Destination SkillQueue
Are We There Yet
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Posted - 2010.12.19 09:41:00 -
[3]
 Originally by: El'Niaga
stuff
Scifi/fantasy doesn't really take that much longer to build up. The makers just feel the need to waste huge amounts of time doing that. You can tell the viewers everything relevant in a pilot episode at max and the rest comes naturally with the normal stories. The biggest mistake you can possible make is start putting the story on hold in an effort to explain things to the audience. A fantastic world should be treated like a trip to a foreign country. There are a few oddities that pop up, but the visitor(audience) doesn't need to know all that much to still keep up and you certainly don't need to explain those oddities to the viewer.
Think starwars episode 4 here. There is no need to explain things to the audience. The first scene tells it all. There is war, the sides aren't evenly matched and the other side is ruthlessly evil. One carefully crafted entertaining scene and you know everything you really need to know. All the finer details are learned when one of the protagonists, the simple outsider farm boy, learns them too.
As for STA and STU, they just weren't particularly entertaining. They were weak repeats of previous plots with a change of scenery. SGU didn't even have a plot as far as I followed it. I imagine the thought went something like this: "Hey let's put a group of people in a strange situation, stranded from the rest of humanity and have them solve a new problem each episode. No one has done this already and certainly not better than us." Problem being just putting people in a unusual setting doesn't make for an entertaining show and BSG and Lost were both much better at this. I haven't watched Caprica and don't know what it is even supposed to be about, so I can't really comment on it.
As for ST. The original series was good and you can still watch the episodes today. TNG was good too(less so in the first season), with nice stories and good actors. I agree partly on DS9, but it only got good after the first season and IIRC closer to the third. That is a huge amount of episodes practically wasted before thing became interesting. I love DS9, but I can't watch through the early seasons, because they are so boring and uninteresting. No doubt this caused many other people to lose interest in the series too.
I'm calling BS on your voyager and enterprise analysis though. Both series were just horribly bad in almost every area and fight for the title of the worst ST series ever made. Personally I blame the incompetent writers for most of the series problems. Voyager doesn't even at times make any sense(internal logic of the ST universe) and has horrible characters you wish would die in every episode(Neelix I'm looking at you, but really the doctor was the only good one.). The setting was a problem in the sense, that they removed most of the interesting parts from the series that people had grown to love, but didn't have anything to replace it with. It got so bad, that they were finally forced to fell back to using the borg in season 3 because all their original ideas were failures. It was a god awful piece of trash most of the time, with a few good episodes mixed in.
Enterprise had potential, but it is pretty bad too. The crew is incompetent and certainly far from the material you would expect the from such a prominent starship. Most of the episodes aren't that well done or written and some are repeats of old episodes from previous ST series. The temporal cold war plot is a horrible mess, that doesn't make sense. It almost seems like they were just mkaing things up on the spot and cramming it in without thinking it through. Again it didn't start of as horrible, but it was boring most of the time and got bad later and better again at the end, but at that point people had abandoned it.
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