What follows is an angry rant about the Star Trek franchise. For those who don't care at all about Star Trek or simply don't want to read an angry rant, you might want to go ahead and turn back now.
So earlier tonight, my dad and I watched the pilot for that new Star Trek: Discovery series that CBS is putting out on its All Access site. They ran the pilot on their regular network as sort of a preview to get more people interested in signing up for that service of their's. My dad and I decided to give the pilot a try to see if the show was worth signing up for that All Access thing. And after watching this pilot episode of Discovery, I can honestly say that... IT TOTALLY SUCKED!!!
I don't what the hell that show was supposed to be, but it was not Star Trek! It did have elements of a Star Trek series and even some interesting characters, but Discovery seems to be nothing more than a shameless cash grab that's practically out of touch with its fan base. One of the biggest problems with the show was that it was just too damn dark! That's not what Star Trek is supposed to be! Star Trek is supposed to be a fun adventure with meaningful characters and explorations of interesting worlds and cultures; with stories that can at times make you really think. This new Discovery series was just another show about war and how much it sucks! There are at least maybe twenty or thirty other shows with that message already on T.V. or available through various streaming services!
It's almost like they're trying to do with that Battlestar Galactica remake from a few years back, and I guess that reboot tactic worked even though that series wasn't exactly one of my favorite shows. Even so, that's no reason to do the same sort of thing with a Star Trek series. Why is it necessary to make all these shows that are so damn dark? Sure, we live in some pretty dark times right now, but that doesn't mean that every T.V. series and movie has to be all doom and gloom! Here's a radical thought! Why not do a T.V. show that makes us forget about how much the world sucks for at least an hour?
Of course the super dark tone of Star Trek: Discovery is only half the problem. The other half of the issue is the way they totally rebooted the Klingons! They look totally different from how they looked in Next Generation and every series done after it! Go ahead. Take a second to open a new tab on your browser and do a Google image search on the Klingons. You should see right away what I'm talking about. And it's not just the appearance of this iconic alien race that's been rebooted, but aspects of their culture as well! It's like they have a more Egyptian motif; which normally I would appreciate, but this is not something that you mess with! Even the Klingon ships had been radically transformed!
So in closing, the Star Trek franchise as we knew it is dead! It's dead because it was murdered, and the murder took place some time after the most recent movie I think. What's even more disgraceful is that one of the relatives of Gene Roddenberry - the creator of the Star Trek franchise - is involved with this new travesty of a show. Either this relative doesn't have very much creative control of the series, or he's some hipster grandson who's totally out of touch with the franchise's already existing fanbase and decided to reinvent parts of the series in an attempt to make it "fresh". I think that pretty much concludes this little rant of mine. The only other thing I have left to say is this.
To you fellow Star Trek fans out there who don't subscribe to CBS All Access, you're not missing much.
