Alelou wrote:honeybee wrote:And as to angst, people do seem to think that once a couple is in love, some angst must be there to keep it interesting. I think that can be true, especially if the show is about the relationships, but this show missed the boat with all the potential difficulties of an interspecies romance - which would have been uniquely Trek. And again, that gets me back to the topic at hand - this show needed an interspecies romance to symbolize the future - and a happy/ambiguous ending was in order. I don't think a sad ending fits with the narrative arc of the entire show.
I totally agree. That's why "Terra Prime" works just fine as a finale, and *the_abomination* utterly bombs and is hard to understand as anything other than some not-entirely-conscious, self-destructive hissy fit.
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Along this line, I would like to add that just about any competent teacher of writing fiction, as well as the writers themselves, will tell you that characters without problems simply aren't interesting. That said, sometimes I think some people just will categorically label something as "angst" if it isn't simply a shiny, happy fic full of not much more than a meandering of tedious every-day details. Everyday life is full of challenges big and small, and what makes people interesting is how they cope with them. If a writer isn't going to give his or her characters some kind of challenge to meet or obstacle to overcome, I'm not interested.
Now again, that's something that can be misconstrued. It doesn't have to be all melodramatic like tossing every horrible thing you can think of at a character. Even the basic plot of a simple sitcom revolves around the one or more of the characters having a problem that needs fixing. Take a show like
Married With Children: a believable "problem" in this milieu could be that Al wants to go to the nudie bar and Peg won't let him. Now, nobody would watch if Al just said "Okay, Peg" and didn't go. So we get thirty minutes of Al trying all kinds of crazy schemes to do an end-run around his wife, which could even end up "happy" (he gets to go to the bar and stick dollars into the waist of a stripper's g-string), or, as what usually happens on this show and for this character because he's supposed to be kind of a loser, he'll get busted and his wife will take all that money he was going to spend on the stripper and buy something she really wanted, something she probably told Al she wanted at the beginning of the show. Point being: "problem" doesn't necessarily have to be defined as something "angsty" and horrible; rather, it's simply the reason we're bothering to tune in and/or read in the first place, it's the reason the plot exists.
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