The "what are you watching" thread

The Dutch Ghost said:
I see you are also not a fan of Picard. Some people swear by season 3 but I just find it long nostalgia milking.
It may be better than the previous two seasons but that doesn't make it good Star Trek.
What I found one of the problems is that a story that could be told in two or three episodes is dragged out into a full season.
There are ST fans that wanted Matalas to do a Star Trek Legacy series that would build on the ending of Picard season 3 but I honestly do not consider Matalas the 'savior' of Star Trek as these people make him out to be.
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I wasn't a fan from the first episode. It felt completely opposite of what Trek was supposed to be. It barely felt like a Star Trek show, and every episode after that just confirmed that feeling. On the topic of the "story could be told in two or three episodes" it's an issue with how shows are nowadays in general. You don't get the 30-episode-long seasons anymore, with enough time to establish plot arcs and characters. Every show is like a BBC miniseries. And that was great when it was just the BBC doing it for a bunch of one-off (two seasons max) shows, but now every show is like this and quite frankly most shows NEED 30 episodes in a season to even begin to care about the characters. Imagine if TNG's first season was just an extended 'Encounter at Farpoint?'

I don't anticipate Star Trek being saved by anything. Same feeling as my feeling towards Fallout. The only "things" that matter are the "original" run of TOS -> Enterprise, just as Fallout only matters to me as 1, 2, and New Vegas. To me stuff like Strange New Worlds, Discovery, and whatever schlock will end up filling the airwaves is just elaborate fan film projects. The only thing that COULD save Trek is an extended hiatus and, in ten years, a team of writers deliberately craft a canon/lore document to pad out for a potential twenty years of Star Trek. That's the only way.

The Dutch Ghost said:
I heard there was a reason for the whole Temporal War stuff but it has been a while since I read the interview with Braga in which it was mentioned.
But I agree that it was an in general pointless storyline that went nowhere.
And yeah I saw it as something Braga made up as he had a great fondness for time travel stuff.
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Yeah I mean he was hinting at this shit back in Voyager, and even in DS9 (although B&B had limited input on what the DS9 team put out IIRC.) The Time Travel shit was what he wanted to lead Star Trek towards. I don't think the other writers who had stuck around from the TNG and DS9 days wanted to do that, so he had to relegate his time travel to one-off episodes and mostly confine it to stupid holodeck episodes on Voyager.

The Dutch Ghost said:
Well a prequel series could have worked, but I just felt the the producers didn't have the right mindset for it. You would have to be really nerdish about the facts and details from the background lore to pull it off and I didn't see B & B as being such Trek nerds.
Some may say that that would make Trek too much niche and not appealing to a greater audience, but if you do a prequel to established series the primary interested party are the hardcore fans who expect stories about the founding of the Federation and the Romulan wars.

Wanting to make Trek appeal to the larger audience is in my opinion one of the problems with Abrams, Kurtzman, and Paramount. They are so focused on this goal that they series they produce are in general so average and non Trek (I can't judge the cartoons as I don't watch Lower Decks and I have only watched parts of Prodigy), that its painful and disappointing to be a Trek fan.
Okay my rant is over.

I feel very conflicted about trying to appeal to the masses vs trying to appeal to the fans. I feel it is the same as with Bethesda's Fallout.
Why be a fan when everything you care about is such as lore and canon can be changed on a whim by people who only cared for a select few parts in the original productions.
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Compared to Abrams and Kurtzman (especially Kurtzman) B&B might as well have been wearing homemade Spock ears at the convention asking Leonard Nimoy what Vulcan culture really is, since he IS Spock. Compared to the new host of writers and showrunners who came up with STD, Strange New Worlds, Picard, and Section 31, they are Trekkies. We simply didn't know how good we had it.

I think Star Trek CAN be marketed towards a larger audience if they took more risks in storytelling but retained the identity of the thing. That is to say, add some "drama" and "conflict" within the characters (which is what Roddenberry was all against, but whatever) but retain the concept of "exploring different planets in a serialized space opera." The problem is what they do is they have these serialized plot arcs that are meaningless because no one cares about the characters, and there aren't any "filler episodes" (planet-of-the-week) to make you care about the setting or the characters. Every show is in reality a miniseries/extended TV movie and it suffers from this.

Their approach at the moment clearly doesn't work, because I'd say Trek is at an all-time nadir even lower than it was for Enterprise or before that with the TOS hiatus. No one gives a fuck.

Ultimately, like I said, my view of the "lore" and "canon" is the same as my approach to Fallout. The only things that matter are the things that I like and enjoy, and everything else is at best some kind of fan fiction project. Maybe this is conceding and cucking out, but whatever. I do give all of these things an honest shake, and I've really tried to enjoy the new Star Trek projects, but when Vic Mignogna makes a better Star Trek production on a (relative to Paramount) shoestring budget as a fan film than the actual real Trek productions? That says just about everything there is to say.
 
I've been watching a lot of The Twilight Zone episodes, but in no particular order.

Also, porn.
 
I'm generally awful about watching tv, or any series. I can't stay still for long periods of time.

Nevertheless, I've been watching Le Bureu with familymembers. It's a French thriller-thingy, following agents . It's incredily tense and thrilling despite half the time nothing happenin except middle-aged men sitting in a crisis room, smoking and staring at one another.

I'm also *going* to start a black sails marathon with a few friends, hopefully soon. I tried watching it way back when, when it came, but never got through the first season by myself.
 
Currently watching Mr. Robot, expecting it to keep me occupied long enough to find something else to watch that's serious and grounded.
 
Well I finished reading The Lost World. Jurassic Park was better but The Lost World went into some very interesting sci-fi stuff.
Also, both books are very sci-fi oriented with a lot of explanations to the scientific process behind htings.
 
I took the time to watch Idiocracy because I came across a video and a thread somewhere else that discussed the similarities between the plot and worldbuilding of Fallout 4 and Idiocracy. After finishing the movie, I couldn't have agreed more.
 
Anaphylaxis said:
I wasn't a fan from the first episode. It felt completely opposite of what Trek was supposed to be. It barely felt like a Star Trek show, and every episode after that just confirmed that feeling
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Yeah, I disliked how the Federation was turned into a dystopia and Picard into a broken man who is barely a shadow of the character he was during TNG. I feel that this form of deconstruction was inspired by stories from the 80s and 90s such as the Dark Knight Returns though I doubt that the producers and writers actually read it.
But this trend of wanting to dismantle previously optimistic characters and settings, I understand it is called pathos though I could be wrong.
Anyway Stewart was onboard with this so he also lost a lot of my respect for him which retroactively makes me less interested in watching TNG again.

Anaphylaxis said:
The only thing that COULD save Trek is an extended hiatus and, in ten years, a team of writers deliberately craft a canon/lore document to pad out for a potential twenty years of Star Trek. That's the only way.
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I doubt that is going to happen, Hollywood is all about milking its IPs dry for everything it got.
Something like you suggest would require an environment different from the current Hollywood, producers and writers who really want the old audience back but also attract a new audience. Try to find someone who is capable of doing those two things.

I fear that what Paramount and Skydance will learn from Kurtzman Trek is the wrong lessons and most likely go for a reboot which will quickly dive into mining the previous Star Trek series for elements and plotlines as the producers and writers think Star Trek is all about.

Personally, I don't want a reboot. I would prefer that everything produced after Enterprise such as the Abrams movies and Kurtzman Trek is declared non canon/alternate timelines so that future producers/writers don't have to keep that baggage in mind when they write new episodes in a Star Trek set after Voyager.

Anaphylaxis said:
Their approach at the moment clearly doesn't work, because I'd say Trek is at an all-time nadir even lower than it was for Enterprise or before that with the TOS hiatus. No one gives a fuck.
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I wish Paramount got the news and told Kurtzman not to start any new series.
 
ZooBis said:
I took the time to watch Idiocracy because I came across a video and a thread somewhere else that discussed the similarities between the plot and worldbuilding of Fallout 4 and Idiocracy. After finishing the movie, I couldn't have agreed more.
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That movie is basically a horror movie at this point because it's hardly a parody given how the world has become in real life. Still, Luke Wilson's delivery of the answer to the two buckets question is still really funny.
 
The Dutch Ghost said:
Yeah, I disliked how the Federation was turned into a dystopia and Picard into a broken man who is barely a shadow of the character he was during TNG. I feel that this form of deconstruction was inspired by stories from the 80s and 90s such as the Dark Knight Returns though I doubt that the producers and writers actually read it.
But this trend of wanting to dismantle previously optimistic characters and settings, I understand it is called pathos though I could be wrong.
Anyway Stewart was onboard with this so he also lost a lot of my respect for him which retroactively makes me less interested in watching TNG again.
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I think the worst thing, retrospectively, is that it's clear he didn't understand the character fundamentally. But Stewart's nonsense wasn't something out of the blue with the Picard show, because he insisted on the action sequences in the movies and turned them into 90s schlock-action films instead of what could've been.
The Dutch Ghost said:
I doubt that is going to happen, Hollywood is all about milking its IPs dry for everything it got.
Something like you suggest would require an environment different from the current Hollywood, producers and writers who really want the old audience back but also attract a new audience. Try to find someone who is capable of doing those two things.
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Yeah, it's very unlikely. My guess is they will just shelve the whole project. It's an expensive IP to produce on the face of it, especially since "Hollywood" demands ever-increasing graphics and set-fidelity, even though I think most people would be okay with last-century-tier set design as long as the writing and acting was good. I don't think audiences care about the gimmicks as much as producers and the Hollywood circle.
The Dutch Ghost said:
I fear that what Paramount and Skydance will learn from Kurtzman Trek is the wrong lessons and most likely go for a reboot which will quickly dive into mining the previous Star Trek series for elements and plotlines as the producers and writers think Star Trek is all about.
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I disagree. I think the lessons they'll take is that it is a generally "unpopular" or, rather, a "niche" IP that isn't profitable in the era of streaming, and has issues with broad appeal and a massive fucking price tag attached to anything that is being made under it. After SNW it's unlikely they'll continue.
The Dutch Ghost said:
Personally, I don't want a reboot. I would prefer that everything produced after Enterprise such as the Abrams movies and Kurtzman Trek is declared non canon/alternate timelines so that future producers/writers don't have to keep that baggage in mind when they write new episodes in a Star Trek set after Voyager.
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I agree. Thankfully we'll always have the books, which were better than the Star Wars EU in my opinion.
The Dutch Ghost said:
I wish Paramount got the news and told Kurtzman not to start any new series.
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They did. Strange New Worlds is only going to get five seasons. I assume season 4 is already in post-production, and they're just beginning the filming of season 5 now. Section 31 was supposed to be a whole series, but it was such a shitshow they made it into a forgettable direct-to-stream movie instead. The only actual thing that's planned is the Starfleet Academy show, but they've been talking about that for years.
 
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