I can’t speak to US social media trends as I live in Europe. There is a certain overlap for sure, but I can’t say I follow the online water cooler talk about current shows outside of this server. My critique was based only on watching the show.

You could have a point about changing audiences, and certainly about broadcasters lagging behind such changes. If the powers that be chase their own tail rather than connecting with the actual viewership, surely their shows suffer.

It surprises me a bit that Legacy of monsters reached beyond its target audience, though. It just doesn’t feel very engaging to me. But I may be closer to the intended viewer rather than the people actually watching? Which again just emphasises the discrepancy between intent, expectation, and reality in terms of this show and its audience.

Honestly, branching the cold war narrative out is probably the more obvious way to streamline the show. It can’t be easy to juggle two plot lines, past and present, and have them reflect upon each other without becoming contrived and gimmicky.

But the late '50s part of the show feels more vital than the rest of the show, maybe for its heightened Indiana Jones feel. The bigger challenge IMO is to make the contemporary human characters seem relevant. Especially the twenty-something cast is given mostly filler to work with, against a backdrop of pretty dire kaiju fare.

Although I think that the best Godzilla movies have focused on human drama, I can genuinely understand if viewers of corresponding ages don’t identify with Cate, Kentaro, and Corah. They’re the biggest albatross around the show’s neck, even given the Rodan appearances.

Rest in power, Captain.

I opted for “The Tholian web”, and it opens on Chekov. Maybe he’s not super prominent in it otherwise, but it’s a peak TOS episode.

Edit: Watching it now, he has some good away team scenes, and that great freakout on the bridge when Kirk’s fate is uncertain. Definitely a Koenig showcase!

Get McAvoy, Tom Hardy, and Ed Speleer together for The Picard Dynasty. It’ll write itself 😂

Oh! Oh! It gets better!

[After failing at running comic shops as well,] Wilhite started attending Lamb of God Lutheran Church in Humble in 1989 and wrote a Christian memoir looking back over his involvement in comics and gaming. In it, he warns readers about the dangers of occult activities like playing Dungeons & Dragons or watching horror movies.

Apparently all his failures were not due to his own shortcomings, but signs from god to stay away from all of that occult scifi stuff or whatever.

There’s also a bit of info in this Houston Press article from 2014:

In 1982 there was supposed to be a con to end all cons here in Houston. And there was, but not in a good way. It was billed as the Ultimate Fantasy, a product paired with the respected name of Houstoncon, which had been providing a quality and successful con experience in the city since 1967.

Thereafter it would be known as the Con of Wrath, or the Ultimate Fiasco, and its failure is the stuff of geek song and legend.

[…]

Ultimate Fantasy was ambitious even by today’s standards. It was to be a huge stage show hosted in the Summit and featuring a rotating stage and a laser light display. The guests would be most of the stars of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, who would re-enact parts of the film. Nothing like it had ever been done before, and Wilhite was convinced he could pull it off.

So convinced, actually, that he got several investors to mortgage their houses. Billboards went up all over the city. Ads appeared in TV Guide and Starlog. Wilhite believed that Ultimate Fantasy and the associated Houstoncon at the Shamrock Hotel would draw 10,000 people, including Trekkies, from as far away as Japan and Europe.

Organizers needed 5,000 people just to break even. Two months before the event, barely 400 presale tickets had been sold.

[…]

When the stars of the convention appeared, they found out that their hotel rooms hadn’t been paid for. They were forced to pay out of their own pockets.

As the con progressed, it became apparent that the thousands of attendees needed would not appear. Vendors and venue realized that they were not going to be paid. Shamrock management contacted all the dealers in the hotel and told them that unless the remaining balance was collected by that evening, they would all be thrown out. They passed the hat to keep the doors open and hoped to sell enough to recoup their losses.

And Jerry Wilhite had disappeared. No one could find him. Or any of the money that was supposed to materialize. With him he took Houston’s reputation as a place for comics and science fiction pop-culture acceptance and celebration. Word went out from guests and dealers alike to avoid the city. The people in Houston didn’t know what they were doing.

[Edited to add source link]

True. And can she transform all of that to an arresting comics story? We don’t know.

Do comics do ghost writers?

I mean, there is the Marvel Method where Stan Lee would brainstorm with artists, let them go off and do the brunt of the work, and take a writing credit for filling in dialogue.

More to the point, I guess nobody has as much head canon about Dr Crusher as McFadden. She’s spent decades creating back story for character motivation where it may not have existed on the scripted page. As I understand it that’s pretty much par for the course.

I’m pretty sure IDW have “support writers” in staff to make those ideas conform to industrial narrative standards and formatting…

You talk a lot about trust, and I think that’s an important factor. Sure, you can argue that the shows’ utopianism changed entirely because the powers-that-be warped the messaging. That’s probably true too, certainly now with the Ellisons at the top. But that’s pretty recent.

I think there’s also an aspect of how much viewers would be able to suspend their disbelief if they were served '60s or even '90s era scripts today. Especially TNG was very diplomacy focused and based in mutual respect. My guess is there has been an erosion of trust in Western society in the meantime. Again, ultimately because Capitalism, I’m sure — but in a broader sense than I interpret from your comment?

I dunno, I don’t have a neatly wrapped theory about this. Sorry if I go completely off on a tangent based on your comment.

I think the first season of Discovery tried to earnestly grapple with real world politics through the whole Klingon war/Mirror Universe arcs. All of Picard seemed to be about conspiracies and shadow governments, which certainly also speaks to its time of production… while dulling the shine on the utopian vision for the future.

And it’s not just badmirals and Section 31 that have been at issue. We’ve seen plenty of disgruntled pirates (read: regular-Joe capitalists) turned terrorists in the eyes of the Federation. Our main casts have visited enough dystopian “slum” planets in the past ten years, where criminals organise and prosper, that the idealism of Star Trek is depicted as precarious.

Way out in the 32nd century, as Osyraa bites into a Federation-produced apple, admiral Vance comments that “it’s made from our shit, you know”. Way to sell post-scarcity, buddy. Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. I think the past decade of Trek has done a good job of postulating soft values, standing up for minorities and diversity. It’s been pretty shit (to stay in the vocabulary) at representing the very foundation of that sort of tolerance, though.

Trek should be a means to imagining the end of Capitalism, even if only as a background note for all kinds of weekly weird encounters and philosophical twists. But that is not just hard to depict in the 21st century — it’s actively being played as downright unsexy in the shows.

And they’re still on a trek through the stars? Seems to do what it says on the tin.

Okay, that was rude and nitpicky. But I’ll bite:

Read the article. Her voice was heard on every episode, but recorded separately. So, for example, the cast of TNG never met her until she showed up for her first guest spot as Lwaxana. Sirtis relates their (or her) initial reservations:

I didn’t meet Majel until she was a guest star on our show in the episode ‘Haven,’ and we didn’t bond immediately because she was the boss’s wife, and we were all a bit nervous because as a cast; we were a little rowdy

Note the distinction I put in italics.

That was a good read, it’s nice to have both her acting peers’ as well as Rod Roddenberry’s perspectives on her. I’m not sure I’ve read more than the equivalent of her Wikipedia entry before. Polite secondhand info, that is.

I’ve always enjoyed watching Majel whenever she’s on Trek. The first Number One, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxanna… and all the while, also the voice of the Enterprise. Geez, Gene may have been the mind behind the show, but she probably embodied it more than anybody outside of the main cast(s) 🤩

Oh please let’s not 🤣

— Hey, you know how other shows make sequels to really great, memorable episodes?

— …yeah?

— I know how we can subvert that:

Yes, but hear me out: what if you pull down your shirt at the speed of ligh?. I posit that for just a second your belly will show through it.

Yeah, and the above trailer is already turning into a premiere night cinema trip with him, so I’m a happy parent 🙂

That was the one that caught my eye, too. Also, probably the one best suited for my budget.

It’s the opposite situation here. My youngest will watch a kaiju movie with me at the tip of a hat, but rolls his eyes every time we put on a Trek episode 😄 He does so politely and in good humour, but there’s no doubt which is his favourite of the two options.

Finally, the Doctor Who crossover we deserve.