"The Decline and Fall of Star Trek" Topic

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I concur completely.

Star Trek to me is the original series and The Wrath of Khan. All the rest is dead to me.

I concur with Choctaw.

I have to agree also.

I as well.

Why would anyone be surprised?
The whole idea of a "franchise" is that nobody has to put any original thought into it.
Canon? We don't need no stinking canon!

Star Wars should have stopped with the first 3. Maybe even just the original.

Tolkien? Movies and shows are being made now because the holders of the IP are contractually obligated, or they lose it. I think the LOTR trilogy was magnificent, with a very few lapses. But a Hobbit trilogy? Rings of Power? 😱🤮

Game of Thrones?

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

For folks of a certain age TOS was the pinnacle of culture and recent "offerings" are profoundly disappointing… well actually disgusting to be frank. The contrast is so great it's easy to let go of some nuance.

Some of the TOS episodes were pretty weak.

Some of TNG, emphasis on SOME, was pretty good. Same for DS9 and Voyager. As time went on it seems like the ratio of Good Material to Bad Material went in the wrong direction, the strength of the good material weakened, and the appalling vileness of the bad material because pretty impressive. But there was still some good and bad.

In face, my wife and I watched all the way through Starfleet Academy (we are stubbornly optimistic people, apparently) and there was a pretty good episode in there. It's certainly not worth watching through the series to get to that episode, but there was one episode that really gave me hope that things could get better. They did not, but for a moment it seemed like they could. I couldn't tell you which episode it was because I don't remember anything about it which suggests that maybe it wasn't all that great. But that one episode was not insulting, was not stupid, people acted reasonably, you weren't suer what was going to happen, and it had a satisfying ending. In those respects it was different from every other episode.

I will say that Starfleet Academy had some great sets. And I you ever wondered if you could make a good TV show with just great sets and everything else terrible, mankind has now tried this and it does not work.

Lower Decks was good. It's certainly outside the main vein of Star Trek, but it was funny, the adventures were reasonable, the characters were believable and fun, they didn't try to be excessively woke, and they were not excessively preachy. I think it was supposed to be a comedy but as an adventure series, a Star Trek series, it was pretty good, just a little less serious than the other series.

I'm not sure Star Trek is dead. In one sense, what was started with Star Trek may be continuing in other franchises. And it had such an impact on culture and society that it will never really be gone. Certainly I don't expect anything good in the near term, but I can imagine years from now someone will say, "hey, let's try another Star Trek show" and maybe it will be okay.

But many, Starfleet Academy really layered on the dumb.

I must salute both Anya Taylor-Joy and the show runners for The Queen's Gambit.
Their reaction to the possibility of a sequel was "Good Lord, no! Why???"

My favorite Star Trek was DS9 (I was a preteen when TOS came out). Some of the characters were just fascinating.
Garak was awesome.

Andor and Rogue One were the best Star Wars since the first movie. The other new stuff is just "Yuch." Much of which I haven't bothered to watch.

Loved Jackson's LotR. Even enjoyed the hobbit well enough. Mostly because I though the actor who playted Bilbo did an incredible job.
Haven't bothered to watch Rings of Power – except for The Drinker's and Nerdrotic's reviews.

I liked the original and next generation. Some of the movies with the original cast were good, some mediocre at best.

I liked the first movie with Chris Pine. Thought the picks for the cast were very good. Into Darkness was ok. The last not very.

All series since next generation have been mediocre to totally unwatchable. In fact I don't think I even wasted time on the last 4 or so.

Same thing happened when Disney grabbed Star Wars and recently with Marvel.

I was really hopeful Star Fleet Academy would have a lot of potential. I thought what a great idea, going in depth on the training it takes to make it into Star Fleet.
But no, the show was a disaster! I thought, did ANY of the writers see any of the original Star Trek episodes? The show was an abomination. It seemed every episode was worse than the last. I couldn't make it through the first season.

When the Showrunners show open contempt for the Source, you wonder why they got hired in the first place. 🤷 Oh, right $$$$$
For Rings of Power. Not only the Showrunners, but also the actors openly boasted about "Updating for today's audience".
Red flag.

I never read the books, nor played the games. But I did watch the first season of The Witcher. Showrunners had the same contrmpt for Source.

Star Trek will be back, I think. Not just "someone will produce another movie or TV show" back, but someone will recapture the mix of optimistic future, confidence in science and concern with morality which made classic Trek what it was. Possibly the same with Middle Earth and the "Star Wars" universe. They're interesting places where all kinds of things can happen and lots of stories be told. Mind you, I'm getting to be an old man: odds are decent I won't live to be proven right.

The real problem is a terrible dearth of story-tellers, and we have to fix that first. Out of curiosity, I actually researched ALL the writers associated with Star Trek: 90210, AKA Star Fleet Academy. Hired fresh out of trendy liberal arts schools, every one, and virtually all writing credits were for Kurtzman projects. Read up on the "story by" and "written by" people for classic Trek for comparison--usually a decade or more older, lived through a war, frequently in uniform, worked multiple jobs. If you want to be a story-teller, you need to have something to say. Right now, most of them don't. I walked through the local Barnes & Noble with money in my pocket looking for new fiction last week, and came out empty-handed. It's as though someone put a curse on English-language fiction.

It won't last. The great thing about capitalism is that idiots with a pile of money eventually run out, and people who know what they're doing take over. But given the size of the money piles in the "media" these days, it might take a bit this time.