“I could be a severe bastard,” he writes. “My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious … On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that’s when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby’s, ‘We’ve got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick’ comment by saying, ‘We are not here, Denise, to have fun.'”
“In retrospect,” Stewart continues, “everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at. I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.”
Stewart then details how Frakes and Spiner came to his trailer for a heart-to-heart chat.
“People respect you,” Spiner told him. “But I think you misjudged the situation here.”
Recalls Stewart: “He and Jonathan acknowledged that yes, there was too much goofing around and that it needed to be dialed back. But they also made it clear how off-putting it was — and not a case study in good leadership — for me to try to resolve the matter by lecturing and scolding the cast. I had failed to read the room, imposing RSC behavior on people accustomed to the ways of episodic television — which was, after all, what we were shooting.”
In short, he became angry because he was used to theater acting and tried to hold a tv production to theater’s standards.
he actually learns how to be a captain while playing the role, that's so awesome.. he gets a lecture from Number One and his Science Operations Officer on human behavior, it's just hilarious and beautiful, i'm dying here..
All good friend! I’m just too much of a Trek nerd to not correct it. It’s an easy mistake to make too, seeing as Data handles a lot of the science related stuff on the show and the Enterprise-D is notably lacking a Chief Science Officer. Behind the scenes Data was originally going to be in Sciences, but the producers didn’t like the way a blue uniform looked with his skin so they made him Ops.
that is awesome my friend, thank you.. you know i may have watched nearly every episode of that show, and not really been sure about his job, haha.. but i just naturally equate him with Spock, when i think about his relationship to the Captain character.. and the fact that Spiner's character is the one learning human emotions from square one makes the whole real world episode with Stewart (the ACADEMY man, for God's sake) even better..
Yes. If he carried a grudge for years, that would make him a pompous ass. This, on the other hand, just sounds like someone making the adjustment to television acting from a stage career.
I like that his fellow cast members felt like they could talk to him about it. That alone says quite a bit.
There’s interviews with Frakes where he talks about stepping into the director’s role for a few episodes and quickly realizing that it was very difficult to do when the cast would goof off up until the word ACTION gets called.
So Stewart probably had a point, especially from production’s view.
What a clickbaity headline. It makes it sound like there was some drama between him and the other cast members. But the article is just some stories of them goofing off on set. Regardless, it’s nice to know they all got along and had fun making the show
I’m always in favor of putting your own title. You are sharing something, make the title about what made you share that. Reference the original title in the body of the post.
Respectfully to the other person that replied to you…No, what you did was correct. It’s important to keep the title the same as you are sharing not editorializing.
It depends. With important news I would agree, but this article is just a fluff piece. Changing it would harm nobody, and in fact be less harmful due to the misleading nature of the original headline. It would have been fine for OP to title the post something like “nice article about Jonathan Frakes having to put up with the cast goofing around when he directed a few TNG episodes”
I figured as much, when I do posts I do my best not to sensationalize them. Thats why I started anchoring the titles to the articles so there would not be any allegations or claims of me doing so.
Lol I love Frakes just dropping to the floor like a sack of potatoes when they flub. Also Data just slowly bonking his head after LeVar Burton says a line completely wrong. Very funny stuff!
Ryan’s Edits on youtube does a great series called Star Trek INtakes that edits those outtakes back into the original scenes.
So you’ll have stuff like Data rolling his eyes in mock horror during an otherwise serious scene. It’s honestly one of my favorite things on the internet.
I am not tipsy and the title got me too. I was running a magic event in my game shop and let out an audible gasp causing several players to ask what was wrong.
I had the same panic. That's not even the title of the article ('Voyager's Roxann Dawson Had A Chance To Direct Star Trek But Dropped It For Another Show') so, unless the website changed it, you have to wonder what OP was doing writing it that way.
OP isn’t American. It’s not a universal euphemism.
Even having lived in the US at one point it’s not an automatic connection.
Canadians (at least in my experience) use the expression ‘passed away’ if at all to avoid saying ‘died.’
But also being Canadian, I’ve given my regrets elsewhere on this thread. And I’m sorry for the unintended shock to any and all who don’t share my dialect.
I’ve lived everywhere but Atlantic Canada actually. I also work with colleagues from coast to coast.
One hears it, (as in, ‘she moved into town once her husband had passed on’) but it’s not the kind of automatic euphemism that would make it the first interpretation. ‘She passed on that opportunity’ is really common.
No worries. You regularly comment and post on a variety of topics, always with a steady and non-antagonistic viewpoint. This situation is very, “it’s not you, it’s me.” I have relatives from the southern U.S., and they shorten “passed away” to just “passed.” It’s just what I’m used to hearing.
My favourite line in the whole thing is right at the end when Commander Jack Ransom (played by Jerry O’Connell) walks past the poster of Lieutenant commander Una Chin-Riley (played by Rebecca Romjin) and calls her “The hottest first officer in Starfleet history.”
It took me a long time to reach this conclusion. I love TOS, and the characters are cultural icons, but when I want to fanboy over the whole “philosophy” of Star Trek, I’m thinking of TNG every single time.
I’ll probably get wrecked in here for saying this,but I never liked TOS. It’s so campy and hokey. Even the movies with the original cast don’t interest me all that much. I respect them for paving the way for TNG, but I’ll never choose TOS over TNG.
I wouldn’t say they are related at all, at least in terms of how the TV comes off vs the movies even though the cast is the same. TOS TV show is not too dissimilar to the old school Batman show in it’s corniness. Not to that level of silliness, but they were contemporaries of each other when they aired on TV in the late 60s.
@Hazdaz@BeigeAgenda the hippie vibe was part of the general campy tone those days - see The Man from U. N. C. L. E., Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, That Was The Week That Was, or The Wild Wild West for other variations on that theme. Hi-tech, Steampunk, SciFi, variety, news spoofs - all had similar tone
Oh I get that was the tone of shows back then. Get Smart was another one. It’s just not my cup of tea for the most part.
Of course the irony is that I think shows (especially movies) these days are too serious and I almost wish they were a little more fun and playful like they were back in the 60s/70s. Just as long as they don’t go too silly.
I agree. TOS has some interesting characters and fun moments, but I just can’t get into like I get into TNG. TNG is a series I can watch start to finish and all the movies and then start right over and watch it all again. TOS is one I might re-watch every 5+ years to refresh my memory, but I’ll put it on exclusively while I’m doing something else so I don’t waste my attention. My Dad loves TOS and TNG, and regularly references TOS, expecting me to remember episode names and whole plot lines. Oops.
That’s actually why can rewatch TOS endlessly but TNG only occasionally. TOS is that light popcorn fare that’s entertaining but you don’t take very seriously. TNG is serious sci-fi that challenges the audience often with very difficult subject matter. The latter is objectively the better show but if I’m looking for something to throw on for casual fun, for me it’s TOS all the way.
I tried to go back and watch it as part of a kind of personal nerd pilgrimage. I just couldn’t get through it to save my life. Then I hit the beginning of TNG and was shocked, that was not what I remembered at all from all the reruns I saw growing up. I’m honestly still kind of shocked it lasted long enough to grow the beard.
I really think that can be said for a lot of shows. First few episodes, and sometimes the first few seasons don’t hit like the later ones. Simpsons, Seinfeld, TNG, Arrested Development and a lot of other shows were constantly on the cusp of getting canceled until they got their audience and the writers hit their stride with the story.
It happens so much to shows that we know ended up turning out good, that it always makes me wonder how many shows were canceled a few episodes or maybe a season or two sooner than they should have.
I love the first two seasons for their episodic adventure structure. But I also greatly appreciate the character driven structure of seasons 3+ and I definitely think the aesthetic changes for s3 were an unadulterated improvement.
Some ferangi conned him into playtesting and debugging a new holonovel under the guise of it being a prototype training course for cadets. The whole series was the b-plot of a TNG episode about the ethics of clone voting or something.
Yeah, the author was pretty obviously decided on his position and accuracy was an afterthought. But if you check his name, you’ll realize he makes a mean spicy chicken sandwich fwiw
If you read the initial material, Data is drastically different. There is no explicit mention of being unemotional, just that he tends to speak more formally. He’s supposed to be more like the Ilia probe than Spock.
Worf didn’t exist at first, so Geordi the teacher with bionic vision would be the most “other” character. If they’d seen any of the early press material for Phase II, Spock’s replacement there was a very junior officer.
The idea was that the Klingons had joined the Federation and we’d see Klingon Starfleet personnel in the background. When they did add Worf, he was to be more frequently Data’s relief than Yar’s.
At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.
I used to put that one in the same category as the man-in-suit gorn from TOS: budget/tech restrictions. But even in the latest SNW episode, we see someone waking up on a piece of wreckage with gravity still perfectly fine, while also getting several zero gravity scenes in the same episode.
Aritificial Gravity is probably part of the system that prevents everyone from going splat against the window Maneo style when they leave warp. Without inertial dampening you couldn’t move ships basically at all, so these systems are probably passive.
The inertial dampeners have issues all the time tho, but instead of everyone getting turned into red mist against a surface instantly it just causes them to sway a little and the camera to shake.
Survivor(star)ship bias: There are only episodes about minor issues with the inertial dampeners because major issues with the system would be very short and messy, and not make for good archival training footage for cadets or whatever the Watsonian reason for our Doyalist TV show may be.
I watched most of the first episode but had to leave the couch for real world reasons (tragedy). So far it’s fantastic! Verymuch not Star Trek which is a nice change and unusual for me. Thanks for the recommendation!
I am so sorry for the tragedy that happened to you. I hope, you have people to be with you.
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I'm glad, you liked my recommendation. Many people don't get hooked until the 4th episode or so, so, if you're not entirely convinced, give it some time.
Inertial Dampeners failing means the ship can no longer remain at warp. (Ship would be fine, the meat bags of mostly water would not) Trek is usually pretty consistent about that part.
You should really only need inertial dampeners when changing velocity. You only go splat when the ship's velocity is significantly different from yours. If it slows down before you do, you splat on the forward bulkhead. If it speeds up faster than you, you splat on the aft bulkhead.
I can’t remember which series this is from but I swear I remember them saying that the grav plating still holds a charge even in the event of total power failure. So even when the ship is disabled, gravity will maintain it’s hold for a period of time and then will slowly dissipate
If it was mentioned, it was probably in ENT. They talked a lot more about grav plating in that show than any of the others, probably more than all of them combined.
This is the literal only reason I haven’t tuned in. I’m not signing up and keeping track of yet another streaming service, especially one that’s only has one thing I want to watch. This show is the only one I’m actually missing right now.
I will say, I’ve been getting a lot more useful things done once I started cancelling streaming services that I hadn’t watched anything on in months.
Yeah, that’s the irritating thing about P+, they think they’re worth the same as D+ a month with only one big franchise to their name. D+ brought together Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Fox content before launching.
I tend to agree here. But it has been interesting watching the proliferation of streaming services and trying to figure out what’s gonna happen next.
Like Netflix was a big first-mover, then everyone realized they could keep more money if they built their own streaming service, then everyone realized that building and running a streaming service is expensive and complicated, then everyone had to get onto the Original Content treadmill to try to keep folks subscribed which has led to somehow even more commodification of art, and now that running at a loss and pouring cash into original content to bump up numbers has gotten too expensive some services are pricing themselves out of the market.
I’m fascinated to see what the next big move is for these businesses. With more and more people starting to choose month to month which one or two services to subscribe to rather than keeping them all, I wonder if we’re gonna continue seeing the return of ad-supported plans or some services only offering yearly contracts or what the next move will be in pursuit of endless growth.
I honestly think that music did more to hurt the show than anything else. It was the musical equivalent of starting EVERY EPISODE with a voiceover saying: “we hate all that old star trek. This is the new WB Network Star Trek, with 70% more down home, Midwestern American values! Yeehaw!”
Yep … completely agree and I’ve said the same before. Whether the producers liked it or not, the opening and its vibe is part of Trek. If you want to do a different kind of show … cool … but you’ve gotta meet fans somewhere in the middle. Starting the whole thing off with a complete undoing of the whole vibe of the thing is not the right way to meet fans in the middle.
I’m sure I’m not alone in this, but when I first saw enterprise, I honestly thought it was a cheap rip off that was bound to get sued, and the song was a huuuuge part in the that impression. “No Star Trek would start with that song, this is some weird corporatised shit”.
And the effect of that … to this day, even though I didn’t mind ENT S4, I don’t count it as part of (my) Trek (it also did particularly bad on the bechdel test). And to this day, even with new-Trek, we’re struggling to get new series that push Trek forward without being nostalgia driven, a reboot, prequel or maybe even all of the above (looking at you SNW!). Lower Decks, in this way, really does stand out (Prodigy too, though I haven’t seen it).
I liked the song when I was a kid and watched Enterprise (and I liked Enterprise in general) but growing up, the sheer American nationalism throughout the series was pretty unwatchable. Still leagues ahead of the all-American new Trek.
To quote the great Nicholas Meyer (Director of Wrath of Khan) who spoke on this topic:
“Roddenberry had his own utopian vision about the perfectibility of man, and I never really believed that. And I don’t think the show demonstrates that. I think it is about gunboat diplomacy. In the final analysis, the Enterprise fires. They’re always shooting and bringing civilization, and coming to worlds where they don’t approve of tyrannical enterprises – no pun intended – and they substitute their own quote unquote enlightened version of how society is supposed to work, which is essentially American.”
I didn't think she's gay, probably more pansexual. She had a pretty weird upbringing, if you'll recall, so her sexuality is more like "gender is irrelevant."
The episode that really nailed down what a talented actor Jeri Ryan is was the time she had all those assimilated personalities surface and was switching back and forth rapidly, and the bit where the Doctor "took over" her body when they were in prison.
Both times, it was absolutely believable that someone else was at the wheel, and "Seven" wasn't there.
While I absolutely do not want to defend Rick Berman, I also think it's important to acknowledge that his brand of assholishness was not unique (and, frankly, still isn't).
It’s also why so many people latched onto The Orville.
People like to say that TOS was a product of its time, but thematically it reached for the absolute stratosphere. DIS just basically played our own paranoid dysfunction in a new setting. Hell, chunks of it felt like 24 in spaaaace
The Orville geeks me out, because all the ads play it up as “FAMILY GUYYYYYYY IINNNNN SPPPAACCCEEEE” and I whole heartedly believe that’s how he pitched it to make it happen -
And then it was one big bait n switch, “HAHA actually I’m just a nerd and wanted to make a good scifi show suck it Fox!”
That’s actually how he did it. That’s why the first couple eps are kinda meh, then BOOM if the stars should appear, pria, krill, what the fuck just happened???
I think this is an extremely lousy headline, but the content is good.
Firstly, the headline slightly misquotes what Matalas actually said (emphasis added):
“We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’”
I think a story being a little too “inside baseball” and reliant on stuff from decades ago is a perfectly valid note, especially when we’re talking about ideas like this:
The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening.
The stuff about COVID messing with the writing and shooting schedule is understandable, and created problems that can be seen in many TV shows filmed around that time. All the same, it makes me wish they had decompressed the schedule and not rushed through things as much as they did.
The comments about there being a lot of different ideas in season two are interesting, since I think she overall series’ biggest flaw is that it crammed a lot of ideas, many of which I like quite a bit, into only 30 episodes, with few (none?) of them being fully explored.
And regarding the Jurati Borg…I don’t know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.
And regarding the Jurati Borg…I don’t know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.
Yes, I was surprised to read that there was any misconception. It seemed pretty clear to me that nothing they did in the past would have altered the history of TNG/Voyager/etc.
As I recall, the order of events played out like this:
Picard and crew entered an alternate timeline in the Picard era (25th century, ~20 years after TNG era).
Picard took that timeline’s Borg Queen into the shared past of the two timelines.
Jurati merged with that Borg Queen.
They fixed the timeline and returned to the standard Star Trek timeline. Queen Jurati remained in the past. At this time, “Borg Queen Prime” (the one we know from First Contact) was still in the Delta Quadrant, unaffected by any of this.
In the 25th century, Queen Jurati re-appears with her own collective, entirely separate from the Prime Collective we’ve known throughout TNG, Voyager, etc. From the 21st century up the 25th, Queen Jurati just stayed out of history’s way to avoid a time paradox, ensuring that the chain of events that led to her creation would still happen.
I really enjoyed Jurati’s story in season 2, and was a bit disappointed that we didn’t see her at all in season 3, since she and her collective should no longer be required to stay out of history’s way. But at the same time, they set that up at the end of season 2 pretty explicitly. I just felt like if they were going to bring the Borg back again, they ought to least mention that there’s a whole other collective of friendly Borg who are possibly much more technologically advanced than the Prime Borg and are kinda-sorta part of the Federation.
If the network had a problem with the plans for season 2 being too dependent on older stuff it’s odd that season 3 still managed to be so dependent on older stuff, considering the seasons were apparently filmed back-to-back. Did the network folks give their notes on season 2 and then stop paying attention?
I’m not going to complain that it wasn’t specifically written for long-time fans, but I am disappointed that it wasn’t specifically written for long-time fans.
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