Entertainment
Star Trek Has Updated The Worst Writing Trope In The Stupidest Possible Way
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
Decades ago, comic writing legend Gail Simone coined the term “women in refrigerators”, (better known as “fridging,”), which describes writers killing female characters in gruesome ways just to motivate male protagonists. Star Trek started doing its own, more inclusive spin on this trope in Star Trek (2009), and the practice is alive and well in shows like Picard and Starfleet Academy. Instead of killing off a single character, though, this venerable sci-fi franchise keeps destroying entire planets in order to give its characters the most basic motivation.
In the 2009 Star Trek reboot, Romulus is endangered by a supernova, so Ambassador Spock embarks on a crazy plan to save the planet using red matter. He fails, and the subsequent red matter reaction sends both him and a Romulan named Nero over half a century into the past. There, Nero becomes enraged by the death of his planet and his family; blaming the older Spock, he decides to go “eye for an eye,” using red matter to destroy the planet Vulcan.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Cry
This leads to some fairly exciting action scenes as the Enterprise crew tries (and fails) to save Vulcan. Arguably, though, the primary reason for having Nero destroy this iconic Star Trek planet is to have Spock lose his mother. Star Trek (2009) was all about making Spock an angry emo kid, and killing off his mother helped contextualize both his rash decisions about young James T. Kirk (he literally ejected him out of the ship!) and his later desire to kill Nero rather than resolve things diplomatically.
Years later, the spinoff Star Trek: Picard returned to the plot beat of Romulus getting destroyed, revealing that Picard left the Enterprise-E to command an armada of ships whose mission was to save as many Romulans as possible before the planet’s destruction. Unfortunately, that armada is wiped out by a rogue group of synthetic lifeforms, and Starfleet subsequently abandons its rescue efforts. This causes Picard to retire, ending a lifetime of service in utter disgust at Starfleet abandoning the very principles upon which it was founded.
Even Picard Gets Riled Up
For The Next Generation fans, it was fun to see Picard flesh out how the destruction of Romulus affected the rest of the galaxy, but the primary reason the writers returned to this plot point was to explain how and why Picard went from celebrated Starfleet celebrity to disgruntled old fart wasting away on his vineyard. Like Kelvinverse Spock before him, Picard now had a tragic back story that explained why he might be more emotional than usual (which is presumably why he later lets his Romulan sidekick just behead anyone who gets in their way).
Most recently, Starfleet Academy introduced the shocking plot point that the Klingon homeworld of Qo’noS had been destroyed by the Burn. That homeworld and all the worlds of the empire were apparently powered by dilithium reactors. After the Burn (a galactic event that rendered all dilithium crystals inert and blew up any ship with an active warp drive), the Empire that once nearly destroyed Starfleet was reduced to about 50 ships and eight family houses.
It’s Getting Hot In Here
While Starfleet Academy may do something cool with this plot development (hey, stranger things have happened), it really seems like the writers destroyed Qo’noS just to give extra motivation to Jay-Den, the show’s Klingon cadet. As a pacifist, wannabe doctor Klingon with a combo of Daddy and abandonment issues, this guy already has a lot going on. However, the show’s writers decided to also make him one of only a relative handful of Klingons trying to keep their millennia-old culture alive despite only a fraction of his people surviving the Burn.
Watching that Starfleet Academy episode, it hit me with all the force of a bat’leth blow: for Star Trek, blowing up entire planets is the new fridging. Back in the ‘90s, writers were content to motivate characters like Green Lantern by simply killing their girlfriends in the most edgelord way possible (and stuffing their bodies in the fridge, no less). Now, these modern-day sci-fi writers feel the need to destroy entire planets and snuff out billions of lives just to explain complex plot points like “why is Spock sad?” and “why is Picard sad?” and ‘why is Jay-Den sad?”
Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with blowing up an entire planet if it really suits the story; Star Wars, for example, had the Empire blow up Alderaan to demonstrate how evil they really were. But since 2009, Star Trek has gone to utterly excessive lengths to motivate its chief characters in the stupidest possible ways. Like, be honest for a minute: would you have found Spock any less compelling if his mommy didn’t die in an extinction event, or Picard any less engaging if his reputation didn’t die along with Romulus?
This Repetitive Plot Is Without Honor
The blunt truth is that this is just lazy writing by Star Trek creative teams who don’t know how to motivate characters without giving them tragic backstories with body counts in the billions. It was already tired when they did it in the first Star Trek reboot film, and it was completely played out when they used it to explain why Picard was now so cranky and boring. Starfleet Academy has returned to this well for a third time, and to nobody’s real shock, the well is completely dry.
Gail Simone was right all those years ago when she called out fridging, and her general thesis was solid: namely, that writers need to find better ways to motivate characters than by killing the ones they care about. Instead, Paramount has continually upped the fridging ante by destroying entire planets because their creators can’t figure out any other way to give characters depth or emotional growth. Now, it’s well past time for the Star Trek writers to boldly go where they arguably haven’t gone in decades: to original stories featuring dynamic, properly-written characters with grounded motivations.
Should that prove impossible, what should the Star Trek writers actually do? They should blow up our own planet, which would be far, far more merciful than making us sit through this predictably awful franchise plot point for the umpteenth time. Plus, the destruction of the entire Earth might finally give us the motivation to do what we should have done long ago: unsubscribe from Paramount+ before we are finally claimed by the void.
Entertainment
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Entertainment
Star Trek’s First Broadcast Episode Was Very Carefully Chosen, Because It Was Boring
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
These days, Star Trek is a bona fide pop culture phenomenon. But during the development of The Original Series, there was anxiety that the general public wouldn’t really understand Gene Roddenberry’s mashing up Western tropes with a sci-fi setting. Making matters worse was that the original pilot, “The Cage,” had been rejected by NBC for being too brainy. Fortunately, Roddenberry got a chance to shoot another pilot, one which impressed the network enough to order an entire season worth of episodes.
Several episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series had already been shot when the time came for this new show to make its broadcast premiere. The first episode that the general public saw was “The Man Trap,” which featured a shapeshifting monster that was revealed to be an alien salt vampire. This good-but-not-great episode was an odd choice, and it was one that the cast and crew hated. As it turns out, though, this episode was very carefully selected by executives because it served as an inoffensive, relatively straightforward encapsulation of everything Star Trek had to offer.
It’s A Trap!
Most of the information we have about why “The Man Trap” was selected as Star Trek’s first episode comes from the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. Within this impressive reference tome, Robert H. Justman and Herbert F. Solow revealed something surprising: NBC had several other episodes to choose from for the premiere, including “The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Charlie X,” “Mudd’s Women,” “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and “The Naked Time.” All of them had already been shot and were mostly finished, so it was just a matter of figuring out which episode would serve as the best introduction to Star Trek, a heretofore unknown sci-fi series.
“The Man Trap” won out, mostly because the powers that be worried that other episodes would be off-putting to general audiences in some very specific ways. For example, they worried that audiences would find “Charlie X” a story that was “too gentle” because it focused on an adolescent with special powers. This was probably the right call, in retrospect: when Variety gave a negative review of “The Man Trap” (an episode chosen, in part, because of its relative maturity), they declared that Star Trek: The Original Series was “better suited to the Saturday morning kidvid bloc” (ouch!).
A Monster Hit Of An Episode
“The Corbomite Maneuver” was a great potential choice, but this episode’s impressive special effects were still in post-production, and almost all of its action took place on the ship. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” really outlined the premise of the new show, but it was deemed “expository” for general audiences expecting more action and danger. Justman thought “The Naked Time” was a killer introduction to the crew’s personalities, but the network passed, presumably because of how over-the-top (half-naked, swashbuckling Sulu? Oh, my!) that episode gets. “Mudd’s Women,” meanwhile, was deemed too offensive because the plot involved literally selling women to miners.
Through this process of elimination, executives decided that “The Man Trap” was the best intro to Star Trek. It had cool scenes on both the Enterprise and a distant outpost (a strange new world) and featured a straightforward action plot you didn’t have to be a sci-fi aficionado to understand. Finally, it was all about finding and defeating a creepy monster, which offered thrills to audiences of all ages. The network’s choice paid off, and Star Trek: The Original Series became the most popular sci-fi show in television history, even though the cast (including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy) thought “The Man Trap” was the worst possible episode they could have chosen.
All of this is a keen reminder of how much thought and work went into putting Star Trek’s best foot forward. It might be a reminder that Paramount’s current upper leadership needs, as Starfleet Academy hit the ground running with the worst episodes of Season 1. The show got better after that, but it didn’t matter because the prospective audience had already been driven away. As it turns out, today’s execs need to learn something that the network execs of the ‘60s had learned very well: series succeed when you give the audience what they want to see and not what you want to show!
Entertainment
How A Fantasy Box Office Bomb Lost $200 Million In Theaters, And Suddenly Became A Streaming Hit
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
For the last decade as streaming has taken off in homes around the world, it’s become possible for films that lost historical amounts of money in theaters to find success, even if it might be the post-Mystery Science Theater 3000 trend of “so bad it’s good.” That’s why a massive flop, for example say, Morbius, and films that slightly missed the mark like The Fall Guy can turn it around and become a streaming success.
What’s even more impressive is the amazing turnaround of 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer, which lost Legendary Pictures an alleged $200 million, only to end up topping streaming charts in 2025.
The Classic Fairy Tale With A Twist
Everyone knows the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, the classic fairy tale about selling a horse for magic beans and climbing a beanstalk to find a giant living in the clouds. It’s simple, contains multiple morals, and can be easily adjusted to turn Jack into the villain, but Jack the Giant Slayer instead asks, “What if there was no moral, and instead of one giant, there was an entire army of evil giants?” The movie is the classic story, as you’ve never seen it before, and it almost works.
Nicholas Hoult plays Jack, the young man who finds himself trading his horse to a monk in exchange for beans that he can’t allow to get wet, ever. Like the rules in Gremlins, it’s not long before Jack accidentally gets the beans wet and a beanstalk grows under his house with the princess, Isabell (Eleanor Tomlinson), trapped inside as it grows into the sky. All the king’s men gather to rescue the princess, including Lord Roderick (Stanley Tucci), who, thankfully, Jack the Giant Slayer makes obvious is very evil, very quickly.
It’s up to Jack, Isabell, and the loyal Knight, Elmont (Ewan McGregor) to save the kingdom and stop the invasion of giants led by Roderick and the giant two-headed General Fallon (Bill Nighy). If there’s one thing Jack the Giant Slayer does better than every other adaptation, it’s the third act featuring a full-blown war between humans and giants, with a touch of humor and absurdity. Watching a giant toss a windmill like the glaive from Krull is the perfect amount of off-beat to distract from a surprising amount of body horror in both the giant’s designs and Fallon’s ultimate fate.
A Movie For No One
Jack the Giant Slayer looks too good, and the star-studded cast is having way too much fun for it to be a truly bad movie. The problem is that the pacing is off: it takes a little too long to get to the good stuff, then it feels a little too rushed, and though it is a fun adventure, it’s also, like the source material, simplistic. It’s not like the movie wasn’t watched in theaters; it made $197 million worldwide, which would be a great haul except it cost $185 million to make, and that’s not including the extensive marketing campaign.
The push and pull of director Bryan Singer’s vision of a dark take on the fable, complete with actual people-eating on screen, and the sanitized version that hit theaters, which was still too dark for children, since the film is surprisingly rated PG-13, meant it ended up being a film for no one. The Rotten Tomatoes ratings, of 52 percent from critics and 55 percent from the audience, are proof that the final product is not great, but not bad; it’s a movie that will keep you watching for a few hours and then leave no lasting impression. These days, Lionsgate and Sony wish they’d release a movie that is that well-received, as even Jack the Giant Slayer looks like a masterpiece compared to Borderlands or Kraven the Hunter.
Streaming is the perfect home for Jack the Giant Slayer, and 10 years later, it no longer matters that the movie lost hundreds of millions in theaters. It finally gets to stand on its own as a fun, if unremarkable, fantasy adventure.
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Frederik Andersen, Hurricanes look to shut down Senators in Game 2
