StillPaisleyCat

StarTrek.website is an instance dedicated to the Star Trek franchise.

It is a solid, well functioning medium-sized instance, and the largest one specific to a particular show, movie or franchise. It was created by mods of related subreddits.

It’s communities cover Star Trek television shows and movies as well as tie-in books, comics, games and merchandise. It also has a general discussion (off topic) community.

Unfortunately, there’s increasing evidence that the streamers are saving cash and reducing net streaming losses by not producing new content, while not having to worry that their competitors are out producing them.

For AMPTP, this is a deus ex machina that gets its members out of the trap of dreadnaught-like extraordinarily expensive competition.

Eventually, they won’t be able to buy existing content to fill their schedules and subscribers may find other things to do without new content, but for the moment there are incentives for them to drag out the strike.

Given Pelia took a leave (ran away) from her post at the Academy to have a bit of fun and replace her deceased student Hemmer, she may be more than happy to leave Scotty with the ship once she’s put him through her paces.

I would like to see at least one episode where she gets more of a guest star featured turn though.

I very much wanted SNW to be its own show for at least a few seasons.

It’s not the Pike’s Enterprise I fan-campaigned for based on The Cage or Discovery season two.

I’m enjoying it for what it is even so, and accepting that the powers that be at Paramount wanted ‘familiar faces’ in their new Star Trek offerings, which means legacy characters. It’s the best of the new live action Trek whatever. All to say that I appreciate your frustration, I’ve decided to make peace with it myself.

Season 3 was originally scheduled to start production May 2nd, just before the start of the strike. It’s only the impending strike date that caused them to stand down on that.

This tells us that the script for the season premiere has been locked for some time.

This exactly. Using something closer to the xenomorphs of Alien, introduces a truly frightening species that is sufficiently different that their kind of intelligence and motivations are believably difficult for Federation humanoids to understand.

I know there are other older fans struggling with this, but I think it’s saving the Gorn and Arena from absurdity.

No matter how compelling the story, TOS Arena’s ridiculous rubber suit Gorn has become one of the most recognized images from the franchise in popular culture.

Even as a child watching the episode in its first run it seemed more like silly monster movie stuff. It didn’t have the quality of truly scary monsters of that era such as the Creature of the Black Lagoon. It wasn’t in any way reaching Roddenberry’s target high value sci-fi standard of Forbidden Planet or even The Cage.

More, with so many later stories of Kirk and other captains welcoming the strange and different, coming to terms with very alien species, we need to be shown why Kirk was so hostile to the Gorn by the time of TOS.

While they could have gone for some other kind of reptilian, I like SNW’s choice to go with a the biology of parasitic R-breeder. Roddenberry’s original concept for the Ferengi was closer to the parasitic bat people of Andromeda than what TNG and DS9 gave us. The updated Gorn can be viewed as incorporating that idea and making them as terrifying.

Well, the silver lining is that you have some content with the original cast yet to see.

Bottle episodes don’t perhaps save as much as they used to.

With the UHD, the bottle episodes involve a great deal of interior ship scenes with extensive lighting issues. Anson Mount has talked about ‘bridge days’ as being some of the most gruelling shooting days on Discovery.

Yes can bottle episodes save on new/redressed sets and new props, but they also cause more wear and tear on the sets themselves. The makeup challenges are no less although SNW has just has Spock with prostheses within the main cast.

In the end, we have to accept that for new shows to be visually engaging for new fans, they need to be up to the same product standards as other new science fiction. That standard is very high and there are few short cuts.

TAS is imperfect, and for some the Filmation animation is hard to get past. It does however have some great episodes, and several were written by TOS writers. I can’t imagine skipping it.

Also not Sulu if Sam Kirk is hanging around. Sulu was some kind of xenobiologist (xenobotanist?) in the opening episodes of TOS. The move to alpha shift helmsman came later.

Martin Quinn (Montgomery Scott) was reportedly born in Paisley, Scotland.

Dropping in to note that I’m feeling very smuggly self-satisfied that I decided not to completely abandon my alias when we migrated from the other place.

I guess that I must now become an unrepentant SNW Scotty stan. I look forward to seeing the character grow.

In Prodigy’s case, I would say that nostalgia is the opposite of what they’re trying to do.

The show is intended to pull kids and families with no Star Trek experience into the franchise. It is a gateway into Trek’s massive library rather than using the legacy characters to pull viewers in.

The main cast is primarily original characters, but using Janeway who has been demonstrated to appeal to 8-11 year olds as a heroic captain who will protect her crew is a smart choice.

Now, it’s fairly clear that having Janeway and now Voyager is a way to get established fans to show Prodigy to their kids and grandkids, as well as to have them join in the viewer base. But that’s clearly a secondary goal or Paramount would have kept the show on Paramount+ where it outperformed every other original digital animated show other than Lowe Decks in 2022.

It seems the real problem is that Prodigy wasn’t reaching enough of the new viewers on Paramount and Nickelodeon to fulfil its mission to expand the audience base for the future. It will be interesting to see where it lands.