Mine is that Discovery should have been a series taking place in the Picard era.
I can’t fucken see shit on the new ship sets except for on SNW. They all adopted Klingon lighting or something and even my glasses leave the scenes like the end of GoT.
I have that problem on my televisions, it turns out, it’s bad implementation of HDR.
Turn HDR off on your devices and the picture is instantly bright and clear.
I’mma try it out. Thank you, I always blamed it on my IT job destroying my eyesight always looking at screens up close.
It’s particularly bad on my Samsung sets, their HDR implementation is a known bug and there’s no way to disable it on the television itself, all you can do is disable it on connected devices.
Then I find, everytime my Roku, Xbox, or Playstation gets an update, I have to disable it again. :(
Still, better than watching a black scene in a coalmine. LOL.
HDR on:
HDR off:
Oh then I’m screwed I’m just streaming from the TV. I only do it occasionally but this might make me watch Star Trek on my computer instead lol cause those screencaps you posted match my experience exactly
Depending on the streaming service, a $99 Roku box might be worth the investment.
Enterprise is better than people give it credit for.
If the theme song were magically, retroactively changed to Archer’s Theme, the show would automatically be considered twice as good with no other changes.
I’m convinced I’m the only person on the planet that thought it was a banger.
IIIITTTSSS BEEEN A LOOOOOOOONNNG ROOOAAAADDD
You are. You totally are…
A lot of banger songs don’t belong in a Star Trek intro.
You take that back
should have gone 7 seasons, too.
Enterprise is a great series marred by some the worst writing for a female character in the history of science fiction.
The entire franchise should be handed over to Simon Pegg.
He has the most thoughtful understanding of what Star Trek is suppose to be since Ronald Moore, Jeri Taylor, and Ira Steven Behr.
would like to read more about this. I know he’s a fan, but I’m just cringing at the idea of the Cornetto trilogy expanding into Delta Quadrant…
Jeffrey Combs is awesome. That is all.
Shran is one of my favorite recurring characters in any series. So is weyoun.
Do…people not share our opinion?
not sure if that’s a hot take…
Keiko wasn’t that bad of a character. She wasn’t a great character, but the biggest problem was that her actress, Rosalind Chao, had very poor chemistry with Colm Meaney, who in turn had great chemistry primarily with Alexander Siddig, and also with several other actors. This wasn’t a problem when she was cast in “Data’s Day” as the bride to be with nervous bride energy, if anything that’s an asset in such a short time frame. But then expecting that to work in what is supposed to be a long-term marriage is what led to perception of her being all MIIIIIILES all the time.
Now, I don’t know that mid to late 90s Star Trek producers would have been on board, but they should have written an amicable divorce plot for the O’Briens. Miles and Keiko clearly grew apart from each other over the course of the show. Between her extended trips to Bajor and the way she all but threw Miles at Kira, they were already about 85% of the way there anyway. A divorce would have been a great way to resolve that issue, and use Star Trek as it was always intended: to explore real life issues in a scifi universe.
Wow that is hot.
Picard should have died in season 1 of PIC and the rest of the seasons should have concentrated on the new crew gallivanting across the galaxy in their newly christened ship, “The Picard”.
SNW should never have killed off Hemmer.
Cumberbatch was miscast as Khan.
Totally agree about Cumberbatch.
Cumberbatch should have been Gary Mitchell. He’s got the right vibe for a man losing touch with his humanity as he’s consumed by his godlike abilities, and a movie expanding on Mitchell would cover more new and interesting ground than plagiarizing Wrath of Khan.
As much as it is fun to revisit legacy characters and settings, they need to do a complete break, TNG style, and set a show somewhere where we can have new adventures with new characters. Lower Decks is somehow the closest to doing this and it’s a member berry show. The constant revisiting (and retconning) is slowly suffocating the franchise.
Lower Decks deserves 7 seasons x23 episodes per season, with better quality animation for the space-based visuals
They need to actually give a full look into the economics of the federation. Yeah, it’s space communism. But I want more specifics.
There’s a recent episode in Lower Decks where they liberate a planet from capitalism… by essentially taking all the “worthless” gold and jewels and giving it to Space Pirate Royalty to broker a peace deal between them and the Federation.
I don’t doubt that the majority of the occupants of said planet are now happier not having to grind for capital…, but apparently having capital is still an immensely useful resource that the Federation is happy to, uh, quietly commandeer in lieu of payment for its, uh, services to the planet(?)
I still need to catch up on the latest season(s?) of lower decks. And given the fact that lower decks is a comedy, and borderline non-canon, I’d take that with a giant grain of salt.
Energy-to-(organic)matter conversion + futuristic power generators makes feeding your population a triviality. That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
But Star Trek is a fictional utopia, much like Communism.
In reality, corruption would still mess up government in a “real world” Star Trek. I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares? It’s not really relevant to the themes of the shows.
Star Trek is founded on liberal ideas popular in the mid-20th century that humanity could achieve unity and peace if it just cast aside superficial differences like race and gender, allowing us to focus on exploring the universe once we’d gotten over fighting each other. That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It’s like how the force is best left a mystical property of the universe in Star Wars, rather than science-ized with medichlorians.
That simplifies just about any economic system, which takes a lot of the complicated stuff out of government and class hierarchies.
Right, but they very clearly don’t get all of their food out of a replicator, nor do they use the holodeck for things like hair cuts. There is still people who serve as cooks, waitresses, barbers, etc despite the technology being there to not need those jobs.
And that’s what I want explored in more depth.
I’m a casual Trekkie, but I don’t recall much detail about the Federation’s or Earth’s government structure. Do people still vote? Is it a benevolent military dictatorship? Who knows? And who cares?
I’ve been dipping my toe in the books. At least in the first book for PIC, The Last Best Hope, they very clearly still have political struggles for power, corruption, tribalism, and voting. It ain’t a dictatorship, but the goals and views of the government leaders aren’t wholey benevolent.
A particularly good example was the Federation council member Olivia Quest. She’s a rep from a border planet, whos been facing some issues with the romulan star going supernova, and all the immigrants that are mayhaps being sent their way. So she raises a big stink over any and all help towards the romulans. It’s self serving, selfish, and tribalism, but she was voted in and she wasn’t alone.
All of this is very familiar to real life. But it’s the exact kind of details I want, but on one of the shows. They made it interesting in the books, they could just as easily make it interesting in the show.
That’s the very core of the entire franchise and I’m fine leaving it that way, unscrutinized, since it clearly doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Maybe the tech of replicators/transporters/holodecks should be left unscrutinized, because ultimately it relies on technobable for it to be compatible with a suspension of disbelief. But I don’t think the same goes for the societal structures of the federation. It worked in the Last Best Hope, I think it could work on the screen.
Tasha should have stayed.
Well then, my hot take is going to be that she was miscast and it was to the show’s benefit that Worf took over as security chief.
The 90s aesthetic doesn’t make the second gen series unwatchable, but damn if it isn’t hella distracting. (It’s the hair. And the wardrobe. But mostly the hair.)
Vulcans are a completely unbelievable race. There is absolutely no logic to being so diafainful to other races yet it’s pretty much universal amongst Vulcans.
I don’t know, I actually like the whole flawed idea of vulcan logic. Throughout the different shows we come to understand that ‘vulcan logic’ isn’t some weird alien “their brains work differently” thing. They used to be violent and emotional, and they came up with a social system that helped solve that, and ushered in an age if peace and progress.
But “logic” isn’t a meaningful method to live a life, it’s a very specific tool for certain types of problems. Even our primitive earth philopshers have identified many problems with thinking that we could live life purely logically, as Hume puts it "Reason Is and Ought Only to Be the Slave of the Passions”.
So we’re not seeing a bunch of transcendent android minds, we’re seeing the equivalent of a bunch of recovering alcoholics clinging desperately to a worldview that they cannot question, but that is itself “illogical”. So their disdain for other races is partly a consequence of their general directness and not holding back criticism, but also an anxious defence mechanism of people who know that even their indoctrinating school system and constant peer pressure might not be enough if Vulcans feel like it’s okay to like humans or whomever, because that’s only one step away from “well, if they’re doing okay why can’t I fall in love and cry and laugh!” and that way lies bloody civil war and a return to barbarism.
Which is why Old Man Spock is the best vulcan. As he said, “Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.” In his old age, he learned to understand and value the role emotion plays in our lives and how logic is best when it works together with emotion. That T’Lyn seems to have learned this from him specifically and is going down the same route makes me really happy.
So much of the Vulcan culture is just exhausting.
Rewatching The Search for Spock… there is an insane amount of religion in Vulcan culture.
“Spock’s Brain” has been memed as the worst episode ever, one of the ones we pretend doesn’t exist.
My hot take is that it’s not actually that bad. It’s not a top tier episode, but it’s perfectly serviceable. The worst actual thing in the episode is the sound effect used for the medical device to keep brainless Spock alive. I’ll grant that. Otherwise, the central conflict is average Trek stuff. The scene where McCoy gets an ancient medical database downloaded into his brain is actually really neat.
I am convinced the legacy of an especially bad reputation of this episode is because it appeared on a few “Worst Episode” lists because of the personal taste of the authors and very few people actually watch TOS for themselves, but instead absorb it through articles. So it just became accepted that the episode was outlandishly bad.
My hot take is that the dominion war was hot garbage. Just episode after episode of the least fun parts of trek for me. It has some stand out episodes, but it drags and I basically stop rewatches in the late seasons. I also think Sisko’s ending sucks, he should have stayed with Jake. Lastly, the prophets were way better before they introduced Pah-Wraiths and made them way more mystical.
It think the Dominion war works but as a framework for some of the more complicated choices the characters need to make. It also give us a chance for decisions to not play out in an hour episode.
It gave us the most interesting human klingon stories since TOS. Allies with different views and where the klingon perspective has more value.
I agree the actual battle scenes and episodes are usually week.
I also agree Sisko and the wraith / prophets stuff was terrible though. Though I always hated the prophet stories not just the end. I would have loved to see a better ending to Dukat and Winn than blasted with space magic.
I loved Voyager and don’t understand the hate. I’m more of a Star Wars fan, however, and not that knowledgeable regarding Trek.
Honestly, there aren’t enough good actors on the show. Picardo, Mulgrew, Phillips, and later Ryan carried the show… everyone else was kind of just… there. Couple that with very hit and miss writing and it’s easy to see why it doesn’t live up to the previous shows… but it was still a pretty good show when they weren’t going action heavy. Or throwing weird salamander sex in there.
