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So late thoughts/baseless speculation on the STD trailer. I know it's obviously got the look of that old McQuarrie concept, but I still think there's a little bit more we can read into the ship's design than just, "they copied an art." For starters (and I'm amazed no one else mentioned this), it looks like a warship. It's bulky and sturdy-looking with those thick pylons, but streamlined into that wicked arrowhead shape, which gives it a much sleeker and more predatory look than the McQuarrie design ever had. The teaser had a tense score with lots of martial elements, which along with Meyer's association with a more military sort of Trek almost suggest to me that the name "Discovery" might have a hint of irony to it. What's more, there are echoes of the newer JJTrek designs in the ship's coloring and many of its lines, but I think the basic look of the thing (particularly the lack of spindly pylons and tube nacelles) doesn't fit the TOS-era design language at all and probably means it's set in a different era, probably earlier because of the registry number and also because it doesn't fit with a TNG/post-TNG look as it's not nearly as smooth and curvy or "high tech" looking and has a round, flat saucer like the older ships did. I also agree that there is a Klingon (or perhaps Romulan) look to it, but I disagree that this means it's a combined crew. The other reason you might see a ship that incorporates another culture's design is if the technology has been reverse-engineered, which often happens during periods of hostilities. Which leads me to my new fun theory, which is that this show will be set during/just after the Klingon war as part of a concerted effort to make those Axanar shits die choking on their own outrage.
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Jul 26, 2016 12:46
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MikeJF posted:If I was going to fit it in with existing Trek design lineage, I'd say it looks like part of the Refit/Miranda/Excelsior/Oberth era design family. Yeah, I can see that as well. Some of the details on the saucer made me think of the Excelsior at first, but it's also got some of that flatness the NX and some of the other "old" ship designs have. Really, neither era would surprise me.
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Jul 26, 2016 13:14
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WickedHate posted:All Starfleet vessels are built with the purpose to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before. But space is mad dangerous and you need to pack serious heat to do any of that. Also they're frequently given the romantic names of majestic old sailing ships that just happened to have two decks of cannon and full compliment of marines.
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Jul 26, 2016 13:25
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Arglebargle III posted:The American namesake of Enterprise was a schooner with a few pop guns, not a 2 decker. And most of the British Enterprizes were apparently no big deal, but there were a couple 44 gunners named Enterprise in the 18th century so the name was being used by warships before the US even existed.
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Jul 26, 2016 20:43
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Nessus posted:The Ferengi aren't really unrestrained capitalism, they're just a lot closer to what we'd consider modern day capitalism than the Feds. Quark is aghast at the prospect of selling tobacco, and Quark is more or less portrayed as John Q. Ferengi. "Unrestrained capitalism" here would either do some math to figure out the highest sustainable rate of death-stick sales, or try to goose death-stick sales immensely to make quarterly figures and then let everything collapse. I think it's important to remember that while the Ferengi have an allegedly free market, it's steeped in tradition and doctrine. Hell, it's part of their religion. There are a lot of Rules of Acquisition and well most are pretty open to interpretation, it's also pretty clear that you don't want to be a Ferengi who's seen as acting outside the rules. So even if you ignore the presence of governing bodies like the Commerce Authority and the Nagus, there are strong social pressures to do things the Right Way. Since those who are successful are assumed to have gotten that way because they followed the Rules, the system becomes self-reinforcing. It's really not that different from the way a lot of under-regulated capitalist economies operate in the real world. In theory, such a system is supposed to be cut-throat competitive, but in practice, the wealthy power-brokers work together to maintain a system that benefits them while leaving just enough opportunity for the lower classes to keep climbing the ladder, so long as they do so in a way that their bosses and superiors approve of. Basically, if you and your friends own the playing field, you can set whatever rules you want and everyone else can choose to play ball in your rigged game or sit on the sidelines with no chance of winning at all. As systems of social control go, I'd say the Ferengi approach makes at least as much sense as the Klingon "we are all honorable warriors" claptrap or the Romulan paranoid fascist police state. Hell, the Federation's decentralized structure and "we just work to better ourselves" ethos seems like a system that would make it at least as hard to actually get anything done.
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Aug 1, 2016 03:32
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Nessus posted:Doesn't look like it, but S2 did only have 22 episodes due to other poo poo going on, so they'd have had more money rattling around on a per-episode basis - especially since one of those episodes was a clip show. I don't know about that. It's not like they knew there'd be a strike when they budgeted out the episodes. I think the two big factors were they didn't have to spend a bunch of money upfront on sets and wardrobe and stuff and they started hiring less horrible directors.
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Aug 4, 2016 10:14
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My favorite is the silly little jacket thing with the four useless-looking silver "tools" that Torres wore in later Voyager episodes.
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Aug 4, 2016 22:08
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8one6 posted:They are. It's my least favorite part of DS9's later seasons. As long as there are those last few mirror universe episodes, the Sisko's Ghost Mom (who can't act), and Quark getting a sex change, this opinion will always be wrong. Plus I really like "It's Only a Paper Moon." The others are mostly crap though. Man, DS9 didn't have a lot of filler, but the filler it did have was baaaaad.
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Aug 6, 2016 05:50
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MikeJF posted:Counterpoint: James Bond. That episode is actually pretty important character development for both Garak and Bashir. e: Just rewatched it. My favorite part is how proud Garak is when Julian shoots him. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 08:45 on Aug 6, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 07:51
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While we're at it, can we dispense with the notion that Threshold is the Worst Episode Ever. Sure the last ten minutes are pretty awful what with the Doctor's technobabble filibuster and the weird salamander sex, but the actors are actually trying, the script has a lot of nice little touches (like learning why these tests are so important to Paris), and the effects were genuinely Emmy worthy. Is it a good episode? gently caress no, it's dumb as hell, but it was competently produced, reasonably entertaining, and only moderately offensive, so I don't get what the big deal is. Is the science bad? Yeah, it's terrible, but there are dozens of episodes from every era of Trek that get these things (especially biology) just as wrong. Is the plot a mess? Of course, but this is Voyager we're talking about. Is it uncomfortable and rape-y? Yes, but somehow there are at least a dozen Star Trek episodes that are way worse on that front. All I can say is at least it's not a complete rehash of another script, at least it's not a racist piece of poo poo, at least it isn't a misdirected mess, at least the effects don't look awful, at least the actors were competent, at least the script was trying something new, at least it's interesting, which is more than you can say for many, many other episodes. Controversial opinion time: there isn't a single Voyager episode that is tangibly worse than the worst TOS or, especially, TNG episodes. Well, except maybe Coda.
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Aug 7, 2016 10:22
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I agree that Voyager is Worst Trek, but I think most of its problems can be traced pretty directly to the writers trying to slap a new coat of paint on the sinking ship that was end stage TNG. It's really lucky that the TNG writers got their poo poo together long enough to give it a decent finale, or the show would not be nearly so well remembered. Also, the worst TOS episode is Metamorphosis.
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Aug 7, 2016 10:59
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I think a big part of what makes it so bad is we get to see the characters we love act in strange, inconsistent, and horrible ways for no real reason. Picard runs off to become a space pirate, lets an entire planet of people die because ~prime directive~, and ruins Ensign Ro's life during one of the stiffest and worse acted/directed hours of the entire franchise. All the characters meet long lost family members or have bits of character backstory finally revealed in a way that I think was supposed to be poignant but instead was terrible because it exposed how shallow the characters really were and also gave us Rape Ghost and the Lwuxana Troi repressed memory episode. Worf is dating Troi for some reason, apparently has a human brother, and is such a bad father that his son figures out time travel. Troi takes a test and somehow becomes a senior bridge officer, despite being, you know, Troi. We learn that traveling at high warp is causing space climate change, that the federation built a cloaking device that can pass through solid rock (but won't build normal ones), and that Crusher is such a bad doctor she can accidentally make the whole crew "de-evolve" while treating the flu. Picard has a fake son, Data has a fake mom, and the Enterprise gets pregnant. Also there are a handful of good episodes and a few "weird stuff happens" episodes that aren't bad exactly, but are still gimmicky and extremely Voyagerish, but overall that poo poo stinks.
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Aug 7, 2016 20:30
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FilthyImp posted:Troi's leadership episode was good, because there was still "LOL a WOMAN in charge" sexism around that episode was all about her making the hard choice. It also delineates her experiences as a counselor and as a senior crew member: she can't be the ship buddy friend if she's in the chain of command. Yeah none of those episodes is particularly bad (certainly not by season 7 standards), but they're all rather contrived. The Troi one felt like the writers were trying to make the point that Troi was a real officer like everyone else and we shouldn't underestimate her, despite the fact that we'd spent the last six years seeing her not act (or dress) like the other officers and be hopelessly out of her depth in command situations (like the episode with Ro and O'Brien). Having her study and take a test and suddenly be able to order around seasoned bridge officers despite having demonstrably less command experience was weird. Meanwhile, the other two episodes aren't that bad on their own but they're very formulaic. They both fall into the pattern of "person from character X's past appears, with a dark secret" that like a third of the episodes in season 7 were following and even the better invocations of that premise are pretty much tainted by how threadbare and predictable that device had become. Also, as much as I want to defend Pegasus because it's reasonably entertaining for what it is, the rogue Star Fleet officer that goes too far and the amazing prototype technology that has to be destroyed because it's too dangerous were already terrible Trek cliches when it was written and are even more overplayed now. Sadly, while the nature of the device itself was interesting, it's just about the only fresh idea in the whole script. Also, also, I kinda like Masks, because I'm the worst.
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Aug 7, 2016 21:46
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Also, their plan demonstrably worked because the Earth got borgified. It was only the Enterprise's lucky entry into the timestream that stopped them. Presumably, the sphere would have done way more damage if the Enterprise hadn't blown it up, but even the damage it did in the initial bombardment was enough to make Cochrane cancel his flight and miss his window for meeting the Vulcans, so the Bord didn't actually need to do any more damage than they had already.
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Aug 7, 2016 22:20
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Getting back to the worst Voyager discussion, I'm always surprised that there isn't more hate for Coda which, to my mind, has what is quite possibly the worst script in the history of Star Trek. Janeway keeps dying in some sort of weird time loop (iirc some of these scenes seem to be from Chakotay's perspective, even though that makes no sense), so that's the mystery right? Nope, because then the plot shifts to a different Voyager trademark of hallucinatory weirdness and the crew acting craaaazy, but nope that's not really what the episode is about either, because then an alien pretending to be her ghost dad shows up and tries to lead her to the "afterlife" and she fights it and wakes up and it was all a dreamlucination but it was too real and maybe they were just somewhere with an evil alien or maybe these evil aliens are everywhere and heaven is a lie and makes you think doesn't it? But no it doesn't because two-thirds of the episode had nothing to do with any of that crap and oh my loving god you can't just mash three different recycled plots together with no through line, slap a spooooky ending on it and call it a loving story. Also I found this: Sperg Space 9 posted:The development of this episode began as an amalgamation of plot ideas that Star Trek: Voyager's writing staff had been considering. Executive producer Jeri Taylor explained, "It was a combination of several threads of ideas that we had been kicking around. None of them seemed to be working on their own. Then we began cobbling them together, and all of a sudden we had this wonderful, rich mystery."  e: I should clarify that when I said "worst script" I meant in terms of plot coherence. There are plenty of episodes that have way more offensive premises and way dumber dialog. Coda is awful in terms of delivering a quality product but it's probably still not worst tier because at least it isn't actively hateful (except for, you know, saying religion might be an alien plot to steal our souls). Duckbox fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Aug 9, 2016 |
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Aug 9, 2016 00:21
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Yeah The Thaw is good Voyager even if the clowns look kinda dumb. And that version of Mark Twain was the worst because the actor was (badly) playing him as a completely larger-than-life character and wore more reflective of the legend of Mark Twain as a wry old curmudgeon in a white suit than the actual man. He wasn't even that old when he lived in San Francisco.
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Aug 9, 2016 05:57
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So I've been giving the Animated Series my first real run through (I'd seen a couple episodes before, but couldn't get into it). The animation is pretty tragic and sometimes the voice actors aren't quite delivering, but otherwise I've been pretty pleasantly surprised by how much like real (good, weird) TOS it is. I just got to Walter Koenig's giant Spock episode. 
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Aug 9, 2016 07:08
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I don't know, hearing Koloth sound just like Scotty was pretty hilarious.
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Aug 9, 2016 07:28
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TAS update, holy poo poo, magic is real! Also my ancestors who were tried at Salem were apparently aliens.
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Aug 9, 2016 09:15
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I think it's easy to nitpick First Contact because time travel plot, and I agree that sexy robot lady has some issues, but I think a lot of these questions you guys and the RLM people posed have pretty easy answers/handwaves. The time travel device was in the little sphere because it was a backup plan or because it couldn't take the whole cube for some reason and they didn't go back in time somewhere else and travel to Earth in the past because they didn't have the range for it (I know VOY suggested those spheres were transwarp capable, but there's no evidence for that in First Contact) or, again, past assimilation was just a backup plan. As for why they don't do time travel more, I think it's because the moment they leave their time frame they're cut off from the collective and lost in the galaxy, which is probably why they had the Queen with them. Or they have the same foibles about it the Federation does. I don't know, time travel is stupid and it's probably a good thing the Voyager Borg weren't using it. As for why they didn't go to any other time period, I don't think the point was actually to assimilate Earth in that time frame, but rather to disrupt the formation of the Federation so that they could assimilate it later. Note that they never landed on the planet and were more focused on assimilating the advanced tech of the Enterprise than lovely post-nuclear humans. This also explains why they didn't just vaporize half of Montana. They wanted humanity and the other Federation species to keep advancing. Hell, they probably wanted the Warp tests to still happen, but on their terms and in a way that they were fairly sure would result in no Federation and an Earth too weak to resist them later. Yeah, most of this could have been better explained (and a lot of it's just my supposition), but it was trying first and foremost to be a big flashy space movie they didn't have time for the typical 15 minute conference room scene explaining everything.
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Aug 9, 2016 22:07
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I really like the Star Fleet primary color uniforms and much prefer them to the gray shouldered post-First Contact uniforms or the generic blue jumpsuits from Enterprise, both of which seem hopelessly drab for a franchise that originally existed in part to sell color TVs. That said, the smocks and space pajamas they wore in TOS were cheap, cheap, cheap and their simplistic design was a reflection of that. The JJTreks did a great job copying the style while improving on the general quality, fit, and functionality of the originals, but I think they might have been a bit too slavish to the source material as even with good material and consistent coloring, the general shapelessness of the garment is still pretty noticeable. I wonder if that's why Beyond spent so much time finding excuses to put people in other outfits. My ideal uniform would have the big, bold colors of the TOS and early TNG uniforms, but with more defined features and some of the functionality and martial flair that the WoK and ENT uniforms experimented with.
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Aug 11, 2016 12:28
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Big Mean Jerk posted:I want to change my vote to the Defiant for best bridge. It's only negative aspect is that your helmsman is blocking the captain's view of the viewscreen. The Defiant's bridge was seriously cramped and also kind of dark and boxy most of the time. The fact that they had trouble fitting the dolly tracks in at first and couldn't shoot from a lot of angles really didn't help either. Baka-nin posted:No the two things were completely different. In Voyager they just said the actor was a super advanced hologram (even though we see him drink and eat on Voyager) the DS9 thing was a weird sort of holographic frame the actor stood in. He wasn't a hologram, that was just a projection.
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Aug 11, 2016 23:49
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If I were one of the Maquis crewmen and I'd been told I had to wear the Star Fleet monkey suit all the time for "unity" reasons only to find out that the weird aliens and sexy borg lady were apparently exempt from that rule, I'd be pissed. Of course, the Maquis uniforms they had were ugly as sin, but they could have at least given them a special pin or something.
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Aug 15, 2016 10:52
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Rhyno posted:Who created the Holodeck? I would like to punch them in the nose. Roddenberry, who else?
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Aug 16, 2016 03:51
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CaveGrinch posted:I agree. I'd love this very much. However, there is not only a forgetfulness amongst fans (not that it couldn't be explained very easy to the newcomer) - but again, original Trek is in the minds of the masses. I really don't know about this. TOS has a longer legacy and old-timers who never watched more than a smattering of syndication episodes or whatever certainly still associate the words "Star Trek" with Kirk and Spock, but TNG aired for seven seasons, got good ratings, and is still shown on cable almost daily. It was a genuine cultural phenomenon twenty years ago that made Patrick Stewart a household name, spawned three more spin-offs, and started an entire industry of crappy novelizations and video game tie ins. All those 80s and 90s kids who grew up thinking of that as Star Trek have now aged into the prime demographic and I think that untapped well of nostalgia is ripe for mining. If the later Berman era hadn't burned through so much goodwill fifteen years ago, we'd probably have already gotten a proper TNG sequel/reboot series. For movies, using the TOS crew made a ton of sense because, First Contact aside, the TNG crew never prospered on the big screen and modern effects-heavy blockbusters have to, by necessity, appeal to the widest possible audience. JJTrek could pretty well count on bringing in preexisting Trek fans (to the extent that they didn't seem to care too much about putting us off), but in order to be the sort of mega-hit the studio was hoping for, it had to also bring people whose last experience with Trek was watching Wrath of Khan or The One With the Whales thirty years ago or who never watched Trek at all but still knew "beam me up Scotty!" and the like. Especially when you consider the growing importance of the foreign market in Hollywood, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that huge portion of the people who saw those films had only the vaguest idea of what Star Trek was about. Unfortunately, now that there has been a(nother) string of major motion pictures set in that era and the prospects of a new Trek series are still very much up in the air, it's not surprising that the producers of DSC would try to harness that new energy and that new audience to ensure the success of their show. Does that mean that the Berman-era continuity is dead or we'll never get a TNG/DS9/VOY sequel series? I actually don't think so. One thing that was very interesting to me was the announcement that DSC will be set in the "Prime" timeline. Now, some may say that it doesn't really matter which timeline a TOS prequel is set in and this just be a sop for fans who want the original show to remain the "real" version, but to me it says that Fuller thinks the old continuity still matters and has rejected the idea of a reboot. As a DS9/VOY alum himself, he probably respects the work done in that era enough to want to keep it in continuity. There was also that rumor of an "anthology' show, which seems way less reliable now given that the show isn't set post TUC as was suggested, but could still be possible. I could easily see this new TV Trek team using the first season of this new show to get TOS grognards, Berman-era burnouts, and JJTrek newcomers used to the idea of Trek being on TV again and then using a sequel season/series to start filling out gaps in the timeline or moving forward again. For all we know, there could be some master plan in the offing to make multiple simultaneous Trek spinoffs again like they had back in the late 90s or like Netflix and CW are doing with shared-universe superhero shows now. Of course, any of that will be contingent on this first season not getting crib death from a lovely CBS streaming service. Regardless of what happens with this series though, TNG nostalgia is real and there's a lot of money in it, so we'll likely see some sort of revival within a decade or so. I just hope it's better than Nemesis.
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Aug 17, 2016 13:29
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After The War posted:I would love to see a return of the Big Idea Science Fiction you only really saw in TNG, especially with beings far removed from our definition of "life." Before they were dumbed-down, the Borg were an exercise in not just collective intelligence, but collective identity. You had a four-dimensional species that built nests in black holes. Nagilum was a sentient sector of space that needed to have the concept of "death" explained. The Trill. The beings trapped in the other side of the Tyken's Rift whose communications could only be interpreted through dream imagery. They did that post-TNG as well. The Dominion were mostly used as a sort of dark mirror to the Federation, but the Founders themselves were super alien in that not only did they not really grasp individualism as we do, they weren't even really distinct individuals at all in their natural state. Voyager also tried to have any number of weird space intelligences, but they mostly fell flat because Voyager is bad and just used them as an excuse to have yet another weird stuff is happening episode with lots of dutch angles and dream sequences.
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Aug 18, 2016 01:35
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Ogmius815 posted:Correct. That's such a weird, lovely episode. What was Bashir thinking? Getting way too close to his patients is a pretty consistent part of Bashir's character, even if both "I can cure you, now love me!" episodes are pretty mediocre. He also lost perspective in the The Quickening, when he was trying to help Garack, and probably a bunch of other times I'm forgetting. One really interesting thing about his character is how he tends to get fascinated with solving puzzles and that extends to his patients. If that patient happens to be a beautiful woman, then that fascination he has with solving her problem becomes a fascination with her in general and he decides he must be in love with her and falls off the deep end. I like it because I feel like it's a fairly believable trait for his character (young, arrogant, brilliant, emotionally immature) to have and the selfish aspect of it sets him apart from the other Trek doctors who mostly lose perspective or violate medical ethics simply because they Care Too Much. Personally, I think Bashir might be my favorite Chief Medical Officer because he's such an interesting, flawed individual -- simultaneously quite likeable and deeply frustrating. I'm still a bit annoyed that they felt the need to retcon him into a mutant because I feel like his growth over the first few seasons had been interesting enough already without turning him into yet another smarty-pants character. It's kind of frustrating that they took one of the most relatably human characters in all of Trek and said "whoops, turns out he was superhuman all along!" It also makes all those early season episodes where he clearly isn't superhuman (or else he's willing to risk everyone's lives to keep his secret) look really weird in retrospect. It's a lot like rewatching early Buffy the Vampire Slayer and seeing Willow be all hung up on various boys because the writers hadn't decided she'd been a lesbian all along yet. I feel like that sort of hasty character retcon was far more common before DVDs and streaming services gave people ready access to all the back episodes and I'm really glad it seems to be going away. Anyway, favorite doctor chat. I love McCoy a lot, even if he's fairly defined by his job and his temper, and he probably has the most important role in the cast of any Trek doctor except maybe the EMH. It's sad his backstory never got much development as I'd love to know what that disco medallion was all about. Crusher really is Doctor Mom and most of her good spotlight episodes are high concept rather than character-based, but I do like the handcuff episode with her and Picard. I like Pulaski a lot, especially because she's so awful to Data. Data's whole Pinocchio complex is annoying as hell and it seems like in real life he'd be fairly insufferable, especially since he was the second officer with massive command responsibilities but he was still being all "beep-boop how does social interaction work." Just having a character there to remind us that he is a machine and much of what he does is just programming felt important, even if she seemed pretty nasty picking on the poor autistic robot, it's still no worse than the sort of racist poo poo McCoy was constantly hurling at Spock and it was good for the characters. Plus Diana Muldaur owns. As for The Doctor, I realized after a while that he's basically written like a bratty precocious teenager/college kid who thinks he knows everything and acts like he's better than everyone but really just wants to be loved. Picardo does a great job, but the character was better in small doses and the more they expanded his role the more I found him insufferable. I don't remember much about Phlox except that he had funny mannerisms and committed genocide.
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Aug 18, 2016 05:09
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17th Century fleets weren't all frigates and ships of the line. They'd also use smaller and more maneuverable ships like galleys, cutters, sloops and corvettes for boarding, raiding, flanking, and interdiction. They were useful for navigating in harbors and other tight quarters, mounting surprise attacks, running messages and supplies, and filling out the line in battles and blockades. If the Galaxy class is equivalent to a first rate ship of the line and most of the other big ships we see are lower rated line ships or frigates, then something a bit smaller like the Defiant would probably be somewhere in the sloop/corvette range at the very smallest, but is probably closer to something like a brig or small frigate. Shuttles are obviously a ship's boats, and runabouts and those Peregrine fighters seem roughly equivalent to a 6-10 gun cutter, a type of vessel that was in common use throughout the age of sail.
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Aug 18, 2016 09:12
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There's also the question of how much notice they had for the supernova. No way could they evacuate the whole planet, but there's a good chance the senate and upper leadership got out of there in time. The real question is how this would affect their foreign policy. They seemed like they might be on their way to becoming the preeminent power after DS9, but now that their empire is crippled (and presumably rife with internal strife), the question of expansion vs. isolation becomes even more fraught. Will they turn inward again and just focus on holding their borders or will they open up and ask their neighbors for help? Will they seek to regain power through expansion? What about the all the territory they took (back) from the Dominion/Cardassians. Will they be able to hold that, or will their weakness open the door for uprising? What about the Klingons, how long before they turn on their ancient enemies once they're too weak to defend themselves? What would the Feds do then? There are just so many great story possibilities and it's a shame we won't get to see how it all turns out for a while yet, if ever. I'm really looking forward to that DS9 documentary. The talk of getting all the writers together to brainstorm "season 8" sounds rad as hell.
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Aug 18, 2016 10:19
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Here it is It was already linked a few pages back, but the gist of it is that Ira Steven Behr interviewed a bunch of old ds9 alums -- pretty much everyone except Avery Brooks. The two of them apparently are still on good terms. Brooks just didn't want to do it. Supposedly, twenty years later they were finally able to pin down what DS9 was "about." The coolest part though is probably that Behr got the core writing team back together, made them rewatch the last episode, and then started asking them what they thought should happen next.
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Aug 18, 2016 10:31
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There's no reason that they'd have had to continue the Dominion War. It sort of took over the show in the last few years, but they did several seasons without a big war and many of the best episodes are from that era. They could always do stories about rebuilding Cardassia, the establishment of a new DMZ, uneasy relations with the Romulans and Klingons and so on, or actually start exploring again. The bigger issue is they sent Sisko into the wormhole. I suspect that if they'd had another season to wrap things up, they would have pushed the Pah Wraith good vs. evil apotheosis stuff further on and given the Dominion war a little more time to breathe. I know a lot of you hated the whole Dukat/Kai Winn subplot, but I think the big problems with it were that it didn't get a lot of screen time and really had very little to do with what was going on the rest of the time. Likewise, the resolutions to the Klingon, Ferengi, and Ezri subplots ended pretty abruptly. I know it's silly to say that they just didn't have enough time given how much goofy filler there is even in season 7, but I can easily see how they could have filled another half season or so just be fleshing out the existing story threads. It still probably would have been better than the last season of TNG.
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Aug 18, 2016 10:52
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Yeah, I get that smaller craft aren't "traditional" or whatever, but that's only because budget limitations in TOS and TNG only allowed for a handful of ship models. Period. If they'd had the modeling and effects budget for diverse fleets or proper fleet actions, they probably would have gone for it. DS9 broke with tradition because they were the first series that actually had the capacity to do so, and even then the budgetary concerns were very much a factor. They made the fighters because the Maquis needed to be flying crappy little ships for story reasons (and because they could just redress the shuttlecraft set for the interiors). Then, a couple seasons later, when they started doing big fleet battles, they still had the model lying around so they reused it. It's really that simple. Don't be like one of those Memory Alpha nerds who try to find in-universe explanations for every budgetary or narrative expedient. It's a bad look. Ditto, stuff like "it's supposed to be like the Age of Sail," because not only was that never a hard and fast rule (remember that the first real ship-to-ship combat in the original series was basically a submarine movie), but it falls even flatter when you realize that real Age of Sail fleets were typically more diverse in size and role than literally anything ever shown on Star Trek.
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Aug 18, 2016 22:26
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Nessus posted:Wasn't that more that they had no mechanisms to try a godlike dude who happened to seem to be a Federation human? As opposed to their protocols for Lucien or Trelaine or something. Yeah, it seems like the Federation playbook for dealing with godlike beings involves being super rational and trying not to piss them off long enough to talk them down. Obviously Picard had some idea how to deal with godlike beings because he'd already gotten to know Q by then, but actually holding one accountable for his actions in any meaningful way is basically impossible, hence him not knowing how to do it. Also we know Sisko and Janeway were definitely briefed on Q and Bashir knew about Kirk's mirror universe transporter accident so I can only assume that Star Fleet officer training spends months going over every loving nutso edge case that has ever happened to a Star Fleet officer. If they act surprised when history inexplicably repeats itself, it's only because, like with any other history class, most of them just dozed through the lectures, skimmed the textbook, and forgot almost all of it twenty minutes after they finished the final. Tighclops posted:I'm sick to death of starfighters and associated characters, I had enough of that poo poo after BSG I agree 100%. gently caress starfighters and the tired WW2 cliches they rode in on, but I still think the slope would have to be pretty drat slippery for the presence of small craft in like two sequences to be all it takes for Star Trek to turn into Rogue Squadron: the series.
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Aug 18, 2016 23:04
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Cojawfee posted:The fact that they use telepathic and empathic aliens in an official capacity is such bullshit. They could just pretend you're lying and no one would know. They did sort of address that couple times (though it may have been on Voyager so  ). At some point, I remember them saying that the Federation doesn't consider telepathic readings/memory extraction/whatever to be entirely foolproof or reliable (though iirc the aliens of the week did), so legally they were treated more like circumstantial evidence that probably wasn't good enough to condemn someone without corroboration. Sort of like how polygraphs or expert testimony are (supposed to be) treated in modern courtrooms.
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Aug 19, 2016 09:58
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Re: warp chat, I didn't even know that that the scale was supposed to be logarithmic or whatever until I started reading this thread. I'd always just assumed that Warp 8 was twice the speed of Warp 4. They never say outright that warp 9.5 is many times faster than Warp 9 and not knowing that really didn't change anything about what was going on on the screen. I get that this stuff is all in the technical manual or whatever, but so much of what we see doesn't reflect that kind of massive difference between numbers. I mean, just think of all the time they spend puttering around at Warp 2 or Warp 4 or whatever. To me that always conveyed "we're not in a big hurry" as opposed to "we're willing to spend weeks doing something that would only take us a few hours at top speed." It would be like if a modern naval ship decided to just turn the engines off and start rowing for a while. Yeah, it saves energy, but come on. Also the whole Warp 5 limit becomes even more absurd. Plus every time there's a sequence where they're speeding up/slowing down, they tend to go through the Warp factors at a more-or-less even interval.
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Aug 20, 2016 12:18
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Rhyno posted:I guess I haven't gotten to that episode yet. Yeah, it's weird, but for whatever reason, the Kazon backstory doesn't come up until Alliances half way through season 2. I kind of like that episode because (while kind of bad), it actually addresses the conflict between Federation ideals and the reality of Voyager's situation in a way that's more nuanced than "we'll stick to these ideals no matter what" (even if that's more or less how the episode ends). Plus, we get to see Janeway tying to be a Picard style peace maker and failing miserably, which is pretty entertaining. WickedHate posted:It's literally canon that the Borg didn't assimilate them because doing so would make them worse off. I always figured this line was intended to be a sort of self-mocking mea culpa like "sorry about the crappy villains," but it really just felt like a final gently caress you to the fans. The Kazon weren't bad because they were so weak, fractured, or primitive -- that was actually the one thing made them interesting. They didn't have a sophisticated culture or crazy Star Fleet super tech, but they didn't need them to be a threat. Just having more ships than Voyager could possibly face alone and vast territories to hunt them in (and good reason to do so because of the aforementioned supertech) made them dangerous enough. There were certainly a lot of bad things about the Kazon. Their introduction in the pilot as Mad Max style wasteland nomads that also have space ships was weird as hell (and hopelessly shallow and rushed because that episode is an overstuffed clusterfuck). They took way too long to get established as anything more than stupid, balkanized Klingons, the factions themselves were embarrassingly undifferentiated, and they had the horrible misfortune of being mixed up in the Seska spermjacking plot (forget Threshold, this was the real nadir of early Voyager). Here's the thing though, I actually liked Maje Culluh as a villain (except when he was just being used as a prop so Seska could play Lady MacBeth). He was canny, ambitious, and tough. He wasn't as smart as he thought he was and the writers really played up his cupidity, but he still managed to outmaneuver Janeway on several occasions. With better writing he could have been a really compelling character. Instead they dropped him, and his entire species, like a hot potato. His last appearance is literally him fleeing the ship and swearing revenge. On any show where the writers gave a poo poo about their characters or their setting he would have returned for a final confrontation or at least gotten some kind of resolution, but sometime around season 3, the writers just stopped giving a poo poo about all their previously established storylines and all the things that made the Delta Quadrant feel distinct as a setting and just started desperately retooling the series into TNG Mark 2. The Kazon and Vidians disappear without proper sendoffs (just throw away lines about how Voyager has left their space), the Maquis/Star Fleet rift stops seeming to matter at all, and three years of character growth for Kes and all the mysteries regarding her people, their powers, and their real relationship with the Caretakes come to nothing because she's replaced by a sexy borg lady. From then on out worldbuilding stops mattering. Voyager enters a region of space where everyone has replicators and transporters again, any alien species not named "The Borg" disappears after two or three episodes (even the Krenem, Hirogen and Malon, their last stabs at alien races that are more than just random foreheads, only appear in a few episodes), character development starts running on autopilot (except for when it's The Doctor and 7 Show), and nothing about the setting seems distinct or interesting anymore. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 08:26 on Aug 22, 2016 |
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Aug 22, 2016 08:07
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I understand why they felt the need to change out the aliens now and then, but never giving the Kazons a proper sendoff was still awful. They were the main villains for two seasons and then they were suddenly just gone. As for how they kept running into Culluh and the others, I figure their tendency to stop and dick around at every interesting nebula and M class planet probably contributed to that. They never seemed like they'd be that hard to follow. What really gets me is that once the writers decided to stop using races like the Kazon, Vidians, and Talaxians in their story, they never really bothered to come up with anything new. The Borg were a story we already knew. The Krenem never got any characterization outside of that one time ship, the Hirogen and Malon were completely one-note ("hunters" and "polluters") respectively, and I can't even think of any other later Voyager species that showed up for longer than a two-parter. They could always handwave it by saying they were in a new region of space, but the slower travel they did early on felt more like real motion because we actually got to see when they reached the edge of Neelix's experience, or when they traveled from the territory of one Kazon sect to the next. By contrast, everything after Borg space is just a blur because, no matter how many times then ended an episode with "we shaved x years off our journey," it never really felt like the region of space they'd just entered was that different than the one they just left. Plus, even though they take years and years of their trip with transwarp coils, quantum slipstream, and that one catapult thing, they still act like they're hopelessly far from home, and they also somehow keep running into Borg and Hirogen.
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Aug 22, 2016 08:59
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I don't know what happened to Voyager, exactly, but even though Season 4 on is frequently "better" episode-to-episode (all the "good episode" guides seem to pick pretty lightly from the first three seasons), the early years feel like a show that's actually trying things, a show that actually has potential, that you can actually believe in and root for. I know it gets poo poo on a lot for bad episodes and some of the character elements (clingy Neelix, flute music Chakotay, "hot-blooded" B'lanna) are completely indefensible, but the worst thing about Voyager -- the bland pointlessness of it all, the sense that no one actually liked the show they were making or cared about doing a good job -- just got worse. That one Ronald D. Moore interview that seems to have really deeply informed the fan consensus of Voyager feels a lot more accurate to the later seasons than the early ones. The fact is that they did try to set up tensions between the Maquis and Star Fleet. They did try to introduce interesting new aliens and play with big sci-fi ideas. They did have the ship running out of resources and getting into trouble far from home. They did show the limits of Star Fleet protocol and Federation ideals. They were just really, really bad at it. They did all these things that they thought were good ideas and, in many cases, were good ideas, but they were tired and incompetent and overworked and underqualified and no one was there to act as quality control or make sure that everyone was working together and that the vision for the show would become its week to week reality. A few grueling, sloppy seasons later, whatever joy and vision they'd had originally was dead and the whole thing just became about keeping people's butts in their seats by giving them something half-decent to watch episode-to-episode. The fact that that made the show better is probably the most tragic part.
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Aug 22, 2016 11:59
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Brawnfire posted:Schisms freaked me out Yeah, the weird click-click aliens gave me nightmares (of course, so did the lame hyrdophobic aliens from Signs, so maybe kid me was just pretty dumb) and I didn't rewatch it until almost 20 years later. In retrospect, I can see why it scared me, but it was still just a dumb goofy episode with sets and props that looked way cheesier than I remembered. It's also one of the many later Berman era episodes that deal with alien abductions, fringe science/parapsychology, and UFO lore and those are generally pretty bad, but with some arresting nightmare imagery around the edges. I think Braga, in particular, kinda wished he were an X-Files writer because so much of the poo poo he wrote had nothing to do with real science or science fiction and everything to do with crazy tabloid nonsense about repressed memories, devolution, ancient astronauts, probe-happy alien abductors, and mind control (take a shot every time Voyager's Doctor uses the word "engram" then shoot yourself). I mean, they lost so much perspective that in The 37s they felt free to just casually use alien abductions in Earth's past as a plot device, but didn't really even care enough about the ramifications this would have for human history to say who the aliens were or why they went halfway across the galaxy just to gank some Earthlings... and then there was Tattoo...
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Aug 22, 2016 23:58
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Rhyno posted:I just watched it from beginning to end, they don't clearly say which ship is the original. I don't think there was an original. They call the anomaly of the week a "subspace scission" which implies they sort of got split down the middle. Basically, they went from being one whole to two halves that had the same mass as the original. Of course, this might mean that the surviving crewmembers are all down to half a soul, but... that actually sort of fits with the rest of Voyager, come to think of it. e: Also re: that episode, the ethics of the reset button are super hosed up. They handwave it by saying that they can only bring a couple people through the rift and I can get why they would save the baby at least, but the stuff with Harry (and Kes iirc) is super hosed up because everyone else on that ship was just as "real" as he was and had no less inherent right to life. Janeway just picked him because she'd lost her Harry Kim and needed a replacement. Personally, I would have gone for a second Tuvok. Duckbox fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 00:39
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