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.”
All modern science fiction TV shows and movies have been heavily influenced by the original Star Trek — except for the current batch of Star Trek shows,'” Weir said
Damn came out swinging. And… Th I agree with him. It’s pretty clear krutzman threw out the guidebook for his shows and it is pretty clear in them. Personally, the only ones I’ve enjoyed are SNW and the third season of Picard, and Lower Decks is on my watch list. They just don’t have the spark.
SNW has a great cast that I think all brought different energies that matched earlier trek shows. They encounter new things and phenomena which challenge them. Importantly too, not every episode is a “zomg the world is ending”. It’s real people making real decisions. I just don’t like the other ones because it feels like “this action replaces the need for writing”.
The man has a vested interest to be in the headlines. Media take an interest in him because of the movie. It’s the perfect climate to turn a statement of not much importance into a news headline.
I haven’t listened to the podcast. If anybody has, maybe they can comment on the tone of the conversation. Seeing it just in writing makes him seem a bit petty and adversarial. But the way it happened it could just as well be isolated, throwaway jovial comments where the “fuck them” could be much less pointed and we are left feeling this was a nothing burger.
This is of the same quality journalism as any actor of the fantasy lightsaber universe being asked if they world return to the franchise. Sure, if the script looked promising, said Daisy Ripley. “Ripley to return to Star Wars!” reports niche media site struggling to get eyeballs in front of their ads.
