Ds9
TNG
Original
That’s my order of those. 
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I finished Discovery a few days ago and still I miss the characters. Section 31 also makes the stories much more interesting; it reminds me of Iain Banks’ Culture series. He invents a perfect Communist utopia in which most people live satisfying but insignificant lives, and his novels are all about outsiders and misfits because that’s where the interesting things happen. So Banks had Special Circumstances and Trek eventually came up with Section 31.
According to Wikipedia, they’re considering a spinoff featuring Section 31 and another featuring Captain Pike. Recent events have thrown a spanner into the works of all dramatic productions, so it remains to be seen whether either of these sees the light of day. I want to see more of Anson Mount’s Pike and Michelle Yeoh’s Georgiou, though.
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I’m trying to think of any western show I’ve enjoyed recently. Breaking bad, Lexx, the sopranos. Even that star trek with the guy from quantum leap was good. Didn’t like the vulcan in it but never did like vulcans.
I wish I hadn’t seen Picard. I remember him as Captain Picard, a smart, decisive man. A bit aloof, but he had to be, he was the captain of a ship with thousands of lives dependant on his command. The new show? He’s a bumbling fool hen pecked by bickering women in a world that’s not star trek. Money? People living in poverty in a post scarcity world?
I mean how does that work. You know what, I don’t care. Money works with ferengi as that’s their raison d’être.
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There was some talk of giving (Emperor) Georgiou a section 31 spinoff, but with he continuing her journey with Michael I don’t see hat happening. The Pike series is apparently a go though, which is cool. I think they’ll do a decent enough job. I think as iconic as it is, it deserves to be given the production value that Desilu couldn’t match in 1960s money.
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Must have missed the hen pecking. In fact I haven’t even heard the term since I was a small child in the sixties.
I take your point about poverty, but perhaps as in our own timeline the future while clearly here is unevenly distributed. And I’m also reminded of an enthusiastic Iranian colleague who said of America, which he had visited while I had not, that there were no poor people. When I checked him on this, he shrugged and said “well, nobody who counts.” That’s management consultants for you.
So while the Federation propaganda we were force fed in earlier decades presented a rosy picture of a world with limitless power and abundance (like Banks’ Culture) the reality may often fall short of the image. The further you get from a Federation starship the more likely the cracks will show.
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I’m going off of Riddenberry’s vision, which is the only true star trek. It’s a post scarcity world for those in the federation, simple as.
If someone wants to do anything more gritty show, like Babylon 5, then great. Do so. The current era of tacking on new ideas to old ones is really unappealing. Does everything have to be a franchise?
I really enjoyed the imperator furiosa film. But calling it mad max fury Road didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t feel like a mad max film. It could have stood up on its own merits without tacking on the mad max label.
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Movies / shows / video games etc are made to make a return on investment. There is a known correlation with immediate buy-in based on brand or intellectual properties that already exist.
I get it, and i have made this exact argument. However, even if you take greed aside, these things usually take a lot of money to realize. Many people’s jobs rely on the success of these things, and thats one reason the “safe bet” is typically sought after.
That being said, i think DS9 was good and basically star trek bab5. It explained how they can have both worlds. Essentially that post-scarcity extended as far as the federation’s influence, and even then, during times of war (the borg conflicts in TNG) it is shown that resource scarcity is absolutely a thing still (ship repairs, personnel, ships, actually being able to scout and cover areas defensively).
TOS did have the most pure vision of post-scarcity, but it too still had its moments. In “Errand of Mercy”, the Klingons were after Organia which was desired by the empire for its strategic location. This Federation-Klingon cold war was full of failing negotiations over territory. These territories were sought after as a direct result of empire expansion, and either the federation’s own need to “keep the lights on” or to stifle the growth of another superpower.
Any way you look at it, Star Trek was never fully “post scarcity”. The larger the federation gets and the more enemies it got, the more resource starved it got. This is only sensible if you think about it really.
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Yeah, you’re right. TOS is a bit cheesy in that regards, and of all the series, DS9 was my favourite.
But then other writers get in and writing about what they know, it’s hard to imagine a post scarcity world. With fusion power and replicators, the cardassian occupation of bajor makes no sense.
Imagine if the cardassians found the bajorans so annoying they decided the only thing to do was occupy and humiliate them, rather than genocide, reeducation, turning them into die hard terrorists, which the cardassians respect. It could have been written that way, and it would have been interesting to have aliens doing irrational things (why waste their time with people they hate?) because their motives are alien.
That’s why I liked that TOS episode about the alien that brings klingons onboard the Enterprise, and it feeds on their fighting.
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On the topic of Banks, I remember reading a couple of years ago that Amazon had acquired the TV rights to Consider Phlebas. I wonder if this will ever see the light of day. The novel has all the excitement you’d expect from a space opera, and it has Banks’ signature gigantic structures and gruesome situations.
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It’d necessitate a big budget, possibly better as an animé for the aliens, but I’d love to see a cartoon of Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton.
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I’m watching Hamilton and Frozen 2 on Disney+. The Broadway musical seems to be essentially a prequel to Gore Vidal’s Burr. Frozen 2 starts off unexpectedly with a flashback incorporating the girls’ wonderful parents.
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You may be surprised to know that I think Frozen 2 is a great movie.
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I have high expectations of it.
Hamilton, about which I was only being slightly facetious, had been hyped beyond all reason, so even though I’m already more familiar with the subject matter going in than are most people it took me a while to settle into and enjoy the unorthodox presentation.
In his novel, Gore Vidal picks up the story towards the end of Burr’s life, when he returns from his exile in Europe to a New York greatly changed. The tone of Vidal’s work is a deconstruction of the myth of the Founding Fathers. Hamilton seems to be a renewed act of myth-making. I’m really enjoying the depiction of King George as an abusive lover.
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Not television, but I’m listening to the audio version of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. As I remarked above in discussing Watchmen, I find graphic novels difficult to follow. Gaiman and Dirk Maggs (who last worked together on the BBC Radio production of Neverwhere) have turned the story into what Maggs terms an “Audio movie.”
Having many times over the years heard about Gaiman’s great breakthrough work, it’s exciting at long last to have it rendered into a form that I find accessible.
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Did anybody here enjoy China Miéville’s novel The City and The City? I heard it in a reading by John Lee. It seemed unfilmable at the time. Then BBC2 announced they were going to film it.
I was impressed at the end result. Some small liberties were taken with the plot, some characters were changed, but it’s still the same novel and the same two cities which outsiders insist on seeing as a single city, to the peril of a fragile peace. The main character Tyador Borlú is played by David Morrissey but the star, as I’m sure you know I’m going to say and you can’t stop me because it’s too late, is the City and the City.
After hearing John Lee’s reading of this I was reminded of Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities and so I went looking for an audiobook version (one of my kids has “borrowed” my paper copy.) To my surprise the audiobook of Invisible Cities is read by the very same John Lee.
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I just watched the Doctor Who special. If you are spoiler-averse, you may want to skip the rest of this entry.
It has the return of the Daleks and the departure of two companions. I really love Chris Chibnall’s innovation of having Daleks able to use their tentacles to act as a highly sophisticated external parasite of a human host, it’s given the stories a new dimension.
The use of Chris Noth as the Trump-like character Jack Robertson in one of the weaker episodes of Series 11 has really paid off as Robertson returns here madder and badder than ever. He’s the only character who emerges from the episode in a better state than he started it, last seen widely proclaimed as the saviour of the planet and eyeing a possible run for the US Presidency. This is a truly dark incarnation of the series, despite its many lighter touches.
I love the retcon of her backstory. Chibnall really has to stick around long enough to fulfill this broader sweep of her character biography. I want to see more of Ruth, too. Much more.
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I looked at Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy. I’m halfway through and enjoying it more than the first season. It’s great to have Reginald Hargreeves as a living person at the centre of things. The X-Files style conspiracy plot is perfect for the comic book style. The characters are now well rounded. I’ve some niggles (October 1963 is rather late for a lunch counter sit-in in Dallas, for instance, though still plausible) but that’s not really the point of the show.
Saving (or possibly destroying) the world as a weird substitute for family therapy. Plenty of twists and turns.
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oh thanks for the spoilers , 63 would have still been in the thick of the civil rights movement . hell its still an issue in texas .
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Yeah seems accurate. Martin Luther King was assassinated in ‘68
I need to watch umbrella acedemy!
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