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Embrace the chaos and show TAS. Although arguably TOS is much, much more dated because by the time TAS rolled out, they had an idea on where to go with Star Trek as a franchise, what starfleet and federation are supposed to be, and what are the main factions.
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Mar 7, 2024 19:38
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WhiteHowler posted:The Ultimate Computer was on my short list; I was considering swapping it out with one of the third-season selections. I personally love the episode and will recommend it if/when she wants to dive deeper into TOS. You fool. You utter buffoon. The odd numbered ones are good, too.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:48
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Also you can't watch 2 and 4 without 3.
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Mar 7, 2024 20:51
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I can appreciate TMP, and I'll go to bat for 3, but 5 is just…not great.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:03
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Fighting Trousers posted:I can appreciate TMP, and I'll go to bat for 3, but 5 is just…not great. 5's plot sucks, but it's got some great character moments sprinkled around its second act.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:05
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Also, if you're doing a limited run on TOS, definitely don't bother with The Changeling because TMP will cover it.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:05
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WhiteHowler posted:It's less about story background than pop culture background. She wants to see the dated series out of curiosity and as a contrast. Well then why do you want the good ones? Show her Cat's Paw, Charlie X, Spock's Brain, The Children Shall Lead
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Mar 7, 2024 21:07
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MikeJF posted:Also, if you're doing a limited run on TOS, definitely don't bother with The Changeling because TMP will cover it. as the tmp joke used to say, “boldly going where nomad has gone before”
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Mar 7, 2024 21:10
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A.o.D. posted:You fool. You utter buffoon. The odd numbered ones are good, too. Ehhhh... 2, 3, 4, and 6 is a good run. I get why people like TMP, but even as a big Trek fan, it's a slog to get through. Search for Spock gets a worse reputation than it deserves. Nothing was going to measure up to Khan. And it's hard to understand why anything is happening in 4 without watching it. 5 should be towed away as garbage. I watched it again a couple of months ago to see if my prior opinion had changed, and... nope. There are a few great moments in it, but it's a dumb story that frustrates at every turn. zoux posted:Well then why do you want the good ones? Show her Cat's Paw, Charlie X, Spock's Brain, The Children Shall Lead
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Mar 7, 2024 21:18
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5 may be a "swing and a miss", but at least Shatner DID take a swing at... well, at something. It's not good, but I'd still rank it a lot better than Insurrection or Nemesis.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:24
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I would honestly rate V above all the TNG and JJTrek movies, including First Contact (which is my pick for the best of the TNG lot). But if I were showing these movies to someone trying to get a feel for TOS, I'd probably stick with 2, 4, and maybe 3 if they were up to it.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:28
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5 is a lot of fun with good character moments for the main trio. Not every Trek movie has to be a masterpiece. It’s very much a movie in the vein of the silly lighter episodes that every Trek series has. It’s always going to pale in comparison to most of the other TOS movies in terms of quality, but I’d honestly put it on par with IV. IV is more iconic but the sense of humor and tone in both movies is (imo anyway) really similar. People always point out Scotty knocking his head on the pipe in V as a mockery of the character, but is he any less buffoonish trying to use a PC mouse as a microphone? One’s a better joke for sure, but they’re not that dissimilar. Not to mention the smaller technical things, like how V’s score is a huge improvement over the super dated mid-80s poo poo going on in IV or how V is much more competently shot because Shatner is pretty objectively a better director than Nimoy. I think V is maybe two choices/events away from being way better remembered than it is; 1) actually getting Connery for Sybok and 2) Shatner having the money/time to film the planetside stuff in the finale properly. Big Mean Jerk fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 21:52
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I would honestly rate V above all the TNG and JJTrek movies, including First Contact (which is my pick for the best of the TNG lot). But if I were showing these movies to someone trying to get a feel for TOS, I'd probably stick with 2, 4, and maybe 3 if they were up to it. If the subject is of a certain age (or I suppose a student of the right period of history), 6 should definitely be on the list, probably replacing 4. But it just won't land the same way for kids these days. I prefer 6 to 2, but I can also see how without its allegorical strength it loses some of its punch. But I'd say it's more of a Trek movie than 2: making galactic friends even through a history of strife and conflict; fighting to change the minds that can be changed and consigning the obsolete rearguard to history. Sure, it's essentially done at phaser-point -- at least making the principals listen to the truth is -- but so was disarming the intolerable situation in A Taste of Armeggedon, for example. edit: Big Mean Jerk posted:I think V is maybe two choices/events away from being way better remembered than it is; 1) actually getting Connery for Sybok. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 21:56
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Admiralty Flag posted:If the subject is of a certain age (or I suppose a student of the right period of history), 6 should definitely be on the list, probably replacing 4. But it just won't land the same way for kids these days. That brings up an interesting point: whether 6 would mean as much to someone who didn't have that much exposure to TOS beyond the movies. "Living" with the characters through TOS (the best episodes, anyway) might make the story of the TOS crew's final bid to Save The Galaxy might hit better than if you had only seen movies 2-4.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:59
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Personally, I'd forget the lists and just watch the first 10 episodes of TOS. They are, on average, pretty good and representative of the series. The problem with curated lists is that if you like them, you've already seen most of the best episodes and don't have as much to look forward to if you watch the rest of the series eventually.
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Mar 7, 2024 21:59
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MikeJF posted:Also, if you're doing a limited run on TOS, definitely don't bother with The Changeling because TMP will cover it. Also you'll avoid having a robot scream "ERRROR! ERRR-RRROR!" in your brain every couple months for the rest of your life
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Mar 7, 2024 22:02
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I have used Devil in the Dark to intro a few people to TOS, and I think it's a good one because it has a lot of the actual tropes of Star Trek, and not so much the pop culture ones like Kirk Drift. You have a weird/rubbery deadly monster that turns out to have a tragic and sympathetic reason for it's actions, Spock doing mind meld stuff, a little look at the intensity of the Kirk/Spock relationship, McCoy getting some good McCoy dialogue and medical miracle, and an end where knowledge and empathy win over fear and hate. Even the miners, rough and tumble and full of anger, feel remorse over their actions and are able to create a healthy partnership with the Horta and her children, and for her part, is able to look past the ugly devils who destroyed so many of her eggs.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:02
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Dr. Sneer Gory posted:I have used Devil in the Dark to intro a few people to TOS, and I think it's a good one because it has a lot of the actual tropes of Star Trek, and not so much the pop culture ones like Kirk Drift.  but that's too low-effort for your post. You picked out a great sleeper.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:11
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The Yosemite scenes in Final Frontier are great too, and along with the aforementioned explorations of pain and tragedy as essential to growth and character really deserved to be in a better Star Trek movie. EDIT: Big Mean Jerk posted:I think V is maybe two choices/events away from being way better remembered than it is; 1) actually getting Connery for Sybok and 2) Shatner having the money/time to film the planetside stuff in the finale properly.  I had no idea Connery was considered for Sybok, that would have been interesting.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:21
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Lemniscate Blue posted:The Yosemite scenes in Final Frontier are great too, and along with the aforementioned explorations of pain and tragedy as essential to growth and character really deserved to be in a better Star Trek movie. There's a universe out there that got Connery as both Sybok in Final Frontier AND Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:38
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Lemniscate Blue posted:
It was considered seriously enough that the planet Sha Ka Ree was named after him, and this survived even after they didn't get him.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:50
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I don’t think Connery ever actually came close to being in the movie, but for a long time he was their pie-in-the-sky dream casting for Sybok.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:47
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Court Martial is definitely not a TOS episode to overlook. It's the first courtroom procedural of the series and it has a good lesson at its core about not putting major decisions in the hands of a hallucinating AI, even if the AI was being manipulated by an outside force and wasn't just hallucinating on its own. Also, while it's only an average episode, I think Space Seed is worth watching if you're going to watch Wrath of Khan because it really exemplifies how the production quality changed significantly when they went to the big screen. Everyone who complains about TMP being a slog never ate a pile of edibles first. That movie is amazing when time becomes an abstract experience.
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Mar 8, 2024 00:22
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The Conscience of the King is another one of those really strong but often neglected stories as well. It really is astounding how many great episodes that first season had!
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Mar 8, 2024 01:25
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Zaroff posted:The Conscience of the King is another one of those really strong but often neglected stories as well. Season 1 was new and exciting and groundbreaking TV where the writers could really reach deep for inspiration and do something innovative. That momentum clearly starts to fade through season 2 and is almost completely gone in season 3.
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Mar 8, 2024 01:50
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Prequels are a bit more awkward to make, but there's no big reason they can't work. The biggest obstacle is probably that a lot of reasons to do prequels promote dumb writing. If you want to dive into origins, that can promote a lot of referential circlejerks and not letting things bloom on their own. Star Trek's reason to go hard on prequels I guess was that they wanted to first get away from the Federation being the preeminent power in the galaxy to tell a story about scrappy humanity clawing its way up in the galaxy. Which kinda was an un-trekky thing to focus on. After that they felt like it had been too long since the last Star Trek, so why not just nuke everything and start over. Then I think the idea they had was that by staying still set in the past they can do more direct echoes of the original series to get more star trekky? It gets very confusing when the alternative is just "next story comes after the last story".
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Mar 8, 2024 01:54
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SlothfulCobra posted:Star Trek's reason to go hard on prequels I guess was that they wanted to first get away from the Federation being the preeminent power in the galaxy to tell a story about scrappy humanity clawing its way up in the galaxy. Which kinda was an un-trekky thing to focus on. After that they felt like it had been too long since the last Star Trek, so why not just nuke everything and start over. Then I think the idea they had was that by staying still set in the past they can do more direct echoes of the original series to get more star trekky? It gets very confusing when the alternative is just "next story comes after the last story". In the case of Disco, Bryan Fuller had some specific pre-TOS things he wanted to explore and it was too late to change the setting when he got replaced but the new people didn't really gives that much of a poo poo about the setting/prequelness.
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Mar 8, 2024 02:11
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Big Mean Jerk posted:I think V is maybe two choices/events away from being way better remembered than it is; 1) actually getting Connery for Sybok and 2) Shatner having the money/time to film the planetside stuff in the finale properly. You're forgetting the really big event: The 1988 Writers' Guild of America strike, which to this day remains the longest strike in the WGA's history. Shatner, Harve Bennett and David Loughery had cracked a story and Loughery had barely started work on the actual script when the guild went on strike in March 1988. The strike wasn't resolved until August. The film had to start shooting as soon as possible, because the June 1989 release had been locked in for ages. So Loughery essentially had a month to turn a story outline into a script. TFF is barely a second-draft script.
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Mar 8, 2024 03:48
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Timby posted:You're forgetting the really big event: The 1988 Writers' Guild of America strike, which to this day remains the longest strike in the WGA's history. Shatner, Harve Bennett and David Loughery had cracked a story and Loughery had barely started work on the actual script when the guild went on strike in March 1988. The strike wasn't resolved until August. The film had to start shooting as soon as possible, because the June 1989 release had been locked in for ages. This is very true. I'd say the timing of these events is probably the biggest thing that went against Shatner in making ST5, but there were others. If inter-dimensional cable was real, I'd love to see the Star Trek V from the universe where he had a free hand and an ample budget. e: I'm not saying it'd be great, but it'd certainly be different.
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Mar 8, 2024 03:55
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Powered Descent posted:If inter-dimensional cable was real, I'd love to see the Star Trek V from the universe where he had a free hand and an ample budget. Here's the thing: Bennett & Ralph Winter had the money; The Final Frontier was the most expensive TOS movie, clocking in around $34 million (closer to $35 after re-shoots); by comparison, The Undiscovered Country finally came in at $30 million, and The Voyage Home was around the $26 million range. The big cock-up, of course, was the choice of Associated & Ferren as the VFX company; not only were they unprepared and incompetent for the work (they literally didn't have a motion-control track big enough to handle the Enterprise-A model), but they incurred a bunch of cost overruns due to rush. Also, the heavy location shooting was extremely expensive, and was done under the shadow of an impending Teamsters strike. Bennett's excuse for going with Associates & Ferren was that ILM was too busy with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well as Ghostbusters II, so they couldn't handle the workload, but I don't buy that for a minute. They had no problem moving their one VistaGlide camera between the sets of Wrath of Khan and two other movies that were shooting at the same time. The real issue is that the relationship between ILM and Bennett got heavily soured because ILM was insisting on doing everything in-camera while Bennett wanted effects done in post, and by the end, ILM really didn't care to work with Bennett again. ILM's C crew was better than pretty much any other effects company at the time. Anyway, the money was there, it's just that Bennett and Winter didn't spend it well. Regarding the choice of Associates and Ferren over ILM, Bennett later said, "Well, Bill was easy to con."
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Mar 8, 2024 04:19
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counterfeitsaint posted:I'm sure that a prequel is capable of being good, and it might even have happened once or twice, but generally speaking, when they start making prequels is when they start running out of ideas for the actual story, or they've written themselves into a corner and can't move forward anymore. Prequels always seem to change the context of the original story and it's always for the worst. Yea I want to know what happens after the dominion war, for example. And LDS is the ONLY show that's actually doing that. I don't care about TOS poo poo - as we've said in the thread already TOS hadn't really cemented what the universe of the show really is yet so you're going back to when it should all be energy beings and whatever. It's one thing I was really liking in Orville - the story advances and we didn't know what was going to happen next in the setting.
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Mar 8, 2024 10:09
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All any of us ever wanted was a show set immediately after DS9 with a new hero ship and cool crew doing Star Trek poo poo but for some reason that time period was off limits.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:04
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That would require acknowledging that the Dominion War (and by extension, all of DS9) had happened, and the Star Trek powers that be took whiny nerds howling about how much they hated DS9 very much to heart.
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Mar 8, 2024 16:14
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The reason why they didn’t continue the TNG spinoff timeline wasn’t nerd backlash, it was diminishing returns. DS9 and Voyager both failed to recapture TNG’s mainstream audience. Was this because they continued its timeline? Not really, because you can see they attempted to course-correct with Enterprise which was an even bigger failure and torpedoed Trek off the small screen for a decade plus. But without Enterprise to serve as a warning, you can see the theory: if you’re faced with diminishing viewership, telling stories that require more familiarity with the details of an increasingly incoherent fictional history isn’t necessarily going to catapult you back to relevance. of course what they ended up writing was just twice-microwaved TNG leftovers with a side of still more incoherent fictional history details and nobody cared. And then BSG demonstrated that a crunchy scifi setting could hold mainstream interest for a bit, even on basic cable, even without the show being very good. As it turns out, what was needed was for the generation that grew up on 90s Trek to grow old enough to join the executive-producer country club. And they engendered Picard, which would be as good a cautionary tale against sequel wanting as has ever existed, if not for Star Wars
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Mar 8, 2024 16:36
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The biggest issue was that Enterprise was a product no-one really wanted as a followup show to take over from TNG-DS9-VOY. -It was a prequel so TNG fans weren't that into it, but it also wasn't something that continued TOS/TAS lineage. -It used story/monster of the week format instead of steadily progressing storylines so DS9/B5 crowd wasn't into it. -It continued VOY format so it really didn't attract back those who had dropped off from the franchise watching that either. The final straw was the aggressively recycled or basic scripts used in the two first seasons, couple of weak casting decisions, and an overarching story nobody but the Paramount suits wanted, in an attempt to get the series more securely tied to TNG/VOY era and homage episodes where they happen to run into late 90's -early 2000's Earth because of temporal shenanigans. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 16:44
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Honestly the revisionism on here around BSG is insane. The show started to get a little shaky around S3 and the ending was insanely stupid but the first two seasons were captivating and the popularity of the show as it aired was completely justified
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Mar 8, 2024 16:49
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skasion posted:The reason why they didn’t continue the TNG spinoff timeline wasn’t nerd backlash, it was diminishing returns. DS9 and Voyager both failed to recapture TNG’s mainstream audience. Was this because they continued its timeline? Not really, because you can see they attempted to course-correct with Enterprise which was an even bigger failure and torpedoed Trek off the small screen for a decade plus. But without Enterprise to serve as a warning, you can see the theory: if you’re faced with diminishing viewership, telling stories that require more familiarity with the details of an increasingly incoherent fictional history isn’t necessarily going to catapult you back to relevance. Those people aren't Us, who gives a poo poo what normies like. Normies like Discovery. I want more deep lore! I want a 7 season adaptation of the Starfleet Technical Manual. I wanna see the centipede Enterprise!
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Mar 8, 2024 16:53
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No Dignity posted:Honestly the revisionism on here around BSG is insane. The show started to get a little shaky around S3 and the ending was insanely stupid but the first two seasons were captivating and the popularity of the show as it aired was completely justified  everything up to the escape from New Caprica was fantastic, minus some goofy characterization and pant-seat writing choices. But I never saw a show fall apart as hard as BSG did until GOT came out.Edit - House of Cards maybe Eason the Fifth fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 16:59
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Ent didn't make any sense as a next project at all. Like, TNG-era Trek had become too bloated with internal world building lore that it was increasingly inaccessible to an increasing number of viewers. It needed a breath of fresh air, you couldn't have just done a straight followup to DS9/Voy without the franchise slowly strangling itself to death as fewer and fewer people make the investment of over a decades worth of television. Ok. Fine. You need to hit the soft reboot button. Do a different setting. Different storytelling styles. Different type of show. Develop a new audience. Cool. Fine. So you reboot, do a completely different time period and...make it a prequel that almost entirely relies on knowledge of the other shows? Eh? Who on earth is that for? Hardcore fans wanted a sequel and to continue the world building which you didn't give, and having a bunch of Ferengi show up isn't going to matter to someone who doesn't know what they are so it's still going to scare off new viewers. What on earth was their endgame there?
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Mar 8, 2024 17:18
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Ent is cargo cult TOS. If we just put a white guy captain, a southerner and a Vulcan as the main trio, they will watch. Just don’t bother with any of the charm, chemistry, imagination, ambition or visual appealNo Dignity posted:Honestly the revisionism on here around BSG is insane. The show started to get a little shaky around S3 and the ending was insanely stupid but the first two seasons were captivating and the popularity of the show as it aired was completely justified It’s all downhill from 33. They hosed up. There’s great work in the show, as a production it never lets itself down, the actors play like their lives depend on it, and the show as a whole could still really turn it on for 10-15 minutes at a time, but it all leaves a bad taste in the mouth because they never settled on what a good episode of BSG is like, let alone figured out where the plot was going or what the point was.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:31
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