Star Trek

This is why a lot of franchises fail:

• Studio execs and creators fall into the trap of "X is the reason it was popular so give them more X!". X being: fistfights, Romantic Plot Tumor, SFX etc. Completely Missing The Point of the series/franchise. That's why the last two TNG movies bombed and why Into Darkness is a base-breaker, they are seen as trying to ape Wrath Of Khan.

• Often things get changed in the adaptation. Hence Vulcan has a moon and young Kirk steals a car. Sometimes changes are better, sometimes worse.

Pillar missed the point about old Trek, it wasn't cartoonishly evil villains and white hatted good guys. In TOS the Baku would've been the planet with a dark secret not Space Elves. So wedded to his vision that, yes, studio execs pointed out the plotholes you could fly a Borg Cube through on his movie.

Most of the middling Star Trek movies are trying to ape Wrath of Khan. Into Darkness not only just plain rebooted Khan Singh, but copied a bunch of Spock's dialogue from WOK and put it in Kirk's mouth, and vice versa.

Executive Meddling seems to be constant because very rarely do the writers let it be known the executives are the ones who came up with the good ideas. But writers are very quick to use the faceless "exec" as the source of the stupid idea. 90 percent of the time the notes they give are actually great or just recommendations on what to avoid.

Early drafts of First Contact didn't have the Borg Queen, studio notes said that the Borg were just cyber-zombies without a leader. If this was the first time they encountered the Borg, that faceless malevolence might have worked. But they have a long history with them and already know what they are, so introducing the Queen put the characters a couple steps behind and that built more tension into the story. In the long run it humanized the Borg too much, but you can't do "Best of Both Worlds" again without becoming an instant cliche.

For the record I liked the Borg Queen, given that she had little screen time.

Voyager Flanderized the Borg and the Borg Queen into a beehive causing Bad Ass Decay. Again, missing the point of what made them good villains.

600 is a funny number for them to pick, as that's a common number people peg for the "Minimum viable population" of humans. IE, enough genetic variation to avoid excessive inbreeding for the foreseeable future.

Borg Villain Decay happened pretty early on, with "I, Borg" and Hugh from TNG. From that point on, every drone is capable of friendship and recognizing right from wrong. After "Best of Both Worlds" they never actually faced the Collective again until First Contact. I read an article where the writers wanted to avoid doing Borg stories because they were such good enemies. "Resistance is Futile" doesn't hold true once they've been defeated so many times.

Voyager ended up using the Borg so much because they needed something to bring out cliffhangers. The Borg were never as scary as they once were, but they were at least still a threat. Their big introduction in Voyager, "Scorpion," is as close the franchise ever came to reaching "Best of Both Worlds" level scary again.

That's the problem with incredibly scary and powerful villains that the heroes only beat because of sheer luck or a desperate tactic: they should be used only very rarely, but writers will want to use them more often because they easily bring a significant amount of threat. And so they have to suffer Villain Decay to ensure the heroes keep winning.

And that's the rub. A villain becomes popular and then overused. Darth Vader came into his scenes and then left, allowing the story to move on. It sounds awesome on paper, but it'd suck if Vader was in every other scene of Star Wars.

The Borg became a popular villian: easy to hate, no guilt if you phaser down a Cube-full of drones.

And then they became "instant drama, just add Borg..."

-_-

And then Badass Decay...

I refer you to 2 Bob Chipman reivews: TERMINATOR GENISYS and SPECTRE (2015).

And for those of you who hate Movie Bob or just want the tl;dr version:

STOP MAKING POINTLESS PLOTHOLE SEQUELS THAT JUST RUN ON FANSERVICE!! A lot of franchises seem to coast on "look! This is the thing you remember! Pay us money so you can remember it and that character says the Catchphrase you like!" And many franchises seem to try and Follow the Leader from other franchises/current movies creating a Suck-Ception with a badly written movie harming the franchise.

(See Enterprise aping 24)

edited 19th Nov '15 10:19:37 PM by TairaMai

I think "I, Borg" and "Descent" were actually a pretty good solution to the dilemma of "how do we tell more Borg stories without making them look less badass"? (Even if "Descent" itself is not a good episode.) "I, Borg" of course is not about fighting the Borg at all, and in "Descent" it's obvious that the Lore-lead faction of Borg are not as effective as the main Collective, since they've been infected with Hugh's individualism. So with those episodes they could tell stories about specific, unique type of Borg without making the actual Borg Collective look less effective and scary. It's only the introduction of the Queen in First Contact that really starts the Badass Decay, since it retcons a needless weakness to the whole Collective.

I think it would have been possible to both keep the Borg badass and tell more stories about them in TNG, but then the series would've had to commit to more continuity than it was willing to, since the logical continuation of "Q Who" and "The Best of Both Worlds" would've been a kind of a "hopeless war" arc, where the Federation wages a losing battle against the Borg. DS9 was able to pull this off with the Founders and the Dominion War arc: from their introduction until the reveal of the morphogenic virus in the final season, the Founders were practically unbeatable, and they didn't really suffer from Badass Decay. Because DS9 was able commit to long-term continuity, it could pull off the kind of a "hopeless war against a nearly invincible enemy" arc that TNG couldn't do with the Borg.

edited 20th Nov '15 1:36:30 AM by Tuomas

I actually liked Genesys. It didn't make me want to think about demanding a refund of my cinema ticket, unlike when I was conned by the reviewers into seeing that Woody Allen crap, "Hannah and Her Sisters."

It's fine for other franchises to be hit with boring Sequelitis, Star Trek should be smarter and better.

I said should be, we did get Star Trek V, which is so bad you need an EPA license just to handle the DVD's.

Hopefully with Simon Peg on board the next movie can get to right proper Trek.

Or, more accurately, with the guy who hated Star Trek no longer making Star Trek, maybe we can get some actual gorram Star Trek again.

I don't understand the reasoning behind JJ Abrams doing Star Trek. He never liked Star Trek. He disliked the thing that made the franchise popular. So why would the producers hire him to make it, and why would he accept?

The new series really needs to throw out every single aspect of the Abrams Trek. Just pretend those movies never happened.

Uh, yeah, that's not going to happen. Those movies made, like, a ton of money. And it's already been established that the new movie is set in the new timeline.

Star Trek has every right to go sequelitis, it's a natural part of any movie franchise. The main two options you have when making a sequel is more of the same, or ambitiously try something different. I'd much rather they try something different than recycle what worked in the prior film and amp it up. For good or bad, even the poorly received Star Trek films at least tried to offer something different in each film.

The Abrams Trek manage to fulfill the role of popcorn blockbusters, but in doing so took away the actual heart of the franchise. Actual characterization is forfeited by only having them say something funny or do something cool. Ignoring logical plotting in favor of a cool visual or action sequence (ie, submerging the Enterprise for no other reason than to see it rise out of the ocean). And most of all, the story is so focused on trying to go somewhere that it never stops and give us a commentary on the human condition. Having Kirk kick a warp core back in place and give a speech at the end doesn't make him Captain material.

I would agree that the first film had a lot more characterization — especially in regards to Spock and Kirk — than the second film.

It makes him heroic, certainly, but doesn't actually fix any character flaws the story was trying to highlight. Being heroic is something he's already proven for himself.

The '09 Star Trek film worked alright mostly because of the gimmick of gathering the original crew together. Into Darkness actually had something of an okay, Star Trek-esque plot brewing, but kind of lost itself at the halfway point. The idea of the villain using a domestic terrorist attack and the threat of an oncoming war as an excuse for militarization could have been great, but they ended up directly aping Wrath of Khan at the end just because they could.

And they have no idea how to use Spock without making him flip out and lose his cool. The tv series and original movies got a lot more mileage over subtle behavior traits, like deliberately swearing or his voice cracking. Spock only flipped out in like 4 episodes of the tv show and not at all in the original movies (barring the Genesis Planet pon farr) and every time had some explanation for it like a virus or puberty, not just that he gets really angry.

Kirk in Nu-Trek definitely feels a little hollow. I think a lot of the problem comes from parody and pop culture caricature exaggerating his character into a rule breaking, womanzing, Starfleed cowboy sooner to punch an alien in the face than anything else.

If one actually watches the entire run of TOS, he typically has good reasons for violating or ignoring the prime directive, gets involved with women often for the sake of a mission, and is rarely the instigator in any physical fight. It also ignores that while Kirk did fly by the seat of his pants with his plans, he could very often be a thoughtful, strategic, and intellectual commanding officer.

Hell even Trek canon got into this, with Janeway describing the TOS era crew as likely being booted out of Starfleet in the current era, which not only strikes me as dubious, but pretty galling considering what she's pulled off. Unfortunately the Jim in Abrams' films feels inspired by this exaggeration too, never getting anywhere close Kirk's introspective depth in an episode like Balance of Terror or the Ultimate Computer.

edited 21st Nov '15 6:20:57 AM by BorneAgain

The sad thing with the Abrams movies is that they brought cash. I live in a country where Star Trek is mostly known as the old american series with the pointy-eared guy and terrible special effects, and most people I've been talking with about the Abrams movies are usually enthusiastic about them.

So, commercially, the move of handing the franchise to Abrams was a very sound one. It brought in a lot of people who thought Star Trek was a nerdy show for nerds who like to dress up as Klingons by turning it into a standard blockbuster series. In other words, it ripped the soul of Star Trek so as to attract people who had no idea what the show was really about in the first place, and it worked.

As I've said dozens of times, Cracked responded to the announcement that he was directing Star Wars by pointing out that essentially the way his Trek reboot saved the franchise was by skinning it and draping the pelt over Star Wars. All pew pew lasers and grandiose schemes.

And what of the next Trek movie? Any words on the script? I don't want another "Pay us to remind you that Star Trek exists!" movie.

We know that Orci's treatment was thrown out for being too Star Trek, but that they replaced him with Simon Pegg, who is a huge Trek fan. We know that Idris Elba is an original character, for sure this time guys, none of this "John Harrison" stuff.

I think that's all we know.

Points of interest from Chaos on the Bridge:

• The one note on creating the character that Patrick Stewart was given was that he was given a stack of Horatio Hornblower books and told "that's the essence of the man." So both of the best parts of the 80s golden age were from Hornblower.

• The budget was cut so low in the first season they didn't really have craft services.

• Most of Denise Crosby's 15-hour days were to stand in the background so the camera could see her legs behind the captain.

• When Ira Behr was hired at the start of the third season, he was shown a list printed on the bathroom wall of all the writers that got shitcanned in the first two years.

• Roddenberry's response to Behr's idea of a pleasure planet (Risa): "I'm seeing a place where we could have women fondling and kissing each other, and men hugging and holding hands, and we could imply that they're having sex in the background!" Berman's response to Behr's shellshock from that meeting: "don't pay any attention to that. Just get the captain laid."

• At one point as the second season was winding down, Hurley was so frustrated that he proposed firing the entire cast and starting over, writing a story of the entire ship blowing up and searching for a new crew.

• I think Hurley uses the term "wacky-doodle" only once, but they built the whole end of the doc on that phrase.

edited 29th Nov '15 8:11:35 PM by TParadox

Roddenberry had the right idea!

And one can only hope the next series manages to continue in that right vein, given the levels of acceptance same sex couples are gaining nowadays.

Roddenberry got kinda pervy at times (his worldbuilding notes on the Ferengi went into great detail on things like their preferred mating positions, and he allegedly went down to the set just to poke the Duras Sisters in the Boob Window), but at least in that instance, his perviness would have resulted in better representation.

There was an interesting comment in the doc that the captains reflect what Gene wanted to be in his life at the time. Jim Kirk goes around punching and sleeping with and yelling at everybody, Picard is a wise older man who negotiates and calms people down and has authority without bluster.