Alternatively, some of the best episodes of TNG were “bottle” episodes to fill space and keep costs down. If 90s trek had shorter seasons would we have had “Measure of a Man” ,“Duet”, or “Masks” made?
I know the days of a 24 episode season are long gone due to the increase of production time in modern TV, but maybe we could have 13 to 15 episodes ? Enough for a 10 episode dedicated season arc with a few others just to explore some weird anomalies that make no sense at all.
I said pretty much the same in a comment above, but I’m not against filler, or bottle episodes, though I may have come off that way. I’m just against bad filler, stuff that would have never made it into a show if there was no predetermined season lengths. In a perfect world, it would be great if stories could be chosen simply because they were great stories. I’d like to know that something like the Fly episode of Breaking Bad would could still be filmed just because the show runners thought it was a great story, and not because they had a make a certain number of episodes and needed to save some money on one episode so they could spend more on another.
Honestly, I think there should be some really corny/goofy “what were they thinking” clunker episodes. Not lazy writing that disregards established character traits or contradicts itself or anything, but something they try that doesn’t work, but they tried in earnest and it shows.
Something that reminds you of the participatory nature of suspension of disbelief.
Not sure I’d put Masks alongside Measure of Man or Duet. Or indeed have it as an argument for filler episodes.
Given TNG never had much character serialisation, I’d say filler is more like those DS9 and ENT episodes late on that never fit I to anybody’s arc. Like the holosuite ones. Some amazing ones from DS9. Some less so from Enterprise.
But SNW has a good balance between episodic and serialisation. All this comes down to can they keep up the quality on greater volume. That needs more investment at a time when Paramount is cutting back…
Yeah Spiner’s acting in that episode is great, it’s a bit ridiculous and over the point but I believe that that was intentional, and I am not holding it against the episode
Longer seasons would allow them to throw in a few SciFi oriented episodes that don’t necessarily advance character arcs. Where would SNW be if TOS didn’t have the “Arena” (Gorn) episode that was based on a completely unrelated SciFi short story?
Mirror, Mirror was a SciFi episode that not only gave us the foundation for Discovery, but cemented the evil-twin-goatee trope into pupular culture.
Space Seed (Botany Bay/Khan) was also a one-off SciFi episode. Where would the entire franchise be without it?
I really hope SNW makes room for exploring the sort of SciFi ideas that Star Trek was originally based on.
Part of the reason why TNG was good beyond the first couple seasons was because of the open script submission policy that’s no longer in existence. According to ex-Trek producer Ronald D. Moore, they were reading something like 3000 scripts a year. It allowed them to be choosy (though there were still some stinkers). Now that the characters are established, if the seasons were longer, it might be cool to see the open script submissions come back (though, as I’m typing this, maybe implementing this during or shortly after a writers strike would be a poor choice, even though there were limits to how many scripts one could submit before going through “official” channels). Anyway, one could argue that a huge amount of ideas need to be generated for a show as great as TNG to exist, more than a small group of writers could produce. If outside script admissions were allowed, I’m sure we’d see some great sci-fi episodes from writers who weren’t even thinking “Star Trek” as they wrote them.
I’m not against filler, and my post may have come off as being that way. Not every story has to advance character or advance some storyline. I’m just against bad filler.
Just a fun note: Ron Moore got his start through that open submissions policy when submitted a script for what became “The Bonding.” He had no writing credits before that.
Several of the Relaunch novelverse TrekLit authors tried out with spec scripts before being picked up to write tie-in fiction.
David Mack, a film school grad, got script credits for 2 DS9 episodes, Starship Down and Only a Paper Moon before being contracted for some Starfleet Core of Engineers stories.
Kirsten Beyer, a theatre grad, never got into one of the shows with a spec script, but was picked up to write Voyager books, then came full circle to be in the writers rooms on all the new live-action shows.
Wow thanks, that really explains well why the modern shows respect (at least some of) “beta canon” more than what I would expect. A natural consequence when some of the authors sit in the writer’s room :)
David Mack was more recently a consultant for the development and first seasons of both Lower Decks and Prodigy as well. I believe we can thank him for bringing Peter David’s Brikar aliens (from the YA Starfleet Academy and the New Frontier books) into onscreen canon with the character of Rok Tahk in Prodigy.
SNW has been pretty good with the standalone episodes though, no? Maybe leaning a little more on the comedy and hijinks than the sci-fi this season but they don’t seem too afraid of treating an episode as a mini movie in its own right.
I wouldn’t mind a few more episodes anyway, but 20 does feel like too much. And honestly I’m not unhappy with 10 either, particularly considering the quality of them and that it’s not the only Trek in town. 10 episodes of this show, but there’s like three or four other shows too. We’re not at a loss for Trek.
Was the show doing well at all? I appreciate that I might just be in my own little bubble, but I don’t know a single person that loves this show. Some people like it, but it’s always a milquetoast endorsement, like “It’s not bad” or “It seems like a good scifi series but it feels like Star Trek fan fiction”, etc.
I’m surprised they didn’t at least strongly suspect it was the end.
Especially when compared to Strange New Worlds, which is an, imo, amazing Star Trek series.
I personally might have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been (seemingly) shoehorned into the Star Trek universe. I understand it’s not a very subjective metric, but Discovery just didn’t feel like Star Trek.
It comes across as if someone producer got pitched a sci-fi series with the plot of Discovery and thought, “This is great! It would be even better if we slapped Star Trek all over it!”
I bailed on DSC back when season 2 was airing. Specifically, Project Daedalus was my last episode. Later, I tried watching it again and trying to enjoy it more on its own merits, ignoring the Trek branding and whatnot. I wanted to bail again at the exact same point. I don’t know if it’s a too many cooks situation with the constant showrunner turnover or if the writers’ room just has an obsession with melodrama, but at no point did it feel, to me, like there was a good show hiding in there.
What I saw was ok from a plot perspective (for me). So the whole premise was nice and to me it fit into Star Trek. But as I just complained in another comment: I couldn’t cope with the amount of crying and the way they forced drama into the story.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off. Also the other officers. I should believe that these are the best of the Star Fleet, top of their class, trained for war but then they falter in the middle of a mission because their lover/friend/whatever gets hurt or dies? That just doesn’t fit.
Maybe I zoned that out from previous Star Trek (because it’s been a while …), but in my mind the characters there were a lot more stable and professional. They all had their individual quirks and mannerisms, but during missions they more or less got their shit together.
There are a lot of bad trek episodes scattered across every series. Bad episodes isn't the issue with Discovery. The issue is that, throughout all of trek, the crew has come together and stuck with each other through thick and thin. If there ever is inter-crew strife, it's solved in generally one or two episodes (except for major plot/story themes like the Maquis, or Seven being a Borg).
Discovery, on the other hand, is a show where the crew was constantly backstabbing, betraying, lying, and being all around bad towards each other. There was no finding solace among the crew in a world filled with strife -- the world was strife, and the crew was also strife. And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
It’s almost like those “filler” episodes in all the previous series actually had a function of allowing the series’ interpersonal relationships to gel and solidify. When everything is always an emergency and everyone must react RIGHT NOW OR ELSE it tends to wear people out. There’s nothing wrong with missions that just go somewhat routine and people get to interact with strange and interesting people from entirely different situations and places.
Burnham is raised by Vulcans which is used when it suits the plot (then she’s extremely analytical and objective) but then suddenly turns into an emotional mess when they want to portray drama. That just feels … off
No, that part feels very, very on to me. Burnham was a human girl who was witness to family being brutally slaughtered (as far as she knew/could tell) who was then placed in the care of a Vulcan man who liked living as a sociology experiment. This is a person who is traumatized from a relatively young age, and who has no idea how to cope with her feelings. She's never received therapy, only more psychological abuse.
The issue I ended up having with the show is that the show itself never addresses this. It's actually pretty clearly the setup for the entire series, but no one ever acknowledges that Michael needs help, no one ever tries to get her any, and, in the end, she never gets the help she needs. They took what could and should have been a character arc about healing from abuse and just turned it into "SMG's pretty good at crying".
Once it became clear that the show had zero interest in examining its inciting premise, I lost all patience with it.
I like it as well, yet I didn't find a place in Trek forums until I left Reddit last month. So this is new territory for me. Take it in stride, there are other Discovery fans out there.
Greetings fellow DSC fan. I like the show, too. Considering that Paramount+ kept it going for 5 seasons, a lot of other people watched it. While I’m a fan of the show, I don’t think it’s perfect, and I can respect other folks critiques of the show. But sometimes the vitriol generators go so long and strong, it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise with DSC criticisms.
Really depends on the site, the time of year, and the specific topic. The Trek subreddit, for instance, tended to be pro-DSC when a season was airing and anti-DSC between seasons. Even here, that recent thread on the DSC Klingon redesign was very in favor of DSC.
There’s a lot of “emotionally” in that article. Kinda fits the series that was over-filled with emotional crap. (tbf, I aborted watching somewhere in Season 3, so maybe that changed afterwards. But I doubt it.)
yea, love it or hate it, Discovery did not really change its core vibe. I think I had hopes it would in season 3. Season 2 had already played with different vibes with Pike/Spock etc. And the idea for the premise of season 3 was so bold (and which I think is the best and most forward pushing premise of Trek since Next-Gen and DS9) that I figured something new was in stall. It seemed so at first … but then wasn’t really IMO.
Enterprise, when it wasn't actively sexually harrassing T'pol, was great.
The problem is, the episodes where B&B are using Jolene Blalock as a sounding board for their fetishes are so bad, that it drags down the series as a whole.
I never understood that need. T’pol was already fiercely exotic, what with her flawless face and remote Vulcan disdain. They could have put her into a spacesuit for the entire series and she would have still been attractive AF purely due to her personality and strength of character. About the only improvement I would have liked to see is more of her character arc being in conflict with her Vulcan upbringing, particularly in trying to deal with those infuriatingly irrational humans, and her emotional entanglement with Trip.
I'm not a huge trek nerd, but recently watched the whole series, and the two main irritations were the blatant/unnecessary/annoying/offensive sexualization, and the theme song.
It's easy to skip the opening sequence but the gratuitous fetishizing was pretty awful. The whole series would have been better without.
The scenes in the isolation chamber in underwear applying gel to each other were totally unnecessary and unpleasant to watch, especially nowadays. They have aged very poorly.
The scenes in the isolation chamber in underwear applying gel to each other were totally unnecessary
I thought so at the time but later realized that was a key scene of the whole entire show. You missed a lot of the nuance. That was where T'pol developed her crush on Trip. Her crush on Trip was the only reason she became the first Vulcan to be able to stay aboard a human ship for longer than a few weeks. And T'pol's presence on the ship advising Archer was what made Archer so successful in laying the groundwork of the entire federation.
Y’know, if I had a nickel for every time Jonathan Frakes was involved in a Star Trek episode that unexpectedly became the series finale, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.
I’ve been rewatching TNG and it has become very, very apparent to me how much of the charm of the show was due to two things:
The sheer chemistry of the cast. Since really learning how much they all loved each other, it really just feels like a ship of joy.
The filler episodes let you spend time with the cast. I mean, you rarely get something like a whole scene about Data painting, or stroking a fake beard, or Geordi striking out with multiple women, or Troi extolling the virtues of chocolate sundaes.
I’ve been really impressed by how much SNW has been able to do with the ensemble, it really feels like the cast have relationships, so if we can get more of that, yes please!
I almost want to believe that they’re cancelling Discovery to give more resources to SNW’s production schedule. ;)
...i mean, let's be fair: voyager set the bar so low the franchise nearly fizzled-out in its wake, and arguably never recovered despite enterprise's strengths...
As someone who watched it with no nostalgia glasses: it is not good trek.
I can't think of a really outstanding episode off the top of my head (maybe the Tuvix one? But even that is just ... rough?). And there are some episodes in there that I actively dislike in a way I don't with most of the other series.
I like Kate Mulgrew, she was a strong actor for the role and the theme is a banger, otherwise .. meh.
I also think it's fairly weak overall but there are some really great outstanding episodes. Blink of an Eye, Counterpoint, Scorpion, for some examples. And I also agree that the worst Voyagers are really very bad, but are they that much worse than other series' follies? Is Threshold worse than Code of Honor? Sacred Ground worse than Turnabout Intruder? Fair Haven worse than Profit and Lace?
Originally sole canadian actress was hired to play Janeway...forgot her name, but you can see some original footage on YouTube, she was so bad as captain Janeway. Mulgrew took the character to a whole other level.
Personally enjoyed Voyager, skipping some episodes however, mostly those personal quests... And Neelix didn't bring much as well.
Enterprise was...meh. Learned to like it and by the third season it felt like they finally found the right direction. Loved the doctor in that series. And the theme song, my god who decided that. Awful.
Strange new worlds is great, feels like it has everything I expect from a star trek series. Atmosphere, decors, characters, theme song...
I'm retroactively annoyed at the stranded but in good repair situation. But voyager failing made Battlestar a thing so....
I also think it's just a weird transition period for tv. Still had crap budgets and weird unpolished plotlines due to the need for season-long fillers. If you cut each season down to 8-10 episodes as we sometimes do today, could be a fine show.
Star Trek really has 2 different genres, there's action/adventure and there's real hard sci-fi where philosophy is at the forefront. Voyager generally appeals more to the action/adventure fans, whereas the previous iterations appeared like the entire series was heading in a more philosophical direction with TOS to TNG to DS9 increasing in their thoughtfulness. VOY was seen as a huge backslide to people who were tuning in largely for the philosophical aspect of the show.
Considering there was and still are very few popular philosophical and thought provoking shows that challenge the viewer's world view and biases, I think it's fair to be upset that the new direction of the show is to dumb down everything and focus more on the action.
Of course, that's not to say that Voyager was completely devoid of any philosophical debate, but I don't think anyone can make the case that it's equally as intelligent as TNG and DS9.
I think that's part of why bringing in Seven of Nine helped the series a lot. Exploring how she adapted to being a human, when she'd been a Borg since she was a child, was much more philosophical and led to a lot of really great episodes.
Voyager was probably the most high concept of the era's Trek and didn't really fulfill that promise. It is funny that DS9 kept better track of its roundabouts over Voyager's shuttles.
They really didn't nail down the writing of the crew. The Doctor and Seven are the best written. However, out of the rest of the crew, only Tom Paris seems somewhat consistent.
You get some good episodes out of it, but I don't think it plays with the parts of Trek they were given to its fullest extent. I also feel like, while some of the shows are pure Trek, they aren't Voyager.
A big part of Voyager's problem was that the writers had absolutely no clue what to do with Kes. You had one of the main characters being just kind of there and largely useless. Once they brought Seven of Nine in and dropped Kes Voyager got a lot better. The writers had a clear understanding of how to write for Seven and she had a ton of character development over the final four seasons. Hell, I'd even say they did a better job with Neelix once they got rid of Kes, since they couldn't keep falling back on "Neelix is super jealous of Kes interacting with any male on the crew" BS they did a lot of. (And dear god was that annoying as hell. And I like Voyager!)
I feel like it wasn't just Kes who had this problem.
The Doctor and Seven were probably the best written characters. Tom and B'Lenna were probably the next two after that. Janeway only got better because she could act as a bad parent to Seven, which vastly improved her character and gave her focus. Neelix and Tuvok kind of drifted off to the background. Kim and Chakotay were blander than that, although Kim got a few decent character beats.
I'm not going to fault the actors on this, since this was the writing.
And Robert Beltran kept upping his salary demands each season hoping they'd fire him, since they were giving him so little acting to do. But they saying yes, so he stayed.
I'm a voyager fanboy since it aired, but it really doesn't hold up well.
Nevermind the fact that it is low quality visually and will never be remastered, but the practically non existint continuity really really really hurts it.
I still recommend people watch it, but it would be 3rd of the 'old' shows I'd suggest. (DS9 1st always because it is fucking awesome, then TNG because it brought Star Trek to the masses and solidified a lot of 'canon')
I really enjoyed Voyager. Saw it for the first time in 2020-2023, so maybe that played a part. Of course Tuvok, Seven, EMH, and Janeway were great, but I even liked Neelix as a character.
Great to know! There are more novelverse fans here than I think we realize.
I don’t know if the mods (@ValueSubtracted ) would be up for it but I’d love to have some of the authors with a fediverse presence to come over for an AMA sometime.
We’re definitely open to it, but aren’t usually in the habit of hounding people over it, if you know what I mean. As we become more established, we might be able to make some organic connections, and follow up on some from the Reddit days.
As for a Treklit community…it’s probably too soon for one, but the best way to make the case for one is to have a lot of Treklit engagement in c/startrek. We want to see that in general, which is why we’ve been trying the weekly comics post.
We usually wait to get the omnibus editions rather than order one by one. (Our local independent comic book store does better with special ordering those although they carry the occasional individual issue.)
So it’s good to get user reviews to help decide which ones to invest in.
I’ll try to get some book reviews up of the new releases. We got in all the Prodigy books as a show of support, so I was planning to give them a quick read.
Nog I think is the easiest recast. It could be explained just that the character aged. Odo would be harder. He could be a CGI character with a voice actor but that doesn’t sound good. It could be a plot point that both characters are killed prior to the beginning of the story and the story involves resolving the mystery of what happened and why.
All and all I think it’s unlikely we’ll see any kind of continuation of DS9, which is unfortunate because it’s my favorite series.
“Rémy-Luc Julian Michel Auberjonois is an American actor. He is best known for his recurring role as Mr. Albin in the television series Weeds and as Dr. Emerson on the television series Mad Men.” - Wikipedia page.
He does like so much like him, however with Odo that isn’t the most important thing. The voice is much more important and René’s voice is so very distinctive.
@Salamendacious@Evilcoleslaw In Ira Steven Behr's doc "What we left behind", he get the original writers brainstorm a new season of DS9 and they promptly kill Nog in the first episode.
I would have misgivings of using the character with René, but it wouldn’t be hard. He’s changeling, god dammit. It was one of the weird conceits of DS9 that odo kept the same humanoid form, and so the changeling who interacted with him did too (along with implausible excuses about “not being able to master the humanoid face”, or the changing virus).
Having spent time with the founders, you could easily recast “Odo” as a dozen different characters of different species and genders. Perhaps he has transcended the attachment to a single form that he developed from living among solids? I feel like watching some good actors do Odoesque performances could be quite interesting!
Yeah, that’s a really good solution. There would have to be something that gives the audience a clue that we’re dealing with the same character I think so the actors would have to really collaborate on their collective characters. That’s really a great idea.
odo is easier. Find a similar looking actor who can do a similar voice and say he got better at making a realistic human look. no more makeup needed even.
That’s possible. Rene gave odo a real presence though. I don’t know how well another actor would mimic it. They could always do something like interstellar. That character who was left on the ship by himself for all those years was markedly different from the character before they left for the water planet.
As much as I wish they could all be in a DS9 revival I don’t see why they have to. Sisko ascended, Odo returned to the founders, and it would be easy to say that Nog is just stationed on the far side of the Federation or on a deep space mission. The first two could easily be off screen presences who effect the story but are never seen. That still leaves Bashir, Dax, Kira, Worf, and Jake. Could be a smaller, more personal story that follows up on plot elements from DS9. Like what they tried to do with the first two seasons of Picard, just hopefully better written.
If they hire outstanding writers then I’d be interested in a show about Jake after his dad disappeared. Follow that timeline and show Jake’s struggle. It doesn’t really need to happen though and it would be very high risk.
20 seems unrealistic given the longer shooting time per episode and actors’ wanting flexibility to be able to work on more than one project.
12-15 however seems very possible especially with the episodic format. Producing a longer season after the strike especially would seem wise. It would also allow Paramount to take a brief hiatus midseason (the way Discovery did originally) to stretch out the schedule.
SNW has already demonstrated that it is an ensemble show with a full cast that can basically carry or star in their own episodes. Not every main cast member needs to be on set every production day, and even the principal character, Pike, can step back in some episodes.
The traditional American 20+ episode format is superior and I have no problems dying on this hill. It is the format that got almost everyone into Star Trek, and as such we are limiting ourselves with binge-junky 10 episode format.
This way I think we should sit at 12 to 15 and the norm. I love have 20+ season but for the well being of cast and crew the 12+ makes more since and while at time it would only be 2 more then the streaming 10 episode the extra wiggle room would allow for more stand alone episode.
Epic poems, such as the Iliad, were the preferred storytelling methods at one time, yet society had little issue with building upon that as they left it behind. It’s one thing to prefer something, and another to say that because something was once one way, that’s how it always should be. Things change and hopefully improve. Kind of the main theme of Trek.
However, the message of Trek also is that not all change is good, already evident in the M5 episode of TOS. There’s no shame in taking a step back if the prior state was superior, which some think it is (with regard to the 20 episode scheme)
things are a great deal more expensive these days than they were then, even comparing like to like special effects, SNW is right near the very top, and TNG was 100% advertiser supported
TNG is my favorite for now because it finished well, in spite of the notoriously bad episodes that were in each season. SNW hasn’t finished yet and could screw things up, so I can’t say it’s my favorite yet. But when comparing the two seasons of SNW to any two random seasons of TNG, SNW wins. Episode count and quality aren’t necessarily linked, true, but my point is that there’s a higher chance of introducing poor episodes when the season is longer. A longer season could produce 20 great episodes instead of 10, but I have yet to see a show where this happens.
Up until Trek started streaming, the longer seasons were all we had, so comparing NG to all the other shows before streaming, it’s my favorite. Mainly comes down to the characters for me, as I think the storytelling in the network shows after TNG were just as strong as seasons 3-7 of TNG. And even though Disco and Picard had shorter seasons, they suffered under the weight of having to fill a predetermined episode count with a serialized show, so yes, episode count and quality aren’t necessarily linked. But an episodic show with a shorter season means the show runners can be picky with the episodes they want to film, much as a chef can be picky with what dishes they want to present.
TNG was great, and the best episodes are incredible, but most episodes were fairly mediocre. I feel SNW's average is higher, and it's probably in part for having LESS than half the number of episodes per season.
I think they'd be fine with 12, maybe even 14, but beyond that I don't they could keep it as great as it's been.
@exscape@lucidinferno@BradleyUffner One need only look at the best British TV shows and how their seasons are shorter and their schedules are not yearly to see how time to work on scripts and production makes for great fiction, but that can't be exploited.
@kamenLady Ah, but you'll notice I specified "the best British TV shows". 'Sherlock' always was Moffat and Gatiss thinking they were more clever than Conan Doyle.
Rating each episode is part of the problem. We have t step back from that madness and enjoy the exploration of characters, species, and story that made us fall in love with Star Trek.
I'm not sure how it's madness. An episode can be bad in itself and not contribute anything of value to the greater story arc, in which case I don't see why it's wrong to see it as bad.
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