New Picard Trailer just dropped

[rah]

Does continuity really add anything to your life. As long as you're entertained, what does it matter.

 

[Mouthwash]

Ignore the heretic, people.

 

[Patine]

Bruh, fans that wish for continuity can produce continuity out of anything. My amusement is with the people who say "well, this has continuity (which I produce because I am a fan) and this doesn't (which is why I'm not a fan."

Does continuity really add anything to your life. As long as you're entertained, what does it matter.

Well, not everyone shares your vapid, low threshold for entertainment...

 

[rah]

Not everyone gives a crap about some made up universe and whether it's always consistent.
Star Trek started as a cheesy TV show for younger people. Let's keep things in perspective here.
They threw in a few social issues. Big whoop. I will admit that I was sucked in, but then I turned 15.
If the producers have a choice between making big money or staying true to the Canon, guess what they choose.

I'll take a good plot with good characters. As long as I get those, I'm entertained. If you prefer bad plots and crappy characters as long as they stay true to some made up canon, good for you.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, not everyone shares your vapid, low threshold for entertainment...

LOL...is this really the direction you want to go without a phaser in hand?

 

[Bugfatty300]

I have apps from Netflix (and maybe also Amazon) that allows me to do that on my tablet, but I'm not aware that it's a common feature yet. It certainly should be. I'm lucky enough to live in an area with decent service, but there are swathes of this country - and I imagine around the world - where that's not true. Here in the US, we can't even agree that good internet service is important, nevermind how to provide it. I've read and heard that the service in South Korea would make an American feel like they've been transported into the future.

I looked into it but they're all encrypted by Google to only work on the smart phone that your registered to which is a deal breaker for me. It's asinine DRM just like the gaming industry.

They'll never allow a media file to touch a PC because the DRM would be useless. The copyright holders will pull their shows and movies out if they do.

My current system: If there is something I want to watch featured on Amazon prime I'll just go and download the torrrent and watch it through my router network.

 

[Broken_Erika]

LOL...is this really the direction you want to go without a phaser in hand?

But, if he removes the phaser from it's packaging, it's no longer a collectable!

 

[Patine]

Does continuity really add anything to your life. As long as you're entertained, what does it matter.

Not everyone gives a crap about some made up universe and whether it's always consistent.
Star Trek started as a cheesy TV show for younger people. Let's keep things in perspective here.
They threw in a few social issues. Big whoop. I will admit that I was sucked in, but then I turned 15.
If the producers have a choice between making big money or staying true to the Canon, guess what they choose.

I'll take a good plot with good characters. As long as I get those, I'm entertained. If you prefer bad plots and crappy characters as long as they stay true to some made up canon, good for you.

But not everyone is apathetic about such traits either. You can enjoy whatever you wish, not enjoy whatever you wish, for whatever reasons you wish, and state those reasons publicly wherever you wish. And I have the same rights, which your commentary seems to imply I somehow DON'T.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Does continuity really add anything to your life. As long as you're entertained, what does it matter.

Think about any TV show you watch. Would you want at least minimal continuity among the episodes (unless it's a true anthology show, such as The Twilight Zone), or would you want the writers/producers to just make <stuff> up any which way from week to week?

Not everyone gives a crap about some made up universe and whether it's always consistent.
Star Trek started as a cheesy TV show for younger people. Let's keep things in perspective here.
They threw in a few social issues. Big whoop. I will admit that I was sucked in, but then I turned 15.
If the producers have a choice between making big money or staying true to the Canon, guess what they choose.

I'll take a good plot with good characters. As long as I get those, I'm entertained. If you prefer bad plots and crappy characters as long as they stay true to some made up canon, good for you.

Wow.

Did some Star Trek fan kick your favorite relative/toy at some point in the past?

I'm curious about what you got interested in at age 15 that had better plots and characters, and when that was.


It is possible to enjoy Star Trek and have other SF/F interests. For instance, one of my favorite science fiction novels is Cyteen, which qualifies as hard science fiction (ie. the emphasis is on not only the characters, but also the SCIENCE) and the reader actually has to concentrate on it to get everything that C.J. Cherryh put into it.


And on the other end of the spectrum, I'd still watch Star Wars if it came on TV. There's not a shred of science in it and Lucas shot his own continuity all to hell when he started tinkering with it (I'm fortunate enough to have a set of commercial VHS tapes of the first three movies (the middle trilogy) that were released before Lucas started messing everything up).


My own take about continuity is this: If you find it necessary to change it, make sure it's for a valid reason that's more than "just because." Otherwise, people like me will conclude that you don't respect the audience or even yourself if you can't be bothered to take more care with it.

For example: I got fed up after years of searching online, trying to find any Hulzein Saga fanfic. So I decided that if I wanted more stories (the original author is dead), I'd have to write them myself. And then I discovered that F.M. Busby went to a lot of trouble to figure out how relativity can make or break an interstellar economy and political situation, but he couldn't keep track of the career of one of his significant second-tier characters, and he couldn't seem to count ordinary years (some characters would need outlandishly long lifespans to accomplish everything he said they did, and there would need to be an extraordinarily advanced genetics lab in operation sometime in the 1940s to make the timeline fit - it would have worked better if he hadn't used some very specific dates).

I still like the books, but in order to make my own stories work, I have to retcon Busby's dates, decide which version of Cecil Bernardez' career is the real one, and figure out which first name a particular character has (Busby switched them around and mixed them up within the same book). Fortunately, I'm the only person I know of who even noticed his mistakes (he hadn't noticed a couple of them himself and evidently neither did his editors).

So this might seem like needless nitpicking to some people who don't think an author should respect their audience/readers. But at least I'm not arguing over the minutiae of what shade of whatever color the Enterprise nacelles are in any particular season of which particular show. I really couldn't care less about stuff like that.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

If it's the correct term then it's grammatically correct by default. Kind of like how a person was hanged by the neck until dead instead of hung.

Yes I know, I'm kind of just joking around about how a single word can be grammatically incorrect. Maybe that is indeed a thing, but I'm not sure how.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

I'm curious about what you got interested in at age 15

Well... hmm... shall I? No, never mind.

 

[rah]

I still enjoy star trek. The recent three new movies were fun. Despite the crappy plots (how many times can we do Khan), I thought the casting was great, the interactions made me think of the show I watched as a boy. But to me that's all it is, a couple of hours of diversion from the REAL WORLD. I really don't care if they get all the details right. I liked that Spock had a girl friend. We had Kirk and the crew and the ship. I was actually somewhat bullied by diehard fans because I didn't share their ire at some of the liberties they took. IT's a damn TV show. Even Patine was criticizing me for not being a fan boy. Get a life folks. Enjoy it how ever you like.
And around 15 I had to start working to eventually pay for my education (and decided women didn't have cooties) . Real life priorities. If you want to spend your time poring over and arguing about all the little details, fine. I think it's a waste of time but people are entitled to waste their time however they want. I don't even want to start on Star Wars. While a bit silly, I still liked the new ones and will go to the next one. It reminds me of a happy childhood and how much fun the originals were.
And for the record, I did attend some science fiction conventions.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well... hmm... shall I? No, never mind.

So it wasn't some other TV show, then. There goes your argument, POOF!

 

[Farm Boy]

LOL...is this really the direction you want to go without a phaser in hand?

The first interaction ends this way, but by the end of the episode they're banging Kirk.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

So it wasn't some other TV show, then. There goes your argument, POOF!

Eh? You mean your argument* surely? He just said he turned 15 and lost interest.

* Not that "argument" really applies to anything either of us said. Yours was a question and mine was a joke.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Does continuity really add anything to your life. As long as you're entertained, what does it matter.

For me, the ongoing stories and character development are the main reason that I prefer television & movie series to 'single-serving' movies and episodic anthology shows. I also like series that remember their own history and connect new stories to old ones. It is, of course, all entertainment. Whether it adds anything to life is an open question, I guess. Roger Ebert called film an "empathy machine."

 

[Lillefix]

For me, the ongoing stories and character development are the main reason that I prefer television & movie series to 'single-serving' movies and episodic anthology shows. I also like series that remember their own history and connect new stories to old ones. It is, of course, all entertainment. Whether it adds anything to life is an open question, I guess. Roger Ebert called film an "empathy machine."

I remember back in the nineties when I watched Next Generation for the first time. In one episode(the Defector) Crusher referenced that she recently treated a romulan(the Enemy). I was overjoyed when I heard that because I think I was starving for continuity between episodes. So for me it was obviously huge deal that there was a reference to a minor incident that happened a few episodes before, since I still remember it clearly.

In my opinion, never EVER go back to contained episodes that never references or deals with things that happened before and with a premise that never changes and the clock is reset to zero every time the episode ends.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

In my opinion, never EVER go back to contained episodes that never references or deals with things that happened before and with a premise that never changes and the clock is reset to zero every time the episode ends.

There was a show I started recently and it reset everything, every episode, to the point where it was extremely frustrating. Not only were the characters failing to change but the excuses used to 'reset' the world were transparent, dumb, not funny and overall just frustrating. It's like if a character got a new job that would lift them out of poverty only to find out the job was really a multi-level marketing scam or something. Like, that can be funny a few times but when you end every show knowing nothing would ever change and that there would be some stupid, goofy reason for it, it got very old, very fast.

As I was typing, I remembered which show it was - it was Cheers! There was a bit of character development but for the most part, everything reset at the end of each episode.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I remember back in the nineties when I watched Next Generation for the first time. In one episode(the Defector) Crusher referenced that she recently treated a romulan(the Enemy). I was overjoyed when I heard that because I think I was starving for continuity between episodes. So for me it was obviously huge deal that there was a reference to a minor incident that happened a few episodes before, since I still remember it clearly.

In my opinion, never EVER go back to contained episodes that never references or deals with things that happened before and with a premise that never changes and the clock is reset to zero every time the episode ends.

For me, that big moment was when Yar's daughter Sela first appeared, looping back to "Yesterday's Enterprise" a year-and-a-half later.

I also liked the Enterprise episode "Regeneration", which took the events of First Contact 7 years earlier, and looped back to "Q Who" 14 years earlier, and also told us something more about Q - that he didn't send the Enterprise-D to the Delta Quadrant in a childish fit of pique; he did it because he knew the Borg transmission from 22nd-Century Earth was about to reach the Collective. Throughout The Next Generation, Q was portrayed as having a fascination with, if not affection for, humanity - with Picard, in particular - and it seemed inconsistent that he'd do that (well, maybe not altogether inconsistent; he was also portrayed as being kind of a d**k - but he never seemed genocidal). All that time, we thought the Borg invasion was essentially Q's fault, but it turns out he was actually doing Picard a favor. I think that storyline is one of the few I'm aware of that used time travel to good effect, where a prequel added something, and a "ret-con" changed something in a way that actually made it better.

 

[EgonSpengler]

There was a show I started recently and it reset everything, every episode, to the point where it was extremely frustrating. Not only were the characters failing to change but the excuses used to 'reset' the world were transparent, dumb, not funny and overall just frustrating. It's like if a character got a new job that would lift them out of poverty only to find out the job was really a multi-level marketing scam or something. Like, that can be funny a few times but when you end every show knowing nothing would ever change and that there would be some stupid, goofy reason for it, it got very old, very fast.

As I was typing, I remembered which show it was - it was Cheers! There was a bit of character development but for the most part, everything reset at the end of each episode.

I think that was the norm back then, especially for sitcoms and procedurals. I've heard a theory that it had to do with syndicated distribution (aka "reruns"), and so that episodes could be watched out of order without any confusion. There were some serial shows in the '80s, but not many. The procedural shows - hospital and cop shows, mainly - were similar; in those, the character arcs involved the guest characters, the hospital patient or the crime victim, who only ever appeared in one episode. Those shows were almost anthology series, with each episode a separate play. Michael Mann made waves in '84-'86 with Miami Vice and Crime Story in part because those weren't episodic procedurals, they had ongoing stories.