The sigh from me is wondering why Andy Weir felt it necessary to use a platform like ‘criticaldrinker’ to go out of his way to trash recent Star Trek.
“They didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ‘em,” doesn’t really sell me on putting my dollars and eyeballs towards the success of his movie — no matter a great performance by Ryan Gosling or great production values.
Rather tells me why all Weir’s heros are lone-guy-saves-all-on-his-own tropes.
Quoting Weir in the interview:
Later, Marsden brought up the divisive Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, which Paramount+ recently confirmed will end after its already-shot second season.
“I think we can probably safely never talk about it again,” Marsden quipped.
“It’s gone baby!” Weir cheerfully agreed. “It’s all gone.”
Marsden said his advice to Paramount is to de-canonize everything Star Trek from Enterprise onward.
“Okay, you’re a little more severe than I am,” Weir said. “I’ll give you my opinion and I’m just a consumer. I like Strange New Worlds. I think it’s pretty good. I didn’t hate Enterprise. I thought it was kind of weird. Lower Decks I thought was entertaining and fun. All the others, they can go. And here’s another thing: I pitched a Star Trek show to Paramount and I was in Zoom with the showrunners with all the shows and spent a lot of time talking to [executive producer Alex Kurtzman]. I don’t like a lot of the new Trek. He, as a person, is a really nice guy. But at the same time, those shows are shit. He is a nice guy. But they didn’t accept my pitch so, you know, fuck ’em.”
We seem to share a reaction.
To be fair, I already had sense of Weir as an author was that he was limited in range, and would basically pitch the same kind of lone, MacGyvering hero, to anyone who would buy it — whether or not it was a fit for their show or strategic plan.
It’s the punching down to promote himself, while he’s riding a high, that’s earned my disrespect.
Weir’s reportedly doubled down in other interviews since, saying things along the lines that Star Trek has influenced all of modern science fiction except the more recent era of shows. I’m not going looking for that interview, but it seems that this isn’t a one-off comment on his part.
Ugh. I didn’t watch The Martian because of Matt Damon and his face, but I’m going to continue not watching it because of Weir.