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Baronjutter posted:It's not like he had some trademark nazi mustache. I know Pol Pot was a genocidal maniac but if I ran into him on the street I would't know who he was. So all Asians look alike to you, huh? 
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Jan 15, 2017 09:11
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You know, despite all the love it gets on these forums I think the first ten minutes of Into Darkness is pretty loving bad. There's plenty of "turn your brain off" entertainment I enjoy, but even under the most casual scrutiny nothing about it makes sense and it paints the lead characters as a bunch of raging, self-absorbed, incompetent jackasses right from get-go.
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Jan 15, 2017 11:19
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King Hong Kong posted:Given the admittedly generous characterization of Star Fleet officers' education, it seems pretty unlikely that no one would have vaguely recognized him especially when they knew his name. The failure to do was purely for the sake of plot convenience. "Khan Singh" is like the "John Smith" of South Asia though ("Noonien," not so much, but I don't remember when they learned his full name) and he was from an explicitly chaotic era where a lot of records were lost. Plus there weren't any South Asians on the command staff, so maybe he wasn't an iconic figure for them the way Da Vinci, Lincoln, Apollo, Zephram Cochrane, or Colonel Green were. Also, this was (I think) their first time meeting someone who was supposed to be dead for centuries, so maybe they weren't used to thinking that way yet. Really, really, the biggest issue is how the hell a chemically-propelled ship from pre-Warp Earth could wind up in an "unexplored section" of space in the first place.
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Jan 15, 2017 11:38
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Duckbag posted:Really, really, the biggest issue is how the hell a chemically-propelled ship from pre-Warp Earth could wind up in an "unexplored section" of space in the first place. The same way V'Ger did! And Nomad. And Pioneer 10. And that poor bastard from The Royale. And that probe from Voyager that ended up poisoning some Delta quadrant world.
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Jan 15, 2017 12:14
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Subspace anomalies will gently caress you up something fierce.
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Jan 15, 2017 12:17
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:How bad do you guys think Into Darkness is? Because I realized it's been a few years and I still think it's the second-worst Trek movie, right behind Nemesis. It rewatched it on a plane trip in November. It'll sit square middling for me. Worse than First Contact (half of which wasn't enjoyable to me) but better than Insurrection* and Nemesis. *I haven't seen the Insurrection commentary yet, but from what I've heard, I'd probably rank Insurrection's commentary better than ID.
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Jan 15, 2017 15:20
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Duckbag posted:"Noonien" There's a fun little real-world story behind that name. The story goes that in the 60s, Gene was hoping to track down an old war buddy of his, a Chinese fellow by the name of Kim Noonien Wang. So he named a memorable character after him, in the hopes that someone who knew him would say "Hey Noonien, you're famous! Ever see that show Star Trek on TV?" And then Noonien would catch an episode, see the name Gene Roddenberry in the credits, and get in touch. It didn't work, but twenty years later he tried again, this time with a character named Noonien Soong. Again, no success, and the fate of Gene's old friend remains a mystery to this day.
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Jan 15, 2017 17:45
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I really didn't like how they decided to retread a bunch of the "Kirk and Spock learn how to trust each other and be friends" stuff. That's my big issue with the movie. I generally like it, for the most part, but the first half, or even more, just completely repeats Kirk and Spock hating each other from '09, which makes Kirk's death scene -- which I actually think is really well done -- reach for emotional beats that are completely unearned. Remove that aspect and replace it with them actually being genuine friends, and Into Darkness would be in the upper tier of the Trek movies for me. Powered Descent posted:There's a fun little real-world story behind that name. The story goes that in the 60s, Gene was hoping to track down an old war buddy of his, a Chinese fellow by the name of Kim Noonien Wang. So he named a memorable character after him, in the hopes that someone who knew him would say "Hey Noonien, you're famous! Ever see that show Star Trek on TV?" And then Noonien would catch an episode, see the name Gene Roddenberry in the credits, and get in touch. It didn't work, but twenty years later he tried again, this time with a character named Noonien Soong. Again, no success, and the fate of Gene's old friend remains a mystery to this day. I've always considered this story to be apocryphal at best, given Roddenberry's predilection for ... fabrication. Kim is a Korean name, while Noonien is Chinese. Beyond that, Gene Coon wrote Space Seed and he was not one to let Roddenberry rewrite him. Timby fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 23:47
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twistedmentat posted:I really love this idea. It might be interesting if there was a Star Trek series where you have one main protagonist who starts the show as an ensign and ends it as a captain. I imagine Roddenberry would've liked to have done something like that with Wesley in TNG (I believe the TNG series bible, which makes for interesting reading, is fairly explicit about Picard, Riker and Wesley being conceived as representatives of three generations of Starfleet leaders) though obviously it didn't pan out. Come to think of it, the closest we get to that is probably Nog in DS9 if you count "The Visitor". 
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Jan 15, 2017 23:50
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I still think Into Darkness is tied with Nemesis as the worst of the Star Trek movies. As much as I dislike V, I can still pick out a couple of scenes that I actually kind of like. Nemesis and Into Darkness are just completely irredeemable as far as I'm concerned. I guess I might dislike Nemesis a bit more just because it's such a terrible way for the TNG movies to end.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:48
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I dunno. Simon Pegg at least has a couple of good scenes. That's more than Nemesis has going for it, at least.
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Jan 16, 2017 01:21
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Scott Bakula is cool and good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNvHz-n5F5Q
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Jan 16, 2017 02:37
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I remember being legitimately excited about Bakula being cast as the captain prior to ENT's premiere because he really is a talented guy, it's a real shame Archer turned out the way he did Timby posted:reach for emotional beats that are completely unearned This sums up most of the best elements of the JJTrek movies. Like at the beginning of the last one, gee it would have been nice if we got to see some of that Star Trekking all those characters are apparently so very, very tired of
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Jan 16, 2017 03:00
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I've always wondered why Intro Darkness is read as a Truther movie, outside of its screen writer being a Truther himself.
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Jan 16, 2017 03:27
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I wonder how Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman ended up being entrusted with the Kevin Feige role (Orci more than Kurtzman, as far as I can tell) for the forthcoming Universal Monsters franchise reboot. It's curious how these guys (and guys like Marc Webb et al.) all started off working on Hercules and Xena back in the 1990s then got big because they were friends with J.J. Abrams.
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Jan 16, 2017 03:35
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Baronjutter posted:Scott Bakula is cool and good. Bakula looks older than Stewart. Holy hell.
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Jan 16, 2017 03:37
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twistedmentat posted:I've always wondered why Intro Darkness is read as a Truther movie, outside of its screen writer being a Truther himself. Well, a massive false flag operation (the planned destruction of the Enterprise by the Klingons as a pretext for war) is at the centre of the plot, for one.
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Jan 16, 2017 03:41
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MikeJF posted:Well, a massive false flag operation (the planned destruction of the Enterprise by the Klingons as a pretext for war) is at the centre of the plot, for one.
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Jan 16, 2017 04:23
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Quick question for anyone who's read the second volume of The Fifty-Year Mission: is there any interview with Jennifer Lien about her time on Voyager or discussion of why she was fired? I'd heard rumors she had problems even while she was on the show, but before that arrest I'd just dismissed those as bad fan gossip.
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Jan 16, 2017 04:59
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gently caress Truthers. But my issue with the (for lack of a better word) plot of Into Darkness had little to do with the truther reading of it. It just felt lazy. Like, if you didn't know who the screenwriters were, you can see the government conspiracy as an attempted shortcut to make the script feel "smart". I read it as a really dumb take on the invasion of Iraq, ten years after it happened. And then it got muddied more with all the other stuff like Cumberbatch being thrown in. It just didn't make sense, and wasn't entertaining. And it wasn't the only bad thing about the movie. The movie was parade of crap; and I feel like I'm doing a disservice to it if I single out one bad thing. I still remember apologists defending every single bad thing about the movie, as if a movie's awfulness needed to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Like if every flaw could be rationalized; the movie couldn't have been bad. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 05:02
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There has been a lot of hate directed toward Into Darkness over the last few pages, and most of it is very deserved. However, here's why it's better than the other bad Trek films (5, Insurrection, Nemesis, Generations at the very least): it gets really preachy about how horribly evil drones are. One of the best parts of TOS is that it follows in the tradition of the Twilight Zone by telling stories that have a strong "you're loving up, society" message. DS9 did it pretty much accidentally by being very relevant in this way after 9/11. But TNG, Voyager, and Enterprise were so toothless and I loved that Into Darkness had something to say, even if it's an awful mess and Quinto is a cringey Spock.
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Jan 16, 2017 05:16
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Marshal Radisic posted:Quick question for anyone who's read the second volume of The Fifty-Year Mission: is there any interview with Jennifer Lien about her time on Voyager or discussion of why she was fired? I'd heard rumors she had problems even while she was on the show, but before that arrest I'd just dismissed those as bad fan gossip. I don't remember anything about Lien and a quick glance-through doesn't even show anyone mentioning her at all. Although, I did re-stumble across that Jeri Taylor said the Kazon were Michael Piller's big push. Why cookie Rocket posted:There has been a lot of hate directed toward Into Darkness over the last few pages, and most of it is very deserved. However, here's why it's better than the other bad Trek films (5, Insurrection, Nemesis, Generations at the very least): it gets really preachy about how horribly evil drones are. What's the anti-drone message from - is that the whole "advanced torpedoes" deal? Because that's not even drones (as "remote-controlled airplanes loitering around dropping death at will", anyway), that's just old-fashioned lobbing cruise missiles at tents/"terrorist training camps"/pharmaceutical factories in the desert. I mean, even if President Obama had signed an executive order "banning all drone warfare forever" we'd almost certainly feel free to chuck cruise missiles at will. (yes, I know that cruise missiles are basically just drones that are expendable/suicide bombers, you know that, but it's the reusable RC airplanes that everyone associates with ~drone warfare~)
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Jan 16, 2017 06:18
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I don't remember anything about Lien and a quick glance-through doesn't even show anyone mentioning her at all. You raise some good points and I'll admit I'm not going to go back and watch that movie a second time to verify that my first impression was correct. But I'll take "9/11 was an inside job" as a message over "space adventures are fun" or "families are good" or "maybe gay people are good and maybe not?" because again, at least someone had SOMETHING to say.
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Jan 16, 2017 06:30
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Sash! posted:Everyone on Voyager should have just used the Scotty Transporter Buffer Trick while the ship autopilots itself in a beeline home. That trick has a 50% mortality rate when you've got goddamn Scotty jiggering it for you. Voyager's senior engineering staff got wiped out in the pilot down to the point that they took a terrorist with no Starfleet experience and a boatload of anger problems who smashes control panels when she gets frustrated and made her Chief Engineer so, uh, no thanks I'm not getting into that thing. WickedHate posted:Here's something I don't get: Why do humans never get offended by aliens? Why is there never a scene where the human captain storms out of a meeting because the representative on the other side of the table started furiously masturbating? It's always "oh, I didn't know the blaborxians found blinking offensive". Probably because Starfleet personnel have a bunch of training to deal with situations like this, also usually they're the ones who urgently need something from the aliens and not the other way around. Still I just saw two episodes where that happened. An S7 TNG episode (Liasons) with some weirdo aliens who don't understand human feelings visiting to learn about humanity. One requests Worf for his tour guide and spends the entire episode insulting and belittling him while Riker just smirks and tells Work to be diplomatic until Worf finally snaps and tries to disembowel the alien in the middle of a poker game. And the head alien dude tries to date-rape Picard and Picard is super pissed off and has to calm down and be like "yeah that's not cool man, I don't know how to explain this to you but you need to find another way to learn about love". Also a DS9 episode (Life Support) has a B-plot with Jake and Nog on a double date. Nog talks about the girls in the third-person, calls them "females", and won't address them directly except when ordering his date to cut up his food. The girls finally get pissed off and storm out, Jake fights with Nog etc. Later on when they talk it out Nog's all  "Hey I didn't even ask her to pre-chew my food for me because I knew that would gross you out, why are you being such a dick about this. I mean I even let her wear clothes why are humans so oversensitive when I tried as hard as I could to meet you halfway on this. I didn't get all pissy when you treated your date like an equal you weirdo."And arguably, the Sheliak, who are being unreasonable dicks the entire episode because they hate diplomacy and human language, and every time Picard loses his cool they just beam him off their ship because who wants to deal with some whiny human who can't even abide by the terms of a treaty. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 07:43
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Rewatching DS9 for the first time, and what the gently caress. O'Brien dies and is replaced with some alternate timeline copy and no one gives a gently caress. Alt-O'Brien is the only one who is sad or even concerned that another man died and he's just stepping into his life, and all his friends are just like "whatever we've got another one". The whole tone of that episode was weird as hell, not only does his bestie Bashir not care that he's dead, but earlier in the episode when O'Brien travels into the future and finds out he's going to die on the operating table Bashir seems nonplussed about the whole thing: "Oh hey you're here, no I wasn't waiting around your corpse or anything in case past-you showed up, just happened to walk back by lucky huh. Anyhoo, yeah you died because I hosed up, when you go back just let me know what I did wrong I guess."Jarring tone/moral change from just a few episodes before when Kira's asking Bashir to Ship-of-Theseus her boyfriend with more and more positronic brain parts as his brain dies and eventually Julian says  " If I end up replacing his whole brain with a machine, he may look like Bareil and sound like Bareil. But it won't be Bareil. The man will be dead, that special spark of life that's the man we know will be gone." "I'm good with that, I just need the bottom half to still be the man we know." "No, no more. He'll be dead and I'll be the one who killed him. I won't kill this man and create a copy to live out a sham of his unique irreplaceable life."Later "Special spark of what now? Look one O'Brien is the same as another, are you gonna play darts with me or not."Nobody even mentioned what they would tell his wife for god's sake. (Okay not that Keiko would be able to tell the difference no matter what came out of an anomaly and claimed to be her husband, but still. Did anyone even bother to mention it?) VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:29 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 08:03
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Starfleet don't care if you're you or a quantum duplicate as long as you show up for your duty shift.
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Jan 16, 2017 08:08
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Marshal Radisic posted:Quick question for anyone who's read the second volume of The Fifty-Year Mission: is there any interview with Jennifer Lien about her time on Voyager or discussion of why she was fired? I'd heard rumors she had problems even while she was on the show, but before that arrest I'd just dismissed those as bad fan gossip. She has a few bits, but the only thing I remember is that she thinks the higher-ups were upset that they had cast her when she was breastfeeding, and her boobs became normal when the time to start the show actually began.
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Jan 16, 2017 08:13
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Not-all-there Bareil going into that meeting with that glassy stare was legit unsettling, that was pretty good. And whoa boy are you in for a treat with O'Brien and existential torment!
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Jan 16, 2017 09:42
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That O'Brien episode actually bothers me a lot less than a ton of other random existential crises that crop up in Star Trek episodes. I mean, in this case it totally is O'Brien. It's O'Brien from a little bit in the future, but it's definitely still him. Like, what does it even mean for past O'Brien to be dead and future O'Brien to be alive?
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Jan 16, 2017 09:52
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That Bareil episode was great. It was just a really strange contrast later between Bashir talking about Bareil's soul that would be killed no matter how good the replica might be (as it turned out, not that great but good enough for Kira) vs "meh I can't tell the difference, stop whining about your dead double." Might as well just put up holoemitters and simulate your dead friends if that's all that matters.
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Jan 16, 2017 09:53
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Paradoxish posted:That O'Brien episode actually bothers me a lot less than a ton of other random existential crises that crop up in Star Trek episodes. I mean, in this case it totally is O'Brien. It's O'Brien from a little bit in the future, but it's definitely still him. Like, what does it even mean for past O'Brien to be dead and future O'Brien to be alive? They weren't the same though. They had different memories (future O'Brien didn't experience the final two time jumps and didn't know the station was about to blow up,) stuff that happened to past O'Brien like radiation poisoning and oh yeah dying didn't affect him, etc. It's more like he's from an alternate timeline than the same guy. It'd be like going to the Mirror Universe (or doing Worf's shuttlecraft trick to get an O'Brien from a closer universe where the only difference is his birthday cake was a different flavor last year) and getting a replacement. The guy you knew died. The situation seemed to me just like sending quantum-clone Harry Kim to replace sucked-into-space-Harry Kim. But the tone wasn't jarring in Voyager because the crew was openly indifferent/disrespectful towards Kim the whole time and all they cared about was having a warm body to wear ensign rank and do the poo poo jobs. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Jan 16, 2017 |
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Jan 16, 2017 10:04
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It's him from an alternate timeline, but one with an extremely small divergence (the few hours with the timejumps, as you pointed out). It's like in Farscape when John got twinned -- which one's the real John? Yes.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:48
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I think the idea with both O'Brien and Kim is that the timeline diverged into two either during or just before the episode, not that there was always an alternate timeline that was the same up until that point. There is no 'other O'Brien' until the timeline starts getting screwed up - there was only one, which briefly became two, one of which died, the other resumed being the only O'Brien. There isn't a 'Parallels' style alternate universe that's now missing 'their' O'Brien. It's more like Will and Thomas Riker - they were the same individual for the first twenty or so years of their lives.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:58
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VitalSigns posted:That trick has a 50% mortality rate when you've got goddamn Scotty jiggering it for you. Voyager's senior engineering staff got wiped out in the pilot down to the point that they took a terrorist with no Starfleet experience and a boatload of anger problems who smashes control panels when she gets frustrated and made her Chief Engineer so, uh, no thanks I'm not getting into that thing. Except that they used a variation of this trick to hide a bunch of telepaths while traveling through some anti-telepaths race's region of space.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:00
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EvilTaytoMan posted:Except that they used a variation of this trick to hide a bunch of telepaths while traveling through some anti-telepaths race's region of space. Yeah but that was only for a few hours at a time.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:02
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McSpanky posted:It's him from an alternate timeline, but one with an extremely small divergence (the few hours with the timejumps, as you pointed out). It's like in Farscape when John got twinned -- which one's the real John? Yes. Plus there's the weirdness of past O'Brien dying in a future that doesn't actually happen anymore. Unless you want to look at all time travel in Star Trek as just creating a whole bunch of parallel realities, in which case basically every major cast character in every series is dead anyway so who cares.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:03
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VitalSigns posted:They weren't the same though. They had different memories (future O'Brien didn't experience the final two time jumps and didn't know the station was about to blow up,) stuff that happened to past O'Brien like radiation poisoning and oh yeah dying didn't affect him, etc. He's only a variant O'Brien from like, eight hours in the future, though, most of which he probably spent sleeping. How much does missing out on one night's sleep really change you? Trek's approach to timelines is inconsistent enough that I don't think you can really say he's a "different" O'Brien, especially when he still has the Chief's main character trait of suffering.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:06
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In the inimitable words of Morty Smith, "Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody's going to die. Come to the holosuite."
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Jan 16, 2017 16:12
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Pieces of Peace posted:He's only a variant O'Brien from like, eight hours in the future, though, most of which he probably spent sleeping. How much does missing out on one night's sleep really change you? Trek's approach to timelines is inconsistent enough that I don't think you can really say he's a "different" O'Brien, especially when he still has the Chief's main character trait of suffering. I'm not arguing that he's too different, I'm arguing that their friend died and no one cared because they got one that's close enough. If they'd found Thomas Riker after 3.5 hours instead of several years but Will died on the away mission to get him, it'd be extremely hosed up if his friends on the Potemkin just shrugged and said "whatever probably easier, no need for a funeral and we need a replacement second officer now sooooo". Like yeah I figure eventually they'd accept they have a new O'Brien, but drat you'd think everyone would have to come to grips with it emotionally and maybe they'd at least do a memorial for the guy they knew who volunteered to die horribly from radiation poisoning to save them all?
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Jan 16, 2017 17:12
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twistedmentat posted:I've always wondered why Intro Darkness is read as a Truther movie, outside of its screen writer being a Truther himself. Peter Weller and Section 31 are America and the CIA Khan is Bin Laden, used strategically by the CIA then gone rogue Kronos is Afghanistan 72 of Khan's crewmen is an allusion to Allah's 72 virgins Commentary on drone strikes False flag stuff And some other nonsense. http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2013/09/11/how-star-trek-into-darkness-is-a-crypto-truther-conspiracy-movie
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Jan 16, 2017 18:23
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