Star Trek DS9 on Blu-Ray -- Remain Ever Hopeful Thread (1 Viewer)

[dana martin]

according to the CBS syndication bible , ST:TAS has been done in HD so possibly it is filler while the finish the next run of TNG

 

[Jason_V]

It looks gorgeous, doesn't it?

 

[Nelson Au]

The increased resolution is certainly an obvious benefit, but it's always amazing to see the improved color resolution. You can really see the detail and colors of the make-up and the James Cromwell mask really shows well there!

 

[The Obsolete Man]

according to the CBS syndication bible , ST:TAS has been done in HD so possibly it is filler while the finish the next run of TNG

Hopefully, it's filler between TNG and DS9. I can't believe that TNG will be completed on blu any later than early December, so they can get the maximum sales out of the Christmas rush.

As for the video posted earlier... Morn made it to HD.

 

[Mark Collins]

Check out what Bill has to say about DS9 at The Bits.

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/

 

[Kevin EK]

I've read his postings about this, and I've also seen the materials written up by the guy from Trek Core who's been in touch with the various players.

The short version of the entire discussion is that this is about the dollars. According to the people actually involved in making the TNG blus, it cost x amount to do the remastering - and x was a large number. They had a reasonable expectation that they could make a profit off that work, given the continuing popularity of TNG. To remaster DS9 or Voyager would be considerably more expensive than even TNG was, as they would need to completely recreate the CGI vfx shots that were generated for the shows - and the sheer numbers of CGI shots went way up over the final few years of each show.

DS9 and Voyager are quite different matters. Neither ever reached the popularity of TNG, and as we saw over the course of 1995-2005, the ratings continued to drop until Paramount decided to give the franchise a rest. This doesn't mean that DS9 and Voyager don't have loyal fans. It means that there simply aren't enough of them for CBS to be able to justify the additional expense. They're not looking to break even - they want to actually make a profit. Currently, those numbers aren't there, and we don't know if they will be any time soon. (And that's without even getting into the animated series - which I doubt would look better in HD. We're fortunate they spent the time to get it to us on DVD in the first place.)

As I understand it, the TNG restoration staff has pretty much completed this project and they're looking for new assignments. No work is happening on DS9 and none is anticipated to be happening - at least not for the foreseeable future. They could always come back to this idea in 2016 if they wish.

 

[Chareth]

I'm struck by Bill saying that social media can make a difference in this space, even though petitions don't. And given those financial realities you outline, Kevin, I'm surprised that he thinks there's enough of a chance to bother writing that post.

So given CBS clearly want to do this but just need the justifiable incentive, let's try to make #ds9onblurayplease a thing. Tweeting a photo of your Trek TV Blus with an impassioned message to CBS is a very small effort as far as campaigns like this go, even for those who are rightly skeptical that it will ever happen.

 

[Sam Favate]

Something to remember regarding DS9's supposed lack of popularity compared to TNG: In the New York area, which is one of, if not the, largest television audiences in the country, DS9 aired on WPIX, a local station, since it was syndicated. DS9 was the only Trek on TV for the fall of 1994; TNG wrapped up in the spring, and Voyager was starting in Jan. 1995. Here's the thing: Voyager, as we know, was the flagship show of the new UPN network, and in New York, Voyager aired on the same day and at the same time as DS9. Programming executives, in their infinite wisdom, chose to immediately cut their potential audiences in half. Neither show would budge. Is it any wonder that neither show really took off the way its predecessor did?

I hope blus are eventually made of DS9 and Voyager, with the same honest bonus materials we saw on TNG and Enterprise. I really think UPN mishandled Voyager, interfering with its development, and actively sought to hurt DS9. The producers have said (on the Enterprise materials) that the UPN execs never 'got' Star Trek (they wanted, for example, a different young band to appear each week on Enterprise). Star Trek fans are still paying for that lack of vision.

 

[Chareth]

Indeed, and some fans have discovered and embraced Enterprise years after its original run, with the resentment and hostility having faded. The later Trek shows all have the potential to be discovered now, far away from the circumstances that hindered their original run. Twin Peaks is a case study for this. Its popularity and presence in pop culture only seems to grow with each passing year as it becomes more widely available. The negative sentiment surrounding the second half of the series during its broadcast no longer taint how its perceived.

Unfortunately, the Star Trek brand has positive and negative effects. For those who don't think they like Star Trek, they tar all the shows with the same brush even if they may, for example, appreciate the moral ambiguity and serialized storytelling of DS9. DS9 in particular is both bolstered by being a Star Trek show and trapped by it. Mainstream viewers who loved Battlestar Galactica may assume DS9 isn't for them because they don't generally like Trek or space shows, even though it helped shape how Ron Moore crafted BSG.

If CBS ever do remaster DS9, there may be benefits to promoting it in a completely different way to TNG. Don't preach to the base. Advertise it as an influential serialized drama and emphasize the characterization, acting, and politics. Don't just throw out ads that say 'here's more Star Trek!'. The base are going to know all about it already, after all.

 

[Kevin EK]

I don't know that I would say that Paramount or anyone else on the production end was trying to hurt any of their productions, whether that be DS9 or any of the others. I think it's fair to say that UPN was trying to position itself as a major network as best they could, and they wanted to push the syndicators to respect network programming on the schedule over syndication programming. I'd agree that this didn't work out so well, but I believe that was the mentality.

But this isn't what caused the ratings of DS9 and Voyager to continue to decline, nor is it what caused the audience to not really embrace Enterprise. The issues are more ingrown than that. The fact is that the Star Trek audience was told they were going to see something new and exciting with each new iteration that happened.

With DS9, the idea was to introduce the viewers to new cultures and new civilizations via the wormhole, and to base the show in a more compelling, conflict-ready environment. But within a couple of episodes, it was clear that we were just getting another TNG-styled show, only set on DS9. This doesn't take away from the quality of many episodes during the series' life, but you can see the producers trying to switch course almost every year until they settled on the Dominion War. (And we should keep in mind that for most of DS9's life, it was effectively in competition with Babylon 5, which had plenty of problems of its own but did have a consistent overall arc to its story.)

With Voyager, we were promised a show that would take us back to the original spirit of the 1960s TV series, of just exploring new worlds and new civilizations in the Delta Quadrant. Except that within a couple of episodes, it was clear that we were just getting another TNG-styled show, only set on Voyager. Again, this doesn't take away from the quality of many of the episodes, but by this point, the story patterns, the character types, the dialogue and the music were becoming awfully familiar.

With Enterprise, we were promised a show that would take Star Trek back to its beginnings and really examine the beginnings of what would eventually become the history of the original 1960s series. And once again, it became clear even during the pilot that we weren't seeing a new series - this was Trek set in an earlier time frame, following the same basic rules, using the same basic tropes and living within the same pattern we had now seen for 15 years. It frankly was not a surprise to see the last show's ratings descend, given that people by this time had now seen hundreds of hours of the same kind of material.

The ratings decline was simply due to people being hungry for something that really was different. There's a reason that LOST took off like a bottle rocket in 2004, at the same time that Enterprise was completing its existence. This doesn't mean that there aren't great episodes of all of these shows, or that we shouldn't be able to have them in the best possible quality on home video. I'm happy that we can get any episode of any of these shows either on DVD or Blu-ray. We haven't lost them. It would be very nice to have DS9 and Voyager on Blu-ray, if it happens. If it doesn't, I'm still happy to have the DVDs I already have.

BTW regarding Twin Peaks, I agree that people are a bit fonder about the series these days then they were during that disastrous 2nd season. But fans and viewers well remember how fast the fall came from when the show was on the air. I'm shocked to admit that this was over 20 years ago, as it still feels quite fresh to me. When a TV show jumps the shark, as it were, people still remember, even decades later. It's been part of my work here with the reviews of Complete Series sets, to recount the life of a show, from when it started and was fresh and new to when the show finally came to end, either voluntarily or involuntarily... If anything, that may be the most interesting part of the study of an older series. We may learn just as much from the decline of a great show as we do from its formation.

 

[Chareth]

Agreed that the post-TNG shows weren't fresh enough. VOY and ENT in particular failed to live up to their premise. And as ambitious as DS9 was, it still had much of TNG's aesthetic and style, particularly in the early seasons, which may have put off people wanting something fresh. Then again, some dismissed DS9 as being too different to what they knew of Trek, so it's all about perspective. And it's certainly hard to imagine characters like Garak and Dukat and episodes like "In the Pale Moonlight" on TNG.

Regarding Twin Peaks, I was referring more to younger audiences who may not even have been alive during the original broadcast, and are amazed by this show that feels both old and incredibly fresh at the same time (the show still feels ineffably like something from a parallel universe). Peaks now has a significant teen and 20-something fanbase. It's one of the few shows from that era and earlier that is still being discovered and embraced in a non-ironic way by Gen Y/Millennials and beyond.

I was also thinking of those who knew of the show at the time and dismissed it due to the negative sentiment or because they thought it was another primetime soap. The critical reappraisal has circled them back to the show and they're surprised by what they find.

 

[smithbrad]

DS9 is probably the most wanted series on my list of remaining shows to get.

With respect to the Star Trek TV series in general, I picked up the remastered TOS DVD's before upgrading to BR. With Enterprise I ended up with the UK release on DVD before upgrading them to BR. With TNG I managed to hold out until the BR releases. I was really hoping to do the same with DS9, but all this talk has me leaning towards getting the UK DVD's as insurance in case it never makes it to BR. I probably would have done it sooner except for the questionable reviews about the video quality of such a dark series. Especially, the last season. The R1 releases are just too expensive for me, but the UK sets I could handle. Decisions...decisions.

 

[Kevin EK]

Jack, I agree with you that DS9 regularly tried to push beyond the norms of what we could expect from regular characters on a Star Trek series with Dukat and Garak. And yes, "In the Pale Moonlight" was an attempt to push Sisko to a place you couldn't imagine Picard going.

On the other hand, the Cardassians and the Romulans were usually up to this kind of stuff in TNG whenever we saw them. The key difference was that our heroes would never act like this. Except in certain cases - Riker lying about the Pegasus, Worf doing several interesting things over the course of the series, Data trying to kill Fajo and then lying about it to Riker, Wesley participating in a coverup, etc. Could Picard have taken the step Sisko did in that episode? Probably not - but he was more than capable of taking strong and even duplicitous action when necessary - as seen in "Skin of Evil", "Ensigns of Command", "The Survivors", "Unification", etc.

I agree with you that Twin Peaks continues to attract viewers who didn't get to see it when it was first on the air. And like many David Lynch works, it has a kind of timelessness to it, as though it is happening in another dimension like the Twilight Zone. I think you're right that people who didn't follow the show as it was on would probably enjoy all of it. I also think that people who were big fans of the first year are still a bit disappointed in how things fell apart in the second year. On the other hand, they may look at that year with a little less vehemence now. I'm not certain that LOST will benefit from that kindness in time. As I revisit LOST, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that these guys had no idea where they were going. But I have some of the same reactions to The X-Files, where the show started off a little odd, and then really got cooking in its 2nd-4th seasons. After that, the whole mythology of the show got so complicated and whacked out that the final episode became one of the single strangest episodes of TV I've ever seen. I think with both LOST and X-Files, I deal with them better by just watching the earlier, better episodes where the whole thing hadn't quite fallen apart yet.

 

[TravisR]

As I revisit LOST, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that these guys had no idea where they were going.

Not to go too far off topic but if you're rewatching Lost, I'm surprised to see you say that. That's the show's reputation but that rep owes to people repeating the "The finale didn't answer anything!" nonsense that they've read rather than what the show actually did. I think Lost continually demonstrated that when they set something up, they knew exactly or had a good idea (leaving themselves the freedom if a better idea came up or a real world factor blocked them) of what it would be and how it would work with the rest of the series mythology. The X-Files, on the other hand, would just lay a new piece on top of their existing mythology and while it basically fit, it was also just something new rather than an interlocking piece like Lost.

That being said, I love both shows.

 

[Kevin EK]

With X-Files, I found that they kept adding to the mythology to the point that you'd have to think there was a conspiracy involving the entire world except for Scully and Mulder. (Or the Season 9 team, where Mulder was gone and Scully was out of the field) It was kind of like a rubber band ball. When it started, it was a cool little ball of mystery. After five years, they'd added so many bands onto the thing that it was getting a bit clunky.

With LOST, my issue wasn't that the final episode didn't answer everything. It was that they seemed to change up what they were doing, and what things meant from year to year, while telling the viewers that they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do. Lindelof has since admitted (in his interview with Jon Favreau on the Cowboys and Aliens Blu-ray) that they had a very general plan but nothing more than that, and it changed as they went along. Maybe I'm taking it too far in saying they had no idea where they were going. But you could get serious whiplash trying to work your way through some of their change-ups. I think the main thing they knew was that the series would begin with an eye opening and end with an eye closing. The rest was stuff they figured out along the way. My biggest problem was with them establishing giant mysteries they couldn't really answer, and then saying that the mysteries weren't the point of the show. For that show, the Smoke Monster was one of the giant "Huh" moments once they established what he was. The whole bit about Jacob's cabin doesn't make sense, and it's pivotal to the plot of the end of the third and fourth seasons. The whole notion of "moving the island" and then having to leave was interesting but never paid off. The whole idea that Dharma was still somehow active and dropping food and even knowing where the island was felt like they never worked out what any of that meant.

In the end, it's just frustrating in dealing with Lindelof's shows where he'll set up a tantalizing mystery, and then refuse to really solve it, while telling the viewer that this isn't what the show is about. And at the same time, providing some answers that really don't settle the questions. Prometheus is probably his most notorious example of that whole idea. (e.g. a mystery that doesn't really get answered, while some of the answers that do pop up are real head-scratchers)

You're right that this isn't relevant to DS9. I'll give DS9 that they were mostly consistent on where their mythology was going. My issue with them was that they kept changing course. For the first season, it was mostly TNG-styled episodes that sometimes worked better and sometimes worked not so well. The second season was designed to build up both the politics of Bajor and this new unseen enemy called the Dominion. I did enjoy what I think was Michael Piller's initial description of the Dominion - that it was an onion that had an infinite number of layers. Every time you'd peel a layer back, you would find another layer beneath that one. Except that DS9 immediately ended that entire notion by settling with the Founders at the top of the third season. This led to a year of intrigue about the changelings and what they were up to, with the punchline being "We're everywhere!" I could go with that as a notion for the show, but they switched up again to have a season about a War with the Klingons. Except that at the top of Season 5, they suddenly end that and go back to the Dominion. I think I raised the issue of whiplash before...

That doesn't take away from the fact that there were many good and even great episodes of DS9 along the way. They had a strong sense of their characters, and a real ability to tell a variety of TNG stories in a different setting. Some of their episodes rank with the best episodes of Trek ever done. Some of them were head scratchers all their own. I'll give DS9 that I was very pleased with the final run of episodes - they had a strong throughline and a clear notion of where it all was going. And even after they wound up with a new Dax in the final year, they were still capable of depth charges with that character. There's a wonderful moment between her and Bashir in "Afterimage" that may be my favorite bit of the final season - it's something that Babylon 5 was never capable of and DS9 could accomplish with disarming ease.

 

[smithbrad]

If someone was to decide and go for the current DVDs over waiting for a BD release that may never come. Is there any reason to pay twice as much for the R1 release over the UK R2 release? Any differences in quality?

Just as a note, I've not been bothered by PAL speedup in the past, and I have the ability to display PAL natively. I also watch on a front projection system. Thanks.

 

[Jason_V]

And I'm sure you know, Kevin, the reason behind the abrupt change in S4 to showcase the Klingons: ratings. That's why Worf was brought on board. That's why there was the season long detour. In the long run, I think it worked since it gave us more exploration of the Klingons, more Gowron, Jadzia and Worf and of course Martok. S5 got the show back to where the writers were planning. The only real by product was more Klingons. Bajoran politics and religion never brought in viewers. The Dominion did.Sent from my iPhone using HTF

 

[Kevin EK]

I absolutely agree Jason. Bringing Worf onto the series was intended to help bolster the ratings, as they were already falling by the end of Season 3. And I think it did initially help, but in the end the overall trajectory was unchanged. My issue was that it wasn't the only time that they had done these course changes. The start of Season 3 and the addition of the Defiant were little game changers that seemed to show the writers trying to reinvent the series right there. And the top of Season 4 showed another try, this time adding in the Klingons. And so on.

Again, there were great episodes that came in the midst of this stuff. The battle sequence in "Way of the Warrior" was a classic. And I think it was a big plus to the show to add Worf into the mix.

 

[Jason_V]

I totally get what you're saying about the game changers. But almost every show out there has done them at some point to figure out what they want to be.TNG certainly did change tone and types of stories. VOY changed almost as much through its run from a show about getting home to all Borg, all the time to Janeway/Doctor/7. I don't see the changes as being bad...it all feeds into the larger mythology and is true to life. Different things pop up all the time we have to deal with and it's rare the same problem or people are around in year one than in year seven.Sent from my iPhone using HTF

 

[Kevin EK]

I agree - and we can look to LOST for the most notorious recent example of "a game changer in every cliffhanger"...

I agree that Voyager changed up a bit along the way, but I never felt it was as drastic as DS9's course corrections. With Voyager, each movement felt like it stemmed from what had come before it and I don't remember too much in the way of "Wait a second, what happened?"

TNG felt pretty consistent to me - particularly once the 3rd season started. I agree that if you look at a Season 1 episode and a Season 5 episode, you might wonder if you were watching the same show at times.

With DS9, the course corrections came a bit more abruptly than I'm used to. Only LOST has pushed it that far for me. Maybe the new Dallas, where they seem to change the scorecard of who's a good guy or a bad guy at random...