You mean 10% smarter? Indeed, the third episode was better in that it did a very Star Trek thing and used an alien culture's customs as a mirror for our own assumptions and prejudices. I could see Janeway winding up a fire over this. The jokes, however, weren't so funny (the holodeck "dance off" was painfully lame), and the show still doesn't know what it is, identity wise. Technically, it's *lit* like a sitcom -- all bright, very little shadows -- but it's trying to do drama. I left last night's episode with a very bad taste in my mouth.
You didn't like 'bad hombres' jamming to Girls Just Want To Have Fun? Or the sickbay scene with jello-man coming on to the female doctor and she says: "we're incompatible species, it's impossible!" and blobby extends a long tendril towards her an goes 'ehh, there's more where that came from". Had me in stitches! But I take your point about muddled identity. There is a tension, especially in this episode, between the serious, dramatic scenes and the odd puerile joke. It feels like it should be one or the other, ie, make it a serious alternative ST show (which I believe they are capable of doing) or make it a full-on comedy, like say Airplane or Naked Gun (which is likely harder to do well).
The point is it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be a worthy successor to TNG and be humorous.
I don't care what the critics say, I'm enjoying it. Although, then again, I also like "Legends Of Tomorrow"
Awful. Just happened upon it. I sort of enjoy Family Guy. This was basically a straight Star Trek remake with bad jokes.
I tried it but not my thing I guess, same with Family Guy. No problem if others enjoy this (or Family Guy), live long and prosper! Looking forward to trying the new Star Trek show tomorrow (Sunday).
That is basically it. It's amusing to me to see the things Fox realized they couldn't get away with borrowing... particularly the transporter. The famous Hollywood expression is, "they have a problem with consistent tone." The show doesn't know what it is: drama, comedy, serious issues, fart jokes, sci-fi, or what. There are abrupt switches in direction that are bizarre and unwieldly. I thought the recent episode was interesting and at least they tried to tackle a complex issue. I think it needed a stronger ending -- I might've had the alien couple actually split up and "divorce" over their disagreement -- but that's me. At least they showed multiple sides of a complicated issue. The moment this happened, 10 minutes in, I said, "well, they should bring in an alien doctor and have them perform the surgery. What we think is right in our culture probably won't apply in an alien culture, and it's not our place to judge if it the medical issue is not life-threatening." And that's basically what they did. I'm watching the show, but jesus, MacFarlane is insufferable.
Well, look at it this way: there are currently 6909 different languages on Earth. If I parachuted you down to a remote area in the middle of Africa or India or China, there's a good chance you wouldn't be able to talk to any of them, except on the rare chance that somebody spoke English. If you spread that problem across thousands of planets, the potential for being misunderstood or having trouble communicating would increase exponentially. And there's a ton of life forms on Earth we can't communicate with: I can't tell my cat it's time to eat or go outside, and the human race shares 90% of our DNA with cats. Imagine if we were only 5% similar to another species. As far as time goes: SF writer David Gerrold ("The Trouble with Tribbles") has noted that if you go back in time more than about 200 years, the English language changes so radically it's almost impossible to be understood (either way). At best, you're going to stick out like a weird foreign guy or something if you were in the year 1800. I think the reverse is also true: if we jumped 400 years in the future, it'd be very hard to communicate with people. I think the show makes a drastic mistake of being set too far in the future, and I would have an easier time buying into the concept if it were only 50 or 60 years from now. Particularly the dick jokes and stuff like that. BTW, Gerrold has weighed in and said he likes the show because they're actually going for comedy, and he's lamented that the last 20 years of Star Trek has become very grim and overly-dramatic and heavy-handed. David believes that the original show at least had lighter moments of comedy here and there that helped contrast with the drama. The best episode of the original show I think was "City on the Edge of Forever," and there were some stone-cold hilarious lines in that one... and also some wrenching moments of very real human tragedy.
What makes you think "they couldn't get away with" it? ("Trust me" would not be an acceptable answer, nor would anything that includes"haaaaaaarible") While there is some truth to that, one could also recognize that they are creating something that isn't standard "Hollywood" product, and perhaps trying to reach an audience that can appreciate something more.
The language used tends to take me out of the story or the moment. It's not the comedy so much as the current cultural references that seem more out of place. The aliens come off as more believable than the human characters. It's as if they don't belong in this future and are all a version of Gil Gerrard in Buck Rodgers with the use of slang. And they need to set a better verisimilitude for this to be a believable and viable future. Would the operation of a vessel in any century not have a protocol for command structure that didn't need to be explained to a senior member of the crew? Would you not be aware of the customs and medical needs of all the races in your organization if you are spending a long time away from port? These are examples of lazy writing in my opinion.
The Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Christmas special used to teach a "lesson" was kind of silly. That is an example of something from current day that would never be remembered far into the future. Too many anachronisms (references to current day stuff) is being used for the show.
That's kinda the point of the humor. It's nothing new. There have been plenty of period pieces where the characters use modern idioms and colloquialisms to humorous effect.
You're right about them setting the show too far into the future and keeping current-day slang, but then it's designed to be entertaining to *today's* audiences. It's that same old adage: you have to suspend your disbelief and roll with it. I'm not crazy about the junior high humor and fart jokes, but I think that's where MacFarlane's sensibilities lie. I think I might be done with the show as it doesn't seem to want to take itself seriously enough. But aliens speaking English are the least of the show's problems. At least STAR TREK gave us some technobabble about a Universal Translator. And surely language *is* fluid and dynamic. It changes over time. Just in my lifetime words have totally changed meanings from what they were when I was a kid.
Well, ep3 was almost entirely serious with only minimal gags (TNG also had holosuite gags, though often talked about as opposed to shown). We'll have to wait and see if ep3 was an outlier or the shape of things to come.
I've thought they could clean this up by having a character or two that have an aknowledged 20th century pop history fetish and/or have a character say something like, "It's so funny that the best entertainment we all watch is from the 20th century, you would think somebody could pull of a great comedy like 'I Love Lucy' but for a centuries nobody has been able to beat Lucy and Seinfeld!" That would justify much of the humour.
You obviously haven't been paying attention. The supposed problem is that the show isn't "typical Hollywood". (Not sure what all that other "BULL-loney" crap you were talking about was)
That's exactly what it comes down to for me. Insufferable is a perfect one word description. After watching him host the Oscars for about 30 mins containing the infamous, "We Saw Your Boobs" bit, I turned it off, took long gargle of Scope and never watched another Oscar broadcast. Again, exactly true. The on-screen chemistry between Spock, Kirk & McCoy is one big thing that made TOS last as long as it has. Plus many of the scripts were written by actual Sci-Fi authors of the day. Funny you mention COTEOF, I just watched it for the zillionth time on the BBC marathon. Written by one the best authors, Harlan Ellison and certainly an all-time best TOS episode combining everything that the show was about. I did get into TNG after a bit and they did have some excellent story arcs but enough with Geordi and his f'ing tachyon rays or particles or whatever they are. They couldn't do a direct Vulcan replacement of Spock so they inserted Data and imo it worked pretty well.
I'm not sure that's an accurate description. In what way was it supposedly "sanctimonious"? Did you watch the entire episode?
When it comes to sci-fi comedy series nobody is going to better Red Dwarf anyway (with Hitchhiker's as a close second)... but having some lighter moments is usually a good thing in anything. I thought the uniforms and ship sets were reminiscent of a Burger King or something, sorry.
Two important caveats: 1) Gene Roddenberry really hated injecting humor into the original Star Trek and battled several writers and producers over it. It's one of the main reasons original show line producer Gene Coon quit the show at the end of the second season (to Star Trek's detriment, in my opinion). 2) Harlan's script for "City on the Edge of Forever" was cut by about 20 minutes and it really pissed-off the writer; he had some additional characters who were excised, plus he had a (new) character actually selling drugs on the Enterprise, which Roddenberry abhorred. Harlan's original script won several major awards, but Roddenberry criticized him for years, saying "if we had shot the show as originally written, it would've gone a million dollars over budget and gotten censored by the network" (which I think is partly true).
It wouldn't be any more or less entertaining if they said the show took place in the year 2070 vs. the year 2400. Look at the Spielberg films Minority Report and Artificial Intelligence, both of which took place around 2050. They work fine, the language works fine, and there are just enough futuristic gimmicks to make me believe it's possible they could exist 30-40 years from now. Note that I'm not quarreling about keeping the language identical to the way we speak today: I'm saying nobody will talk like we do in the year 2400. Rather than change the language to something almost indecipherable, my solution is just to say it's the year 2070 (or 2080 or whatever), just to keep it within the bound of possibility in a modern viewer's lifetime.
I have to agree with Mr. Roddenberry on the comic elements in Star Trek. I'm not a fan either. Humor yes, comedy no. I can't stand I, Mudd or A Piece of the Action. I could watch The Way to Eden for 6 hours before I'd watch I. Mudd again.
