Hey, this week is the 20th anniversary of the airing of Star Trek: the Next Generation!
Cool.
I was in my first year of grad school then. A bunch of us nerdy astro grads got together and watched it, and we liked it, though the giant Portugese Man-O-Wars in love thing was pretty silly. I didn’t like Q much either, which goes to show what I know (he later became a favorite, though ruined on Voyager and DS9).
Anyway, I’m glad it revived the series. Next time I’m in Vegas (next June for TAM6, baby!) I’ll go to Quark’s bar and hoist a Warp Core Breach in TNG’s honor.
Hmmm, Wil, you listening? You should come to TAM!
September 29th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Phil, you can be histarical sometimes with how much you love this show!
September 29th, 2007 at 10:22 am
[...] wrote an interesting post today on Happy Anniversary, ST:TNG!Here’s a quick [...]
September 29th, 2007 at 10:31 am
It was pretty well done, I came to the US towards the end of its run, so I had to watch most of them while it was in syndication. I got so fed up with the way syndication randomized the running order that I had to find a list of all the episodes on the Internet (a bit harder then that it is now!) and check them off once I had seen them, so that I could tell which ones I had left to watch.
I thought DS9 ended up being a better show overall, but without TNG it would not have existed. After that, well, thank goodness for B5, Farscape, BSG, and yes, even SG-1
September 29th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Portugese Man’O War? Those things always creep me out, on account of being in the same room at AMNH as the Giant Squid, which I swear is out to get me.
September 29th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Always loved Q. My favorite was when he showed up in a sombrero with the mariachi band and started omnipotently willing cigars into everyone’s mouths.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
*”There is a theory of the Morbius. A twist in a fabric of time. Where time becomes a loop.” -Warf.
*Note: Loosely recorded…since I am hearing from Orbital’s remix of the said statement which is now pounding in the background as an impromptu tribute to one of the best sci-fi series of all time, IMO. In short, I loved the show. As well as a reminder of how old I have quickly become…since it’s been 20 years.
*Also note: To those that play World of Warcraft; Yes, that’s Michael Dorn’s voice on some of the Human and Tauren NPC’s. I checked it out with IMDB.
*Yes, I am wierd.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
When it first came out I think I lasted 4 or 5 episodes before I lost interest and moved on. For me at least the show was just to painful to watch. Bad science, bad economics, bad acting.
I am glad it gave Ronald Moore his start and as a result we had kick ass shows like Carnival (although it didn’t last) and, more recently, Battlestar Gallactica which ends it run next year.
Having attended a wedding on the bridge of the star trek enterprise and attending the reception in Quarks bar in vegas I do suggest you avoid the food at all costs. The drinks are interesting but the food tastes like something out of a replicator. But you can pick up a Borg Teddy Bear in the gift shop.
September 29th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Start wreck?
September 29th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
I love TNG. It takes a lot of bitter licks to get to it’s chocolaty center, though. It could be corny and heavy-handed, and too often repeated itself (How many different kinds of pure energy beings could there possibly be?). But at its best, it could be brilliant. My favorite episodes were the ones with Twilight-Zone-esque “What the hell is going on?” plots.
The show also championed rationalism, and gave no quarter to religion or woo. Like the Original, it pushed the envelope in terms of content and imagination.
It also had a great cast. I give a lot of credit to Patrick Stewart, who threw himself into every performance, no matter how silly.
September 29th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Also, I think it was on BA that I first learned of the opposite of “Jumping the Shark”: “Growing the Beard”.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I hated Q. I’m glad he was only in one episode of DS9 (”You hit me! Picard never hit me!”). When I was younger, DS9 VGR > TNG.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
And that cut out my > and < signs. Oh well. DS9 rules your face. That is all.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
20 years!!!!!?
Oh dear. I’m clearly getting old.
Anyone remember ‘The Inner Light’ – my favourite.
September 29th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Patrick Stewart is a bit of a hero in Mirfield, a small town in West Yorkshire, England where he was born. Despite the fact that he is now such a well-respected actor (and was long before TNG) he still finds time to come back to this town (pop 18,000) and give a talk at the school he used to attend when he was a boy.
September 29th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I keep reading the title of this birthday as “Happy Anniversary, Sting!”
*shudder*
September 29th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Sorry, the original can’t be topped.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
The show also championed rationalism, and gave no quarter to religion or woo. Like the Original, it pushed the envelope in terms of content and imagination.
Actually, TOS had a number of pro-religous references and even Kirk, in a discussion with Apollo about gods, says that “we find the one quite sufficient” or words to that effect.
TNG was decidedly atheist though and religious cultures were viewed with suspicion in general. I always found that refreshing.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Phil.. I’ll join you in Quark’s bar!
September 29th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I first saw it as a video (yes, that’s old!) cover. Looked corny and derivative, so I marked it up as “no way see”. Then a channel started a run, I stumbled in on one of the good episodes (the later years), and now I have watched every episode and movie.
Not too bad, but of course not the original. A personal plus is that Patrick Stewart is a carbon copy of my father. But of course playing way cooler and nowhere as good at strategy, especially chess. (I’m sorry they spun the gaming off on Data, because I would have liked to experience the cognitive dissonance seeing Stewart make a bad 3D chess move.)
Evolving Squid, the envelope had moved between ST and ST:NG.
September 29th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
The Good: Data’s brother episodes
The Bad: Troy’s mom episodes
The Ugly: Worf’s son in any episode
I want to have an andriod follow me around and ask me questions about the human condition in front of other people.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
You *had* to say it was 20 years.
I feel old AND empty now…
Ooo! New Torchwood tonight! Happy again!
>>> bad economics,
More like *NO* economics, which, as a mild fan of Objectivism, I found really annoying, but I suppose replication technology could accomplish that, in theory.
That was what I liked about Babylon 5. There was an economy there. Traders and companies and scouts all that good stuff in a big stew of galactic political tension. Even BSG handles it better with the ad hoc economies and black markets depicted in the rag tag fleet.
September 29th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
>>> I want to have an andriod follow me around
>>> and ask me questions about the human condition
>>> in front of other people.
Really?
I want to have an android follow me around and attack anyone or anything I told it to.
Preferably, it would look something like this:
http://www.simshost.com/images/char/KOS-MOS.jpg
Me: What do you want?
Bible Freak On Street: Did you know that Jesus has a plan for you?
Me: KOSMOS? Deal.
KOSMOS: Yes, master.
Bible Freak On Street: (strangled gurgle)
September 29th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
The author Iain M. Banks created a fictional universe in which the human race has combined with sentient machines to build a society called The Culture, where there are virtually unlimited resources, I guess taking this aspect of TNG to its logical conclusion. No one starves, you can live as long as you want to, even change sex for a decade or two just for the hell of it, and if you want your own fairytale castle on your own terraformed moon, then have at it.
The best of his Culture novels is called “The Player of Games” and it is well worth a read. Banks is one of the best British scifi writers around today. (Just avoid his non-scifi “The Wasp Factory” novel unless you want to be seriously (and I mean seriously) grossed out).
September 29th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
>>> The author Iain M. Banks created a fictional
>>> universe in which the human race has combined
>>> with sentient machines
Well, I consider AI and “sentient machines” to be forever science fiction. I know that makes me a bit of a heretic in some circles, but there you have it.
AI is the fusion power of the computing world. It’s always just “around the corner”.
I’ve think that much of today’s SF is just as innacurate as the pulp SF of years past, especially a lot of what is billed as “Hard” SF. Yeah, hard as warm butter.
I just don’t buy this “human mind is just a digital pattern that can be downloaded” idea. Even a cursory reading of anything on the deep mechanics of neurophysiology seems to deny that possibility.
I’ve tried to start The Golden Age by John C. Wright about five times now, but to no avail. And this is from someone whose numbers amongst his favorite books “Creatures Of Light And darkness” by Roger Zelazny, so I love me some weird.
>>> even change sex for a decade or two
Heh. Sounds like John Varley. In one of his books, the main character changes genders in the middle of it.
September 29th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
I turning 20 tomorrow, which means I am as old as TNG. I am unsure of what it means.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
In my younger years I loved TNG, especially most of the Borg episodes. “The Inner Light” and “Tapestry” were two of the best episodes in all of Star Trek canon. Overall, however, I became disenchanted with the show because so many episodes relied of “techno-babble” to resolve problems, like reversing the polarity on the EPS conduits blah, blah, blah. But when they relied on strong adversaries, or innovative, character-driven drama, it shined.
And by the way, I hated the Enterprise-D. It looked odd no matter what angle you looked at it from. I was happy to see it go. For my money, the redesigned original Enterprise from the movies was the best of the bunch, followed closely by the Enterprise-E. Both of those ships were great designs.
September 29th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
The way I phrased my description of The Culture may have been a little ambiguous. I meant that “the human race, after having created sentient machines, teamed up with them…” (i.e. worked side-by-side)
Anyway, I agree that the human mind is more than just a digital pattern (it is a lot more complex than that), but human consciousness is still just a manifestation of the physical contents and structure of our brain, albeit an almost impossibly complicated one. So, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one day, perhaps not for hundreds of years, we will be able to full simulate what’s going on in a person’s mind, down to the individual neurons. Whether a “downloaded” copy of you would still be “you” is debatable. I would tend to say not. It would still be a copy, and you would still cease to exist when your original brain dies.
Banks makes no effort to develop a continuity between the society we know today and that of The Culture. If anything, it is set thousands of years into the future, so he has eschewed any attempt to extrapolate from today’s technology. That’s fine, science fiction is speculative fiction, and is a spectrum of speculation from the probable the “might just be possible one day in the distant future”.
September 29th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Make it so, Number One.
September 29th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
>>> we will be able to full simulate what’s going on in a person’s mind,
Hmm. Godel might disagree. If our brains turn out to be non-Turing hypercomputers, then forget about marketing those mind saver devices.
Or if there’s any merit to quantum brain dynamics. The concept is a bit fringy, but interesting and fun to speculate on.
Ideas from quantum decoherence may eventually knock it all into the rubbish bin, though, but that’s science.
September 29th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
It’s science.
September 30th, 2007 at 5:38 am
Sorry, TNG “free of woo”? There was a frickin’ psychic psychotherapist on the bridge crew.
September 30th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Making me feel old too. I’m barely old enough to remember TOS first run (I got upset every time a red shirt bit it, thinking he was an important part of the show), and in 1987 it seemed like eons ago. 1987 seems like yesterday. I didn’t like Q at first either, and the jellyfish in love were silly… 20 years ago… dang…
I was never fond of any off the other spin offs, never made it past the first season of Deep Space 90210, or a few episodes of voyager or enterprise… Rick Bermann taking over the franchise after Roddenberry died killed it… I doubt we’ll see another Trek on TV for a long time. I am NOT a fan of metaplots or story arcs, which was all DS9, Babylon 5, and the new BSG is. Bleakh. Give me one hour of a self contained story, with the occasional two parter.
I hope Russel T. Davis doesn’t do the same thing to Who… Although I am really loving Torchwood and surprised it seems to not be well liked. (although it’s the highest ranking show in BBC America’s History which is a very good sign, maybe we can see Sarah Jane in the States now too).
I just hope all the spinoffs doesn’t ruin Who like they seemed to have done Trek…
September 30th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Twenty years ago? Doesn’t seem like it. One of the few cons I have been to In Huston Just before the debut of STNG. I hated the first season, got to love it later. Hated Q! Original’s ‘Beard and Circuses. seemed to imply that the human population was heavily Christian. Uhura was anyway. I remember one Next Gen that ecplectly repudiated religion.
September 30th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Willo,
Yes there was a “psychic”, but her abilities were fully natural. They evolved as part of her species (well, her mother’s species). They were also testable and consistent, though still scientifically mysterious to humans. Any full-blooded betazoid would certainly win the JREF prize.
That’s not woo.
September 30th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Reading all you folks, I must be the odd one here. Never could get into it. Never got into any of them except TOS which I grew up with. Watched a few episodes when it first started and got annoyed they always seeemd to borrow from TOS. I hear from a good friend it got better, but I had already shelved it in my mind. Hard to believe it’s been 20 years. I don’t regret not watching any of the later stuff. You can’t top Kirk!!
September 30th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Willo,
I usually hate when psychic powers get shoehorned into sci-fi. So many writers seem to regard it as inevitable. I loved the first couple of Foundation books, but the introduction of psychic powers just about ruined the series for me. Why couldn’t the Second Foundation just be really good psychohistorians? (Don’t get me started on the later books. Gaia?! Ugh…)
I see your point about woo in TNG. I was thinking about woo more in the sense of how they approached unexplained phenomena and extraordinary claims. Like Steve said, TNGs psychics had testable, falsifiable powers and they didn’t resort to supernatural explanations for them. Granted, the powers had very “magic wand”, Star-Trekkie scientific explanations, but so did most of the rest of the technology on the show.
September 30th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
What made TNG a real player was when the killed off Tasha Yar, not because I didn’t like the character but because the writers and producers proved early on in the series that they were willing to kill off major characters, something that wasn’t done often in those days.
The implicit knowledge that not just random ensigns could die added a certain dramatic tension to the show.
I found out later that it was because Denise Crosby wanted to leave the show but, no less, it counted for something.
September 30th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Remember that episode when the Enterprise-C came forward in time…
And when Picard died and was able to redo some of his life…
Also when Pulaski stuck a bunch of needles in Riker’s head…
Okay, maybe not the last one.
September 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
It’s interesting how TV scifi has changed in the years since TNG was on the air. In those days, and ever since TOS really, scifi was essentially escapist heroic fiction, with the lead characters struggling mightily against the forces of evil and always striving to do the right thing even though sometimes the options weren’t clear or the outcomes optimal.
DS9 blurred the lines a little bit, and B5 a little bit more (with G’Kar & Londo at least), and that same tradition has been carried forward with into the Stargate Universe.
But things have changed a great deal in other shows. Heroes deals with a whole group of flawed individuals who only get it right despite their own personal demons and selfish motivations. Farscape included similarly flawed characters who often only did the right thing whenever they are forced to by circumstance. Hiro stands out as the most popular character of Heroes partly because he represents the heroic strain of scifi from the past.
And, of course, we have the new Battlestar Galactica, which is probably the antithesis of TNG. Ron Moore, the creator of the show, explicitly wanted it to be that way, and given the howls of protest from the viewing public, he was a very brave man to do it! Yes, there’s hardly a person in the series without serious and chronic character issues, and while the idealism of TNG occasionally peeps its head above the parapet it is usually pounced upon immediately by all kinds of complications and unsavory motivations. Kind of like real life really
For me, while I still enjoy shows like Stargate, I prefer the intrigue and suspense a show like BSG can bring, with its ability to use the full gamut of human emotion and behavior. It makes the show more unpredictable, more compelling, and thus more entertaining. I know lots of people hate all the angst and the misery that comes with the show, and that’s fine, no show from any genre will suit all tastes. But I am so glad grateful that there are people in the scifi business who are willing to take risks and take the genre in new directions on TV.
Interestingly enough, with BSG there seems to be a noticeable political bias as to who loves or hates the show. Right-wing message boards have been particularly dismissive of the show, even before the overt Iraq war parallels of the previous season. I suspect that conservatives tend to prefer the old style of heroic scifi, where the issues are more black and white with no Shades of Grey (worst TNG ep ever?) to muddy the waters. It seems to fit their world-view better where there are moral absolutes with none of this relativism “nonsense”. I know they hit the roof when the new captain of the Pegasus turned out to be a nasty piece of work.
September 30th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
>>> I usually hate when psychic powers get shoehorned into sci-fi
Doesn’t bother me at all as long as it’s done well. That’s why I like the series Medium despite the fact I am an uber-skeptic. My major lust for Patricia Arquette has NOTHING to do with it. Honest.
It’s speculative fiction. Some of the great classics have psi powers as their central theme. You can’t let the real world put the kibbosh on any enjoyment of fantasy. That’s terminally pendantic. Relax.
Honestly, is psi speculation really any worse than warp drives or hand weapons that can level a building if they go into overload? Or humanoid aliens?
If it helps: pretend that quantum brain dynamics actually turned out to be true, and any sort of telepathy is just nonlocality at work, and the coherency of the brain waves establishing higher harmonic nodes beyond the physical bounds of the brain. There. I just hand waved it as well and any of the other impossibilities thst SF throws at us. Oh, and, um, tau-klaatu particles, or something.
September 30th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
>>> Interestingly enough, with BSG there seems
>>> to be a noticeable political bias as to who loves or
>>> hates the show.
That just doesn’t compute with me. It probably has to do with the fact that I avoid rigid ideology like rape. I have yet to see anything on BSG (which I love) that bother me in a political sense. I didn’t even think the “Iraq war parallels” were all that big a deal. I probably just don’t have a political sense. IOW, I don’t see things through a political filter.
Yes, I feel very alone sometimes. I can’t even discuss current events anymore. It usually goes like this.
SOMEONE: Global warming is going to kill us in 10 years.
ME: Well, there’s some interesting analysis by some high level atmospheric scientists recently that suggest otherwise. In fact, it might even-
SOMEONE: Oh, so you support the Halliburton War in Iraq?
ME: Uh, what?
SOMEONE: Pffft! Go worship at the altar to your god Bush!
ME: Uh, I voted Libertarian last election.
SOMEONE: Fascist!
And so on and so forth.
September 30th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
I feel your pain, Quiet Desperation. I was just thinking the same thing. I don’t really fit into any “category” on the right or left.
September 30th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
I like to party:
It certainly seems like rather simple biologically inspired models exhibit properties observed in biological systems. For example, a network modeled loosely on what is known about dopaminergic synapses in basal ganglia to prefrontal cortex exhibits symbol-like processing. It spontaneously forms abstract representations of data, and avoids the usual overtraining problems in general networks.
So I’m optimistic that such efforts like the Blu Brain project with its ambition to provide a foundation for whole brain simulations will eventually provide networks that functions like brains.
But not this much:
Gödel’s completeness and incompleteness theorems describes properties of formal systems, and have no predictive power on physical reality. In effect, they say that whatever axioms we need to describe nature with formal methods can be added at will, which means there is no constraints either way. (Ie, properties of formal systems doesn’t affect nature, and nature doesn’t affect Gödel’s result.)
If there are realizable computing devices that are more powerful than Turing, the algorithmic complexity classes will collapse and allow all problems to be easily solved in finite time, including the halting problem. As this seems highly unlikely considering the mathematical nature of this undecidable object, computer scientist Scott Aaronson suggests accepting the NP Hardness Assumption as a physical law. That would be consistent with the requirement of relativity that we don’t have closed timelike loops, ie “time machines”.
On quantum brain ideas, physicist Max Tegmark has convincingly showed that decoherence in the environment a brain consists of is many orders of magnitude faster than the relevant dynamical timescales for even the smallest neural components.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:06 pm
Oops. That was the “Blue Brain Project”.
Quiet Desperation, scifi props are plot devices to visualize alternative worlds, or in the video media to accelerate plots. I don’t mind those props, except when ST uses technobabble for other things such as providing unnecessary atmosphere. (SG handles that well.)
So I usually don’t mind mental powers. The problem is when they ride on, and probably amplify, ignorance and superstition. Actually, some portrayals of mental powers in US shows are so bad in that respect that it is probably hyperstition.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
@Quiet Desperation
Well, I don’t think I need to justify my personal preference… but I’ll do it anyway
I agree psi is okay sometimes. My problem is not in the explanation. I realize that it can be sci-fi justified (in fact I think I mentioned that). My problem is that it’s kind of done to death and, to me, isn’t a very interesting concept to begin with. I like Sci-Fi best when it introduces some new ideas.
In the case of Foundation, Psychohistory, an interesting and fun idea, gets all but discarded in favor of a bunch of boring psychic horse-hockey.
In TNG it works better because Star Trek is more of a Sci-Fi boullabase, with a little of everything thrown in. In stories that are more “high concept”, Ringworld and the Uplift books come to mind, Psi tends to feel tacked on, IMHO.
I’m by no means opposed to books where mental powers are treated well. I’m a HUGE Dune fan, but Paul’s/Leto’s powers are way more compelling than just generic mindreading.
As for other “magic wand” type sci-fi conventions, Warp drives have always been more of a means to the end of getting the people to space and/or aliens. Anyways, I’ll take some space-ship action over new-agey mindreading any day!
Medium’s a fine show. But it comes on at the same time as Lost, I think, and NOTHING gets in the way of Lost in the BlockStacker household.
September 30th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
20 yrs?? wow. I had the chance to meet “Riker” and “Wesley” due to my job at the time. I worked at an amusement park and they were doing a Q&A for the public. Got the oppertuinty to take them out on the rides and chat with them a bit. Also had the chance to emmberess Mr. Wheaton in public also. BUt that was back when the show was only about in it’s 3rd or 4th season. But they both were really cool, down to earth guys.
September 30th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
I happen to think that BSG is very political in the sense that it juxtaposes real life and drama occasionally. When the Cylons occupied New Caprica, we were rooting for the insurgents. In Iraq, we are trying to kill them. On BSG, President Roslin, a staunch supporter of reproductive rights, outlawed abortion in the interest of the survival of humanity. Baltar legitimately won the presidential election, but we were still hoping that Roslin’s effort to steal it would succeed. When the workers on the tylium refinery ship (yes, I know I watch this show too much) refused to produce more fuel until their working conditions improved, while risking the entire fleet, who do you side with? And let’s not forget the animus among the humans toward the Cylons. It very strongly reminds me of the muslim-bashing that went on after 9/11. Part of what makes BSG so frakking good is how it mirrors the issues at the forefront today, just like the original Star Trek did in the 60s. So say we all.
October 1st, 2007 at 9:21 am
@KaiYeves:
Giant squid? Isn’t that PZ’s territory?
—
Does anyone else here dig Hidden Frontier?
October 1st, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Evolving Squid said:
> The show also championed rationalism, and gave no quarter to religion or woo. Like the Original, it pushed the envelope in terms of content and imagination.
> Actually, TOS had a number of pro-religous references and even Kirk, in a discussion with Apollo about gods, says that “we find the one quite sufficient†or words to that effect.
I think you misread that. “Like the Original” modifies the sentence following, not the sentence preceding.
Thomas said:
> What made TNG a real player was when the killed off Tasha Yar, not because I didn’t like the character but because the writers and producers proved early on in the series that they were willing to kill off major characters, something that wasn’t done often in those days.
What I liked wasn’t so much that they killed her off, but the way they did it. It wasn’t some drawn out, emotional sacrifice story. She just died doing her duty. Oil-beast throws her around, she’s dead. No last-minute rejuvenations, no transporter buffer miracles, just kaput.
October 1st, 2007 at 12:07 pm
>>> Well, I don’t think I need to justify my personal preference
Oh, c’mon. I didn’t mean any attack. I did say relax.
It was metaopinion.
>>> In the case of Foundation, Psychohistory,
>>> an interesting and fun idea, gets all but
>>> discarded in favor of a bunch of boring
>>> psychic horse-hockey.
I’m a bit of a SF fan heretic. I don’t really like Asimov, so I found sufficient other faults with the series.
But I thought The Mule worked in his intended context. It was a random factor that Seldon’s science could never have predicted. I suspect Asimov made is something paranormal intentionally for that reason.
If you mean the stuff after the original trilogy, yeah, it’s pretty weak, but nothing specific to psi-ness. It’s just poor writing.
>>> I’m a HUGE Dune fan, but Paul’s/Leto’s powers
>>> are way more compelling than just generic mindreading.
Well, here I’m a heretic again. The first book was great. The five subsequent volumes descend into an eventually unreadable morass of author self-indulgence. I simply cannot get past Children Of Dune.
>>> Medium’s a fine show. But it comes on at the same time as Lost,
I’m a fan of both. This is why God gave us dual tuner Tivos.
October 1st, 2007 at 2:34 pm
Re: Asimov – his later writing was afflicted heavily by “bloat”, a condition that is a considerable danger for any successful writer, but seems to affect scifi and fantasy writers more than most.
Re: BSG’s politics. I wasn’t suggesting that many conservatives dislike the show because of the politics (although, no doubt, many do). It just seems to me that right-wingers are more prone to prefer shows where characters will always end up “doing the right thing” and where good triumphs over evil. That’s not to say all conservatives think that way, at all, but that seems to be at the bottom of many of the complaints about the show.
October 1st, 2007 at 3:00 pm
When TNG came on in 87 I was 15 and DESPERATE for any sci-fi TV programming. I’d seen reruns of TOS for years and the thought of Star Trek redone with (then) good FX made me drool. I loved it from the first episode and watched pretty much every episode for the entire run of the series. In hindsight pretty much the first two or three seasons were pretty bad. It seemed to take a few years for the show to hit its stride and then the last few seasons were very good (I seem to remember the show being up for the best dramatic series Emmy its final season). DS9 I never got into because it paled in comparison to Babylon 5. Voyager never did it for me. I liked Enterprise but it didn’t last all that long.
Thankfully TV sci-fi has grown by leaps and bounds since then thanks (mainly) to cable networks. I’m a big fan of BSG (by the way Tacitus I have observed the same rejection of the show by conservatives~mainly my own brother~that you have and find it equally interesting) and will be sad to see it go. I only hope they can wrap the series in a satisfying way. Huge, series long story arcs are hard to pull off. Only Babylon 5 in may experience has managed it, though I may be forgetting some series. Comments are welcome on that point.
October 1st, 2007 at 4:15 pm
@flak
I agree B5 managed the story arcs very well, but I would put the first season of Heroes as well as Lost up there as well, ever though they’re probably not considered hard scifi. IIRC Farscape had plenty of long-running plotlines, but I’m not sure they would be considered arcs (I can’t remember enough to be sure).
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel (not really scifi, but genre shows) had season-long arcs of varying success.
British TV shows in general have always had more story arcs than American shows, but there just haven’t been that many scifi shows. The old Doctor Who tried once or twice (the Key to Time, etc) but mostly stayed away.
October 1st, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I always thought of ST:TNG as the last great gasp of the 70s; something like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, except set in outer space. There is a reason the Romulans had 1980s style shoulder pads. Does anyone else here remember “Dress for Success”? When Riker discovered a transporter echo of himself trapped on some isolated outpost for a decade, his old hippy self denounced his careerist incarnation, “Whatever you beamed up all those years ago, it wasn’t me.” Had we all changed so much?
The original ST was about the Cold War, with its Klingons and Federation, but ST:TNG was about the work place, because that’s where all the baby boomers were.
DS9, with its multi-season story arcs, went back to the Cold War, except now it was over. The Cardassians had lost their empire and the challenge was integrating Eastern and Western Europe. You got a bit of this in B5 with the Centauri modeled on czarist Russia, though I think that story was really based on LotR.
I never got into Voyager. It just never got intrigue-y enough. I always like plotty scheme-y story lines. Enterprise had the feel of a rehash. I know I should watch and enjoy BSG, but it is just too grim for me. I don’t have the stomach for the gory details. I can get them from the online news.
I haven’t been watching much TV lately. I recently turned on the set and had to call tech support because the satellite modem software was 50 revisions out of date and couldn’t use the new software update format.
October 2nd, 2007 at 2:21 am
I recall seeing ‘Star Trek :The Next Generation’ (ST:TNG) premiering as the first new TV SF show in a ve-ery long while. Here in Oz it started at 7.30 pm and was the first Trek franchise I actually got to see.
Twenty years ago … Aya-Yiii-Yaa! Scary how quick time goes.
It may not have been as original as the (now very, very dated) ‘ST :The Original Series’ and Babylon 5 far surpassed it later to become my all-time fave SF TV series but I enjoyed most of the episodes & I have to say I drooled over Deanna Troi. Yes, okay she was telepathic (& TP ain’t quite the same as pyschic btw.) but I gotta say my only problem with her was the lack of seeing her in nude scenes!
(Yeah, okay I’m male & was at the time teenaged, so … a-n-y-w-a-y.)
Far as I’m concerned, ST:TNG was the best of the Trek franchise.
ST:TOS was utterly revolutionary in its time -but now seems so very dated as noted earlier.
ST : DS9 was boldy staying put, wrapped up too much in Bajoran baloney & very much overhsadowed by the similar but far deeper & better Babylon 5. Plus it liek the otherspin-offs endedup farmore soap opera than SF .. & too much baseball bleeech! It just ain’t cricket!
ST: Voyager had some good episodes esp. in later seasons versus the Borg and had its moments but the whole franchise was already getting quite stale. Neelix was Trek’s eqiv. of Jar-Jar – just too annoying to live!
and then last & by a long margin least, came ‘ST: Enterprise’ – a prequel that contradicted the series, was utterly stale, woefully backward (now we’re back to a nearly all-Yankee crew when ST:TOS broke the ground in showing international co-operation optimism and inter-racial kissing & ST :Voyager allowed a women to command for the first (Trek) time)
… and well, that ‘entry-prize’ tosh really put the nail in the Trek coffin. I stopped watching after the Ferengi episode … Just wishing they’d put the old franchise out of its misery. It really went one spin-off too many … & I hope it is allowed to rest in peace now.
All ‘Trek’ has struck me as being a bit one-dimensional & simplistic in taking an unrealistically clear good versus evil line and suffered at times from saccharine overload.
It does seem an American national trait to shift to black versus White hat thinking with a sickening dollop of self-congratulatory, “we are always right and lets not look too hard at the other culture’s views” approach.
Trek has suffered from that a lot but has often challenged it some too, esp. with ST:TOS & ST :TNG (Uhura kissing Kirk was appparently the first interracial kiss ever screened – even if both were under an ancient Greek God’s telepathic control at the time.)
ST :TNG has since been surpassed by B5, BSG, & the excellent ‘Firefly’ SF-Western (’Who’ was always better) & has degenerated away ever since (pun unintentional) but yeah, I’ll always fondly rember the ‘Star Trek : Next Generation’ series – & esp. watching Deanna Troi.
——————————————————–
NB. Of course, the above is all In My Humble Opinion Naturally & all art is subjective & a matter for personal preference…
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Quiet_Desperation said:
> Well, here I’m a heretic again. The first book was great. The five subsequent volumes descend into an eventually unreadable morass of author self-indulgence. I simply cannot get past Children Of Dune.
I slogged all the way through the Herbert books. Haven’t read any of the newer books. I thought Chapterhouse Dune wasn’t too bad. At least in comparison to some of the others.
I don’t care for “Medium” and won’t watch it. Maybe 20 years ago, but I don’t like the current wave of psychic medium nonsense (Ghost Whisperer, Medium, The Dead Zone, et nauseum). Given that the creative parties involved in these shows include “real” psychics (Allison Dubois, James Van Praagh), I think the intent is to promote psychics as reality, even if “loosely based” fiction. I can’t enjoy them as fiction. YMMV. Whereas I really liked Buffy and Angel. I had to be encouraged to watch Buffy as I originally didn’t until about halfway through the first season someone told me it was actually pretty good, so I gave it a try. It’s not the mysticism per se, it’s the attitude and approach. Firefly was the same way. I was cautious when someone described it as having a “psychic”, but River was more than that, and wasn’t a typical psychic at that.
A book series I enjoyed even with the mystical bent was the Mageworld books by Debra Doyle and James D. MacDonald (The Price of the Stars, Starpilot’s Grave, By Honor Betray’d, The Gathering Flame). One of the main characters is something like a Jedi in training, and the mystical elements permeate the story. But I still liked it.
tacitus said:
> It just seems to me that right-wingers are more prone to prefer shows where characters will always end up “doing the right thing†and where good triumphs over evil.
Oddly enough, I tend to prefer that and I’m more of a liberal. So there.
flak said:
> Huge, series long story arcs are hard to pull off. Only Babylon 5 in may experience has managed it,…
Babylon 5 in theory and in actuality are slightly different things. I think how JMS envisioned the story and what really played out were slightly different things. I think he did a stellar job recovering from outside influences he couldn’t control (actors leaving, impending cancelation and last minute reprieve, contract renegotation, etc), but it disrupted the pure flow that I can see was perhaps his original intent. I also personally didn’t like a couple of the choices made by characters, even though I could see the creative intent from JMS.
StevoR said:
> Deanna Troi. Yes, okay she was telepathic (& TP ain’t quite the same as pyschic btw.)
Actually, she was telempathic, which is different still. Telepathic is mental communication, telempathic is sensing of others feelings and emotions, not thoughts and ideas. Star Trek always had the premise that some races naturally have the ability through their brain structure, so it was slightly different than granting humans inexplicable mental powers without rational explanation.
> and then last & by a long margin least, came ‘ST: Enterprise’ – a prequel that contradicted the series, was utterly stale, woefully backward
I am continually amazed by Star Trek’s ability to mangle its own storyline. The “temporal cold war” was a gimmick that allowed the show the creativity to add the drama that things might not work out as we knew they did. It was a “get out of jail free” card for the writers. But I think it sucked. I would much more have preferred a show that told us how they got where we saw them, but I wasn’t happy with just about anything they did as the prequel. The interactions with Klingon’s bothered me, the portrayal of Vulcan’s always came off as annoyed and pissed rather than rational and logical, and then there were events like meeting the Romulans. The show did get better writing in the last couple of seasons, but it was too late to save itself.
> All ‘Trek’ has struck me as being a bit one-dimensional & simplistic in taking an unrealistically clear good versus evil line and suffered at times from saccharine overload.
There’s another demonstration of the problem. I’ve heard that complaint before about Trek, yet when Trek tried to get grittier and drag in the interpersonal conflicts, it didn’t work. DS9 was darker than other Trek and tried getting more conflict, but it is one of the least liked franchises.
Trek was Roddenberry’s utopia. Earth had solved most of its own internal problems, and was working with other races in the peaceful Federation. Exploration was key, but there were still outsiders who didn’t have the best intents to be faced. Berman and Braga tried to dirty up the utopia, but really just annoyed people (me). It killed internal consistency at all turns.