I had the same panic. That’s not even the title of the article (‘Voyager’s Roxann Dawson Had A Chance To Direct Star Trek But Dropped It For Another Show’) so, unless the website changed it, you have to wonder what OP was doing writing it that way.
Lutfur Rahman and his mob are doing the Tories’ work for them.
DERS WAAAAAAGH IN DAT NEBULA!
TMP and TSFS certainly aren’t bad, they’re just not at the extremely high standard of TWOK, TVH and TUC.
Small sample sizes and idiosyncratic factors.
I agree that the 6 TOS movies on average are better than the 4 TNG movies on average. But if you remove Insurrection (which was fine) and Nemesis (which had a lot of flaws) from the mix, then that is no longer the case - so the question really becomes a narrower ‘why is Instruction only okay and what went wrong with Nemesis?’, rather than the broader ‘TOS vs TNG’ way you put it. If they stopped after First Contact, people would rave about the quality of the TNG movies.
Another way of looking at it is that if you alternatively removed TWOK (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer), TVH (written by Nicholas Meyer) and TUC (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer) from the TOS list then the comparison would also no longer be clear cut. In which case you could also phrase your question as ‘why was Nicholas Meyer so good at making Star Trek movies?’
I don’t think continuity in actors is anywhere near as absolutely critical as you seem to think it is. It was a neat touch that they dubbed in the digital appearance of Mark Hamill / Carrie Fisher / Peter Cushing, but I don’t think that means they need to do it every time - I see that as more akin to an Easter egg. When they’ve done this, it’s mostly for characters with small cameo roles, like Luke showing up in The Mandalorian. And I certainly wouldn’t approve of yet more retrospective tinkering with the OT - that time has passed.
I think most fans’ immersion can cope just fine with Genevieve O’Reilly, who we’re plenty accustomed to playing Mon Mothma, continuing to be her visual appearance in post-OT media. The same way we cope just fine with Vader with mask off in RotJ looking like Sebastian Shaw, and not a digitally-aged Hayden Christensen.
I fully agree that’s it’s an authoritarian measure that needlessly targets a vulnerable minority.
But it’s also something we should laugh at the French state for. Orwell memorably mused that the reason the goose-step never made its way into British military marching drills - at a time when many other European armies were adopting it - was because if British civilians saw soldiers on parade goose-stepping down the road then they would laugh at them. He thought that instinct to laugh at pompous displays of authority was something that helped insulate the British from the fascist and communist totalitarianism that took root elsewhere in the first half of the 20th century. Fascists tend to have very thin skins.
The French state is making laws to regulate women’s fashion. They should know that doing this makes them look ridiculous to normal people.
The French state literally making laws governing fashion is the most French thing ever.
Trip can’t read anyway.
Right, I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m just observing that, for someone who remembers that time, seeing a politician eating for the cameras to prove some food is safe brings to mind this very specific unfortunate example.
In 1990, as the BSE (‘mad cow disease’) crisis in the UK was unfolding and shortly after scientists had found proof that the disease could indeed cross species, the Agriculture Secretary John Gummer went on national TV to try to force his four-year-old daughter to eat a beef burger for the cameras, to convince the public to keep eating British beef.
Several hundred people ended up dying from CJD (the human variant caused by eating infected beef). It remains one of the most widely derided photo ops in British political history.
Because Brexiters are irrational. I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
So that way, they always come out on top!
Totally. We’ve had a few decades now of successive governments that have taken increasingly centralising attitudes towards privacy and civil liberties - essentially going back to the 1980s.
But the one bright spot in there was the 2010-15 Coalition, who abolished Labour’s biometric ID scheme (people forget now, but the Brown government had passed legislation that meant that, if they’d won the 2010 election, then we would all have needed to register for these), deleted innocent people’s DNA records from the police DNA database, halved the maximum length of time the police could detain people without charging them with any crime (from 28 to 14 days - after Labour has earlier tried to increase it to 90), etc. The Coalition was the one truly liberalising government of my lifetime and that’s entirely a consequence of the Lib Dems’ role in driving its agenda.
It took place in Britain because it was written by a British author for British audiences. It was written at a time when totalitarianism (both fascist and socialist) was a major threat in the world outside Britain.
IngSoc wasn’t meant to suggest that Britain was somehow uniquely vulnerable to totalitarianism. It was meant to be a warning to Britons of how the totalitarianism that we could see dominating continental Europe and Russia at the time could also hypothetically develop here - IngSoc was meant to be a sort of ‘totalitarianism with British characteristics’.
The Schwartz is strong with this one.
‘Hi we’re Starfleet, and we recruit our captains from among the best and the brightest on 150 member worlds, spread over 8,000 light years! But the vast majority of the time, when it’s not Jean-Luc Picard, we just get them from this one particular country that accounts for about 4% of the population of Earth. Weird, huh?’
'Use the Force, Harry! ’
-- Gandalf
GEORDI LA FORGE WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE! … WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
There was a good FT opinion piece by Janan Ganesh last year that argued that Sunak has a liberal ‘vibe’, and that’s what they hate him for. In other words, it doesn’t matter to the Tories that he’s one of the most right-wing prime ministers we’ve had, he was an OG Brexiter long before the referendum or before Johnson or Truss was, very socially conservative, he’s presided over a sharply illiberal shift in the immigration system, etc - because he dresses smart, sounds educated, studied abroad, worked in finance, etc, and that all gives him the ‘vibe’ of a much more liberal politician.
Whereas Truss voted Remain, used to be a Lib Dem and served in the Coalition cabinet, yet they saw her as having a conservative ‘vibe’ because she grew up in the North and came across as proudly unintellectual. And that’s why she beat him in the Tory leadership election.
For these Tories now, it’s not about what Sunak has done in government, much of which is actually profoundly conservative; it’s about who he is, since so much of his identity marks him out as someone who does not come across as tribally ‘one of them’.