Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Never watched the original series much (wasn't alive at the time of the originals, don't recall seeing the reruns), but became a fan of the movies when they started. Fell into things fully when TNG began (watched from the first episode to the last) and still followed those films, though after starting with both Deep Space Nine and Voyager I gave them up fully in late 1995 and never looked back. Have a couple of the, ahem, 'technical manuals' around the place but that's about it -- the other books I've avoided. Have no costumes, have always avoided any kind of conventions general or specific, take cruel pleasure in laughing at Shatner's follies in the fifth movie, as should we all (the fake MST version is the only one to see, frankly).

Unsurprisingly, Picard is my fave (I was actually a Patrick Stewart fan already), but both Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew did excellent jobs in their Sisko and Janeway roles. Scott Bakula as Archer just scares me as a concept. TNG cast my favorite ensemble bunch, though I will give it up (oh yes) for George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy, Terri Farrell, Alexander Siddiq, Rene Auberjonois, Ethan Phillips, Robert Beltran and Robert Picardo. Data ist rad. And so forth.

note: star trek: the motion picture looked awful. but all the ones after that were awesome. how much cooler would next generation have been if they had those burgundy uniforms? kirk looked like the motherfucker in EVERY MOVIE wearing that shit.

ned: you think picard is tougher than picard. what. the. fuck. did you see wrath of khan? did you see that shit? he fucking kicked khan's fucking vinyl-chested ass. 'oh, yeah, you have genesis, khan but you don't have me. if you want me, you're going to have to come down here. you're GOING to HAVE to COME DOWN HERE!!!@#@@!$#'. you can say ANYTHING ELSE about kirk vs. picard, picard is smarter and more civil and professional or whatever the fuck, but nobody in their right fucking mind would say that he's tougher than motherfucking kirk. i am actually literally angry about this, so i need to calm down now. christ, i'm such a trekkie.

I thought it was Riker who had the twin. ;-)

that riker transporter twin episode is some stupid shit though.

original series: chekov...maybe, but that's stretching it. he kicks ass in the movies, he's just sort of useless on the show. but the original cast (chekov being a second series addition) is flawless.

next generation: RIKER RIKER RIKER, troi, that doctor who replaced crusher for one year, yar, data (come on, admit it. he's a super-advanced andriod and he can't understand common phrases? he thinks a 'lemon' is a literal lemon for god's sake. i'm sure the writers kissed each other for how fucking cute that was. anyway mudd's women were way smarter). and WESLEY. geordie would get on my nerves if he were played by anyone but le var burton, but he's a childhood icon and can therefore do no wrong.

deep space nine: the only memorable character besides the captain (who is cool) is quark the ferengi (who is also cool). but the rest aren't even fleshed-out enough to annoy me. wait, no, the short-haired chick with the ridges on her nose aggravates the piss out of me. and the doctor, god.

voyager: it has an indian. and an asian guy. and a black vulcan. and the captain is a woman. only as annoying as that new ghostbusters cartoon where one of the ghostbusters was in a wheelchair. like, what the hell?

evidence that kirk is the best captain: all series after that have had kirk ripoffs that are nowhere as good as kirk because they are not as cool as the godly shatner. like riker, or that really forgettable womanizer guy from voyager. i mean, what the hell, don't you just want to punch riker in the face? does anyone not want to? anyone?

All-time favorite episode is "Charlie X," where the Enterprise picks up some teenaged human waif from a planet, who then runs around the ship melting off the faces through telekinesis (?) of various crew members whenever he's teased or horny. What teenager couldn't identify with that?

I remembered TNG being great when I was 12, but I watched a few of them more recently and they were AWFUL, even the later ones. I think I might have quite liked Deep Space Nine later on, when they started having season-long story arcs, but I never saw enough of them to make sense of what was going on.

How come most of the crew are American yet NONE of them are chronically obese? (except Scotty who's - ahem - ""Scottish"")

In the 60s it was a bizarre mix of US military 'might is right' fascism and Hippy-dippy, 'why can't all nations hold hands?' idealism (though still managing to be sexist ~ Uhura the Captains secretary and Yoaman Rand (is that right) the Captains bit of [onboard] fluff. AND THATS IT SISTERS!)

It should have ended there as it ran out of ideas and people stopped watching it. But OH NO, they had to bring it back in the 80s with over-long, plodding bore-a-thon 'Next Generation' episodes that tapped into the touchy-feely / inner-child / New-Age nonsense that was on the go at the time. I mean - Counsellor Troi = WHY? She even sits on the bridge next to the Captain!! the message is in the 25th Century a bloody social worker is one of the most important jobs on a space ship.

But it was all so clinical and corperate and soul-less, advocating Pro-conformity and how you should be a good citizen. And too much sanctimonious liberal finger-wagging for my liking.

And it starred Whoopi Goldberg.

And how come all the baddies end up as the Federation's (UGH!) freind, taking tokenistic jobs as Navigators etc?

And why was it always so fucking BORING?

Another Star Trek I had over the other incarnations -- BETTER BACKGROUND MUSIC! Esp. that duh-dum-duh-dum-DUH-DUM-duh-dum theme whenever Kirk's ass was in deep ship.

On the other hand, Troi's mother was AWESOME.

And the original ST's music was Varese-influenced, hey? Hmmmm ... never knew that! Maybe I should go over to that "Who Opened Your Ears" thread in ILM and change an answer or two of mine :-)

Troi's mom was cooler than Troi, not more attractive! Aigh, my eyes!

troi: not attractive.

crusher: nuh-uh.

troi's mom: uh.

that guy who was troi's mom's butler or something and was the guy who played lurch in the addams family movies: mrowr.

question: who liked first contact? it was like a next generation episode, only like, cool. plus, supercool supporting cast with alfre woodard and the farmer guy from babe.

someone start a star wars thread so i can bitch about how much that sucks except for empire strikes back.

hey i just remembered something else i liked in next generation, although it's from that bastard movie where kirk dies (falling off a walkway! the fuck? he's saved the universe like two hundred times and he falls of a walkway and dies? fuck). um anyway, i liked when data said 'shit'.

Andrew L has not mentioned his great expertness in this area, for some reason. I know about it because I very briefly worked under him on a Star Trek magazine!

Rennies? Feel like I’ve heard them describe themselves as Rennies.

if grandma was so happy how did mad jock mctavish know the ghost was bad news? how did he know it had been around for generations? how did he know it was to do with the candle? how did he get up to the ship and how did he know where to go fiddling in the innards?p

LOL I didnt even think about all this it was so bad! But yike, yes.

TNG: In Theory

data gets a girlfriend, random things break. includes the quite gruesome image of a crew member embedded in the floor, see Act Four here:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/In_Theory_(episode)

the season pass changed between seasons so i only saw the start of the two part corss-season finale about worf

today's episode: Ensign Ro, the start of a long crush

they are taking about her as if she has a history, but i don't think we've seen her before. Memory Alpha has her playing a different character in season 4.

I'd forgotten or not realised that! I looked it up - yeah she played someone called Dara with a ridonkulous hairdo.

Identifying with Reg Barclay a lot lately tbh. “I’m nervous about everything! Everybody knows that.”

been catching up on the christmas backlog. 2 of the last 3 episodes have been I Borg and The Inner Light which have got to be in any list of top 10 ST:TNG episodes, i think

Two hugely popular but somewhat divisive episodes

I haven't seen I Borg in a long time. I do remember liking it, but for some it marked the beginning point of the Borg becoming Just Another Species. But that was probably inevitable anyway.

The Inner Light is probably a top five for me, though I find it funny how easily Picard seems to brush the whole thing off after it's over. Hey, this is episodic genre TV, so you'd better be back on your feet in time for next week's adventure

I didn't think Inner Light is considered divisive -- everyone likes it. Except me, because I don't think I ever really connected with the villagers much.

There are two common criticisms I've seen: one is the "magic technology" aspect, in which a species that appears to be roughly on our present-day technological level (if even that) somehow made an interactive lifetime simulator that could be transmitted and downloaded into an alien explorer's brain. That doesn't bother me personally and I think it's better left unexplained.

Secondly, the whole ethical issue of the story. The probe drags Picard into this other identity, with no consent sought or explanation given, and once he's in the programme, he's given no choice but to accept it. It only really happens inside half an hour, but for him it's a whole adult lifetime. And yes he does accept it, and takes an opportunity to travel the road not taken, and gains a happy family and community...but still. It doesn't ruin the story for me (in fact it kinda makes it more interesting, maybe?), but there is a troubling aspect that isn't really acknowledged in the script.

last two were DS9 / TNG crossovers but only Bashir seemed to be around

today, Starship Mine, and there's tuvok, minus the pointy ears, and evil. (apparently he also played a klingon in ds9 before voyager)

really like the sound effect of the cargo bay doors (perhaps also the holodeck doors?) in the '90s shows

it's not unlike cabin/turbolift doors closing, but then there's an 'awww' that is perfect. these doors are bigger, and closing them made the ship sigh!

I kind of hated its first season but the second season of Prodigy is actually pretty good! The things I dislike about it (impulsive boy protagonist who glides by on questionable rakish charm) is still present but is balanced by the story which has been a step above.

Voyager s2e13 owns. The director (none other than Jonathan Frakes!) closing in on Mulgrew as she announces "have we gotten ourselves into the middle of some sort of...robotic war??"...perfect framing, writing, delivery, just chef's kiss.

Are there Voyager highlights? Year of Hell is a good one. I’ve barely watched an episode since the 90s but my memory is that the stories run the gamut from dreadful to pretty good, but there aren’t many genuinely excellent episodes.

Section 31 I fast forwarded through yesterday and seemed like it was even worse than everyone said it was.

re: voyager ‘the thaw’ (the one with michael mckean), ‘distant origin’ (the one with the dinosaurs), ‘blink of an eye’ ( the one with daniel dae kim) come to mind. also the one with the far-future museum doing reenactments of them as villains

Weirdly Voyager had multiple episodes with aliens re-interpreting Voyager storylines for comedy. There's a latter season one that goes What If Instead of Primitive Vulcans Threaten to Worship Picard as God, Alien Greek Playwright Makes Knockoff Voyager Stage Play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvVdcTb_qwY

Agree that Prodigy, while probably not best appreciated by anyone over 12 or can't stand over-enthusiastic voice acting, is astoundingly the best written of the Nu-Treks, and kind of absurdly committed to picking up dangling legacy character arcs (I don't think Voyager gave Chakotay anywhere near as much attention or care as this ensemble kid's show where he's missing for most of the series). Picard series finale basically redid Prodigy's season 1 finale but with worse setup and execution.

chakotay was a terrible and boring and occasionally ridiculous character in voyager

(in case it isnt obvious)* i totally zoned out of my TNG first-time watch, it is no TOS

*(in case yr not zeroed on my activities 24/7)

you'll never get to the ep where Beverley reads her grandmother's erotic diary with that attitude!

Lots of good Voyager EPs once it gets going around the 2nd season.

Granny's Erotica is tomorrow's episode on Sky Mix

(currently about half way through the final season. and it shows)

I remember Voyager as being great single episode stories going through all the sf tropes one after another. terrible ending though.

"Section 31 I fast forwarded through yesterday and seemed like it was even worse than everyone said it was"

I think, like a lot of people, I consume modern Star Trek by watching the chaps from Red Letter Media talking about Star Trek - rather than by actually watching Star Trek. Which means that I'm completely unfamiliar with Strange New Worlds. Because it's apparently pretty good! And thus RLM hasn't covered it. Instead they cover Picard.

And Section 31, which they did a few weeks ago. It's a knock-off of The Suicide Squad or Guardians of the Galaxy, where a bunch of mismatched D-list heroes form an effective team. Fuck you, Sally! You know, XCOM: Enemy Unknown also had a reference to "Horatius". Which raises the question of whether Firaxis copied Oblivion or if it was the other way around. Or just coincidence. Or they were both copying a common source.

The two things I remember about Section 31 are that it's full of crash-zooms. Crash. ZOOMS! CrashZOOMS! CrashZOooOOMS! CraSHZOoooMMMS! I'm trying to evoke the spirit of Italian futurism here. PicPACpicPACZZZZooms! ThruMPISHpashPISHPACZooms! Tich-tech-TASHZOoooms! Time and space are dead! Lots of crash zooms added in post-production because the film appears to have been produced as quickly as possible.

And secondly there was an interview clip with the producer and the director, who appeared to be struggling to describe the show and gave the impression that they would rather have been somewhere else. One of the influencers involved in the interview had seen the film three times. Also, the show has a superweapon that's literally called the superweapon.

And it has Jamie Lee Curtis, who has superweapons of her own! That's not a sexist joke, by the way. It's a postmodern parody of sexism.

Prodigy season 2 has a Vulcan character who's voiced by Amethyst from Steven Universe, the juxtaposition of which I find hilarious.

it's the last week for TNG repeats. and given that the last few have all been basically 'person is haunted / possessed by something' it's probably not a moment too soon.

LONG OPINION here, but: I feel like it's really difficult for core Star Trek stuff to be good anymore, because it's so fundamentally a TV show and people hardly make or watch true TV shows anymore.

A while back a kid asked me why I liked Star Trek and not Star Wars, and as I thought it over I felt like most of the reasons were actually downstream from that central thing: one is fundamentally movie-sized and the other TV-sized. Wars starts with a handful of mostly blood relatives fulfilling epic destinies in stories that climax in theatrical duels and revelation of family secrets. Trek is a workplace with a set of character types who, each week, encounter a new and provocative scenario that is often resolved with a big speech. The latter of these is a great mode for doing mild sci-fi stuff — the whole task is to come up with one scenario per week that's fun to think over for an hour, which makes it great at constantly producing memorable ideas.

But now the world is abandoning the old episodic hour-long TV form and making everything more like film. The prestige format has become the 10-episode streaming season that's like a single serialized movie. Even the types of procedurals that retain the old format have leaned into long arcs, characters with backstories, etc. (So many backstories! How often do you still see the old model — largely static characters with little backstory or root trauma to be resolved, people you come to love and understand and see as three-dimensional via watching how they react to what's actually happening week-to-week in the show?) Most anything that isn't a comedy seems to get designed and budgeted for splashy cinematic action, instead of having to use standing sets to stage something that's verbally or theatrically good. Plus, to be snobby for a second, I suspect the sheer dumbness and unsubtle emotion-explaining of a lot of blockbusters now gets applied to anything seen as remotely adjacent to superhero action, including sci-fi and fantasy.

And from what I've seen of recent core Trek productions, this makes it suckier? Like at the end of the first "Strange New Worlds," Pike actually pulls the classic Trek move of resolving everything with a big speech ... but instead of being dramatized in a good TV or theatrical way — installing you in the room, working up some tension, lingering on the delivery and impact of the speech itself — it's done like the end of a movie, where it's cutting to people listening from orbit and making "he's really doing it!" faces. (And then, if I remember correctly, it whisks rapidly along to a crew member coming to Pike and saying "by the way, it's important for you to understand my backstory and its impact on my character, which I will now summarize.") Even when the writing's decent, the language and form of the thing seem ill-suited to what the world was built around. It works as a stately, talky, theatrical thing, not a brisk action film; I'd probably like it more if someone filmed a stage production than some of the streaming stuff.

I always wind up imagining people's favorite TNG plots and how they'd look if they were made in today's context, and it's a reliably depressing thought. Maybe this is partly generational bias; I'll admit that I find the original series to be kinda gruelingly paced and chintzy, and I'd bet some audiences today would think the same about the TNG era. But I also see young people working through DS9, and it's not like you can't update the pacing and feel of these things while preserving the root episodic-TV orientation of it! In any case we are approaching the point where there are more Star Trek properties I don't enjoy than properties I do, at which point my answer to the thread question will tip over to Dud.

TOS and TNG were largely also just morality plays, like The Twilight Zone in a way. No one does these anymore.

I would agree, but Lower Decks, which only just finished, was very, very good and felt like proper Trek -- for me it's up there with the core shows (TNG, DS9, and the original series).

I guess my curiosity is - does Trek need to keep going? I love it but I'm ready to accept that it's an old antique, like me. And how wonderful for today's teens to have all those shows on streaming.

Mookieproof, thanks for recommending "The Thaw", what a great story! It's like "Move Along Home" done right. I've never really gotten Janewaway, but she has some great moments and line deliveries in this one -- The last minute has to be one of the greatest non-cliffhanger endings to a Trek episode ever -- fantastically abrupt.

Anyway, I look forward to watching the other Voyagers on your list. Does Janeaway having great moments ever coalesce into her having a definable character?

today's TNG was them de-evolving. which looked a lot like them being possessed, by monkeys. she turned me into a newt. i got better.

Lower Decks is totally in a TV format!

I guess my curiosity is - does Trek need to keep going? I love it but I'm ready to accept that it's an old antique, like me.

Probably not but every old IP is going to continue to be mined forever, Star Trek ain't intrinsically more antique than Batman or Star Wars or whatever.

Watching Voyager rn and one thing that did strike me was that, outside of the lack of queer characters*, the cast looks pretty close to what you'd expect from a 2025 show.

* Canonically I mean, well aware of the many subtexts and shippings.

On the one hand, having your basic premise be that humanity has solved all its problems is an awful box for writers, so I understand if nobody on the creative end really wants to do Trek qua Trek anymore, but it seems like nobody else has picked up the mantle of showing a deeply positive future, so in that sense I do think there's actually some kind of social responsibility to try to keep the flame going, because in its absence, you cede any territory of optimism to doofuses like Musk (and unless you buy that they were dropping hints that Lorca was a mirror universe nazi the whole time, nu-trek writers seem more than willing to canonize such doofuses, so maybe in the future reserve a modest quota among creative staff for people who might actually like Trek more than they like permacrises?)

There's a generation of STEM scientists who wouldn't exist if not for Janeway. If Star Wars can still crank out an Andor now and then, why not let Star Trek grind away?

That’s another thing that helps Lower Decks fit in: the joke depends on keeping the utopian-professional-hypercompetence thing.

Probably a shorter version of my point would just have been that I think this works best as a classic procedural. There’s an interesting assortment of highly skilled professionals. Each week they encounter a novel scenario that presents some ethical or intellectual challenge, and we watch them address it. Often the main scenario has some thematic resonance with a challenge one of the characters is facing, and the resolution of the A plot teaches them how to approach their B plot (or vice versa).

It’s a good system! It’s funny that DS9 succeeds by introducing all the stuff that’s led TV away from this — longer arcs, mysterious backstories, ambiguity and antiheroism — but of course that stuff popped because it was still happening within the context of this more procedural model, not replacing it.

There are no bad characters in DS9, TOS, TNG and Lower Decks - I think that's what draws me back to them. The other shows are a mixed bag, or worse. Even at its least serialised, DS9 is still a fun show, 'cause it's a hangout show at a base level.

last episode of TNG today and... it didn't record

Interesting thought experiment! I've been wondering how cinematic production values, with the same scripts, might've changed my enjoyment of some of the more spectacular episodes of TNG ("All Good Things", "Yesterday's Enterprise"), and maybe it's just a lack of imagination but I don't think the modern, glossy look would've added much.

I think it’s an amazing-glooking show. The 90s beige-ness has aged really well. Incredible vibes

Some episodes, it seems like they do a little extra. There's a one take pan and focus move in the briefing scene in Yesterday's Enterprise that I don't remember them doing on any other episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yHOtkxDAk0

The music on the Best of Both Worlds really stood out as well (I think this was also one of the episodes they did some super extra VFX remastering for theatrical re-release).

In contrast, it's really weird how much less ambitious the Spock crossover episode was. Here's what should be an iconic scene between Spock and Data, and they're facing away from each other for 90% of it, shot like cubicle co-worker banter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YahVhEZ55FI

first half of the last episode of TNG and they've made future LaForge a novelist which is a nice touch (given Levar's history with books)

the second half of this didn't record 8(

and Data lives like Sherlock Holmes surrounded by cats

wondering if they reused the scenes with tasha or whether they were new.

new, according to Memory Alpha. her and Miles are guest stars.

"Interesting thought experiment! I've been wondering how cinematic production values, with the same scripts, might've changed my enjoyment of some of the more spectacular episodes of TNG ("All Good Things", "Yesterday's Enterprise"), and maybe it's just a lack of imagination but I don't think the modern, glossy look would've added much."

This is one of the reasons The Motion Picture feels odd. It's the only one of the films that tries to use the language of cinema to tell a story. It has lengthy, dialogue-free montages and the occasional visual metaphor. Whereas the other films didn't have any time for that.

Given that TNG began a few years after Miami Vice it's surprising, in retrospect, that it's so cinematically conservative. It might have benefited from some musical sequences where Worf and Geordi silently checked their phasers while "Brothers in Arms" wafted over the tannoy. Or even special guest stars such as Glen Frey, or Frank Zappa as an alien from a planet where people communicate exclusively with overbearing sarcasm. But no, it's as if the producers were dead set on dialogue-heavy character drama, which I suppose is a good thing because the show hasn't aged all that badly.

I always assumed that Trek tried to deal with the long-form story-arc quasi-cinema thing in the wake of Bablyon 5. But DS9 began the same year, not a few years later. And yet there is still some debate as to whether one is a rip-off of the other, according to this fascinating Reddit thread which - as one of the comments points out - feels like a USENET post from 1994. My recollection is that Enterprise tried to do series-long arcs, but after its failure (and the dead-end of Lost and the eventual failure of Battlestar: Galactica) the concept fell out of fashion for a few years.

what should i watch next? chronologically it's discovery (seen series 1) and then picard. both are complete, which is good, but I've heard mixed things about both.

lower decks also complete and had sounded mostly positive.

stargate? farscape? firefly again?

lower decks SLAPS

also Farscape is never a bad idea truly great show

LEXX

That Reddit thread re B5 is comprehensive but in no way new info of course - people were hashing it out back in the Usenet days which is prob why Usenet got mentioned I guess. As everyone prob knows by now I've always firmly been in the "they stole a lot from JMS" camp, because you just cant get past the amount of "coincidences" even when you put aside ones that can be explained by trope/cliche (such as "set on a space station/next to a wormhole/next to a planet/political machinations")

Its a shame B5 has dated so badly because with modern TV tech it could look glorious - they were *really* innovative with their aliens.

yesterday bcs I'm sick with a cold I watched TAS "The Practical Joker" for a laugh, then by sheer coincidence the next thing I watched was the Very Short Trek that referenced it (talking about how it was the first mention of holodecks), so that was fun.
I really wish they'd do more Very Short Treks, those ruled.