Television

While watching season 1 as it was airing a friend bright up the two time periods theory and that the the Man in Black and William are the same.

I said I didn't think it was true because It would remove the narrative anchor they had built the show around. There wouldn't be any thing to keep audiences emotionally invested in the plots that are going on.

It turns out we were both right.

Oh yeah. One of the biggest falls from grace in TV imo.

I loved the 1st two seasons! Although season 1 was far better. Season 3 I have vague memories of and season 4 I gave up. They never should have left the park, that was the best bit.

Picard lost me the moment they had a scene where a bunch of down on their luck blue collar workers were complaining about shitty rations and being forced to work on a holiday.

WHAT PART OF POST-SCARCITY LUXURY GAY SPACE COMMUNIST UTOPIA DID YOU INBRED FUCKING DOGSHIT FOR BRAINS MORONS NOT GRASP?

I swear to god, Picard is a Star Trek show written by people who have apparently never watched a single episode of Star Trek in their entire lives. Unbelievably poor grasp of the basic concepts of the setting, and of Roddenberry's core thesis. And it's not like you can't make Star Trek grimy if you want to. Deep Space Nine did it frequently, playing with concepts of liberty vs security and so on. But the writers of Picard were just too lazy to engage with the core ideas of the setting and instead just wrote a bunch of generic, broadly science fiction filler and then slapped the Star Trek logo on it.

Discovery I feel more kindly towards, even though it was also terrible. It at least makes some kind of an effort to be Star Trek, which automatically puts it above Picard, but god that is such a low bar. It still has the same basic problem of being written by people who seem to be deeply embarassed about the idea of writing Star Trek. They had to go in and try to retcon in a bunch of crazy tech, rewrite huge parts of the setting, throw out everything about the Klingons and start from scratch, all out of some kind of weird hatred for the universe in which they were telling stories. Also, dear god it was just incredibly slow and dull. Some of the worse pacing I've ever seen.

Thank the lord almighty for Strange New Worlds. If you're soured on all the new Trek and skipped it because you were worried about it being more of the same, holy fucking shit go watch it now! Strange New Worlds is perfect. It's a Star Trek show written by people who absolutely adore Star Trek. It's a love letter - a love anthem - to the original series. And it manages to somehow find an unearthly balance between being one of the most campy and fun takes on Star Trek, and one of the darkest and scariest. There's a musical episode, and there's an episode that's basically "What if the plot of Aliens happened on the Enterprise?" and somehow both of them fit in the same show perfectly. Also, THE KLINGONS ARE FUN AGAIN! They're loud and boisterous and drink blood wine and yell "Qapla" while they headbutt each other and it's fucking great.

I considered reading the books before the series came out, and I’m really glad that I did didn’t. As a result, I fully enjoyed the show.

God I found foundation so frustrating to watch, the only characters I liked were the emperors. Everyone else was stupid and insufferable. Such a shame as the books are so so good

When I heard they were making it, I told my friends that if they did it right, it would be bigger than Game of Thrones.

Then I saw the first trailer. From that alone, I knew they did not do it right. Watching the first season only confirmed it for me.

Outside the show, it's not even known whether Spartan IIs have skin below the neck, let alone genitals. Things from Halo are just shoehorned into an unrelated story, which is thought by some to have started out as an adaptation of Mass Effect. Commander Shepherd definitely has skin and genitals in the games, and isn't afraid to use them.

Halo was something that shouldn't have happened, the writers admitted they wanted their own story unrelated to Halo.

In a slight defense of Rings of Power, I don't think the lore "problems" are really a big deal. It had to not follow the Silmarillion for legal reasons. As someone who hasn't digested that "book" the lore parts seem ok. The problem is most the writing still sucks and has many problems that are more substantial than that's not what Tolkien said in the book that can't be named. Also the weirdly cheap appearance is totally accurate. I think there's also a lot of merit to the rumors much of the writing and props were originally intended for a dragon age adaptation.

Oof. Yeah, that one really hits. Great start, then creative differences collapsed the whole endeavour and it just went to shit.

And it's not like I can even recommend the book anymore given, well... y'know.

Just a fucking mountain of disappointments on disappointments.

Seconded. It was just such an enormous pile of shit from the first episode.

Edit: felt like it was worth mentioning that I've read all the books multiple times, and love them. I just hate what they did to the characters.

I didn't consider it disappointing, I considered it a decent starting point for better seasons.

I was born before we had a 5 minute tiktok attention span and if we weren't blown away by the first episode that meant everything was obviously garbage.

Watch TNG season 1, one of the worst seasons of anything ever.

everyone agreed SEASON 1 was bad, season 2 it was getting interested but it was cancelled long before the season began. apparently s3 would have much more of the mysterious aliens from the planet builders in it.

Gotta admit, I loved it. Hated to see it cancelled.

You didn't like As The Universe Turns?

First episode got me hopeful, but the series dragged on. Forcing us to watch little webclips for lore and story bothered me.

It had a bad start, but it became really good.

What's really surprising is how once piece ended up being pretty good, after all the garbage adaptations.

It's pretty amazing how out of touch Netflix can be