Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Titan Lithos said:
Well, The Orville has Brannon Braga as a producer and Jonathan Frakes as a director. Two Trek alumni helping out there. That doesn't give it legitimacy, but it does put it ahead of STD for Trekkiness. If Seth could just get rid of all the modern pop culture references, it would be more decent.

I could give STD a pass if it weren't for the extreme focus on the main character. I want to know more about the others and how they weave into the plot. I like Tilly, but we all know she's going to die in this new serial format. Gotta be up there with Game of Thrones.
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Why? Trek does historical references that a lot of people don't get.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
Why? Trek does historical references that a lot of people don't get.
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The historical references kind of make sense for the characters, as they're supposed to be well educated explorers/diplomats, and it sometimes even feeds into an episode's plot or enhances a character. The pop culture stuff in Orville is just cheap laugh fodder and kind of distracting. I can see people remembering Shakespeare 400 years from now, but [insert 80s/90s pop culture reference here]? Not so much.
 
Kevin Spencer said:
I know a lot of people hated Enterprise, but I dug it. I dunno, I liked him on Quantum Leap, and it was cool when Al(forget his RL name, too lazy to look it up) made an appearance.

DS9 was cool but the whole other universe stich became corny. Plus I felt Ezri Dax was the Moe Howard of DS9.

But Trek over all is cool. Though I'm not really into any of the movies cept for Wrath of Kahn and a few of the original series movies.
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To me Ezri is more a Joe Besser or Joe DeRita. Obviously not as good as the original, but still gives the other remaining characters somebody to do their thing off of.

And yeah Captain Sam is cool. The real ending is that as he starts to give that speech he leaps out.
 
My favorite OG Star Trek movie is probably IV, aka the one with the whales. It was just a lot of fun, which is probably why it made the most out of all the OG & TNG films.
 
Lackadaisy said:
I was surprised by how much I liked an episode of The Orville, specfically the one about the bio/planet ship. It was just a neat, classic sci-fi plot. Nice to see that on TV nowadays. I still hate MacFarlane, but that's kinda beside the point now. The jokes definitely need work. I did laugh at the 'practical joke' stuff in the 4th/5th episode.
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There is a Robert Heinlein radio play called "Universe" that is probably the inspiration for the episode. https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/sci-fi/x-minus-one/universe-1955-05-15


It's a fun concept and I think they did a decent job of hitting the same beats.
 
Lackadaisy said:
The historical references kind of make sense for the characters, as they're supposed to be well educated explorers/diplomats, and it sometimes even feeds into an episode's plot or enhances a character. The pop culture stuff in Orville is just cheap laugh fodder and kind of distracting. I can see people remembering Shakespeare 400 years from now, but [insert 80s/90s pop culture reference here]? Not so much.
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I take it you never watched the last three Star Trek movies.

Also, people still remember music, shows and even comics from the 40's. Thinking that we would forget about popculture is just wrong. There will always be a few people who want to keep certain things alive. Just look at how forgotten Action Man was and now we get IDW comics of him.

Your train of thought is that things like Action Comics which is today's own version The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in terms of popularity would be forgotten is wrong.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
I take it you never watched the last three Star Trek movies.

Also, people still remember music, shows and even comics from the 40's. Thinking that we would forget about popculture is just wrong. There will always be a few people who want to keep certain things alive. Just look at how forgotten Action Man was and now we get IDW comics of him.

Your train of thought is that things like Action Comics which is today's own version The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in terms of popularity would be forgotten is wrong.
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Do you mean the new Trek movies? I saw them. I thought they were fine. I just find the references in The Orville annoying. That's really it.

And I'm not saying that we'd necessarily forget pop culture, but we'd likely forget a lot of the specifics or misquote it or whatever. There's so much more media to consume nowadays, which is why I think we remember stuff from the first half of the century easier/more clearly. It's a smaller cultural base to draw from.
 
I think The Orville should have been played straight, putting the characters into ridiculous situations.
 
Larry Thorne said:
I think The Orville should have been played straight, putting the characters into ridiculous situations.
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I haven't watched the newer episodes yet but I think Seth would agree. They keep dialing back the humor and it seems like the pilot is the show he sold to FOX (I assume they wanted him to make a comedy because that's what he's known for) and everything after is closer to the show he actually wanted to make. This is what he said in 2011:
"I'd love to see that franchise revived for television in the way that it was in the 1990s: very thoughtful, smartly written stories that transcend the science fiction audience. I don't know who would give me the keys to that car."
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Not a big fan of his other works but when it comes to Star Trek he's a decent fellow.
 
MacFarlane was even in Enterprise:
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I did a Farscape marathon over the weekend and wanted to note that the pop culture references made by the main character were made because the character was from that time. I'm just not sure making references to the Kardashians will outlive, say, the Marx Brothers.

I also watched the newest episode of STD and... it's probably not going to be canceled. It may survive an additional season. But there are still many things that annoy the piss out of me. The least of which is the Mary Sue-ishness of the main character.
  • One source said that the Klingons were based on Trump supporters, but others quickly distanced themselves from that. But then there was the "Make Klingons Great Again" comment...
  • The religious armor is driving me crazy with its impracticality. The spikes on an EVA suit is a bad design choice.
  • The roulette wheel saucer. It spins around when about to "warp".
  • Still not entirely sold on the spore drive. The whole tech amnesia that's going to happen may be interesting, though.
 
I watched the fourth episode of Discovery, it's a fucking mess. Especially the incomprehensible battle around the 40 minute mark. Who greenlit this utter garbage?

I mean, they have fungal warp drive, a giant fucking tardigrade acting as navigator (we're supposed to feel bad for), literally autistic crew members and whatnot. And no, I've yet seen how the Klingons are supposed to be Trump supporters.

I might be in the minority, but I think Star Trek should have been allowed to fade away.

edit: I'm pretty sure the writer was on acid.
 
So I'm watching Discovery.
It's garbage. It lacks a lot of what I enjoyed about Trek. Like most of what I enjoyed about Trek. I just want the show to only be from the Klingons PoV and that would make it 10x more tolerable minus their garbage redesign. Also...

So I'm watching The Orville.
I might have gotten a little autistically mad about how Seth McFuckingFarlane made a better Star Trek than Star Trek. It's not mindblowing, but it feels like a fantastic tribute. Like I may actually care about characters in this show and I might realize they have flaws and I might have notice that Mc fucking Farlane actually put in some character development in the only 4 fucking episodes I watched.

Which really boggles my mind. This show actually feels like the people enjoyed Star Trek and Seth is trying to put himself into it a little and make something "new". Why don't I feel like that with Discovery at all? Since the first episode I've just constantly felt like Discovery is a show made by people who don't really care for Trek much. It's weird, I don't think I've ever really gotten that feeling from any other series even if I didn't enjoy them like Enterprise or Voyager.
 
GeorgeDaMoose said:
So I'm watching Discovery.
It's garbage. It lacks a lot of what I enjoyed about Trek. Like most of what I enjoyed about Trek. I just want the show to only be from the Klingons PoV and that would make it 10x more tolerable minus their garbage redesign. Also...

So I'm watching The Orville.
I might have gotten a little autistically mad about how Seth McFuckingFarlane made a better Star Trek than Star Trek. It's not mindblowing, but it feels like a fantastic tribute. Like I may actually care about characters in this show and I might realize they have flaws and I might have notice that Mc fucking Farlane actually put in some character development in the only 4 fucking episodes I watched.

Which really boggles my mind. This show actually feels like the people enjoyed Star Trek and Seth is trying to put himself into it a little and make something "new". Why don't I feel like that with Discovery at all? Since the first episode I've just constantly felt like Discovery is a show made by people who don't really care for Trek much. It's weird, I don't think I've ever really gotten that feeling from any other series even if I didn't enjoy them like Enterprise or Voyager.
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I've only seen the abortion of television they called a pilot, but it feels like it was made by someone who dislikes Trek because a) it drops the idealism and positivity that Trek was known for, even in darker shows like DS9, b) everyone in the show is abrasive, smarmy and "edgy" to try and make the show cooler to what some suit thinks kids these days like, and c) it has an extremely unappealing and self-aggrandizing main character. Main characters (outside of TOS I guess) aren't usually a thing in Trek shows.

Both shows try to do a spin on Trek, but the Orville twists things while still paying homage to the material. The production design looks very TNG, the ideals are extremely TNG, and the sociopolitical topics covered (so far) are done through metaphor in a pretty Star Trek fashion. I think the episode about the monogender species and gender alteration surgery could've come straight out of the DS9 writing room. In general, it has a vibe of "what if Star Trek were populated by more normal people than we usually see?", coupled with McFarlane style comedy that either works for you or doesn't.

Discovery radically alters the design of everything for the sake of being different, makes zero effort to have their technology square with the existing timeline, jettisons the character bits you usually see for MOAR ACTION and changes the history and motivations of Klingons to the point that they may as well be different aliens entirely. The fact that the cast and production staff kept talking about wanting to jettison the legacy of Kirk and Picard and constantly threw out barbs targeted at the old fanbase a la Ghostbusters 2016 only reinforces the notion that it was made by people who dislike Trek.

There's a reason no one involved with the Trek golden age in the 1990's is working on Discovery while a bunch of them are working on the Orville.
 
Absolutego said:
There's a reason no one involved with the Trek golden age in the 1990's is working on Discovery while a bunch of them are working on the Orville.
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I never thought I'd say this, but between The Orville and the reports of his original ideas for Voyager and Enterprise that were shot down, I'd actually quite like to see Brannon Braga invited back to create his own Star Trek series from scratch, without having Rick Berman or the incompetents that used to run UPN looking over his shoulder all the time.
 
HarryHowler said:
I never thought I'd say this, but between The Orville and the reports of his original ideas for Voyager and Enterprise that were shot down, I'd actually quite like to see Brannon Braga invited back to create his own Star Trek series from scratch, without having Rick Berman or the incompetents that used to run UPN looking over his shoulder all the time.
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Under the condition that he no longer be allowed to do time travel episodes. The predestination paradox bugs me.

I watched the most recent episode of STD. It's getting weaker. I was thinking this show would get at least another season, but now, not so sure.

I did like the fact that the Klingons weren't wearing that ridiculous religious armor. They were wearing something closer to TNG Klingons.

They said fuck and shit in the show. Is that supposed to make it better?
 
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