The sigh from me is wondering why Andy Weir felt it necessary to use a platform like âcriticaldrinkerâ to go out of his way to trash recent Star Trek.
âThey didnât accept my pitch so, you know, fuck âem,â doesnât really sell me on putting my dollars and eyeballs towards the success of his movie â no matter a great performance by Ryan Gosling or great production values.
Rather tells me why all Weirâs heros are lone-guy-saves-all-on-his-own tropes.
Quoting Weir in the interview:
Later, Marsden brought up the divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which Paramount+ recently confirmed will end after its already-shot second season.
âI think we can probably safely never talk about it again,â Marsden quipped.
âItâs gone baby!â Weir cheerfully agreed. âItâs all gone.â
Marsden said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.
âOkay, youâre a little more severe than I am,â Weir said. âIâll give you my opinion and Iâm just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think itâs pretty good. I didnât hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And hereâs another thing: I pitched a Star Trek show to Paramount and I was in Zoom with the showrunners with all the shows and spent a lot of time talking to [executive producer Alex Kurtzman]. I donât like a lot of the new Trek. He, as a person, is a really nice guy. But at the same time, those shows are shit. He is a nice guy. But they didnât accept my pitch so, you know, fuck âem.â
Thanks for writing that. Itâs quite long but I can see your point. Iâm relieved that you didnât just read two headlines and sent him to the digital gallows. Personally, I donât reach the same conclusion as you. If youâd say in reply my standards were perhaps lower I would not disagree with you. As I wrote before, this is not enough for me. Weir is not a saint. I heard hin trash talk his own follow-up to the Martian in an interview when Hail Mary came out. He knows heâs not Asimov or Dick. Or Shakespeare.
In terms of what science fiction is best at doing, we donât appear to be that far apart. Allegorical storytelling is great. Thatâs why I mentioned Picard S2 where there is none of that. They have characters sit in ICE detention or looking at the burning mountains in 2020 and say this is shit (which, of course, it is). Zero allegory, all in our face virtue signaling. Virtues that I find valid but in a sci-fi story told in a very literal (read: shit) way. Politics overrode good story telling. (Then again, it was the pandy, there are extenuating circumstances.)
You donât have to answer this; Iâm just curious. How is your enjoyment of 90s Trek knowing that Rick Berman was involved? Iâd argue heâs a far bigger sob than Weir.
Regarding Rick Berman or other showrunners of a large collaboration, my reaction is more complex, because there were so many others involved in the creation.
While a cinematic feature is a huge collaborative undertaking, Weir sells himself as a kind of lone-wolf type author and so invites reactions on that basis.
Thereâs also the fact that Bermanâs abusive behaviour was kept largely secret while the shows were running. So, my love of the specific shows and episodes was already set before I had the full context.
Iâd known from friends in the fandom, with close connections to production, that the early TNG years were generally miserable for all involved but hadnât heard as much by season four. Berman made the other showrunners be the media frontman, spokespersons for production during most of the 1990s. He wasnât an eminence gris in reality, but might have well have been for the amount of information available for viewers to know what was actually going on.
Watching now, knowing how the actors and crew were treated, hearing their sides to the story, definitely does impact my experience on rewatching, and I am not as likely to rewatch as frequently as I was.
As another comparison, to someone who made himself out as more of an auteur creator, I find that I really canât rewatch Josh Whedon productions at this point, especially Buffy.
Maybe it will be for the best that in the future weâll all create our own holodeck stories. It will rid us of having to separate artists (or co creator/producer) from the work. Reading Bermanâs name in the credits is a bit like Weinsteinâs in movies. Immediately lessens the enjoyment. Thanks for taking the time to answer.
Another factor in Picard S2 was that the characters - through whom the show is telling you what it thinks - are from a future where those problems donât exist. That made it feel to me like a lecture from a position of privilege. I really only realized this while watching Quantum Leap (the more recent show; Iâve not yet seen the original), where the characters live in the present day and tend to deal with problems that do still exist in their own time.