Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (Page 3 of 4)

OMG - have you seen the latest one?  s01e07
They have the Klingon in a full fraking evening gown with a single-shoulder shawl.  Very Haute couture.

Star Trek Ibiza?

Has the woke thread moved here ?

What you are noticing is the absence of an absence. American television has been pointlessly censoring itself for so long that it's apparently started to feel normal to you. It is not. Being on a streamer probably just released them from that chokehold. People use those words a lot, and pretending otherwise is just silly.

The most recent episode was... actually pretty good? I'm certain quite a few people here can each somehow find a handful of moments that were so unbearably wrong that it made the whole thing unwatchable again; but if we let go of the desire to not like it, I'd say it was actually pretty decent Star Trek there.

I don't think its a desire to not like.  Its just not likeable.  I had seen the images of a student vomiting glitter and thought it was just an attention getter via Photoshop to be the title card on people's YouTubes etc.  Then I saw the episode: They actually really have a kid vomiting glitter.  If that doesn't sum up the show I don't know what does.

You don't have to look far for reasons this episode was a problem. 

To say this episode was "pretty good" is very generous of you.  I'd say it was maybe "the least bad" of the season so far.  That's not a high bar.  But that leaves the audience asking: "Why?"  Why was this the least bad?  Because it was the episode that was the least amount of the academy in it and leaned the most into being a Star Trek episode about a ship, in space, doing things, and confronting an enemy and a problem. 

They had to get away from it being Academy to make something that folks like you and other supporters start to call 'pretty good'.  That all by itself is all the indictment this show really needs when one stops to think about it.

You understand it's a spherical space around 20% of a galaxy-Right.  Its not a flat perimeter like in that first map they show.  Later they show a sphere wall.  Picture a Dyson sphere not just around a solar system but 1/5th of the galaxy. 

{see screenshots}

Yeah, we have roughly the same job there, and mine's for an industry that tends to be even stuffier by default. People there do value put-on professionalism, that's why I mentioned "ceremonial" occasions, such as presentations. But you are conflating "foul language" and "calling each other names" here. For the latter, consent is usually key, but there's always a good chance some busybody will get involved; because that sets the overall tone of communication in a place. It'd be something else if you were sent to HR for loudly muttering "fuck" occasionally, which this is mostly about, as the complaint was about using the words at all.

Hmm.

I enjoyed reading your critical post (valid points!) AND also enjoyed watching season 1.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 2 Wraps Filming
https://trekcentral.net/star-trek-starf … s-filming/

Alright.

Good:

• It was decent SciFi, all things considered. Yes, some stuff is still stupid, but name one non-hard-SciFi show where that isn't the case. The best ones at that are still mostly doing it by lampshading.

• They made an effort to actually include what's been in Star Trek before in the story, rather than only making up their own stuff.

• Tig Notaro isn't that good an actress, but she does pull off the technobabble well and her character's sarcastically pragmatic style is... a good fit for this kinda show.

• Robert Picardo still got it, and what he played did seem like his old Doctor, if we make an allowance for those 900 years of existence.

• They managed, despite the premise, to mostly contain emotional outbursts to where it makes sense for those characters. This is a notable improvement over Discovery.

• Tatiana Maslany is actually an impressively versatile actress, almost didn't recognize her. Too bad they didn't really give her anything interesting to do.

• They did undermine that rampant trope that any character's personal problems are more important than everyone's. Hell, the final episode is basically making fun of the main villain for thinking that. The theme of the show is basically "just grow up", and they sort of got that across, at least better than expected.

Bad:

• It's a teen/college drama. The very premise is something nobody asked for. They did, in my perception, make an effort to dial it down a lot from the tropes that genre would usually entail, but it's still very much there.

• They failed to capture the scope of things. Everything important happened while at least some of the always same dozen people are around, there's almost always a clear delineation between characters and extras. Lower Decks often showed how that can be done better.

• That same problem chewed away at the gravity of things. Wolf 359 is something they could not actually show on TNG. The fact that they didn't, and none of the characters see more than the aftermath, actually made it more impactful. I guess what I am saying is that "show don't tell" is often wrong in this genre. SgtSaint demonstrated well how that applied to the "barrier" here.

• That main villain was just... not necessary, at all, and not done well. I think he was supposed to be a guy who manages to exploit what hasn't been fully rebuilt, but they didn't pull that off, and he was always straining the believability.

• The technical side of the final resolution made no sense.
  

  ▼Spoiler

  It wasn't actually the girl who found the solution. It was the Doc, which made even less sense. They could have handwaved it with the fact that 7 of 9, his good friend, had almost managed it once, but they didn't. And it makes even less sense why he would know the answer only after being turned into the projection of a ship. Which, by the way, made no sense either, why that projection needed to be made out of him.
  

Gets lots of complaints:

• So there's a Klingon character that happens to be gay. That part is brought up maybe three times. Mostly he's written as a guy who just happens to be really bad at his own culture, while still being proud of it. Why that might be a relevant characterization for a lot of young people these days really shouldn't need to be explained. That being said, his name is stupid, obnoxiously so.

Overall, not great, but alright. It very much suffers from being Star Trek, as that fandom is surprisingly caustic when it comes to anything new. I think there are still some who haven't accepted anything newer than TNG? There would likely be a lot less pushback had it been, say, a spinoff of The Orville. But Star Trek has also had a lot of very weak first seasons, so if they can improve on this, it may well become something.

Holly Hunter:
The post you mention is 8 years back.  And the hearing problem and speech affectation have been lifelong.  That was kind of my point: If it wasn't this thick cheeky sound for The Incredibles why is it so pronounced now? One could say 'age' and we all degrade over time and maybe its just getting harder for her to speak as she ages. But then why is it not so pronounced in her current time interviews?  Personally, in the same way they're showing eye glasses and wheel chairs (none of which should be there in 32nd century) and special needs all being 'equal and not holding back' I think they told her to lean in to it.  I think they wanted her to have a speech impediment as yet another disability to showcase in their show.  Great do that. Add another message to champion.  Just don't do it for the captain who should be delivering some of the most important dialog for the show.  Its like when the fast food place decides to put that person on the drive through speaker system instead of at the counter. Its just a bad choice. You can still treat the person fairly and respectfully while still acknowledging there's better and worse places to utilize a person.

You're right I did skip him because I tend to think of him like the crew does: As A.I. tech.  People don't transmit through deflector dishes and morph into starships.  He's a 32nd century A.I. pretending to be a living being.  Might as well be "Rommy" from the Andromeda Ascendent.  I think it's great that he and other photonics are thought of living beings but... You don't build, debug, reprogram, fix relays, fix processors, in living beings.  If you require an emitter you're tech.  If you can jump from an emitter, to the ships computer as a program, through the ship's network, to another part of tech like a deflector, and back, you're a program.  Sophisticated for sure but that's to be expected centuries from now. But still a program.  Humans like to anthropamorphize.  We're doing it already with ChatGPT being the go-to for this generation's friendships and even therapists and relationships.  Its totally reasonable to expect people in hundreds of years to fully interact with A.I. in the same way as a person. But that doesn't make it a person.

I also didn't list the captain, or Reno, or what's-her-name Gizelle/Galaxy/Glamor the cadet with the gold eyeshadow, or, or...  So not sure where the score card is there.

Just pointing out that if someone took the time to do a study of the episode it would be 9:1 significant accomplishments by the girl boss team. I'm fine with equality and that's what I'd like to see in modern shows.  Making it 9:1 is just as wrong and lopsided as 1960's shows that were 1:9
I think voyager was probably best at that.  It felt balanced in accomplishments. Some were the capt, some were Chicotay.  Some were Tuvak, some were Torres.  Some Paris, some 7of9.  It just felt balanced, and that's very much missing in modern Trek.

I would say "It very much suffers from being *called* Star Trek.

I think this is what most people are saying: Its okay as a sci-fi and should have been made as such.  Confident people would have done that.  It could have been the next Dark Matter (2015) or Another Life for example where it was intended to be 'a sci-fi', a little campy, not trying to be accurate, not trying to be anything but itself.  That would have worked so much better.  But the creators lacked the confidence in their own work, so they're just misusing an existing I.P. name to try to pull in viewers.

They went full teen drama with this one. Not a good show. Doesn't feel anything like Star Trek. Stay clear.