I hope my terrible confession doesn’t drive away my readers, but…
I can’t stand Star Trek anymore.
I don’t want to watch it. I see an ad for a new Trek series, or Trek memorabilia, or a Trek convention, and I immediately set course for a new destination far far away. This is the year of the 60th anniversary of the series, and my mild disinterest has evolved into strong revulsion.
I have happy memories. When I was 9 or 10 years old, it was an obsession — I looked forward to Thursday evenings (I think that was the day it was on) and staying up to watch it on our old black & white TV. I was even enthused when they made movies based on it. But by the time Star Trek: the Next Generation was a thing my interest was cooling, and I was thinking it would be nice to have some more creative science fiction approaches in my entertainment. The Federation was stale.
And now, my reaction is nothing but boredom or disgust. Star Trek is oversaturated. Let’s all move on.
Remember all those 1950s SF serials that I saw in reruns? Shall we bring them back, too? Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers got some attention, but it didn’t last. I kind of wish Star Trek got the same flash of transient revitalization, before fading away as the entertainment industry found novelty more interesting.
Next: I’m waiting for Star Wars to die. Disney is helping by driving it into the ground with new series that I can’t even be troubled to look up.
I would recommend that you watch the black and white German “Raumpatrouille” that debuted just one month after Star Trek did in USA. Likewise, it was set in a world where nation states no longer existed. And the main protagonist even answered to a female admiral. Not even 1966 Star Trek was that progressive.
.
Instead of rubber suit aliens, they were semi- transparent humanoids, details were not visible. This made them much more intimidating than people in makeup.
“Schneller Raumkreuzer ORION Alarmstart”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=hobEAZ5N3L4
PZ, try the Andor SW series. No Jedi, Sith, or the Force anywhere in it. Just a study of a fascist empire and the lengths it (and some of its enemies) will go to.
Oh so Trek didn’t invent the miniskirts. X-D
I recently rewatched original trek. In Roddenberry’s first pilot (with Captain Pike) all crew wore trousers (pants in American I guess) and the 2IC was a woman.
For the 2nd pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before), Kirk was Captain, Number One was gone, and Spock was 2IC. All crew still wore trousers.
By the third story (Corbomite Maneuver) all women were in miniskirts (but Roddenberry snuck in Uhura to have a woman on the bridge).
The interference of the studio is rather obvious.
P.S. I’m referring to production order, not broadcast order which was completely different.
P.P.S Yeah I gobbled up TOS to the point of buying all the Blish books and “Fotonovels” as a kid (no video in those days youngsters). But to this day I’ve never watched a New Gen episode. Some would say this makes me a trek philistine, but I felt it had been milked for all it was worth.
I love Star Trek, but it has run its course. For me, TNG and DS9 were its peak. I don’t like what I’ve been hearing about the new Treks: They’ve apparently gone backwards in politics.
It feels like that with so many media lately, personally.
“Microwaved retreads” doesn’t feel like it uses enough idioms to indicate how overlong these packages have sat open on their counters.
Don’t give up on Star Trek until you’ve seen Lower Decks. Better than Red Shirts in its demolition of the mythos.
The whole entertainment industry is changing in basic ways. Streaming has allowed/forced more shows with smaller budgets and shorter seasons. These shows require different skills to produce well and the industry is still adjusting.
Expect the reuse of material to continue. Existing IP is very valuable in a market where there is so much competition for attention and just advertising the existence of shows is difficult.
I will never see any of the streamed Star Treks. Pay DirectTV for access to the channel, and then pay Paramount for the content??? In the words of Mark Watney, tell them their mothers are prostitutes. Their sisters too.
Sorry, PZ, still a Star Trek Original fan!
It came on Friday night in our area. Unfortunately, I was the yearbook sports photographer and had to attend every football and basketball game, plus other Friday night school events. I only saw the first five minutes of Star Trek. No recording in those days and no syndication. I had to wait for Summer reruns, but often missed those, too. It wasn’t until I was in college that Star Trek came on every evening at 6pm. The Dorm TV was always tuned to Star Trek and it was like a mini-Trek convention every day.
Now, I have all the episodes downloaded on my computer to watch at will. Ahhhhhh, Yeoman Rand …
I tried Star Trek but got fed up with the feel of it after a while. I couldn’t say, why but television Science Fiction didn’t appeal. The Burkiss Way (Anarchic BBC radio comedy) was parodying the BBC television series ‘Blake’s Seven’ which was, apparently, rather dystopian. Did anyone see that and did it appeal?
Seconding the reco for Lower Decks, if you were also a TNG watcher. The first batch of episodes are keyed too far to the manic, but if you get an hour in, you’ll see the love for pre-Kurtzman optimism and canon. And there are some genuine emotional moments and interesting ethical questions addressed.
For context… I’ve been rewatching DS9, so that’s where I’m coming from.
Who killed Star Trek Wars?
@sumoron, #10: Yeah, Blake’s 7 was very dystopian. I think it still stands up pretty well though, provided you can overlook trivia like the wobbly sets, the dated costumes, and the atrocious special effects… It was the BBC, it was the late ’70s, and the budget was loose change they found in the back of the sofa. However, the stories are mostly pretty good, the characters are good, and there’s some real stand-out performances, particularly Paul Darrow’s Avon and Jacqueline Pearce as Servelan. Just don’t expect it to cheer you up.
I’ll confess to being in the process of watching and enjoying some of the latter-day Treks. LD was too silly right out of the gate (and the SNW crossover episode confirmed that). Someone suggested you’d only like it if you liked adult cartoons in general (I don’t). Liked SNW at first, but the later seasons seem to be turning into comedy. One more episode to go on DIS, which we like. SFA? No thanks — mostly about silly college hi-jinks with 30th century tech. Also re-watching DS9, and finding that it stands up well even after 30+ years (some of TNG does not).
Second the recommendation for Andor – the single best thing to come out of the Star Wars franchise, IMO.
You’re almost getting your wish. There’s no new Trek in production at this point. They have a 6 episode wrap up season for Strange New Worlds to do and the second season of the Starfleet Academy show that was already contracted even though it’s been canned. Other that that there’s a bit of noise about a few different film proposals, but nothing concrete at all. Celebrating their 60th anniversary by mothballing the franchise.
I was enjoying the newer Trek until Paramount+ came to Canada and that’s where to watch it now. Ain’t giving my money to the Ellisons.
“Next: I’m waiting for Star Wars to die.”
It’s been dead since 1980, with Return of the Jedi.
Since then, it has just been getting dragged around like A Long Time Ago at Bernie’s Far Away.
I meant 1983…christ I’m getting old
Blake’s 7 was maybe the best of the “spaceship roaming around” concept TV series.
I was very annoying for some friends last Saturday because of my railing against the latest episode of Strange New Worlds, which has completely put me off the series. I haven’t liked the silly nonsense they’ve been showing as unimaginative and insulting to good taste and artistic expression but not as much as I loath the base attack the shallow rip of off Crimson Tide the last episode was – that actively attacked all prior Star Trek ambition and admirable hopes for advancement. The writers pretty much asserted Star Fleet was the military arm of humanity, it’s crew soldiers in our empire and dismissed all the idealism people had held with regard to Star Trek. The final cherry on their shit sandwich was Uhura’s ‘Battlefield promotion’. Sums up the abandonment of the once pretended morality of the stories in one sentence.
Just as they destroyed character in the earlier episode when Pike had the choice to stop a genocide and decided not to when the CHARACTER built until then would not have hesitated to act in defence of Sol’s once fourth planet the people responsible have no idea why audiences used to respect Star Trek.
#18: ‘Blake’s 7 was maybe the best of the “spaceship roaming around” concept TV series.’
I had an idea of a Blakes 7 sequel twenty years ago, when original cast members were still around. You sell it as a remake with a new cast and make it as such (tyranny, police arrests, prison transport, find alien space craft et al) – until the episode that Servalan appears in (as Earth’s tyrant) – because at the end of Blake’s 7 the situation was exactly the same as it’s beginning; Earth is ruled by tyrants, and there’s just been a large war against invading aliens leaving high tech war ships floating about to be found. What would be a one to one remake could easily be a sequel and just as doomed.
Oh and speaking of Star Wars – I can’t understand why no one seems to recognise it’s biggest weakness; In the original a rebellion against the old decayed corrupt Empire and it’s apparently immortal Emperor is a solid straight forward story you didn’t have to explain – the audience completely groks it and understands what’s going on very quickly.
Then it turns out the whole thing is just a momentary blip of history of no more duration than the protagonists teenage life span.
Complete rug pull I feel.
There’s some fun stuff going on in Star Wars animation, comics, books, and video games. A lot of people are always going to dismiss these genres as being for children, so they’ll get less attention than live-action, so they’re less subject to executive meddling, so the creators get more chances to express their creativity.
There’s some fun stuff going on in Star Wars animation, comics, books, and video games. A lot of people are always going to dismiss these genres as being for children, so they’ll get less attention than live-action, so they’re less subject to executive meddling, so the creators get more chances to express their creativity.
Rule 34 applies, UffDah!.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059288/
Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody
Video 2012 X 2h 32m
i was a 13-year-old boy growing up in a small city near RIchmond, Va., in 1966 and Star Trek was exactly what a sf, fantasy, comic book nerd was looking for. I was not a civil rights type then, but it felt exactly right to me to see a black woman and Asian man on screen, along with an “alien” (who was obviously human but with some minor facial feature oddities) yet was not a world-destroying monster but a citizen of a civilized human society (and a “half-breed” human-alien one at that). I remember people saying Uhura was a “token black” that Hollywood threw out there. (The words “liberal” and “n-word lover” were implied and not needed in the South.) I’ve always been grateful that my parents, despite leaning Republican, never stopped me from watching it.
At LSU in Baton Rouge, when I was a student in 1972-74, I raced to the student union every day after class in order to see Star Trek in color for the first time. (I finally learned what “red shirt” meant.) It was always the chosen program in the student union TV room, which was usually mostly full. If only the network could have seen that, I think it would have completed its five-year mission.
Star Trek was revolutionary in the South. The people who complain about the 1960s flaws have a valid point about the misogamy and other issues, but miss the more-important point. A Star Trek that avoided the flaws we see today would never have been created, much less aired. The networks feared Southern TV stations would not even air Star Trek if Uhura was on screen. Spock looked “satanic,” so the first publicity pictures of him air-brushed out his eyebrows and ears. Roddenberry wanted a woman second-in-command but sacrificed her to get Spock on the screen. MIniskirts attracted the young male audience who also bought the science fiction books and comics that featured Frank Frazetta near-nude sex fantasies while also supporting writers and artists who needed to make a living but in some cases also wanted to offer something of social or artistic value.
Star Trek was a show that changed television and to some degree society for the better. Complaining what we would like to see today ignores the reality of the era it came from.
I’ve thought a series based on the Tom Corbett: Space Cadet novels and television series would be fun. Update it with modern understandings of technology, but try to sort of keep the ’50s esthetic. Also update the people a good bit, much less overwhelmingly white and male. Then after the series is done do a “making of” show which has the conceit that the series was made in a universe where ‘stuff like this was true!’ (sort of), much like “Top Gun” sort of took place in ‘the real world’. So we get lots of thanks to the Solar Guard, with the Solar Guard portrayed in what the Solar Guard perceives as a good light…. [I would have lots of subtext, implication, and more, about how things in this universe are not nearly as perfect as the people on top think they are….all throughout the series. The books have lots of things in them which make actions look a lot different if you look at what the back story to various of those things is.]
I would like science fiction writers to take a deep breath and veer back towards a little bot of science . Not the fantasy that knows that planets are not flat and especially not the imperialism in space of space opera. Specifically not the Corps of Discovery Expedition In Space of the original Star Trek. Because the original expedition did not end well for those being discovered and nothing in the mechanics of the world building suggests that the Prime Directive would be honoured if something important to the federation suggested it needed to be compromise. Even Kirk our moral exemplar cheats.
Science fiction without ftl & humanoid robots & magic energy sources and the other fantasy crutches of the last hundred years might be a refreshing change.
Never heard of them.
Grew up watching Star Trek especially TheNextGen and Deep Space 9 & Voyager plus later Enterprise and did manage to catch a few episodes of Discovery Enjoyed them although they could be hit and miss with some great epsidoes and moments and others that were a bit meh or even pretty bad.
Babylon 5 was better tho!
Also wish Firefly had been given more of go and got an extra season.Loved a lot of that one & did kinda do Mandalorian before Mandalorian at least kinda..
Return of the Jedi as one of the very first movies i ever saw and I’ve loved Star Wars ever since & still do. Didn’t think much of Grogu & Mandalorian or Rise of Stywalker but did enjoy most of the animated Clone Wars series plus Mandalorian. Definitley not “disgusted” even if they are gettig a bit stale and already done.
Have these SF / fantasy classics been milked out yet? Maybe and would be good to get more original series but they are still pretty enjoyable and could still have potentially more great series / movies if they are done well and given new twists in my view so not writing these franchises off just yet here..
@ francesconic
Oh please, Kirk was never “our moral exemplar”. In the first season he gets split into “submissive Kirk” and “dominant Kirk” by a transporter accident and the latter tries to rape his yeoman!
From the beginning Kirk is supposed to be heroic but deeply flawed.
I do agree about the need for actual space sci-fi as opposed to fantasy. What we used to call hard sci-fi. I would love to see something like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars stories that at keast “tried” to be plausible. X-D
While I agree with almost all of your opinions, this is giving me old man, “Get off my Lawn” vibes.
Watched the finale of ST:DIS last night and and oh Roddenberry, 1h26m, of which the last 30 minutes was an utterly superfluous denouement?! Yeah, we like to see everyone get a Happily Ever After, but that was way over the top. It was like the ST:PIC finale, which was also overlong, but the DIS crew has nothing like the screen history and fan devotion the TNG crew does, so WTF were the writers thinking?
@25 wsierichs: That brings back memories of living in rez (Queens University at Kingston) in the late 1970s, and every weekday at 5pm there was a devoted crowd of us in the common room to watch it (in B&W!).
@28: Seconding the love for B5 and Firefly.
I had such high hopes for SNW, but then Paramount striped out the progressive political themes from the show (Gee, I wonder why?), resorted to cheap nostalgia (Oh look! It’s Scotty! You remember Scotty, don’t you?), and came up with ridiculous gimmick plots.
I’m currently waiting for the next season of Foundation and I miss The Expanse .
@28
Babylon 5 was my favorite TV show of all time. I originally liked Firefly, but the more and more I thought about it, the more our heroes seemed like space MAGAts. After all, the setting is based on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Independents do seem more than a little… Southern, if you catch my drift.
Akira @33: In the last month, I’ve re-watched Babylon 5 in its entirety after many years, and then watched all of The Expanse. B5 has aged well, but its teetering on the edge of being replaced by The Expanse as my favourite SF TV show. Both of them still parsecs beyond any Star Trek or Star Wars incarnation (although Enterprise had its moments).
Star Trek was important to me as a kid; the first serious SF TV show. But from there, things just got largely silly, and occasionally outrageous, as with the development of the Prime Directive into sociopathic bullshit masquerading as ‘thoughtfulness’.
@33: I don’t think you’ve got the parallels (if there are supposed to be some?) between Firefly and the Civil War right. IIRC e.g. the Alliance has a freaking aristocracy with a code duello, and one guy they deal with is an actual slave-holder, both of which seem a lot more Southern.
Awww. Space operas…
Enterprise was my favourite Star Trek show. I’ve not bothered with anything ST since then. I did see my first episode of The Original Series “The Apple” during its first airing and loved it at the time.
The real reason that I watched the final 3 of the Star Wars movies was that I had put the time in on the other ones, and I wanted to see what the end was … and it was a disappointment. I’ve not sought out any of the derivative shows.
Farscape is intriguing, Babylon 5 awesome. I may have been too young for Blake’s 7 but was watching Dr Who before it. Lexx was … interesting.
For short run shows, Firefly was wonderful, but with the disclosures around Whedon, it’s tainted. I could not get enough of the British UFO show, but it aired at the same time as Beaver Scouts, so was hit or miss until summer reruns. Space: Above and Beyond needed another season or two. I admit to a fondness for The Starlost and for Starhunter.
I used to have a whole swack of Tom Corbett – Space Cadet books, though Rocky Jones must have eluded me. For novels, though, E.E. “Doc” Smith’s “Lensman” and “Skylark” series were a lot of fun. AH, but who to play Clarissa MacDougal in the Lensman movies?
WhiteHatLurker,
As a young lad, those were quite thrilling.
Canonically, though, one expects striking red hair and a perfect skeletal bone structure.
(Wow, I still remember duodecaplylatomate and Zabriskan fontemas)
@18 Nah, the best of the “spaceship roaming around” would have to be Farscape. For a show with budget issues, it was a visually beautiful show with stellar writing and acting and the Jim Henson Creature Shop pulled the show out of the People of Foreheads trope. I also really loved the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, even if it did go off the rails in seasons 4 & 5. Never liked the original (it was nicknamed Battlestar Ponderosa for a reason).
@27 I would like to see CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series brought to life on the small screen–there’s no way you’d fit the series into a movie franchise.
Star Trek (the original) was a product of its time and was a far better show than so much of the godawful crap being produced in the 70s and 80s. TNG and DS9 were decent if not especially compelling but they look like Shakespeare compared to the reboot of Buck Rodgers, Space 1999 and the original Battlestar Galactica or god help me, V. Anyone remember those?
@ 36 WhiteHatLurker
Good for you!
I have every episode on DVD. X-D
Hopelessly dated but the intriguing thing is how much of a downer it was. I mean by design. No happy endings . Every episode ended on a bleak and chilling note.
(For those who don’t know “UFO” was by the Thunderbirds guy Gerry Anderson – his first try at live action. Went on to make “Space 1999” when that sounded like the far future. X-D )
Are you telling me that there is a new Star Trek series coming up?
Awesome!
Definite kudos for Jim Henson Studios’ work on Farscape. They went above and beyond with the makeup and puppets. I’m willing to accept some rubber foreheads as long as you include more exotic forms alongside them.
If I were somehow charged with making a new sci-fi franchise with diverse aliens, I’d probably push for animation so my imagination can stretch. Actors would just need to provide voices, though maybe with some audio tweaks for alien vocal chords or synthetic voice translators.
WhiteHatLurker@36,
Talking of Dr. Who, I’m currently writing something on “AI and technofascism” (everyone should read Gil Durán’s just published The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy) – and being constantly overtaken by events. But this Daleks cartoon is definitely relevant to some of the more ludicrous fantasies now emanating from the TechBros.
I heartily concur. I’d particularly like to see Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future serialised. Although the idea that anyone is actually going to do anything about climate disruption before civilization collapses is becoming more implausible by the week.
While there are times I grumble about obviously impossible science in Star Trek (using neutrinos to regenerate tissue and starship fuel?), I still enjoy the shows. Also thoroughly enjoyed meeting a lot of the actors at the 60th Star Trek Convention. Really decent people (especially the Klingons!). I guess I’m still young at heart at nearly 70, as I enjoy most non-apocalyptic scifi and fantasy shows. Hell, I even enjoy Riordon’s young-adult stories about demi-gods and monsters. Enjoy what you can, while you can!