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Lord Hydronium posted:Rewatched Lower Decks (the episode), and man, that is just a great episode, probably one of my favorites of TNG. Season 7 gets some mostly deserved criticism for episodes that felt like they were running out of ideas, but episodes like this also show the confidence that a show can have late in its run to do something so unique, and the skills to pull it off. The characters feel remarkably real and fleshed out for the short time we spend with them, like they have whole lives outside of this episode. The ending still hits hard, and for a series that usually does character deaths as either throwaway bits with redshirts or big dramatic events, Sito's feels both impactful and understated. It's also low key a great Worf episode. It would be fun to see any of these characters pop up again in Lower Decks the show. I still remember being drawn in by the commercials for this episode. When Taurik says "why are we intentionally damaging the shuttlecraft", which gave off such a mystery vibe because it seemed like there were so many possibilities behind that line.
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Aug 31, 2023 08:05
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Powered Descent posted:Remember Taurik, the Vulcan lower-decker from this episode? Remember when later on a Vulcan appeared in a few Voyager episodes who looked and acted exactly like Taurik and was played by the very same actor as Taurik and whose name was even almost exactly the same ("Vorik") but because he was a legally-distinct character they didn't have to pay the writers of this episode who had created Taurik? How much do you think they pay writers - assuming it wasn't a staff writer that created Taurik - for using characters? More likely it was because there was already a Vulcan with a T name on the show.
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Aug 31, 2023 15:36
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A.o.D. posted:The Vorta have a terrible odor, not inherently but because they can't smell when they are funky. They can, however, hear when others start to complain. And Nausicaans have no noses! "Well, how do they smell?" Terrible!
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Aug 31, 2023 15:36
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Big Mean Jerk posted:I mean I guess this is true if you’re talking about the first half of season 1 where certain minor elements were kind of in flux and contradictory based on who was writing the episode, but it’s demonstrably false for basically the rest of the show. How is it?
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Aug 31, 2023 16:39
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zoux posted:How much do you think they pay writers - assuming it wasn't a staff writer that created Taurik - for using characters? I looked this up on Memory Alpha, and unlike ‘The First Duty’, ‘Lower Decks’ was from a freelancer who provided detailed character notes, so it’s very possible they wanted to skip on royalties. I suspect the only reason we got Vomit in Voyager was because he was played by a relation of Jeri Taylor…
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Aug 31, 2023 17:19
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Rewatched "Paradise", the DS9 episode where Sisko and O'Brien end up in the Luddite colony with the boo box. The leader actress has such a weird cadence of speaking, like she's constantly nearly out of breath.
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Aug 31, 2023 18:35
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Taear posted:It's still funny in the same way as it was. No jokes punching down, nothing like that. S1-6 have some wobbly moments but it doesn't feel like punching down so much as clumsiness when those happen. Oh, and apparently Craig Charles was inspired to audition for Lister when Grant and Naylor asked him to look over the material and give his opinion on whether some of the stuff they were planning like casting a Black actor as the Cat was racist... consider that next time someone talks like "sensitivity readers" are a new thing. S7-8 are shockingly poor in that respect - Rob Grant had left, Doug Naylor was largely writing it on his own, and I think he was playing up to the "laddish" comedy of the era. Genuinely less progressive than S1-6 by quite a comfortable margin, and at least one episode (Krytie TV) which has aged shockingly poorly. The seasons are also shaky-to-terrible in terms of quality (S7E1 is good but then it's all downhill from there), but the regressiveness adds injury to insult. Back To Earth/S9 as it's sometimes called is not so much offensive as just kind of poor all round, by contrast. The more recent seasons turn it around somewhat. The TV movie they did recently - which is perhaps the best thing established that gender-affirming care is not only very much a presence in the universe of Red Dwarf, but it's more effective than in the real world. It's in the service of a misguided joke, but it establishes an explicitly trans-friendly universe.
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Aug 31, 2023 19:34
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 voyager has way too many aliens that are just people with a hat or headband or some craft junk glued to their hair. why was it like this
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Aug 31, 2023 19:54
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Khanstant posted:
Because it was 90's TV-show where you need to crank out episode basically every week, and there is no time or budget to make super-complicated makeups, sets, or props unless you are doing ratings week episode.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:02
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Also something I've learned watching shows like Face Off (special effects competition) is that even seemingly simple facial prosthetics take a while to apply, so it's way easier to put on a funny hat and paint some spots than to apply a weird forehead or noise piece or ears or something. Especially when you need a lot of them, because you need either a lot of make up artists, or for extras to show up 10 hours early so they're all ready to shoot.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:22
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Yeah, you have 22 episode seasons with episodes coming out weekly. There isn’t budget or time to come up with a ton of different prosthetics and the shooting schedules likely can’t accommodate the guest cast spending 4 hours in makeup before shooting starts. Voyager’s setting makes it a bit more egregious since they are traveling a distance and not encountering the same known races week after week. Nowadays, 3d printing could help a lot of the prop work. No more modeling in clay, taking castings, cleaning up, painting. Just design on the computer, print and paint with some minor cleanup. Even with traditional prosthetics, I imagine that they can speed up a lot of the work with 3d scanning an actor’s face and designing on a computer prior to production. Materials have also improved as well which makes the application process quicker and easier. On top of that, easy CG touch up means that the practical makeup itself doesn’t have to be as perfect or complete.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:26
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bull3964 posted:Even with traditional prosthetics, I imagine that they can speed up a lot of the work with 3d scanning an actor’s face and designing on a computer prior to production. A lot of hardworking people are trying very hard right now to not let that exact thing happen
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Aug 31, 2023 20:39
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There’s a difference between 3d scanning with intent to use the likeness later and 3d scanning so that you can manufacture prosthetics for an actor.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:43
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bull3964 posted:Yeah, you have 22 episode seasons with episodes coming out weekly. Most of the old Trek seasons were 26 episodes each.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:55
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Der Kyhe posted:Because it was 90's TV-show where you need to crank out episode basically every week, and there is no time or budget to make super-complicated makeups, sets, or props unless you are doing ratings week episode. Yeah but contemporaneously, DS9 had the highest ratio of aliens to humans out of any Trek show, and while the Bajorans may have been simple, the Ferengi, Cardassians, Voorta, and even changlings were very elaborate and must've been very time-consuming to apply the makeup, and yet still constantly kept using those alien characters. And outside of star trek, you have Babylon 5 in the 90s putting in the effort to fill rooms with extras in prosthetics to get good group shots. I can't imagine how difficult it was to stage that barfight between Centauri and Narn. I think it's probably more that Voyager didn't expect to ever have to worry about ever seeing most of its races ever again, so it didn't worry about getting creative or elaborate with the designs. They're disposable. Possibly DS9 may also have the most prosthetics per episode out of any Trek. Enterprise kept its main cast simple and gave up on its idea of having Phlox make CGI faces. The other live action treks I haven't seen, but I think they're mostly human cast.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:56
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Another aspect of application is design, it's also hard to just crank out unique alien faces week after week after week. DS9 had the benefit that we didn't see many new faces from week to week. But imagine a new Cardassian-level makeup every week for a new alien, you'd burn out your creatives so fast.
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Aug 31, 2023 20:57
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Also, for any recurring with complex makeup, they already had the prosthetics pre-fitted after the first appearance, which really helped on a show like DS9.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:01
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MikeJF posted:Also, for any recurring with complex makeup, they already had the prosthetics pre-fitted after the first appearance, which really helped DS9. ...and they could recycle the background wardrobe or "out of focus" prosthetics from episode to episode if they needed 10 cardassians or Jemhadars or such. Because Voyager kept meeting new civilizations that also wasn't an option. I mean, they were so tight-fisted with money that they recycled the main cast's uniforms between the shows or movies if necessary. From 50YM I recall that someone from the main cast of TNG took their communicator badge home after the last day of shooting and Paramount actually bothered to send production assistants to search for it and ask around to get an idea on who took it. You'd think that for a production company that size they would have a bucket-load of those and it would be trivial to ask the props department to make 10 more but no. Der Kyhe fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 21:05
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Der Kyhe posted:...and they could recycle the background wardrobe or "out of focus" prosthetics from episode to episode if they needed 10 cardassians or Jemhadars or such. Because Voyager kept meeting new civilizations that also wasn't an option. Also Marina Sirtis nicking a whole bunch of poo poo off the TNG set after the finale, only to have to use that stuff in later appearances.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:20
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I wonder if all the forehead and ear and nose aliens think humans are smooth weirdos.
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Aug 31, 2023 21:27
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What do you think, pinkskin?
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Aug 31, 2023 22:13
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season one of enterprise was almost entirely poo poo, and not only ranks worst opening season so far but possibly worst season but I haven't remembered how to make excel do averages yet so I'm not sure up to carbon creek now at the start of season 2 and it's my favourite so far probably because its a one shot episode pretty much entirely unrelated to the general themes of enterprise, that and they found a way to essentially do a time travel episode without doing a time travel
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Aug 31, 2023 22:14
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zoux posted:How much do you think they pay writers - assuming it wasn't a staff writer that created Taurik - for using characters? This post aged like Benjamin Button I'm saying it came out pre-aged in the extreme, knowing what we currently know about Hollywood's general predilections re: paying creative labor, is what I'm saying McSpanky fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 22:54
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Metamorphosis is interesting because Kirk tries his go to move of wiping out the only known representative of an alien life form, wiping its kind from existence, but when that fails Bones reminds him that he is a diplomat so he does eventually find a solution. The solution also involves the murder of a distinct individual, but that's fine because she needed a man.
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Sep 1, 2023 00:10
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Identity Crisis, come the gently caress on, what was that? Already wasn't on board for another round of "Geordie sits in ten forward and boisterously laughs like a weirdo in the proximity of women", this really is far too soon after Galaxy's Child. But then, the episode itself is just the dumbest of dumb schlock. He yet again attempts to solve a mystery by heading off into the holodeck and is farting about in there for far too goddamn long, before turning into a ludicrous UV light monster that certainly wasn't intended to hold up to HD scrutiny. Boy oh boy, what a pile of poo poo. Yet more awkward NERDY BOY TIME in The Nth Degree, only, dare I say it, just a bit more tolerable and a shade less creepy, since it's Barclay. And Geordie spends a lot of time looking "concerned" for him, but I'm reading it as intense jealousy that he couldn't be the smartest nerd on the block. A delightful goofy finale and a small coda about peaking in life and coming back down that I found quite relatable. Oh and Picard finally agrees with Worf, yes we should use the phasers. It does nothing! Oh well!
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Sep 1, 2023 00:52
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Identity Crisis is great just for the horror of the holodeck recreation when Geordie realizes they weren't alone.
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Sep 1, 2023 01:00
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Yeah that shadow blob freaked me the gently caress out as a kid
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Sep 1, 2023 01:03
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CPColin posted:Yeah that shadow blob freaked me the gently caress out as a kid Same, also the makeup of Geordi's friend in her advanced transformation really creeped me out for some reason. She looked like she was moldering to death.
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Sep 1, 2023 01:16
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zoux posted:I wonder if all the forehead and ear and nose aliens think humans are smooth weirdos. That might've been where the idea for Odo came from. A guy to push humans more towards the middle of the spectrum.
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Sep 1, 2023 01:34
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Eighties ZomCom posted:Also Marina Sirtis nicking a whole bunch of poo poo off the TNG set after the finale, only to have to use that stuff in later appearances. Didn’t Troi have the wrong hair in TATV because they couldn’t find any Troi wigs and Sirtis admitted she took them all?
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Sep 1, 2023 02:42
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The Nth Degree is great. Also I always thought that given the alien species they meet lives in the center of the galaxy and communicates in the form of a giant disembodied head, it could be related to "God" in The Final Frontier.
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Sep 1, 2023 02:45
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McSpanky posted:Same, also the makeup of Geordi's friend in her advanced transformation really creeped me out for some reason. She looked like she was moldering to death. You know what, I may not have liked the episode, but credit where due that was well realised and quite freaky.
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Sep 1, 2023 03:04
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I’m a ways into Voyager S5 and Janeway being a psycho is starting to make more sense. She basically told B’Elanna to fucj off because she was unhappy at having been treated by the Cardassian holo-Mengele. I wonder if that Bajoran crew member was ever allowed to resign.
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Sep 1, 2023 05:04
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MuddyFunster posted:Identity Crisis, come the gently caress on, what was that? Already wasn't on board for another round of "Geordie sits in ten forward and boisterously laughs like a weirdo in the proximity of women", this really is far too soon after Galaxy's Child. But then, the episode itself is just the dumbest of dumb schlock. He yet again attempts to solve a mystery by heading off into the holodeck and is farting about in there for far too goddamn long, before turning into a ludicrous UV light monster that certainly wasn't intended to hold up to HD scrutiny. Boy oh boy, what a pile of poo poo. Yea I love that episode because it's freaky as hell, but like most posters I saw it as a kid so it's coloured a lot by that
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Sep 1, 2023 08:42
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Zaroff posted:Didn’t Troi have the wrong hair in TATV because they couldn’t find any Troi wigs and Sirtis admitted she took them all? They also didn't know that she wore coloured contact lenses and she had to use a pair she nicked.
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Sep 1, 2023 08:51
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Alfred P. Pseudonym posted:I’m a ways into Voyager S5 and Janeway being a psycho is starting to make more sense. She basically told B’Elanna to fucj off because she was unhappy at having been treated by the Cardassian holo-Mengele. I wonder if that Bajoran crew member was ever allowed to resign. We just watched The Thaw and Tuvix back to back, which I didn't realize was also the actual episode order. That means two weeks in a row on UPN or whatever people tuned in to watch Captain Janeway personally murder a lifeform. My wife, halfway through Tuvix, said "I don't think she'll kill Tuvix" and I just stared at her.
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Sep 1, 2023 10:24
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"Nemesis" is a goofy fuckin episode. I saw the twist coming as soon as the first scene back on Voyager. (That Tom Hardy was Picard's clone, of course.)
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Sep 1, 2023 10:38
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Der Kyhe posted:...and they could recycle the background wardrobe or "out of focus" prosthetics from episode to episode if they needed 10 cardassians or Jemhadars or such. Because Voyager kept meeting new civilizations that also wasn't an option. I think Delta Flyers talked about reusing costumes from TNG, no?
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Sep 1, 2023 11:27
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V-Men posted:I think Delta Flyers talked about reusing costumes from TNG, no? Yep. Garrett Wang got Spiner’s shoes or something.
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Sep 1, 2023 11:32
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Zaroff posted:Didn’t Troi have the wrong hair in TATV because they couldn’t find any Troi wigs and Sirtis admitted she took them all? You go to Marina's house, and her living room is just the bridge set she smuggled out of the studio
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Sep 1, 2023 11:47
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