While I love TNG (even though the cast can’t shut up) and that was the first Star Trek I was familiar with since I was 6 and a fan of reading rainbow when it came out I would say that the original series is my favorite (can happily watch Trek through Enterprise). My dad watched Original Series reruns since as long as I can remember.
The sendoff for the original crew always gets to to me and it just contrast that with writers today who live to crap on or deconstruct the works of better writers. I saw they are making a new blade runner with a delusional man, Disney is making a new Neverending Story, and Netflix is butchering… I mean remaking the Chronicles of Narnia.
One good thing about Star Trek is that I have a lot of books to read. I was at a convention once and a guy had a bunch of Star Trek books for a quarter a piece so I left with a bunch.
I love that the movies became unabashedly about the three male leads. Kirk,Spock,and McCoy were wonderful through their movie run. I like that Kirk didn't change his prejudice because of some self righteous speech but by seeing people further gone than him. I wonder if the cabal could turn Kirk to their side if he didn't have Spock and Bones.
Plummer and Warner were amazing Klingons, which looking back at their body of work who would've guess. Seeing a subordinate like Sulu rise up to captain was pretty cool. Klingons are just cool. I hate their backstory has been retconned numerous times now. We like our brow ridge Klingons, Ka-pla.
Too bad Sulu's legacy is the geriatric wokester of today.
And I love the line about Shakespeare in Klingon. But that moment when they are ordered to return to Earth and Kirk says “second star to the right and straight on til morning” followed by the final Captain’s Log is such a great moment.
Those are the Klingons I consider canon. I saw what Discovery did to them
Discovery Klingons are not in my head canon, even if they are “official”, at this point…
Ironic, really, since the last two Trek series (Discovery and the other one) seem to go against all the previous established lore to that point…
But yeah, much like how the 2007 movie Romulans bear almost no resemblance to that “race” in any prior media, I guess we can say the same for the recent Klingon “experiment”…
Just decided to read up on a bit of Discovery’s “lore”, because I remembered that they also fucked with the androids of Trek (Airiam, in the Discovery-verse, who also runs counter to established Trek lore)…
Man, that show was an absolute shitfest. Like, we’re they going for the wokest show on TV, that had as little as possible in common with its source material, or what??!
Yes, Kurtzman hates Star Trek he just wanted a platform to virtue signal enough to fail his way upward in Hollywood like big bro JJ.
Warner is amazing in everything.
"If I were creating the world I wouldn't mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!" Evil.
"She'll fly apart!"
"FLY HER APART, THEN!"
George Takei may be insufferable, but I will forever love his depiction of Sulu, and especially this one line. It encapsulates everything between him and his friends, the Enterprise crew.
Hopefully like most history, the story of Sulu will outlast the pitiable meat of Takei.
Yep. I try to tune out his crazy rants and remember him as Sulu. Also loved how he was at the end to say goodbye to Kirk
if you can track down a copy, star trek: shattered universe was a great, if hard, game. Basically, the excelsior ends up in the mirror universe and has to fly halfway across the alpha quadrant to get home.
The twist is that they're in the bodies of their mirror universe doppelgangers, and the ship has star fighters instead of shuttlecraft.
not necessarily canon, but a fun game, and you get to see what kind of captain sulu might have been.
Beyond being one of the best Star Treks, Undiscovered Country is a phenomenal movie. The TOS cast was at the top of their game, and the writing and story were excellent.
I agree, It's ridiculous what Hollywood is pumping out these days. Idiotic pap written by inexperienced morons. Every remake is worse than the source material, only intended to please pink haired intersectional studies majors who are offended by the lack of strong female leads in the original.
Voyager was an average Star Trek series overall, but it will be funny when they get around to remaking that. Janeway will be turned into a troon and Chakotay will be a lesbian just to get the two of them into bed. Because Hollywood has no creativity or writing ability, and just puts a chick in it and makes her lame and gay.
I love how that South Park line has become such a meme and they insist on proving them right
That’s my favourite piece of Trek, that movie (although the second-last episode of TOS is also very good). It’s excellent, even considering the purple Klingon blood floating around the room, lol.
Voyage Home is also good, but that was more spoof, than “true” Trek, imho.
I do also enjoy me some Voyager, but man, The Undiscovered Country is just… The most I enjoy Trek, personally.
Also arguably Kim Catrall’s best acting performance. Certainly during the height of her career, anyway!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Would also recommend both Galaxy Quest and Red Dwarf, on the humour front, if you haven’t seen those yet!
Love Red Dwarf and Galaxy Quest is a great movie. I almost tear up every time they get the order to return home and the camera pans across and you see their faces and Kirk gives the final captain’s log. I enjoyed Voyager as well.
did you ever see the pilot to TNG?
The cameo from McCoy interacting with Data was amazing...
"Human rights. Why, the very name is racist"
Well, speciesist.
If a right is natural, then all species have it, regardless of form or intelligence.
The thing about movies 3, 4, and 6 was this:
Nimoy had some control over all three. He directed 3 & 4, and for 6 he was behind the story (with Konner and Rosenthal of "Planet of the Apes" fame). And Meyer was friends with Nimoy since his contributions on 2 and 4.
In the aftermath of Roddenberry's disengagement from the franchise, you had two camps of thought with the ability to produce material for the franchise. The Nimoy-Bennett-Meyer group, and the Berman-Piller-Taylor group. And the two didn't get along all that well. They came from very different traditions, and the Berman group was very much "THE BERMAN SHOW (and you're just living in it)".
Now, Berman did understand that Nimoy was better at making MOVIES, where you only get two hours and you cannot afford the script to be a dud. So he called in Nimoy for Generations; Spock one look at the script, told him it was a dud and that it needed a total rewrite, and Berman told him to GTFO.
I often wonder how Generations would’ve looked with Nimoy at the helm
My understanding is Nimoy's criticism was foundational. The problem was the story itself. Having to spend far too much energy in the why just to swing a gimmick to pull off the what (get the two captains in the same scene).
As insulting as it was to ENT, if you want to get Kirk and Picard in the same scene, it's easier to do it "These are the Voyages" style. Give Picard some new mysterious crisis in the present that has to be explored on the holodeck in the past. Sort of a cross the episode where Picard orders Data to lie and the time Geordi creates a holo-engineer. A murder mystery, "piece it together" story. Kirk & crew encounter something, resolve it, but the threat comes back and their OFFICIAL report doesn't give Picard enough to go on so he has to get inside Kirk's thinking.
That would’ve made much more sense
It couldn’t ever have happened. He read the script and immediately noped out.
The basic storyline is dire, so the man’s instincts were on point. And the underlying push- for yet another “passing of the torch”- was pathetic.
I know they were intent on Kirk and Picard together but that could’ve been done in a holodeck
Or time travel. Fuck can you imagine if the threat was something like a Borg-ified V'GER returning, and the only person that could reason with it was Kirk, so Picard violates the TPD and goes and grabs the old crew from the past, where the official record says they all disappeared mysteriously sometime after TUC? It would have been a reversed callback to TVH too.
They were all gold-pressed latinum compared to the excrement they try to pass off as entertainment today. My view of Berman has changed over the years and I get the idea he was an executive who saw himself in a careful balancing act.
TaH pagh, taHbe!
Star Trek, despite having watched two of their series from start to finish, is never something I really developed much genuine appreciation for. It doesn't manage to be grounded hard sci fi or space fantasy(or something that blurs the two like the original Mass Effect), but rather it seems to be a drama show or soap opera only coincidentally set in space.
Plus the fan base for the show, yikes. Even as far back as the 90s most of them were the kind of effort averse communists who deserve to be sealed alive in oil drums.
But I can certainly think of worse things to read to eat up spare time. Scalzi for example.
I'll admit, at least some of the tech-side of things (IE transporters) definitely feel a little silly as I've matured and developed a more grounded perspective on science and technology.
Even so, I think the political and ethics angle was well established and well executed, especially for its time. Even if a little overly idealistic.
I also think TNG era managed to create some legitimately fun, interesting, and thematic alien cultures, even if they occasionally adopted a few bits and pieces from historical Earth cultures.
I've never been able to get into most of the books though, largely because of how often it carried a similar kind of episodic approach, which doesn't make it very easy to narrow down a selection to read. I'm also not sure how well managed the book canon was compared to the Star Wars EU.
The transporter should work by physically sending a transporter pad then sending the people. It'd be scientifically rationalizable, practically reasonable by 'landing' much faster than a manned shuttle, and provide interesting limitations. edit: like Galaxy Quest pods, another reason why it's the best Trek.
TNG is the best of times and the blurst of times. They invented the Borg, then a 37? dimensional shape that kills the Borg. Lore and then killed him because Spiner had spine problems. Troi as the goddess of empathy, then a bridge officer.
Half of the TNG writer's room must have been geniuses and the other half fools.
Oh, for sure. That transporter idea you mention reminds me of Galaxy Quest actually, which was a much neater idea (the little goop-pod thing around the start of the movie).
Probably my biggest gripe with transporters is the barely addressed existential conundrum, where for all intents and purposes, they're creating a "duplicate" of a person, and destroying the excess copy.
Yet somehow, this same technology is hardly ever used to heal someone of serious injuries, or to prolong someone's life beyond the natural limits. Save for the odd episode where they may touch on such questions, but shoo it away as inconsequential, and never bothering to visit it again.
Back to the main writing, I probably skip about 1/10 of TNG and DS9 episodes I recognize as cringe or rather dull.Then with Voyager it's about 1/4-1/3, and that's assuming I'm feeling bored enough to actively watch it.
The transporter isn't a xerox. It's more like shipping ikea furniture. Your matter is broken down, then moved along an energy beam to the destination, where the same matter is reassembled in the same pattern.
That's what it's supposed to be, at least. Different writers all handle tech slightly differently. It shouldn't be possible to get a transporter clone, like what happened with Riker. The tech doesn't work that way, unless it does this week.
I suppose I'd just assumed that in some sense the entire molecular makeup of a person was scanned and more or less converted into data throughout the process. I suppose I haven't revisited the idea in a very long time though.
Hadn't given any thought into the actual "beam" portion of the functional idea, which does change the concept quite a bit. Not sure if I'd say if it's more realistic, but it does hinge on a very different kind of implementation than I'd been assuming.
To be fair, the writers get really lazy with it and it's really inconsistent.
I think the idea of a particle stream is actually a lot more realistic than matter-energy-matter conversion because a particle beam would cost less energy.
I don't like the reading that a ridiculous amount of Federation tech is constantly doing matter-energy conversions. For example, the replicators being synthesizers that take in matter and rearrange it strikes me as way more likely than every bedroom having an energy-matter converter.
I always figured that it was the ultimate garbage recycler. Takes garbage, breaks it down into atoms/molecules, and then rebuilds those particles into whatever it is you want - a guitar or an ice cream sundae. That would totally explain the "utopia" that they supposedly experience.
What gets me is, if they have that, why does Picard have a commercial-sized vinyard? Sure, I could see people growing stuff for "real food", but you'd only need - and be able to work - so much. If you wanted help, you'd have to search out people who are willing to be paid in wine, and well, then you've got a goddamn commune, but you're not going to be able to sell to anyone outside of said commune (not like you'd need to.) And really, you can get a lot of wine out of a standard back yard (of the sort I grew up with, anyway, lots of Italians grew their own grapes. Us kids used to cruise the alleys to nick anything growing outside of a fence ...)
Yeah it's not really more realistic, it just sidesteps the philosophical question about transporter clones. Interestingly the ST-TNG technical manual includes both references to matter-energy conversion, and "feedstock" containers of molecules for replication. In the show itself they've also described wacky mixups between the transporter pattern buffer and the replicator, allowing the transporter to create new things. That's not even getting into the holodeck and how crazy those episodes could get.
A fundamental problem of episodic series. DS9 was only slightly better, since even though it was serial it focused almost entirely on soap opera drama and war. Those heady philosophical questions were still in the one-offs.
John Scalzi, or as Vox Day calls him, "McRapey"
Always wondered why he called him that.
I'm afraid I don't know the origin of the nickname.
Scalzi is the Uber left military sci fi author?
He's the dress wearing heroin addict who authored Old Man's War if that's what you mean yes.
Yeah. His "best" book is essentially Starship Troopers + Forever War + 50 Shades of Gray.
I will cut my own throat before I watch them butcher's Jack's work "for the modern audience." Amazon's rape of Tolkien is where I first drew a line with things that I will not even hate watch.
you can find all of the star trek books on archive.org if you are missing any
Thanks!
Undiscovered Country has always been my favorite of the Star Trek movies. I heard it’s even better in the original Klingon.
My first Star Trek was actually te cartoon in the late 70's. I still remember vividly when they went into the parallel universe where space was white and stars were black. And in the very early 90's before streaming and even DVD a friend of mine bought back from the United States 4 long play VHS tapes that had managed to compress the entire first two seasons of TNG before they were released in Australia. I only had access to them for a weekend so we watched every single episode in about 70 hours with basically no sleep. So Star Terk will always hold a special place for me. But funnily enough - the only series I HAVEN'T watched is Scott Bakula Enterprise. But of late I've started to give up. I enjoyed Picard Season 2 despite its many short comings and I didn't mind Lower Decks but Discovery has just left me cold. And I can't put my finger on why - I think part of it was jumping so far into the future.
The one silver lining of getting older is you can watch stuff you've seen many years before and not remember it all. So I'll go back to Voyager, TNG and DS9 at some point but I've seen the Original at least 3 times and all the movies at least twice. As you say at least we have a massive amount of existing material so we can ignore the modern woke takes as they come out.
I swear I flipped on Disco and saw robots. One of the things about Trek is that it wasn't a robot-heavy vision of the future; Data and Lore were meant to be exceptional. They never really explained why, as far as I know; out of universe, I feel it's because Asimov had such a lock on Robot sci-fi at the time Roddenberry made Trek. That, and the budget likely wouldn't allow for that drastic of a costume/puppet.
Throwing in robots just shows that they didn't give a shit about Trek, they just wanted their own generic gay sci-fi to sully the Trek name.
I liked Enterprise. Haven’t watched any Nutrek. So true about rewatching stuff
VI is alright. It’s got a great, worthy story, but it suffers horribly by looking cheap as hell.
From reused TNG sets (observation lounge, ten forward, engineering) to poor effects (warping to camera after “Come on, I need you,” the pan around the 1701A while Chang says “Tickle us do we not laugh…”), the movie was in dire need of more money and polish.
As send offs go it’s good. I just wish it looked more in keeping with Wrath of Khan, Meyer’s masterpiece.
Wrath of Khan is amazing. Khan quoting Moby Dick at the end was great
When I watched all the Star Trek movies, this one was my favorite. I just remember it being the most interesting and kinetic feeling.
I also don't really like TNG. I felt that the characters all felt sort of autistic, whereas the original series cast felt more like human beings.
I was able to get all the OS/TNG movies at bargain prices except for Undiscovered Country and Insurrection.
Undiscovered Country is reminiscent of our current path towards World War III with Russia.
Insurrection reminds me of what's happening with Lahaina, Maui.
...if it makes you feel better, Neverending story 2 was already meh, and neverending story 3 was a trainwreck...
first one was good, but yeah, there's a reason it took them this long to do another one after the first two sequels, lol
I plan on reading the book soon. I’m sure they will update it for modern audience though