"The Vandalization of Star Trek" Topic

Well…

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Amicalement
Armand

I fully agree with what this person had to say he made a lot of sense.

Oh, it makes sense. But why does he sound surprised and disappointed NOW? I got all that out of my system early in TNG. Trek has been dead for a long time. Do people put up YouTube videos to tell me that Westerns are dying?

I think that this youtuber is so full of that he can't tell the difference between his ass and his mouth

I'll go further. If the spirit of Gene Roddenberry--the original, and not the mush-minded idiot responsible for "Encounter at Farpoint"--took over the body of a Hollywood producer today, the last thing he'd do is crank out more Star Trek episodes, aided be people who really know The Franchise.

The original's overarching vision of humanity wasn't much more "in three centuries, we'll have gotten past our present obsessions." (Might happen. It's been a while since the last Yankee-Pennamite War, in case anyone hasn't noticed.) Then he told real SF writers "here's my overall situation and specific characters: sell me a science fiction story in that setting. Overall continuity is my job" Read the story credits for Classic Trek Seasons One and Two. Those were real SF writers. And because they didn't have 50 years of The Franchise, they had great freedom. If they needed most of Kirk's family to be dead in a rebellion, it was dead. ("The Conscience of the King.") If they needed a major and bloody war a generation or so back, they had it, no questions asked. ("Balance of Terror.")

That sort of original and thought-provoking SF may show up on television again some day. But it won't happen on Star Trek. On Star Trek, they'll be too busy looking up who invented the holodeck and how you pronounce Bat'leth.

I suppose he could always watch Babylon 5 re-runs instead.

> I'll go further. If the spirit of Gene Roddenberry--the original, and not the mush-minded idiot responsible for "Encounter at Farpoint"

Er, Gene Roddenberry is one of the writers of that particular episode. Unless you are saying that Gene went from the TOS visionary to something quite a bit less then that, which I would agree with.

I am feeling throughly alienated by mainstream entertainment these days.

Dynaman, that was exactly what I meant. Somewhere between the last episode of Second Season TREK and the pilot of "Next Generation" the tough-minded visionary was replaced by a generic Hollywood leftist. The name and fingerprints may have matched up, but there was nothing left of the mind that made classic TREK what is was.

I fully agree with the original post.

Well…

Amicalement
Armand

Many series have a bible which establishes certain basic ideas and propositions people want to pin down for the writers to nominally adhere to.

Star Trek may not have had a bible but it could with a little good will be described as "almost coherent"

There are a few basic changes like the Klingon makeup change and the retcon of the Ferengi that didn't cause major problems.

ToS had quite a few bits that didn't add up or features that changed from one episode to the next.

TNG was fairly consistent on its own.

The ToS movies didn't introduce major changes.

DS9 challenged a few ideas and while it did put the Federation's lofty ideals before a number of "damned if you do/don't" problems, it didn't try to make any substantial changes.

Voyager attempted to marry the exploration of TNG with the drama of DS9 until they declawed that idea, but again fairly consistent.

Enterprise is probably the series where writers were first really tempted to openly retcon established on screen canon. There were a few "submarines" like not specifically identifying a race to avoid their established first contact being upset etc.

I'm withholding judgement on Discovery for the reason that until now it has heavily been implied that some dimensional travel is involved and that there is a real possibility that the future of the series might be more fluid than previously thought combined with a less than stellar fan reaction.

Until now Discovery seems to have been quite keen to retcon many details of what was previously Star Trek canon. Is this part of a planned misdirection and surprise or are they only interested in the Star Trek name to push their own style of SF.

I have this hunch that the characters may not be from the actual mainstream Star Trek universe or are part of a larger reality which contains everything we have seen in the original Trek run and might even include the Abramsverse Trek … Maybe they discover they are already an amalgamation of different universes, and perhaps I read too much in this and they were simply doing their own thing under the Trek name.

We'll know when the season ends next year and what the future holds.