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JJTrek Sarek, Ben Cross, died yesterday. He was 72.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:31
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Like I have done before, I'll point out that the Maquis didn't form because the Cardassians were ceded ownership of Federation colony planets by treaty. The Maquis formed because the Cardassians then violated the treaty by trying to kill them/force them off the land, and the Federation didn't do anything to stop that. If the Cardassians had let the Federation colonists alone, which they were obligated to do by the terms of the treaty, or if the Federation did something to hold Cardassia accountable for breaking the treaty, the Maquis wouldn't have formed.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:34
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Given what we know about he Ferengi, how possible is it for Rom to actually effectively change society? Getting a 'progressive' Grand Nagus doesn't mean much if the systemic forces are 100% against any kind of reform. Just think there's probably 1000 other people just like Brunt who are opportunists and want to maintain status quo. Is it more likely that Rom gets ganked, or that he ineffectually 'rules' and people don't follow his example? SardonicTyrant posted:I think another thing that's not talked about is that a utopia does not mean it is a benevolent society. The Federation treats its citizens very well, but is less concerned about people outside of its territory, and it raises the question of how far will you go to maintain your utopia. They do let non-Federation but human colonies devolve into rape planets. As long as the last functioning government says no to Federation involvement, they are perfectly fine just ignoring massive suffering.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:43
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xerxus posted:Given what we know about he Ferengi, how possible is it for Rom to actually effectively change society? Of the three main Ferengi characters, one is a decent business owner but doesn't have the sociopathy needed to become Really Rich (Quark), one has no business sense but excels in another field (Rom), and one rejected Ferengi society to pursue their own career (Nog). I like to think Ferengi society looks more like the Quark family than the usual Ferengi stereotypes.
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Aug 20, 2020 07:21
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The show never really gives enough detail to know what is and isn't justified, I mean if any of the annoying little bastard fucker groups seems like a logical one to just put the boot on it's the Orions who have been a pain in the fuckin rear end since TOS
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Aug 20, 2020 07:38
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Watching a bit of Enterprise on a whim and...sigh. I hate to admit it, but I'm beginning to accept that Deep Space Nine was always an outlier. It's like none of the shows after it want to borrow what made it so good.
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Aug 20, 2020 08:09
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Nessus posted:The Roddenberry vision was mystifying, but a lighter version where the core crew do not seem to all loathe each other or be laden with secret agendas seems to be part of what has made TNG work so well. Indeed a lot of the core premise sacrifice in Voyager could be summarized as, they laid that on a crew where that made no sense - meanwhile there was a fairly modest amount of it in DS9. The crew being well-adjusted professionals and basically decent and respectful people is what really sets TNG apart, especially nowadays where 'good character writing' too often means 'tough and cynical people making tough and cynical decisions toughly and cynically' 'No interpersonal conflict, everyone is perfect' is definitely mystifying though
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Aug 20, 2020 10:38
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SardonicTyrant posted:Watching a bit of Enterprise on a whim and...sigh. I hate to admit it, but I'm beginning to accept that Deep Space Nine was always an outlier. It's like none of the shows after it want to borrow what made it so good. People like Section 31, right? Yeah. Let's do Section 31.
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Aug 20, 2020 10:49
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womb with a view posted:People like Section 31, right? Yeah. Let's do Section 31. Their ruler? Two evil Spocks's dicks
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Aug 20, 2020 11:24
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Barry Foster posted:The crew being well-adjusted professionals and basically decent and respectful people is what really sets TNG apart, especially nowadays where 'good character writing' too often means 'tough and cynical people making tough and cynical decisions toughly and cynically' I'm not a huge trek guy, but I've had some free time recently and have been watching tng, and this is so refreshing and makes it so nice to watch. Its so so so pleasant and fun but not dumb. I love it. I just watched the enemy from season 3, where jordi has to work with an injured Romulan to get off a stormy planet. It was so good.
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Aug 20, 2020 11:28
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I do find it kind of jarring when you have plots where someone doesn't fit right into this perfect world though, and Geordi flips out on them. Like Barclay's first episode, or the one where Scotty shows up and Picard has to tell Geordi to be nice, or the one where Geordi makes a sexy holodeck simulation of a real person. You'd think to get to this utopian ideal you would have to have a basic understanding of things like social anxiety, or being old, or being a woman.
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Aug 20, 2020 11:37
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...you know, it hadn't occurred to me how much Geordi's the common element in stories where people don't fit in on the Enterprise.
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Aug 20, 2020 11:56
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SardonicTyrant posted:I think the ideal scenario is Ferengi like Rom who aren't proficient at business are encouraged to pursue other professions. I don't think so. The compare/contrast is with the Klingons. It varies depending on the story we are looking at, but the general rule is that while Klingon society places being a warrior as the most prestigious thing you can do, there are plenty of other paths a Klingon can go down as long as they act honourably and aren't a coward. An average Klingon warrior is will be overawed by meeting a famous priest, or opera composer, or brewer of the best bloodwine on Kronos. Klingons hate accounting tricks, but it wouldn't be out of place to have a story where Klingon warriors tell the tale of Kronk the Quartermaster who performed a heroic feat of logistics. Conversely everything we are shown of Ferengi society is that your worth is considered to be your literal worth. Money is everything. So you can have a Ferengi Opera composer, but a Ferengi character will only care about the answer to 'how much did he sell the performance rights for?'.
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Aug 20, 2020 12:37
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BB2K posted:I'm not a huge trek guy, but I've had some free time recently and have been watching tng, and this is so refreshing and makes it so nice to watch. Its so so so pleasant and fun but not dumb. I love it. I just watched the enemy from season 3, where jordi has to work with an injured Romulan to get off a stormy planet. It was so good. Yeah it's great. TNG is like a warm bubble bath for me because of this (and the fact that it was such a fundamental part of my childhood my brain basically formed around it). It's been lockdown comfort food for awhile. The world is bleak, insane and hopeless enough already. The world needs more optimistic, idealistic TV. womb with a view posted:I do find it kind of jarring when you have plots where someone doesn't fit right into this perfect world though, and Geordi flips out on them. Like Barclay's first episode, or the one where Scotty shows up and Picard has to tell Geordi to be nice, or the one where Geordi makes a sexy holodeck simulation of a real person. You'd think to get to this utopian ideal you would have to have a basic understanding of things like social anxiety, or being old, or being a woman. Not unfair, yeah. I wonder if that's down to the time it was made. Or that its writers were nerdlingers and/or mostly men (I don't actually know if either of those are true, though)
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Aug 20, 2020 12:38
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Angry Salami posted:...you know, it hadn't occurred to me how much Geordi's the common element in stories where people don't fit in on the Enterprise. Riker's got a surprising mean streak in him too, but it's usually for professional incompetence. He doesn't care if you're weird on your own time, but if he thinks it's affecting operations (Ro and Barclay) he doesn't have any time for it. Barry Foster posted:Yeah it's great. TNG is like a warm bubble bath for me because of this (and the fact that it was such a fundamental part of my childhood my brain basically formed around it). It's been lockdown comfort food for awhile. Yeah I think it had the right ideas mostly, but sometimes just tripped on itself in weird ways when writers brought in their current day line of thinking. Totally agree about the optimism though, I really wish I could find more (any?) media taking that approach today.
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Aug 20, 2020 12:44
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womb with a view posted:Riker's got a surprising mean streak in him too, but it's usually for professional incompetence. He doesn't care if you're weird on your own time, but if he thinks it's affecting operations (Ro and Barclay) he doesn't have any time for it. That's 100% the job of an effective XO, tbf
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Aug 20, 2020 12:49
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Barry Foster posted:Yeah it's great. TNG is like a warm bubble bath for me because of this (and the fact that it was such a fundamental part of my childhood my brain basically formed around it). It's been lockdown comfort food for awhile. To your reply, I completely agree. Sick of grim dark antihero bullshit. But also, the jeordi making an ai of the sexy ship engineer was an ep or two before this and was so funny today. Its wild how his bad with women-ness was portrayed. I watched it with my gf and she was like 'this is really weird', and I was like, yeah, it really fucken is
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Aug 20, 2020 13:06
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I mean I used to watch Octonauts with my kid and that has no interpersonal conflict and is pretty dang good Trek
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Aug 20, 2020 13:14
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Barry Foster posted:That's 100% the job of an effective XO, tbf Yeah that's probably why it doesn't come off as off-putting as Geordi can sometimes.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:14
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xerxus posted:Given what we know about he Ferengi, how possible is it for Rom to actually effectively change society? Every time someone tries to assassinate Rom he like bends over cause his shoes are untied and their shot hits like a giant bag of popcorn and everybody is up to their necks in popcorn and profits go up 200% cause everybody wants to be like the cooooool grand nagus they saw on TV.
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Aug 20, 2020 13:17
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I always felt like DS9 was just showing us more of what we had been told in TNG: That the federation is an utopia, but the galaxy is not. That there is a frontier, and frontier life is rough. That extraordinary people from the federation sometimes seek out frontier life, and are left to live and die with the consequences. The starfleet officers on DS9 are unique in that they're ostensibly meant to uphold federation and starfleet values while immersing themselves in frontier life, which is generally not the case with colonists, and independent explorers and traders, and the show plays with that contradiction. I don't believe these officers and their actions are meant to be completely representative of starfleet in general, because although the case can definitely be made that all people who go into starfleet are putting themselves in harms way, the people on DS9 sought out a very difficult assignment far from the utopia of the federation and that says something about them specifically. The focus on interstellar war in later seasons shifts the premise somewhat, and I don't really care for it as much, but showing the corrupting influence of war on starfleet/federation ideals have been a thing since TOS. thotsky fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 13:47
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SardonicTyrant posted:If I could change one thing from Voyager, it would be for the ship to suffer actual permanent damage, and then the crew did their best to repair it with whatever alien tech they could find, until it's a mishmash of like 5 different ships If I had to change something, it would be to strand the ship in the Gamma Quadrant instead of the Delta Quadrant. It would start out as a Starfleet deep space mission to another quadrant, then the war starts, they can't get home, and they have to run from the Dominion in the Gamma Quadrant's equivalent of Farscape's Uncharted Territories.
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Aug 20, 2020 14:34
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womb with a view posted:I do find it kind of jarring when you have plots where someone doesn't fit right into this perfect world though, and Geordi flips out on them. Like Barclay's first episode, or the one where Scotty shows up and Picard has to tell Geordi to be nice, or the one where Geordi makes a sexy holodeck simulation of a real person. You'd think to get to this utopian ideal you would have to have a basic understanding of things like social anxiety, or being old, or being a woman. Angry Salami posted:...you know, it hadn't occurred to me how much Geordi's the common element in stories where people don't fit in on the Enterprise. i always appreciated that he was really good friends with data and wesley tbh. the three of them were basically the dork table at lunch
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Aug 20, 2020 16:03
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Barry Foster posted:'No interpersonal conflict, everyone is perfect' is definitely mystifying though The TNG writers guide doesn't quite say that: quote:SHOW A SOMEWHAT BETTER KIND OF HUMAN THAN TODAY'S AVERAGE. Our continuing characters are the kind of people that the STAR TREK audience would like to be themselves. They are not perfect, but their flaws do not include falsehood, petty jealousies and the banal hypocrisies common in the Twentieth Century.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:21
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Everyone having free therapy their entire lives probably helps interpersonal relationships and allows people to be better friends with less conflict, but it definitely wouldn't fix everything. It's why the TNG crew feels happier than DS9 and Voyager: they actually have someone who knows how to work through the weird stress and trauma of being in space to help them do that, Voyager has turning the safeties off on the Holodeck, and DS9 has a bar.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:25
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curiousTerminal posted:Everyone having free therapy their entire lives probably helps interpersonal relationships and allows people to be better friends with less conflict, but it definitely wouldn't fix everything. It's why the TNG crew feels happier than DS9 and Voyager: they actually have someone who knows how to work through the weird stress and trauma of being in space to help them do that, Voyager has turning the safeties off on the Holodeck, and DS9 has a bar.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:26
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FlamingLiberal posted:Wasn't Neelix supposed to be the de facto ship's counselor originally
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Aug 20, 2020 23:39
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Another thing I'd change on Voyager: Lean in to the weird stuff happening to Harry Kim. He starts the series out as a wet blanket, by the end he's a weathered adventurer.
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Aug 21, 2020 00:23
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The TNG writers guide doesn't quite say that: "B-B-But I heard Gene Roddenberry was evil and dumb and didn't really create Star Trek!" It sounds like what they meant was that there wouldn't be dumb office politics on the ship, no backstabbing--basically not so different from TOS. Even Spock and McCoy would argue, but McCoy wasn't trying to get Spock fired because Spock kept turning up the heat in the rec room and suddenly since Spock came on board everyone in the lunch room ignored McCoy or something. I also wonder if there wasn't some trend about workplace drama on TV in the early 80s that made them say "yeah, none of that poo poo in the 24th century please." I would say there were a lot of flaws and a lot of humanity present in the show as it started. Picard was clearly treating Wesley like a child, and the arc was intended to be that Wesley was a prodigy who had potential. And I don't know for sure, but IIRC the history between Picard and Wesley's father, and guilt over Jack's death, might have been something they intended to explore from the beginning. There was also the seeds of an arc with emotions and flaws in the prior relationship with Troi and Riker--this is for sure because it was a 1:1 copy of the Ilya and Decker history in TMP and something that would have been explored. Now having said that, I can understand how a bunch of tv writers in the room might have felt constrained if they tried to do certain plots or character development only to have it shot down over and over to the point they felt "OK so Gene wants these to be perfect beige people with no flaws or emotions."
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Aug 21, 2020 00:26
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every time i think about it i accept that there might be flaws with how ds9 approached the morality of the federation or action sequences or the war at the end or a number of other things, but i am infinitely grateful it was made in the short span of time between tv shows that are blatantly old and outdated and prestige grimdark tv. theres no way that if the premise was approached today or even 10 years ago (ds9 lets say didnt exist at all) that it wouldn't be a catastrophic disaster
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Aug 21, 2020 00:44
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Aug 21, 2020 00:46
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I think people get muddled between "Roddenberry's apparent vision based on the notes that got into public release, like the visions for Earth's surface in the first TOS movie" and his disputes with the writing staff early in TNG, and the general thrust that we actually got, which seems to be like that writer's note of "people aren't perfect but they aren't just generic 20th century dipshits in space." It makes total sense to me, if you allow for a certain degree of myopia because he was first authored in the late 80s, for Geordi to be where he is. He's obviously got what it takes to be a talented and effective officer but he also has some weird quirks which are not necessarily disruptive in most circumstances but do come up in the context of some of the stressful environments on the Enterprise. And Geordi's nerd-rear end poo poo doesn't come up as a problem constantly. He makes his weirdo holo wife - which is weird - but it's not a running gag.
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Aug 21, 2020 00:56
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There was clearly a pretty extreme "we have evolved beyond such things" concept floating around somewhere in Gene's head post-TOS. The characters themselves said so on several occasions. Overall it was probably a good thing. The other writers had to fight hard against it, and the show got better when he couldn't be involved anymore, but it was probably better than the alternative.
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Aug 21, 2020 01:07
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Lower Decks is good and fun gently caress all you nerds  Edit: dammit I put this in the wrong thread
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Aug 21, 2020 01:34
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Real Lower Decks move there
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Aug 21, 2020 02:05
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curiousTerminal posted:Everyone having free therapy their entire lives probably helps interpersonal relationships and allows people to be better friends with less conflict, but it definitely wouldn't fix everything. It's why the TNG crew feels happier than DS9 and Voyager: they actually have someone who knows how to work through the weird stress and trauma of being in space to help them do that, Voyager has turning the safeties off on the Holodeck, and DS9 has a bar. In the later seasons, DS9 also had a Trill officer who was made a counselor because someone thought that several centuries of generic "life experience" is an acceptable substitute for actually studying how to be a proper therapist. And the last episode of Lower Decks got me thinking: Is it just me, or are humans and Vulcans the only species capable of realizing that if you're meeting a member of a totally different culture, and they do something you consider rude, that it might have been an innocent mistake?
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Aug 21, 2020 03:53
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I’m watching Shore Leave and it looks like Bones is rocking some eye shadow...?
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Aug 21, 2020 04:23
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60s TV makeup was fuckingawesome or horrible no in between
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Aug 21, 2020 04:43
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They pretty regularly talk about how the Andorians are a founding race of the federation and they're important and a big deal. Why the gently caress do we see like 4 Andorians in total outside of TOS (which I haven't really watched and I don't think had that many Andorian characters either) but tons of every other race? What is the deal with the Andorians?
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Aug 21, 2020 05:04
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Mr.Unique-Name posted:They pretty regularly talk about how the Andorians are a founding race of the federation and they're important and a big deal. Blue people with wiggly antennae are silly. Too silly! Green women with big bosoms though... that's very, very serious, and good
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Aug 21, 2020 05:07
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