I watched about 5 minutes of it and basically got the same old millennial "everything is bad and we can't be optimistic about the future" vibe from it and stopped watching right there.
99% of today's shows follow the exact same pattern of a dystopic future which is starting to get really grating. It's almost like people can't write optimism. It's almost like this pessimism is a symptom of a crumbling capitalist society around them.
I watched about 5 minutes of it and basically got the same old millennial "everything is bad and we can't be optimistic about the future" vibe from it and stopped watching right there.
99% of today's shows follow the exact same pattern of a dystopic future which is starting to get really grating. It's almost like people can't write optimism. It's almost like this pessimism is a symptom of a crumbling capitalist society around them.
The people making the shows probably aren't millennials, though. That's the work of another generation.
I remember in high school and college (and even after) people used to berate me for being so pessimistic. Now I'm the optimist. Times-they-are-a-changing, I guess.
Good point. Kurtzman is Gen X. I guess my point was more to say that it's *catering* to millennials who seem to enjoy dystopic fiction more than the utopian writing of early Trek. I personally prefer the utopian vision of TNG. Of course, we had the darker version of the Galaxy with DS9 and I loved the mix they had with Voyager for a while. But with Enterprise they started going dark and with Star Trek 2009, they completely shifted the direct towards a completely messed up universe that I couldn't accept (I liked 2009 Trek as a standalone adventure, but what spawned from it is a largely unrelateable and ulikeable universe for me).
I *want* to watch more Trek (I've been a fan since the TNG pilot which I saw live), but it's just very hard to stomach the combination of the Kelvin and Prime timelines they're trying to do --- which is literally not even a creative choice but an outcome of terrible corporate creative contracts.
BTW, dystopian sci-fi is literally my favorite genre. But I just want a change of pace and Star Trek was that.
Except, I don't know, I feel like a lot of millenials are sick of dystopias. At least, I know I am. It wasn't really what I wanted from this show. I could deal with a corrupt Federation but the direction they took with Allyson Pill and Seven of 9 was too much for me.
Except, I don't know, I feel like a lot of millenials are sick of dystopias. At least, I know I am. It wasn't really what I wanted from this show. I could deal with a corrupt Federation but the direction they took with Allyson Pill and Seven of 9 was too much for me.
I'm not sure what the current generation wants to say, honestly.
I think the scifi/fantasy crowd in the 40-70's decades were doing something new in their mind -- responding to their modernist culture, confronting the flaws of mechanistic society, etc. The genre was also kind of new, we hadn't even sent people to the moon at the time; it certainly had not been standardized per se, although there was a lot of scattershot stuff. Look at how horror, scifi, and fantasy changed over the course of that time in our television, books, and movies.
Considering how many forums of media developed when Gen X were kids, we spent a lot of time either deconstructing and/or mocking it (to comment on a society we couldn't control -- hello Simpsons) or revisiting it with spins on our own view which was less rosy than the generation preceding us. (Lots of examples, but compare ET to Super 8 for example, sorry to bring back Abrams but he's kind of a prime example unfortunately.)
It's really interesting to me to see the glut of superheroes, scifi, fantasy, and horror nowadays hitting even mainstream audiences rather than just niche... but so much of it is just casual fodder / a ripoff of a ripoff. Typically the outstanding stuff either takes an idea that was badly explored in the past (but still does have the taint of being too familiar) or really gets into the details that individualize the story rather than making something broader and more generic. I mean, there is stuff that gets a lot of publicity / public love nowadays like Stranger Things, but in ten years will anyone care about that show? Not really, because it's mostly just a rehash of other things + doesn't have the dramatic chops to endure. (Meanwhile, people will still be discussing Breaking Bad, the first season or two of Lost, The Sopranos, and other things that have more staying quality.)
There is stuff that was passable in the 70's and 80's simply because the field was not saturated yet and the sprawling gatekeepers (publishers and production houses) controlled what got up there and heavily promoted it. Nowadays it's a feeding frenzy and the bar is much lower.
I was kind of keen on Lovecraftian themes, as an example of a genre, because it was different than "evil is directed and malevolent and, well, evil" and "evil as chaos and madness" wasn't heavily explored, but now it's becoming a genre du jour. it will soon be picked clean like everything else.
I think the dystopian carcass was starting to rot by the time the Hunger Games films were coming out, and now it's kind of old news. All the films from that genre were dying on release, I think Divergence was the most notable example of the flopped genre.
I guess getting back to Trek -- the dystopian future was a response to the rosy "everything is awesome!" view of prior scifi in general, but it soon enough dominated and itself became the force to rebel against. Now people are trying to react against the dystopia framework because we're tired of it. Where do we go to now? Not back to rosy, I hope. Each is kind of a cliche. Maybe something more complex and nuanced? Look at current society. There's a lot of corruption in government, yet there are good people as well, especially down on local levels.
I dunno, I am also going to say I think some of this judgment is by people who already dislike certain directions and aren't taking a work as a whole. I wouldn't say that "Picard" the series revolves around dystopia, especially if you reach the last episode; Starfleet actually organizes to do something positive and helps save the day. There are still good people in the system, but you're liable to run into the corrupt elements first because they (1) present easy opponents to the heroes and (2) you only have limited time to establish conflict and (3) you're not really seeing outside of the plot conflict to see all the good stuff. Put another way, we get attached to what we get attached to, and then we hate it when people disrupt what we're attached to with something different. Sometimes the 'something different' isn't very good, sometimes it's notably good, and sometimes it's either a mix of good and bad or we find it might be decent enough after first having a negative reaction to it. IOW, the problems it is experience I look at it as a defect in the medium, the franchise, the tone an audience expects, etc. Why isn't it capable of being something more like Breaking Bad or some other quality drama show? Because it never was that kind of show and attracted a different kind of audience who will bitch when it becomes more like that, even if it's good. as such, it will maintain the flaws of the kind of show it is. I guess the best it can do is determine its target audience and align the tone that way, and leave it to some other show to take a different tact.
Was it making her a hard drinking clone of a Charlize Theron action movie character that bothered you or some other aspect that you found annoying about Seven?
I guess getting back to Trek -- the dystopian future was a response to the rosy "everything is awesome!" view of prior scifi in general, but it soon enough dominated and itself became the force to rebel against. Now people are trying to react against the dystopia framework because we're tired of it. Where do we go to now? Not back to rosy, I hope. Each is kind of a cliche. Maybe something more complex and nuanced? Look at current society. There's a lot of corruption in government, yet there are good people as well, especially down on local levels.
I don't know a great deal about the character but I doubt she was like that in Voyager. That seemed like an attempt to be more "edgy" that I didn't particularly want.
Killing in Voyager was literally last resort self-defence for all of them, always as far as I remember. There might have been moments of controversial decisions, but nothing that blatantly in disregard for higher human morality.
In fact, they made a very huge deal about having to do it.
Even had an episode where another Starship was stuck in the Delta Quadrant who took a different approach than voyager (no morals, just get home at any cost approach which required killing aliens for fuel) and that entire crew was chased, captured and put in the brig by Janeway (I don't remember the ending, but I think those who didn't want to join Voyager were left on a planet to settle somewhere).
Seven *never* even came close to anything resembling killing unless having to in combat (which I recall for her was rare). In fact, she was even often up in Janeway's face lecturing her about her even slightly deviating from Janeway's own morality and Starfleet's moral ethos as Seven understood it. She was pretty stubborn about striving to be humanity's best.
I didn't like the fact that she was like to Picard "i'm totally not going to murder evil Counselor troi" and then she went and did it. That was the episode that made me check out, which was why, yes, I didn't consider the work as a whole.
I don't know a great deal about the character but I doubt she was like that in Voyager. That seemed like an attempt to be more "edgy" that I didn't particularly want.
But JVDB, you liked TLJ, some of you might be thinking:
But in that movie, Luke only only considered killing his nephew (just like he considered killing his father in a previous film). He didn't tell Leia "even though your son is bad, I'm not going to kill him", and then when her back was turned, put a lightsaber in his nephew.
Part of what rankled me about that was the deception. It might not have bothered me if they hadn't done that bait-and-switch.