Star Trek Discovery. [SPOILERS WITHIN]

Theoretically, yes. But as I've said many times before, it's the fans who have ruined Trek to a large degree.

It's not like the 1960s, 1970s or even 1980s, where the fanbase was largely homogeneous. There have been so many incarnations of Trek, and with the advent of internet message boards, the fanbase is fractured to a point where the studios simply can't get the viewership to justify the investment. Just look at all the bitching and moaning over JJ Abrams' version of Trek, despite the fact that the films were critical and commercial successes. Paramount had to go outside the traditional Trek fanbase to put asses in seats. That pissed off a lot of the hardcore fans.

Discovery will be make-or-break it for Trek on television for the next twenty years. What little I've seen so far on this show really doesn't fill me with promise, but I do hope I'm wrong.

I feel like I've crossed some sort of threshold.

For the first time in my life, a new Star Trek series is coming and I really couldn't care less. If everyone raves about it, I may watch. If not, I'm gonna pass.

There's a fucking shock.

@Captain X didn't like my post.

quod erat demonstrandum.

Oh I agree. The first real schism was actually with TWoK, a lot of fans loathed the jump in the timeframe.

DS9 managed 7 seasons, mostly of high quality, despite many fans hating the premise and internal horror at how dark it went. So I have faith good Trek series' can work, despite fan opposition.

Movies are a different beast. The JJTrek films aren't without their negatives, but they're designed to be popcorn flicks, which given the market and the cost of effects is how it should be. There's a reason Interstellar isn't a franchise, and it's because such movies are one-offs. Trying to come up with a new high concept every 2 or 3 years for the same crew? Isn't going to happen. Reasonable story, engaging action and 'splosions? Franchisable, and if you can shoehorn in some high concepts, well, bonus points, but be aware that's always going to be an optional cherry on top of the movie cake.

I'd be quite happy if Trek movies were retired - it's hard to maintain a consistent cast, and that's without the poor buggers being crushed by their cars - and we just had series'. If a movie franchise emerged from one of those naturally, then yay.

It's easy to try to blame the fans. The BumbleBees certainly did plenty of that themselves. They also tried claiming "franchise fatigue" when really it was just that they themselves were out of ideas. No, the only part the fans play in what went wrong is that they were taken for granted. TPTB took them for idiots and thought they would lap up anything they put out, especially if it involved scantily-clad women, because Star Trek fans are all teen-aged boys as far as they were concerned.

You can also blame The CW as well. There's plenty of blame to go around.

I don't like the demonizing of B&B, it's too damned easy.
Sure, they made some of the worst Trek, but they also made some of the best Trek.
Overall, it was a mixed bag, like Peter David's run on Hulk, or Steve Moffat on Dr. Who, or George Lucas on Star Wars.

Very much this.

My theory is that TV in general got a lot better during their reign. The artform developed, and they were too busy with 1-2 shows on the air all the time to move along with it. DS9, mostly handled by another team when they moved on to VOY, was the best Trek we got, and it wouldn't have worked without the foil of TNG to work against. TNG would not have been a good show if it premiered when ENT did, and neither was ENT.

The difference that can be seen between DS9 and VOY (and ENT by extension since it was a lot like VOY) is a wonderful illustration of what I'm talking about, because DS9 was run by people who had a passion for Trek, whereas the VOY staff saw it as just another job. Like I said, they took the audience for granted and tended to look down on them. Another great example is how Ron D. Moore was treated when he tried to work on VOY, and this by Braga, who he had actually been friends with back when they worked together on TNG.

As for TNG not being successful if it's come out when ENT did, yeah, you're right, but the thing is, it would have been for the same reason ENT ended up failing. To be frank, it was making a lot of the same mistakes TNG was making when it first got started, which is pretty pathetic considering they'd had over a decade to learn from all the mistakes they'd made over all of those shows.

Exactly! Berman and Braga were doing the same thing, at roughly the same quality. But it wasn't good enough 15 years later.

You're missing the aspect of why that is, though.

...and it's been delayed again!

http://m.ign.com/articles/2017/02/27/star-trek-discovery-premiere-delayed-to-late-summerearly-fall

Yeah, I'm chock full of excitement and confidence for this project.

Jesus Christ. Delayed again. Do they think they're Making game of thrones? Do they need more second unit shooting in Dubai or Iceland?

I wonder what the problem is?

Could it be someone at CBS wants to pull the plug on the series but can't muster the cahones to do it yet?

Taking their time ti get it right isn't necessarily a bad sign. That's how we got Portal, to name just one off the top of my head.

Hey, toenails don't clip themselves.

It's not the 00's anymore either.
The cure for a finicky eater is starvation, and the JJ era has been a crackers and water diet.

The Discovery is that we have to discover when it's going to air.

Down, boy. as Packard said, there's every chance they're trying to take time to get shit right. Especially since they don't have to place it within a network schedule.

As for @We Are Borg and @Captain X 's views....well, they're both right. I don't think one takes away from the other's argument. The fact is, we are a fairly neurotic fanbase; I don't think there were Doctor Who fans campaigning for BBC to cancel the reboot in 2005 like some TOS purists were doing with TNG, and every other show that followed.

But TATV is exhibits A through Z as to where Bermaga's collective minds were at. Like FF, I don't think every problem with those two shows lay at their feet or that they were completely stupid UPN lackeys (Berman put an end to that boy band nonsense, for example, and fought to have the entire first season on Earth and serialize the show but UPN shut that down).

But I do think they thought could continue to coast on TNG's popularity but telling the same old stories the same way they did a decade earlier. They seemed to miss the fan objections about what a complete miss the Archer character was, as evidenced by the fact that an entire episode about him whining about his sick dog who got sick by him failing to do due diligence (and also lusting over the XO he could barely tolerate for the previous 30 episodes) made it past the pitch stage, let alone the greelight to air. Braga all but had open contempt for TOS yet they emulate the Big Three format without having a clue as to why it worked. I was too new to fandom to care about Akiraprise-gate at the time, but yeah, let's throw that lazy rip-off in the mix too.

For all that Season Four doesn't hold up especially well (and oh God does it not!), there was at least someone at the helm who had some passion in Manny Coto that most people forgave him for basically turning the show into TOS fanfiction. He didn't go out of his way to insult fandom.

DSC will sink or swim on its own merits, because people respond to passion. New Trek fans that come into this series won't care about the nitpicky stuff...I didn't 15 years ago. I liked the soap opera-y human versus Vulcan culture stuff. Frankly, that Archer/T'Pol bigotry angle would've been entirely apropos to do in 2017...but I digress.

TLDR: to DSC--don't try to be a great Trek show. Just be a great show and let fandom be the judge.

One thing in my opinion that has hurt modern Star Trek:

Each set of producers are convinced they have to "do something different".

I reject that notion. Right now we've got hours and hours of successful prime time programming that has been basically retelling the SAME DAMN STORIES for literally decades.

The Law & Order franchise. The NCIS franchise. Hell the "Chicago" franchise now has freaking FOUR series on the air at one time!!!!

Except that Rick Berman and Brannon Braga *did* the same thing for the better part of two decades, and ratings continued to sink. To a much lesser extent, even DS9 was sorta guilty of this.

Also, what's the Chicago series?

THOSE ARE BORING. THOSE ARE BORING!!!! PROCEDURALS ARE BORING!!!

ss

But they are successful.

Four television series on NBC now.

Don't remember the order they came out though the most recent is "Chicago Justice".

Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Chicago Med, and now Chicago Justice.

No they didn't.

Deep Space Nine radically changed the main setting from a starship to a space station.

Voyager removed the ship from all the familiar elements to 24th-century era Star Trek (though they tried like hell to reintroduce those same things later).

But how many of Voyager's stories could've been done better--or had already been done better--on any of the other three shows?

How often did issues of rationing come up? Oh, they a had replicator rations but if Torres could save for a few weeks to make a TV replica for her boyfriend instead of....well, some useful fucking shit, I'd say they were pretty well off.

How often did they struggle with power reserves? Like, truly struggle and not in the "well, we gotta find those dilithium crystals for Janeway's coffee addiction" way?

Even the conflict between the Maquis and Federation officers was disregarded by the end of season one.

DS9 wasn't even all that different from the happy-go-lucky tone of DS9 till mid-season two.They stopped with the shoehorned TNG references and weren't afraid to be their own thing and it's getting the due it should have twenty years ago.

VOY and ENT are the equivalent to putting a big, fancy looking spoiler and body kit on your mom's boring ass Honda Accord. At the end of the day, it's still boring and it shows on the racetrack. The racetrack being ratings that put Enterprise in particular to shame.

Lucius Malfoy is the captain.
Captain Lorca.
http://www.cbr.com/star-trek-discovery-captain-jason-isaacs/

Wow, the producers really dropped the ball on this one.

Another white, heterosexual male captain?



I was hoping for a black transsexual in a wheelchair who's legally deaf and blind!