Red Letter Media

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Favorite recurring character? (Select 4)

  • Jack / AIDSMobdy

    Votes: 257 24.0%

  • Josh / the Wizard

    Votes: 77 7.2%

  • Colin (Canadian #1)

    Votes: 460 42.9%

  • Jim (Canadian #2)

    Votes: 230 21.4%

  • Tim

    Votes: 386 36.0%

  • Len Kabasinski

    Votes: 208 19.4%

  • Freddie Williams

    Votes: 274 25.5%

  • Patton Oswalt

    Votes: 27 2.5%

  • Macaulay Culkin

    Votes: 541 50.4%

  • Max Landis

    Votes: 64 6.0%
  • Total voters
    1,073
Chiri said:
A lot of people will tell you that it's just the result of writers using a show purely as a vehicle to push some agenda but I think here it runs deeper than that. I genuinely think that we as a society have become too pessimistic and cynical for a show like Star Trek to exist. Something that optimistic and sincere isn't going to fly in the current zeitgeist.
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You could say the same about the nihilistic cynicism of 70's cinema too ...and then Starwars became the biggest thing in the world.
Sometimes, particularly in these times, I feel like people are eager for something that just makes them feel optimistic in the same way a heavily divided society after the Vietnam war was eager for something to come along that was fun and just made everybody feel good.

Writing morose and cynical characters is easy, 'look, he's damaged! What an interesting character he is!' Writing positive optimistic well adjusted characters is hard. It's definitely beyond the skill set of lazy hacks like Kurtzman and the corporate marketing departments that manufacture product today.
 
Maybe its just me, but I think there was some pretty heavy irony when Plinkett recommended Westworld for a compelling show on Synths when that also became dumpster fire after the first season.
 
Y2K Baby said:
Star Trek has always been libtard.
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But it managed to do so while not being overly preachy. Mostly because the liberal things that the current generation of moronic writers would have made a focal point were written as accepted by that point. It's a lot easier to say "we've evolved beyond money" than writing a bunch of hamfisted, hairpulling screeds against the GOP disguised as story.
 
Y2K Baby said:
Star Trek has always been libtard.
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In a sense, yes, but it was also competent.

EDIT:
Starscreams Cape said:
But it managed to do so while not being overly preachy. Mostly because the liberal things that the current generation of moronic writers would have made a focal point were written as accepted by that point. It's a lot easier to say "we've evolved beyond money" than writing a bunch of hamfisted, hairpulling screeds against the GOP disguised as story.
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Well.... Let that be your last battlefield is preachy as FUCK.

It's also a kind of shit episode. But it always gets brought up in retrospectives so writers & producers learn the wrong lesson from it.
 
Starscreams Cape said:
Bonus points for the swipes at Wil Wheaton. Low hanging fruit but it must be done so long as he is getting even this pathetic amount of work.
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It's been a long time since I watched Wil Wheaton in anything, but I could not believe how phony and smug he was. I don't know where his career is these days (the fact he has a Farms thread suggests "not so good"), but if he wants to play a self-righteous, sniggering parody of a 1990s trash talk show host, you could do a lot worse.

Also, get some fucking pants that cover your socks, you weak-chinned buffoon.
 
Comicsgeist said:
Sometimes, particularly in these times, I feel like people are eager for something that just makes them feel optimistic
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nah, we've gotten to the point where any sort of logical character progression is a good thing
joker made a ton of money and people loved it, and the movie was basically "broken man becomes more broken"
people want stories with characters and not "generic white woman with funny POC men flawlessly beating evil white males" #923874

Comicsgeist said:
Writing morose and cynical characters is easy, 'look, he's damaged! What an interesting character he is!'
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apparently it's not since the hacks making the media now-a-days can't even do that
then again to these people, a character is just a bunch of labels and nothing more
 
Starscreams Cape said:
But it managed to do so while not being overly preachy. Mostly because the liberal things that the current generation of moronic writers would have made a focal point were written as accepted by that point. It's a lot easier to say "we've evolved beyond money" than writing a bunch of hamfisted, hairpulling screeds against the GOP disguised as story.
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I wouldn't call ST liberal, but it's definitely humanist.

The economic system is debatable. It's post-scarcity, so there's no need for money

I don't know... I think it was intentionally vague so it wouldn't interfere with the ethical themes of the show.

I like Rich's idea that the currency of the future is prestige.
 
Great review. A little meandering at times but I can't fault him for that. It's a lot easier to have laser focus with your critiques on a 2 hour movie then a 7 hour shit fest. There's simply so much garbage to sift through with this series. So many plot lines that went nowhere, so much action for the sake of action. I feel like you could have cut so many of the characters out and still had the same arc. Like what was the actual point of trying to flesh out Rafe by introducing tensions with a son we only see once and learning they're estranged? What the actual fuck was the point? It went nowhere. All of the fan theories I read were better then what actually happened. I notice that happening a lot lately with more and more shows. It's like no one can write a good story past 1 season anymore. Series get made on a feeling and an idea and the plot and details get patchworked together later.

ProfDongs said:
Maybe its just me, but I think there was some pretty heavy irony when Plinkett recommended Westworld for a compelling show on Synths when that also became dumpster fire after the first season.
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I like Westworld better then anything ST lately. It has issues though. Season 3 is opening my eyes to that. Same issue, so many interesting questions raised and really good fan theories, then nothing fucking happens and the whole thing feels like a waste.
 
{o}P II said:
I could honestly listen to Plinkett's ideas for Picarrd's retirement episodes all day

With a glass of wine
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Those fake storyboards were brought to us by the same artist that did the posters for Feeding Frenzy and Space Cop and yeah, they are amazing.

Twinkletard said:
I think this review plays better for people who have seen Picard. I haven't watched any nuTrek since the JJ Abrams abortions, so I'm out of the loop. Trek has been on a downhill slide since best of both worlds. There were gems afterwards, but nothing ever got better than that two-parter.

And that was a really long time ago. It's time to let go.
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This might be very hard for some people to accept, but we may have to face the possibility that franchises have lifespans, that after a few decades a franchise naturally runs out of gas and the smart thing to do is to simply let it end completely.

The "real" Star Trek had a run of just under 40 years before it totally ran out of gas, Star Wars had a run of exactly 40 years before it totally ran out of gas, 40 years is a long time, long enough for a franchise to have a good run and be retired.

What we need are new franchises that are in the same vein of Star Trek and Star Wars but also offer something all new, all new worlds, all new characters, all new stories

That's just the nature of life, everything is a cycle of death and rebirth, what we've been doing for the last 15 years is trying to artificially extending the life of the pop culture of the latter half of the 20th century rather than allowing the 21st century to have it's own pop culture, it's no wonder it's crap because it's artificial and unnatural.

RomanesEuntDomus said:
Yeah. Like everything nowadays, we need every show to be political, or should I say POLITICAL? It's so in-your-face, it deserves allcaps. It must be FUCK DRUMPF at all corners, it needs to be abou refugees and strong women and lesbians and space islam and FUCK DRUMPF FUCK DRUMPF FUCK DRUCMPFAD FAK DRAMBRLUMP and I just can't take this shit anymore. It ruins everything.

You could get pretty neat political messages in old Star Trek and I would say that the old Star Trek was more bold in what it did. TOS had the first interracial kiss and an ethnically mixed crew, containing a black woman during a time when Jim Crow Laws were still a big issue, it contained a Russian guy during the peak years of the Cold War, it contained a Japanese guy 2 decades after WW2... TOS took risks. TNG had a strong humanitarian tilt, where issues would be resolved with kindness, understanding, diplomacy... and it would only use violence when everything else failed and it would still ask the question of "Could we have done better?". Hell, even Voyager had a decent episode, featuring Neelix of all people, that dealt with the remorse of a scientist that invented a WMD that obliterated an entire planet. It deals with Neelix' PTSD and the Scientists guilt and how he wants to put things right and seems like a rather obvious stab at the nuclear bomb and their use in WW2.
What does STD or STP offer? "FUCK DRUMPPPPPPPPPPF" being screamed at the top of its lungs into a void of identical screams. It has the boldness to say what everybody else is already saying. It has the boldness to agree with what everybody else is already agreeing. It is bold enough to take no risks. It is despicable and smug.
TOS has a strong message of intercultural understanding in every scene with the main cast, far stronger than any message in STD or STP combined.
TNG, Voyager and DS9, even ENT, show the ideals of a future without hate... or at least they try to. DS9 shows the ideals of Star Fleet and the Federation at odds with an overwhelming enemy. Voyager is a hodgepodge of badly written nonsense at times, that celebrates the importance of the prime directive one episode and flings it into the trash the next. But Voyager still has a recurring theme of the Crew prefering to stick to their ideals rather than using a shortcut to get home quicker.

And now we have filthy shows like STD and STP, you can't even imagine how sad I am at scenes like that cunt of an admiral using the word "Fuck".

I want my optimistic humanism back. I want a fun show with fun characters, not miserable people being accused of their "fucking hubris" for trying to help people.
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A key difference between TOS and now is the diversity on TOS was still all centered around a strong and proud white male character, the idea was everyone who was not a white man is equal to the white man, but the idea today is that the white man is below everyone else.

Time and time again the modus operandi of the modern left is that you can only prop someone up or create something new by tearing down someone or something else, you can't just try to bring more females into gaming for example, you have to try to dismantle and destroy whatever gaming culture already existed, you can't just add to, you must always take from.

And consequently you can only make "women and people of color" feel good themselves by making white men feel bad about themselves.

It's a completely twisted and despicable mentality.
 
Intelligent Calcium said:
I hate Reddit so fucking much.
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The alternate r/star_trek has pretty good coverage of it:

Lots of bans for even mentioning RLM.

Stab You in the Back said:

snew

snew.notabug.io snew.notabug.io

So far r/startrek has deleted close to 100 topics referencing or posting the Plinkett Review.
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snew

snew.notabug.io snew.notabug.io

People have been posting it all day long! This is great.

This fancy ban from the r/television thread:

startrek ban.png
I think anyone interested in appealing a ban, even just a 48-hour ban, would do really well to reflect not on the behavior of others but to start by reflecting on their own behavior.

Before I review your ban, would you like to take the opportunity to review your own conduct?
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Last edited:
Dom Cruise said:
This might be very hard for some people to accept, but we may have to face the possibility that franchises have lifespans, that after a few decades a franchise naturally runs out of gas and the smart thing to do is to simply let it end completely.

The "real" Star Trek had a run of just under 40 years before it totally ran out of gas, Star Wars had a run of exactly 40 years before it totally ran out of gas, 40 years is a long time, long enough for a franchise to have a good run and be retired.

What we need are new franchises that are in the same vein of Star Trek and Star Wars but also offer something all new, all new worlds, all new characters, all new stories

That's just the nature of life, everything is a cycle of death and rebirth, what we've been doing for the last 15 years is trying to artificially extending the life of the pop culture of the latter half of the 20th century rather than allowing the 21st century to have it's own pop culture, it's no wonder it's crap because it's artificial and unnatural.
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I mean you're not wrong but....

What was the lifespan of Avatar? Game of Thrones? Westworld?

I could go on but there's plenty of examples right now of proto-franchises crashing and burning before they can reach the decade mark - if they even make it past 1 year.

Maybe it's not lifespans. Maybe it's almost like writing quality has taken a turn of late...
 
Dom Cruise said:
This might be very hard for some people to accept, but we may have to face the possibility that franchises have lifespans, that after a few decades a franchise naturally runs out of gas and the smart thing to do is to simply let it end completely.
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Dunno about that. It seems more likely to me that the current generation of film executives aren't competent.

Why that should be so is debatable, but it's striking that even people who made excellent work in the past are no longer able to do so.

I suppose it's possible that the film production process itself is broken, but I still think that tearing down the Phantom of the Opera set has cursed everyone involved.
 
Dom Cruise said:
Time and time again the modus operandi of the modern left is that you can only prop someone up or create something new by tearing down someone or something else, you can't just try to bring more females into gaming for example, you have to try to dismantle and destroy whatever gaming culture already existed, you can't just add to, you must always take from.
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1589927803788.png


Ironically that's the same principle that was crippling TNG in its first season. As SFDebris pointed out, Roddenberry had gone to making his humans so amazing, the only way to keep raising them up, was to start pushing others down. Thus, the Ferengi were invented - and were a joke.
 
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