personal account. no fun allowed

 

professional: @videodante

star wars fanblog: @ct-0451

 

last.fm listening


personal website
dante.cool/

over the past year or two i've found myself becoming more and more of a "star trek" guy instead of a "star wars" guy. I think it's interesting to see myself going down this route, and there are a lot of hypothetical reasons for it but ultimately i think it functionally comes down to the fact that I think the Star Wars franchise is in kind of a really weird place right now, and that's unusual for the franchise, whereas the Star Trek franchise is in a really weird place right now and that's pretty much standard for the franchise, as far as I can tell.

I'm not a Trek obsessive -- at the time of this writing I still haven't seen TNG outside of an occasional episode. I've seen almost all of DS9 (loved it), a fair chunk of TOS (mostly loved it), all of Lower Decks (incredible), and all of SNW (generally great). There's still a lot of Star Trek that I haven't seen! And that's kind of fun and exciting even if I know a bunch of it will suck.

Star Wars has this eternal curse on it due to the fact that the original works of the franchise (the original trilogy) are actually fucking incredible. Like, putting aside all the weight of the franchise that has been heaped on them afterward, all the posthumous Importance of those movies -- they're just really well made and fun films.

They're nuanced! and they're adventure-fun-stupid! and they are well-paced! And they're comedic, and dramatic, and they have a lot going on in general. Lucas was a weird, idiosyncratic creative who had a lot of disparate interests that were all dumped into Star Wars, and you can tell!

Of course, that means that everything else in the franchise is now living in its shadow. You can't really blame Lucas or the franchise writ large for that, they were just trying to make the best thing they could.

Star Trek does not have this baggage. TOS is good -- sometimes even like, sublime television -- but it is not at all without its clunkers. It's a long show, many of the episodes are just stupid. They're generally still fun, but they're stupid. At time of release, Star Trek TOS was a flop.

I put that post by hthr up top there because I think about it all the time, or some variant of the phrasing there. Star Trek is a perfect example of something that is almost great. It's not quite there, it is at some points, but rarely all the way through.

I think this is generally true for all the Star Treks that I've seen, too -- I think DS9 is sublime television, but also it has some truly stupid episodes. The heat that is contained in Star Trek is intrinsically related to some of it being kind of stupid. It's the required nutrients in the meal.

And there's a real reason for this, too -- Star Trek is allowed to experiment, to try weird things, and to fail. A lot. I'm mostly paraphrasing Sarah Zedig's excellent video essay on Doctor Who here (which talks about a very similar phenomenon w/r/t Who, give or take. apologies to sarah if i'm biffing that explanation), but what makes Star Trek work is its conviction to experiment and its freedom to experiment due to episode orders and length. That's a material grace that is afforded to (television-originated) Star Trek and not to (movie-originated) Star Wars.

Star Wars material in the post-OT world (so, numerically, the vast, vast majority of it), has rarely approached the level of nuance and stupid-fun-adventure as the OT, and even when it approaches it (The Clone Wars, Rebels, Force Awakens) it is often hamstrung by a lack of resources required to match the execution of the OT. It is a really tough bind to be in, genuinely, and I have as much deep annoyance for the current creative direction of the franchise as I have sympathy for folks still trying to make it work.

In my opinion, the only pieces of Star Wars media that have managed to be "as good as" the OT are Andor and TLJ, whereas everything else just... lives in its shadow. I love most of the cartoons, I liked Rogue One quite a bit, the current games are much better than people give them credit for, but they often rely on callbacks, responses to the OT rather than building on what made it great.

I don't want to get into a "what if Star Wars did [x] thing better" conversation here because... frankly, I am tired of having that discussion over and over and over, but what I do think is very interesting that I have noticed in my Trek endeavours is how much the dumb stuff sticks out to me.

Star Trek has such a history of being kind of dumb, and experimental, and from drawing influence from so many things that are not Star Trek that even when it stumbles it tends to at least be interesting. It's an approach that I wish Star Wars was more willing to partake in, since when it does do that (I'm lookin' at you, Andor) it has proven an ability to knock it out of the park.

Good art requires those risks! It requires taking those risks, with reasonable fallback. It requires embracing the fact that not all the risks are going to pan out, and building your work in such a way that it can be resilient to those risks if possible -- for Star Trek, that was mostly through having a bunch of episodes. And it worked. People don't remember the clunkers as much as they remember the highs. That's the power of television, baby.


This is a mirror of a post on my blog. Feel free to read it there too!


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @dante's post:

It's an approach that I wish Star Wars was more willing to partake in, since when it does do that (I'm lookin' at you, Andor) it has proven an ability to knock it out of the park.

I really wish that they just greenlight projects from Visions to be full series rather than one offs. Some of those shorts just make for far cooler concepts than a lot of what has come since, canon be damned. Honestly, as the more fantasy series Star Wars could benefit more from the idea of a loose cannon and "legends" than a hard setting like Trek. Plus I think canon in general has held Star Wars back more than anything.

i don't really agree, and I think Andor is my favorite example as to why. I think Andor's relation to canon is one of its biggest strengths -- it is allowed to explore things that other works are not doing, and to show that the world is bigger than the rest of what we've seen, without contradicting it.

personally i thought Visions were neat visually but I wasn't particularly captured by the "aims" of the project. I like story-worlds that are contained, not infinite

this is kinda what has been happening to me as well since I feel the same about Star Wars and Star Trek, although it sounds like I've seen more bad Trek than you. Doctor Who has a similar thing where it will have bad stretches that I still sorta enjoy and also the benefit of it almost being an anthology series where you'll hit a really bad episode but it won't matter because the next episode is by a writer you like and it will be in a different setting and time.

i haven't seen the acolyte (or most other recent star warses) so i can't comment on whether it's good or bad but i think it getting canned after just one season is an interesting contrast

i'm getting into ds9 (mostly because of cohost's enduring love for it) and i can already tell i'm going to love the characters and setting, but there's a run of episodes in the first season (centred around the crew getting stuck in a tabletop crystal maze game) which are a bit of a slog. with hindsight those episodes are at least skippable but only because the showrunners were afforded space to stumble around while they got their footing. wonder if ds9 would have been allowed to survive in today's television landscape