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Post by Garak Nephew on May 17, 2023 13:42:49 GMT
I think in the long run this will fade tho. The rose-tinted nostalgia glasses will come off, and people will notice that the plot is absolutely horrendous. I mean if you look at it from a certain perspective, the fact that everyone is literally ONLY screaming about the TNG reunion says a lot already - there is literally nothing else that's special. But in the long run, this kind of nostalgia won't hold up. People will re-watch this. They won't have the tearful nostalgia again. And that's when they'll start to notice the plot holes. If this season had been a season of Star Trek: Discovery, people would have ripped it to shreds. The only thing that prevented this is the return of the TNG cast. But this WILL wear off eventually, and people will notice that Matalas didn't deliver the banger they thought he delivered. Part of me even WANTS for him to get to make that Legacy show - it will show people in no uncertain terms that he is not a brilliant writer; it will reveal the gastly truth: That he's just a fanboy with a whole lot of badfic ideas. His only brilliant move was to bring in the TNG cast and playing the nostalgia tunes to mask his below-average story. If this guy is given his own show that DOESN'T have the TNG cast reunion, tho? It will be a disaster. He can bring in some legacy characters, but it won't be enough to mask the fact that his Star Trek is nothing special. The mask will come off, so to speak. The fandom will go from worshiping the ground he walks on to ripping his show into shreds. And honestly? I'd get myself some popcorn for that. Yes. I agree. PIC will not pass the ultimate Trek test: rewatchability. It is just a fad, I hope. It will gather the usual crowd at conventions but with time people will realized that it was just an empty shell.
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Post by nombrecomun on May 17, 2023 18:04:25 GMT
I think in the long run this will fade tho. The rose-tinted nostalgia glasses will come off, and people will notice that the plot is absolutely horrendous. I mean if you look at it from a certain perspective, the fact that everyone is literally ONLY screaming about the TNG reunion says a lot already - there is literally nothing else that's special. But in the long run, this kind of nostalgia won't hold up. People will re-watch this. They won't have the tearful nostalgia again. And that's when they'll start to notice the plot holes. If this season had been a season of Star Trek: Discovery, people would have ripped it to shreds. The only thing that prevented this is the return of the TNG cast. But this WILL wear off eventually, and people will notice that Matalas didn't deliver the banger they thought he delivered. Part of me even WANTS for him to get to make that Legacy show - it will show people in no uncertain terms that he is not a brilliant writer; it will reveal the gastly truth: That he's just a fanboy with a whole lot of badfic ideas. His only brilliant move was to bring in the TNG cast and playing the nostalgia tunes to mask his below-average story. If this guy is given his own show that DOESN'T have the TNG cast reunion, tho? It will be a disaster. He can bring in some legacy characters, but it won't be enough to mask the fact that his Star Trek is nothing special. The mask will come off, so to speak. The fandom will go from worshiping the ground he walks on to ripping his show into shreds. And honestly? I'd get myself some popcorn for that. Agreed...but I wonder if audiences today will re-watch this. I tend to think a lot of shows today are not made to be rewatchable; we're so bombarded with media that there is no time to re-watch something when there's 3 other things I 'need' to watch. So the impression people may be left with is that this was a success.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on May 17, 2023 18:49:37 GMT
I think in the long run this will fade tho. The rose-tinted nostalgia glasses will come off, and people will notice that the plot is absolutely horrendous. I mean if you look at it from a certain perspective, the fact that everyone is literally ONLY screaming about the TNG reunion says a lot already - there is literally nothing else that's special. But in the long run, this kind of nostalgia won't hold up. People will re-watch this. They won't have the tearful nostalgia again. And that's when they'll start to notice the plot holes. If this season had been a season of Star Trek: Discovery, people would have ripped it to shreds. The only thing that prevented this is the return of the TNG cast. But this WILL wear off eventually, and people will notice that Matalas didn't deliver the banger they thought he delivered. Part of me even WANTS for him to get to make that Legacy show - it will show people in no uncertain terms that he is not a brilliant writer; it will reveal the gastly truth: That he's just a fanboy with a whole lot of badfic ideas. His only brilliant move was to bring in the TNG cast and playing the nostalgia tunes to mask his below-average story. If this guy is given his own show that DOESN'T have the TNG cast reunion, tho? It will be a disaster. He can bring in some legacy characters, but it won't be enough to mask the fact that his Star Trek is nothing special. The mask will come off, so to speak. The fandom will go from worshiping the ground he walks on to ripping his show into shreds. And honestly? I'd get myself some popcorn for that. Agreed...but I wonder if audiences today will re-watch this. I tend to think a lot of shows today are not made to be rewatchable; we're so bombarded with media that there is no time to re-watch something when there's 3 other things I 'need' to watch. So the impression people may be left with is that this was a success. 600 hours in scripted entertainment every year.
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Post by nombrecomun on May 17, 2023 19:23:04 GMT
Agreed...but I wonder if audiences today will re-watch this. I tend to think a lot of shows today are not made to be rewatchable; we're so bombarded with media that there is no time to re-watch something when there's 3 other things I 'need' to watch. So the impression people may be left with is that this was a success. 600 hours in scripted entertainment every year. And that's not counting various social media(YT, Tik-Tok, IG, etc...). A lot of competition out there for our attention.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on May 17, 2023 20:10:32 GMT
600 hours in scripted entertainment every year. And that's not counting various social media(YT, Tik-Tok, IG, etc...). A lot of competition out there for our attention. Which is to say that I expect you're right. It hits and it's gone. I don't think there's a lot of time for lasting impressions....for thinking about what you've seen.
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Post by scenario on May 17, 2023 20:40:02 GMT
And that's not counting various social media(YT, Tik-Tok, IG, etc...). A lot of competition out there for our attention. Which is to say that I expect you're right. It hits and it's gone. I don't think there's a lot of time for lasting impressions....for thinking about what you've seen. I think this is big with the TLDR crowd. Society has been encouraging shorter attention spans for decades. Things like plot, characterization, and character development are boring. Need that quick hit every few minutes to keep their attentions. I've always felt Discovery was written that way as well. Lots of nice moments and scenes but the whole doesn't stick together. The parts are greater than the whole.
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Post by nombrecomun on May 17, 2023 22:05:10 GMT
Which is to say that I expect you're right. It hits and it's gone. I don't think there's a lot of time for lasting impressions....for thinking about what you've seen. I've always felt Discovery was written that way as well. Lots of nice moments and scenes but the whole doesn't stick together. The parts are greater than the whole. I can't even see the parts of Discovery to be great to begin with.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on May 17, 2023 22:51:12 GMT
I've always felt Discovery was written that way as well. Lots of nice moments and scenes but the whole doesn't stick together. The parts are greater than the whole. I can't even see the parts of Discovery to be great to begin with. I like Tilly, Saru, Culber and Stamets. I liked Saru's relationship with the Vulcan President. There are lots of things on that show that I can point to that I can say are enjoyable and well done. But Scenario is right, they are disconnected islands.
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Post by RobinBland on May 18, 2023 21:56:55 GMT
One final thing bothers me about this whole affair of the botched Picard presented on PIC Season 3. It is more macro, related to the idealized Trek that I have in my head, and my opinion on the effect that these representations might have on society at large. WHY? Any writer or creator approaching the complexities of Picard should honestly asks themselves that question. Simply, why? Why should Picard be a family man and be a father? Let me tell you why NOT (again this is from the Trek I have in my head). The core philosophy of Star Trek is Infinite Diversity on Infinite Combination. If Trek is to survive the current onslaught of banality, status-quo propaganda, and weak storytelling then it must return to IDIC and the promises it harvest. What does it means? How to magnify it? Childless Picard was an example of IDIC. Picard represented a difference. Riker, a father. Worf, a father. LaForge, a father. Even Data, a father (they conveniently chose to forget that on S3). If the totality of the human social experiment is best exemplified by it's diversity, isn't it also true that people that choose not to have children could have a fulfilling life and be active participants on society? By not being a father, Picard was unique and therefore he made his community richer and more diverse. That is one of the many reason PIC is broken and that final shot of Picard and his all-white, straight family joking about nepotism is just offensive. All of this post, ๐ but particularly that last paragraph. Well said, sir. @sehlatvie said: The highlighted point is something I'm having difficulty wrapping my brain around as well. My best guess is that it was all of the fan service, which was used to hide a weak and illogical story (full of plot holes, too). While I admit, I appreciated the finale's scenes on the Ent-D bridge and all of that, I still feel the season overall was weak.
My favorite season of PIC remains season 1, if only for the fact that it did something different and elegantly closed a few arcs. Yes, season 1 of PIC was a mess as well, but I liked some of the new characters, and its bits of fan service weren't so violently shoved into my face. I liked that S1 tried. We know its parameters were narrower, because Chabon and company had to persuade Sir Patrick that they'd be trying something new. It didn't wholly succeed, but it was an admirable effort. I've rewatched it, something I can't foresee ever wasting time doing with seasons 2 and 3.
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Post by MrPicard on May 19, 2023 6:24:44 GMT
It's a desire of a lot of fan fic writers to make Jean-Luc a father because the whole thing IS an integral part of his character, even in the second season already he says "wishing for a thing does not make it so" when Wesley asks him if he never wanted kids of his own. There IS a basis for the fatherhood thing. I'm not faulting the PIC writers for trying to explore it. They just... messed it up. They turned it all on its head because for some reason every single person who worked on PIC conveniently ignored who Jean-Luc Picard really is and went with the weird pop culture nonsense image of "he hates kids" that isn't even REMOTELY true. They approached it from the wrongest angle possible because they clearly weren't about to really get into what drives him as a character. (Failing to understand him due to only looking at him from the pop culture image viewpoint is a major flaw of the entire show tho, not just season 3. I can tell that nobody who worked on that show really tried to understand him. All they did put out was "oh yeah there was an episode where this happened, wasn't there, ah, we'll go with that, we can use this, but no, not that episode, that won't work for us, we'll drop it" writing.)
This is exactly why things like fatherhood for Jean-Luc should remain confined to fan fic. And it's why the third season is just Matalas getting to turn his fanboy badfic into canon.
I don't mean to belittle fan fic, I'm a fic writer myself, but there's a reason why fan fic exists. It expands things canon didn't show us - often deliberately not because Trek canon often shies away from getting too complex about relationships, especially on TNG. But if you start to mix canon and fan fic (ESPECIALLY fan fic that concerns pairings that were never actually together on screen), things get messy as hell. See The X-Files. Mulder and Scully worked as 'will they won't they', but then the writers made them a couple and threw in a kid and everything became one hell of a mess, especially in the revival. Sound familiar? This is why fan fic should remain fan fic and canon should never try to emulate it. Partly because it's fan fic and partly because, frankly, we fan fic writers know our pairing dynamics one hell of a lot better than showrunners do. We know what makes sense AND how to make it make sense. And showrunners are limited with what they can do. Fan fic writers are not. Showrunners have to bend to studio rules. Budgets. Actor wishes. Whatever else. Fan Fic writers do not. We can do whatever we want.
I'd feel the same way if the writers had thrown in a kid with Q and a failed relationship. (It would have made a lot more sense for Q to hide a kid from Jean-Luc tho, I have to admit that, lol.) It's shipper territory. It's where shippers shine with fan fic. Not showrunners. They should focus on plot. Character interactions. Let shippers and fan fic writers build the relationship worlds around that. We know how to do that.
The fact that Matalas now runs around and yells about "regretting to not have more romance in season 3" says a lot, too. He threw in a completely nonsensical fatherhood plot and expected for people to eat it up based on "Picard and Crusher had this thing going on, right, oh, we can make something out of that, let's play the nostalgia card here, oh and ditch Picard's girlfriend in the first episode, people will have forgotten about her by the end anyway because LOOK PICARD AND CRUSHER'S KID SERVES ON THE ENTERPRISE NOW HOW AMAZING". Not even the shippers are eating it up tho. Because this entire fatherhood thing would only have worked in a very complex fan fic situation. But not on a show with only ten episodes and no time to go into things and a plot that was mediocre at best already.
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Post by Sehlat Vie on May 19, 2023 14:22:13 GMT
I think in the long run this will fade tho. The rose-tinted nostalgia glasses will come off, and people will notice that the plot is absolutely horrendous. I mean if you look at it from a certain perspective, the fact that everyone is literally ONLY screaming about the TNG reunion says a lot already - there is literally nothing else that's special. But in the long run, this kind of nostalgia won't hold up. People will re-watch this. They won't have the tearful nostalgia again. And that's when they'll start to notice the plot holes. If this season had been a season of Star Trek: Discovery, people would have ripped it to shreds. The only thing that prevented this is the return of the TNG cast. But this WILL wear off eventually, and people will notice that Matalas didn't deliver the banger they thought he delivered. Part of me even WANTS for him to get to make that Legacy show - it will show people in no uncertain terms that he is not a brilliant writer; it will reveal the gastly truth: That he's just a fanboy with a whole lot of badfic ideas. His only brilliant move was to bring in the TNG cast and playing the nostalgia tunes to mask his below-average story. If this guy is given his own show that DOESN'T have the TNG cast reunion, tho? It will be a disaster. He can bring in some legacy characters, but it won't be enough to mask the fact that his Star Trek is nothing special. The mask will come off, so to speak. The fandom will go from worshiping the ground he walks on to ripping his show into shreds. And honestly? I'd get myself some popcorn for that. ^ I agree that if it were a season of DSC dealing with the exact same threat, fans would rip it apart. However, I'm not sure if the nostalgia factor will fade and allow people to see it for what it is; nostalgia tends to swell with time, not diminish.
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Post by scenario on May 19, 2023 16:28:17 GMT
To me you've got two incompatible storylines jammed together. Picard discovers he is a father is a small emotional story. Picard saves the universe is a big sweeping story.
If you want mom to be one of the main characters, you've got two choices and ones already taken. You have to assassinate her character to make it work.
I think you'd be better off with an unknown mom. A woman in her 30s who wants a child but not a husband has a one night stand with a young Picard. She dies off screen but he meets his adult child, grandchildren and a few small great grandchildren. Tell this story then tell the big story with a newly found relative with him.
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Post by MrPicard on May 23, 2023 9:45:30 GMT
But that doesn't give you the NOSTALGIA DRAMA WITH CRUSHER. If they had made some unknown woman the mother, the fandom would have been up in arms because "WHAT ABOUT BEVERLYYYYYYYYY". Too many people in the Trek fandom have a really unhealthy obsession with this pairing even though TNG showed us time and time again that it goes nowhere.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on May 23, 2023 14:24:59 GMT
But that doesn't give you the NOSTALGIA DRAMA WITH CRUSHER. If they had made some unknown woman the mother, the fandom would have been up in arms because "WHAT ABOUT BEVERLYYYYYYYYY". Too many people in the Trek fandom have a really unhealthy obsession with this pairing even though TNG showed us time and time again that it goes nowhere. Too many people see something that was never there, IMHO.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on Jun 7, 2023 18:52:45 GMT
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Post by scenario on Jun 7, 2023 19:27:06 GMT
The good part: They might made more trek The bad part: They might make more dreck like Picard
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 7, 2023 23:06:48 GMT
Or: "If we say it often enough, it'll be true." Truth is consensus, and inevitably subjective, but good grief. All joking about parallel universes apart, there are times in life when you realise that you do live in an entirely different social reality to some people.
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Post by scenario on Jun 7, 2023 23:50:12 GMT
I can understand some people liking Picard especially if you never watched NG or watched once in a while 30 years ago.
To me its like a movie based on a book. Sometimes an okay movie is made off a great book but if you were a huge fan of the book and didn't see the opening credits you'd never realize that the movie you're watching was based on your favorite book.
Picard felt like a movie based on a 20 page summary of NG. Okay here and there but missing all the nuance.
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 8, 2023 14:34:25 GMT
I can understand some people liking Picard especially if you never watched NG or watched once in a while 30 years ago. To me its like a movie based on a book. Sometimes an okay movie is made off a great book but if you were a huge fan of the book and didn't see the opening credits you'd never realize that the movie you're watching was based on your favorite book. Picard felt like a movie based on a 20 page summary of NG. Okay here and there but missing all the nuance.Exactly this. Back in the day, there was a lot of room for the viewer's own imagination in viewing Star Trek. For all its many and various flaws, even Nemesis left the story open for the fan imagination to continue the story. S3 of Picard felt like one single (and powerful) fan's very narrow idea of the Next Generation and where it should all end up. As has been said many times in these threads, a "greatest hits" collection, and inevitably there's an audience for that. You only have to look at the vinyl records section in any Target or Walmart to understand that mindset. (And that's no bad thing; a greatest hits collection is a fine place to begin if you're interested in exploring the work of a musical artist.) What I can't get my head around is how anyone who is a longtime diehard fan who, in the past was exposed to so much good storytelling via Trek, thought this was good. But I guess, if it presses your buttons... To me, it felt so plastic and packaged - all those nostalgic callbacks and cherry-picked references mashed up into the semblance of a story. All the incredibly obvious character progressions (or digressions). Makes you realise what a masterful piece of storytelling All Good Things... was.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on Jun 8, 2023 15:46:43 GMT
I can understand some people liking Picard especially if you never watched NG or watched once in a while 30 years ago. To me its like a movie based on a book. Sometimes an okay movie is made off a great book but if you were a huge fan of the book and didn't see the opening credits you'd never realize that the movie you're watching was based on your favorite book. Picard felt like a movie based on a 20 page summary of NG. Okay here and there but missing all the nuance.Exactly this. Back in the day, there was a lot of room for the viewer's own imagination in viewing Star Trek. For all its many and various flaws, even Nemesis left the story open for the fan imagination to continue the story. S3 of Picard felt like one single (and powerful) fan's very narrow idea of the Next Generation and where it should all end up. As has been said many times in these threads, a "greatest hits" collection, and inevitably there's an audience for that. You only have to look at the vinyl records section in any Target or Walmart to understand that mindset. (And that's no bad thing; a greatest hits collection is a fine place to begin if you're interested in exploring the work of a musical artist.) What I can't get my head around is how anyone who is a longtime diehard fan who, in the past was exposed to so much good storytelling via Trek, thought this was good. But I guess, if it presses your buttons... To me, it felt so plastic and packaged - all those nostalgic callbacks and cherry-picked references mashed up into the semblance of a story. All the incredibly obvious character progressions (or digressions). Makes you realise what a masterful piece of storytelling All Good Things... was. And AGT was beautiful and epic, and quintessentially TNG. That's what I expect from a TNG movie or a mini based on this series. S3 was not that. At all. And, honestly, it was so aggressively not that, it was not that on purpose.
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 8, 2023 19:08:44 GMT
Exactly this. Back in the day, there was a lot of room for the viewer's own imagination in viewing Star Trek. For all its many and various flaws, even Nemesis left the story open for the fan imagination to continue the story. S3 of Picard felt like one single (and powerful) fan's very narrow idea of the Next Generation and where it should all end up. As has been said many times in these threads, a "greatest hits" collection, and inevitably there's an audience for that. You only have to look at the vinyl records section in any Target or Walmart to understand that mindset. (And that's no bad thing; a greatest hits collection is a fine place to begin if you're interested in exploring the work of a musical artist.) What I can't get my head around is how anyone who is a longtime diehard fan who, in the past was exposed to so much good storytelling via Trek, thought this was good. But I guess, if it presses your buttons... To me, it felt so plastic and packaged - all those nostalgic callbacks and cherry-picked references mashed up into the semblance of a story. All the incredibly obvious character progressions (or digressions). Makes you realise what a masterful piece of storytelling All Good Things... was. And AGT was beautiful and epic, and quintessentially TNG. That's what I expect from a TNG movie or a mini based on this series. S3 was not that. At all. And, honestly, it was so aggressively not that, it was not that on purpose. To give him his due, Matalas has been very open about his agenda, which is to continue legacy Star Trek in the TNG era. This whole season was set-up for that. Forgive me, Terry, for imagining that it could've been done with a deft touch and a bit of elegance and nuance.
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Post by Garak Nephew on Jun 8, 2023 20:43:51 GMT
How ridiculous is everything! I wonder if we are witnessing on real time the usual cyclical disagreement on Trek fandom? Wasn't the same when TNG came out and TOS fans thought that it wasn't the true spirit of Trek? And DS9... what? "a space station?" "How can it be Trek?" How is PIC S3 different from those instances of past Trek grievances? I know now. I just hope to be around in 20 years to reiterate my view that this Trek iteration is (and was) a poorly executed space opera.
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 14, 2023 15:27:25 GMT
Hey Guys,
Remember Gus?
Maybe now... I am Gus.
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Post by Garak Nephew on Jun 14, 2023 19:05:18 GMT
Hey Guys, Remember Gus? Maybe now... I am Gus.ย What is this? ๐คจ๐ What am I missing? Who's Gus?
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Post by Prometheus59650 on Jun 14, 2023 20:14:55 GMT
Hey Guys, Remember Gus? Maybe now... I am Gus. You are not Gus. Gus was being the way he was for no particular reason other than, 'He just didn't like it. It just wasn't Star Trek. Only Jeffery Hunter is Pike. There are reasons for having an issue with this season. There are reasons that can be articulated and discussed in detail and at length. They aren't random. They aren't just based on "feels." So, no, man. You are not Gus.
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Post by Prometheus59650 on Jun 14, 2023 20:19:38 GMT
Hey Guys, Remember Gus? Maybe now... I am Gus.ย What is this? ๐คจ๐ What am I missing? Who's Gus? A former Trekcore poster that eventually departed because he simply couldn't accept the state of current Trek, couldn't understand why other people liked it and thought that it moved beyond him. I'm feeling that way a bit right now, but, I could tell you why where he just never had the words to describe it. It just was.
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Post by Sehlat Vie on Jun 15, 2023 1:06:24 GMT
But that doesn't give you the NOSTALGIA DRAMA WITH CRUSHER. If they had made some unknown woman the mother, the fandom would have been up in arms because "WHAT ABOUT BEVERLYYYYYYYYY". Too many people in the Trek fandom have a really unhealthy obsession with this pairing even though TNG showed us time and time again that it goes nowhere. Yeah....based on our long talks on Trekcore, I think most people here know how you and I feel about Crusher.
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Post by Sehlat Vie on Jun 15, 2023 1:07:37 GMT
Hey Guys, Remember Gus? Maybe now... I am Gus. Save for SNW (we'll see if S2 continues the winning streak) and PRO, I'm more or less with you. LD does nothing for me, and DSC is an exercise in frustration.
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 15, 2023 20:24:20 GMT
Thanks, gents. I guess I am not Gus.
It's true that he couldn't really articulate exactly what he didn't like about current (Kurtzman-era) Trek, but I sympathised with him sometimes, even while I tried to persuade him into a more optimistic attitude about the state of Trek.
And, while I did write that earlier post in a kind of "tongue-in-cheek" sense, it was also a way of venting my frustration with this era. I'm definitely a fan of Prodigy, and S1 of SNW. But such is my distrust of TPTB, I'm not even sure that I'll watch S2 of SNW until the whole season has aired, to spare myself the possibility of experiencing the same disappointment I felt throughout most of Disco, all of Lowest Dreck and seasons 2 and 3 of Picard.
For me, S3 of Picard now represents the nadir of Star Trek. I've felt this way before - and I know I have - back when Star Trek V: TFF first came out. But at that time TNG had just started on TV and was showing signs of becoming seriously good. And, as the health of the franchise steadily improved, it stoked hope. Of course, that era turned into a golden age, plus Star Trek VI: TUC arrived and all was right with the world. That said, things are different now but I reserve the right to feel good about Star Trek again.
Right now, a cautious approach seems best.
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Post by RobinBland on Jun 15, 2023 20:26:01 GMT
Hey Guys, Remember Gus? Maybe now... I am Gus. You are not Gus. Gus was being the way he was for no particular reason other than, 'He just didn't like it. It just wasn't Star Trek. Only Jeffery Hunter is Pike. There are reasons for having an issue with this season. There are reasons that can be articulated and discussed in detail and at length. They aren't random. They aren't just based on "feels." So, no, man. You are not Gus. I'd actually forgotten about the "only Jeffrey Hunter" stance! Oboy.
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