Over the last 15 years there has been a decline in the quality of Star Trek. So what went wrong? A video essay on Star Trek over the years. #startrek #writing #videoessay
Agreed. Except SNW is going backwards in time again to the TOS period. As much as I am enjoying it, they should have gone forward, past TNG timeline to a new fancy show and new fancy ship. Instead SNW forced them to create a futuristic yet retro version which looks super advanced, but also clunky. It's a weird mashup.
Strange New Worlds was hit or miss for me. I think the external conflicts (e.g. an on a planet where you forget things, a comet on the path of an inhabited world) were pretty interesting. But the interpersonal conflicts (Uhura having self-doubt, the courtroom episode where the defender attorney berates her own client while on the stand, anything with Spock's relationship issues) really didn't work for me. Not helped by 10 episodes a season, meaning the bad episodes stick out more than when we had 26.
Genuine question; what about Picard season 3 did people like? Like was it the visual nostalgia? I watched it after hearing good reviews from people who like classic Trek and 10 minutes into episode 1, I wanted to turn it off because I personally thought it was horrifically bad television. I stuck it out to see if it would get better but honestly hated all of it. The quality of the writing just didn't hold up at all imo, not one character was anything like themselves and the plot was paper thin. The visuals were good and some of the ideas definitely had potential, but I just can't get my head around anyone saying that it was any better than any other modern Trek.
I agree that SNW is better than most and largely enjoyable yet it still suffers from many of the problems outlined in this essay, albeit to a lesser extent. Novelty 'musical' episodes has become a tired and cringe-worthy meme in modern times (see: recent Doctor Who) and I would have been far happier living my life in it's entirety without ever seeing/hearing Klingons sing K-pop (to be fair all of the musical numbers were bland, tiresome and ill-fitting to the series but that was possibly the most cringe-inducing moment). It is very difficult to invest in the situation and characters after hearing auto-tuned karaoke performances of cheap off-Broadway songs. In essence, I can hear 'Planet Of the Apes: The Musical' whenever this silly stunt is pulled. The bigger issue - as stated in the video essay above - is twofold; a lack of truly original ideas (which at least hold to the internal logic of the universe in which they are set) and incredibly poor dialogue. SNW probably does better than STD (what doesn't?) but it still suffers from a sense that the ship is crewed by narcissistic children who all regret not pursuing their dreams of being stand-up comedians and who are utterly bereft of any Star Fleet discipline. Picard Season 3 was very enjoyable but I have to agree with other commenters that the plot was a bit thin. If the entire season had been written and paced in the manner of TNG it would have been a two or three episode story. I suspect the dialogue was of a slightly higher standard due to the stars having some say. After all, would you say no to a scripting suggestion from Patrick Stewart?
9:11 - it's worth pointing out that we got 'Yesterday's Enterprise' from a script a fan had sent in. I was at a Q & A with one of the writers who adapted this episode for television and he talked about the various changes that episode went through before we got to the final version, but suffice to say, without this open minded approach to accepting outside scripts, we'd have missed out on one of the greatest episodes in franchise history.
I still remember the dialogue between Madred and Picard in that interrogation room: Madred: What a blind, narrow view you have. What an arrogant man you are. What do you know of Cardassian history? JLP: I know that once you were a peaceful people with a rich spiritual life. Madred: And what did peace and spirituality get us? People starved by the millions. Bodies went unburied. Disease was rampant. Suffering was unimaginable. JLP: Since the military took over hundreds of thousands more have died. Madred: But we are feeding the people. We acquired territory during the wars. We developed new resources. We initiated a rebuilding programme. We have mandated agricultural programmes. That is what the military has done for Cardassia. And because of that, my daughter will never worry about going hungry. JLP: Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty. This is brilliant writting. The dialogue was intelligent, thought-provoking and poetic. Maybe I'm getting older and I don't know what to make of this new style but whenever I watched an episode of TNG, it left me thinking and question my own biases. This new Star Trek looks like it's written for kids.
STD is the worst Star Trek today. It's written by people with a chip on their shoulder an agenda. Too busy navel gazing instead of looking at the stars. Picard season 3 redeemed itself and Strange New Worlds is fun but not really challenging like older Trek.
Old Star Trek is Naruto and new Star Trek is Boruto. You are correct, the old Star Trek was very good and exquisite. Not every episode mind but they were a few gems every season.
Great comment. You captured what was so great about TNG. It made us question. It didn't TELL us. It encouraged us to critical thinking and introspection. It's a shame what it has become today.
What bothers me most about modern trek is how the characters sound like they live in the 21st century. In TOS, TNG, DS9, and STV the characters all sounded like they lived in the future. They didn't use modern slang or inflection they used tones that sounded different. When speaking they used examples of things that we've never heard of but would be common knowledge to members of Star Fleet. Like Talarian Hook Spiders or Klingon Targs. Modern trek they all sound like they just stepped out of a Tik Tok video. They don't sound like people who were born and raised in a future utopian society, they sound like people who were born and raised in modern day Los Angeles.
And how they love their profanity. Centuries in the future and they're still throwing F-Bombs? When Kirk used the word "hell" at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" it had enormous meaning, demonstrating how deeply affected he was by the events of the episode.
I am rewatching DS9 at the moment and a few nights ago I got very angry after watching what I consider the best episode of the first season: Duet (1x19). It made me angry because it made me think of the sorry and possibly unredeemable state of current Trek. I also find it funny that DS9 used to have possibly the darkest sets because of Cardassian architecture and lighting on the Station, and STILL it's bright and vivid compared to modern Star Trek.
Oh, but there is. Bad show running, bad production... If those telling the writers, directors, and actors cannot themselves imagine a future where people are better than people are today, they cannot make anyone else believe it. Worse, it those telling the writers, directors, and actors cannot imagine people less petty or more intelligent than they are themselves, it will show in the product of their labors -- and it has been.
I'm being gaslit in a Facebook group right now for saying Trek and *Wars have both been in decline, telling me it's my perception that has changed because I grew up with the original. To which I called bullshit. That's just ageism. Don't pat me on the head and tell me to take my meds, when I can clearly watch them side by side if I wish and see the glaring differences with my own eyes. Same with another classic show that's being run into the ground: Doctor Who. And the worst thing is the ultimate contempt that the showrunners and actors have for the fans, berating them and saying it's their fault if they don't like the new shows they're producing. More gaslighting. Make good shows without heavy-handed moralizing and maybe people will enjoy them again won't complain as much; there's a novel idea.
6:20 There's one particular episode of The Orville that exemplifies what you're trying to get across, in spades. It was the first season one where the Moclan officer had a child. Moclans are all male, and if a Moclan is born female, they force gender reassignment surgery on them as a child. A very topical subject. If Discovery were doing an episode on this topic they would take an anvil to your head about what a bigot you must be if you don't agree the way they all do. The Orville did not do this. In the episode, fittingly set in a courtroom, they examined the issue from both sides, they called witnesses, they presented evidence. While the aliens ultimately decided to keep to their tradition and force the surgery, many of the crew of the ship were clearly very unsettled by this outcome. And they left it that way, with the issue being presented, the sides being argued, people on both sides being emotionally moved, and you, the viewer, could make up your own mind on the issue. It was powerful but they didn't preach either side or talk down to their audience.
@@sharp14x it's topical because they're making a choice to change the child's gender, just like some people advocate for being allowed to change children's genders today.
When the movie "Star Trek" came out in 2009, I said "this is the end". It was the end. Once *those* Hollywood people get hold of something, there is no recovery.
When seven of nine came out as lesbian too , did it for me beside how Discovery was a total woke disaster . The last " real " Star Trek was with captain Archer and everyone back then trashed the series, today its an different story compared to the woke sh*t that came after that .
@@morganreese8904 yes, it was undoubtedly visually appealing and I liked the new approach in general („how things could play out if only one detail of history changed“), but that’s about it. It’s so stupid that it even hardly qualifies for a „guilty pleasure“…
TOS was also the first TV show to feature a kiss between a Vulcan and Romulan. Such interspecies interactions were strongly discouraged even in Kirk's time.
The answer to the question posed here is simple: writers don't know how to write adult characters doing adult things. I supposed it's because most of them aren't adults themselves, but whether they are nor not, the way they write characters these days is incompatible with older Star Trek products and I don't see that changing any time soon.
The problem is that all the writers and showrunners taking over all the major franchises at the moment, have little to no industry experience and even less life experience. It's all being written by people whose feet have never touched the ground. Industry nepo-hires. I don't mind actor nep-hires because they've been raised by actors and inherited their looks, and probably skills often enough. But giving these rich kids creative control over a franchise they've never watched when they actively despise the fanbase? What is going on?
'TV trek' needed good writing to keep viewers watching it long enough to see all the adverts. In effect, _viewers_ were the things being sold by the network to advertising agencies. This is why episodes aired in sweeps week (which determined the advertising clout of a network) were usually the best episodes of the season. But in the era of 'streaming Trek', what networks need is _subscribers_ paying their monthly fee. So what they need is, at most, 3 minutes of amazing visuals to put into adverts for their streaming service. This is why so many streaming series rarely get past 2 seasons - they've done their job and hooked in subscribers, so now the service needs a new 'must watch' show to hook in the next lot.
I big problem is that Star Trek isn't being made by intelligent people who have a clear understanding or appriaction for a military lifestyle and scientific research. A big identity of Star Trek was that Starfleet was a military entity that made a focus on maintaining diplomatic relations between other factions, scientific discovery, and dare I say it - a look on social and cultural challenges from a military perspective. Gene Roddenberry, in all his faults, was an ex-military veteran of WW2 who dreamed a better future. Now he wasn't perfect, but he was the first to admit he wasn't perfect. He crafted a formal that was based on naval ship protocol and military procedures mixed with civilian life and science. A starship would essentially act like literally an aircraft carrier but needed to have all the comforts of home because of voyages into deep space. Modern Star Trek is made by people who don't understand (nor respect) the military, and they don't understand (or care to understand) real-life scientific theory. Instead they just focus on drama, romance, and cultural issues that are only relevant in modern American society. But in order to do it justice, they need to get a bigger worldview. Currently we're on the brink of a WW3 (possibly) yet none of that is being commented on in these shows. Instead the focus is humor, drama and romance. Escapism is great, but why is there no emphasis on conflict with other factions? No political drama, no societal divide with other species, why do none of the actors feel like actual military personnel? It's like a cruise ship.
I think you're idolizing Gene a bit too much, and forgetting what he actually said and did. While the military aspect was more present in TOS, and emphasized in the TOS movies, it was massively toned down in TNG under Gene's leadership and direction. In fact, his original concept for TNG was that people had no interpersonal conflict anymore. This resulted in some of the worst episodes of Trek, and put TNG on the chopping block. If anything, it was well after Gene was no longer the show runner that the militaristic part of Starfleet returned to the forefront, culminating with possibly the most militaristic season in the form Discovery season 1. The Kelvin verse tried to find a balance but never really had time to grow as movies have to be short glimpses into a universe. It's sort of like how Star Wars fans, myself once included, pined for Lucas' vision over Disney while conveniently ignoring the fact that George also was responsible for Midicholrians and the Whils which are some of the worst ideas to come into that universe. Let's also discuss one other unfortunate aspect... Star Trek is old. 57 years old. The audience that loved original Trek are, sadly, a quickly shrinking group who are fading into history. Newer audiences enjoy different style story telling just as new generations like different music. They also are living through an era where it's very, very likely their lives will be worse than the last 3 generations, and are constantly reminded of this through a non-stop 24-7-365 news cycle and onslaught of social media. As such, they prefer escapism. TOS only lasted 3 years because it was unprofitable the end, and at the end of the day, profits drive the media industry. New Trek has to appeal to these audiences.
Agreed, in Strange New Worlds there is no chain-of-command and everybody cross talks like they're discussing what restaurant to order lunch from. All the emphasis seems to be from the women's point of view while the captain enjoys his neutered role as the chef. The vulcans are as nakedly emotional as humans and the writers seem obsessed in pursuing stories for the sake of being different versus giving any sort of collective inspiration to the viewers (the majority of whom are probably much more thoughtful and intelligent than they are).
@Revenant_Knight Comparing Star Trek to Disney and Geaorge Lucas is a weird way to drive your point home. Acolyte was canceled after season 1 because it attempted to get an audience that wasn't interested in Star Wars while destroying any and all good will they had left with the fans. George Lucas had great ideas for a sequel trilogy that sound a heck of a lot better than what Disney did. Now going to Star Trek. I know and am aware of Gene's history. By the time TNG came, it was reported he had gotten sick, and I agree he didn't do a good job with season 1. The importance of Gene's legacy that I believe should be kept is that he was a WW2 veteran who made a show about a futuristic military force that deals with real-world comparison conflicts. Star Trek isn't being made by nerds anymore. It's being made under people who don't have any understanding of the military or nerd Trek culture. They got so bad I found other series now that I prefer as a more modern take on society. The Orville is an excellent show that stays true to Gene's vision, because Seth McFarlane is an actual fan of Star Trek.
@@angryfilmgamer570 First, my response was 2 months ago...I had to go back and reread it LOL. Second: I think you misunderstand the reference I was making regarding Star Wars. Third: I believe you are putting your own beliefs on Gene rather than looking at his actions. Finally, I absolutely agree that the Orville is great. Gene's vision though? That include the first season? Anyway, I'm off from this. Enjoy your shows!
I disagree. Breaking Bad, House of Cards (minus final season), reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Fargo, House, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy are all well written. The problem is profit before creatives. If you don't hire a good writer's room, plus a show runner who loves the source material and understands its culture and history - you get crappy TV.
11:30 - "It used to inspire others to greatness" 11:56 - "A lot of the children watching the show grew up wanting to go into space, to explore, to invent, to push the boundaries of the known." As soon as he said that, it clicked and I knew he was right. That described how I felt watching Star Trek, I just couldn't find the words. And now that I have them, it makes all too much sense why I don't like modern Trek. Who wants to explore a dark and depressing place with no light at the end of the tunnel? When you see all the horrible things on the news, why tune into a show just showing the exact same thing with no positive end? Where did the better tomorrow go?
I think the answer is really simple: Star Trek is smarter than the current creative class people and they just don't understand it or why people like it.
You don't have the time to develop these things when you only have 8 or 10 episodes in a season and have to develop multiple characters, the season long story line, and the individual episode story. There's literally no place to just have an episode to explore philosophical ideas in a nuanced way
I disagree. Take a look at Silo. It was only 10 episodes and characters were developed intelligently and had multiple sub plots that actually contributed to the main plot. There are plenty of other shows that were / are just as outstanding as Silo. Shogun in particular. Wednesday is also good, mainly because the star keeps the writers focused on the show instead of preaching woke nonsense.
What I'd give to have back the old 26 episode TV seasons, that ran at a firm and predictable time each year, like clockwork. Heck, I'll even take the 22 that it first stepped down to. It just keeps on getting pruned down more and more. Along with that I'd like to have shows worth watching.
I think it's worth mentioning the fan-based series 'Star Trek Continues' which did an excellent job in bridging the gap between TOS season 3 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Great work! There are other critiques about modern Star Trek out there, but I appreciate your unique take. You make such a compelling argument about what we are missing out on: talent, social impact, ingenuity, and class. It makes me even more grateful for old Star Trek. Well done!
You hit the nail on the head about old Trek going beyond the time it was written as opposed to new Trek which is trapped in the time it was written. A lot of old Trek is still relevant today and will continue to be into the future. New Trek and its preaching, on the other hand, will be quite dated a couple decades from now when society has moved on from its current fixations.
I've been trying to articulate everything you clearly put together here for people that don't understand why I don't like new Star Trek. I am a huge fan of the of everything up to Enterprise, but it's just been so broken ever since. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and piecing them out so thoughtfully since I will just share your video with people that ask me why I can't watch anything post Enterprise. Subscribed.
It's hard for me to articulate what I am feeling about the new trek since 2008, but you did a great job. I have been a star trek fen since I can remember as a 4-5 years old little kid, watching 1st season of TNG on black and white TV . Remember how respectful, smart and trustworthy they where. Hypothetically, if I had problem, I loud not hesitate to ask someone from the TNG crew for help or advice. Star Trek was so big impression on me that I wanted to know how everything works and to fix stuff.. 25 years later, I was chief engineer on big industrial factory and did great job there.
Feels like their only goal with modern Trek was to push as much inclusion as possible onto the screen without a particular reason. The old shows were progressive in their time but had heart and good writing to back it up. I watched a couple seasons of Discovery but never liked it much, felt like they erased the entire universe that had been built with no regards for the older fans.
I liked Saru....but that's about it 😆. I agree that Saru would definitely fit in on the older shows (I feel like he and Picard would have some fascinating conversations). Saru is the best-developed character in Discovery. My thoughts on Burnham....She's a DEI captain. Now, before anyone screams "REEEEEEEEEE!!!!! Racist!!!!!!!!", I'll say that Sisko and Janeway are WAY better than her. Both of them give off the feeling that they got there on their merits. The only thing of merit that I remember Burnham doing is (Not spoiling), and that alone wouldn't make up for (Not spoiling). Now, regarding my LEAST 3 favorite characters...I could've gone the whole series without knowing about Stamets and Culber (ESPECIALLY after [Not spoiling]). Those two are why the show's abbreviated "STD". An extra thing on Stamets...the near-constant stuttering. And Adira? She was almost as bad. I would not feel comfortable with an Engineering team that, in the middle of a crisis, and even when NOT in a crisis, is looking and sounding like they're on the verge of a panic attack. Scotty, Geordi, O'Brien, Torres, Tucker; They kept COOL under pressure. Discovery felt like a Starbucks in space, and Saru was the only one drinking water.
Trek has always been “woke”. Good Trek used that inclusivity as a way to explore the full spectrum of philosophical thought and the human condition. Bad Trek treats it as end to itself. It’s like a teenager waking up one day and just deciding out of the blue to be a punk. They don’t like the music. They don’t subscribe to punk ideals. It’s all just surface cosplay aesthetics. As a result it’s transparent and boring.
Don't like the characters or story in discovery at all. But i really enjoy Lower Decks, i think theyve done a good job making humorous stories about the characters who really run the fleet.
Saru is actually good IMO, he had perhaps the most transformative character journey in all star trek tv and movies and he has enough qualities as a character to stand next to ones from the old shows.
For me it is simply the characters, like OP said it is extension of 21st century kids, when watching tng,ds9,voy you can feel that the characters were different they had a different personality they werent like us and off course there is no tecnological conversation.
Wonderfully thought out, detailed video, thank you for hitting the nail on the head with the issues. This is the very same problem with Doctor Who’s new season.
Great show, but leans too much into CW like drama instead of the space program. I'm binging it, currently on season 3 right now, I have to take a break every few days due to all the drama they use to pad time. I love the space race, focus on the space race, not on Karen banging Danny.
you’re kind of right about Enterprise, it was Season 3 where the network demanded changes made in order to take the show in a more action oriented direction. It was also a time fresh after 9/11 as Enterprise premiered that very month, and presumably during the creation of its second season there was more of a push to make the show more appealing to the audience of a post-9/11 world, so of course the Xindi attack and season long revenge storyline came about. It was a reactionary reflex (akin to the Man Of Steel movies battle of Metropolis as seen in that and Batman Vs Superman - while they are not a direct reference to 9/11 they would not exist in the state they do had that event not happened). Season 4 was by comparison, a complete return to the core values of Star Trek, and very much what Enterprise should have been all along - after closing off the mis-guided temporal war storyline that was used as a ‘new’ starting point in the season’s opening two-parter, it instead focussed on the birth of the federation, with Enterprise starting to setup the basis of the united federation of planets. But it was too little too late, as the network had already decided to cancel the series as by then it would have reached the 100 episode mark, meaning it had enough to package the show in a package to other networks for re-runs, and the show came to an end, making it the first time in decades that no episodes or movies of Star Trek would then be aired/released or in production. As you mention, a large part of the issue is the writing - while they had previously had the ‘Open door policy’ as you mention, it invited people who were fans of the shows and of the genre to write in with ideas and submit scripts. That would be of help if still an option, but without it the issue is thwt there are people in charge and in the writer’s rooms who either have little or no knowledge of sci-fi, science (a basic yet comprehensive understanding of physics and how to break them in a sci-fi show is really a pre-requisite), and some of them have no knowledge of the extensive history of the universe for which they are now writing. Examples of these are prevalent throughout the entire run of Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds in particular - with examples of the musical SNW episode (an anomaly that somehow has the effect of making the universe change like it’s a broadway musical because Uhura broadcasts her singing through it?), and an upcoming episode where human crew members are given an injection that turns them into Vulcans suddenly giving them full logic as if it’s a genetic condition of their race (when anyone who knows anything about Vilcans from the literal hundreds of hours featuring those characters, would know the logic is a learned suppression of their extremely powerful emotions, which takes them years to learn from birth). No, the problem is the pool of writers that are being sourced for the show, that have little or no experience with sci-fi but have written for teen drama shows, because that’s who the networks want the shows to appeal to. And in doing so, they are making absolute garbage that not only fails at drawing in that wanted audience, but fails to retain and in fact alienates the core audience that has followed Trek for decades as far back as its inception with the original series. The people in charge don’t understand that what made Star Trek so appealing was that it was an abstract outside way of viewing and exploring the human condition, without dumbing it down. The audience has a far greater understanding of Trek than the networks do now, and continually telling us that we don’t is just making us mad and dis-interested. Know your audience, don’t preach to them and insult them.
Remember when a Star Trek episode ended and you felt good? You felt good about the future or humanity or life? The story culminates in such a way you just come to realize that all that is good and truth will always prevail somehow? Not a single one of these new Kurtzmann trek episodes ends like this, in fact, none of these episodes have that serotonin booster, that makes you think or feel. That challenges your perspective in a good way. That's what's missing, the very soul of Star Trek. A good example of this: Remember the end of Generations when Pacard tells Riker, "Someone once told me... Time is a predator (lol good one Pacard, Soren literally told you that ten minutes ago) But I would much rather see it as a companion" That speech? Or the progenitor episode, where the klingons, federation, and romulans seek an ancient treasure. They find only a hologram of an ancient alien that admits they seeded life throughout the milky way (why all the aliens are humanoid with different makeup) the klingon screams, "Thats it? If she wasnt dead I would kill her myself!" Big laugh... But the feel good moment: as the episode ended and everyone was leaving the romulan commander hails Pacard and tells him that maybe we arent as different as we believe.... "Maybe someday...." and Pacard just says.. "Yes... Maybe someday.." Yeah, this new Trek lacks a SINGLE moment like that.
My biggest issue with New Star Trek is its insistence on chaining us to the past. Literally every major New Trek show has chained itself to an old Star Trek in some way shape or form. Why do we need more stories about Spock?! Why not just make an entirely new Vulcan character on a new show if you want to explore Vulcan stuff? Why do we have to go back to the TOS era? Why not just set the show in the 26th century, make it all super futuristic, new baddies arrive. It would all work.
This is an excellent analysis. The critique is applicable across a very wide swathe of what passes for entertainment today. There has been great spiritual decay in our culture that has been especially rapid in recent decades and it manifests itself most clearly in our cultures inability to produce meaningful art. It’s like an anti-golden age we’ve entered into.
Two Very Important Fixes to New Star Trek 1: Stop making space travel instantaneous! No more getting everywhere in the Galaxy the time it takes to walk from the Ready Room to the Bridge! No more every ship in the fleet instantaneously showing up two seconds after you call for help! Help should be days or even weeks away. The crew should be on their own to solve the problem without help. There should be time for the crew to interact with each other and time to develop the characters on the way to their destinations. 2: Cut it out with the tired old Starfleet/Federation/Earth annihilation routine! Earth doesn’t need to be in danger for the audience to be emotionally invested! There are thousands of planets and trillions of people in the Star Trek Universe you can save besides Earth and Starfleet! The constant threat of annihilation is not an optimistic view of our future. PS: The old shows and movies (save The Animated Series) weren’t totally innocent of the save Earth routine either but, none of them did the fleet instantaneously showing up thing.
That anecdote about Gene Roddenberry seems out of character... one of the most interesting parts of TOS was the conflicting views of Spock and McCoy. Disagreement among the crew was a frequent plot point of TOS.
100%. They act like people from the 20th century. I have hoped that others with a bigger platform than myself would spot this. I noticed it creeping in on Enterprise a bit but I thought it was intentional. I think Voyager definitely was the last of the star treks in the vein of what star trek was about. enterprise at least felt like star trek. thank you for putting this together so coherently. its how ive felt, but i couldn't put it into words.
Because they just CANNOT LET GO of the idea of using it to push a social engineering framework on us. If they would just tell us a great story and leave it at that, it would be tons better.
Hi! So, I hear you saying the writing for new Trek is bad, but your video doesn’t really give any specific examples. I think your arguments would be stronger if you did some juxtaposition of scenes or ideas to give context and evidence to your views.
The TNG production crew got into a groove around season 3 of TNG & they pretty much kept going until the end of Enterprise. The 5-act episode structure got honed to perfection. In Discovery they were writing a whole season, not individual episodes & they couldn’t get that magic back.
Modern trek writing is a travesty to story telling. I just tried watching Strange New Worlds. Its like they just take a bunch of things, toss them in to a blender, spit out random Trekbable that isnt even plausible and call it a show. They immediately find a solution using the most incoherent and un cohesive explanations. The second episode was so badly written that I dont even get why it was allowed to publish. All of the relationships are forced instead of developed. I felt something for the crew of Voyager in the first episode. They just dont develop anything any more.
I started watching Star Trek as the original and TNG just happened to be on after The Simpsons when I was a kid. I got sucked in and continued to watch DS9 and Voyager. It was my secret geeky world that nobody else knew about 😂 Enterprise was pretty good and Season 3 of Picard was AMAZING. Everything else was trash... Lower Decks was decent though! Without Star Trek, I would have never got into sci-fi literature.
Picard Season 3 was incredible! The return of the Enterprise D, the final sendoff for the NG Crew, the presence of a true villan with Amanda Plummer at the helm of the Shrike, the final wrap up of both Dominion War and Borg plot lines, and a plausible jump off point for things to continue! What Metallis did was masterpiece trek the likes of which has not been seen since DS9.
Considering the state of Star Wars, modern Star Trek is really not that bad. At least it's convinced newer audiences like me to go back and watch the older shows and movies.
On a side note, I disagree with the categorization. I'd say: Classic Trek = TOS, TOS movies, TNG (optimistic, unassuming, themes under the surface) Modern Trek = DS9, TNG movies, Voyager, Enterprise (cynical, self-serious, themes on-the-nose) Nu (Contemporary) Trek = JJ Abrahams, Kurtzman, etc (no comment)
I can see how if you grew up with Voyager it can be very nostalgic and fun. But after having watched TNG and how Patrick Steward's Picard was so multi-dimensional as a character - I just couldnt wrap my head around how awful Janeway was. The writers mistook strength, leadership, gravitas as speaking sternly while threatening to blow up a much inferior ship. Stand-offs were almost always resolved with janeway threatening to blow up the other ship. and then getting her way. It was one-note and it was boring. An example of how TNG threatened violence until they got their way was when Worf pretended to be captain to control the Klingon ship that was in status for a few hundred years. That was clever and fun.
100% Enterprise was the beginning of the end. It doesn't seem that bad compared to the modern stuff. But at the time Enterprise was a new low compared to Voyager. They scrambled in season 4 with all the fan service, but the show was fundementally flawed.
Well done! I agree with you 100%, even though the a numerous canon violations, which were done on purpose, the greatness of Star Trek was its ability to unite and inspire people. I was born and raised in an Evangelical home and my dad used to gather us as a family around the TV every Wednesday for a new TNG episode. I became a Trekkie when I was 6 I became a Trekkie when TNG first aired. I am a Christian myself but Star Trek inspired me to get into technology and philosophy. I am an Aviation Electronics Technician by trade, with prospecta to work for NASA, and a Christian Apologist by hobby because of the philosophy I was taught by Star Trek. Just making a generic scifi and slapping the Star Trek name on it just goes to show why the STD-verse ia horrible! Finally I am a fellow Orvillian as well, and I just finished my DS9 binge and right now I am going through Andromeda. Have you seen The Expanse? Anyway well done! ✝️🖖
To me Star Trek always was about a distant yet familiar Grandeur… a bold imagination of what humanity could become if we‘d put our petty self-sabotage aside and concentrated on a greater objective. Modern Trek (starting with those awful „Apple Store“ ship designs in the 2009 JJ Abrams movie) was the exact opposite: „Average Joe in Space“… that hopeful Grandeur and professionalism was gone, only to be shallowly replaced by emotionally unstable dimwits cosplaying as presumably trained Starfleet personnel. Proper Trek died alongside with Data in „Nemesis“.
@@TheUnsungVil I also miss when old star trek would come up with clever way to deal with an issue by creating a situation to parallel something, but modern trek just says "No, lets just go back in time to modern day and complain about current immigration law or something.
Its nice knowing there is a bastion of people who understand my gripes. I don't enjoy much past Enterprise. I feel a lot of what you said could also apply to Doctor Who
This resonates a lot with me. For the most parts, I just can't comprehend what is going on with the writing and Series in general today, when it comes to the old franchises. Really feels like a "hostile" take over of groups, who have zero interest in what they are building on, but to use it as a platform. (I just think it can't just be such a level of incompetence, there must be a general strategy). I think when it comes to later decades, most of the expensive sludge of today will be used for drinking games - if even - and nothing more, and be ignored otherwise. A good indicator is that there are still a lot of people who are watching Star Trek - but only the "old" one - because stories and execution matter more than state-of-the-art effects.
As if people today want to be challenged. I watched Star Trek starting in 1966 & watched every one as they premiered. I continued to watch the reruns of TOS in the early 1970s. Star Trek greatly affected my view of the world & world politics. It showed a world that could be, if people wanted it. We got close to a form of world cooperation, but there was no profit in it.
Look at the journey ahead, and then back to the path already carved. What is undiscovered, and what is intrinsic to the "human condition"? The "undiscovered" requires vision to chart a course, while knowledge of the human condition requires knowledge of the past such as of knowing one's self. War in Star Trek was solved by magic space elves, along with magic crystals (dilithium) to solve Relativistic Time Warp equations such as those put forth by Miguel Alcubierre. These are not things shown, but things hid in a "technological singularity", a "black box" akin to a "Pandora's Box" full of assumptions. Things we still must figure out. How do we see beyond choices we do not understand? We can make assumptions. There are some things for which we should not make assumptions, the "Undiscovered Countries". One more thing to ponder, may be that our old stories have "lost meaning". Stories that make an emotional connection to us, or perhaps even inform our subconscious or our instincts. However, ones for which the original inspiration has been long buried in abstraction and does not necessarily connect to us on a conscious level. Are these things that are part of a universal "human condition", or are they relics of a smaller subset of a shared cultural heritage?
IMHO, It is not the writers fault. Watch the opening credits, there are more producers on each of these shows than writers. I would wager each of these producers thinks they are the smart ones in any room, they are the ones that guide the writers and directors into making the show the producers want to see. The writers are left with making the 13 producers happy, rather than making a worthy hour of TV
All Sci-Fi is over hyped and terribly executed. The reason why most of television is becoming bland and unwatchable is because people are waking up from the hypnosis they’ve been under for their entire life.
Star Trek went the way of all the Disney StarWars shows....woke and annoying as hell. Everything now must come with the blessings of the Alphabet mafia. Huge failure.
I agree with you on everything about the Enterprise show. I liked that show, especially the last two seasons. In my mind, Nu Trek started in 2009 once JJ Abrams took over. He admitted himself that he was never a fan of Star Trek, and it showed, And Star Trek TV has only gotten even worse.
At least JJ had the sense to have his Trek in a separate timeline. Kurtzman keeps imposing his Trek as Prime. I was relieved when the SNW epside "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" (S2E3) confirmed KurtzmanTrek is in an alternate (delayed Eugenics War) timeline. Like bruh, stop trying to overwrite Prime and embrace it as your own Trek universe/timeline, like JJ did with his.
Star Trek couldn't keep going same old same old. Which is why the Richard Berman team had to go. When Next Gen first came on, many of the old trekkers disapproved, which has reversed dramatically. When Enterprise arrived, same thing. We now are seeing this shift with the Kelvin films. When a different new ST comes out in 15 years, people will again be complaining, but this time, whining over how it doesn't measure up to Alex Kurtzman's vision.
If STD ever did one thing it inspired me to right a better Star Trek stories and make sure that awful show doesn’t become the end to this franchise. Right now working on a plot and story to a video game that combines the “Thief Dark Project” game and Klingons.
Writers and directors are the true stars of what makes great TV and movies. Actors help but as Nicholas cage likes to prove over and over, good actors aren't a substitute for good entertainment when the writing and directing is crap.
I think one problem of moderne trek is the writers don't know what they're writing, they think sci-fi = dystopian future, which of course is the by far most common sci-fi trope, and a core method for telling these tales that has a message, because it's showcasing just how bad things can become if you choose this path. But that's not Star Trek, ST is the opposite, it's a "look how good we can have it, if we choose this path", and then you have the problems come as a sort of snake in paradise. The current writers are on team dystopia, not team utopia, add to that they've clearly been shown some highlights of the past series and movies, which is why they reference the most popular episodes so often, because it's what they saw. But like Tom Paris on Earth in 1997 they just get it slightly wrong because they didn't see the rest. When you watch TOS-ENT it's pretty clear that the writers put a lot more thought into world building behind the scenes, and that they never got around to using it all on screen directly, but much is still visible in behaviours, personal dynamics etc. Like the Klingons are clearly a feudal society, not a trace of that in STD.
When discovery was announced EXTREMELY conservative guy: Why is her name Michael? Me: It's 300+ years in the future, it's probably just a unisex name like Dana or Cameron STD: If you're a girl, why are you called Michael?
Also, most shows and films are being written to the lowest common denominator, trying to appeal to as many people as possible without regard for who the realistic audience demographic is. When you’re trying to appeal to that wide of an audience you also have to avoid lots of things in an effort not to alienate anyway and it often seems to result in a whole lot of words that don’t really say anything.
What on TV, is Fresh? They Re Did Roseanne, without Roseanne. Re Did Hawaii 5-0. Re Did Magnum P I Coincidence? How about all those, Tribute Songs? It’s Nothing New, this Generation, doesn’t have a lot of New Ideas, for Entertainment, or many Other Products, but they do have a few
I remember de 90’s, Deep Space 9 and Voyager, I was anxious to get the next episode. How some different themes could be seen. Today, fx are beyond imagination, and I just don’t care. I tried to watch Discovery. I found out whispers are annoying and, usually, ends with a stupid point of view. Shows are not perfect, but ST today is not Star Trek. It’s a boring propaganda of something I don’t understand. Hope we get some good new stuff.
Excellent piece, Gareth - details the 'field' well. Oddly enough, having a mirror held up to the destruction of our culture, by the current Woke poison, was quite moving. Stories *are* powerful, not just fluff, which is why the Marxists behind it all took the road of infiltrating the institutions from which creativity flowers. If the landscape of fiction is not reclaimed then it is *their* vision for society which will endure and it is a terrible one. Indeed it reminds me of a sci-fi tale in which people had to fake being happy at all times, regardless of actual circumstances, or they were killed.
I tip my hat to you Sir. Subbed and liked, this video needs to be shared to the masses. New trek is just aweful anymore. It's stuck in 2020 P.C. ideals with a shiny sci-fi coating. It may look better with new CGI, but it has no soul at all anymore.
The weird thing is is the The Lower Decks has a few episodes that actually have some decent ideas and writing (if you get past the madcap cartooniness of it). I find it more tolerable than the toughy feely, constantly crying world of STD anyway.
I hate modern trek but there are a couple exceptions. I think Strange New Worlds is pretty good, and season 3 of Picard was great.
Agreed. Except SNW is going backwards in time again to the TOS period. As much as I am enjoying it, they should have gone forward, past TNG timeline to a new fancy show and new fancy ship. Instead SNW forced them to create a futuristic yet retro version which looks super advanced, but also clunky. It's a weird mashup.
Strange New Worlds was hit or miss for me. I think the external conflicts (e.g. an on a planet where you forget things, a comet on the path of an inhabited world) were pretty interesting. But the interpersonal conflicts (Uhura having self-doubt, the courtroom episode where the defender attorney berates her own client while on the stand, anything with Spock's relationship issues) really didn't work for me. Not helped by 10 episodes a season, meaning the bad episodes stick out more than when we had 26.
@@WillHerrmann Yeah I dont disagree with ya, really. Part of my acceptance of SNW probly has to do with how much i loath discovery
Genuine question; what about Picard season 3 did people like? Like was it the visual nostalgia?
I watched it after hearing good reviews from people who like classic Trek and 10 minutes into episode 1, I wanted to turn it off because I personally thought it was horrifically bad television. I stuck it out to see if it would get better but honestly hated all of it. The quality of the writing just didn't hold up at all imo, not one character was anything like themselves and the plot was paper thin. The visuals were good and some of the ideas definitely had potential, but I just can't get my head around anyone saying that it was any better than any other modern Trek.
I agree that SNW is better than most and largely enjoyable yet it still suffers from many of the problems outlined in this essay, albeit to a lesser extent.
Novelty 'musical' episodes has become a tired and cringe-worthy meme in modern times (see: recent Doctor Who) and I would have been far happier living my life in it's entirety without ever seeing/hearing Klingons sing K-pop (to be fair all of the musical numbers were bland, tiresome and ill-fitting to the series but that was possibly the most cringe-inducing moment). It is very difficult to invest in the situation and characters after hearing auto-tuned karaoke performances of cheap off-Broadway songs.
In essence, I can hear 'Planet Of the Apes: The Musical' whenever this silly stunt is pulled.
The bigger issue - as stated in the video essay above - is twofold; a lack of truly original ideas (which at least hold to the internal logic of the universe in which they are set) and incredibly poor dialogue. SNW probably does better than STD (what doesn't?) but it still suffers from a sense that the ship is crewed by narcissistic children who all regret not pursuing their dreams of being stand-up comedians and who are utterly bereft of any Star Fleet discipline.
Picard Season 3 was very enjoyable but I have to agree with other commenters that the plot was a bit thin. If the entire season had been written and paced in the manner of TNG it would have been a two or three episode story. I suspect the dialogue was of a slightly higher standard due to the stars having some say. After all, would you say no to a scripting suggestion from Patrick Stewart?
9:11 - it's worth pointing out that we got 'Yesterday's Enterprise' from a script a fan had sent in. I was at a Q & A with one of the writers who adapted this episode for television and he talked about the various changes that episode went through before we got to the final version, but suffice to say, without this open minded approach to accepting outside scripts, we'd have missed out on one of the greatest episodes in franchise history.
And that is unlikely to ever happen again because of CBS and there hate for fan films they can't make money on
I still remember the dialogue between Madred and Picard in that interrogation room:
Madred: What a blind, narrow view you have. What an arrogant man you are. What do you know of Cardassian history?
JLP: I know that once you were a peaceful people with a rich spiritual life.
Madred: And what did peace and spirituality get us? People starved by the millions. Bodies went unburied. Disease was rampant. Suffering was unimaginable.
JLP: Since the military took over hundreds of thousands more have died.
Madred: But we are feeding the people. We acquired territory during the wars. We developed new resources. We initiated a rebuilding programme. We have mandated agricultural programmes. That is what the military has done for Cardassia. And because of that, my daughter will never worry about going hungry.
JLP: Her belly may be full, but her spirit will be empty.
This is brilliant writting. The dialogue was intelligent, thought-provoking and poetic. Maybe I'm getting older and I don't know what to make of this new style but whenever I watched an episode of TNG, it left me thinking and question my own biases. This new Star Trek looks like it's written for kids.
STD is the worst Star Trek today. It's written by people with a chip on their shoulder an agenda. Too busy navel gazing instead of looking at the stars. Picard season 3 redeemed itself and Strange New Worlds is fun but not really challenging like older Trek.
Old Star Trek is Naruto and new Star Trek is Boruto. You are correct, the old Star Trek was very good and exquisite. Not every episode mind but they were a few gems every season.
I never thought about it like that LMAO good one
There are still only 4 lights!
Great comment. You captured what was so great about TNG. It made us question. It didn't TELL us. It encouraged us to critical thinking and introspection. It's a shame what it has become today.
What bothers me most about modern trek is how the characters sound like they live in the 21st century. In TOS, TNG, DS9, and STV the characters all sounded like they lived in the future. They didn't use modern slang or inflection they used tones that sounded different. When speaking they used examples of things that we've never heard of but would be common knowledge to members of Star Fleet. Like Talarian Hook Spiders or Klingon Targs. Modern trek they all sound like they just stepped out of a Tik Tok video. They don't sound like people who were born and raised in a future utopian society, they sound like people who were born and raised in modern day Los Angeles.
And how they love their profanity. Centuries in the future and they're still throwing F-Bombs?
When Kirk used the word "hell" at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" it had enormous meaning, demonstrating how deeply affected he was by the events of the episode.
@@balavent Kirk: "Well that's simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word."
I am rewatching DS9 at the moment and a few nights ago I got very angry after watching what I consider the best episode of the first season: Duet (1x19). It made me angry because it made me think of the sorry and possibly unredeemable state of current Trek. I also find it funny that DS9 used to have possibly the darkest sets because of Cardassian architecture and lighting on the Station, and STILL it's bright and vivid compared to modern Star Trek.
So true. It is quite jarring to see Federation ships in the modern shows be darker and gloomier than Cardassian or Klingon ships in the old shows.
You should take a look at both SNW and Lower Decks. Both of them flip the script of modern Trek being bad in awesome ways, well worth it.
There's no greater, more fatal flaw than bad writing.
It seems there is too much repeat story lines throughout the Star Trek universe!
Oh, but there is. Bad show running, bad production...
If those telling the writers, directors, and actors cannot themselves imagine a future where people are better than people are today, they cannot make anyone else believe it.
Worse, it those telling the writers, directors, and actors cannot imagine people less petty or more intelligent than they are themselves, it will show in the product of their labors -- and it has been.
I'm being gaslit in a Facebook group right now for saying Trek and *Wars have both been in decline, telling me it's my perception that has changed because I grew up with the original. To which I called bullshit. That's just ageism. Don't pat me on the head and tell me to take my meds, when I can clearly watch them side by side if I wish and see the glaring differences with my own eyes. Same with another classic show that's being run into the ground: Doctor Who. And the worst thing is the ultimate contempt that the showrunners and actors have for the fans, berating them and saying it's their fault if they don't like the new shows they're producing. More gaslighting. Make good shows without heavy-handed moralizing and maybe people will enjoy them again won't complain as much; there's a novel idea.
I watched The Phantom Menace in the cinema as a teenager. I never watched a Star Wars movie after that.
Agreed! Older Star Trek also 'made you think' and it had something original to offer. :)
6:20 There's one particular episode of The Orville that exemplifies what you're trying to get across, in spades. It was the first season one where the Moclan officer had a child. Moclans are all male, and if a Moclan is born female, they force gender reassignment surgery on them as a child. A very topical subject. If Discovery were doing an episode on this topic they would take an anvil to your head about what a bigot you must be if you don't agree the way they all do. The Orville did not do this. In the episode, fittingly set in a courtroom, they examined the issue from both sides, they called witnesses, they presented evidence. While the aliens ultimately decided to keep to their tradition and force the surgery, many of the crew of the ship were clearly very unsettled by this outcome. And they left it that way, with the issue being presented, the sides being argued, people on both sides being emotionally moved, and you, the viewer, could make up your own mind on the issue. It was powerful but they didn't preach either side or talk down to their audience.
It's not topical at all. The alien is born as that gender, rather than making a choice to change it.
@@sharp14x it's topical because they're making a choice to change the child's gender, just like some people advocate for being allowed to change children's genders today.
When the movie "Star Trek" came out in 2009, I said "this is the end". It was the end.
Once *those* Hollywood people get hold of something, there is no recovery.
I like how you subtly emphasized _those_ 🤗👍
When seven of nine came out as lesbian too , did it for me beside how Discovery was a total woke disaster .
The last " real " Star Trek was with captain Archer and everyone back then trashed the series, today its an different story compared to the woke sh*t that came after that .
I liked that first JJ Abrams movie but it wasn’t Star Trek. It was just mashing Star Trek action figures together.
@@morganreese8904 yes, it was undoubtedly visually appealing and I liked the new approach in general („how things could play out if only one detail of history changed“), but that’s about it. It’s so stupid that it even hardly qualifies for a „guilty pleasure“…
end of what? star trek is flourishing lol
TOS was also the first TV show to feature a kiss between a Vulcan and Romulan. Such interspecies interactions were strongly discouraged even in Kirk's time.
I don't remember any kissing in that episode - I DO recall a lot of finger action though...
Easy answer, Alex Kurtzman
To summarize there are two different types of Star Trek..... "Roddenberry Star Trek" and "Paramount Star Trek"
The Orville was so good, even with Set MacFarlane's "quirky humour". I loved every second of it like I did TNG. Great video, subscribed!
I absolutely hated that show.
The answer to the question posed here is simple: writers don't know how to write adult characters doing adult things. I supposed it's because most of them aren't adults themselves, but whether they are nor not, the way they write characters these days is incompatible with older Star Trek products and I don't see that changing any time soon.
My dad had trouble watching discovery because he felt like everyone was just way to nice to each other.
The problem is that all the writers and showrunners taking over all the major franchises at the moment, have little to no industry experience and even less life experience. It's all being written by people whose feet have never touched the ground. Industry nepo-hires. I don't mind actor nep-hires because they've been raised by actors and inherited their looks, and probably skills often enough. But giving these rich kids creative control over a franchise they've never watched when they actively despise the fanbase? What is going on?
'TV trek' needed good writing to keep viewers watching it long enough to see all the adverts. In effect, _viewers_ were the things being sold by the network to advertising agencies. This is why episodes aired in sweeps week (which determined the advertising clout of a network) were usually the best episodes of the season. But in the era of 'streaming Trek', what networks need is _subscribers_ paying their monthly fee. So what they need is, at most, 3 minutes of amazing visuals to put into adverts for their streaming service. This is why so many streaming series rarely get past 2 seasons - they've done their job and hooked in subscribers, so now the service needs a new 'must watch' show to hook in the next lot.
I big problem is that Star Trek isn't being made by intelligent people who have a clear understanding or appriaction for a military lifestyle and scientific research.
A big identity of Star Trek was that Starfleet was a military entity that made a focus on maintaining diplomatic relations between other factions, scientific discovery, and dare I say it - a look on social and cultural challenges from a military perspective.
Gene Roddenberry, in all his faults, was an ex-military veteran of WW2 who dreamed a better future. Now he wasn't perfect, but he was the first to admit he wasn't perfect. He crafted a formal that was based on naval ship protocol and military procedures mixed with civilian life and science.
A starship would essentially act like literally an aircraft carrier but needed to have all the comforts of home because of voyages into deep space.
Modern Star Trek is made by people who don't understand (nor respect) the military, and they don't understand (or care to understand) real-life scientific theory. Instead they just focus on drama, romance, and cultural issues that are only relevant in modern American society. But in order to do it justice, they need to get a bigger worldview. Currently we're on the brink of a WW3 (possibly) yet none of that is being commented on in these shows. Instead the focus is humor, drama and romance.
Escapism is great, but why is there no emphasis on conflict with other factions? No political drama, no societal divide with other species, why do none of the actors feel like actual military personnel? It's like a cruise ship.
I think you're idolizing Gene a bit too much, and forgetting what he actually said and did. While the military aspect was more present in TOS, and emphasized in the TOS movies, it was massively toned down in TNG under Gene's leadership and direction. In fact, his original concept for TNG was that people had no interpersonal conflict anymore. This resulted in some of the worst episodes of Trek, and put TNG on the chopping block. If anything, it was well after Gene was no longer the show runner that the militaristic part of Starfleet returned to the forefront, culminating with possibly the most militaristic season in the form Discovery season 1. The Kelvin verse tried to find a balance but never really had time to grow as movies have to be short glimpses into a universe.
It's sort of like how Star Wars fans, myself once included, pined for Lucas' vision over Disney while conveniently ignoring the fact that George also was responsible for Midicholrians and the Whils which are some of the worst ideas to come into that universe.
Let's also discuss one other unfortunate aspect... Star Trek is old. 57 years old. The audience that loved original Trek are, sadly, a quickly shrinking group who are fading into history. Newer audiences enjoy different style story telling just as new generations like different music. They also are living through an era where it's very, very likely their lives will be worse than the last 3 generations, and are constantly reminded of this through a non-stop 24-7-365 news cycle and onslaught of social media. As such, they prefer escapism. TOS only lasted 3 years because it was unprofitable the end, and at the end of the day, profits drive the media industry. New Trek has to appeal to these audiences.
Agreed, in Strange New Worlds there is no chain-of-command and everybody cross talks like they're discussing what restaurant to order lunch from. All the emphasis seems to be from the women's point of view while the captain enjoys his neutered role as the chef. The vulcans are as nakedly emotional as humans and the writers seem obsessed in pursuing stories for the sake of being different versus giving any sort of collective inspiration to the viewers (the majority of whom are probably much more thoughtful and intelligent than they are).
@Revenant_Knight Comparing Star Trek to Disney and Geaorge Lucas is a weird way to drive your point home. Acolyte was canceled after season 1 because it attempted to get an audience that wasn't interested in Star Wars while destroying any and all good will they had left with the fans. George Lucas had great ideas for a sequel trilogy that sound a heck of a lot better than what Disney did.
Now going to Star Trek. I know and am aware of Gene's history. By the time TNG came, it was reported he had gotten sick, and I agree he didn't do a good job with season 1. The importance of Gene's legacy that I believe should be kept is that he was a WW2 veteran who made a show about a futuristic military force that deals with real-world comparison conflicts.
Star Trek isn't being made by nerds anymore. It's being made under people who don't have any understanding of the military or nerd Trek culture.
They got so bad I found other series now that I prefer as a more modern take on society. The Orville is an excellent show that stays true to Gene's vision, because Seth McFarlane is an actual fan of Star Trek.
@@angryfilmgamer570 First, my response was 2 months ago...I had to go back and reread it LOL.
Second: I think you misunderstand the reference I was making regarding Star Wars.
Third: I believe you are putting your own beliefs on Gene rather than looking at his actions.
Finally, I absolutely agree that the Orville is great. Gene's vision though? That include the first season?
Anyway, I'm off from this. Enjoy your shows!
Original Storytelling is a lost art, we are in the it's like " insert content " we are in comparison era, reboot era and check the box era.
I disagree. Breaking Bad, House of Cards (minus final season), reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Fargo, House, Dexter, Sons of Anarchy are all well written. The problem is profit before creatives. If you don't hire a good writer's room, plus a show runner who loves the source material and understands its culture and history - you get crappy TV.
11:30 - "It used to inspire others to greatness"
11:56 - "A lot of the children watching the show grew up wanting to go into space, to explore, to invent, to push the boundaries of the known."
As soon as he said that, it clicked and I knew he was right. That described how I felt watching Star Trek, I just couldn't find the words. And now that I have them, it makes all too much sense why I don't like modern Trek.
Who wants to explore a dark and depressing place with no light at the end of the tunnel? When you see all the horrible things on the news, why tune into a show just showing the exact same thing with no positive end?
Where did the better tomorrow go?
I wasn't even aware there was still a star trek show.
STD is what happens when you hire discount soap opera writers who dont like star trek to write star trek.
I think the answer is really simple: Star Trek is smarter than the current creative class people and they just don't understand it or why people like it.
You don't have the time to develop these things when you only have 8 or 10 episodes in a season and have to develop multiple characters, the season long story line, and the individual episode story. There's literally no place to just have an episode to explore philosophical ideas in a nuanced way
I disagree. Take a look at Silo. It was only 10 episodes and characters were developed intelligently and had multiple sub plots that actually contributed to the main plot. There are plenty of other shows that were / are just as outstanding as Silo. Shogun in particular. Wednesday is also good, mainly because the star keeps the writers focused on the show instead of preaching woke nonsense.
What I'd give to have back the old 26 episode TV seasons, that ran at a firm and predictable time each year, like clockwork. Heck, I'll even take the 22 that it first stepped down to. It just keeps on getting pruned down more and more.
Along with that I'd like to have shows worth watching.
I think it's worth mentioning the fan-based series 'Star Trek Continues' which did an excellent job in bridging the gap between TOS season 3 and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Great work! There are other critiques about modern Star Trek out there, but I appreciate your unique take. You make such a compelling argument about what we are missing out on: talent, social impact, ingenuity, and class. It makes me even more grateful for old Star Trek. Well done!
Glad you enjoyed it!
You hit the nail on the head about old Trek going beyond the time it was written as opposed to new Trek which is trapped in the time it was written. A lot of old Trek is still relevant today and will continue to be into the future. New Trek and its preaching, on the other hand, will be quite dated a couple decades from now when society has moved on from its current fixations.
I've been trying to articulate everything you clearly put together here for people that don't understand why I don't like new Star Trek. I am a huge fan of the of everything up to Enterprise, but it's just been so broken ever since. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and piecing them out so thoughtfully since I will just share your video with people that ask me why I can't watch anything post Enterprise. Subscribed.
Shades of modern Doctor Who and its grotesque message-down-the-throat stories.
Same disease infecting multiple franchises. It's called DEI.
The decline in the quality of screenwriting over the past decade or so is obvious, sad, and has ruined many franchises, including Star Trek.
The writing has become so poor because the balance of the generation coming up can't really read.
It's hard for me to articulate what I am feeling about the new trek since 2008, but you did a great job. I have been a star trek fen since I can remember as a 4-5 years old little kid, watching 1st season of TNG on black and white TV . Remember how respectful, smart and trustworthy they where. Hypothetically, if I had problem, I loud not hesitate to ask someone from the TNG crew for help or advice. Star Trek was so big impression on me that I wanted to know how everything works and to fix stuff.. 25 years later, I was chief engineer on big industrial factory and did great job there.
Feels like their only goal with modern Trek was to push as much inclusion as possible onto the screen without a particular reason. The old shows were progressive in their time but had heart and good writing to back it up. I watched a couple seasons of Discovery but never liked it much, felt like they erased the entire universe that had been built with no regards for the older fans.
I liked Saru....but that's about it 😆.
I agree that Saru would definitely fit in on the older shows (I feel like he and Picard would have some fascinating conversations). Saru is the best-developed character in Discovery.
My thoughts on Burnham....She's a DEI captain. Now, before anyone screams "REEEEEEEEEE!!!!! Racist!!!!!!!!", I'll say that Sisko and Janeway are WAY better than her. Both of them give off the feeling that they got there on their merits. The only thing of merit that I remember Burnham doing is (Not spoiling), and that alone wouldn't make up for (Not spoiling).
Now, regarding my LEAST 3 favorite characters...I could've gone the whole series without knowing about Stamets and Culber (ESPECIALLY after [Not spoiling]). Those two are why the show's abbreviated "STD".
An extra thing on Stamets...the near-constant stuttering. And Adira? She was almost as bad. I would not feel comfortable with an Engineering team that, in the middle of a crisis, and even when NOT in a crisis, is looking and sounding like they're on the verge of a panic attack. Scotty, Geordi, O'Brien, Torres, Tucker; They kept COOL under pressure.
Discovery felt like a Starbucks in space, and Saru was the only one drinking water.
Sounds like Star Wars - the two universes finally converge 😉
Diversity is good when the characters are good. Just look at ds9 vs discoverey. Its night and day.
Trek has always been “woke”. Good Trek used that inclusivity as a way to explore the full spectrum of philosophical thought and the human condition. Bad Trek treats it as end to itself. It’s like a teenager waking up one day and just deciding out of the blue to be a punk. They don’t like the music. They don’t subscribe to punk ideals. It’s all just surface cosplay aesthetics. As a result it’s transparent and boring.
Don't like the characters or story in discovery at all.
But i really enjoy Lower Decks, i think theyve done a good job making humorous stories about the characters who really run the fleet.
Saru is actually good IMO, he had perhaps the most transformative character journey in all star trek tv and movies and he has enough qualities as a character to stand next to ones from the old shows.
Lower Decks is the only NuTrek show that still has the Old Trek feel.
For me it is simply the characters, like OP said it is extension of 21st century kids, when watching tng,ds9,voy you can feel that the characters were different they had a different personality they werent like us and off course there is no tecnological conversation.
Wonderfully thought out, detailed video, thank you for hitting the nail on the head with the issues. This is the very same problem with Doctor Who’s new season.
Dr Who is a mess
Well said.
One, thing, though, you forgot Nebula and Hugo Award winning author Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote the episode "Shore Leave" from TOS.
True, but I couldn't cover all of them. I only gave a selection.
I liked how they used aliens to show what it is to be human in TNG.
This was an excellent essay covering all the points I wish I could explain so eloquently.
Have you watched For All Mankind? It’s incredible.
No, but I hear good things about it
Great show, but leans too much into CW like drama instead of the space program. I'm binging it, currently on season 3 right now, I have to take a break every few days due to all the drama they use to pad time.
I love the space race, focus on the space race, not on Karen banging Danny.
you’re kind of right about Enterprise, it was Season 3 where the network demanded changes made in order to take the show in a more action oriented direction. It was also a time fresh after 9/11 as Enterprise premiered that very month, and presumably during the creation of its second season there was more of a push to make the show more appealing to the audience of a post-9/11 world, so of course the Xindi attack and season long revenge storyline came about. It was a reactionary reflex (akin to the Man Of Steel movies battle of Metropolis as seen in that and Batman Vs Superman - while they are not a direct reference to 9/11 they would not exist in the state they do had that event not happened).
Season 4 was by comparison, a complete return to the core values of Star Trek, and very much what Enterprise should have been all along - after closing off the mis-guided temporal war storyline that was used as a ‘new’ starting point in the season’s opening two-parter, it instead focussed on the birth of the federation, with Enterprise starting to setup the basis of the united federation of planets. But it was too little too late, as the network had already decided to cancel the series as by then it would have reached the 100 episode mark, meaning it had enough to package the show in a package to other networks for re-runs, and the show came to an end, making it the first time in decades that no episodes or movies of Star Trek would then be aired/released or in production.
As you mention, a large part of the issue is the writing - while they had previously had the ‘Open door policy’ as you mention, it invited people who were fans of the shows and of the genre to write in with ideas and submit scripts. That would be of help if still an option, but without it the issue is thwt there are people in charge and in the writer’s rooms who either have little or no knowledge of sci-fi, science (a basic yet comprehensive understanding of physics and how to break them in a sci-fi show is really a pre-requisite), and some of them have no knowledge of the extensive history of the universe for which they are now writing.
Examples of these are prevalent throughout the entire run of Star Trek Discovery and Strange New Worlds in particular - with examples of the musical SNW episode (an anomaly that somehow has the effect of making the universe change like it’s a broadway musical because Uhura broadcasts her singing through it?), and an upcoming episode where human crew members are given an injection that turns them into Vulcans suddenly giving them full logic as if it’s a genetic condition of their race (when anyone who knows anything about Vilcans from the literal hundreds of hours featuring those characters, would know the logic is a learned suppression of their extremely powerful emotions, which takes them years to learn from birth).
No, the problem is the pool of writers that are being sourced for the show, that have little or no experience with sci-fi but have written for teen drama shows, because that’s who the networks want the shows to appeal to. And in doing so, they are making absolute garbage that not only fails at drawing in that wanted audience, but fails to retain and in fact alienates the core audience that has followed Trek for decades as far back as its inception with the original series.
The people in charge don’t understand that what made Star Trek so appealing was that it was an abstract outside way of viewing and exploring the human condition, without dumbing it down. The audience has a far greater understanding of Trek than the networks do now, and continually telling us that we don’t is just making us mad and dis-interested. Know your audience, don’t preach to them and insult them.
Remember when a Star Trek episode ended and you felt good? You felt good about the future or humanity or life? The story culminates in such a way you just come to realize that all that is good and truth will always prevail somehow?
Not a single one of these new Kurtzmann trek episodes ends like this, in fact, none of these episodes have that serotonin booster, that makes you think or feel. That challenges your perspective in a good way.
That's what's missing, the very soul of Star Trek.
A good example of this: Remember the end of Generations when Pacard tells Riker, "Someone once told me... Time is a predator (lol good one Pacard, Soren literally told you that ten minutes ago) But I would much rather see it as a companion" That speech?
Or the progenitor episode, where the klingons, federation, and romulans seek an ancient treasure. They find only a hologram of an ancient alien that admits they seeded life throughout the milky way (why all the aliens are humanoid with different makeup) the klingon screams, "Thats it? If she wasnt dead I would kill her myself!" Big laugh...
But the feel good moment: as the episode ended and everyone was leaving the romulan commander hails Pacard and tells him that maybe we arent as different as we believe.... "Maybe someday...." and Pacard just says.. "Yes... Maybe someday.."
Yeah, this new Trek lacks a SINGLE moment like that.
No one could have said it better than you just did. I’m sending this to my trek buddies.
My biggest issue with New Star Trek is its insistence on chaining us to the past. Literally every major New Trek show has chained itself to an old Star Trek in some way shape or form.
Why do we need more stories about Spock?! Why not just make an entirely new Vulcan character on a new show if you want to explore Vulcan stuff? Why do we have to go back to the TOS era? Why not just set the show in the 26th century, make it all super futuristic, new baddies arrive. It would all work.
This is an excellent analysis. The critique is applicable across a very wide swathe of what passes for entertainment today. There has been great spiritual decay in our culture that has been especially rapid in recent decades and it manifests itself most clearly in our cultures inability to produce meaningful art. It’s like an anti-golden age we’ve entered into.
Wow. What a great video that clearly identifies what's needed in Trek and also modern entertainment. Thanks for the time and effort in making this.
Star Wreck and Star Was will be a reflection of this time peroid of Hollywoke disaster.
Enterprise was bad but I had no idea how much worse it would get lol.
Two Very Important Fixes to New Star Trek
1: Stop making space travel instantaneous! No more getting everywhere in the Galaxy the time it takes to walk from the Ready Room to the Bridge! No more every ship in the fleet instantaneously showing up two seconds after you call for help! Help should be days or even weeks away. The crew should be on their own to solve the problem without help. There should be time for the crew to interact with each other and time to develop the characters on the way to their destinations.
2: Cut it out with the tired old Starfleet/Federation/Earth annihilation routine! Earth doesn’t need to be in danger for the audience to be emotionally invested! There are thousands of planets and trillions of people in the Star Trek Universe you can save besides Earth and Starfleet! The constant threat of annihilation is not an optimistic view of our future.
PS: The old shows and movies (save The Animated Series) weren’t totally innocent of the save Earth routine either but, none of them did the fleet instantaneously showing up thing.
That anecdote about Gene Roddenberry seems out of character... one of the most interesting parts of TOS was the conflicting views of Spock and McCoy. Disagreement among the crew was a frequent plot point of TOS.
Good video. I agree with everything you said. Keep going. Star trek suffers the same fate as every franchise. Preachy wokist destroying everything
100%. They act like people from the 20th century. I have hoped that others with a bigger platform than myself would spot this. I noticed it creeping in on Enterprise a bit but I thought it was intentional. I think Voyager definitely was the last of the star treks in the vein of what star trek was about. enterprise at least felt like star trek. thank you for putting this together so coherently. its how ive felt, but i couldn't put it into words.
A calm, objective and interesting analysis, which I enjoyed very much.
Live Long And Propser. :)
In the modern writer's,room there is only The Message and everyone wrong is evil.
Preach brother! Excellent evaluation of the current issues with modern Star Trek series.
Because they just CANNOT LET GO of the idea of using it to push a social engineering framework on us. If they would just tell us a great story and leave it at that, it would be tons better.
The only good modern trek is Picard season 3 only
Hi! So, I hear you saying the writing for new Trek is bad, but your video doesn’t really give any specific examples. I think your arguments would be stronger if you did some juxtaposition of scenes or ideas to give context and evidence to your views.
STD is bad but, I was out when they started swearing. ST should allways be family friendly
The TNG production crew got into a groove around season 3 of TNG & they pretty much kept going until the end of Enterprise. The 5-act episode structure got honed to perfection. In Discovery they were writing a whole season, not individual episodes & they couldn’t get that magic back.
Enterprise was fantastic. The last of the decent treks.
Lower Decks, Picard Season 3, and Strange New Worlds are the only good new ones.
Voyager wan't much better. Was it the first or second episode where they flew across the face of a quantum singularity....A QUANTUM SINGULARITY!
Modern trek writing is a travesty to story telling. I just tried watching Strange New Worlds. Its like they just take a bunch of things, toss them in to a blender, spit out random Trekbable that isnt even plausible and call it a show. They immediately find a solution using the most incoherent and un cohesive explanations. The second episode was so badly written that I dont even get why it was allowed to publish. All of the relationships are forced instead of developed. I felt something for the crew of Voyager in the first episode. They just dont develop anything any more.
1:25 Ok but like star trek has never been subtle about its moral messages
I started watching Star Trek as the original and TNG just happened to be on after The Simpsons when I was a kid. I got sucked in and continued to watch DS9 and Voyager. It was my secret geeky world that nobody else knew about 😂 Enterprise was pretty good and Season 3 of Picard was AMAZING. Everything else was trash... Lower Decks was decent though! Without Star Trek, I would have never got into sci-fi literature.
Strange New Worlds isn't good?
Picard Season 3 was incredible! The return of the Enterprise D, the final sendoff for the NG Crew, the presence of a true villan with Amanda Plummer at the helm of the Shrike, the final wrap up of both Dominion War and Borg plot lines, and a plausible jump off point for things to continue! What Metallis did was masterpiece trek the likes of which has not been seen since DS9.
"Why is modern Star Trek so bad?" I'd say it's not any worse than Voyager.
Considering the state of Star Wars, modern Star Trek is really not that bad. At least it's convinced newer audiences like me to go back and watch the older shows and movies.
On a side note, I disagree with the categorization. I'd say:
Classic Trek = TOS, TOS movies, TNG (optimistic, unassuming, themes under the surface)
Modern Trek = DS9, TNG movies, Voyager, Enterprise (cynical, self-serious, themes on-the-nose)
Nu (Contemporary) Trek = JJ Abrahams, Kurtzman, etc (no comment)
I can see how if you grew up with Voyager it can be very nostalgic and fun. But after having watched TNG and how Patrick Steward's Picard was so multi-dimensional as a character - I just couldnt wrap my head around how awful Janeway was. The writers mistook strength, leadership, gravitas as speaking sternly while threatening to blow up a much inferior ship. Stand-offs were almost always resolved with janeway threatening to blow up the other ship. and then getting her way. It was one-note and it was boring. An example of how TNG threatened violence until they got their way was when Worf pretended to be captain to control the Klingon ship that was in status for a few hundred years. That was clever and fun.
100% Enterprise was the beginning of the end. It doesn't seem that bad compared to the modern stuff. But at the time Enterprise was a new low compared to Voyager. They scrambled in season 4 with all the fan service, but the show was fundementally flawed.
Well done! I agree with you 100%, even though the a numerous canon violations, which were done on purpose, the greatness of Star Trek was its ability to unite and inspire people.
I was born and raised in an Evangelical home and my dad used to gather us as a family around the TV every Wednesday for a new TNG episode.
I became a Trekkie when I was 6 I became a Trekkie when TNG first aired. I am a Christian myself but Star Trek inspired me to get into technology and philosophy.
I am an Aviation Electronics Technician by trade, with prospecta to work for NASA, and a Christian Apologist by hobby because of the philosophy I was taught by Star Trek.
Just making a generic scifi and slapping the Star Trek name on it just goes to show why the STD-verse ia horrible!
Finally I am a fellow Orvillian as well, and I just finished my DS9 binge and right now I am going through Andromeda. Have you seen The Expanse?
Anyway well done! ✝️🖖
To me Star Trek always was about a distant yet familiar Grandeur… a bold imagination of what humanity could become if we‘d put our petty self-sabotage aside and concentrated on a greater objective.
Modern Trek (starting with those awful „Apple Store“ ship designs in the 2009 JJ Abrams movie) was the exact opposite: „Average Joe in Space“… that hopeful Grandeur and professionalism was gone, only to be shallowly replaced by emotionally unstable dimwits cosplaying as presumably trained Starfleet personnel.
Proper Trek died alongside with Data in „Nemesis“.
20th century Star Trek was about the future. Modern Star Trek is about the present.
@@Randomcorpse well then, nothing is more boring and dated than the present day - once it turns tomorrow…
@@TheUnsungVil I also miss when old star trek would come up with clever way to deal with an issue by creating a situation to parallel something, but modern trek just says "No, lets just go back in time to modern day and complain about current immigration law or something.
STP, STD, section 31 and all of them are so bad that star trek enterprise is good lol
I just can’t get into the new stuff. It’s not because we’re getting older it’s because it’s not fun or interesting anymore
Its nice knowing there is a bastion of people who understand my gripes. I don't enjoy much past Enterprise. I feel a lot of what you said could also apply to Doctor Who
A very interesting video. I'm rather surprised that Theodore Sturgeon wasn't listed among the renowned writers of OG Trek.
There were dozens of writers, I didn't have time to list them all.
This resonates a lot with me. For the most parts, I just can't comprehend what is going on with the writing and Series in general today, when it comes to the old franchises. Really feels like a "hostile" take over of groups, who have zero interest in what they are building on, but to use it as a platform. (I just think it can't just be such a level of incompetence, there must be a general strategy). I think when it comes to later decades, most of the expensive sludge of today will be used for drinking games - if even - and nothing more, and be ignored otherwise. A good indicator is that there are still a lot of people who are watching Star Trek - but only the "old" one - because stories and execution matter more than state-of-the-art effects.
I stopped when the remake movies came out. TNG and DS9 provide me with all the content I ever need.
As if people today want to be challenged. I watched Star Trek starting in 1966 & watched every one as they premiered. I continued to watch the reruns of TOS in the early 1970s. Star Trek greatly affected my view of the world & world politics. It showed a world that could be, if people wanted it. We got close to a form of world cooperation, but there was no profit in it.
Look at the journey ahead, and then back to the path already carved. What is undiscovered, and what is intrinsic to the "human condition"? The "undiscovered" requires vision to chart a course, while knowledge of the human condition requires knowledge of the past such as of knowing one's self.
War in Star Trek was solved by magic space elves, along with magic crystals (dilithium) to solve Relativistic Time Warp equations such as those put forth by Miguel Alcubierre. These are not things shown, but things hid in a "technological singularity", a "black box" akin to a "Pandora's Box" full of assumptions. Things we still must figure out. How do we see beyond choices we do not understand? We can make assumptions. There are some things for which we should not make assumptions, the "Undiscovered Countries".
One more thing to ponder, may be that our old stories have "lost meaning". Stories that make an emotional connection to us, or perhaps even inform our subconscious or our instincts. However, ones for which the original inspiration has been long buried in abstraction and does not necessarily connect to us on a conscious level. Are these things that are part of a universal "human condition", or are they relics of a smaller subset of a shared cultural heritage?
"you should assume that the audience is as smart if not smarter than you"
They already do, and that's the problem 😂
IMHO, It is not the writers fault. Watch the opening credits, there are more producers on each of these shows than writers. I would wager each of these producers thinks they are the smart ones in any room, they are the ones that guide the writers and directors into making the show the producers want to see. The writers are left with making the 13 producers happy, rather than making a worthy hour of TV
Excellent review and analysis of the many myriad self-created problems of this now sprawling and appalling franchise.
All Sci-Fi is over hyped and terribly executed. The reason why most of television is becoming bland and unwatchable is because people are waking up from the hypnosis they’ve been under for their entire life.
Star Trek went the way of all the Disney StarWars shows....woke and annoying as hell. Everything now must come with the blessings of the Alphabet mafia. Huge failure.
I agree with you on everything about the Enterprise show. I liked that show, especially the last two seasons. In my mind, Nu Trek started in 2009 once JJ Abrams took over. He admitted himself that he was never a fan of Star Trek, and it showed, And Star Trek TV has only gotten even worse.
At least JJ had the sense to have his Trek in a separate timeline. Kurtzman keeps imposing his Trek as Prime. I was relieved when the SNW epside "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" (S2E3) confirmed KurtzmanTrek is in an alternate (delayed Eugenics War) timeline. Like bruh, stop trying to overwrite Prime and embrace it as your own Trek universe/timeline, like JJ did with his.
Star Trek couldn't keep going same old same old. Which is why the Richard Berman team had to go.
When Next Gen first came on, many of the old trekkers disapproved, which has reversed dramatically.
When Enterprise arrived, same thing.
We now are seeing this shift with the Kelvin films.
When a different new ST comes out in 15 years, people will again be complaining, but this time, whining over how it doesn't measure up to Alex Kurtzman's vision.
If STD ever did one thing it inspired me to right a better Star Trek stories and make sure that awful show doesn’t become the end to this franchise. Right now working on a plot and story to a video game that combines the “Thief Dark Project” game and Klingons.
Writers and directors are the true stars of what makes great TV and movies. Actors help but as Nicholas cage likes to prove over and over, good actors aren't a substitute for good entertainment when the writing and directing is crap.
I think one problem of moderne trek is the writers don't know what they're writing, they think sci-fi = dystopian future, which of course is the by far most common sci-fi trope, and a core method for telling these tales that has a message, because it's showcasing just how bad things can become if you choose this path. But that's not Star Trek, ST is the opposite, it's a "look how good we can have it, if we choose this path", and then you have the problems come as a sort of snake in paradise. The current writers are on team dystopia, not team utopia, add to that they've clearly been shown some highlights of the past series and movies, which is why they reference the most popular episodes so often, because it's what they saw. But like Tom Paris on Earth in 1997 they just get it slightly wrong because they didn't see the rest. When you watch TOS-ENT it's pretty clear that the writers put a lot more thought into world building behind the scenes, and that they never got around to using it all on screen directly, but much is still visible in behaviours, personal dynamics etc. Like the Klingons are clearly a feudal society, not a trace of that in STD.
When discovery was announced
EXTREMELY conservative guy: Why is her name Michael?
Me: It's 300+ years in the future, it's probably just a unisex name like Dana or Cameron
STD: If you're a girl, why are you called Michael?
Ron Moore is a genius.
Agreeeeed! The Orville was the best new Star Trek so far!
Honest question: why does it seem that bad writing is so ubiquitous nowadays??? How does someone get a high-profile job they suck at???
DEI... they're hiring based on what boxes people tick and not how well they can write.
Also, most shows and films are being written to the lowest common denominator, trying to appeal to as many people as possible without regard for who the realistic audience demographic is. When you’re trying to appeal to that wide of an audience you also have to avoid lots of things in an effort not to alienate anyway and it often seems to result in a whole lot of words that don’t really say anything.
What on TV, is Fresh?
They Re Did Roseanne, without Roseanne.
Re Did Hawaii 5-0.
Re Did Magnum P I
Coincidence?
How about all those,
Tribute Songs?
It’s Nothing New, this Generation, doesn’t have a lot of New Ideas, for Entertainment, or many Other Products, but they do have a few
I remember de 90’s, Deep Space 9 and Voyager, I was anxious to get the next episode. How some different themes could be seen. Today, fx are beyond imagination, and I just don’t care. I tried to watch Discovery. I found out whispers are annoying and, usually, ends with a stupid point of view. Shows are not perfect, but ST today is not Star Trek. It’s a boring propaganda of something I don’t understand.
Hope we get some good new stuff.
Excellent piece, Gareth - details the 'field' well. Oddly enough, having a mirror held up to the destruction of our culture, by the current Woke poison, was quite moving. Stories *are* powerful, not just fluff, which is why the Marxists behind it all took the road of infiltrating the institutions from which creativity flowers.
If the landscape of fiction is not reclaimed then it is *their* vision for society which will endure and it is a terrible one. Indeed it reminds me of a sci-fi tale in which people had to fake being happy at all times, regardless of actual circumstances, or they were killed.
Star Wars says hello
Yeah, most of the modern Star Wars has been a shitshow.
Don't forget Doctor Who.
I tip my hat to you Sir. Subbed and liked, this video needs to be shared to the masses. New trek is just aweful anymore. It's stuck in 2020 P.C. ideals with a shiny sci-fi coating. It may look better with new CGI, but it has no soul at all anymore.
I miss the Orville having no new shows it is great
The weird thing is is the The Lower Decks has a few episodes that actually have some decent ideas and writing (if you get past the madcap cartooniness of it). I find it more tolerable than the toughy feely, constantly crying world of STD anyway.
I actually really like Lower Decks. Despite being a cartoon comedy it still has old Trek's values as the heart of the show.