Go watch the “casino in the void” episode of TNG and come back and talk about how much trek sucks now. I personally enjoy the campiness of the episode, but it was played straight, and it was terrible.
Casino in the void always had the vibe of a TOS script transplanted into TNG, the few episodes that I watched from TOS all had the same campiness and stage acting.
I think that’s what makes it so terrible, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Bad stories reliably end in TNG. Usually, they’re done after a single runtime. In Discovery, the awful plots smear across multiple episodes, if not entire seasons.
Big arcs can work in Star Trek, but they have to be good. Discovery is like if the writers decided to make Pen Pals into a 12-episode saga. If something doesn’t hit, it takes forever to rectify. Then, since they decided to start as a prequel, they did the star wars thing of irreparably tarnishing the stories that came before.
First seasons often get a bonus for me when judging a show, it all has to find together and that often needs some time.
That’s why I gave Discovery three seasons to win me over, I really tried to like it.
Arguably they were still figuring out the tone, and how to revive a 20 year old franchise while not retreading the past. Not claiming there aren’t some duds, but later 90s Trek benefited from TNG cracking the “formula” and sticking to it.
Compare a modern spiritual successor to TNG like The Orville, which, despite a rocky premiere, just crushed it within 5-6 episodes, and kept crushing it, because they didn’t have to put so much legwork into defining the tone of the show.
The Orville… Still the best Trek of the modern era.
Go watch TNG season 1.
Exaxtly. You can go up to season 3 easily too.
Go watch the “casino in the void” episode of TNG and come back and talk about how much trek sucks now. I personally enjoy the campiness of the episode, but it was played straight, and it was terrible.
Casino in the void always had the vibe of a TOS script transplanted into TNG, the few episodes that I watched from TOS all had the same campiness and stage acting. I think that’s what makes it so terrible, it stands out like a sore thumb.
Bad stories reliably end in TNG. Usually, they’re done after a single runtime. In Discovery, the awful plots smear across multiple episodes, if not entire seasons.
Big arcs can work in Star Trek, but they have to be good. Discovery is like if the writers decided to make Pen Pals into a 12-episode saga. If something doesn’t hit, it takes forever to rectify. Then, since they decided to start as a prequel, they did the star wars thing of irreparably tarnishing the stories that came before.
Are you a fan of Wesley Crusher? How about Alexander?
Those are characters, not stories.
First seasons often get a bonus for me when judging a show, it all has to find together and that often needs some time. That’s why I gave Discovery three seasons to win me over, I really tried to like it.
Arguably they were still figuring out the tone, and how to revive a 20 year old franchise while not retreading the past. Not claiming there aren’t some duds, but later 90s Trek benefited from TNG cracking the “formula” and sticking to it.
Compare a modern spiritual successor to TNG like The Orville, which, despite a rocky premiere, just crushed it within 5-6 episodes, and kept crushing it, because they didn’t have to put so much legwork into defining the tone of the show.
The Orville… Still the best Trek of the modern era.
The Orville also had the advantage of being Not Star Trek™ in that they didn’t have to adhere to sixty years of pre-established lore.
Discovery could have avoided the vast majority of that burden by being set in the far future. (And they painfully, eventually realized that.)
Edit: spelling.