I still enjoy star trek. The recent three new movies were fun.
Nope. I only watched them because the people on TrekBBS wouldn't shut the hell up about them whenever I stated that based on the clips I'd seen and the articles I'd read, it was very likely I wouldn't enjoy them. And so I watched the first one, posted my negative opinions of it, and got flamed by a friggin'
moderator over there (who, 10 years later, has still never acknowledged that it was inappropriate of him to do that).
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.
Yeah, the Khan ripoff was pathetic. Here they have a brand-new timeline and what's the first thing they do? They rip off the best of the TOS movies, and what's worse, they do it so
badly. If they really had to rip off the whole Eugenics wars vs. 23rd century thing, they should have just let Benedict Cucumberpatch play this guy named "John Harrison". There's no reason why Khan or some other warlord of that time couldn't have had a follower by that name. At least it would have meant we wouldn't be subjected to nuSpock bellowing "Khaaaannnnn!" even worse than William Shatner did, and for a much dumber reason. And it would have saved
years of arguing over whether it was appropriate for Ricardo Montalban to play a Sikh in the first place.
The "Spock has a girlfriend" thing was pathetic. Yes, RealSpock was the target of RealUhura's flirting in an early episode of TOS. But it went nowhere, she realized it wouldn't, and went back to being professional. RealUhura was never his girlfriend while she was at the Academy, he was never her instructor, and there was never any cause to suspect that he treated her any differently from any other subordinate officer. And for damn sure, RealUhura never told RealKirk to shut up while she whined and complained at RealSpock about their relationship
while in the midst of a dangerous mission. RealKirk would never have tolerated that, but nuKirk (aka Captain Frat Boy) in the movie just meekly took that bit of insubordination from her.
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.
Since you were carrying on about elements of TV shows, I assumed you meant you found some other type of TV/movie entertainment at age 15 that was better. If you swore off all TV at that age, why didn't you just say so?
And for the record, I did attend some science fiction conventions.
Well, that's something. Actors as guests, or authors?
I prefer the ones with author guests. They're far more interesting people, and it's a lot easier to have a conversation with them. They also don't charge $$$ for autographs.
Eh? You mean your argument* surely? He just said he turned 15 and lost interest.
* Not that "argument" really applies to anything either of us said. Yours was a question and mine was a joke.
Since I was talking about other TV entertainment, my argument was just fine.
For me, the ongoing stories and character development are the main reason that I prefer television & movie series to 'single-serving' movies and episodic anthology shows. I also like series that remember their own history and connect new stories to old ones. It is, of course, all entertainment. Whether it adds anything to life is an open question, I guess. Roger Ebert called film an "empathy machine."
I really wish I'd placed a bet, back when the topic of TV-related conversation was, "Who do YOU think shot J.R.?" (J.R. Ewing in "Dallas" in case anyone has no clue who I'm talking about)
I realized right away that it had to be Kristin. She was the only non-main character at the time who had a compelling motive to do it, and who people would care about whether or not she did it. And the actress wasn't essential to the show, so she could easily be written out, either by having her die or go to jail, or whatever.
There was such tight secrecy about the identity of the shooter, and even whether J.R. was going to survive (Larry Hagman was renegotiating his contract and holding out for $$$$$$$/episode; if he got it, his character would survive, but if the studio said no, J.R. would die), and they shot multiple scenes of every member of the main cast, plus several secondary characters... including J.R. himself. So
nobody knew who had done it.
As for why this was so significant... Dallas was the first of the modern night-time soaps, and after the first couple of seasons it went from anthology-style, loosely connected episodes to full-blown soap, with an ongoing storyline that continued for over a decade (and carried over to a spinoff soap, Knots Landing). This is the show that got a lot of viewers into the idea that shows
should be connected like that, and that continuity mattered and the order in which people saw it would matter.
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.
The reset button is one of the major complaints about Voyager. No matter how much hell the crew went through, or how damaged the ship was, most or all of it was reset by the end of the episode (if they weren't doing a two-parter).
That said, there were some loose storylines that carried through the series, although it's been frustratingly difficult to make some people understand that. The whole "redemption of Tom Paris" arc is carried throughout all seven seasons. The developing friendship between Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman (who helps Seven learn that it's okay to have fun once in awhile - something Seven forgot because she had been only 6 years old when she was assimilated) carries on for over 3 seasons.
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.
This ignores the fact that the first humans the Borg encountered (in the 24th century) were the Hansens (Seven of Nine's parents and Seven herself, when they were all human and studying the Borg). The Hansens were assimilated years before the Enterprise ever heard of the Borg.
I mean it fit with the sort of general purpose ship that the Galaxy-class ships were. They were general purpose, long-haul ships meant to support everything from colonies, to science missions to showing the flag near hostile ports and hosting diplomatic missions. They were later overshadowed by the big Romulan Warbirds and Borg Cubes but they were always these huge, multi-purpose ships to begin with. The kids were part of their flavor although as hostilities got worse over the course of TNG and DS9, yeah it became anachronistic of a more peaceful time. I'm sure by the time the Dominion was chewing them up in combat that the kids had been pulled off the ships.
The reason the kids were aboard the Galaxy Class starships was because those ships' missions weren't intended to be a mere 5 years; Picard's Enterprise was intended to have a mission lasting something like 10-20 years.
Of course that's far too much time for people to be separated from their spouses and children. It would severaly impact morale, and besides... having kids on board meant a greater likelihood that most of those kids who had the aptitude for Starfleet would probably want to join. There was no shortage of educational opportunities, so other than being on a ship, it wasn't too different from the bland 24th-century version of Earth that these people were used to.
