You know what else would've been awesome? If Star Wars died with Luc... oh wait.

Somewhere along the line the franchise's focus shifted from good storytelling that just happened to have a photon torpedo every now and then to CG battles that used plot as something to get to the next explosion.

If Lucas had died fifteen years ago many things would be better. Nothing would be worse.

There's nothing wrong with a universe/story continuing after someone's death so long as someone decent is writing it. Berman & Braga were the worst things to happen to Trek, and their model of letting anyone write an episode and not using a head writer to keep some kind of continuity to the whole mess didn't help.

For example, look at the final season of "Enterprise," minus the god-awful finale (a Berman & Braga production). The writing was so good, the worst thing about that last season became the acting.

Well obviously it would've been better if Star Trek had never been invented, or if Gene Roddenberry had never been born, or both. But barring that, if it had just disappeared into the soundless deep with his final sputtering, it would've been badass.

Star Trek was always about dumbass stories and retarded deus ex machinae. Always. How many times did they travel through time? Or go into another dimension? Or reverse the polarity on the warp core or shoot an inverse tachyon stream into the jeffries tubes to irradiate Wesley's sac or whatever

Jesus

The episode where they irradiate Wesley's sac was a brilliantly written episode by any standard.

the point behind this, regardless of whether or not you like star trek, is that basically ONE GUY did this whole sequence. As someone who works in the industry, that's pretty fucking awesome.

Ehh, the good trek shows always had a preachy message about tolerance or somesuch.

The original trek had the first televised interracial kiss, if I remember correctly. And lots of messages about how people in the future stop being stupid.


Having seen the new movie, yeah, I'm one of those nerds that thinks it's way watered down. It's a script dressed up with million in special effects. (though I liked the effects, especially the new ship-going-to-warp effect.)

I eagerly await the 3 extra hours of galactic negotiations and delicious technobable.

I disagree with it being a boring concept. Let me preface by saying I loathe "Voyager," and think "Deep Space Nine" started well, but became just a bad aping of "Babylon-5" (assuming it wasn't a direct B-5 ripoff as rumor has it).

"Star Trek" was originally about humanity's encounters with the unknown and how we'd react to it. And if you think TNG was preachier than the original series, that's probably because you didn't watch the originals in the era when they were being written (episodes about racism, the futility of war, etc.).

The problem is that Trek has gotten away from telling stories about people and gone into upping the technology ante without ever actually integrating it. Further, any time someone says that there's a Trek coming that "retains Roddenberry's vision," that usually means "the captain will sleep with everyone and we'll have cheesy costumes and one-liners." I hate to point to "Stargate," but at least when they found some new gizmo, chances are it would be integrated into the narrative at some point and not just ignored.

Good sci-fi has always been about human nature. Technology only played a role to bring up questions about said nature (hint: which two original Trek crewmembers embodied emotion and reason?).

Post-Roddenberry Trek somehow went to the horrible, completely missing the point extreme in BOTH directions: soulless videogame cutscenes on one end, soap opera bitching who is sleeping with who between crew members on the other.