Star Trek Discovery not getting any better I fear.

Hussar said:

But, the continuity arguments I never really understood. Never minding that they've now answered pretty much all of them. IOW, had folks just waited a bit, the writers would have backfilled the holes just like Trek has always done.

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I can only speak for myself here - for me it depends on the continuity argument. I didn't mind so much with Discovery because I felt that the writers would have had a plan eventually. Personally I didn't like the new Klingon look with their monstrous hands (how the hell did they build anything with that) but I was willing to forgive that for the storyline purposes.

What annoys me though, is this notion that just because I happened to like this or that Trek, that somehow I'm owed something by the writers and the show.

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This feels like a tricky concept and I'm not going to do this justice...but the short version being people buy into something, spend hours invested in it and I guess they feel betrayed when the creators decide to go in an unexpected direction. It is human nature.

See, to me, it's fans who hatewatch shows are the same kinds of fans that wear "Shut Up Wesley" T-shirts while asking the teen age actor to sign an autograph. Trek fans made Wil Weaton's life a living hell.

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Wow, that is rough. I didn't know about any of that.

It's the same kinds of fans that drive actors off their Twitter pages with lengthy hate screeds about how they've destroyed Star Wars. It's THOSE fans that I wish would find some other hobby instead of constantly bringing tons of negativity to mine.

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Despite the crap I write about Burnham and maybe some other issues I'm unsatisfied with, there is plenty to like about Discovery too. Maybe we are getting old and more critical.

It not just the though bits more or less any franchise that lasts a few decades. Coke, D&D, car companies (Ford for lyfe etc).

They way to do it right is be respectful of the last (TNG, 5E etc) while you put a new spin on it. The blow it up approach/radical change approach doesnt tend to go down well.

Same idea with food. Get a great steak you tell a few people about it, get a bad one everyone's gonna know about it.

Zardnaar said:

It not just the though bits more or less any franchise that lasts a few decades. Coke, D&D, car companies (Ford for lyfe etc).

They way to do it right is be respectful of the last (TNG, 5E etc) while you put a new spin on it. The blow it up approach/radical change approach doesnt tend to go down well.

Same idea with food. Get a great steak you tell a few people about it, get a bad one everyone's gonna know about it.

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Battlestar Galactic shared virtually nothing with the old series. Yet did extremely well. Doctor Who shares very little with old Who and yet is more popular today than it ever was. The Transformers movies did fantastically well, despite ejecting nearly all lore.

The notion that you have to adhere to canon to satisfy fans just isn't born out by what happens. Granted, lots of properties do poorly when they "fail to be respectful". OTOH, sure, I'll give you 4e as blowing stuff up, and raise you a 3e which took virtually all of D&D and chucked it out the window.

The trick isn't to be "respectful". The trick is to actually write a good story and then produce that good story. Get that part right and pretty much everything else goes away.

Usually.

The funny thing about the Klingon change from TOS to the movies, is that third parties managed to shoe-horn reason into it. The old FASA Star Trek RPG managed to plausibly explain not only that, but expand it to another Klingon "hybrid" race and, along with the Four Years War, it was considered canon at the time. Of course Enterprise had to shoot that in the foot.

BSG was a reboot done well it didn't have the pop culture impact other things had. Only had one season as well of which only the pilot was good.

Even in the cool kids thread though they want a Pike spin off. He's a more compelling character along with Georgia iirc her name. New Spock seems decent.

You're right about the story though but some of the excuses offered up are stupid. There's not enough byime to develop characters the seasons are shorter but GoT pulls it off. Just finished DS9 though would give that a 8 or 8.5, STD maybe a 6 or 6.5.
New Doctor who has been going downhill for a while as well. Since late Matt Smith or Capaldi it was getting rough.

I’ll take your word on game of thrones. Don’t watch it at all. But, again, comparing it to other Treks is not unreasonable. First two seasons of TNG is painful. Never minding Yar’s character being essentially a cardboard cutout.

And again, I found the last two seasons of DS9 just painful. I had to force myself to watch just because I wanted to know how the story ended.

Tastes are different.

Haven't seen TNG except for bits of what was probably season one. I'm not a trekkie but even I know the first two season of TNG are considered trash.

DS9 did go downhill at the end but it didn't fall off a cliff. Just finished season 7 yesterday or day before. Watched DS9 first as I wasn't sure my wife would watch some trek starting with TNG.

The "disrespectful" argument is something I can see as a subjective thing, but I see a lot in Discovery that shows a great respect for Star Trek. Every time they reference some obscure lore and give it a use in the story.
Enterprise and Discovery finally told us what happened to the USS Defiant. If you don't care about Star Trek, and "disrespect" it, no one would drag out that old chestnut.
And now the second season gave us Christopher Pike and basically enshrined him in canon as far more than a character from a failed pilot and a clip show.

Of course, there is also an element of the show-runners changing and altering their priorities, but the fact that it happened and how it happened means that Star Trek means a lot to the people involved. And accusing them of disrespect seems disrespectful in turn, because you literally disrespect their effort in fitting the show into canon and enrich canon with new facets of the world.

And in the end, everything new - prequel or sequel - has to do something new and different from what exited before - it always risks alienating people.


I know I am quite scared about the time jump. While the writers basically now seemingly have carte Blanche, they will also need to make decisions that alter canon forever (well, until the next temporal trickery.), because whatever canon was at the end of VOY or Nemesis or the Hobus event, it lead to whatever Discovery encounters in the future.
For example, while the concept of and Andromeda type storyline is cool, I kinda don't like as the future of canon, because it seems to unmake the efforts of our past "heroes".
But admittedly, I dislike the ENT/VOY "Temporal Starfleet" and "Temporal Cold War" as well, I don't think the stories you can tell with that are all that relatable. It works with Doctor Who, because it's often more personal and its not like he and his companions are a formal organization systematically trying to repair the timeline.

Zardnaar said:

BSG was a reboot done well it didn't have the pop culture impact other things had. Only had one season as well of which only the pilot was good.

Even in the cool kids thread though they want a Pike spin off. He's a more compelling character along with Georgia iirc her name. New Spock seems decent.

You're right about the story though but some of the excuses offered up are stupid. There's not enough byime to develop characters the seasons are shorter but GoT pulls it off. Just finished DS9 though would give that a 8 or 8.5, STD maybe a 6 or 6.5.
New Doctor who has been going downhill for a while as well. Since late Matt Smith or Capaldi it was getting rough.

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If you're talking about the 2005 BSG reboot series then it had four seasons, not one. The BSG reboot spin-off prequel series, "Caprica", had only one season.

Morrus said:

Just popped in after a few months ... man, this thread. A bunch of people hatewatching a TV show they don't like and making sure everybody knows it. It's the most depressing thing I ever saw. God, why flagellate yourselves like this?

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For me there are a couple different reasons.

One, is that I write a lot of stuff for a Star Trek Adventures fansite (https://continuingmissionsta.com/) and keeping up with Star Trek is part of that voluntary "job", in case I want to stat out new ships or races or technology.

Second, I have a compulsive need to "finish" things. I can't start TV series halfway through, and once I've started I need to finish seasons. I can count the number of series I've walked away from and not seen through to cancellation or completion on one hand.
Not finishing the season nags at my brain as something undone, like having left the stove on.

The final is that I identify as a "Star Trek Fan". I've been a Star Trek Fan since I was eight years old. I've been a Star Trek Fan for longer than I've liked D&D or Doctor Who or even music. And almost as long as I've liked superheroes and Star Wars. A lot of my self identity is wrapped up in being a "Star Trek Fan".
I've been waiting for a new Star Trek show since the last one ended, and followed the development of Discovery closely. And I want to like it. Because having a Star Trek show and not watching or enjoying it causes an identity crisis in how I perceive myself and my actions.

In much the same way as a football (either gridiron or soccer) will cheer and champion one team and will continue to do so even when they have a crap roster or are on a losing streak.

I want to like Discovery. And this season started fairly strong, with a few good episodes and a lot of reasonable changes that seemed designed to address criticisms of the show. And unlike the first season, it was a singular vision and it was not attempting to balance the outline & scripts of the original fired writer with that of the replacement showrunners. There was the hope that the series could be more consistent and tell a less jumbled and problematic story.