Star Trek Picard/Discovery

Why did you waste time on such a comment? Hope you don’t sink too much into this; I imagine answers will be reflective of these posts ratings…

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@Korbyyn no need for that. Much like this thread, if you don’t like content then you can easily avoid it. Others want the content and modiphius listened.

Trolls are D&D creatures, with no place in Star Trek

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That’s kinda the whole point of IDIC. Trek is embracing that more so now than ever before. With 5+ series actively on air or in production, with 13 movies and six other series, there’s a lot of Trek available and not all of it will be to everyone’s taste. Watch the stuff you like and ignore what you don’t like. Everything on screen is canon until CBS tells us otherwise.

Disco and Picard are two of the current series. They’re bringing in a whole new generation of fans. Any licensee would be smart to make products to appeal to the widest range of Star Trek fans as possible. I’m excited to add them both to the STA line and hope fans will check out the products. And if you don’t, that’s fine too. Find another Trek that you do like.

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I am very interested in the Disco era ships.

I also have thoroughly enjoyed all the Trek recently - the JJverse (in my opinion) are good sci fi, not good trek - but I have enjoyed all of Disco (I can think of maybe 2 episodes which were “meh”), even S1 (my opinion, S1 Disco is the 2nd best overall First Season of any Trek) and not just because of the fantastic graphics. Its gritty, its dirty, and even though a lot of the answers come from one character, I dont hold it against the show/the character.

Picard I was slightly disappointed with; it was good, but I wanted more - but I’m not sure what I wanted.

Lower decks is brilliant. This is literally how my STA players play, and it felt like the TNG-Voy era. This was the best first season, and it left me really wanting more.

I agree with watching Picard on wanting more. I liked it, but I it wasn’t quite what I wanted. But I also don’t know what I wanted, but it wasn’t exactly that.

I started watching Star Trek in the early 90s. A friend of mine had Wrath of Khan and was psyched to share it with me. By the end of that summer I had rented all of the movies, was watching TNG repeats religiously.

My friend was put on Star Trek by his aunt who was a big fan of the original series and the movies. When I asked what she thought of TNG she simply said she didn’t care for it. That was it. She didn’t watch the series because it didn’t appeal to her the same way TOS did.

Similarly, Deep Space Nine is my favorite Trek and has been since about season three of that show but I never really got ino Voyager. I bounced on it not long after Seven of Nine was introduced. For the longest time I made snarky comments (and still do but less so) about how DS9 is so much better than Voyager, but I never had an issue when people said they liked Janeway etc.

I dug Enterprise and watched the first season when it aired. I fell out part way through season two because I was in college and had some night classes and juggling them with Star Trek was too difficult. Also I needed some time off from Star Trek. I’ve come back to it in recent years and I think it is a strong show, but some characters are too underdeveloped and the plots seem like recycled TNG ideas.

Star Trek is awesome. It is part of my DNA. There isn’t a day in my life where something happens and I think to myself, “That is just like the episode when…” However I don’t love all things Star Trek. I’ve never been able to get far into watching the TOS shows and Voyager still doesn’t work for me (I’ve tried recently and still find it to be very meh). And a lot of Enterprise is unfulfilling (and a lot very satisfying).

The new series do not hook me as deeply as those 90s shows did. I’m not a fan that Michael Burnham seems to be the solution to almost every problem. At least half to the crew are background characters that three seasons in I still feel like I don’t know well at all. They got Section 31 completely wrong. When I think of the spore drive I think of how no other species has been able develop this technology and how the Dominion would have annihilated everyone in the Alpha Quadrant with it. The Picard series I liked but mostly because of nostalgia and I was not happy with major elements of that finale. Also I don’t know if it needs to be a continuing series, I feel like I got everything I needed from that first season. And Lower Decks exceeded my expectations. I really like it.

I don’t think Discovery is written for me. I recognize that it is a more diverse cast. A lot of strong female characters and LGBTQ characters are asserted forward. I think the themes of the series resonate with people of color, of different sexuality, and identify with different gender norms than I am used to. That does not take the series less Trek. I might not be able to get out of my white male cis head enough to really gel with it but that doesn’t make it fake Star Trek (And every season I enjoy more than the previous). It is as well written and well produced as any other Star Trek series (all of the shows have continuity issues).

I often think back to my friend’s aunt when she told me she didn’t care for TNG. She didn’t start ranting about how crappy it is and what is wrong about it. She simply accepted that there was Star Trek that she liked and there was other Star Trek that she didn’t like. She didn’t try to show me how I was wrong for liking TNG. It didn’t matter to her that I thought TNG was better. It is all Star Trek. It has always been about diversity as our strength, fighting aliens when they’re bullies, striving to utopia and making errors in the continuity(both as the plot and in the plots of episodes). Some of it is going to blow you’re mind and some of it is going to make you cringe.

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Well said. I’ve been a fan since watching re-runs of TOS as a kid (though the cheese in some of those episodes makes me cringe a little today) and I’ve given all the series a try. Some I like more than others, some I didn’t like much on first watch but have grown to appreciate later. I don’t need to like them all, or have anyone else like all the ones (and only the ones) I like. I can feel like Voyager was “Gilligan’s Star Trek” without attempting to shout down anyone who feels differently.

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Personally, my problem with DIS wasn’t the darkness, it was that they opened up with it.
Tough moral choices, and sometimes risking your career to do the right thing, are an integral part of Trek.
But I don’t think any of us who are GM’s, if we were planning a long campaign, would start the very first session off with one of the PC’s being presented with the option to commit mutiny and start a major war. That’s the kind of thing you save for the end of a long multi-session arc after all the players have fleshed out their characters and have some history going.
Same thing on TV. What Sisko did during “In the Pale Moonlight” is every bit as dark and morally murky as what Burnham does in Discovery. But we knew him for six years and saw exactly how he’d come to the point where he could consider such a thing. We knew Burnham for 20 minutes.

I largely agree, the impression I got was DISCO wanted to move to fast. they wanted the pay off of DS9 without earning it via a build up. weather that was the case or not I definatly came away with that impression. I mean imagine if they had done a 7 season series centered around the Shenzhou only to have it end with the discovery opener.

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As much as I enjoy 90s Trek (especially Deep Space Nine), there is a lot of fat that could be trimmed from those series. Not all of those episodes have essential character development that is be needed to get to that “In the Pale Moonlight” moment. These new series are leaning and don’t have the luxury of putting that much production in front of the interesting moments. I don’t want to watch six seasons of the Discovery crew rehashing TNG plots to get to Burnham’s mutiny moment, which is the plot that differentiates it from other series. I agree it doesn’t have the gravest of Sisko telling us, “I can live with it.” However I don’t think it is trying to be.

I think Discovery’s first episode is a decompressed version of DS9’s Wolf 359 opening. It is an action moment with high stakes and it is meant to hook us in. Also to set up Burnham as a character who isn’t afraid to take big actions when regulations and orders don’t offer a solution for the moment.

What I think is happening with these new series is us old timers from the 90s keep trying to make the current shows conform to the 20+ episode season format. This is Star Trek for the peek TV era. The old ways of setting up plots and characters aren’t going to work as well as they did then. The current series present a season more like a novel than a block of TV programming. They’re intended to have themes and character arcs. DS9 touched on that structure but still had one and done episodes where they played hopscotch with aliens and got shrunk down to the tiny size inside the Defiant’s computers.

The new series have a more focused story structure and if the themes of that story doesn’t engage you then you’re out of luck for that season. Unlike back in the day when if you didn’t like an episode it largely didn’t affect the plot of next week’s, which you might like more.

The shows I’ve seen were very badly written and directed, leaving aside whether the tone and premise are anything I want from Star Trek. But it’s quite easy not to watch them and excise them from your games. I don’t include anything from Star Trek: Enterprise, for instance, just because I don’t think it’s very good and it also contradicts earlier Star Trek stories that I did enjoy.

I’d say they should only support what they enjoy.

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I agree with that. Since the Star Trek shows are so different, it is likely that there is at least one show that you don’t enjoy.

Personally, I find Discovery OK, but I just think it is pointless somehow. Lower Decks was pretty good, but I just cannot bring myself to let it into my head-canon. Picard had some great episodes, but the plot was bumpy and random at times.

I think if the internet had existed during the time TNG first aired, reactions would have been the same as they are now. There are people who only like TOS, people who only like TNG, people who love DS9, people who hate DS9 and people who hate Voyager.

As a company, Modiphius will likely try to appease all fans, so there will likely be material for the new shows. But I don’t think it will be something major like the Tricorder Bundle.

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I was on Usenet back when TNG first aired, and TNG was pretty much hated by Trek fandom for the first season and a bit.

I remember reading a book a while ago that talked about how people perceive things from the past, and it argued, with supporting research, that people’s impressions of things are affected by 1) their average perception of a thing over time, and 2) how they felt at the end of a thing.

On average, TNG wasn’t bad, and at the end, the episodes were pretty strong. So people mostly think on it fondly. But that first season wasn’t good, in my opinion.

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The first two seasons were not very good. A handful of good episodes and more than a few cringe-worthily bad ones. It got a lot better, though. I always thought it was too bad they stopped making the series in favor of pursuing movies as the cast was still game to continue and the Next Generation movies were unfortunately uniformly not very good.

Mildly put. But Star Trek uses to take a few seasons to be really good. DS9 starts to be strong around season 3/4, I held the same true for Voyager.

But, here’s an interesting thing: Perception changes. 20 years ago, I loved TNG and DS9, thought TOS to be pretty strong, wasn’t compelled by VOY and hated ENT when it came out. I still love TNG and DS9, but watching TOS comes hard to me nowadays. VOY and ENT, on the other hand, aged pretty well in my eyes and I think I won’t write a lot of comments to the internet on ENT (frequently using the term “Action-Archer”), again with such spite. :slight_smile: It’s also easier to me to watch the reboot-films, now.

Every Trek has it’s time. If you don’t like some Trek, maybe your time with it hasn’t come. Just be curious and try again after some years or decades. And if you still don’t like it, there’s still plenty. :slight_smile:

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For my part, I’ve been a long time Trekkie since maybe the late 70s-early 80s when I was just a little kid and all I had of Star Trek were TOS reruns. When TNG first came on, I remember being disappointed that it wasn’t featuring the return of the original TOS characters, especially when the early teaser commercials just before the 1st season aired featured snippets from the first three TOS movies. (In hindsight, I really should have known from the title “Star trek: The Next Generation” that it was going to feature brand new characters. Derp.) But I got over that soon enough and learned to enjoy TNG, VOY and especially DS9 as they went along and found their footing after their first few seasons. (“In The Pale Moonlight” remains one of my most favorite Star Trek episodes ever just because Star Trek never really asked the question before: When your entire civilization is at stake, how far will you go to help it survive?)

I watched the first two seasons of ENT, but lost interest because I really dislike the time travel Trek stuff and the “Temporal Cold War” narrative really irked me. In hindsight, I wish ENT had lasted longer because I really would have liked to see the Earth-Romulan War arc that they had planned.

DIS I both like and dislke. I like DIS because it has darker and grittier stories that explore messy moral dilemmas; I dislike it because it seems to violate and/or retcon much of the TOS continuity. But now that Season 3 has had a significant timeskip, that’s no longer an issue so I look forward to seeing more of DIS. (Full Disclosure: I haven’t subscribed to CBS Access yet, so I’m only seeing the NuTrek stuff when it comes out on BluRay.)

PIC I find amazing because it’s like watching a Star Trek version of Firefly. A bitter, cynical freighter captain accompanied by a crew of socially damaged misfits who engage in legally questionable actions while trying to dodge the agents of a fascistic organization: was I talking about Cristobal Rios and the crew of La Sirena avoiding the Tal Shiar/Zhat Vash or was I talking about Malcolm Reynolds and the crew of Serenity avoiding the Alliance?

Lower Decks I haven’t seen yet (has its BluRay release even been announced yet?) but the snippets I have seen look hilarious as hell. I can’t wait to get the BluRay and enjoy it fully.

As for Prodigy? I’ll admit that I’m skeptical about the premise: a bunch of kids get their hands on an abandoned Starfleet starship and have wacky adventures while being babysat by Admiral Janeway? I’m not sure about this premise, but I’ll reserve judgment until I actually see it and can judge it on its own merits.

I’m curious to see what they do with Strange New Worlds and the Section 31 show. I’m eagerly awaiting both shows.

But yeah, I can’t wait to see what Modiphius does with the Discovery and Picard stuff for STA. When is that stuff coming out, 3rd Quarter 2021?

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Mutineer Mike was the show breaker for me and pretty much everyone I know. Disobeying your CO and your Admiral followed closely by an armed attack on said Captain as part of an attempted seizure of the ship is as bad as it can get. That person, if they lived, would never ever be allowed back in any organization because she would have zero trust from anyone. Period. No more than a known pedo would be released to run a grade school.

The there has to be a suspension of belief in any show to be enjoyable. Kicking off with an act of mutiny was the nail in the coffin.

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To me, its a holo-novel. Its what a show like MAS*H or JAG would look like in that time frame.

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If that had happened in the season finale, after 12 episode of developing her character, carefully crafting the story, raising the tension, and getting to a point where we as viewers would understand her choice and imagine that in her place we might do the same thing no matter the cost, it could have worked brilliantly.

Doing it on the first episode before we get to know her at all was just the worst possible storytelling decision, and as you say, killed the show for me before it ever really got started.

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I think it’s strong right out of the gate. The premiere is the best of any Trek series. There are at least a dozen very strong episodes and more than a couple of brilliant ones in the first season, and even the clinkers aren’t that bad (with the possible exception of “Move Along Home” and even that’s not as awful as some of TNG’s first season stories). And then the 3 parter to open season two is just amazing.

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