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points by rpmisms 7 hours ago | 0 comments

Roddenberry had much less to do with TNG, which is why it's better.

Much less, but not none at all. Roddenberry refused to budge on his rule that the crew shouldn’t have grievances with one another. That why even scenes shared earlier still end in a positive outcome.

Whereas Voyager, which was written after Roddenberrys passing, leaned heavily into inter-crew disputes.

[–] derefr 7 hours ago

I have to hand it to Roddenberry, though; even though having no infighting produces a somewhat-unrealistic show, I think there's a solid justification to have the rule anyway. It prevented TOS and TNG scripts from being caught in tension between trying to "say something", vs. entertaining the audience with "low" soap-opera drama (of the kind you see increasingly in the later series.)

I have a feeling this might be no small part in why TOS and TNG are the two ST series that contain 90% of the "only comes up once" sci-fi plots / concepts / worldbuilding that people ever make reference to when talking about "things from Star Trek" rather than when talking about Star Trek. TOS and TNG, while definitely soft sci-fi, were to some degree trying to create 22-minute-long works of literary Speculative Fiction, modelled after the sort of things you'd read in serial SF magazines of the 1950s. Later ST series are emphatically not that, and nor do they try to be.

[–] hnlmorg 7 hours ago

Yeah. I’ve heard the writers hated it because they had to work so much harder to create drama.

But as you said, I think it ends up with a higher quality show.

[–] WalterBright 6 hours ago

Some TOS episodes were based on classic scifi stories, like "Voyage of the Space Beagle". Also, Roddenberry employed established scifi authors like David Gerrold to script episodes.

An annoying facet of ST episodes is the morality lessons they push, like on every episode of The Brady Bunch.

[–] hnlmorg 6 hours ago

For me, that’s the best part of the TOS era.

It’s nice to watch something that highlights the best of humanity in a future setting.

Almost everything else in SciFi is dystopian. But ST is a rarity. And it’s all the more beautiful for it.

[–] alittlebee 5 hours ago

Yeah, I agree.. I still rewatch it every so often, when I'm feeling down or uninspired.

[–] kstenerud 6 hours ago

I actually found DS9 to be the best of all of them. Aside from the terrible Dr Bashir character, they felt believable, and like any real environment had personality clashes, personal issues, baggage, and of course interpersonal conflicts.

The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).

[–] derefr 6 hours ago

Thus "increasingly" :)

• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.

• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.

• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.

(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)

[–] AngryData 5 hours ago

The Lower Decks was good as a love letter to older fans, I do recommend that. But both Discovery and Academy were horrendous and I regret the time spent. Picard had a few good episodes and it was nice to see the old crew but was not great. Stranger New Worlds had some good things and wasn't a butcher job but not anything to write home about in my opinion.

[–] hnlmorg 6 hours ago

Strange New Worlds started strong. But the last couple of series was so bad for the drama. In fact one episode was a literal soap opera.

[–] outworlder 4 hours ago

I would have ZERO issues with the wacky episodes if and only if we were back to the 20-ish episodes per season format. Then sure, do a puppet show. Musical episodes (for how much I HATE musicals, it was decently enjoyable, Klingon boy band was super unexpected).

But when you only have half a dozen-ish episodes per season, you can't afford filler.

[–] hnlmorg 3 hours ago

My issue with the last season was that it was all gimmick and no substance. Literally the whole series was made up of filler episodes.

It’s such lazy writing.

I actually didn’t mind Academy. Yeah it was flawed and had a lot of lazy tropes. But it had an identity to it and some substance to it. Not much substance, but still something. Whereas the latest season of Strange New Worlds? It wasn’t anything. It had no substance. It had no identity. It was as if someone made a silly clip show (like the Stargate 200th episode) but instead of lots of short parodies in one filler episode, they made an entire series with each episode being one very long joke. A singular punch line stretched out over nearly an hour.

I hated the first season of Discovery. But that was still better than the season 5 of SNW. I hates the first season of Enterprise. And that was also better than S5 for SNW. And I wasn’t much keen on the first season of Lower Decks either. And even that was less goofy than S5 of SNW. And what’s worse, all of those spin offs that I said had poor first seasons ended up with excellent 5th seasons. And yet SNW started of strong and fizzled out it shallow jokes.

It honestly feels like the writers had nothing.

[–] 1potato 5 hours ago

Agree. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they gave Captain Sisko's character -- not to mention Worf, O'Brien and others -- a lot more room to develop and grow.

I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.

Also agree about Bashir.

[–] hnlmorg 4 hours ago

Though in defence to Bashir, without him you wouldn’t have Garak, who is possibly one of the best written characters in all of SciFi.

And some of O'Brien‘s best performances were counterpointing Bashir too.

I think as a solo character, he’s a little shallow. But he works exceptionally well at being an anchor for other characters to play off.

[–] outworlder 4 hours ago

The Inner Light begs to disagree. Plus his Borg summer camp.

But yes, those instances were a bit rare.

[–] yyyk 6 hours ago

TOS and TNG were sci-fi, even if many scripts varied. Given its time, you could have the classic and interesting tech and society questions there, even if they avoided a lot of the implications. But over time the franchise lost this key part, and so it's much worse for the wear. We could use an actually relevant sci-fi series given current tech.

[–] ahazred8ta 5 hours ago

Unfortunately the 1970s ST animated series gave us the 'trapped in the holodeck' story format. The TNG writers leaned a little too heavily on it.

[–] rpmisms 3 hours ago

I think maybe 5 total episodes meet that description.

[–] WalterBright 7 hours ago

I'm not so sure about that. I enjoyed the subtle humor of the illogical Mr Spock, whose logic always came to the wrong conclusion. And McCoy with "dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!"

The best dialog ever:

Lawyer: Mr Spock, I understand you know something about computers?

Spock: I know all about them.

Always makes me laugh.

[–] tmtvl 2 hours ago

Reminds me of that one episode where Mr. Spock figures out there's a problem with the computer because it loses at chess. And he knows it shouldn't lose at chess because he programmed it himself.

[–] randcraw 7 hours ago

And it had a MUCH bigger budget than the original, as well as the assurance that it wouldn't be cancelled at a moment's notice.

[–] WalterBright 7 hours ago

Eh, it's the writing and the characters that make it fly, not the budget. TOS was blessed with some really good writers, and was very lucky with the actors.