BCG wrote:
Been trying to care about SNW season 2 but finding it hard. I think the problem is that I can't develop a bond with the characters with only 10 episodes a season. I don't yet care about the character enough to watch a whole episode about them. It's a continuing problem with NuTrek - it assumes you care about the characters because of what Star Trek accomplished, and it just doesn't work for me.
That said, I thought the LD crossover was fun and I don't even watch LD
-> it also just occurred to me that there's a big difference between peeking in on the crew of the Enterprise every week for about 7 months (or daily wrt syndication) vs 2.5 months
I saw on IG that Jack Quaid (Ensign Boimler) ad-libbed a line in that episode that stayed in. As he was mounting that saddle he said "Rrrrrrrriker!"
And since Riker himself was directing, he was right there in the room!
I dunno, I don't think we really need 20+ episodes in a season anymore. I found myself exhausted after getting through just one season of Enterprise. And I'd argue SNW has done more in just a handful of episodes with characterization than Enterprise did in four 4X20-plus hours of TV. I still don't know much, if anything about Travis Mayweather and Hoshi Sato. Kind of a problem when your two non-white characters are given the least amount of love in the writer's room...just sayin'.
I don't feel like I don't know these characters due to smaller screen time, each of them has gotten at least one episode centered around them, and even when it's not we occasionally get snippets in others that give us some insights. It's a testament to the SNW team that they've done this, meanwhile I still don't know a damn thing about a vast majority of the Discovery crew because it feels like waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much screen time has been given to Michael Burnham (a problematic character IMO, but that's a post for another day), Saru, Mushroom Dude from Rent, and Book.
If anyone has taken a backseat this season, it's Pike.
Also, the tradeoff with shorter seasons appears to be a bigger budget. These new shows make the previous iterations look wildly out of date, especially in terms of SFX. I maintain though that TNG has aged remarkably well. Enterprise is actually newer and, ironically, it's that show that looks and feels way more dated (not just because it takes place in the 22nd Century either).
The Shuttlepod Show podcast has been remarkably insightful. Jonathan Frakes was on there as a guest and said the 2009 Abrams film inspired the TV folks to be more ambitious in terms of storytelling and what kind of shots to pull off. Apparently when Berman ran Trek he was old-school in the extreme and restricted what directors were allowed to do. Also they NEVER allowed actors to go off-script, and now they do. Berman himself was on and said the budget for the four Trek movies he headed was the same as the food budget for today's Marvel films. Don't know if that's necessarily true but he made it clear he was quite disdainful of Marvel films.
And now...the musical episode is coming up. We'll see if it works. I'm skeptical.