Ten Forward

I think that Star Trek had exhausted its public good will by the time such a thing could have happened. If the Next Generation cast films had started their road to diminishing returns, Voyager wasn't goint to turn it around. I guess economics was the major factor there. For all the detractors of the Abrams film, it DID generate fresh interest in the viability of the franchise.

I think the answer is quite simply the franchise was financially performing worse as time went on. Here are the opening weekend totals for the 4 Next Gen movies in Millions of Dollars.

Generation: 23.1
First Contact: 30.7
Insurrection: 22
Nemesis: 18.5

Given the trend lines it is not surprising that the other series never spun off into big screen adaptations. Star Trek (2009) was a massive budget film that the Studio used as a tentpole for that summer's release. (150 million budget I think.) Given that the studio has taken star trek from a mid-grade expectation film to a block buster expectation franchise I think the future films will be more action adventure sizzle and far less idea driven than the previous incarnation.

I don't think we'll ever see another TNG movie again, though I could see them finding a way to work some of the characters into a future Abrams movie sometime. A shame, because the TNG crew never got a proper sendoff.

I wouldn't mind seeing that crew together again, but I was terribly disappointed in Nemesis. We'll probably re-watch it eventually, but I can say now that it felt like a really bad episode of the TV series, and I was most annoyed by a) retconning, such as Picard's supposed kidnapping/cloning by Romulans and the existence of another prototype Soong android, b) the gratutitous action scenes, and c) Data's fate. That said, I managed to enjoy it more on subsequent viewings, mainly because I really do like the cast that much. There are some very interesting things going on there, despite the superficial stupidity, and I look forward to discussing them.

I think the TNG cast has been pretty clear that even if offered huge piles of cash, they will not do another movie. I believe Brent Spiner in particular was adamant against an "old" Data.

I am still disappointed that the TNG cast didn't get the kind of honorable sendoff the TOS cast did. Nemesis is terrible Star Trek but it's actually a pretty fun action movie. (Compare to Insurrection, which is just unspeakable.) On the other hand, "All Good Things..." is pretty much the best series ending they could have hoped for, and the story really could have ended there.

As for Voyager, well, that series struggled with ratings its entire existence. When it flagged, they threw Seven of Nine on the show to try and drum up some interest--with only moderate success. Enterprise didn't even make it past the fourth season, so I think all parties involved were pretty sure that the franchise was dead. Ron Moore (who I have mixed feelings about anyway) had moved on to reboot BSG and Rick Berman should never have been put in charge of the property.

I can't help but wonder sometimes if Star Trek as we know it isn't basically dead. What Abrams has created bears little resemblance to any Trek I know, and the secondary properties, like Star Trek Online, never gained any traction.

My Trek History in brief summation:

1. TOS: Saw it from the very beginning with my parents. Sci-fi was really big on TV back in those days, and we watched all of it. Nobody knew at the time that out of all the great shows (The Time Machine, Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc), that Star Trek, which only lasted 3 years, would still be around all these years later!

2. TNG: Saw it from inception as well, loved it from the 1st episode. It had some weaknesses at first, but they were not enough to tank the show, and, were all soon worked out. Great ensemble, great writers.

3. Voyager: I loved Voyager! But, as I recall, I was working nights at the time, and they kept moving the show, eventually to a night I couldn't see it. I lost track of Voyager for many, many years, until I started catching it in re-runs round about 2004 or so. (Stumbled on it about 3:00AM one night.) To me, its probably one of the most dynamic Star Trek shows, with lots and lots of good characterizations. I especially liked The Doctor (HATED him, at first, lol!), Captain Janeway, and, of course, B'Elanna Torres. Wasn't too crazy about Tom, but he grew on me.

3. Deep Space Nine: It was a hard relationship, from the very beginning, but, I came around about 2006, and really grew to love that show. It took some time, tho!

4. I hated Enterprise, HAVING NEVER SEEN IT (much to my eternal shame!). But, once I actually watched it, I found that I really, really liked it. But, of course, it was too late, the show was already gone! I think the Rod Stewart song (which I actually like), is what put me off. Where was the soaring orchestral score?? If you've never watched Enterprise FOR REAL, please, consider giving it a 2nd chance.

I'll whine about the moves in another post!

I think Brent Spiner's reasons for putting Data to bed are rather excellent ones. I agree with the general perspective that it was time to finish the series but I really wish they'd chosen a decent story and given them a proper sendoff (Though All Good Things really was a great way to end the series).

I actually rather like Insurrection (especially compared to Nemesis and Generations) but I know that I'm a minority on that. I also really liked Enterprise (including the theme song until they changed it in Season 3) so it's clear that my tastes cannot be relied upon.

Voyager I hated. I couldn't stand the concept or most of the characters and adding Six of Nine just tied up my general dislike in a bow.

As it happens, despite my other unpopular views, I completely agree with Torie about Rick Berman and Ron Moore. I know Ron Moore's pretty popular, especially after Battlestar Galactica but there's something about him that irritates me. Rick Berman though...man, I hope I never bump into him.

The notion of a "Voyager" movie freezes my blood. The only hope would be to turn it into outright satire, with Capt. Janeway's spectacularly incompetent approach to command leading to the ship's stranding even further away from home than when they started.

I don't quite wish to judge Abrams's notion of Star Trek until the second movie. I disliked the first intensely, don't get me wrong, but a large part of the problem was that its script was composed largely of plot glue designed to get all the familiar cast together and fixed in the roles expected of them. Yeah, it's kind of dumb that McCoy just happens to pop up in the same enlistment queue as Kirk. (Hell, we have to be thankful, at least McCoy's fortuitous appearance gave us something to watch.) It was unutterably convenient that Spock should just happen all of a sudden to jettison Kirk onto the same planet as "Spock Prime" and Scotty. It's borderline insulting that Kirk goes straight from cadet to captain at the end of the movie. But as long as you accept that Abrams's "Star Trek" movie was never really meant to be a movie in the accepted sense and more like a two-hour TV pilot episode, something to be gotten out of the way so you can tell a real story later, then it's not so bad.

I can't disagree with any of that, CaitieCat, yet somehow I can't bring myself really to hate the Abrams Trek movie. I feel curiously detached from it. There's something almost disarming in how brazen the movie is. You're right, no icky science. Not even the shamefaced attempt to present make-believe science by hurling fistfuls of technobabble at us. The 2009 Star Trek movie doesn't even bother. How are entire solar systems destroyed and time travel effected? Two words, "red matter", is all we get. It's almost...genius. A TNG or Voyager episode would have fabricated some quite elaborate nonsense involving tachyons and subspace and phase reversal; to give us nothing at all but two meaningless words is an astonishing feat.

Or take the staging of Kirk's legendary faked Kobayashi Maru test. I suppose we've all imagined how Kirk tried to win the no-win situation. Surely--although I've never come across any of it--there must be many written accounts of Kirk's trickery, amateur and professional. I don't suppose that any of them disposed of the scene in as off-hand and casual a manner as Abrams did, giving us a Kirk who cheats without cleverness, without the slightest effort to be plausible, who munches on an apple like a bored grade-school student. It's as slight and shameless a dodge as "red matter" is...and it fits the film perfectly, I realize now.

The whole movie's like that. It should have made me furious. And I did write some nasty words about it immediately after seeing it. But now I can regard it like I might regard a Rube Goldberg device. All the incongruous, individual mechanisms, laughable on their own, add up to a whole that's somehow almost admirable. Only this device wasn't designed to light a candle or toast a slice of bread but to plant Chris Pine's ass into a captain's chair by hook or crook.

Silent space was good, I did like that, and they even lampshaded it, when someone gave their Wilhelm scream and it was cut off as the air dissipated. It just made the rest hurt more - I found, unlike etomlins, that the "red matter" dodge just made me sneer in despair and disgust at how they'd completely given up even trying anymore. TOS made an effort at being scientific, in some ways, as did TNG; it was kind of a thing, the thing we Trek-favouring types used to hold over the space operoids with their Star Wars fetish: "Yeah, but Star Wars" - best cutting look here - "isn't even really science fiction."

Now, the Star Warriors (what the hell do they call themselves, anyway? Probably "Star Wars fans", that sounds about prosaic enough) can just point-and-freakin'-LAUGH.

I mean, they didn't just cock up any one or two of astrophysics, cosmology, military careers, time travel, linguistics, geography, or biology, among others: they cocked up ALL of them. Even the Phantom Freakin' Menace made more sense, and felt less railroaded. And I LIKE the Phantom Menace.

As to the Kobayashi Maru, I don't even want to think about it. They made a complete shambles of the whole thing: instead of his refusing to accept defeat, and heroically outthinking the simulation to come up with a million-to-one shot win (Kirk's staple in TOS), he just cheated, and made it obvious he'd cheated, and didn't give a shit that he'd been caught cheating.

Kirk from TOS wouldn't have done that. He'd have been arrogant as hell about having beaten it, probably by pretending to be humble (and this encouraging others to tell the tale for him, inevitably exaggerating it, and without any blame to him for the exaggeration - he's CRAFTY, remember?), but he'd never simply cheat without making it at least difficult to find out how. This just feels like he spotted some cheap security flaw in the computers running the sim, rather than actually figured out how to beat the situation, as TOS-Kirk (as opposed to Tosser Kirk? would that be too rude?) certainly did.

@ Cait
I'm with you on all of this, and the only thing that I can add is that having now seen the Transformers movies (only with RiffTrax), I feel I understand AbramsTrek better--by allowing myself to understand it less. Orci and Kurtzman are talentless hacks; it's not just a one-off failure.

But I never liked Lost, either, so maybe I was just never going to get behind this reboot.

Quote from Torie on February 3, 2012, 11:06
@ Cait
I'm with you on all of this, and the only thing that I can add is that having now seen the Transformers movies (only with RiffTrax), I feel I understand AbramsTrek better--by allowing myself to understand it less. Orci and Kurtzman are talentless hacks; it's not just a one-off failure.

But I never liked Lost, either, so maybe I was just never going to get behind this reboot.

Orci and Kurtzman are exactly that. And with the addition of Damon Lindelof, they formed an unholy trinity of bad storytellers that perfectly predicted the shitstorm that was STID. Sadly, ever since Abrams made sure everyone knew how much he wanted to dumb down Star Trek to his own levels of stupidity, the low quality of these films has been a foregone conclusion. Hopefully, taking the helm of the SW sequels will prevent him from ever directing a ST film again. (Of course, his production company will still be making them, so don't start the celebration just yet.)

Voyager's terrible premise -- let's strand an entire starship in unexplored space 70,000 light years from home to complete a task that one crewman in a shuttle could have managed on his own (which would have resulted in Farscape being part of the ST Universe, as Lone Crewman tries to find his own way home) -- at least managed to prevent any movies being made. Although learning that Janeway had been promoted to admiral while watching Nemesis nearly made me leave the theater. But having already stayed through the ridiculous off-roading sequence, I couldn't quite justify walking out at that point.