Star Trek vs. Star Wars (and a collection of memes)

I like to think of myself as being like Metron the Chronicler (a DC character). Though why he came across as badass the first tme I saw him, each subsequent time I saw him he was a bit of a jerk.



It's hard to pick any video or article. There have been a gazillion articles about leaked or rumored aspects of the plot of Episode 9. I'm not big in conspiracy theories but the idea that these "leaks" are deliberate as a form of market research seems to be getting traction.

One thing I've seen is speculation that these leaks are deliberate because Disney is using them for market research. I have never seen a rumor or leak where the main response is "Wow! That's a great idea." And it seems to be the case that JJ Abrams is making extensive and expensive reshoots around this time, about six months before the release.

I don't know whether or not extensive reshoots cause problems or they merely indicate problems. I'm a big DC media fan. DC's biggest flop was Suicide Squad which had extensive reshoots. In this case it was because Suicide Squad kept switching directors and producers and the producers, directors and writers disagreed on the theme and mood of the movie.

An educated guess for Star Wars Episode 9 is that these reshoots have soemthing to do with Rian Johnson and JJ Abrams love of improvisizing stories rather than planning but it could be due to their clandestine market research.

While Justice League was not the garbage fire that Suicide Squad was, it had extensive reshoots to address the blowback they got for Suicide Squad and Dawn of Justice. That also applied. Becuase Disney was well onto working on episode 9 before they finished receiving all the feedback for Episode 8, Solo, and maybe even Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland. Galaxy's Edge is not a pure flop but it is very much underperforming what expectations were. Disney arguably relies on their theme park for money more than films and TV. If a big budget film doesn't help bring tourists to their parks, it's not a very succesful film.


Going back to Star Trek, Star Trek Discovery (STD) is continuing to have problems. They still have legal and PR issues because they stole a lot of their plot points from an indy narrative game developer. Now they have the fallout because they pushed out a minority writer for something silly and stupid. Part of the reason I'm not in show business is I'm not much of a risk taker. If I were CBS I would throw in the towel. CBS All Access has no chance to survive the Steaming Wars but they don't want to give up. They keep doubling down on STD throwing more money at it while they keep angering their fan base and they keep hemoraging writers and actors who are actually good at their craft.

The Star Trek's people like, the original series, Next Generation, Voyager, DS9, even Enterprise (which is gaining new appreciation because it's not STD) are all available on Hulu and Netflix. Different Star Trek fans like different iterations of the series. No one's favorite Star Trek is Star Trek Discovery. So whatever someone's favorite Stgar Trek is, they don't need to use CBS to get it anymore. CBS sold almost all their Intellectual property (IP) that is worth anything. The Streaming Wars mostly depend on exclusive IP, and CBS has very little of it.

To heal, Star Trek needs to take a 3-5 sabbatical with no new shows or movies, so we can forget STD and the mediocre movies. Then we Star Trek fans can be ready to give the next iteration of Star Trek a fair shot. I would prefer to see a continuation of Deep Space Nine where the Klingons, Bejorans, Cardassians, Ferenghi, Federation, the Dominion, and the Breen are all undergoing extensive political reformations. I think it would be a good basis for a show to have all these groups get mired in infighting as different factions within these groups oppose the new order, either as conservative old guard who want to return to the old ways or starry eyed liberal dreamers who want to push farther. Then they start manipulating the other groups. Throw in some third party mercenaries and you can have a hundred stories.

That said, most Star Trek series have a single super bad guy faction. The Klingons, the Borg, the Dominon. I am guessing that nearly all iterations of Star Trek will have this motiff and eventually this will grow stale. If every single unexplored region of the galaxy is hiding metaphorical space Nazis.

That is one of the problems that caused the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels to falter. Scale creep. A bigger Deathstar. A stranger super weapon. A new alien invasion that is potentially stronger than the Empire ever was. A lot of my favorite Star Wars and Star Trek stories involved a small scale. Saving one planet or one village or even one person. You don't always have to be saving the galaxy. Small scale stories also help with characterization. Lack of characterization is a moderate problem with STD and a huge problem with Disney Star Wars.

That's what I want to see. More characterization, less epicness.

 

I'm not sure I see why the Enterprise would have so many near empty decks that people can walk on.

Back when I played West End Games Star Wars RPG, my friend was a running a campaign and he bought the (New Hope era) Death Star sourcebook. The Deathstar can only hold around 200,000 people. 90% of the Death Star's volume is the power generator. It takes a lot of power to generate the super laser. It also takes a lot of power just to move the Death Star, especially it's hyperdrive.

I would guess that Star Trek would operate on the same principle but it doesn't. The engine room features in a lot of shows and it's a fairly small set. I never cared for the supposed science of Star Trek much. Star Wars doesn't need to be scientific because it basically involves space wizards.

That being said, the Holdo maneuver is unforgiveably setting breaking.

Spoiler: The Fun RPG Antics of 14 year old boys with no respect for logic or canon

Anywho, we were playing about ten years post battle of Endor in a very free form take on the Expanded Universe and my friend thought "I have this book, I want to use it." So we were going to take on some nameless Imperial commander who reconstructed the first Death Star. My friend thought we would plant a bomb in the Death Star.

We captured the Death Star instead.

We fought our way to the control room. Then we selectively depressurized the quarters of the ships with the soldiers. This Death Star was built primarily by slave labor. We were able to somehow only depressurize the places where bad guys were at and save all the prisoners who then agreed to help us crew our new Death Star. A couple hundred bad guys got vaccum suits before the depressurization killed them. We fought them with our tank (which we could some how drive freely around the Death Star). Poof, now we had a ridiculous Death Star to go with our super Tank.

The game was nicknamed "The Tank Game." Before we got the Deathstar, we pretty much upgraded our tank after session. Every enemy we defeated we used all the stolen tech and credits we got and put into the tank. Until we got the Death Star. Then we didn't upgrade the tank as much. We mostly went recruiting to boost our Death Star which ran on a skeleton crew and to acquire more ships to protect it.

The ridiculousness of the tank not withstanding, I wouldn't design a warship that is capable of killing or incapacitating the entire ship from a single room. I guess Star Trek does that a lot. Lots of times they will "flood the ship with anestathine gas."

 

Yeah that was a bit silly.
But then: maybe it only works very rarely? Or maybe there were other factors involved with which you can handwave it. Star Wars does that all the time since it inherently doesn't make sense physics-wise. I don't understand why it is such a big deal in this case and not in others. Star Wars is full of nonsense that doesn't even make sense within the setting.

That's what I enjoy about Star Trek a lot more, especially the TNG era. They have a lot of explanations for how and why their technologies work the way they work.
I couldn't watch the video posted above yet, but I have the official technical manual (it is awesome) and it explains a lot of things that look weird on first glance.