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Marshal Radisic posted:There's room for a Ben Shapiro joke, but I'm in the same boat. PIC and LDS were the one-two punch that knocked out any hope that there would be something about this modern iteration of Trek I actually like, and the only bit of Trek media I still engage with regularly is Star Trek Online, which at this point I'm playing solely to tick off boxes. And yet I'm still posting in this thread, a slave to my dispassions. Why do you hate Lower Decks?
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Oct 29, 2021 00:59
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a neat cape posted:Top 5 DS9 My fave episode in P much all of Trek.
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Oct 29, 2021 01:00
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Zedd posted:My fave episode in P much all of Trek. Like Rocks and Shoals it’s one of those episodes that doesn’t make it onto a lot of lists but it always deserves to be on them. Maybe even more so because it’s a such a good guest star episode.
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Oct 29, 2021 01:50
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Hey, Prodigy was pretty decent for what it is.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:27
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I'm thinking maybe Star Trek shouldn't have waited this long to dip its toe back into animation. And that's got me wondering what a Trek cartoon would've looked like back in the 90s.
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Oct 29, 2021 02:43
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Kibayasu posted:Like Rocks and Shoals it’s one of those episodes that doesn’t make it onto a lot of lists but it always deserves to be on them. Maybe even more so because it’s a such a good guest star episode. Rocks and Shoals has the problem of being part 2 of 6 near the end of the show but the A plot with the Jem'Hadar is fantastic and its one of Kira's best episodes- the repeated shot of her morning routine is great
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Oct 29, 2021 02:48
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Tighclops posted:ST: Picard fundamentally killed my lifelong interest in the entire Star Trek universe and it is for that reason that I will warn anyone away from it at any opportunity. Like, it was the final slug through my heart after being riddled with bullets but still. poo poo's terrible, no redeeming qualities after the first two episodes or so. Go watch Dune instead. But Picard is in Dune
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Oct 29, 2021 02:50
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John Wick of Dogs posted:But Picard is in Dune Picard is no longer Patrick Stewart. Modern Patrick Stewart is terrible and should never be allowed to give creative input by being a ~producer~
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Oct 29, 2021 03:05
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Patrick Stewart apparently always wanted to be more action focused as a captian and his rising star power in the movies shows this pretty explicitly. The picard most people like is a softened version of genes hard nosed serious diplomat and archeologist turned star captian.
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Oct 29, 2021 03:58
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Axe-man posted:Patrick Stewart apparently always wanted to be more action focused as a captian and his rising star power in the movies shows this pretty explicitly. jeeves posted:Picard is no longer Patrick Stewart.  Yeah once the movies start, Picard stops being Picard. Picard the show just shows it way more starkly if you somehow missed that Patrick Stewart demanded that there be a dune buggy in Star Trek.
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Oct 29, 2021 04:22
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StashAugustine posted:Rocks and Shoals has the problem of being part 2 of 6 near the end of the show but the A plot with the Jem'Hadar is fantastic and its one of Kira's best episodes- the repeated shot of her morning routine is great Rocks And Shoals is the best of the S6 arc, and Tacking Into The Wind is the best of the S7 finale arc.
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Oct 29, 2021 05:06
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https://twitter.com/TheGr8Aspie/status/1453940992218783744
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Oct 29, 2021 05:52
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Bullshit, Riker's into jazz and not a bolshy arsehole, he wouldn't be into coke, he'd be into weed and viagra (and maybe heroin too, that's how a lot of the old jazz guys did  )
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Oct 29, 2021 06:31
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Barry Foster posted:Bullshit, Riker's into jazz and not a bolshy arsehole, he wouldn't be into coke, he'd be into weed and viagra We know first hand from Mariner now that Riker used to hit her up with all sorts of illegal poo poo that they'd confiscate on the Enterprise-D, so yes. To all of it.
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Oct 29, 2021 06:50
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Arivia posted:Why do you hate Lower Decks? I suppose the simple answer is that I don't find it funny. I watched the first season of LDS save for the last two episodes, and while I thought the show was cute, I realized I wasn't enjoying myself that much. When I think of Trek-as-comedy, I tend to think of Peter David's novels from the 1990s, where we either had the TNG crew put in ridiculous situations and having their normal straitlaced composure tested, or the New Frontier books where we had a crew that was weirder than Picard's, but they had all their own little idiosyncrasies and they were strong enough that they could be put in more serious situations and function just as well. With LDS I felt like the show had set a lower bar for itself and was content to stay there. A lot of the plots were either stock sitcom situations or remixes and rehashes of old Trek plots. I never felt like the characters were strong enough to "switch gears" and be just as compelling in a dramatic situation, or that their own personalities could be a source of comedy instead of their reactions to the plot. (Did they ever give Rutherford and Tendi any characterization beyond "eager naive nerds"?) Now I've heard a lot of people saying that the show greatly improves in the final two episodes of the first season, but from the dribs and drabs I've been hearing about newer episodes it still sounds like a lot of the stuff I didn't like about the first season is still there. LDS is not my idea of a Star Trek comedy, and I didn't find anything compelling about the characters, so I haven't felt any desire to come back. I also feel like Trek should have stayed dead after 2004, and these days its primary purpose is not to tell stories, but to serve as an Intellectual Property to be squeezed into different demographic molds, seasoned with thematic flavor packets, and served to various target markets in order to increase viewership and revenue on Paramount Plus, just like everything else these days. But that's a point everyone and their dog has made, and it's definitely colored by my own depression, so I'll just leave it at that. I will say that I appreciate that the showrunners of LDS actually like the older eras of Trek and are trying to make something that emulates it. It certainly beats DSC and PIC, where the showrunners seem to desperately wish they were writing for The Expanse instead.
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Oct 29, 2021 06:52
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Finally gave Lower Decks a shot after accidentally clicking this thread and seeing the Riker clip, loving it much more than Discovery and Picard  e: Just finished S2, we finally got to see Cetacean Ops 
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Oct 29, 2021 06:52
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Marshal Radisic posted:I suppose the simple answer is that I don't find it funny. I watched the first season of LDS save for the last two episodes, and while I thought the show was cute, I realized I wasn't enjoying myself that much. When I think of Trek-as-comedy, I tend to think of Peter David's novels from the 1990s, where we either had the TNG crew put in ridiculous situations and having their normal straitlaced composure tested, or the New Frontier books where we had a crew that was weirder than Picard's, but they had all their own little idiosyncrasies and they were strong enough that they could be put in more serious situations and function just as well. With LDS I felt like the show had set a lower bar for itself and was content to stay there. A lot of the plots were either stock sitcom situations or remixes and rehashes of old Trek plots. I never felt like the characters were strong enough to "switch gears" and be just as compelling in a dramatic situation, or that their own personalities could be a source of comedy instead of their reactions to the plot. (Did they ever give Rutherford and Tendi any characterization beyond "eager naive nerds"?) Now I've heard a lot of people saying that the show greatly improves in the final two episodes of the first season, but from the dribs and drabs I've been hearing about newer episodes it still sounds like a lot of the stuff I didn't like about the first season is still there. LDS is not my idea of a Star Trek comedy, and I didn't find anything compelling about the characters, so I haven't felt any desire to come back. I really enjoyed both seasons of Lower Decks and I disagree with you that it didn't go anywhere, but you've thought out your opinion well and I respect it. Thank you for taking the time and effort to share it, from one severe depressive to another.
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Oct 29, 2021 07:11
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Marshal Radisic posted:I suppose the simple answer is that I don't find it funny. I watched the first season of LDS save for the last two episodes, and while I thought the show was cute, I realized I wasn't enjoying myself that much. When I think of Trek-as-comedy, I tend to think of Peter David's novels from the 1990s, where we either had the TNG crew put in ridiculous situations and having their normal straitlaced composure tested, or the New Frontier books where we had a crew that was weirder than Picard's, but they had all their own little idiosyncrasies and they were strong enough that they could be put in more serious situations and function just as well. With LDS I felt like the show had set a lower bar for itself and was content to stay there. A lot of the plots were either stock sitcom situations or remixes and rehashes of old Trek plots. I never felt like the characters were strong enough to "switch gears" and be just as compelling in a dramatic situation, or that their own personalities could be a source of comedy instead of their reactions to the plot. (Did they ever give Rutherford and Tendi any characterization beyond "eager naive nerds"?) Now I've heard a lot of people saying that the show greatly improves in the final two episodes of the first season, but from the dribs and drabs I've been hearing about newer episodes it still sounds like a lot of the stuff I didn't like about the first season is still there. LDS is not my idea of a Star Trek comedy, and I didn't find anything compelling about the characters, so I haven't felt any desire to come back. I on the other hand want cartoon to be liked. WHY YOU NO LIKE CARTOON. WE LOOK FOR THINGS. WE LOOK FOR THINGS THAT LOOK LIKE TREK THINGS. CARTOON LOOK LIKE TREK.
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Oct 29, 2021 07:41
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I grew up in a Trek household and have been continuously watching TNG since before I can remember; everyone in my immediate family can name a TNG episode within 30 seconds of its cold open. My family has never been that interested in DS9 though, and I have watched DS9 in its entirety only twice: once as a child when it was live on air (and in fact I only caught the latter half as it premiered, and saw the rest as reruns aired between seasons) and then again when I was ~16 when it was on Spike TV. In fact, DS9 is why I own a VCR, even at the time (2005 or so) they were considered obsolete, but I acquired one so I could tape DS9 episodes while I was at school, since they aired at like 2pm or something. What's so interesting about the way children consume media is that confusing them/letting them lose the finer details of the plot is really not a big deal; kids are told to just accept poo poo that makes no sense to them all the time, they're quite practiced at just powering through without a full understanding if they're sufficiently entertained. When I was watching DS9 in the 90s, I liked the characters so I was content to sit through the talky bits. My favorite characters were Bashir and Quark. I liked Quark because he was funny, and I liked Bashir, I don't remember specifically why but I think part of it was that even though I knew all the main characters on the show were adults, he seemed the most like a kid. My teenage rewatch was such a strange experience. I ended up discovering what parts of the show I had remembered correctly and which things I thought were part of the show were actually confabulations. It turns out that I had mistakenly remembered the status quo of season 7 as being like a third of the show (I think this must have been because I was 9 when it aired, so my brain absorbed it better than earlier seasons or something.) A lot of episodes I thought happened around the final years of the show were actually season 1 or 2 episodes; I suppose I must have thought that because I caught them on reruns between seasons, as there's no way I could have seen them on first airing. So one of the bigger surprises was what an annoying dork Bashir was through most of the early half of the show. And I thought Quark's gimmick wore out its welcome pretty quickly. I also was only then able to understand the political nuances of Bajor having been occupied, and exactly why Kira hates Dukat so much, and so on. Also, I gained a healthy appreciation for Garak that time around. I honestly did not register him as a character as a kid, or I may have thought he was Dukat in different clothes. But I think the most interesting new realization was, as a kid I thought Dukat was very bad. As I was rewatching as a teen, I started to think "well maybe he's actually more morally gray..." and then at the end having to conclude that no, I got it right the first time. I decided to revisit the show again recently, some 15 years after the last time I watched it. Going in I kind of assumed that there were no more revelations to glean, since I grasped the subtleties of the in-story politics and intrigue and so on. But what's really interesting on this rewatch is that, while this time my memory of the plot of each episode has been basically perfect, what's changed is my interpretations of it. In some cases it's once again going back to basics. You know what, Quark really is funny. But in other cases it's getting a deeper and richer understanding of characters than was possible as a teen with no life experience. So anyway, Odo is a fascist 
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Oct 29, 2021 08:16
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If it helps (it probably won't), remember that Star Trek's original idea of showing a better future and a united humanity was only a side benefit from Roddenberry's main motivation: making a shitload of money and having lots of sex. In that respect, the current producers are just following his example.
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Oct 29, 2021 08:23
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I'm in the "LDS picks up in the last episode of Season 1 and is actually good in Season 2" camp, but I don't think it's changed enough that you'd enjoy it. Mariner and Boimler both have had a fair amount of work done on their characters to the point where I think when the show switches to drama they both work just as well. I'd say better, actually - scared but resolute Boimler is far better than constant suck-up Boimler. Tendi's had a bit of character work done but could use some more, and Rutherford.. well, they're going somewhere with him in Season 3 for sure. I would suggest perhaps watching the finale of Season 2 as if it was a stand-alone episode of a Trek series you hadn't seen before.
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Oct 29, 2021 09:58
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Delsaber posted:I'm thinking maybe Star Trek shouldn't have waited this long to dip its toe back into animation. And that's got me wondering what a Trek cartoon would've looked like back in the 90s. Imagine if it was designed by Bruce Timm. Imagine how wide Riker's shoulders would be Payndz posted:If it helps (it probably won't), remember that Star Trek's original idea of showing a better future and a united humanity was only a side benefit from Roddenberry's main motivation: making a shitload of money and having lots of sex. In that respect, the current producers are just following his example. And yet old trek rules and new trek drools, almost like there's more to the equation than horny dudes getting paid?? Also this is revisionist bullshit, it wasn't the first time Roddenberry tried producing progressive morality plays on television, everyone always gets the priority backwards.
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Oct 29, 2021 10:20
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Tendi's had a bit of character work done but could use some more, and Rutherford.. well, they're going somewhere with him in Season 3 for sure. I'd reverse that - Rutherford has had genuine character work done on him, Tendi has had background added but still no character and I suspect they realised they were struggling to write her into situations which is why she got a career move. S1 was a show on quite uncertain ground, S2 they found their footing a bit, I'm reasonably confident that S3 will be even stronger. I criticise LDS a fair bit in the other thread for not being nearly as funny as it thinks it is, but I think that's actually a subset of a broader issue I think the show has in that the quality across and within episodes varies wildly. So on the one hand you'll have an easter egg reference to a single scene in TAS that would have taken dozens of hours to research, or a piece of background detail that runs through an entire season to come into focus in the finale, but set alongside jokes that sound like they wrote down the first idea that came out of someone's mouth in the writer's room and just left it at that.
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Oct 29, 2021 11:00
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Alchenar posted:So on the one hand you'll have an easter egg reference to a single scene in TAS that would have taken dozens of hours to research Or they knew off the top of their heads because they're the biggest nerds there are and also even if they didn't it's all indexed on memory alpha and instantly available to flip through the episode so nothing is more than a minute away. And I think maybe it's less they don't spend effort on jokes and more your sense if humour doesn't align with theirs. Humour is the form which least has a simple quality scale.
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Oct 29, 2021 11:09
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Payndz posted:If it helps (it probably won't), remember that Star Trek's original idea of showing a better future and a united humanity was only a side benefit from Roddenberry's main motivation: making a shitload of money and having lots of sex. Also just acting out a whole bunch of navy fanboy stuff while claiming not to be military.
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Oct 29, 2021 12:35
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McSpanky posted:Imagine if it was designed by Bruce Timm. Imagine how wide Riker's shoulders would be 
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Oct 29, 2021 14:02
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Marshal Radisic posted:I also feel like Trek should have stayed dead after 2004, and these days its primary purpose is not to tell stories, but to serve as an Intellectual Property to be squeezed into different demographic molds, seasoned with thematic flavor packets, and served to various target markets in order to increase viewership and revenue on Paramount Plus, just like everything else these days. But that's a point everyone and their dog has made, and it's definitely colored by my own depression, so I'll just leave it at that. I will say that I appreciate that the showrunners of LDS actually like the older eras of Trek and are trying to make something that emulates it. It certainly beats DSC and PIC, where the showrunners seem to desperately wish they were writing for The Expanse instead. That's a very weird cutoff point, partway through the final season of Enterprise. Definitely the format of the stories have changed; Lower Decks usually fits a full A, B, and C plot into half the time of an earlier Trek show. They still tell stories, and they're often less interested in the original series' type of stories where they just come across some weird new space thing or a crazy new planet every episode and more into building a lasting world and characters to play around with, but that shift started in like the later seasons of TNG, and later shows like DS9 would drop the exploration of planets and anomalies entirely, while some like Enterprise made that exploration much more explicitly inward-looking to barely examine the aliens they meet and just show off the main cast and how they're developing elements for the later franchise. Generally I am a fan of the idea of letting old IPs/franchises lie, not to hold them sacred, but to free up all that money and creative energy for original projects. Although larger franchises have their own advantages of giving writers the ability leapfrog off eachother to create bigger worlds and concepts than they could on just one show's run. None of them, considering how they make a big deal of using fake alcohol that won't get them drunk. Also Yar would stab them to death.
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Oct 29, 2021 15:24
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Payndz posted:If it helps (it probably won't), remember that Star Trek's original idea of showing a better future and a united humanity was only a side benefit from Roddenberry's main motivation: making a shitload of money and having lots of sex. Just like Zefram Cochrane 
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Oct 29, 2021 16:12
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Xibanya posted:So anyway, Odo is a fascist One of my big shifts from my recent DS9 rewatch is that I went from "Odo is one of the very few cops I would trust if I knew him in real life" to "I still like Odo but nope,  and I'd be a fool to trust him".This probably has more to do with my evolving perspective of the real world than with my perspective of DS9, but there it is.
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Oct 29, 2021 16:35
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Khanstant fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 17:15
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StashAugustine posted:Rocks and Shoals has the problem of being part 2 of 6 near the end of the show but the A plot with the Jem'Hadar is fantastic and its one of Kira's best episodes- the repeated shot of her morning routine is great
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Oct 29, 2021 19:14
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They never did much with her character, which is probably for the best as otherwise we don’t get Kai Winn https://twitter.com/startrek/status/1454133612169678849?s=21
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Oct 29, 2021 19:36
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Don't worry, she'll be alive again in a few hours. RIP, best Kai
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Oct 29, 2021 19:59
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Lower Decks leaps over the bar set by DISCO and PICARD in that it actually resembles something I'd call Star Trek, and more or less is along the lines of Orville in that sense. But that probably just says more about my distaste for DISCO/PICARD than anything else.
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Oct 29, 2021 20:00
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLB9jfvN6og
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Oct 29, 2021 20:03
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Fidel Cuckstro posted:Lower Decks leaps over the bar set by DISCO and PICARD in that it actually resembles something I'd call Star Trek, and more or less is along the lines of Orville in that sense. But that probably just says more about my distaste for DISCO/PICARD than anything else. There is just something ...hateful and anti-humanist about them that's hard to articulate. Real Walking Dead vibes, which got stale quick on WD and is a non-starter in Star Trek. Like they're cargo-culting Prestige TV poo poo and Prestige TV has explicit torture, war crimes, and mega-death stakes so we gotta do that too. I still stand by my "internalizing 9/11 broke brains in star trek writer's rooms" theory. E: Before any clever dans say 'same as it ever was" I'm aware these subjects were touched upon in Good Trek as well but there's just a abandon one could mistake for gleeful wallowing in most post-2010 trek wheras in the 90's the emotional core was still with the human spirit and the resolve of the characters. Weird times when the best Treks currently going are the Cartoon Joke Trek and the Ersatz Store-Brand Trek made by a racist cartoon man. Owlbear Camus fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Oct 29, 2021 |
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Oct 29, 2021 20:10
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As modern Trek goes, I just watched Orville, and I think it does a pretty good job telling the same kind of stories TNG did, just in a different (and often less serious) universe. And it doesn't have 25 seasons of continuity to care about, so it can do wild twists without it feeling like they destroyed something, like Picard and the Romulans.
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Oct 29, 2021 20:11
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Owlbear Camus posted:There is just something ...hateful and anti-humanist about them that's hard to articulate. Real Walking Dead vibes, which got stale quick on WD and is a non-starter in Star Trek. Like they're cargo-culting Prestige TV poo poo and Prestige TV has explicit torture, war crimes, and mega-death stakes so we gotta do that too. JJ/NuTrek reminds of when torture-porn horror films made a lot of money out of no where, and suddenly producers must have been like “quick make a bunch of torture porn too! That’s what ALL of horror is!” Except Picard and Disco is loving torture to watch, so I don’t exactly know where my analogy was going with that.
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Oct 29, 2021 20:37
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LividLiquid posted:I'm not sure if you're confused or I am, but Rocks and Shoals was near the beginning of Season 6 and wasn't part of the huge-rear end season 7 finale arc. Yeah by "near the end" I meant "the second to last season"
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Oct 29, 2021 21:08
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FlamingLiberal posted:They never did much with her character, which is probably for the best as otherwise we don’t get Kai Winn In theory they could've brought her back to be on the show every so often and characters could make pilgrimages to her little world to seek advice from the former Kai, but I guess that would've been complicated and superfluous to plot out. Possibly the Dominion stopped by her planet to turn off the immortality nanobots as part of wiping out outposts from the Alpha Quadrant and leave the planet dead forever.
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Oct 29, 2021 21:59
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