The Star Trek Thread, 3.0

The number one word that comes to mind watching Season 7 of VOY is "Unimaginative."

Unbearable.

Been reading this series of interviews with Robert Meyer Burnett on TREKCORE, regarding making special features, how he approaches him and a couple of his own comments on the shows. Here's his take on VOY:

Quote :

TrekCore: Let’s hear some candid talk from you about Star Trek: Voyager. It’s often the bastard stepchild of Star Trek, even more so than Enterprise, because it kind of gets forgotten in between all of the other shows. What are your thoughts on it now, looking back? Would you ever want to write VAM for that?

Robert Meyer Burnett: I’ll admit, I liked the first season of Voyager – but here’s what I don’t like about Voyager.

Voyager, to me, is just an amalgamation of Star Trek tropes that are being put through Star Trek stories that we’ve already seen before. Then, in a shameless bid to grab ratings, they co-opted things like the Borg, and ruined them. They added Jeri [Ryan], who turned out to be a great character, but they added her and she was clearly, at least at first, eye candy. Brannon Braga’s obsession with time loops and all that; to me, what Voyager should have been – and maybe you should never criticize something for what it wasn’t, but what it actually was – but I do think that with Voyager, you have a half-alien, half-human in Roxann Dawson’s character (‘B’Elanna Torres’) who is Spock, who is Data, now a cliché. It was just an amalgamation of everything we’d ever seen before on Star Trek, and it didn’t offer much in the way of something being new. That is what I never liked about it.

But it had a great idea – that a starship has been flung to the other side of the galaxy, cut off from its supply line, cut off from any help – but the idea that they were trying to get home, to me, was dumb. Because, theoretically, the only way they’re going to get home is to cheat. They’re going to find some way to cheat, because they’re going to need some propulsion system or some transwarp conduit… Played straight, it would be impossible for them to get home, so that show should have been about Columbus going to the New World, or something, where they were going to take the ideals of the Federation – the idea of the Prime Directive – and try and build a coalition in a part of the galaxy that was full of strife and full of problems and full of conflict; try and worldbuild… how do you build a Federation beachhead in an area of space that isn’t interested while you’re cut off from any other supplies or aid from your homebase. That would have been the show that I would have liked to have seen – it would have been a much different show than we’d ever seen before, and I think it would have been fascinating to watch.

But they didn’t go that way; they just started telling standard Star Trek stories that were, most of the time, rehashes and variations of what we’d already seen on the previous three series. There was nothing new, whereas Deep Space Nine was full of new ideas all the time, and it did really interesting stuff. That’s not to say that when I catch random episodes of Voyager, I don’t catch episodes that I like. I’ll watch individual episodes, and now I’m not so vehemently against it the way I used to be… but it just seems to me that it was the copycat Star Trek show. I know that there’s a lot… again, if Voyager was the very first Star Trek show you came to and you started watching it when you were young – also, I know that there’s a lot of women like Mary Czerwinski, who’s done a lot of work for Creation and Roddenberry.com, who adore the show. So I know – if you were female and came to Star Trek because of Voyager, there are a lot of – beginning with Kathryn Janeway – a lot of really strong female characters. Kes, Seven of Nine, all these characters… there’s a lot of strong female characters on that show, and I can see… and Roxann Dawson became a director! She started directing because of that show. I don’t begrudge people who came to Star Trek for the first time because of Voyager, but I think that Voyager is just so gimmicky, like, let’s do “Year of Hell”, let’s go back to Earth in the 20th Century [“Future’s End”], but then hit the reset button, so nothing which happened really mattered; I hated that. Also, everything, to me, was just shamelessly gimmicky all the time. Plus, the Kazon were lame, the Phage was stupid… I didn’t like it. And Janeway’s command decisions were usually incredibly suspect.

More comments on his love for TAS, and criticizing Abrams' Trek.
http://tng.trekcore.com/bluray/01162013_robmeyerburnett6.html

Excellent.

I actually really loved the "Free Enterprise" movie. It was sorta doing the "geeks are cool" thing ten years before everyone else did.

I remember seeing an ad for it on TV back in the 90s and thought it looked funny, but never really got around to checking it out. Gotta change that.

It was sorta the first step of Shatner learning how to make fun of himself and embrace a comedic persona and at the time was unique for depicting geeks as people, capable of having relationships and foibles just like anyone else.

His musical Julius Caesar would've been something else. All six hours of it.

I haven't been posting about my TOS run as my thoughts are generally the same as always. But boy, does "Miri" suck. They spend all of this time focusing on the disease, and then they leave the planet behind with a medical team. But nobody seems to give a shit that the planet IS AN EXACT DUPLICATE OF EARTH. With no clouds, and looking like the Paramount backlot after a tornado.

Obviously this was done to have the teaser end with a mystery. And when they beam down it "explains" the fact that everything down to the cars and football helmets are just like on Earth of 1960.

I don't even care, though. The episode sucks, period. And Kirk is beaten up by children.

I will say that Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard are good. Darby at least makes her scenes watchable, even if Kirk comes off as a pedo.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Darby at least makes her scenes watchable, even if Kirk comes off as a pedo.

But, SHE'S A YOUNG WOMAN!!!!

Its an awful episode. One of the few S1 lapses.

It's S1's greasy shart. "The Alternative Factor" is it's full-blown explosive diarrhea.

I'm considering getting the TOS soundtrack boxset.

Unless someone else knows how to get it another way...?

Register at FFShrine and all your problems will be solved.

http://forums.ffshrine.org/f92/official-tos-music-thread-123255/

Hint: it's not really about FINAL FANTASY.

I've checked that thread. Even have it bookmarked. But where are the links?

"The Alternative Factor"

A problem that I have with "Tomorrow is Yesterday" is that the whole ordeal with John Christopher comes about completely due to Kirk making three utterly stupid decisions in a row.

1. He orders the tractor beam engaged on the plane. Why? There's no reason.
2. He has the pilot beamed aboard instead of perhaps to the ground.
3. He proceeds to have diarrhea of the mouth to the guy from the 20th century about shit from the 23rd.

Ya know, I've always been underwhelmed with the scenario in "Court Martial" that leads to the actual court martial. They should have tried him for this!

Yeah, "Court Martial" is a great episode, but it seems odd that they bring him up on charges for those decisions considering the other shit he gets away with on that show.

Another WTF? thing in "Court Martial" is the gigantic wrench that's just sitting there in engineering.

"The Return of the Archons" is pretty decent. Pity we never got the season 4 sequel where Landru is rebuilt on Earth.

The wrench-thing in engineering is similar to that pipe-thing in Space Seed. Not there beforehand, not afterwards but damn handy for Kirk to give a good thrashing.

I was thinking the same thing. Khan, genetic superman, tyrant, done in by a pipe.

A friend I showed "Space Seed" and TWOK to said his only complaint about the movie was that Kirk didn't full-on fight Khan in physical combat, which was his favourite part of the original episode.

He's the exact demographic that "Where No Man" was designed for after "The Cage" was rejected.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

A friend I showed "Space Seed" and TWOK to said his only complaint about the movie was that Kirk didn't full-on fight Khan in physical combat, which was his favourite part of the original episode.

He's the exact demographic that "Where No Man" was designed for after "The Cage" was rejected.

I'll take that demographic over the current one.

Though it can be said that it would have been nice for Kirk and Khan to meet face to face.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I was thinking the same thing. Khan, genetic superman, tyrant, done in by a pipe.

can only imagine this 'John Harrison' will be done in the same way

"The Devil in the Dark" is probably the only episode of S1 that I honestly have no real criticisms about or nits to pick. I'm even amused that the miners looks like a bunch of guys you'd find in a bar in Milwaukee. I kept expecting the leader of the mine to crack open a bottle of Schlitz. And how can you possibly not like an episode that has a guy named Schmitter?

"The City on the Edge of Forever"... Usually called the best. I'd call it the most powerful. The central conflict is extremely grabbing and Joan Collins is luminous. I still find the whole setup with the hypo a bit.... I dunno.