14
votes
Space Command S01E01 — The greatest 'Star Trek' type show you're not watching right now
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- Title
- The Greatest Star Trek Series You're Not Watching -- Full Episode!
- Authors
- Mr. Sci-Fi
- Duration
- 1:09:54
- Published
- Apr 24 2020
I watched the trailer and visited the website. The CGI looks great at least on my phone. The acting and the writing did not impress me.
The creator says he got 1 million dollars to shoot 3 hours of content. That’s pretty impressive but makes me question the sustainability of the project. He’ll certainly need less money for subsequent episodes since he will reuse a lot of stuff, but when I see ambitious independent projects like this I start to think about release models.
If he already has the ability to produce so much content in one go, why not make it a movie or a limited series instead? Something that can stand on its own and be already narratively satisfying (even if they fail to get further funding)? Futurama did something like that for a while and the result was phenomenal.
I mean, if you don’t have the support of a large media corporation and is not constrained by the needs of appointment television, why follow their model?
I’d be a lot more willing to watch something I was sure would come to some kind of conclusion.
Watched the first 15min, it is.... rough. There's a lot of names attached to this that I am very fond of but some of these scenes are really badly written, and the cgi is actually way over done in a lot of them.
I intend to finish it, I'll post more as I go.
Edit: finished it. While there are some good performances, the writing is just shlocky. The character establishment is superficial, some of the dialog is so stilted it needs a wheelchair, the "do intelligent machines have rights" morality trope is ham-fisted, the lighting of a lot of the shots is horrendous and dark to the point of indecipherable, and the main AI character is so "dark and mysterious" you could put him in a satirical skit about sci-fi tropes.
The thing about successful screenwriters and actors is that they do not succeed in a vacuum. There’s a general dislike for producers and/or money people, but they are an integral part of many TV hits.
I completely agree. I usually use The Matrix as an example of this. The first one was incredible, ground breaking, a solid piece of cinema. Because nobody knew if it was going to be successful, more people questioned aspects of it, elements where cut out at all stages of production, until you where left with the final product. Then when the second and third films where made, everyone knew they would make money the question was just how much. So less people questioned, less things where cut, and your ended up with an end result that while not completely terrible, suffered from not having more things cut or reworked.
Truly creative people can create some truly amazing things. But they can do so way more consistently when they're paired up with someone who is somewhere detached and isn't afraid to tell them "no".
Just for the record, I enjoyed matrix ii as much as i. In different ways, but just as much. III, on the other hand, well, it was certainly the equivalent of star wars ep I.
I think if 3 had not been so bad, 2 would be looked on as a generally good movie. It had some problems but I suspect it mostly gets panned because of how awful 3 was.
Pirates of the Caribbean 2 had the same problem. All buildup for a big letdown, so both movies get hit with retrospective apathy.
I think it's probably an issue with middle movies in general. It's hard for that second movie in a trilogy to stand on it's own until the last installment comes out and pays off the things that were being set up.
I've read before that Empire Strikes Back got a lot of mixed and lukewarm reviews when it originally came out, but it's now widely regarded as the best movie in the Star Wars franchise. I think because it did such a good job creating tension and setting up conflicts to be paid off in RotJ.
I'm curious now if there are any trilogies with a weak third movie but a very good second...
The Empire Strikes Back was regarded as the best or second best movie in the Star Wars franchise when it first came out, too.
The Star Wars trilogy fits this as well.
Last Jedi and Rise?
I was originally going to cut and run, but now I'm curious how a second movie by JJ and then calling in Rian for the third would have played out.
Yes. That’s of course relative. Some creators thrive on full creative control. Others need someone to keep them on planet Earth.
This is true just about everywhere, not just entertainment. There is genuine skill involved in being able to assemble talent that will produce a product that people want. You can't just lock a random group of software and hardware engineers in a room for a few years and expect them to pop out the next iPhone. Someone needs to know what to ask them to build, how to ask them to build it, and even how to pick the right people to build it.
For sure. The adoration for film directors kinda bothers me because of that. Not to deny their importance, and there are many awful producers and studio heads, but in many cases it’s a good thing directors don’t have the final cut. The Director’s Cut of Apocalypse Now has 40 extra minutes of useless sideplot, and I may be the only person alive that liked the voice over in Blade Runner (I’ve been trying to find it for years but it was basically erased from the internet). And what about the continuous changes George Lucas made in Star Wars?
Fair point, however I think it's important to remember that each of those series was a product of it's time. Not just in terms of plots and social norms, but also storytelling and production methods. I enjoy a bit of nostalgia same as other people, but there are certain tropes that are tropes for a reason. And bad writing is just bad writing.
Not in the slightest. All main Star Trek series had several memorable episodes with top notch writing and their overall quality is vastly superior to this pilot in all aspects but CGI.
Okay, I watched it. There are some good ideas but the writing is shockingly bad. It’s hard to criticize the actors due to the quality of the dialogue they had to carry. In one interaction between the main guy and his romantic interest stop to give each other a salute — only to continue the conversation. WTF is that? I had go back to see if that made any sense, but I don’t think so. In another, Robert Picardo’s character turns to a woman and says: “look, you’re a handsome archeologist and...”. That’s how they wrote his attempt at courtship: no subtlety, no attempt at making things interesting. Just a character blurting out whatever the writer wants us to know.
The emotional progression is absurdly contrived, characters that barely know each other show automatic intimacy.
I’m not allowed to experience the story, since in every scene I see a writer desperately trying to make his very expansive universe fit within budget and time constraints. There’s way too much unrefined exposition, what some screenwriters call “talking heads”.
The CGI flourish is frequently distracting.
The scientist is like a cartoon and his son looks straight out of a high school play.
The editing is okay, but they like to cut within the same shot which is unpleasant and screams “cheap”.
There is one scene in which Picardo demonstrate his range for drama, and the Android is kinda interesting.
I feel kinda bad to be so negative about a labor of love, but I highly doubt this comes even close to being “The greatest 'Star Trek' type show you're not watching right now”. And it’s bothersome that the aspect I disliked the most was the one that cost no money to make.
The ending was kinda cool though. So I have some hope. Beginnings are full of exposition and hard to write.
Mostly agreed. It's a lot of exposition, and the first 15 minutes is a bit hard. The only thing keeping me on for the first 20 or so was the synth's plot line.
It does, imo. He's seeing off his fellow officer, talking business about the ship and crew. Salute signifies the official part is over. Usually, that'd be it. But he then asks her out. Definitely not part of official business. I don't know military protocol all too well, but I could imagine that she can not bug out until dismissed, so he decides to give her an out here and makes it clear this is not official. Something like that.
One way to make this work would be to introduce a beat or a small action/reaction after the salute to show that the guy took a moment to motivate himself to pursue her romantically. Every action, even psychological, needs to create momentum. The way they did it was super mechanical and awkward.
Suppose for example that after the salute she entered an elevator and he suddenly prevented the door from closing just to ask her out. That’s a better scene!
I was really conflicted about this. Picardo gave a really great performance and his dialog was actually pretty good in that scene. However the context made it feel really contrived. This character had no motivation too talk about something very emotional with a character both he and the audience just met. It feels like a scene that should have taken place much later in the overall plot.
Same for the scene between the archeologist and the Captain about the archeologist's unique medical condition. She had no (apparent) reason to tell him anything more than vauge details when she won't even tell her own daughter.
The ending was "meh" for me, but I had already kind of checked out at that point.
The preview for the next episode was even more astonishingly bad. The two captains having a heated argument and then anger-kissing? Are we just running through a list of the most common TV tropes? If we are can we at least embrace it and make it funny?
It’s a bad scene for sure. But Picardo almost made it work.
This is a first episode of Space Command, if you make it past the first 20minutes the show does get incredibly interesting and fun to watch. This is a great entirely independent scifi show!
I hope you enjoy!
Are the first 20 minutes bad?
Edit: After reading other comments, I guess so.
They are. But it’s also not so easy to discard because there are some actually interesting ideas.
I guess I'm going against the grain here, but I actually liked it. There's nothing polished about it, it has crappy graphics, and most of the cast don't seem comfortable in their roles. To me it seems like the start of many sci-fi shows that I have loved in the past. I don't know if in four hours the cast can come into their own, or if the story is too vast to be contained in such a short time, but I'm excited to find out!
I agree with you. Reminds me of the start of a lot of other scifi shows I love, rocky but may grow into their own. I have high hopes purely because an original independent scifi show would be fantastic to see.