I have to admit that I was blinded by all the classic Trek references and actually enjoyed this and the 2009 movie on my first watch. It was a fun action movie with a Star Trek coat of paint on it, which got me to the theaters.
After a little while, however, the flashy new paint started peeling, and I realized that I had just liked it because it was new. It doesn’t share the same place in my heart as TOS, so whenever I feel the inclination to watch Kirk & crew explore the galaxy again, I go back to the original.
The visuals, music, and fight scenes were cool, but the writing felt superficial and boring. The same argument might be made for the original 6 movies, but I think the difference is that where the original movies felt like an encore for a beloved cast/crew that audiences were dying to see more of, the JJ movies were built without the same foundation. Watching them now feels like I’m watching a shadow of something else that was great.
As much as I loved this movie (it was my first exposure to trek at all, which franchise has ultimately made me a better person), I hate that Abrams does what he does. His influence tends to just ruin things.
It “works” in tv because writers have to excrete an episode every week for half a year and only get to spend like a day writing. It strings audiences along through the ad breaks and keeps them hooked for next week.
It’s bad. It isn’t good writing. It isn’t saying anything about art besides “watch more”. It is easy though, and it sells shit.
Agreed Abrams ruins things, but this is the corporate art we deserve for allowing monopolies.
Corporations don’t care about making something good. They just want more return on investments than Oreos or whatever else they could have invested in.
Break up the big studios. Maybe we’ll get movies again instead of box office targets.
Yeah Abrams’ mystery box method only “works” while watching a show for the first time. But it inevitably leads to a poor conclusion, and thus a negative re-evaluation after the fact. Because the key aspect of how Abrams does it is that he doesn’t care what the resolution to the mystery is. So it hasn’t done the legwork to make the mystery feel satisfying after-the-fact. The best mysteries have reveals that in hindsight seem inevitable, which means there’s evidence that could have been used to infer it earlier, as well as red herrings which end up having adequate alternate explanations. If you decide the answer to the mystery after the fact, that’s never going to happen. Especially if you pick your answer—as he is known to have done—based on what audiences didn’t guess.
Roddenberry gave conflicting direction on this. By the time TNG rolled out, his position was that most of the crew were officers.
But it was a long and confusing evolution. After intervention by the network after the TOS pilot, turned Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary. NBC was no more ready for a senior NCO who was a woman than they had been to have a female first officer Number One.
Discovery makes things murkier by mixing in ‘Chiefs’ as a title for department heads but never actually saying who is chief medical officer or chief engineer.
Lower Decks seems to have ensigns being hazed with junior enlisted tasks. However, Prodigy has introduced warrant officers as another career pathway outside the Academy.
Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary.
A yeoman is a person who does administrative and clerical work in the modern Navy. They run the gamut from E-4 to E-9. That’s low enlisted rank to the highest. Rand could be an E-9 Master Chief Petty Officer Yeoman for all we know. That would make her the appropriate rank to be the captain’s administrative assistant.
Just to say the way the role is presented kn television doesn’t highlight the sensitive roles such as being the senior NCO responsible for oversight of enlisted personnel performance evaluations or communications with command.
It would be very senior AO role on a capital ship, but she mainly comes by to get the captain to sign stuff.
I had a bunch of pictures of the Macs powering all the displays on the set of the NX-01 on a hard drive somewhere. I should go see if I can find them and post them.
They needed something that was just going to put a fake computer display on the screen and they went with Mac’s? That’s not… Exactly a cost-efficient way of handling that. Then again maybe they had some kind of weird corporate thing going on?
my guess would be it was the smallest/fastest mac they could get and the scenic design team used macs almost exclusively and probably had no interest taking a chance on a different platform. Just a hunch tho.
Here is Denise Okuda in front of her Quadra 700. She used it to make all the wonderful LCARS and other alien UI panels on DS9. This was her taking a break while working on the DS9 pilot in 1993.
Well whatever it is, Pike and the radioactive accident had something specifically to do with M’Benga stepping down. I wouldn’t call it demotion necessarily as there are reasons that someone could willingly step away from the position of Chief and still hold their rank. Either way, during the Quality of Mercy episode M’Benga was still CMO under Captain Pike.
With how M’Benga holds himself and takes the quality of his patients personally, and becomes heavily emotionally involved in his work, I think he stepped down willingly because he no longer believed himself to be capable of providing the support necessary to a Captain. I think maybe he worked on Pike and tried to save him but when Pike was too far gone that M’Benga became a bit despondent. We know the two are friendly and decently close so maybe between being unable to save his daughter and being unable to save his Captain he just felt he wasn’t capable of doing his best anymore. Still wanted to help and assist and thought of the Enterprise as home, and wanting to stay near his family in the crew, but didn’t want to carry the weight of that responsibility anymore.
It certainly could have been a voluntary “demotion” and there is a reason to believe he hasn’t changed a huge amount. There is an issue that needs to be resolved though:
On the one hand, he still seems to have a streak of violence in him the way he slapped Spock (at Spock’s request) in A Private Little War, which would track. On the other, you would think he would have worked with Spock in the plan to get Pike to Talos IV.
If we are to believe the two M’Bengas are the same person, which we have no reason to disbelieve (we can excuse the TOS M’Benga’s lack of an accent), an explanation for why he wasn’t part of Spock’s plan would be an interesting thing to ponder.
This seems likely given that in the timeline where Pike was still in command in 2266 having avoided good accident M’Benga was still CMO. I would imagine that having give through all that shit he wanted to step back a bit and let someone else run the department.
Since this isn’t Ten Forward and we’re trying to have more legitimate discussions here, I think it’s necessary to paste this part of the article:
Let’s be clear: this research doesn’t suggest you should ask AI to talk as if aboard the Starship Enterprise to get it to work.
Rather, it shows that myriad factors influence how well an AI decides to perform a task.
“One thing is for sure: the model is not a Trekkie,” Catherine Flick at Staffordshire University, UK, told New Scientist.
“It doesn’t ‘understand’ anything better or worse when preloaded with the prompt, it just accesses a different set of weights and probabilities for acceptability of the outputs than it does with the other prompts,” she said.
It’s possible, for instance, that the model was trained on a dataset that has more instances of Star Trek being linked to the right answer, Battle told New Scientist.
And they suddenly have the ability to download memories into alien species! This would make schools obsolete, and potentially give them the ability to train the entire population on chemistry/biochemistry/biology. They could have built Silos and possibly survived underground if everyone could be insta-programmed with long term survival skills.
The correct answer of course is “don’t think about it!”
On top of that, ‘give one person memory of our civilization that they can’t really share with anyone adequately except knowing how to play this flute’ may not be the best way to memorialize a planet.
I hate it. I tried to like it but overall, I am appalled by it. There was one exception: The way they portrayed the relationship between Stamets and Culber was nice. However, the dumpster fire at the center of the show is Burnham. I have never seen a show try to glorify a main character like that unless there was some irony involved. STD really shoves Burnham down your throat again and again. SHE saves the day/ship/federation/universe. She is praised constantly, just in case you idiot failed to realize how magnificent she is, and, hey, did we mention, she is…ummm…SPOCK’S…SISTER!!! Yes, his sister! What? Doesn’t make sense? Shut up and love her already! Then, the plot holes. Would it have been so unbearably hard to write scripts that at least try to look consistent and logical? As for the dialogs: they are important to show how great Burnham is. I found myself skipping over most of them without missing anything important. Oh, and, then there’s Saru‘s sister piloting a fighter while Burnham‘s mom returns from the dead to join a ROMULAN order of warrior nuns. In my opinion, as personal and inconsequential it may be, this show is a big F*** YOU! to Trek fans.
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