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The Corporal
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Post by The Corporal » Sun Feb 01, 2009 6:06 pm

l33telboi wrote:
From what I've seen pretty much everyone agrees that the two last seasons of Enterprise were really good.
I've heard the same, I got out in Season One though. But apparently the increase in quality wasn't enough to save the show. To bad really, I thought it had potential when the show first aired.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Sun Feb 01, 2009 7:29 pm

If you have to watch any two episodes of ST:ENT, watch "In a Mirror, Darkly, Parts I and II".
-Mike

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Post by ILikeDeathNote » Mon Feb 02, 2009 10:48 am

Mith wrote: That's not true. TOS had plenty of episodes based on morals and lessons. Were they a bit dumbed down? Yes, but that's due to Paramount trying to mess with things.

Some of the better, if not the best, episodes are just as Mith described. But then again I don't recall much of a message behind "Balance of Terror."
If this movie is in that same vein, then fine, but it just being an action movie would really just be putting the whole franchise down the toilet.
Eh, that remains to be seen. I argued back in my thread about The Day The Earth Stood Still (too lazy to link to it, look for it yourself on the Review board) that a movie doesn't automatically suck because it takes a more "cerebral" franchise and "dumbs" it down into an action flick - though the near-universal hatred for the remake does not bode well for Star Trek.

But the dislike for TDTESS wasn't because it was an action flick, it was because it failed to be entertaining, and it failed the internal logic and internal consistency test - and TDTESS was the type of action flick that relied on plot progression to build up suspense, which in turn relies on internal logic and internal consistency. But I'm really going off-topic now, the point being is that it remains to be seen if Star Trek will even be the type of movie to have plot progression (in other words, like Independence Day, a 2-hour long fireball)
The Corporal wrote: SW has indeed started the same long slow side into garbage that plagued Trek.
True. Perhaps the only thing that can be debated is who started the slide more dramatically and who has weathered it the best.
You can only put out so much product before you start to run out of steam/ideas. Look at Dale Brown and Tom Clancy, their early books were quite good and now they've become filled with bizarre wank (Brown) and the authors politics (Clancy)
There's actually a bit of basis to that
I've heard the same, I got out in Season One though. But apparently the increase in quality wasn't enough to save the show. To bad really, I thought it had potential when the show first aired.
The time to save Enterprise was during Season 3 and Brannon and Braga knew it (hence the Xindi arc). Seasons 1 and 2 were notable only in how dull of a sound they made and Season 3 very nearly became its last (These Are The Voyages was originally meant to be tacked on to the end of Season 3). Season 4 definitely was the superior season, but by then the handwriting was already on the wall, really; the staff convinced Paramount that episodes could be done for somewhere around 3/4 of the price, if not less, and that it was worth it to bring in enough episodes to make syndication attractive. But that was it, they practically knew from the middle of Season 3 that Enterprise's final air date was set in stone, and they (B&B in this case, specifically) could've retained themselves as the main creative force and just really phoned in Season 4 with the most boring tripe they could think of. The fact that they made a true, concerted effort to raise the quality of Season 4, and to bring in Manny Coto as the main creative force no less, really speaks volumes and shows that they were at least trying - but then again, they also stiffed Coto with a lame duck series (though I find it hard to forgive him for the 1/2-Hour News Hour).

In the end, I guess Enterprise overall wasn't a sound exercise. Back when it was obvious that Voyager's run was coming to a conclusion, I kinda figured that would've been it for the Star Trek television franchise then and there - they messed around with the future (relative to TNG-era Trek) so much and it was clear that they were running out of creative steam such that I figured they painted themselves into a corner for future franchise expansion. Well, I guess it turns out I was half-right - they decided to ride prequel fever instead and go backwards in time. I welcomed the new series with my own share of trepidation, and well, it turns out my fears were right.

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Mon Feb 02, 2009 10:13 pm

Talk about a page missing the mark. There are worse offenders in terms of that.

Goodkind, for example, didn't change all that much from novel to novel as he moved along his Sword of Truth series. He started off verbose, he stayed verbose. Same thing with the Wheel of Time books - the style doesn't change significantly. People just got tired of it. Other listed offenders did perfectly good work after becoming famous enough to be "editor-proof."

Meanwhile, they missed some of the worst offenders. I'm thinking of Weber. The most recent Honor Harrington book needed a couple hundred pages of extraneous and repetitious material edited out of it. After that, it could have been split into two whole novels if he'd trimmed carefully and added the right hooks in the right places. I like his stories, but the man needs an editor.

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Post by The Corporal » Mon Feb 02, 2009 10:26 pm

Jedi Master Spock wrote:
Meanwhile, they missed some of the worst offenders. I'm thinking of Weber. The most recent Honor Harrington book needed a couple hundred pages of extraneous and repetitious material edited out of it. After that, it could have been split into two whole novels if he'd trimmed carefully and added the right hooks in the right places. I like his stories, but the man needs an editor.
Nah, someone just needs to nick whatever he uses a tech-guide. I like uber-wang shaped warships and missiles as much as the nexxt guy but its not really required to go into the details on an x-ray bomb laser more than once.

I'm surprised that they left out Battlefield Earth, you could easily have chopped off the last 200 pages or so and had a more appealing novel. And I like that one.

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Post by Jedi Master Spock » Tue Feb 03, 2009 12:30 am

The Corporal wrote:Nah, someone just needs to nick whatever he uses a tech-guide. I like uber-wang shaped warships and missiles as much as the nexxt guy but its not really required to go into the details on an x-ray bomb laser more than once.

I'm surprised that they left out Battlefield Earth, you could easily have chopped off the last 200 pages or so and had a more appealing novel. And I like that one.
See what I said about Goodkind. Weber's always been a tech-head who drools over his machinery a bit. Granted, it's gotten a bit worse, and he repeats himself more, but those weren't the only sections that got repetitious. In the most recent Weber novel I read, he also felt the need to describe sign language gestures in detail every time a treecat used them. Sign by sign.

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Post by The Corporal » Tue Feb 03, 2009 1:54 am

Jedi Master Spock wrote: See what I said about Goodkind. Weber's always been a tech-head who drools over his machinery a bit. Granted, it's gotten a bit worse, and he repeats himself more, but those weren't the only sections that got repetitious. In the most recent Weber novel I read, he also felt the need to describe sign language gestures in detail every time a treecat used them. Sign by sign.
Well I'm glad I got out at the second novel.

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