Star Trek: final (and serious) question for the night?

I think the last movie breathed new life into the Star Trek franchise although was it every really dead?

I’ve always loved the series conglomerate franchise. Keep it funny and thought provoking and I’ll continue to love it.

It could be worse. They could keep going, poisoning it with characters like Jar Jar Binks.
I think there will always be a chance at a new series. The Star Trek Universe is rife with new stories, and Battlestar Galactica showed how easily a sci fi show can be relevent.

I have loved almost everything in the Star Trek Franchise, with the exception of Deep Space Nine (too boring) and Enterprise (which is surprising considering that I loved Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap) which was also too boring and just wasn’t far enough into the future for me to appreciate it in the way that I do with the “technological” masterpieces that are Star Trek.

I loved/love the original series, all of the movies (except for the schlocky first movie, in which the costumes were so wrong that it made my stomach turn), TNG and Voyager. Loved everything about all of those and I even loved the new movie. I almost shat my pants when I saw Zachary Quinto and fell in love with Spock all over again. And although I couldn’t figure out from where they devised the romance between Spock and Uhura, I loved that part and then started doing searches from the original TV series and found lots of “hot” scenes.

I would definitely love to see any and all movies by any and all of the casts (except the Deep Space Nine and Enterprise groups). And I would be open to a new TV series as long as it was set far enough in the future to seem like real Star Trek stuff or close enough to our own time period (but with tons and tons of foreshadowing stuff) to make me believe it.

I really appreciate the smoldering “will they or won’t they” romance stuff like between Picard and Dr. Crusher, Captain Janeway and Chakotay and Reicher and Troy. And I love having a strong ensemble cast where there is lots of smart, witty dialogue. Having a Brit or a Scot or and Irishman or a Welshman is always a plus in my book.

Some funny scenes from any new Star Trek material would include anyone watching re-runs of “Shit My Dad Says” or “Boston Legal” with Denny Crane or a Xmas theme with someone watching scenes from Patrick Stewart’s Christmas Carol. I just love it when the shows get cross pollinated and there’s brief inside joke humor.

Oh, I see… it’s a “series” question, and you misspelled it “serious”. Well, that’s okay, because I’m going to give it a Sirius answer:

According to another current thread it exists concurrently in the past, present and future. If you travel out far enough (and quickly enough) on the broadcast wavelength, you can still catch the pilot episode, but the reception may be a little sketchy. Somewhere out there, they’re still awaiting that original episode (and series) with glee. (But not yet with Glee! They still have a while to wait for that, thankfully.)

@Kardamom

“Some funny scenes from any new Star Trek material would include anyone watching re-runs of “Shit My Dad Says” or “Boston Legal” with Denny Crane or a Xmas theme with someone watching scenes from Patrick Stewart’s Christmas Carol. I just love it when the shows get cross pollinated and there’s brief inside joke humor.”

That’s a great idea. :-)
I’d love to see a scene where Picard or Janeway are making fun of a TJ Hooker rerun. ;-)

You’ve already given the show a title, you know.

Star Trek: The Final Question

@WasCy No, you have.

@filmfann BSG certainly showed the sci fi can be relevant, but it is in a class of its own. Its very hard to create material of that quality so I wouldn’t expect the next star trek move/show/etc… to be anywhere near that good.

I’m unsure of why they canceled Enterprise, but I sure do hope they start another series – in the original universe, none of this alternate stuff. I miss having a Star Trek to tune in to every week.

@papayalily Just do what I did and pick up a bunch of the old movies on VHS and stream episodes of the the shows online. :)

@incendiary_dan Already done that. A hundred times. I need new material,

@papayalily Well then, your only recourse is the scary world of fan fiction. :P

@incendiary_dan Also done that quite a bit,

Guys: you must join me in Star Trek stoned and let loose.

One website had a good idea, to take Star Trek and make a game based off of it like Mass Effect. Mass Effect has a huge, sprawling narrative that spans a bunch of planets and is a very personal story.

Star Trek died with Roddenberry. Star Trek was always a concept show about a future where liberalism won, in the vein of H.G. Wells’ Men Like Gods. When Roddenberry died, Rick Berman got his hands on Star Trek. Berman is a homophobe and a racist, neo-conservative prick. He once called a gay studio lawyer “an AIDS-infested faggot” and had a knock-down-drag-out brawl with Whoopi Goldberg when she refused, during the filming of a marriage scene, to call marriage “the union of a man and a woman.” (Whoopi got her way and it was changed to “two people”—but later on Enterprise, Berman made sure that it was changed back to “man and a woman.”)

I would much rather see Star Trek die than allow it to be desecrated by the evil gruppenfuhrers of the Amerikan Empire.

@SmashTheState

“Star Trek died with Roddenberry.”

I see that he died in 1991.

Did Berman take over during that year or before?
I’m wondering if Berman’s influence can be seen in any of the ep’s of TNG.

@SmashTheState I don’t think that more liberalism would save the franchise, or that such conservativities as saying that marriage is a heterosexual matter would kill it.

@Brian1946 Towards the end, Roddenberry was losing influence and Berman was gaining it. And yes, you can see Berman’s thumbprint all over. One good example is the episode which was supposed to be about tolerance for homosexuality… but because it was “inverted” and the intolerant supposed unisexuals were all played by women, it was really an episode about The Planet of Angry Man-Hating Lesbians. In that same episode, Jonathan Frakes wanted his alien love-interest to be played by a man, but Berman overruled him and declared he would be kissing a female actor.

It was even worse in Enterprise, which was entirely Berman’s baby. Roddenberry had long promised that there would be an openly gay crew member on one of the Trek shows, and it’s pretty clear they were grooming Malcolm Reed to be gay… until Berman made sure that he got a female love-interest to make absolutely sure he couldn’t even be tacitly assumed to be gay.

This isn’t just conspiracy theory. Ronald Moore, in an interview in 2000, said that the reason there were no gay crew in Star Trek was “someone” (whom he does not name) wanted it that way. (Not that I’m a huge fan of Ronald Moore either; Battlestar Galactica was obnoxiously racist.)

They should have let it die gravefully. Instead, it was raped by the 2009 movie.
The day the 2009 movie waves are received by aliens, they will come to destroy all humans.
And btw, DS9 was the best of the franchise.

They might have some success approaching the universe from a non-Federation angle. I don’t think that the Horta would make for especially compelling protagonists, but perhaps the Romulans? Or one of the myriad species that the crew of the USS Voyager encountered on their way through the Delta Quadrant.

@Nullo I don’t want to see Nee “kitchen rat” lix EVER again

I would love a series about the Borg, though.
Or the saurians that left Earth millions of years ago.

@ragingloli Yes, a series about the borg would be spectacular. They can go into the history of the borg and how it evolved. But they’d need to be careful not to mess it up as was done in Caprica.

@SmashTheState How was BSG racist? I don’t remember there being a lot of racism in it but I might well have missed it.

I don’t know that Star Trek as a TV series can work anymore. The fact that Enterprise was cancelled although it was a good show just supports that theory, I think.

I think the new movie may have done enough to reboot the franchise for the big screen, though. I wasn’t cool with all of the casting choices (ahem – Uhura) but personally, I thought Zachary Quinto as Spock was brilliant.

@SmashTheState – I have to echo @roundsquare‘s question – BSG racist? I’m usually pretty sensitive to things like that, and I didn’t pick up on any racism. I think it portrayed a lot of the issues taking place in recent times in US society pretty well, but I didn’t see any racism. (The only thing I can think of is Baltar’s denial of his Aerilon heritage and adoption of a Caprican accent, and his father’s reaction to that.)

@Seelix how many black characters were in BSG?

@ragingloli – There was Simon, also known as #4, Dualla and Elosha. There were also several characters of other ethnicities including Boomer/Sharon, Bill Adama and Tory Foster. I can also remember quite a few people of varying ethnicities on the show, though they weren’t main characters – I particularly remember an Asian woman sitting on the Quorum representing Gemenon, for example. There was a lot of discussion of “racism” (for lack of a better word) particularly against Taurons, which has been carried over into Caprica.

I’d like to point out that representation =/= racism. The Swedes don’t count many blacks amongst their ranks, but that doesn’t make them racists.

@Seelix Even what you pointed isn’t the kind of problematic racism. I’d only consider a show “obnoxiously racist” if it furthered racist stereotypes or something like that. Pointing out that race is an issue in our society and portraying some characters as denying their heritage, etc… is a good thing.

I was just wondering what @SmashTheState thought was so racist about BSG. The example I gave was the only one I could think of at the time that had to do with race at all (by the way, I completely agree that it’s a good thing to address social issues). I was asked a question about representation of various ethnicities on the show, so I answered it.

@SmashTheState How about the 1998 Star Trek:Insurrection, which has some pretty clear pro-indigenous rights/anti-colonialism messages?

@incendiary_dan That’s Star Trek. That message litters TNG and TOS and probably the other ones, too.

@Seelix & @roundsquare

I stopped watching in disgust before the last season, but at that point the only three black characters we had seen in the entire show were (1) an insane dreadlocked Rastafarian who tries to assassinate the Great White Father of the fleet, (2) a sadistic, masked collaborator with the secret police on New Caprica, and (3) a fat, heavily-accented religious kook with Magical Negro powers who looks like Aunt Jemimah.

I should also add that I was highly irritated with the way anarchism was portrayed on the prison ship, at best being a bunch of violent thugs playing at consensus who need to be violently oppressed lest they rape the white women, and at worst as devious, lying psychopaths who don’t believe a single word out of their own mouths and are only waiting for the opportunity to snatch totalitarian power for themselves.

@incendiary_dan Particularly with TNG, the actors involved share much of Roddenberry’s philosophy, which is why I suspect they got picked. Several of the actors from TNG, most notably Jonathan Frakes and Whoopi Goldberg, clashed repeatedly with Rick Berman.

@SmashTheState Makes a lot of sense to me, particularly since I noticed Frakes directed that movie. Thanks!

Lurve the thread. Thanks Trekkers.

@Seelix I think we’re in agreement here. I just wanted to point out that what you were discussing is not racism.

@SmashTheState Going through your three characters… (spoiler alert)
(1) Indeed they did have a black guy trying to kill the white leader. But, they also portrayed him as being betrayed by said white leader several years beforehand. Indeed, they showed him as having been subject to years of capture, etc… which in large part led to him going insane. Hardly a poor portrayal of black people. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this episode portrays Adama in a worse light.
(2) Who are you talking about here? I don’t remember this scene… but I do remember that there were a lot of collaborators with the secret police on New Caprica and many of them were portrayed poorly.
(3) But she’s often right. If I’m not mistaken, they also had a number of other priests of different races throughout the show. Anyway, she hardly has magical powers. Instead, she mostly connects whats happening to the scared scrolls.

In addition, almost no character is displayed without severe mental and moral problems throughout the show. Everyone in that show has a dark side and the worse comes out of them. But, one of the characters who I think comes out looking the best is Dualla. Up until her death, she is shown has a strong character who does this well. She is critical to the success of almost every dogfight in the show and is a trusted member of the team. Sure she does some bad things, but as I said, I’m hard pressed to think of a major character who doesn’t.

I don’t think BSG portrayed its black characters much worse than its other characters. Everyone comes out looking pretty horrible in that show. Of course, if you focus on which black characters get shown in a negative or stereotypical light, you’ll find things that are disagreeable. That doesn’t mean, however, that the show displayed its black characters in more negative a light than any others.

To the pure, all things are pure. A lot of the ‘racism’ present in contemporary media is, in fact, firmly lodged in the brains of certain of the viewers, not in the show.