Why Startrek is Dead (Opinion Thread)

[mojo1701]

Star Trek is dead cause Dr. Who is coming back. Star trek will never have more on screen hours than the greatest of all TV Sci Fi.

Aaron.

But Star Trek HAS had Big-screen hours.

Seriously, I think that it should go for some more movies now, but it'd be great if we had an Enterprise movie to show the Earth-Romulan war or something. Get Manny Coto to write it or something.

 

[DaveMage]

It seems to me the set-up at the end of Nemesis would be a great start.

Have the Enterprise and Titan on a mission together, or have one go look for the other.

It practically writes itself...

 

[jester47]

But Star Trek HAS had Big-screen hours.

Seriously, I think that it should go for some more movies now, but it'd be great if we had an Enterprise movie to show the Earth-Romulan war or something. Get Manny Coto to write it or something.

Dr Who has had big screen hours, with none other than Grand Moff Tarkin himself as the Doctor:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060278/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059126/

Granted they were kind of hammer films hokey.

Aaron.

 

[frankthedm]

Star Dreck was bad Sci-Fi from the start and still is to this day. Aliens should be alien, not a shipcaptain's boink-buddies or deus ex machina for kewl powers on the human's side. Nemoy's Spock could have easily been a brilliant human sociopath, but making him an alien made his detachment more palitable. The next generation's Ferengi merchant/ double dealer could have easily been human, but making him alien was a crutch to soften the blow from his actions.

Today there is no excuse for 'Hawt vulcan action'.

 

[mojo1701]

Star Dreck was bad Sci-Fi from the start and still is to this day. Aliens should be alien, not a shipcaptain's boink-buddies or deus ex machina for kewl powers on the human's side. Nemoy's Spock could have easily been a brilliant human sociopath, but making him an alien made his detachment more palitable. The next generation's Ferengi merchant/ double dealer could have easily been human, but making him alien was a crutch to soften the blow from his actions.

Today there is no excuse for 'Hawt vulcan action'.

Me confused. What TNG Ferengi?

 

[Ranger REG]

I'll remind you that they were responsible for the movie "Star Trek: First Contact", which most people consider to be one of the very best of the Trek motion pictures. I also thought that "Star Trek: Insurrection", while not what I had expected from a movie, worked very well when you look up it as a two-hour Next Generation episode.

That was a fluke. Yeah, they managed to make a handful of good episodes, but when you stack them against the pile of unimpressed episodes, it ain't good. So far, out of the four TNG films, that one you mentioned is good. 1 out of 4. If I apply the ratio to a typical TV season, that means only 5 good episodes out out of 20 or so are good enough to impress me. A handful.

This fourth season of Enterprise pretty much did the mandatory 5 good episodes and more, courtesy of Manny Coto. Yeah, that's right. He's the one that makes me want to come back to Star Trek. Not Berman & Braga. In fact, I will go so far as to praise one time they made the most intelligent move for the franchise in their employment history: hire Manny Coto as the showrunner this season, albeit late.

You can all complain about poor story writing and stuff, but when it boils down to it, you gotta name the people who are doing these.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Me confused. What TNG Ferengi?

General Ferengi I would assume, they were introduced in the first show or was it the second and as a foe a couple of times to Jean Luc. Rumor at the time was that they were to be the new foe, capitalist with no morals: everything for a price and do anything to open a market BUT this was changed (PCism?).

 

[Orius]

As a side question: I know TNG and DS9 were produced in syndication, but what about the other series?

Here goes:

Roddenberry first pitched the idea of Star Trek to CBS way back in 1964 or so. They turned it down in favor of Lost in Space. He then took it to NBC. The original pilot, "The Cage", impressed the execs at NBC, but they were basically too stupid to understand it ("too cerebral" were their own words), and so asked for a second pilot. The second pilot introduced Kirk as the captain, and the NBC execs had an easier time understanding it, since it ended with Kirk in a fist fight.

However, NBC repeatedly dumped the show in unfavorable time slots, and it was always threatened with cancellation. It managed to survive three seasons because of huge fan support, but at the end of the third season they pulled the plug. Of course, if they didn't make the brain dead decision of putting it on 10 pm on Friday night, it might have done better, but who knows? After cancellation, Star Trek entered syndication, where it gained a great deal of popularity.

An animated Trek series was aired during the early 70s, but I know little about it, and it's not considered to be canonical (for the most part) anyway.

In the late 70's Paramont tried to start up a fourth television network, but plans for that ultrimatly fell through. A new Star Trek show was to be one of the series offered on the network, and sets were built, scripts were written, and so on. After the success of Star Wars, they decided to do a featrue film instead, and some of the scripts for this series were rewritten for TNG.

TNG was created during the mid 80's and launched in 1987. Roddenberry decided to put it directly into syndication, probably because of the bad history Trek had had with networks and/or the fact that Star Trek had done better in syndication than on the networks. DS9 was also produced in syndication later.

Star Trek returned to the netwroks with Voyager. In the early 90s, Paramont succeeded in establishing a TV network, and Voyager was the first show that aired on UPN. Later, Enterprise was also produced for UPN.

 

[Orius]

Anyway, I didn't understand "prequel" direction, especially now that I hear that they used races that weren't supposed to known during that time. Post-DS9 had a lot of potential. The Romulans were allies and the Gamma Quadrant was now open. If they wanted to go back to the whole "exploration and discovery" thing, why not have them explore the Gamma Quadrant?

Keeping it in the 24th century would have had some interesting potential from the events of DS9, but I think the whole idea of doing prequels was in vogue or something when Voyager ended. Not that I think it was a bad direction for them to take.

Getting back to why Trek in general seems to be dead, my belief is that it:

Hmm perhaps, but I think maybe the fans deserve some amount of blame too. There's a lot of people out there in fandom that bitch about every little thing possible, and the Internet has magnified that tendancy greatly. Not just Star Trek too, read Whisperfoot's rant at the beginning of the "The Problem with Star Wars" thread.

Too put it bluntly, I think fandom is its own worst enemy because it wants more of what it likes, doesn't know what that "more" is, and then bitches and moans when it doesn't get what it wants, which is all the time because it doesn't know what it wants. Not to mention most of these fans are armchair critcs as well. WRT Star Trek, the problem is that the fans are in disagreement with what Star Trek "should" be doing. I've read plenty of Star Trek posts here over the last few years, and if the content here is indicative of the larger community, the fans are clearly divided. Some like the idea of a prequel, some don't. Some think (I'll call them the Trek grognards) that TOS was the only real Trek and that everything after it sucked. When the fans can't even agree on what they want, it divides the fan base which is the foundation fo Trek support. Like I said above, this isn't just Star Trek, it's all of Sci-Fi/fantasy fandom. I'm perhaps a little guilty of some of this myself, though for the most part I liked Enterprise, I liked the new Star Wars films, I like the 3.x D&D rules, etc.

I'm not entirely blaming the fans though. I still think that bad writing and lackluster network support played pretty important roles in the decline of Trek as well.

 

[mojo1701]

I knew about Star Trek being made by NBC, and of the planning of Star Trek: Phase II (I saw a preliminary sketch for the new Enterprise... ugly), but I wanted to know what Voyager did. And you said so.

I'm not entirely blaming the fans though. I still think that bad writing and lackluster network support played pretty important roles in the decline of Trek as well.

True, but I think it's the cynical attitude of people on the internet. Apparently, the only way people feel smart on the internet is to make something bad and saying, "I say this sucks, and I'm right because I'm smart," as opposed to saying what they DID like about the series.