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.
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.