[off topic?]
One of the best reboots ever was the Netflix version of “Lost In Space.”
They took a silly kids’ show and made it great. Parker Posey is an incredible villain and the rest of the cast is just as good.
Watch this while you’re waitng
Maybe I have to rewatch it, but I remember a lot of the characters making a lot of really dumb decisions.
I think that holds for most dramas.
All I remember about it is a rocket exploding during launch, and next episode the crew are alive clinging to some piece of space junk in orbit. Fucking stupid.
https://factually.co/fact-checks/science/did-challenger-crew-survive-explosion-26d977
I don’t remember the episode off hand, but I do remember that there’s reason to believe that the crew of the Challenger survived the initial explosion, and died on impact.
Yes, but they didn’t make it into orbit, as in the show.
I think it’s a huge struggle to tackle something like this in the 10 or fewer episode season format. 26 gave them time to do story, character building and fluff. Ten simply doesn’t afford that.
Life isn’t just plot plot plot and modern shows feel too rushed when that’s all that’s happening.
It felt like a big failing in Strange New Worlds, an otherwise great reboot in a sea of mediocrity, but it might just be a reality of the modern era.
agreed, i long for 26 episode sci fi rather than the 10-part series en vogue these days.
Agreed. I’d rather smaller budgets and smaller stories in trade for more episodes.
It’s always difficult to follow in footsteps that size. And there’s an added difficulty in rebooting a franchise after a considerable amount of time has passed. I still remember many SG-1 episodes and their writers dealing with almost every problem thrown at them. Cast not available, pregnant, main actor absent? No issue at all. Budget tight? They just deal with it and somehow make the season work. And I liked how they didn’t even bother and just took it and went with it.
And I wish someone gave Seth McFarlane money for some more The Orville, as well. I like this kind of old-school sci-fi, episodic storytelling and the like. Depth and hard ethics problems, or something that gets solved by cleverness. And most modern sci-fi is more focused on different things, does less techno-babble and wits, and replaces it with more overblown, dramatic pep-talks by the captain for 3 minutes… Not sure if that really works out with the audience, though.
dramatic pep-talks by the captain for 3 minutes…
This easily accounts for 60% of the runtime of any randomly chosen episode of ST:Discovery
And the other 40% is crying.
20% crying and 20% zooming in on the crews’ faces in order to see their approving nods toward Burham’s inspirational speech.
Yes. Burnham was what I was thinking about as well. Discovery got a lot of criticism for things I think are fine. And they mostly add something to the overall story and universe. But all the pathos and we can do it speeches are really piled on thickly. Like someone thought this pizza needs a good layer of whipped cream on top… Idk. They also did some of that in Picard. And with Picard I can’t even see the zooms on their faces because it’s just dark on every one of their spaceships and my TV is 10 years old so I can’t see anything… 😅
(Both nice shows, though, in their own way. I’m mostly talking shit here, I don’t regret watching them.)
I also am not ashamed to have watched both but Discovery really felt like a chore at times because of all the forced sappyness. I thought it got pretty interesting after the time jump but the above mentioned criticism detracted from the show
I think there’s a lot of great ideas and potential in the show from a storytelling perspective. These jumps or openings of portals or unlocking of baffling new technology are a great plot device. And enable the writers to do almost anything. Including escape their confines, change the entire tone… And it massively hypes up the audience if a season ends on that. We have that in The Expanse, Stargate unlocks new technology and enemies all the time, and I think they needed to, because a lot of classic episodes are pretty much the exact same story with just a slightly different planet and the Goa’uld.
I also liked how they laid out the beginning of Discovery, to subvert the audience’s (and my) expectations. And how it wasn’t very easy to digest, but something to think about, invoke some feelings… And it’s not necessarily the usual spiel. I think they know how to do these things, change the tone and atmosphere… Tell a story in a more complex and not so bland way. And they made use of creativity to approach the issue of rebooting a franchise after several years.
And they have some lovely characters as well. Old Star Trek used to do over-acting as well or have characters be a walking stereotype. Their parallel-universe counterparts had beards tucked on, Patrick Steward etc do a lot of over-acting and weird episodes, Janeway is completely full of herself. But somehow they make it work. I’m fine with Tilly and all the others. Even Burnham has an interesting backstory. It’s really just that she has glassy eyes all the time and then cries every episode and everything is heavy with meaning in a way that feels very fake and unearned. And everything is about her. And I think Kurzman or whoever is responsible always doubled down and we got yet more of it.
Idk. I think most criticism written after the first few seasons reads pretty much like what I’ve written just now. I just googled a few blog posts and videos and it seems to be the predominant perspective from the fans.