The sigh from me is wondering why Andy Weir felt it necessary to use a platform like ‘criticaldrinker’ to go out of his way to trash recent Star Trek.
“They didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ‘em,” doesn’t really sell me on putting my dollars and eyeballs towards the success of his movie — no matter a great performance by Ryan Gosling or great production values.
Rather tells me why all Weir’s 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.
“I think we can probably safely never talk about it again,” Marsden quipped.
“It’s gone baby!” Weir cheerfully agreed. “It’s all gone.”
Marsden said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.
“Okay, you’re a little more severe than I am,” Weir said. “I’ll give you my opinion and I’m just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And here’s 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 don’t 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 didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ’em.”
Thanks for writing that. It’s quite long but I can see your point. I’m relieved that you didn’t just read two headlines and sent him to the digital gallows. Personally, I don’t reach the same conclusion as you. If you’d 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 he’s not Asimov or Dick. Or Shakespeare.
In terms of what science fiction is best at doing, we don’t appear to be that far apart. Allegorical storytelling is great. That’s 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 don’t have to answer this; I’m just curious. How is your enjoyment of 90s Trek knowing that Rick Berman was involved? I’d argue he’s 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.
There’s also the fact that Berman’s 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.
I’d known from friends in the fandom, with close connections to production, that the early TNG years were generally miserable for all involved but hadn’t heard as much by season four. Berman made the other showrunners be the media frontman, spokespersons for production during most of the 1990s. He wasn’t 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 can’t rewatch Josh Whedon productions at this point, especially Buffy.