"I have ever been prone to seek adventure and to investigate where wiser men would have left well enough alone."
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Strange New Worlds S4 teaser strikes a more serious tone
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I actually really like SNW, and it breaks my heart it’s on Paramount, because I won’t touch Paramount with a ten foot skunk.
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SNW has been great and I hope they keep it going with a similar new show. There's still huge amounts of room before or after the TOS and even more if you look at a ship not named Enterprise. Lower Decks and Voyager showed that you can have a great show without being the flagship.
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jonbob_newcastle
Ars Praetorian
For the moment I’m guarded, because at the end of the day there were a few plot points in the last series that were supposed to be taken seriously but were still quite laughable.
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Mixing metaphors but it is a shame that the Evil Empire of Paramount owns Star Trek
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DS9 showed you didn't even need a ship... well sorta, they did give them the Defiant, which I think looks the coolest of all the Trek ships (only one I ever wanted in Star Trek Online!)
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I only had two real problems with season 3. One, the space kaiju episode appearing to have been censored by the new management (much shorter runtime than the rest of the S3 episodes and it seemed like critical parts of the story were missing). Two, in the finale it really felt like the Discovery writers suddenly hijacked the show, it was the sort of hackneyed shit they did a lot on DIS and had otherwise managed to stay away from in SNW.
I think we won't see a repeat of the first point, but only because season 3 was filmed under the old management and the sale went through while the season was in the middle of airing (or right before?, but either way way too late to reshoot or anything). Now they're probably being told what they have to stay away from from the get go.
I think we're likely to see the second point rear its ugly head again just based on there having been nothing else in the Trek pipeline for those people to have working on other than Academy, and Academy seemed to not get hit with that kind of writing.
[edit] Every season of DIS from S2 through S5 started out seeming promising before shitting the bed, S4 maybe excepted. So given I think the DIS writer involvement (or if not literally DIS writers then whatever led to the S3 season finale writing) is likely to be high again this season of SNW I'm disinclined to get too excited just based on the trailer.
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I got to singing Klingons and noped right out. S1 started strong, but it just feels like a TOS parody at times and because so many of the bridge crew have plot armor, it devolves into silly interpersonal stuff that just happens to be in space. And my excitement at the Gorn got derailed quickly when they were turned into Xenonorph budget CGI knock-offs. And a Khan Noonien Singh Mary Sue that breaks canon, etc, etc, etc.
Instead of using good writing and storytelling to reflect external issues onto our own—via, you know, through exploring strange, new worlds—current issues (aka TOS), every character is seemingly fucking the one sitting next to them, buried in personal trauma (oh my!), and using modern day idioms, making it cosmetically, Star Trek.
They jumped the shark pretty damn quick. But it was the least-bad NuTrek so hey, I guess Kurtzman can hang his hat on that.
Or to quote Kirk: “Let them die!”
Instead of using good writing and storytelling to reflect external issues onto our own—via, you know, through exploring strange, new worlds—current issues (aka TOS), every character is seemingly fucking the one sitting next to them, buried in personal trauma (oh my!), and using modern day idioms, making it cosmetically, Star Trek.
They jumped the shark pretty damn quick. But it was the least-bad NuTrek so hey, I guess Kurtzman can hang his hat on that.
Or to quote Kirk: “Let them die!”
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Look, the is a lot of bad writing and a lot of "look at me, I'm a canon thing someone read about on Memory Alpha" in nu trek. I don't deny that.
But there is still quite a lot of heart in these shows. Disco has a special place in my heart. I didn't have housing in 2017, but every Sunday @ 5pm I was at the coffee shop with my MacBook catching up on it. Disco 1 & 2 were actually really good(the other seasons never happened imho). And while I totally get that Starfleet Academy was WAY TOO cutesy, it was actually pretty good at what it was, a show about college kids with a kooky dean trying to figure out what "Star Trek" means. I'm not sure what the "woke" critique was. It didn't seem super woke, unless a majority female cast(which aligns with academia) is woke with 47 in office?
I don't get how "Old Trek" fans watched "Code of Honor"... and they kept watching TNG... "like the blonde woman is kidnapped by a bunch of black aliens" episode is ok... but you won't watch Wesley kick butt in Prodigy or watch a really great purple Data episode in Lower Decks? (But please do watch the whole first season of Lower Decks before you crash out, episode 1 is decidedly very uneven, episode 10 is an awesome deep cut.)
I think it's ok for Star Trek to expand, I just don't think it would be fair to compare a "Star Trek: CSI: Temporal Crime Unit" to TNG or DS9. Each show is a slightly different direction. The main big critique I have with the "Kurtzman" era is that the minds in charge, instead of focusing on creating good trek, they seem to focus on creating more Trek fans($$$).
Now, can we please have a Star Trek Legacy/Capt Seven show set on the USSTitan Enterprise-G?
But there is still quite a lot of heart in these shows. Disco has a special place in my heart. I didn't have housing in 2017, but every Sunday @ 5pm I was at the coffee shop with my MacBook catching up on it. Disco 1 & 2 were actually really good(the other seasons never happened imho). And while I totally get that Starfleet Academy was WAY TOO cutesy, it was actually pretty good at what it was, a show about college kids with a kooky dean trying to figure out what "Star Trek" means. I'm not sure what the "woke" critique was. It didn't seem super woke, unless a majority female cast(which aligns with academia) is woke with 47 in office?
I don't get how "Old Trek" fans watched "Code of Honor"... and they kept watching TNG... "like the blonde woman is kidnapped by a bunch of black aliens" episode is ok... but you won't watch Wesley kick butt in Prodigy or watch a really great purple Data episode in Lower Decks? (But please do watch the whole first season of Lower Decks before you crash out, episode 1 is decidedly very uneven, episode 10 is an awesome deep cut.)
I think it's ok for Star Trek to expand, I just don't think it would be fair to compare a "Star Trek: CSI: Temporal Crime Unit" to TNG or DS9. Each show is a slightly different direction. The main big critique I have with the "Kurtzman" era is that the minds in charge, instead of focusing on creating good trek, they seem to focus on creating more Trek fans($$$).
Now, can we please have a Star Trek Legacy/Capt Seven show set on the USS
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UP here in Canada, SNW was on a streaming service called Crave: which has... a lot of stuff from a lot of places and I can't quite figure out how...
but for the longest time, it had all the Treks... and then 'bloop' they all vanished, and I hadn't realized that Paramount was now a streaming thing in Canada... but when I did figure it out: the "nopes" were just so high..."nope, not yet another streaming service". "nope not paramount" "nope there's nothing here I need"
So, sadly I missed SNW 3rd season; and thus I don't actually know how the Gorn cliffhanger played out.
and, the worst part? I'm not sure I really care to bother to go find out.
I used to love Trek
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I liked Seasons 1 and 2 a lot. Season 3 I couldn't finish as it was not for me. Anyone else have a similar response?
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I’ve not sat down and watched all of SNW, but I’ve seen a fair bit of it in pieces as my wife has watched it multiple times.
Almost every time I tuned in to s3 episodes, it felt like poor remakes of old classics. Not just riffing on old ideas, but hamfisted references to old stuff, to the point where they’re practically winking at the camera at times.
The singing episode was way too much. Even a too bit much for my wife, who is generally really tolerant of, if not outright enjoys, musical episodes in non-musical shows and generally really likes Nu-Trek and old Trek alike. Woof. Season 3 as a whole definitely tested her resolve at times, but she’ll still rewatch it.
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SNW is okay because of its likable cast but the writing is sub-par, just like all the other Kurtzman ST series. Not that I'm a fan of Paramount's new owners but even they must realize they need to clean house. If they want to keep going into the TOS era with the new actors, fine. But get all-new show runners and writers. Something is not working behind the scenes.
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Kurtzman needs to go and whoever takes over should watch DS9 and figure out why it's so much better than Kurtzman Trek. You're right that Kurtzman Trek is not going to stand the test of time. SNW benefits from good casting but the writing keeps dragging the actors down. S3 was worse than ever.
I'm not going to hurry to watch the new season. Paramount+ doesn't have anything else worth bothering with so it's not even worth a one-month subscription.
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The main issue to me regarding season three is that the writers tried to hard to make every episode a very special episode, changing the format, the point of view, the tone on a whim. And eventually, the show didn't have any identity. There were some gimmicks during season two, but things were mostly grounded, which made these episodes stand out. Season three had the episodes being different for the sake of being original, not to make them better.
Another qualm of mine, which was also very much on display with Discovery, is that they have no real hierarchy or sense of discipline on the Enterprise. Starfleet may not be entirely military, Pike may do his best to reach a collegial decision, taking in consideration everybody's input (which is frequently the best part of an episode), but then there's supposed to be some chain of command, with people following orders, instead of paying respect to the feelings of any crew member.
Another qualm of mine, which was also very much on display with Discovery, is that they have no real hierarchy or sense of discipline on the Enterprise. Starfleet may not be entirely military, Pike may do his best to reach a collegial decision, taking in consideration everybody's input (which is frequently the best part of an episode), but then there's supposed to be some chain of command, with people following orders, instead of paying respect to the feelings of any crew member.
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That's the main issue with this era, I want to say it was Andy Weir who said that they(Kurtzman) didn't accept a pitch from Weir because they wanted people less familiar with the content. !?
It's also a bit ironic that you say that as one of the main writers of SA(Tawny Newsome aka Mariner/ aka Illa Dax) is a DS9 super fan. And there was a very lovely, very review bombed, Sisko/Avery Brooks tribute episode(S.A.M) in SA. The biggest payoff of that episode is that it resisted the nu-trek urge of explaining a thing while providing great exposition of a "Spock" character, the holographic 4 month old girl.
If one is curious, S.A.M.(S01E05) is a bottle show and you don't have to know the series to watch it. Just know, it is a very campy episode and Trekkers have an uncanny valley thing with camp... it only works in retrospect... the episode has to be more than 20 years old(See Tribbles, Q and Chaotica).
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Much as it pains me to say this, I think it's time for fans to move on. SNW is easily the best new Trek show. It gets up there with TNG and DS9 - maybe we're forgetting how wildly uneven those earlier shows were in their first seasons and their final ones, whereas SNW hit the ground running and it's still consistently good.
But SNW breaks no new ground in terms of the Trek storytelling universe. I don't know how Paramount management can explore newer strange worlds without constant throwbacks to past series or past characters.
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Right...
"S1" (10) + "S2" (10) = 1 season aka S1
"S3" (10) + "S4" (10) = 1 season aka S2
This is literally the 2nd half of Season 2.
It sucks that Paramount suffers from Dyscalculia. They must have hired the kid from BBC.
This means nothing due to timelines.
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I know this is the unpopular view, especially on Ars and Verge, but Paramount, Amazon, et.al., aren't JUST the Ellisons and Bezos's. Paramount has over 17,500 employees, many of whom are working joes. There's a monumental amount of sociopaths the C-Suite that most of us never hear about, yet we unknowingly buy their products, eat at their restaurants, and bank at their branches. Entertainment is the outlier because there's an entire industry devoted to reporting every puncture wound from the back-stabbing that takes place in Hollyweird. If you filter all of your buying decisions based upon how you feel only about the execs at the top, your list of options is going to get really slim.
In the meantime, if you set your hatred aside and enjoy the content and ignore the political garbage you're still supporting the ~17,499 non-DT butt-kissers that are just trying to make a buck for their families. On another note, please show me one example of where these amorphous "protest" boycotts have had any meaningful impact on the employment of Ellison, Musk, Iger, Schultz, Fiorina, Kotick, Zaslav, etc. About the only example I can come up with is the CEO of Target, but his paycheck is a blip. I hate to admit it, because the world really does feel like a cesspool sometimes, and believe me I wish karma really was a thing, but these folks are largely inured to the type of hate they engender.
Live your life. I just can't make every buying decision with an eye to the C-Suite because the public image you see is often divorced from the jerk that exists behind closed doors.
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The final S5 episode needs to include a scene where Una Chin-Riley and Christine Chapel are caught in a transporter accident that merges Chapel's brain with Una's body. You wind up with a Nurse Chapel on Kirk's Enterprise who looks surprisingly like Captain Pike's Number One.
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My 2 cents worth: SNW is the only ST series that I've liked in recent years. It's head and shoulders above any other of their recent fair. I won't comment on the other recent series other than to say that I agree with some the commenters above. The other series have been poor or spotty at best.
They need to keep these writers together and generate a new series with at least some of these characters and actors involved.
I look forward to seeing this season. I hope they don't take themselves too seriously (that's what killed some of the other newer series) and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the future. I hope they remember to include some light stuff.
They need to keep these writers together and generate a new series with at least some of these characters and actors involved.
I look forward to seeing this season. I hope they don't take themselves too seriously (that's what killed some of the other newer series) and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the future. I hope they remember to include some light stuff.
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DS9 showed that you absolutely do need a ship. The Defiant appeared in the opener of Season 3 and was there for 5 seasons, appearing in 62 episodes. It was so important to the success of the show that when it blew up, they just said that actually they have lots more of them.
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It bums me out as a trek fan that well I very well may eventually watch it, I’m just not excited
I didn’t even bother with academy
I didn’t even bother with academy
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Did Voyager show that though? I know it got 7 seasons, but I really feel that that was just executives not wanting one of the great IPs to go dark on their watch. Of the starting cast, only the EMH and Janeway characters had even a hint of depth to them.
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This.
Being one of those whose Star Trek journey began with the first showing of the first TOS season on a black and white TV while in the 5th grade, I'm minded of Enterprise's theme song: It's been a long road.
Much of it was uneven. As of late, especially the whole fucked up Discovery series. It never computed that the ships looked far more advanced before the Kirk era. Thinking of it as some Alt-universe bullshit didn't help, either. Some of it was "Holy fuck, what were they thinking?!?"
My Star Trek collection does NOT included most of the movies or series after Enterprise season 2. I never liked the alt universe subplot, though I know it's a thing. Picard, I watched, and was happy I got a one out of three that I liked.
But SNW is fully up to date, even season 3. I LIKE uneven, because it gives you a chance to sit back and enjoy the show instead of lamenting it or getting bogged down in a soap opera-ish drama. Serious is fine for engagement and drama, but the light-hearted shows are often much better for the soul. Picard season 3 was the best, and the only one I actually liked. It started to become "fun" again. Before that, it wasn't fun.
Star Trek was about fun to my 11 year old brain. The adventure, without cleaving too closely to real world problems. Art is often a mirror of society, which is great, when you want to see a mirror of society. When you don't, being shown a mirror kinda sucks.
I'm not sure that Season 4 striking a more serious tone is going to be too welcome, but I'll be waiting for the DVD's to drop. I won't sub to watch it. But I will watch it, even if it is serious. It's delivered pretty well so far, and I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, even if a preview of the season indicates it expected to be more serious than before.
Star Trek was originally a show that explored the human condition. And that does get serious at times. Hopefully, it doesn't get disappointing again.
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Regardless of what Star Trek series we individually like; let's face it:
This is the first time I remember a Star Trek TV series lasting for as long as Star Trek: Enterprise (4 years)!
This is the first time I remember a Star Trek TV series lasting for as long as Star Trek: Enterprise (4 years)!
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