I feel bad for Mulgrew, and for those who were pumped for a female captain, and I want to see Janeway written well consistently.
For all of my bitching, I wouldn't want to retcon any of them out of existence, Jesus. Mulgrew was great in Orange is the New Black, she just didn't get much good writing in Voyager. Year of Hell is about the best episode of Voyager and that wasn't until Seven came on board which is when the show got good/watchable.
Voyager is, to pull a quote from Canadian literature, a graveyard of broken dreams. Between Paramount betting the farm on UPN and Berman being an untalented, sexist hack that lucked into his position because Roddenberry kicked the can before a replacement could be found, we were never gonna get a better version of Voyager than what we got. Coincidentally, it's actually THE most streamed of all the Trek series on Netflix. Only explanation on that has to be from Kate Mulgrew's presence from OitNB, but I find a lotta folks that are new to Trek dig it for the potential it had. I dunno, it's not my favorite but between coming in via Enterprise myself and putting some distance from the show, I don't have it on me to see it as Teh Suxxorz that killed the franchise, yanno? Even Enterprise has gained a new following and that one I find even more bizzare.
Voyager is the best Trek series for casual viewers. TOS is a campy sausage fest. DS9 is too serialized for a casual viewer. TNG is boring and talky and the female characters are largely wasted. Enterprise is just meh. Most Voyager episodes have some action, be it a fight scene or a space battle, and there are male and female characters that get to play active roles in almost every story.
You know, that's a good point. I mentioned in this thread how Trek is a franchise that people largely got into because they were introduced to it by older relatives. Hell, that was mostly the only way anyone under 12 got into the show before the Kelvinverse films. Having such a limited way to drive in viewers did more harm than good in the long run. I don't think TIIC went about freshing up the franchise in the right way with Enterprise, but I can tell you as a then-15 year old whose only knowledge of Trek came from episodes of TNG I was forced to watch, it was a show that was easy to access and follow along without having to know 3 decades' worth of history to follow. The ad about "The Andorians are back!" meant nothing to me when that one episode aired. But what I did like was that we watched as Archer had to confront his prejudice throughout the episode, only for the Vulcans to be the villains the entire time. I didn't stay because of the "sexiness" (which I found laughable even then--if I wanted that, I'd been watching Dawson's Creek FFS!) but because it felt like a show that I could engage with on my terms and not be bored out of my mind. And eventually I did watch the other Trek shows and even liked TNG to a point. But if I hadn't had UPN on the night of the premiere, I promise you I never would have revisited TNG and certainly wouldn't care a thing for DS9. It's a long way of saying that we (royal "we") have got to stop boohoo crying over every new incarnation big Trek "ruining the franchise". I mean, the franchise survived Rick Berman who barely cared a thing about living up to the show's aspirations for the future, onscreen or off. I think it'll be fine under Kurtzman. If it brings more eyes to the "good" parts of the franchise--however one defines "good"--all the better. As an aside, I hadn't realized how long is been into this franchise until I realized one of the Discovery actors was born the same year Enterprise premiered. Made me feel old as all fuck knowing that
Another thing that folks need to remember is that until fairly recently, there weren't a whole lotta options when it came to watching SF. You either watched what was available on broadcast and cable, or you broke out the DVD/VHS. You couldn't sit down and have every episode of this or that TV show (or every film in a saga) at your fingertips. So, quite often, you watched things that were shit, but hey, it was better than the sitcoms with the canned laughter on the other channels. Somebody plunks down a show basically identical to one you used to watch and you might very well run screaming into the night because of how bad it is. Yet, if you're given the opportunity to watch that old show, people all too often snuggle in and try to pretend that it's something EPIC due to their fond memories of it. It ain't. I remember when I picked up the boxed set of the 70s series Buck Rogers and being all excited since while the second season was shite (more on this in a bit), the first season seemed kind of fun to me when I watched it back when it originally aired. Turns out, it wasn't. I made it about 5 episodes in and had to give up. I don't mind someone saying that they love the show but don't pretend that it's anything like good TV, because it ain't. Yet, I'm sure that there's plenty of people who'll breathlessly tell you about how awesome it was because, well, folks will do that about anything. As for the second season, I've watched exactly one episode since it originally aired. It was the space vampire episode. I happened to buy the special issue of Starlog magazine that told folks "How to Write for SF TV." It featured interviews with various TV writers, talking about projects they'd worked on. One of the guys they interviewed was the guy who wrote the space vampire episode. He talked about how he had to struggle to get his vision on the screen, and how there were these crucially important plot elements that various people wanted to cut out. He really talked it up as someone desperately trying to get groundbreaking elements on TV in an era when folks just put poo on the screen. So, I thought, hey, here's a serious writer who's bitching about how fucked up things in Hollywood were, and managing to do something better than others. There's a guy who wrote for the original Batman series who liked to slip obscene words in foreign languages into the show as character names (as a gag). Eventually, the suits got wind of what he was doing and not only told him to stop, but said that they'd have to approve any scripts he wrote. He was kind of miffed at this, since he knew they didn't speak anything other than English, but he went along. Then, they rejected a script he wrote because they thought that a name he used was obscene. So he changed it to the most obscene word he knew in any language. They said, "Looks good" and let the episode get made. Apparently, they got huge amounts of mail on the subject and realized their mistake, and never asked to see another one of his scripts again before approving it. I figured that this guy had done something like that. Nope. Literally, a few days after I read the article, I was at a friend's house and he had SciFi (as it was then known) on, and they said that the next thing to air was the space vampire episode of Buck Rogers. I said, "Oooh. We need to watch this." and explained why. He agreed. This best sums up our reaction to the episode: It was so campy and awful that we were rooting for the space vampire before it was over. The only reaction to a film/TV show more extreme in hatred than ours that I know about is that someone who was friends with people who died on the Andrea Gail and their reaction to seeing the movie The Perfect Storm which was about the crew dying in a hurricane was, "Shut up and drown."
Oh, yeah. I'm grateful for the fond memories I have of discussing Enterprise with my tenth grade crush in math class and writing my bad fanfiction online but I couldn't pretend it was a masterpiece even when it was in first run. One episode that's aged the absolute worst? "Congenitor". Many new kids to Enterprise find it more insulting than ANISB and that's one hell of a statement. The allegory is so damn middle that even after I got to watch it for a second time in 2006 or so, I went "....that's it?" Talking to older queer people who were in fans at the time, a lot of them were not especially thrilled to see a non-binary person cast aside for the "better good" of everyone else's convenience. As a slavery allegory, the idea that ignorance was a kindness is some Muad Dib level bullshit. I get why it was hyped at the time because s2 was an intellectual wasteland. I don't know that it still deserves it.
I've tried making TOS virgins watch it, they can't fucking stand how slow it is. And these are people that loved DS9 and Discovery. I like Cogenitor. It's not perfect, but Trip always gave off a "George W. Bush in space" vibe to me, which adds to the slow motion trainwreck of watching him try to help an oppressed individual in such a naive, poorly considered, half-assed way that results in disaster. It always makes me think of the Muslim women who get a taste of freedom and eventually kill themselves in the face of having that freedom taken away, or the ones that are "honour killed" by their shitbag families for becoming too westernized. (I strongly suspect Charles was executed by the Vissian captain to protect the status quo.) The "ignorance as a kindness" idea feels disgusting to me, but so does the idea of "liberating" someone in a way that only serves the ego of the liberator.
I dunno. Being black, I think if I were born 400 years ago, I'd rather die with knowledge and on my own two feet than to live on my knees, regardless of what motives an outsider had in teaching me Also, they did that exact story with "Detained," the one where Dean Stockwell played the gulag warden and told Archer he'd just released thousands of Suliban to his deaths. He didn't seem conflicted about that I also think if we *had* to have a story about how knowledge is dangerous to women/slaves/marginalized group of choice that I wish people besides Berman and Braga had written it. A marginalized person would have had better insight about well meaning whites outsiders being obnoxious as fuck and not listening to what the affected person(s) had to say.
That's fair. I'm sure I'd rather be free too in a situation like that. I only made it halfway through that one, once I realized they were determined to waste the Bakula/Stockwell reunion. I really hope that wasn't the intended moral. Anyway, that episode in comic form:
I mean....I'm not Tererun or Amaris so you know what I think of that But I don't think Trip was out of line in thinking Archer would have at least granted her asylum after all his other turns at playing God where not one single person asked I know as a sailor, I'd also be extremely angry if my superiors hung me out to dry for shit I'd see them do and encourage multiple times. Even apart from whatever allegory Bermaga were going for, that was poor leadership. If that was gonna be a turning point in the interference policy--as it very well should have-- they should've dropped the C-plot about Reed pretending to be straight, had this interference conversation earlier in the episode and then, after Charles' suicide have Archer reflect that they both failed rather than a line that at best was open to interpretation, depending on how much one tolerated Archer's character (spoilers: even filtering for thirsty Tucker fangirls who hated Archer for breathing, no one had an inch to give after ANISB). There's no easy answer, but there were things that could've been done to make the framing a bit more palatable. Imagine if Janeway had pulled this on someone and denied asylum because she was totes BFF with some new species. You'd never hear the end of it.
Now that I'm extremely high I'm realizing Archer the hypocrite was standing in for every western government that throws ethics out the window wherever the Saudis are involved. For a depressingly perfect example, the Phillipines: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dina_Ali_Lasloom
Paramount likes what they're seeing from Prodigy, the showrunners just signed a multi-year deal. They don't say how many years, but I'm thinking minimum of 3-4. https://trekmovie.com/2021/03/11/star-trek-prodigy-showrunners-ink-extended-deal-with-cbs-studios/
We might be getting some Prodigy news Monday. There's another virtual convention thingy for Zephram Cochrane day.
The theory was right! Janeway is a hologram! She's the Emergency Training Hologram. Here's her CG self. And here she is integrated with the rest of the crew.... Source. https://trekmovie.com/2021/04/05/st...ls-a-whole-new-janeway-and-more-show-details/
Ahah! We've got timeline and location! 2383, and the Delta Quadrant. So the little troll dude is indeed a Talaxian! So, that's 3 years after season 1 Lower Decks, and 16 years before season 1 Picard. And, just about during the prequel flashbacks in Picard.
What?! No! She can't be a hologram! Curse you Paramooouuunt--! No, it's gonna be okay. I can fix this. It'll be okay.
OK, so Starfleet has started putting holo-Janeways aboard ships to help the crew if they find themselves lost like Voyager was. Whilst the Delta Quadrant setting explains how the kids can hold on to a Starfleet ship without Starfleet wanting it back, we don't know yet how the ship GOT there. Holo-Janeway means the ship is post-Endgame, so it's not another victim of the Caretaker where the crew didn't survive but the ship did. From LDS, Starfleet still lacks easy access to transwarp/slipstream - it COULD be a Starfleet attempt at testing one that went awry (crew died/devolved into lizards), but weren't we told this is an older ship? Wormhole? Again, would need to explain why the crew is gone.
See post 83. PROD is a little bit after LD, a lot before PIC. So it can't be the distant future to age the ship. It has to be a fresh prototype ship. There isn't much wiggle room.
Well...you know how TMP established that when they're in an unstable wormhole, their atoms start to go all smear-y? Maybe enough of that turns them into eraser dust.
Holograms work anywhere there's a holodeck. Could be a Miranda or a Constellation as long as it gets to the Delta Quad somehow.
Yeah, well, that could be true... But when have Trek (TV) writers ever missed an opportunity to use a sexy new ship? I mean, novel writers like to dig old ships out of mothballs, but...y'know, studio suits and all...
