I find the execution to be lackluster.

This is, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder, and I’m not inclined to argue too much about taste.

Except. Except.

the explanation of the Burn

I honestly think this is the most “Star Trek” thing the franchise has done in…decades. It feels like it was ripped straight out of TOS, and I absolutely adore it.

Agreed, though it seems unlikely that we’re going to get any more of it, sadly.

I have a lot of half-baked thoughts about how TNG was more of a product of its time than we realize.

Growing up in the late 80s - early 90s, a lot of us were taught that social injustice were issues of the past, and TNG reflected that perspective.

That…well, even at the time, we were being sold a false bill of goods, and it certainly isn’t the world we live in today.

Sure, I don’t think anything is absolute. But I think there’s a general impression that as the older fans literally die off, there aren’t enough younger ones to replace them, let alone expand the popularity of the franchise.

I’m struggling to find it now, but I read a Jonathan Frakes interview last year (I think) where he expressed a similar sentiment.

Basically, he said that the fans that he sees at conventions are getting noticably older, and there aren’t as many younger people joining the fold.

I think the current approach is the correct one, even if it produces a few misses here and there.

A variety of tonally distinct projects, aimed at different demographics, telling stories.

I’d consider Discovery to be optimistic as well - striving to make the world(s) a better place in the face of conflict, uncertainty, and disaster is still optimism. In fact, it’s arguably the type of optimism we need now more than ever before.

The first season of Picard flirted with similar themes, but I don’t think that series ultimately went anywhere with them.

It seems to be improving now - it was over 10 days behind at one point.

Hmm. This unfortunately only just made it through to the instance, thanks to the large lag we’ve been experiencing from lemmy.world.

I guess I agree with the premise of the article to the extent that the ensemble cast was pretty charming, and I honestly wouldn’t mind seeing any of them again in the future.

The most “successful” part of the movie to me was Georgiou’s arc - she’s really the only character to get a complete arc in the movie, and it was admittedly pretty thin.

I definitely wouldn’t assume that any of Fuller’s ideas were in the show being the first season.

Like Brian, I would love to see an in-depth book about the first two seaons of Disco in particular.

Related to this article, VFX supervisor for “Picard,” “Strange New Worlds,” and season 4 of “Discovery” posted this rather interesting thread to Mastodon:

Reading the article going around about Bryan Fuller’s Discovery, and people’s “What If” scenarios reminds me of 2016 and my brush with it interviewing for the VFX department there:

I got a chance to interview as a potential Compositing Supervisor. It’s a trend which continues today that some productions have small in-house groups to concept things, sometimes do shot work, directly interface with a show to do certain things faster and cheaper than going to vendors, like previs.

I get to Los Angeles Studios downtown to talk to the Producer, and the first thing I notice in being in the offices; no real concept art to be found, no white board with scheduling info; I think I saw 3 pieces of artwork (only one of which was ever reflected in the show, but more about that later). No one really in the office yet, but it was also a late evening and they weren’t in production yet.

Kinda a red flag, but maybe the stuff was somewhere else I just couldn’t see.

I go through a pretty standard interview process, and when asked what questions I might have, I start with some pretty standard ones: How many hours a week? 60. How big a team? 20ish. What types of work are you planning on doing, concept, prep shots, actual shot production? All the VFX work of the show.

OK big red flag.

That is not enough to do this kind of show in the 2010s. Maybe a TNG show with TNG amount of effects an episode, but not modern TV.

When do you start shooting? In months. Do you have scripts to breakdown and budget staff? No. Any scripts at all? No.

WHAT? These two things do not go together, especially on a new show. Pilots for shows will float around for sometimes years being prepped and budgeted.

Do you have art for phasers, transporters, warp, or even ships? They showed me like a temp transporter. And the 3 pieces of art on the walls. Maybe they had more and didn’t want to show me. I did sign an NDA

What kinds of shot pipeline do you have? We have Lightwave and Nuke. No I mean pipeline. Nope.

At that point, I knew this was going to be a disaster and wanted no part of it. I finished up pleasantly with them, and got the hell out of Dodge. There is bootstrap small high performance team work, which I’ve been a part of, and there’s throwing yourself into a meat grinder. It didn’t matter if they wanted me, I didn’t want them. Which was crushing for a lifelong Star Trek fan.

Months away from shooting and no scripts on a completely new show that was supposed to launch a streaming network is a recipe for disaster.

Later, I found out that after spending millions of dollars in prepro, Fuller had “departed” and all those people were sacked. Fuller, while being responsible for some really loved shows, also has a history of lots of aborted projects, or projects he left really early on. But I’m sure other people actually know that story better than I.

At that point Alex Kurtzman was brought in to actually make a show that could be produced. I went back to the VFX place I was working for, and would just be a viewer like everyone else. I wouldn’t get a chance to work on Trek until 2019 working on Star Trek: Picard for DNEG.

Anyway millions were wasted for nothing that was able to be shot. Just something to consider with “What Ifs” of Star Trek. I really hope someone writes a book about Star Trek production someday.

Looking at our metrics, there’s a chance things are starting to improve now. It’s too early to know for sure, though.

I’m not really interested in casting blame - the Fediverse is complicated, and can be affected by any number of things.

All I can say is that we haven’t been able to find an issue on our end, and at the same time, federation doesn’t seem completely broken - just about 10 days slow, and only in the one direction.

I just want to provide a brief update on this.

It’s still happening. As near as we can tell, there’s nothing we can do on our end. Federation from .world is just ~1.5 weeks behind, but it’s still happening.

Deadline is an industry news site, so the comments tend to be filled by people from the industry (or at least claiming to be).

It’s real hard to interpret all the corporate jargon, but…I think in the near term, nothing’s likely to change. The guy was already overseeing drama, including Star Trek, and is continuing in that role. The new bit seems to be “emphasis on franchise building and leveraging and identifying new and existing IP across broadcast, streaming and other emerging media,” which is…vague, but obviously could have implications for Trek. Maybe they’ll lean into alternative projects like the Khan podcast series, or that Picard audiobook they did a while back.

And maybe it could involve coordinating with the film division for the next theatrical movie?

To elaborate on this a bit, filtering by “All” will provide content from all federated Lemmy servers, not just ours.

If you want to only see content from startrek.website communities, you can filter by “Local.”

If you browse or search Lemmy for communities you like, you can also subscribe to them, and then filter your feed by “Subscribed.”

Well, Bashir (and I think his buddies from the Institute?) are proof that it’s possible. I’ve never delved into novels or other things about the Eugenics Wars, though.

Controls’ file says that Georgiou was brought to the prime universe in 2257, ”but after a few years we lost contact.” The events of season two of DIS take place almost immediately after season one, unless there were ”a few years” between the resolution of the Klingon war, and the USS Discovery setting out from Earth to pick up her new captain on Vulcan in “Will You Take My Hand?”.

I wonder if our boi Ash Tyler had something to do with that when he covered up what happened to Discovery (and, I guess, to Leland). Maybe he decided to remove Georgiou from that whole situation and falsify a record saying she disappeared some time later.

I also wonder if Ashy T. is still involved with S31 at this point - the man’s a Klingon, so he’s got the life span for it.