Some of us do like Star Trek for its exploration of the human condition.

A “Love Boat” episode is a plot that could have taken place on the Love Boat, an 80’s light entertainment fiction series about a cruise ship.
All that crap about Seven of Nine, Kess, Data or whoever endlessly is agonising this week about the meaning of life. What a load of bollocks.

Lets get this straight. When I switch on Star Trek or any science fiction I want to see space ships, cool tech, wormholes, and big frikking laser guns. I want to see aliens and things getting blown up – expecially if those things happen to be Neelix, Wesley Crusher, R-R-R-Reg Barkley, Q or whatever other insufferable arse the script writers have concocted to get over their heart-warming agenda this week.

If I want finely crafted tales of human politics, relationships, emotions and moral quandaries there are lots of things made by the BBC on PBS. Here’s the deal: if Shakespeare, Bronte, Hardy and Conrad promise not to write about SF then perhaps the Trek writers can promise not to write about anything else!

No, I have to dissagree with you. Star Trek started to suck when they came out with Nemisis and then the series Enterprise. I’m not saying Enterprise was a bad show, but is wasn’t Star Trek, at least not until season 4. If the whole series of Enterprise could ahve been like Season 4, then it would have been worth hammering a wedge of ‘stuff’ into the trek time lines.

When a Franchise has to look to it’s past and rewrite it, then it has no future because it has just negated it’s own premise. In other words, people watch Star Trek because it’s grown past TSO. I never liked TSO. I started watching Trek with TNG. The new Star Trek movie starts with history being changed so TNG, DS9 and VOY never happened.

We didn’t need them to rewrite TSO, we needed them to continue “to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Sadly, they instead just want to make what we had over again but planets blow up like in Star Wars… Star Trek now sucks, and is going to only suck more as time progresses. Abrams has done to Star Trek what Booth did to Lincoln.

I do admire Star Trek for showing “evolved” humanity. The new movie seems to feature “flawed” versions of Kirk and Spock, but I think this is necessary in order to appeal to a wider audience.

Good stories can be told with STAR TREK’s characters, as well as the flawed humans common in may other shows.
Star Trek characters are only flat if you value pettiness. Except everything was flat about Voyager both it’s characters and stories… I felt new BattleStar Glactica’s characters were flat, as in 1 dimensional, just unpleasantly and petty. (a opposed original BattleStar where the characters were so corny they were 1 dimensional flat characters)

STAR TREK ENTERPRISE is still my favorite show, even if it’s in repeats, only House MD and Babylon 5 even came near it for interesting stories and characters… but I also loved Star Trek the Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, none of those shows had flat characters….

The original Star Trek, well that one had cartoonish characters… and the new movie (Number XI) looks like like FAST AND FURIOUS IN SPACE, very lame indeed…

Regarding the whole dramatic conflict debate, I do admire Roddenberry’s attempt at creating drama without resorting to the easy character conflict that television writers need to resort to. Even some of the writers who disagreed with Roddenberry’s ways had to admit that Roddenberry’s restrictions forced the writers to be more creative in order to create drama.

Star Trek is dead, and deservedly so.

Well, that is because the writers suck. Tons of great stories have been made without degenerating into emotional shouting matches, or personal frustration. Politeness can be so much more powerful than being rude. Is it so incredibly hard for writers to write stories where people are friends instead of enemies? How much fucking constructed drama does a story need?

I hate it when cocksuckers like Ron Moore complain that “people in Star Trek are too nice too eachother, and the universe is too optimistic”. Idealism should be preserved. It is too easy to base your stories on jealousy or greed or other such petty things that we’ve seen countless times before. Unless these childish notions become philosophically explained (ie. closer to the way Oliver Stone tries to portray greed in Wall Street), it’s stock. It’s been done. TNG is different from pretty much any american show of it’s genre, and you should celebrate it, not complain like the hack you are and go off and make a pandering action/sex/adolescent-emotions driven show. Ronald D. Moore, you started out with such potential, but you’ve become an embarrasment.

Professionalism is much more realistic. If you compare a film like Gettysburg to a shitstain like Saving Private Ryan, you will see what I am talking about. It’s not a weakness of TNG that it doesn’t have a pathetic excuse like “frak” (if you want to swear, swear. How pandering can you get?), it’s one of it’s biggest strengths. Reed, you disappoint me with including that paragraph.

Oh how true. This is my one major complaint with Voyager, easily one of my favourite of the Trek franchises, that they didn’t make better use of that story line which so interestingly kicks off the series. It seems to have simply been forgotten or as you mention “Must be something that’s pumped through starship ventilation systems that keeps everyone happy.”