Star Trek: First Contact - Video Review

[Srelex]

I don't know--has it ever been said if they had any plans for extra seasons? Dunno if it wouldn't like Berman et al sink their claws into it--who knows what would've happened then.

[Stofsk]

I am reasonably sure they decided that the seventh would be their last, because IIRC they wanted to make a new show - Voyager - and have it as the flagship show for UPN.

Although I will concede that the seventh season was pretty bad in comparison to the previous seasons (except for 1 and 2 naturally). One of the problems was Jeri Taylor taking over from Michael Piller, who had decided to put more effort into DS9.

[Gandalf]

I don't know--has it ever been said if they had any plans for extra seasons? Dunno if it wouldn't like Berman et al sink their claws into it--who knows what would've happened then.

In Nemecek's TNG Companion, there was talk of an eighth season, but it was shot down pretty quickly.

[Uraniun235]

I think another problem was that the writers/producers were not only confined within some pretty narrow rules about what kind of stories they would and would not do, but were also just increasingly picky about what they wanted to do. Ron Moore was pissy about the episode where Daimon Bok tries to fool Picard with a fake son (that Patrick Stewart wanted to do, because he wanted to revisit Bok) saying something about "well who cares about anything that ever happened in the first season some evil Ferengi captain from back then anyway", then turned around and wrote Journey's End which referenced the Traveler. Brannon Braga complained that Gambit - one of the best Season 7 episodes - was "too campy" or some such bullshit, then he turned around and wrote Genesis. I can't help but wonder if the producers were shooting workable ideas down because it didn't fit with their pet vision of TNG.

[Marcus Aurelius]

I don't know--there's rarely too much of a good thing. Better to have ended the way it did rather than get dragged on and become stale.

I actually agree with you, since there were a lot of signs of that happening during the last two seasons of TNG. Mostly on Season 7 of course, but in my opinion things started to go downhill already on Season 6, if only slightly at first. The Inner Light really was the highpoint of TNG.

On the other hand I agree with Stosfk that even Season 7 quality TNG would have been vastly superior to Voyager. The caveat is if course whether they could have maintained even that level of quality or not for another season or two. I don't see how it could have worked for more than that under any circumstances, since the actors were probably getting pretty fed up with doing TNG as well.

As for why all the TNG movies sucked in some way or another, I have a fairly simple explanation: they didn't hire a real director for any of them. Jonathan Frakes is a semi-competent director, but hardly a visionary, and on the big screen mere competence is seldom sufficient, especially of you have to work based on mediocre scripts and with a not too large budget. Stuart Braid is a very accomplished film editor, but his directing credits are a lot less impressive.

I sense some of you will object based on the fact that Nicholas Meyer and Nimoy were hardly very experienced directors either, but at last Meyer benefited a lot from being also a writer of the movies he directed, and Nimoy when given a good script was not bad either. I am actually a bit surprised that Meyer has not directed more movies (the ST VI is still his last big screen directing job), but I suppose he either does not really like directing or there is one of the other myriad of reasons why somebody would not get directing jobs in Hollywood at play. So yes, the TOS movies did have better writers as well, there's no denying that, but all of the TNG movies could have been better with only a better director at the helm.

[Stofsk]

Having looked the writing staff over on memory alpha, I'm a bit surprised. Some of the good episodes were written by people who wrote some of the worst. It seems obvious that they really needed to bring in fresh blood but weren't willing to, instead they seemed to keep the majority of the stories they developed in-house especially in season seven.

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On the other hand I agree with Stosfk that even Season 7 quality TNG would have been vastly superior to Voyager. The caveat is if course whether they could have maintained even that level of quality or not for another season or two. I don't see how it could have worked for more than that under any circumstances, since the actors were probably getting pretty fed up with doing TNG as well.

Nah I doubt it. I think if there is ever anyone who wants the show to go on it'll be the actors.

As for why all the TNG movies sucked in some way or another, I have a fairly simple explanation: they didn't hire a real director for any of them. Jonathan Frakes is a semi-competent director, but hardly a visionary, and on the big screen mere competence is seldom sufficient, especially of you have to work based on mediocre scripts and with a not too large budget. Stuart Braid is a very accomplished film editor, but his directing credits are a lot less impressive.

I sense some of you will object based on the fact that Nicholas Meyer and Nimoy were hardly very experienced directors either, but at last Meyer benefited a lot from being also a writer of the movies he directed, and Nimoy when given a good script was not bad either. I am actually a bit surprised that Meyer has not directed more movies (the ST VI is still his last big screen directing job), but I suppose he either does not really like directing or there is one of the other myriad of reasons why somebody would not get directing jobs in Hollywood at play. So yes, the TOS movies did have better writers as well, there's no denying that, but all of the TNG movies could have been better with only a better director at the helm.

Directors and writers. One of the most persistent complaints I've heard about the TNG films is that they feel like longer TV episodes, and that's precisely because they are. They were written by writers from the show and they were directed (at least in the case of First Contact and Insurrection) by Frakes. Ron Moore and Brannon Braga wrote Generations at the same time they were writing 'All Good Things...'

In a way, their idea for Nemesis was sort of right but ended up wrong because they chose the wrong guy. They seriously needed to get writers and directors who were outside the Trek establishment. A larger budget wouldn't hurt either (indeed, I think the lack of a large budge hurt more than we like to think - but also the way things were spent. Imagine Generations if we had seen a large space battle between the Enterprise-D and a larger more threatening ship, rather than having a pretty poor battle which then culminates with the saucer section crash landing on a planet).

[Uraniun235]

Michael Piller claimed that he tried desperately to get new blood in, hence the "we will accept waiver'd unsolicited submissions" policy, but again I wonder how many good ideas got shitcanned because someone on staff stuck their nose up and pooh-poohed the idea.

I also can't believe there were no sci-fi writers back then who had any interest in doing a TNG episode. That was one of the things that TOS trumpeted was the participation of published sci-fi authors - what happened to that with TNG and beyond? Did Gene's rabid lawyer poison the well early on? Was everyone unofficially boycotting in support of crazy ol' Harlan? There really needs to be an Inside Star Trek: TNG.

[Stofsk]

Michael Piller claimed that he tried desperately to get new blood in, hence the "we will accept waiver'd unsolicited submissions" policy, but again I wonder how many good ideas got shitcanned because someone on staff stuck their nose up and pooh-poohed the idea.

Not just that, but a lot of the episodes they did go with could have been so much more. Remember in that other thread where Piller noted how difficult Roddenberry's rules were, up to and including 'people in the 24th century don't grieve'?

Another example, remember that episode in season six where they had Riker meet his transporter duplicate? They were originally going to shake up the cast by having the original Riker die and his duplicate replace him, only his duplicate was only a Lieutenant. So they'd have Data become the new number one, and Riker would take Data's job at Ops. That got shit-canned quickly, so the episode feels like this absurd notion that there are two Rikers running about, and by the end of the episode you KNOW they're going to hit the reset button. Lieutenant Riker was even trying to rekindle his relationship with Deanna especially since the memory of her was what was sustaining him for the last eight years or so. Instead what happens is he makes the same decision the original Riker did, to put his career ahead of his feelings for her.

And then to top it off, Ron Moore writes him into an episode of DS9 where Tom gets taken prisoner by the Cardassians after turning into a traitor by joining the Maquis and commandeering the Defiant. And then he's never heard from again. (gee, you think Ron might not have liked the idea of a transporter duplicate of Riker?)

I also can't believe there were no sci-fi writers back then who had any interest in doing a TNG episode. That was one of the things that TOS trumpeted was the participation of published sci-fi authors - what happened to that with TNG and beyond? Did Gene's rabid lawyer poison the well early on? Was everyone unofficially boycotting in support of crazy ol' Harlan? There really needs to be an Inside Star Trek: TNG.

I bet it's a combination of factors. I'm not sure how Harlan's gripes (which honestly are deserved) had an effect, but remember that that kind of shit went on in TNG season 1 with Leonard Maizlish breaking and shitting on guild rules by illegally rewriting episodes. David Gerrold left the show because of that swine. You had dickheads like Maurice Hurley who was sexually harassing one of the regular female cast members. Seriously season three was when TNG really started getting good, and that's because a lot of those guys had been shoved out of the way.

[Big Orange]

You had dickheads like Maurice Hurley who was sexually harassing one of the regular female cast members.

Hmmmm:

According to Rick Berman, Hurley was the reason behind Gates McFadden's departure from The Next Generation in its second season, as he disliked her acting and "had a bone to pick with her." After he left the show in the third season, McFadden was invited back by Berman. However, this account was later discounted by McFadden herself, as well as by Tracy Tormé, who revealed that Hurley had been sexually harassing McFadden. With Paramount and the show's producers unwilling to help her, McFadden quit, returning only when Hurley was eventually fired for not getting along with the cast and crew.

Tracy Tormé – who also clashed with Hurley many times, and left Star Trek because of that – later created a character in his series Sliders named "Michael Hurley", who was characteristically a jerk and referred to by characters as "a putz on every (parallel) world." Torme has claimed the character is based on Maurice Hurley.

Memory Alpha

Anyway I don't think TNG carrying on would've made a real difference and "All Good Things" was the only final episode of a Trek show that was genuinely excellent and a far superior final send off for the TNG cast than Nemesis was. The tried and tested TNG character ensemble could not really compensate for poor or repetitive story telling brought on by studio meddling (which resulted in the last two TNG movies tanking so I doubt Sir Patrick Stewart & Co. could've salvaged episodes along the lines of "Persitance of Vision" or "Threshold").

Jonathan Frakes did very well with First Contact (which I slightly prefer to the recent Star Trek '09) but it's a shame his movie directing career never really took off, finally crashing down in flames with Thunderbirds (way to screw up a classic show completely).

[adam_grif]

Is SG-1 the longest running individual SciFi series (not counting spinoffs, ten year breaks etc)? Was still watchable all the way through, even if it did take a nose dive in S08. Ideally, shows wouldn't go for more than about 5 seasons, and they would have a more reasonable number of episodes per season, like 12, so they could cut down on filler and spend more time polishing individual scripts.

[neoolong]

North American, yeah. But not for very much longer. Smallville will overtake it this season.

[RedImperator]

North American, yeah. But not for very much longer. Smallville will overtake it this season.

That's still on the air? Holy shit.

[neoolong]

A decade, baby.

[Revy]

North American, yeah. But not for very much longer. Smallville will overtake it this season.

But the latest Smallville thread here on site is listed on the Fantasy board not the Science Fiction one. Does Smallville count as a SciFi show at all? I know it has aliens in it but still ...

I thought Doctor Who was the longest running SciFi series?

[adam_grif]

I thought Doctor Who was the longest running SciFi series?

Given the constant actor churning and breaks between incarnations of the show, it's more fair to consider Doctor Who as a franchise as you would "Star Trek" rather than a contiguous, single series.

[Marcus Aurelius]

But the latest Smallville thread here on site is listed on the Fantasy board not the Science Fiction one. Does Smallville count as a SciFi show at all? I know it has aliens in it but still ...

The general consensus is that super hero stuff is fantasy, if the the heroes have actual superpowers. So yeah, Smallville would not be scifi, but I think that it's still close enough to count for this discussion. In any case, I don't think there is any longer running North American fantasy show, either.

[DaveJB]

Given the constant actor churning and breaks between incarnations of the show, it's more fair to consider Doctor Who as a franchise as you would "Star Trek" rather than a contiguous, single series.

Don't be ridiculous. Using that logic, just about every long-running soap opera ever made would count as a franchise rather than a TV series. Even if you throw out the TV movie and the episodes from 2005 and onwards, you've still got a show that kept the same title and broadly the same writing and production style throughout a 26 year run.

[Cecelia5578]

Given the constant actor churning and breaks between incarnations of the show, it's more fair to consider Doctor Who as a franchise as you would "Star Trek" rather than a contiguous, single series.

Don't be ridiculous. Using that logic, just about every long-running soap opera ever made would count as a franchise rather than a TV series. Even if you throw out the TV movie and the episodes from 2005 and onwards, you've still got a show that kept the same title and broadly the same writing and production style throughout a 26 year run.

Except soap operas don't have 16 year gaps between seasons. *That* is the difference.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Don't be ridiculous. Using that logic, just about every long-running soap opera ever made would count as a franchise rather than a TV series. Even if you throw out the TV movie and the episodes from 2005 and onwards, you've still got a show that kept the same title and broadly the same writing and production style throughout a 26 year run.

Except soap operas don't have 16 year gaps between seasons. *That* is the difference.

Well, in case you didn't notice, he did write: "Even if you throw out the TV movie and the episodes from 2005 and onwards...", which means that he he only included the original 1963-1989 run of Doctor Who. That makes 26 years, just as he also wrote, by the way...

[neoolong]

Guys, there's a reason why I said North American.

[Big Orange]

Stargate SG-1 carried on past seven years and guess what? I stopped watching it regularily around that mark (some of the story repetition was getting painful by its seventh series) and on Channel 4 I don't think they ever got round to showing the last couple of seasons, also Atlantis seemed to have tanked on Channel Five and I haven't got Sky (it seemed overly familiar and just didn't drag me in), but I can't really comment on Universe (which seems to have hitched onto the NuBSG bandwagon). I miss RDA's charm.

TNG ended when it ended, with the two other pre-planned spin-offs impossible to stop by TNG's sixth season when post-87 Trek peaked in popularity and quality: Generations really suffered from being rushed out when Braga and Moore were concentrating on finishing off TNG proper, so while it was considerably more in keeping to the TNG series than the later movies, it didn't feel truly cinematic in a lot of places (with strained production values indicated by the uneven sprinkling of early DS9/VOY uniforms). First Contact had the same writers and production team who had learned from their mistakes, working with a cleaner slate, so it was generally more successful and better received, but it was a shame that the goodwill generated by FC was squandered by INS and NEM (JJ Abrams' surprisingly successful handling of the Trek franchise could stall yet and his movie had holes as well).

[Stark]

Are you saying there's some fixed maximum effective age to a science fiction show? Its probably more meaningful to say that there's a shelf life to any production team.

[adam_grif]

That's not really it, though. Writers don't stop being good writers after they've written a show for 7 years, but there's only so much life you can squeeze out of a premise and a regular cast of characters.

By the end of 5 seasons, with 40 minute run time and 20 episodes per season, a TV show has 4000 minutes of screen time. By comparison, assuming 100 minutes average running time, the Bond Franchise had 2100 minutes of screen time by the end of it's 21st film. Long running SciFi shows regularly resort to clipshows and stock standard SciFi scripts (Pretty sure invasion of the body snatchers has been remade by every SciFi show ever, generic time travel stories, space vampires, space zombies, space whales) to pad out the episode count. If you reduced to 10-15 episodes per season you could eliminate most of these, but it's kind of just putting off the inevitable. The scripts still go down hill, characters get derailed, continuity gets shat on and so on and so forth. The kind of "we're going to mine this fucking franchise until it's dry" business approach is why this happens, because it makes writers hesitant to plan the story too far in advance lest they get canceled before it's up. Being mostly-planned in advance is why Babylon 5 was so much better in its first four seasons than the ad-hoc 5th season it ended up with.

Unless you're planning on constantly changing things up with actor and character churning or a fluid status quo, it's a bit of a struggle to see shows maintain quality for so many episodes.

[Stofsk]

I don't buy that. If a show's quality suffers, it's because the writers keep dropping the ball. In the case of TNG's seventh season, one explanation is that someone incompetent was put in Michael Piller's place. That's why the season suffers from a meandering, unclear run - it's not about anything. In a way, season seven is a prelude to what would happen on Voyager.

Sure, over time people get tired, but that's still their problem. I don't buy this whole 'you can only squeeze out so much from the premise' idea. Take Voyager for example. It's premise is rock-solid awesome. It should have been a great show. But it wasn't, because of incompetent writing and production from the top. Stark's right, a production team eventually gets tired and either needs to guard against it and be aware of it as a serious problem or needs to step away and let new blood into the mix (or some combination). The problem with Star Trek is that they had the same idiots in charge for a decade and it damn near drove the entire franchise to the ground.

[adam_grif]

Take Voyager for example. It's premise is rock-solid awesome. It should have been a great show. But it wasn't, because of incompetent writing and production from the top.

The fact that shit writers write shit scripts is totally unrelated to the fact that good writers start churning out mediocre scripts as time wears on because they've already done so much with the characters and it's hard to keep writing fresh stories and situations. Monster of the week shows suffer from this more than shows with lots of arcs, but they're hardly immune.

You propose replacing the writers with other competent writers as a solution, but that's something of a double edged sword, because new writers rarely know the characters as well and you get inconsistent characterizations or in bad cases total character derailments. Not just characters of course, the universe as a whole will inevitably shift from the vision that the original writers had, which can be good or bad. Nothing here is an obvious silver bullet solution that will guarantee quality across the run for arbitrary lengths of time.