I Think I Miss Rick Berman - Modern Star Trek In Hindsight

I keep forgetting that Section 31 exists.

Isn’t that the point?

Yeah, sorry to anyone who tried to suppress their memories of that atrocity.

Like (the mythical) Highlander 2, there is no Section 31.

Steve Shives pointed it out in his review of the season, but I agree once I realized it: STA despite its short season was filmed as a TV show and not a ten hour movie. It's paced in largely episodic episodes but the build up reads very much like it could've been for DS9 with half the episodes, and without being as scatter shot as SNW season 3.

Loved seeing it.

I mean technically, the Doctor was less than 7 years old by the end of the show and accounting for her actual age, so she'd be the pedo there ...

The age gap with C/7 OTOH was the absolute least of that ship's problems. Fans will forgive a lot if the chemistry is good and those two mixed like two noble gasses.

Still, it was nice to see two actors of similar age getting together, and it's also notable that Sandro Rostra was even allowed to have a romance at all that wasn't played for laughs as Harry's romances were, made to be a gameless dork like La Forge and Bashir or made completely sexless like Culber (although that was more to him being one-half if a gay pairing than him being Brown, admittedly).

LeVar Burton is on record for complaining how TNG seemed more interested in an android's love life than that of a Black man, and the optics of Worf being a distant father are......not great, even if Michael Dorn is not actually playing a Black character

What is this "Section 31" of which you speak?

No such thing exists.

TOS and 80s-90s Trek all come with nostalgia armour, and TOS with pioneer armour, and nostalgia is a hell of a drug - I still enjoy catching the odd A-Team episode, despite if series was written today like that I'd roast it until it could be classified as a fossil fuel.

As for modern Trek, before I get the skewers out, my two main bugbears, one is many people involved are obviously fans - and no matter how disciplined the writer, producer, director or whatever is, they will eventually generate fanwank. I don't want fans involved, I want people who don't care about Trek or even sci-fi, I want writers who can create good stories and research the shows' history and make story-informed decisions of when to cling to canon and when to retcon. It doesn't need fans involved, it needs people respectful of what has come before.

The second is bringing their sad faces to the core of the series'. There was an article about how PIC and DISCO turn towards grimdark because of the likes of Trump and Brexit. Remind me what a lot of sunny uplands the first half of the 20th century handed to the scribes and creators of the 60s? It started with the industrialisation of death on the battlefield, and, two world wars later, ended with us now able to turn the planet's surface into a traybake of radioactive death.

TOS gave us dystopias as tales, as history, but they were plots, not the situation plots ran in. TOS and 90s Trek were Windows 95 with some buggy programs, PIC and DISCO post-jump has been more like Windows 11, where even the best programs are drowning, not waving, in the shit they're having to run in.

SNW could have had a great Brexit style tale over a planet potentially seceding from the Federation, PIC or DISCO could have dealt with the evil Gnar'Sizuz of the Tangerin Empire. You can do these tales without turning the Federation into a miserable place.

As to the shows/films themselves, going backwards-ish:

SFA - first couple of episodes were really poor, but it picked itself up and ran with it, and by the first season's close had certainly done enough to earn respect and be worth people's time. Characters mostly grew, some interesting ideas. Had you told me I'd be sad to see it cancelled after the opener, I'd have laughed, but I am.

S31 film - The script could have been massaged into a great Riddick movie. It was a godawful Star Trek movie.

SNW - excellent. A show confident enough to take swings, and I'll take a 50% success rate over not trying at all, it is a show rarely boring, and whilst I take a few issues with choices made, I really appreciate not playing safe when they easily could do

PIC - meh. S3 was enjoyable, but mind-rotting, nostalgia, S1 and S2 was a lot of pedestrian storytelling doused in TNG sauce, and was really a missed opportunity.

DISCO - started off okay. Great characters, nice idea with the ship's capabilities, but with the time jump, yet again, a missed opportunity. What could have opened up stories across the galaxy and beyond, they chose to have a disaster so they could keep things small in terms of the Federation. And then they kept on with the disasters. I gave up when it was clear no season could be considered complete without offing billions.

LD - just brilliant. Funny, clever, visual easter egg gags, always balanced the reverence for Trek with self-aware mockery.

JJVerse movies - 09 has not aged well, but has the bonus of adding Deep Roy to Trek, STID wasn't bad, but shouldn't have used Khan, and relied too much on mirroring TWoK, Beyond felt like a 90s TNG movie - good, but 20 years out of date when compared to major movies around then.

I've not seen Prodigy, so cannot comment on it.

Might have a binge watch in autumn.

Good luck finding it...
Your best bet is to buy it on disc.
But I don't think you'll regret it.

As a disk collector; season 1 is split into 2 parts, so you have to find 3 disks.
There may be a merged version of season 1, but there wasn't one when I got 'em.

So far as I can tell, there still isn't one.
And no collection of the entire series either, which would be my preference.
It's just another example of Paramount mistreating the series.

I think that can't be emphasized enough. I think if they did an almost shot-for-shot, scene-for-scene remake of a TOS/TNG/DS9 episode considered a classic as a modern Trek story (and were able to somehow make people forget the original so they can't hit with the "rip-off" criticism), there'd be certain fans who would rip the episode to shreds about how unrealistic it was, or how poorly the characters were developed, or how they were all Mary Sues, etc.

I maintain that if Disco, post-jump, was a series built entirely around Discovery being the vehicle which re-established relations with familiar worlds while Starfleet built more spore ships that had vast storytelling potential and would have been a much better show.

As far as modern Trek, I initially liked that the Abrams movies and the Prime timeline were separated. But when the new shows got tied to CBS All Access/Paramount+ my enthusiasm waned.

I’ve seen SNW and some of PIC. It was enjoyable but didn’t captivate me like the DS9/VOY years. In a way, I probably miss the Berman years, but I want the franchise to be successful, and endless call backs to prior shows ain’t going to cut it.

My biggest concern is that the current leadership of Paramount is garbage and will find novel ways to fracture the audience even further.

I like that idea. Some of my favorite parts of SFA were when they directly addressed the "rebuilding the Federation" aspect of the premise.

They kind of played a long-game practical joke with the spore drive.
After all that struggling with making it work, and making it non-fatal, and keeping it from the bad guys as the ultimate secret of the universe....it just gets surpassed by pathfinder drive, and becomes a museum piece.
Womp-womp.
Rimshot.

What sort of stories do you envision Rick Berman coming up with? He told ALL of his stories. It’s done. That story is over. Re-read it. It’s okay to do that.

new stories are being told. And you don’t like them. That’s fine. I don’t like a lot of new things either. Our parents didn’t like the next generation. It’s not that things suck when we get older. It’s us. We change. Those new stories, they’re just as engaging as the ones we liked. The difference is that we can’t stop thinking of and equating our stories with our youth.

It’s not coming back. And thank god, television writers, producers, directors and all have moved past the need to get a tickle in their dinky every time they watch tv or play a video game.

I'm not sure I've even got a disk player anymore, hopefully as part of the 60th celebrations it'll resurface on a streamer

I'm going to spend a week or so in October filling out my own wish-concept for DISCO, mostly for my own entertainment, but I'll pop it on here in case anyone also enjoys it.

The premise is that the Federation we all knew as pretty much gone as there was a mass shift to becoming higher beings, there are a few post/trans<insert-species-here> about, and the concept of the Federation is now a franchise that has multiple versions (the franchise owner is, ofc, a Ferengii.) and at different tech levels. Over the course of the season the crew figure out out they're being led by the nose by someone as they explore and acclimatise to their new surroundings with some assistance.

Turns out there's an extra-universal threat, and it needs a spore drive to figure it out, only the mycellium network has blocked sentients access after the Terran Empire's plans, DISCO being the only vessel that retains access. The higher level remnants have been manipulating them in the hope of getting them to agree to help, as they're incapable of merging with the spore drive like Stamets without being rejected by the mycellium.

Finishes with the DISCO crew providing the key to trans-reality travel without the mycellium, the crew happy that they've seen the birth of a Federation of Realities to combat the threat, and finding themselves given caretakership of both Earth and the Triskelion Federation as a thank you, along with the Ferengi franchiser now as their Mergers and Acquisition expert, as future seasons see them build a new Federation with new founding species, and new enemies, from the various Federation franchises and their enemies, and could be split with Saru as the Federation President and Burnham captaining the DISCO.

And, as a bonus, the Q get access to a whole new infinite number of infinities to explore, and get them out of their funk.

I'd advise to invest in one.
Honestly, relying on streamers is a good way to feel disappointed and angry on a frequent basis.

I'm just not as invested in media as I once was, used to have thousands of CDs and maybe a hundred DVD/blu-rays, these days if I miss out on something I just shrug and move on.

Maybe I've just been overwhelmed with the options these days, most of which seem to involve straight-to-DVD plots with A listers and high budgets, along with being underwhelmed by most of the new franchise stuff coming out.

At this point it's difficult to distinguish between tentpole movies and dogshit like Red Notice.

So true!
Separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming more and more difficult.
That's why I'm mostly focusing on Star Trek for disc collection.

Buffy Babies-TAS?

on that note... imagine LD with Mariner as a white dude? boring as fuck

Why? I mean there are a few characters where I think their race/sex/gender are instrumental to them, but they're few and far between like Bond and Shaft, I don't think Mariner really fits that.

Tawny Newsome is fantastic, and really made Mariner into a brilliant character, including pushing her ideas and throwing in some ad hoc stuff, and I think she would have done that if she was playing a white guy. Might have made the SNW crossover a little more awkward though.

Even if someone other than Newsome played Mariner as a white bloke, you still not getting a guarantee of them being boring if said actor was white. If you want to go down the minority route, Suzy Izzard or Jordan Gray would have been fun choices. And if you want to just pale and male, you've the likes of Simon Pegg, Milton Jones, Joe Wilkinson... Hell, Kevin Smith in his prime. Not even got to the white biological women yet...

Comments like this depress me, not only does it provide fuel to the likes of FF's sense of victimhood, if you flipped that round you just wouldn't say it.

a bunch of reasons... start with oversaturation. We've seen the mavericky archetype as a white guy forever in Trek and fiction in general, it'd bring nothing new, especially to the character's POV.
Her dynamics with the supporting characters. Race may not be important here, but Mariner definitely doesn't work the same way with a guy on any level from friendships to relations with superiors to romantic entanglements. The reactionaries would have a field day with Brian Mariner enduring conflict with his dad/crushing on the first officer, and Roddenberry forbid, a boy friend.

There's more, but I gotta head out to work. Simple version is we just wouldn't have had the same character and I think the series would've suffered for it.

You've got oversaturation of white people across the board, for any archetype you can throw a stone at. It's a property of an industry without the greatest record on race, so you could apply that to anyone. And Mariner's character and their attitude to relationships shouldn't be a function of their sex, do all guys work in a certain way? That's news to me. And even if we did, wouldn't it be more subversive to challenge that? There are certainly ways to challenge traditional views on sex, but Mariner never really comes across as that type as a whole, more of a what if Bart Simpson joined Starfleet type character.

And honestly, fuck the reactionaries, it's 2025. Men fuck other men, and have been doing so for millennia. Christ, Frasier was able to play with that waaaay back on S1, something set in the 24th century ought to be able to too.

We wouldn't have had the same character and I'm glad they made the choices they did, but a different take may have been great too, just differently great. It's this assumption that making them white and male would automatically make them lesser I take issue with - apart from being the absolute reverse from taking an inclusive attitude, thinking about it, maybe it's a little disrespectful to Newsome too, it's really reductionist.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds [SPOILERS]

I’m glad that you’re wrong. I think the current writers of Star Trek don’t particularly like the old stuff and rejected a lot of things that separates it from other sci-fi franchises… and to be honest, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but at least give me something good in return. This latest episode of Strange New Worlds is heads and shoulders above almost everything that modern Trek has attempted to do, IMHO.

It definitely THINKS it is. The contempt for what came before is palpable.

What would be some examples of this palpable contempt for what came before?