a reply to:
scraedtosleep
This is the place I am in with Star Trek at the moment.
I have been a fan since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and love the original series (although for totally different reasons, than I enjoy the
other parts of the franchise), TNG, DS9, and quite enjoyed a lot of what Voyager had to offer. I like the lore, have HUNDREDS of Trek related books,
some of them having to do with technical breakdowns of the spacecraft featured in both film and television shows in the Star Trek family, others just
fictions which flesh out the aspects of the lore of the setting, not dealt with in the shows and movies.
However, Voyager, as you say, was the last Star Trek series which did anything for me. Enterprise was a total waste of production time and money, if
you ask me. First of all, it was a prequel, which is dodgy ground to start with, since there are only a few periods previous to the installation of
Captain James Tiberius Kirk as captain of the Enterprise, with regard to the in universe lore, which ought to have enough resemblance to either the
original series setting, or indeed the TNG setting, to make them watchable entertainment. In the period covered by Enterprise, the most challenging
thing about operating a starship would not have been the scheming of alien species, or the machinations of undesirables in the command structure, or
time traveling borg, or whatever nonsense was a foot in Enterprise. It would simply have been dealing with the problems which come up when your
technology is not actually up to snuff, when your engines fail because their design is so inefficient that you spend more time adrift than under
power, the problems of keeping people supplied with medicines, food, water, and so on. In the show however, the ship itself has a sleek, modern
looking design, which makes the Enterprise of TOS, look like a bloody Nissan Micra, which is one of the many reasons that prequelising Star Trek to a
pre-Kirk era, is and always was a bloody stupid idea, from a series perspective.
I did enjoy the first of the new batch of films, on the basis that the time lines were buggered about with. If they had not have been, I would have
been unable to accept them at all, since again, stylistically, the ships were all wrong for the period, and so on, and so forth. I did not mind Into
Darkness, although it had some holes in it, one might say, and I have not seen the other film that came out, simply because I saw the trailers, my
reaction to which was "Since when the bloody hell is Star Trek supposed to look like a pajama party which got into a rugby scrum with a Star WARS fan
club?". If you had told me, that since these films have been made, with this new timeline, any future series will now operate on THEIR timeline, I
would have said "Stop this ride, let the people with taste and discernment off".
Look at comic book related movies, right? The BEST ones, are as rigidly devoted to the comic books they portray, as is physically possible. Case in
point, Logan is a brilliant movie, but X-Men Origins: Wolverine is TERRIBLE, just a TERRIBLE movie. Same lead actor, same character, but the directors
and direction are totally different, and simply put, the Origins movie was awful because?
TOTAL LACK OF RESPECT FOR THE SOURCE MATERIAL ON THE PART OF PRODUCERS AND DIRECTORS ALIKE!
By that I mean, that fans of the comics which came before, should find themselves unable to utter a single "Thats not canon" or "They buggered the
plot about here" or "Wow... this movie has nothing to do with *insert name of intellectual property here*. This is tripe" when watching a comic book
inspired film, and the same thing can be said of Star Trek series. The people making these things need to accept that if they want to work with a
totally or even nearly free reign, then they may simply not work on things which have an existing following, pre-existing timelines, pre-established
paradigms.
To do anything other than work WELL within the pre-drawn lines which define the Star Trek universe, the characters, species, the progression of the
advance of technology throughout time, and so on, is just not acceptable, because unless the writer has more respect for what has gone before, than
they do for their own vision, then personally speaking, I do not think they should be permitted to work on these things.
Star Trek is more than a fictional universe, more than a television show or collection thereof, more than a film franchise. Its a lifestyle, a way of
thinking, a way of life. You cannot attach things to it willy nilly, so those working on projects related to it should not be trying to put their own
stamp on it, but fit comfortably and without overmuch fanfare, into it. Whats happening now, is a case of directors and producers with egos too large
to fit, trying to shoehorn themselves into a franchise in which they do not belong, with no regard for what it does to the lore. This is my fear, that
the lore (which, before the new cluster of movies, was a huge, but largely cohesive and beautiful thing), will now become a convoluted, utterly
unfollowable mess, as a result of nothing more than those making a show, not understanding their own total irrelevance in the face of the lore,
failing to realise just how little importance their artistic freedom has, when compared with the weight of what has been before, and staying true to
it.