What a fucking breath of fresh air. Never watched it because I thought it would be lame since there's never any fighting. But fuck me it stands in stark contrast to all other media. It shows a future I actually want to live in. Everything else is some dystopian, violence ridden, dim look on humanity. Don't get me wrong I love a good dystopia but wow.
Fuck now I'm a nerd send help.
Looking forward to the Irish reunification of 2024 personally.
At this point it's still almost possible, like holy shit, what if Scotland ends the UK, and Ireland does some kind of partial reunification, this could literally happen.
Awesome, welcome to the fandom!
It shows a future I actually want to live in. Everything else is some dystopian, violence ridden, dim look on humanity. Don’t get me wrong I love a good dystopia but wow.
Just FYI, I'd avoid watching the new shows, Star Trek Discovery or Star Trek Picard.
Lower Decks is pretty good, yeah. The writers know how to write a coherent plot, unlike Alex Kurtzman.
Wow really? The commercials seemed like poo poo doo Doo trek. It's good?
It's a very mixed bag with the movies. Here's my personal opinions on each:
The Motion Picture- I think it's a great movie, but a lot of people disagree because it's very slow and strange. Might be an acquired taste, but I love it.
The Wrath of Khan- Fantastic flick, generally considered to be the best Star Trek film.
The Search For Spock- OK IMO, but a big downgrade from Wrath of Khan. Some lame stuff happens, but Christopher Lloyd plays a great hammy villain.
The Voyage Home- For me, this is tied with Wrath of Khan for best Star Trek movie. In a departure from the last two films, it's a fun, light comedy with an environmentalist message, written and directed by Leonard Nemoy.
The Final Frontier- Very bad, but funny if you don't take the franchise too seriously and like "so-bad-they're-good" type movies. Directed by William Shatner, whose massive ego just drips in every scene.
The Undiscovered Country- A solid film and a good end end to the TOS series.
Generations- Sucks. Stupid plot, ruins one of the best episodes of Next Gen, totally unnecessary addition of Kirk in the plot. A good performance from Malcolm McDowell elevates an otherwise stupid villain.
First Contact- A lot of people like this one- it's fairly solidly written, the special effects hold up extremely well, but it kind of ruins a lot of what makes TNG great.
Insurrection- Sucks.
Nemesis- Sucks. Nothing else to say about either Nemesis or Insurrection, they just plain suck.
09- Dumb action schlock that's fun for one watch but doesn't hold up at all on repeat viewings.
Into Darkness- Pure dogshit, the absolute worst Star Trek film, and it has heavy competition in that area.
Beyond- Actually kind of good, still action schlock with a weak villain, but IMO it's the only Abrams-Trek film to really nail the characters and the world.
I'll always love Undiscovered Country because it gave us Christopher Plummer as a one eyed Klingon general (whose eyepatch is bolted to his skull, what a badass!) who quotes Shakespeare while blasting torpedoes at his foes. What a fun character.
My absolute favourite joke in that film is when Bones, and I think Spock, are loading up a torpedo to fire at Chang's ship and he's once again quoting Shakespeare over the comm channel, and Bones is just like "does this guy ever shut up?" lol
Lmao! I almost referenced that exact part! You hear Chang say "I AM AS CONSTANT AS THE NORTHERN STAR" and then Bones says that quip. It's fantastic. A toast to your good taste, comrade. Edit: Yeah its Spock. He asks Bones to help him "Doctor, would you mind assisting me with performing surgery on a torpedo?"
Okay so maybe I've seen this movie too many times, don't @ me.
It's a good movie and weirdly not that talked about for some reason. II and IV come up a lot in Star Trek conversation but VI is really solid but I feel doesn't get mentioned as much.
It also has a character in it called Worf and he's played by Michael Dorn but he's also not that Worf played by Michael Dorn which is weird.
It also has René Auberjonois play one of the villains. He was called Colonel West which was a jab at Lt. Colonel Oliver North.
Another recurring character is Chang's ship getting blown up, where the scene shows up in Generations (where it's portraying the Duras sisters ship) because Paramount were cheap fucks, I guess.
I knew about the way they pretended Worf was a different Worf in TNG but I didn't know about the Oliver North joke nor the part where they reused the SFX shot of Chang's ship blowing up. Awesome trivia bits, thanks for those, I'll have to tell my Trek (original series and the old movies) father about those bits the next time we talk. He was the one that introduced me to Star Trek because he used to watch it in its original broadcast back in ye olden times. When the Sci Fi channel re-ran the original series we'd tape it on VHS and watch it together later on after he got home from work (it used to air in the mid afternoon if I'm not mistaken, back in like 1998/1999)
The real joke is that he doesn't quite understand why I am such an ardent socialist. Sorry dad, you showed me a better future, don't blame me for doubling down.
It also has Sisko's dad and the dude who plays Martok is in there somewhere. I was watching the movie with the subtitle commentary by Micheal Okuda and there may actually be more DS9 actors than TOS ones in that movie.
I seriously thought about putting a Mike Stoklasa emoji after my comment lol.
but a lot of people disagree because it’s very slow and strange
There's a reason why it's also called The Slow Motion Picture, or The Motionless Picture.
Agree except I'm not huge on Voyage Home and Undiscovered Country is tied with Khan for me.
Original series movies are good. Like the one where they face off against God (Star Trek V). Most people disagree with me on this
Original Series movies are good, 5 is the only particularly bad one but it's schlocky fun. TNG movies are weh.
First Contact is fun but holy shit it needed to just chill for a second. The pacing during the first half is just too fast. Insurrection is actually my favorite TNG movie because it's the only one to actually be TNG in movie form
Yes Discovery is apparently anti-trek. I cannot confirm because I will not watch it.
It's also nice that most of Star Trek is episodic enough to jump in and out of. Serialized TV has its place, but it's also cool to just watch a few episodes of something without missing any larger plot.
Gene Roddenberry's wife said he was a Maoist. The first two seasons of TNG were led by him and it certainly has a different feel than S3-S7.
He even wanted the Romulans to be "Space Maoists" (note how much more sympathetically they're portrayed in the TOS episodes compared to the Klingons) and was very, very angry when the novels turned them into Space Romans/Confucians and TNG made them Space KGB.
They're legitimately the worst seasons, but yeah she did say that lol
If I had to pick one Trek, it would be TNG, but god damn DS9 does a lot of things better.
Isn't it? It's actually an optimistic show which is so rare in sci-fi. Everything is so grimdark and I enjoy grimdark but a little socialist optimism is nice. Which is why JJ Abbrams needs to suffer a few decades of back-breaking hard labor under the whip for his destruction of that, for turning it into another ridiculous, explosions in space, grim-dark, sci hollow, piece of consumerist garbage. I seethe with rage whenever I see that guy's name, he had to destroy it and he is a bastard. I suppose it was inevitable given that it's owned by a capitalist media empire that obviously realized soon enough that they couldn't be funding space socialism futurism with their money.
Watch order: TNG > TOS > DS9. Voyager is fash (it's watchable but not great), Enterprise is garbage, everything newer I don't know about and don't care about given the direction it's taken since the "reboot".
I actually quite like Voyager, was my fav for years until I recently rewatched DS9 and realised how fucking good it was. A lot of Voyager was just memes and episodes for the sake of it, whereas most of DS9 was magnificent.
Same opinions re. the reboot stuff, don't care to watch it since it's not made for me, it's made to milk a previous brand for all its worth
Voyager is alright I'm just memeing. It just never really had the same magic as TNG.
I like DS9 best, even though it's the darkest of the lot. Shows what happens once the Enterprise gives it's grand speeches and moves on. 1st season is garbage but the first season of everything but TOS is garbage.
ENT is definitely utterly useless for most of its run, but gets really good half way through season 3. Apparently if they'd continued they were going to do the Romulan Wars and base it strongly off of Diane Duane's Rihannsu novels where the not-quite-yet Federation gets its ass handed to it by the space equivalent of a Technical swarm.
I'll defend Voyager. I've been watching it over the last few weeks and while there are a lot of trash episodes, I think it's more good than bad. It's basically TNG but with less likeable characters (the Doctor and Seven of Nine are good tho), an overarching plot that doesn't make much sense and wastes a lot of good plot threads, and a wildly inconsistent captain who occasionally does wildly immoral things with no real ramifications. Which sounds really bad but it still has plenty of really great episodes despite all that by virtue of how self-encapsulated they are. Also, both TOS and TNG have plenty of astonishingly bad episodes, so there really isn't a radical difference there.
Definitely worth watching.
Fully automated queer vegan space communism when :sadness:
After a century of riots, a nuclear war followed by Fascist governments, being bailed out by some arrogant condescending elves, and several ultra-destructive conflicts culminating in a battle to the death against the Romulan fleet near Pluto apparently.
i loved farscape but every episode felt emotionally exhausting especially during the later seasons, these people can't have nice things :(
I watched farscape then stargate, and when I hit season 9 I was pleasantly surprised but also confused.
It’s funny that you mention that because my roommate and I just started SG-1 after finishing Farscape! We’re almost finished with Season 2! Before Farscape were watching Enterprise (it’s been a long road...) which I also loved.
Highly recommend reading the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov if you want more non-depressing sci-fi futurism. It's kinda depressing because it's about the collapse of a galactic empire, but all the crises are solved non-violently and Asimov was definitely influenced by Marxism and historical materialism. The whole universe is basically a fun thought experiment about a universe where science becomes religion and the effects that would have on the development of productive forces in feudal society.
Also, cool spaceships and funny names.
Not gonna lie, Foundation bored me to tears. I generally really like Asimov, and it has an interesting central concept, but it stretches that central concept real thin and doesn't really do anything else all that well.
It is also most definitely not an optimistic future, especially with the ending, if that's what anyone's going for. It's not super dark or anything but there's nothing space communist about it.
They're nonexistent for most of the trilogy. There are literally zero in the first book.
I don't really read any of them as male or female or of any race (he doesn't dwell on those parts of the character, it's mostly general shape, trait, accent). The characters aren't really that important anyways, they're all archetypes used to help you understand the internal politics and conditions within the galaxy.
No character lasts more than like 5 chapters before history advances and you're into the next generation. Sometimes if they did something really important they'll be referenced later (Salvor Hardin) and occasionally diefied (Hari Seldon/ Karl Marx).
The show seems to be exploiting this by casting the characters with no regard for the pronouns used in the book. You could honestly change them for most and not even notice except for maybe some of the royals.
Oh, I heard someone saying that she thought it was like Asimov couldn't think of a future where women, like, do something. I'm not 100% sure what she meant by that. On the other hand she is a major TERF and was pissed at Asimov for dissing Orwell sooo idk maybe it didn't matter.
I have no hopes. It's written by the guy who did Batman v Superman and the Terminator movies so I feel like they're gonna ham it up way too much.
It was originally supposed to be the Westworld crew, but that fell through.
I'm actually looking forward to it because I was so unimpressed by the books. The concept is neat and it's hard to imagine them changing anything for the worse given how bland the source material is.
Also check out the Orville. I love that they managed to sneak a straight down the middle Trek Series under the cover of it being "Family Guy in Space" (it doesn't have that much more humour than say ST4.)
Oh man, Orville is amazing. It's the best Trek going right now. I hope they resume soon
Congratulations cadet, it's genuinely the best series ever and the only one worth being a fanboy over.
After a lifetime of watching Star Wars, I started watching Trek during the quarantine and I felt the same exact way! It's great
I legitimately think humanity as a whole will reach that level at some point. Like, people are born good, you have to learn to be shitty, and I'd like to think that the natural resting place for all of us is a better place.
As much as we all live in societies that are way worse than they could/should be, we still live better than people have like, ever, and everything is accelerating so quickly that we might just live to see it.
Didn't mean to make a comment this sappy but fuck itRemember how shitty the 21st century was in Star Trek? Humanity has a good future ahead but we must struggle for it.
