Why Star Trek Fans Hate Star Trek Intro 1.

Five Series, 10 Films, about 1 Billion Books, and a Vocal Audience for Each One Star Trek has entered its fifth decade with a long legacy of film, television, print, and Web storiesand more than a little doubt as to its future. As with any long-running franchise, familiarity breeds contempt. Worse, the visionary producer who started the whole thing, Gene Roddenberry, gave fans a glimpse of a brighter future, not realizing that that glimpse would outlive him, and that the story would pass into the hands of a protg who only did well with it as long as he did not stray from the original vision. Sadly, the protg also hired a bunch of cohorts with the sci-fi writing ability of a sack of doorknobs. As if all that weren't enough to sour Star Trek fans, they have to contend with the fact that their beloved story really consists of six separate chapters (unless you divide up the films, in which case there are 15 and counting!), each of which has a different tone, style, and flaws, and each of which betrays itself as a product of its era. Each Star Trek differs from the others. The original series came from the cold war, and reflected not only the prejudices of that time, but a hope that we as a species would overcome those prejudices eventually. The first few films continued that sense, but with a more reserved sensibility; the same cold war still persisted in real life, adding a sense of sober realism to the backdrop. Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, came about just as the cold war began to draw to a close, and as unprecedented leaps forward in technology hit the headlines. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the first Star Trek story to enter production after the death of creator Gene Roddenberry, reflected in depth the points of view of multiple alien cultures at once both on-screen and off. Star Trek: Voyager attempted to return to basics, even as society in the real world got more complex; ultimately, it failed in the eyes of many fans because of obvious similarities to Lost In Space and Gilligan's Island, but without the camp value. Enterprise (later renamed Star Trek: Enterprise in a desperate effort to remind the audience what they were watching, and to remind the producers and writers what they were making) attempted to reboot the entire saga, but only succeeded in convincing most fans to reinstall the original. Think of it as the Windows Vista of Star Trek. The last few movies started strong, but eventually devolved in much the same way as the TV shows. 2. Shaky Premises, Weak Scripts, Rubbish Continuity

3. The Happy Little Sci-Fi Sandbox (the AOL of Sci-Fi) 4. Outside Competition (Inside competition is almost completely covered under item 1) 5. Bury Me Not at Wounded Pride 6. It's just a TV show, Dammit (Really!) Conclusion

Gene Roddenberry famously once said that he put together Star Trek as "Wagon Train to the Stars." Looked at objectivelyas he had to have done when he pitched it to CBS and NBCthe show started out as a simple anthology show set in a happier future, where a group of well-meaning explorers descended on a different planet each week in an effort to make their galaxy a better place. Peacenik Trek fans hate this because the explorers were part of a thing called Starfleet, and were always heavily armed and quite willing to execute double-fisted punches and drop kicks to green-skinned adversaries (and to sleep with the cute ones). Gung-ho pro-military Trek fans hate this because Starfleet plotted a course in a nebulous middle ground between militarism and pacifism, and too often this meant they handled diplomatic situations with fistfights and gunplay, reserving the wearing of cheery colors and the apparent unwillingness to take cover or, um, duck, for major threats. Because the films had somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours to tell a complete story, they took on a tone different from the TV shows: uniforms carried a more military look; more characters died; more ships blew up. Fans of the peaceful United Federation of Planets exploded too. Additionally, to date only 10 films have been produced, directed by seven [check fact]different directors. If one episode of the several hundred produced for television sucks, there are still dozens that don't. If a film in a given series doesn't work, it will stick out. (Ask George Lucas.) So far, it's happened at least twice to Star Trek. I) Self-competition

Enterprise, in fact, provides many of the reasons why fans defected in droves to Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and at one point, even American Idol. (The science fiction element of the latter is the mistaken belief that Simon Cowell is human.) In trying to replicate the two-fisted style of the original series, Enterprise merely managed a style best described as one-fisted. The writers of the new series seemed to feel an urgent need to tie their show in with the rest of the franchise, but tried to avoid mucking about with continuity. As such, the crew of the previously unheard-of, but nonetheless newly original, Enterprise (NX-01) became the first to meet the Borg and the Ferengi. To avoid flying in the face of the established story points, the writers came up with the clever combination of not having either race introduce themselves and exceptionally poor record-keeping by the NX-01 crew. I mean, come on. The ship is filled with cameras and monitoring equipment and DNA scanners and a gorram beagle, and nobody thinks to get a few baseline scans of these guys in case it becomes important later? I mean, yes, Starfleet is brand new at this point, but how would it survive until Kirk's time making dumb decisions like this? The real self-competition for many years, however, stood between the original series and The Next Generation. In 20 years, Starfleet had gone from a lead-from-in-front captain who got his shirt ripped on every mission, and who, when diplomacy failed, drop-kicked, phasered, or slept with anything that got in his way to one who stayed on the bridge and thought his way through every crisisbut proved quite willing to throw down once every possible peaceful solution was exhausted (including three-dimensional checkers). The new show still bore the bright primary colors and optimistic outlook of the original, but amplified: Not only did the Federation make peace with the irascible Klingons, but it now deployed ships with entire families aboard, and with bridges that looked like hotel atriums (if hotel atriums had weapons consoles). The first Enterprise (in reality, not the retconned NX-01) had a five-year missionlargely because a TV show in the 1960s usually needed to run five years to get packaged for syndication, a lucrative practice of selling shows to individual channels instead of just to one network. TNG started in firstrun syndication, an unusual practice at the timebut one that made the Enterprise-D's mission a "continuing one." In fact, it continued for seven yearsand while it did alienate thousands of original series watchers, it drew in millions of new fans. Nonetheless, the two shows differ greatly enough that it is possible, even easy, to like one and detest the other.

II) Fan Passion vs. Creators' Passion (to the producers, crew, and talent, it's also a job) III) IV) V) VI) Decision-Making Differences in Style and Tone Are they keeping up? V.A) Outside Competition The Happy Little Children's Sandbox of Sci-Fi

You will often hear self-described science fiction purists declaim Star Trek as "not real sci-fi." Well, let's look at the facts. Star Trek is fiction. It's got (a little tiny bit of) science in it, and that science (along with, admittedly, quite a lot of pseudoscience and technobabble) plays a central role. So it may not be full-on Isaac Asimov or Larry Niven science fiction, but it is science fiction, as opposed to, say, a cooking show (up next on Voyager Network: Cooking With Neelix! The topic how to kick that boring old leola root up a notch). VII) Bury Me Not at Wounded Pride

If you ever tell anyone you like Star Trek, good luck. There are several types of people: those who never liked it; those who "grew out of" it; and those who love itbut Those who never liked it will cite all sorts of reasons, from the cardboard sets and scenery-chewing of the original to the cardboard acting and overwrought special effects of the current series. After awhile, it becomes easy to agree with them. The shows and films, after all, do have their flaws, and producers, especially former Executive Producer Rick Berman, have a history of not altering their vision to reflect the wishes of their constituentsor physics, or chemistry, or reality.