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
Sure, Mike and Rich can shit on NuWars, but being Trekkies, they really can't do the same with NuTrek. Both are complete pozzed by their own respective companies.
 
Mola Ram said:
When it comes to Trek and Mike/Rich, all those keen critical faculties they bring to bear against every other piece of media turn to absolute shit. You cannot trust their opinions on Trek because they are Trekkies. Sad but true.
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What I don't respect even more than their thirst for any Trek content is their rampant hypocrisy. Even as a TNG movie, it's between Nemesis and First Contact in quality, both movies that RLM has said are bad. It's a darkly-lit show with really cliché villains. Nothing against Amanda Plummer, but Vadic even does the cliche "kill the lackey for incompetence" even though Changelings consider murdering other Changelings to be the ultimate crime, especially when there aren't that many of them and they're all stranded from the Great Link. That, and shoving the Borg into the story AGAIN when Voyager proved that doing so made them less interesting in the process, never mind the early Picard seasons.

Think about it, the drama that should be in this show isn't that Vadic only wants revenge, but also to go home. It is part of the biology of the Changelings to want to be part of the Great Link, so to say she became twisted by revenge isn't sufficient motivation. It is also in Picard's character to be willing to let potentially dangerous creatures go (Hugh, that time the Enterprise gave birth) because they were wronged or had an intrinsic right to life. Picard, of all people, would at least recognize that Vadic is as much of a victim as she is an antagonist and would look for a diplomatic solution over a military one. We still have movie Picard, but without the ability to do much action, so it should follow that old man Picard relies on diplomacy. Instead, Vadic gets spaced. Because movie villains need to die.

I would argue that even Nemesis was a more mature handling of these characters. That movie had the empty nest theme where everyone is moving on with their lives and in Data's case, death by self-sacrifice. How does it affect Picard to know that his family is now leaving? Everyone looks tired because they're aging out of these roles and when Data dies, absolutely no one is immortal. No one wants to accept this is the end, but they have to. What does this show do? Nostalgia-bait everywhere and that is what I mean by "it tells me more about the fans than the show itself." The fans themselves are immature and unwilling to accept that TNG ended DECADES ago. We just want the TNG family back and it doesn't matter what they do to put them together.

What they told the studio is that they just want more TNG movies. The movies that got RLM started in the video essay business for their badness.
 
Drag-on Knight 91873 said:
I would argue that even Nemesis was a more mature handling of these characters. That movie had the empty nest theme where everyone is moving on with their lives and in Data's case, death by self-sacrifice. How does it affect Picard to know that his family is now leaving? Everyone looks tired because they're aging out of these roles and when Data dies, absolutely no one is immortal. No one wants to accept this is the end, but they have to. What does this show do? Nostalgia-bait everywhere and that is what I mean by "it tells me more about the fans than the show itself." The fans themselves are immature and unwilling to accept that TNG ended DECADES ago. We just want the TNG family back and it doesn't matter what they do to put them together.
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Nemesis was still bad, even if the writers finally got their shit together and make the characters more more believable, especially how they pull a very shitty way of Data dying while the main characters on the Fleet still survive even aging. It's why that and its predecessor Insurrection were complete hot turds.
 
TVBForever said:
Nemesis was still bad, even if the writers finally got their shit together and make the characters more more believable, especially how they pull a very shitty way of Data dying while the main characters on the Fleet still survive even aging. It's why that and its predecessor Insurrection were complete hot turds.
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I didn't say it was good. I said it was more mature, a relative statement to Picard.
 
Joeyb said:
Oh yeah I'm sure she'll say yes to anything...I just don't know why the production would bring her in. If she was a terrible actress but was hot, I get it. If she's not hot but amazing actress, I get it. She's neither, so why do people hire her?
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VHS on a boxy 13 incher has far less detail than we are used to today. It was likely not a big issue at the time.

I think her fucking for roles is a stretch, better looking women than her would fuck for a role if that's what you're into, Harvey.
 
Their review of Picard more or less reveals that they just want TNG to be what Star Trek is forever. Which I love TNG and it's probably my favorite show ever and I like that now I don't have to hate how it all ended, so PIC S3 is successful enough on that front for me. But you can tell Mike and Rich don't want Star Trek to evolve or change in any way, which is funny enough because TNG at its best evolved into something pretty different from TOS. I think in one of their million different Star Trek reviews Mike mentions not liking the Dominion War, meaning even DS9 pushing back on TNG (while still affirming its core values) is too much change. In the end Mike and Rich really are Mr. Plinkett, wanting to watch their old Night Court TNG tapes.
 
Privilege Power Hour said:
But you can tell Mike and Rich don't want Star Trek to evolve or change in any way, which is funny enough because TNG at its best evolved into something pretty different from TOS.
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Well, but the problem is, basically every "evolution" since DS9 has been a degeneration, rather than an evolution. And I don't think that's nostalgia coloring my perspectives.

Change is fine in theory, but change that sucks still sucks, the fact that its change isn't redemptive.
 
MembersSchoolPizza said:
Well, but the problem is, basically every "evolution" since DS9 has been a degeneration, rather than an evolution. And I don't think that's nostalgia coloring my perspectives.

Change is fine in theory, but change that sucks still sucks, the fact that its change isn't redemptive.
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I was okay with the change of DS9 because it still contained the core ethos of Star Trek. It was Star Trek, but with more real politik and more grimdark that made the audience think harder about implications of the idealist, utopian future.

The new stuff doesn't contain that core. It uses the most superficial trappings of Star Trek (the ships, the uniforms, the names) and slaps it on top of the same generic schlock writing that everything else in Hollywood uses. Nu-Trek is only "changing Star Trek" in the same way murdering a woman and wearing her skin as a suit is "changing her look".
 
MembersSchoolPizza said:
Well, but the problem is, basically every "evolution" since DS9 has been a degeneration, rather than an evolution. And I don't think that's nostalgia coloring my perspectives.

Change is fine in theory, but change that sucks still sucks, the fact that its change isn't redemptive.
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Matt Damon said:
I was okay with the change of DS9 because it still contained the core ethos of Star Trek. It was Star Trek, but with more real politik and more grimdark that made the audience think harder about implications of the idealist, utopian future.

The new stuff doesn't contain that core. It uses the most superficial trappings of Star Trek (the ships, the uniforms, the names) and slaps it on top of the same generic schlock writing that everything else in Hollywood uses. Nu-Trek is only "changing Star Trek" in the same way murdering a woman and wearing her skin as a suit is "changing her look".
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Agreed to all of this, but RLM's stance becomes the opposite problem where the franchise just stagnates. The problem is that we just don't have a good well of writers to pull from any more and science fiction in general has either turned into YA crap or wannabe Star Wars, not to mention pushing idpol. Hell, part of the reason everyone seems to like PIC S3 is that it's the first time in over a decade somebody's writing Trek that seems not to hate it, with the possible exception of Beyond. DS9 is proof talented writers can do new and different things with Trek, and my fear is that the choice is either stupid STD-level writing where hating means you're a bigot or just looking backwards forever. I'm a huge proponent of the idea that what Trek needs is a good, traditional Enterprise show, probably on the Enterprise-G at this point, but it isn't 1987 any more, and the solution to making good, new Trek isn't copying TNG, it's facing 2023 while keeping true to Trek's core ethos of a better future for humanity where curiosity and exploration are the core of what humanity is.
 
Privilege Power Hour said:
and the solution to making good, new Trek isn't copying TNG, it's facing 2023 while keeping true to Trek's core ethos of a better future for humanity where curiosity and exploration are the core of what humanity is.
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And there we get into the Orville situation - granted it's a Seth McFarlane comedy show, and it's more mimicry than true evolution, but they at least had those things.

I'm not saying Orville is the best show ever... And I'll always find Seth McFarlane eminently punchable... But I'll give the douche credit, he seemed to understand what Star Trek was about.
 
MembersSchoolPizza said:
And there we get into the Orville situation - granted it's a Seth McFarlane comedy show, and it's more mimicry than true evolution, but they at least had those things.

I'm not saying Orville is the best show ever... And I'll always find Seth McFarlane eminently punchable... But I'll give the douche credit, he seemed to understand what Star Trek was about.
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More importantly, he got someone that understand how Star Trek works on a structural level: Brannon Braga. That's why it feels like Voyager with McFarlane-tisms in it. Matalas is most definitely not that kind of producer. At best, he's a fanboy as a producer that happened to be holding the bag when the higher-ups decided to do other things. At worst, he's Dave Filoni.
 
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