Slashdot Mirror
Could TNG Stunt Casting Save 'Enterprise'?
Tycoon Guy writes "It seems Star Trek: Enterprise isn't about to go down without a fight. TrekToday is reporting that Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis will guest-star on the season finale of Star Trek: Enterprise, to reprise their Next Generation roles of William T. Riker and Deanna Troi. Hello stunt casting! The news has been confirmed on Sirtis' official fan site."
How about they just do it the old fashioned way and revive the series by reversing polarity and firing anion thrusters to create a temporary wormhole that can act as a gateway to the ratings.
No... That didn't work at all for Voyager...
Please, no. Just let it get cancelled and go the way of the dodo like it should!
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
the show will still suck.
unless they stop travelling through time. and get the regular actors to learn how to act....
Does anyone really care? I'm sorry but with Battlestar Galactica reinventing the science fiction genre in the same fashion the Sopranos did to the gangster genre - it's hard to watch anything Trek related. It's the visual equivalent of listening to Cyndi Lauper records from the '80s - you can't believe people ever liked the stuff when you look at it with some hindsight.
Plus, IMHO, most science fiction is really science-themed fantasy. I enjoy the Stargate shows most times (with all the light beings and whatnots) but I don't really count it is SciFiction. Trek was true SCIFI but after years and years of prostituting its original ideas for meagre ratings - there is nothing but a shell. I mean how many Borg related episodes did they drag out for sweeps? It's like gay marriage and abortion to republicans - whenever they wanted to get attention they would drag out the Borg! I'm sure the last Enterprise episode will feature a half-vulcan/half-borg Picard with large breasts.
-_-
Much as I wouldn't mind seeing Frakes and Sirtis in action again, it would only be because for nostalgia's sake. When your show becomes characterized by this kind of hysterical desperation, it's a pretty good sign you should just let it die.
TNG and DS9 were at the top of their repective games in their later seasons -- they just got better and better, IMHO. Neither shows needed this kind of nonsense to shore them up for another handful of weary episodes. If Enterprise doesn't have enough momentum to propel it after all this time, then it's just plain out of gas, and stunt casting is not going to save it.
Especially when I, as a not-so-fanatical Star Trek watcher, can probably tell you the plot of this episode right now. Picard and Troi, on board the Titan on a diplomatic mission to Head-Ridge VII, run into a subspace anomaly and are transported back in time, and must deal with the cultural and technological gaps while...zzz...
I'd advise letting Enterprise, and Trek, rest in peace for another few years while it still has some dignity, but unfortunately that moment is already long past (for me, the last of TNG's dignity departed with the introduction of Retarded Data in Nemesis). I guess now the best we can hope for is that these sorts of decisions don't bury the franchise altogether.
When TNG started, people were afraid it wouldn't suceed without having to bring back members of the original crew. And while it did eventually bring most of them back in some form or another (McCoy in the pilot, Spock in Season 4, Scotty in season 6, and Kirk in Generations), it spread it out so much that it was fairly innocuous. On the other hand, this is a blatant attempt to appeal to TNG's popularity to save what has been an otherwise horrible series.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Can't they just let it fade away instead of making everyone HATE it.
moo.
So... their strategy to save a show which suffers from incredibly poor casting, is to bring two of the previous generation's casting gaffes.
I can't think of two more expendible characters from TNG (After wesley crusher of course) than Riker and Troi.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Wow, am I the only one who likes Enterprise, and hates Battle Star in any incarnation? One hot andriod is no enough for me to get interested in Battle Star!
I sense a deep feeling of forboding...
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
BSD..er...Enterprise is dead.
Deanna will travel back in time to set an insidious series of events in place that will ripple through the very fabric of space-time...and make sure she doesn't marry that slut poindexter with a beard Riker! All she has to do is jetison some drive plasma, reverse polarity on the intake valve and say three times "He is an ass, what was I thinking?"
Despite the fact that this is probably the last season being abandoned on a Friday night ... I think Enterprise is finally hitting its groove. I know everyone has their opinion, but while it isn't comparable to the very best of DS9 or even TNG, its certainly miles ahead of Voyager in terms of quality. I don't think its the casting that's necessarily weak - but probably more the characters. Still, TNG didn't have characters as good as TOS ... and DS9 was weaker than TNG until they brought Worf aboard. It took Avery Brooks until probably Season 3 or 4 to really start getting into Sisko ... he wasn't like Patrick Stewart who had a great screen presence almost from the beginning (sorry, it took me a while to get used to the bald captain :) ). Voyager never .. NEVER had good characters .. at least the new series has Hoshi :) And really there isn't anyone groan inducing like Neelix (which is strange - because the doctor kind of reminds me of him - just not annoying) or Nog from DS9 or Wesley (sorry Wil .. still think *you're* cool) from TNG.
... go back and watch enterprise lately .. I think they are doing a great job. Not as good as it could be, and certainly not as "cool" (now the in thing is to be anti Star Trek) as Battlestar (now that we decided not to kill anyone for a female Starbuck and human cylons) or Stargate (but not Atlantis, because thats NOT cool in the eyes of the SF culture police) ... but they are making it entertaining at least ...
Seriously
Stardate 209323.30934
We have entered a region of unknown and dangerous space. We have full sensors recording any possible signs of threat
(intercom) This is your captain speaking. We are under direct financial attack, and are being threatened with the possiblity of being taken offline! How dare they treat us like scum! Prepare for all out defensive manuvers! Hold on folks!
Stargate and Battlestar Galactica are the premier scifi shows on today. I'll admit, the last couple of seasons of Stargate have really been reaching beyond the original storyline, but not in a bad way. I firmly believe Richard Dean Anderson is the primary reason why that show doesn't suck. Battlestar Galactica, on the other hand, is extremely watchable. The realism, subtle plotlines, the intensity of some of the characters (Cmdr Adama)...it just all adds up to a great show. I agree that Star Trek needs some time off; movies included. If it ever is to return, a new set of writers and directors will have to take the helm and come up with something new/different/better/that doesn't suck.
I watched a coupla episodes here and there...and the damn Vulcan chick was always getting her tits out on the slightest pretext.
Don't get me wrong -- I LOVE TITS.
But I know where to get pr0n when I wanna look at them, thank you very much Star Trek.
When tits and ass becomes a major selling point
of a show it's just demeaning to the viewers and kinda sad.
Some issue with the Battlestar Galactica remake. Having cute girls on the show is cool, but give them better roles than serving as eye candy, damnit.
If Riker and Troi will be in the season finale, that probably means it'll be a cliffhanger...so if Enterprise gets cancelled, we'll never find out how it ends. I know the show isn't that great, but seriously, that would be a very sad way for a Star Trek series to end.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
...DeForest Kelley, and I'll be impressed.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Maybe they'll come through the same wormhole that allows Geordi to host Reading Rainbow.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Picard: "Mr Worf, fire at will!"
*ZOT*
Picard: "Hmm... where did Riker go?"
bash$
I think that B5 (and Farscape to a lesser extent) really showed that season-long story arcs work much better than the classic Trek planet-of-the-week format.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
The temporal cold war arc was more or less abandonned at the end of the second season and tied up at the beginning of this season.
The good casting decisions have agents who won't let them on Enterprise.
paintball
How about instead they ditch those two, save all that money and instead spend it on a 45 minute long lesbian scene between t'pol and hoshi, no not some crappy kid-safe scene, a proper late-night special, go beyond the final frontier, the next generation, boldly! and it could even involve some elaborate time-travel scenario where they must get completely naked or else risk being stranded in a half-way dimension. Now tell me seriously that this episode won't get viewers?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I think that the number one thing they need to do right now for Enterprise is to 'cat script | grep temporal' For every word about time travel that shows up, you get to beat the writers with a 2x4. They abused time and time travel so horribly it's beyond reason. The Voyager two-part 'year of hell' was hard to believe, but Enterprise made it look downright quaint.
Okay, an occasional foray into time travel is cool. An entire season based on a 'temporal cold war' it is a sign that the idea factory has burnt to the ground.
Just my $.02...
I've given the show multiple chances so far.
I have to admit that I was against the idea of a prequel to start with. It just seemed like the Berman/Braga team saw that George Lucas made a financial (if not artistic) success of the idea and therefore decided it was worth copying. I watched the pilot anyway, but gave up about halfway through. Now, Trek pilots are classically weak, but this one was just boring. Like Voyager on Sominex.
So I waited a while. I still didn't like the whole prequel idea, didn't like the fact that the tech seemed to be more advanced than the first TOS pilot, and wasn't that impressed by the cheesy technological substitutions for stuff from chronologically subsequent eras of Trek like "polarized hull plating" and "protein resequencers." (Now of course the obvious reason is that "The Cage" was 1966 and "Broken Bow" was 2001, but how do they go from "phase pistols" to "laser pistols" back to "phasers?" Why does the Romulan ship look like it belongs in the 24th century with the similarly-styled D'Deridex rather than the 22nd? But I digress.)
So when an anticipated "event" episode that all the reviewers said was good came up, I tuned in. I did this with the Borg episode. How cute, they managed to work one of the the most recognizable Trek villains in and made all sorts of in-jokey references while leaving the principal cast in the dark as to what they had just encountered! I did this again with the first Xindi episode, when half of Florida got taken out. The terrorist metaphor and somber mood just seemed forced to me, like they were groping for something to write into the script.
I did this again for the last Xindi episode. That was pretty neat, even though Archer's action-hero stint left me cold. The Death Star ripoff was kinda cool, and seeing the CGI P-51s was neat even though I knew the twist was coming, but the alien Nazi thing was just blah. I didn't really care how that turned out, fearing similar convolution to the concealment of the Borg and the intro of the Xindi. Since then I've tuned in once more, to the Augment episodes with Brent Spiner. He was kinda cool (my mom even walked into the room and exclaimed, "It's Data!") but the actors playing the Augments (who had to carry much of the story) kinda sucked. It was partly what they had to work with. The most memorable thing, to me, was that it was the first time I had heard the word "bitch" in what was ostensibly a Star Trek episode. Ooh, edgy.
That being said, I have to respect Manny Coto for tying in old plot elements. It looks like the next hyped "event" episode will be the Mirror Universe one, and I may tune in for the "ooh-ahh" of a CGI battle damaged Constitution-class. But the TrekToday preview I saw made a point of noting how much more aggressive and backstabbing the mirror Archer would be. Big whoop. Another problem I've had with the show is that Scott Bakula seems to have lost his acting talent since "Quantum Leap." All the Archer performances I've seen come off as wooden, and I have no reason to believe this won't be the same.
Another point in Enterprise's favor is the awesome special effects that trump just about anything else in Trek, but SFX do not a show make. Without characters to fly all them nifty ships in a convincing manner, it ain't worth much. A lot of people have cited the addition of Worf to DS9 as something similar to the Enterprise gimmick castings, but think about what they did with Worf on DS9. He got married, got captured and thrown in a POW camp, met Martok and joined his House, watched his wife die, and at the end of it all wound up a diplomat instead of a warrior. Tell me, is Arik Soong gonna be back, ever? Are Riker and Troi going to be stranded in the 22nd century and join the NX-01 crew, and thus explore new situations we haven't seen their characters in before? Hell, is any of this gonna happen with the already-established Enterprise characters as a result of these castings? Somehow, I doubt it.
This comment is already way too long, but I'm also gonna h
[Enterprise 1 set vanishes, replaced by empty holodeck]
Riker: [taps badge] Riker to bridge. Captain, the runaway holodeck virus has been destroyed.
Picard (heard through communicator): Very good Number One. Mr. Crusher, ahead warp 5.
Troi: How are you feeling?
Riker: Hungry. For a hot fudge sundae. In your quarters.
Troi: [knowing smile]
Theme music up, Enterprise D goes into warp. Roll credits.
Enterprise is starting to look really good. I previously submitted a story - that was rejected :-( - about the next half of Star Trek: Enterprise. Trektoday reported that it will feature some exciting plots involving "Andoria, a Klingon moon, Romulan outposts, Romulan Marauders, Orion Privateers, Earth's Moon, Mars, a Constitution-class Federation starship and more. You'll see a live Tholian... and a Gorn." according to the show runner Manny Coto. Leaked mild spoilers also indicate that the Constitution-class ship is the U.S.S. Defiant, which re-appears in the two-parter episode titled, In a Mirror, Darkly. There have been beautiful pictures of the reconstructed set just recently posted too. As a hardcore Trekkie, I find it fascinating.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
While it has its flaws, I would say Stargate is one of the hardest science fiction shows in history.
The reason why is because it's progressive. If you exclude the introductory and wrap-up episodes common in more recent series, you could swap the first and last episode of ST:TNG. ST:TOS. Quantum Leap (other than Sam regaining his memory). Seven Days. And on and on and on. It's all fantasy - the actors have a magic box or two and roam the universe or timeline without really changing anything.
Stargate is one of the few shows that shows progression. The Tori'i were clueless in the first few episodes (after Teal'c joined them). But their hard work introduced them to the Toik'ra, gave them naquida generators, introduced us to the Asgard, bootstrapped the development of our own fighters, allowed us to run the Prometheus, got us advanced engines from a grateful Asgard, and on and on and on.
Have they had missteps? Sure. Are they on the verge of having so many goodies that they run the risk of having the rabid viewer ask "why didn't they use the gozmotron from the 3rd season?" In fact they've turned that to their advantage - after a few seasons those goodies are reintroduced in a natural manner. The "safe" bullets are used for training. The virtual reality pods are used for training and planning.
Sometimes the science is hokey, but you have a very real sense that they're trying to figure things out and often get it wrong. But they keep at it until they succeed.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
yeah? well... double dumbass on you!
Getting Frakes and Sirtis to reprise their best-known roles is not "stunt casting". If you got Paris Hilton and Carrottop to play Troy and Riker, that would be stunt casting.
fish and pipes
When I was a kid, I love ToS. I don't know why - I can hardly watch it now. Probably cause it was sci-fi more than anything. I remember when TNG came on, and while rough at start, it became a damn good show, going all sorts of places the original never did.
I'll admin that I never really watched DS9. The theme music put me to sleep, and I saw it as B5 without tha action. I understand it got a lot better, but the first season turned me right off.
I watched Voyager - I can't recall very much about it. Lots of holodeck adventures or "oh...that never really happened" stories to the best of my knowledge.
Voyager to me was way too calm. TNG had stuff going on, crap that just had to happen even if Picard thought it was a bad way to handle things. Voyager just seemed to be too much of "well...we're in a jam, lets all sit down, talk about it, and then talk our way out of it." Though, in their defense with Species 8xxx, they finally came up with an alien that was more than a funny forehead or nose! Though another annoying thing was every alien planet looked like the california desert with little mud homes that had high tech doors on them or something. Okay...find a few different locations to shoot on folks.
I was REALLY looking forward to Enterprise. Sounded cool - the Federation at the beginning during it's rough founding years. Soundes like a nitty gritty show. I like Scott Bacula as an actor and thought that would help.
While I still like it better than Voyager, the show suffers from the same problem - too much "lets show the universe how wonderful and diplomatic humans are".
I think one of the best episodes was when Archer sole the warp coil or something from one ship stranding them. Reminded me of TNG where crap had to be done, against the rules or not and it was done - damn the consequences.
Other problems I have with enterprise are:
1) Why is it so damn dark? Here it is in 2005 and we have light bulbs that put use 25 wants and act like a 75 watt light bulb. The enterprise looks like it is lit with a few flashlighs that need new batteries.
2) why is the ship so nice? This is one of the first ships, it should be rougher. I like the different bridge design, but to me, it should be something more like the Maru in Andromeda.
3) Why don't we ever come across aliens that can't kick our ass?
4) Enough of the shots of the shuttles. We know the transporters work pretty okay now - time to start using them and stop having "were stuck due to shuttle issue" stories.
5) enuff of the damn vulcan's. Yeah...they are annoying but mostly look good in tight garb. We get the picture.
Probably my two favorite characters are Hoshi and the Doctor. Hell...on Voyager, the Doctor was my favorite character as well. Perhaps they should write more medical stories.
Oh well...I'm tired.
Have Riker and Troi in the present (well, the present for them at least - TNG time) and have them researching or learning about something that happened during Enterprise's time period and show it with the enterprise crew in flashbacks or something.
That way you can get the guest appearances without having to come up with a complete cheese story.
Kinda like how they got Starbuck into Galactica 1980!
Either that or have them be guest stars but in different roles or something.
I pity da fool who goes to da Delta Quadrant!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is the latest bad gimmick in a tragic series. Enterprise got more and more gimmicky every month, until they had nothing left.
The first season was quite good, though it had the usual Trek first-season weaknesses: plots kind of random, characters not fleshed out, tech not developed, etc. Unfortunately that probably turned off a lot of the viewers who were expecting more, and the reduced ratings may have started the whole spiral...
I rolled my eyes when they brought in the time-travel gimmick with people from the future, but at least it was all new material and helped the storylines develop, so that was okay.
Then they did this future-9/11 thing which was obviously a big huge gimmick to try to tie the show to current affairs. It was too obvious, but it did help the stories (some were actually quite riveting) -- for about half the season.
Towards season's end they started dropping more and more references to past Trek series (i.e. to the future), like Archer hinting about the Federation and "explainations" of some of the history from TOS/TNG/DS9. That was the point they crossed the line from "good" gimmickry to "bad". These did nothing for the series, and just seemed to be there to try to keep old Trek fans hooked.
Then Archer starts making alliances with the fuckin' "hated" Xindi and I knew I wouldn't be watching for much longer. I know Trek is repetitive, but it's usually in a good way. Heck, they've used the "enemy-turn-friend" theme to produce some great Trek episodes in all series up until Enterprise. There it just killed the story lines and took the drama with it.
I stopped watching at the end of last season, and when I saw the preview for the first episode with Spiner in it, I knew I'd done the right thing.
I wondered how much lower they might sink, and with this Troi/Riker thing, now we know.
It's time to kill this Trek and file it off in the "bad mistake" pile along with ST:V and most of Voyager. (Though at least Voyager didn't make a mockery of Trek. It just wasn't well-written most of the time.)
Hopefully we'll still get to see a "Birth of the Federation" series at some point, which is what Enterprise originally (d?)evolved from. There's so much potential there. Just as long as they don't give it to the Enterprise producers...
Alright, so riddle me this:
I "skimmed" a lot of DS9. And I mean A LOT. The first two seasons weren't that great... some episodes were down to Enterprise-level. I finally got back into it around the time the Dominion and Worf started to figure in heavily (what do you know, gimmicks that worked!). Even then, I didn't watch every week. There was quite a bit of Dominion War stuff I missed... but I could still come in, watch a single episode, and walk away entertained, even though they were part of an overall arc. Now, going back and being able to watch those arcs in sequence greatly enhances the entertainment value, I will agree. But individual episodes of Enterprise still leave me cold. If they had nifty massive space battles, or strong standalone character pieces like "In The Pale Moonlight," I might get pulled in. The entire point of my above post was that I have watched all the stuff that was supposed to pull me in, AND IT DIDN'T WORK. Call me obstinate, but I still don't like it. I use the DS9 comparison so heavily here because that was the only Trek series up till now to heavily employ the concept of the story arc. TOS, TNG, and Voyager all were mostly standalone episodes with the occasional interseason cliffhanger.
Now, about characterization. That's all well and good that they're learning how to be a starship crew. It's obvious that Archer can't have the "ultraslick" personality of Picard. But what I get from Archer is the aloofness of Sisko with an occasional dash of the brashness of Kirk. Not too terribly exciting.
Also, if they're just now learning to be a starship crew, doesn't that ignore previous efforts at space travel, even in the pre-Enterprise continuity? I mean, I'm sure our current space shuttle crews could handle something like NX-01 with a minimum of fuss. Wasn't part of the point of having a cramped vessel of limited capability such as NX-01 to make links between Star Trek and contemporary cramped, limited space technology?
There are also established space crews by the time of Enterprise. What about the cargo crews that (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong) Trip Tucker's family is part of? Wouldn't it be just a snazzy upgrade in technology for them? I mean sure, they have new devices like the transporter to get used to, but other than that, NX-01 could be a freighter with bigger engines. To me, it seems like the spit-and-polish crew of the other Treks, but with supposedly more primitive tech. It would be much more interesting if we saw the crew as trying to become more regimented from the more loose, informal cargo crew culture. Instead, they've basically already got the military discipline so there's little there to develop. I'm not suggesting Star Trek: Redneck Rampage, although that would be pretty damned funny. But I still don't think the series is showing the development of a starship crew that it's supposed to, if so much of the baseline stuff is already in place and we're just watching some running fanboy injoke about the development of the technology.
Also, if there's some decrease in available talent between now and the 22nd century, can we explore why that is? Maybe it's due to the after-effects of World War III, which were barely touched upon in First Contact. It'd be nice to explore that (and I don't mean through the Vulcans being condescending to warlike, primitive humans angle, that just serves to draw a sharper dichotomy between Enterprise and established Trek).
Kirk wasn't a flat character - just acted that way!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Yea..I almost wish I could create some sort of subspace temporal anomaly and go back to the beautiful time of TNG. *sigh* A girl can never get enough of Mr. Crusher...haven't his balls even dropped? The only way they could save this enterprise crap is by cutting it off nice and clean, who can get the image of hairy Samuel Beckett in that dress (opening theme QL) out of their head anyway!
How's that offspring doing? I can't watch it here in Austria, so I'm curious if its good or not. Oh, I've read about some of its episodes, but this stuff with the Wraiths sounds kinda lame to me. Am I wrong?
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
What I would find much more interesting would be the DEATH of the Federation.
That would be interesting.
Empire rise and fall - but the Federation collapsing beneath corruption and war would be amazing.
(this was supposedly a show idea, starring Frakes and Sirtis - but I'm not sure they could carry it themselves)
Firefly was the only SciFi TV with some innovations at all in the past few years.
As much as I liked Firefly, it was essentially just Blake's Seven in the Wild West.
Media SF is never innovative; at best it repeats ideas that literary SF tried out a decade before -- BSG, for example, is combining the original series, MilSF and Vernor Vinge.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
"On the other hand, the order of battle for the officers goes lieutenant, captain, colonel, commander, which is not similar to any existing military force structure. It's a direct lift from the old show's character names: Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, Captain Apollo, Lieutenant Starbuck."
I think what they are doing is mixing Colonial Navy and Colonial Marines together without doing much to differentiate them.
Petty Officer (navy) / Private or Corporal (marine)
Chief Petty Officer (navy) / Seargent (marine)
Ensign (navy) / 2nd Lt (marine)
Lt (jg) (navy) / 1st Lt (marine)
Lt (navy) / captain (marine)
Lt Commander (navy) / Major (marine)
Commander (navy) / Lt Colonel (marine)
Captain (navy) / Colonel (marine)
Admiral (navy) / General (marine)
Of course that wouldn't explain why an old war hero and the commanding officer of a strike fighter carrier would only be a commander. That should be at least a Captain's billet.
Only on
http://www.trektoday.com/news/180105_02.shtml
That was linked in the previous Slashdot article, Star Trek: Enterprise' Cancelled? and instead of the 'Startrek cast to be fired in March' article it has the producers rebuttal that Enterprise being cancelled is just a rumor. Personally, I'll take their word for it over some anonymous guy on the internet anyday.
There's an official Marina Sirtis fan website.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Hey Enterprise writers, could you take a look down. That thing swiming below you, that is a shark. You are in the air because you are jumping it. Now take a look behind you. See those other 15 sharks, you jumped them as well.
I used to love Enterprise, but time travel and special guest apperances always get out of hand. Though the episode with the Borg even though that was technically a special guest appearance was great.
"Trek is, and has been, about the future"
No, trek is about the past. Specifically, the technocratic science-utopia ideals of the 1950s, the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s, the 1980s liberal ideal of an greed-free moneyless society so utterly purged of "isms" that they've become inconcievable.
SF has always been about the present day as seen through a distorting lens. Trek was no exception.
And then, it painted itself into a corner. Typical left-utopia problem: nowhere to go, nothing to do, no hope of rising above equality except in science, arts, or the military. Effectively Trek disproved itsself. The only society-changing message it can send anymore is "avoid this".
They tried to keep it running on momentum, but Trek without a message, without reflections of reality, is just a dull and dated SF show.
RIP
you misspelled "fat bastard" "flat character"
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious