Who is the worst Captain?

[ScreamingDoom]

With the EU defunct it's not really relevant

Why would the EU being kaput make this question irrelevant? The movies (including the prequels) and the Clone Wars/Rebels series are all still canon, so the fact that the Galactic Republic didn't have a standing army is also still canon.

Is JJ Abrams the worst captain of a storytelling universe?

Not Zach Snyder?

[FaxModem1]

To be fair to the Jedi, they do predate the Republic by millennia(in the old EU anyway, we'll see what Episode 8 changes about Jedi history), and we're considered a force for good since they largely kept the peace and worked to right wrongs, etc. Having them around kept the Republic from falling when the Mandalorians invaded, for example. Imagine if the Knights Templar survived to this day and were part of the EU.

The Republic is actually a bit like the EU, in that it's an economic and military alliance formed from several states banding together, and largely ineffectual due to competing interests, with no strong executive branch of government, or strong authority over it's members. KOTOR largely argues that the Jedi are pretty much the only thing keeping the Republic from falling apart over the thousands of years that it existed.

The big issue for the fall of the Republic era(the prequels), is that the Jedi had become insular and were largely keeping out of galactic affairs, for fear of attachment corrupting them. This was due to the Jedi having students fall to the dark side because they were getting involved all the time, like Revan did. Too far a course correction, and the Galaxy crumbled around them from lack of care.

[TrueMetis]

With the EU defunct it's not really relevant

Why would the EU being kaput make this question irrelevant? The movies (including the prequels) and the Clone Wars/Rebels series are all still canon, so the fact that the Galactic Republic didn't have a standing army is also still canon.

I wasn't saying the question is irrelevant, I was saying the information I gave about the Judicial Force and Republic Security Force is. Both those things are now regulated to Legends rather than being Canon.

[PerrySimm]

Not Zach Snyder?

Well, I'm not much of a comics guy - is Snyder that big of a crowbar-to-canon?

[Durandal_1707]

The Ori were a good concept IMO, I just think they fell victim to a combo of series fatigue in general, and too many changes to the series in too short a time. The team got new leads, and the classic leads either went away or changing into other roles that didn't have equivalent appeal. The Egyptian theme the series had been rooted in (which had already been more and more diluted by "gods" from other pantheons) got abruptly swapped out whole hog for a monotheistic Arthurian theme. And all that was happening at a point where the series had been on the air for so long it was starting to feel tired regardless. Whether the Ori were good or not, the series was petering out at that point, so any changes/ideas that popped around that time were ripe for blame confusion.

Though for the record, connecting the Ori to Arthurian stuff in an attempt to keep the mythology connection theme going was complete rubbish, IMO. Felt cheap and cargo-cult-ish, and only served to cheese-ify what were good and scary villains.

I only watched the first couple episodes of Universe, so I don't know how it went overall, but I remember at the time it felt in a lot of ways like a transparent and shallow attempt to copycat BSG, and that turned me off (both on principle, and because the stuff it was copying was the stuff I didn't like about BSG anyway). I never watched it enough to have strong feelings about it, it just lost/killed my interest very quickly, and I never saw/heard any reason to go back.

I liked the Ori, if only because I'd been waiting forever for SG-1 to finally work up the guts to send up an actual major religion instead of long-extinct ones. (That one where Teal'c claims Yahweh was far too merciful to be a Goa'uld was particularly face-palming.) For eight seasons, they chickened out at the prospect of causing pearl-clutching among religious viewers, but suddenly we have crusades! Holy books and parables! Priests and missionaries! Inquisitions! Messiah figures! Medieval trappings! Arthurian mythos! Gregorian chant! There's even a virgin birth in there! I almost couldn't believe it.

[Nessus]

Yup. They spent years addressing the idea of destructive faith in the "safe" context of dead polytheistic religions. Didn't take long for it to be obvious the writers very much wanted to deal with certain ideas, but were prevented from doing anything remotely direct, and so had to sidle adjacent and rely on the audience to make the leap.

The Ori were scary precisely because they hit so close to home with modern forms of nuttery. The kid gloves were off, and the writers could finally stab straight. And with the villains themselves, they did a very good job of standing right on the line between allegory and literal representation.

And then they kinda borked it by having the heroes questing for ancient "sufficiently advanced" talismans and appealing to "good" alien not-gods. It started out as faith vs rationality (as it had been throughout the Goa'uld years), and crumbled into basically evil religion vs good religion.

Not Zach Snyder?

Well, I'm not much of a comics guy - is Snyder that big of a crowbar-to-canon?

From what I've seen, he seems to have three main issues:

1) He doesn't seem to have much creative vision of his own. On the one hand, this means his direct adaptations tend to be unusually faithful. But on the other hand, it means he's not very good at translating. He has a hard time spotting when the language of one media doesn't match the language of the other, so his pacing and composition is often wonky because he's copying the source in too frame-by-frame a fashion.

2) When he does break away from the source, he reveals a strong tendency towards 90's style grimdorkness and and a juvenile concept of what constitutes "mature" material.

3) He's like JJ Abrams in that he's kind of a train wreck when it comes to storytelling ability (sort of connected to 1 above). It doesn't show up as much when he's doing direct adaptations (300 or Watchmen), but the more liberty he has, the more chaotic things get (Batman V Superman). Unlike JJ though, he doesn't seem to have Dunning-Kruger pretensions of being a smart storyteller, instead hewing more more the Michael Bay excuse of cool flashy imagery being more important than writing. When taken in concert with 1 and 2 this unfortunately means his idea of cool and flash imagery tends toward the shallow and heavy handed.

[CareerKnight]

Part of the problem with Zach Snyder is its hard to figure out what to blame him for due to the insane amounts of executive meddling in his DC movies. There was a opportunity for a good director/writer to make something great from the ashes of Man of Steel, Snyder probably wasn't capable of doing it but we'll never know cause the studio kept adding more and more to the movie. Wonder/JL tie ins and Superman's "death".

Which brings us to the fourth biggest problem with Zach Snyder. He's a shill, he's just in it for the paycheck (and what fan of a franchise doesn't want to hear that about the man in charge of adapting it eh Mr. Bay?). A lot of directors have walked off Marvel movies over less interference but he will happily go along with any of their demands as long as he gets payed. Probably why they stuck with him for so long. If they got someone more talented they might call them out on their dumb ideas.

[Durandal_1707]

Yup. They spent years addressing the idea of destructive faith in the "safe" context of dead polytheistic religions. Didn't take long for it to be obvious the writers very much wanted to deal with certain ideas, but were prevented from doing anything remotely direct, and so had to sidle adjacent and rely on the audience to make the leap.

The Ori were scary precisely because they hit so close to home with modern forms of nuttery. The kid gloves were off, and the writers could finally stab straight. And with the villains themselves, they did a very good job of standing right on the line between allegory and literal representation.

Exactly. The Goa'uld always came across as cheesy villains straight out of a 50s B-movie (and often got called out by O'Neill on it ), but the Ori did feel actually threatening when they showed up.

And then they kinda borked it by having the heroes questing for ancient "sufficiently advanced" talismans and appealing to "good" alien not-gods. It started out as faith vs rationality (as it had been throughout the Goa'uld years), and crumbled into basically evil religion vs good religion.

I think the problem there was that they made the Ori so ridiculously powerful that there wasn't really any believable way that we could beat them on their own, and then they only ended up having two seasons and a movie to work with. Plus, this is SG-1; everything gets beaten with a deus ex machina, and I was pretty used to that by this point. I mean, the magic superweapon in Antarctica that they find just in time to stop Anubis' attack, and especially the Replicators just deciding to show up at the same time the Goa'uld are attacking that one free Jaffa planet, which just so happens to have a super-ultra-turbo-galactic-ultimate weapon on it that they can use to wipe out every Replicator in the galaxy right after they're finished destroying the Goa'uld...... this is just how the Stargate writers operate.

With that said, it didn't really feel like "good religion vs. bad religion" to me, because the "good" alien not-gods were mostly just assholes, and the only help we got from them was from a couple of rebels that the rest of the "good" not-gods tried to stop. And, of course, their tech-tech that got left behind.

[ScreamingDoom]

Plus, this is SG-1; everything gets beaten with a deus ex machina, and I was pretty used to that by this point. I mean, the magic superweapon in Antarctica that they find just in time to stop Anubis' attack, and especially the Replicators just deciding to show up at the same time the Goa'uld are attacking that one free Jaffa planet, which just so happens to have a super-ultra-turbo-galactic-ultimate weapon on it that they can use to wipe out every Replicator in the galaxy right after they're finished destroying the Goa'uld...... this is just how the Stargate writers operate.

Y'know... considering that we know that there is that one Ancient who can travel through time and has a penchant for influencing events, it seems like the writers missed a real chance to make all those massive coincidences turn out to be that Ancient's working. He becomes aware of humanity through Dr. Weir in Atlantis, goes out to study them and, whenever they are about to be completely overwhelmed, gives them the means to keep going. It's still up to humanity to use the tools and clues he leaves behind, but the reason why Earth always ends up on top is that there is one time-travelling Ancient in their corner.

All he needs is a big scarf and to redesign his time pod to look like a police box.

[Durandal_1707]

^ Haha, so many things would have suddenly made sense if they'd done that.