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TulliusCicero posted:The rest of the season will take place in Ten Forward. The new bar on the ship is called "The 10/405 Interchange" and the logo is Guinan winking at a camera
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Mar 7, 2023 16:09
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Alchenar posted:Well the endgadget review says that the first four episodes are the extended prologue, so at the end of this week the plot might start to settle a bit. I see Terry Matalas went to the Patrick Rothfuss school of writing. The "this 100,000 word banger and its two 100,000 sequels are merely the prologue to the real story I want to tell!" style of writing. Seriously, this is like every teenager's first attempt at writing a fantasy novel where the prologue is 40% of the book.
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Mar 7, 2023 17:05
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Alchenar posted:Well the endgadget review says that the first four episodes are the extended prologue, so at the end of this week the plot might start to settle a bit. Edit: ooh, only another 100 pages before Matalas's podcast buddies' favourite number!
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Mar 7, 2023 17:06
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Payndz posted:"What's four-tenths of the way through is prologue" - William Shakespeare. USS Matalas NCC-1488
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Mar 7, 2023 17:45
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Alchenar posted:Well the endgadget review says that the first four episodes are the extended prologue, so at the end of this week the plot might start to settle a bit. lmao so, basically, nothing is going to actually matter to move the plot forward until at least next week? again? i guess i shouldn't be surprised, but 
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Mar 7, 2023 17:52
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4 of your 10 episodes ain’t a prologue Terry, that’s all of Act 1 and a big chunk of Act 2.
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Mar 7, 2023 18:02
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It's a little appropriate how the discussion previously was centered on the breakneck pacing of LDS because it provides a really shocking contrast to how season 3 of Picard has had three broadcast hours to accomplish about a quarter of the plot of a single Lower Decks episode.
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Mar 7, 2023 18:10
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It’s not just the Titan stuff either, even the Raffi scenes have still established little-to-nothing and been constrained to the same planet and back alley sets. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so frustrating to see people claim this season has fixed everything, because at its core it still has all the exact same problems. - molasses pacing - paper-thin plot - dragged out mysteries (we still don’t know Vadic’s motivation and last episode we added magic mystery psychic vision images with Jack) Even the “improved” dialogue seems more like a simple byproduct of having actors comfortably inhabit 30+ year old roles again than any actual upgrade in the writing.
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Mar 7, 2023 18:19
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Big Mean Jerk posted:It’s not just the Titan stuff either, even the Raffi scenes have still established little-to-nothing and been constrained to the same planet and back alley sets. It really puts the lie to the idea that these chuds were upset over the "bad writing" of Star Trek: Picard's prior years when the same crippling flaws are all still there in abundance, the only change now is that all the people of colour are gone from the show and it's jerking its wrinkly self raw on nostalgia instead of trying and failing to do something almost new like previous attempts.
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Mar 7, 2023 18:28
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Has anyone contemplated the fact that maybe Terry is also just a chuddy piece of garbage like all these guys he seems to pal around with? Not sure there's any point in giving him the benefit of the doubt with his current trajectory.
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Mar 7, 2023 19:02
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There are just as many POC and ethnic minorities in this season as the last one. Rafi, the Laforges, Worf (jewish).
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Mar 7, 2023 19:12
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Professor Beetus posted:Has anyone contemplated the fact that maybe Terry is also just a chuddy piece of garbage like all these guys he seems to pal around with? Not sure there's any point in giving him the benefit of the doubt with his current trajectory. He certainly seems to be pandering to them but it seems a bit of a reach to say he holds the same positiona himself. His vision of Star Trek is very lame though
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Mar 7, 2023 19:16
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Professor Beetus posted:Has anyone contemplated the fact that maybe Terry is also just a chuddy piece of garbage like all these guys he seems to pal around with? Not sure there's any point in giving him the benefit of the doubt with his current trajectory. I mean folks like Nerdrotic and The Critical Drinker absolutely suck at hiding their power level when it comes to their bigotry. These people tend to tell on themselves often and loudly to the point where they're incapable of communicating normally. Matalas has shown himself to be an otherwise run of the mill milquetoast Twitter shitposter, so all jokes on the subject aside, I don't actually think he's a chud, I just think he's a massive rube with no sense of self-preservation skills who is cloyingly desperate for 100% approval from 100% of the people out there. And these chodes have taken him in because they're all predatory scumbags and they know that if the guy who's in charge of (what they consider to be) Star Trek is seen palling around with them, it legitimizes them and their opinions as much as it de-legitimizes Matalas in the eyes of people outside their sphere of bigotry (ie: folks like us).
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Mar 7, 2023 19:22
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yeah, he comes off to me more like a guy who's just too dim to realize he's being deliberately lovebombed instead of a fellow traveler
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Mar 7, 2023 19:31
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nine-gear crow posted:I mean folks like Nerdrotic and The Critical Drinker absolutely suck at hiding their power level when it comes to their bigotry. These people tend to tell on themselves often and loudly to the point where they're incapable of communicating normally. Matalas has shown himself to be an otherwise run of the mill milquetoast Twitter shitposter, so all jokes on the subject aside, I don't actually think he's a chud, I just think he's a massive rube with no sense of self-preservation skills who is cloyingly desperate for 100% approval from 100% of the people out there. And these chodes have taken him in because they're all predatory scumbags and they know that if the guy who's in charge of (what they consider to be) Star Trek is seen palling around with them, it legitimizes them and their opinions as much as it de-legitimizes Matalas in the eyes of people outside their sphere of bigotry (ie: folks like us). I assume these dipshits didn't even jump on the Lower Decks bandwagon because one of the leads is a queer Black woman? (Prodigy gets the double whammy of 'for kids' and 'has an NB character in the cast' to ward off the chud)
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Mar 7, 2023 19:53
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I dunno, actions speak louder than words, and pallin around with racist poo poo stains sure seems to say a lot more than "he's not posted too much bad stuff on Twitter"
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Mar 7, 2023 20:08
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Gaz-L posted:I assume these dipshits didn't even jump on the Lower Decks bandwagon because one of the leads is a queer Black woman? Lower Decks and Prodigy look like they're not even on these fools radar, thankfully. One out of every like 100 comments I've seen on clips of Lower Decks episodes on YouTube is some gonad going "THIS ISN'T STAR TREK AAAAARGH  ", but that's about it.Hell, these fools literally don't even think Prodigy exists: https://twitter.com/faketrek/status/1457778379827007490
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Mar 7, 2023 20:09
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Matalas is clearly online enough to know who these people and what their deal is. e: also because I did a round up of trek space battles but missed this one: The Undiscovered Country. Structurally it's a simple race against time: Bones and Spock need to reconfigure the torpedo before Chang blows up the Enterprise. After every hit Scotty updates us on the shield integrity and it goes down. But if that were just it then the sequence would be a bit poo poo. So in addition to the time pressure of the shields failing with every hit, we also have intercut to the time pressure of the impending assassination attempt on the planet and a tension shift in space when just like it looks like the Enterprise is out of time Sulu arrives. In conclusion I have come to the novel and provocative suspicion that good storytelling is about characters with clearly defined goals striving to overcome obstacles to those goals Alchenar fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 20:13
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nine-gear crow posted:Lower Decks and Prodigy look like they're not even on these fools radar, thankfully. One out of every like 100 comments I've seen on clips of Lower Decks episodes on YouTube is some gonad going "THIS ISN'T STAR TREK AAAAARGH The one time I recall chuds getting mad at LDS it was some kind of weird petersonian rant about how the ensigns don’t respect “hierarchy” vs Picard’s speech to Wesley about how the first duty of a starfleet officer is to the truth. This was specifically in response to Mariner giving off-the-books farming aid to the guys in the pilot and only livea in my memory because there was a dude in the comments unironically saying section 31 did nothing wrong.
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Mar 7, 2023 20:28
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i assume the cartoon and the mid-sweeps replacement for butt ugly martians costs significantly less to produce
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Mar 7, 2023 20:30
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Gaz-L posted:(Prodigy gets the double whammy of 'for kids' and 'has an NB character in the cast' to ward off the chud) Two, Murph and Zero.
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Mar 7, 2023 20:37
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3 posted:there was a dude in the comments unironically saying section 31 did nothing wrong. lmao
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Mar 7, 2023 20:39
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I both find Section 31 an interesting concept and also hate that it gave chuds a clear organization to sympathize with in Star Trek and not just make them stay the gently caress away due to Space socialism and "alien" sexualities. Like every appearance of Section 31 ever they are clearly shady antagonist/ villains in Star Trek, but chuds love their "Humanity first" poo poo.
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Mar 7, 2023 20:54
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I just don't think it's an appropriate concept for Trek.
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Mar 7, 2023 20:57
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HD DAD posted:Episode 5: “Alright back to the LA parking lot” If Shakespeare can have the gravitas of The Tempest entirely on Prospero’s island, sure Matalas can do the same with an LA parking lo… oh poo poo guys it’s 4:45 we need to wrap up before the rush hour exodus
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Mar 7, 2023 20:58
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mllaneza posted:Two, Murph and Zero. We don't know if Murf's even sapient, let alone how they identify gender identity wise!
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Mar 7, 2023 20:58
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Khanstant posted:I just don't think it's an appropriate concept for Trek. it absolutely is. i'm paraphrasing here, but odo said it best: "the cardassians had the obsidian order, the romulans have the tal shiar... why not the federation?" the mistake is integrating them into starfleet. the obsidian order was not part of the central command; we see this conflict play out several times. the tal shiar is not part of the romulan military, either, we also see this conflict what started out as an extremely similar organization questioning whether or not the federation's values are mere lip service morphed into something far worse, a literally uniformed branch of starfleet that is said to be so integral to them that they literally do all of the decision making. sloan on DS9 had the right idea: the federation has a lot of great people in it, with laudable morals and goals. but at the end of the day, if they're not willing to get their hands dirty someone has to, because the galaxy is a rough place turning them into something akin to the MACOs on enterprise is deeply stupid and undercuts that idea in a number of ways. they're not supposed to be overt spies. you're not even supposed to be sure they exist e: oops phone posting so there were some typos Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 21:06
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If the concept at all involves "sometimes to uphold the peace you need secret extreme immoral violence and subterfuge" then I think it's inappropriate for Trek and the federation and honestly not that interesting of an idea besides something to demonstrate is stupid and wrong.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:18
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Starfleet Intelligence exists though.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:18
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3 posted:The one time I recall chuds getting mad at LDS it was some kind of weird petersonian rant about how the ensigns don’t respect “hierarchy” vs Picard’s speech to Wesley about how the first duty of a starfleet officer is to the truth. This was specifically in response to Mariner giving off-the-books farming aid to the guys in the pilot and only livea in my memory because there was a dude in the comments unironically saying section 31 did nothing wrong. Chuds loving love hierarchy and “respecting authority”.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:26
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The important thing about Sloan in DS9 that a lot of section 31 hangers-on forget about is that he's demonstrably wrong and the changeling virus not only didn't win the war, it nearly led to the founders going full scorched earth on the alpha quadrant starting with Cardassia. The war is ultimately won through an act of radical empathy that upholds the Federation's core values, Odo returning to the link with the cure. Someone brought up a comparison with Mass Effect's Cerberus earlier, which I agree with in that both organizations are far more interesting when they're clearly a handful of psychopaths operating far off the books rather than a large, well-organized private superpower with resources rivaling major players in the galaxy.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:26
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i mean, one of the best things about DS9 to me is that it doesn't accept the idea of the federation as an inherent good. thats great, because why should we? they absolutely can and do hosed up things all the time, and it would be ridiculous to never question it. section 31 might be a somewhat lazy stand-in for that sort of introspection, but it works well if they really want to uphold federation values, they have to be prepared for any consequences that might bring. this is also explored a bit in LDS: when discussing the brekkians and onarians, ransom is like "picard just... left? after all of that?" (when referencing "symbiosis"). and he's right, that's extremely hosed up similarly if people are willing to fight and die for federation values, well, why not take that idea to its logical conclusion? starfleet is depicted as only willing to go so far in order to do so, which makes sense. they like to think that they are not the military; well, if they're not, and they want the federation to prosper and survive, there needs to be some sort of apparatus that is willing to subvert those values in service to the greater good, or else the whole project will fail eventually it's a moral gray area to be sure, but it's not like that is antithetical to star trek as a concept, either. as mentioned picard and crew (and kirk & co.) do ostensibly good things all the time, but the results are not questioned, we just move on. that's the nature of those shows, and DS9 is much more analytical about it. i don't think that's "not trek". the series is ideally supposed to make you think a bit, which is something that voyager, enterprise (to a lesser degree), discovery and picard just aren't interested in, and that's sad
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Mar 7, 2023 21:26
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3 posted:The important thing about Sloan in DS9 that a lot of section 31 hangers-on forget about is that he's demonstrably wrong and the changeling virus not only didn't win the war, it nearly led to the founders going full scorched earth on the alpha quadrant starting with Cardassia. The war is ultimately won through an act of radical empathy that upholds the Federation's core values, Odo returning to the link with the cure. Someone brought up a comparison with Mass Effect's Cerberus earlier, which I agree with in that both organizations are far more interesting when they're clearly a handful of psychopaths operating far off the books rather than a large, well-organized private superpower with resources rivaling major players in the galaxy. i'm not saying section 31 is right — i agree with you, their actions just make the dominion fight harder — just that the concept is not antithetical to star trek as a whole. there are "bad" people everywhere, and a lot of the times the ends don't justify the means; it's an examination of that concept, and one that i think works very well in that regard
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Mar 7, 2023 21:31
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socialsecurity posted:Starfleet Intelligence exists though. Starfleet Intelligence and Section 31 is that Family Guy meme of S31 going "What makes you think you're better than me?" and SFI going "We're competent."
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Mar 7, 2023 21:32
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Beeftweeter posted:i'm not saying section 31 is right — i agree with you, their actions just make the dominion fight harder — just that the concept is not antithetical to star trek as a whole. there are "bad" people everywhere, and a lot of the times the ends don't justify the means; it's an examination of that concept, and one that i think works very well in that regard Oh no, I agree with you and I think that DS9 handled the concept of section 31 perfectly. The problem is when writers for shows like Disco and Picard only take the surface-level reading of "the Federation isn't perfect" as a foundation for story beats without remembering the follow-through of "but its ideals are still worth upholding and fighting for despite aberrant outgrowths like section 31"
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Mar 7, 2023 21:34
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HD DAD posted:Chuds loving love hierarchy and “respecting authority”. Yeah, the things they were the most mad about in Season 1 of Picard was that Picard was "belittled" all the time and no one respected his authority, nevermind the fact that he's an elderly civilian who forsook his authority in a fit of self-righteousness and he's now running around angrily spouting poo poo that sounds like complete BS because his brain is currently melting from Space Alzheimer's.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:36
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I think DS9 is a bit equivocal on that - the war ends because Dominion power is broken in the Alpha quadrant and losing the war is what causes the Dominion to start purging Cardassia. Odo goes back to heal the great link and that adds a hopeful tint to the ending... but the great link only needs curing because of S31. The plot to infiltrate the Romulan Senate is also wildly successful. DS9 is smart enough to understand that it isn't a very interesting moral dilemma if S31 are a bunch of useless fuckups. In that show they appear to be very very good at what they do.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:41
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3 posted:Oh no, I agree with you and I think that DS9 handled the concept of section 31 perfectly. The problem is when writers for shows like Disco and Picard only take the surface-level reading of "the Federation isn't perfect" as a foundation for story beats without remembering the follow-through of "but its ideals are still worth upholding and fighting for despite aberrant outgrowths like section 31" absolutely, i think the way any spinoff (enterprise included) handled section 31 is absolutely the wrong way to do it. they're not necessarily villains. they're not really spies, either: it's a covert organization, which is a similar but distinct concept of course that kind of nuance is completely lost on a lot of people, though. they might just think "federation bad, here are some bad federation people to prove it". well, no, that isn't what section 31 as originally depicted is about at all, although they did essentially force the change as a concept they are at their most effective when doing something that seems extremely hosed up, but that might seem right on the surface (i.e. wiping out the founders to win a war) and also not prepared for the consequences of that action (i.e. the dominion obliterating cardassia). turning them into mustache-twirling villains was absolutely the wrong move and as such makes criticism of the concept harder, because they keep changing what it is Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 21:45
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3 posted:The important thing about Sloan in DS9 that a lot of section 31 hangers-on forget about is that he's demonstrably wrong and the changeling virus not only didn't win the war, it nearly led to the founders going full scorched earth on the alpha quadrant starting with Cardassia. The war is ultimately won through an act of radical empathy that upholds the Federation's core values, Odo returning to the link with the cure. Someone brought up a comparison with Mass Effect's Cerberus earlier, which I agree with in that both organizations are far more interesting when they're clearly a handful of psychopaths operating far off the books rather than a large, well-organized private superpower with resources rivaling major players in the galaxy. ...I completely forgot that the Dominion was prepared to go to Warhammer 40k levels of Alpha Qaudrant extermination after the virus. Yeah Section 31 hosed that poo poo up hard. I really like your point that it was upholding the Federation's values that saves the day, not subverting them. DS9 is more optimistic than I came away with before.
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Mar 7, 2023 21:47
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The concept is just Special Circumstances from the Culture Novels and that's an entire book series that wavers between positing them as 'unpleasant but necessary', 'unpleasant with spectacular fuckups', and 'unpleasant but even the best utopia will produce individuals who are really into this poo poo so you might as well try to point them in the right direction'. e: /\/\ you are misremembering, it's the Cardassian betrayal that triggers the Dominion to go scorched earth on Cardassia. If I recall right there's actually no point at which it's hinted that the Founders know where the disease came from, much less that its a bioweapon from the Federation. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 21:48
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