• 20Feb

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    When Star Trek went wrong

    2

    You may know that I am a quasi-closet Trekie.  I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was 10 years old and have watched all of the movies and episodes from all 5 different series countless times.  In fact, I pop in one of the DVD’s and kill at least 1 episode before bed-time each night (currently I’m bouncing back & forth between Season 6 of DS9 and Season 1 of Voyager).

    While I am a big Star Trek fan, I’m not a Trek Koolaid drinker.  I would actually consider myself a skeptical Trek fan.  Not every episode is a great episode – in fact, there were some pretty crappy episodes.  I have respect for Rick Berman and what he means to Star Trek, but I also firmly believe he’s responsible for running the franchise into the ground and why there’s currently no Trek on TV.  I’m also glad that he’s nowhere near the 2009 movie project.

    Some of these episodes were isolated, but then again some of them represented the point-of-no-return for the series, leading to a “ho-hum” burnout.  After watching as much Star Trek as I have, I think I have a good sense of possible indicators to the point of no return for many of the series.  This is completely subjective, and I actually would encourage anyone to offer their own opinions. Maybe you have a different opinion on the episode/season/timeframe, or you could disagree that the series made a turn for the worse.

    TOS

    SpocksBrain This one was most difficult for me, largely due to my relative unfamiliarity with the series.  We also have to take the fact that virtually all 60′s TV was campy into consideration as well.  I’m going to take the easy road out and take a swipe at “Spock’s Brain“.  While this episode is consensually considered the worst TOS ever, this pick is based on the fact it was the season 3 premier.  After reading the Star Trek Memories book that William Shatner wrote, this was the first episode after the circumstances that took place before the season: the move to bad time-slot, the budget cuts and the way Roddenberry’s hands were so tied he felt forced to leave the show.  The movies obviously rebounded the series, and while there was a roller-coaster of good and bad TOS movies, the series ultimately ended on a strong note with Undiscovered Country.

    TNG

    This is also difficult because the series was so good and arguably enabled the green light for the subsequent series’.  I don’t mean to sound like a TNG fanboy, but I don’t really think the show suffered any kind of downward spiral – at least not in their TV run.  The first season was a bit hokey, but you can’t hold any first season (of any series) to the fire.  The spiral did unfortunately met it’s demise on the big-screen, in the form of Insurrection.  The plot of the movie could have been passable, had it not been for the lame dialog.  Part of the reasons TNG movies struggled was because they were completely Picard-centric, to the detriment of all other characters.

    DS9

    CordiallyInvited This one is easy: Season 6 “You Are Cordially Invited…“.  It wasn’t that this episode necessarily bad, it was just the first episode that wasn’t good in DS9.  The Dominion was the best and worst thing that happened to DS9.  Many would argue that the Dominion gave DS9 a purpose, but at the same time it really pigeon-holed the whole series.  It seemed that after the writers had the crew return back to the station, they often wanted to forget that the show revolved around the war – implausible for a space station that was supposed to be in the thick of things.  True, the latter part of Season 6 brought us “In the Pale Moonlight” – one of the best episodes ever – but we still can’t forget that 9-episode mess that was the end of the 7th season.  The ending of the web site just seemed forced.

    Voyager

    Voyager did the roller-coaster for a majority of it’s run, but had more strong episodes than weak ones.  However, any episode that had to do with the Borg tarnished the Trek legacy.  It’s disappointing that the writers of Voyager took arguably the greatest foe in Trek and relegated them to mediocrity.  The episode that drove the nail into the Borg coffin was the finale: Endgame.  If there was anything more mistreated in Voyager than the Borg was temporal paradoxes, especially involving not-really-alternate-future-but-should-have-been-erased-from-time-after-altering-the-past Admiral Janeway.

    Enterprise

    Xindi The Xindi, which started the serialization of a once-promising series.  Serial dramas like Lost and 24 worked for a lot of shows, but not for Trek – DS9 taught us that.  At the same time, we saw this drastic change of the show, where Archer went from being a fledgling explorer to a crazed madman, shooting from the hip and basing all of his actions on revenge.  By the time everyone realized this in Season 4 it was too late and the series was already canceled.  It was a shame, as the 4th season offered compelling material. If left many Trekies wondering why they didn’t trot this stuff out during the troubled second and third seasons.  The problem with Enterprise was that Paramount placed it on the crappy UPN.  Voyager barely survived the removal from syndication that made TNG & DS9 popular.  I realize syndication is not what it once was, but part of me believes that Enterprise would still be on the air if it was syndicated or even on a cable network.

    Where did I go wrong?  Please let me know!

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  • http://www.and-stuff.org/ AJ

    I’m not really familiar with the original series, so I can’t comment on it at all.

    TNG had the same issue a lot of sci-fi shows suffer from: The crew would find some really neat way to overcome their difficulty and/or save the world that would involve some rather manageable alteration to the deflector array. Then, two episodes later, when that same move would easily have worked again and kept 90% of the problems later in the episode from coming up, the crew had spontaneously forgotten how they did it. Sigh.

    DS9 was really the height of the Treks for me. Characters were allowed to really advance because there wasn’t a new alien and planet every week. They dealt with social issues and inter-personal conflicts a great deal more. I liked that. DS9 never went completely wrong for me, but I didn’t really care for the issues surrounding Sisco becoming a deity class figure…

    Voyager had a great theme song. Yup, after that it crashed for me. The show had a number of redeeming cast members including the doctor and Tom Paris. Janeway destroyed that show for me. She was quite possibly the most irrational Captain ever to walk a bridge. She played up the Picard side by always quoting the Prime Directive, but only when it was convenient to her point of view. If it wasn’t useful to her, she ditched it. But the worst part for me (even worse than their de-nutting of the Borg), was their implication that Janeway cared about or respected her crew. In staff meetings she would regularly discuss the problem of the episode with her crew, listen carefully to their opinions and expertise, then use whatever she wanted that often meant contradicting the current expert on the subject. She annoyed me to the point that I couldn’t stand the show, despite really liking the theme song ;-)

    Enterprise was hit and miss. When they started up, they did a fair job and I didn’t mind Archer being less rational than Picard had been. It was a throw back to Kirk in many ways and he was at least consistent. They went horribly wrong with the Xindi and the time traveling story lines. The only Trek episode I thought managed time travel in a fashion that wasn’t insulting was TNG’s finale, “All Good Things…” Enterprise became irredeemable when they added Nazi’s. I’m sorry, but any show that has to resort to using the Nazi’s as their primary villains has run out of good story ideas. Their finale was unnecessarily violent as well. I didn’t mind crew members dying, but Tucker was smarter than going down the way he did.

    I can tell you this much: I’m with you that the TNG movies missed hard with Insurrection, then put out pure gold with First Contact, and then proceeded to flush it all down the toilet with Nemesis. I’m interested to see what they’ll do with the new movie, but at this point, I’m not holding my breath anymore either.

    Still, good review man.

  • http://www.and-stuff.org/ AJ

    I’m not really familiar with the original series, so I can’t comment on it at all.

    TNG had the same issue a lot of sci-fi shows suffer from: The crew would find some really neat way to overcome their difficulty and/or save the world that would involve some rather manageable alteration to the deflector array. Then, two episodes later, when that same move would easily have worked again and kept 90% of the problems later in the episode from coming up, the crew had spontaneously forgotten how they did it. Sigh.

    DS9 was really the height of the Treks for me. Characters were allowed to really advance because there wasn’t a new alien and planet every week. They dealt with social issues and inter-personal conflicts a great deal more. I liked that. DS9 never went completely wrong for me, but I didn’t really care for the issues surrounding Sisco becoming a deity class figure…

    Voyager had a great theme song. Yup, after that it crashed for me. The show had a number of redeeming cast members including the doctor and Tom Paris. Janeway destroyed that show for me. She was quite possibly the most irrational Captain ever to walk a bridge. She played up the Picard side by always quoting the Prime Directive, but only when it was convenient to her point of view. If it wasn’t useful to her, she ditched it. But the worst part for me (even worse than their de-nutting of the Borg), was their implication that Janeway cared about or respected her crew. In staff meetings she would regularly discuss the problem of the episode with her crew, listen carefully to their opinions and expertise, then use whatever she wanted that often meant contradicting the current expert on the subject. She annoyed me to the point that I couldn’t stand the show, despite really liking the theme song ;-)

    Enterprise was hit and miss. When they started up, they did a fair job and I didn’t mind Archer being less rational than Picard had been. It was a throw back to Kirk in many ways and he was at least consistent. They went horribly wrong with the Xindi and the time traveling story lines. The only Trek episode I thought managed time travel in a fashion that wasn’t insulting was TNG’s finale, “All Good Things…” Enterprise became irredeemable when they added Nazi’s. I’m sorry, but any show that has to resort to using the Nazi’s as their primary villains has run out of good story ideas. Their finale was unnecessarily violent as well. I didn’t mind crew members dying, but Tucker was smarter than going down the way he did.

    I can tell you this much: I’m with you that the TNG movies missed hard with Insurrection, then put out pure gold with First Contact, and then proceeded to flush it all down the toilet with Nemesis. I’m interested to see what they’ll do with the new movie, but at this point, I’m not holding my breath anymore either.

    Still, good review man.

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