Discovering How to Ruin Star Trek
I’m interrupting my overblown series on ranting at Star Wars to rant this week about another ruined franchise: Star Trek: Discovery. The second season just finished and I cannot contain myself. The first season was so bad that it almost killed any possibility of improvement. Almost. They then changed the showrunner. They changed writers. They had feedback from the fans. They had feedback from the licensees. Hmmm. Okay, all that amounted to a glimmer of hope. Maybe they could take all that on board and do something with Discovery and make it … Star Trek. Right? Right? Unfortunately, not. The second season isn’t just an indictment on the second season,…
Star Trekking: Part 1 of 3
I’m a Trekker. Reruns of Star Trek: The Original Series captured my imagination when I was just a kid in the 1970s. Space, aliens, adventure – what isn’t there to love? The effects are obviously dated now, but the storytelling was paramount. I had an argument with somebody once about Star Trek: The Original Series versus JJ Abrams’s reboot; what the other person highlighted – as an intended detractor from TOS – was the terrible special effects TOS incorporated. But the storytelling itself holds up. While there’s some stories typical of that era, overall the storytelling is logical, causal, and makes sense within its own universe. Even at its worst,…