Category: StarTrek

i ain’t no damn trekkie

whbeebe

I’ve spent decades noticing one Star Trek property after another rolling across both the big screen and small, like plagues of locusts across verdant fields of wheat. I was introduced to Star Trek when I started watching The Original Series in its second season. I  couldn’t watch the first season because I was in school and it broadcast on a Thursday evening past my dad’s mandated evening curfew: no T.V. after 8pm on weeknights. When it switched to Friday nights the second season I watched every episode of season 2.

When the third season started I eagerly tuned into the first episode, Spock’s Brain. That episode turned out so bad it turned me off of The Original Series. I have never watched a single complete episode of season 3, not even in reruns. Why was Spock’s Brain so bad? Mid-episode, Bones beamed down to the surface of a planet with a brainless Spock in tow. Bones had attached a device (prop) to Spock’s head, and had a control box (another prop) in his hand to help control brainless Spock. When he pressed a button on the hand-held prop to “control” the brainless Spock, a mechanical clockwork-like clicking sound could be heard coming out of the T.V. I couldn’t believe it. Here was a technologically advanced culture portrayed as using a mechanical clicking sound to convey the brainless character Spock moving and walking. I suddenly realized I could have written everything up to this point better than what I was watching, at which point I turned off the show, and the T.V. itself.

At that moment in my young life a basic rule was born. If a science fiction movie or a television show looked like something I would write, then it wasn’t worth finishing. Because believe me when I say I couldn’t write a lick of decent science fiction you’d want to read if my very life depended on it. But I do have enough good taste to recognize good science fiction when I read or see it.

Television shows are easy to boot to the curb as they are part of your basic streaming/cable service. Movies, especially first run shows in theaters, are tougher to walk out on because of the expense of seeing them (but I have for a few). That’s why I don’t go to very many any more, and haven’t since at least 2017. The pandemic just reinforced my abandonment of theater movies.

I attended the first Star Trek movie and managed to sit through the entire production, but I’ve never since watched it again. The second movie, The Wrath Of Khan, is the only movie I truly enjoyed and the only movie I have watched more than once. I watched The Search for Spock, leaving less than satisfied. I left in the middle of The Voyage Home and never went back to watch another one of the original cast films.

As for The Next Generation I pretty much gave up on it after watching a few of the first season episodes, with one notable exception. Guest star John de Lancie added considerably to every episode he appeared in as the character ‘Q’. I tried to watch those episodes he appeared in. He is a treat to watch. It’s a shame he was never made a starship captain.

I essentially skipped Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I managed to watch a bit of Enterprise, stopping during the Xindi story arc and never going back. As for the modern show Discovery, I absolutely can’t stand it. I assume it’s due to the fact it most certainly isn’t aimed at my age demographic, but still. Discovery (or DISCO to its admiring fans, which says a lot there) started its existence racing off the proverbial cliff with a fungus-powerd starship warpdrive. Fake dilithium crystals were bad enough, but a fungus? Really?

Then there’s Picard. I came by that show through Apple TV+, and I came by Apple TV+ because I purchased my iPhone 11 back in late 2019 before I retired. Apple was handing out free twelve month subscriptions with the purchase of new expensive Apple gear. When I finally redeemed my free subscription in December 2019 it lasted pretty much through 2020. Along with Apple TV+ came a free 30-day subscription to Paramount’s streaming service, so I used that to watch the first season of Picard. By the time I was done I’d done something I hadn’t done since The Original Series; I’d watched most of an entire season of Star Trek. I wasn’t impressed and did not watch Picard season 2, nor will I watch season 3. It’s just not worth my time.

And what about the latest Paramount property, Strange New Worlds? I’m not going to bother. What little I’ve read on other news spots indicates it’s a retread of The Original Series’ first pilot, The Cage. New actors obviously, but Strange New Worlds has its real roots (and a number of its characters) from Discovery, and that’s enough to kill any interest.

If I dislike Star Trek so much, why even talk about it? Good question, and the answer is because I’m tired of seeing it constantly mentioned and written just about everywhere else on the web. Because I’d decided I’d finally had enough. Star Trek in the 1960s was something fun and a way for my friends and I to get excited by the future. Now Star Trek is just another way for Paramount to create a recurring revenue stream called Paramount+. Long gone are the days when I’d channel surf at 2am through the UHF stations until I found one playing an old TOS episode. Those easy days came to an end when it got pulled into Netflix along with everything else Netflix streamed. Now everything Star Trek has been gathered up into Paramount+, and you gotta pay them to watch. No thanks.

This is my first and last rant about Star Trek. It’s finally out of my system. Sorry to have bothered you.

other content i won’t be watching going forward, and why

whbeebe2 Comments

Since I’m on something of a rant about what I won’t watch, let me continue on with what else I won’t be watching going forward, and why. And then switch to what I am watching in its place, and again why.

Apple TV+

I got a year’s free subscription to Apple TV+ when I purchased my iPhone 11 Pro Max in September 2019. It was January 2020 before I even bothered to set up the application, let alone start to watch anything on it. The only show I remember watching was “For All Mankind,” and I stopped watching it because I’m no fan of alternate history, especially when it involves the space race of the 1960s between the US and the Soviet Union. The whole series is based on what if the Russians moon rocket booster, the N1, had actually worked? I’ve studied the N1 and it was a manufacturing disaster. The N1, on paper, was the most powerful heavy lift first stage every built. That first stage used 30 NK-15 engines, which were considered the most powerful rocket engines in that class of their day. The problem is that the N1 first stage was not static fire tested, the entire N1 program being under-funded and rushed to completion. As a consequence, all four N1 test launches self-destructed when launched. An awful lot of what went wrong in our time line would have had to have been done correctly in an alternate history. An awful log stretching back decades. You can’t just blithely wish it so. Rocketry is stupidly hard, such that the only rocket that even comes close to the N1 is today’s Falcon Heavy, with three Falcon 9 cores, each core with nine engines, for a total of 27 when the Heavy is under full thrust.

I got tired of all the glib passing over of the technical issues so that “For All Mankind’s” writers could write a convoluted soap opera. I skipped around a few episodes in the first season, and gave up.

After several months of light watching I stopped watching Apple TV+ completely. I only remembered I had it when I received an email from Apple that my free subscription was expiring in November 2020. That’s when I unsubscribed.

CBS All Access

That service was offered through Apple TV+ with a free 30 day all-you-could-watch trial, so I signed up. I managed to watch “Star Trek: Picard” as well as “Star Trek: Discovery.” Both shows were fan-service shows. If you’re a die-hard Trekkie then those shows are certainly for you. I’m not in that category. I’m the 8th grader who turned off the original Star Trek, season three, first episode, “Spock’s Brain,” because it was so bad. That episode has absolutely no redeeming qualities; by the time I’d gotten to the mid-point of the episode I’d had enough. I never watched another episode of season 3, and when NBC finally killed it I barely noticed.

Both of those new shows reminded me a bit of that crap. I quickly went through all the episodes, skipping parts that were of no interest to me. On “Picard,” the last episode where Data dies was particularly bilious. “Discovery” on the other hand was just off the scale when it came to overall acceptance of any of the stories or plot lines. “Discovery” is just bad fantasy wrapped in Star Trek technobabble and flashing lights. Once I finished with “Discovery” I killed my subscription.

Netflix

I was an old subscriber to Netflix. I opened a subscription with Netflix back when you ordered DVDs to be shipped to your home, back in the early 2000s. It was cheap, a lot cheaper than going to the movies, and it helped entertain the family, including the girls who were in high school at the time. I stuck with Netflix when they switched over to streaming; I first streamed Netflix with an app I installed on the family Nintendo Wii. When I upgraded the family DVD to Blueray, it came with Netflix streaming pre-installed. Same with my first digital TV, a Samsung 55 incher. Netflix was ubiquitous, and full of video content from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was cheap and plentiful.

Then it got not so cheap and not so plentiful. Other streaming services came along (Disney, for example) and starting pulling movies to show on their services. And then Netflix started to “rotate” movies out, so that if you didn’t watch it, and it was rotated out, too bad, so sad. And then Netflix started to make their own movies, none of which appealed to me. I know my taste in movies can get pretty trashy, but not Netflix trashy. So early 2020 I killed that subscription.

So what are we watching these days?

Amazon Prime with Brit Box

It’s Amazon, and it seems to come with everything. I added Brit Box so we could see all the British TV that never was complete on any other streaming service. So all the seasons and all the episodes are complete on Brit Box. I watched Amazon pretty much because of “The Expanse,” but if you read my last post, you pretty much know I’ve walked away from that. I use Amazon Prime for a lot of other services besides movies, so I’m not to concerned with whether I keep it or not; Video is just one of those added perks.

Disney+

I signed up to Disney+ because it’s cheap and because of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision,” as well as the complete catalog of Star Wars, MCU, and Pixar. There’s a lot there to keep me occupied. But not necessarily happy.

I’ve already passed judgement on “The Mandalorian” and found it lacking. Once again, a fan service episode. If there’s any redeeming feature to the show, it was season 1, episode 1, in which Werner Herzog stared as “The Client.” It slowly went down hill from there.

“WandaVision” is a bit more enigmatic. They’re trying to be clever, and they’re almost making it happen. These first few episodes remind me a bit of the first few seasons of “Agents of Shield.” The fact that new episodes are only released weekly every Friday is a bit of a letdown, but then, it takes time to film and produce anything, so I can wait for the finished product to be delivered.

Going back through the MCU catalog has allowed me to build a better understanding of how all the pieces fit together. The problem with movies is the long delay between releases, when you memory of the last movies grow a bit hazy. So when I see something that doesn’t quite make sense in one film, I can go back to a prior film and see how that led to an event in the later film(s). I’ve grown to have a better appreciation of what the MCU accomplished up to this point.

In conclusion

That’s about it. My TV watching is declining over time. I have a recent LG 55 inch TV that is programmed to stream just about everything. Funny thing is I spend as much time watching streamed content on my iPhone and iPads as I do on the LG. My wife is going down the same path. If we want to watch something together I’ll pull up my 12 inch iPad Pro and share it with her. It seems sufficient, and it harkens back to the early days of broadcast TV when my primary TV was a 13″ Sony that my wife and I shared right when we married. Talk about coming around in circles…

As for the other kind of visual entertainment, video games, I hardly play anything anymore. I have exactly one game I play on both iPhone and iPad. My oldest daughter and her husband gave me a Nintendo Switch Lite, on which I play “Animal Crossing” and share it with them and my youngest daughter. I’ve tried to get interested in other Switch games, especially when the local Walmart puts them on sale, but I play them a bit then put the cartridges in my Switch case and don’t think much about them after that.

I have no patience anymore with fantasy and make believe worlds. They take too much time, have too many logic and story holes, and demand too much money over time for too little in return.