Shuttle Pod – The TrekMovie.com Podcast Episode 3: Great Links #1

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This week, a newsy addition of Shuttle Pod. Kayla, Brian, and Jared discuss Rick Berman’s maybe appearance in Vegas next year, news (or lack thereof) concerning Star Trek Beyond, and the latest on fan productions and new books. Plus, Jared introduces Treknecdotes.

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Shuttle Pod: Episode 3 – Great Links #1

 


 

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Rick Berman absolutely deserves to be in attendance. He was the guy that made Star Trek the huge behemoth it was back in the mid 90’s. Did he make some bad choices? Perhaps but like him or loath him, Star Trek has never been so popular among its fans as it was during the TNG Berman years.

When was this recorded? It doesn’t mention the large host Star Trek Beyond photos Screencrush released of the set with actors, or all the set photos the Trek core site posted from Vancouver or Dubai. The TMZ photos were like the worst of all the photos put out so far.

@Ryan – it was recorded last week, which is why we don’t talk about the photos that came out over the weekend.

I have nothing against Rick Berman. It’s always interesting hearing his point of view. I get the vibe as far as the network is concerned Star Trek is the Enterprise traveling around the galaxy having adventures. It doesn’t sound like the network was really that supported on a trek Series involving a lost in space or a space station premise. Even a pre sequel premise.

I feel like the TNG movies suffered because the writer cared more about working on Voyager, DS9 and the last episode of TNG.

I share your observations re Simon Pegg’s intellect. I’m not at all sure about Berman attending next year. I’m sure the fans will be polite, but he’s a very controversial figure and still comes across as very bitter in every modern day interview he does. It’s clear he did not leave Star Trek willingly.

My advice to Berman is keep it short, light and humble.

As far as I know, Berman was a company man whom Paramount basically foisted upon TNG. TNG and DS9 worked well with him as executive in charge of production and Piller and Behr respectively as the head creatives. But, Trek under Berman appears to have suffered from nepotism to some degree after DS9. And the TNG movies were very poor—including First Contact, notwithstanding its financial success, which unravels if you don’t completely shut off the thinking part of your brain while watching it. (To anyone who maintains that First Contact is a well-written, well-conceived movie, I refer you kindly to this, which should put that argument to rest: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/star-trek-first-contact/)

I appreciated Berman’s Trek.com interview several years back, where he basically apologized and took responsibility for being greedy and overly exploiting Trek (which the studio offered him the opportunity to do). What would be most interesting to hear from Berman now is why every movie that he was involved with turned out so poorly. How is it that Trek writers like Moore and Piller, who did great work on TV Trek, couldn’t manage even a single great Trek movie? Was it Berman’s reverse Midas touch that ruined the TNG movies? If Berman has any self-awareness about this, I’d be interested to hear it. But, if he doesn’t, he should probably keep his comments short, light and humble. As Kayla and Jared pointed out, there is a trail of disgruntled carcasses in Berman’s wake. Taking them all on at this point, I think, would be a mistake. Maybe just a sincere apology and move on.

I’m a big fan of Star Trek Continues, and while I fully agree that Divided We Stand was masterfully produced, had great production values, and that the acting has only gotten better with each new episode of STC, I am at a loss as to what the point of Divided We Stand is supposed to be.

Firstly, isn’t the premise of this episode the same basic plot contrivance as in the previous episode, The White Iris, where Kirk (and this time, McCoy as well) gets some sort of illness that causes him to hallucinate so that we can have an other-worldly sort of primary storyline playing out in Kirk’s head while in the secondary storyline he’s actually just lying in Sick Bay on the Enterprise? Didn’t they just do that in the previous episode?

But, at least in The White Iris there’s a meaning/theme revealed at the very end, in the significance of the flower in the painting as a metaphor for the drama vis-a-vis Kirk that played out in the story. What’s the theme/message/meaning of Divided We Stand? Whatever the writer was going for, to me it seems muddled, at best. If I’m totally missing the point, someone please let me know, because I’d really like to appreciate this story. And, it’s not just that the story that seems muddled and pointless, but the dialogue, too, is conspicuously and unusually weak in places. It all comes across as an unusually bad script for an STC episode.

So, apart from the obvious—fighting for what you believe in yada yada, which is really too basic and commonly treated here to rise to the level of a theme—what is the point of this story? Past episodes of STC have all had strong, meaningful, clever themes in the spirit of TOS. I’m totally at a loss as to why this story was written. Divided We Stand reminds me more of a TOS Season 3 episode, where Fred Freiberger had replaced the meaningful, more subtle, theme-driven writing of the past with meaningless, overly drawn-out action scenes and hackneyed thematic development.

The funniest Trek-related fan series that I’ve seen is one where, at the end, the family is trying to make it into the Trek convention but they’ve been outdone by a rival family. It’s like a 12-part series, parts I recognize were filmed in Queens. For the life of me I can’t find it online or remember the title, but I remember finding it laugh-out-loud funny in places and very enjoyable throughout. The premise is a Trek-loving family, the parents love TNG and DS9 but forbid their children from watching the JJ movies, which the kids watch anyway though they have to sneak around to do it.

Does anybody know this series?!? It’s a few years old by this point.

Might not be exactly 12 episodes in the series, but something like that. Each episode is like 3-4 minutes long on average. I watched them all at YouTube.

Rick Berman gave a 3 hour interview to the Academy of Television (the Emmy people) about the whole history of Star Trek. This interview was done after Enterprise ended, but before the Abrams movies (Berman references the then-recent news that Abrams was taking over so it must be about 2007).

The interview is very candid and covers everyting from the start of TNG to the end of Enterprise, so if you want his opinion on what was going on behind the scenes this is one of the major primary sources.

http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/rick-berman

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Thank you for that link.

Right off the bat, Berman says that GR and his evil lawyer approached him to come work with them.

P.S. Here’s the whole 3 hr. interview in one YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9HcSB9WDTQ

Note this interview is from May 2006.

I know you are just getting started. Content is good, but the production quality is pretty bad.

Just finished watching “Divided We Stand” and am frankly gobsmacked at the level of production value and buy-in by the actors involved. But at the end of the day, I have to agree with Cygnus: what was the point? What do the impressive direction, felicitous use of music old and new, and those performances add up to? How does the sacrifice of Drake’s artificial limb–which he trades for a better model on any case–compare to those hapless Civil War veterans who got a wooden leg for their troubles, if that? But if “Divided We Stand” winds up being less than the sum of its parts, well, I’d make the same criticism of much higher-profile projects like THE MARTIAN. Maybe with the endless possibilities of the SF genre it’s too easy to get caught up with high concepts like a guy being stranded on Mars or Kirk and McCoy fighting the Civil War. Production value and feel good moments are great but at the end of the day, why are you telling us this particular story? Overall I found this show to be quite entertaining and as such a considerable bounce-back from “The White Iris,” but I’m hoping that the STC producers will spend more time considering that question going forward.

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