What to watch to be ready for Star Trek: Picard

What to watch to be ready for Star Trek: Picard

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for the episodes and films on this list.

It’s only a few days till Star Trek: Picard premieres. Just saying that gets me excited, as I’ve been anticipating this series since it was announced! And in a broader sense, I’ve been waiting for the Star Trek franchise to move its timeline forward again since Voyager went off the air and Nemesis was in cinemas.

If you’re new to Star Trek, or haven’t watched any of the older series for a long time, it might be worthwhile to go back and take a look at some of the classics in anticipation of Star Trek: Picard. So let’s go together and get caught up on some of the episodes which may – or may not – be relevant to Picard’s story. At any rate, they’re all worth a watch before the show kicks off.

Number 1:
Endgame (Star Trek: Voyager, 2001)

Admiral Janeway and the Borg Queen in the Voyager episode Endgame.

Before The Avengers ever thought of it, Voyager had the first Endgame! And it was a heck of a ride involving a time-travelling Janeway giving her past self technology from the future in order to defeat the Borg. By changing the past, Janeway was able to get Voyager home far sooner than she had in her own timeline.

Time travel paradox aside (how could future Janeway exist if she erased her own timeline by interacting with her past self?) the episode sets up what could be an important story point regarding the Borg. As Voyager prepares to travel home, future Janeway infects the Borg Queen with a virus – one that has the potential to devastate the entire collective. Voyager is able to easily destroy many Borg vessels – and the Borg Queen’s complex – thanks to the enhancements future Janeway brought them, and the end of the episode is the last time we’ve seen the Borg in the Star Trek timeline. What happened to them after Endgame is a key question, and given that we’ve seen a Borg vessel and ex-Borg in the trailers for Star Trek: Picard, it may be one that the series will answer.

Seven of Nine, a key member of Voyager’s crew in its later seasons, is also set to feature in some form in Star Trek: Picard, and her relationship with the collective was always a point of interest. I definitely think it’s worth giving Endgame a rewatch before Picard kicks off.

Number 2:
Star Trek: Nemesis (Film, 2002)

Data and Picard in this scene from Star Trek: Nemesis.

This had to be on the list, right? Nemesis is as far forward as the Star Trek timeline had gotten – prior to last week’s Short Treks episode Children of Mars. And it was a Picard-centric story, focusing on his fight against a clone of himself created by the Romulans. As a story which features Picard heavily, as well as his relationship with the Romulans, this would already be an important one to watch. But because in this film Picard sees Data sacrifice himself to save him, it becomes even more meaningful in the story of Picard’s life.

We already know from the trailers that Data’s loss weighs heavily on Picard, and may even be a significant factor in his decision to leave Starfleet a few years after the events of Nemesis. As Data’s sacrifice is such an important moment in Picard’s later life, Nemesis is definitely worthy of a viewing before Picard premieres.

Other things to note from the film would be the Romulans and their relationship with the Federation. Nemesis takes place after the Dominion War (as seen in Deep Space Nine) and the Federation and Romulans had been allies. Is that alliance still in place? Is it possible that the surviving Romulans will have a good relationship with the Federation after the destruction of their homeworld? All interesting points to consider!

Number 3:
Children of Mars (Short Treks, 2020)

Picard’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo appearance in Children of Mars.

I have a full review of Children of Mars already written and posted, which you can find by clicking or tapping here. Suffice to say that it wasn’t my favourite episode of Short Treks, but nevertheless it was created to be a prequel to Star Trek: Picard. While it’s unclear whether the two principal characters the episode features – schoolgirls named Kima and Lil – will cross over to the main series, there’s a significant event depicted which certainly will be a story point in some form.

A faction called the “rogue synths” launches a massive attack on Mars, where the Federation’s Utopia Planitia shipyards are located. Who this group are and what their aims were isn’t clear, but it seems as though this attack was designed to disrupt efforts led by Admiral Picard to assist the Romulans as they faced the supernova which would ultimately destroy their homeworld. In that sense, the attack on Mars looks set to be significant in the backstory to Star Trek: Picard.

Unfortunately if you’re outside the United States, as I am, you won’t be able to watch this episode by “conventional” means. Amazon Prime, despite having the rights to show Picard, don’t seem to have shown this episode of Short Treks. I suppose it’s possible that they will put up Children of Mars on their streaming platform before Picard premieres, but realistically if you want to guarantee seeing it before the main series you will have to find another way to access a copy. I can’t recommend any one website or other method, but if you know your way around a computer I daresay you’ll be able to find it.

Number 4:
Disaster (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1991)

Picard and the children in the stuck turbolift in Disaster.

Disaster is one of my personal favourite episodes of The Next Generation. Perhaps I should do a list of those one day! It’s a bottle show (i.e. a show taking place entirely on board the ship – these were usually done to save money on building new sets) but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t tell a very interesting story – or rather, a connected series of stories. As the Enterprise-D hits a “quantum filament”, it is left without power to most of its key systems. The main crew are split up, and are forced to play different roles than they usually would.

It’s a great example of characters working in the face of adversity, and of how the threat and danger in an episode of Star Trek doesn’t have to come from a menacing evil alien. Worf ends up delivering a baby, Counsellor Troi is the senior officer on the bridge and is forced to make significant command decisions, and most significantly for our purposes, Picard is stuck in a turbolift with a group of frightened children.

We’ve seen Picard in command countless times and we know he’s good at it – with his own crew. What Disaster does is show us how Picard can take control of any situation, even one he’s uncomfortable in as he’s never been keen on children. He’s able to get the situation under control and lead the kids to safety in the face of a difficult situation. It may not be the most significant TNG episode ever from Picard’s point of view, but it is nevertheless worth a watch.

Number 5:
The Battle (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1987)

Accompanied by a Ferengi Marauder, the Enterprise-D takes the USS Stargazer under tow in The Battle.

The Next Generation’s first season was all about the show finding its feet. With the Klingons having been somewhat pacified, the show was looking for a new antagonist, and the Ferengi were initially created to fill that role. Though over the course of Deep Space Nine we’ve come to see the Ferengi more as a neutral power, interested in their own finances more than in galactic events, in early TNG they were much more aggressive.

The Battle was only the Ferengi’s second appearance, though we’re not really interested in the episode for that reason. Dai’mon Bok, a Ferengi captain, has somehow acquired the USS Stargazer – a ship previously captained by Picard. Over the course of the episode, we learn Picard had been in command at an event called the “battle of Maxia”, in which he defeated a Ferengi vessel using a warp speed technique called the “Picard manoeuvre”. The story fills in some of Picard’s pre-TNG history and proved to be a great opportunity for Patrick Stewart to show off his acting abilities, as the episode takes the character through a moment of (induced) madness.

Number 6:
The Best of Both Worlds, Parts I & II (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1990)

Picard transformed into Locutus of Borg in The Best of Both Worlds.

I’ve kind of spoilt it in the above picture, but Picard’s assimilation by the Borg in The Best of Both Worlds was a truly shocking moment for The Next Generation to end its third season on. This was the first time we’d seen assimilation on screen, and for a character as significant as Picard to be captured was a phenomenal moment. The entire two-part episode is beautifully constructed, and the moments leading up to the reveal of the assimilated Picard are perfectly shot and edited.

In terms of Picard’s life, his experience with the Borg, and the guilt and regret he felt over the attack on Starfleet ships at Wolf 359, would stay with him for a long time. In First Contact we see how it could influence his judgement – Picard was usually level-headed, calm, and neutral, but when it came to the Borg his emotions could get the better of him leading to irrational decisions. Seeing how this came to be, and how one traumatic event can affect his character, could be very important to understanding his decision-making in Picard, especially if the Borg are involved.

Family, the second episode of Season 4 of TNG, follows on from The Best of Both Worlds and would also be worth a look-in as an epilogue of sorts to this story.

Number 7:
Star Trek: Discovery (2017-present)

Lorca and Saru during Discovery’s first season.

Given the significant changes to Star Trek storytelling that are present in Discovery, it would be well worth getting up to date with Star Trek’s most recent outing if you haven’t seen it already. I understand that some fans weren’t happy with the series for a number of reasons, but there are some definite high points in there which even the most hardline sceptic should be able to appreciate.

Jason Isaacs in Season 1 and Anson Mount in Season 2 both give amazing performances as two very different Starfleet captains, and Discovery tells two separate, season-long serialised stories in the style that Picard plans to adopt for its first season. If the Short Treks episode Children of Mars is any indication, the visual style of Discovery will also carry over to Picard at least in part. Whether you think this is a good thing or not is another matter, of course, but if you’ve somehow avoided Discovery this long, now could be a good time to give it a second chance.

Because of its serialised nature it’s hard to pull just one episode from Discovery and say “just watch this one”. But if I had to pick a single episode, I’d recommend An Obol for Charon from Season 2. Despite containing several ongoing story arcs, the main thrust of this episode – dealing with an ancient planet-sized lifeform – is largely a self-contained story, albeit one that would have a huge impact on the remainder of the season.

Number 8:
Star Trek: Generations (Film, 1994)

Captains Kirk and Picard meet for the first time inside the Nexus in Star Trek: Generations.

“Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you, don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there, you can make a difference.” Those were the words spoken to Picard by Captain Kirk in Star Trek: Generations. And for a time, it seemed as though Picard was following the advice his predecessor gave him. We saw Janeway promoted to Admiral in Star Trek: Nemesis while Picard remained a captain, even though for the audience she was a character we’d met much later and was noticeably younger. What could it have been that caused Picard to turn his back on Kirk’s advice?

In Generations, Picard loses several members of his family to a fire. Château Picard, where it seems he’s living in retirement at the beginning of the new series, was the place where his brother and family had lived. Family had been important to Picard, but he had been content that the family line would continue thanks to his brother having a family, but that was taken away from him in Generations. It’s a film in which he suffers another loss, too – the Enterprise-D.

Though casualties were said to be light, the loss of the ship he’d called home for more than seven years and had countless adventures aboard did have an effect on Picard, not that much of it is acknowledged on screen. Mostly, though, it’s Kirk’s sacrifice which is the key point worth noting from Generations, and even though the two men didn’t know each other particularly well, Kirk’s advice seemed to be taken to heart.

Number 9:
Tapestry (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1993)

Given the chance to start over by Q, Picard ends up leading a very different life in Tapestry.

As Tapestry begins, Picard has been badly wounded. His artificial heart couldn’t tolerate the injury and he dies – only to be greeted by his long-time nemesis Q, and given a rare opportunity to make a fresh start.

Picard has an artificial heart because in his youth he was brutally stabbed! By choosing to avoid that fate, Picard set his life on a different path, one which didn’t lead to the man we knew, but a more timid and less successful man who had only made it as far as a junior lieutenant in Starfleet. He realises his mistake, and pleads Q to send him back to set things right, stating: “I would rather die as the man I was… than live the life I just saw.”

It’s another story that adds some colourful background to Picard’s story, and we see him in his youth before he settled down into the man we knew. Given that there are sure to be changes in his character between the last time we saw him and how he appears in Star Trek: Picard, it’s worth remembering that people do change over the course of their lives, and the person you are at 20 isn’t the same person you are at 50 or 70 or 90.

Number 10:
All Good Things… (Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1994)

Q takes Picard back in time in All Good Things…

The finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation was a strange one, with a time-travel concept and the return of Q. Across three time periods Picard had to figure out a puzzle – a spacial anomaly which would destroy humanity, and for which he was ultimately responsible!

If you’ve seen the science fiction film Arrival, then All Good Things… uses a similar concept. By learning to perceive time differently – realising that events in the future were impacting the past, not the other way around – Picard was able to prevent disaster. “We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons. And for one brief moment, you did.” So says Q, complimenting Picard on his ability to change the way he thought and attack the situation in a different way from a completely different line of reasoning.

Bringing to a close Q’s arc in The Next Generation, the episode also shows Picard as someone who is capable of things that he even doesn’t know about himself. Q gave him the push, but it was Picard who solved the mystery and saved humanity. We also get glimpses of Picard’s personal future – including his retirement at Château Picard. There’s the mention of a degenerative disease called irumodic syndrome which Picard is said to be suffering from in his later years – whether this will come into play in Star Trek: Picard is unknown.

Honourable Mentions:

I can’t end a list without adding in a few honourable mentions!

Star Trek (Film, 2009) – This is where we first hear about the supernova that destroyed Romulus from Spock. It’s a significant plot point in the film, but not one which is covered in great detail.
What You Leave Behind (DS9, 1999) – Concluding the Dominion War arc, which brought together the Federation and Romulans as allies, this episode is the most recent in which we saw many Star Trek factions like the Cardassians and Breen.
Skin of Evil (TNG, 1988) – Picard’s first on-screen experience with losing an officer and a friend, when Tasha Yar is killed in action.
Time Squared (TNG, 1988) – Picard must contend with the idea that he abandoned ship in the middle of a crisis when a duplicate of himself from the future is discovered.
The Defector (TNG, 1990) – A Romulan Admiral defects to the Federation to try to prevent a war, and Picard must deal with the information he provides.
The Raven (VOY, 1997) – Seven of Nine experiences flashbacks and uncovers her family’s half-assimilated ship where she was first captured by the Borg.
I, Borg (TNG, 1992) – The introduction of Hugh the Borg, and Picard’s attempt to weaponise him to defeat the collective.
Human Error (VOY, 2001) – Seven of Nine begins to discover more about her human side after years away from the Borg.
In The Pale Moonlight (DS9, 1998) – Sisko lies and cheats to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War as an ally – and Garak commits murder to cover up their actions. Did the Romulans find out between the end of the war and the events of Picard?
Sarek (TNG, 1990) – Picard came to know Spock well, but also met his father. Picard helped Sarek stay in control of his emotions as he suffered a serious Vulcan illness.

So that’s it.

A few episodes and films that might feed into the plot and background of Star Trek: Picard. Perhaps not everything will be relevant, especially given the scant information about the show’s plot that we actually have. I’ve made two significant assumptions based on the trailer and cast information that we’ve seen so far – firstly that the Borg will have some role to play in the story, and secondly that the Romulans will too. But it could be an elaborate misdirect and both of these factions will ultimately end up being little more than backstory. We’ll have to see.

Regardless, the episodes and films above should go some way to showing off Picard and Star Trek at their best as we prepare for the new series. It’s been a long time since I was this excited about the premiere of a new television series, and I can’t wait to tune in when Picard kicks off in just ten days’ time.

Live Long and Prosper!

The Star Trek franchise – including all films, series, and episodes listed above – is the copyright of Paramount Pictures and ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

The biggest problem with the Star Wars sequels

The biggest problem with the Star Wars sequels

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for all three films in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, including The Rise of Skywalker.

As I’ve covered already here on the website, reviews for the final part of the Star Wars sequel trilogy – The Rise of Skywalker – are mixed. What this unfortunately means, at least in the short-term, is that the divisiveness in the fanbase and in online fan communities, as well as a lot of vile anti-Disney hate, will continue. The best opportunity to bring fans back together was wasted with The Rise of Skywalker, which inexplicably brings back Emperor Palpatine, throwing up issues not just for this trilogy, but for the original films too.

I don’t want to get into all of that right now, as I’ll save my opinions on The Rise of Skywalker itself for when I get around to a full review. This article intends to address the production side of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, and the clear issues that have been present.

Poster for The Force Awakens (2015)

Despite what George Lucas subsequently claimed, 1977’s Star Wars was a one-off film. It wasn’t “Episode IV” when it was released, it was a standalone story – albeit one that was careful to leave the door cracked slightly open to allow for the possibility of a sequel. The fact that the original trilogy wasn’t a planned story is noticeable – not least in the haphazard approach to the family ties between Vader, Luke, and Leia. A New Hope (as we’ll have to call it to avoid confusion) is a self-contained story with a beginning, middle, and end. If there had only ever been one Star Wars film, it would still be a complete story. The two sequels follow on from A New Hope, but are a second self-contained story; a duology, if you will.

In 1977 that made perfect sense – there was no guarantee that A New Hope would be a success, so dedicating extra time and money to writing sequels before the original was even a proven earner would have been wasteful. Not to mention that if the story had been written as part one of three, ending without wrapping up its story, and then for production reasons parts two and three were never made, A New Hope would be even more of a failure that if it were a standalone film that flopped. In short, in 1977 it wasn’t anyone’s intention to make a trilogy of films, and the fact that The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were able to be made at all was purely on the back of the success of A New Hope and the story it told.

Fast-forward to 2012, when Disney bought Lucasfilm – and with it, the rights to the Star Wars franchise. The intention, as stated by Disney at the time and many, many times subsequently, was to make a new trilogy of films. Not one new film with the possibility to make others, but a trilogy of three films to serve as a sequel to the originals.

It’s apparent from the ending of The Force Awakens that it wasn’t ever intended to be a one-shot story. As Rey finally travels to Ahch-To and meets Luke, she extends her hand and offers him his father’s lightsaber. And then the film ends with the two of them standing on the cliffside – as close to a “cliffhanger” as it’s possible to get without one of them literally hanging from that cliff! This moment set up a sequel, the second part of the planned trilogy.

Disney and Lucasfilm went about writing this trilogy in the worst possible way. They brought in three different writers and directors – later reduced to two when Colin Trevorrow left the project that ultimately became The Rise of Skywalker – and each was essentially given free rein to tell whatever story they wanted, regardless of how well it worked as one part of a larger overall story. JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson simply didn’t work together on their stories – that’s “stories” in the plural, where it should have been two parts of one single story.

The use of different directors for each film is not, in itself, an issue. Even the original trilogy had three different directors. Television series do this all the time, and as long as the story is good there can even be a benefit to having different directors, as each brings their own style and insight. In Game of Thrones, for example, some directors became renowned for their battles, and others for quieter, character-driven stories. Splitting up the directing duties worked well in countless other franchises, so why not in Star Wars too?

Promo poster for 2017’s The Last Jedi

The fundamental problem is that there was no story for the directors to work from – or if there was, they were allowed to ignore it entirely.

Between 2012, when the Lucasfilm deal was announced, and the release of the film that ultimately became The Force Awakens, there needed to be one writer – or a team of writers – planning out in excruciating detail what the story of the trilogy would be. They needed to consider which characters were coming back – obviously Han, Luke, and Leia were, but who else? Then they needed to consider what was happening in the galaxy – we all assumed the Empire had died with Palpatine, but what happened next?

A lot of Disney sequels (the direct-to-video kind) have the same basic problem: how do you tell an interesting and engaging story after “happily ever after” – without completely undoing the happy ending? This is the problem Star Wars was facing: the Emperor was dead, the Death Stars destroyed, and as of the end of Return of the Jedi it looked like we were on course for a Rebel victory. So, if the Rebels did win and managed to restore democratic government to the galaxy, and both of the Sith Lords (Vader and Palpatine) had died, where was the threat, drama, and tension going to come from in order to drive the new trilogy of films?

This was the fundamental question. What came after the happy ending? And then how could that be spun out into a three-film story arc that would be as dramatic, as tense, and as exciting as the originals?

The answer came from JJ Abrams as he set to work on The Force Awakens – after the Empire fell, the First Order rose from its ashes, and was trying to overthrow the New Republic. They had legions of Stormtroopers, they had a planet-killing superweapon, and they had a mysterious Dark Side user as their Supreme Leader, who had a helmet-wearing Dark Side apprentice. A little derivative, perhaps, but not bad. After the disappointment of the prequels a decade prior (see my last article for my thoughts on that series) a return to what made Star Wars great seemed like a solid idea. It was, at the very least, a plausible and perfectly reasonable way to approach the new trilogy.

Except this was how JJ Abrams approached The Force Awakens; it wasn’t how Disney and Lucasfilm were approaching the whole trilogy. Rian Johnson came along and decided that Star Wars needed to go in a bold new direction. Instead of Rey being related to Luke Skywalker or Obi-Wan Kenobi, she was nobody, related to no one. Instead of Kylo Ren being on a path to redemption like his grandfather, he chose to commit to the Dark Side and claim for himself total power. And instead of Snoke being as manipulative and cunning as Emperor Palpatine, he was cut down by his apprentice before he could achieve his goals. Bold. New. Different. And a great way for the franchise to go to stay relevant and exciting.

BB-8 on a promo poster for The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Both concepts – JJ Abrams’ idea of retelling the “greatest hits” of Star Wars, and Rian Johnson’s idea to shake up the franchise and take it to wholly new thematic places – have merit. But they’re about as far apart as it’s possible to be.

What that means is that Disney and Lucasfilm needed to pick one style or the other. Before The Force Awakens was fully in production, Rian Johnson had been approached to make The Last Jedi and will have, at the very least, submitted some kind of story outline or discussed the basic premise and concept he had in mind. There was still time, even in mid-2014, to change direction and go down the Rian Johnson route if Disney and Lucasfilm wanted to do so. But if they were happy with the JJ Abrams approach, and wanted the sequels to essentially re-tell the original trilogy, then they needed to commit to that approach instead.

Trying to do both has resulted in the sequel trilogy being a mess. It hasn’t had any direction to its story, and at a fundamental level it hasn’t even known what kind of story it was supposed to be telling. That is a significant problem that has hampered it, and one that was entirely avoidable if basic film production and storytelling rules had been followed.

This has been made worse and more noticeable by JJ Abrams returning for the final film in the series. If someone else – literally anyone else – had made their version of The Rise of Skywalker, perhaps the trilogy would have felt like a bit of a mixed bag; a collection of three distinct films. But because JJ Abrams came back and was allowed to essentially ignore the plot of The Last Jedi – even overwriting large parts of it – the resulting trilogy has a very weird feel where two films take one approach, but the middle part is completely different. And whatever one’s opinions on The Last Jedi may have been when it was released, the overall trilogy is not served by having films overwrite one another.

When there are a total of three films to tell a story, with a total runtime of seven hours, give or take, there just isn’t time for one film to retcon and overwrite its predecessor. The tonal shift is incredibly jarring too, as the trilogy goes from “remember the greatest hits of Star Wars?” to “I bet you didn’t see that coming!” – and then back again. A consistent tone is just as important as a consistent story – perhaps even more so. And as it’s clear that the two writers and directors had such contradictory visions for where to take the franchise, a decision had to be made as to which one to go with.

The first promotional poster for 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker

The fact that no such decision was made, and production on the films was allowed to proceed in this manner ultimately rests with the executives at Disney, who will have had the final say on such things. I guess I just don’t understand how people who have worked in this industry – very successfully – for decades would have failed to realise that they had a problem on their hands. Organising the trilogy along these lines should simply have never happened. I don’t think it’s fair to blame either JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson – because both The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi are great films as standalone pieces. In fact I think as time goes by, The Last Jedi in particular will be held up as a great example of sci-fi filmmaking and of the Star Wars franchise in general. But you can’t blame storytellers for telling the stories that they wanted, especially when they had almost unlimited resources thrown their way. The guidance and the control over their stories had to come from someone higher up, and it was unfortunately absent.

If there had been a story treatment written for the trilogy, then each director would have been constrained by that. Perhaps someone like Rian Johnson might’ve decided not to jump on board if he had to tell a JJ Abrams-style story, and vice versa.

But I’d have liked to see it go even further. The most successful film trilogy of recent years, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, was produced and shot back-to-back. One team was in control for the entire production, and the films were then released over a three-year period. There’s absolutely no reason why Star Wars couldn’t have emulated this successful formula. By appointing someone to be in overall creative control, there would have still been the option to have three different directors and different scriptwriters for each film, but the production would have been smoother.

Shooting the films back-to-back would have also meant that Carrie Fisher’s death in 2016 wouldn’t have been an issue for The Rise of Skywalker to have to get around. This is purely hindsight, because no one would have predicted that she would have passed away before the trilogy was complete, but it has nevertheless been a production issue. With the death of Han Solo in The Force Awakens and the death of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi, Fisher’s Princess/General Leia was the last remaining of the original core characters. And unfortunately the scant footage that was left on the cutting room floor from the first two films was nowhere near enough to sculpt the kind of major role destined for her in The Rise of Skywalker – leading to some clumsy scenes in that film. Again though, this isn’t a reason why shooting all three films at once should have happened, it’s instead a positive consequence of doing so because of what happened out here in the real world.

This kind of production would have been more expensive initially, because the cost of producing all three films would have to be paid up-front. But it does offer advantages. Firstly, some costs would be lower – due to not having the expense of setting up production three times. Secondly, and most importantly from an audience point of view, the story and scripts could be adjusted if necessary. If something didn’t seem to be working or making sense it could be cut or reworked, to the ultimate benefit of the story of all three films.

Theatrical release poster for The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

Whether that option was ever seriously considered, or whether it was always the case that the three films would be produced wholly separately isn’t known. But I think that the way the sequel trilogy turned out is a great argument for producing all films in a planned series at once. In that sense, its ultimate purpose may be to serve as a warning of how not to approach filmmaking in future.

At the end of the day, the two competing visions at the core of the Star Wars sequels – JJ Abrams’ idea to re-tell Star Wars “greatest hits”, and Rian Johnson’s approach, trying to take the franchise to new and unexpected places – have merit, and each could have been spun out into a creditable series of films. Both concepts actually produced decent standalone pieces of cinema. But they completely failed to gel together and produce a cohesive story.

When film historians look back on the sequels, they will say that they managed to avoid many of the missteps that plagued the prequels, and that they are a much more watchable and enjoyable set of films as a result. What the sequel trilogy is not, however, is a single narrative. And it lacks many of the basic points that a story should have to reach the heights that the franchise aims for.

How are Rey, Finn, and Poe significantly different by the end of The Rise of Skywalker than they were at the beginning of The Force Awakens? Rey has learned the truth of her parents – after a deliberate false start. Finn… quit the First Order. But he did that in The Force Awakens and as a character hasn’t changed any since. Poe is still Poe… he’s a good pilot and a leadership figure. But none of them learned major lessons, suffered significant defeats, or appear to have grown. And from the original characters, Han was murdered by his son, and Luke and Leia both died performing the same Force power. Han had actually wholly regressed as a character by The Force Awakens, abandoning his family and the cause he’d fought for to return to being a smuggler. Leia was fundamentally no different than the last time we’d seen her, taking a leadership role in the new rebellion. Luke is the only one of the three to have had significant character development – all of which happened off-screen. He tried to raise a new generation of Jedi, and fell into a deep depression when he failed.

I know some fans were upset by Luke’s depiction in The Last Jedi, and I’d like to address that one day in a standalone piece as there’s too much to cover here.

But back to the characters – Kylo Ren is the only one of the new characters who goes through any significant arc. And even this is blighted by the different approaches from the different writers/directors. In The Last Jedi, after killing his father in the previous film he then turns on his master, Snoke, and kills him too, claiming the mantle of Supreme Leader for himself. He had made a commitment to the Dark Side and seemed beyond redemption, only to be redeemed anyway in the next film.

The sequel trilogy hasn’t really known whose story it was telling. The prequels were Anakin’s story. The originals were Luke’s story. And the sequels can be viewed as both Rey’s story and Kylo’s, but also as Palpatine’s thanks to his inclusion in The Rise of Skywalker and the revelation that he’s been manipulating everything and everyone from the beginning. For me this deus ex machina fails completely as any kind of passable story point. But given that it’s in there, it changes the whole nature of the trilogy, and of the “Skywalker Saga” as a whole. It should have almost certainly been titled the “Palpatine Saga” given his role in the story.

The only way to have avoided these pitfalls would have been an entirely different approach beginning immediately after Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012. By the time they’d decided to essentially tell three independent stories and string them together, the damage was done and it’s taken till now for the extent of it to be realised. JJ Abrams, given his “mystery box” style of crafting stories was always the wrong choice to helm this series. He was the wrong choice to tell the first part of a story because he offered a barebones setup with no forward plan, and he was the wrong choice to bring in to conclude it for the same reason. Rian Johnson, for all the criticism that came his way, made a brilliant film. But The Last Jedi only really works as a standalone piece, bookended as it now is by two JJ Abrams films.

Ultimately, responsibility lies with the senior executives who chose this approach. And while it might be tempting to say that Rian Johnson derailed the trilogy by taking the middle film in such a different direction, if there had been someone in overall creative control, that either wouldn’t have happened, or it would have happened in such a way that the final film could have followed on from its conclusion and still felt natural. As things stand today, the trilogy is a mess. It’s a mess in terms of story, and in terms of tone, and unfortunately it’s in a position similar to The Hobbit from the last decade – in that it’s considered mediocre at best, and not really a worthy successor to a franchise as iconic as Star Wars.

The Mandalorian – despite how I personally felt about it – has been received far better. As was Rogue One. So there is still life in the franchise thanks to these other projects, and as we move forward there will be the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and at least one new series of films which I hope will be more successful. Unlike with the prequels I’m happy to rewatch the sequels because, as I keep saying, they do make for great standalone films. But as a series, and as one single, cohesive story, they didn’t hit the mark.

The Star Wars franchise is the copyright of Disney and Lucasfilm. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Short Treks (Star Trek: Picard) review – Children of Mars

Short Treks (Star Trek: Picard) review – Children of Mars

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the Short Treks episode Children of Mars.

For those of you lucky enough to live in the United States, the latest episode of Short Treks – and the final episode of the current “season” – premiered yesterday. Before we jump into the full review, I want to address again the stupidity of keeping these episodes away from the majority of the Star Trek audience and fan community.

ViacomCBS needs to get as many people invested in the Star Trek franchise as possible. It’s one of their main properties, it’s one they’ve invested a lot of money in, and in order to ever see a return on that investment – which in the days of the “streaming wars” is no longer guaranteed – they need as many people on board as possible. As Star Trek: Picard premieres in two weeks, now is the time to start a huge push to bring in as many people as possible – both returning fans and curious newcomers.

Children of Mars serves as a “prequel” to Picard. Its story is inherently tied to the upcoming series, and Admiral Picard himself even features – albeit very briefly and only on a screen. So why is this episode, of all the Short Treks episodes, not available outside the United States? Here in the UK, and I believe in other countries and territories too, Amazon Prime will be broadcasting Picard. Why are they not also showing this episode of Short Treks? Children of Mars wasn’t the best Short Treks has had to offer this season – spoiler alert for the review below, I guess – but it is a part of the Picard story, and one which at the very least would remind people that the show is coming and get people paying attention. With only a short time left until Picard premieres, now is the time for ViacomCBS to pull out all the stops and get the word out about this series.

Short Treks as a concept was designed for this very reason – to keep the Star Trek brand alive in the public mind while the main shows were in between seasons. And Children of Mars is literally made to be a teaser to get people excited for Picard.

With CBS All Access in a difficult market, and running an in-house streaming platform being an incredibly expensive endeavour at the best of times, Star Trek since 2017 has only been financially stable thanks to outside investment – first from Netflix, who essentially paid for all of Discovery‘s first season, and later from Amazon Prime, who snapped up the rights to Picard. Star Trek’s international audience is big – at the very least equal in number to the audience in the United States, and quite possibly bigger. Yet despite all of these factors, Short Treks hasn’t been made available to us, and despite the fact that the sale of international broadcast rights has been essential to Star Trek’s continued production in the wake of CBS All Access’ shaky market hold at home, ViacomCBS treats its international audience like second-class citizens. They don’t care about us, yet without our viewership, the money they’ve been getting from companies like Netflix, Amazon, and other broadcasters like Channel 4 would dry up, leaving not only the Star Trek brand but CBS All Access itself in a very perilous position.

This remains a source of considerable disappointment.

But that’s enough about that for now. When I tracked down a copy, I sat down to watch Children of Mars, and finally, for the first time since Nemesis in 2002 and brief scenes in Star Trek in 2009, we were back in the 24th Century.

Utopia Planitia as seen in Children of Mars.

Not that that was immediately obvious. Short Treks has worked very well in the past by reusing Discovery‘s sets, but obviously for a short-format show there’s a limited budget and not much scope to build whole new sets. And in this case, that was painfully apparent. The building representing the school had a definite modern-day feel throughout, despite the CGI trappings of the 24th Century, and unfortunately that was noticeable to me. Star Trek has always had a distinctively futuristic aesthetic, and even though the look has changed and evolved significantly between its 1960s origins and its more recent iterations, there were not many moments where as the audience we were knocked out of the future because what we were looking at looked like something from today. Children of Mars absolutely has this issue, and it runs through the entire episode.

Indeed many of the aesthetic choices are strange by Star Trek standards. The school uniforms would be just as at home in the modern day, and had no Star Trek elements at all. We’ve seen countless civilian and non-Starfleet outfits in Star Trek, but none looked like this. Again, it was a modern day school uniform with a white polo shirt and red blazer. And maybe this is a minor point and up for debate, but would 24th Century schoolkids need big school bags like those depicted in the short episode? On its own I wouldn’t have noticed, but as an accessory to a bland, modern day school uniform on kids running around a perfectly nice but definitely contemporary building, it just added to the impression that this wasn’t the 24th Century after all.

There’s also the fact that a significant portion of the first half of the episode has its soundtrack taken over by a modern pop song, which again adds to the feeling that we’re watching something from our own time with a few bits of CGI tacked on.

Transport shuttle from Children of Mars.

It’s difficult to tell a compelling story in less than eight minutes, and I understand that for budget reasons we aren’t going to be running around a brand new, never-before-seen starship and interacting with dozens of characters. My expectations for an episode like this are kept in check. But even so, I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed.

It’s no criticism of the two young actresses, who gave fine performances, but they didn’t really have much to say, and all we really got for more than half the total runtime was a kind of overly-artistic, soundtrack-heavy sequence of two girls making their way to school. During which I just remember thinking to myself that “this doesn’t feel like Star Trek.”

So the basic premise is that there are these two girls who each have at least one parent who works at Utopia Planitia. If you don’t remember from previous iterations of Star Trek, Utopia Planitia is one of Starfleet’s biggest shipyards, and it’s on/orbiting Mars. It’s never fully shown on screen, but it has been referenced a number of times across several different series. Anyway, one of the girls is an alien – maybe from the same species as Tilly’s friend Po from the Short Treks episode Runaway, which fed into Discovery‘s second season. The other at least appears to be human.

I think we were meant to get the impression from the girls’ conversations with their parents that there’s some kind of class difference. One of the parents is an “anti-grav rigger”, and the other is a “quality systems supervisor”. It’s not clear, especially because both parents seemed to be dressed in engineering gear – complete with helmets – but I think we’re supposed to infer that Lil’s family is perhaps the Star Trek equivalent of the middle class, and Kima’s is working class. It seems like they were going for that, at least.

The majority of the episode doesn’t take place on Mars itself, as the girls seem to be living and/or going to school on another planet. I want to say on Earth, but this isn’t clear at all and realistically it could be any one of a number of Federation worlds. Lil’s dad tells her he’s too busy with work to come home, and she heads to school in a sulk, deliberately pushing Kima on her way to the shuttle, causing the latter girl to miss the shuttle. Kima eventually gets to school and the two girls continue their rivalry, silently bickering with each other until eventually a fight breaks out for which they’re both in trouble.

The way this was done was fine, it paints Lil as more of the aggressor than Kima, but ultimately they’re both responsible for continuing the feud and escalating it. As a work of characterisation it’s okay given the short timeframe and by the episode’s climax we know the girls greatly dislike one another.

As they sit a few metres apart in the school’s lobby area, either in detention or waiting for punishment, a couple of the teachers receive a message on handheld communicators. The message is soon broadcast all over the school, and shows a significant attack on Mars.

The stingray ships of the “rogue synths” attacking Mars in Children of Mars.

The vessels engaged in the attack aren’t any we’ve seen before, and it would be pure speculation to try to identify them. But hey, that sounds like fun so let’s do that. They’re described on-screen as “rogue synths”, but that doesn’t tell us anything of their origins. Purely from the design of the vessels, which had a kind of stingray-esque shape, my first thought was Klingons. I could see that shape of vessel being a natural progression from the Klingon ships of the 24th Century. But then we know Picard is going to deal with the Romulans, and that Utopia Planitia is building a fleet to help Romulans, so maybe it was a faction in the Empire opposed to Federation help. I could see vessels of that design being Romulan – again as a natural evolution from their 24th Century ships that we’ve already seen. I don’t think it was the Borg, as I can’t see them using ships of that type, nor carrying out an attack of this type. Their style has always been to assimilate instead of exterminate, so this wouldn’t fit. The other possibility is that these are Federation ships – or ex-Federation ships commandeered by a new breakaway faction like the Maquis.

The stingray ships, as I’m calling them for now, are by far the most interesting ship designs from Children of Mars. The Federation ships being built at Utopia Planitia – as glimpsed briefly at the beginning of the episode – looked decidedly 23rd Century to my eyes. They looked like ships better suited to the Discovery era than the Picard era, and considering it was all CGI I don’t really see why that had to be the case. For nostalgia’s sake they could’ve easily dropped a Galaxy-class or Excelsior-class ship in there instead of the Discovery-esque ships that we ultimately saw, as that would’ve avoided revealing too much about Picard-era ships if that was a concern for whatever reason.

Admiral Picard’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in Children of Mars.

The CGI work for the shipyard and later for the attack on Mars was decent. Not cinema-level, perhaps, but good enough not to be immersion-breaking. At the end of the day, that’s its basic job and it accomplished it successfully, so credit to the animators involved for that. The way that the stingray ships seemed to glide while in flight was great, their motion was clearly unlike any heavier-than-air craft we have in the modern day, so that was a high point of the animation for me.

Children of Mars will feed into the events of Star Trek: Picard, though exactly how is unclear. Short Treks has had a strange relationship with the main Star Trek shows thus far, with some episodes like Calypso and The Escape Artist being true one-shots that didn’t tie into anything else in Discovery, and others like Runaway where a main character crossed over. It isn’t clear yet how this story will affect Picard, and whether the two girls featured, or their parents, will make an appearance. If I had to guess I’d say probably not, and that this episode was just a vehicle to communicate the attack on Mars, but we’ll see in a couple of weeks I suppose!

Unfortunately, Children of Mars didn’t tell the kind of story that I personally find very interesting. The attack on Mars itself will be significant for Star Trek: Picard, and in that sense I’m glad to have seen it and been aware of it. However, the majority of the episode wasn’t about that. Indeed the attack sequence takes up little more than one minute in total. The bulk of the story is the tension between the two girls, which immediately evaporates when they realise what’s going on.

And as a story concept, that’s fine. It’s nice to see two people who weren’t friends come together in the face of a crisis. As they hold hands at the end of the episode, it marks the end of their childish fighting, and because of the severity of what’s happened, arguably the end of their childhoods too.

Perhaps a short format wasn’t right for this story, or perhaps the episode spent too long building up the enmity and fighting before getting to the resolution, because the girls coming together at the end and just letting go of all their anger toward one another didn’t feel like it was earned or that it was plausible. And I know what some people would say, that looking for plausible outcomes in a Short Treks episode is too much. But Children of Mars presented itself this way, as an artistic-inspired, character-centred story. So how the only two characters involved in that story go from enemies to friends in a single moment is the absolute crux of the story, and it’s the part we should rightly be focused on.

I get what the director was going for. This was a story that wanted to say “people can put their petty arguments and rivalries aside in the face of catastrophe, and come together.” It’s an inspiring message of the kind Star Trek has always been good at delivering. But something about the overly-artistic way it was presented, with practically no dialogue, a heavy soundtrack, and stylised camera work just didn’t work for me. And the ultimate pay-off when the girls realise that they have to come together didn’t work either as a plausible outcome. As an artistic outcome, and as a philosophical outcome, sure, it makes perfect sense. But if we’re to treat the girls as real characters inhabiting this fictional galaxy, I just didn’t feel that they had gotten to a place by the end of the episode that the attack on Mars would bring them together in that way. Did they even know each other had a parent stationed there? That detail would’ve built up the emotional bond between them, but because it wasn’t made clear on screen how well they knew each other or if they knew about each other’s family, that moment was robbed of some of its dramatic effect.

Perhaps I’m being overly critical of a short episode. But this is the way ViacomCBS chose to present the “prequel” to Picard. They didn’t have to do it this way, they could’ve told literally any story they wanted if all it had to do was be a vehicle for showing off that Mars was attacked in the years prior to Picard. That they chose this story about fighting schoolgirls was an artistic one, and I respect that. It just didn’t come across as a strong story on its own, at least in my opinion. The sequence where Mars comes under attack is worth watching for anyone intent on tuning in for Star Trek: Picard, but as I said it’s barely a minute long, and the rest of the episode, while interesting in concept, ends up being little more than fluff.

Maybe we’ll see these characters again, if they crop up later in Picard. At this point that’s not confirmed, but if they do then maybe the episode will get some more context and will be worth a rewatch at that point. I kind of hope that turns out to be the case, because I feel Children of Mars is quite a weak story when taken as a standalone piece.

The aesthetic and design issues certainly hampered it too, and it would have been better to redress a Discovery set for the schoolroom than use whatever contemporary building they ended up going with.

Both the starships being constructed and the transport shuttle to take the children to school were both very much in the same style as Discovery. While I like that look overall, it’s a 23rd Century look, is it not? We should surely have seen some kind of change between Discovery and the era of Picard, and if they didn’t want to go to the trouble of making all new models and designs, it would have been better in my opinion to reuse some of the TNG-era designs than fall back on those from the Discovery era. I think seeing a familiar starship or shuttle design would’ve also been a nice little wink to returning fans.

Unless Children of Mars has a more significant relationship with Star Trek: Picard than I’m assuming at present, I’m in no hurry to watch it again. It was okay, but it wasn’t Short Treks‘ finest offering by any means, and as both a tie-in to Picard and a first look at the 24th Century really since 2002, it was a bit of a let-down.

The Star Trek franchise – including Short Treks and Star Trek: Picard – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Children of Mars is available to stream in the United States on CBS All Access – but not anywhere else at time of writing. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Looking back at the Star Wars prequel trilogy

Looking back at the Star Wars prequel trilogy

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: Beware spoilers for the Star Wars prequels.

I’m not a prequels fan. I wasn’t when they came out and I’m not today. For all of the missteps made since Disney acquired Star Wars, the films that have been made since 2015 are superior in practically every way to the prequels. So if you’re here expecting me to say that the prequels were great, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Nor am I going to say that the sequel trilogy having problems – and it undeniably does – somehow makes the prequels better. That’s probably one of the more idiotic arguments people have put forward – “this is bad, therefore this thing that’s also bad is now good!” It doesn’t work that way.

Of course films are subjective – a film that works for one person doesn’t work for another, and that’s okay. We don’t all enjoy the same things and that’s fine. I’m not for a moment trying to argue that the prequel trilogy is objectively bad, just that it failed to win me over. In my subjective opinion. One of the biggest annoyances in the aftermath of The Last Jedi was the insistence by some fans that it was an “objectively” bad film. It wasn’t; they just didn’t like it. And that feeling is the same for me with the prequels.

Theatrical release poster for The Phantom Menace in 1999.

Nostalgia is a funny concept, and one that can be difficult for all of us, let alone big companies, to come to terms with. If someone (like myself) watched the original Star Wars films years before the prequel trilogy was even conceived, there’s a higher than average chance they’d be disappointed in the prequels when they came out. If someone’s first encounter with the Star Wars universe was the prequels, or they were very young when they first saw those films, chances are they enjoyed them much more. Particularly as kids, a lot of the finer points of cinematography and filmmaking go completely over our heads. That’s why a film like The Emoji Movie found an audience – it’s made for kids. And those kids who saw it and loved it at age six or eight will grow up regarding it as a piece of their childhood.

In that sense, we tend to put childhood memories on a pedestal. It’s just a natural way that human beings are, and it means that some legitimately bad stories we encountered before the age of, say, twelve or thirteen are forever cemented in our brains as a positive experience. This applies to films, books, television series, and even songs, and it’s related to the idea that we’re all defined to an extent by the era we grew up in and the trends that were evident at that time. There are many examples from my own childhood; silly little cartoon shows of the 1980s which I remember with incredible fondness. British children’s television shows in that era were – when looking at them with a critical eye – awful. Animation for cartoons was dire, with whole scenes often comprised of a single static image. Stories were simplistic, there was often only a single voice actor who would make no effort to differentiate characters, but because these are some of my earliest memories of watching television I hold such programmes as Mr Benn or The Adventures of Rupert Bear in high regard. Not for their actual value, but for what they represent to me as an individual. Their flaws, while I can spot them with a critical eye, melt away. And all that remains is the positive nostalgic feelings.

For many people, the same is true of the Star Wars prequels. They were young enough when first viewing them that the flaws in the films don’t register – only the positive feelings do. And when it comes to looking back and being objective, they’re incapable of doing so. Particularly in the wake of the disappointment many fans felt at the sequels – The Last Jedi in particular – they’re clamouring for more films like the prequels, and for the figurehead of their hate, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, to be replaced by Star Wars creator George Lucas.

But Lucas wasn’t a particularly good director or writer, especially when given the kind of leeway he got when making the prequels. His status as a legend in both the franchise and wider filmmaking industry scored him essentially free reign to do whatever he wanted when he started to make the prequel trilogy. This wasn’t the case when making the originals, and a group of incredibly talented creative people, including John Williams the composer, as well as editors, directors, script doctors, and so on all contributed massively to those films’ success. Lucas may have come up with this kernel of an idea, but to say he alone was responsible for Star Wars as we know it simply isn’t true. And when given free reign to tell his own story in the universe, he came up with a series of three films which undermined Star Wars’ classic villain, Darth Vader.

When we encountered Vader in 1977’s Star Wars (later retitled Episode IV: A New Hope) we knew all we needed to know. He was “more machine now than man”, he had a very powerful command of the Force, and he was ruthless. Seeing nine-year-old Ani, and trying to frame at least the first two films of the prequel trilogy to make him the protagonist detracted from that, in practically the same way as Hannibal Rising detracts from the character of Hannibal Lecter, or the 2005 remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory overexplains Willy Wonka. Some characters work because they’re mysterious. We didn’t need to know that Willy Wonka runs a sweets factory because his dad was a miserly old dentist. And we didn’t need to see Hannibal Lecter as a scared orphan – it took something important away from the character. And the same applies to Darth Vader. Seeing him as a bright-eyed child, with much of the film shot to make him as sympathetic as possible, robs Darth Vader of much of his imposing fear factor.

To explain why, let’s hop from one franchise to another and look at Star Trek: The Next Generation, and in particular the two-part episode Chain of Command. Capt. Picard has been captured by the Cardassians, who are trying to get him to reveal sensitive tactical information – using torture. It’s one of TNG‘s finest stories, but one moment in it is interesting, and it shows why too much backstory ruins a threat. At one point, days or weeks into his captivity, Picard is sat down with his torturer, Gul Madred (played expertly by David Warner). Madred tells Picard a little of his life growing up alone and in poverty on Cardassia, and Picard seizes upon it, proclaiming: “Whenever I look at you now, I won’t see a powerful Cardassian warrior. I will see a six-year-old boy who is powerless to protect himself. In spite of all you have done to me, I find you a pitiable man.” The circumstances are not the same – we’re the audience looking in, Picard is a character in the middle of it. But the effect is the same. Too much information detracts from a villain.

The creative decision to allow us, the audience, to see Darth Vader as a child, to tell his story as a young man, robs the character of a significant part of his imposing nature. He could still tear us apart with his lightsaber or choke us to death while not even being on the same starship, but all the while we’re still able to pity him, not be afraid of him. Lucas allowed the most significant element of his story’s most important character to be lost through this decision. Instead of wondering what horrors lay beneath the mask, or what twisted reasons Vader had for giving himself mechanical parts, we now know not only that he was a slave, that he grew up in poverty and cried for his mommy, but that underneath that scary suit is a burnt-out husk, and without the suit he’ll just suffocate and die. As he ultimately does.

The reveal of Vader in Return of the Jedi as a mere man, a fragile, badly wounded man kept alive by this suit we’d come to fear over three films, is robbed of all dramatic effect too. In Return of the Jedi, this powerful scene is rendered almost meaningless, because we’ve already seen what he looks like under there in Revenge of the Sith – which showed us more than we needed to see of his injuries. Vader’s transformation from imposing and frightening villain, redeemed through his one good deed, is complete. It began with seeing him as a child, it ran through his stint as protagonist, and finally seeing the painful, life-limiting injuries he had to live with, as well as the mental anguish he went through after the loss of his wife, change fundamentally how we see him. And it’s not a change for the better. Sometimes, less is more. The original film gave us everything we needed to know about Vader. The prequels told us too much.

While for me, the fact that the prequels seriously undermine Vader as a redeemable villain is their most unforgivable error, the prequel trilogy also throws up a huge number of other issues, some minor and some more major. Many of these are present simply as a result of the nature of prequel stories, and others are just a consequence of bad and/or lazy writing.

One of the biggest criticisms I’d have of the sequel trilogy is that it was split up. There wasn’t any attempt made to tell one single story over three films, instead the writing was split up between different writers and directors, with each given free rein to tell whatever story they wanted. The result is a jarring tonal mess. The prequels don’t have that issue, because generally George Lucas knew what story he wanted to tell. There were tweaks, certainly – Jar Jar Binks’ role was scaled back after the response to The Phantom Menace, for example. But overall, he knew what story he wanted to tell and he made three films to tell it. Problem is, the story was crap.

Politics can be exciting, and political dramas can be thrilling. At a fundamental level, the rise of Palpatine from being a senator from a backwater planet to Supreme Chancellor and then Emperor is the same as the rise of the scheming Frank Underwood in House of Cards – and watching how he manipulated circumstances to become Vice President and then President was both fascinating and exciting. So I disagree with those who say that all of the politics behind Palpatine’s rise is a fundamental flaw; if handled differently it could’ve been okay – though it’s not necessarily what fans wanted or expected from a Star Wars film.

Theatrical release poster for 2002’s Attack of the Clones.

The prequels didn’t fall flat for any one reason, though Vader’s characterisation is a significant issue all by itself. There were dozens of smaller problems that they created. Jar Jar Binks is mentioned frequently by detractors of the films, though he was really only a significant stumbling block in The Phantom Menace, being largely absent from the two other titles in the series. It’s understandable to see why he was disliked though: in a film that a lot of people had been waiting almost twenty years to see, there was this oafish character with a hammy performance that seemed to be aimed at children under five. Many of those kids, by the way, are the prequel films’ defenders today as mentioned above. Reaction to Jar Jar was so extreme that some fans even went so far as to edit him out of the film, cutting his scenes entirely in a reworked fan-edit of The Phantom Menace. But Jar Jar was there to give the film extra appeal to children, because Star Wars has always been – despite what many hard-core fans want to think – a family franchise. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they’re kids’ films, but they’re films which have always appealed to children and though there’s nothing wrong with adults enjoying them too, Star Wars wants to keep that child-friendly atmosphere. After all, it’s mostly kids who buy toys and other merchandise.

And that’s another big point. The original films had made a lot of money from merchandise, so when the prequels rolled around the expectation was that they’d do the same. Some creative decisions can be linked to this, such as the decision to have “Jedi robes” mimic Alec Guiness’ costume from the original film. That costume was clearly something fit for wearing in a desert environment, and wasn’t originally supposed to represent the robes of the lost Jedi order. If it was, why would Obi-Wan be so blasé about wearing it everywhere he went? If the Jedi are being actively hunted, any surviving Jedi would be taking steps to ensure no one knew of his or her identity. The fact that this doesn’t happen is an example of a prequel-created plot hole.

By going back in time to before the original films, the Star Wars prequels create a number of inconsistencies and issues for the franchise. This isn’t something unique to the prequels – the reveal that Darth Vader is Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back, and the semantic gymnastics required to get around that in Return of the Jedi (remember “from a certain point of view”?) was the first and biggest example. But the fact is that that reveal worked – it was dramatic, shocking, and for the vast majority of the audience who didn’t remember Ben Kenobi’s one line in the previous film about Luke’s dad, wasn’t in any way contradictory.

But it’s stated several times that Yoda is the Jedi who trained Obi-Wan. Yet in The Phantom Menace, we’re introduced to Obi-Wan Kenobi as a padawan apprentice – whose master is in fact Qui-Gon Jinn. Liam Neeson’s performance as Qui-Gon is one of the few high points of that film, so I’m not trying to detract from the character altogether. But it’s yet another example of the prequels taking what was already established and ignoring it. It would have been perfectly feasible to have Kenobi and Jinn as partners, teamed up in much the same way, and still establish firmly that Yoda was Obi-Wan’s master. Same story, no contradiction. One or two lines of dialogue and/or an extra scene would’ve established this and it would fit right in with canon.

Then there’s the inclusion of C-3PO and R2-D2. Obi-Wan spent a lot of time in the prequels with R2-D2 in particular, yet in A New Hope claims to have never seen the droid. That must’ve been depressing for poor R2. Not to mention that Anakin build C-3PO as a child. Okay, this one isn’t so much a plot hole as it is stupid.

Speaking of stupid – Anakin was conceived with “no father”, implying a Jesus-esque immaculate conception via the Force. This was vaguely tied into the “prophecy of the chosen one”, which is referenced several times across the three films, but ultimately serves very little purpose. Star Wars has, and continues to have, problems with the idea that people – good and bad – can come from ordinary beginnings. Anakin had to be a Force baby. Rey had to be a… well, spoiler alert for The Rise of Skywalker. Luke couldn’t just be a great Jedi, he had to be Vader’s son. And so on. Because both the immaculate conception and chosen one concepts were handled so poorly, it wasn’t even obvious that this was Lucas’ intention. The famous opera scene, where Palpatine tells Anakin the “story of Darth Plagueis the Wise” is supposed to imply that Plagueis created Anakin by “manipulating midi-cholorions to create life”. Except, we never met Plagueis, we never saw any of this happen, and no timeframe is hinted at by Palpatine in the scene. As far as I knew on watching the films, the Plagueis legend took place centuries earlier, and was just another way Palpatine could get his hook into Anakin to sway him. It was also never expressed that Palpatine was the one giving Anakin the visions of Padmé’s death – though again we’re supposed to have implied this somehow. Even though the film is shot in such a way that we don’t.

Some of these ideas actually have merit – particularly the concept that Palpatine was both giving Anakin the visions of his wife dying while at the same time hinting he knew enough about the Dark Side that he could save her. That shows Palpatine at his devious best, except it never fully made it to screen. It instead stumbled halfway onto the screen, then fell flat. And that’s a shame, because it’s one of the few good story points the prequels had.

A little while ago, I read an article where someone had suggested that the prequels would have been made significantly better if Revenge of the Sith had been all three films, and The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones were never made. This might actually be a decent idea, because it would have allowed some of the themes and concepts in Revenge of the Sith more screen time to be properly explored, instead of merely mentioned in passing or hinted at.

So those are some of the story threads that failed in the prequels. And by far, story and characterisation is where the prequels failed hardest for me. But on the production and filmmaking side, there are major issues too.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were when CGI was really becoming a big deal in filmmaking. But the CGI in those days was pretty rough, meaning a lot of films produced in that era that rely heavily on those kind of effects have aged very poorly – and didn’t even look great at the time.

This is arguably at its worst in Attack of the Clones, where legions of clone troopers are seen, rendered in CGI. And it looks like a mid-2000s video game. The CGI is unrealistic, far too “shiny”, and not at all lifelike. The fact that these films were largely shot on green screens with few practical effects has dated them horribly, and the aesthetic they present is poor by anyone’s standards. CGI today is still an impefect medium, but back then it was far worse.

Where the original films have a late-70s, early-80s aesthetic, complimented by some wonderful puppets and practical effects giving them a unique charm, the prequels just look like a low-budget fan film of the kind you’d find on YouTube by comparison. Even in The Last Jedi a little over two years ago, director Rian Johnson opted to use a puppet to represent the spirit of Yoda, believing CGI would look worse. And he was right – CGI would’ve looked worse that a physical puppet. In 2017. So you can imagine how much worse it would’ve looked in 2002 – but you don’t have to, just take a look at Yoda in Attack of the Clones.

2005’s Revenge of the Sith theatrical release poster.

One thing that the visuals of the prequels did get right, and I’m happy to give credit where it’s due, is in how the Republic ships, troops, and overall aesthetic is clearly linked to the later Imperial aesthetic that we know from the originals. The Republic had its own look, but it was clearly a predecessor to how Imperial things looked, and the attention to detail to get that right is impressive.

And there were some decent performances from the cast. All of the main cast, really. Part of the reason fans are excited for the Obi-Wan Kenobi spin-off television series is because Ewan McGregor was fantastic in that role. I’d argue he gave a great performance from three poor scripts, as did other actors like Liam Neeson, Christopher Lee, and even Hayden Christiansen, but the fact is that as acting performances they’re all decent. I don’t believe for a moment the prequels flopped on account of bad acting. Some of it was “hammy”, certainly, but that’s how the films were written.

Again, it’s worth crediting Lucasfilm in the prequel era with crafting and telling a single story. That’s absolutely how filmmaking should work, and the idea that writers/directors can “pass the baton” from one to another without even having the barest bones of a story structure to work from has meant that the sequel trilogy has not been the success it should’ve. The fact that I personally dislike the story of the prequels, and the plot issues it creates, as well as the overreliance on bad CGI, doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate that it was planned and told as one story – the fall of Anakin Skywalker.

I’d just argue that we didn’t really need to see his fall to know he’d fallen, nor to understand how he came to be redeemed in Return of the Jedi. Once it had been established that Luke was Vader’s son, his path to redemption existed and seeing how he came to be Vader rather than Anakin was an unnecessary addendum. It isn’t in any way necessary to watch the prequels, or even read a plot synopsis, to understand how anything in the original trilogy came to unfold. In fact, in many ways it detracts from that experience, particularly if someone new to the franchise were to choose to watch the prequels first. But again, that’s my opinion, and all of this is subjective.

At the end of the day, it’s easy enough to ignore or not watch the prequels and still enjoy Star Wars for what it is and what it represents. To me that’s a positive thing, because I’m not arguing that the prequels somehow “ruin” Star Wars. But it’s also a fairly damning indictment – three films telling the rise and fall of a main character are ultimately wholly unnecessary and contribute nothing to the story except exposition and background.

Star Wars was, for me, Luke’s story, not Vader’s. And overexplaining his origins, from his “virgin birth” and awkward childhood through his spell as the series’ protagonist, ultimately did more to detract from his character as an imposing but ultimately redeemable villain. By turning Vader into an object of pity, the prequels ultimate sin was in robbing Star Wars of its best villain and most mysterious Sith Lord.

The Star Wars prequel trilogy is available to stream now on Disney+, and may also be available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The Star Wars franchise – including The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith – is the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Mars by 2030?

Mars by 2030?

Dennis

It’s the start of a new decade! And as we enter the 2020s, “futurologists” and others are popping up, sharing their predictions for the technologies and events we can look forward to in the 2020s. One prediction that has cropped up on a number of lists is that we – and by “we” I mean humankind – will land at least one manned mission on Mars before the close of the decade.

Sounds amazing!

Except… haven’t we been here before? Every decade since the 1980s we’ve been promised the same thing, both by people who try to make a living predicting the future and by governments and space agencies themselves. So why hasn’t it happened?

Mars – the red planet. Are we going there soon?
Photo credit: ESA – European Space Agency & Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research for OSIRIS Team ESA/MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Money is of course a factor. NASA has seen its budget cut dramatically in the last few years, particularly by the Obama administration in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. When citizens are living on food stamps and unable to afford basic necessities like healthcare, it seems more than a little obscene to spend vast sums of taxpayers’ money – their money – on space exploration. Space exploration is seen by many as the ultimate luxury for a government, and is one of the first projects on the chopping block when financial savings need to be made.

The space shuttle programme is also a factor, and that ties into the financial issues mentioned above. The space shuttle was designed to be reusable – largely to help NASA cut costs. And overall that’s a positive thing, because it meant more manned space missions were possible during the shuttle’s lifespan. But the shuttle also stifled technological growth in the space industry. Because there was a reliable, reusable vessel to get humans and cargo into orbit, there was no need for a long time to upgrade it or design new spacecraft, and crucially, successive governments could get away with saying “no” when NASA wanted to undertake those projects, using the excuse that they already had a perfectly serviceable fleet of spaceships, so why pay to build new ones? Many people have said how the space shuttle’s limited cargo capacity has, in many ways, constrained the development of satellite technology by forcing practically every major satellite project during the shuttle era to fit certain size and weight requirements. But the shuttle also, in very real ways, slowed down the development of other spacecraft and other space technologies – including those that would have been required to get mankind to Mars in every decade since the 1980s.

Only six months ago we passed the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. And sadly, within a couple of years we’ll pass the fiftieth anniversary of the last manned moon landing too. In my lifetime, no human being has stood on the moon or even left Earth’s orbit, yet that would have seemed completely incomprehensible to people in the late ’60s and early ’70s when space exploration was reaching its peak. Back then, the idea that we’d have gone on to Mars and elsewhere seemed an absolute certainty.

So there are definitely practical considerations from here on Earth – both financial and political – as to why a manned Mars mission hasn’t yet happened. But there are other issues at play too, and unfortunately they may mean that Mars by 2030 just isn’t possible.

The longest ever human spaceflight (achieved by Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov in the early 1990s) is one year and two-and-a-half months, or 438 days. A mission to Mars, assuming the best possible launch window, would take at least nine months each way, plus a mission on the surface of three months or so, for an absolute minimum duration of 635 days – almost 50% longer than any other previous human spaceflight. And unlike a spaceflight to low Earth orbit, there’d be no prospect of resupplying a ship once it had left on its mission.

A human could absolutely survive for that long in space; there’s nothing to suggest that 438 days is the maximum a human body can last under those conditions. But the problem is that it isn’t just a case of being in space.

When astronauts return to Earth even after relatively short missions in low gravity, it can take weeks or months to adjust to being in gravity again. The reason astronauts are carried from their landing sites when they get back to Earth instead of walking is usually because they physically can’t, especially after months in space. When the Apollo astronauts went to the moon this wasn’t as much of an issue for two reasons – the moon’s gravity is about 17% of Earth’s gravity, and the amount of time they spent in space was only a few days. A mission to Mars gets neither of these advantages, meaning the first humans to land on the red planet after a nine-month-long flight might not even be able to stand up when they touched down.

Mars’ gravity is much stronger than the moon’s, at around 38% of that of Earth. And as we have already covered, the travel time to get there is measured in months, not days.

There’s also the logistics of creating a spacecraft that is capable of getting to Mars, existing as a home base for astronauts while they’re there, and is capable of getting home again. It would need to be a huge vessel – capable of housing the astronauts both in space and while on Mars, and carrying enough fuel and supplies to complete a mission of that duration. Remember that the International Space Station, as well as previous long-stay space stations in Earth’s orbit, were always able to be resupplied, even on short notice. That obviously isn’t possible for a Mars mission, meaning that any spacecraft headed there would have to be entirely self-sufficient.

Realistically that means a crew far larger than the three-person Apollo missions, as there would need to be specialist engineers on hand with the technical knowledge to perform repairs to any part or system of the ship, as well as at least two pilots who could make independent adjustments to the vessel’s trajectory as needed. The ship would also need a dedicated medical facility – and at least one doctor. That would be in addition to the scientists and geologists and microbiologists that would be at the core of the work the mission wanted to undertake. And each additional person requires extra food, water, and air, adding to the weight and size of the vessel, which in turn would need more powerful engines and more fuel.

Then there’s the problem of cabin fever, and the issues humans have when living and working in close proximity with one another for prolonged periods of time. On a Mars mission, there’d be no escape from your colleagues, and no privacy. When experiments have been conducted, putting a group of people in total isolation for a year or more, issues almost always emerge. One famous study that aimed to look at the effect of a long-term Mars mission ended with the “crew” having split into two factions that weren’t even on speaking terms. During the moon missions, real-time two-way communication was possible, albeit with a short delay. On a Mars mission, the distances involved mean that communication would only be possible in the form of recorded messages, and real-time conversations both with the space agency and with their friends and family wouldn’t be possible for the crew – further adding to their isolation.

The duration of the flight also causes another issue – dangerous levels of radiation. On Earth, and even in low orbit, Earth’s magnetosphere shields us from what would otherwise be fatal levels of solar and other cosmic radiation. After leaving the protection of this magnetic field, astronauts would be exposed to much higher levels of radiation than is safe, meaning any spacecraft has to find a way to offer protection from that. And while it’s accepted that the Apollo spacecraft were suitable for the short duration to the moon and back, a spacecraft built to similar specifications would not be good enough for a months-long mission outside of Earth’s protective magnetosphere.

Then there’s the concern of Martian microorganisms. One of the main reasons we want to go to Mars is to find out if it supports life – but what if it does? It wouldn’t be possible to create a sterile environment on the Martian surface for astronauts to live in, at least not without making the landing vehicle/home base significantly larger and more complex. So if there are microorganisms present, either fully alive or in some kind of suspended state, what would be the effect of interacting with them?

This was a concern for the Apollo missions, too, and there’s a famous photo of President Nixon with the Apollo 11 crew – while they’re standing at the window of an isolation chamber to keep them quarantined. The risk of contamination is significant, and exposing a human to what is literally an alien microbe could be harmful or even fatal. And while living on the surface of Mars for literally months, it would be very difficult to prevent that kind of contamination, if there’s anything of that nature on the surface at least.

The Mars Rover.
Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

So the question I have is this – is a manned mission to Mars genuinely practically achievable with our current level of technology?

It seems to me that we’re missing some key pieces.

The first is some form of artificial gravity, both for the spacecraft and to use while on the planet’s surface. There are some great theoretical means of generating artificial gravity, but none have yet been realised. And unfortunately many of our attempts in this area are hampered by a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of gravity itself – we simply don’t know exactly why gravity works the way it does, even though we’re fairly clear on the how.

Secondly, we really need a faster method of propulsion than we currently have. Partly this is to keep astronauts safe from both radiation exposure and the effects of low gravity, but also it’s a practical concern to prevent astronauts succumbing to cabin fever and avoiding the issues that can develop from living and working in close quarters. If the time to fly between Earth and Mars could be cut even in half, that would be a great first step.

Finally, we need to be able to build a spacecraft larger and more powerful than any we’ve ever constructed. It needs to be large enough to hold its crew, all of their consumables, and have the ability to land and take off from the surface of Mars. Taking off from Mars is an issue in itself – with Martian gravity being a significant hurdle. The spacecraft would need to be able to exist as a home base for astronauts while on the surface, and be shielded from dust storms known to plague the planet. The engineering task of building such a vehicle is enormous.

With all of the issues above taken into account, are we really on course to land on Mars in the 2020s? It’s not impossible, and there are some incredibly clever and outright brilliant people working on achieving precisely this feat. But until the ship is built and the astronauts are suited up and sitting on the launchpad ready to go, I’m going to remain sceptical. We’ve been here before, and previous promises of Mars missions have come to naught. There are huge issues that still need to be tackled to make it a reality, and while it’s definitely possible we’ll get there before 2030, I’m just not convinced yet that it’s a certainty.

Fingers crossed, though!

This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Unsolicited Star Trek pitches

Unsolicited Star Trek pitches

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: Beware of spoilers for Star Trek Discovery and practically everything else in the Star Trek franchise.

Welcome back! Last time, I talked about why I wasn’t keen on the post-apocalyptic setting that Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 is seemingly heading toward. And in the course of writing that article it got me thinking about what I’d prefer, and from there, what other settings the Star Trek franchise could use that might make for interesting stories.

This list isn’t even speculation, it’s purely fantasy. These are some of my own ideas for Star Trek that would take the franchise in a different direction. It was inspired by my concerns about Discovery Season 3, but it goes beyond Season 3 to look at other ideas as well. Like a lot of fan fantasies, some of these pitches wouldn’t have any real appeal beyond a small niche of Star Trek fans.

The list is broken into two parts. The first deals with alternative Season 3 ideas that Star Trek: Discovery could have chosen instead of the far future, and the second looks at a few other Star Trek series ideas that I think have some potential to be interesting.

Part I: Season 3 ideas for Star Trek: Discovery

Number 1: The 23rd Century, but with new crew members.

As Season 2 of Discovery drew to a close, it wasn’t at all certain that they were going to head into the future. The decision to do so was only cemented in the finale, leaving open the possibility that the USS Discovery could’ve remained in the 23rd Century. With Pike and Spock headed back to the Enterprise, there would be two openings for new cast members, and realistically I’d have liked to see two new permanent members added to the cast – with a view to having them stick around for future seasons.

Discovery has been, in many respects, a leaderless series. Michael Burnham is the protagonist, but her role across both seasons thus far has not been one of leadership, which has always been occupied by a Captain or Commander in other iterations of Star Trek. Gabriel Lorca was, at least for me, one of the definite high points of Season 1 – at least before his dramatic turn in his final episode, in which he became a one-dimensional, moustache-twirling pantomime villain. Lorca’s departure was an inherent part of Discovery‘s narrative in that season and was inevitable, but his loss did leave a void in the show, one which Capt. Pike – played so wonderfully by Anson Mount – stepped in to fill. But as with Lorca, Pike was strictly a one-season deal, and so we’ve seen two very different leaders come and go for the series.

Stopping the churn of characters, especially high-ranking characters, has to be something Discovery addresses going forward. One way to do so would be to promote a current cast member to the captaincy – most likely this would be Burnham, though how that would work from an in-universe perspective given her mutiny conviction would require explanation. Saru would also be a good candidate, and could be Star Trek’s first non-human commanding officer.

Alternatively an outside captain could be parachuted in, but after going through two captains in two seasons I think fans would be clamouring for some consistency at the top. New characters would be great though, such as a security officer to replace the departing Ash Tyler. It would also be an opportunity to get to know some of the secondary characters, like Detmer at the helm and Owosekun at operations, both of whom have had very little to say or do thus far. Seeing them both in their home environment would let us get to know them better than seeing them in a completely unknown future.

There was still scope for Discovery to tell interesting stories in the 23rd Century, and if the Control/Leland storyline had been concluded differently, there’s no reason why Discovery couldn’t be hopping about the galaxy with or without the Spore Drive on missions of exploration.

Number 2: Ditch Michael Burnham

Burnham has been Discovery‘s main character since it premiered – but as a protagonist she can be difficult to root for at times. It’s no criticism of Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays her very well, but Burnham’s Vulcan upbringing has left her with two of the least attractive Vulcan traits – a cult-like devotion to logic (or rather, her own interpretation of logic), and an aloof nature that can come across as arrogant. This isn’t helped by putting her in stories in which she, and she alone, is able to be the saviour of the ship and crew.

In The Vulcan Hello (the premiere episode of Discovery) her motivations for staging the mutiny are so poorly communicated to the audience, and her actions so incomprehensible, that on first viewing I genuinely thought the producers had pulled the ol’ switcheroo and were surprising us by making Burnham the antagonist of the series. Her storyline in that episode and the one that followed set up Discovery‘s whole Season 1, but it made no sense and has been a major contributing factor to how fans have come to view her character.

Star Trek series have never been primarily focused on one individual before – with the exception now of Star Trek: Picard, which kicks off in just three weeks. But every other Star Trek series has been about a crew, not a person, and losing or swapping out one individual shouldn’t bring the whole concept of the series crashing down. The crew of Discovery would cope without her, and one possible ending for Season 2 would’ve been to send Burnham and the data into the future, while Discovery and the rest of the crew stayed behind to have new adventures without her in the 23rd Century.

Getting rid of Burnham, and not replacing her with a like-for-like “main” character, would allow other members of the crew to shine, as we could spend more time with them. And whether they travelled into the future or not, I think that would be a net positive for the series, because as mentioned above, we still know very little about several of the main crew.

Number 3: Travel into the future – but only to the dawn of the 25th Century

As I wrote a couple of posts ago, I’m not convinced that having multiple timelines and realities on the go all at once is a good way to organise a franchise. If you’re trying to convince a friend to give Star Trek a shot, and you have to spend an hour explaining that Discovery is in the 33rd Century, Section 31 is in the 23rd Century, Picard is at the start of the 25th Century, and there’s a film coming out that’s in the 23rd Century – but a parallel universe – it starts to get so convoluted that it’s just offputting for newcomers. And as much as long-time fans might deride it, ViacomCBS needs new people to get on board if Star Trek is to remain profitable and viable into the future. So what better way to fix things than to bring as many of your shows as possible into the same time period?

If Discovery had to abandon its 23rd Century setting, this is by far the best option. By bringing Burnham and the crew into the same time frame as Star Trek: Picard there’s the possibility for characters, storylines, and themes to cross over, and for the franchise as a whole to build a solid foundation in this new era. Other series could take that foundation and build upon it, creating a new era of Star Trek with a 25th Century setting – in much the same way as The Next Generation did for Deep Space Nine and Voyager. And who would disagree that the 24th Century shows were Star Trek’s “golden age”?

Precisely because of their shared setting, having a similar aesthetic made sense. Similar visual effects, a similar level of technology, and the possibility for characters, factions, and storylines to cross over all contributed to those shows being Star Trek storytelling at its best. But instead of trying to recreate a formula that worked, ViacomCBS seem intent on splitting up all of their projects, even though they’re in production at the same time. To me that doesn’t make a lot of sense. The difference in how TOS and TNG looked was caused by the shows being produced 20 years apart, and the similarity in effects and technology in TNG, DS9, and Voyager was perfectly reasonable considering these shows were all taking place in the same era. But if Picard in the 25th Century looks the same visually as Discovery in the 33rd Century and Section 31 in the 23rd Century, the aesthetic of the shows becomes an issue – and people will be wondering how they all look the same and have the same level of technology when they’re supposedly taking place centuries apart.

Instead, how about this: something goes wrong during Discovery’s jump to the future, and instead of emerging in the 32nd/33rd Century, they end up at the beginning of the 25th. And who do they meet? Capt. Picard and his new crew, who bring them back to Starfleet for debriefing. Such a scenario would be easy to pull off with a little technobabble to explain how the time-wormhole collapsed.

Starfleet would be sure to find a use for the ship and crew, who would want nothing more than to get back to work. Having two series running in the 25th Century would also allow for more backstory – allowing us to catch up on even more of what’s going on in the galaxy, and because we’re seeing it through the eyes of newcomers instead of people who already live there, there’d be more excuses for exposition and explanation, perhaps allowing for a deeper dive into some of the events we’ve missed since Nemesis. If there were some kind of war or conflict, this would be a great excuse for Starfleet to be in need of every available vessel, again providing a reason for the Discovery to remain in service.

It would also allow for more Spore Drive-related adventures, which Season 2 mostly lacked. The Spore Drive as a whole has felt underused in Discovery, really just serving as a macguffin to allow for the jump to the Mirror Universe. Its potential is unlimited, and it would be interesting to see how Starfleet would react to its reemergence.

Number 4: The Borg

When we think about iconic Star Trek villains, the Borg have to be right up there as one of the best and scariest. And Discovery seemed, for a while at least, to be touching on the Borg in Season 2. Many fans speculated that the Control AI, with its nanobots and ability to take over (or “assimilate”) human bodies was somehow tied to the Borg, and the season could have ended as a Borg origin story.

If Leland/Control and Discovery were thrown backwards in time instead of forwards, we could have seen how the Borg came to be; how the technology of Control came to be used by another species or how Control took over another species and turned them into proto-Borg. I kind of like this one, because as a narrative device, the cyclical idea that Starfleet actually created its own worst enemy could be – if executed well – absolutely fascinating to explore.

This is pure speculation on my part, but at least part of me thinks that this may have been in the original story pitch for Season 2. So much of the Control storyline lines up perfectly with a Borg origin story that it hardly seems accidental. If it was part of the original premise, I wonder why they decided not to go down that route. As with the idea of leaving the 23rd Century, this concept was still valid right up until the finale, with the story in Season 2 being able to go many ways even that late. To me, that makes for good storytelling, and I can’t help but wonder how this alternate route would have worked.

The downside to the Borg idea is that overusing a classic villain is problematic. We’ve seen the Borg many times across Star Trek, and particularly toward the end of Voyager they had become stale. When a villain gets overexplained and we spend too much time with them, they can lose a lot of their fear factor, especially if our heroes come out unscathed time after time. Just look at the zombies in The Walking Dead – the concept is similar in that you have an enemy who massively outnumber our heroes, and who can grow in strength and numbers by forcibly turning anyone into one of them. Yet by the third or fourth season of The Walking Dead, the zombies weren’t scary any more, and the show has since focused much more on human villains. Nevertheless, it’s been more than fifteen years since the last Borg story in Star Trek, and there’s a case to be made that the time is right to reintroduce them.

Part II: Other Star Trek ideas

Number 1: A Deep Space Nine film or miniseries

In the finale of Deep Space Nine, Benjamin Sisko disappears into the realm of the Prophets, and the crew go their separate ways. Sadly, the losses of Aron Eisenberg and René Auberjonois in 2019 mean that the whole crew will never get back together, and that we won’t get to see Odo and Nog again, but we could catch up with Sisko.

Sisko did promise to return from the Prophets, and his return could be a great excuse to catch up with others on the DS9 crew, as well as to see the galaxy through the eyes of someone who’s been away from galactic events. I mentioned this above with one of my Discovery ideas, but using a returning character in this way really is a great storytelling device. It brings us as the audience up to speed without feeling like the explanations and exposition are unnecessary.

Unlike with Star Trek: Picard, which already has a second season on order, I don’t think there’s necessarily scope to turn a Sisko-helmed series into a full-blown multi-season show. Part of what Star Trek: Picard has to be careful of is not simply turn into TNG Season 8. While there’s nothing wrong with that as a concept, Picard is supposed to be a new story and has a new cast of characters. I’m excited to meet them and see what they have to offer, so the show has to strike a balance between looking back and moving forwards. A DS9 sequel would have to do the same, and that’s why a film or miniseries format would work better.

If the Star Trek franchise were producing all of its shows in the same time period, it would be easy for such a project as this to be a nice addition to other 25th Century Star Trek.

Number 2: A hospital ship

This is a series premise I’ve been thinking about on and off for years. Sort of a combination of Star Trek and medical shows like ER, this concept would take a medical ship (like Dr. Crusher’s USS Pasteur from All Good Things) as it travels around the Federation.

Unlike with real-world medical dramas, the series wouldn’t be constrained by real-world diseases, which would allow for a lot of creative freedom for the writers. I don’t mean Theme Hospital levels of silliness, but the conditions which afflict both human and non-human patients could be explored in detail. It would also be interesting to expand our understanding of many of the diseases mentioned on screen only in passing, as well as to learn more about medical equipment and procedures in the 25th Century.

If it were part of a broader franchise, again there’s the possibility for characters crossing over, and it would even be an option to have a former regular like Bashir or Crusher be a part of the show. Medical dramas are popular, and if a series like ER could run for fifteen seasons and still manage to be engaging for (most) of that time, I really feel like this concept could work in Star Trek too. It would be new enough to shake up the franchise by not simply being another exploration or “boldly going” show, but would be familiar enough with the starship setting to be appealing to fans.

Number 3: A series set on a colony

Deep Space Nine sought to break the Star Trek mould by being the first show not set on a moving ship. Thus far it’s the only Star Trek project to take this approach, but going a step further would be to set a series on a colony world. Not even in space, the characters would be firmly rooted to the ground, and we could see how a colony is established.

There are hundreds of possibilities for such a setting. If it were a colony on a disputed world, that could lead to tension with whichever other power wanted the planet. If it were a colony far away from the nearest starbase, there’d be a sense of isolation among the crew. And we’d get another opportunity for Star Trek to show off non-Starfleet personnel – something the franchise hasn’t always done very well.

When it came to the character of Jake Sisko in Deep Space Nine, it always felt like the show’s producers didn’t really know what to do with him. With Nog becoming the young person who went to join Starfleet, Jake was kind of in limbo much of the time and many of his appearances didn’t do much to show what civilian life was like in the 24th Century. Not to say that Jake should’ve enrolled in Starfleet – that wouldn’t have been right for his character, and making him Wesley Crusher 2.0 wouldn’t have made Deep Space Nine any better.

But civilian life in Star Trek is something we don’t see much of, at least not human civilian life. Quark showed us a lot about the Ferengi, but other non-Starfleet characters, like Kes and Neelix, were still crew members on a Starfleet vessel and thus had roles to play in that environment. It would be interesting to see a colony on a planet where there were perhaps one or two Starfleet personnel but everyone else was a civilian. The Star Trek galaxy has room for so much more than just Starfleet ships having adventures, and a colony could be a good setting for telling a long, serialised story. I know some people have talked about a series on Earth, perhaps at Starfleet Academy, but to me a colony has more potential to tell interesting and different stories.

Number 4: Something set between The Undiscovered Country and The Next Generation

This is less a series premise than a time period, but I’ve always been curious to see more of this eighty-odd year span. We’d see, for example, the Romulans going into isolation, as well as the growth in relations between the Klingons and the Federation in the aftermath of the Khitomer Accords. It would also be interesting to see first contact with some species we’ve only seen later, and it would be an opportunity to look at relations between the Federation and other Alpha/Beta Quadrant powers like the Tholians or Breen, and see how things progressed with them.

I know I’ve said before that I prefer Star Trek to look forward not back, and that the franchise should try to set its shows in the same era. Both of those are still true, but if a prequel (or mid-quel) is on the cards, this could be a fun era to look at in more detail. Plus it would be an excuse to revisit the uniforms of that era, which are among Star Trek’s best.

So that’s it.

As I said last time, it’s easy for someone to criticise and tear down, but much harder to come up with new and interesting ideas to create something. I hope that at least some of these concepts were of interest to you.

The Star Trek franchise, including all shows and films mentioned above, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Is A Post-Apocalyptic Setting Right For Star Trek?

Is A Post-Apocalyptic Setting Right For Star Trek?

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Discovery and Short Treks.

The trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIKAkge9Trg

In both the Short Treks episode Calypso and in the trailer for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Discovery, we are given the impression that all is not well in the Star Trek galaxy. In Calypso, main character Craft tells the AI Zora of a war he’s involved in, and he later needs to use one of the USS Discovery’s shuttlecrafts to get home – his pod being slower and less advanced than a thousand-year-old shuttlecraft says a lot about the state of technology in this timeline.

Whether or not Calypso is fully canon, or whether its timeline has changed, and whenever it’s supposed to be set, if the trailer for Discovery Season 3 has correctly portrayed the environment they’re heading into and isn’t an elaborate deception, it seems that whatever era the ship and crew ultimately arrive in is also one where war and disaster have occurred. But is this kind of post-apocalyptic setting right for Star Trek?

The last few years have seen a glut of shows, films, games, and books choosing a post-apocalyptic environment. And many of these have been great – I Am Legend is a great film, The Last Ship is a great television series, and The Last Of Us is a great game, just to give three examples. Major franchises like The Walking Dead have helped popularise this sub-genre, and it’s become a popular choice for a lot of storytellers.It’s easy to see why – this kind of setting lends itself to high-stakes drama, and forcing characters to make life-or-death decisions. When survival is at stake, characters need to step up in order to just make it through the day, and that can be a strong driving force in any narrative when it’s done correctly.

The kind of post-apocalypse we seemed to glimpse in the trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 3 might not quite be at that same level, where it’s day-to-day surviving at the end of the world, but it certainly seems as though something absolutely massive has happened since we last saw the galaxy in the 2380s. Whenever the USS Discovery emerges from the time-wormhole it entered at the end of Season 2, it seems they’re heading into a challenging environment. In the trailer, we saw an official who seemed to represent the Federation saying that Discovery was his last hope, and unfurling a flag with a Federation crest that seemed to be missing many stars – perhaps indicating the loss or secession of planets from the alliance. The Starfleet badge Burnham was wearing was referred to as a “ghost”, and Saru, in a pep talk to the crew, tells them they need to “make the future bright”. All of which strongly imply that the Federation in this era is in serious trouble – if it still exists at all.

But what’s just as telling from the trailer is what we didn’t see. Where was all of the new technology that should surely have been invented by then? At one point, Burnham and a new character are walking across a landscape – why could they not transport from point to point like we’ve seen across Star Trek (and especially with the “transwarp beaming” concept from the Kelvin films)? The weapons used in the trailer also seem to be little more than energy weapons already known to exist, and we didn’t see any new starships or stations or anything that indicated the galaxy has advanced significantly. In a few episodes of Star Trek in the past, particularly in Voyager and Enterprise, we’ve had glimpses of the Federation in the 29th and 30th Centuries – and it seemed not only to be doing great but to have time-travelling starships, and that time travel was so common a concept that it was taught in schools. In short, where is the technology?

Wars and conflicts, especially long ones, can be devastating. But from war, technology often emerges. In the real world, as destructive as WWII was, it led to the development of such things as rockets and computers. So even if the Star Trek galaxy plunged into war in the 32nd or 33rd Centuries, we should still see at least the level of tech they’d got to before the war, and perhaps the emergence of new tech as a result of research during it. The fact that nothing of the sort was in evidence is interesting, and that’s why I’m calling the setting “post-apocalyptic”. At the end of the day, if people of the 32nd or 33rd Centuries are living with a 23rd Century level of technology, that would be a huge backwards step for them, even if it still looks cool and futuristic to us. If we were sent back technologically to the 1950s or 1960s, that would look incredibly impressive to a Victorian, but would feel apocalyptic to us. It’s that principle that feels like it’s in play with Discovery.

Regardless of the exact details of how far technology has advanced or regressed by the 32nd/33rd Century (assuming that’s when Discovery is going to be set – see my previous article for my thoughts on that) it certainly seems from the trailer that something big has happened. The Star Trek galaxy and the Federation are not where we would have expected them to be. Is the Federation in decline? Has it broken up altogether? It’s not clear, but it is definitely facing huge difficulties if the “best hope” they’ve had in years is a 930-year-old ship and crew.

In a media landscape dominated by war and aggression, Star Trek has always shown a more positive vision of the future. Where The Terminator and The Matrix showed us rogue AIs killing humanity, Star Trek showed us Data, the friendly android. Where Star Wars had an evil empire ruling the galaxy with an iron fist, Star Trek had an enlightened democratic society. And where Twelve Monkeys and 28 Days Later had humanity on the brink of extinction, Star Trek showed humankind flourishing, having overcome countless obstacles. As Trip Tucker puts it in Enterprise: “war, disease, hunger – pretty much wiped them out in less than two generations.” This, to me, is the core of what makes Star Trek what it is. And I don’t necessarily think that gels with a post-apocalyptic setting.

Partly, Star Trek’s optimism is a product of its 1960s origins. At the height of the Cold War, there was the legitimate possibility of nuclear war causing the end of human civilisation, and with TOS premiering a mere four years after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world as close to that fate as it arguably ever came, the need for optimism was great. But that optimistic approach has been a constant thread running through the franchise ever since. It’s been the one consistent thing in all of Star Trek, even at the height of the Dominion War in DS9, humanity was still there, and Earth was still a paradise worth fighting for. The drama in that story came from the existential threat to the optimistic future humanity had built, not from that future already being torn down. That’s what made it work as an exciting narrative within the framework of Star Trek’s optimistic take on the future.

A post-apocalyptic setting is, by its very nature, the exact opposite. Where Star Trek has presented an optimistic vision of humanity overcoming obstacle after obstacle, any post-apocalyptic setting says that the obstacles got the better of us. We went up against something – be it a disease, technology, warfare, etc. – and lost. Star Trek says that whatever life threw at us, we came out on top. That cannot be true in a post-apocalyptic setting, where we will have lost.

This represents a fundamental change to the nature of storytelling within the Star Trek franchise, greater than arguably any change made thus far. Enterprise took the franchise backwards in its own timeline, the Kelvin films were not only an alternate reality but changed the storytelling to be more action-heavy. But even these are not as major as changing the entire underlying premise of a positive vision of humanity’s future. In both 2009’s Star Trek and Enterprise, as well as the Dominion War arc of DS9 mentioned above, the basic concept that humanity had not simply survived but was thriving in the future was unchanged. The drama, tension, and narratives all came from challenges humanity faced within that framework, not that we’d failed or that something had beaten us.

Such a significant change risks Star Trek losing its uniqueness and, from a commercial point of view, one of its key selling points. Without its positive vision of humanity’s future, a fundamental part of Star Trek is missing – and without it, will the franchise still work? If Star Trek loses the one thing that makes it stand out, and continues its transition to primarily action-oriented stories, it risks becoming just another work in the generic sci fi and/or post-apocalyptic genres, losing its uniqueness and fading into the mass of action/sci fi franchises which already occupy that space.

Some fans would claim that this has already happened, due to a combination of the Kelvin timeline, Discovery, and even Enterprise taking the franchise to different places and by modernising the storytelling. But that alone isn’t enough to fundamentally change Star Trek. And at the core of Discovery and the Kelvin films, that optimism and positive outlook was still present, even if it wasn’t front-and-centre in the way it had been in prior series.

Taking a bleak setting, where the Federation is shattered and life for humankind is going backwards just doesn’t feel like Star Trek. Perhaps it could be a solidly entertaining sci fi series, but one of the core tenets of Star Trek would be lacking, and I’m certain that would be noticeable.

There’s another problem with this post-apocalyptic theme, too. As things sit right now, Discovery is the only Star Trek series taking place in that time period. Picard and Lower Decks both take place after Nemesis, and the Section 31 series is assumed to take place in the era Discovery left behind. With a second season of Picard on order now, all of these series will basically be prequels to Discovery – and if we see Picard and his crew fighting for the future of the Federation, when we know that actually the Federation has no future because we’ve seen in Discovery that things go very, very wrong, there’ll be a sense of “well what’s the point of this?”

I wrote previously how splitting Star Trek up into three timelines and two parallel realities is a bad decision for a franchise. With three live-action series in production practically simultaneously, there’s just no way to make them line up, let alone allow for any crossover of characters, plot points, and themes. It will make it harder for fans of one show to jump across to another, and will put off new fans altogether at a time when the shaky nature of CBS All Access in the midst of the “streaming wars” means they need those people more than ever. And having one show set in a future that’s potentially saying that everything that happens in the other shows comes to nothing is bleak, depressing, and offputting for both fans and casual viewers alike.

Now that all that’s been said, it should be pointed out that the trailer for Discovery‘s third season may be deliberately misleading, having been cut in a certain way. There are other explanations for what we saw in the trailer that don’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that we’re looking at a fractured Federation and a post-apocalyptic setting. And we won’t know for sure what’s in store until we see Discovery on our screens later in the year. But of all the seasons of Discovery so far, this is the one that has me feeling the most nervous. I want the show to succeed because I want the franchise to succeed so we can continue to enjoy new stories in the Star Trek galaxy for a long time to come. I’m just not convinced that this is the way to do it. And by abandoning one of the core parts of what makes Star Trek, well, Star Trek, the producers are taking a massive risk that could backfire.

As I’ve said several times before, I dislike the expression “nobody asked for this”. And there are two reasons for that: firstly, plenty of shows and films that “nobody asked for” actually turn out to be phenomenal. And secondly, because in a lot of online fan communities, the things that people are actually wanting and asking for are absolute crap. So in principle, the fact that I wouldn’t have chosen this route for Discovery and the Star Trek franchise doesn’t necessarily make it invalid or mean it will be bad. And I hope to be pleasantly surprised, because I’m always hopeful that new Star Trek will be enjoyable. But at the moment, I’m just not convinced it’s the best idea.

So what would I have rather seen? Anyone can complain and whine about what they don’t like, but not enough people are proactive in putting their own ideas forward for what they’d do instead. It’s easy to be negative and tear down someone’s ideas, but it’s much harder to imagine and create something.

So stop by next time and I’ll throw some concepts your way, both for Discovery and for the Star Trek franchise in general.

The Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery, is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Star Trek: Discovery is available on Netflix in the UK and around the world, and on CBS All Access in the United States. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Season 3 of Discovery – when is it set?

Season 3 of Discovery – when is it set?

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Trek Discovery and Short Treks.

At the end of Season 2 of Discovery, Burnham led the ship and crew into a time-wormhole. For better or worse, they’re leaving the 23rd Century behind and heading into the future – but when, exactly? And how will it affect the rest of the Star Trek franchise now that there are other series joining Discovery on the roster?

Let’s start off by looking at the currently-announced Star Trek series and their supposed timeframes in the Star Trek universe.

Firstly we have Star Trek Picard, taking place in approximately 2399, as the 25th Century dawns. Then there’s Lower Decks, set in the 2380s. Next we have the Section 31 series, which is supposed to be set in the mid-23rd Century, possibly overlapping with TOS. Already that’s two very different time periods, and three concurrent timelines running within the Star Trek franchise. And in addition to these prime timeline settings there’s the alternate reality, where a fourth film is currently in pre-production, further complicating matters.

If we’re to believe the ending of the second season of Discovery, the ship and crew have travelled into the far future – the late 32nd or early 33rd Century, depending on how literally one takes “950 years” when it’s spoken in Discovery Season 2. So that would a third distinct time period, and one which would potentially undermine every other Star Trek series currently in production, as well as making the franchise overly complicated for newcomers.

CBS All Access, if it’s going to survive as a platform as the “streaming wars” ramp up, needs to bring in as wide an audience as possible. Realistically, most people who tuned in for Discovery are not hard-core Star Trek fans. They’re not the kind of people who argue about the length of time for subspace messages to travel from Earth to the Borg Collective in the 2060s, or who wonder why Tom Paris’ dad had a picture of him with him combadge on the wrong side framed on his desk. Most folks are casual viewers, tuning in to see an episode then moving on and doing other things. Having three entirely different time periods for one franchise risks being confusing and putting off those casual viewers who make up the bulk of any television audience.

In addition, setting Discovery in the far-future will adversely affect all the other Star Trek series currently in production – by essentially turning them into prequels. As a concept, some prequels can work. Rogue One, for example, is a great film and a direct prequel to the first Star Wars. But many prequels are robbed of a significant amount of tension and drama because we already know the outcome. In Enterprise‘s third season, the crew were facing down an existential threat to the Earth in the form of the Xindi’s planet-destroying superweapon. But having seen Earth in the 23rd and 24th Centuries, it was already known to most of the audience that there was no real danger. Thus, the storyline – while still arguably one of Enterprise‘s best – wasn’t as dramatic or edge-of-your-seat exhilarating as it could’ve been if an identical story had been made as a sequel set after Star Trek Nemesis.

By moving Discovery to a far-future setting, in which some form of galactic government and humanity still exist, any significant, galaxy-ending threat in Picard, Lower Decks, or the Section 31 series immediately loses much of its drama in the same way as the Xindi story. It constrains the direction of any future series, because we already know what direction the galaxy is headed. How we get there might be interesting – though Discovery will be under immense pressure to explain much of that backstory itself – but when the destination is known there are only so many options for the journey to take.

Unless the plan is for all of Star Trek to quickly shift to a 33rd Century setting as well, leaving behind almost everything we’ve known thus far, it seems like a bad storytelling decision – one which is sadly motivated by the vocal minority of fans who disliked Discovery‘s place in canon. And trying to run a franchise with three different timelines all running simultaneously will be a daunting task for Alex Kurtzman and others, not to mention that it precludes the possibility of cameos and crossovers.

As Deep Space Nine was getting established early on in its run, there were several crossovers with The Next Generation, which was also on the air at the same time. And Voyager also brought in settings, concepts, and characters from TNG and DS9. Those three shows all overlapped and all shared a single timeline, making it easy for fans to jump between series without getting confused, and with the ability to bring across even major characters like Worf. Aside from a dwindling number of fans who love only TOS, I think most people agree that the TNG era – including DS9 and Voyager – was the “golden age” of Star Trek. Current and upcoming series are trying to reach and surpass those heights, but may find themselves hampered by the decision to split up the timelines.

One of the biggest things getting people excited for Star Trek Picard are the cameos from returning main characters. And this isn’t something exclusive to Star Trek, either. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, crossovers and character cameos are a big deal, and that franchise is arguably the most successful in recent history. By having practically all of its titles in one timeline and one setting, Marvel’s superheroes can cross over from film to film, and fans can skip an entry and still be able to largely follow what’s going on without having to be brought up to speed. I hadn’t watched most of the films preceding Avengers Infinity War and Endgame, but I could still follow what was going on because it was familiar. A casual Star Trek fan who enjoyed Discovery trying to jump into Lower Decks might find themselves confused by the change in timelines, and that might be sufficiently offputting to stop watching. Having to have a chart or graphic to explain where each new series fits in the timeline means that the whole thing is convoluted – and that absolutely will put people off.

So those are the two biggest issues which stem from Discovery heading into the far future: the overly-complicated timeline situation, and the fact that any prequel series potentially loses a portion of its dramatic effect.

The solution is complicated, and would require a either a retcon of parts of the ending of Season 2, or yet another time travel story. So then, either the USS Discovery travels into the far future, then somehow comes back to the 25th Century, or it never travels into the far future at all. The latter is by far the more preferable outcome, as it would allow the series to tie in with Picard, and any future series and films set in that era. Star Trek should be aiming to bring its series together into one single timeline, and the ending of Discovery‘s second season actually gives them a great way to do so.

Instead of travelling 950 years into the future, the USS Discovery would emerge in the Picard era, perhaps in an area of space far away from the Federation or where Federation jurisdiction is in question. Nothing from the Season 3 trailer that premiered a few months ago is contradicted by a setting like that, and in my opinion it would allow for future Star Trek shows to work better as one single franchise, with related – if separate – stories. As things stand, the franchise is fractured by the huge gaps in its timeline between series, and aside from the briefest of references it won’t be possible to have any crossings over.

It would be easy to explain, as well. The Red Angel suit and/or Discovery herself malfunctioned, causing the time-wormhole to collapse before they had exited, thrusting both Burnham and the ship into the early 25th Century. That whole situation could be cleared up inside of the first ten minutes, and whatever we saw in the trailer could just as easily be taking place around the same time as Picard.

Part of Discovery‘s problem has always been its place in canon. I mentioned before the vocal minority of fans who’ve taken it on themselves to be hate mongers of the series and everything about it, but the show itself has provided them the ammunition. The silly thing is that there was no reason to make it that way – nothing about the first two seasons of Discovery would have changed if it were a sequel series, aside from a handful of TOS-era characters. The Mirror Universe plot would have been fine, either by saying the Terran Empire had reformed after the events of DS9 or by setting it in a different parallel reality. And the time travel/Red Angel plot would’ve worked too, and there’d have been no reason to end it by sending the ship away.

In a similar way to how Disney and Lucasfilm have approached the Star Wars sequels, it seems from the way Discovery and the other new Star Trek shows have been rolled out that ViacomCBS hasn’t had a consistent approach, nor really had any idea of what direction to take the rejuvenated franchise. The result in the case of the Star Wars films has been a failed prequel, a complete mess of a trilogy lacking a cohesive story, and one standalone film that was brilliant almost by accident. I hope the same fate isn’t in store for Star Trek, or the franchise could disappear just as quickly as it was renewed. At the end of the day, ViacomCBS brought Star Trek back for basically one reason – it was the biggest property they owned with the best name recognition, and they wanted to launch their own version of Netflix to try to get a piece of the streaming action. But if CBS All Access continues to struggle (at this point it’s not clear whether it’s actually been profitable or has a pathway to becoming profitable) there’s no reason for ViacomCBS to keep making new Star Trek. After all, what would be the point?

The Short Treks episode from its first season, Calypso, comes into play when talking about the direction Discovery could and should go.

Calypso is set after the USS Discovery has been abandoned for almost a millennium, and a human character – or at least, someone we assume to be human – comes aboard. Discovery’s computer has evolved into a full artificial intelligence, complete with emotions, but we don’t learn the stardate or exactly when it’s supposed to take place. If Discovery sets its third season in the 33rd Century, 1,000 years later would be the 43rd Century, which would set Calypso far beyond anything we’ve ever seen in Star Trek. And that still could be its setting, there’s nothing to say that doesn’t work in the context of Discovery setting itself in the far future. But it was interesting that this episode premiered just prior to the season where the USS Discovery and her crew also end up further ahead in the timeline from anything else we’ve seen before. Some people have suggested a connection, or that the galaxy we glimpsed in Calypso is the one Discovery will enter in Season 3.

There are some superficial similarities based on the trailer – both settings exclude Starfleet and suggest that the Federation isn’t present, both feature humans who are at war or in conflict, and both suggest that the level of technology present aboard Discovery is either roughly equal to that which exists in the future or is perhaps even something future people would covet. So is Discovery‘s third season perhaps in the Calypso timeline, and if it is, how would Calypso itself be explained given that the USS Discovery was abandoned? There are a lot of loose ends to tie up there.

It seems to me that at the time Calypso was being made, Discovery‘s future was in jeopardy, or at least in doubt. This would explain why Calypso exists as an epilogue – almost certainly one to an alternate ending for Season 2 where the ship is abandoned. If that had been one option the writers were considering, Calypso makes perfect sense. As things stand now, it’s a bit of an outlier.

I really feel that bringing together Discovery and Picard somehow is a great option for Star Trek, and because of the nature of time travel stories it would be possible to do so in a convincing way that doesn’t feel too forced. Discovery has been a great reboot for Star Trek on television and it deserves more success than it’s arguably had thus far. But the time has come for Star Trek to stop looking back at its own past and do what it’s always done best – press ahead into the future. And if the future is the Picard era – which makes the most sense – then finding a way to tie Discovery to that is what needs to happen.

Whether I can call it a “theory” or not is questionable, because at the end of the day the most likely outcome is that Discovery does what everyone has said it will do and head into that far future setting. But my hope and/or my preference would be that it doesn’t. I don’t think it necessarily needed to leave the 23rd Century, and keeping it in that same setting would have allowed for some crossover with the Section 31 series. But if it has to leave and go into the future, ending up around the time of Picard just makes so much more sense.

If we think about technological progress in the Star Trek galaxy, in roughly 200 years we’ve gone from the tech available on the NX-01 Enterprise, with limited warp speeds and basic weapons, through Kirk’s time and greater exploration of the Alpha Quadrant, into the 24th Century with holodecks, slipstream drives, and the rollout of time travel. The level of technological change in 200-odd years is massive. Representing on-screen the level of change between the 24th and 33rd Centuries will be a huge challenge, and if the tech available to future Federation citizens in the 33rd Century looks oddly identical to that of the Picard era – and thanks to visual effects it will at least look similar – then that will have to be explained somehow. And from the trailer, it looks like Discovery is launching into an almost post-apocalyptic setting… that’s one way to explain it. But is it a good way to explain it? I don’t know. I’m not convinced post-apocalyptic Star Trek is what I want to see, and at the end of the day all of this speculation and hope is down to that fact. If Discovery couldn’t continue in its 23rd Century setting, then at the very least I’d much rather see it connect with Picard than try to explain why the future is so grim and technology has stagnated.

Whether it happens or not, I don’t know. I doubt it, but I still think that putting Discovery in that era gives the show and the franchise more options and better options than going such a long way into the future, beyond everything we’ve seen.

I had more to say on the potential for a post-apocalyptic setting, but I’ll save that for next time.

Live Long and Prosper!

As a final note, I just want to say that more Star Trek is always better than less or none, and whatever Discovery does and wherever it goes, I will always tune in to see what’s happening. As a fan, I’ll always want to see more and spend more time in that world.

The Star Trek franchise, including Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and Short Treks, are the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

My biggest pet peeve in fiction

My biggest pet peeve in fiction

Dennis

One short section of this article contains spoilers for the new Star Wars film, The Rise of Skywalker. This section is clearly marked, so if you don’t want it spoiled please skip those two paragraphs.

I started writing an article discussing the various issues that prequels tend to have. But the bulk of it ended up being about one particular topic, so I decided to rework it into its own standalone piece.

When a franchise and the world it inhabits are new, we as the audience – whether we’re readers, viewers, listeners, or players – are learning about the setting just as much as we are about the characters. What factions are in play, who owns what fictional corporation, who’s the current king – hundreds of little pieces of background story or lore come together to build up that world in our minds, and believing in that world for the duration of the story is a key part of suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, in essence means that as the audience, we put our knowledge of the real world as well as our logic and critical thinking to one side for the sake of enjoying the story. It’s a phrase which explains the basics of how we can take seriously a story about wizards and magic spells, or spaceships and aliens, when none of those things exist in our daily lives. Being able to suspend our disbelief – that is to say, to give a free pass to the illogical and the unreal for the sake of a story – is a key part of how we, as human beings, engage with fiction. It applies to children watching My Little Pony and it applies to literature professors reading War and Peace. It’s a fundamental part of human imagination, and without it fiction could not exist as we know it.

One major part of world-building in any fictional setting is the establishment of fundamental rules about how things work. In the Star Trek series, for example, starships are powered by dilithium crystals, which allow them to travel at faster-than-light speeds. In Middle-earth, wizards can perform spells and there are a variety of sentient non-human creatures. Star Wars has the Force and hyperspace, and even a cartoon like Phineas and Ferb establishes early on that it’s possible for its protagonists to invent and engineer massive projects. In each of these cases, something about the setting has been established in the mind of the audience, and we accept it in the context of our suspension of disbelief.

When any fictional world has established its ground rules, it’s horribly jarring for the audience when it subsequently breaks those rules. Internal consistency is incredibly important to maintaining suspension of disbelief, and a failure to abide by the rules of the road in a fictional setting is immersion-breaking.

Prequels quite often fall victim to this, but it isn’t solely a prequel problem.

It’s obviously very tempting for writers and producers, when dealing with a setting that doesn’t have to abide by the rules of our real world, to use magic or technobabble as a cover-all, explaining away anything and everything by saying “magic works this way” or “starships don’t work that way”. And in a brand-new franchise, they can get away with that to an extent, provided it doesn’t seem to come completely from nowhere – if it does, it’s a deus ex machina. And that’s a whole other problem.

But in some ways, dei ex machina (yes, that’s the plural form) are exactly what we’re dealing with here. Briefly, a deus ex machina is a solution to an unsolvable or difficult problem that comes from nowhere – such as by introducing something brand new and never mentioned before, or by giving a character powers, abilities, weapons, etc. that they never had before.

When a franchise has run for a number of years, the basics of how its setting works has been established in the minds of its audience. We know, for example, that the Force in Star Wars can be used to choke people, to create lightning, and to confuse people. It can clearly do many other things, but introducing any new Force power has to be treated with caution – because if it seems to contradict what we’ve already seen on screen, it can be an issue. And these issues are not simply a case of “why haven’t we seen this before?”, but also of “in situation X in a previous film, this ability would have been useful”.

Spoilers ahead for The Rise of Skywalker for anyone unfamiliar with its plot.

In The Rise of Skywalker, we have precisely this scenario unfold. The Force can be used to both heal wounds and revive the dead. How many times in previous Star Wars films would such a power have been useful to our protagonists? How many characters could have been saved from dying unnecessary deaths if such a power had been deployed sooner?

The decision to include the ability to use the Force to heal and revive is contrived, it’s clearly done for storytelling reasons to get around what would otherwise be plot holes, but in so doing it’s created a bunch of new plot holes.

Spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker end here.

There’s always going to be a huge temptation to use contrived technological explanations or the use of magic to get away with what is essentially bad writing. But by failing to abide by the rules of the world they’re supposedly setting their story in, writers are being lazy and disrespectful. Magic and technology aren’t a cure-all to explain away anything a writer wants. They are part of the foundation of the setting, and chipping away too much at the foundation risks the entire story collapsing.

I don’t hold any respect for the argument that “it’s just a story”, either. Of course it’s just a story, and of course characters go from one place to another at the whim of the writers. But that is also no excuse for bad writing and mishandling the basics of the setting. The best stories are the ones we can get lost in, and part of that means that they have to make sense in the context of their world. When the underlying rules are broken, and the story fails to abide by its own world-building, it’s jarring, it’s immersion-breaking, and it ruins any suspension of disbelief. If a writer cannot make their story work without changing the fundamentals of the world they’re supposed to be writing in, then they have written a bad story.

In the current age of online fan communities, people can become very attached to a franchise and its world. It should be well known by now to writers and everyone on the production side of a franchise that anything like this is going to be seized upon and criticised.

This isn’t to say that there can’t be innovation. In Star Trek, for example, we’ve seen greater and greater warp speeds allow starships to travel further and faster in the 24th Century than in the 23rd. But that doesn’t break immersion because it doesn’t change anything fundamental about how warp drive works – it’s still a dilithium-powered faster-than-light engine. And in a way, the less detail we as the audience know about how some magical or technological thing works, the more wiggle-room writers and producers have to adapt it to fit their story. There will always be a bending of rules in this regard – to use the warp drive example again, precise warp speeds are a bit of a mess. The fundamental principle is intact, but the minutiae is a bit muddled, with different episodes giving different timeframes for travelling at different warp speeds, essentially making a real-world comparison impossible or very difficult (though reference works for Star Trek have tried). Just as one example, warp 10 is supposed to be so fast that a starship could travel to any point in the galaxy instantaneously, yet at warp 9.975 (the top speed of the USS Voyager) a 75,000 light-year journey will take 70+ years. And the Borg are capable of “transwarp” speeds, which are much faster than warp 9.975 but don’t seem to allow for instantaneous travel anywhere in the galaxy. As I said, messy.

But we’re getting off the subject.

When a setting has established how its technology, magic, or other such things work, stories in that setting need to stick to that. They can elaborate on how things work, and they can add new technologies or magic spells provided nothing overwrites what’s already there, but they have to stick to the fundamentals because failure to do so takes what could be a good story and spoils it.

This can be applied to characters, too. If a character’s backstory is established, that needs to be stuck to. It’s no good to say that character X is a smuggler, then two episodes later change that and make him a doctor or a marine biologist simply to fit a particular story. A character trait appearing out of nowhere at the very least is noticeable, and at worst is another immersion-breaking problem, potentially ruining a story.

Outside of the real fundamentals of a character though, we start to stray into subjective territory. One person’s idea of a believable and enjoyable character arc may not be the same as another’s. Luke Skywalker’s depiction in The Last Jedi is a case in point – I found his characterisation to be incredibly relateable in that film, as I felt it showed how anyone could become jaded and regretful, and how anyone could suffer the consequences of a significant error in judgement. But others felt that there’s no way Luke Skywalker could ever behave like that, that he’d never have considered cutting down Ben Solo – even for a brief moment – and that he’d never just go and live in isolation. We can agree or disagree, and that could be a whole article in itself.

We’ve gotten a little off-topic again, but the point I’m trying to make is that a story that doesn’t stay consistent with the world that has already been established, and strays into overwriting established ground rules of that world, ruins my sense of immersion and completely takes me out of whatever I’m reading or watching.

I love to see franchises evolve over time, and establish new elements of their worlds. But when it’s not done right it comes across as simply being bad and lazy writing, and using all the magic and technology in the world won’t stop it feeling that way. Once a ground rule has been established, once the audience knows how something works in that world, any future stories have to be constrained by that.

You’d think that in today’s media landscape, every significant franchise would have people poring over stories specifically to look for details that go against what’s already been set up. A franchise like Marvel – though I’m not personally a huge fan – is at the very least well-managed, and they absolutely deserve credit for the way the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been constructed. On the other hand, we have a franchise like Star Wars, which has unfortunately suffered as a consequence of production decisions, including the decision to bring in some technological and Force-based story points which clearly clash with what has already been established.

For me, a story that can’t even stick to the basic way its own setting or world works is a fundamentally flawed story. And that really is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to works of fiction.

All properties mentioned above are the copyright of their respective studios, producers, and/or distributors. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

A few of the best holiday sales deals for PC gamers

A few of the best holiday sales deals for PC gamers

Dennis

Important: The 2019-20 Winter/Holiday Sales have now ended; prices listed below will no longer be accurate.

It’s the time of year where the main digital shops for PC games have big sales, and there are some great deals in there that are worth checking out.

Despite costing more up-front than a console – significantly more, depending on what kind of specs you go for – using a PC as your primary gaming platform can save money in the long run when you take into account sales like these. If you’re willing to wait a little and not jump on a brand new title on release day, within a year you’ll almost certainly find it discounted.

That’s not to say PC is necessarily the best option for budget gaming, but it is worth considering that many titles can be bought at a significant discount this time of year. If I were giving advice on the absolute best budget setup, I’d have to say that an Xbox One S with Xbox’s GamePass service is hard to beat. GamePass is a subscription service (think Netflix, but for games) and with the lower entry price of the Xbox One S you can be set up and playing a bunch of titles pretty quickly – assuming you have a good internet connection. But we’re getting off the subject.

I’ve had a look at the big sales over the last couple of days, and I’ve picked a few titles that are worth grabbing for the discounted price.

Disclaimer: discounts and prices are in GBP and may vary depending on where you are in the world. Prices are correct at time of writing; sales end at the beginning of January. The list is in no particular order.

Spoiler Warning: Though I’ve tried not to spoil the plots of titles listed below, minor spoilers may be present.

Number 1: Mass Effect 2 (Origin) £4.49, plus £8.79 for all DLC

Promo screenshot for Mass Effect 2 featuring Jacob, Tali, and Commander Shepard.

I named Mass Effect 2 as my number one game of the decade a little while ago, and I absolutely stand by that. The game tells a story that would be at home as a big-budget television show or series of films, as Commander Shepard must put together a crew for a dangerous mission to stop an alien race abducting human colonists.

It’s a much more streamlined version of the first game in the series, with fewer weapon and ammo options cluttering up your inventory. The third-person shooting mechanics are great, and the addition of biotic and technical powers adds an extra dimension to combat.

For a game that is basically ten years old by now, it still holds up remarkably well from a graphical point of view. For £4.49 it’s well worth a punt, though if you want the complete story – including the mission which bridges the gap between this title and its (somewhat disappointing) sequel, you’ll have to get the DLC pack as well.

Number 2: Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition (Steam, £4.49)

Promo screenshot of Fallout 3.

Considering that for £4.49 you’re getting the entire main game of Fallout 3 plus five DLC packs, there’s a lot of content here.

Taking place in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC, Fallout 3 dumps players in a large open world. There is a main quest to follow, but there are also dozens of side-quests and other factions and NPCs to meet and engage with. There’s also a “karma” system – with points awarded for bad and good behaviour respectively. Doing bad things to people will result in negative karma and vice versa – these can affect gameplay.

With a ton of ways to play thanks to character creation and levelling-up systems allowing you a huge range of customisation options, Fallout 3 is a steal at this price and if you really get sucked into its world, will give you hours and hours of entertainment.

I’d absolutely recommend Fallout 3 over Fallout 4. But whatever you do, don’t buy the catastrophe that is Fallout 76.

Number 3: The Epic Games Store – Free £10/$10 voucher

This isn’t a single game, but the Epic Game Store is currently offering a free voucher to spend on games over £14.99. I know that the Epic Games Store has been controversial in PC gaming circles because of its aggressive policy of paying for exclusive titles, but they’re currently offering a £10 voucher to anyone who’s signed up.

The voucher is valid until May next year, and can be used on most games priced over £14.99, which includes titles that are currently on sale. It isn’t valid on pre-orders or in-game content, but if you figure a title has been discounted by £10, and you can save another £10 thanks to the voucher, it stacks up to be a pretty good deal.

I have heard that the discount is also available in Euros and US Dollars, but you’ll have to confirm on the Epic Games Store website that the deal is available in your region.

Number 4: Age of Empires: Definitive Edition (Steam, £3.75)

A comparison of the changes from the original version to the Definitive Edition.

Age of Empires came out in 1997, and was the first real-time strategy game that I played on PC. Microsoft spent a long time reworking this classic of the genre for modern PCs, and though the wait seemed to last forever, the end result was worth it.

Though many people prefer Age of Empires II, I’ve always had a special respect for what the original game did – for both my own PC gaming experience and for the genre as a whole. And the opportunity to dive back in when the Definitive Edition was released was too tempting to pass up.

You start with a Stone Age tribe of humans and have to build a town, while managing such resources as food, wood, stone, and gold. And in addition, you have an array of combat units to fight off other players (either AI or real people if you feel up to that). Battles can be intense in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, and with the number of units you can have in any one game being raised from the original 50 all the way up to 250 this time around, be prepared for some truly epic fights.

There are campaigns as well if you want more of a story, but I’ve always preferred to set up random matches against AI opponents.

Number 5: Banished (Steam, £5.09)

A town in Banished on this promo screenshot.

Another title from my top games of the decade, Banished is a town building and management game.

If you can imagine Age of Empires without the fighting, you’re close to understanding what Banished is about. Players start with a small number of citizens and a stockpile of resources, and must work to keep citizens fed, clothed, healthy, and happy. Striking the balance is harder than it sounds, and gathering all of the necessary resources to build all the different buildings needed takes time.

Different factors affect how well citizens will perform – if they lack suitable clothing they’ll need to spend more time keeping warm, or if they weren’t educated at your town’s school house they will work less efficiently.

Considering the entire game was built by just one single person, Banished is an amazingly detailed experience, one that’s very easy to get stuck into and lose hours playing.

Number 6: Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Origin, £5.11)

A few of Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga‘s huge roster of characters.

When it was released in 2007, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga contained levels set across all six Star War films. Obviously since then we’ve seen the Star Wars universe expand, but that doesn’t mean that this incredibly fun game is not worth taking a look at, especially when it’s on sale.

If you’ve never played any of the Lego games, they take whatever their setting is and make it incredibly fun. This is a very polished game, and has literally hundreds of collectables and unlockables hidden throughout its numerous levels. Every major and minor Star Wars character from the first six films makes an appearance – and when unlocked, almost all are playable.

Going back to a previously-beaten level with a different set of characters might unlock new areas or allow access to previously-off limits collectables, and finding every single hidden Lego kit and collecting every single coin to 100% complete Lego Star Wars is a heck of a task. For such a low price there’s a lot to do here, and while it isn’t a game that takes itself seriously in any way, it’s great fun and well worth a look. I’ve even played this with people who aren’t Star Wars fans and they all had a great time.

Number 7: The Witcher 3: Game of the Year Edition (GOG, £10.49)

Promo screenshot for The Witcher 3.

Big disclaimer: I haven’t played this game for myself. But The Witcher 3 is held up by many gamers as one of the best single-player experiences ever created, and with the Game of the Year Edition at 70% off, giving you the main game and both of its expansions, I’d say the reviews alone make it worth a look if you’re like me and haven’t got around to playing yet.

Excitement for the series is sky-high at the moment, thanks to Netflix’s The Witcher series getting rave reviews and being picked up for a second season. So maybe this could be a good time to finally jump into this world.

Number 8: Project CARS (Steam, £5.84)

A race in Project CARS.

For some reason, racing games over the last few years have all ended up looking absolutely stunning, and Project CARS is no exception. For a game that’s approaching its fifth anniversary it looks incredible, and even if it were released today it would still be a great-looking title.

But there’s more to a game than graphics, and luckily Project CARS has a lot to offer for racing fans. There are 65 cars in the base game, with others available as DLC – and the DLC packs are also on offer at the moment. Each car can be tuned to fit the way you want to race, and there’s both a career mode as well as the freedom to set up individual races.

Number 9: Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (Steam, Origin, and Epic Games Store, £45.64)

Main character Cal Kestis in a promo image for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Another big disclaimer: I haven’t played this game yet. But Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a return to single-player gaming for the Star Wars franchise, and by all accounts it’s a great game. Some reviewers have criticised the difficulty – even comparing it to Dark Souls – but there is a “story mode” which supposedly reduces this significantly.

This isn’t going to be a game like Knights of the Old Republic, because it’s not a role-playing game in the same way as those classic titles. It’s more in the vein of an adventure title like the Uncharted series, but with a Star Was setting.

When you factor in that the £10 voucher will actually let you nab this for £35.64, this might be a title worth picking up over on the Epic Games Store, and considering it’s only been out for a month or so, the 17% discount seems generous.

Number 10: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series (Steam, £5.01 or Origin, £4.74)

A battle taking place in this Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II promo screenshot.

I mentioned the Knights of the Old Republic games in the entry above, and at £5 or less for both games, that’s a pretty great deal in my opinion. I played both titles on the original Xbox when they were new, and they’re absolutely incredible.

Taking a setting several thousand years prior to the events of the main Star Wars films, Bioware gave themselves an almost blank canvas to tell a really exciting story of a war between Sith and Jedi. And you actually get to choose whether to stay with the Light Side or allow your character to succumb to the Dark – with different outcomes in both games depending on which path you choose to follow.

Some people will tell you that Knights of the Old Republic II is the better title, but both are incredibly strong stories, wholly single-player, and a lot of fun to spend hours with. The non-linear nature of the story, as well as a number of optional side-quests, and of course the differing Light Side and Dark Side paths, combine to make both titles very replayable.

Number 11: The Monkey Island Collection (Steam, £7.64)

Promo screenshot for Monkey Island 2.

A series whose first two titles date back to the days of MS-DOS, Monkey Island is a hilarious pirate-themed point-and-click adventure. The first two titles – The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge – have been remastered with voice acting and up-to-date graphics in this collection.

The series follows the story of wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood, as he blunders his way across the Caribbean. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes, but the series has an incredible sense of humour.

These games require a lot of puzzling and thinking, figuring out which objects in your inventory could be combined or used to interact with the environment. There are walkthroughs online, though, so if you get stuck help is available.

And the third game, The Curse of Monkey Island, has one of my all-time favourite NPCs: Murray the talking skull.

Number 12: Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition (Steam, £2.39)

Promo screenshot for Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition.

In a strange way, the manner in which Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition portrayed Hong Kong felt familiar to me – I’d played Shenmue II years previously, and despite never having set foot in the city, playing Sleeping Dogs felt like a strange homecoming of sorts.

The game takes the Grand Theft Auto playbook and completely changes it up – firstly by switching the setting from America to Hong Kong, and secondly by making the player character an undercover police officer instead of a criminal.

There’s a hugely detailed story to get stuck into, and an exciting open world that genuinely feels lived-in. I have no idea why the game is so heavily discounted, but for less than the price of a drink you’ll get hours of fun, both from the main game and its DLC packs.

Number 13: Euro Truck Simulator 2 or American Truck Simulator (Steam, £3.74)

The view from your cab in this promo screenshot of American Truck Simulator.

If you’re looking for a slower-paced experience, something to do while you listen to your favourite tunes, or you’re just a big fan of trucking, one or both of these titles might appeal to you.

The Truck Simulator games put you in the boots of a truck driver, giving you journeys across either Europe or the United States to complete in exchange for cash you can use to buy new vehicles and upgrade your fleet. Business management is part of the simulation, but at its core it’s primarily a driving game.

This isn’t like a Grand Theft Auto or Crazy Taxi title where you’re rushing around, not caring about damage to your vehicle or the environment. Collisions will cost money, and the point of the game isn’t to kill and destroy, it’s to relax and enjoy the beautiful environments. American Truck Simulator is my favourite of the two, simply because of the scenery, but both games are strangely compelling, and if you need to unwind or just have time to waste, you could do a lot worse.

Number 14: The Outer Worlds (Epic Games Store, £37.49)

Promo screenshot for The Outer Worlds.

Another title that comes with the “I haven’t played it yet” disclaimer, but The Outer Worlds received stellar reviews from critics. Coming from Obsidian Entertainment – the team behind games like Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas – this wholly original title takes players to a distant outer space colony where corporations are in charge.

The environments look amazing, and from what I hear the story is an exciting one. Another game that might be worth spending that £10 voucher on, The Outer Worlds has been on my radar for a while, and I can’t wait to see what it has in store.

Number 15: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind – Game of the Year Edition (Steam and GOG, £3.89)

The town of Seyda Neen in a screenshot for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.

Another of my all-time favourite games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind represented a massive jump in both quality and scale over its two predecessors, and really set the stage for future Bethesda titles – including Skyrim and the Fallout series. The roots of what would become Skyrim are here on full display, and while the game’s lack of voice acting and heavy reliance on text may be offputting for some, it is an incredibly detailed experience.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind actually offers a lot more than its sequels, Oblivion and Skyrim, in some respects. There are more weapon types – including throwing knives and spears – and more factions to join – including three great houses. Considering this game was first released in 2002, it was incredibly ambitious, and the open world it created, while imperfect and dated by today’s standards, was a monumental achievement.

Hundreds of hours of gameplay await if you really get stuck in, and because of the huge number of factions it isn’t possible to complete every single quest and side-quest in one playthrough – so there’s always a reason to come back. I bought the game when it first came out on the original Xbox, and in 17 years I still haven’t completed 100% of the game. There really is just that much to do here.

Honourable mentions:

It isn’t possible to detail every single game that’s currently on sale, such is the scope of Steam and other shops. But I found a few more that would be just as worthy of an entry on the list above:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Steam, £3.89) – If Morrowind‘s reliance on text isn’t your thing, Oblivion is fully voice-acted and is a great entry in the series in its own right.
Two Point Hospital (Steam, £8.49) – A spiritual successor to classic title Theme Hospital, this game is a hospital management title with a real sense of humour.
Steel Division: Normandy ’44 (Steam, £11.89) – A realistic WWII real-time strategy title with a detailed and exciting single-player campaign.
Control (Epic Games Store, £32.15) – Another contender for your £10 voucher, Control is a supernatural third-person adventure.
The Sims 4 (Origin, £8.74) – It can be hard to recommend The Sims when considering the price of all of the various expansions, but at this discounted price it could be worth it if you want to try the most up-to-date edition of the classic life simulator.
Shenmue I & II (Steam, £8.49) – Absolutely among my all-time favourite games, Shenmue tells a slow-burning, cinematic story of revenge, set in a wonderfully realistic open world.
Resident Evil 2 Remake (Steam, £14.84) – Considering this is one of the best games of the year and only came out in January, this horror title’s 67% discount is huge.
Star Wars Battlefront II (Origin, £19.99) – Though incredibly controversial upon release for its microtransactions, Battlefront II has a solid single-player campaign, which has been updated with a free expansion, and the story it told was worth the asking price.
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown (Steam, £24.99) – A fun, arcade-style air combat game with an interesting story.
Rise of Nations: Extended Edition (Steam, £3.74) – Similar in some ways to Age of Empires, this game is a fun RTS title that takes you through almost all of human history right up to the present.

So that’s it.

A few titles I found that are worth considering before the sale ends at the beginning of next month. I reckon if you bought all fifteen entries on the list, you’d have spent £143.58 (assuming using the £10 Epic Games Store voucher) and that works out at less than £10 a game – including two brand new, expensive titles. Excluding Jedi: Fallen Order and The Outer Worlds, you’d spend £70.45 and have a huge library of games to play heading into 2020.

These sales are part of what gives PC gaming an edge over consoles, and even if you just want one or two new titles to play, there are some great discounts on plenty of games across every genre.

I hope this has been helpful for some of you. Remember that sales are currently taking place on GOG, Origin, the Epic Games Store, and Steam – and a number of titles are available in multiple shops so it’s worth shopping around to make absolutely sure you’re getting the best discount.

All titles listed above are the copyright of their respective studio, developer and/or publisher. Prices listed are for the UK versions only and were correct as of 22/12/2019. Sales end at the beginning of January – though it’s possible some discounts may end sooner. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

A festive list to get you in the holiday spirit!

A festive list to get you in the holiday spirit!

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are some minor spoilers ahead for the titles on this list.

Tis the season to be jolly… and all that. There are some fun Christmas films and television specials, and with it being only four days till the big day, I thought I’d share a few of my favourites. I’m sure most will be familiar to you, but they’re all worth a watch at this time of year.

With all of the controversy around projects like Star Wars, it’s nice to kick back with an old favourite at this time of year. Some of the titles below are full-on guilty pleasures, the kind of film you’d never watch if it wasn’t Christmas-themed. But there’s nothing wrong with that every once in a while.

These titles are in no particular order, but it’s a list so I had to number them.

Number 1: Carols From King’s (Annual)

Title card for Carols From King’s.

I’m by no means a religious person. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I set foot in a church. But when I was at school, every Christmas just before the end of term we all trooped down to the local church and attended a Christmas carol service. My English teacher would pick on a few of us every year to read aloud some kind of Christmassy poem or short section from a story, so every year while at school I got to take part. The only benefit was that we got to miss a few lessons in the run-up to the event, but that alone made it worthwhile.

Carols From Kings is basically the kind of Christmas carol service I remember from my schooldays – just much better quality(!) There’s a choir, and they sing a selection of Christmas carols interspersed with a few readings and churchy things. While the selection of carols varies somewhat year on year, most of the traditional English carols make an appearance, such as Once In Royal David’s City, or The First Nowell.

As a fan of Christmas music in general, Carols From Kings is a pleasant, calm television programme of the sort that I’d never be interested in at any other time of year. At the end of the day, all it really is is a church choir singing Christmas carols – but that’s okay. Of course if you just wanted to hear the music you could find 1,001 versions of all of these carols on any music streaming platform, but seeing it and knowing it was recorded live does make it a different experience, and focuses attention on the music and the event itself rather than letting the songs be background noise for whatever else you might be doing.

There are new editions of Carols From King’s recorded every year (or most years, at least). Several past years, including 2018, are available on YouTube at time of writing, and I believe the 2019 edition is to be broadcast on Christmas Eve here in the UK.

Number 2: The Polar Express (2004)

Poster for The Polar Express.

This film was a novel take on the “does Santa Claus exist?” theme that a lot of Christmas titles explore. Following a young boy who finds it hard to believe in Santa, The Polar Express takes the unnamed child on a whirlwind adventure to the North Pole, complete with snow, ice, and a weird train roof-riding hobo.

Notable at the time of its release for its CGI animation – which some critics called “creepy” due to its attempts at realism – the film has aged well and has rightly become a modern-day Christmas classic, one which is fun to return to year upon year. I’d especially recommend it for families – though with the caveat that very young children may find a few scenes frightening.

Tom Hanks is on form here, voicing several characters and giving each a unique sound. You might recognise him in the persona of the train’s conductor, such is the nature of semi-realistic CGI animation, but some great voice acting ensures his other characters are unrecognisable.

Trains – especially toy steam engines – have somewhat of an association with Christmas, so The Polar Express doesn’t come from nowhere. However, its unique approach to Christmas, Santa Claus, and the North Pole, as well as some comical moments, make for a fun modern Christmas film with heart. The message is that Santa is real, and for little ones wavering on that issue it might be a reassurance. And though it’s primarily a fun adventure for kids, there’s some entertainment for grown-ups to have here as well.

Number 3: Father Christmas (1991)

The VHS and/or DVD box art for Father Christmas.

A semi-sequel to 1982’s The Snowman, Father Christmas sets out to answer a simple question: what does Santa do for the other 364 days of the year? Apparently the answer is that he takes a massive round-the-world holiday. And gets drunk.

As a kid, the scene where Father Christmas (as Santa is known in the UK) gets completely trashed and starts hallucinating/dreaming and throwing up was a really weird thing to witness. And that sequence may be why this animated short doesn’t seem to be readily available at the moment. It is, of course, online on various streaming sites – none of which I’d happily recommend, so take your own chances – but it is on DVD at least here in the UK.

Clocking in at only 25 minutes, it’s a bit steep to pay a lot of money for a copy, but it is a fun, wholly British, and entirely tongue-in-cheek look at Santa’s everyday life. For some reason he lives in a terraced house in the UK. And has a pet dog and cat. And his neighbours seem blissfully unaware of his true identity.

The animation style is, frankly, outdated. It’s very much a product of its time, with a particular hand-drawn style that may not be to everyone’s taste. And as mentioned, a few scenes may be offputting for sensitive young ones. But there is a bloomin’ great song (which you can almost certainly find on YouTube).

Number 4: The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)

Could it be? A Star Wars film worse than The Phantom Menace?

I’m kidding – no one should watch this nonsense.

Thankfully non-canonical, the Star Wars Holiday Special takes classic characters from the original film and sets up the premise of Life Day – a celebration on Chewbacca’s home planet.

It has been rightly ridiculed for its bad script, bad effects, and for being an all-round failure.

It is, however, a wholly unique piece of television. Sometimes bad films make for entertaining viewing simply because of how bad they are, and if you have a few Star Wars-loving friends (and a healthy amount of alcohol or other substances) maybe this could be a fun romp for you.

And since this came out before Empire Strikes Back is is technically the first Star Wars sequel.

Still, it’s better than The Phantom Menace.

Real Number 4: Miracle on 34th Street (1947; 1994)

Box art for the 1947 original Miracle on 34th Street.

I actually had a hard time deciding which version of this Christmas classic to put on this list. The 1994 version is a rare example of a successful remake – thanks largely to the wonderful performance of the late Richard Attenborough.

I’m not a huge fan of black-and-white films in general. Not so much the lack of colour itself, but primarily because older films tend to be very dated in their effects, sets, and especially their acting style. I know that’s a horribly subjective statement, but as a very general rule I’d say most films (and TV series) prior to the mid-1960s don’t really work for me. The original Miracle on 34th Street was an exception, however. I actually saw the remake first, probably not long after it was released, and for years I wasn’t even aware there was an older version. When I did encounter it, I was initially put off by the black-and-white and the year it came out, but when I gave it a chance I found the same heartwarming tale underneath.

When a Thanksgiving parade needs a replacement Santa Claus, a man named Kris Kringle steps up – and claims to be the real deal. After being briefly institutionalised, a court case find that (for differing reasons in the two versions) they cannot prove he isn’t Santa – so therefore he can go free.

Actor Edmund Gwenn won both a Golden Globe and an Academy Award for his role as Kris Kringle in the original film, and though his performance is in many ways iconic, Richard Attenborough took over the role for the 1994 version and also gave an incredible performance.

Number 5: Love Actually (2003)

Poster for Love Actually.

So here’s a conundrum – is Love Actually a Christmas film, or is it a romantic comedy with a Christmas background? I can’t decide.

Some films seem to pick a Christmas setting and hope it will cover all manner of sins. Not so for Love Actually, because while Christmas serves as a backdrop for the film and the various sets of characters, it’s actually (pun intended) rather good.

Taking multiple plot threads and a huge cast of characters, the completely different stories slowly work their way together over the course of the film. And there are some wonderful performances in there, as well as some funny ones. Hugh Grant’s take on the British Prime Minister came mere months after then-PM Tony Blair took Britain controversially into the Iraq War. And the scene in which Grant’s character stands up to a rude, pushy American President (a pitch-perfect performance from Billy-Bob Thornton) was, in a very real sense, something that large sections of the country were looking for and responded to.

Alan Rickman also gives one of his best performances here, and his on-screen chemistry with Emma Thompson is part of what gives the film its heart.

I didn’t expect Love Actually to become as culturally significant as it is when I first saw it. I dismissed it as “just another rom com”, having seen Hugh Grant in what felt like several dozen similar pictures by that point. But, helped by its Christmas setting no doubt, Love Actually is another modern classic which I think families will enjoy at this time of year for a long time to come.

Number 6: A Christmas Carol (1999)

The 1999 version of A Christmas Carol stars Patrick Stewart.

There are many adaptations of Charles Dickens’ famous novel – the book credited with bringing Christmas back into the popular imagination after a period in which it wasn’t widely celebrated. And many of those versions are good. Some are funny, some are animated, and some take great liberties with the source material. But if I had to pick just one adaptation, the 1999 made-for-TV version is my choice.

Starring Sir Patrick Stewart (hot off his role as Capt. Picard in Star Trek: Insurrection) this version of the story sticks fairly closely to the original novel. There’s nothing especially ground-breaking here, nothing that will change the way future adaptations are viewed. But as a pure adaptation of the novel, I don’t think the performances can be bettered.

Some of the effects, especially those for the ghosts, may look a little dated by now, but overall the film does a great job telling the classic story of bitter old miser Ebenezer Scrooge as he learns to embrace the spirit of Christmas. I’m a big fan of Sir Patrick (as you probably know by now if you’re a regular around here) but his performance here is a great example of why. He carries this film all the way, appearing in practically every scene, and if you can get over the fact that he’s not Jean-Luc Picard and simply enjoy the story being presented, you’re in for a treat because his performance is incredible.

Some actors are inexorably linked to their most iconic roles, and if you’re a huge Star Trek fan perhaps this version will be jarring for you. But stick with it if you can, because in my opinion this is the best adaptation of A Christmas Carol.

Number 7: Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation (2009)

Streaming icon for Phineas and Ferb Christmas Vacation.

You might remember from the list of my top television series of the decade, but I’m a big fan of this Disney Channel animated series.

Christmas Vacation is actually one of the best episodes as well, a feature-length episode in which the evil Dr Doofenshmirtz builds a machine to make everyone in town naughty – thus cancelling Christmas. The boys manage to save the day, of course, and there’s plenty of mayhem and fun along the way.

The soundtrack to this special episode is great, too, featuring a couple of Christmas classics and a few original songs – including a Christmas-themed version of the show’s opening song.

If you’re a sucker for the “Christmas is in danger, then someone saves it” plot cliché – and I absolutely am – then this will be a fun time. Yes it’s a kids’ show, but Phineas and Ferb has always been a series that holds some appeal to adults too, so it’s not without merit here. It’s by no means an original premise, but it is a uniquely Phineas and Ferb take on that premise, and as a fan of the series it’s great to come back to this special at this time of year.

The soundtrack album (which also includes a few tracks from a couple of other holiday episodes) is also well worth a listen. Yes, I bought it.

Number 8: Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)

DVD box art for Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Every family has different Christmas traditions, and these traditions vary an awful lot from country to country. It wasn’t until I spent a Christmas in the United States that I became aware of this charming stop-motion film, and I think from people I’ve spoken to that it doesn’t have as big of a following over here.

Despite first encountering Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer as an adult, I had a fun time with this film and enjoyed a look at another country’s idea of a Christmas classic. And a classic it certainly is – it was on TV dozens of times in the run-up to Christmas when I lived in the States, and almost everyone I spoke to reacted with incredulity when I said I’d never seen it.

It’s a re-telling of the Rudolph story with a few original characters that haven’t appeared elsewhere, like Yukon Cornelius, and Hermey the elf who wants to be a dentist. After facing rejection, the characters run away together, only to be welcomed back after their adventures in a heartwarming tale of… bullies that decide to stop bullying? I guess.

Number 9: Delia’s Classic Christmas (2009)

Delia’s Classic Christmas DVD box art.

I wanted to put at least one cookery programme on this list, because of all the various holidays and events throughout the year, none are so intrinsically linked to food as Christmas.

Delia Smith is the original British television cook, appearing on TV since at least the 1980s. Her 2009 outing – Delia’s Classic Christmas – is exactly what it sounds like. British Christmas classic dishes, presented in her trademark gentle style.

As a collection of classics, don’t expect much outside the mainstream of British cuisine. That’s actually what I like about this television special, because in many ways, Christmas is the one time of year where traditions dominate and it’s great to celebrate that. In this case, we’re talking about food traditions like roast turkey with all the trimmings. For my American readers, Turkey has been traditional Christmas fare in the UK for at least the last century. Though some families will still opt for ham or beef as their main meat of choice, turkey is still the king. And because we don’t have Thanksgiving, this is for most people their main turkey dinner of the season – possibly of the whole year.

But to get back to Delia’s Classic Christmas for a moment, Delia Smith’s style of presenting is just pleasant and enjoyable to watch. This is pure light entertainment at its festive best, and even if cookery shows wouldn’t normally be your thing, maybe you can make an exception at this time of year. It does wonders to get me excited for my Christmas dinner, anyway!

Number 10: Die Hard (1988)

Bruce Willis on the poster for Die Hard.

I debated whether or not to put Die Hard on this list. Is it a Christmas film? Or is it an action film with a couple of Christmas references? That argument will rage on and on, I fear.

Christmas film or not though, Die Hard is a classic of the action genre. While its sequels haven’t really lived up to the original, that doesn’t detract from the enjoyment here. Bruce Willis is on form as action hero John McClane – trapped in a building under siege and where terrorists have taken hostages (including his wife), McClane slowly cuts his way through the terrorist troupe.

Alan Rickman features on this list for the second time, in his iconic role as terrorist leader Hans Gruber. Though protagonist and antagonist only meet at the film’s climax, their radio communication earlier in the story is fantastic and the way Willis and Rickman portray their characters’ hatred for one another in this limited format is really something to witness.

Die Hard could’ve ended up like so many other action films of its day – a fun but mediocre gun-fest. But there’s something about the two leads, perhaps aided by the Christmas backdrop, that elevates the title to something better.

Number 11: Jingle All The Way (1996)

Poster or DVD box art for Jingle All The Way.

In the entry above for the Star Wars Holiday Special, I mentioned that sometimes a bad film can be entertaining. And make no mistake, Jingle All The Way is, by practically every conceivable measure, a bad film.

It’s on this list purely as a guilty pleasure, and were it not for its Christmas theme it would probably be long-forgotten. In Jingle All The Way, Arnold Schwarzenegger (future Governor of California) has to get his son a must-have Christmas toy… but they’re all sold out. What follows is a slapstick comedy in which Arnie fights with another kid’s dad to find the last one on Christmas Eve.

It really is as bad as it sounds – Arnie’s acting has always been wooden at best, and this is certainly not his best performance by a long way. The premise is dumb, and the comedy is really quite stupid in parts, but what’s hiding just below the surface is a story worth telling – one of a family man recognising his flaws and trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his son. Christmas is both the setting and the driving force for the main story, but the idea of a family coming back together from the brink of falling apart is a timeless one in many ways, and one that epitomises Christmas.

Number 12: Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (1989)

Several main characters from The Simpsons.

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire is actually the first ever episode of the long-running animated sitcom. And it is a classic in its own right, as Homer tries to turn his financial troubles into a successful family Christmas.

Much of what makes The Simpsons great is on display here. At the end of the day, the series has been so successful and lasted so long because it has heart. There are plenty of funny moments, but despite his failings, it’s easy to root for Homer. He’s a likeable protagonist in this episode.

Arguably this isn’t The Simpsons at its best, because the show probably took at least to the end of the first season to really hit its stride, but despite that, and despite the fact that many of what would become the show’s principal supporting cast aren’t present, it’s a solid episode.

And as a Christmas story, it’s oddly timeless. The down-on-his-luck dad, trying to hide his finances from his family and then having to get into deeper and deeper trouble to cover it up, all while trying to provide them with Christmas gifts is, in an unfortunate way, still as relevant today as it was thirty years ago. While life has changed in many ways since The Simpsons premiered, there are still too many people who don’t have enough money at this time of year – or indeed all through the year. That sense of a real-world situation comes through, despite the fact that we’re looking at a cartoon, and I think that’s what makes it so relatable.

Honourable Mentions:

I couldn’t possibly cover every Christmas film or television special on this list. There are far too many, and there are some real classics that I’ve probably forgotten all about. Here are a few more that could’ve made this list, and are definitely worth a look.

Santa Claws (2014) – Not to be confused with the 1996 horror film of the same name, this family adventure sees a litter of kittens save the day and deliver Santa’s presents – after he has an allergic reaction to them.
The Snowman (1982) – The predecessor to the 1991 film Father Christmas listed above, this animated short sees a boy and his magical snowman go on an adventure.
Home Alone (1990) – A holiday classic. When a young boy is left behind by his family, he has to cope on his own while fending off burglars who want to rob his mansion.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) – After losing his firm’s money, a desperate man contemplates taking his own life and wishes he was never born. His guardian angel shows him the effect his life has had on others.
The Flight Before Christmas (2008) – A reindeer who’s afraid of flying saves the day in this cute animated film.
Elf (2003) – A human raised by Santa’s elves at the North Pole travels back to the human world in this lighthearted comedy.
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) – Is it a Halloween film or a Christmas film? Either way, this stop-motion film directed by Tim Burton has become a classic.
The Morecambe and Wise Show Christmas Specials (1968-83) – For well over a decade in the late 1960s, ’70s, and into the ’80s, these variety shows by a comedy duo were the most-watched thing on British television on Christmas Day.
The Nativity Story (2006) – Future Star Wars actor Oscar Isaac features as Jesus’ father Joseph in this re-telling of the Biblical story.

So that’s it.

A few Christmas specials and films to get us all in the holiday mood now that we’re on the home stretch. Only four days left and then it’ll all be over for another year!

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas!

All titles mentioned above are the copyright of their respective studios, networks, and/or distributors. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Reviews for The Rise of Skywalker are mixed

Reviews for The Rise of Skywalker are mixed

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: While I have tried not to reveal any significant plot points from The Rise of Skywalker, this article does stray into somewhat spoiler-y territory. There will also be potential spoilers for The Last Jedi and The Force Awakens.

Last time I wrote this about The Rise of Skywalker: “if it’s only okay – and even if it’s good but not great – the online hate and anti-Disney sentiment will continue”. After all of the controversy surrounding Star Wars over the last two years, which began with the reaction to The Last Jedi and continued through Solo: A Star Wars Story – which significantly under-performed – this film needed to work especially hard to bring fans back together.

Pre-release reviews initially seemed to be positive, but now that we’ve hit release day in the United States and other territories around the world, the full picture is coming into view, and it seems as though The Rise of Skywalker is not being particularly well-received.

Promo poster for The Rise of Skywalker.

Critic reviews are not always a reliable metric for judging a film – after all, critic reviews for The Last Jedi were glowing and completely failed to predict that film’s divisiveness. But this time, it seems as though critics and a significant number of Star Wars fans are on the same side, believing The Rise of Skywalker to be a flop.

As a caveat, this isn’t a review. While I have read a synopsis of the story, I haven’t seen the film for myself, and I won’t until it’s available on home video in a few months’ time. My health unfortunately precludes me taking trips to places like the cinema, and because I knew I couldn’t realistically avoid spoilers for months I chose to read a summary of the plot when it became available. But I won’t dig too deeply into that here – I will save reviewing the film itself for when I’ve seen it in the new year.

What The Rise of Skywalker had to try to do is bring back together two groups of fans – those who liked and hated The Last Jedi. The way to do that wasn’t by picking a side, because by so doing one group or the other will end up feeling alienated. The only way to bridge this kind of gulf would have been to set aside The Last Jedi and neither overwrite it nor celebrate it. There are ways that The Last Jedi could have been built upon to tell a new story which wouldn’t have been controversial. By trying to retcon large parts of it, The Rise of Skywalker has picked a camp and will have unfortunately upset many fans of its predecessor.

As I said last time, bringing back Emperor Palpatine risked coming across as cheap and lazy – and by most accounts, that has been exactly the outcome. Palpatine’s appearance in The Rise of Skywalker – after only the scarcest of references in the last two films and having had essentially no impact whatsoever on their stories – seems to be a deus ex machina. And this is a direct consequence of who was brought in to tell this story – JJ Abrams, who’d set up a mystery box in The Force Awakens that he didn’t know how to solve. He didn’t know how, of course, because he never expected to be in this position.

The decision to break up the writing of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, giving each part to a new writer/director, is inexplicable. It is by far the biggest issue that these films have had, and I’m saying that as someone who loved The Force Awakens when I first saw it, and as someone who greatly enjoyed The Last Jedi. As much as I liked The Last Jedi, the shift in tone from its predecessor is noticeable, and apparently The Rise of Skywalker is yet another change in tone from that film.

After buying Lucasfilm and the Star Wars brand in 2012, Disney needed to get together one team of writers and task them with crafting a new story – one which would play out over three films. If they wanted a JJ Abrams-style of storytelling, leaning very heavily on the original trilogy, then okay. If they wanted someone like Rian Johnson to shake up the whole trilogy and take Star Wars in a new direction, that’s okay too. But pick one – by trying to do both they’ve ended up with a disjointed series of films that have literally gone out of their way to overwrite one another. When there are a grand total of seven hours to tell the story, there’s just no time for rushing around undoing parts of it to cram in something new.

Realistically, this began with The Last Jedi, where Luke Skywalker famously throws away his lightsaber. That moment, set up at the end of The Force Awakens was a literal passing of the baton from one writer/director to another. And instead of taking that moment and building on it, Rian Johnson threw it away and told his own story. And from what I’ve read about The Rise of Skywalker over the last couple of days, JJ Abrams has essentially done the same thing this time too.

Instead of a triumphant return to Star Wars after the disappointment of the prequels, this trilogy simply hasn’t known what it wanted to do or what it wanted to be. Is it supposed to be a reboot, retelling Star Wars’ “greatest hits” for a new generation? Or was it supposed to be a bold new direction for a forty-year-old franchise that had serious issues with its prequels? Someone needed to be in charge to make that decision, and not allow the trilogy to sit on the fence and try to be both – while ultimately ending up being neither.

Theatrical release poster for The Rise of Skywalker.

When I’ve had a chance to see the film for myself in its entirety I will review it, but for now suffice to say that the division in the Star Wars fanbase looks set to continue, and this last best opportunity to patch things up has been lost. That’s a huge disappointment – and an own goal from Disney, as they needed to bring back fans of the franchise who’d drifted away in the last two years. Despite my own personal misgivings about it, The Mandalorian television series has been well-received and hopefully that will go some way to mitigating the issues with Star Wars as a brand.

Indeed, The Mandalorian and its success may well have bought Star Wars some breathing room. Despite that, however, if the next Star Wars project underwhelms or disappoints, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that there’s going to be a major shake-up, including cancellations or possibly even the brand going on hiatus. We should remember, after all, that it’s only in the last four years that we’ve had Star Wars as a franchise back. And it’s only since 1999 that the idea of Star Wars as ever being anything more than three films has existed. In short, we can’t take for granted that the franchise will just go on churning out new content, especially if that content doesn’t meet Disney’s objectives.

Reviews for The Rise of Skywalker, to get back on track, mostly seem to say similar things. The overriding feeling is that, for better or worse, there’s an absolute ton of nostalgic throwbacks and returning content from previous iterations of the franchise. And in addition, the film goes out of its way on a number of occasions to undo and retcon moments from The Last Jedi. Several reviewers have written that The Rise of Skywalker feels like it’s trying to be both Episodes VIII and IX – almost as if JJ Abrams has completely written The Last Jedi out of Star Wars lore and has tried to cram in two films of his own into the runtime of a single title.

One positive aspect of seeing films late is that I know what I’m getting myself into when I finally do get around to seeing them. And with The Rise of Skywalker I have suitably lowered my expectations – which may actually make for a better experience. When it came to The Last Jedi my expectations were similarly low owing to that film’s controversial nature, and I ended up really enjoying it (despite the shift in tone). So we will see – and I’ll report back when I’ve seen it in the new year.

One thing I hope all Star Wars fans could agree on is that more Star Wars on our screens should be a positive thing, whether we’re talking about films or television series. But there are some people who now feel that Star Wars in the Disney era is wholly without merit, and they won’t tune in for new shows nor show up at the box office for new films. That could be a problem for the brand going forward, and one that will have to be addressed. Even if future Star Wars projects are great, I fear some fans have already decided to essentially quit the fanbase, or at most stick to the original trilogy and the now-outdated expanded universe.

It really does feel as though the best opportunity to bring fans back together was missed with The Rise of Skywalker.

The Rise of Skywalker and the Star Wars brand are the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

It’s do-or-die time for Star Wars

It’s do-or-die time for Star Wars

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There will be spoilers ahead for Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, as well as other films in the Star Wars franchise.

The final film in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, The Rise of Skywalker, releases tomorrow here in the UK. And it’s not unfair to say that there’s a lot riding on it for fans of the franchise.

Disney spent a lot of money to buy Lucasfilm – and with it the rights to Star Wars – back in 2012. Depending on what measure you use, they might’ve just about broken even by now, thanks to three successful titles at the box office, one headline series leading the charge for their new streaming platform, and sales of a ton of toys and merchandise. But breaking even isn’t good enough for a huge company, and with Solo: A Star Wars Story being the first title in the history of the franchise to fail to make its money back, there’s a lot riding on The Rise of Skywalker as far as Disney is concerned.

It’s also a critical time for fans.

The spectre of Palpatine looms over Rey and Kylo Ren on the promo poster for The Rise of Skywalker.

Personally I enjoyed The Last Jedi, though I think it works better as a standalone piece than it does as part two of a trilogy, or part eight of an ongoing series. The major shift in tone from The Force Awakens – as epitomised by the scene in which Luke Skywalker simply throws away his old lightsaber – is certainly jarring. And while I’m a fan of the film myself, I understand the criticism levied at it by some in the Star Wars fanbase.

The Last Jedi was, whichever side of the argument you’re on, an unquestionably divisive film. And unfortunately, one consequence of the controversy it generated is that fans have broken up into factions. Some fan groups have descended into pure hate, attacking Disney, Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, and even actors and actresses from the films. This insane amount of online negativity has damaged the Star Wars brand to an extent. The Rise of Skywalker has to find a way to get things back on track.

In the run-up to the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, some groups of fans were planning to boycott the film and its merchandise as a way to register their dislike of The Last Jedi and disapproval of the overall direction of the franchise. How many of them stuck to their guns and didn’t see Solo is something impossible to measure, but the negative feelings and ill-will undoubtedly hurt the film, which came out only five months after The Last Jedi.

What The Rise of Skywalker has to manage to do is bring back those fans. It has to give them a reason to want to show up at the box office, but more than that, it has to give the story a satisfying conclusion – one which can reunite the fractured fanbase.

I honestly don’t know whether it can.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren.

The problem isn’t that huge numbers of people will stay away. I think that most Star Wars fans, even those who felt that The Last Jedi was a terrible film, will head back to the cinema this time around, if for no other reason than morbid curiosity. At the end of the day, this franchise has been running since 1977, and the first phase of its story – that of Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker – is finally coming to a close. That alone is reason to turn up and check out the film. Whether fans who found The Last Jedi to be a bad experience will find the conclusion of the story to be satisfactory is another question, however.

The Star Wars sequel trilogy failed to reunite its core three characters – Han, Luke, and Leia. By killing off Han Solo in The Force Awakens while Luke was still out of the picture, there was no opportunity for a reunion. And with the untimely passing of Carrie Fisher – as well as Luke’s supposed death in The Last Jedi – there’s now no chance to bring them back together even in a flashback sequence. In time, I suspect this will come to be viewed as a mistake. And as I wrote in my list of disappointments of the decade, the decision to have Luke going missing be the driving force for the plot of The Force Awakens will probably also be seen as problematic in hindsight.

There are, undoubtedly, missteps and mistakes to be overcome in The Rise of Skywalker. On the one hand, bringing back JJ Abrams for the film is a positive thing. He was, after all, responsible for creating characters like Rey, Poe, and Finn, and did initially draft out where those characters could go after The Force Awakens ended. But because the decision was taken to split up the storytelling of these films, giving each part to a different writer/director, Rian Johnson had the opportunity to ignore much of that story treatment when he wrote The Last Jedi – and that seems to be exactly what he did. Johnson was constrained by the concept of Luke being missing, but now Abrams is constrained by the ending of The Last Jedi too. And if it’s the case that the characters are in a completely different place than he intended them to be, then he basically will have had to write a whole new story for The Rise of Skywalker.

JJ Abrams is a good storyteller, and he can make films that are respectful of their place in a franchise but without feeling the need to entirely copy an existing story. His work on Star Trek Into Darkness shows this – that film pays homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan without copying it or overwriting it. But Abrams can also cross that line, and I’d argue that The Force Awakens strayed from being an homage to the first Star Wars film into copying it. Starkiller Base is, for all practical purposes, the Death Star, even down to the vulnerable hole at the end of a trench that a team of X-wings have to attack. When I first saw The Force Awakens I thought that kind of film is exactly what I wanted from Star Wars, especially after the disappointment of the prequel films a decade earlier. But looking back, it wasn’t the best take on Star Wars, and a little more originality would have been called for, as well as a better use of Luke Skywalker – or at the very least a reason for his absence.

“Mystery box” storytelling is what JJ Abrams has always done. He sets up a puzzle, a set of unexplained situations and circumstances, which draw in audiences and get people thinking. But he never writes a conclusion. His mysteries are beautifully set up – and then he disappears, leaving the ending to someone else. He did that in the television series Lost, which started well, but unfortunately became incredibly convoluted and ended with a controversial and, to many people, disappointing finale. So whether Abrams really was the right choice to bring the “Skywalker saga” to its end is something I’m not convinced of – at least, not yet.

The Rise of Skywalker has a difficult job to do if it’s going to be viewed as a success by both fans and detractors of The Last Jedi – and whether this division in the fanbase between the two camps will be temporary or permanent really does depend on how this film is received. If it manages to be a hit, then the fanbase can come back together and look forward together to new Star Wars projects. But if after release, fans remain divided into pro-Disney and anti-Disney camps, the biggest and best opportunity to heal that divide will have been lost. Also lost will be some fans – who will no longer turn up for new films and shows in the franchise. This happened to an extent with Star Trek, three times in fact: in 1987 with fans who didn’t want The Next Generation, in 2009 with fans who didn’t want the reboot films, and in 2017 when some fans didn’t want Discovery.

Any discussion of this topic would be remiss to not point out that some of the anti-Disney communities online actually make money – even a living in some cases – from their hate. And yes, a lot of it crosses the line from criticism into outright hate. For some of these YouTube channels, websites, and social media groups, controversy, division, and hatred are what drive clicks, views, and advertising revenue. If they were to come out and say “hey guys, The Rise of Skywalker was great and you should all go to see it!” they’d lose subscribers and viewers so fast they’d have nothing left. Many of the people who read and watch such content are there purely to see their own preexisting opinions reflected back at them, and the people creating this content know this. They know that their audiences expect a negative reaction to The Rise of Skywalker – and most of them will give them what they want, regardless of whether it’s what they actually think. And the reason is simple: attention and money.

With that in mind, The Rise of Skywalker has to go even further than any other title in order to be successful. It has to absolutely knock it out of the park, because if it does, maybe the overwhelming positive reaction from fans will force at least some of these people to concede. But if it’s only okay – and even if it’s good but not great – the online hate and anti-Disney sentiment will continue, because people are getting attention from the community and money from advertising on sites like YouTube for speaking out in that way.

It’s an uphill struggle then. But it’s one of Lucasfilm’s own making in a way – splitting up the story, and giving three different writers and directors essentially free reign to do whatever they wanted was an own goal. When creating any story, let alone one that has to be the follow-up to a genre-defining set of films, it’s important to take the time and plan it out. They needed to think carefully about legacy characters as well as plot out character arcs for the new ones. There’s no evidence that there was any proper planning or story work done – and that was a mistake.

Some of the story points which appear to be part of The Rise of Skywalker are questionable, too. Palpatine feels shoehorned in, especially given he was scarcely mentioned in the previous two films and had no impact whatsoever on their plots. A combination of fanservice, to appeal to those who hated The Last Jedi, and desperation, caused by the lack of a significantly imposing villain after Snoke’s death, seems to be why Palpatine has returned. Those reasons do not form the basis of a strong narrative, and the risk is that his appearance in the film will simply come across as cheap and lazy.

I’m sure Disney and Lucasfilm are aware of these issues, and others. There’s a lot riding on JJ Abrams and his storytelling, and in a very real sense The Rise of Skywalker will, for better or worse, set the stage for the next phase of Star Wars.

On a personal level, I really hope that the film will be a success. Not least because I want an ending to Luke and Leia’s stories that will be satisfying, but because I really want to see the division of the last two years put behind us as fans. There will always be disagreements over The Last Jedi – just like there are in Star Trek over who’s a better captain – but if the majority of fans can at least return to civility and get back to a place where new Star Wars projects generate almost universal excitement rather than arguments, I think The Rise of Skywalker will have done its job. Reviews from critics have come out in the last couple of days, and seem to be positive – but critic reviews for The Last Jedi were strong too, and failed to anticipate that film’s divisiveness. So we will have to wait and see.

If we can return to a place in the fanbase where debates are good-natured then that’s really going to be a positive thing. The negativity generated two years ago has been difficult to wade through, at times. There are enough things in the world today to divide people; we don’t need entertainment adding to that. Not when it’s supposed to be escapism and a distraction.

It’s my hope that The Rise of Skywalker will go a long way to mending fences, and that the Star Wars franchise can have a more united and secure future going forward.

The Star Wars franchise and The Rise of Skywalker are the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Why I’m so excited for Star Trek: Picard

Why I’m so excited for Star Trek: Picard

Dennis

Spoiler Warning:
I will be looking at material from the two trailers for Star Trek: Picard, as well as discussing the most recent season of Star Trek: Discovery. There will also be spoilers for other Star Trek films and series.

In either 1999 or 2000 – I can’t remember which – I was listening to the radio when the news of a new Star Trek show was breaking. In the UK, the complicated rights agreements in place for broadcasting Star Trek meant that – at least for households which didn’t have satellite television – we were quite behind where the various series were in their US airings. The Next Generation had concluded its run, though Deep Space Nine and Voyager hadn’t yet, and I was very interested to see what would be coming next for the franchise.

When it was announced that the new series – later titled Enterprise – would in fact be a prequel, I wasn’t impressed. Star Trek was about looking forward to the future, I felt, so why did they need to go back in time to before Captain Kirk? In addition, Star Wars Epsiode I: The Phantom Menace had been in cinemas, and there was a lot of talk at the time about how prequels as a concept were bad – some of which admittedly went over my head in my youth.

Nevertheless, I wasn’t convinced about a Star Trek prequel and during Enterprise‘s original run on television over here, I only tuned in sporadically. It wasn’t until I got the series on DVD a few years later that I got to watch it in its entirety. Enterprise actually told some great stories – and is a good example of how a show that “no one asked for” can actually be worth watching after all. But this isn’t a review of Enterprise.

We’d have to go back to the 1990s to find a Star Trek series with a new cast that wasn’t a prequel.

Since just after the turn of the millennium, when Voyager went off the air and Nemesis hit cinemas, the Star Trek franchise hasn’t moved its timeline forward. Instead, we’ve had Enterprise and Discovery – both of which are set before Kirk’s original five-year mission – and the Kelvin-timeline reboot films – which are also set in the 23rd Century, but in an alternate timeline. In all that time we’ve had some admittedly interesting stories, and in 2009’s Star Trek a very brief glimpse at the post-Nemesis future, but no real advancement of the overall narrative of the franchise. And while Enterprise, Discovery, and even the Kelvin-timeline films have told some fun, interesting, and “Star Trek-y” stories, they’ve all been firmly embedded in a time period we’ve seen before.

Any prequel has an uphill struggle when it comes to telling a dramatic and interesting story, as well as building tension. The reason is simple – we know what comes next. You can have a galaxy-ending threat as part of your narrative, but if we’ve seen the galaxy fifty or a hundred years hence, we know that the threat isn’t serious – and even if in the moment it’s possible to get caught up in the story, at the back of our minds we still know that there will be a way out of it. At least, that’s how it works for me. As an example, in season 3 of Enterprise we follow the crew as they race to stop the Xindi planet-killing weapon from destroying the Earth. And that’s a very exciting story – arguably Enterprise‘s best season – but while watching it, at the back of my mind I was always aware that in the 23rd and 24th Centuries, we’ve been to Earth and we’ve seen that it clearly wasn’t destroyed. The journey can still be entertaining if the destination is known, but for me at least, knowing the outcome robs the story of some of its drama and tension.

This is why series like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead have been so successful with what I call the “disposable cast”. By routinely killing off key characters and getting rid of starring actors and actresses, simply being a main cast member isn’t enough to guarantee safety any more – and the sense that anything could happen is present all the time as a viewer, arguably raising the stakes.

Star Trek has occasionally lost main cast members, though these have more often been motivated by production reasons – such as a cast member leaving the series, or the showrunners deciding to “refresh” the cast by replacing someone – rather than for purely narrative ones. In most cases, as viewers we tend to feel that the main characters are safe, and it’s the redshirts like Ensign Bob, introduced for the first time five minutes ago, who are most in danger in any given scenario.

But as we’re now in a new phase of television, one dominated in the aftermath of shows like Game of Thrones with ideas like the “disposable cast” and serialised storytelling, there are new and exciting possibilities for Star Trek. We’ve already seen some of this in Discovery – the first two seasons each told season-long stories instead of being episodic, and we’ve seen characters like Lorca killed off, as well as Pike, Spock, and Una appearing for a single season, and of course Ash Tyler being left behind as Burnham leads the U.S.S. Discovery into the future. Sir Patrick Stewart, when interviewed regarding the new series, has gone on record saying that Picard will be “like a ten-hour movie” instead of a series of episodes – firmly stating that this will be another serialised show.

The vineyards of Château Picard form the Starfleet logo in the first teaser poster for the new series.

Personally I’m a fan of episodic television – I think it’s great to be able to drop into an episode of a show without needing to have followed the entire season to understand what’s going on. Previous iterations of Star Trek largely operate like this, though the aforementioned third season of Enterprise, as well as the Dominion War arc in Deep Space Nine, were serialised stories. But for shows like TNG and Voyager, it’s possible to jump into most episodes and follow a single story over forty-five minutes. I like that, and I think it makes for a good format. There’s no getting away from the move to serialised shows, though, and Picard is set to go down this route.

When the TNG-era series all concluded around the turn of the millennium, there were a lot of leftover story points. Although each crew had arguably reached their destination – Deep Space Nine ended its war, Voyager saw the crew make it home, and Nemesis saw the Enterprise’s crew go their separate ways – 500-odd episodes across 21 seasons of TV, along with four films, told over a 15-year period from 1987 to 2002 had a lot of stories to tell and taking that era of Star Trek off the air left a lot of open-ended, unfinished plot threads. There are too many to name here, but a few that spring to mind are: what would happen next for Cardassia after the war? How would the Klingon-Romulan-Federation alliance work with no common enemy? And what happened to the Borg after Voyager attacked their transwarp network and the Queen’s complex? In addition, finding out what happened next to a lot of the characters is something fans would like to know.

By this point in time, several members of Kirk’s crew have had their futures shown on screen. Kirk himself died saving Veridian III in Generations, McCoy lived to a ripe old age and helped christen the Enterprise-D when it launched, Spock ended up in the Kelvin timeline after trying to save Romulus, and Scotty emerged from transporter-suspension in the TNG episode Relics. But what happened next for the crews we’d seen in the TNG era is still unknown to fans – and there’s definitely scope to explore some of that within Picard.

I don’t feel that Picard should overload itself with characters, though. It’s a short series – clocking in at only ten episodes – and the more time it spends looking back, the less time there is to look forward. And the more time it spends with fan favourites of the past, the less time there is to show off the new crew. I’d like to give the new cast a chance to become fan favourites for the next generation (pun intended) of Star Trek fans. I really hope that in another thirty years’ time they’ll be clamouring to find out what happened next to some of these characters the way we are for those of the TNG era. So in that sense, Picard has to walk a line between what happened since Nemesis and what’s to come.

It’s my hope that Picard can strike that balance, and that while we’ll learn a great deal about the shape of the Star Trek galaxy and what happened next for some fan-favourite characters, we’ll also get an exciting original story in which those pieces of information are conveyed. The Next Generation didn’t spend too much of its time in its first season looking backwards – aside from DeForest Kelley’s cameo in Encounter at Farpoint and a couple of name-drops, TNG told its own story. Some elements of that story filled in the blanks for returning fans – we learn, for example, that the Klingons and Federation are at peace, and that the Romulans have isolated themselves for a number of years – but they weren’t in-your-face about it, and those story points unfolded naturally in the episodes in question. They didn’t feel tacked-on or shoehorned in in order to provide cheap fanservice – something I’d argue has happened in some recent Star Wars projects.

At the end of the day, Picard is taking the franchise forward in time – to the close of the 24th Century. And it’s the first time in a very long time that the timeline is going to advance. That is already a huge point in its favour, and without knowing much at all about the story, it’s enough to get me hyped up.

Jean-Luc Picard and Number One (the dog) on the second poster for Star Trek: Picard.

The two trailers for Picard have been great, and I can’t wait to catch up with Seven of Nine, Riker, Troi, and of course, Picard himself. I’m also really interested to learn more about the new cast – including, for the first time, a Romulan main cast member. It looks from the trailers that we’ll see some Borg story elements, as well as learning more about the Romulans after the destruction of their capital. All of those things seem absolutely fascinating, and while I have to admit I’d be hyped up for almost any Star Trek story that moves the narrative forward, the teases we’ve seen of Picard just look incredible.

I know that recent Star Trek projects haven’t thrilled everyone in the fanbase, but I really do hope that Trekkies who weren’t taken with Discovery will give Picard a try. The chance to see what comes next isn’t something we’re always going to get. A lot of shows – by far the majority – are one-off things, and when they’re done they’re done. Some even get cancelled too soon, before even the first part of their story can be told. So this opportunity that Picard presents is a rarity, one I intend to take full advantage of. If Picard is a success, it has the potential to be a launchpad for other series set in the same time period, taking the Star Trek franchise boldly into the 25th Century.

While I don’t expect Picard to spend its entire runtime catching up with galactic events and reintroducing old crewmates, I do hope we’ll get enough of that to feel like we’re back in that galaxy again – combined with enough new material and new characters to drive the story forward and give new fans a chance to get hooked in. Walking that line between the old and the new might be a challenge, but I’m confident that the producers, having cut their teeth on Discovery, can manage it with ease. And with Picard having just been renewed for a second season while I was writing this column, ViacomCBS are clearly confident of that too.

After almost two decades, Star Trek is finally ready to move forward again. With just over a month left to go, I can feel the excitement building already. Forget Christmas, forget New Year – it’s Star Trek: Picard that I’m most looking forward to right now!

Live Long and Prosper!

The Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: Picard, and all other Star Trek properties mentioned above are the copyright of ViacomCBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Disappointments of the decade

Disappointments of the decade

Dennis

Spoiler Warning:
There will be spoilers ahead for the films, games, and television series listed below. If you don’t want to be spoiled, skip ahead to the next entry.

I initially thought about doing another top ten list for games, films, and television series that left me disappointed or underwhelmed in the 2010s, but the truth is that I don’t think I could reasonably find ten of each that I was genuinely disappointed by. There have been a few, but not enough to fill three full lists. So I’ve condensed what I had into one piece.

“Disappointment” is a very broad term when it comes to entertainment. For example, a television series I really enjoyed this decade was Terra Nova (it was in the “honourable mentions” section of my list of top ten television series), but despite it being a wonderful show, it was cancelled after one season with a story that hadn’t concluded. That’s a disappointment, undoubtedly. And of course there are films, games, and series that were just outright bad. I can be pretty brutal when it comes to switching off something I’m not enjoying – if it doesn’t seem like it’s improving or will improve, I’ll happily switch to something else. Life’s too short, after all, for bad entertainment.

That said, here are a few titles that, for a variety of reasons, I found to be disappointing in the 2010s. Please keep in mind that, as with previous lists, this is 100% subjective. This in my own opinion, and if you like any or all of these titles, that’s okay. You like what you like and I like what I like – and that’s great!

Film #1:
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Promo poster for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

You may remember from my comments on the list of top ten films that I’m not a Marvel fan, all things considered. I’m not a fan of superheroes, nor of comic books; I just never have been and even as a kid I didn’t read comics – my reading preference was for novels and books. Despite this, by 2014 I had managed to watch (most) of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films – albeit grudgingly in some cases – and I’d even started watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. which was at the time a solid television series.

But then along came Guardians of the Galaxy. I found this film to be an absolute bore from start to finish. The comedy fell flat, the characters were either stupidly uninteresting or childish caricatures who couldn’t stop making (bad) jokes for even ten seconds. But worst of all was the plot. I just couldn’t find a way to care even the tiniest amount about the alien races I’d never seen on a planet I’d never heard of (and can’t even remember the name of) when it was under threat. There were no stakes and thus, no drama. At least in a film like The Avengers, it was New York and Earth that were attacked. In that case I knew the stakes – even if I found the film to be a bland, over-the-top action flick on par with something like Transformers. But Guardians of the Galaxy just failed across the board – uninteresting characters, meaningless aliens, and a threat to an unknown, insignificant planet about which I simply did not care.

On that final point, the film failed to communicate the stakes and get me invested in its world. A lot of sci fi and fantasy stories take place in worlds away from Earth. In The Lord of the Rings, Middle-Earth is threatened – yet I didn’t sit in the cinema thinking “who cares?” the way I did in Guardians of the Galaxy – because Peter Jackson’s films hooked me in and got me invested in its characters and its world. Likewise in the Star Trek franchise – the destruction of Vulcan in 2009’s Star Trek reboot had emotional weight because the film (and the franchise overall) had successfully got the audience invested in its world. This is the failure of Guardians of the Galaxy for me – it just couldn’t make me give a damn what happened. In most of the other Marvel films I’ve seen, I at least worked up enough investment in the films and their setting to want to see it through to the end. But by the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, I was done with Marvel. I skipped a lot of the next films in the series, and when I saw some of the Guardians characters pop up in Avengers: Endgame this year I let out a sigh of disappointment that I had to put up with their crap again. Just a disappointing, uninspiring, boring film that thinks itself to be far funnier and cleverer than it actually is.

Film #2:
Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar poster featuring Matthew McConaughey.

Interstellar reminded me exactly why I don’t like time travel stories. It basically takes everything that I find stupid and uninteresting about time travel and combines them into one slog of a film. It rightly received praise upon release for its visuals, including a stunning depiction of a black hole, but that aside there’s not much I enjoyed here, despite the hype.

Sometimes sci fi can be too science-heavy, with not enough attention paid to the “fiction” element – you know, the part which makes stories interesting. Interstellar falls into that trap at points, spending too much time explaining the relationship between gravity, speed, and the passage of time. And when it finally does get away from real-world science into a story, the plot is exceptionally convoluted, even for a time travel film, and it ties itself in knots in the second half basically creating a time loop – a form of paradox which just irks me.

It’s exceptionally hard to do time travel well, precisely for the reasons Interstellar shows. It’s too easy to write yourself into a corner, creating a scenario which is impossible to understand, let alone explain and communicate to your audience. And that just completely takes me out of it and ruins any enjoyment I might have otherwise got from the cast, who overall give good performances – just with a crap script.

Some people have told me I need to rewatch Interstellar four or five times in order to “get it” – as if that’s somehow a point in its favour. If a film is so bad that I barely made it through to the end the first time, I promise you I’m not going back for more. And if the only way your film is any good is on its fifth viewing, then I’m sorry but you made a crap film. And Interstellar, despite its star cast and great visual effects, is absolutely a crap film.

Film #3:
Into The Woods (2014)

Poster for Into The Woods.

Musicals aren’t usually my thing. They can work – especially in animation – but most of the time, the cast randomly breaking into song midway through a scene is something I find incredibly jarring. It takes me out of whatever I’m watching, ruining any suspension of disbelief. On the stage or in animation I’m always aware that I’m watching something fictional, but with today’s exceptional visual effects, as well as great costuming and set design, there’s a much greater sense of immersion than in previous decades – and that’s partly what makes the random songs in any musical so offputting, I think.

But anyway, that’s a more general point. Into The Woods features some truly crap songs – sung badly by actors and actresses who aren’t natural singers. So at the numerous points where the film is interrupted by song, the songs aren’t even good or enjoyable to listen to. It also fails as a fantasy film, plagued by over-the-top hammy acting of the kind usually seen in pantomime. In fact, if it were a pantomime, Into The Woods might’ve been alright.

But as with a lot of modern films, Into The Woods wants to make a point. Something about how actions have consequences, maybe? I was so bored by the end I’m not even sure if that’s what it wanted to say. It also tries to satirise the fantasy genre and criticise fairy tales, but instead of gentle parody and laughing with its targets, it comes across as mean-spirited and laughing at them – and at the people who enjoy those genres.

There might’ve been the kernel of an interesting concept buried somewhere in the pre-production of Into The Woods, but it never made it to screen. And the bad acting, bad singing, and overall bad intentions as well as the aggressive, mean nature of the film made it a truly unenjoyable experience.

Film #4:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

The poster for The Force Awakens.

I actually really love this film. And I love its sequel, The Last Jedi, despite what many people have said about it. They are both great films – taken as standalone pieces. As two parts of a greater whole, however, they aren’t anywhere near as good.

The shift in tone from The Force Awakens to The Last Jedi is noticeable, and the reason why is that Disney and Lucasfilm decided that the way the sequel trilogy would be produced is that each writer and director would be given essentially free rein to tell whatever story they wanted. To me, that’s an absolutely absurd and inexplicable decision from a group of accomplished filmmakers. On what planet is that how storytelling works? If you’re creating a trilogy of films you need one writing team to tell a single, cohesive story – one story, told in three parts. Let alone that this trilogy is actually parts seven, eight, and nine to an already-existing series – and that that series happens to be one of the most important works of the genre. I just cannot fathom how this decision came to be made. It doesn’t make sense – and the result is a jarring tonal shift from one film to the next, epitomised by the scene at the very beginning of The Last Jedi where Luke Skywalker throws his lightsaber away.

As a standalone piece, The Force Awakens is a clone of A New Hope (aka Star Wars, the 1977 film). And on first viewing, I thought that was exactly what I wanted – especially after the disappointment of the prequels ten years previously. A return to what made Star Wars great was fantastic – but on looking at it again it’s clear that JJ Abrams crossed that invisible line which divides nostalgic throwbacks from outright copying. The strange thing is that two years previously, while working on Star Trek Into Darkness, Abrams had managed to pay homage to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan without falling into that trap. If he could do it there, how did he manage to go too far here?

One final point, the concept of “Luke Skywalker is missing”, which The Force Awakens sets up and uses as the driving force for much of its narrative was, in retrospect, a bad decision. Killing off Han Solo meant that fans of the original films never got to see any on-screen interaction between Han, Luke, and Leia – the trio of characters at the core of those films. As a sequel to a trilogy of films so reliant upon those three characters, I have to say I feel that was a big mistake. Carrie Fisher’s untimely death in 2016, as well as the supposed death of Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi also means that we got very little Luke and Leia interaction on screen either. While I, like most Star Wars fans, left the cinema thrilled with what The Force Awakens did, looking back at it there are a number of issues which I’d say make it a disappointment.

Its sequel, while divisive, was much better and tried to take the franchise to different places. It was, however, constrained to a great extent by the concept of Luke Skywalker being missing, isolating himself on this small island. From that foundation, there weren’t many places to take the character and the story, and that contributes to the sense that The Force Awakens didn’t set up a strong narrative for the trilogy. But again, that failure is on the head of the producers, and their decision to allow the story to be split up. If one team of writers had worked from day one to tell a single story across three films, instead of three one-shots, the trilogy would arguably have been much better. The Rise of Skywalker – set to conclude the “Skywalker saga” – is to be released soon, and that could go a long way toward redeeming the series if it’s good enough. We’ll have to wait and see.

Television series #1:
Game of Thrones’ eighth season (2019)

Teaser poster for Game of Thrones’ eighth and final season.

This really boils down to the first three episodes of the season. After that it did improve, though the disappointment of what happened in those first episodes wasn’t wiped away by what came after.

In the premiere episode of Game of Thrones way back in 2011, the White Walkers are shown for the first time, and throughout the entire seven seasons leading to this point, the overall message of the show was that the politics and infighting may be interesting, but something far greater and more dangerous lies beyond The Wall and is coming – and it won’t care who’s in charge. In the background, behind all the wars and all the politics, slowly building up over seven seasons was The Night King and his army of the dead. Finally, at the end of season seven, he brings part of The Wall crashing down and is able to lead his army south – atop an undead dragon, no less.

As the eighth season begins, many of the main characters have arrived at Winterfell, and the first couple of episodes lead up to a climactic battle in the third episode – where The Night King finally unleashes his army and all of his firepower upon our heroes. This is the moment the entire show feels like it’s been building up to… and then, just like that, he’s dead at the end of it.

The Night King, built up over seven seasons as the greatest threat our characters have ever faced, doesn’t even last one episode south of The Wall and is killed in his first battle against any significant opposing army. To me, that’s an unforgivable storytelling mistake. Game of Thrones is rightly held up as one of the all-time great works of television, and is a seminal event in this decade’s storytelling, but this one moment, and the episodes preceding it when looking back in hindsight, threatens to undo all of that. It taints Game of Thrones with just how badly it was done.

I won’t go over all of it here – because I plan to do a full article or even a series on this topic – but Game of Thrones deserved a better final season than it got. Luckily, the remaining episodes were largely good and did go some way to saving the season, but even so it remains a disappointment and the way that The Night King didn’t even bring his “long night” for a single day, let alone years, is incredibly disappointing.

Television series #2:
House of Cards’ sixth season (2018)

Robin Wright on a promo poster for the sixth season of House of Cards.

House of Cards – a remake of a British series of the same name from the 1990s – is an incredibly important television series. While not on par with something like Game of Thrones, perhaps, it is nevertheless the show that pioneered Netflix’s original programming, and that was the first significant show to premiere all the episodes of its season in a single day. Other Netflix shows owe their existence to House of Cards, and Netflix’s decision to diversify into original programming – as opposed to merely licensing other peoples’ properties – is what will allow it to survive as we enter the “streaming wars”.

In 2017, Kevin Spacey, who played devious mastermind Frank Underwood in House of Cards, was accused of a number of serious sexual offences. His response to the allegations was widely criticised, and as a result he became persona non grata overnight, even being digitally erased from the film All the Money in the World. As the sixth season of House of Cards was in early production, Netflix quickly announced he’d be dropped from that too, and production was restarted without him.

As happens in a lot of cases when a main character leaves a series, the way in which he was written out (he died off-screen) was ham-fisted and just poor overall. For a main character to just be dumped never sits well, but in a story so focused on a single character like House of Cards, where Frank Underwood is so central to everything that happened, there’s basically no point in carrying on without him.

At the end of season five, Frank had resigned as President amidst a scandal (of his own making), thus arguably completing the “rise and fall” narrative of House of Cards. With Spacey embroiled in scandal there was no way Netflix could continue to work with him, so the decision should have been to pull the plug and end the series. The sixth season was just an unnecessary disappointment. This isn’t, by the way, a criticism of Robin Wright, who did an admirable job stepping into the role of protagonist/anti-hero that Spacey had occupied. It’s simply the fact that the series was never her character’s story, and jettisoning its main lead while production was underway and a deadline was coming up meant that the sixth season had to be rapidly adjusted to fit the new circumstances. And unfortunately, it came up short.

Television series #3:
The Walking Dead (2010-Present)

Promo poster for The Walking Dead featuring Andrew Lincoln.

Even speaking as someone who isn’t a huge fan of horror, the first couple of seasons of AMC’s zombie show were decent. Playing more on the post-apocalyptic setting than the zombies themselves, the earlier episodes of The Walking Dead had some great character moments and performances by the cast. But as time has passed, the series has completely run out of ideas.

Rick Grimes and his ever-changing group of survivors seem to stumble from bad situation to bad situation, and in recent years all of those bad situations have been essentially the same thing. When the zombies lost their fear factor a couple of seasons in, writers began looking for new threats for the group to deal with. And since then, every season has followed basically the same pattern – Rick and his group arrive in an area, other human survivors decide they don’t like Rick and his group, the two groups fight, and then that’s it. Roll on the next group of human survivors with an inexplicable and poorly-written anti-Rick agenda. The Governor came first, so he gets somewhat of a pass. But after him came the Terminus cannibals, then Negan, and it’s just become so boring and repetitive that I tuned out.

Fear The Walking Dead – a spin-off of the main show – is actually much better. It’s taken a look at the immediate aftermath of the zombie virus in a way that The Walking Dead didn’t, and thus its post-apocalyptic setting, while the same as that featured in the main series, feels like it has more of a foundation to build upon.

Any villain or enemy can be overused or overexposed. And when they are, when the protagonists have defeated them so many times, they lose their fear factor. And even though The Walking Dead was up there with Game of Thrones in pioneering the “disposable” cast (i.e. main cast members could be killed off at any time and you couldn’t be sure who’d survive), by this point in the show as it passes its tenth season, the vast majority of the original cast have gone, and the few survivors who are left from earlier seasons don’t feel like they’re in danger. Add to that that the new characters are less interesting and less well-known to the audience and the show has become boring. Some series have a natural lifespan – and The Walking Dead should’ve ended after perhaps four seasons or so.

Television series #4:
Doctor Who (2005-Present)

Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman on a promo poster for Doctor Who.

There have been some great Doctor Who stories this decade – The Day of the Doctor is brilliant, for example. But unfortunately, after Matt Smith left the role in the 2013 Christmas Special, things went downhill fast.

Peter Capaldi is exactly how I’d imagine The Doctor if someone just described the character to me. He has a certain quality, perhaps best described as “gravitas” or “weight”, allowing him to seamlessly and successfully step into the role of this ancient, time-travelling alien. Which is something that previous Doctor Who actors of the relaunched series arguably lacked.

Sadly, though, Capaldi just had nothing to work with. For the entire three seasons he was in the role, the writing and stories were just bad. They started bad and even managed to get worse over time, as the team being the series simply ran out of ideas. Modern Doctor Who has suffered from an overuse of three key villains – the Daleks most notably, but also the Cybermen and Weeping Angels. All of these adversaries were great in their initial appearances in 2005, 2006, and even up to the end of the last decade. But by the time Peter Capaldi took over they were played out. And the stories featuring new opponents for The Doctor simply didn’t get off the ground.

Clara, who had been the companion to the previous Doctor, was written out of the show in a bad way, and Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame is introduced as an incredibly annoying immortal character. The only decent companion of this era, Bill (played by Pearl Mackie) only lasted a single season and was treated as a complete afterthought in most of her stories – and also came to a stupidly annoying end.

I struggled on through Capaldi’s reign as The Doctor, waiting for the writing to improve so the show could finally shine, but unfortunately it never happened, and his departure was thus the last time I bothered watching. Doctor Who needs a root-and-branch overhaul, and since that seems impossible right now, it would be better to put it back on hiatus for a while. Perhaps we can come back to it in a few years when someone has a genuinely good idea for its revival.

Video game #1:
Fallout 76 (2018)

Fallout 76 box art.

What’s at the core of a great story? Whether we’re talking about a film, a television series, or a video game, characters are at the heart of any story. And the Fallout series, from its inception in the 1990s through the three more recent titles, have been story-focused games. So why, then, did Bethesda choose to release Fallout 76 – an online game where there are no non-player characters?

Forget about the bugs for a moment. Fallout 76 was riddled with glitches and graphical errors, but if, underneath all of that, there had been a story worth telling, a lot of that could have been and would have been forgiven. But there wasn’t, and the fact that Fallout 76 is essentially a big, empty world has meant that the issues which are present seem all the more egregious. I’m honestly not sure what the point of this game was. Aside from walking around to look at the decently pretty – if somewhat last-gen – environment, and fighting off a few monsters, there’s literally nothing to do.

I’m not a multiplayer gamer; I don’t enjoy playing online with strangers. But I fully understand that a lot of people do, and that this game was aimed at them. But even if that was the objective, it’s completely failed. The lack of story meant that even players who teamed up to tackle Fallout 76‘s environment together would be bored pretty quickly, and the shoddy gunplay – which Fallout’s signature VATS system concealed so well in Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4 – means that it’s worthless as a multiplayer player-versus-player shooter like Call of Duty. So honestly, what was the point of this game? It’s been nothing but a massive PR own goal from Bethesda, and their damaged brand will take a long time to recover. If their next title isn’t absolutely fantastic, they’ll be in a mess of trouble.

Video game #2:
Mass Effect 3 (2012)

Female of Commander Shepard on the alternate box art for Mass Effect 3.

I picked Mass Effect 2 for my game of the decade – spoiler warning for that list. But its sequel struggled to conclude the trilogy in a satisfactory way. Mass Effect 3 told what should’ve been the most interesting part of the story. After Shepard is introduced to the idea of The Reapers – space-dwelling robot aliens who want to rid the galaxy of all intelligent life – in the first game, and the second game uncovers another part of their plan, this game features the actual war against The Reapers – and players have to fight battles and bring the galaxy together to defeat them.

On paper, it sounds like the best part. But, coming out only two years after Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3 was rushed. Gameplay remains solid, though not notably improved from its predecessor, and there are none of the bugs and graphical issues which would plague Mass Effect: Andromeda. But as the story ramps up, it’s clear that developers Bioware simply ran out of time to pull everything together.

It isn’t just the “pick a colour” ending – though that is a significant disappointment in itself – but the fact that choices made throughout the game, and indeed in the previous two games, not only don’t matter but aren’t even given lip service as Mass Effect 3 enters its final climactic fight.

To give an example, if players have followed a specific path across all three titles, it’s possible to save both the Geth species and the Quarian species when it seems like it should only be possible to save one or the other. This is an incredible moment in the game, and it feels like having both powerful fleets on your side will make a difference when you reach Earth – where The Reapers have massed their forces. But it doesn’t – literally the only difference comes in the cut-scene immediately after arriving at Earth, where the different fleets check in to confirm they’ve all arrived. Two seconds of dialogue reveals that you have both the Geth and Quarians on your side… then that’s it. And there are dozens of other instances throughout the final third of the game where an extra few months of development time would’ve allowed for a much more satisfying way of recognising the player’s choices.

In a series where players were promised that “every choice matters”, it turned out by the end of Mass Effect 3 that that simply wasn’t the case. And while the game is solid overall, it’s a poor relation to its predecessor.

Video game #3:
Shenmue III (2019)

Ryo Hazuki and Shenua on Shenmue III‘s box art.

I’ve already written an article detailing at length my problems with Shenmue III, but suffice to say it’s absolutely one of the biggest let-downs for me personally.

As a big fan of the first two Shenmue games, back when I had a Dreamcast, I was absolutely thrilled to hear that series creator Yu Suzuki had managed to buy the rights to the legendary series with a view to finally making a sequel. Eighteen years have passed since I left protagonist Ryo in a cave in China, and I was really looking forward to learning what happened next after that cliffhanger, as well as finally seeing the story brought to an end.

But Shenmue III doesn’t bring the story to an end – thanks to an absolutely inexplicable decision not to make cuts to the bloated story of the series. Yu Suzuki genuinely thinks he can get lightning to strike twice and that he’ll somehow get the money together to make Shenmue IV – and presumably V and VI as well? Fat chance.

His studio had been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by a dedicated group of fans to conclude the story, and they blew it. The Shenmue series was as dead as it was possible to be, and Sega was only willing to part with the rights because they knew that it would never make them any money. As great as Shenmue was, it was a colossal failure, and Shenmue II managed to retain less than 10% of its fans from the first game, resulting in a massive drop in sales from one title to the next. By every conceivable metric, the games failed. And despite that, a small, vocal group of fans managed to stump up over $7,000,000 – some individuals contributing thousands of dollars.

I don’t claim to speak for all of them, but the one thing I expected from Shenmue III – in fact, the only thing I expected from it – is that it would finally complete the story. And if Yu Suzuki couldn’t find a way to cut it down to fit into one game, someone needed to be brought in to swing that axe and make those cuts. As a result of this, I haven’t even bought the game. And I won’t, because what’s the point? Get drawn back into that world, only to be left on another unresolved cliffhanger? No thank you.

So that’s it.

A few titles across entertainment that I found to be disappointing or underwhelming this decade. If your favourite is on the list, well I’m sorry. But we all have our own preferences and tastes. These are just my opinions, and are wholly subjective.

The 2010s have, overall, been a wonderful decade for entertainment. TV shows are better than ever, often with cinema-quality acting and visuals, video games continue to get bigger and better, and at the box office there have been some incredible films. But there are always going to be misses to go along with the hits, and this list just runs through a few that didn’t work – at least for me.

All titles listed above are copyright of their respective studio, developer, producer, and/or distributor. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

The £48,000 computer

Dennis

Actually it’s £48,087.98. Can’t forget the 98p, am I right? If you’re in America, that’s $64,000 – though from what I’ve seen online it may be closer to $50,000 over there for you guys. Obviously we’re talking about the Mac Pro, the latest computer from Apple.

The Mac Pro starts at £5,499 for the “basic” edition, and even that is absolutely obscene by most people’s standards. Where I live, £48,000 would get you literally acres of arable farmland, or would be a sizeable deposit on a house. Or get you a very nice car. The list of things you could do with 48 grand could go on and on. But in the first line you missed the key point – “by most people’s standards”. This isn’t a machine for the likes of you and me.

Some time ago, I found myself working in government. Nothing fancy (I wasn’t an MP or anything) but I worked an office job in a small local government office. The work that we had to do in this office required the use of a spreadsheet – a programme like Microsoft Excel, which is part of their Office suite. Office costs around £120, maybe closer to £200 for a business edition. And of course, any big organisation gets a sizeable discount that scales with how many copies they need. For a big organisation, like the place I was working, Office was an essential tool and all the computers in our office had it installed. Yet, despite Excel being perfectly serviceable for what we needed, the department was paying several thousand pounds a year (in the mid-2000s, inflation will have raised the price since then) for the license to a different piece of spreadsheet software – one that was marketed at being designed especially for what we needed! It was, of course, essentially the same product as Excel. Just with less compatibility – it wouldn’t open Excel files, nor allow Excel to open its own files, and because other departments in the same building – as well as other departments doing the exact same job as us in other locations – didn’t use it, anything they sent to us or we sent to them had to be manually converted. What a colossal waste of everyone’s time – and money. Taxpayers’ money, in this case.

The point of this long story is that there is a whole world out there which most of us don’t ever see, or if we do it’s only a brief glimpse: the world of big business, and of powerful organisations for whom money is – for all practical purposes at least – no object.

These are the kind of people who Apple are targeting with the new Mac Pro. Because they know that people want to stay on the cutting edge, and upgrade their machines as often as possible. And these people will go to see their boss and ask for the upgrade – and it will be granted even if it costs £48,000 because the organisation they work for doesn’t even notice that amount of money. If you’re working in, for example, a film studio, where budgets regularly balloon past the $150 million mark, what’s 50 grand compared to that? And when you consider for someone who works in an industry like that, they would get a decent amount of work out of that machine over two or three years, working on multiple titles, why not spend the money?

I’m a paid-up member of the Apple “ecosystem” – by which I mean I’m an iPhone guy. And even though I have to concede that iPhones are generally more expensive, I’ve found them to be much better than Android phones, especially at the lower end of the market or on models a year or two old. So there is something to be said for choosing quality over price. But is that a fair argument when looking at a computer – one single computer – that’s the price of a brand new flash car?

I mean, for £48,000 you could buy close to 100 decent computers and kit out a medium sized business. Sorry, no more “you could buy X for that money”. But you could. Just saying.

For someone who’s already an Apple user, who uses professional software like Final Cut Pro or Logic Pro, and who needs a really powerful machine for work, if they’re bringing in the big bucks and this will help them do their work faster and more efficiently, there’s an argument to be made in its favour.

But despite this, despite the fact that I can see a potential user base – albeit a small one – some of the costs of components really seem inflated.

Adding wheels to the case costs £360 – that’s £90 per wheel. They might be good quality – I mean, they better be at £90 each – but are they so much better than anything else on the market? It’s possible to buy a wheeled computer stand for less than £10 on Amazon, and that would do basically the same thing.

It’s possible to get a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive for about £250. Apple wants £720 for a non-specified SSD. Is it NVMe (or Apple equivalent)? Because there’s a big performance difference between SATA and NVMe. And even if it is NVMe, what makes it so much better than other options on the market that it’s basically triple the price? Additionally, 2TB isn’t a lot of storage when you’re talking about video files, animation, rendering, audio work, and the like. That SSD will fill up pretty quickly, and the only other option, costing £1,260 more than the base model, is 4TB. I’ve seen folks with YouTube channels who have literally hundreds of terabytes of video – presumably anyone buying a Mac Pro still needs to pay extra for external storage.

I know there’s a market for a machine like this, and I know Apple will have taken the time to make sure every component is high quality and will work well with their software, and that has to be factored into the price. But it still seems excessive, and some of the choices – like £360 for a set of wheels for the case – are just obscene.

But hey, if anyone wants to get me one for Christmas I won’t say no. Not that I really need all that hardware for blogging.

This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Animated Star Trek is back!

Animated Star Trek is back!

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for the plots of both Ephraim and Dot and The Girl Who Made The Stars, as well as for Star Trek: Discovery. If you want to avoid spoilers, turn back now!

Star Trek: The Animated Series ran for two seasons in 1973-74. It featured the voice talent of most of the original cast (sans Walter Koenig), but since then Star Trek has stuck to live-action series and films. Until, that is, the latest two episodes of Short Treks, which were released a couple of days ago.

At least they were for Trekkies in the United States – ViacomCBS apparently places no value on its overseas fans. But let’s not get into that right now, because these two episodes were absolutely fantastic.

After I was finally able to track down copies, I watched The Girl Who Made The Stars first, as I thought I probably wouldn’t find it as interesting as the other episode, Ephraim and Dot. But The Girl Who Made The Stars was a cute, Disney-esque bedtime story, told by Michael Burnham’s father to her when she was a child. I got a distinct Moana vibe from this short episode, which tells of a young girl who teaches her tribe of ancient humans to overcome their fear of the night – aided, in true Star Trek fashion, by an ethereal alien.

The unnamed little girl in The Girl Who Made The Stars.

As in Moana, the key to defeating what the tribe’s elders called the Night Beast wasn’t violence, and hiding away from it didn’t help either. It took someone to be bold and head out beyond the safety of the tribe’s valley to overcome the imagined monster. How much of the episode was actually based on African legends is something I don’t know, but this was a uniquely Star Trek look at history and at Africa. Framed as a bedtime story, I’m certain we aren’t supposed to take the episode’s main plot as canonical, but it was an interesting look at Michael Burnham’s childhood. Burnham has been in some respects a hard protagonist to get behind in Star Trek: Discovery. Partly that’s a consequence of her internal struggle between a logical Vulcan upbringing and human emotion, which she has at times seemed to be confused with. And partly, it has to be said, it’s a consequence of a character whose motivations – especially in Discovery‘s premiere – were impossible to follow and understand. This short episode doesn’t change anything fundamental about her character, but it does show the audience that she’s human at her core. Something which may be important as Discovery travels to unknown destinations next season. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this bedtime story referred to, perhaps inspiring her to lead Discovery’s crew and/or the Federation in season 3.

The other episode was absolutely adorable. Ephraim and Dot told the story of a tardigrade, the species seen in season 1 of Discovery, laying its eggs. After trying to find a warm place, the tardigrade chooses the warp core of the Enterprise – by this time under Kirk’s command. We see an animated recreation of the TOS engine room, and this is where Ephraim (as I assume she’s called, she’s never named on-screen) lays her eggs, only to be kicked off the ship by Dot – an R2D2 or BB8-type droid, seemingly employed on the Enterprise to perform menial tasks and jobs humans wouldn’t be able to do.

Ephraim and DOT.

The episode then launches into a brief “greatest hits” of the Enterprise under Kirk’s command. We see Khan waking up in sickbay from Space Seed, the hand of Apollo, Sulu brandishing his sword, the Planet Killer from The Doomsday Machine, and a recreation of Lincoln featured in the episode The Savage Curtain. As the sequence continues, we see the refit Enterprise fighting Khan’s Reliant in The Wrath of Khan before Ephraim finally manages to scramble back aboard, just as the Enterprise is set to be destroyed over the Genesis Planet in The Search for Spock.

I’m going to let you guys in on a secret – I got legitimately emotional at this point. As Ephraim races to save her eggs from the crippled, soon-to-be-destroyed ship I was literally on the edge of my seat. And when Dot got to her first and threw her overboard yet again, I felt a real emotional stab. I’ve always been a sucker for animals in films and television, and the cute way Ephraim is styled here no doubt contributed to that.

Luckily, at the last minute Dot realises that the eggs are on board and manages to save them, delivering the newly-hatched babies to Ephraim after the ship has exploded. The two then disappear into the Mycelial Network – perhaps laying the groundwork for a future episode or an appearance in one of the two new animated shows? Gosh I hope so.

Ephraim embraces DOT.

These two episodes were absolutely unlike anything Star Trek has done before – at least not since some of the weirder episodes of The Animated Series in the 1970s saw a 50-foot-tall clone of Spock, or the Enterprise visiting a parallel universe where magic is real. Yes, those really happened. And yes, they’re canon. Deal with it.

These episodes were undoubtedly inspired by Disney – the storytelling, the use of animals, cute robots, and a child as the main characters all come together to make these the most child-friendly Star Trek episodes so far, as well as a fantastic way to introduce little ones to Star Trek. Ephraim and Dot in particular contained some very funny moments, complete with traditional cartoon sound effects. At one point, Ephraim is sucked into a tube and bounces through it, with the tube bulging out in a throwback to old-school cartoons.

The little girl and the alien in The Girl Who Made The Stars.

But at their core, these were just cute, heartfelt episodes. I’m sure that people who haven’t enjoyed modern Star Trek will hate them, and that’s fine because at this point those folks hate just about everything. Both of these episodes have something to say about Star Trek. Yes, characters are important. Yes, alien races and cool ship battles and the politics of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are important. But at its core, Star Trek is about inspiring stories, and seeking out new life. The Girl Who Made The Stars tells such a story, and Ephraim and Dot takes a look at one example of the kind of new life that Starfleet has been seeking. And these episodes are presented in a cute, fun, approachable way. Show them to anyone sceptical of Star Trek and I bet they’d come away thinking about the franchise in a whole new light.

Overall, Ephraim and Dot and The Girl Who Made The Stars leave me hopeful that the new animated series – Lower Decks – is in good hands and will turn out to be a lot of fun. And moreover, that the currently-untitled animated series that’s supposed to be more kid-friendly will also have something to offer to adult fans like myself. The best kids’ shows manage to find a way to appeal to us too, and from these shorts, I feel like there’s a real chance that the new series will absolutely have something to offer older Trekkies.

Star Trek animation is back – with a bang!

There’s only one episode left in this season of Short Treks – and it’s set to be a prequel of sorts, leading into Star Trek: Picard. So I can’t wait to see that. And Picard is coming next month! It really is a great time to be a Star Trek fan right now.

The Star Trek franchise – including Short Treks and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of ViacomCBS. Short Treks is available to stream on CBS All Access in the United States, and is now available on Blu-ray elsewhere. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Xbox is terrible with names

Xbox is terrible with names

Dennis

At last night’s Game Awards, Phil Spencer, the head of Microsoft’s Xbox brand, made the surprise announcement of their next-generation console. That the console exists wasn’t the surprise, of course; we’ve known another Xbox would come out next year for quite a while. But it was a shock to me to see it unveiled at the Game Awards.

I don’t mean to be too disrespectful, but the Game Awards are very much a second-tier event in the industry, definitely not on par with E3, and probably behind Europe’s biggest event Gamescom when it comes to the gaming calendar. While the event is somewhat unique – though practically every outlet and organisation in games media makes a list of their favourite titles of the year – it just isn’t quite on the same level as some others. Which makes it an unusual choice of venue to premiere a new console. Just in terms of raw numbers, the audience for the Game Awards is much lower than for something like E3, and with it being so close to Christmas a lot of people who don’t follow the games industry religiously have tuned out.

Promo image for the Xbox Series X.

That’s not to say that unveiling the console at a big event like E3 would be the best idea, with so many other news stories coming out of that event you might be headline news for a day, only to be overshadowed the next day by another announcement. These kind of announcements are best suited to a dedicated event, where the brand can control all aspects of the presentation. At least in my opinion (as someone who did work for a time in games marketing, I should add) that seems like the best route to go down for something this significant.

As a result of announcing the device here, the immediate reaction hasn’t been one of triumph for the Xbox brand. Instead it’s been confused. At first I wasn’t sure whether the Xbox Series X was a new console, another Xbox One variant, or a different device entirely. And a significant part of that is down to the choice of name – one which is, frankly, crap.

Xbox has struggled with names since its second generation. And it was an understandably difficult conundrum for the brand to overcome. In 2005, the original Xbox came to the end of its life and was phased out. PlayStation, having launched its brand a whole generation ahead of Xbox, was already onto the PlayStation 2 – so logically, their next console would be the PlayStation 3. From Xbox’s point of view, having the Xbox 2 compete with the PlayStation 3 wouldn’t work. In the opinion of marketing professionals, they would surely have argued that running a “2” console against a “3” would look like it was a step behind, and would cost them sales, especially among consumers who didn’t know much about gaming. So the decision was made to name the new console something with a 3 – to match PlayStation 3. And as Xbox 360 essentially won that generation’s console war, it seems like it wasn’t a terrible name after all.

The Xbox Series X control pad.

But after Xbox 360 came Xbox One, though that console’s rough launch can’t really be attributed to its odd name. Midway through this generation we’ve also seen the Xbox One S and the Xbox One X – one a lower end system, one a more advanced system. Not that you’d know the difference from the names. Xbox One X is already a complicated name, with no simple short form way to say it. PS3, PS4, PS5; those short nicknames just work well and roll off the tongue. XBX doesn’t, not that anyone’s ever called it that.

And so after the Xbox One X, we arrive at the Xbox Series X. I fear it risks making the mistake Nintendo made with the Wii and Wii U – those consoles’ names were so similar that a lot of people were confused as to what exactly a Wii U was. Was it a tablet? An accessory for the Wii? A handheld? That confusion among consumers – especially casual consumers who aren’t hardcore gamers and who don’t follow any gaming news – hurt Nintendo and contributed to Wii U’s underperformance. And Xbox Series X just sounds so similar to Xbox One X and Xbox One S that I fear they haven’t learned from Nintendo’s issues in 2012/13.

If I already own – or have just recently bought – an Xbox One X or Xbox One S, if I’ve even heard of Xbox Series X I’m going to be seriously wondering whether it’s something I need to buy. Is it a new console? Is it just another variant of what I’ve already got? A lot of people won’t know – and won’t take the time to find out, especially if PlayStation 5 comes in with slick marketing. Now that’s clearly a brand new console, and even if I’m not normally a PlayStation consumer I still know – instantly – that it’s their next generation machine.

The Xbox Series X box.

I think Xbox had a couple of good naming options – one was simple: Xbox. Just plain Xbox. Everyone would know what it is, and that would be that. Alternatively, the name I really thought they would’ve gone with was Xbox Five. Why five, if it’s only the fourth generation Xbox? Because you’d number them like this: 1) Original Xbox, 2) Xbox 360, 3) Xbox One, 4) Xbox One X, 5) Xbox Five. Then they’d have the Xbox Five up against the PlayStation 5. There’d be no confusion as consumers would know both consoles represented the same generation.

Even while writing this article I had to go back and double-check that Xbox Series X was definitely, 100%, their next-generation offering. The confusing name is a potential problem – one that the brand is all too familiar with. Time will tell whether the choice of name will be damaging, and to be fair to Xbox they have a solid ten or eleven months to get the word out and get Xbox Series X firmly locked into the minds of consumers. But even if they can overcome the confusion with their current-gen offerings, let’s be honest – the name is still crap.

Xbox, Xbox Series X, Xbox One X, and other consoles mentioned above are the copyright of Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Post edited (to correct an image alignment error) 23rd Nov. 2020.

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #3

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #3

Dennis

Spoiler Warning:
There may be spoilers ahead for the story-focused titles on this list. If you don’t want to see spoilers for a game you haven’t yet played, feel free to skip that entry and move on to the next.

As the decade draws to a close, I’ve taken a look back at some of my favourite television series and films of the 2010s. Now it’s the turn of video games, and it’s been a good decade for the medium overall.

I used to work in the games industry, writing marketing blurb and website content for a large games company, so I might look at things slightly differently than the average gamer. I’ve also found that, due to a combination of my health worsening and just getting older, my ability and desire to sit down and play games isn’t the same as it used to be ten years ago. As a result, there are some titles which people hold up as being absolutely fantastic that I just haven’t played this decade – including games like Red Dead Redemption II, The Witcher 3, and God of War. That they aren’t included on this list doesn’t mean they aren’t great games, it’s simply that they aren’t titles I have any personal experience with.

With the rise of on-demand streaming for films and television, it’s safe to say that in most cases, most people can watch any film or TV series that they want to. There are even, shall we say, ways to get around pesky restrictions for those who sail the high seas. Ahoy, mateys. So in that sense, TV and film is one platform that everyone with a screen can access. Not so for games, where different titles are released on different systems – some being exclusive to just one. A person’s preference for games is therefore going to be tied to the platform they use to play and the titles that system has available. My primary gaming machine is PC, but I’ve been lucky this decade to play on a variety of others.

Let’s look back briefly at the systems we’ve seen this decade. Obviously PC has been there for the whole decade, chugging away in the background. In 2010, the main consoles that were available were the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. These consoles were into the latter half of their life by this point, having been released in 2005 and 2006. In 2012, Nintendo launched the Wii U, which didn’t sell particularly well, and in 2013 Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were released. Following the failure of the Wii U, the Switch came out in 2017, and these three consoles are the primary ones in use today. The 2010s also saw the mass adoption of smartphones, which are a legitimate gaming platform in themselves, and finally just a few weeks ago, Google jumped into the gaming market with its streaming service called Stadia. There were also a couple of handhelds, the Nintendo 3DS and the PlayStation Vita.

As I said for the previous lists I’ve made, everything here is wholly subjective. These aren’t games I’m saying are “objectively the best”, they’re simply the titles I personally found to be the most interesting, entertaining, or memorable over the last ten years. And aside from my number one pick, which is my favourite game of the decade, the rest of the list could really be in almost any order. So with that out of the way, let’s jump in.

Number 10:
Minecraft (Multiplatform, 2011)

Promo artwork for Minecraft.

I came to Minecraft quite early in its life, when it was still in beta. I was with a partner at the time who had got into it through watching YouTube videos of playthroughs and wanted me to try it out. The early versions of the game lacked a lot of features that are available currently. When I first played, there was no Creative Mode option, no villager NPCs, no End portal, and a lot of other elements. But it was nevertheless a fun game, and one that was great to play together with other people.

Minecraft took me by surprise by blowing up the way it did. I didn’t expect this scruffy little game, with its incredibly outdated pixel graphics and that seemed to be all about building mud huts and chopping trees, to become a global gaming phenomenon. Shows what I know, eh?

The core appeal of Minecraft is that in its randomly-generated world, players can basically do anything they want. People have done everything from using Creative Mode to make incredibly detailed artwork to redstone-powered in-game computer systems which actually work. Schools have even started using Minecraft as an educational tool, teaching kids how to interact with and use computers. And Minecraft is everywhere, on every platform and system from consoles to phones to PC and even the Raspberry Pi mini computer. And it’s picked up a worldwide fanbase that must number in the hundreds of millions.

The combination of exploration, collecting resources, building, and fighting monsters has been incredibly alluring, and while Minecraft may seem simple on the surface, there’s so much to do that it’s easy to lose many, many hours in its simple, pixelated world. I’ve had great fun taking an empty world and building castles, digging huge caverns and tunnels, travelling to different realms, and fighting off some of Minecraft’s iconic creatures. And compared to a lot of players, I’ve barely scratched the surface.

The PC version of Minecraft has also benefited from a very active modding community, with some incredible mods that completely change the game. One such mod is even credited (at least by some people) with spawning the battle royale genre that has taken the gaming world by storm in the last three or four years.

All in all, Minecraft is a rare, genre-defining title and its success has been imitated by many other games – so much so that “Minecraft clone” is a legitimate game genre in itself at this point – but never bettered. That it still has such an active playerbase over eight years after its official release is testament to its place in the history of gaming.

Number 9:
The FIFA series (Multiplatform, annual releases)

Promotional screenshot for FIFA 18.

In 2010, I picked up the World Cup edition of FIFA. I’d played several FIFA titles in the 1990s – FIFA ’97 on PC, World Cup ’98 and FIFA 99 on the Nintendo 64 – but I hadn’t touched the franchise since the turn of the millennium. It had changed hugely in that time – not just graphically, but the AI too.

Though it’s probably fair to say that FIFA games this decade haven’t made such groundbreaking changes as they did in the previous one, for me as someone coming back after such a long hiatus, I was absolutely struck by how much better World Cup 2010 was than the titles I remembered from years prior. While FIFA games absolutely can be enjoyed in single-player, where I had the most fun was playing against friends one-on-one.

I’m not a big online gamer, but if I have two control pads and someone to play with on the couch, FIFA is definitely one of my go-to series for a fun time – assuming, of course, that the other person is a football fan. For non-fans, there’s obviously much less enjoyment to be had.

The most recent edition of FIFA I played was FIFA 18, which has some minor improvements over games earlier in the decade, but nothing that I’d say that majorly changed the game experience. What I find the most fun isn’t playing as my favourite team with my favourite players, but picking a less-known team in a different league, building a team of players, and challenging for the league title or a cup. FIFA is a surprisingly adaptable series in that respect – there are a lot of options and ways to play. Depending on how long or short you want matches to be, and how much input you want to have in the management of your team, you can spend either hours in the backroom playing with different tactical choices and player options, or just blitz through a campaign of short matches all the way to the end of the season and the cup final. There’s something for everyone – or at least, for every football fan.

There are some absolutely legitimate criticisms of the FIFA series for the way it charges players for random in-game content in its Ultimate Team mode, and the way that recent iterations of the game – especially on platforms like Nintendo Switch – haven’t really brought any new gameplay to the table for a full-priced title, and I don’t want to ignore those. But for me personally, as someone who doesn’t play online and doesn’t buy in-game items, FIFA is a lot of fun and offers a lot of content for people who enjoy football. And the massive improvements made since I first played it in the 1990s are still impressive, even if the pace and scale of gameplay and graphical improvements has fallen away in recent years.

Number 8:
Shenmue I & II (PC and PlayStation 4, 2018)

Ryo Hazuki (left) faces down an opponent in this promo screenshot from Shenmue I & II.

I was a huge Shenmue fan when I had a Dreamcast, so when this remaster was announced I was incredibly excited to jump back into that world. It’s a little bit of a stretch to call this a remaster, though, as while the game is upscaled to fit modern widescreen displays, and there were some minor changes to controls to better suit modern control pads, the games are essentially identical to their respective 1999 and 2001 releases – including, so I hear, some of the same bugs and glitches as were present two decades ago. Though I did encounter a few bugs in my playthrough (the same cutscene repeating, getting stuck in the environment, etc.) I can’t say for sure whether those are bugs which were carried over from the original versions or not.

Though Shenmue I & II haven’t really aged all that well from a gameplay perspective, it was absolutely a nostalgic treat to be able to replay these classic games I enjoyed years ago. And the first game in particular was a landmark in the history of gaming – for me personally as well as the industry. Prior to playing Shenmue, most of my gaming experiences had been in flat, 2D worlds. The few 3D titles I’d seen or played had been games like Super Mario 64 – which is a great game in its own right, but not what you’d call cinematic. Shenmue completely changed the way I viewed games; no longer just digital toys, they could tell stories that would be just as at home on television or in the cinema. I love that about games, and my favourite titles ever since have been ones that told great, immersive stories. The chance to recapture some of the way that felt was too tempting to pass up, so I couldn’t wait to replay Shenmue.

Shenmue I & II was a return to a game world I hadn’t visited since the early 2000s when I traded in my Dreamcast for an Xbox when that console failed, and as a piece of nostalgia, getting to enjoy these titles again was wonderful. Shenmue is a series all about telling one story, and the unique world it created – with characters and businesses operating on a day-night schedule, variable weather conditions, and the freedom to ditch the main quest and just explore the environment or play games in the arcade – was groundbreaking for its time and still something special today.

In an article earlier this month, I wrote how I was very disappointed that Shenmue III won’t be completing Ryo’s story, despite having what is almost certainly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do so. I still haven’t bought that game, and I’m not sure whether I want to until I know whether there will be a sequel – or any other conclusion to the story. But that disappointment hasn’t detracted (much) from my enjoyment of this rerelease of the first two titles.

Number 7:
Mario Kart 7 (Nintendo 3DS, 2011) & Mario Kart 8 (Wii U, 2014; Switch, 2017)

Being able to race underwater was new in Mario Kart 7.

Ever since I played Super Mario Kart on the SNES in the mid-1990s I’ve been a fan of Nintendo’s fun and silly racing series. Both of the main entries this decade – 2011’s Mario Kart 7 and 2014’s Mario Kart 8 – have been absolutely amazing. The less said about Nintendo’s money-grabbing mobile version the better, though. I got to play Mario Kart 8 months before release at a press event, and I was in awe of the game’s hugely improved graphics. For a while it seemed like the Wii U tanking would mean fewer people would get to play this great entry in the series, but Nintendo repackaged the game for Switch in 2017 – where I’m not ashamed to say I bought it for the second time.

A racing sim this ain’t, so leave your $500 sim cockpit at home, and pick up a controller (or a pair of Switch joy-cons) because Mario Kart is pure arcade racing goodness. When I was working in a big office, a group of colleagues and I would regularly play Mario Kart 7 via the Nintendo 3DS’ Download Play feature, and those races could get very competitive! Mario Kart 8 is also a great multiplayer game, and on one occasion I had a birthday tournament with some friends. As a split-screen game, it’s absolutely perfect. Its simple controls mean anyone can jump in and play, with races being easily accessible to a newcomer – even someone new to gaming.

My favourite character is Dry Bones – the skeleton version of Koopa Troopa – so I was pleased to see him (or her, I suppose) return for the Switch version of Mario Kart 8. It’s always nice to be able to play as your favourite – and I’d been playing as Dry Bones since Mario Kart Wii. The expanded roster of characters this time around should give players plenty of choice, as will the variety of customisation options for karts. Putting together the best kart – with a combination of body, wheels, and glider – to win races has become an important strategic element of the game!

At the end of the day, Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 are just good, solid fun. With Nintendo’s typical high quality, these really are games anyone of any age can have a fantastic time with. Whether you want to kill five minutes with a single race, or spend hours trying to unlock all the characters and vehicle options, there’s something for everyone to do in this fun, casual title.

Number 6:
The Last Of Us (PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, 2013)

Ellie and Joel in an atmospheric piece of promotional artwork for The Last Of Us.

The Last Of Us was the PlayStation 3’s swansong – one of its final titles that really showed off what the system was capable of. In 2013 the games industry was gearing up for new consoles, but famed studio Naughty Dog had one last hurrah for the departing generation, and released what is arguably the PlayStation 3’s finest game.

Set in a post-apocalyptic environment where most of humanity has fallen victim to a fungal infection that turns people into zombies, The Last Of Us is really a character-driven story, a road trip game where main characters Joel and Ellie cross a hauntingly beautiful rendition of an overgrown, largely deserted United States. There’s a variety of enviroments, from crumbling cities to open areas of countryside, and to call the world “atmospheric” wouldn’t do it justice.

Joel is the game’s main protagonist, and while players get a turn playing as Ellie, The Last Of Us is really Joel’s story. The ending is gut-wrenching, and whether or not you agree with Joel’s decision to save Ellie’s life – and in so doing, rob humanity of the chance to cure the cordyceps disease – it’s an incredibly powerful ending. I’m not sure whether the game really needs a sequel; you can’t usually get lighting to strike twice. But regardless, a sequel is due out next year and I’ll be interested – if cautiously so – to see where it takes these incredible characters.

The best post-apocalyptic fiction, whether in the format of a game, book, film, or television series, takes relatable, down-to-earth characters and throws impossibly difficult situations at them. For me, The Last Of Us is right up there with films like I Am Legend and TV shows like The Last Ship as a standout piece of work in the post-apocalyptic genre. By focusing so much on two characters, their journey, and their growth, the game takes everything great about storytelling and makes it an interactive experience. The best games, at least in my opinion, are the ones that manage to do this. And The Last Of Us is absolutely among the best games of the decade for that very reason.

Number 5:
Banished (PC, 2014)

An example of a town players can build in this Banished promo screenshot.

Banished is a complicated town-building and management game. Players take control of a group of citizens who are starting a new life after being banished from their society. Aside from planning and building the town, it’s important to manage resources like food, clothing, firewood, tools, medicine, and citizens’ happiness, and getting the balance right between all of these elements is incredibly tricky to master even after hours of trial and error.

The amazing thing about Banished, considering how much there is to do, is that it was all created and programmed by one person. Every aspect of the game was designed and put together by just one guy, and that’s just incredible to me. There have occasionally been other indie titles with just one creator, but none have come close to being on par with Banished. This game would still have made this list even if it had been the work of a team of developers or a whole studio, but considering only one person worked on it, I’m speechless, truly.

The world that players’ citizens inhabit is randomly generated each time, meaning no two towns will be alike. While it’s relatively easy to get started, scavenging available above-ground resources, in order to maintain a town that will be viable for 50+ years of in-game time, it’s important to put sustainability at the heart of playing the game. Forests can be replanted, but if players clear the map from end to end it’s easy to run out of other resources like iron or stone. And striking the right balance to keep everyone in town fed, clothed, equipped, healthy, and happy is a task that is difficult to get the hang of, and one that varies with each map and each playthrough, giving Banished almost unlimited replayability for people who really get into it.

Number 4:
Super Mario Odyssey (Switch, 2017)

Cappy and Mario in New Donk City in a promo image for Super Mario Odyssey.

For a few years in the 2010s, it seemed as though Nintendo was only interested in 2D Mario games, titles which imitated the character’s NES and SNES heyday but with up-to-date graphics. Those 2D platformers were okay, but Super Mario Odyssey is on a whole other level.

Playing out like a massively expanded version of classic 3D platformer Super Mario 64 – complete with a version of that game’s iconic castle – Odyssey takes Mario on an incredible journey all across the Mushroom Kingdom and beyond. There’s plenty of nostalgia here for returning fans, including throwbacks to previous titles in the franchise, but there’s also loads to do for new players, and you don’t have to be a Mario fan to have an amazing experience.

For what is I believe the first time, it’s possible to customise Mario’s outfit. This simple change alone provides tons of fun, and an additional incentive to collect all the hidden coins throughout Odyssey‘s expansive levels. I’m a big fan of character outfits and customisation, and being able to style Mario in such a wide range of outfits was great fun.

There’s a range of different environments in Odyssey, with no two levels being alike. From a cityscape to a dark forest all the way to the moon, there’s a lot to see and do. The game revolves around collecting moons – which replace the power stars from Mario 64 – and while a couple of hundred is enough to unlock all the levels and defeat Bowser, there are literally hundreds more available. 100% completion of the game is possible, but difficult – and requires a heck of a lot of time. This is a title to come back to over and over, and an undoubted classic of the genre and the generation.

Number 3:
Grand Theft Auto V (Multiplatform, 2013)

Promo artwork for Grand Theft Auto V featuring protagonists Michael, Franklin, and Trevor.

For a lot of people, Grand Theft Auto V will be the game of the decade, and understandably so. Rockstar’s most recent entry into its action/crime franchise is a juggernaut – regularly appearing in top ten sales charts and on Steam as one of the most played games even six years after its initial release.

The main reason Grand Theft Auto V has been so successful is its online mode – though as a predominantly single-player gamer this isn’t a mode I’m familiar with. Instead, what I like about this game is its single-player campaign. The characters are great to interact with, and watching them team up and work together is more rewarding because players get to spend time with each of them. In previous Grand Theft Auto titles, players took control of a single protagonist. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, Grand Theft Auto V‘s approach, having multiple protagonists, has arguably led to more immersion and the feeling that missions have higher stakes. Watching two or three characters you’ve played as interacting with each other is a very different experience than watching a sole protagonist interact with NPCs. There’s a personal connection that exists between player and character – one which Grand Theft Auto V uses to great effect.

While the story is a fun, over-the-top parody of America as it was in the early 2010s, where Grand Theft Auto V really shines is in letting players loose in a huge open world. Half of the fun of any Grand Theft Auto title is in taking time off from story missions and roaming around, blasting the soundtrack from the radio of your stolen car, and just soaking up the atmosphere of the world that has been painstakingly created. And that’s just as true here as it was in Grand Theft Auto III, which was the first title in the series I played back on the original Xbox, or in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which first featured the city of Los Santos.

Los Santos is a parody of Los Angeles, and the city is created in absolutely amazing detail. Even more than six years after release, this open world’s scale is impressive and it looks great to boot. There’s a lot to do even when not taking part in a mission, far too many side activities to list here, and it’s quite easy to see how people have sunk thousands of hours into this game. Grand Theft Auto V is a title which has lasted from the end of the last console generation right through the current one, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest to see it ported to next year’s PlayStation 5 and next-gen Xbox. How will Rockstar possibly be able to follow its success? I wrote an article about that.

Number 2:
Civilization VI (PC, 2016)

Promo screenshot of Civilization VI.

Civilization VI might be the game I’ve spent the most time with this decade. It’s certainly my most-played game of the last three years, that’s for sure. It’s a game that hooks you in and keeps you coming back for more.

My first experiences with PC strategy games back in the 1990s were real-time strategy games like Age of Empires and Command and Conquer. Early games in the Civilization franchise didn’t really appeal to me because they were slower and, in my opinion at the time, less exciting as a result. So when Civilization VI came out in 2016, I wasn’t particularly interested at first. But after reading some very positive reviews online I decided to give it a try – and I’m so glad I did.

Playing out like a digital board game rather than a video game, Civilization VI lets you build cities, colonise the world, and defeat your opponents through a variety of victory conditions: cultural, domination, religious, scientific, or simply by having the highest score at the end of an arbitrary time limit or turn limit. Each of these victory conditions requires a different play style to achieve, and which one seems best to pursue can change depending on the outcome of wars and diplomacy with other factions in the game.

Despite some glitches here and there, including one introduced by an update at one point, the AI in the game is very good and plays to win. On harder difficulty settings, you’re in for a real fight! There are also some great custom scenarios – shorter games with different factions and specific victory conditions. I also had great fun trying to unlock various Steam achievements – some of which required oddly specific circumstances like capturing an oil well in the final turn of a game, or building districts in a city in a specific pattern. Achieving some of the more obscure ones – especially ones that hardly anyone else had – became a fun game in itself for me.

The game takes players from the stone age through to the near future (as of the most recent expansion pack) and various technologies can be unlocked along the way, improving your cities, units, and abilities. There are plenty of civilisations to choose from, with the number almost doubling thanks to several expansion packs. Unfortunately, the price for the game plus all its current expansions can be a bit steep – but it is on sale on Steam from time to time, so it’s worth keeping an eye out for those sales to get the game at a discount.

Civilization VI converted me from a real-time strategy fan to someone who appreciates a slower turn-based game. And I’ve spent hundreds of hours in this game, customising everything I could (I like to give my cities names) and having a whale of a time. The randomly-generated maps, and the fact that there are far too many civilisations and leaders to play against in a single match, means that Civilization VI has huge replayability potential once you get stuck in. And I really, really did get stuck in for a while there.

Honourable Mentions:

For every title on the list above, there was at least one other I could’ve picked. It really has been a great decade for games, and with more people than ever now owning a console and playing games regularly, things can only get better as the 2020s roll around. Just before I crown my favourite game of the decade, here are a few titles which almost made this list (and one bonus subscription service – let’s look at that first!)

Xbox GamePass (Xbox One and PC, 2017) – GamePass aims to be the “Netflix of video games”, and that’s exactly what it is. A huge number of titles can be played for a single subscription fee, and I’d absolutely recommend it to anyone on a budget. An Xbox One S with a GamePass subscription (and an internet connection) is enough to get you stuck into this generation’s games without spending a huge amount of money up front.

Star Trek Online (PC, 2010; Xbox One and PlayStation 4, 2016) – It wouldn’t be one of my lists without a Star Trek title, and Star Trek Online is a lot of fun – provided you can tolerate playing with thousands of other people. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognise it’s a good game.
Fortnite (Multiplatform, 2017) – As a title that has brought millions of new people into the hobby, and changed the way companies approach charging for games, Fortnite is a landmark in this decade’s gaming landscape.
Plague Inc. (iOS and Android, 2012) – I didn’t expect to find a mobile game so genuinely different and interesting, but this fun strategy title – in which you play as a virus trying to wipe out humankind – is just that.
Victoria II (PC, 2010) – A massively in-depth grand strategy game that must take years to master, set during the 19th Century. Notable for allowing players to play as literally any country in the world – and expand to colonise and conquer it.
Planet Coaster (PC, 2016) – A spiritual successor to the classic Rollercoaster Tycoon series, this surprisingly detailed theme park builder is difficult, but a ton of fun.
Meow Motors (Multiplatform, 2018) – It’s basically Mario Kart with cats. What’s not to love about that?
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One, 2019) – I can’t rank this game because I haven’t been able to play it yet, but everything I’ve read sounds amazing and I can’t wait to jump back in to a galaxy far, far away.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Multiplatform, 2011) – I’d been an Elder Scrolls fan since Morrowind, and Skyrim did not disappoint – a massive open world, tons of NPCs, several factions, and hundreds of missions and quests to get stuck into.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, 2011) – Another franchise I’d long been a fan of, Human Revolution is a well-built prequel with fun gunplay and interesting ways to genetically and technologically modify your human character.
Halo: Reach (Xbox 360, 2010; Xbox One and PC, 2019) – It’s funny to be ending the decade replaying a game from the very start, but Halo: Reach is a fantastic story-driven FPS and was original developer Bungie’s final entry in the Halo series.

Number 1:
Mass Effect 2 (PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, 2010)

Jacob, Tali, and Commander Shepard in a promo screenshot for Mass Effect 2.

What can I say about Mass Effect 2 other than “wow”? This game’s incredible story of a no-hope mission to stop nefarious aliens from abducting human colonies is without equal in gaming, and would be at home in any big budget television series or film franchise.

I came late to the Mass Effect party, only playing the first game in the series several years after its 2007 release. I must confess that I wasn’t impressed at first. Mass Effect 1 struck me as a poor rip-off of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic; a generic clone of Star Wars from a studio that didn’t have the license any more. But after running out of things to play, I gave the first Mass Effect 1 a second chance, and second time around it hooked me into its world. By then, Mass Effect 2 was due for release and I picked up a copy on launch day. To say I was blown away would be an understatement – the game is such a massive improvement on its predecessor.

Gameplay is fantastic, a cover-based third-person shooter with a few different weapons to choose from and a variety of powers, including technological and the fantasy-based biotics (which I felt on my initial look at Mass Effect 1 was a poor clone of the Force from Star Wars). There are numerous planets to explore, and players get their own ship to command. Planets and missions don’t have to be done in the same order every time, giving some variety to additional playthroughs.

But what really shines in Mass Effect 2 are the characters and the story. Essentially, Mass Effect 2 is a team-up story: players must recruit the best team possible for an incredibly dangerous mission into uncharted space. Each team member needs to be recruited, then have their loyalty to you and the cause cemented by completing an additional optional mission, usually to resolve part of their backstory. Once these missions are complete, and the Normandy (the player’s ship) has been suitably upgraded, it’s time to take the fight to the evil Collectors (revealed to be pawns of the series’ main antagonists the Reapers).

The final mission of the game – dubbed the “suicide mission” – is one of the most intense sequences I’ve played in any game. The characters we’ve spent so long with can die, permanently, if the mission doesn’t go exactly right. First-time players will probably need a walkthrough to complete this final mission successfully. It’s an incredibly powerful story, with consequences for the final part of the trilogy (which came out two years later).

Mass Effect 2 also included some great expansion packs, adding additional story content which paved the way for Mass Effect 3 nicely. These expansions were well worth the money, and added hours of extra gameplay to what was already not a short game.

Being able to play the game as a nice guy or evil badass, as well as deciding who to recruit, whether to bother with their loyalty missions, and whether to try to keep everyone alive or make sacrifices in the endgame all combine to make Mass Effect 2 a game well worth revisiting. I must’ve played all the way through half a dozen times. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a long game!

The Mass Effect series was also unique, at least at the time, for letting players choose to play as a male or female Commander Shepard. Both options were fully-voiced, meaning there’s even more reason to come back to the game after beating it the first time.

Mass Effect worked so well as a trilogy, despite its controversial and somewhat lazy ending, but the standout part has to be Mass Effect 2. It built on the universe its predecessor created, streamlining the gameplay to really shine a spotlight on its amazing story. Mass Effect 3 would round out the trilogy, and unfortunately since then, the franchise hasn’t been able to recapture the magic of its second instalment. This is definitely a series worthy of a next-gen remaster, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see that some time in the 2020s.

When it came to choosing one title to top this list, Mass Effect 2 was the first one that came to mind. And when I stacked it up against other games, even ones I’d played a great deal more of, Mass Effect 2‘s amazing story won out, and I’m happy to crown it my game of the decade.

So that’s it.

Those are the games I personally had the most fun with over the last ten years. If your favourites didn’t make the list, please keep in mind that there are a lot of recent games that, despite wanting to, I just haven’t got around to playing yet. And as I said at the start, this whole thing is entirely subjective. It’s been a wonderful decade for games, one which has seen the medium grow beyond all recognition. Thanks to the almost universal adoption of smartphones, and the ease of smartphone gaming, millions of people who wouldn’t have ever called themselves “gamers” are getting into the hobby for the first time. And blockbuster titles like Minecraft and Fortnite have done wonders for the industry.

There have been some drawbacks and issues – loot boxes and random in-game monetisation is, despite what companies claim, akin to gambling, and I fear that some young people are going to have issues as a result of that in future. We need to keep a weather eye on some of these companies, and be unafraid to call them out when they misbehave.

But overall, the 2010s will be remembered as a decade which, though it didn’t see such a radical improvement in graphics or available computing power as the 1990s or 2000s, took gaming as a medium forward, pushing the boundaries and finally breaking into the mainstream as a legitimate entertainment form. Gaming is no longer looked down on by the majority as a nerdy hobby for sweaty teenagers. More and more people have become gamers themselves, and the decade has rewarded them with some absolutely incredible titles, both in terms of single-player story experiences and online multiplayer titles.

All of the games listed above are the copyright of their respective developers and publishers. All screenshots and promotional artwork were taken from IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #2

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #2

Dennis

Spoiler Warning:
There are spoilers ahead for all of the shows mentioned on this list. If you haven’t seen one, or haven’t seen up to the most recent season, feel free to skip ahead to the next entry.

In this second part of my series looking back at some of the entertainment highlights of the 2010s, I’ll be taking a look at television series. A couple of these may have premiered in the 2000s, but the criteria here was that they had to have new episodes (not re-runs) broadcast sometime between January 2010 and December 2019. So now you know not to complain that “technically this series aired in 2009”.

As is the case in cinema, television series this decade have benefited greatly from a huge increase in the quality and availability of CGI and other special effects. The result is that for a series with a sufficiently high budget, visuals and effects bordering on (and in some cases surpassing) the big screen have been possible. Additional technological changes like the availability of drones have meant that even low-budget shows have been able to get dramatic, sweeping aerial shots, and the move from standard definition (480p) to high definition (720p or 1080p) as well as the move from DVD to Blu-Ray has meant the visual quality of television series this decade is higher than ever. And that’s great, because television screens have been getting larger and larger. A few shows are even available in 4K resolution (2160p), pushing visuals even further.

The decade has also seen a major shift away from broadcast television channels to online on-demand streaming. Netflix and Amazon Prime end the decade in pole position in this new market. It’s funny to think that at the beginning of the decade I was still buying DVDs and watching them on a 4:3 CRT television. Going back to that setup today, after experiencing the convenience of Netflix and 4K visuals, would be one heck of a downgrade.

As more and more companies have tried to capture for themselves a piece of the streaming market, television budgets have skyrocketed. The result has been an exceptional decade for television storytelling. Some series have focused on telling a single story over multiple episodes and seasons, and this serialised format has become increasingly popular, largely replacing episodic television (or the “monster-of-the-week” format) across many genres. Personally, while I like some serialised shows and the format can suit some stories, I miss being able to jump into any random episode of a show I enjoy without having to remember everything that happened that season – or several seasons prior. But that’s really just a matter of personal taste.

Speaking of personal taste, this entire list is completely subjective. I’m in no way saying these shows are “objectively the best”; they’re simply the ones I personally enjoyed most over the last ten years. My number one pick is my favourite show of the decade, but the others could really be in almost any order – they’re all so good. So let’s dive in!

Number 10:
Elementary (2012-19)

Elementary took Holmes and Watson to New York City.

While the BBC won almost universal acclaim for their series Sherlock, a second modern-day take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic detective premiered in the USA. Elementary stars Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu as Holmes and Watson respectively, the latter being “gender-swapped” to be female. I’m not usually a fan of changing the fundamentals of a character in this way, but this take on Sherlock Holmes was so altogether different from its source material that here, it worked surprisingly well.

One of the main reasons why I found Elementary to be preferable to Sherlock – and I’m afraid the comparison is an inescapable one – is simply that there was much more to watch. Sherlock, at time of writing, has had a grand total of 13 episodes over four seasons, and while most of them were good, there wasn’t actually a lot to get stuck in to as a viewer. Elementary, in contrast, ran for seven seasons and has a grand total of 154 episodes. While quantity over quality is not a good argument, if the quality is good then I’ll always be happier with a series that delivers more to watch. And as good as Sherlock was, Elementary just offered so much more.

Miller and Liu lead the cast, but there are great performances from guests such as Rhys Ifans and Natalie Dormer, the latter playing Sherlock’s nemesis Moriarty in earlier seasons. These recurring characters add an extra element to the show and allow for character development and arcs over multiple seasons, in addition to the episodic nature of much of the show. Indeed Elementary is one of the few series this decade to primarily stick to an episodic format, allowing Holmes and Watson to solve a huge variety of cases over the course of all seven seasons. As with some shows that run for a long time, toward the end the quality dipped a little as storylines became overly complicated, but overall Elementary is a really enjoyable crime drama/detective show that brings Sherlock Holmes firmly into the modern day.

Number 9:
The Terror (2018-19)

Ciarán Hinds on a promo image for The Terror‘s first season.

I’m always more than a little sceptical when it comes to an entertainment product using real-world people and historical figures without their permission or knowledge. And The Terror, at least in its first season, uses the crew of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition as its cast of characters. I’m also not a fan of horror in general, but the story of the Franklin Expedition was too tempting to pass up, so I gave The Terror a chance. And I’m so glad that I did.

Sir John Franklin – portrayed by Ciarán Hinds as a somewhat pompous and ill-prepared leader – takes command of two ships on an expedition to find the northwest passage at the very end of the Age of Exploration. Almost all of the world had been mapped by the 1840s, save for some of the most northerly arctic regions, and the Franklin Expedition was aiming to find a way to cross between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This serves as the backdrop for the series, which is ultimately about the increasingly desperate attempts of the crew to survive, as well as fend off a soul-devouring monster.

Luckily the monster didn’t get too much screen time, and in the vein of classics of the monster horror genre like Jaws was the better for being largely unseen. Both Tobias Menzies and Jared Harris give incredible performances as naval commanders, and the story plays out across a single season, leaving practically the entire cast dead by the end.

The second season picks up a completely different story, set this time in a Japanese internment camp in the USA during WWII, and The Terror thus becomes an anthology series. The second season wasn’t as strong as the first, but did feature Star Trek’s George Takei among its cast – noteworthy because he was, in his youth, interred in such a camp.

An interesting premise gave The Terror the foundation upon which a truly interesting series was built, and as a horror show that didn’t focus too much on jump-scares or gore, it was something different in the 2010s. Finally, as a character study of individuals dealing with incredibly difficult, almost unimaginable circumstances, The Terror has certainly earned its spot on this list.

Number 8:
The Last Ship (2014-18)

The U.S.S. Nathan James on a promo image for The Last Ship.

Post-apocalyptic settings have been common in entertainment this past decade, but few series nailed it the way The Last Ship did. Rather than an alien invasion, like in Falling Skies, or something supernatural, like in The Walking Dead or The Strain, the threat here is something down-to-earth and real: a viral pandemic. To me, that sense of realism heightened the drama – the premise of The Last Ship feels like something that could actually happen some day, and I found that to be absolutely gripping.

At the heart of it, though, The Last Ship is about characters, as the best shows often are. The crew of the U.S.S. Nathan James go through a heck of a lot, first to find a sample, then to create and distribute a cure, before finally facing the impossible task of rebuilding civilisation. There are some great ship-to-ship battles here, for fans of such things, and despite a lot of modern series and films having a military focus, modern-day naval combat isn’t something there’s been a lot of on television. So in that sense, those sequences are as interesting to watch as they are nervewracking and dramatic.

The show isn’t afraid to take risks – splitting up its cast at numerous points, often for multiple episodes at a time, as well as killing off key crew member and scientist Dr Rachel Scott at the end of its second season. The latter is an especially bold move given the focus The Last Ship had on the work undertaken to cure the virus and synthesise the cure in a form which was easy to distribute.

As in many post-apocalyptic settings, a significant part of the drama comes from human beings facing unprecedented situations for which they were not prepared. Many of the show’s antagonists – such as a government official illegally burning the bodies of the dead to fuel a power plant – are created by circumstance, and while in the context of the show we root for the crew of the Nathan James to bring them down, in more thought-provoking moments we’re left wondering just what we’d have done in such a situation.

Number 7:
The Vietnam War (2017)

Title card for The Vietnam War.

As I mentioned in my previous list, which was about the best films of the decade, I’m a big fan of documentaries. And Ken Burns has produced some absolutely outstanding documentaries about the United States, with his latest work tackling the Vietnam War.

I studied the war quite a bit when I was at university, so the overall story is well-known to me, as I’m sure it would be to a lot of people. But that didn’t mean that the way it was presented here, complete with interviews given by soldiers on both sides, and many others who were involved with or affected by the war, was in any way less interesting. The Vietnam War is a masterpiece, telling the story from the American side, but not with malice or bias toward the Vietnamese – who did ultimately win, of course.

The soundtrack is also outstanding, featuring many classic songs of the era, including a number of protest songs. In many ways, the societal divisions we’re living through today have a parallel in the Vietnam era – pro-war and anti-war activists would frequently clash, and there was no middle ground and no civility between the two sides. Sound familiar?

What was great about The Vietnam War is that Ken Burns didn’t treat the retreat from Saigon as the end of the affair. Instead the documentary continues, exploring in detail the consequences of a communist victory for the south – and the country overall. In many ways, Vietnam was a turning point for the Americans, who’d never been on the losing side of a war since 1812, and a reality check on their foreign policy. The legacy of that conflict persists today, both for the Americans and Vietnamese, and The Vietnam War explores the issues as carefully as possible while trying to remain balanced.

Number 6:
Hannibal (2013-15)

Mads Mikkelsen in a promo image for Hannibal.

Sir Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of the famous cannibal was always going to be a difficult act to follow, as his performance in 1991’s Silence of the Lambs is iconic. But to my surprise, Hannibal actually managed to bring something new to the table – pun absolutely intended – and in a positive way, showing off Thomas Harris’ serial killer in all his devious glory.

The premise is interesting – a police procedural where the killer is already known to the audience and is hiding out among the cast. Known to us but unknown to them. It’s something which is incredibly hard to get right, because it risks the story becoming either boring or over-the-top. Luckily, at least in its first two seasons, Hannibal avoids that trap and instead tells a fascinating, if somewhat complicated, story.

The two leads, Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen, give outstanding performances as Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter respectively, and the chemistry between the two of them carries the show forward. Unfortunately, the show’s ratings were never great, partly due to its heavy, overly artistic style (a scene which is literally just a slow-motion teacup shattering and then coming back together is always going to have very limited appeal) and it had to be saved from cancellation after both its first and second seasons. The third season was much weaker, at least in my opinion, and I’d have preferred if the second season’s finale – where Hannibal walks away from a wounded Will Graham into the night – had been the series’ end. The first two seasons, however, were fantastic, and there really isn’t another series quite like Hannibal.

The level of gore was very high, but much of it was treated in a very artistic way. Hannibal himself, at least this version of the character, tends to display his victims in a variety of poses, often imitating art or making a point. In one famous sequence, the brain and heart of a judge are cut out, and his corpse is displayed with the two organs balanced on a scale in a brutal display. For some viewers, such content would be shocking and enough to stop watching. In that sense, Hannibal is much more of a niche product than its big screen cousins.

Number 5:
Game of Thrones (2011-19)

The end of the title sequence of Game of Thrones.

It’s not in the slightest unfair to say that television in the 2010s was dominated by Game of Thrones. It’s a seminal work, rightly hailed as a classic, and one which will be a joy to return to even in twenty or thirty years’ time. At some point in the future I’d like to do a full retrospective of Game of Thrones, including its controversial and disappointing final season, but there’s far too much to go into on this list.

I hadn’t read George R. R. Martin’s fantasy epic before I watched the show – but that’s okay, because he still hasn’t finished writing it. It took me a while to get into Game of Thrones, because despite loving the fantasy setting, the sheer volume of characters introduced in the first few episodes is hard to keep track of at first, especially for a total newcomer.

Game of Thrones changed the way television was produced in three key ways – firstly, it wasn’t afraid to kill off regular cast members. Soaps had been doing this for years, it has to be said, but most prime time shows simply didn’t have a disposable cast until Game of Thrones came along. Secondly, it made multi-season serialised storytelling mainstream for the sci fi/fantasy genre, which had previously been much more episodic in nature. And finally, it demonstrated to television companies that it can be worth investing cinema-level money into television.

Speaking as a fan of science fiction and fantasy, Game of Thrones took what had been a fairly niche, geeky genre and pulled it firmly into the mainstream. People who, a few years ago, wouldn’t have been caught dead watching something like this were drawn into the realm of fantasy – many for the first time – and from the point of view of ensuring more fantasy and sci fi will be produced, and with bigger budgets, that’s a really great thing.

There are too many great individual performances to cover here, but as a whole the cast did a fantastic job bringing these characters to life. And in terms of visual effects, Game of Thrones really does throw cinema-quality visuals at viewers. There are a small number of awkward CGI moments, especially in earlier seasons, but these don’t really notice when taking the series as a whole. As a landmark in the history of television, and a truly outstanding fantasy epic that rivals greats like The Wheel of Time and even Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones is absolutely unmissable. And with prequels and spin-offs set to premiere in the coming years, we haven’t seen the last of the land of Westeros.

Number 4:
Chernobyl (2019)

A promo image for Chernobyl.

After Game of Thrones went off the air, I was legitimately wondering how HBO could possibly follow its success. It didn’t take long to get the answer – Chernobyl, produced in conjunction with Sky here in the UK, is probably the best miniseries I’ve ever seen.

The aesthetic of Chernobyl is perfect. I’ve talked before about how nostalgia for the 1980s has been big this decade, but Chernobyl nailed the mid-80s look and feel better than any other show or film. Even the smallest details were perfectly replicated, and while some of the green screen special effects stray a little into the “uncanny valley”, overall the way Chernobyl looks and the way it captures the feel of the 1980s is outstanding.

Telling the story of the 1986 nuclear disaster, Chernobyl might seem like a weird choice for a big-budget production, but as with other entries on this list, what makes it such gripping television is its characters. Jared Harris features in a leading role for the second time on this list, and for good reason. His work in Chernobyl – as whistleblowing scientist Valery Legasov – is one of the best individual acting performances of the decade. A conflicted man, trying to do the right thing while being hampered by the corrupt and ineffective Soviet state, Harris puts his heart and soul into the real-life Legasov, and though there are only five episodes, by the end of the series his death really hits hard. And feels like it matters.

Though the story takes some liberties with the facts of the Chernobyl disaster – supporting character Ulana Khomyuk is a “composite” representing dozens of scientists, the helicopter crash is moved to much earlier after the initial explosion, and the risk of another explosion causing a much more widespread disaster seems to have been overstated – the majority of it is firmly grounded in fact, and Chernobyl is one of the rare drama shows that the audience can learn a lot from. Not just the history of what happened, but some basics of how nuclear power is made. “Now I know how a nuclear reactor works,” says Boris Shcherbina (played by Stellan Skarsgård – father of It actor Bill Skarsgård) and I think the audience feels the same way.

The show explores all aspects of the disaster, from the faults in the design of the nuclear reactor, all the way through to the culling of animals in the radiation zone and the disposal of the horribly radioactive corpses of those who died in the immediate aftermath. Chernobyl is both grim and gripping, detailing the story of how individuals rose to the occasion to deal with one of the most challenging moments in recent history.

Number 3:
The Expanse (2016-Present)

Title card for The Expanse.

Based on a series of novels, The Expanse is one of the most unique and interesting science fiction settings I’ve seen in a very long time. It takes many sci fi tropes – like faster-than-light travel, a united human species, and a galactic community of aliens – and ignores them, charting a path for itself that is completely different than anything else on television.

The Expanse is set in a near-future solar system where humans have colonised Mars and parts of the asteroid belt, but Mars has broken away to become a fully independent power, and “The Belt”, as it’s known, is far enough removed from Earth as to be practically autonomous. There’s a cold war going on between Earth and Mars, and it’s with this backdrop that the drama of the series unfolds.

For a SyFy channel original, I was impressed with the production values, visuals, and acting. Across the board, The Expanse delivered an exciting and cinematic story. When SyFy cancelled the series in 2018, fans started a campaign to have someone else pick it up, and Amazon stepped in. A fourth season will premiere in only a few days time. A modern-day version of the Star Trek letter-writing campaign of 1968, this success in bringing the show back shouldn’t be understated. It would have been a great shame to leave the story incomplete – especially as it had reached such an interesting point – and the fact that Amazon was willing to step in and pay for a fourth and fifth season is testament to the power of online fan communities.

There are some great performances in The Expanse too, notably from Thomas Jane, Dominique Tipper, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. The series starts with several completely separate story threads – a police detective in The Belt looking for a missing girl, the crew of a freighter transporting ice receiving a distress call, and a UN representative questioning a terrorist. Subsequent episodes bring in additional characters, like a marine from Mars and the crew of a space station run by The Belt. The way these stories play out and slowly work their way together is narratively brilliant, and the way the books have been adapted for television has been hugely successful. Casting choices were on point, and the aesthetic is great. It can be difficult to visually convey something as radically different as an extraterrestrial, but The Expanse manages to do so in an interesting way. In many shows and films, aliens end up looking just like people with a funny prosthetic, or puppets, or variants of animals or people from Earth. The weirdly ethereal way that The Expanse treats its alien element is unique and fascinating to see. There’s a heavy reliance on CGI at times, but generally it’s well done.

Rather than treating alien life as commonplace, as other sci fi series tend to do, The Expanse shows it off as something radically different and unique, and highlights the incredible danger even a molecule could do to us if we’re not prepared for it. Now that the show has been saved and its future on Amazon looks secure, it’s going to be fascinating to see what’s in store for the crew we’ve come to know.

Number 2:
Phineas and Ferb (2007-2015)

“Mom! Phineas and Ferb are making a title sequence!”

I firmly believe that Phineas and Ferb is one of the best cartoon series ever made. A Disney Channel original, the show ran for four seasons across seven years, and even spawned a feature film. The characters have since cropped up in episodes of Milo Murphy’s Law – created by the same team behind Phineas and Ferb – so while it went off the air in 2015, the characters are still kicking around over at Disney.

What Phineas and Ferb does well is that it throws in little jokes, references, and easter eggs which adults can enjoy, while still being 100% kid-friendly. The best kids shows and films do this, and the little inside jokes between us and the creators that kids wouldn’t necessarily get is part of what gives the show its near-universal appeal.

Unlike many cartoons, which tend to follow a single story thread, Phineas and Ferb uses its ten-minute runtime to tell three distinct stories. The formula of each story doesn’t really change all that much from one episode to the next: Phineas and his step-brother Ferb build something or invent something, often with their friends; their older sister Candace tries (and fails) to get them in trouble with their mother for their dangerous activity; and all the while family pet Perry the Platypus is actually a secret agent who disappears to battle an evil scientist. Simple, right?

The two wholly separate elements – the boys’ invention and Perry’s battle with the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz – don’t interact much with each other, essentially making the series two shows rolled into one. The voice acting is great, and the plot, while silly and totally aimed at kids, is a perfectly fun distraction. Practically every episode also features a song, and many of the songs are catchy and downright hilarious. There are also some touching moments, notably in the Christmas special and in the series’ finale. Phineas and Ferb also attracted some great guest stars over the course of its run, including boxer Evander Holyfield, the cast of Top Gear, actor Ray Liotta, actor and producer Seth MacFarlane, and singer Kelly Clarkson.

On a personal note, Phineas and Ferb has been a show I drift back to when my mental health is poor. The happy tone, the musical elements, and the bright colours can absolutely take the edge off when things seem dark. It’s really for that reason that I’m putting it here on the list.

Honourable Mentions:

Before I end the list I wanted to briefly highlight another ten shows, which could’ve easily been the top ten themselves. As I said at the beginning, it’s been a great decade for television, and there’s certainly way more than ten or twenty series worth watching. I have a pretty long list of shows I’ve been meaning to watch but haven’t gotten around to yet – including highly-recommended ones like Breaking Bad, Stranger Things, and The Orville. I know, I haven’t seen The Orville yet. Sue me.

The Simpsons (1989-Present) – It may surprise some of you to know that this classic cartoon is still running, but it is. After years of declining quality, recent seasons have improved greatly and the series is well worth a second look.
Page Eight (2011, 2014) – AKA The Worricker Trilogy, this political thriller was gripping from start to finish, and features a wonderful performance from Bill Nighy.
Terra Nova (2011) – A fun dinosaur/time travel series that was unfortunately cancelled after one season, just as the story was looking to get even more interesting.
Turn – Washington’s Spies (2014-17) – Telling the history of a spy ring that aided the Americans during the War of Independence, this show was entertaining and exciting, with some fun moments for a history buff like me.
Rick & Morty (2013-Present) – A hilarious animated show that satirises the science fiction genre, and plays fast and loose with its timeline and canon to great effect.
Short Treks (2018-Present) – Designed as a way to keep Star Trek on the air in between seasons of Discovery, these short-format episodes have told some amazing and occasionally very funny stories of their own.
The Strain (2014-17) – A vampire apocalypse comes to New York City in this show created by Guillermo del Toro. David Bradley gives an incredible performance as a seasoned vampire hunter.
The 100 (2014-20) – Set 99 years after a nuclear war, the show follows survivors who return to Earth after spending their whole lives in space. While it can be a bit “teenager-y”, it’s a solid work of post-apocalyptic sci fi.
11.22.63 (2016) – Based on the Steven King novel of the same name, this time travel thriller follows an attempt to prevent the assassination of JFK, and comes with a great twist.
Black Sails (2014-17) – Imagined as a prequel to classic novel Treasure Island, this series takes a more serious look at the Golden Age of Piracy than the recent Pirates of the Caribbean film series.

Number 1:
Star Trek: Discovery (2017-Present)

Promo image for Star Trek: Discovery.

It couldn’t possibly be anything else at the top of this list, right? After a twelve-year period in which the Star Trek franchise received three decent, but imperfect, action-heavy films, I was longing for it to return to the small screen where it belongs. Star Trek: Discovery is the reason I signed up for Netflix (we don’t have CBS All Access here in the UK) and it’s been well worth it.

As with most Star Trek shows, the start was rocky, but it picked up over a solid first season, with a great performance from Jason Isaacs as Capt. Gabriel Lorca. The second season improved greatly, and Anson Mount’s portrayal of legendary Star Trek character Capt. Christopher Pike has justifiably spawned a campaign for him to get his own show – seemingly catching the creators off-guard.

Discovery has taken a serialised approach to Star Trek, following the trend of many shows this decade, and that has allowed it to tell two season-long stories. The visuals have been updated massively; even the original Enterprise got a redesign. Some fans have felt the aesthetic was too similar to that used in the Kelvin timeline films, but taken as a standalone show, I think there’s nothing wrong with that. And the special effects and CGI have been fantastic.

Though we haven’t spent as much time as I’d have liked with all of the characters, there have been some wonderful character moments and relationships. A show like Discovery needs that, and the character development that has taken place over the first couple of seasons has been a joy to watch for the most part. Characters like Saru and Stamets have come into their own over the course of the series so far, gaining in confidence and going above and beyond for their crew.

Unfortunately, as with Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, this return to the Star Trek franchise hasn’t sat well with some fans, and in that sense that show has been divisive in the wider Trek fanbase. That’s a shame, but it’s a natural consequence of studios playing on nostalgia. There are some people who just don’t want anything new – if they want more Star Trek at all, they want to see carbon copies of what’s come before, not a show that tries to take the franchise to new places. Personally I’m just glad to see Star Trek back on our screens, and I hope it stays around for a long while yet.

For me to rank Star Trek: Discovery so highly considering that two of its key narrative elements in its first two seasons – the Mirror Universe and time travel – are generally not my favourite Star Trek stories is testament to just how good this series has been, and how happy I am to have Star Trek back after years in the wilderness.

Star Trek legend (and future Star Trek: Picard guest star) Jonathan Frakes stepped up to direct several episodes of Discovery across its first two seasons, further cementing its connection to the franchise. His episodes were actually among my favourites, and I look forward to seeing more from him in both Picard and the third season of Discovery when they premiere next year.

Star Trek: Discovery aimed to breathe new life into a franchise that had started to run out of ideas, and it has succeeded beyond all expectations. Its success has paved the way for Star Trek: Picard, as well as Lower Decks, Section 31, and other future Star Trek projects, and while it may not be everyone’s all-time favourite, in that sense it’s been great news for the franchise. I’m more than happy to crown it my favourite show of the decade.

So that’s it.

Those are my picks for the decade’s best television shows. As I indicated, there have been a number of series that I just haven’t found the time to sit down and watch yet, despite meaning to. But that happens, life gets in the way sometimes! There will be plenty of time to get caught up and binge-watch them in future. If your favourite series didn’t make the list, please just remember that this is all subjective. These are just the shows I enjoyed, it doesn’t mean what you like isn’t just as good. In case you missed it, you can check out my picks for the decade’s top films here. And stick around, because coming up next will be the final part of this series where I’ll look back at the decade’s top ten video games. See you next time!

All television series discussed in the list above are the copyright of their respective studios and distributors. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #1

Obligatory end-of-the-decade list #1

Dennis

Spoiler Warning:
There will be spoilers ahead for each of the films on the list. If you haven’t seen one and don’t want to have it spoiled, skip that entry and scroll to the next.

It’s December 2019, and with the 2020s just around the corner, it’s time to look back at some of the entertainment high points of the decade as it draws to a close. In this first list, I’ll be looking at my personal picks for the decade’s top films.

The 2010s saw some rather impressive technological leaps in cinema, particularly in the realm of special effects. The CGI of the 1990s and 2000s looks incredibly amateurish by today’s standards. Going back to some earlier films – even big-budget blockbusters – which rely heavily on CGI can seriously detract from the experience, especially on today’s large format 4K displays.

Narratively, the decade has seen franchises and sequels firmly dominate the box office, inspired by the success of Marvel in particular. It’s also been a decade where nostalgia and throwbacks to past films and franchises has been important. Many films have gotten sequels years or even decades after release – the revival of the Star Wars franchise being most notable.

By the way, the numbering here isn’t necessarily in order. The number one film is my favourite film of the decade, but the others could really be put in any order. All are great and while some have flaws or weren’t perfect, these are the films I enjoyed most. If your favourite(s) don’t make the list, just remember this is all subjective. You like what you like and I like what I like. And that’s great!

Number 10:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 & 2 (2010 and 2011)

Herminone, Ron, and Harry in the promotional poster for Deathly Hallows Part 1.

This is kind of a cheat because it’s two films, but it’s my list so that’s just tough. Looking back to the beginning of the decade, it’s hard to imagine that the Harry Potter series hadn’t yet concluded. But Deathly Hallows was split into two parts, coming out in 2010 and 2011, and they brought the series to an explosive conclusion. The decision to split up Deathly Hallows – which was, of course, a single book – into two films got a lot of criticism at the time for being a fairly obvious and shameless money grab, but the thing about the Harry Potter series is that there was always a lot of cut content from the books. So while it certainly was a moneymaking ploy on the part of studio Warner Brothers, it wasn’t one which damaged the films. If anything, the extra runtime makes Deathly Hallows a more enjoyable and fully-rounded experience.

Prior to JK Rowling messing with the characters (did you hear Dumbledore is gay now?) Deathly Hallows marked the end of the Harry Potter saga, which had been running since 2001’s The Philosopher’s Stone. Subsequent attempts to pull fans back in, with the two Fantastic Beasts films and the Cursed Child stage play haven’t managed to be anywhere near as successful, either in terms of story or financial results, so it would’ve been better in many ways if this had been the final entry in the series.

By this point in the film series, we’ve been with the characters for a long time, we’ve got to know the actors and watched them in a very literal sense grow into their roles. Deathly Hallows doesn’t shake up the formula or the aesthetic of the Harry Potter world. It’s more of the same, building on previous films and drawing the story to a satisfactory conclusion. The climactic fight against antagonist Voldemort had been building slowly over several films and when he was finally vanquished – with Harry’s trademark disarming spell, no less – it was a great and emotional moment. Aside from the awkward epilogue with several key characters having been “aged”, both films accomplish what they set out to. And as a fan of Harry Potter overall, it was a good way to say goodbye to the series. Or at least, to this iteration of it with these actors. I wouldn’t be shocked at all if Harry Potter returns as a big-budget television series in a decade or two.

Number 9:
Frozen (2013)

Promo poster for 2013’s Frozen.

In the autumn of 2013, when Disney’s Snow Queen-inspired Frozen was released, I was living in a different country, and perhaps it’s for that reason that I missed out on almost all of the advertising and hype for this film. It was only when browsing local cinema listings for English-language films that I even heard about Frozen, and decided from that to go to see it. Disney films have always been decent, so I wasn’t expecting to be disappointed, but I really was surprised at just how good Frozen was.

We could do a whole article on how the animators created the incredible snow for the film – important, obviously, in a film with such a wintry setting – because honestly the amount of work that went into that aspect alone is amazing. The snow in Frozen looks and behaves like real snow, right down to its powdery consistency, and the level of detail really took me by surprise. I understand that animators spent months working on just this one aspect of the film, and that attention to detail shows in the finished product. Frozen wouldn’t be half as good if it looked like Anna and her sister Elsa were trekking across a flat sheet of paper.

As a story, Frozen stands out for breaking the typical Disney Princess mould. Rather than being a story of a damsel in distress being rescued by a dashing prince, Frozen turns that on its head by having the central characters be two sisters, and the ultimate act of love be one of sisterly love. In addition, the dashing handsome prince featured in the early part of the film turns into a villain in what is, by Disney’s standards at least, a shocking and unexpected twist.

Despite being played perhaps more than a little too often in the years after Frozen‘s release, the soundtrack is also amazing. Let It Go, the main song from the film, is undoubtedly one of Disney’s best, and there are several others throughout the film which are memorable. It’s always nice to be surprised at the box office, and Frozen definitely did it for me this decade.

I’d like to give an honourable mention to Disney’s other great film of the decade, Moana. When I was writing this list I debated including Moana, but when it came down to a choice between the two, Frozen just edges it for me. Still a great watch though, and with Disney+ coming soon, there’s no excuse to not see both!

Number 8:
A Brony Tale (2014)

Ashleigh Ball on the promo poster for A Brony Tale.

I love a good documentary. I’d have put more docs on this list if I had more space, but considering the theatrical documentaries of the decade, A Brony Tale definitely earns its spot. The film could’ve easily descended into ridiculing the so-called Bronies (a portmanteau of “bro” and “pony”) but manages to stay away from mocking its subject matter, instead telling a more nuanced story.

The film follows My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic voice actress Ashleigh Ball as she prepares to attend a Brony convention. Prior to watching the film, I was loosely aware of Bronies – largely from internet memes – but I hadn’t really spend any time investigating the cartoon or its fans. Bronies, if you’re unaware of the term, are adults (usually men, but the community includes women too) who have become fans of the 2010 cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Obviously the odd thing about this, for anyone who knows their cartoons and toy brands, is that My Little Pony is aimed at girls, specifically girls aged 6-12, so for adult men to be interested in this series raises a lot of questions.

The documentary tackles its subject matter in a respectful way, letting fans of the show speak for themselves without being overly judgemental or preachy. One story, recounted by the father of a fan, explained how someone dealing with depression and mental health had found an artistic outlet after being inspired by My Little Pony. And the fans themselves come from many walks of life as well as different backgrounds.

At the centre of it all was Ashleigh Ball and her decision to attend a convention. She specifically talks about how she’s used to being anonymous as a voice actress, and how it will be an unusual experience to be the star attraction and have so many people knowing and recognising her. The film documents her struggle to understand and come to terms with the phenomenon of adult fans. And again, the way it’s presented and the way the film explores both the fandom itself and Ball’s reaction to it was done tastefully and respectfully.

It’s also a reminder that any fandom can be seen as odd from the perspective of an outsider. Something like Star Wars is practically mainstream nowadays, but when I was at school, Star Wars was very much a nerdy franchise to be associated with, as was Star Trek or something in the fantasy genre. It’s fascinating to me to see how something like Game of Thrones became as popular as it did as a fantasy series, when not that long ago it was something mainstream audiences would’ve looked down on. The overall message of A Brony Tale seems to be: “let people enjoy whatever they want and try not to judge”. I like that message, and that’s what I took away from the film.

Number 7:
Lincoln (2012)

Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for his portrayal of the titular American President in Lincoln.

Now for a complete change of pace. The American Civil War – and American history in general – has always interested me, so Lincoln had been on my radar for a while prior to its 2012 release. And it was absolutely worth waiting for.

Telling the story of the last few months of Abraham Lincoln’s life, as he struggled with Congress to end the Civil War and emancipate southern slaves, the film and its spectacular cast do an amazing job portraying the complexities of negotiations and political manoeuvring. Sometimes a story can be uninteresting if its ending is known – and we know, of course, that Lincoln successfully freed the slaves and won the war – but in this film, how it played out is a joy to watch.

Aesthetically, Lincoln does a great job portraying Washington DC as it would’ve looked in the 1860s, and the costumes and set designs are absolutely on point. The dirty, gritty reality of life in those days is conveyed beautifully on screen, and supplements the story and acting greatly. People often downplay these aspects of a film, and while its true that some minimalist productions can do well – especially on the stage – as well as low-budget films that don’t necessarily have money to waste, in a title like Lincoln getting the look right definitely adds a quality to the film that just wouldn’t exist even if all other factors (the script, acting, direction, etc) were identical.

Lincoln stands up among other great works of cinema, and I think in future will be hailed as a must-watch classic of the history and drama genres. With Steven Spielberg directing and producing, alongside fellow producer and future Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy, there was so much to this film that even after multiple viewing I still find new elements to enjoy and new moments to revel in. Overall a really stunning piece of cinematic history.

Number 6:
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

A different look at the Starfleet logo on the poster for Star Trek Into Darkness.

Star Trek Into Darkness isn’t my favourite Star Trek film. It’s probably not even in my top five, but it’s definitely the better of the only two Star Trek films released this decade. As a follow-up to 2009’s Star Trek reboot, Into Darkness builds on its predecessor and is a solid action flick with a twist (some) fans will have appreciated, and a flickering of that elusive “Star Trek-ness”. It’s also notable for being Leonard Nimoy’s final film role; unfortunately the decade has claimed many Star Trek actors.

So I have to admit that as a big Star Trek fan, it would’ve felt wrong to not include a Trek film on this list. That’s 100% my own bias coming through rather than a commentary on Into Darkness, which is a decent action film but probably not one of the best ones I’ve ever seen. What Into Darkness did, however, as with its predecessor and sequel, is keep the Star Trek franchise ticking over, giving it some breathing room while keeping it alive in the popular consciousness. It’s hard to see how we’d have got to see Discovery, Picard, or Lower Decks next year if the JJ-verse films hadn’t given the franchise a breath of fresh air. In that sense, Into Darkness – as arguably the best of the reboot films – is a key stepping stone in the franchise’s continued success. And while the film stands up on its own merits as a piece of Star Trek storytelling, in my opinion at least, its biggest accomplishment is paving the way for what’s come since.

The twist Into Darkness springs on fans was clever, but also had been rumoured to be happening, and the result of that rumour being all over the internet in the weeks before release detracted from it somewhat as I wasn’t surprised. Central villain John Harrison (played by Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch) is revealed to be famous Star Trek baddie Khan, and what follows is a film which pays homage to The Wrath of Khan without going overboard. As a JJ Abrams film, in that sense I greatly prefer it to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which went too far in copying its 1977 predecessor.

It’s become a recurring theme in this list, but the special effects and visuals were great in Into Darkness, and the difference between this iteration of Star Trek and what we’ve seen previously is huge. While some of the aesthetic changes haven’t sat well with fans of TOS, and I understand that, the effects, particularly in big set-pieces, look fantastic even six years later.

Number 5:
The Hobbit trilogy (2012, 2013, & 2014)

Cover of the DVD or Blu-Ray version of The Hobbit trilogy.

Realistically I should’ve just put the first two parts on this list, because the third film isn’t all that great. Indeed, The Hobbit is overall a poor relation to the previous decade’s epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, but nevertheless was an enjoyable return to Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth.

Martin Freeman is the standout here, a perfectly-cast lead as titular Hobbit Bilbo Baggins. It’s through his eyes that we see Middle-Earth as we follow his adventure to The Lonely Mountain with the Dwarves, and Freeman’s strong performance carries what would otherwise be a much more underwhelming trilogy of films. Part of the criticism these films got is due to comparisons to Lord of the Rings, but that was inevitable, and other criticisms of the runtime, effects, and dialogue are valid.

When I saw the first and second parts in the cinema, I was able to see the “high frame rate” version, shot in 48 frames-per-second – a novelty for the big screen. While this seemed gimmicky and even offputting at first, once I got used to it it did make for an interesting experience. Disappointingly, the films have not been released anywhere in this format, as the DVD, Blu-Ray, and digital releases all stick to the standard cinematic 24 fps.

While the plot of The Hobbit suffered as a consequence of being dragged out across three films instead of one or two, and some of the added new characters fell flat, any time fantasy makes it to the big screen with such a big budget is going to be a positive thing. The plot of The Hobbit is certainly less exciting than Lord of the Rings, at least in the sense that nothing world-ending is threatening our protagonists. Peter Jackson tried to compensate for that by throwing in a lot of “foreshadowing” for the rise of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, but in this case it would’ve arguably been better to stick to the core story.

The final film is a rare example this decade of sub-par special effects, perhaps due to their overuse, and while there are some great moments (such as a Dwarf played by Billy Connolly) overall the first two films do a much better job of telling an interesting fantasy story. Some of the highlights for me included the creepy, claustrophobic time the party spends travelling through Mirkwood in a perfectly-shot sequence, the portrayal of Radagast by former Doctor Who actor Sylvester McCoy, and above all, being back in Middle-Earth once more.

Number 4:
Ready Player One (2018)

Lead actor Tye Sheridan on a promo poster for Ready Player One.

The second film on this list to be directed by Steven Spielberg is a geek’s paradise thanks to countless references, easter eggs, and nostalgic throwbacks to films of the 1980s in particular. The story is centred around players in a massive online world who are racing to gain control of that world by solving a series of puzzles its creator left behind when he passed away.

Ben Mendelsohn plays a truly nasty villain, giving the story much more weight and raising the stakes for the main characters. Ready Player One is laden with special effects, and because (most of the time) the effects aren’t trying to be hyper-realistic and imitate reality, but rather imitate a futuristic online game, many issues present in other titles simply vanish here. Because we know that what’s being shown on screen is taking place in a virtual world, there’s no expectation of it to be perfect, and thus none of the “uncanny valley” effect which some CGI-heavy films can fall victim to.

The plot is exciting – and it’s always great to root for an underdog in a fight or race against a big corporation. I have to confess I haven’t read the book upon which the film is based, and I have heard some criticism of the film from fans of the book. But as someone going in with no expectations, I was very impressed and found Ready Player One to be a very entertaining film.

Number 3:
Source Code (2011)

Jake Gyllenhaal on a promo poster for Source Code.

I didn’t know what to make of Source Code at first. It’s a complicated film – as time travel stories often are – and it took me a while after leaving the cinema to fully process what I’d seen. Some of the implications are actually a little disturbing – like whether lead Jake Gyllenhaal’s character actually stole someone’s body and identity.

Usually I’m not a big fan of time travel as a concept. It works in some instances, but in too many films and stories it gets convoluted and some stories completely tie themselves in knots either with inexpiable paradoxes or trying to over-explain the rules of time travel in their world. Fortunately, Source Code manages to avoid those traps for the most part, and what results is a genuinely thought-provoking film.

The basic premise is that a secret government programme has given an injured soldier a way to travel back in time to find out who was responsible for a terrorist attack. He only has a few minutes in the past before the explosion occurs and then the operators have to reset the loop and send him back again. It takes multiple visits to the past (or simulated past) before he gets the hang of things. To explain the entire thing would take more time than I have on this list, but suffice to say it’s a fascinating concept that is, for once, well-executed.

Strong performances from leads Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan carry the film, as their characters slowly work out what’s going to happen. It’s perfectly paced, well shot, with a couple of unexpected twists and revelations which keep things interesting. The real-world, modern day setting is a change of pace from a lot of science fiction films of this decade, and I found myself rewatching Source Code multiple times.

Number 2:
Deadpool (2016)

A promo poster for Deadpool.

Though it may seem heretical to some, I’m not really into superheroes. As a kid I didn’t read comic books, and the big-budget superhero films I’ve seen over the years – the likes of Fantastic Four or X-Men – just didn’t hold my interest. Even the Marvel films of the last few years haven’t really interested me all that much, and I found myself seeing them more out of obligation than enjoyment. Deadpool was different, however, as a comedy film and with Ryan Reynolds masterfully portraying antihero Wade Wilson.

Not knowing much about Marvel or any of its characters outside of Iron Man and The Avengers, I didn’t really know what to expect going in. I’d heard the film was funny, but it had some real laugh-out-loud moments that I didn’t expect.

I think the problem many superhero films have is that they simultaneously take themselves very seriously while having storylines, characters, and an aesthetic that is childish and inherently un-serious. That disconnect is jarring for me, and takes me out of it. In addition, as I’ve mentioned previously, much of the appeal of Marvel films – as with Star Trek, Star Wars, The Hobbit, and other franchises this decade – is nostalgia. The films appeal much more to people who grew up with these characters in the various comic books, and as someone who just didn’t have that experience I don’t have the same connection to those characters.

What was great about Deadpool, to get back to my original point, is that the whole point of the character is that he doesn’t take himself or his surroundings seriously. That was true in the comic books and it’s carried over to the film perfectly. Reynolds was an absolutely inspired casting choice, as his comedic range fits the character so well. The frequent breaking of the fourth wall – apparently a Deadpool trademark going back to his comic book days – was done perfectly and provided many fun moments.

The over-the-top action was great, as were the gory deaths which earned the film a more restrictive rating than it otherwise would’ve. But it’s hard to see how Deadpool could’ve worked as a film marketed at kids and teenagers; it needed to have the freedom to offend in order to accomplish what it set out to. Overall, I don’t really care whether it stayed true to its source material, but Deadpool was a hilarious send-up of the whole superhero genre.

Honourable Mentions:

Just before I declare my favourite film of the decade, I want to look briefly at a few other titles that almost made this list. I’ve picked ten – which absolutely could’ve been the top ten themselves. Obviously there are way more than ten or twenty films to enjoy from the 2010s, and while the decade has been dominated by sequels and franchises, there have been some great original and standalone works too.

Oz The Great And Powerful (2013) – A fun return to the Land of Oz, fronted by James Franco.
Jurassic World (2015) – An interesting attempt to reboot the Jurassic Park franchise. It was nice to see a fully-operational park.
Tomorrowland (2015) – An underrated film loosely based on the Disneyland attraction. Great performances and an interesting concept.
Bohemian Rhaposdy (2018) – Perfectly acted by Rami Malek, who won an Academy Award, this biopic of Queen’s front man is an entertaining look at the band’s rise.
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017) – Controversial and unfortunately divisive among fans, Rian Johnson’s film tried to shake up Star Wars after JJ Abrams played it very safe two years prior. And it succeeded.
Joker (2019) – I can’t rank this because I haven’t seen it. But everything I’ve heard has been great and I can’t wait to see for myself.
Moana (2016) – As mentioned above, a great Disney film with an inspirational story. And some catchy songs.
World War Z (2013) – Less a horror film than an action flick with zombies, it stands up as an interesting and different take on the zombie genre in a decade overrun by The Walking Dead.
Game Change (2012) – I fully admit this is a niche film (especially outside the USA) as it documents John McCain and Sarah Palin in their unsuccessful campaign. As someone who finds such things fascinating it was an interesting – if supposedly inaccurate – film.
Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension (2011) – What can I say except I really enjoy Phineas and Ferb? The film is based on the longest-running Disney Channel original cartoon, and is more of the same, playing out like a feature-length episode of the show.

Number 1:
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

The Death Star looms over the beach on the plant Scarif in this poster for Rogue One.

When it came to naming my favourite film of the decade, I didn’t need to think twice. Rogue One took everything great about Star Wars and condensed it into a single standalone piece of cinema. Though I would argue the scenes with Darth Vader were unnecessary, the full power of The Empire is on full display here, and after The Force Awakens successfully took the story forward by a generation, Rogue One brought fans back to where it all began.

Jyn Erso is such an excellent protagonist; selfish and completely jaded when we first meet her, she becomes conflicted and eventually rises to inspire hope in the Rebellion over the course of the film. Each of the characters we meet is interesting and could reasonably have a whole film or series dedicated just to them. Rogue One is, in that sense, a perfect team-up film, bringing together a diverse array of characters from the Star Wars galaxy in a no-hope plot to steal the Death Star’s plans.

Ben Mendelsohn is on this list as a villain for the second time, and while he was great in Ready Player One, this is truly his outstanding performance. Though unfortunately his character is ultimately overshadowed in the final cut of the film thanks to Darth Vader’s appearances, Krennic is a kind of Star Wars villain we haven’t really seen – the career man who takes far too much glee in his work.

The CGI recreations of both Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing were very, very close to being perfect. And I think in that sense, Rogue One has paved the way for technology that will become increasingly common in future.

Everything from the music, the aesthetic, the return to the era of the Original Trilogy was everything I wanted from a Star Wars film, and the decision to kill off basically the entire cast was an incredibly bold decision in such a franchise- and sequel-focused era of filmmaking. We need more films like Rogue One.

So that’s it.

My top picks for films of the decade, and while there are undoubtedly lots of enjoyable films I missed, these are the ones that were, at least, the most memorable. I’ll also take a look back on the decade’s best television series and video games in upcoming lists, so be sure to check back for those before 2020 rolls around.

All films mentioned above are the copyright of their studios and distributors. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Looking back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture on its 40th anniversary

Looking back at Star Trek: The Motion Picture on its 40th anniversary

Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and other iterations of the Star Trek franchise.

On the 7th of December 1979, ten years after going off the air (and five years since The Animated Series went off the air), Star Trek was back. Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered, and while it has been overshadowed in many ways by its sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film was a success – albeit not an overwhelming one according to distributors and producers – and reinvigorated the franchise. Make no mistake, if it weren’t for The Motion Picture, Star Trek as we know it wouldn’t exist today – there would’ve been no Wrath of Khan, and from that there’d have been no Next Generation or any future series or film. In a very real sense, The Motion Picture paved the way for the franchise’s future, and the success Star Trek enjoys today owes a lot to this film.

The Motion Picture was a risk for Paramount Pictures. Star Trek had shown that it had a number of very vocal fans – the letter-writing campaign in 1968 to get the series renewed demonstrated this – but its wider popularity was an unknown quantity, especially on the big screen. Reruns of The Original Series had garnered a larger audience than its 1966-69 original run, but there were still question marks over whether to make a new television series or to go down the box office route.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture turns 40 in December 2019.

Indeed, the project that would eventually become The Motion Picture started out life as Star Trek: Phase II, a television series that was to reunite the original cast – without Spock – for another five-year mission onboard the Enterprise. After a project called Planet of the Titans failed to get off the ground in the mid-1970s, by 1977 Phase II was officially in production. It has been said many times that the success of another 1977 project – Star Wars – is what led Gene Roddenberry and Paramount to reconsider the television series and make a film instead. While there is undoubtedly a kernel of truth to that, there were other factors at play too. The script which would eventually become The Motion Picture was originally set to be the pilot episode for Phase II but after a series of revisions and discussions between the creative team and the studio, the decision was made to enter production as a film instead, and two versions of the script were submitted – one by Gene Rodenberry and one by Harold Livingston, who’d been a producer on Phase II. Livingston’s script was chosen (by Michael Eisner – future CEO of Disney) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture was officially greenlit.

As an interesting aside, Phase II remained officially “in production” even after the decision was taken to switch focus to a film, and for much of 1977 the official line from the studio was that a series, originally set at 13 episodes, was being produced. It wasn’t until 1978 that the film would be officially announced.

Concept art of the bridge of the Enterprise that was created for Phase II.

So that’s a brief potted history of how it came to be. But despite making around $139 million on a budget of $46 million, Paramount considered the film a disappointment. The big risk had paid off, but not as much as they’d hoped. The expensive special effects and continued revisions to the script even during production were cited as reasons why, as was the less action-heavy, more ethereal storyline.

For me personally, it’s the lack of action and the deliberate slow pacing that gives this film something that others lack – a sense of “Star Trek-ness”. Star Trek was always into the weirder, more esoteric side of science fiction, especially prior to The Motion Picture, and this film stands alongside episodes of The Original Series as a pure science fiction work, not an action-sci fi film like The Wrath of Khan or First Contact. While some people might find its slower pace to be a grind, to me it makes it akin to watching a feature-length episode of the series, rather than just another action flick.

Leonard Nimoy, director Robert Wise, Gene Roddenberry, DeForest Kelley, and William Shatner during production on The Motion Picture.

Because of the overwhelming popularity of The Wrath of Khan within the fanbase, The Motion Picture often gets a bad rap. People have said that “all of the odd-numbered Star Trek films are bad”, including The Motion Picture in with Search for Spock and The Final Frontier. Both of those titles have good and bad moments – the latter suffering perhaps from too much involvement from William Shatner – but to me, The Motion Picture is in a different league.

Some criticism of the film is that it feels like a two-and-a-half hour episode of The Original Series. But why should that be a criticism? The Motion Picture masterfully builds up its drama – the V’ger cloud’s attack on the Klingons, its destruction of the Epsilon IX station, and finally the death of new character Ilia all add to the stakes. While none of these are particularly dramatic, nor gory, that doesn’t detract from the threat, it heightens it. V’ger is shown to be a being of such incredible power that it can make whole fleets of starships vanish in a heartbeat. We don’t need huge explosions or a punch-out to learn this. V’ger’s power is also confirmed by the reaction of characters. So as the film progresses, we know what’s at stake.

Kirk and the away team encounter V’Ger.

To change lanes completely, I happen to really like the aesthetic of The Motion Picture. It’s very 1970s in some ways – the orange and brown tones, and some of the uniform choices in particular, but that’s not necessarily a negative thing. Kirk’s uniform as an admiral happens to be one of my all-time favourite Star Trek uniforms. The high collar, the belted tunic, and the simple curved lines in grey and white combine with a metallic gold Starfleet insignia to make an understated yet interesting uniform. I’m not a cosplayer by any means, but if I ever were to make myself a uniform, that would be the one I’d go for. And while we’re talking about things that look great, the sweeping shot over the Enterprise when Kirk is being taken aboard by shuttlepod is absolutely perfect. Combined with an amazing score – for which composer Jerry Goldsmith was nominated for an Academy Award – the full sequence is one of the most inspiring and moving in all of Star Trek, speaking for myself as a fan. When the music ramps up right as we see the Enterprise from the front for the first time, it can be quite emotional. I could happily watch that sequence over and over again.

Many of the sets built in 1978-79 were in continuous use (albeit in modified form) right through to Enterprise‘s cancellation in 2005. Some of the reuses are quite apparent in The Next Generation, so in that sense, the design choices made in The Motion Picture carried through the next two decades of Star Trek as a franchise. The panelling and angles on corridors in particular can be seen on the Enterprise-D and the USS Voyager, and the idea of a warp core as a large upright glowing tube is also something that has carried on right through Star Trek – even cropping up in CGI form in the most recent of the Short Treks episodes. Much of what we consider to be “Star Trek” in terms of aesthetic has its roots not in 1966 but in 1979 – future productions built on what designers and artists had created here. The Next Generation and Voyager in particular owe significant parts of their design to The Motion Picture.

Some of these sets would be in continuous use – albeit with tweaks here and there – until Enterprise’s cancellation in 2005. They defined the “look” of Star Trek.

The storyline of The Motion Picture is certainly different from many science fiction outings. It isn’t a film about defeating and destroying an enemy, it’s a film about bridging the gulf and communicating with a new form of life. V’ger, set up to be the film’s antagonist, wanted to evolve – to merge physically with its creator. The crew of the Enterprise could’ve used that moment of weakness to attack it, and maybe even destroy it – and in a different film perhaps that would’ve been the finale. But The Motion Picture builds up to this moment, and it isn’t the death and vanquishing of a foe that we see, but communication, and ultimately the creation of new life. Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and the like may be fun to see on screen, but Star Trek is all about “seeking new life” – and what could be newer and more different than a hyperevolved, massively intelligent machine?

This side of Star Trek, though, has always been more of a niche product. When fans are asked about their favourite films, The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are usually somewhere up near the top, as well as episodes like The Best of Both Worlds, or DS9’s The Way of the Warrior. These are all action-heavy stories, and while Star Trek has enough room for both these and the slower-paced, thought-provoking ones, The Motion Picture falls firmly into the second category. With that comes being underrated and overlooked by fans who prefer more action-oriented stories.

Robert Wise, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry, and DeForest Kelley at the film’s premiere.

When Spock describes V’ger as being little more than “a child”, he sets the stage for understanding, and from that, communication. The ultimate revelation that V’ger was, in fact, a probe of human origin was truly unexpected. The Motion Picture had an incredibly ambitious story which sought to blend these elements together. The cyclical nature of a returning spacecraft, the massive differences that almost certainly will exist between humankind and anything we might encounter in outer space, and at the heart of it all, the returning characters – not all of whom had enough to do, arguably. But the core dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy was still there. Perhaps The Motion Picture needed more fine-tuning, and perhaps its scope was too vast for a single film to properly encompass, but as a story it makes you stop and think. The galaxy isn’t just going to be humanoids, there are going to be things out there completely beyond our understanding. And the choices we make today – like probing outer space – may have consequences well into the future that we could never foresee.

As an inspirational message, I think that can’t be understated. Seeking out new life and new civilisations – the raison d’être of Starfleet – isn’t always going to be smooth sailing. But if we’re willing to look at things from a different point of view, to listen, to understand, and to communicate, we can find a way to coexist even with someone who seems to be big and threatening. I know the real world doesn’t always work that way, but Gene Roddenberry was always about showing us how humanity can be better than we are in the present day. Speaking personally, I find that aspect of The Motion Picture to be inspiring. As a work of science fiction, that’s the kind of message I admire and what I’d like to see more of on our screens.

Above all, The Motion Picture relaunched the Star Trek brand for a new decade, one which would culminate in The Next Generation and a return to television. If it weren’t for this film, Star Trek would look very different today – if it even existed at all. We can argue about which Star Trek film we like best, and at the end of the day it’s always going to be a subjective choice, but I’d definitely rank The Motion Picture highly on any list. Not just for what it did for the franchise, though that is incredibly important, but as a work of science fiction that wasn’t afraid to tell a thought-provoking story.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture is available to stream now on Paramount Plus in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries and territories where the platform is available. The film is also available to buy on DVD and Blu-Ray. Star Trek, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and all other Star Trek properties mentioned above are the copyright of Paramount Global and/or Paramount Pictures. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Live service? Buyer, beware!

Dennis

The Elder Scrolls: Legends, a fairly uninspired digital card game from Bethesda, has become the latest in a long line of live service games not to deliver its promised content. The reason is simple: maths. The numbers didn’t add up for Bethesda to make continued development worthwhile, either because the game had already slipped into loss-making territory, or the scant money it was making wasn’t enough. So after two-and-a-half years, new development has been shuttered, and while the developers promise to continue “maintenance” support, in reality the game is brain-dead and on life support. It’s only a matter of time before it’s shut down altogether, and while Legends does have a single-player mode which I’d hope would be able to continue to be played, a lot of live service games don’t. When the servers are switched off, that’s it. Curtains. It doesn’t matter how much money you might’ve put into the title.

At this point I’d hope more and more gamers are becoming aware of this phenomenon. It isn’t an isolated issue; time and again a live service title will launch – often in a half-finished state – with promises of huge amounts of additional content to come. Often termed a “roadmap”, far too frequently these promises don’t come to fruition.

In most cases good intentions are there in the beginning. Nobody makes a bad game on purpose, and developers do genuinely intend to release the additional content when the game is launched. In that sense, strictly speaking these aren’t scams or deliberate false advertising. But it’s a hard pill to swallow nevertheless for a player who purchased a game like 2014’s first-person shooter Destiny, which promised to be a “ten year” experience. Destiny received its final update barely two-and-a-half years later, with a full sequel released a few months after that – as another full-priced game. And think also of Anthem, Bioware’s live service which launched only in March 2019 – only to have its roadmap cancelled after a single update.

In many cases, there is good reason from the point of view of games companies to discontinue support and move developers over to new projects. At the end of the day, no company can survive long term running a loss-making project, and there comes a point for a live service where the number of players – or rather, the number of players spending money – is simply not high enough to be sustainable. In cases like Anthem perhaps it’s the case that the number of players (and the amount of money coming in) actually never hit that mark.

A significant part of the problem is the way these games are planned and developed in the first place. Releasing what is essentially an unfinished title, with the promise of future updates and content to pad it out, can lead to live services feeling underwhelming when they first release. But this is a flawed strategy – interest in any game peaks in the days immediately before and after its release, so if it’s incomplete, riddled with glitches and bugs, and is overall a mediocre experience, that’s the narrative of the game in the minds of players everywhere, and that’s also what critics (and players) will be saying when they write their reviews. A bad launch can doom a project before it even has a chance to get going.

Surely it would make more sense to ensure that a live service is released with more than just a moderate amount of content. How much exactly is required will vary from genre to genre and title to title, but a couple of recent examples jump to mind. Fallout 76 released with no non-player characters to interact with. In a franchise which has always been strongly story-driven, this was surely a huge mistake. The result was a large, empty world, and besides wandering around it to see the locations and fight a few monsters, there wasn’t actually anything worthwhile to do. If the game had launched with significantly more going on, some of its other issues – notably the glitches and graphical errors – would have been less noticeable and the game would surely have got a better reception.

The 2015 iteration of Star Wars: Battlefront also suffered from the problem of missing content, compounded in its case by charging what was seen as excessive amounts of money for that missing content when it did finally release months later.

The fundamental problem is the “release now, fix later” business model. In most cases, a majority of players will not be willing to stick around long enough if the game feels lightweight and incomplete. And the reason for that is simple – there are other, better games available to play right now, games which aren’t short on content and which don’t have the same problems. Most games, with very few exceptions, have a short lifespan. If you consider all of the titles that released in the first half of the 2010s, how many are still being played in significant numbers today? In terms of live services, I can think of Grand Theft Auto V, Diablo III, and Rocket League. Maybe you can think of one or two more, but out of all the games that came out in those years, only an absolutely minuscule percentage are still being played in significant numbers to be sustainable and to warrant continued developer support. In short, the odds are against any game, no matter how great it seems, to survive beyond a couple of years. Only the truly exceptional, genre-defining titles make it. And most live services, especially ones which launch incomplete and broken, were never going to be anywhere close to that level.

When I see a game launch in an incomplete state, my first reaction isn’t to buy it, wait for it to get better, and keep playing. The promise of future content means nothing if the game isn’t good enough now. My reaction is to stay away, and wait to see whether things improve. And judging by a lot of reviews for these types of live services, a lot of people feel the same way – or wish they hadn’t spent their money too soon. The “wait-and-see” approach, which is a natural consumer response to any incomplete product that promises future improvements, is fatal to many live services. They become caught in a spiral: a bad launch leads to low player numbers, low player numbers leads to less income, less income means the company decides to cancel future updates, and the cancellation of updates leads consumers who were in “wait-and-see” mode to not bother with the title and go elsewhere.

In many industries – perhaps all – companies, driven by the desire to make as much money as possible for as little effort and expense as possible, see a successful product and try to copy its formula. This is what’s happened with live services. Once a few had been successful, games publishers decided to try to emulate that style of game and by doing so, hoped to reap the same rewards as Epic Games had with Fortnite or Rockstar had with Grand Theft Auto V. The fact that such titles are once-in-a-generation success stories didn’t matter to executives who thought only of the financial gains and nothing of the games or their players.

While it does vary from player to player, most people like at least some variety in their games, just as most people like some variety in their entertainment in general and in other aspects of their life. The number of players content to only play a single title for a decade must be small compared to the overall number of gamers across every platform. While it’s true some titles like Starcraft II or World of Warcraft manage to have active playerbases years after release, with some dedicated players sinking tens of thousands of hours into those games, the reality is most players have a library of titles, and are frequently looking for a new experience. After beating the campaign of a game like Destiny or Anthem, most folks will move on and look for the next adventure – and if the game isn’t all that good, the chances of them returning are slim, even with online multiplayer and expansion packs to try to lure them back.

So in addition to all the problems of releasing half-baked products, putting off players and causing many to avoid jumping in at launch, the very concept of a live service that lasts for years has a natural ceiling – a cap on the maximum number of players who would even hypothetically be interested to keep playing for such an extended period of time. Even the best title which could draw in players and convince them to ditch other games has, therefore, a natural limit of players who’d be interested to keep coming back. And in many cases, the sheer amount of money it costs to keep development going at this level, with updates, patches, and large expansions will simply never be cost-effective when considering the maximum number of players the game is ever likely to get. So if a studio sets itself up for future development expecting Grand Theft Auto V levels of income, but launched to average reviews in an incomplete state, the playerbase will simply never exist for that to be sustainable.

The reality is that many live service titles were never going to succeed. From the very moment the concept sprang into the head of an executive, it was a losing proposition. And to the credit of developers – who are usually not involved in the decision-making process – they do a valiant job under often difficult circumstances to get a title ready and keep it operational. But if the concept is bad, if the player numbers simply do not exist to justify the cost, and the game is pushed out before its ready, there’s nothing they can do. Even the most talented gamemakers can’t fix an unfixable mess, and that’s what many of these live service titles are – unfixable messes built on a flawed idea that was dreamt up by managers and executives who don’t understand the industry they’re supposed to be experts in.

I have to be honest and say that by the end of 2019, if someone chooses to buy into a game on the promises of marketing which speaks of “roadmaps”, “ten year plans”, and “improvements to come”, my sympathy for that person when the title shuts down a year later is limited – or nonexistent. There have been enough titles like this by now from almost every major games publisher in the industry that people should know better. A game – any game, regardless of promises – shouldn’t be treated as an investment to sink huge sums of money into, but a temporary product to be enjoyed while it lasts. While it may seem sad to think of games as disposable, that’s the way publishers treat them, and to avoid disappointment it’s the way we need to start thinking too. At this point I’m incredibly wary of putting any money into in-game content, as I simply don’t know how long that game and that content will be accessible. If someone has money to burn and they don’t mind losing it, that’s fine, but I don’t have that luxury and nor do many others.

There’s an old Latin expression – caveat emptor. It means “buyer beware”, and that basically sums up how I feel about live services. There is a chance – a very, very strong chance based on recent experience – that the title will not last as long as it says it will, and will not release all of the patches, updates, fixes, and expansions that it promises to. As I said before, this isn’t deliberate and it isn’t a scam, but it is the reality of most live services. And any player buying into such a service needs to be aware of that up front, and know that disappointment is coming down the line. If, armed with that knowledge, they still decide to proceed, that’s their call. But I’m afraid that they don’t get to turn around and whine when it all goes belly up, because we’ve all been down this road enough times to know that that’s where it was going.

Let’s all treat live services the way publishers do – as disposable, temporary products. If you want to spend your money on a game you won’t be able to play in future, and on in-game items that you’ll never see again when the game shuts its servers, that’s your call. But at least be informed of that decision, and be aware that there are many other titles, both single-player and multiplayer, which don’t jerk you around and waste your time and money. Maybe, just maybe, if we all bought those kind of games and left live services alone, nobody would have to suffer the money loss and disappointment that comes from their practically-inevitable demise.

All games and franchises mentioned in the article above are the copyright of their respective parent companies. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Grand Theft Auto 6 speculation

Dennis

Grand Theft Auto V came out in September 2013 on PS3 and Xbox 360. It has since been released on current consoles as well as PC, and it would be an understatement to say it’s made developers Rockstar a metric fuckton of money. For a six-year-old game to continually be among the most-played games and in the sales charts across all three platforms is no mean feat, and repeating GTA 5’s success will be a challenge like no other.


So how to go about it?


There’s been a lot of speculation going back several years about what form a future Grand Theft Auto title should take. I don’t have any sources, this is just my opinion. So take everything from this point with a grain of salt.


The formula for GTA 5’s success was based on its online mode, and that’s been where the real money has come from for Rockstar. Online has kept people interested and returning, and most importantly, spending money on in-game cash and items. But Grand Theft Auto games weren’t built on multiplayer, and even in the case of GTA 5, it wasn’t what hooked people in in the first place. The core of any GTA game has, and always should be, a great story. It wasn’t until Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that the series even featured a multiplayer mode, albeit a very limited one which was a bit of fun but nowhere near the scale of GTA 5.


The story for any GTA game needs several key elements to come together: character, location, era, and destination. Each element influences the others, as characters become defined by the era and location they reside in, and the destination they strive to reach changes depending on who they are and where they came from.


The setting and era need to be nailed down first. GTA 5 has done exceptionally well with a modern setting (or modern-ish now, given the game is into its seventh year of life). But previous entries in the franchise have used the recent past – the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s. It would be tempting to suggest that an historical setting, even a recent decade, would cause the game to find more of a niche audience, as players who want their games firmly rooted in the modern day might drop out. But the success of Red Dead Redemption II, while admittedly not on the same scale as GTA 5, should show that historical settings can play very well when there’s an interesting world with lots to do and some great characters.


There’s a lot of nostalgia flying around at the moment – especially for the 1980s and 1990s – and Rockstar could absolutely tap into that. Doing so would not only open up the game to the significant market which exists right now for a nostalgic setting, but would ensure GTA 6 would stand apart from its predecessor and not look like simply an updated version of what people have already been playing for the last few years.


Differentiating itself from GTA 5 will be a big task, and the physical location will be a part of that too. I’ve heard “rumours” (which, let’s be honest, are 99.9% bullshit) that there might be a return to Vice City on the cards. But to me that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Vice City is Rockstar’s version of Miami, where Los Santos (the setting for GTA 5) is their version of Los Angeles. But LA and Miami are both cities on the coast, with beaches, in a sunny, tropical part of the country. The look and feel of those cities is different, but not radically so. Not as different as, say, New York or Chicago would be. Given that Rockstar’s New York analogue, Liberty City, was the setting for GTA 4 I think that’s an unlikely candidate. I’d be wary of another tropical setting if the game is to truly step out of GTA 5’s shadow.


Practically everyone speculating on GTA 6’s location has been looking at past settings, thinking Rockstar might take the series back to one of its prior locations. But games should, where possible, try to push forward, and the United States is far bigger than California, Miami, and New York. It would be great to see a Midwestern city like Chicago or Minneapolis parodied in the next game, or a version of a city with history like Philadelphia or Boston. A city based on Washington DC could be a great choice too. It could even go to one of the big Southern metropolises like Atlanta, but I think after a game set in the balmy, sunlit California (sorry, I mean San Andreas) it would be interesting to have an autumn or winter setting somewhere to the north, where players could see snow.

A setting based on Detroit, for example, could highlight the decline in former industrial areas of America. And with Detroit having major crime and gang problems in the real world, it would be an interesting setting. A Washington DC analogue could focus more on decadence, elitism, and political corruption. And a setting with a Chicago theme could tackle the Mafia and organised crime. There are dozens of potential US cities which could serve as settings that would be different from what’s come before, but not so different as to be offputting to fans.


Leaving the United States entirely isn’t something I think would do well. GTA is, in a peculiar way, a distinctly American entity, not least with its huge emphasis on firearms. Placing the next title in Europe or South America might seem interesting, but I think it would lose too much of what makes a game “Grand Theft Auto” – as opposed to a generic action-shooter. Watch Dogs Legion (due out sometime before April 2021) is supposed to be set in London, so if Rockstar released GTA 6 any time around or shortly after that, it would draw immediate comparisons – and perhaps some criticism – if it were to use the same or a similar setting. Certainly since GTA 3 in 2001, the series has so wonderfully parodied the United States that leaving that behind entirely seems unthinkable.


But perhaps a split setting or a dual setting could work. In a way, San Andreas tried to accomplish this with its three cities. There were missions which took players from one city to another – across what was for the time an absolutely huge map – but generally, most missions took place within one city. In GTA 6, there could be two major locations – one in the United States which would serve as the player’s home base, and another in Europe, Asia, or South America which the player could visit for part of the game. Attempting something like this, and particularly finding a way to transition smoothly between two large open environments, would be ambitious, but it should be something next-gen hardware could handle.

While a split setting might work well from a story perspective, one thing players have enjoyed about GTA 5’s online mode is that there was one map, one open world, which everyone was traversing. If GTA 6 has two separate – albeit linked – locations, that potentially raises challenges when it comes to the online mode, and while these challenges could be overcome, anything which risks narrowing or splitting the playerbase ultimately carries a risk of reducing the mega-bucks Rockstar has been making.


Personally, I really liked GTA 5’s three-protagonist approach. Being able to switch between characters on the fly was great, and the interaction between the characters gave the story more depth than it would’ve had if we were just seeing the others as NPCs. So it would be great if GTA 6 could retain that idea, at least in some form. Certainly two playable characters could work, and it would potentially allow for co-op play. And yes, making one of the protagonists a woman, or giving players the ability to choose their character’s gender à la Mass Effect, would be a nice touch. I guess that’s not essential, but there’s no reason not to.


Finally, the character’s destination comes into frame. What’s their story arc going to be? Where are they going to end up at the end of the campaign? In past games we’ve seen players building a criminal empire of sorts, buying up business interests, earning more and more money, and essentially becoming the kingpin of their virtual city. There’s no need to stray too far from that formula, but some changes again to help the game stand out from its illustrious predecessor would be good. San Andreas dealt with street gangs, GTA 4 saw players tackle Russian/Eastern European organised crime, and GTA 5 most recently saw heists and corruption. Other entries in the series also saw heavier involvement of the Mafia. Organised crime is a theme running through GTA, but so is corruption. In a Washington DC-themed city, players could deal with corrupt politicians and a corrupt government, and that could be a fascinating parody of our current times. There could also be an exploration of drug cartels, or of Asian organised crime syndicates. In short, there’s a lot of organisations the game could explore without retreading too much old ground.


Here’s the thing: there’s no conclusion to this article. Until the game is officially announced and we know the rough outline of its setting and protagonist, there’s not much more to say except to fantasise about my “perfect” GTA game. The map should be big, but not so big it becomes a chore to drive from place to place. It should be diverse, with a city but also rural areas to give some variety. I’d really like to see a brand new setting, one that GTA hasn’t explored before. A Washington DC-themed city would be my first choice if I had to pick, but there are so many great options for cities to parody across the United States that almost any could be exciting. Time period-wise, I think the 1970s, 80s, or 90s would work well – it would be modern enough that players wouldn’t feel overwhelmed, but distinct enough to ensure the game wouldn’t be viewed as just a copy or iteration of its predecessor. But at the end of the day, if the writing is good, if the story is engaging, and the vehicles and guns are fun to play with, the game will be great.


From a purely financial point of view, I think an awful lot of people who enjoyed GTA 5 are going to jump into its sequel just to see what it’s like – and to get something new after a long time playing in the same sandbox. In that sense, almost anything Rockstar produces should be profitable. It would be up to them to turn that around and reproduce what GTA 5 managed, but I think with careful management of GTA 6’s online mode, that’s certainly a likely prospect.


Whenever it comes out, I’ll definitely jump in and see what they have in store!

Grand Theft Auto V is available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. All Grand Theft Auto titles are the copyright of Rockstar Games and Take Two Interactive. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Section 31 Enters Production… Meh.

Section 31 Enters Production… Meh.

Dennis

Spoiler warning: spoilers ahead for Star Trek, including both seasons of Star Trek: Discovery. If you haven’t seen Discovery yet and don’t want to see any spoilers, you’re better off reading another article and coming back when you’re caught up.


Just to get this out of the way, more Star Trek on our screens is always going to be a good thing. Even when it’s at its worst – like some of the episodes in TOS season 3, or that weird TNG clip show in season 2 – it’s still better than having no Star Trek at all. When Star Trek: Enterprise was cancelled in 2005 I really felt disappointed. I wasn’t around through the dark days of the 1970s when it seemed like Star Trek was gone forever, so to me this was the first time I’d really seen it off the air. I’m not sure if you remember, but before JJ Abrams picked up the franchise for his reboot film, Star Trek really did look dead.


I also don’t like the expression “nobody asked for this”. A lot of films and series that nobody seemed to be asking for have turned out to be absolutely fantastic. And honestly, in today’s insular fan communities, a lot of what people seem to be asking for or think would be good would either turn out to be just god-awful, or at the very best a niche product that would be a commercial failure.


So with those two big caveats out of the way, I’m not really sold at the moment on the idea of a Star Trek series based around Section 31.


There are some interesting ideas within that concept, which, if properly executed, could work well. But there are some issues with the Section 31 show as currently envisioned that make me feel it might not be the best direction to take the franchise.


First is the timeframe. With Star Trek: Picard and Lower Decks returning to the late 24th Century and beyond, as well as Discovery‘s third season heading into an unknown future, I’m just not sure that the franchise needs to have three different eras on the go simultaneously. Aside from the fact that it’s convoluted to the point of being offputting for new viewers – people who CBS needs to hook in and retain if Star Trek is to survive long-term – it’s just not a good way to split up the narrative of the franchise. Personally I’ve been going back and forth on my pet theory that Discovery either doesn’t go as far into the future as was suggested last season, or that somehow its time travel narrative crosses over with Picard. It just makes more sense to me to do it that way; tying shows together when they’re set in the same universe and being produced at the same time makes a lot of sense. Look at how the Marvel films cross over with one another successfully. But that’s just one point.


The 23rd Century has been explored a lot recently, and Star Trek has been busy with prequels, reboots, and mid-quels (or whatever Discovery is) since the turn of the millennium. I don’t want to say it’s entirely devoid of storytelling potential, but Star Trek has primarily been about moving forward, looking to the future, and where it’s been arguably at its least successful from the point of view of its story is when it’s been looking back at its own history and tying itself in knots. After four seasons of Enterprise, three reboot films, and two seasons of Discovery, it’s going to be great to see Star Trek finally moving into the future again, and the Section 31 series taking place in the 23rd Century seems more than a little regressive when looking at Picard, Lower Decks, and Discovery‘s future.


The next issue is with the two main characters, or rather, the two characters returning from Discovery around whom the show is currently being built.


Ash Tyler – or Voq – has had his story fairly well explored already in his appearances in Star Trek: Discovery. Without inventing more backstory for him, it’s hard to see where he’d go and how he’ll be able to have a satisfying character arc. Having started out as a victim of Klingon manipulation, Tyler fought hard against his programming and fell in love with Discovery’s protagonist, Michael Burnham, who helped him overcome what had been done to him in what was a very interesting and inspirational rape analogy. Star Trek, for me, is at its best when it uses its sci-fi setting to tackle real-world issues, and the issue of under-reported male sexual abuse is something Ash Tyler’s story touched on perfectly. And in his second season role as an agent of Section 31, he overcame his Klingon heritage, had a child, gave up his child, and finally dealt with his feelings for Burnham – and hers for him. He’s been on a rollercoaster over the last two seasons, but what he’s been through has concluded, and while there may be lingering feelings left over from that, as a story arc it’s essentially done. Because of how much of him we’ve seen and how much he’s been through, he wouldn’t make for the best protagonist.


So that leaves the Mirror Universe version of Burnham’s old captain, Philippa Georgiou. Michelle Yeoh has been announced as the lead actress of this series, so her character would be central to the Section 31 show. But… what character is there, exactly? In terms of modern Star Trek, Mirror Georgiou is about as one-dimensional as it gets. She seems to like being evil for the sake of being evil – a 23rd Century Heinz Doofenshmirtz, perhaps, but with less backstory. No, Mirror Georgiou is the Star Trek equivalent of a villain from a bad direct-to-video kids’ film, the kind of person who wants to steal a puppy from a child or tries to shut down a sweet shop so she can bulldoze it to build an office block. She just isn’t interesting in the slightest.


I like Michelle Yeoh. As a supporting actress in Danny Boyle’s 2007 film Sunshine, she did a great job. But she’s unproven as a lead actress in a major series like this, and the character she’s set to play just isn’t one a lot of fans find interesting or relatable.


While there are positives to consider from a Section 31 series, such as exploring how the organisation changed and went entirely underground between its appearances in Discovery and Deep Space Nine, as well as the potential to see Star Trek cross over into the mystery/thriller genre, I’m just not convinced right now that it’s the right way to go.


Section 31 was announced too early. If CBS had waited to see how Discovery’s second season was received, then the obvious choice by far for a spin-off was an Anson Mount-led series, which would probably be set on the Enterprise. That would be the fan favourite choice for a 23rd Century spin-off at the moment. You can see the desire for such a series at conventions and panels, and whenever Alex Kurtzman and others are interviewed, it’s the one question that keeps coming up. Conversely, when was the last time you heard anyone asking about how the Section 31 show is progressing?


It is actually a really great time to be a Star Trek fan at the moment. There are three series scheduled to premiere in 2020 – Picard‘s first season, Discovery‘s third season, and the first season of Lower Decks which already has a second on order. And in addition, a fourth Kelvin-timeline film is in the works, and beyond that, a possible Quentin Tarantino-directed Star Trek film. More Star Trek on our screens is always going to be a good thing, and while I don’t want to say I don’t want Section 31, it’s just not at the top of my list right now. I want it to do well, and to be successful, because I want Star Trek as a franchise to succeed and carry on into the future. So while I remain more than a little cautious about approaching this new show, I wish it well and I will certainly tune in when it premieres. Perhaps in 2021?


Live Long and Prosper!

Star Trek: Discovery and all other Star Trek series and films are available in the United States on CBS All Access, and in other countries on Netflix. Star Trek: Picard premieres on CBS All Access in January 2020 and on Amazon Prime in other countries. All copyrights belong to Paramount and CBS. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

I didn’t buy Shenmue III

I didn’t buy Shenmue III

Dennis

I was a huge Shenmue fan back in the Dreamcast days. I played both the first and second instalments many times over, and I loved the modern, real-world setting, and the cinematic storytelling. Before I played Shenmue, my experience with video games was limited mostly to 2D titles on the SNES and Sega Mega Drive, and while I had played 3D games before on the Nintendo 64, most of those were titles like Super Mario 64 or Donkey Kong 64, neither of which you’d describe as particularly story-driven, cinematic, or realistic. My favourite N64 games, by the way, outside of Super Mario 64, were probably Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire and Jet Force Gemini, both of which managed to have decent stories. But I digress.

Shenmue represented a colossal leap in gaming for me, showing me that video games were more than just digital toys and could tell stories that would be equally at home on the big or small screen. And Shenmue was a genuinely groundbreaking game in many ways. Its large world, with short transitions between areas, was as close as it was possible to get to an open world in 1999. Characters felt real, they had jobs, they had schedules, their place of work was open during some hours of the day and closed in others. Almost every shop and restaurant in the game was accessible, even if many of them played little or no role in the main story. It was possible to spend hours and hours just walking around town, soaking up the atmosphere, talking to people, and yes, playing mini-games. To call the mini-games “mini” is a bit of a stretch, because contained within Shenmue were two full games of the 1980s – Space Harrier and Hang On – as well as a darts game and two QTE games. This alone was enough to draw me in. I spent hours playing Space Harrier and Hang On, first at the in-game arcade, and later when I realised it was possible to win copies of the games to play at main character Ryo’s home (on an anachronistic Sega Saturn), I tried to do that too.

Promo image for Shenmue.
Key art for Shenmue.

While we’re talking about QTEs or quick-time events, Shenmue was the game that invented them. While QTEs get somewhat of a bad rap nowadays, thanks I’m sure to their misuse and overuse in other titles, in Shenmue they added a sense of tension and drama to what would’ve otherwise been a simple cut scene. Shenmue had even found a way to make its cut scenes interactive, and again that was a huge deal in 1999 and one I really came to enjoy. It kept the gameplay going during those moments. Sure, there were still cut scenes (a large number of them) but the QTE sequences were something new and exciting, and because you had mere seconds to respond, added a great deal of tension to the sequences in which they appeared.

Shenmue described its world in the manual as F.R.E.E – “Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment”. For some reason I still remember that two decades later! It was the term for describing an open world before anyone had invented the name “open world”. And though Shenmue‘s world may seem small in comparison to some titles today, it really did let you do a lot.

Concept art of Shenmue protagonist Ryo Hazuki.
Concept art of Ryo.

It’s easy to understate nowadays just how much the game fitted into its four Dreamcast GD-ROM discs: there was walking/exploration, fighting, QTEs, driving (both a forklift and motorcycle), examining both the environment and objects in first-person, mini-games and arcade games, fully-voiced characters, a day/night cycle, randomised weather patters (and day-accurate weather for that region of Japan based on real-world weather data) which included snow, rain, overcast, and sun, and other elements which I’m sure I’m forgetting.

For its day, Shenmue was incredibly ambitious, and while the finished product might not appeal to everyone (I’ve heard some describe its slow pace as “boring”) it blended together all of those elements successfully into a single experience that really felt like a real, lived-in world. No other game before had come anywhere close to this, and I was awed by what I was playing.

Screenshot of Shenmue showing a harbour security guard.
A guard at the harbour.

Some aspects of Shenmue and Shenmue II have not aged well, and it’s worth admitting that up front. The controls for the fighting sequences are essentially taken straight from the 2D beat-em-ups of the early- and mid-90s, complete with complicated multi-button combos, and don’t translate well to a fully 3D game. I would often find Ryo flailing around, swinging kicks and punches at mid-air because an opponent had moved to one side or the other. And the lack of a difficulty option is noticeable nowadays, especially speaking as someone with health issues who usually will play games on whatever the easiest setting is!

The controls, even on last year’s remaster, are clunky and awkward by today’s standards. I lost count of the number of times Ryo would get stuck halfway up a staircase because there was no fine control, or how he would find it difficult at times to successfully navigate a doorway. Much of the recorded audio in the first game is also of relatively poor quality, and on a decent set of speakers or a soundbar today sounds like listening to an amateur YouTuber who’s just upgraded to their first $15 microphone.

Promo image for Shenmue I/III showing Ryo with his fists raised.
Ryo Hazuki.


But despite these criticisms, when I replayed the games last year, for the first time in well over a decade, nostalgia hit and I was really enjoying myself again.

So why haven’t I bought Shenmue III now that it’s finally out?

It’s been eighteen years since I left Ryo in a cave in China, and as a huge fan of the first two games, I should’ve been first in line on day one to pick up the third title and resolve that cliffhanger. But I wasn’t. Shenmue III has been out for a few weeks now, and I still haven’t picked it up either on PC (my primary gaming platform) or PS4. As the third part of a game which was all about a single story, Shenmue III was unlikely to pull in a lot of new players, which means it really needed older fans of the games, or people who’d become fans by playing last year’s rereleases, to step up and buy in. And while early sales put Shenmue III somewhere in the top ten PS4 titles in its launch week, it doesn’t seem to have sold like hotcakes.

Still frame of Shenmue II showing Ryo and Shenhua in a cave at the end of the game.
This is where I left Ryo’s story all the way back in 2001.

That matters because if the game doesn’t sell enough copies for the likes of Sony and Epic Games (both of whom pumped money into the title well above its $7m that it earned from Kickstarter) how will it get a sequel? But wait, isn’t Shenmue III the sequel I’ve been waiting eighteen years for? Nope. Because it doesn’t conclude Ryo’s story.

I genuinely don’t understand how Yu Suzuki and company could have made such a monumentally bad decision. Shenmue as a series was as dead as dead could be. And it died because it was a failure. It managed to have a very vocal fanbase, but that fanbase was tiny. Only around 100,000 people bought Shenmue II in 2001, a drop-off of more than 90% from the 1.2 million players who bought the first game. And Shenmue lost an insane amount of money for its companies. The reason Sega was totally happy to part with the rights to the franchise in 2013/14 is because they knew then that it would never make them any money. So when Shenmue fans raised a whopping $7 million in 2014 to make a third instalment, Yu Suzuki and his team should’ve recognised what a miracle that was. Finally, after all these years, the story could be complete.

Kickstarter's 2019 logo.
Shenmue III was backed by thousands of fans on Kickstarter.

But Shenmue‘s story, which had been planned out in 1999, was supposed to take place over multiple games, five, six, perhaps even seven titles being necessary to complete all sixteen “chapters”. The first game, by the way, contained only the first chapter, with chapter two taking place between games in comic book form, and three, four, and five encompassing the second game. So on the one hand, Ys Net – Yu Suzuki’s studio responsible for making the third game – had raised $7m to make another game, while on the other hand still having perhaps ten or eleven chapters remaining.

The sensible thing to do would’ve been to make cuts. Whole sections of the story could’ve been cut out, or alternatively released as novels or comics. And Shenmue III, so eagerly awaited by fans, could’ve rounded out the story and given Ryo the conclusion we’ve all been waiting for. It didn’t have to be a perfect ending by any means, but it did have to be an ending, because the chances of getting lightning to strike twice and being able to make another Shenmue game after this one were always slim to nonexistent.

And that was before Ys Net managed to upset many of their core fans with delays and the now-infamous Epic Store exclusivity deal on PC.

Promo screenshot for Shenmue III showing Ryo on a forklift.
Ryo driving a forklift in a promotional screenshot.

When that news broke last year, that Shenmue III wouldn’t complete the story, I was gobsmacked. I’d never imagined that they’d make such a horrible decision, and while I’d avoided donating to the project when it was seeking crowdfunding (as I do on principle for every project – I just don’t have the money to waste) I was certainly planning to pick up a copy when it released. But upon learning that the story wouldn’t draw to a close, I became increasingly sceptical of Shenmue III. For me, the worst possible outcome would be getting drawn back into that world, only to be left on another cliffhanger like I was in 2001. With slim prospects of a sequel any time soon, that would be like reopening an old wound.

And under those circumstances, it might be better to wait and see whether a sequel can be developed before deciding. At the end of the day, I don’t want to waste my time on another incomplete game. And you can bet your boots if Shenmue III doesn’t get a sequel, in another fifteen years there won’t be anyone around willing to stump up crowdfunding cash to try. It’s now or never.

Screenshot of Shenmue showing Ryo in Dobuita in the snow.
Ryo with Santa Claus in Dobuita.

If Yu Suzuki couldn’t bring himself to make significant cuts and changes to the story to get it to fit into a single release, someone else needed to be brought in to make those changes for him. Realistically, this was probably Shenmue‘s only chance to conclude its story and Ys Net blew it.

As a fan from the Dreamcast era, I’d rather leave Shenmue there, an incomplete masterpiece, sadly unfinished, rather than drag it into the modern era where it would become a still-unfinished game and a colossal disappointment. I hate becoming jaded, bitter, and negative about a series I used to really love. But I just can’t understand the decision-making that led to this. And I’m so very disappointed that still, eighteen years on, Ryo’s story is unfinished. They had a golden opportunity – handed to them by the fans – and they didn’t take it. If Shenmue III is disappointing for any reason, it’s that. And I honestly don’t know whether I want to bother with it again, because right now Shenmue IV seems like a very unlikely prospect. It’s disappointing to have waited so long only to get another unfinished story.

Sorry Ryo, but I think you’re on your own.

Shenmue III is out now on PC and PlayStation 4. Shenmue I & II are available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 as a single title. All copyrights are owned by Ys Net, Sega, Epic Games, DeepSilver, and Sony. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Article edited in November 2024 for formatting and to add images. Some images courtesy of Shenmue Dojo and IGDB.

A “Mandalorian” Hot Take

A “Mandalorian” Hot Take

Dennis

I can’t be the only one feeling underwhelmed by The Mandalorian now that we’re four episodes in, can I? All I see everywhere online is how great it is, but honestly I’ve been disappointed, frustrated, and outright bored by parts of this series so far.

Part of the problem is that when a show (or any entertainment product for that matter) disappoints or seems to have problems, other smaller problems become more apparent because I start looking at it with a more critical eye. This is the “snowball” or “piling on” phenomenon, and you see it frequently across media criticism, especially when something under-performs. It’s easy for further criticism to creep out of the woodwork, including of comparatively minor points that would not – on their own or in a better product – be worth noticing. Such is the point I have reached with The Mandalorian.

First, I’d like to step back to my biggest and most fundamental issue. The Mandalorian was advertised as “the story of a gunslinger far from the reaches of the New Republic”. To me, that setting sounded amazing. And it still does, because it suggests a strong break from everything we’ve seen before in the Star Wars galaxy. I was attracted to this series not because I wanted to see a Mandalorian/Boba Fett copycat, but because I was genuinely interested to see what the Star Wars galaxy looks like away from the Jedi, the Sith and the Force, and without the galaxy-ending threats of the Empire and Death Stars and Starkiller Base. And while we’ve got some glimpses of that, what happens two episodes in? We get the Force back in play.

Clearly the producers behind Star Wars don’t trust the franchise to survive without it, but that’s just so disappointing to me and I feel like it strays away from what the series promised. It takes the show away from being a Firefly-esque “space western”, and dumps it firmly back in the already-trodden ground of previous iterations of Star Wars.

The Mandalorian.

So that, for me at least, is the biggest problem with The Mandalorian and the fault upon which all others are built. But while a disappointing premise can undermine a series, it’s not the show’s only problem. I mentioned in the intro that at times I find the show to be boring. Any show lacking in dialogue can fall victim to this, but The Mandalorian faces a somewhat unique challenge in that its protagonist is in full armour and wearing a full face helmet at all times. Pedro Pascal is a great actor, but thus far he hasn’t been able to show that. With a combination of his face being concealed, the minimal dialogue, and the unemotional, monotone delivery of the scant lines he’s had, his character thus far is a complete bag of nothing. He could be literally anyone, his motivations are not understandable, and because of these things he’s become a protagonist in name only, a protagonist I can’t get behind and get invested in. Right now I’m honestly not bothered if he succeeds or fails, lives or dies. And four episodes into a ten-episode series, I need that as a viewer. We’ve elapsed almost half of the show’s runtime, and I don’t give a damn about the main man. In a show so centred around one character, this is a serious failing.

Not being able to see or hear the protagonist – heck, he doesn’t even have a name (and no it isn’t “Mando”) – is holding the show back narratively, too. Aside from the brief scene in the spacecraft (itself unnamed until episode four) there was no bonding between the protagonist and the child. He may have felt he owed the child a debt of sorts for aiding him against the CGI monster, but again, how are we supposed to tell that with no dialogue and no facial expressions? So when we get to episode three and the protagonist makes the monumental decision to turn on his client, there’s no buildup to that, no emotional investment; it’s like he makes the decision from nowhere and for no reason other than the writers deemed that that’s what he was going to do.

The best characters in fiction are the ones who feel like real people, and a big part of that is ensuring that a character’s core values, personality, and motivations are communicated to the audience. The Mandalorian has failed comprehensively in this regard. And that failure makes important story points and character decisions seem to come from nowhere – the decision to turn on his guild by helping the child being the most notable. Star Wars has a great variety of characters just in the eight Saga films and two spin-offs. Jyn Erso makes an amazing protagonist in Rogue One, and Luke, Han, and Leia also all feel like real people with real motivations and depth to them. So Star Wars can do great characters – its what the franchise was built upon. But here, there’s no characterisation, no depth, no exploration, no emotion, no nothing. Just actions and decisions dictated entirely by a writers’ room, and it shows.

Recent Star Wars projects have been beset by an overuse of nostalgia. Darth Vader’s appearance in Rogue One, while an exciting sequence, was pure fanservice and really didn’t do much to further the film or improve upon its story. The story could have – and I would argue should have – stood on its own without bringing him and his lightsaber into it. Much of The Force Awakens was, as has been pointed out so many times before by others, an homage to the original 1977 Star Wars to such an extent that it came very close to being a copy in places. And of course Solo was 100% a nostalgia play – an otherwise decent film that was hampered by being a prequel involving Original Trilogy characters. I get it though, nostalgia sells and after all, nostalgia is what convinced Disney to buy Lucasfilm and bring back Star Wars in the first place. And it’s far from the only franchise to be reborn in the 2010s as a safer bet for audiences. But there is a line somewhere, a line which divides an “easter egg” or reference for returning fans from a lack of original ideas. The Mandalorian has, on occasions, crossed that line for me. The Jawas and the Sandcrawler are one example, as is the freezing (presumably in carbonite) of the protagonist’s bounties. Little things like OT Stormtrooper armour are great, the protagonist being kitted out like a shinier Boba Fett is less so. Little winks here and there, like the eyeball droid when the protagonist visits the home of the warlord are nice, subtle nods to what came before but leaving room for the series to carve its own path. But too many pieces from the OT have made their way into the first two hours, and while I can’t exactly pinpoint where this metaphorical line is, some of these nostalgia plays definitely stray onto the wrong side.

“Baby Yoda.”

Since I mentioned the runtime there, let’s talk about that. Half-hour episodes for such a heavily-marketed flagship series? There are kids’ cartoons with longer runtimes than that. One of the great advantages of streaming over “traditional” television channels is that you don’t have a time constraint. Need an extra episode or two? No problem, chuck them in there! Star Trek: Discovery did that for both of its first two seasons. Need an extra ten or fifteen minutes this episode? No problem, we have all the time in the world. There’s no need to cut down an episode to fit an arbitrary time-slot any more, and yet The Mandalorian has the shortest episode runtime of any flagship, “prime time” television series that I think I’ve ever seen. And it’s not the better for it. The most recent episode at time of writing (episode four) would’ve benefited greatly from some extra scenes and sequences. The training montage where the villagers are taught to fight lasted barely a minute, and there was just no indication of the passage of time save for one line of exposition which was clumsily dumped in toward the end of the episode. From the way it was shot, it looked like the protagonist and child arrived, then travelled overnight to the village where in one day they met everyone, trained the villagers, came up with a plan, and drove away the raiders by that same evening. A few extra scenes, totalling no more than a couple of minutes, would have gone a long way to alleviating this problem. So why the unnecessarily short runtime? With the budget Disney has, there’s no sensible explanation for it. And it certainly hasn’t improved the story or made things clearer. Streaming shows can adapt their episodes to be as long or short as needed to advance the story. I just don’t understand why The Mandalorian needed to be so cut-down.

No critique of The Mandalorian would be complete without discussing Disney+. The release in November 2019 just shows how little value Disney places on its overseas (i.e. non-American) customers. In the UK, Disney+ won’t launch until the end of March 2020 – four-and-a-half months after its United States premiere. And I gather in other countries and territories it’s set to be even later still. For a massive release on this scale – the first ever live-action television series in the Star Wars franchise – fans deserved better than a release that’s split up by geography. In decades past, it wouldn’t have mattered. But in the age of the internet, fan communities are a big deal, and spoilers are everywhere. “Baby Yoda” has literally been all over the internet to such an extent that friends and family who have no interest in Star Wars have seen the pictures and the memes. Any Star Wars fan has had The Mandalorian spoiled for them if they don’t live in the United States, and that’s unfair to them. The even more stupid thing is that here in the UK, Disney already has a streaming service called Disney Life. I have a subscription to it. With a minimum of effort it would’ve been possible to add a parental controls setting to Disney Life, gating off The Mandalorian so kids couldn’t access it inadvertently, and allowing fans over here (and in any other territories with a similar service) access to the show. It could even have been delayed to ensure that as many fans as possible around the world would’ve been able to watch at the same time, either by delaying the launch of the app or just the launch of the series. It’s just disappointing to see how little value Disney places on people like me. Game of Thrones did this right – releasing new episodes simultaneously with their US release even though it was the middle of the night here. And Star Trek releases its new episodes within hours of their US premiere on Netflix (and soon to be on Amazon Prime), so why couldn’t Disney have gone down that route? As it stands, the only way to watch The Mandalorian outside of the US is to pirate it. And that’s a massive own goal from Disney.

What I think has been valuable about The Mandalorian is that it has brought back into the fold a lot of fans of the franchise who felt let down by the most recent films, especially The Last Jedi. Introducing some positivity into those fan communities, which had descended into anti-Disney hate groups for the most part, is a good thing. And I respect that a lot of those fans are excited for The Mandalorian and have genuinely enjoyed it thus far.

For me, the two biggest failures are the decision to bring in Force powers in a series that should’ve tried to move away from that side of Star Wars storytelling, and the fact that the main character is, thus far, a blank slate about whom the audience knows and understands very little. The other points where I’ve felt disappointed or underwhelmed would have scarcely been noticed if I’d been more invested in the story and protagonist.

It’s hard to say what I’d like to see going forward that would improve the show, aside from more development of the protagonist. The less we see of the Force the better, that’s for sure, and I hope to God that there isn’t going to be some convoluted time travel or cloning storyline to say the child is actually Yoda from the Original Trilogy. That would be the nail in the coffin and probably the moment I’d stop watching. The old Expanded Universe of Star Wars novels, comics, games, etc. never really appealed to me because, aside from being massively complicated, much of it was essentially low-quality fan fiction made “canon” by Lucasfilm’s bizarre policy of seemingly allowing anyone to write anything. That’s how the EU ended up with fifty clones of Emperor Palpatine, and Darth Maul surviving being literally chopped in half. A time travelling Yoda or a clone of Yoda would really be too much, dragging what should’ve been a standalone series too far backwards, and as I said earlier, not letting it stand on its own two feet carving its own niche within the greater Star Wars galaxy. I really hope that doesn’t end up being the case.

As things stand right now, I’ll keep tuning in to see whether the story picks up. But there are definitely issues that should be addressed going forward to make the show more interesting and draw the audience in. I can tolerate the nostalgic throwbacks, the copying, the unorigiality of too much of the aesthetic, but I can’t really take a whole lot of a boring main character with no personality who just seems to drift from episode to episode at the whim of the plot. Nor can I really be all that bothered to tune into yet another look at how the Force works in Star Wars or how Force users can use their magical powers to show off and save the day. We’ve seen so much of that side of the galaxy already in the “Skywalker Saga”. I really hoped that The Mandalorian would be something genuinely different and original. But instead we’ve got a less interesting, shinier version of Boba Fett who’s inexplicably teamed up with a baby version of Yoda. Some originality, please. Until then, I daresay The Mandalorian will remain a show which is, at best, underwhelming.

The Mandalorian is available for streaming on Disney+ in the United States. The Mandalorian is the copyright of Lucasfilm and Disney. Edited 15.12.20 for formatting. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Guten Tag, Bonjour, Jambo! Welcome to crazy town!

Dennis

Howdy, partners! I’m Dennis and I reckon this here’s my website. This is just a test post to get started and make sure the site’s working as it should. But while you’re here, I’ll give you a brief overview of what you can expect from me if you stick around.

I’m not a critic, at least not a professional one. I’m an ex-writer who used to work in the games industry doing marketing and website work. The point of this blog for me, very selfishly I suppose, is to have a place to throw out my unsolicited opinions on films, games, and television series. That’s what I’ll try and stick to mostly, and I’ll do my best to keep politics out of things because god knows there’s enough of that going around.

While some of my posts here will stray into reviews, that’s not really my main purpose and if you’re looking for someone to give you the lowdown on upcoming films, that probably won’t be me.

Some of the franchises I like most are, in no particular order: Star Trek, Star Wars, The Expanse, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, Disney, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, The 100, Rick & Morty, Mass Effect, Halo, Uncharted, and I’m sure a metric fuckton of others that I’m forgetting.

Unpopular opinion #1: The Last Jedi was a decent film. Not perfect, and probably not reaching the heights it hoped for, but decent nevertheless.

Unpopular opinion #2: Star Trek Discovery is a decent show. Again not perfect, but overall a sound product with some real high points.

I mention these things because they tie into my most important point: I may be critical, at times, of some films and series. But in general, I’d rather see them being made. In the mid-2000s it seemed like Star Trek had died and wasn’t coming back, and that was really not a good feeling as someone who loves that franchise. The JJ-verse films and Discovery may not be perfect, and they certainly aren’t carbon copies of TOS, TNG, or other shows, but they’re keeping the franchise alive and bringing in new fans and that’s a great thing. My next post will hopefully be a critique of the first few episodes of Disney’s The Mandalorian, and while I have to say at this point I’m underwhelmed by that show, I’m still glad it’s here and I’m genuinely pleased to see how it’s bringing fans back to the franchise, as well as bringing new folks in.

Thanks for reading and I’m looking forward to seeing you next time here in crazy town.