"Filler" episodes are usually the best episodes, you fucking idiot.
Just Look at TOS.
"A Piece of the Action," "The Trouble With Tribbles," "This Side of Paradise," "Tomorrow Is Yesterday," "Shore Leave," etc.
These episodes are some of the most memorable ones and had no real point.
The push for every single piece of media to forward the plot is one of my least favorite things. I understand getting tired of stories where nothing happens but character moments are so important. Slices of life makes us care about plot developments
Comics have been dealing with this in a counterintuitively with decompression. Stories are given more time to breathe but often at the expense of supporting cast and actual character development.
Because it can take up to 6-12 issues to tell a story that would be half of that, there is often little room for character pieces in favor of event crossover hell or to push narrative forward
A lot of my favorite comics moments, especially in the X-Men, are them kind of farting around with each other like close friends/family members do, or bickering with each other for the same reason.
Wolverine is a great foil for any character, because he will talk shit to any of them. He’s basically a pint-sized character development engine. It’s great when writers know how to use him for that.
Exactly! It isn’t that they played baseball it’s because it showed them being a family/close group of friends and just being people. It makes me care for when one of the members becomes possessed by fire and life incarnate and decides to kill broccoli people
It’s one major reason I think most early image was so dogshit to me. Apart from an art style I had begun to dislike, I had no reason to care what happened to these new extreme characters who had not been allowed to grown on me unless I pretended they were the marvel characters they were riffing on.
How many titles spent 6-12 issue on a “getting the group together story” but then because the writer is only contracted for 12 issues the next one just starts over again and breaks up the group?
I’m pretty neutral toward Kurtzman’s statement. “Star Trek Discovery” is not produced, marketed, shot, or written very much at all like “Star Trek,” its parent show that’s 50 years its senior. TV has been greatly influenced by other formats: film, miniseries. Hell, Disco isn’t even on proper “TV.”
Even the concept of “filler” seems largely imported from US impressions of anime. The audience is also far more versed in inside-baseball stuff like “bottle episodes” and “clip shows.”
Comparing 20th & 21st century shows in the same franchise is instructive and important but there’s a LOT going on
Well the problem is that people are quick to label anything that doesn't obviously forward an overarching narrative as filler, unless it's a procedural series. Which is dumb.
Fair play. Producers secretly love the taste of their own feet. (Or more seriously, the skills for running shows and being interviewed only overlap so far)
Same w/ the X-Files…not everything need be part of a “rich tapestry of narrative cohesion” especially since the ones doing the writing aren’t thinking THAT much ahead of things.
I had to come back to this wisdom in adulthood. Remembered the series fondly but as just too annoying. A friend insisted and a late series episode about a genie blew my mind. "Yeah, the monster of the week episodes are the reason to watch"
Rewatched a few seasons after and dang a lot of it's good
"Filler episodes" were such a great way to develop characters and their relationships. It rounded them out! People are very different in a crisis versus in their day to day, and seeing the shift and development along both axis is great!
What’s ironic is that Discovery’s serialized approach to storytelling has seen Kurtzman stretch out about a single episode‘s worth of plot over 10 to 15 fairly dull episodes. There’s room for filler, and it would be welcome! Thankfully, SNW seems to have figured this out with its blended approach.
I gave up on "Discovery" in season 4 because everything was just so fucking slow-going. I need SOME momentum in my "Star Trek" not one plot beat per 40 minutes.
I’m sure Kurtzman would argue there’s plenty of character development going on as well, but no, it’s just a lot of tearful melodrama and unearned emotional beats.
I’m watching it, and I don’t know why. The entire premise doesn’t even make sense. Successfully completing a scavenger hunt proves your worthiness to wield unimaginable power? So evil people can’t be good at solving puzzles? They’re constantly a step behind two petty criminals!
Like, I’m gonna finish this show, but boy they are really coasting on goodwill from a guy that was only in the second season and has his own, better Star Trek show
It's just silly. And besides the unexplained why, *how* would an ancient Romulan set up a complicated puzzle across several systems? It's the stuff of mediocre video games
I gave up on DS9 for the same reason. I literally kept falling asleep! I hear DS9 does pick up in later seasons, though, so I will probably revisit it at some point.
The later seasons of DS9 are a great example of the blended serialized/episodic approach SNW is now doing so well. You have all-time great episodes like “In the Pale Moonlight” that deal directly with the Dominion War and then fun ones like “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” that offer respite from it.
