Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, the upcoming Paramount+ series set on Captain Pike’s USS Enterprise, began production in February. Now the show’s star is giving an update on what it’s like to film the series in this new era we live in.
Strange New Protocols
While in Toronto for production for Strange New Worlds, Anson Mount has been doing promotion for his new movie The Virtuoso. Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Mount revealed they are about halfway through shooting the first season, and says he’s happy to be on set after spending a year at home during the pandemic. “The last time I was home for a year was my junior year in high school. Everyone’s glad to be back at work,” he reports.
But Mount did note the differences that impact both how the show is shot and life off the set as well. The lockdown in Ontario means less socializing with the cast, as Mount laments, “Normally I’d be throwing barbecues.” The actor explains how his interactions with the cast (including the newer actors) is limited to the work :
“COVID [protocol] makes everything take longer, but you get through it and it’s weird trying to get to know my cast only on set.” However, despite everything, “it’s been one of the smoothest starts I think I’ve ever had in television.”
Last month those COVID protocols identified a guest star who had to be quarantined along with some members of the crew, but the production was still able to continue, as the contact was limited.
Mount still expressed enthusiasm for the work they are doing on set to RadioTimes:
“We’re really happy with the material. We’re all having a good time together.”
Mount, who is a fan of Star Trek, has recently praised the more episodic format of the Strange New Worlds, saying it feels more like ” classic Trek” which he sees as being “founded on the big idea of the week.”
The USS Enterprise crew in Discovery’s Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2″
Director’s update
In other SNW news, director Maja Vrvilo sent out a message on social media confirming she directed the second episode by revealing some behind-the-scenes images of her laptop and a clapperboard. These show off some working logos for the show; however, the final title treatment for Strange New Worlds has not yet been revealed.
New gig 🖖#StrangeNewWorlds #StarTrek pic.twitter.com/Me67rW5G2j
— Maja Vrvilo (@majavrvilo) May 1, 2021
Vrvilo has previously directed episodes of both Star Trek: Picard and Discovery. It has been reported that co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman directed the first episode of Strange New Worlds, and it’s likely there are more familiar directors to come, including Jonathan Frakes, who has already been confirmed to be directing episodes of the new seasons of Picard and Discovery.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is expected to arrive on Paramount+ in 2022.
Find more news and analysis for Strange New Worlds.
Soooo looking forward to this!!!!
Mount was in a great Western, Hell on Wheels, that I hope that means it is capturing some Wagon Train to the Stars frontier magic.
I also hope they don’t shy away from the music too, some real remastered TOS over-the-top musical cues!!
I need that TOSy and early TNGish style too… Say what you want about that terrible “Code of Honor” episode. But it had the only TNG score done by a classic TOS composer… and that’s why I love the score (the ep. itself is dreck)…
Interesting. I never noticed that, but Code of Honour does have a familiar score sound.
Yeah, it was scored Fred Steiner… the only TNG score by a TOS composer.
I truly, truly, hope it is NOTHING like TOS or early TNG. And I would be shocked if– outside of the episodic nature– it were anything like that.
While I’m hoping for a TOS / Code of Honor music score, I hope the stories are nothing like TNG and pretty much all of Season 3 TOS beyond Tholian Web, Enterprise Incident .
More good TOS though.. in fact they should try to out TOS TOS with better frontier/exploration stories given better CGI.
I simply can’t wait for the first trailer!
Oh that wonderful TOSy Enterprise on that clapperboard, with those retro color streams… so retro, so corny, so cool… This is the most important moment since 1969 and hadn’t even been born back then. For the first time ever, the original Star Trek is back on track…
I loved TNG and the 90s spin-offs… I like ENT and DSC… but that’s a STAR TREK :-) The Enterprise…and no darn A, B, C or D…
Or E!
or F-J!
Once again, I NEVER liked the letters. Yet another terrible legacy from the crappiest Trek movie of all time, TVH.
I want to see the new bridge and new uniforms. I doubt they are going to make the Enterprise look TOS though on the outside. Its still going to be the Discoprise.
The “Discoprise” is the Enterprise. The TOS version was a 1960s low-budget rendering of the real one.
Imagine Gene Roddenberry having had visions just like Benny Russel on DS9. He saw the “real” future, he saw what we see now, but he wasn’t able to fully realize it with those limited 1960s means. He came close but not quite perfect. That’s the way I see it.
That’s definitely one interpretation. Frankly I don’t like “revisionist” history. Enterprise did a good job of making the original Connie seem futuristic, I think [or maybe it was as corny as ever]. But like, why reinvent the most iconic spacecraft in fiction? The Enterprise was the vehicle for literally entire generations of imagination. To say that this is what Roddenberry and the other artists “would’ve done” is a disservice to their original artistic vision. That’s why I also prefer the original TOS VFX to the cheesy CGI, because at least the original was authentic, the product of hours of work and intention. You can’t just discount all that by saying they had “limited means.” They were masters of their craft and their work should be honored. That’s the way I see it, but totally respect your preferences too. I guess that’s the gift of the Discoprise, it allows fans to “see” what they want in it.
I think a lot of that is the Golden Triangle ratios used by Jefferies that the design just gets etched into your mind. That’s why decades later when the flying hotel is long forgotten on Veridian III the 60s 1701 still shows up on TV in commercials, etc.
As an amateur photographer I’m not a big believer in the Golden Ratio, but there may be something to it wrt Jeffries’ design. I much prefer it to the ‘D’ myself in any case, but then that’s what I grew up with, so the proportions obviously feel much more ‘natural’ to me.
It did for its time. But it looks very outdated today. Why it was upgraded in both movies and now the show.
Go back to what production designer Joe Jennings had to say about the Enterprise: it is the Chris-Kraft of spaceships, with smooth, CLASSIC lines. You mess with that and you wind up with the sorry abominations that Aston Martin has come up with in all those iterations that came after the DB 5. The changes they introduced for DSC were as much in that vein — and hurt like being stabbed in the vein by an amateur — as anything else, and lamentable, though not as horrid as the JJprise or the -D.
(here’s hoping this post actually makes it up … I’ve noticed that in recent weeks, while I’ve been posting a lot less, only about one out of every three of my posts seem to actually show up, and that includes a comment in this thread, higher up in reference to TOS music, which was a pretty innocuous remark. If there’s a rolling ban on my posts, maybe it should be limited to angry and well-written dissents, rather than fairly good-natured ones.)
I rather liked the Disco take on the Pike-era Enterprise, minus the swept-back struts which were not part of John Eaves’ original concept. (Certainly, that design would not have elicited from me that gasp of horror the first time I saw the JJ-prise.) I do concur regarding the murky lighting and nebular backgrounds, which would have been much more suited to “Babylon 5.”
Respectfully disagree. My other love from the ’60’s is a little British band, The Rolling Stones. (I can’t get no) Satisfaction. This band grabbed the world stage, in 1965, with that song. People speak of how that song, heard through an AM radio, or record player, with one speaker, turned them on to the band, or music in general. Now, over the past almost 60 years, the Stones have played that song, and their other hits to football stadiums all the way up to 1.5 million people on Copacabana Beach. They play these songs on state of the art sound systems, and you see the band on video screens, stories high. They don’t come out and play with a single speaker and no video screen. Star Trek was groundbreaking TV for its time. I do think the team in 66 would use bleeding edge technology in terms of how the sets and the special effects,as much as budget and technology would have allowed. I love the original Enterprise and I love the Discoprise, just as much. Leonard Nimoy is on record, asking fans not to be slaves to canon. Respect it but don’t let it get in the way of a good story. Chekov wasn’t seen in S1 of TOS and not seen in Space Seed. We still consider TWOK a high water mark in the film series.
In the days of TOS (still my fave) the focus wasn’t on special effects and CGI. None of that existed. The emphasis was on story, action and character.That’s why TOS was so ahead of its time. The stories were cutting edge. Topics that were only newly being discussed among my generation. Stories about racism, misogynism, ageism and other topics that are still difficult conversations today. Back then? Impossible but not for Star Trek.
Of course, a lot of the actors criticized the fact that the action and story centered around Shatner’s character – he definitely got all the hot chicks. To me, it was a reflexion of my house at the time. My dad didn’t get hot chicks, but he definitely ruled the roost.
I thought the CGI work on TOS and TNG Remastered was actually brilliant and true to the original work of the creators. It would have been off putting if they had created a Disco-prise. They did it just right.
Wow, most of the few bits of TOS-R I could stomach reminded me more of TAS than TOS. And the stuff that actually had a decent-looking physical presence was undermined by animation with the ship moving like an angry fly (wide shots in DOOMSDAY MACHINE.)
One could say, though: The TOS-R “The Doomsday Machine” CGI F/X gave us a beautifully rendered/realized U.S.S. Constellation! The AMT model kit used in the original episode was… lacking.
I’m pretty conflicted about a lot of TOS-R, but will say that with respect to “The Doomsday Machine” they pretty much hit it out of the park. Certainly, author Norman Spinrad was very happy with it.
Me too. Was thrilled when I first saw it but honestly it has not aged very well. These days when I watch TOS the main reason is for the cleaned up images and less so the new effects.
Well, some “limited means” argument must be accepted, considering the original show mixed takes from three different Enterprises (the one from The Cage, with the over the bridge shot, the one from Where No Man, very similar to The Cage, but different nacelle ends and internal lights for the windows, and the show version, as it is in the Smithsonian, with smaller bridge module, smaller deflector dish and new nacelle ends yet again) as the same ship…
I don’t think saying that is a disservice. I think it’s almost a sure bet. They were limited even in what was possible back then due to their budget. If they could’ve done more they would’ve, otherwise, the refit wouldn’t exist.
I’m pretty sure that when they found out what they would be able to do with the movie or even Phase II, their eyes lit up and their “Original Artistic Vision” became more attainable.
People always bring up the “original artistic vision” stuff when complaining about George Lucas’ special edition of his original Star Wars trilogy. Clearly, he wasn’t satisfied with what he was able to do.
I do wish the powers that had just said that the new stuff was a reboot instead of trying to cram it into the current canon. Maybe then we wouldn’t have people crying for an explanation of why things look different. Even though they were able to accept that the ’70s and ’80s looked more advanced than the 23rd century. Or the new look Klingons in TMP.
Original artistic vision had nothing to do with MJ’s P2 Ent. GR just asked how he would UPDATE the ship. I happen to think the updating was less than stellar, but the subsequen enhancements by Probert, Trumbull and yes, even Richard Taylor largely improved it into the near-masterpiece that is the refit (I still don’t like the old-train style nacelles caps or the blocky strongback feature, but overall the effect is dazzling and glorious in TMP.)
Just a couple of GL’s complaints on SW seemed valid, especially when Biggs rescues Luke in the deathstar battle, which always seemed like it had shots missing. But nearly all the changes were disimprovements — the big sweeparound reveal of the X-wing fleet turns the movie into a CD-ROM cutscene bit, all just to add some lens flare and do in one cut what the original did with two. And FALCON leaving the spaceport has way too MUCH detail to be credible, given the film’s look in those scenes.
Regardless of how others think about it, obviously GL wasn’t satisfied.
They asked for an update because they new it looked limited. Besides, I’m not sure if artistic vision is something real. What seen on television isn’t the first draft, it went through changes, even after filming.
So if we take the look of DSC as evidence of your claim, he saw starships as fuzzy looking objects instead of hard ones, flying through a murky and colored void instead of the monochrome of space, without the beauty of direct sunlight keys to create the harsh contrasty look we KNOW is out there from decades of NASA imagery?
Sounds like his visions was tainted and only corrected by input from his associates (which is certainly true in other aspects … Coon made TREK better than it ever would have been with GR alone at the helm, as did Justman and others.)
People need to take a step back from the whole “low budget” aspect of TOS. It was certainly not a low-budget show, it was one of the more expensive ones to produce at the time.
What was presented to us in September of 1966 was nothing short of amazing. Nothing else had been done like it up to that point. The main competition was Lost In Space, a mostly planet-bound show aimed at a very young audience.
Star Trek gave us an amazing ship that looked unlike anything done previously. A large and expansive universe with special effects, different worlds, and believable aliens.
For the time, for the materials and technology available to them, it was outstanding. And certainly not cheap to do.
Thanks for the much-needed corrective. I especially hate it when people use the tired descriptor “cardboard sets.” None of the sets were cardboard.
In the mid’70s Pocket Books sold hundreds of thousands of copies of Franz Joseph’s Enterprise blueprints and Starfleet Technical Manual. There’s a reason for that: because we thought the designs looked awesome, not because they were cheap.
This is the same discussion we hear about “Battlestar Galactica.” The 70’s version was really epic: the sets, the special effects, and dialogue. But people, especially now, complained how the original series look. They say “campy” or “poor special effects that is repeated over and over.” This was the 70’s, similar to the 60’s. Both TOS and BSG were masterpieces at their time of production. I think Paramount did a great job in the remastered episodes, but nothing beats the real attempts by the original creative minds.
My at-that-time objections to Galactica78 — outside of the writing ones — had to do with the contemporary-battleship-in-space look, which seemed old-fashioned to me without even being stylish (as opposed to SILENT RUNNING, which actually shot on an aircraft carrier but modified things to make it seem both futuristic and credible.)
Big fake rivets on BSG’s walls really didn’t scream ‘future’ to me (they really screamed IRWIN ALLEN – take a look at BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE if you dare), anymore than JJ’s idiotic beer barrels and barcode scanners. But in retrospect, I find a lot of the GALACTICA stuff to be quaint and tolerable now, compared to some of the more modern design miscues (nuBSG’s cylon basestar interiors are massive offenders to me and at least one other poster on this site.)
Yeah, I’m all about that Discoprise, She’s gorgeous. Only the refit looks better. Especially, The Motion Picture version, with all those painstaking translucent aztecing.
I think the Discoprize works, a CGI version of the classic. The only “improvement” I would have made is to keep the straight pylons and maybe not have lowered the distace between the primary and secondary hulls. Also why not have the single impulse deck, I don’t see the “win” on two and therefore would not have done it.
Really hoping they abandon anything that might make Pike’s Enterprise the ‘Discoprise.’ One of the best things they could do is separate this show from Star Trek Discovery as much as possible. And that includes an entirely different production design. By people who know how to evoke what came before while still making it look good for modern audiences. Personally. I think it a longshot any real changes to the sets will get made. It is Secret Hideout after all. But here’s to hoping…
That said if the shows happen to be good the PD will not matter as much.
I guess i wouldn’t mind the design staying the same if they fixed the lighting on the exterior of the ship, and there was a single beauty shot with extreme detail which we didn’t get yet. I also want recognizable star trek music and for the show to open with Space the final frontier, it absolutely should be Alexander Courage’s theme. The interior of the episodes should of course have new music.
I hope the show stays more in the TV-PG/TV-14 realm rather than TV-MA. It doesn’t have to be super family friendly but it would be nice to have something that doesn’t have a lot of violence or f-bombs, in contrast to Picard. Disco has obviously moved away from the f-bombs and gone back and forth on the violence.
So agreed. The swearing in DISCO/Picard hasn’t added anything, and it means some of this won’t be watching those shows with our kids. I hope Paramount realizes (including with any upcoming film projects) that Trek doesn’t need this, and it doesn’t need to be “edgy.” Just give us good, believable stories with thoughtful sci-fi premises, and we’ll be all over it.
I am in total agreement. No more of these out-of-era colorful metaphors, no more meaningless throatcutting, headchopping and eyeball ripping. No more Klingon torture sex.
This show can be spooky for a few episodes, just like some TOS, TNG and VOY stuff had been. But no more instances of “let’s show some uncensored bloodshed because we can in streaming”… And no more admirals going full Avasarala on us…
My guess is that they will dial back significant on the violence & swearing, while at the same time keep it in their toolbox if they ever want too use it.
Thanks for that Elo.
Our kids are in their teens now, but there are still episodes of Discovery and Picard that are offlimits.
One of the benefits of having Discovery S1 cut for broadcast on linear CBS last winter was that enough of the inappropriate stuff was cut that I was willing to let one of them watch it. When the torture/sex scene came on it was mercifully brief, but our teen’s reaction was “Why do they have to do that?” and “Skip!”
In fact, our kids reactions to most of the content that puts things over the line into 14+ is “Why do they do that?”
So, to all the folks here who fine such content cool or mature or “real” , I offer up the view that even media-savvy teens find it gratuitous and boring.
Love the swearing on Picard and Discovery. Finally start trek that doesn’t feel like an unrealistic kids show. People swear in real life. Kids swear in real life. BFD. To pretend they don’t and be “offended” is just to advertise and show off a limited intellect. I’m bored with the Sunday School crowd and their trivial and absurd “values” that are just a waste of everyone’s time.
I’m 100% with you on that. Trek finally feels real.
LOL
People on Star Trek do a lot of things that people on real life don’t. That’s what makes it different. Wanna see people do ‘real life things’? Go see Bold and Beautiful. Star Trek should transcend our current state and show better humanity. What are you looking for next on board of the Enterprise? Drugs (hi Harlan and your orginal script for ‘City on the Edge…’)? School shoot-outs? Slavery?
When you’re saying that you’re bored with the Sunday School crowd, you’re also saying you’re bored with 50 years of Star Trek. Perhaps you should consider abandoning the fandom of the franchise?
Except that — unlike wars and plagues and such — there is nothing wrong with swearing, and there is nothing about lack of swearing that shows “better humanity.”
I simply don’t get that opinion, Luke. You say no swearing is “unrealistic”… It is futuristic! The entire goal of education and morality is to turn the next generation into people that don’t do certain things… 400 years into the future, that goal should have been achieved.
This has nothing to do with being a “kids show” or not. The really dumb aspect is isolated youth protection. Keeping the truth from children just because they are children is meaningless. It only makes sense to guide children if they remain that way all their lives. This is why I consider most “adult” behavior inacceptable… Adults should behave like children are told to. Otherwise neither values nor upbringing has any deeper meaning…
This is why I’m so offended by “adult” material. Because if people behave like children are not supposed to, it proves that every attempt at educating and guided young people is pointless.
Why keeping swearing, smoking, drinking, nudity from kids when they eventually end up doing all of that anyway? Either it’s wrong or it’s okay. But as long as it is wrong for kids, it must be wrong for adults too.
But that’s the autist in me speaking. I’m simply incapable of grasping the idea of adulthood. I can only think in black and white. I’m unable to grow beyond that limitation. I’m simply doomed to remain an overgrown 12-year-old emotionally…
If the only decision is a binary choice between right or wrong, any attempt at understanding growth and grey zones is pointless. Dropping the f-bomb is either totally wrong for everyone or totally acceptable for anyone at any age. As it is absolutely inacceptable for kids, it has to be absolutely inacceptable for everyone…
That’s simply how my mind works… I cannot grow beyond that. Sorry…
I’m not a faithful Christian but there is that one line in the Bible that represents everything I feel about life: “If you don’t become like a child you will not enter the gates of heaven”.
Due to my “condition”; I’m blessed and doomed with that gift of having to stay a child in a man’s body. While I acquired a certain amout of specific knowledge and life experience, I am simply incapable of understanding the meaning behind adulthood. It simply makes no sense to me at all…
Every adult – for examle an actress in adult productions – once was a 12-year-old. And every 12-year-old will most likely become 18 or 32… But they are still the same person as far as their soul is concerned… call it Katra, Pagh or whatever you want… the essence is the same. I am simply unable to understand what mental growth even means. Like the Bajoran Prophets I am not capable of perceiving linear progression the way you “normal” people do. This Peter Pan Syndrome makes me incapable of embracing any adult material because like a little child who has done wrong, that inner voice keeps judging adult behavior as evil… Everything I had learned at the age of 12 is still in place in absolutes. Any relativity is absent from my mind.
I stand apart, just like your Vulcan science officer, or an android gazing upon humanity woth wonder and confusion or a changeling that is capable of looking human on the outside while never being a solid at heart, or like a former Borg drone that had never undergone natural puberty… I am all of these characters… They are more akin to me than humans ever could.
That is great insight into autism, thank you. As far as keeping swearing, nudity and swearing away from kids? As adults and parents, we try to preserve that childhood as much as possible. Being carefree as a child is a sight to behold when one is an adult. Puberty comes really quickly and our kids will be adults soon enough. Getting an education, finding a job, a passion. Being an adult carries the freedom but the responsibilities, as well. Our kids also have to function in society. There is a code of conduct at school, on sports teams, and interacting with each other. Being polite and having impulse control is just a part of that. I had a friend whose brother and sister in law who felt that disciplining their child was not proper child rearing. When their daughter started school in kindergarten, she was unable to function. She had no respect for authority. They had to pull her out of school for another year and NOW work on self discipline and respecting others. She is starting to thrive, now. She actually seems to be a HAPPIER child with her boundaries in place.
Thank YOU for your kind reply. While I still cannot embrace the idea of a separate set of rules and morality for children and adults, it doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in that. I just doesn’t compute. Growing up physically, I almost certainly haven’t evolved mentally and emotionally.
My autism is high functional, I have a powerful savant (island talent) that must have masked my true nature for decades: acting and linguistic expression is so strong in me it took me ages to discover that I was actually being different.
But all I can say is this: I never grew beyond any of the restrictions set upon me as a child. I still feel bad about R-rated movies and TV-MA content because I can only distinguish between good or bad. Since I don’t perceive time, growth and progression the way you do, I don’t consider myself mentally more mature than back in 1994 when I became a Trekkie at the age of 14.
When I still called myself Smike on this board a couple of years ago, I tormented myself and my readers with endless quibbles I had with all of that. I know now why I had these emotional tremors: Asperger with an unhealthy infusion of borderline issues.
And due to all of that, I’m incapable to comprehend a set of boundaries that only apply to kids wheras adults are not only allowed but virtually invited to bending those rules via media input. TV-MA makes no sense because of lack of maturity within me. Freedom and responsibilities? I can only deal in absolutes. I have no freedom to overstep any boundaries implanted during my childhood and formative years. Legally I have, but not emotionally.
I’m not generally one to buy arguments like “they do it that way in Sweden, ergo it’s better”; but seriously, you wonder how European kids actually manage to, y’know, grow up, what with all that avant-garde, nudity-embracing European cinema.
Perhaps it explains football hooligans. Dunno.
It’s an interesting dichogamy. In the US they crack down on sex but let a lot of violence through. In Europe, they crack down on the violence and let a lot of the sex through. I recall some time ago that Bond producers have been very aware of that from ratings boards and have sometimes complained that it makes it tougher when cutting their films to reach the desired ratings for both N America and Europe.
Perhaps the better balance is somewhere in between.
I find this very interesting. I’m an autistic woman and am pretty much the opposite of what you describe. I was always a relativist, precisely because I saw adults acting in opposition to what they said. “Do as I say, not as I do” bothered me immensely. “No one can force you to do anything you’re not comfortable with… oh, but, you simply MUST do what the teacher says!”
While you describe yourself as an overgrown child, I myself felt like I was essentially born grown up and never really had a childhood. I questioned teachers and got into trouble for it even when I was right and they were wrong. Eg the English teacher screwed up their grammar? I’d point it out. The history teacher said something incorrect? I pointed it out. Geography teacher said Russia was only in Asia? I’d point it out.
So rather than having an inviolable set of rules instilled in you from childhood, I was always skeptical of any of the rules, who was setting them, whose interests it served to have them be followed, who was allowed exceptions and who wasn’t. I’d determined for myself from a young age that many of them were arbitrary and had no fundamental purpose of goodness to them. Getting into trouble for defending myself against bullies while bullies had no punishment at all. Girls getting shushed in class when boys were allowed to keep being disruptive. Girls getting told “he just likes you” when the boy cuts her hair with scissors in class. All of these were things I noticed and took issue with, even in second grade.
So I also never had any personal issue with swearing, etc. I grew up around my older brother who would swear a lot, and I just was taught that teachers don’t like students sweating and to keep it away from school. So I did. But that wasn’t taught as a moral imperative, it was taught as a practical social cohesion rule. Also since I read at a “15 year old level” when I was 7, various more mature themes were brought to my attention earlier than some others might have.
The only really black and white rule for me is: are people being harmed or helped? But of course the answer there is so often not as clear-cut or binary as the question. I’ve always hated hypocrisy, believing it to be among the worst things anyone could do — to act contrary to their stated beliefs. But when it comes to specific social rules? I’ve never seen most of them as anything but arbitrary, in service of wider rules and regimes. I always found myself looking underneath the surface, and between the lines. I get baffled when people take other people at face value instead of analysing context.
You say you can only conceive of the world in binary terms of right and wrong, while I get deeply uncomfortable when people do that because the fact that everything is grey has always been apparent to me from a very young age. Like, eating meat, having money and a home and a job while other places are in deep turmoil, using resources for good (like medicine) that also create local harm when they’re mined, and so on…. even from 4 years old I was deeply bothered by these contradictions. Even the most good things also have harmful side effects. And even the worst things can have unintended good consequences.
And when the world is full of contradictions and inconsistencies, I suppose either you have to come to peace with that fact, or you construct a mental system that reconciles it all into consistency. So I can definitely see some similarities in our underlying mode of operation, but boy have they been expressed differently by our upbringings.
Thank you for your insight. ASD is vast field and there are certainly very different forms around. All I can say is that I score very high on both tests (43/50 and 68/80).
It’s not that I’m a sucker for regulations. On the contrary. As they complicate everything for me, I want most of them to just go away. Hence my inner battle with age restrictions and youth protection.
I got stuck in a very intense feedback loop concerning various age restrictions in every country when DSC came out because I couldn’t handle the divergence between the reality of viewing habits and legal requirements.
DSC and PIC got 16+ ratings in my country and my mind simply couldn’t handle it that young people below that age would watch anyway. I felt like an accomplice in a major crime. I started hating almost everyone: the state for creating those laws, the producers including that “mature” content in Star Trek, the parents letting them watch it anyway, the kids for not abiding to age restrictions, cellphones and the internet for making that possible and myself for being a fan of such “adult” content. That civil war within my mind was raging on for almost three years until my mum died and I lost my parental home… temporarily taking my mind off those quibbles…
I still don’t really know how to break this chain of thoughts or whose side I want to win… the regulators or the industry… All I knows is that I had to cut back on warching mature TV shows dramatically not be confronted with that sort of content on a daily basis… Not because it’s wrong but because I was told it’s wrong by my late parents, my legislation…
“While you describe yourself as an overgrown child, I myself felt like I was essentially born grown up and never really had a childhood.”
I guess we are not that different. I also was essentially born very mature but only until the age of 13 or 14. After that, no real development happened. I never had a couple of essential experiences.
I simply arrested any emotional development. Unexpected situations, unpleasant surprises, difficult tasks and any thought of sexuality make me react like a little child. Sometimes a little event such as dropping a yoghurt is well enough to send me over the edge…
I hide myself in an inner tantrum of anger and aggression, full-on hypermegalomania and a fantastic fear of everything at the same time. Thank God I’m not force sensitive or a dilithium mutant in such a borderline moment… :-)
Right on! Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Twilight Zone are all juvenile trash because they don’t have cursing. Keep bringing that truth.
There was plenty of swearing in Star Trek; it’s just that it was in Klingon or Romulan. Coming up with any in-universe explanation is sillier than the need to explain why Klingons developed foreheads in TNG. The only explanation is that in the pre-Sopranos era, swearing was verboten, and that thankfully audiences have become more mature.
As for “it will corrupt my sweet kiddos”: gimme a break. Remember the elementary school playground? Or if it bothers you that much, don’t let the kiddos watch it. They’ll appreciate it much more as a work of art if it’s not kiddified.
Keeping the swearing to made up languages is almost like going the BSG route for it. Frack!!
I’m hoping for nudity.
Oh that hurts. If that happens, I’m done with your planet. Poisoning Trek with gratuitous nudity is totally out of line. As wrong as it is doing that on Amazon’s Middle-earth show…
I know, GR would have probably wanted it that way. Well, modern Trek didn’t stick to GR’s original vision and values on so many occasions, why starting now? This is the only question in which I completely and utterly oppose GR’s openmindedness…
I felt bad about that on Deadpool, GoT, Species… and I don’t really care about any of those worlds… The Klingon sex scenes was fake enough to prevent actual nudity on Trek. But if they go for a topless Vena dance or naked Edo planet, I’m out…
I simply couldn’t justify being a Trekkie then… It was hardly possible to overcome Icheb’s eyeballs, but that was fake. Nudity is real…
Just to chip in about this important aspect – count me as another who would be very disappointed indeed if this latest spin-off is as littered with unnecessarily crass language as DISCOVERY and PICARD ended up being.
While I can curse with the best of them at times, I’m really hoping that this will be a show that parents can enjoy with their younger ones too…just like the original source material was. Sure, there can be some hard-edged moments and intensity that the writer’s can come up with….but I’ll consider this another missed opportunity for a ‘family’-friendly watch if there’s any overly strong swearing throughout this.
This particular show could potentially end up with a very broad-aged fanbase if they keep very harsh language out of it….so I hope the makers will focus on interesting storylines and adventure, rather than WTF outbursts from the characters!
broad-aged fanbase
Theresa May famously said that “if you’re a citizen of everywhere, you’re a citizen of nowhere.”
The River Temarc corollary: a show that appeals to everyone is a show that appeals to no-one.
Thankfully, David Chase sees no need to kiddify the Tony Soprano sequel, and Vince Gilligan sees no need to kiddify BETTER CAUL SAUL. Unlike much Star Trek 3.0, these people improved on their original masterpieces.
@ The River Temarc – I don’t know why anyone would expect sequel spin-offs to swear-filled original source material like THE SOPRANOS and BREAKING BAD *not* to be equally sweary to be honest….it just seems that those examples are like comparing apples and oranges when it comes to expanding the original source material that was the original ‘Star Trek’ show….which never needed to be swear-filled to build up it’s fanbase. Yes, it was an earlier, more restrictive time for tv shows when it was made, but the point still stands..
Sure, we had Kirk say an expletive to the Klingon who killed his son in THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, and a humorous “Oh, Sh*t!” from Data in GENERATIONS….but I’d argue that those are both much milder and acceptable than F-bombs being casually thrown around needlessly. And I’d definitely argue that a ‘Trek’ show doesn’t need that to be an entertaining hit, if the scripts are good.
Oh, and I’d also say that quote from Theresa May was more ‘infamous’ than ‘famous’….as she was a dreadful Prime Minister. I know, as I’m from the UK, and she was useless in the job!
“The River Temarc corollary: a show that appeals to everyone is a show that appeals to no-one.”
Wow, just wow. You made MY point by trying to make your own :-) If Star Trek tries to appeal to everyone such as the fans of Game of Thrones, Walking Dead and The Simpsons, it appeals to no one.
“Thankfully, David Chase sees no need to kiddify the Tony Soprano sequel, and Vince Gilligan sees no need to kiddify BETTER CAUL SAUL.”
So why adultifying and maturifying Star Trek then? It was never supposed to have f-bombs and T&A… It was never supposed to have torture pawn. Improving on our original masterpieces means creating a family-friendly space opera for a very broad-aged fanbase! Because that is what Star Trek had been from day one…
Honestly, one of the reasons why I was not a fan of The Soprano’s was that it seemed like they dropped F bombs EVERYWHERE. Like Cervantes I can certainly swear it up with the best of them. But good lord the amount they threw at us in Soprano’s was just absurd. It felt more like “hey, we are HBO! We can curse all we want! Let’s go nuts with the F-bombs!” To me, it contributed to making the show unwatchable.
There is a time and a place even when the time and place is appropriate, that time is not ALL the time.
Sex sells. That’s never going to change.
I’m ok with it growing up a bit. I did enjoy TNG with my daughter as 4-7 year old. I’d have struggled with F-Bombs while watching it.
I’m a bit more middle of the road on this. I don’t think Roddenberry would be super excited about vulgarity, ultra-violence, and F-bombs, in the same way he opposed the militaristic bent in the movies after Star Trek II. Vulgarity is often a reflection of violent and hateful inner thoughts. That’s how the Admiral used it in Picard. But then there’s Tilly’s usage, “Science is so f#%*ing cool!” Cheesy, funny, not hateful, not violent—I think that’s in keeping with Star Trek. (Although I could have done without it too.)
Human sexuality and nudity will be more accepted and less a topic of scorn and judgment than it is today. Roddenberry believed it, and I hope for it. I don’t have a problem with depicting sexuality and nudity in Star Trek.
As for violence and other dark practices, so long as it is used to hold up a mirror to modern humanity, it has its place in Star Trek. When they start showing Starfleet and Earth civilization pulling out people’s eyeballs, then they are departing from Star Trek’s hopeful vision of humanity. However, to show a Klingon bat’leth slicing through a human body or a Romulan disruptor tearing apart human flesh, well that to me is holding up the mirror. Like it or not, the worst traits of Star Trek’s aliens—Klingons (violence), Romulans (secrecy), Ferengi (greed), Cardassians (authoritarianism)—are really depicting the worst aspects of humanity. But Star Trek at its best shows humans in the future rejecting those tools of oppression.
But I also loved DS9’s message that we must be diligent to protect humanity’s achievements. If that means showing parts of humanity slipping and morally compromising (Admiral Ross in “Home Front/Paradise Lost” and even Sisko himself in “In the Pale Moonlight”), then so be it. It’s good compelling Star Trek. I would note that one scene that has always troubled me is Archer torturing the Xindi in the air lock in “Anomaly.” In the aftermath of 9/11, it seemed to be endorsing the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Star Trek: Enterprise is pre-Federation, however, so maybe it is showing that humanity in the 22nd century just isn’t there yet.
My issue is not darkness and violence on the content side. DS9 had some dark moments, bleak choices and morally delicate decisions… and all of that – in a healthy dosage – was fine with me even though it isn’t my favourite feature of Trek.
My issues are more with the depiction of such stuff. As you’ve said… the eyeball! That was Hostel, not Star Trek… And there were many more of those scenes, not as gross but shocking nonetheless. Elnor chopping off that bald Romulan’s head in slow motion, the Klingon throat.cutting orgy in DSC S2, the severed baby head in the same episode (fake but still…), thousands of Borg being sucked into space… the infamous Klingon torture sex scene…
On the content side you may deal with all of that. Worf killed Duras and Gowron… but it was never shown in any graphic detail… That’s my issue, not those themes per se…
But I guess it’s a problem if you’ve been raised to certain visual no goes and are psychologically incapable of overcoming such limitations…
I could not agree more with everything you said. This is like 99% how I feel about it.
The pearl-clutchers need to stop kidding themselves. Roddenberry would have shown swearing had NBC censors permitted it back in the day. He was also a notorious horn dog, and would likewise have shown nudity absent the same barriers.
Seriously, he pushed the envelope as it was, and not just with the Kirk-Uhura kiss. Do you not remember the female the suggestive costuming of episodes like “The Gamesters of Triskelon,” “The Cloud Minders,” and “A Taste of Armageddeon”? Or for that matter, early TNG uniform ideas, which showed near-shirtless sides on the tunics?
He would most certainly shown nudity because back then, sexual liberation was seen as a progressive tendency. Nowadays it’s quite the opposite as sexy clothing and nudity is often seen as male-gaze sexism…
But full-on swearing? That’s a zipper GR would have never opened, because Trek was all about overcoming such gross behavior. Mild forms of a colorful language are a non-issue but dropping an f-bomb in every other sentences Avasarala-style is so low and awkward. Once or twice, in a historical context on the holodeck, but when it becomes a habit for the main charcters, it goes against everything Trek stands for… a hopeful, positive and utopian look at the future…
I haven’t sampled an episode of New Trek since the season finale of “Picard” broke my heart. I liked the cast and (for the most part) production design of this take on the Pike era, and am willing to give SNW a try. But at this point, color me skeptical.
Goldsman’s heavy hand is enough to color me red with anger and blue with disappointment, and that’s not even taking into account his feature credit stinkers. To me, it’s like having Janice Lester run a starship.
Well, I’m long past the point of getting angry over creative mishandling of TV shows and other media properties. ‘Disappointed’ will suffice at my age. And while Goldsman wouldn’t be my first choice as showrunner,, either—at least based on his Trek output so far—neither would Seth Macfarlane.
I envy you for actually having an age… I’ve been 14 for the last 26 years and if I don’t die I’ll still be 14 at the age of 60… I cannot mentally grow, I can never encompass an adult’s mind… That’s why being angry like a pubecent Vulcan on PonFar all the time is my permanent condition and errupts in spontaneous ticks of verbal aggression on a regular basis… a lot like Young Spocks outbursts on Genesis…
I’m now 62, and have been pretty emotionally arrested most of my life as well. But given the current state of humanity (as contrasted with my lifelong Trekkian hopes for it), I have no anger left over for TV shows.
@ Michael Hall – like you, I’m long past the point of getting too worked up over any disappointments I’ve had concerning ‘creative mishandling’ of properties which I’ve previously loved and invested in.
There’s been plenty of instances of that over the years (from my own perceived view), whether it be movie or shows from certain franchises.
So rather than letting any dross cloud my appreciation of a franchise, I merely ignore the stuff I dislike now, and stick to just enjoying my own compiled ‘personal canon’ of movies and shows I consider worthwhile for a future rewatch.
For instance, where my own limited ‘Trek’-related preferences are concerned, there’s only the NON-remastered classic original show (minus a smattering of episodes)…the animated Star Trek show with the original voice cast (for nostalgic reasons)….and selection of TNG episodes…and all the TOS movies (concluding with STAR TREK IV:THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, and discarding GENERATIONS)….and ending with the STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT movie….and *nothing else* after that! So far anyway. :)
As another good example, apart from a re-edited version of ROGUE ONE, I contentedly discard *all* of the STAR WARS movies that have been made since the original trilogy of A New Hope/Empire Strikes Back/Return Of The Jedi (but only ‘Harmy’s ‘Despecialized’ edits, although I’m waiting for ‘Adywan’ to finish off his amazing versions)….but am content to include THE MANDALORIAN show as a diverting enough follow-up.
There are plenty of other franchises I can think of that unfortunately disappointed me too,….but in the same way there’s always ‘hope’ that the next SW-spin-off with be a winner for me (I’m looking forward to Patty Jenkin’s upcoming ROGUE SQUADRON movie for instance, as well as the ANDOR and OBI-WAN KENOBI shows), there’s always the possibility that the *next* TREK-related property will be much better also.
Don’t let me down STRANGE NEW WORLDS…
Star Trek is a passion for a lot of us. Thus the term FANATIC. It’s show business. If swearing and adult situations (nudity) attracts and keeps new viewers? It’s here to stay. Par + is willing to annoy us nitpickers because we most likely will WATCH ANYWAY.
The head of ViacomCBS has come out and said that media companies don’t care if people hate-watch, they just need them to watch.
With the observation that if people want something different then they shouldn’t watch what they don’t like.
Maybe it’s just me, but I heard a pointed comment at certain Trek fans in that.
That a very short-sighted idea. If the die-hard fanbase rejects a new property, viewing numbers will be very short-lived as young people will proably move on to something else along that line instead of remaining with a single franchise for over 50 years.
Trek needs new blood, it needs new generations of fans but those must be really fans, not casual viewers to come and go. And I believe you can only be an actual fan if there is something special and unique about a product. If it’s just like any other contemporary property, I smell Pyrrhus victory for the suits. They win over a couple of casual viewers at the expense of an entire generation of next gen die-hards…
I couldn’t imagine myself falling in love and remaining a life-time fan of something as cynical and misantropist as GoT or TWD…
I’ve always been a big believer in the concept of “head canon,” which is why the fan-made “World Enough and Time” is part of the Trek canon that I care about, while the actual TOS episode “And the Children Shall Lead” isn’t.
I think head canon is increasingly going to become a thing in fandom, what with the likes of LOWER DECKS and such; there is simply no credible way to view that show as realistic. Magic blood and spore teleportation drives don’t help.
To me, “head canon” only goes so far. If one is constantly having to resort to “head canon” in order to make what is on screen work within the rules of the created universe, then the problem is the people creating the content. A certain amount of “head canon” is fine. Like my “head canon” is that Scotty was already on the Enterprise before Kirk showed and was promoted to be the Chief Engineer. To me, that helps explains his attachment to the ship. But when one needs to make stuff up to explain why Burnham or Picard was doing something every week… That’s just a lack of understanding from the creators.
That’s why it’s your head-canon, as opposed to mine. There’s nothing to argue about.
Your ability to compress Star Trek down to “head canon” is almost admirable. I would never be so bold to claim that my taste stands above the franchise. As a collector, completist and someone who can only think 1 or 0, I have to take the rough with the smooth when it comes to franchises. But that’s okay. I also like getting emotionally invested with some dislikes, because after all, even bad Trek is still better than no Trek or good other stuff :-)
@ Garth Lorca – I only like what I like nowadays, and forget about the rest. I’m just not someone who likes every single different writer’s/director’s take on original source material that I liked to begin with, if it doesn’t sit well with me. I can’t be uncritical of certain things just because it has the original source material name slapped on it, and it’s now classed as ‘official’ canon.
Everybody has their own favourite movie and show spin-off storylines, and I know that I’m especially selective and nit-picky about mine. It doesn’t mean that I’m right in my own choices compared to what others like…it just means that those are my very own preferences at the end of the day.
….so I’m hoping that I can add STRANGE NEW WORLDS to my own list of ‘Trek’-related likes….as long as it doesn’t require needing to have watch the events DISCOVERY to understand certain plotpoints along the way, then I might be in luck.
My guess is that the producers will try to make the show accessible to as many people as possible. If they reference stuff from Discovery it will probably either be easter eggs (i.e. doesn’t matter if you miss it) or will be explained in a flashback/re-cap. I’m not sure what this means for bringing back characters from Discovery like Ash Tyler and L’Rell. I know that some fans expect them to return but the writers would either need to treat them like new characters or bring their new viewers up to speed about what happened before.
@ DIGINON – you may well be right….which is why I’m hoping that given it’s more individual story episodes, that I’ll be able to *miss out* any episodes featuring DISCOVERY ‘references’ or ‘story strands’ altogether for myself eventually, if I really like the SNW show.
The biggest spanner in the works for me would be some kind of re-introduction of any other DISCOVERY characters other than the Enterprise’s main SNW crew, especially if they end up involved for many episodes.
Star Wars. It hasn’t been seen in over 40 years. A New Hope isn’t Star Wars. They changed the roll up and the starfield, still not as bad as say Han shooting second. Or all those new cartoon cgi effects which ruined the movie. I’m well aware Lucas created the A New Hope title in 1979 but it wasn’t added until 1981. The non anamorphic letterbox 2006 bonus DVD was a facsimile with the original title tacked onto the definitive edition master and still had the incorrect 1993 sound mix. But the original 1977 version has never been on home video.
@ skyjedi – correct. I merely use the A NEW HOPE moniker as an easier way to refer to the original STAR WARS movie nowadays, as there’s been so many ‘STAR WARS’ movies released since then.
I was wrong on Macfarlane, I do now see that, just as I was probably wrong about THE STATION AGENT filmmaker for a trek feature a la Meyer, but I still think he’d be better than what we have.
What was your beef with “Et in Arcadia Ego”?
I thought it was dreadful on just about every level, from the ridiculous tentacled AIs and the predictable appearance of Riker and his boring copy-and-paste fleet, to the decision to turn Picard into a robot. I could scarcely believe that it was written by Michael Chabon, one of the best novelists presently working in the United States — except for the five minutes where Picard and Data have their final encounter, which were just wonderful and the kind of work I would expect from him.
I’ll always have fondness for this franchise, but ever since the crushing disappointment of this finale (and that of Discovery’s first season), I’ve emotionally moved on.
Apart from the copy’n’paste fleets (!), I cannot agree to your criticism. Riker popping up was just cool, the tentacled AIs were a nice nod to both DSC and Matrix and the location felt more like classic Trek than anything else in 50 years.
The only sad but fitting aspect was Data’s Goodbye. Picard becoming a golem is an interesting choice and elaborates in the themes of both his artificial heart and his stint as Locutus…
Riker showing up was cool, but gratuitous. It really should have been Admiral “FU Picard” (as reportedly it was meant to be), giving a little redemption to that long history of terrible Starfleet Admirals.
Riker coming out of retirement and immediately taking command of an entire copy-and-paste armada was just another example of Modern Trek producers who know diddly squat about how any military organization actually works. Roddenberry and Coon had that military background to give TOS that feeling of authenticity. Bad Robot and Secret Hideout have none at all.
Riker knows Picard better than anyone and was best placed to determine whether he had “gone rogue”/insane (a la Kurtz from HEART OF DARKNESS) or whether he really had uncovered a Romulan plot. And Picard would trust Riker if he showed up and said he was ready to help. Neither of these factors would have applied to Admiral Clancy.
Reactivating Riker made sense.
Glad you enjoyed it; I only wish that I had as well. I saw a lot of potential in “Picard” and rather liked the first half of the season, until the thing jumped the tracks altogether. Since the pandemic allowed them to write the entire second season before resuming production, perhaps they’ll do better this time. I certainly hope so.
Right there with you Garth! I think it worked pretty well.
I have issue with the storytelling. The plot goes “clunk” in a few spots. I’m just happy Star Trek is back “home” on television. When you get a good ep? You’re excited for next week. You get a bum ep? Well, there’s always next week…
Personally, I thought the Data/Picard scene redeemed the episode. The action elements are there to rope in the “general audience,” but then hit that audience with a subversive “quiet” Star Trek moment and you expand the minds of the “general audience” and maybe transform a few into actually Trekkies. The season finale of Star Trek: Discovery season 3 achieved this as well. It’s baked into the Star Trek recipe all the way back to TOS. I get why people are upset with Picard in an android body, but how about we see where they take it? Picard’s inevitable identity crisis and resolution could be some really great high-minded storytelling, if folks give it a chance.
I thought the Picard/Data scene was excellent (and pure Michael Chabon), but in my world there’s just no way that five minutes can redeem an otherwise mediocre forty. I wish it were otherwise.
I do agree about the story potential regarding the issue of Picard’s identity. We’ll see.
Well, I thought the transformation of Picard was brilliant, for a couple of reasons. First, TNG was about Pinocchio: Data’s quest to become human. It didn’t *have* to be that way; they might have taken the route, hinted at in a couple of early episodes, that Data was “a culture of one,” much like the portrayal of Odo ended up. And you could argue that the Pinocchio metaphor dishonored Data, an example of humans engaging in what the Extremely Woke call “cultural appropriation.” Picard’s android body (or more precisely: android-ish; remember, he is still living tissue, not electromechanical) delightfully subverts the Pinocchio theme. Becoming human is no longer the apotheosis of an android’s existence; becoming an *android* is the apotheosis of human existence. Second, look: we’re actually on the cusp of “transhumanism” — a fusing between biological and technological components — in real life. I suspect 100 years from now having implants a la 7 of 9 or Geordi or that Lower Decks character will be old hat, and utterly uncontroversial. What better way to explore these issues? Science fiction is *supposed* to provide early-warning alerts about the pros and cons of new technology. Third, it’s not like Picard’s transformation is entirely novel within the Trek universe. There was Dr. Ira Graves from “The Schizoid Man,” which was almost entirely the same procedure (downloading human consciousness into an android body), not to mention adjacent examples like Janice Lester or “Lonely Among Us.” Picard’s rebirth will not be without consequences. They’ve telegraphed that it will be explored thoroughly in season 2, as it should be. Fourth, there was some real moral ambiguity to grapple with. Picard was NOT indisputably correct in his complaint that “Starfleet was no longer Starfleet.” He was NOT indisputably seizing the moral high ground in resigning the admiralcy. (He also ruined the career of his new first officer, Raffi Musiker, in the process; imagine if he had done that to *Riker*.) I saw a Starfleet that went out of its way to assist a former enemy (bear in mind how controversial a “Marshall Plan for the former Soviet Union” was in real life in the late 1990s, and you’ll get a sense of what the debate must have been like in the Trek universe) and broke off the effort only after much of Starfleet’s ship-building capacity was destroyed on Mars. Fifth, as for Riker, so what? “Nepenthe” was one of the best Star Trek episodes ever, in my book. And it’s entirely realistic that Starfleet would recall Riker to service in that instance; who better to assess Picard’s *real* state of mind than his “right hand-man” for 14 years? Bear in mind that the Starfleet brass, personified by Admiral Clancy, probably thought Picard had gone all Col. Kurtz on them (the botched TV interview, the flirting with the Fenris Rangers, infiltrating the Borg reclamation project, etc.). They needed to figure out whether that was the case. As for the copy-and-paste fleet: look, I wonder whether this was a budgetary decision or an artistic one; I tend to think the latter, given that a few CGI tweaks would have been relatively inexpensive these days. They were probably hinting that Starfleet churned out massive number of the same starship design in the aftermath of the destruction of Utopia Planetia, much in the way the US churned out B-52 bombers in World War II, or the ubiquitous DC-3 aircraft. That’s fair enough, although I would have liked to see *some* other ships thrown in the mix; what we saw stretch credibility somewhat, but not overly so. And in any case, Star Trek is fundamentally about the characters and strange new worlds, and not about the FX. How often have we seen people complain that fancy-pants FX is drowning out good writing? Sixth, I thought the series fleshed out Romulan culture very well, beyond the limited exposure we’ve had to the Romulan military culture, and in particular, the Qowat Milat were portrayed very well. Finally, as you point out, there was the wonderful, final Picard-Data scene. I’ve read that Chabon thought about making that scene a full episode, which is an intriguing idea. But regardless, it was still a wonderful scene, and it really capped Data’s quest to be human and gave meaning to his sacrifice in NEMESIS (and elevated that movie considerably). It was a fitting finale for Data. There are some quibbles with Season 1. I’m not opposed to killing off characters, and I understood that decision to kill of Icheb and sent 7 of 9 into an existential spiral. That said, I would not have killed off Hugh; I’d have probably had him team up with Seven to help Riker save the day. Narissa, the female Romulan spy, was too much of a mustache-twirler. Nerek’s arc ended a… Read more »
Small correction it’s B-17 and B-29 Bombers for WWII. The B-52 wasn’t even designed until after the war. But yeah I get your points. :D
Fingers crossed that this particular spin-off can capture some of the old magic of the original show and it’s characters.
It’s going to be refreshing to have some short, self-contained episodic stories again, to add some real variety to the proceedings. That was a big part of what I liked about the original show…it’s totally random situations from week to week. Sure, it had a handful of clunkers along the way, but every episode took you to a whole new different adventure and setting, which kept things unpredictable…and very rewatchable overall.
I’m still gonna look on it as an ‘alternate universe’ to the classic show’s characters, but I’m really looking forward to a return to form for the franchise.
Only please…give us a memorable main theme for this one, although I’ll happily take a re-mix of the classic theme if need be. Good luck to all concerned with this one, *especially* the writers!
I agree, the theme music to these new shows doesn’t inspire like the oldies did. Yeah, that’s right, I got faith of the heart…
@ albatrosity – it may seem like a small thing in the overall scheme of things, but a great main theme can really set up someone’s anticipation for a regular show.
‘Faith Of The Heart’ was a clawing dirge to start the ENTERPRISE show off with, as far as I’m concerned….and the intro. themes to DISCOVERY and PICARD have been blandly insipid I reckon. Others may differ on that…er, note, I accept.
I really do feel like a Star Trek theme should make your heart swell. Picard’s does this for me.
Yes, it does. The PIC theme is the best one since VOY. The DSC theme is a tad bland but it’s growing on me through having been used in so many touching moments…
The theme question for SNW is really exciting. As much as I’d like them to reuse the TOS theme with a modern twist, I’d also like them to have something original. Something like the unused theme for TNG that was later replaced by the TMP theme…
They should do an all new theme for the opening and use the TOS theme at the end, just like they have done in the KT movies and the S1 finale of DSC…
Picard’s theme grew on me. I think it’s beautiful in its simplicity and captures something about aging and the movement of time. Lower Decks is pretty different but fits the nature of that show well. Discovery’s theme though, is a meandering mess that just goes nowhere.
I have three issues with the DSC theme…
First it’s anticlimatic… the Trek fanfare shouldn’t be in this position at the end…
Second it’s a bit bland compared to DS9, VOY or PIC…
Third it is so much like Hoist the Colours from POTC3 I can hardly tell them apart…
I don’t like the “Trek Fanfare” in Discovery’s theme at all. I’ve always thought of it as The Enterprise Fanfare because you first hear it the moment you see the Enterprise in the TOS opening. It was only used on shows/movies with the Enterprise. DS9 and VOY didn’t use it. Discovery shouldn’t have, either.
I think you’re right. Never thought about it that way. But yeah, it is. The fanfare is the only common ground between TOS and TNG… it’s the Enterprise fanfare. But then, ENT didn’t have it either though it was about an Enterprise! And Michael being Spock’s stepsis links her close enough to the main saga to justify that use to some degree.
“Picard’s theme grew on me.”
Oh, it should… it’s the lullaby the Borg Queen sang to you while being in the collective! Don’t you remember, Locutus?
I normally don’t go for just rehashing older things, but if SNW does anything but a new recording of the season 2 TOS music (with the singing) it will be a missed opportunity. This is THE show for leaning into the past. And Mount better have his chance to do the monologue.
(I could take or leave no man/no one — there’s the gendered aspect to be sure, but “man” also means humanity, and after all, if you meet a new civilisation, surely they’re someone who’s been there before? So the gender neutral Picard version raises new problems with anthropocentrism.)
Is it kind of weird that the only theme that brings any emotion whatsoever to me from the New Treks is Lower Decks theme? It reminds me of Voyagers theme and makes me want to go out and explore space.
I can’t unhear that the opening notes echo back to the main theme for The Animated Series.
It really does give one the sense of adventurousness.
Yeah, there’s something there… I couldn’t have said what it was but now that you mention it, yeah, it’s there…
I don’t think it comes even close to anything like VOY. It is the vein of Galaxy Quest and The Orville, with The Orville having the much better theme. If anything, it bears some resemblence to the unused Alternate TNG theme by Denis McCarthy that’s on the Farpoint soundtrack.
LDS is the only theme I cannot even remember when I want at this point. Maybe if they finally gave us a score download :-)
Going with stand alone’s does make SNW ‘stand alone’ from the other current fare. But the down side is 10 episodes of stand alones, even a couple of two parters if they go that route, just don’t feel like nearly enough episodes. For one continuous story, if the story arc works, 10-13 episodes can feel like a complete season. 10 episodes will feel very short indeed.
While I’ve found something to like about every iteration of Star Trek, my heart belongs to TOS in general and to Spock in particular. I’m so very excited for Strange New Worlds!
It’s too bad Spock never had his own series in which he commanded his own 5-year mission. That’s a show that would have had me dialed in every week! Maybe he did during some of those Lost Years between Star Trek VI and TNG, before he dedicated himself completely to diplomatic service. Who knows?
(Come on Nick Meyer make THAT show happen!)
I think Spock is at his most interesting when he has Shatner’s Kirk to serve as emotional contrast, but I’d certainly watch the heck out of a Captain Spock show!
For some reason I can never imagine Spock as a captain. I mean I can imagine Sulu or even Chekov as a captain, maybe even Scotty, but Spock just seems too logical to be a captain.
But Spock already was a Captain… In screen
Yes, he was, but have we really seen all his adventures as a captain? No. I just can’t imagine he’d be a Captain like Kirk. We just saw a small snippet of it. In fact, I think we saw him more in command of the ship in TOS, than he was as an official captain during the TOS movies.
Not so sure that would work. We got a small taste of that in “The Galileo 7”. Granted he was still on his learning curve then. But I think he worked better balanced with Kirk and even McCoy.
“The Galileo 7” was badly written, and I never actually believed in it. I think that so intelligent a person as Spock would realize quite early on that to manage humans, you must also manage their emotions.
I do think it is legitimate to criticize the simplicity of the episode. And the inconsistent size of the creatures was a bit weird. But as far as Spock was concerned I think they nailed it. Spock was still pretty raw when it came to leading humans. He showed that he was able to work with them but he still felt that cold logic was the best way to command at that point. So this was a rather large learning experience for him.
Finally! Star Trek as it was meant to be watched, one self-contained story at a time. Years from now, when you punch up one particular episode, you can enjoy it without having to scratch your head, trying to remember some inane storyline arc that didn’t impress you in the first place!
Enjoy your diet of Big Macs and fries.
TNG’s fans like Tim Lynch pushed long and hard for the serialization of TNG. They’re what got us DS9, and while I’m not on the “DS9 is the best Trek evah” bandwagon, its serialized nature was a strong point.
We’re told that SNW will have “serialized character arcs” and “lots of two parters”; I hope this ends up looking something like ENT season 4, with its trilogies, which I think was the best season of Star Trek ever.
But recreating TOS or early TNG, where there were never any consequences to anything, would be a serious, serious mistake. Television audiences are much more sophisticated these days, *particularly* where — as with Paramount+ — you’re asking them to pay subscription fees. This series has to complete with the likes of THE AMERICANS, BREAKING BAD, etc., not Nu MacGyver and Hawaii 5-0. Someone I fear Akiva Goldsman and Kurtzman are no Vince Gilligan.
Two parters and tripple episodes are neat and ENT S4 was definitely one of the best Trek seasons ever. Especially as they decided to visually move closer to TOS, adding a tad more color… Now we basically get TOS Redux, with the world of TOS being brought to UHD glory.
Character arcs as on Doctor Who are never an issue but when an entire series or season consists of only one main storyarc that causes lots of issues.
All in all, I’ve never truly embraced that new TV format and I’m glad there are still some safe zones for episodic genre TV such as Doctor Who, The Orville or now SNW…
Nice analysis here!
Hear, hear!
Well, I happen to love “The Expanse” to a far greater degree than anything Paramount Plus is currently putting out, but I do agree with your larger point about the re-watchability of serialized episodes and the difficulty of keeping up with all the nuances of stories which take place over an entire season or even series. By the time the fifth season of “Better Call Saul” comes to Netflix I’ll have have to binge 1 – 4 just to remember everything that went down.
Yeah, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a return to the re-set button every week, but maybe something more along the lines of DS9.
Actually I hope this show will be lightyears away from DS9 as far as style and format are concerned. DS9 had its great moments… the Dominion Arc was good, but the episodes that really stand out are the ones totally unrelated to that: Trials and Tribble-ations, The Visitor, Far Beyond the Stars and (guilty pleasure of mine) Move Along Home… Yeah I said it :-) Sorry…
But even those great DS9 episodes are not what I expect SNW to be… The show is called STRANGE NEW WORLDS, so yeah I expect them to waltz down on some truly alien planets and other realms beyond imagination, even a lot more than on TOS or early TNG. They have the technological means now to fully embrace that mission…
And honestly, as much as I’ve loved Trek so far, it has never ever truly fulfilled its mission every week. All shows included far too much politics, holodeck adventures, bottled mystery of the week fillers, comedy and weird off-topic stuff with sick dogs and ancient relative in the year 2000.
And when they finally nailed a planet or place visually, the story wasn’t that good.
I truly hope the entire show will look and feel like the best DSC episode so far: Si Vis Pacem Para Bellum, An Obole for Charon, Forget Me Not… Those three episodes are the benchmark for me as far as STRANGE NEW WORLDS are concerned… new planets, new dimension and psychedelic visions in the inner worlds of the mind…
“politics, holodeck adventures, bottled mystery of the week fillers, comedy and weird off-topic stuff with sick dogs and ancient relative in the year 2000.”
Bingo. I think it’s “politics, holodeck adventures, bottled mystery of the week fillers, comedy and weird off-topic stuff with sick dogs and ancient relative in the year 2000.” >>>>>> Final Frontier exploration hardships / Wagon Train to the Stars
is why new Trek just never captures the imagination or is as fun to watch as classic Trek (with some exceptions like Dominion War / fighting the Borg collective, etc).
In fact new Trek you have to wonder if exploration would be frowned upon as a colonial polluting activity that everyone is forced to instead play holodeck.
lol that’s what has me excited too. I love pulling up my Top Ten TOS/TNG/DS9 episodes. You just can’t do that with DISCO and Picard!
I appreciate the serialized format too, but it does sometimes become very plot driven and doesn’t have the genre bending charm that some older Star Trek episodes pulled off (westerns, mysteries, adventures, romances, humor, and well … sci-fi obviously). Sometimes, it’s also just fun to dip in and out with an old favorite for an hour.
I’m still waiting for my Star Trek “anthology” series ;-)
They should do an anthology streaming movie series. Paramount+ wants weekly original movies so they should have a Trek movie every three months… Those movies should span multiple eras.
They could do pre-ENT early missions (Ringship Enterprise), post-ENT Birth of the Federation / Romulan Wars, a Robert April First Mission movie, a TOS era Vanguard movie, Excelsior, Stargazer, Enterprise-C, Titan, TNG-DS9-VOY reunion movie(s), a live-action Lower Decks movie, Voyager J… you name it! With the new stagecraft and modern CGI, only parts of the set would have to be actually built and could be easily recycled and redressed to fit with each era…
Garth Lorca, I had exactly the same thought when I saw the Paramount+ movie-of-the-week announcement!
Even if it were just two Star Trek Universe movies per year, I’d be delighted.
And I agree that there are many great ideas from the litverse that would be great adaptations to that format.
I really do feel if nothing else this will be a much better and more accurate portrayal of the TOS era than Discovery ever tried to be and why they threw that show so far into the future. We’ll have to see how the show itself is, but I think this is really the chance to course correct a lot of the issues Discovery had when it was in this period and hopefully deliver something a little more in the vein of TOS in general.
They probably should have done this from the beginning, with Saru added and Yeoh as an admiral or captain of a sister ship, like Erika Hernandez.
As Picard would say, agreed!
And while season 3 was far from perfect, it was easily my favorite season of the show by far. I love the era it’s in now. I think I could’ve enjoyed a lot more if it was always there.
The era is interesting but it causes lots of issues for Trek. They shouldn’t have moved a millennium into the future. The 25th century would have sufficed. Now we have wasted 900 years of storytelling and every show set inbetween PIC and DSC S3+ would be some sort of strange midquel… You can probably never just go 50 years into the future of VOY or PIC and start over with another NextGen…
And that has been probably my second-favourite option, just after any TOS extension such as SNW…
But that’s not really true. The Burn didn’t happen until the middle of the 31st century. We still know nothing about the centuries between Picard and that period other than basic info we got from Enterprise and Voyager and it was mostly minor stuff. It doesn’t stop them from exploring or adding anything they want to canon..
I think we are going to get shows in the 26th, 27th centuries and beyond in the coming years. Think about it, if you can stuff SIX shows in the 24th century (TNG, DS9, VOY, PIC, LDS and now PRO) and four films with most of them in the same 10-20 year period after so many seasons/movies there already were in the 90s; how is it difficult to do any show AFTER any of those? It’s not. You can do literally whatever you want still. LDS is just a year after Nemesis and fifteen years before Picard, it doesn’t seem to slow down that show at all.
And in the future, not every freaking story has to stay in the alpha quadrant either. Shows can be thrown in other galaxies and universes in later centuries. We’re heading to the Delta quadrant again in Prodigy. Who saw that coming? Who knows where the next new show will take us? It’s Star Trek THINK BIG!!!!!!!!
Tiger, the only issue I have which makes me skeptical towards any new show / movie post-PIC, pre-DSC-S3 is that some fans have been clamoring for going “to the future” for ages. Now that we are there, we have skipped 800 years…
Hopefully you are right and they won’t be listening to those fans but again, this feels like a drawer already closed…
Both Lower Decks and Prodigy are set after TNG/DS9/VOY. Strange New Worlds is still set before TOS. So I guess this proves that any new show/movie doesn’t have to be set after the 32nd century.
By the way: I don’t think anybody who wanted to “go forward” expected them to jump forward this far. Maybe I’m wrong but my interpretation of “going forward” is more that people want to see something new and not revisit what they’ve seen before (which is what prequels often do). Technological progress in the real world also means that the fictional future we’ve seen on previous shows can look dated to modern eyes. As Discovery has shown, updating the look/technology of a previously established era can be controversial so it’s easier to go to an era we haven’t seen before. I’d say the 800 years between Picard and Discovery season 3 is a big enough gap to fill with a lot of new stories without stepping onto the toes of what has been established so far.
“By the way: I don’t think anybody who wanted to “go forward” expected them to jump forward this far.”
Well you’re certainly right about that lol. I never read a single post from anyone stating they wanted a show to be a thousand years of ahead of practically everything we seen before. MOST of us who talked about going forward usually seem to suggest anywhere from where the Picard show is now, basically set the same number of years in real time from when Nemesis premiered, around 20 years or so and that’s for people who just wanted to see the TNG era continue in some fashion (which I was open to obviously but didn’t care that much about if they did or didn’t).
Or set it a 100 years after Voyager somewhere in the 25th century and just basically ‘start over’ again which would’ve really interested me and others most personally.
And as you said most just wanted to go forward so you can basically show new things, new characters, situations, etc, ie what TNG did. Rewatching that show now after rewatching all of TOS a month ago, there really was a stark separation about it, not just the tech, cooler ships etc, but the show really did have freedom to do what it wanted. It would bring up something from TOS every once in awhile but it really stood on its own because it simply could. That was the issue with DIS, it just couldn’t. Every story line, piece of tech, cannon issue, every element was constantly compared to TOS in some way. That was the always the problem. Even WORSE because no one seem like they really wanted to connect the show to the look of TOS and that just gave them more problems in the end.
So they finally did what they probably should’ve been done from the beginning, just moved it to an era the show can completely be its own thing. And while people certainly complained about the show in season 3 still, no one mentioned anything about it feeling too advanced or it looked too out of place. Now it was completely fine to look out of place even if it did lol.
And yes the 800 year gap you can basically do what you want. The other thing about setting shows in the ‘future’, no one knows what the future actually looks like until someone tells us what it looks like. We have no clue what the Federation is like in the 27th century then we did in the 24th or 32nd until someone simply stated that’s how things were like now in those periods. That’s just the freedom of going into the future, you can think bigger or simply differently. With prequels, you can’t do either all that much, which once again Discovery proved because they had to ‘classify’ everything just to justify its existence a lot of the time. I literally thought that’s why they were making the Section 31 show, so they can show and do whatever they wanted, we would know all of it would be considered classified, so problem solved. ;)
So I’m really enjoying seeing what they are doing now. Nearly all the shows are post Nemesis minus SNW which is the best TOS prequel you can have, because it can just apologetically be a TOS prequel and not make any excuses about it while the others can go forward in different ways like PIC and DIS. And I imagine future shows we will see them in even more different centuries and eras. Once you set a show so far in the future like DIS, anything is possible now. This is what I been wanting since VOY went off the air.
DIGINON said it, but most people just wanted to go forward to really just tell newer stories at the end of the day. I use to have this argument every week practically here with others who said ‘going forward’ didn’t make much sense to them because it would ‘lose’ what Star Trek is, which was the oddest argument I ever heard lol. Star Trek is ABOUT THE FUTURE!!! That’s literally what the entire show is. It’s suppose to be set beyond our life time SO they can present anything they want in it. That’s why most futuristic shows exist.
Being set in the 23rd, 24th, 26th, 32nd, 44th centuries are all arbitrary. When they set the show never really mattered because it’s all just made up at the end of the day. It’s just a bunch of writers who are speculating, nothing more. This idea any of it has to be set in a particular period is just bonkers to me since NONE of it is real or based on anything today outside the fact humans will one day be able to explore and colonize space.
People only care about the ’23rd century’ because that’s where TOS was set, which is more funny because after watching every episode recently and all the references the show makes, it was most likely set in the 22nd century in reality. But by the time the movies showed up, they wanted to make it clear when it was set and pushed it ahead of the show’s original timeline and now everyone thinks of TOS being set in the 23rd century. But it proves how arbitrary it was. They could’ve said later it was really set in the 25th century and people would’ve nodded and that would’ve been it.
My very long winded point is we over think this stuff to a ridiculous level. As long as the shows makes can separate themselves from others, it doesn’t really matter. It only matters to how much it conflicts with canon, but as long as you don’t put a show or movie in places where you know stuff was specifically suppose to happen, you can put it anywhere and make the tech as grounded or magical as you want.
We simply want them to have the freedom to tell whatever stories they want. End of the day that’s all we are talking about. I don’t care about Star Trek being in the 26th or 41st century, I just want to see it be expanded as they are finally doing today. And if they feel they have to set it in a different era to make that clear, fine!
I agree with you Tiger and in fact I’d go so far as to say that we can literally have thousands of Star Trek stories on thousands of different ships with thousands of different crews. Why do we really need to go back to the crews of the Enterprise all the time. They could just imagine a new crew, a new ship in a new time, still exploring space. The most important part is to use your imagination, create interesting themes and colorful characters.
Yeah, if the “go to the future” people don’t regard DSC S3+4 as the new benchmark, then we could have all of these voyages inbetween…
RemInds me of Tilly’s remarks on the Voyager-J… “That’s–that’s ten generations of evolution?” “Eleven. Would love to hear those stories.”
That all the stories become generic as more of the galaxy is explored and the technology of starflight becomes mundane should surprise no one. That’s why the original Star Trek writers guide but an upper limit on the time range.
To break this you have to give up on our space-time and head elsewhere and make everything hard and new again, something that current writers avoid given they are too comfortable in the TNG holodeck
The holodeck was invented in TAS, decades before we saw it in TNG. It was just more advanced by then. As I said it doesn’t matter what century the shows are set in, it only depends on who writes it, period. I’ve said this more times to count and been right over and over again.
When it was announced Discovery was going to be a TOS prequel, people were happy because they thought the show would be more ‘grounded’ to what we saw in TOS and less magical tech stuff. And yet, what did we get in just the first two seasons alone: the spore drive which can literally send you to any part of the galaxy in seconds, a time travel suit that can create wormholes and apparently lift buildings and send them 50,000 light years and a nearly sentient super A.I. computer that not only guides the Federation in its mission but turned into Skynet, among other things.
All this stuff came off way more advanced from what we saw in the 24th century. Of course Discovery itself is one of the most advanced ships out there. Even in the 32nd century it’s more advanced than a lot of those ships thanks to both the spore drive and now Zora since AFAIK, they don’t have near sentient A.I.s on their starships yet (but really should by that point).
And yes, SNW is going to still have the same crazy tech and will have stuff just like you been seeing in the Kelvin movies and Discovery from personal transporters that can get you from Earth to Qo’nos to aforementioned wormhole jumping time travel suits because it’s the same people who wrote all that stuff now writing for SNW.
I think like Discovery, people who believe space and technology is going to feel more limited in SNW are setting themselves up for disappointment yet again. None of that has been true since 2009, not sure why it will be any different with that show given everything we seen up until now?
And it’s probably another reason why out of the five shows, four of them are post-Nemesis shows because not only do they know that’s what most fans want, the producers/writers themselves simply want to create new and cool technology. That’s why most watch Star Trek in the first place.
“When it was announced Discovery was going to be a TOS prequel, people were happy because they thought the show would be more ‘grounded’ to what we saw in TOS and less magical tech stuff”
Yes happy.
“All this stuff came off way more advanced from what we saw in the 24th century.”
Yep, LAME.
Here is to Strange New Worlds I hope!
Tiger2, I hate to break it to you but the general public isn’t watching Star Trek because it’s the continuation to anything that came before. Holodecks were as boring in TAS as they were in TNG.
The general audience watches Star Trek because every once and a while they look up at the stars and wonder what it would be like to explore them. The more dangerous, exciting, final frontier, etc the better.
Do you ever read my posts clearly? That’s literally why I watch Star Trek too. I love ALL of Star Trek and basically every element in it. I’m rewatching the entire franchise from the 22nd to the 32nd century and really enjoying it. I’m currently in the 24th century now which is my favorite era because of how much exploration we got, especially in VOY. That show explored more than any Star Trek show. That’s why it’s my third favorite show today. ;)
It’s also why I’m happy to see Star Trek go FURTHER in the future because I want more exploration and to see the franchise expand like it did starting with TNG and like it’s doing today. I want it to see it go to other universes and galaxies as well, which I’m guessing it will in time.
I just don’t have an issue with holodecks lol. Some of my favorite stories include them.
“I hate to break it to you but the general public isn’t watching Star Trek because it’s the continuation to anything that came before.”
Hence why so many of us hate prequels lol. That’s the point, we DON’T want to see what came before, most fans want to see new things, I completely agree! I have said this many times too including in this very tread dude.
Agreed of course. I understand putting a show on an Enterprise is easier to market but it’s not necessary either. AFAIK, shows that are NOT on an Enterprise seems to have no trouble getting viewers or fans or DS9 wouldn’t be my favorite show today. For me, I like Trek being on various different ships like Voyager or Discovery, because it shows diversity.
SNW is different because people are clamoring to get back on the ‘original’ Enterprise, that has huge appeal, especially since it hasn’t really been around since TOS. But I love to see different ships and crews as they push the franchise forward in new centuries and frontiers. That’s what excite most of us.
Bizarre that I missed this before – I wonder if the uniform Number One is wearing in the promo image is more like the ones we will see in SNW when it premieres. For whatever reason Rebecca’s collar is completely different than those worn by Ethan and Anson. In Disco S2 she wore the same uniform as the rest of the crew. No matter what it looks pretty cool!
That’s a behind-the-scenes shot from S2, her shirt is slightly unzipped at the top, and due to the way she’s leaning, since it’s unzipped, has pushed the collar up slightly and to the sides hiding under her hair.
Nah, it’s the same, just unzipped. That’s literally the costume she wore in the finale because the picture was taken while shooting the finale. It’s not a promo pic for SNW, it’s just something the actors posted to their socials.
If you look closely you can see the black asymmetric collar is there, it just blends in with her dark hair.
However, people working on the show have indicated some subtle set and costume changes were made between season 2 Disco and SNW shooting.
I for one hope the collar becomes symmetric. I get that they were going for a similar effect as the asymmetry in the TNG uniform, but it just looks as if they have only one half of a collar until they unzip it partially.
I just hope to Sha-Ka-Ree that they do not show the roller coaster turbo lifts. That drove me nuts!
The last Enterprise bridge picture posted here has a character at the righthand side who looks a lot like Ben Sisko in Trials and Tribbliations… Has he been visiting the Enterprise once again?
There are always, possibilities…
Anson actually said that he was VERY HAPPY with the material!
I reiterate, how is Strange New Worlds not the same as Discovery in terms of everything people hate it about it, such as setting, technology, and how aliens (i.e. Klingons) are portrayed? Are they going to give it a pass just because it will be episodic instead of serialized and the tone might be less serious?
Nobody knows yet though do they?
Until it actually lands the first episode you won’t know what the deal is, the tone, etc. Just wait and see like the rest of us. If you don’t like it, you just move on.
Like any good Trek I think it’s mostly about the characters and how they react to these unknown challenges. These iterations of Pike and Number One are widely loved. Hopefully SNW Spock will be a little closer to the Spock we know from TOS. That will be up to the writers.
At this point the writing will be key. Will it evoke the best of Trek for this modern age? Stay tuned. Setting, tech, and aliens are irrelevant if the writing is on par with what we know and love about Trek.
DSC opened a lot of pandora’s boxes on technology… and no, I don’t refer to the spore drive which I actually can accept as an abandoned prototype! Nobody every said that there were no spore drives around in the 23rd century. On the contrary: VOY mentioned failed propulsion experiments in that era in the Omega episode.
Klingon cloaking, terraforming abilities, holotech and nanotech… all of that was introduced as absolute firsts decades or even a century later. I’d be happy if they would either explain it somehow or simply retcon it out of premature existence…
The DSC S2 Klingon looks were a good compromise. Add some more human-looking spies to the mix and I’d perfectly accept the upgrade.
And yeah, since most people didn’t really like neither the outcome of the Klingon War arc nor the Control arc, not having season-long arcs will most certainly avoid any more of such major disappointments…
I have bad flashbacks to the ENT pilot, so excited. Previews had some Orion colony. Before Kirk and all that…
One hour later peace with the Klingons, transporters and phasers on stun. And the ship made it all the way to Q’onos like it was a trip to Mexico.
Sigh.
Cloaking devices early always drove me nuts. Clearly Balance of Terror was supposed to be the first time cloaking was encountered and quite frankly who wants to have all the ships invisible anyway? That seems pretty visually unimpressive.
Also anyone remember when TOS had the Klingons giving D-7s to the Romulans in exchange for cloaking tech to out strategize the Federation? I don’t get how some writer selling model kits in the 60s can come up with a more interesting and constant story than 90s writers doing follow up episodes where there literally is a Star Trek Encylopedia and timeline you could pick up at the book store.
It sounds like you are referring to The Enterprise Incident. Where they used Klingon ships as stand ins for the Romulans because they did not have the Romulan model. So they threw in the Spock line of “intelligence reports that Romulans now using Klingon design.” It’s one of those cases where I just don’t take something monumentally goofy that did happen on screen as 100% canonical simply because the genesis behind it was a production issue.
Klingon cloaking has always been a pet peeve of mine. It first showed up in SFS. Which I thought was weird. But later I found out that the original antagonist was going to be a Romulan. Hence the cloaked ship. But studio folks decided that Klingons were better known and changed it to them. But they didn’t change the cloaking part! Sadly, that little error stuck and it became a normal thing from then on.
Why do you equate not being serialized as not being serious? I don’t like it when people do this. We saw from all the classic Trek shows that in a well written standalone story you can absolutely be very serious about a certain topic or the message you want to send.
Discovery is on its own in terms of it’s delivery…mainstream, genZ friendly and it just needs to attract attention to itself so easy to digest for popcorn film fans who like exploding things and poor plots.
I suspect this will be more like traditional trek, quietly confident…
Given their large budgets, the live-action shows will always try to capture as wide an audience as possible. It will probably also mean targeting “mainstream, genZ friendly” audiences if these are the people most likely to sign up for streaming services.