Bagheera wrote:Year of Hell is a fantastic example; we're led to believe the ship went through hell for a year, and the very next episode it's brand spanking new.

Yeah, because at the end that whole year never actually happened. They turned the time-eraser weapon on the weapon itself and undid everything.

NemZ wrote:Yeah, because at the end that whole year never actually happened. They turned the time-eraser weapon on the weapon itself and undid everything.

True, but that in itself is an indictment against the show (perhaps that's the root of my distaste for time travel! Trek has scarred me for life! ).

Glad to find that somebody else has already made the post I was gonna make about Trek crumbling under the weight of its own fan-fueled demand for continuity. None of the post-TOS shows are really any good, and TOS was already frequently shitty (though I love it a lot): like cape comics or for that matter anime they became beholden to their lifeless fan subculture for continued existence and so totally lost what was worthwhile in them in the first place. Gene Roddenberry truly believed the nonsense he pushed, and there's nothing terribly admirable about that, but Berman & Braga didn't believe in anything except the gullibility of their fanbase...and they were right to believe it, just look at how many people STILL obsess about this stuff, myself included.

TNG and DS9 were both attempts to reinvent a wheel which really needed reinvention much less than it needed someone to steer. Each has a handful of good characters, but the good episodes are just so few and far between and there's so much shit to plow through to get there that I can't recommend them. By the time of Voyager and Enterprise whatever dreams of utopia some moron once had are totally lost and the sole goal is "okay, how many shut-ins can we fleece before this shit gets pulled?" I mean come on, you only need to look at those shows to realize that absolutely nobody in them wants to be there (Tim Russ possibly excepted :(). The Abrams movies are an entirely different kind of crap which share the cynical brandname-whoring tactic but (successfully) target a much broader demographic.

Also, Harlan Ellison only wrote one TOS ep, it got changed a lot from his script, and it blows. Though apparently nobody agrees with me on that, I can't find Billshat's attempts at tragic acting (tragic attempts at acting more like, hyuk hyuk) to be either convincing or in keeping with Kirk's admittedly very loosely established character, and the premise is ridiculous on a level unrivaled except perhaps by "The Omega Glory" (peace demonstrations made Hitler win World War II, ergo space pirates. what? better fuck with the timestream until the plot makes any sense again). The only big-name sf author who acquitted himself particularly well on Trek was Norman Spinrad. This is probably because Spinrad chose to write a bitchin' sci-fi story instead of come up with a moral dilemma that sounded good and then slap chunks of drama and effects onto it until it could be filmed.

Trek broke barriers, but from the moment the first pilot's Number One got axed and recast as a whiny lovestruck platinum-blonde nurse, it should be obvious exactly how fucked Star Trek's notions of depth and progressivism are. In no wise has any of the sequel shows improved on this, either -- why bother writing a character who genuinely challenges the social morality of the fanbase or indeed with more depth than a teaspoon when the reason why they are there is so as to produce technobabble in response to this week's deadly menace, the Foreheadbumpians?

There was good Trek once, but it is dead now. Dead and buried, long ago.

Continuity is a fine thing if shows are built with it in mind. Anime tends to be like this, as does the good stuff on cable TV in the U.S. It's only a problem when shows try to have it both ways, which as you and Chuckman note is something that plagued all iterations of Trek to a greater or lesser extend. U.S. comic books also suffer ferociously from this, and it's why I abandoned them long ago (plenty of exceptions to the rule, of course, but still).

Gotta figure out what you wanna do, do it, and move on. But that won't let the execs fleece the sheep of their money, so it becomes an exercise in drawing things out as long as possible to string us along . . .

I keep wondering how anime manages to break the mold. Probably by retelling the same stories over and over again with different character designs, though I'm not sure that's any great sin.

Bagheera wrote:Right, but it was consistent about its continuity. Trek wasn't. Year of Hell is a fantastic example; we're led to believe the ship went through hell for a year, and the very next episode it's brand spanking new. This was routine in all of the series (even DS9), and it wasn't just an episode-to-episode thing -- there were serious issues with one hand not knowing what the other was doing. The technobabble often seemed invented on the fly, never to be referenced again, and the same was true of politics, philosophy, virtually everything about the setting.

The ship was brand new again after Year of Hell because the timeline was reset.

In other episodes, you should just assume that the ship has been in drydock in between episodes and everything has been repaired in that time... except Voyager, which gets repaired quickly because Torres is just that fucking good at fixing shit. Actually, in the first few episodes of Season 4, you can still see a lot of Borg garbage on the ship because Torres hasn't finished scrubbing it off yet.

There's no need to repeat technobabble. It's bad enough the first time around.