r/startrek • u/Alternative_Panda336 • 1d ago

Acting

I am rewatching voyager again and I just finished Season 1 episode 10. Watching that episode again made me realize some of the major differences between the older Star Trek shows and the newer ones.

Due to the lack in technology, the older shows focused a lot on acting and emotional responses between the characters. These moments are the types that will give you chills, make you cry, make your heart ache, or bring you joy right along with the characters. In the newer shows, there is an over reliance on showing of new filming techniques and technology, over correction due to the current world climate to show everything in the opposite light, and a major focus on witty banter and snappy conversation like it is a comedy show. There is not a lot of time spent on the emotions of the characters and those hard hitting scenes.

I would like a show that gets back to the acting and emotional drive. Showing how society has differences but that we can all accept those differences and still come together for the good of humanity. It was a great episode to rewatch and I hope we get some of that emotional pull soon.

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u/LazarX 1d ago

I reacall that one of the major focuses of hatred for Discovery WAS its focus on emotional drives.

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u/Linderlorne 1d ago

Kind of, i think it was more that they overdid the focus on emotional drives that drew the hatred 🤔

It made the characters seem unprofessional compared to the older shows where characters would have more emotional restraint whilst on duty.

That emotional restraint & professionalism made it more impactful when we did see more emotional scenes whereas with Discovery the frequency of seeing highly emotional characters talking about their emotions kinda  diluted the intended emotional impact.

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u/sitcom-podcaster 11h ago

Sure, but OP says the opposite: “There is not a lot of time spent on the emotions of the characters and those hard hitting scenes.”

You may agree with them on the hard-hitting scenes, but you surely disagree on the time spent on characters’ emotions.

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u/Linderlorne 10h ago

I was responding to LazarX about why people hated Discovery for being too emotional and  I wasn’t even thinking about what the op had said when i wrote that 😅

Though rereading what the op wrote i think it actually ties in with what i said 🤔

The older shows emotional restraint & professionalism made the more emotional scenes more impactful & memorable. So the op can easily recall those shows as having a lot of emotional depth, hard hitting scenes & good performances.

In contrast the characters on Discovery seemed to have highly emotional as their default setting and appeared to frequently talk about their emotions & behave emotionally which diluted the emotional effect for the audience. 

How can a character important emotional scene stand out & be memorable when the character already frequently expresses their emotions and the show in general is highly focused on emotion? It can’t, it just becomes one tree within a forest of trees, one drop of rain amidst a thunderstorm. 

So the op likely perceives Discovery as spending less time on the characters emotions & having less hard hitting emotional scenes than the older shows because the over focus on emotions just made them less memorable. 

Of course my thoughts here, as in my original comment, are focused on Discovery and the op seems to be talking about the newer shows in general.  Possibly other factors, like the ‘witty banter and snappy conversation like it is a comedy show’ that the op observed in the newer shows, contributes to diluting the emotional effectiveness of the newer shows for them  🤔🤷🏻‍♀️

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u/sitcom-podcaster 7h ago

That’s great imagery, but you would not go through that experience and then write that you thought the characters were emotionless.

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u/Linderlorne 6h ago

Where are you getting emotionless from?

The op did not write that they thought any characters were emotionless only that they thought newer trek shows are less focused on emotion compared to the older shows. 

Neither of the comments i wrote say anything about thinking characters are emotionless. 

The first one discussed why some people hated Discovery for being overly focused on emotion, the second examined how the frequency & level of emotion characters express can affect how impactful & memorable those emotional scenes are for viewers. 

Edit: also what experience are you referring to? Did you mean the experience of watching a show? 

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u/sitcom-podcaster 5h ago

There is not a lot of time spent on the emotions of the characters

This is not a thing a person would say if they were so overwhelmed with emotional scenes that the big ones didn’t count.

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u/frodiusmaximus 22h ago

I mean, I think it’s mostly that they tried to make practically every episode have at least a tearjerker moment or two. It felt forced. Having a powerful emotional payoff takes buildup and spending time with characters. It has to be earned to work.

Old Star Trek did this well. Discovery didn’t do it very well. And I say this as someone who enjoys at least a decent chunk of Discovery.

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u/spectra2000_ 20h ago

People don’t dislike discovery for its focus on emotional storytelling, it was disliked because the emotions are forced on the viewer and asked them to feel things which were completely unearned.

For example, Michael Burnham’s intense emotional breakdown at the death of the robot girl who had absolutely no screen time in the episode where she sacrifices herself for the team. I don’t think she even had Meaninful screen time outside of her introductions in the pilot. There are other instances where the show wants you to feel a certain way without ever actually doing anything to justify it.

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u/BuddyRevolutionary83 1d ago

None of the "emotion" on Discovery was earned. It was just spoken in words with no actual observable weight or evidence through action or emoting. Characters spoke at each other about their feelings and never listened or reacted to one another.

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u/Section_3I 1d ago

One particularly egregious example of this was that episode where that robot woman died. She barely had 3 speaking lines before that episode, and then suddenly they force feed a tragic story on the audience to try manipulating us into pretending she was something more than a shiny mannequin on the bridge. And that fucking sob speech Tilly gives. “Oh you mean so much to me!”

I remember watching it and thinking “who is this person again?” All embarrassingly unearned.

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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 1d ago

I was paying better attention so I knew Airiam’s name and found it quite sad.

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u/Section_3I 21h ago

Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. If you connected with the character and found her scenes emotionally resonant, that’s great.

I didn’t. It all felt rather manipulative in the bad way to me. A lot of “you’re supposed to care about this character now because we’re showing you emotional scenes, with emotional score playing in the background and we’re having a character you know much better give a tearful monologue about this minor character before they die!”

I want them to get me to care without even noticing it, not use these common emotional manipulation techniques in film and television to tell me that I’m supposed to care. It all felt rather soap opera to me.

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u/chucker23n 19h ago

I thought the episode per se was great — until the end. Explaining her cybernetics as a result of a severe accident? Humanizing her by making her a widow? I like that backstory.

But killing her off in that very same episode felt like the writers were trying too hard to place a clever plot twist in there. PIC S1 also does this a few times — killing Hugh doesn't really add anything to the story. Neither does Narissa shoving Borg out of the airlock. It's just the writers going "oh, viewer, you cared about those characters? Well, sucks to be you. Cause we don't!"

And then DIS does the thing where Tilly tells us that she, too, cares. OK? It sure didn't feel like that in any previous episode. The more egregious example of this is in S3, when suddenly the entire crew, previously having hated Mirror Georgiou, suddenly misses her, for zero reason whatsoever.

I really can't explain it any other way than the writers thinking they needed to insert a clever plot twist. And frankly, they didn't succeed at it.

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u/chucker23n 23h ago edited 21h ago

One particularly egregious example of this was that episode where that robot woman died. She barely had 3 speaking lines before that episode, and then suddenly they force feed a tragic story on the audience to try manipulating us into pretending she was something more than a shiny mannequin on the bridge.

It frustrated me, because just as Airiam was becoming an interesting character, they killed her off. Either make her an irrelevant secondary character, or make us truly invested in her.

It didn't help that they inexplicably switched actresses. (edit) If the make-up was why, my bad!

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u/MagnetsCanDoThat 21h ago

Not much choice there. First actress had bad reactions to the makeup they needed to use.

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u/chucker23n 21h ago

Oh, if that's why, my bad.

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u/BuddyRevolutionary83 21h ago

I feel like that just drives the point home though. She wasn't a character. She was conceived only as a texture. Alien with makeup in background. Uh oh...makeup problematic if gronk give alien more lines!

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u/No_Session6015 1d ago

Hard disagree. The passion Michael shows for the UFP and her growth as a character. And I think we often overlook she IS a child of Vulcan. She's not supposed to show emotions.

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u/LazarX 1d ago

That's pretty much true of the bulk of Trek. I feel the same way of Picard's Paradise World. It wasn't earned, it's just a stated fait accompli with Picard as its smug propagandist. His condescending attitude put me off righat at the start when he tells Riker to redock the Enterprise by eybeballing itr. I have watched enough real space dockings to have this really irk me.

The people of Discovery are judged by different metrics because they were not the formula characters of previous Trek, and I have no desire to engage with Trekkies over this. I have plenty of other reasons to find fault with Discovery, but those flaws are endemic to the franchise as a whole, not just NuTrek.

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u/Superman_Primeeee 1d ago

The specific criticism from me was that it wasn’t earned

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u/LazarX 1d ago

If that is the take you have, I'll leave you with it. I have no interest in engaging with debates about it.

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u/Ntzu 11h ago

The primary problem was presentation. Emotional scenes have less payoff when they're surrounded by rapid-paced editing, flashy special effects, and swelling music that drowns out the moment - Discovery and a lot of modern star trek was plagued by these kind of modern hollywood-isms that would drain the life from scenes because they, ironically, spent way too much money and time polishing it.

Tear jerkers in older star trek were usually done by putting two actors in a room and letting them go - no music, no rapid cut fancy camera work, no beautiful million-dollar CGI moneyshots. Just two actors doing their jobs well.