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VitalSigns posted:I still like DS9 but my god did I hate the wormhole aliens.
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Mar 27, 2017 04:33
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Nessus posted:Well, in the same way Picard might be able to beg Q for aid, perhaps. Not really, Sisko's mom is right next door and he can just waltz in there anytime and be like "ok mommy the Jem Hadar are on their way to earth, I'm gonna go do a suicide run on them if you really love me you'll kill them all before I get there laterz"
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Mar 27, 2017 04:55
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The Bloop posted:Tuvix was good. The ending was bad. Janeway is a monster. Voyager sucks at morals. I mean, doesn't that make it a bad episode since that's what the episode is all about?
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Mar 27, 2017 05:06
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See, but the thing is that the Sisko isn't ACT-TING!!!!, that's just the way Brooks is when he's not playing piano jazz while apparently being the highest a human being can get
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Mar 27, 2017 05:27
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VitalSigns posted:Not really, Sisko's mom is right next door and he can just waltz in there anytime and be like "ok mommy the Jem Hadar are on their way to earth, I'm gonna go do a suicide run on them if you really love me you'll kill them all before I get there laterz"
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Mar 27, 2017 05:43
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VitalSigns posted:I still like DS9 but my god did I hate the wormhole aliens. It's not a Deus Ex Machina. There was no problem that the writers had no way out of they needed to solve with divine intervention. They had set-up everything they needed to solve the problem without anything to do with the wormhole aliens. All they needed to do was have Rom disable the phasers 1 second earlier like a typical resolution. But they didn't. Sisko went into the wormhole to plea with his actual gods (at a cost) to defeat a group of beings who want everyone around them to think of them as gods so they'll be left alone. It couldn't be a more appropriate way of kicking the Dominion off the station. Also it's shown that the wormhole aliens have little direct influence outside of the wormhole itself outside of the orbs, which don't really manipulate anything permanently. So unless the entire war was going to take place inside the wormhole that's a silly complaint. Plus the minefield itself was basically magic anyways, just dressed up in Star Trek technology. Kibayasu fucked around with this message at 06:19 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 06:16
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Kibayasu posted:Also it's shown that the wormhole aliens have little direct influence outside of the wormhole itself outside of the orbs, which don't really manipulate anything permanently. So unless the entire war was going to take place inside the wormhole that's a silly complaint. Plus the minefield itself was basically magic anyways, just dressed up in Star Trek technology. Well the orbs are pretty powerful; the orb of time let two different people go back and try to change the past just by asking. Anyway the wormhole aliens leave their home and go possess people and break poo poo all the time. If Sisko did a suicide run at Cardassia Prime I'm pretty sure mommy or some other wormhole alien could figure something out to save him between their super powers, possession ability, and total control over the timeline itself. But fair point that it's not a true deus ex machina since the writers had another way out but just chose not to use it. Hey speaking of the minefield why didn't the Federation put it back, just in case? I mean the technology to kill all the wormhole aliens already exists because Pa-Wraith-Keiko taught O'Brien exactly how to do it and Rom figured it out pretty much right away. The Dominion obviously never figured it out but they might have. Probably should have mined that entrance again just to make sure they wouldn't wake up one morning with dead wormhole aliens and a new fleet. On the other hand, it was pretty heavily implied that once they were dead the Pa-Wraiths would move back in, so even if they had found out about that Keiko incident, the order-obsessed Dominion might not have wanted to release chaos beings of unknown power and desires on the galaxy. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 06:49
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Kibayasu posted:Sisko went into the wormhole to plea with his actual gods (at a cost) to defeat a group of beings who want everyone around them to think of them as gods so they'll be left alone. The wormhole aliens are just another jumped-up alien race. They're no more gods than the changelings are.
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Mar 27, 2017 06:58
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Tunicate posted:The wormhole aliens are just another jumped-up alien race. They're no more gods than the changelings are. Christian theology's long dominance always seems to make people forget that Gods don't have to be perfect. Plenty of mythology exists where gods are tricked, swayed, and even physically defeated. What is a God? If anything, the actual obvious capability the Wormhole Aliens or the Changelings show puts them ahead of most Gods who only act directly in tales of days gone by and who have since taken on the habit of moving in mysterious ways and acting only in a deniable manner. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 07:06
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VitalSigns posted:I still like DS9 but my god did I hate the wormhole aliens. It wasn't really a deus ex machina because the wormhole aliens had been an important part of the series since the very beginning. It wasn't as if they were just pulled out of the writer's rear end 6 seasons in. As for how it affected the tension, that's another matter. It did feel a bit cheap.
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Mar 27, 2017 09:05
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Tunicate posted:The wormhole aliens are just another jumped-up alien race. They're no more gods than the changelings are. And enjoy his excellent acting in the bargain.
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Mar 27, 2017 10:03
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8one6 posted:
Nah I'm alright, I've already sat through some awful episodes of all the seasons, I don't plan to do so out of choice. The Bloop posted:Tuvix was good. The ending was bad. Janeway is a monster. Voyager sucks at morals. I thought it was an excellent episode and I was completely fine with Janeways decision, but then, I didn't see it that Tuvok and Nelix were dead, more stuck, so it was a save them from being trapped than bringing them back to life. Nessus posted:
I thought they were both really stupid and made no sense, and were also boring. Big Mean Jerk posted:Hold up, how far into the show did you get? It sounds like you only watched season 1. I used an episode guide, I think it recommended about 50% of episodes
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Mar 27, 2017 10:33
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Bates posted:I'd put VOY ahead of ENT just because of the EMH. Having one good character has to count for something. I found the Doctor to be incredibly tedious after a while. After six seasons of his petulant whining and three seasons of him creeping on Seven of Nine, I started just wanting to punch him every time I saw his smug loving smirk. It's one of the main reasons I haven't finished my watch-through, actually.
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Mar 27, 2017 10:48
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In any other thread, I'd write off willie_dee's opinion as trolling, but I've heard enough of the rest of Trek fandom's opinions on Voyager and DS9 to know it might be legit. We are the odd ducks here, not that we're wrong. VOY sucks, and tons of Trek fans got loving Stokholm Syndrome about it for some reason. Read that Reddit list as proof. The comments read like a bunch of people trying to convince themselves of every single thing, with the flimsiest reasons. They are the victims in all of this, and we are like their overburdened trauma counselors. it's like deprogramming cultists from brainwashing jfc. Up is not down. Black is not white. Wooden acting is not good. "The 37's" is not a good episode. Voyager is not good Trek.
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Mar 27, 2017 11:28
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Hey I'm not saying Voyager is good Trek in any of this, just that I enjoyed it far more than DS9. I wouldn't watch it again. The only one I'm tempted to rewatch is TNG. I'm 2 episodes into Enterprise, it's awful. The translator breaking down crying because of the pressure was pathetic after seeing the heroics of previous starfleet members, I don't think I'll be able to watch it.
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Mar 27, 2017 12:02
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Honestly don't bother, it's worthless. Just watch TNG DS9 and BSG over and over
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Mar 27, 2017 12:10
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willie_dee posted:Hey I'm not saying Voyager is good Trek in any of this, just that I enjoyed it far more than DS9. I wouldn't watch it again. The only one I'm tempted to rewatch is TNG. ENT just follows in the proud TNG tradition of the first two seasons being hot garbage. Unfortunately in ENT's case, that's half of the series. I'm near the end of season 2, and it's been alright. Not great, but enjoyable consistently enough to continue. Season one was rough, though. When you complain about DS9 "being for children" and "needing a laugh track," are you mistaking characters having personality and sense of humor for it being childish? Because the only character with a consistent sense of humor in VOY is a pederast. Everyone either has no personality or a repulsive one, except The Doctor (most of the time). Everyone in VOY is such a joyless, wooden shell of a person. It's like someone programmed a machine to write human interactions. The only one that gets a pass is Tuvok, because he's Vulcan so he's supposed to act wooden, and he hates everyone (so is by default the best character). Here's an exercise: Just replace a character in an iconic TNG scene with a comparable one from VOY and DS9. Take the "There are four lights!" scene from TNG. With Sisko, it becomes weird and unsettling with how Avery Brooks would likely play it. Overacted? Probably. But not boring. Weird, but not bad. With Janeway... I have nothing, because her character has no depth or consistency. I literally don't know if Mulgrew would just give the Cardassian an icy stare the whole time, or yell at him (woodenly, compared to Brooks).
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Mar 27, 2017 12:28
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I think Voyager is fine as inoffensive comfort tv as long as you dodge the gratuitous turds and don't think too hard about plot holes and character motivations. I can sort of see how someone who only watched 30-ish random episodes of it it might think it was fine and dandy like sour candy. The problem is the more Voyager you watch, the shallower and more slapdash the whole enterprise seems and once the show has angried up your nerd blood, it's pretty hard to get back to that baseline of "meh, it's OK." Ron Moore said he thought Voyager might have the best cast of any Trek show, and I don't know that I disagree with him. A few of the junior officers are on the weak side, but it's still a drat fine group of actors. The problem is that they worked insane hours and got so many terrible scripts foisted that most of them wound up miserable in their jobs by the end. I've heard lots of different reasons for disliking Voyager from a squandered premise, to TNG cargo culting, to terribly inconsistent characters, but most of that isn't that big a deal on an episode to episode basis. I can absolutely see why someone who just watches the episodes that "work" might think that Voyager has better actors and might not understand why so many of us find the whole thing to be deeply tedious. Simply put, there's about five times as many Voyager episodes as there really needs to be to tell "its story" (whereas other Treks' substance/filler ratio is more like 50/50), and the show tends to get more disappointing the deeper you dive into it. DS9, by contrast, is a show that takes some investment to really appreciate. If you just skip around and watch the highlight reel, so much of the context and dramatic weight of what you're seeing will be lost that the big moments won't really feel earned. I've seen some of the DS9 "greatest hits" lists and like half the episodes are ones where Avery Brooks eats half the set. We love those episodes because we saw all the ones where he was subdued or quietly intense or just laid back and having a good time, but if you just see Pale Moonlight, Far Beyond the Stars, etc. you could easily come away thinking he's like that all the time. He's not, and that's important because the character would suck if he was. It's just like Shatner's hammy reputation has been completely overblown by people cherry picking his "finest" acting moments and ignoring all the times he didn't play Kirk that way. If TOS Shatner were really as in love with ACT-ing and dramatic..... pauses as his parodists make him out to be, the show would be almost unwatchable. I understand that DS9 isn't everyone's cup of tea, I really do, and I can even conceive of a strange parallel universe where Voyager is better. It's just the idea that you can pick and choose episodes of a heavily serialized show with seasonal character arcs and get the "gist" of it that annoys me. I know watching a hundred-plus episodes is a hard sell, but I really do think that -- even if the first season is a little weaker -- just watching episodes in order is a much better approach. Not everyone likes DS9, but the build up is important and I really don't think just skipping to "the good parts" will make most people appreciate it any more.
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Mar 27, 2017 13:02
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Duckbag posted:I think Voyager is fine as inoffensive comfort tv as long as you dodge the gratuitous turds and don't think too hard about plot holes and character motivations. I can sort of see how someone who only watched 30-ish random episodes of it it might think it was fine and dandy like sour candy. The problem is the more Voyager you watch, the shallower and more slapdash the whole enterprise seems and once the show has angried up your nerd blood, it's pretty hard to get back to that baseline of "meh, it's OK." What gets me is that the watch list for Voyager that was posted has some of the most tedious poo poo on it. Things like "Learning Curve" and "The 37's" and "Workforce." Whoever wrote that watch list has really weird ideas about what good TV looks like, even if they are cherry-picking. Granted, about 80% of that list is about as good as Voyager gets, but some of it was baffling. "The Thaw?" Really? The only thing anyone cares about in that episode is the last minute. It's an annoying clown for 43 minutes, and one minute of Janeway being a cold-blooded psychopath. Same with "Tuvix." Every two-parter is on there, seemingly out of obligation. I mean, there is no universe in which "Workforce" is worth watching. It's little hints like that, the things that show VOY fans aping UPN marketing from 20 years ago, that make me think these people are brainwashed. "Workforce" is boring as hell, and it doesn't matter that it was hyped in the same way that every two-parter was hyped back in the day. It's on there just because it is a two-parter. It was terrible, as was the rest of the series that isn't on the list, and some that is. You make a good point about DS9, and a case against watch lists in general. DS9 really does need context more than every other Trek series, especially after season two (and, not coincidentally, when the show starts really getting good). Watch lists are for honorless peta'qs.
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Mar 27, 2017 14:06
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I sincerely like "The Thaw". It's got a neat TOS style surreal environment feel to it. I like those sort of stories, and it's not something the TNG era series did too often.
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Mar 27, 2017 14:16
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Angry Salami posted:I sincerely like "The Thaw". It's got a neat TOS style surreal environment feel to it. I like those sort of stories, and it's not something the TNG era series did too often. True. I would have liked it more if it centered around someone like Kirk instead of Harry loving Kim. All of my memories of that episode that aren't the last minute are of an evil clown and Harry Kim sitting around whining about the evil clown. Kirk would have at least had the good sense to punch the clown and somehow get away with it.
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Mar 27, 2017 14:20
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I was able to tolerate and almost enjoy Voyager because I watched the episodes out of order and ignored continuity more than less. Like, watch a random episode a day or something, like simulating syndication reruns. If I had to watch them all in order, it would have been terrible. Don't get me wrong; it's a bad show, and it's worth mocking every time.
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Mar 27, 2017 14:47
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WeAreTheRomans posted:Honestly don't bother, it's worthless. Just watch TNG DS9 and BSG over and over BSG makes me so angry because it makes me realize how much Voyager was squandered. Railing Kill posted:Here's an exercise: Just replace a character in an iconic TNG scene with a comparable one from VOY and DS9. Take the "There are four lights!" scene from TNG. With Sisko, it becomes weird and unsettling with how Avery Brooks would likely play it. Overacted? Probably. But not boring. Weird, but not bad. With Janeway... I have nothing, because her character has no depth or consistency. I literally don't know if Mulgrew would just give the Cardassian an icy stare the whole time, or yell at him (woodenly, compared to Brooks). *looks longingly at viewscreen* There are four coffees in that nebula...
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Mar 27, 2017 15:50
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Echo Chamber posted:I was able to tolerate and almost enjoy Voyager because I watched the episodes out of order and ignored continuity more than less. Like, watch a random episode a day or something, like simulating syndication reruns. What continuity? The only 2 things I can think of are: 1: Is Kes on the ship or Seven? 2: Have they built the Delta flyer yet?
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Mar 27, 2017 15:54
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Janeway's hair migrates from bun to ponytail and back to bun over the course of seven years
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Mar 27, 2017 16:06
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Lowen SoDium posted:What continuity? I remember watching Voyager live when it was first-run, and when Seven joined the cast I thought "Wooo! Continuity! Change! Look how she started out being a full Borg, then they took out a bunch of her implants in the process of severing her, and then in that final scene she's standing in the holodeck or docking bay or whatever in what I didn't realize at the time would be her final costume, just a few surface-level implants yet and a weird shiny catsuit. What I thought was going on was that this was going to be one phase of her de-Borgification, and that over the course of the following season or seasons she would have more and more Borg bits removed, and eventually would look more or less indistinguishable from a regular human, perhaps even acting like one as she gradually acclimatized to humanity. But what actually happened was, she stayed in that catsuit for the entire remainder of the series, and she actually got more robotic after her first few episodes as she got more and more involved with the character. I couldn't freaking believe it.
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Mar 27, 2017 16:23
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Paris gets demoted, and then re-promoted back to his original rank, soooooo But wait! Harry Kim gets promo---wait, no. No. Of course not. The Borg Babies join the crew. I mean, it's the lamest thing Voyager does to the Borg (which is saying a lot), but it is another piece of continuity. If you want good continuity or BSG-ness from Voyager, just watch "Year of Hell" and pretend that that's the whole series.
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Mar 27, 2017 16:24
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willie_dee posted:Voyager had better acting This one is just objectively wrong.
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Mar 27, 2017 16:29
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Spoeank posted:*looks longingly at viewscreen* Replicators are such an energy drain. They should have a second warp core just for the food dispensers. Voyager's hosed from the get-go if this is how they're going to handle the technobabble logic. An engineer tirelessly working a spanner under a console, "You can go to warp 9.5 or you can replicate a Colombian Roast, but you can't have both." vermin fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 16:44
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Railing Kill posted:If you want good continuity or BSG-ness from Voyager, just watch "Year of Hell" and pretend that that's the whole series. It should have been 
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Mar 27, 2017 17:05
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:It should have been I don't know if I'd say it should've been Year of Hell, but it definitely should've been more like that than it was.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:34
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WampaLord posted:This one is just objectively wrong. Seriously, they weren't even allowed to act on VOY, how could the acting be better?
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Mar 27, 2017 17:36
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Railing Kill posted:Paris gets demoted, and then re-promoted back to his original rank, soooooo Apparently Paris was demoted because the writers needed to fill in an extra two minutes into an otherwise too-short script, and that was the best time filler they could come up with.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:42
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Tunicate posted:The wormhole aliens are just another jumped-up alien race. They're no more gods than the changelings are. Yes, I know. In the framework of the show however they most certainly are, at least in their little domain of the galaxy. "You want to be gods, then BE gods." Yes both of them call themselves gods and both groups who wield enormous amounts of power. But only one of them wields power entirely of their own. With a wave of a hand one saved the galaxy from the other and the only thing the changelings can do is run away, close enough for me. This isn't to say that anyone who doesn't like that ending has to now, just that in a storytelling sense - structurally, thematically, in line with characters - there isn't anything wrong with it.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:45
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Mike the TV posted:Apparently Paris was demoted because the writers needed to fill in an extra two minutes into an otherwise too-short script, and that was the best time filler they could come up with. It's such a weird punishment in Star Trek's setting. Did we ever see anyone else get demoted? It's not like his salary goes lower or his duties change, so it's literally just a symbolic punishment.
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Mar 27, 2017 17:45
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edit: Sorry for the rant about not grasping post scarcity societies
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Mar 27, 2017 18:12
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Well, I can understand why people still want promotions. You want to get more responsibilities, more command, do more cool poo poo. Riker wants to take over the captain's chair one day, after all. The Lower Ranks episode covered it pretty well, they were loving chasing that promotion hard and it was very believable. I just don't understand why a demotion is a punishment if you keep the same duties/responsibilities. Paris should have had to do more boring poo poo for a while if they actually wanted to punish him.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:29
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Kibayasu posted:Yes, I know. In the framework of the show however they most certainly are, at least in their little domain of the galaxy. "You want to be gods, then BE gods." Yes both of them call themselves gods and both groups who wield enormous amounts of power. But only one of them wields power entirely of their own. The changeling shapeshifting is bullshit-strong; that's a power they wield entirely through their own effort, and one which the wormhole aliens don't have. By any reasonable metric, they are equally qualified for the status. Both are less cool than Mr. Giant Green Hand, though. Divinity should come with a certain level of style.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:31
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WampaLord posted:It's such a weird punishment in Star Trek's setting. Did we ever see anyone else get demoted? Kirk, after saving the whales. Of course, that was a "demotion." Also Ensign Ro, off-screen.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:32
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vermin posted:An ensign could be ordered to go on an away mission and go "Nah gently caress this" and be court martialed and discharged and...he goes back to living in a perpetual state of paradise. I dunno about this. The federation is probably pretty lax in terms of crime and punishment, but there is definitely still a rule of law. We've been talking about Voyager (???) and its own Tom Paris spends time before the show in an Earth penal colony because he was a member of the maquis or something, so an ensign refusing to follow orders would probably be discharged into a cell before being released into general population.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:38
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