movie/series/book/whatever would be most likely to be made, you'd just open the intellectual property up to whoever wanted to do something with it. A lot of crap would be made, but maybe some really good stuff too. Of course, you can't expect someone holding such a "hot property" to give it up on their own accord.
1) Space alqaeda.
2) Polarize the hull plating. (Unless everyone attacks them with alpha particles, what can this possibly do?)
3) Over-reliance on time travel. TOS wasn't exactly time traveless, there had to be 5 or 6 involving it... but every other episode of Enterprise uses this stupid cliche.
4) Even more de-scary-ification of the borg. They went from unstoppable, barely outrunnable mindless drones, to something that this crew can chase down and nail. I thought Voyager ruined them, but damn...
5) Stupid science, particularly unclever captain and officers. It's not enough to have a bad lightning storm, it becomes a "polaric" something or other.
6) Bizarre political contrivances. OK, the vulcans are a little annoyed with humanity, even less than friendly. But when the the bomb comes through yet another FTL contrivance, not a single vulcan ship is there to defend us? Certainly they could try, and leave before they themselves would be destroyed by it. Hell, there are more than a few vulcans on the planet at that point...
7) Xindi tests. They keep setting off proto-types to get things right, but because Berman is an ijit, they test the first on earth, presumably just to tip us off. Maybe they want to give earth a fighting chance.
8) Zero character development. For god's sake, even Andromeda has characters that grow and learn, and exist outside of their duty to the ship.
9) The need to wrap things up at the end of the show. Even when they do character development for instance (or what passes for it), it always resolves in the last 5 minutes of the show.
10) Reluctance to develop any minor crew characters. What's the deal, if they do that, they have to start paying these guys guild actor rates?
11) Insistence on tying in every damn thing that the other series did. Let's see, romulans, klingons, borg, Risa, Enterprise E, and a host of others.
12) Generally shitty writing. Take the worst writing from TNG, multiplied by ST1:TMP, plus the cashing in of Voyager... times 1000. This is the best Enterprise episode. The worst... oh god.
13) Berman
14) Braga
needs intelligent direction. coughfirebermancough.
Star Trek was good when Gene was alive and kept "interfering" with its direction.
For it to become good again, Rick Berman must die.
He'll never let go, he'll never admit he's wrong, he'll never stop dilluting it and killing every part of it that was good, leaving only an empty husk that looks like star trek, but isn't.
You can't take the sky from me...
If Star Trek was good, you would watch it. You know this is true. I wouldn't call any of the later series flat out bad, but clearly none have been on the level of TNG. TNG and OS both reflected the times and talked about issues in intelligent ways and hey, we still have issues therefore we still need Star Trek. The problem with Star Trek is their inability to try something new. The universe is so big so why are we always focused on the Captain of a spaceship (minus DS9...to a point, it was practically the same formula just on a spaceship that didn't move). Supposedly, JMS has pitched something to them for a new series. We all know Babylon 5 was the real followup to TNG. (And supposedly DS9 was stolen from JMS's B5 pitch). I think he could do a lot for them if they accept him. But I've always wanted to see StarFleet Academy. Berman/Braga won't do it because it's "Dawson's Creek In Space" but so what. Buffy was about teenagers and still managed to be about more. You want new viewership for Star Trek? Well, attract the teens. I want to see supersmart kids duking it out to be the next Jean Luc Picard. You know, something super-competitive like Ender's Game, but in High School. I think this has been the answer for years but they're too closeminded. The close-mindedness is the problem. Star Trek only needs to go away when we don't need it. We still need it, and we'd all be there to watch it, if only it was good. It can only be good if they get of the myopic path they're stuck on.
That fits in a bit with my idea for Trek.
I loved TNG, most of it was really well done. But I got tired of the 'stateless' nature of the show. DS9 was cool once they got a real story going, but then at the end of the story they had to kill the show (well, it had been on the air long enough either way).
What I want now is a Trek show run kind of like a cross between the last few seasons of DS9 and The Outer Limits. Pick a story in the Trek universe. Any story, past, present or future, choose a story in the empires of humans, vulcans, klingons, whomever. Run it like a SciFi channel mini-series. Use as many or as few episodes as it takes to tell that story. Maybe its just one episode, or maybe it takes a dozen to do the story right. When the story is done, thats it, its over. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Maintain an active online presence, and actually use fan suggestions. Pick up loose threads from other series, follow characters that showed up in other series. Sprinkle in episodes that tell the same story from the perspective of several different characters of different races.
The possibilities for such a show, particularly with writers that will pay attention to feedback from fans, are nearly endless, as is the potential for money-making spin-off series in the style of the older shows.