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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7475795" data-attributes="member: 37579">Which is the crux. They didn't for Discovery. They hired the writers room of a period fiction teen dramady that didn't even pretend to research the 1550s. Good writers are the difference between season 1 and 3 of both The Original Series and The Next Generation. For opposite reasons. But they haven't hired a writer. They focused on the actor. They don't even have scripts. I don't trust the judgment of actors because they can create bombs. Because they're neither the sole nor the primary creative voice. They look at projects from micro perspective of portraying the character and have minimal impact on the final project. There's no shortage of terrible, terrible movies and TV shows with fantastic casts and actors giving amazing performances. I'm always going to need more than "they cast a great lead". Because every single time I have watched a show primarily because I liked the lead actor, I have been disappointed. And so far the only thing we know is that Stewart is cast and it's still being produced by the guy that wrote Into Darkness and directed the latest Mummy movie. He's doubling down on Star Trek now because Universal's "Dark Universe" of united monster films seems to have collapsed. I'm going to need more before I care.First... how is bring back Picard NOT "more of the same-old". It is literally solely relying on nostalgia and fondness for the actor/ character. (edit: that it's Picard and not, say, Worf speaks to this. Fans asked for a Captain Worf show for years, and Worf was easily the fan favourite character with more room to grow, not already being a captain. Or even tapping Wil Wheaton for a Captain Crusher show. But they went with Picard. Not because he's the most popular. Not because he offers the best opportunity for stories or room to grow. But because the *actor* has the most name draw.)Second, it's more than a binary no-risk vs risk. Risk always has to be a comparisons of what is gained versus what is lost. Measuring potential gains against potential losses. What is being risked here? The big thing is the ending of The Next Generation. While we didn't expect everything to be perfect and rainbows after the show, you don't want beloved characters to suffer and fail. Which was the inherent problem with Episode VII-IX: for there to be more story the heroes of the first movie were required to have failed. I don't think people will be very happy if they present a 25th Century of Star Trek with a divided Federation and a Picard who has spent the last two decade withdrawing after the loss of the Enterprise-E and many of his friends.But it has to be something. Because a Picard that hasn't suffered hasn't grown. He needs to be in a place where he can grow and develop over the course of the show. If he's right where we left him then, and that's equally sad. And if he's already happy and content, that means he's either not going to grow over the series or he's going to end up less happy and worse off than he started. (Or he's going to have a lame Jerry Bruckheimer character arc where he gets all sad in the middle and has a huge crisis of faith before returning to right back where he was when he started.)So it's a catch-22. They need to have the character in a different place and where they can tell a story, but anything they do means removing the happy ending already earned by the character. They need him different to reflect his growth and give Stewart something to sink his teeth into as a performer, but the character has to be familiar and recognisable or they've lost the benefit of using an established character. They either have to go Han Solo, where you have the sad loser that is largely in the same place and doing the same thing, or the Luke Skywalker, who has changed and grown for a way that provides the best story but means they've suffered for years. TNG also had the original creator involved.Meanwhile, with Discovery we have a team that seems allergic to trying to capture the feel of Starfleet and Star Trek, and whose first idea was to tell a war story. Who were quick to take the easy and lazy route of drama via interpersonal conflict.I'm not sure I want that done to the decades following Voyager. It'd be a little too simple to just break things for quick drama.</blockquote>

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