Patrick Stewart will reprise his role as Jean-Luc Picard

[rav3n]

They've managed to murder everything good about the ST franchise. I'm so over it, even though it used to be one of the loves of my life.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

 

[Phoenix]

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.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

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.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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.

All things considered, I think we’re better off than we were in 1968. If they could do optimistic science fiction during that year of turmoil, then there’s no reason it can’t be done in 2020

 

[The Cat]

I'm gonna have to watch this show soon. See what the fuss is. 🤔

 

[Phoenix]

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.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

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.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

Just watched the new Teen Titans Go Star Trek Lower Decks trailer.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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.

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?

 

[Totenkindly]

people could do a lot worse than Charlize Theron as an action character. Just sayin'.

"The Old Guard" wasn't the pinnacle of the genre, but it was a fun enough watch.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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.

It's not dystopian fiction per se that I'm tired of. It's more the way so many things have to be remade in that mold that bugs me, and how it's just done kind of lazily and uninspired, like many science fiction trends tend to overdone.

It's as if a bunch of aging gen x filmmakers grew up watching the Mad Max movies, David Lynch, and the Battlestar reboot, then decided to just copy and paste that to the franchises they were rebooting. As we see more millennial filmmakers age and start to become the dominant force in TV, we might very well see an overabundance of optimistic science fiction--in fact, I think this will probably be the dominant style for a while in the wake of covid and Trump's America. It's all kind of cyclical and ultimately seems influenced by what each generation of filmmakers watched when they were kids, as well as influenced by current issues. People are going to be hungrier for that now and I think dystopian scie-fi might fall out of popularity for several years, since it's been milked so heavily over the last 10 or so years and people can only take so much.

On dystopian imagery--It's a patina finish but you have to have something to say, otherwise it's just window dressing and flashy visuals with no substance--the same can be said about optimistic, utopian sci-fi. And I really couldn't find any message in Picard. Shame too since they decided to reference a lot of stuff like AI and synthetics, and in my opinion that's where we got some of the best classic episodes like "Measure of a Man" exploring those themes (so I'd hoped Picard would have taken on similar themes in a way that worked, but they really just kind of referenced old stuff without really saying anything new--for instance referencing Bruce Maddox, you might expect another heavy debate on individuality and what constitutes sentience, but then they just kill him and then we're on to the next setpiece and series of events) but at the end of the day I just felt similar to how I did after watching the movie I Robot. Lots of flashy, satisfying visuals but it doesn't really leave me thinking too much afterwards

Also, while I understand the move from episodic format to a serialized format, if you're going to do that, it's nice to have some outline. You can't set up a bunch of loose threads just for the hell of it if you don't have a general idea of where they're going. And I understand writing for TV is different, you don't always get the time or chance to resolve every loose thread, but come on now, if you are mindfully setting out to create a serialized show with a long arc, I would think you'd at least want some sort of basic outline. You can't have the mystery box without that underlying framework and I don't know, logical reasons for each series of events going on.

 

[Totenkindly]

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.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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.

Well yeah, my point was the dystopianism itself isn't a problem. It's just when it feels like lazy window dressing.

A fair criticism of old Trek was it could be a little stuffy and lacking in visual style. That was made up for (usually) with good storytelling. The inverse of that in nu Trek is all style, no real substance. There's something to be said for finding a happy middle ground, it would be nice if we didn't have to go to one extreme or the other. But you hand the reigns over to guys whose major complaint with older trek seemed to be it wasn't star warsy enough, it just misses the point. Of all the critiques of older trek (and there are many fair ones I'd generally agree with) that one has to be the most shallow and ultimately just boils down to different tastes.

 

[Phoenix]

I think we're ignoring the fact that money and economic systems have become a lot more deeply entrenched in modern "art". It was easier to be more creative back in the day (until the 90s) but once the 2000s hit, you had multiple recessions, war but at the same time more focus on "more is better" with regards to the objectives of corporates. They want *guaranteed successes* and think that live actions, remakes, reboots are the way to go because *some* reboots and remakes are successes (and some aren't) while brand new and fresh ideas are completely unpredictable ...

( Of course, money was *always* important, but now, it's even a much bigger priority when it comes to greenlighting projects.)

What that has meant is that artistic people aren't focusing on creating new IPs but rather trying to force their existing ideas into the only projects that are getting greenlit - which is mostly reboots and remakes, and adaptions - so it's like trying to force a square in a round hole because all you have in front of you is a round hole.

So, someone can have a brilliant idea for a great dystopian science fiction that could stand on its own merits, but it won't get greenlit. What gets greenlit is say Star Trek for example ---- so what does the "artist" do? He infuses his "Fresh" ideas that are incongruent with the universe that was greenlit and therefore serves up something that's a confused mess - as is the case with all modern remakes and reboots.

I don't think anyone has a clear message left because they simply aren't being given the opportunity to tell unique stories and are suppressed by the fact that they don't have as much creative license.

GoT for example was ruined by the 8th season because even though the writers said that wanted to be done by the 4th or 5th season, HBO basically offered them a ton of money to keep going and so they did. The didn't have as much invested in the show anymore. They churned out terrible episode after terrible episode -- but the show was profitable so it was literally forced to be kept on air. You have the same problem with The Simpsons and a few other shows that exist simply because they make money and therefore have a priority fixation that has nothing to do with putting out a good show.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

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 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.

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

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.

There are three reasons why I wouldn't mind rosy:

1. By this point, "dark and gritty" just looks like a lack of imagination. "Things are shitty now so I can't possibly imagine a universe where things aren't shitty" seems to be the thought process of most people creating media now. In the 2000s (like say, the Battlestar reboot), I could find myself agreeing that this was an approach that shed light on aspects of society that were suppressed. Right now, though, it comes off like people trying to make things more "adult" to cover up for a lack of imagination.
   
2. I also think that's really not what we need now; by this point, we're all aware of darkness. I suppose I think that media can have an influence on the rest of society, and right now it just seems to be kind of feeding a useless blackpill mentality.
   
3. Finally, there's also the idea of entertainment as escapism. Why would I possibly want to escape into a world that sucks as much as my own?
   

 

[Phoenix]

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.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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 mean I can kind of understand her arc, but it takes a lot of filling in the blanks on my part. I think Icheb was a reflection of her idealism, so seeing him murdered by someone she'd trusted pretty much destroyed any sense of idealism left in her. They just didn't really do a terrific job of explaining this.

 

[Doctor Cringelord]

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.

I think the eye torture porn scene was where I finally stopped caring.