Starship Enterprise

[percyprune]

Today Kei watched his first Star Trek episode: Norman Spinrad's The Doomsday Machine. (Well, if it was good enough for me in 1968, it is good enough for him today.) Kei seemed very impressed, though he was very tense at the scene where Kirk crashes the U.S.S. Constellation into the maw of the machine

Comments

[moral_vacuum]

That's "bling everything with rapidly dated CG techniques".

[hairyears]

This is why I loved Watchmen: the movie - they decided to make a Sci-Fi novel of the 1980's in the nineteen-eighties, visually speaking.

...How's that gonna look 'dated' ?

The bottom line is that good shots and good scenes don't date. The CG's got to be good enough to pass the test of the audience's willing suspension of disbelief - but a scene or a shot that's only got the 'wow!' special effects going for it will look dated at a second viewing, never mind a second decade or a second generation of technology later.

[percyprune]

I think this is why the remastered Trek works so well. Their ambitions are quite modest. These shots will still look good another 40 years from now.

[hairyears]

Good Lord! I'd forgotten that episode - it's only as I readc the Wikipedia article that recollections returned, dim memories of seeing it in a BBC repeat as a schoolboy.

That's one hell of a plot: I suspect that Spinrad, a published author, did rather better than the run of hack writers - what else did he do for Star Trek?

[percyprune]

I'm not sure I'd call Harlan Ellison or Robert Bloch 'hacks'. They did some cracking stuff on Trek.

I think that was the only episode Spinrad wrote for the show.

Fanquel

[damiancugley]

The first episode of Star Trek Phase II, ‘In Harm’s Way’, is a sequel to ‘The Doomsday Machine’-and also a prequel.