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It's still amazing that DS9 was so on-point on so many "post 9/11" political issues when it came out well before.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:30
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It's not like any of the post 9/11 stuff had never happened before. At least this time we didn't round people up into camps.
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Aug 17, 2016 17:30
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Cojawfee posted:At least this time we didn't round people up into camps. There's still time to fix that!
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Aug 17, 2016 17:33
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Cojawfee posted:It's not like any of the post 9/11 stuff had never happened before. At least this time we didn't round people up into camps. Except for that one at Gitmo
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Aug 17, 2016 17:36
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Hot Take: The Deep Space Niners vs the T'Kumbra Logicians is Ben Sisko's Kobayashi Maru
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Aug 17, 2016 17:36
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skasion posted:Except for that one at Gitmo That's technically a prison and isn't filled with US citizens.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:03
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skasion posted:Trek shows have always been informed by world-political vibes from the point of view of Joe Q. WhiteBread-American. TOS has this tense Cold War in space with other major powers who are the ideological opposite of our heroes. In TNG our heroes have triumphed over the Soviets and for their next trick, take on the forces of unbridled capitalism and technoindustrial complex. In DS9 the Cold War victory seems increasingly irrelevant as the federation is forced to choose between selling its ideals short to combat a new form of hostile ideology, and succumbing to it. Voyager isn't about anything because it's a poo poo show, and Enterprise is about the same thing as DS9 but filtered through 9/11 beer goggles. More specifically, we don't need the show's protagonists to come from the unaccountable police state. This keeps getting muddied again and again. It's my position that Star Trek should, in general, not be about the Federation. I think this is a big part of why people keep getting caught up in "let's make the Federation just another terrible future space-dystopia", because they have a lot of good ideas about stories to be told (the erosion of civil rights in a national security hysteria, the erosion of civic institutions in the face of unchecked greed, criticisms of political realism) and rightly conclude "well poo poo if all these get told in the Federation then it really must be a shithole!" Use the Starship Enterprise (or Discovery, or whatever) to visit a variety of societies that can be
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Aug 17, 2016 18:24
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The 1960s were a time of race riots, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the troubles in Ireland, the Vietnam war, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK... it wasn't the happiest of times. Trek can't get contemporary without completely losing faith in humanity? We probably need Star Trek now more than ever.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:25
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2nd Hot Take The Do-Re-Mi improv from the genetically enhanced idiots in Chrysalis is way more aggravating than anything Vic Fontaine has done.
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Aug 17, 2016 18:26
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:More specifically, we don't need the show's protagonists to come from the unaccountable police state. I mean poo poo dude, that's what Star Trek has been since day one. The Federation and the crew of the Enterprise didn't reflect the zeitgeist of the time, they instead encountered aliens that could be used as metaphors for current-day politics. I know it's a dumb episode, but take for instance the one where they find people who are half-black and half-white on one side and the other group that's the opposite. It took contemporary issues and made them more palatable to the audience by putting them in the context of fictional alien races. You can make Star Trek at any time, because the Federation is not, and rarely is a look at the current political reality. Instead, what Star Trek does is it lets the audience examine current issues from an outsider's perspective by changing the context. The Federation and the Starship Enterprise represent the ideal earth. The aliens they encounter represent the people and issues of current-day earth. Star Trek really isn't about outer space, when done right, it's about the human condition. To paraphrase Captain Kirk: "No, I'm not from outer space. I'm from Iowa. I only work in space."
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Aug 17, 2016 18:54
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armoredgorilla posted:2nd Hot Take Also Bashir's appalling medical ethics
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Aug 17, 2016 20:06
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I am not a writerman who can see instantly how to do it, the way I can do with nerd trivia, but I can see a Trek that confronted issues with consonance to our current problems and had things come out "better if not all fixed," which is a lot of what happened in TOS, if often through the intervention of super-aliens. I guess that would be one big thing, people wouldn't buy super-aliens so readily any more. Of course the real twist would be parasitic aliens -- that fed on cynicism and despair, which they have taken pains to cultivate without too greatly harming the food fields.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:24
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Tsaedje posted:Also Bashir's appalling medical ethics Not as bad as the medical ethics on Enterprise.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:46
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Why does Bashir need medical ethics? He's a mutant.
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Aug 17, 2016 20:54
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Tunicate posted:Not as bad as the medical ethics on Enterprise. Small Strange Bird fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 21:03
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cargohills posted:I find the bolded part difficult to believe. The first. Enterprise has some great moments and is unfairly derided by fans. It's a Good Show as far as Trek is concerned. Edit: It definitely has some duds, though. Every series has its Way to Eden or that Crystal Tree episode. Zurui fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Aug 17, 2016 |
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Aug 17, 2016 22:33
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I would love to see a return of the Big Idea Science Fiction you only really saw in TNG, especially with beings far removed from our definition of "life." Before they were dumbed-down, the Borg were an exercise in not just collective intelligence, but collective identity. You had a four-dimensional species that built nests in black holes. Nagilum was a sentient sector of space that needed to have the concept of "death" explained. The Trill. The beings trapped in the other side of the Tyken's Rift whose communications could only be interpreted through dream imagery. We still need all the stories that are about holding the mirror to our own world, of course, but I miss their opposites, where they see just how different life could be.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:36
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Zurui posted:The first. Enterprise has some great moments and is unfairly derided by fans. It's a Good Show as far as Trek is concerned. To be fair, I like Enterprise, but Voyager and season 3 of TOS brings the standard down pretty low. If you only count it's best moments, it ranks fairly mediocre compared to TNG and DS9, although part of that is a result of having so fewer seasons.
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Aug 17, 2016 22:56
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Enterprise is Stouffer's Lasagna. It's perfectly fine on its own and you usually won't regret eating it, but it's far from the best lasagna you can eat.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:24
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Voyager is vegetarian lasagna. It attempts to be like regular lasagna but falls flat.
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Aug 17, 2016 23:31
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Use the Starship Enterprise (or Discovery, or whatever) to visit a variety of societies that can be Like other people mentioned, Trek series have done the whole Planet of the Hats thing to the point were sick of it. And besides, it's not like TOS was immune to lovely Federation people- just think of all the garbage ambassadors and commodores and scientists who tried to frame, swindle or get the Enterprise crew killed.
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Aug 18, 2016 00:40
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Guys, apparently there's going to be a staged table read of The Voyage Home with surprise actors from Trek and elsewhere at the NY con coming up. Jax, you should be sure to hit that!
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Aug 18, 2016 01:19
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After The War posted:I would love to see a return of the Big Idea Science Fiction you only really saw in TNG, especially with beings far removed from our definition of "life." Before they were dumbed-down, the Borg were an exercise in not just collective intelligence, but collective identity. You had a four-dimensional species that built nests in black holes. Nagilum was a sentient sector of space that needed to have the concept of "death" explained. The Trill. The beings trapped in the other side of the Tyken's Rift whose communications could only be interpreted through dream imagery. That was also a very TOS idea, that Weird Space Stuff. I know all the cool kids like to poo poo on Roddenberry, but that sort of stuff was endemic to the years he directly supervised Star Trek (though how much of that he had a hand in is debatable I suppose). The Bermanga Years were fairly bog standard scifi.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:26
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After The War posted:I would love to see a return of the Big Idea Science Fiction you only really saw in TNG, especially with beings far removed from our definition of "life." Before they were dumbed-down, the Borg were an exercise in not just collective intelligence, but collective identity. You had a four-dimensional species that built nests in black holes. Nagilum was a sentient sector of space that needed to have the concept of "death" explained. The Trill. The beings trapped in the other side of the Tyken's Rift whose communications could only be interpreted through dream imagery. They did that post-TNG as well. The Dominion were mostly used as a sort of dark mirror to the Federation, but the Founders themselves were super alien in that not only did they not really grasp individualism as we do, they weren't even really distinct individuals at all in their natural state. Voyager also tried to have any number of weird space intelligences, but they mostly fell flat because Voyager is bad and just used them as an excuse to have yet another weird stuff is happening episode with lots of dutch angles and dream sequences.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:35
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Ogmius815 posted:Enterprise seasons 3 and 4 are better than any season of Voyager and as good as much of TNG though. Mayweather should have been more brash, trying dangerous piloting maneuvers that he had done on freighters. Reed should have been an overt creep instead of a subtle creep and should have constantly talked about the Royal Navy. Hoshi should have constantly spoken different languages to the plurality of nationalities on board. They should have had something that makes me think they didn't have casting inboxes labeled "Black", "Brit", and "Asian Woman".
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Aug 18, 2016 01:43
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armoredgorilla posted:2nd Hot Take Correct. That's such a weird, lovely episode. What was Bashir thinking?
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Aug 18, 2016 01:56
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Astroman posted:That was also a very TOS idea, that Weird Space Stuff. Honestly, one thing you can give Voyager is that it tended to try weird space poo poo. It was bad at it, but it usually had the most out-there what the gently caress stuff.
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Aug 18, 2016 02:02
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MikeJF posted:Honestly, one thing you can give Voyager is that it tended to try weird space poo poo. It was bad at it, but it usually had the most out-there what the gently caress stuff. Say what you will about hit hit-to-miss ratio, but Braga was the king of High Concept episodes.
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Aug 18, 2016 03:49
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Ogmius815 posted:Correct. That's such a weird, lovely episode. What was Bashir thinking? Getting way too close to his patients is a pretty consistent part of Bashir's character, even if both "I can cure you, now love me!" episodes are pretty mediocre. He also lost perspective in the The Quickening, when he was trying to help Garack, and probably a bunch of other times I'm forgetting. One really interesting thing about his character is how he tends to get fascinated with solving puzzles and that extends to his patients. If that patient happens to be a beautiful woman, then that fascination he has with solving her problem becomes a fascination with her in general and he decides he must be in love with her and falls off the deep end. I like it because I feel like it's a fairly believable trait for his character (young, arrogant, brilliant, emotionally immature) to have and the selfish aspect of it sets him apart from the other Trek doctors who mostly lose perspective or violate medical ethics simply because they Care Too Much. Personally, I think Bashir might be my favorite Chief Medical Officer because he's such an interesting, flawed individual -- simultaneously quite likeable and deeply frustrating. I'm still a bit annoyed that they felt the need to retcon him into a mutant because I feel like his growth over the first few seasons had been interesting enough already without turning him into yet another smarty-pants character. It's kind of frustrating that they took one of the most relatably human characters in all of Trek and said "whoops, turns out he was superhuman all along!" It also makes all those early season episodes where he clearly isn't superhuman (or else he's willing to risk everyone's lives to keep his secret) look really weird in retrospect. It's a lot like rewatching early Buffy the Vampire Slayer and seeing Willow be all hung up on various boys because the writers hadn't decided she'd been a lesbian all along yet. I feel like that sort of hasty character retcon was far more common before DVDs and streaming services gave people ready access to all the back episodes and I'm really glad it seems to be going away. Anyway, favorite doctor chat. I love McCoy a lot, even if he's fairly defined by his job and his temper, and he probably has the most important role in the cast of any Trek doctor except maybe the EMH. It's sad his backstory never got much development as I'd love to know what that disco medallion was all about. Crusher really is Doctor Mom and most of her good spotlight episodes are high concept rather than character-based, but I do like the handcuff episode with her and Picard. I like Pulaski a lot, especially because she's so awful to Data. Data's whole Pinocchio complex is annoying as hell and it seems like in real life he'd be fairly insufferable, especially since he was the second officer with massive command responsibilities but he was still being all "beep-boop how does social interaction work." Just having a character there to remind us that he is a machine and much of what he does is just programming felt important, even if she seemed pretty nasty picking on the poor autistic robot, it's still no worse than the sort of racist poo poo McCoy was constantly hurling at Spock and it was good for the characters. Plus Diana Muldaur owns. As for The Doctor, I realized after a while that he's basically written like a bratty precocious teenager/college kid who thinks he knows everything and acts like he's better than everyone but really just wants to be loved. Picardo does a great job, but the character was better in small doses and the more they expanded his role the more I found him insufferable. I don't remember much about Phlox except that he had funny mannerisms and committed genocide.
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Aug 18, 2016 05:09
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Just got super excited and then bummed out in the same minute. We're going to Wizard World Chicago on Friday and I saw that Kate Mulgrew was a guest, for Saturday and Sunday only. I'm sad now.
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Aug 18, 2016 05:42
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I've never been to a con but this one time I came real, real close to one that had the narrator from Dragon Ball Z. I'll never forgive myself for not making that happen.
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Aug 18, 2016 05:51
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The Dark One posted:Like other people mentioned, Trek series have done the whole Planet of the Hats thing to the point were sick of it. And besides, it's not like TOS was immune to lovely Federation people- just think of all the garbage ambassadors and commodores and scientists who tried to frame, swindle or get the Enterprise crew killed. Look, I just think that if you want to make a Star Trek series about the Federation, you might be better served with a different setting and brand name entirely.
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Aug 18, 2016 06:32
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Also, I don't give a poo poo what mistakes DS9 made, starfighters do not belong in Star Trek, except very occasionally as the bad defense acquisition decisions of lesser space-nations that are then casually brushed aside by the big guns of big ships.
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Aug 18, 2016 06:33
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I was always under the impression that "Federation fighters" were at least runabout sized, and were more like a Defiant shrunken to the point where there's no room for anything other than munitions and enough air to get you through a battle assuming that the antimatter bomb you're riding on doesn't get bisected by a Galor.
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Aug 18, 2016 07:02
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The problem with fighters is that in theory with the large firing arcs of phasers and supercomputers to target them shooting down should be incredibly easy. Unless you can pack shields strong enough to take on a Capital ship's weapons onto a small fighter then who knows.
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Aug 18, 2016 07:22
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Kazinsal posted:I was always under the impression that "Federation fighters" were at least runabout sized, and were more like a Defiant shrunken to the point where there's no room for anything other than munitions and enough air to get you through a battle assuming that the antimatter bomb you're riding on doesn't get bisected by a Galor. That's basically what a jet fighter is right now. It's easy to forget that jet fighters are actually kind of big - about 60 feet long and 40 feet wide if you include the wings. No idea what the runabouts in DS9 were officially sized at but I imagine it's somewhat similar. Of course the DS9 space battles shouldn't have happened in general ("Huh, a giant line of ships in front of us. Okay, well whatever, angle 1 degree upward and don't drop out of warp.") so really someone just wanted action shots of small ships getting blown up by big ships again. Kibayasu fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 07:27
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Peregrine fighters were like twice the size of a Runabout but even that was too small for my tastes in Trek. I wouldn't mind smart torpedos that border on being drones showing up, though.
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Aug 18, 2016 07:27
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Kibayasu posted:That's basically what a jet fighter is right now. It's easy to forget that jet fighters are actually kind of big - about 60 feet long and 40 feet wide if you include the wings. No idea what the runabouts in DS9 were officially sized at but I imagine it's somewhat similar. Counterpoint: Any defending fleet has less distance to travel to cut you off again. The surface of a sphere (distance required to fly around or intercept an enemy fleet) decreases as radius (distance to where the attacking fleet is trying to go) decreases. "The Luftwaffe are so dumb, why don't they just fly over/around the Spitfires to get to Britain?"
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Aug 18, 2016 07:38
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Star Trek just isn't about dog fights. It's 17th century esque naval battles in space, and, most of all, isn't an action series. Anything more than broadside cannon style fights is missing the point. On the other hand, if you want sci fi that mixes fast paced action with nuanced politics and philosophy, that's why we have Gundam.MikeJF posted:I wouldn't mind smart torpedos that border on being drones showing up, though. Read the Culture books. WickedHate fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Aug 18, 2016 |
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Aug 18, 2016 07:38
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WickedHate posted:Read the Culture books. They don't even bother with that poo poo in battles.
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Aug 18, 2016 07:45
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