Skydance only bought Paramount this past summer after production of SFA season one was well advanced and SNW was largely done seasons four production.
While there is genuine reason for concern regarding future Star Trek, it’s very hard to make the case regarding anything in pre production before 2025.
As if Star Trek wasn’t corporate from the beginning!
Every major difference between the original pilot ‘The Cage’ and the original series / TOS was rooted in corporate priorities.
The bright, primary coloured uniform tunics, bright colourful flashing lights on the bridge and other sets were designed to promote NBC’s ‘Living Color’ television broadcasts.
Kirk was younger, physically more vigorous and less cerebral than Pike, no matter what Roddenberry wanted. Action adventure hero, romancing women, was what the network wanted no matter that Roddenberry wanted Kirk to be a ‘stack of books with legs’ and for Yeoman Rand to be the original third principle character and long term romantic interest.
I’m rather wondering if this kind of advertising targeting GenX middle aged and senior men is an inevitable coda to the 1990s wave of colonic irrigation humour.
A most excellent way to celebrate…
Voyager in TAS Filmation-style tribute by Gazelle Automations. Animated Threshold
Hopefully this episode will satisfy the “what happened to the Klingons?!!” questions lingering from Discovery.
…And perhaps kickoff a new narrative with Jay-Den as Heart of Glory did for Worf in TNG season one.
That’s a point.
Although in the case of the introduction of the Cardassians, there were significant contradictions vs the geopolitical situation of the Federation as presented repeatedly in the earlier seasons of TNG.
In relation to fan outrage though, even modest ‘filling in gaps’ — or ‘dancing between the raindrops’ as the EPs of SNW call it, is frequently met with with complaint that “no one has ever mentioned that before.”
Well, I can see your point.
I also was always supportive of WW III being pushed back by a half century.
But you can’t argue that there haven’t been major retcons.
Oh, it definitely did contradict established continuity — certainly more than Spock having had a foster sister or Khan descendants that we hadn’t heard of previously.
TNG initially presented a stable and peaceful utopian civilization. Picard and his officers spoke repeatedly about this in the early seasons.
There were long term stable borders with the Romulans, established relations with the Klingons but no major armed conflicts in the lifetimes of the senior officers.
‘Yesterday’s Enterprise’ was given as the exemplary lesson on how the alternative, more violent, alternative history would have played out but even that was quite far back, with the Enterprise-C.
The Ferengi were in early TNG a new and mysterious alien group on the borders.
The Borg was the most disruptive threat in generations, one that required new technology and new more military forward leadership approaches.
And then suddenly it turns out there has been a major ongoing border conflict with Cardassia, marginalized refugees from occupied planets living in camps bordering Federation utopia, and Starfleet has had its serving crew in armed conflicts.
How can you sincerely argue that isn’t a ‘major change?’
It’s interesting though.
We get the perception in early TNG that it’s been a long stable period of peace, exploration and expansion that’s suddenly disrupted by the Borg.
Then, we find that there have been significant ongoing regional conflicts with the Cardassians, some in Starfleet service have seen combat and torture, and that there have been marginalized refugees that have been marginalized and largely forgotten the Utopian Federation worlds.
BUT we accepted at the time as an audience.
In fact, unlike many of the elements of TNG that were outraging TOS fans in 1987-1989, there was nary a murmur about this at the conventions or on the BBS about the introduction of the Cardassians and Bajorans or the significant retcons.
As someone who was around for the TOS fan backlash in the early years of TNG, I don’t think that this has anything at all to do with the cumulative weight of lore or lack thereof.
My thought rather is that a show at the height of its popularity can get away with a great deal in terms of retcons and rewriting its own canon/lore.
A new show that does that takes a larger risk and is more likely to attract backlash.
I was listening to the video and thought I heard “fighting” but that could have just been my misunderstanding.
I get the discomfort about speculation.
It definitely sounds like there’s been ‘stuff’ behind the scenes already. Not TNG Chaos on the Bridge or Disco season one and two level, but definitely frictions.
(The actor who plays Genesis recently let slip when asked about Jonathan Frakes, that he’d been originally scheduled to direct her character’s second season feature episode but there had been “fighting going on” and Frakes was pushed back to directing a later episode!)
If the backdoor pilot episode in Disco season four didn’t work the way they’d hoped, it would be unfortunate if the characters and their actors have paid the price for the ‘notes’ from the senior executives.
However, as we saw with Number One in ‘The Cage’ if the the television franchise head thinks it’s worthwhile to bring back a character or an actor, one or both will happen eventually.
Although Paramount+ now streams all the live action Star Trek shows in Canada, BellMedia’s CTV Sci-fi Channel has continued to provide linear cable programming for many of the Star Trek shows, including Strange New Worlds.
It wasn’t clear whether Starfleet Academy would also be available on CTV in first run. It’s now appearing in the television listings with a double episode premiere starting at 9:00 pm Eastern Time.
Treklit has some great offerings. The Relaunch universe books in particular developed coherent serialized storylines and a group of strong authors. There is also a deep library of standalone books from across all eras of the franchise.
By contrast, serialized Star Trek is struggling onscreen. Of the current era, only Prodigy has excelled in serialized storytelling.
So, why not look to the books? Not just to lift an idea like Control or the end of the Borg, but to actually tell a coherent narrative across a season or season?
On Netflix, Prime and Apple, it’s become established that successful streaming shows are often based on novels and novel series. Those streamers have come to understand that novelists, not scriptwriters, excel in laying out long form storytelling, and resources are often better put in having the screenwriters adapt than create from the whole cloth.
Reading a recent interview with Mick Herron, author of the critically acclaimed and popular Slow Horses on Apple, with a second show based on his other books launching this fall, I was struck by the interviewer’s assertion of this truism.
I thought about several of the non franchise shows I enjoy and how many of them are more or less faithful adaptations of books.
I was also struck by the thought that both Skydance and Paramount are quite capable of producing excellent book adaptations for Netflix and Apple. Murderbot is a very current example.
So, what’s holding back Star Trek from exploiting the Vanguard series or the Starfleet Core of Engineers books?
Why insist on giving showrunners resources to keep retelling franchise stories with legacy characters and tropes?
Why not exploit that IP that Paramount already owns by adapting the best of decades of TrekLit?
We picked up some good deals from the promotion this week.
Several Star Trek licensed games are on Steam, now at a significantly discounted price for the annual Star Trek Day celebration.
These include the MMP Star Trek Online, but also single player games Star Trek Bridge Crew and Star Trek Resurgence (a choose your own path role play game).
We’d waited until Resurgence came to Steam, because we did want to buy it from Epic, but decided to be even more patient and wait for a sale so we could get it for our teens as well. I’ve been playing in parallel with one of our teens and debating the impacts of our very different choices.
I have had Bridge Crew since 2022, but we got copies for the teens yesterday. One is into it. It requires running an Ubisoft account synched to Steam which can be annoying, but otherwise G2G.
Wondering if there’s a minimum wait before retesting and that would put them beyond the time limit.
Or perhaps she’s previously tested failed the test and this was her best result.