And even if she did, it would still be unfair to assume the subplots would be inherently bad, or severely detrimental to the picture.

This sounds pretty good.  I've been looking forward to this since I first heard of it.  I have a feeling the subplot might just be a YMMV deal.

That's what I'm saying.  I think that TMP and Insurrection were both kind of boring, but IV was a
pretty good sci-fi tale.  Those are the ones that seemed to try most to
be sci-fi.

Iman for the 13th and final Doctor.

I think I'd have to watch it again, but here it is if you get a chance:
http://redlettermedia.com/h…

I do think it's at least a blurrier line now that skews more closely to the action and space opera of the Star Wars films.  Hasn't even George Lucas said that Star Wars isn't intended to be considered science fiction, but science fantasy or space opera?

Oh, I know about both Roddenberry and Meyer being influenced by both Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey, but what struck me when watch M&C were two things in particular: first that it was episodic.  I kind of think that format would be great for a Star Trek film in order to get as close to the explorer tone of the…

In interviews for the first movie they kept on saying they didn't want to make captains incompetent to make Kirk look good, like in the old movies.  I don't know how destroying all of Starfleet is either better, or not sort of doing the same thing, but way more so.

Sometimes "The robots!"

Are you referring to the terrorist?  He was only in it for a few minutes.  The movie wasn't about thwarting him, it was about how the world as a whole would react to such an announcement.  So I never thought about him as someone that needed much development.  I think there probably would be people that would seem to…

He liked the first one.  The Half in the Bag was quite critical of Into Darkness.  The reason Plinkett cited in the review of the first one was that he likes his science fiction movies smart, dry, and boring and his action films dumb, fast, and visceral.  Trek 09 fit into the latter category, and he felt the…

Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones don't strike me as particularly optimistic in tone.  Can you cite any examples of shows that aren't unremittingly dark on TV today?

Fair enough.  I don't really care about hard vs. soft sci-fi.  I guess where I draw the line, and reading what past Trek writers have said on the topic I think they're in the same ballpark, is whether or not they have any concepts that are pretty original and new to the franchise that wouldn't be possible in another…

I guess another movie that sort of had a Trek-like tone that often gets thrown out there is Master and Commander.  The two movies I cited had one thing in common: PG ratings.  I'm not saying a movie has to be toothless (many of the worst movies are "family films" with manipulative scores and worse everything else),…

I haven't seen it yet, buty wasn't even "Moon" sort of a moody psychological drama?  I'd be interested in seeing something that was a little more awestruck and universal, yet not the cold intellectual exercise that TMP or 2001 were.

So I guess we'll have to wait for a Star Trek movie to be science fiction again.
Even the actual science fiction movies that have come out lately like Looper, Europa Report, or the upcoming Gravity are mostly thrillers.  And when they're dramas like Another Earth, they're still these dark angst-ridden dramas.

That's what happened to Curzon…

I wish they wouldn't even try to concoct a solution though, save for maybe giving him back just one more life for the Time Lords taking 2's away, or maybe Susan Foreman, or Romana, or a different Time Lord is found somehow alive and is granted the title of Doctor.

He's also the first person older than the show since Paul McGann, which is nice.

I'm a relative newbie, probably mostly been watching since about 2009.  But it's almost exclusively been the old show, simply because of access.  I did see some of The End of Time (where I thought Tennant was kind of overwrought), The Eleventh Hour, The Curse of the Black Spot, Hide, and The Name of the Doctor, and…