An essay on Star Trek: FUCK Rick Berman

I just have to write this, because right now over on their Facebook page, Star Trek are currently paying homage to the worst thing to happen to the brand, Rick Berman. I shared it with them, but I don't expect it to remain up for very long over there. So here then is my essay, Fuck Rick Berman:

Fuck Rick Berman. Fuck Rick Berman in the ear.

The man turned TNG's final seasons into an uneven mess of "restart-by-closing-credits" melodramas and Rubber Forehead Theatre.

The inability to stick to established Star Trek lore or maintain an even portrayal of characters (or for that matter, DEVELOPING the characters beyond the 2 dimensional), as well as ripping off an idea originally pitched to Paramount by J Michael Straczyinski (The big, blue rotating elephant in the room) to create DS9 only cheapened TNG's already-tarnished legacy.

The movies only ruined things further by taking the Borg completely off the rails, (Creating plot holes the size of which you could fly a planet-eater through), allowing William Shatner a hammish and extended death scene, prostituting the TNG cast to inferior scripts and direction and pointlessly and inelegantly killed off one of the franchise's most beloved characters. The net result? TNG died of terminal suck.

Shall we enumerate the sins of Voyager, of which there are many? Start with the wasted potential to tell REAL "Strange New Worlds" stories, assembling a crew of caricatures instead of characters, spending no time on developing a coherent story arc, completely bollocksing up the Borg, Shoe-horning good, old-fashioned cheezy 1980s Three's Company eye-candy Jeri Ryan into the story (and then not even being able to pull of T&A properly) to distract the horny fanboys who couldn't jerk it to Janeway because she reminded them of their moms, not even ATTEMPTING to formulate any kind of direction for the show...

Enterprise? Purile, outdated garbage. The show would have been great-had it come out 20 years before, when Genre audiences weren't as demanding of intelligent, thoughtful storytelling. And the weekly dose of Vulcan camel-toe (Pon-T'ang, I believe it's called) just wasn't enough to make the show tolerable. Nevermind the Xindi fiasco and the one-again pointless killing off of a beloved character in the finale.

The best thing to happen to Star Trek since "All Good Things" aired was the 2009 alternate-history reboot by JJ Abrams. And even there, we need an extended director's cut to really get the most out of that one, I think.

Rick Berman? Should do to him what the Klingons did to Worf: Turn our backs on him and exile him in shame.