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New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

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Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#41
post #10

I have always been interested in watching Star Trek, having watched some of Deep Space Nine with my dad and thinking it was okay when I was really young in addition to enjoying the new movies. I figure now is a good time seeing as this is coming out in a little over a year. Any suggestions as to what order I should watch it in or if I should avoid any of the series?

The original series doesn't hold up very well from either a narrative perspective or a visual perspective, I'd skip them. The original series movies are a little better and may be worth watching. Other than that I'd start with The Next Generation and go in chronological order.

I have to disagree. The production values might have been low for the original series but most of the episodes had good stories acting and narrative.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#42

They'd better just blow out the stops, go like 4000 years in the future and start imagining some out there stuff. I don't need people in makeup and masks fondling iPads and acting all utopian cause Roddenberry said so.

They had the PADDs on star trek more than decades before tablets where released, yet another example of star trek being ahead of its time

as for your "Utopian" comment, in the last few decades we have entered the era of plenty, the main problem encountered by startups we see here in HN is not that they are not innovative its that their products/services get drowned out in a sea of plenty

Given a few hundred years and plentiful+cheap energy it is not beyond the realm of imagination to imagine replicators, hell on a recent cruise i nicknamed then soda vending machines "the replicator" because the thing could spit out hundreds of different drinks with a few taps.

So a world of the future would be fairly "socialist" as machines and cheap energy allow people to devote their times towards science, exploration, art etc, we are already seeing this happening today and further mechanization and robotics will only speed up the trend

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#43
I was a big Trekkie when I was younger...but I'm surprised at how poorly the show has held up when rewatching on Netflix. I think what spoiled me was the revamped Battlestar Galactica. It's not the dated special effects that bother me, it's the way the utopia of Star Trek's future and technology began to provide way too many plot crutches. By the end of TNG, it seemed like every crisis resolution involved reversing the polarity of some piece of equipment or weapon at the last minute. DS9 was my favorite series up until the latter seasons, where again, fancy technobabble would save the day over well-written plots. I never watched much of Voyager or Enterprise...but it seemed the technobabble only increased, with time travel being thrown in for variety. With Voyager, the absurdity of tech continued from the beginning...IIRC, even though Voyager was banished in the middle of nowhere with purportedly limited resources, some technicality about how the holodeck worked allowed them to basically use the holodeck all the time, as if it ran on magic and dreams (which is basically what the holodeck stood for in all the new series). Even the utopian future of no-currency was rendered a bit absurd with DS9 and the introduction of Ferengi as main characters, and constant mentions of "gold-press latinum"

BSG spoiled me because it showed, credibly that a space-faring future is unlikely to be clean and sanitized. I think one of my favorite aspects of BSG were the mundane ones, such as how having everyone spread out on different ships hampered logistics and communications. In Star Trek, of course, this was solved with instant communication devices, though the impact of instant communication in TNG-and-on seems rather limited compared to what we experience in the Internet-age.

Since the OP states that the new series shares the same writers as the rebooted movies, I'm assuming that the altered timeline will be adopted by the new TV series? The reboot Star Trek films were flashy and entertaining in the way that modern action films are entertaining...but they took up the technology-as-deus-ex-machina to the next level...Scotty created a teleportation device that rendered starship travel moot and, of course, life-giving Tribbles.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#44

I'm skeptical. TV shows in general have taken a turn for the worse lately, with the best series not even really airing on cable. Here's to hoping it's not just another cobbled-together excuse for showing you an ad every 10 minutes.

I like what Steven Moffat did with the Doctor Who series, so perhaps a good team could revive the series.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#45
post #35

It appears we will all need to pay CBS %5.99 a month to watch this.

Yes, CBS has this weird notion that you will pay $5.99 a month AND watch commercials that you can't skip.

I get that they "think" its like this now, they get paid by the cable company for their channel (the $5.99) and they send them content with commercials (which they have sold), but the new world is NetFlix which charges monthly, but has now commercials.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#46

Kinda worried that this will be a "web-only" series, Star Trek needs quite a good production to work well, The budget for a TNG episode was 2M$ which was pretty unheard off back then and is even considered expensive these days (GOT which is currently the most expensive running show has about 6M per episode and when you count the fact that TNG had 24-25 episodes per season the overall season budget was almost the same…

Sci Fi shows are expensive to make period - which is why there aren't usually a lot of them on TV. Just think about it: for a normal sitcom or drama, costumes can be bought off the rack and shots can be done on location or on a sound stage with easily-sourced furniture / decoration / etc.

Everything on a Sci Fi (or fantasy) show has to be custom-made; from the costumes to the wall decorations to the light fixtures to the furniture. Custom making these things isn't easy, because they first have to be designed so they look like they "fit" stylistically, then built. A show like Star Trek will also have extensive makeup / prosthetics to depict the many different races.

Besides, Star Trek is an active franchise with two recent, very successful movies. No studio exec would ruin a franchise like that with a half-assed, underproduced web series. Because you can't do Sci Fi cheaply without becoming B-movie quality, this show will have to have at a minimum Stargate Atlantis levels of production value. They may just be putting it on the web because the Star Trek demographic doesn't watch network TV and the web is a better way to reach the core audience for the show.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#47
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless they put it in the alternate timeline, which it doesn't sound like they will given this quote: >The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016. ...they'd have to some serious retconning to place it anywhere before Voyager. Too much existing canon to take into account when writing the scripts.

Given they have the head writer from the last two movies, I can't see them sticking with the old, tired canon. It could be that they need to be clear that they aren't associated with the next film. Different characters, etc.

> Given they have the head writer from the last two movies, I can't see them sticking with the old, tired canon

What is "tired" about existing canon? What stops people from writing new stories with new characters in the "old" canon? How, for example, was Voyager burdened by the old, tired canon in TNG or DS9?

As best I can tell, the only reason they don't do it is because they would prefer to cash in on the popularity of the pre-existing characters and the pre-existing stories without actually having to write as though they exist.

Star Trek is a series based on exploration. There are plenty of new worlds and new peoples to see, without throwing away the old canon, while at the same time not relying on it very much.

I honestly can't understand why people like the idea of resets and reboots. To me, it just feels lazy and unsatisfying.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#48
post #10

I have always been interested in watching Star Trek, having watched some of Deep Space Nine with my dad and thinking it was okay when I was really young in addition to enjoying the new movies. I figure now is a good time seeing as this is coming out in a little over a year. Any suggestions as to what order I should watch it in or if I should avoid any of the series?

If you start with the first season of TNG and don't like it, perhaps check out a different season before giving up on it. They maybe hadn't quite found their footing yet.

I'd second this suggestion. The first season definitely has some ups and downs - excellent writing but the cast hadn't found the chemistry that really brings the show to life in the later seasons.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#49

Kinda worried that this will be a "web-only" series, Star Trek needs quite a good production to work well, The budget for a TNG episode was 2M$ which was pretty unheard off back then and is even considered expensive these days (GOT which is currently the most expensive running show has about 6M per episode and when you count the fact that TNG had 24-25 episodes per season the overall season budget was almost the same…

I'm much more worried that the Abrams-verse will come to TV as well. Can they get worse than ENT ... apparently they can.

Re: New Star Trek Series Premieres January 2017

#50
post #25
post #2

Hopefully this will be a look forward beyond Voyager rather than going back again..

Agree, please please please not a prequel! The big joy of Star Trek is speculating about the future, in these times especially I think we could use more optimism about a future we haven't thought of yet, not just a dramatic retcon of stories we already know.

I think they do this very deliberately. Short of making an alternate timeline, they'd have to "play-out" the universe we know as part of TNG/VOY/ENT/DS9.

Sure, they could leave it vague and have us all guessing what happened in those intermediate years, but that wouldn't be the StarTrek we know as we'd have no idea how they got to that point.

Also, they'd essentially lock themselves into an intermediate storyline that somehow leads to the universe they portray.

Hopefully ,if they do decide to make the setting "post" all the other shows by a long stretch of time, they work around some of these pitfalls and come up with a great story and addition to the franchise.

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