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MrMojok posted:What is the best-looking ship of all time? Non-Trek. I guess it might be the carrier from Space: Above and Beyond. John F. Kennedy-class SCVN. Trek wise that's always gonna be a tough tie between the Connie-refit and the Excelsior.
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Jan 31, 2023 10:22
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Angry Salami posted:The Voyager book also, I think, had the problem of being one of the first Voyager novels - it came out while the first season was still airing. So I suspect most of the errors were because the author had, at most, seen the pilot and read a couple of early scripts. Not the best choice to make the Voyager novel the grand finale of the series. It was one of the first, but it came out between seasons 2 and 3. So even allowing for lead time, he probably had several full episodes, if not the entire first season, available. Astroman posted:Also a point brought up in the other thread proves what I'm saying here about how TNG is slowly becoming fair game for retcons and "not letting one line in a 40 year old show get in the way of our writers telling a story"--they changed the entire origin story of how Picard met Guinan and completely ignored Time's Arrow, probably because the writers hadn't seen it. While I do care about continuity and notice when it gets sidestepped, I tend to agree with Nimoy on poo poo like this. 
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Jan 31, 2023 13:25
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ashpanash posted:You can reason with one guy in a big dumb rubber suit and you can reason with Hugh, but you can't reason with the TNG Borg collectively. It might have been more interesting - though I'm dubious of the value of a story that's asking the question of "What if infanticide was alright just this once? - if the episode had shown any interest in raising any questions. But it doesn't. The crew just go straight to xenocide as the only solution without anyone even considering other options.
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Jan 31, 2023 13:46
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MikeJF posted:They knew, Guinan in the alt didn't know Picard because Confederacy Picard never went back in time. That was the writing intention, at least. Counterpoint: the Bus Punk grabbed his neck when Seven yelled at him, seemingly remembering the treatment he got from Spock, who never would have went back in time if the Confederacy future occurred.  (I know I'm reaching, but I'm also trying to remember if the "rules" of time travel and branching timelines in Star Trek work this way--but besides knowing the lore, if there's anyone who knows time travel it's Matalas so...  )
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Jan 31, 2023 13:48
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Or the more likely explanation is they ignored Time's Arrow because they didn't want to acknowledge it. Because they're hacks.
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Jan 31, 2023 13:54
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Yeah it'd be much better writing if Picard stopped for five minutes to recite Memory Alpha trivia to the audience to make sure continuity checkboxes are ticked Or you could simply observe the obvious in how Picard expects Guinan to recognize him, then is surprised she does not.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:10
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The Punk on the Bus also appears in the MCU, so clearly he's a multiversal constant and unaffected by changes to a single timeline.
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Jan 31, 2023 14:37
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He's in the Marvel Comics Universe?
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Jan 31, 2023 14:42
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Astroman posted:(I know I'm reaching, but I'm also trying to remember if the "rules" of time travel and branching timelines in Star Trek work this way--but besides knowing the lore, if there's anyone who knows time travel it's Matalas so... There is literally no consistency to the way universes and timelines work in Star Trek. It's very different across many different examples. I remember one of the EU things (I think it was a comic) said that the Federation eventually figured out branching-looping-rewriting theory which said 'it can work a bunch of different ways depending on the circumstances' and that's honestly the best the franchise could ever do at this point, there's been so many different ways we've seen it work. On a similar type of explanation to what Matalis said, I remember Simon Pegg saying at one point re: Beyond that after the Kelvin universe diverged, it ended up changing before the point of divergence too because of all the time travel events that would have happened later changing subtly, so it's now a fully distinct timeline. MikeJF fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 15:00
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I watched the first season of TOS and the TOS movies as a kid long before I ever watched much TNG or DS9; I didn't discover those until I was in high school/college. TOS was a major part of my childhood, and so for a long time, I resisted attempts to update it for the modern world. In the last couple of years, though, I'll occasionally catch TOS episodes on Saturday nights when they air on MeTV, and the older I get and the more separated in time we get from TOS' original run, the more sympathetic I am to people who want to update it. The flaws, which I mostly overlooked as a ten year kid, are a lot harder to ignore as a 38 year old adult. I still love TOS, and it was head and shoulders better than the kind of scifi you got at the time, but it was still a cheaply made 1960s TV show. I definitely get why they updated the aesthetics.
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Jan 31, 2023 16:31
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To be honest that's why I kind of love TOS as we move further away from when it was made -- its kind of become a time capsule to a forgotten age. E: For better or worse, as people have been bringing up below Feldegast42 fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 16:44
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The gender politics are the worst aged bits from TOS. Evil Transporter Kirk sexually assaults Yeoman Rand - and sure, he's an evil transporter copy. But Spock tells her at the end of the episode - "actually, I bet you kind of liked rapey evil transporter kirk, right?"... 
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Jan 31, 2023 16:58
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TengenNewsEditor posted:The gender politics are the worst aged bits from TOS. Yes, this is the worst moment of TOS, hands down.
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Jan 31, 2023 16:59
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Yeah it's all the more jarring because up to that point, they actually treat it pretty seriously as a sexual assault, almost impressively so for the time. Then they just completely blow it.DoubleCakes posted:I watched that Undiscovered Country movie and it was a good time. There could be worse sendoffs for the TOS crew than that. Oh don't worry, there will be!
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Jan 31, 2023 17:03
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I think the worst bit was in this utopian egalitarian society, sorry, you broads just can't be captains, now move along toots. God what a shitshow turnabout intruder was lol
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Jan 31, 2023 17:14
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I still love TOS, and it was head and shoulders better than the kind of scifi you got at the time, but it was still a cheaply made 1960s TV show. I definitely get why they updated the aesthetics. Eh, I don't think anyone's advocated for 'throw up the cardboard sets that look identical to 1966'. There's updates and there's updates.
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Jan 31, 2023 18:17
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People gotta be realistic about the kind of society that produced Star Trek, instead of holding it to moral standards that we can invoke as a direct consequence of the social reform movements that led to mass-media opinion-making like Star Trek itself. Women were not allowed to serve on US Navy ships until a few years before Star Trek’s run began. None would actually command a ship till the run of TNG. Star Trek was walking a tightrope of public opinion by touching on ideas like women in the military, and while it was mostly far less daring in its gender politics than its contemporary Raumpatrouille (a genuinely cheap 60s show, if you want to see one—Star Trek was quite expensively made, too much so for its own good), and even though it often resulted in cringe, I have to respect the effort in telling stories that dared to discuss questions of sexual politics at all in an era where there was a literal code saying that you couldn’t portray divorce or “illicit” sex in a positive light on American TV. Like, Spock’s little joke is obviously crass and inappropriate (much like his more common end-of-episode racial banter) and goes deep into unfunny territory because of what actually happened to Whitney while she was on the show, but it’s not out of nowhere, and it’s not an argument that raping women is good and comical actually. It ties directly into the point of the episode, that we all have these primal animalistic sexual desires we don’t act on because it would be wrong, but also that this is not in itself shameful but a natural thing—for women as much as men. Maybe they should do a twist-retake of it on SNW, like with the season finale’s version of “Balance of Terror”. Let Rand be the good/evil one this time. I’m sure they’d do better treating such a sensitive topic nowadays. skasion fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 19:01
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Angry Salami posted:It might have been more interesting - though I'm dubious of the value of a story that's asking the question of "What if infanticide was alright just this once? - if the episode had shown any interest in raising any questions. But it doesn't. The crew just go straight to xenocide as the only solution without anyone even considering other options. Like the Crystalline Entity that definitely performed infanticide? quote:TNG had more compassion for the crystalline entity and that thing was a global genocidal monster. Picard comparing the Crystalline entity to a 'blue whale' was a loving whopper of a false analogy, considering that a Blue Whale isn't (a far as we know, at any rate) gobbling down sapient creatures. But, you know, you can ding me for being a moral monster I suppose, but if babby is actively trying to (and in some cases succeeding to) kill me and my crew and it's close quarters and I don't have a whole bunch of time or resources to set up an elaborate system of clever traps, then babby becomes target, regardless of how babby is formed.
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Jan 31, 2023 19:10
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skasion posted:People gotta be realistic about the kind of society that produced Star Trek, instead of holding it to moral standards that we can invoke as a direct consequence of the social reform movements that led to mass-media opinion-making like Star Trek itself. Women were not allowed to serve on US Navy ships until a few years before Star Trek’s run began. None would actually command a ship till the run of TNG.
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Jan 31, 2023 19:14
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Fun fact: the first woman CO of a USN aircraft carrier - which at the time of TNG I would argue is the equivalent of Starfleet's Galaxy-class - took command in 2021. She was tapped for that role at least 5 years before. A CVN captain has to be nuke qualified and do a tour as Chief Engineer on something nuclear powered. That takes years to set up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knLdtg2e28U&t=12s
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Jan 31, 2023 19:34
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ashpanash posted:Like the Crystalline Entity that definitely performed infanticide? I mean you can extrapolate this out into the real world, there are cases of kids as young as 6 years old bringing guns to school and shooting people. Anyone with a gun is potentially lethally dangerous, are you really saying cops should just dome a 6 year old child with a gun in his hands on sight before trying something else, or even discussing an attempt to try literally any other course of action or the ethics of it? I mean that is, yes, something I would consider quite monstrous. Now, our real world cops love shooting kids, sure, but I sort of expect slightly better out of our utopian future society and narrative good guys. I mean the Jem'hadar were the backbone of death and destruction in the alpha quadrant, but you didn't see Sisko jam an ice pick into a Jem'hadar baby as soon as he had the chance. The Xindi were trying to exterminate humanity but we are still told its wrong to just let their children die because they look monstrous to us. Its not even like they had one single conversation sitting down where someone said "this is a sentient being, and an infant, we shouldn't kill it, but we're out of every other option and we regrettably have to try and stop it even if that means its death". There was never even a second of concern given to it. The extent of the episode was the writers room going "hey wouldn't it be cool to do an Alien spoof?" "hah totally, hey lets just make it the Gorn, that will be cool right? People love the Gorn". I mean picture that same episode, but its a 5 year old child actor in klingon makeup with a phaser rifle shooting at the enterprise crew, and they freeze him and bash in his skull without any discussion of doing otherwise, because he's dangerous with that phaser. Reads pretty different, yeah?
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Jan 31, 2023 19:37
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Tom Guycot posted:I mean you can extrapolate this out into the real world, there are cases of kids as young as 6 years old bringing guns to school and shooting people. Anyone with a gun is potentially lethally dangerous, are you really saying cops should just dome a 6 year old child with a gun in his hands on sight before trying something else, or even discussing an attempt to try literally any other course of action or the ethics of it? if every single 6-year-old in existence had a gun and was instinctively predisposed to shoot anybody it sees without reason then yeah I would say open season lol Like I appreciate that it is a complete retcon of a pretty well-known alien, and I agree that it wasn't a great episode of Trek overall, but every single aspect of the setup of that episode strongly implied that these are unreasonable, lethal monsters who have brutally murdered a colony and are now trying to kill the crew. The only concrete evidence they have for what they are dealing with is a survivor who describes them in every way as being horrifying soulless abominations who exist only to kill and inflict suffering and fear e: like IMO the issue here is not that the crew wasn't nice enough to the horrifying alien monsters trying to eat/impregnate them, it's that the writers thought "what if we literally just did Alien" was a good basis for a Trek episode. Nobody asks why the Nostromo crew didn't try to communicate peacefully with the Xenomorphs. Snow Cone Capone fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jan 31, 2023 |
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Jan 31, 2023 19:58
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I mean it was the writers choice to make their super generic monster of the week the infant child of a space faring sentient species that were previously shown to be misunderstood. They sat down and wrote a story putting guns in the hands of rabid 6 year olds because they wanted to have a fun episode about shooting kids consequence free. Any humanizing of the Gorn would have crippled that episode and shown how hosed up it is, so they had to go over the top and actively dehumanize an established sentient species to make it ok to kill their children. Thats really messed up for Star Trek, which has always been about humanizing things we don't understand.
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Jan 31, 2023 20:18
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mllaneza posted:She was tapped for that role at least 5 years before. A CVN captain has to be nuke qualified and do a tour as Chief Engineer on something nuclear powered. That takes years to set up. I'm aware - my ship's CO was a fighter jock who was on carrier command track, so they gave him our AOE so he had deep-draft command experience too. I just looked him up out of curiosity. He retired with 2 stars and became a VP at Boeing.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:00
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In the mid-20th century a piece of media was created that starred a reptilian monster as the antagonist. The "monster" was clearly portrayed by a man in a big, clunky rubber suit that he could hardly move in. Even given the primitive nature of the special effects it was still appreciated by audiences and managed to become iconic in its own right. The real draw of this story, however, were the messages it carried that resonate with us even today. Decades later a different group of people created an update to this story. Now with the aid of computer graphics the monster could be portrayed in a completely different fashion. Gone were the days of rubber suits and slow, lumbering steps. Now the monster could move quickly and gracefully and be an obviously far greater threat than before! The stories they could tell now were sure to be far more dramatic and exciting, finally realising the promise those earlier effects could not deliver on. Interestingly, part of the update to this story was also a sudden shift of focus to the danger the monster could pose if it was allowed to breed. Its offspring were lethal from the moment they were born and needed to wiped out to the last or humanity was doomed. Some say this was just the creators taking too much influence from another piece of science fiction media released inbetween the original story and the reimagining and aping it shamelessly, but what do those people know? The original was slow and cringe and this modern version is cool and based, grandpa! I'm sure time will prove that the reimagined version is far superior in every way (just look at the graphics for proof!) and the original will be quickly forgotten by all but the most nostalgia-poisoned of us.
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Jan 31, 2023 21:04
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Anyways, have you guys seen the teaser for the next Godzilla movie? When it stomped on the T. Rex skeleton in the museum, like wow, I got chills bro! This is gonna be way better than that goofy 50s crap!
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Jan 31, 2023 21:07
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I loved that awful 90's godzilla film as a child 
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Jan 31, 2023 21:15
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Tom Guycot posted:I loved that awful 90's godzilla film as a child https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIUAC03YMlA
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Jan 31, 2023 21:20
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Tom Guycot posted:I mean it was the writers choice to make their super generic monster of the week the infant child of a space faring sentient species that were previously shown to be misunderstood. They sat down and wrote a story putting guns in the hands of rabid 6 year olds because they wanted to have a fun episode about shooting kids consequence free. Any humanizing of the Gorn would have crippled that episode and shown how hosed up it is, so they had to go over the top and actively dehumanize an established sentient species to make it ok to kill their children. Just off the top of my head in TNG Lore and the Crystaline Entity are both just assholes and in Voyager it's widely agreed making Species 8472 sympathetic was a huge flub, Star Trek's never been above the occasional straight monster episode
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Jan 31, 2023 21:35
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No Dignity posted:Just off the top of my head in TNG Lore and the Crystaline Entity are both just assholes and in Voyager it's widely agreed making Species 8472 sympathetic was a huge flub, Star Trek's never been above the occasional straight monster episode Lower Decks 5x05: Tendi gets super-excited when a junior Crystalline Entity comes aboard the Cerritos as an exchange student.
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Jan 31, 2023 22:40
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If we're going down this moral thought exercise. Given what we know about the ages of various species in star trek, what is the appropriate age in which to kill them? Vulcan's are double our lifespan, does that mean a 35 year old is still a child and should be tried as a juvenile? Ocampa are only 1/10 of our lifespan. That means that 2 year old can be straight up shot without mercy? How do we qualify the stage of a species lifecycle where it becomes ok in the story to kill them? We know for a FACT that there were maturation chambers on board that Borg cube in Best of Both worlds. So, Picard is a filthy baby murder too. You can't tell me that they couldn't have seperated those infants from the collective early before their brains developed and then had them grow as individuals. Then he did it again in First Contact.
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Jan 31, 2023 23:32
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bull3964 posted:If we're going down this moral thought exercise. But murdering children is Picard's favorite pastime!
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Jan 31, 2023 23:37
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No Dignity posted:Just off the top of my head in TNG Lore and the Crystaline Entity are both just assholes and in Voyager it's widely agreed making Species 8472 sympathetic was a huge flub, Star Trek's never been above the occasional straight monster episode Its a bad example to use since the Crystaline entity was an ancient being, and on top of that we are explicitly told despite all the horror it has caused, the person who murdered it was in the wrong and did a bad thing. Once again it was an inhuman creature they were just starting to realize they might be able to communicate with and thus humanize the unknown and scary, like so much of Star Trek. Even tar monster they tried to reason with. Dehumanizing the known is just... whats the point? What do you get out of it? What interesting moral message or philosophical idea was gained by dehumanizing a people to make a lovely Alien knock off? If they bring back the Horta in season 2 to have their newborns do a crappy remake of The Thing as a vicious monster they need to kill, what does that improve? Thats not to say Star Trek has never done monster episodes, they certainly have done plenty. Its just frustrating because the Gorn could have just been a "monster of the week" evil alien Kirk needed to fight, roll credits, and in fact Arena was relying on their monster movie appearance to make the audience along with the crew see them as "monster of the week to battle", so that it could then pull the rug out and show that monsters might not really be monsters. The people you judge, the people who you see as OTHER might be just like you. You might be the monster to them, and we should learn not to judge the "monsters" we see. Star Trek loved to do this, the Horta are another famous example, even V'Ger was just confused and trying to come home. It was the entire moral point to them even being invented and put on air, and SNW could have written anything on earth to do their Alien knock off. Call the baby gorn the "zargbloids". It would still be a lame Alien redux, but at least wouldn't be spoiling a moral lesson from TOS to teach the important lesson instead of "your enemies are monsters who breed in vile ways and you are 100% justified to kill their children, who are like beasts, with no regrets".
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Jan 31, 2023 23:44
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bull3964 posted:Given what we know about the ages of various species in star trek, what is the appropriate age in which to kill them? I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill em all!
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Jan 31, 2023 23:47
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Tom Guycot posted:Its a bad example to use since the Crystaline entity was an ancient being, and on top of that we are explicitly told despite all the horror it has caused, the person who murdered it was in the wrong and did a bad thing. Once again it was an inhuman creature they were just starting to realize they might be able to communicate with and thus humanize the unknown and scary, like so much of Star Trek. Even tar monster they tried to reason with. It’s basically the equivalent of the Romulans, a concept literally created to make the point that you shouldn’t judge people by their appearance, race, nationality, etc getting chunky forehead prosthetics in TNG so they would have a more distinctive and villainous look cause that’s what they did with the Klingons. only even more gonzo and absurd. I mean idk, I didn’t completely hate the Gorn stuff in SNW. I thought they did some decent pastiche with it. But I really have to hope it ends up having a good point to it. In other words, I hope that this is something like an extended retake of the point of “Arena” itself, and we’re still at the stage of the story where we (with the Enterprise officers) see the Gorn only as incomprehensible inhuman monsters, before we learn with Kirk (or Pike or Laan or whoever) that they’re actually only assholes.
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Jan 31, 2023 23:57
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Yeah that would be amazing if they were going somewhere with the Gorn like that, and I would happily eat all the crow in the world if they pull that out.
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Feb 1, 2023 00:12
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Given what we know about corvid intelligence, what age of crow is acceptable to eat?
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Feb 1, 2023 00:25
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Now that I'm in the second season of DS9, I'm noticing how comfortable it is in its sense of humour. SISKO: "You'd sell your brother out for a few bars of gold-pressed latinum." QUARK: "Doesn't mean I don't love him." Or maybe Quark just has a personality good for some edgier jokes.
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Feb 1, 2023 01:01
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I also hated the Gorn stuff for the same reasons.
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CPColin posted:Given what we know about corvid intelligence, what age of crow is acceptable to eat? I'm not sure the correct response to acknowlage a pun on the forums, but I see what you did there and I think it's funny. = )
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