So, I was expecting to be somewhat underwhelmed, and I know a lot of the truly great episodes are in season 2, but….
is anyone else feeling like the show is unimpressive at best? I know the age range for this community skews older than myself, but so far the gender relations seem incredibly backwards, the episodes seem to be lacking in the moral messages Star Trek is famed for, and the show hasn’t found its footing at all. shrug
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That hasn’t been my experience so far.
Well, maybe I am just the dick. I want this to be more than it is.
Well, I’ve seen many episodes in the past, so it’s hard to feel underwhelmed when I knew what I was getting into. Maybe it is different for you if you haven’t seen much of it until now and are judging by the standard of more recently produced SF. That being said, check out the next episode before you write the show off.
I have seen the entire original series, but it has been a good chunk of my life since then.
It better than TNG’s first season. The show is still looking for its direction. I have seen few TV shows where the start of the first season really showcases what will follow. Very few are really any good in the first season at all.
It is OK so far, but if this was all you would get in the future then yes it would be a disappointment.
I’m not getting that feeling either. Part of it is probably having grown up with TOS, but part of it is probably simply that we’re only a few episodes into the first season. As Don mentioned, very few shows really hit their stride right out of the gate, and with Trek, in addition to the societal changes that make parts of the show seem very dated (gender relations being an obvious major aspect), I think we also get thrown off by the differences in how television was produced.
Now we’re more and more used to shows with ongoing storylines and plot arcs that have a lot of planning put into those stories and arcs well before productions starts (a trend that DS9 helped to popularize, incidentally); at the time TOS was produced, such ongoing stories were (almost?) solely the province of the daytime soaps. Additionally, and to a large part because of the then-standard “monster/crisis of the week” format, the producers (especially at the beginning, when they were trying to draw audiences in) saw no problems with airing completed episodes in whatever order they thought would work best, resulting in the oddities of watching the episodes out of production order — Spock’s charactarization bouncing around, characters appearing and disappearing, etc.
To me, while any individual episode of Trek can definitely have its issues (some more than others), the sum is far greater than the individual parts.
Counting today’s episode we’ve seen 17% of season one–the equivalent of the first 4 episodes of TNG (three, if you combine the halves of Encounter at Farpoint). But I don’t agree that what we’ve seen of TOS so far has been bad.
The thing about filmed science fiction is that it doesn’t show you an image of the future, it shows you an image of the current era dreaming of the future. You can get lost in certain donnybrooks or peccadilloes, and TOS certainly had its limitations imposed by the format of the show and the exigencies of TV production, but they dreamed strong dreams about really cool stuff, in a format that changed everything, and I see that amply on display even in these early episodes. I’m making myself late for a meeting, so I’ll shut up now.
So far, I don’t think it’s great, but it’s also not bad, and it’s more watchable so far than, say, “the Prisoner” or the really old “Doctor Who”.
I still want it to be much better than it is.
I am not disliking it, but I agree that I’m not liking it as much as I had hoped I would. This is my first time really watching the series although I read the novels (continuing stories?) as a child, and I think that is where my disappointment stems. In the books, the characters get so much more growth, and its disappointing to see them as almost caricatures in the TV show.
Also, I have always loved Dr. Who more than any other show. I’ve been re-watching Old Who with my daughter, and it’s just as great as I remember. 🙂
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