Star Trek - Mark writes

Star Trek Ranked

In the tone of The Last Star Wars Movie, every Star Trek thing ranked:

The Original Series. Star Trek is, in short, Horatio Hornblower in space, the final frontier, exploring strange new worlds, and new civilizations. To boldly go where no (Hu)man has gone before. You know what works? Paying good SF writers to write good scripts about Science Fiction Ideas, and then getting good actors to read those lines, with adequate special effects to say "you are in space". They didn't always manage any of that, there's a reason it barely made 3 seasons, but when it hits the right points, it's the best art Humans have ever created. (Preferably pre "digital remaster", but the CGI shit does improve matters in a few episodes, inoffensive the rest of the time.)
The Animated Series. Yes, the "animation" is sub-Hanna Barbera level. The matte paintings are gorgeous. They could do real alien aliens since they didn't need makeup. They continued to get real SF writers (including Larry Niven!) like TOS, unlike any other Trek show.
Star Trek novels/novelizations by James Blish, John M. Ford, and Diane Duane. How Much for Just the Planet, The Final Reflection, and My Enemy My Ally are top of that group. I don't remember the Greg Bear book, but he's a great writer, should be acceptable if he didn't phone it in.
Star Trek Movies I-IV,VI. I'm not gonna nitpick which is better, I honestly like I and VI a lot more than the usual rankings, but all 5 of these are great. Why didn't they make a movie V? Weird, huh?
GalaxyQuest. This is the series finale Star Trek classic deserved.
Lower Decks. Yes, it's a very silly-looking cartoon. And there's parts that are slapstick comedy… and parts are the kind of awe-inspiring, the Galaxy is a great place, let's go explore, heroism that Star Trek used to be about. It's like the lighter TOS eps, compressed to 22 minutes.
Strange New Worlds. I'm already very tired of "Gorn" (they're not Gorn as we know them from "Arena", but knockoff Alien xenomorphs) eps. But I like most of the crew, the plots are generally good enough, they're not trying writing techniques far beyond their ability, it's just a good Trek show. Not best ever, but good so far.
Star Trek Continues. Often exactly as amateur as you'd expect, and other times really manages to make A Star Trek Episode. Give it a try.
Star Trek novels/novelizations by almost literally anyone else. I must've read dozens or hundreds of these, and most are junk, no better than slash fanfic.
TNG. Not generally good, or well-written at all. It sort of finds the characters after 2 seasons of absolute crap. But there is occasionally exploration, adventure, Human spirit, all that. Eh.
DS9, I guess. No sense of wonder. Very little exploration. Once in a while, it has a Science Fiction Idea and explores it for one ep, then forgets everything about that and hits the sitcom reset button. Implausibly promotes Miles O'Brien, most useless Human in the Galaxy, to a major character with a hot wife. Mostly it ripped off Babylon 5, and poached actors, because they had no writers, no direction, no ability to plot ahead. Later on it just got repetitive, then wrapped up a war with deus ex machina "let's all be friends because we're amorphous".
Garbage, do not watch: VGR, ENT, STD ("better dead than Disco"), PIC, all of the other Star Trek movies. Just has nothing to do with Star Trek at all.
Crimes Against Humanity: JJ Abrams' "Star Trek" movies. People who hate Star Trek and are soulless husks motivated only by explosions and lens flares shouldn't be making Star Trek-named shows.

I'm not too familiar with the Star Trek comics to put them on this chart; as opposed to Star Wars, where the Marvel comics are among the best material. The Gold Key & Marvel comics were mediocre, gap-between-series fillers. I didn't see any of DC, Malibu, or Marvel II's runs. Wildstorm's run was awful (and I liked their superhero comics, but they were bad at SF). The Tokyopop manga were hilarious, very off-model, off-character, not at all Star Trek except in the Futurama parody sense. I've only seen a few of the IDW comics, and while they're a solid publisher, they do goofy crossover shit a lot.

What I'm Watching: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S1E04

I'm not gonna post every ep. S1E03 was a nice normal medical disaster ep, TOS had a bunch of those, every planet's full of plagues. Backstory for Number One and a bit for Dr M'Benga.

S1E04 is a little more involved.

**SPOILERS***

Why are they waiting to the final weeks to deliver AIR FILTERING to a shake-and-bake colony? How about you plan ahead a year and then there's no JIT emergency?

"I'm not going to let some doctor inside my head to try and fix me. I'm not broken, I'm fine." —Someone who is the opposite of "fine"

Oh, it really is Acheron LV-426 down there. Including Fig "Newt"-on. "The monsters come out and click at night. Mostly." Kid is never seen again. I really wanted the Gorn to get on board, have a crew hunt in lower decks, Fig escapes and Number One comes in with an exoskeleton and BFG "get away from her, you BITCH!" Anyway. We still haven't seen a Gorn.

What we do get is a submarine battle against a destroyer group.

Singh: "I will make that adjustment. But I will not lie to them." Ash: "…about their chances. But, they have my sympathy."

"Ortegas, full stop": You can't full stop in an orbit, inside a gas giant. Newton's physics still apply here.

It's the Galileo Two (the same shuttle survives 10 years?!) Never send all your good officers on a suicide mission. And don't do therapy when you're supposed to be scouting! The Gorn apparently still use signal lanterns and morse code on their FTL starships; keep banging the rocks together, lizards, you'll invent encrypted radio someday.

"Suit up, strap in", says a man on a bridge with no seatbelts. I wouldn't even want them to develop seatbelt or non-exploding control panel technology now, they never had it on TOS, but don't lampshade it, maybe?

The actual ship battles are pretty good; they've learned a little bit to fight in 3D space, to think about the ships as spaceships and not wet navy battlecruisers. It's not perfect, their physics is total nonsense, but it's so much better than almost any Star Trek's ship fights.

★★★★☆ Either lean a little more into the Alien ripoff, or more into Das Boot.

What I'm Watching: Star Trek SNW S1E2

Second episode greatly improved on the first. I guess I'm subscribed and watching this. Nobody is more surprised that Mark liked a modern Star Trek than Mark.

SPOILER TIMES

Mostly liked.

The Captain's dinner was bad. A) I really really dislike their "casual" being mostly 20th C stuff, obvs Pike's old-fashioned, but it's too retro. TOS set a clear standard that the fashion & music & entertainments of the future are NOT just rehashed pre-apocalypse stuff. B) Ortega's gutter trash look is completely inappropriate for Starfleet, even casual. James T. Kirk wouldn't put up with that kind of disrespect to the service. C) The grilling/hazing of Uhura is poor team-building, but also everyone goes on at length with bad writing nobody would ever say. Very cringey first act.

The comet/alien artifact is fantastic, though. Great design for it. Alien thing that is actually alien and inscrutable. A seemingly simple problem, in TOS it would probably be a Prime Directive violation, but they just set up the PD last episode, so here they can just fix it. Except it's not that fixable.

Uhura gets to use linguistics (kind of a useless skill when you have a Universal Translator) and singing, tho she mostly hums. But she can carry a tune. Sam Kirk gets to be "the guy we zap or knock around because he can't die until TOS" for this series. Spock and Singh just stand around and be useless, but Spock & Uhura (and a bit with Nurse Bleach-Blonde Chapel) actually are funny, there's good writing here. Did they borrow writers from Lower Decks?

The alien menace is kind of ridiculous, bad face on the screen, weird shapeship that doesn't make a lot of engineering sense. For "advanced" aliens they have incredibly bad aim and weak, standard-issue plasma torpedo weapons. In Star Fleet Battles terms, they're like one of the minor races, no new tech but a bigger ship, any good pilot can beat them with a stock Heavy Cruiser.

The natives on the planet are barely seen, little fake camp pounding grit, hard to believe there's millions of them. If they're the reason you're doing this, at least show something sympathetic.

I really hope this doesn't turn into "every alien thing has TIME POWERS", because I'm annoyed by that already.

★★★½☆ but keep in mind I'd rate all of TNG, DS9, VGR, ENT, PIC, & STD ★☆☆☆☆ to ★★☆☆☆ with only rare ep exceptions, so this is some high praise from me.

What I'm Watching: Star Trek Strange New Worlds

So I haven't watched much of Star Trek: Discovery (STD, how unfortunate), the incompetent captain should've been fired… out a photon torpedo tube. There's apparently backstory to this series in it? But I'm gonna go ahead anyway. Better dead than Disco. And really I disdain all official Star Trek past TOS, TAS, movies I-VI (weird they never made V), and Star Trek: Lower Decks. So a new series is pushing a big stone uphill to even get me to watch it.

Theme song is far too mellow, but at least it's not ENT. The scenes with tightly packed walls of "asteroids" make me annoyed, but you know, dumbass visual designers gonna dumbass, may have nothing to do with the show.

SPOILER TIMES

"Pike" is ominously brooding, call to adventure rejected, manly man gonna ride his horse in the snow, gotta go save the girl, yada yada. In reality, Anson Mount is a Confederate sympathizer inbred hillbilly "men's rights" garbage person, who I honestly don't expect to survive a season without some horrible racist/sexist/homophobic scandal. There's just no way. But let's pretend this jackass can keep his shit together for a while.

Security is a girl named La'an Noonien-Singh (Christina Chong). That's literally like naming your kid Adele Hitler. Khan was a mass-murdering genocidal tyrant just 100-ish years before this, nobody's going to have his name. And in previous (later) Star Trek continuity, genetically engineered people like Bashir are hated freaks because of the Eugenics Wars. In the continuing saga of never casting Indians as an Indian tyrant and his cloned descendants, they found a Chinese-English actress. At least it's not honkie Benzedrine Crumpledpants this time.

Doctor M'Benga at least knows what Singh is, and the young and horribly bleached-blonde Nurse Chapel. M'Benga might actually not be bad; the character was in a couple TOS episodes.

Spock & T'Pring are horny young people, formal but not flipping between emotionless/raging hormonal maniacs as they ought to be, but nothing past TOS has ever done Vulcans well. Meh. Spock is played passably but uncertainly by Gregory Peck's grandson, but the kid really doesn't seem to know what he's doing.

Young Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) is… this is petty, but I don't like her look, buzzed-off hair, doesn't fit with Nichelle Nichols in any way. The actress does sing (but IC hasn't had a chance yet), but AFAICT from Youstubes only covers of alt/pop songs ("Isn't it Ironic?") We'll see. Actually a lot of the crew have really shitty Zoomer hairstyles, mullets and fake cornrows and such. Also very modern jumpsuit outfits on most, instead of the mini-skirts & overly tight slacks of the era. This is visually going to age very very badly.

Transporters are used for some tricky stuff that shouldn't be possible for at least a century or two later, they are super unreliable death machines at this time. Maaagic transporter medicine delivery, no.

Nobody has ever actually read their mission briefing, they just showed up in a rush and are waiting for the boss man to tell them what to do. This is not reasonable para-military procedure. I compare it very unfavorably with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where the unfinished refit of the Enterprise and new crew are handled perfectly.

The actual mission, all 15-20 minutes of it, is pretty good TOS-style shenanigans. First contact with asshole planet, ridiculous genetic hacking disguises that wear off when it's inconvenient, sneaking/fighting thru an alien building which is just some brutalist design community college or business center. A preachy speech fixes everything (but blaming America for WW3 instead of, say, Russia? Silly but consistent with the worst eps of TNG).

The aliens have no personalities, no motivations. The leader woman with no name has a brief self-justification, stiffly read. Back in the day, aliens got names, personalities, and plots of their own. I understand actually giving a shit about your job is hard now.

The scout ship that starts this thing is weird. It's a Hermes-class scout ship, which is just an undergunned Saladin-class destroyer; anyone who's played Star Fleet Battles will have destroyed entire fleets of these things, they're cheap but very low on warp power. There should be a crew of dozens to run that, but there's 3 people, and only one of them can even talk when they're rescued? Who ships a main character and two line-less redshirt extras on first contact?

Later, preposterously grimdark backstory for Noonien-Singh, partly told earlier in the most awkward and inappropriate way possible, possibly because the script didn't get edited at all, so much as thrown at a wall. Why not cannibalism and beating her father to death with his own shoes, too? The Gorn don't lay eggs and especially not in "breeding sack" animals, they give live birth, and also hadn't been contacted in this time, Kirk's fight in "Arena" was first contact. Oops all around. Maybe she just had a bad weekend in Manchester and thought they were Gorn.

Pike has his own grimdark backstory and foreknowledge of the wheelchair but not The Cage, his dialogue is often pretentious and slow, but every captain's got their own style. Maybe he'll loosen up.

Not as terrible as Star Trek Discopants or Picknose, I didn't hate anything just disappointed with a lot of the casting, set & costume design, inattention to continuity. In 7 days, I can watch E2, and will decide if I'll keep Paramount+++ for another month or shut it off immediately.