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nine-gear crow posted:Honestly, I find a lot of DS9 visually unappealing because of the soft focus lens they use and what it does to light sources on screen. It gives it that blurry soap opera feel. Same with late stage TNG. I watched both parts of Time's Arrow a few weeks ago on Netflix and the split between their old lighting scheme in Part 1 and the one they'd use in Part 2 and for the rest of the show/DS9 is horrifyingly jarring. It's also the point where Gene dies and they rip his name out of the credits, so I have this mental image of Rick Berman just standing over Roddenberry's corpse going "FINALLY! FINALLY! SOFT-FOCUS LIGHTING! gently caress YOU DEAD OLD MAN! IT'S ALL MINE NOW! MWAAHAHAHAH!" Was all of TNG filmed on 35 or did they start using tape at some point? I'm pretty sure DS9 was taped. Because if your production crew is used to lighting for 35 and you switch to something else, everything is going to look way too bright until you figure out you can get by with like 1/3 the lux.
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Feb 8, 2020 13:11
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Contemporary Trek using digital effects and lighting for an audience watching on 40+ inch HD displays is beautiful but I fear once we move on to 3d holographic projection displays it's going to seem quaint. ps I like that on Rios''s uncrewed ship there are Emergency Hologram options, like we would choose a voice and language for Alexa. But I hope there are also bridge options - give the old man a chair to sit in! 
Binary Logic fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 13:11
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Dietrich posted:Was all of TNG filmed on 35 or did they start using tape at some point? I'm pretty sure DS9 was taped. All Star Treks before Enterprise were shot on film and edited on video I believe.
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Feb 8, 2020 13:17
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AntherUslessPoster posted:Yeah sorry I'm not that eloquent but I'm learning lol Thanks for clarifying, and that's an interesting take. I'd say then that you're arguing that Raffi is stuck in the 'basics' portion of the hierarchy of needs. Which I agree with. I still think the framing is messy, which was my argument all along. With her firing ("You tender your resignation, and my rear end gets fired" - a very corporate characterisation of Starfleet and at odds with what we've previously seen) and her entire speech about Picard's class insulation ("Your very fine Chateau, big oak beams, heirloom furniture. I'd show you around my estate, but it's more of a hovel so that would just be humiliating" - again, very capitalistic and at odds with what we've seen before). Also, this episode went even further in changing the idiology of the Federation than the last one (Picard now says that half the council didn't want to help the Romulans before the attack and the rest are basically reactionary cowards.) So is the setting of Star Trek and "the Federation" really the best fit for their story if they had to change so much of the world to force it to work? My alternative theory was that they had the characters and plot written with little regard for the setting, which was then grafted on as a bit of an after thought. That's why it feels so incongruous to a lot of people, they're getting a lot of change that feels unmotivated and a lot of 21st century framing along with it. Picard even keeps saying "I never thought I'd see this", well yeah no poo poo. It's like even the writers can see that this is inconsistent, but just hanging a lampshade on it isn't enough. I think writers are in such a rut that no political or ethical story is possible except for "one good man against the system". And y'know, that's understandable in this hell world, but there's plenty of other mediums to tell that story in (all of them, if the rest of TV is anything to go by) Lizard Combatant fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 13:25
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Lizard Combatant posted:Thanks for clarifying, and that's an interesting take. re: last paragraph. My interpretation is that just as in classic TOS, the writers are using Trek to comment on contemporary issues. So Starfleet and even more, the Federation, instead of expanding are now putting up walls and barriers, and focused less on expansion and more on individuals shoring up their own interests. And as we see kleptocrats and oligarchs grabbing for more power, the higher-ups in the Federation are also using back channels and working behind the scenes to gain more power, resources, and control. So it's not just "one good man against the system" but one good man seeking the truth about what's really going on. Noise Complaint posted:I honestly don't think that there's many more Trek connected writers than Michael Chabon.
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Feb 8, 2020 13:46
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Nothing about the trek economy ever made any sense and they were very smart to avoid the whole issue in past series. I don't see how they could have done more exposition about it in Picard and not gently caress it up. Should have just stayed away like they do with toilets and modern religions. Also, Romulans are the best part about this whole thing and probably the thing I most look forward to. Turned a one dimensional ethnic stereotype into a fleshed out interesting culture. Ditching the stupid hairpieces was a really good decision.
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Feb 8, 2020 14:22
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GABA ghoul posted:modern religions. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Human_religion nerds have wrote it down carefully. Also back in TNG where they rescued some 20th century cryocapsules Picard said that UFP has no money or religion, afair Maybe they are trying hard to tie up federation to current world so it feels more relatable to general audiences? I dunno, I cant judge. Trek is my 'religion' and I'd change my (well a good one tbh) life to live in trek world any second. Erulisse fucked around with this message at 14:38 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 14:33
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Binary Logic posted:re: last paragraph. My interpretation is that just as in classic TOS, the writers are using Trek to comment on contemporary issues. So Starfleet and even more, the Federation, instead of expanding are now putting up walls and barriers, and focused less on expansion and more on individuals shoring up their own interests. Well then we're just looping back around to my "unmotivated change" point again. But to take TOS as your example, while most episodes are light action/horror outings, the episodes that do feature social commentary take the what would become the typical approach of using an alien culture as a proxy for a contemporary social problem. They'd also use time travel, an alternate universe or other conceits to examine contemporary issues. This carries over even more so into TNG, where the action/horror switches more to science influenced concepts like causality loops, etc... but the idea of using proxies to examine contemporary issues remains in full force. Ethics and diplomacy become the driving plots of the series. You even get the occasional threats from within in the form of everyone's favourite evil admiral trope. But as before, the stories are always about applying or protecting the ideals of an optimistic future. Then DS9 rolls around and now we have more complex characters with non Federation ideals as main cast members working alongside Starfleet. The ideals of the Federation are pretty well established by this point, so the name of the game is pressure. How do these ideals withstand pressure like they haven't seen before. This is where I think people get DS9 wrong, they think the show is darker because it shows that the Federation were just a bunch of hippies, man. But it's kind of the opposite. You get scenes like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvOaUatJfx4 and ultimately the message is of vigilance and resilience. Then Voyager kind of flops around in a throwback to TNG style, but the characterisation of Janeway (the moral center) is wildly inconsistent. There's some good stuff in there, but a lot of retreads. Enterprise? Who cares, let's just skip it. Discovery? This is a flaming mess and the messaging is wildly inconsistent, even within single episodes. So that brings us to Picard. We have a serial story now so the action, horror or sci-fi plotty episodes are kind dropped and we're no longer using proxies for contemporary social commentary, so the Federation has to regress back a couple centuries for plot purposes but there's no apparent motivation. So what's the point? The setting is almost as important as the character of Picard, if not more so. He was really just the implementation of the ideals. If the show didn't want to have to get into the weeds about how things like The Federation economy works, well they're under no such obligation to do so. Who's forcing them to? If they wanted to do a show about the Federation "putting up walls" and morphing into the kind of people who are happy to let an entire species be wiped out even before their scary "Bush did 9-11*" attack, well then the show probably should have been about that intervening time period and how that happened because these things don't occur in a vacuum. *man, Orci may have been the one outed as a truther, but it really feels like a lot of it rubbed off on Kurtzman too if you look at his entire body of work. quote:So it's not just "one good man against the system" but one good man seeking the truth about what's really going on. Lizard Combatant fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 14:33
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Again, DS9 had the right idea with the Ferengi rather than the Federation being the analogue for 20th century capitalism.
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Feb 8, 2020 14:47
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AntherUslessPoster posted:Trek is my 'religion' and I'd change my (well a good one tbh) life to live in trek world any second. Does that make the CBS creative team your infallible pope?  Ghost Leviathan posted:Again, DS9 had the right idea with the Ferengi rather than the Federation being the analogue for 20th century capitalism. Not all Lizard Combatant fucked around with this message at 15:03 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 15:01
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Lizard Combatant posted:Does that make the CBS creative team your infallible pope? Only christian non-GMO vegan Gene-made TNG/DS9 writing here kkplzty!
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Feb 8, 2020 15:04
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Did I imagine it or did Soji's Borg detector go off as Ramdha started going spare?
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Feb 8, 2020 15:06
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AntherUslessPoster posted:... Gene-made ... DS9... DS9 would be what, the Quran to Gene's Torah? (this is a very shallow joke, please don't read any deeper meaning into it)
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Feb 8, 2020 15:17
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Lizard Combatant posted:DS9 would be what, the Quran to Gene's Torah? The most controversial translation of Quaran! yes its a shallow joke too but no offence intended to anyone
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Feb 8, 2020 15:56
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AntherUslessPoster posted:The most controversial translation of Quaran! Well, the New Testament at the very least. 
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Feb 8, 2020 16:11
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Someone earlier on the page made the "star trek is used to comment on contemporary issues" point in a somewhat flippant way, and it's worth going back to to clear something up: Star Trek has always done so being careful to use people/civilisations other than the Federation as the representative for a modern issue. The closest it would get to using the Federation as a stand in for a modern issue would be stuff like "this member species has a weird taboo" like the lesbian kiss DS9 episode, or it would show the Federation in the process of faltering such that the enlightened ideology of the future could swoop in and reinforce itself, demonstrating why things have changed and how foolish we look, like in Paradise Lost (yeah yeah, more DS9, can't fault it for being the best Trek). Picard is failing and feels so wrong because in it, it's the Federation itself that is being used as that representative of a modern issue. It's not the Federation pointing at some repressive regime that won't help refugees and trying to publicly humiliate octogenarian in a live interview to pop a loving rating, but the Federation itself doing these reprehensible things that feels so alien and wrong. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure and purpose not only of Star Trek, but of allegory as a whole, and when your writing team and S E V E N T E E N C R E D I T E D P R O D U C E R S are unable to figure that out, well...gently caress, dude. Pack it in. EDIT: Why is it a misunderstanding of allegory as a whole? Because the best use of allegory and fable is to present the "correct" lesson or ideology or what have you as the most immediately relatable or familiar to the listener. By getting them to imprint themselves on it, when the opposition or alternative comes along, they are already primed to be receptive to why that opposition is wrong. Keep in mind that one of the most effective instances of this has already been brought up in this thread, the cryoman episode. We have a human, on screen, that very much looks and sounds and acts much more like anyone in this thread than any member of the UFP or Starfleet, and yet we KNOW he's in the wrong and that Picard and the ideology of the UFP is correct because of how strongly we identify ourselves with it. Paper Lion fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 16:14
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i mean we all knew it was going to be exactly like this when Patrick said 'it's not the picard or the starfleet you remember' i went from loving yes to oh....right in the span of a sentence. even the audience at the convention did cos they all knew what was coming the second he said that. still, you had a little hope. but hope is dead. large_gourd fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Feb 8, 2020 |
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Feb 8, 2020 16:20
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ConanThe3rd posted:Did I imagine it or did Soji's Borg detector go off as Ramdha started going spare? You did not imagine it.
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Feb 8, 2020 16:51
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GABA ghoul posted:Nothing about the trek economy ever made any sense and they were very smart to avoid the whole issue in past series. I don't see how they could have done more exposition about it in Picard and not gently caress it up. Should have just stayed away like they do with toilets and modern religions. Money and religion are both explicitly gone on 24th century Earth.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:18
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Some humans in TNG are interested in money though, like Vash, and Troi's creepy mostly human part Betazoid love interest negotiator guy. So needing money (latinum?) for the off the books unregistered starship captain makes sense to me. Nothing in this show says that humans living on earth use money.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:35
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So RE: Raffi: The bottom line to me is that it was initially jarring to hear somebody seemingly complain about their living conditions on 24th century earth. But at end of the scene, the big reveal is that she's upset with her loss of career and purpose (her security clearance), not really just her living conditions. Also, one could read her dig on Picard about relaxing in his fancy chateau as just a dig on him tastelessly living the high life, but necessarily jealously. Like "you used to stand for something, now you're just acting like some ancient aristocrat?" I don't even see her as the type of person that cares about material things herself, but she would certainly have resentment against people that seemed to. You can hate the rich without necessarily aspiring to be one yourself.
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Feb 8, 2020 17:54
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You know it's funny, given how many people want to be architects and how presumably easy it is to build a new house with industrial replicators and whatnot I bet large houses out in the middle of nowhere would be easy to have made. Probably would be seen as tasteless though. Gauche as gently caress 2350s lawyer foyers.
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Feb 8, 2020 18:11
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She had precisely what she chose to have in terms of living conditions Even post-scarcity people can self-pity and get pissy and refuse mental health treatment She was pissed at Picard and saying things designed to injure him, combined with her own sense of being done wrong by history
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Feb 8, 2020 18:15
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Clearly not everyone can inherit genuine old buildings and there must be limited actual jobs doing winemaking so clearly Picard is privileged above your average random earther. That doesn't mean poo poo is totally hosed and Federation Earth is now the 21st century USA. Raffi's place looks like a trailer, but its' in a sweet location with a great view and it's full of gadgets.Arglebargle III posted:You know it's funny, given how many people want to be architects and how presumably easy it is to build a new house with industrial replicators and whatnot I bet large houses out in the middle of nowhere would be easy to have made. Probably would be seen as tasteless though. Gauche as gently caress 2350s lawyer foyers. Real reason the Maquis left to live on disputed planets was to escape the oppressive nanny state laws stopping earth being covered with gaudy mansions.
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Feb 8, 2020 18:24
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The Bloop posted:She had precisely what she chose to have in terms of living conditions ding ding ding
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Feb 8, 2020 18:24
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Drink-Mix Man posted:So RE: Raffi: This is partially my view after watching it as well. She's pretty clearly not attacking Picard out of jealousy, but because he gave up on their meaningful fight and retreated to these pointless trapings of a bygone era.
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Feb 8, 2020 18:28
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That's an awfully measured and inferred argument for a few lines in a show where every other thing presented was as blunt as a sledgehammer. There's no way to reconcile the disconnect of Raffi speaking in semi code and nested intentions when that scene is mere minutes removed from "sunglasses means bad guy" Vulcan and all the other sloppy, lazy shorthand the show is using. I think it would have been a better scene if she did outright say, or even more overtly implied if not stated outright, what you have been saying, and there's nothing wrong with the reading. But at the end of the day, a cigar is a cigar and Picard is Picard.
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Feb 8, 2020 19:26
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Arglebargle III posted:Money and religion are both explicitly gone on 24th century Earth. Which I guess begs the question is the Picard vineyard grandfathered in by being passed down over the generations via property rights? Which would just end up with landowners owning everything anyways and nothing societal actually changing.....
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Feb 8, 2020 19:32
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I've been thinking about it and I've decided I'm going to be really disappointed if the sunglasses don't somehow mean something
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Feb 8, 2020 19:48
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Koirhor posted:Which I guess begs the question is the Picard vineyard grandfathered in by being passed down over the generations via property rights? Which would just end up with landowners owning everything anyways and nothing societal actually changing..... Theoretically, if wealth and status don't flow from land ownership anymore, you'd eventually end up in a spot where the landowners are the people who get personal joy and satisfaction out of whatever use they're putting their land to, and much more flux in ownership because people will be much more willing to give up a hobby than their golden goose.
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Feb 8, 2020 19:53
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Tighclops posted:I've been thinking about it and I've decided I'm going to be really disappointed if the sunglasses don't somehow mean something 
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Feb 8, 2020 19:55
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"Paranoia?" scoffs Picard. "I never get that and I smoke 3.5 grams of snakeleaf a day. Who's your guy? Okona?"
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Feb 8, 2020 20:05
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Whatever value is lacking in Raffi's hovel, it must be rich in land value what with it being at the foot of the famous Vasquez Rocks. That's where Star Trek was filmed!
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Feb 8, 2020 20:10
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Tighclops posted:I've been thinking about it and I've decided I'm going to be really disappointed if the sunglasses don't somehow mean something They give access to the intersect.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:13
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Banana Canada posted:Whatever value is lacking in Raffi's hovel, it must be rich in land value what with it being at the foot of the famous Vasquez Rocks. That's where Star Trek was filmed! Aren't those in a public park, besides? Did parks stop becoming a thing? I would think they'd be MORE of a thing. Like, most of Earth would be park.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:14
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Banana Canada posted:Whatever value is lacking in Raffi's hovel, it must be rich in land value what with it being at the foot of the famous Vasquez Rocks. That's where Star Trek was filmed! Yeah, that to me was the only real immersions breaking part of her situation. “Really? She literally lives at Vasquez Rocks? Noted famous tourist destination Vasquez Rocks? Even known as a hotspot for non-Star Trek reasons? She must have to shoot like a dozen people a day with her phaser rifle then to keep them away from her trailer. I’m surprised the state of California hasn’t evicted her yet. She’s living in a national park, isn’t she?”
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Feb 8, 2020 20:15
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Tighclops posted:I've been thinking about it and I've decided I'm going to be really disappointed if the sunglasses don't somehow mean something The sunglasses are a hint that she's not a secret Romulan, but a secret Reman, because Remans are very light sensitive.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:18
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I can dig having weapons stashed throughout the chateau, especially when cohabiting with two former Tal Shiar. But it seems kind of strange that they're preset to kill? I guess one possible explanation is that those are their old disruptor sidearms and maybe they didn't go for them immediately because they were trying to keep the fatality count down until the fight became more desperate.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:20
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Pinterest Mom posted:The sunglasses are a hint that she's not a secret Romulan, but a secret Reman, because Remans are very light sensitive. I hope we see another Reman eventually. They were an over designed movie monster race, but I kinda dug how they looked and really appreciated them showing up on Enterprise in the background as bodyguards to Admiral Valdore.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:20
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With the amount of Nemesis they're pulling out they've pretty much got to deal with the Remans somehow. Perhaps that will be the conflict going on in Freecloud: it could be basically a refugee community viciously split between the Romulans and their previously-enslaved Remans, thus the "Romulans ONLY" signs? Just a thought.
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Feb 8, 2020 20:25
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