James Lileks on the new series Where No Non-specific-gender Person Has Gone Before "Star Trek," but it'll cost you. Forty quatloos or whatever the price for their streaming service turns out to be. Comments at Variety are just what you'd expect: the producer is the wrong guy, they should do that other show, won't pay, et cetera. "Star Trek" fans — at least the vocal ones — will repay the resurrection of their beloved franchise by nit-picking the next iteration to bloody bits. And then he gives his predictions. There are some obvious episodes that they should do, backed by one simple premise. Original Timeline Spock wrote down every single thing that his Enterprise ever encountered. So in the reboot universe, the producers should just do all the original series episodes with the twist that the crew already knows what happened last time. The first 7 minutes of each of the new episodes should have the new crew consulting OTime Spock's notes to get everyone up to speed.
The writers will be key though. Rick Berman didn't mess up Star Trek beyond basically allowing hack writers like Braga to do what they wanted. Even a guy like Kurtzman can make a good series if he happens to get the right writers. Ron Moore was vastly overrated. And too obsessed with the Klingons (he wanted a Klingon Soap Opera to be the future Trek series years ago).
50 power show runners 2014 From this list, who would you pick? Ronald D Moore is on it for Outlander. Going by success in a similar genre, Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane from The Last Ship might work out, as would a few others.
I'm cautiously optimistic. I think it depends greatly on what the premise ends up being, how closely it's tied to other existing Trek properties (regardless of the timeline in which its set), etc. But if it results in me reviewing seven years of garbage, may God have mercy on their fucking souls.
Oh, you know you'd love it. "And then, my God, my God, they use a replicator to create photon torpedoes in the torpedo tube prior to launch, claiming it saves storage space. You might think they'd just combine the replicator with the transporter and skip the whole launch thing and beam the replicated torpedoes right to the target, but that might make sense, and this show does not. And why the fuck do the three officers who man the helm console in front of the captain sit on what appears to be a large sofa?"
Given who is in charge, I wouldn't be surprised if this sucks. And while some people seem to want this to be set in the "prime" universe, I honestly hope it's not. That way, if it's good, it can be better allowed to succeed on its own merits. And if it sucks, it can simply be ignored. I think Abrams Trek went too overboard to act as a good starting point, though, so I'd hope that it was another adaptation or was otherwise unique from both universes. Anime does it all the time, so I don't see a reason why this couldn't be the case for Star Trek.
Well, this is happening, and that's good, but I don't feel really excited about it, and that's bad. I'm mildly curious, though, and that's good, but the curiosity contains potassium benzoate, ... and that's bad. The streaming system doesn't bother me. If I like the premier and it makes me want to watch more, I'll subscribe. If it doesn't, I won't. Either way, by the next year it would be on Netflix and I'd watch it all then.
The problem on modern Star Trek is that they seem to inevitably take a piece of technology that at least has some basis in possible reality (transporter, replicator) and instead of dealing with story problems by good writing, using the tech as a miracle machine.
Don't Paramount own the rights to Trek any longer? If watching this needs me to pay a subscription fee then sadly I won't be tuning in (although I can't promise that I won't obtain the episodes through other means).
I hope we get an anthology series. Each season has an over all theme, with side stories. And it can be from any time period.
It needs to feature a F2M trans captain, married to a man, be set in the 22nd Century, yet have a Prometheus-class ship. No space battles, all conflicts to be resolved over a nice hot cup of Starbucks coffee (product placement!) and Krispy Kreme doughnuts (moar produce placement!) and a jolly good chat, some hugs and some twee life lessons. And the last 5 minutes should be some form of cookery tip. Also, the theme should by Weird Al doing a version of the Archies 'Honey, Honey', but called 'Bugger, Bugger' (bugger, bugger, da-da-da-dah, gonna need KY Jelleeeee (moar moar product placement!)) Then I'll stick microphones next to a few select members of the fandom and record the sounds that eyes make when they bleed and start to bulge from blood pressure.
Actually, I'll be surprised if it's anything but sci-fi by numbers. Male lead. Earth will be prominent. The Borg will appear before the season 2 closer. Some shitty shiny romance. Dayton whined about a Klingon soap opera, but at least that would've been something different. I really hope I'm surprised, I'd love a proper Trek series that gave us tales that movies simply cannot, I'm just pretty much aware that this is a bit of a risk, and hence they'll be dead conservative.
As for the universes bit, I don't think it'd be bad to take a leaf out of DC's book (especially since they've crossed over Green Lantern and Trek...) and have two separate strands - the TV 'verse and the Movie 'verse. If you're going to take a leaf out of Marvel's book and have merged 'verses then you need to have a tighter rein on the overall lore, and Trek has been atrocious at that. TOS didn't even bother trying to maintain much consistency, yet managed to hold together better than later series' that didn't have that excuse.
It is human nature. You watch something you like, you want to see more of it. Not something off the wall different. And given Gene Roddenberry actually sold the original Star Trek as a very formulamatic "wagon train to the stars" I do not see any irony at all.
I don't think people hating the Abramsverse movies means they are too critical or too picky. Most of the reasons I've heard for hating the Abramsverse are very well thought out. Its the reasons for liking it that do not sound serious.....
CBS owns all of the rights to Star Trek. They allow Paramount the license to produce the films. This happened during the split.
I want Gritty SF. But that doesn't seem to go together with Star Trek. Lame aliens, predictable, childish storylines (like Star Wars) on the other hand, do. So am I looking forward to this? Meh. But then, it's SF, so I'll watch it.
I'll take Trek on a subscription over broadcast TV any day. Like most of you, I'm pretty Meh about the whole thing, honestly. I mean, if this gets new fans that otherwise might not have ever watched Trek at all, great. As Kyle said at the end of the Voyager thread, old Trek is dead and buried and whoever takes over the reigns has better catch up with the times. Forehead aliens of the week won't cut it, nor the watered down cookie cutter cast that passed for Enterprise's roster. I like the clean slate coming into it, which was sorely needed by the end of DS9 arguably and most assuredly by the time Manny Coto was hired for Enterprise.
