Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Beachcomber posted:

Things like this simply don't happen to any of the other factions.

It'd be a bit of a pity if it didn't happen to the other empires. Then again, I'm the sort of silly person that hears about stuff like Stargate SG-1 and wonders what sort of cool adventures interstellar adventures the Russians were having.

Beachcomber posted:

Given how finicky it is, how the hell did the Trill ever discover symbiosis?

I was wondering about this on a comment thread on another site many years ago. Apparently in their natural environment of their little cave pools, symbionts can "talk" to one another with little electrical zaps. There's nothing in the canon confirming it either way, but I assume they can do something similar with unjoined Trill. My personal theory is that, many thousands of centuries ago, some ancient Trills fell into these pools, the symbionts started zapping, and these people began hearing spirits talking in their heads. Over the centuries, interaction between the two species grew, and the two eventually came to realize each species had abilities that could benefit the other; symbionts could hold the wisdom of centuries in their minds, and the Trill had opposable thumbs and legs and stuff. I sort of imagine that for most of Trill history, symbiont pools may have started off as shrines or oracles, and over the course of centuries grew to be maintained by monarchs or noble houses as a status symbol and a living archive, with serious taboos concerning the treatment of the symbionts. Of course, this would be a far from perfect system, and as Trill society evolved into its equivalent of our industrial and modern ages, something like a "symbiont's rights movement" may have developed, with both Trill and symbiont criticizing the "royal/noble pools" as exploitative and demanding a more equitable relationship between the two species. Someone would have eventually come up with the idea of symbiosis, and then it would be the work of a century or two to do the medical research to make it work in a way that doesn't kill the symbiont or force the host to chug anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives.

It's a patchwork history, and one that assumes the Trill as a species were not quite as thoughtlessly exploitative as we are, but it's a workable idea that doesn't have things go completely lovely for the symbionts, and could also serve as a decent sf/f premise on its own.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2017 03:27

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:08

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

twistedmentat posted:

I had this idea for new Trek series being set in the future where refugees of all the wars Janeway started in the Delta quadrant were flooding into the Alpha and realized it was pretty much the right wing fantasy of evil refugees.

But I cannot help but think Voyager damaged the Delta Quadrant so much it killed trillions.

That actually did come up at least once on the show. In "Hope and Fear," the whole reason that Ray Wise alien made that fake-Federation slipstream ship was to kill Voyager's crew in revenge for helping the Borg beat Species 8472 and thus allowing them to assimilate his entire species afterward. Voyager's effect on the Delta Quadrant is also something that's been wrestled with in a few of the post-series novels.

As an aside, I really like that Dauntless was made to look like a Federation ship that was built by someone who doesn't quite know what a Federation ship was supposed to look like. At first pass everything looks fine, but you start looking at it and all these incorrect details start popping out. It's got the traditional saucer-engineering hull-nacelles arrangement, but everything is melded together into one piece, like you dropped a towel over Voyager or something. Then you start looking at the bridge and you realize it has no viewscreen and even fewer bridge stations than the Enterprise-D's bridge did. I just love the little things like that.

Powered Descent posted:

In the episode Living Witness (the one that's set hundreds of years farther in the future), didn't they outright say that Voyager was remembered as some horrible ship of doom, bringing death to every world it touched?

I love that episode, but I always wondered why a 31st-century Federation ship never showed up at some point and told those aliens their history was bullshit. Eh, maybe by then the Federation has a "deluxe Prime Directive" where they won't talk to anyone who doesn't have time machines.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2017 21:52

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb! Repetition posted:

The female Trill kissed Crusher's wrist, that might've been scandalous when it aired. Episode over.

So yeah, that's the Trill. They completely revamped the species for DS9, mostly because of the problems that would arise if you made a Trill one of the main characters on your show. They changed the design of the symbiont and make the nature of symbiosis more of a personality-merge of host and symbiont rather than a straight-up bodyjacking. They also completely changed their makeup because the Paramount executives didn't like the idea of sticking a rubber forehead on Terry Farrell, so in all subsequent appearances they just have little spots that follow the hairline down the sides of the head to the shoulders. Oh, and it's also later established that they had prolonged diplomatic relations with the Federation even as far back as the pre-TOS years, yet no one ever found out about the symbionts until this episode. To be honest, TNG Trill and DS9 Trill are basically different species.

Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Sep 6, 2017

# ¿ Sep 6, 2017 05:24

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

MisterBibs posted:

I wonder what the franchise would be like today if Voyager had came out right after TNG, to sate the audience who wanted more TNG instead of coming face to face with only DS9. Would Voyager's numbers had been higher had DS9 not poisoned the well?

Voyager did come out right after TNG. "All Good Things" aired May 23, 1994, Generations was released in November, and the pilot for Voyager first aired January 16, 1995. DS9 was only running solo for little over half a year.

You know, I never looked at the timing before, but 1994 must have been a nightmare. Shooting what amounts to two TNG movies, then tearing everything down and building and shooting Voyager in a year? That's insane.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2017 21:18

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Mister Kingdom posted:

Was Sisko's brief interaction with Kirk from "Trials and Tribble-ations" ever brought up in any of the books?

I did a skim through Memory Beta, the crummy wiki for Trek EU stuff, and as far as I can tell it's never come up again.

On a related note, while Jeb's been giving us his TNG commentary I've been skimming MB to see how many guest crewmen and whatnot have reappeared in the various books. So far it's been less that I'd expected, believe it or not.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 04:52

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Well, this is sad. Stellar Parallax, the modding time behind Star Trek Armada 3, announced over the weekend that they have cancelled Star Trek Infinities, their Trek mod for Stellaris. According to their official statement, it was mostly bad luck that killed the project. A lot of the team ended up getting caught up in real-life stuff, and the way Paradox patches their games meant they essentially had to start from scratch every time a new update was released, and they ultimately just didn't have the manpower to keep up. We still have New Horizons, and the Stellar Parallax team is apparently planning something new at the moment, but it's a disappointment all the same.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2017 22:39

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

twistedmentat posted:

The funny thing is the People who watched TNG growing up are probably the target market for Trek more than anyone else. We're the people who for 7 years lived and breathed TNG. We kept going with DS9 and Voyager, even though it wasn't good we still watched it because it's Star Trek!

I said it before, that I think they went with a TOS reboot rather than trying something else is because to everyone else, Star Trek is Kirks bad acting and Spock saying something about logic. They weren't appealing to us, they were appealing to everyone else.

But on the other hand, TNG had massive appeal even outside of the core fanbase of Trekkies, and was so influential that you could argue, with some justice, that almost every major American television space opera made between 1990 and 2010 was a response to TNG.

For myself, I go with the theory that the guy from the "Midnight's Edge" videos had that the main push for the TOS reboot was so Paramount could have their own "Star Trek" brand they could exploit without ever having to interact with CBS. (He's also suggested that Discovery is being driven more by Paramount than CBS, but I'm not 100% certain on that front, even if it does explain some of the production choices.)

Jeb! Repetition posted:

Their calculus is probably that people who care about Star Trek will watch it anyway for the name so all the appeal can be safely aimed at other people. And I'm not prepared to say they're wrong.

That may be their calculus, but I'm not sure how true it is anymore. It seems to me these days, with the wide variety of choices across various forms of media, that there's probably a lot of former Trekkies who've given up on the franchise entirely and moved on to The Expanse or Mass Effect or what you will. I don't know who in the thread said it, but I agree that at this point, CBS might not be able to sell Star Trek to Trekkies anymore.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2017 02:25

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

Is.. is this a coach z reference or was HSR referencing something else?

Aw, geez, you guys. It's an MST3K riff from "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians." And you call yourselves nerds!
(It's a good riff, but it's not a patch on Santa's 'Nam story.)

Jeb! Repetition posted:

This is kind of making me wonder how translation works in Star Trek. I assumed it was just some kind of neural implant that was so effective no one ever needed to worry about it, but now they kind of do.

Yeah, the "lore" reason is that there are devices in comm badges that handle translation (though the Ferengi go the implant route), but at the end of the day it's one of those conceits you just have to accept on faith to have the show work. Mind you, a space opera where all the aliens look like they're dubbed would be funny, but I bet that would get old real quick.

# ¿ Sep 13, 2017 05:23

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

All the themes and episodes you really seem to enjoy are basically DS9.txt. I know people keep saying it, but you should really give it a shot after TNG.

Ironically, "Ensign Ro" was not written to set up the premise of DS9. Planning for the series started around the time the episode aired, but it took a while for the concept to solidify beyond "frontier town in space." The introduction of the Cardassians and their occupation of Bajor were spur-of-the-moment creations from TNG that the producers and writers eventually decided to incorporate into DS9's premise later on.

Also, according to Memory Alpha, the Bajorans were going to be oppressed by the Romulans in the first draft of the episode, but Rick Berman, of all people, decided they should switch to the Cardassians, so I suppose he deserves some credit for giving us our favorite lizardy space Nazis.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2017 03:14

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Big Mean Jerk posted:

I think the Cardassians may be my favorite race in trek, even if you only count their TNG episodes. The paranoia and secrecy of the Romulans with the war culture of the Klingons and vaguely ancient Egyptian ship design. It helps that lead Cardassians were consistently played by really charismatic actors.

Mine too. After looking at some of the production notes and such, I'm wondering if part of their appeal is that they're the most "human" of the Trek antagonists. We've often argued in these threads about how Trek has a bad habit of boiling its aliens down to just one trait, like "Klingons = honor" or "Romulans = treachery." With the Cardassians, while they have their own values and ways of looking at the universe, there is more latitude to them. It's easy to imagine Cardassians from different walks of life and with different attitudes towards their society, mostly because DS9 showed us a fair amount of both.

There's also the point that the Cardassians are fascinating because, in their own way, they represent a dark mirror to the Federation. The Federation has always been portrayed as the ideal society; after humanity's hardships in the 21st century, we pulled ourselves up, achieved enlightenment, and set out to make the universe a better place. For the Cardassians, that enlightenment never came; they ran out of resources, authority clamped down on their society just to keep civilization functioning, and everything they've done since has been in the name of mere survival. If the Federation is the platonic ideal of progressive Americanism, then the Cardassian Union is what you'd get if an even more cynical version of the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union took over the planet and discovered warp drive.

Also, yes, their aesthetics are rad as hell.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2017 03:52

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Star Trek Is A Locked Room And Only Bryan Fuller Has The Key.

(I got nothing.)

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 05:10

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Ooooh, that article's not good. Not good at all.

In equally disappointing news, I just found out that the name of the first episode of Discovery will be..."The Vulcan Hello." Now, I ~~may be~~ am a child, but the first thing I thought when I saw that title was that episode of The Venture Bros. where everyone's arguing about which particular sex act is called a "Rusty Venture."

# ¿ Sep 19, 2017 23:14

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Wheat Loaf posted:

Was she ever in any expanded universe stuff? I assume she must have been.

Oh, she's been in a ton of EU things, most of it contradictory to one extent or another. In the books she seems to rise and fall in the Romulan military through the later 2360s and 2370s, usually appearing as part of some sort of anti-Federation operation. Depending on what you read, she ends up burning her brain out to fend off a mindmeld in 2375, or killing herself in 2384 to avoid extradition for causing the destruction of Deep Space Nine. In STO, she ends up running the rump Romulan Star Empire by the beginning of the 25th century, conspiring with the Hirogen and horrible subspace aliens to maintain her power. Later on it's also revealed that the whole conflict with the Iconians is her fault too.

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Yeah Geordi showed up as captaining some Galaxy-class ship in an episode of Voyager. I think it was the one where Harry woke up on Earth and had some bullshit story with Tom Paris, the climax was stealing some experimental shuttlecraft. Whole fuckin' episode was super lame as I recall.

No, Captain Geordi showed up in "Timeless," the one where Harry and Chakotay get everyone on Voyager killed and they have to do time shenanigans to fix it. That one was all right; at least it gave Garrett Wang something to do for once.

Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Sep 20, 2017

# ¿ Sep 20, 2017 23:33

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb! Repetition posted:

The dad explicitly called it rape, so this and the episode Alan Moore wrote make two times Troi was raped onscreen, unless there's one I'm forgetting. Anyway they did a good job making the episode disturbing even if it was overdone by modern standards.

Alan Moore wrote an episode of TNG? That can't be right. The only other...er, rape episode that comes to mind was "The Child," and that wasn't written by him. Which one are you referring to?

# ¿ Sep 25, 2017 03:14

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Zutaten posted:

The new Discovery tie in novel is a Shenzhou/Pike's Enterprise all star team up and it apparently gives Number One a name. Her name? Lt. Commander Una

The Bloop posted:

Also, she's Chekov's godmother, Uhura's academy roommate, and secretly a changeling, probably

There's something like five different backstories for her, most of which contradict each other. Probably the nuttiest one out there is from the New Frontier series, which is basically a sandbox for Peter David to do whatever he wants. In those books, she's introduced as "Morgan Primus," and she's a human from Earth who became immortal sometime in the misty past, kinda like that Flint guy. She tended to swap identities every few decades, one of which was Number One, though there's also some jokes made about Christine Chapel and the ship's computer. She eventually ended up on the USS Excalibur, the main ship of the series, and eventually got killed by a Greek god, only to have her mind end up in the computer. She eventually contracted Cortana's space madness, and she ended up getting erased. Oh, and she's Robin Lefler's mother.

Jesus, when I lay it all out like that, it's so incredibly stupid. How did I never see it before?

Doggles posted:

What's our man Macet been up to in the EU no one might ask?

"Macet remained on DS9 to represent Cardassia at Bajor's signing ceremony for admittance into the Federation, but instead witnessed the assassination of the First Minister Shakaar Edon - who it turned out was under control of a Bluegill parasite. A short while later another parasite attempted to take control of Macet."

Bluegills are the parasites from Conspiracy. Macet leads a force of Cardassians to blockade the Bajoran sector to prevent the infection from spreading. When the Defiant comes across the blockade Ezri reveals one of her former hosts encountered the Bluegills during an expedition lead by Christopher Pike. Research into the Bluegills was interrupted by Pike's incident that resulted in his beepy chair.

Those books did have one cool part. At one point in the proceedings, a bluegill tried to take over Taran'atar, a Jem'Hadar elder that Odo had sent to DS9 as an envoy. It leapt into his mouth, as bluegills do, only to...well, let's just say that for an engineered species that doesn't eat, the Jem'Hadar have incredible jaw muscles.

# ¿ Sep 28, 2017 21:03

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Kibayasu posted:

Shatner('s ghost writer's) theory in the book series Kirk gets revived for is that the Mirror Universe split happened just after First Contact (the movie). Despite not showing it in the movie one of the books says that Crusher used future medicine to erase the memory of the Enterprise etc from everyone in the camp but, for some reason, it didn't work on Cochrane. He then flipped a coin to decide whether or not to tell the Vulcans about the Borg (which for some reason they told Cochrane about despite him never going to the ship?).

Him deciding to not tell them is our universe. No one felt the need to militarize over the unstoppable cyborg zombies.

Him deciding to tell them is the Mirror Universe.

There's a bit more to that story. In the Shatnerverse trilogy where the mirror universe appears, there's also a major plotline about the Preservers, in which it is revealed that all those duplicate Earths Kirk ran into were probably artificially constructed as laboratories for experiments in social engineering. (There are also supposedly several duplicate versions of Qo'nos, Vulcan, and Andoria floating around too for good measure. By the end of the book, it's theorized that the Prime Trek universe itself is another Preserver experiment, and that the mirror universe is the "control," and the end of the last book has our heroes preventing a Preserver plan to wipe out the mirror universe for interfering with the Prime one.

For my money though, the best mirror universe explanation comes from Diane Duane's Dark Mirror, which has the Enterprise-D getting sucked into the mirror universe as part of a Terran Empire plot to conquer the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. (Suffice to say, this was written before DS9's mirror universe excursions.) There's a section where Picard has gone undercover and is looking through his counterpart's collection of books, and he's horrified to find Shakespeare's plays in this universe are far more vicious and cruel. (Duane does this lovely faux-excerpt from The Merchant of Venice which depicts Shylock getting his pound of flesh.) After looking through the books, Picard surmises that it wasn't any one thing that made the humans of the mirror universe act the way they do; it was more of a "slow moral inversion" that happened gradually over millennia, even going as far back as whenever Homer was writing in ancient Greece. (Pointedly, Picard decides not to touch the Bible in his counterpart's quarters.)

# ¿ Sep 29, 2017 20:43

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Brawnfire posted:

It makes sense to me that, despite limitless possible alternate universes, that the prime and the Mirror universes are sort of "stitched together" by both commonalities and intrusions into one another, thus making them bonded more closely than the prime is to other realities.

Yeah, that's really the only way to justify having our heroes always having mirror versions of themselves, despite the timeline being so drastically different that the odds of the character's parents getting together, and getting the right sperm/egg combination to boot, are astronomical.

Wheat Loaf posted:

I presume one of those pre-DS9 books must have been the one where Mirror Worf, rather than being the tyrannical ruler of the Klingon Empire, is inverted in the sense that instead of a brave warrior, he's Mirror Picard's cringing slave who's been broken down by a lifetime of mistreatment and abuse? I remember reading a summary to that effect.

That was Dark Mirror, and I didn't really read him as "cringey" so much as beaten down and resigned. He does get a good moment at the end, when Picard gives him the "one man with a vision" speech.

As for the subject of "alternate Treks" in general, for some reason one of my favorite things are those "timeline where one character is replaced by someone else" episodes, particularly with speculation of what these characters are doing in the Prime timeline. I mean, Thelin was good enough to be first officer of the original Enterprise, and Thomas Halloway got to command the Enterprise-D, so how did their careers go in the regular timeline? They do occasionally pop up in regular EU novels, but they always seem to be treated rather poorly. (Thelin got killed by an avalanche on an away mission, while Halloway was killed at Wolf 359.)

# ¿ Sep 29, 2017 23:14

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

MillennialVulcan posted:

The Discovery design is based on the Star Trek Phase II design that was floating around somewhere after TMP and before TNG, iirc. They used one of the mock-up models at Wolf 359, as you see there.

And if I'm not mistaken, that four-nacelled ship above it is one of the early mockup models they made while they were designing the Excelsior for The Search for Spock. The TNG team liked to reuse those old models for "ship graveyard" scenes; they also appear in the aftermath of Wolf 359 if you squint hard enough.

Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Oct 3, 2017

# ¿ Oct 3, 2017 20:58

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

It's another one of those conceits you just have to accept for the episode to work, like how they're able to breathe or see with permeable retinas. Later Trek shows have mentioned something called "grav plating," so you might as well go with that.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2017 03:15

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

So I had a dumb thought rattling around my head and I'd like to hear you guys sound off on it. For those of you who dislike how STD's aesthetics clash with just about everything we remember from the TOS era, would you have less objection if a Trek show with similar aesthetics had been set in the "Lost Era," aka that big chunk of time between Kirk's death in Generations and the Enterprise-D's first mission in Encounter at Farpoint? I was just thinking about how no one except die-hard Trek fan-filmmakers would be willing create a show that stuck to the '60s aesthetics exactly, which has been a recurring issue with both JJTrek and STD. However, it seems some of the more flashy modern stuff would be easier to accept in a show between the TOS movies and TNG. Heck, a lot of the time it just be a natural application of in-universe technology that we never got to see.

# ¿ Oct 9, 2017 21:18

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb! Repetition posted:

I bet Data's head was the inspiration for items that criss-cross time loops in Homestuck like the bunny or of course Lil Cal.

There's also a possible example from the TOS movies. In Wrath of Khan, McCoy gives Kirk a pair of antique reading glasses for his birthday, only for Kirk to pawn them in 1984 San Francisco in The Voyage Home when he needs some American money. I've seen at least one comic speculating that the glasses might never have been "made," instead just appearing in the late 20th century and disappearing in the mid-23rd century. Personally, I assume there are either two sets of glasses, or during the three centuries the glasses are repaired enough that it becomes a "ship of Theseus" situation. You know, just to avoid the whole "spontaneous generation" thing.

# ¿ Oct 12, 2017 13:39

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Man, I'd suggest just watching all of season 6 at the very least, but if you're looking to compress things, I suppose this might work. I not sure how much I whittled things down, so I put asterisks next to the ones you need to watch.

Season Six

*Time's Arrow, Part II (well, duh)
Realm of Fear (standard ep, but a good Barclay one)
*Relics (a classic)
*Schisms (great mindfuck episode)
True Q (Not the best Q episode, but a different take on the character)
*Chain of Command, Part I
*Chain of Command, Part II (a must watch; fantastic performances from Patrick Stewart, Ronny Cox, and David Warner, and sets up some of DS9)
*Face of the Enemy (probably the best Troi episode)
*Tapestry (another must-watch, and a total classic)
*Starship Mine (the first appearance of action-hero Picard, but better handled than the movies)
Lessons (alright if you like Picard romances)
*The Chase (good Trekky fun)
*Frame of Mind (a good mindfuck)
Suspicions (a fun mystery)
*Timescape (great temporal nonsense)

Season Seven
*Phantasms (Data goes nuts)
Inheritance (A good episode for Data's history)
*Parallels (great sf premise, and a fun bit of misery for Worf)
*The Pegasus (really good Riker episode)
*Sub Rosa (if we had to watch this, you do too)
*Lower Decks (a look at a side of the Enterprise's crew we rarely see)
Thine Own Self (not entirely essential, but good for Data and Troi)
*Masks (y'all like Aztec bullshit? Well y'all are gonna get some Aztec bullshit!)
Eye of the Beholder (a nice Troi mystery that gets a bit mindscrewy)
Genesis (a delightful mess, and proof that Brannon Braga doesn't understand biology)
Firstborn (worth watching if you hate Alexander)
Emergence (another weird sf one)
*Preemptive Strike (a farewell to Ro, and sets up some stuff for Voyager that was never used)
*All Good Things... (duh, and it's also the best TNG movie)

# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 19:55

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Meanwhile, in the world of modding, Stellar Parallax, the team behind beloved Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion mod Star Trek: Armada III and the recently-cancelled Stellaris mod Star Trek: Infinities have announced their new project. They've returned to Sins and have turned Infinities' lemons into lemonade with a mod series entitled Ages of the Federation. For the first installment, they have announced The Four Years War, a mod that ironically spans the breadth of time from Enterprise to the beginning of TOS. At present, it looks like a revision of their old aborted Axanar: Strategic Operations mod, in which battles will turn on individual ships rather than massed fleets. They've announced that the mod will primarily focus on the conflicts between the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans, and that they'll be drawing more from Axanar and TOS for their design aesthetics than Discovery (feel free to argue about that last one). For myself, it sounds pretty interesting, but I'll be waiting to hear if they ever put that "Lost Era" (post TOS movies to pre-TNG) mod that was rumored many moons ago.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2017 03:57

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

cheetah7071 posted:

If you had the tolerance to get through TNG seasons 1 and 7 without skipping it probably isn't necessary, but in case you care, the more-or-less universally agreed really bad episodes in DS9 are:

Melora
Meridian
The Muse
Profit and Lace

So those are safe to skip. If you find season 1 a bit boring (no shame in that, it doesn't really find its feet until season 2) you can skip a few more forgettable but not terrible episodes but that probably isn't necessary for a TNG veteran

You forgot "Let He Who Is Without Sin...," the episode even the writers, directer, and showrunners all agree was a huge mistake.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2017 20:47

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb! Repetition posted:

Haha the end with the tarantula. That was a great episode. Thanks whoever recommended it.

You're welcome...maybe! I don't quite remember!

# ¿ Oct 20, 2017 07:47

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

I'm late to the "Rascals" party, but I had a thought last night: didn't they say in Season 2 that Picard had an artificial heart? With the way they explained the kidification field, shouldn't kid-Picard's heart has degenerated into base components and killed him instantly?

Eh, probably putting too much thought into things.

Jeb! Repetition posted:

Hahahaha

Jeb, I don't know how you did it, but you managed to take the perfect screenshot. I'm dead serious; I can't decide whether I want this picture printed out and framed or to be rendered in the style of Edvard Munch and entitled "The Depression."

CharlieWhiskey posted:

It iust dawned on me that O'Brien has seen:
His wife become a child
His child become a woman
His offspring populate a planet and then unexist
His cellmate die needlessly
Etc etc

O'Brien must suffer

He's also seen his unborn son be removed from his wife's body and implanted in his boss's, and had a bunch of his subordinates murdered by his best friend's friend while under the influence of experimental combat drugs. And to top it all off, all this crazy bullshit started dropping on him the day he turned 40. Before that, his life was normal. He did some soldiering, worked some grunt tech jobs, nothing out of the ordinary, then BOOM.

VitalSigns posted:

He watched himself die and then stepped into his duplicate's life and he told everyone what happened but no one cared.

He's seen himself die twice, actually. The first time it was a programmed assassin clone of himself, and the second time was during that temporal switcheroo.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2017 22:26

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Cythereal posted:

Not enough for the character? She'd be a Romulan serving on a Starfleet station and ship with the Dominion War looming over the future, probably the first Romulan to serve with a Starfleet crew ever (unless you count T'Pol). That's a whole lot of character right there and without even worrying about her personality or personal history.

Just thinking about T'Rul being around for Improbable Cause/The Die Is Cast makes me regret what could have been.

Personally, I'd have preferred more Romulans and less Klingons in later seasons. Martok's great, but the Romulans have never been used well beyond an ominous, looming presence with incredibly cool looking ships.

Or T'Rul being around after the Dominion War starts but before In The Pale Moonlight. A major cast member is not a Starfleet officer or a Klingon, but an officer of a galactic power that is so far neutral in this conflict where she's nevertheless serving on a Starfleet station at the front line. That's a huge well of dramatic and interesting story potential.

Those are fantastic ideas. I've never been able to find out why DS9's showrunners didn't make her a recurring character, but it is a shame. It's not hard to imagine that she could have been for the Romulans what Worf was for the Klingons or Garak was for the Cardassians.

Sadly, this seems to have been a recurring pattern with Martha Hackett's work on Trek. After playing T'Rul, she was cast as Seska on Voyager, another character who became a huge missed opportunity. Some people just don't get no luck.

EDIT: T'rul also hasn't been used that much in the Trek EU either. The only thing that ever used her was a DS9 novella that had her working with Dax on a way to screw up Jem'Hadar biology. From what I've heard, the most interesting thing about that story is that it delves into how the events of "In the Pale Moonlight" affected her. Long story short, after serving on the Defiant she was reassigned to the Romulan embassy on Cardassia and brought her family along. When the Romulan Star Empire declared war on the Cardassian-Dominion alliance, the Jem'Hadar stormed the embassy and killed most everyone there, including her husband and children.

Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Oct 25, 2017

# ¿ Oct 25, 2017 21:28

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Baronjutter posted:

Eric Andre had a bit of a transporter malfunction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4fR2vvTkpI&t=245s

Heh, I've been tempted to post the entire opening from that episode before, but was reluctant because of that one shot of Eric loving the world. (Note: not hyperbole.) Eh, cat's outta the bag now.
:nws:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApF5ojF2u4E :nws:

There's also this, which features Lance Reddick losing his mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaWa4ScfQXc

In more family-family related news, you may not like Red Letter Media, but you cannot deny Mike Stoklasa's love of Star Trek...nor the misery Jay Bauman feels when Mike talks about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reApQlk5JiA

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 03:54

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

jeeves posted:

Dukat is great. It's too bad what they decided to do with him in Season 7 though, as I think the role Damar played would have been far better-- dying for the rebellion against the Dominion FOR Cardassia would have been a far more fitting ending for the character.

To be honest, I don't think your idea would have worked two reasons. First of all, Dukat was the guy who sold his people to the Dominion in the first place because he hated the namby-pamby civilian government that had the gall to bust him down to freighter captain, even though he presumably had access to plenty of intel from his days in power about how the Dominion treats its allies/subjects. Secondly, Dukat's whole character is build around this whole weird nexus of megalomania, ego, and narcissism to the point where you're not entirely sure if his fleeting selfless and compassionate moments are genuine or just feeding back into his complexes. The rebellion arc worked for Damar as from day one he was presented as a "good soldier" looking to advance himself, until he hit a point where could no longer rationalize or make excuses for himself. To nick a line from The Death of Stalin, Damar loves Cardassia, while Dukat loves Dukat.

(Also, I never thought of it before, but being his legitimate Cardassian wife must have sucked. She probably got roped into it for political reasons, had to deal with his charming personality, then was left her at home for years at a time to raise the kids while he banged his way through the Bajoran workforce.)

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 08:58

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Timby posted:

In the script, he has a line at the wedding reception where he says something like, "I was ... not suited for life as a diplomat."

Years ago there was this series of Trek novels entitled Star Trek: A Time to..., which were written with the goal of both filling in the four-year gap between Insurrection and Nemesis and explaining why the hell everything's so different on the Enterprise in Nemesis. They show a fair amount of Worf's time as the Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire, and long story short, Worf eventually decides he just can't handle all the bullshit of High Council politics.

I only ever read two books in that series, A Time to Kill and A Time to Heal, and I thought they were actually a decent Trek analogy for the Iraq war, believe it or not. They're also unique in that the central conspiracy of the books is perpetrated by members of the Federation government itself rather than Starfleet.

# ¿ Oct 26, 2017 19:25

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Cythereal posted:

Apocalypse Rising

[...] Good twist, good use of Odo, good Sisko being a badass and fitting in pretty well. But why oh why bring O'Brien along? He's blatantly a bad fit, should have gotten Bashir or Garak instead. Hell, Kira probably would have made a badass Klingon. [...]

Arglebargle III posted:

Dax is the obvious choice but Terry Farrell was still super allergic to the prosthetics.

Kira wouldn't have worked either. According to the DS9 Compendium, Nana Visitor was super claustrophobic and spent the filming of "Second Skin" almost crawling out of her skin when she had the Cardassian prosthetics on her face. I doubt Klingon makeup would have been any better.

Also, here's a fun fact: Colm Meaney bitched up such a storm over the makeup job on his hands (according to him, he thought they'd hosed up his nails) that even Rene Auberjonois, who'd previously been enjoying the makeup schadenfreude of his costars, told the showrunners to never put Meaney in makeup again.

# ¿ Oct 28, 2017 18:32

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

turn left hillary!! noo posted:

This brings up a ~~good~~ question, what are the limits of the Founders' shapeshifting abilities? We know they can change size and even mass, otherwise they would never be able to e.g. actually take flight in bird form. But how big can they get? Can one masquerade as an asteroid or even a planet?

I tend to assume that changelings can "shunt" excess mass into [SUBSPACE SCIENCE] and pull it out when needed, but they can't pull out extra mass. A bunch of them linked together could probably be an asteroid, but probably not one changeling on its own.

As for the lower limits, there was a DS9 novel (part of the Millennium trilogy, I believe) that had a short bit with Odo musing on how the smallest thing he ever morphed into was an alien bug half the size of a housefly, and that he doesn't want to push his luck any further than that. Of course, Laas showed that Founders can become gases, so who knows what's possible anymore.

EDIT: Oh man, I just checked the episode list for TNG, and I'm now really psyched for Jeb's next posts. TAPESTRY!!!!

Marshal Radisic fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Nov 4, 2017

# ¿ Nov 3, 2017 21:43

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Cythereal posted:

I can see it with a specific case like Picard. This is a man with a drive and a will, who should by all rights go on to do great things... not acting on the great gifts he has. There undoubtedly are people who would be completely happy as an astrophysics officer - no better place to study the cosmos than Starfleet and I'm sure the astrophysicists on board are delighted whenever the Enterprise runs into an anomaly this week. But that's not Picard, his heart (pardon the joke) isn't in it. He had the potential to be so much more and he knows it, and knows he chose to not take a chance and act on it.

McSpanky posted:

I'm sure there is someone with his job there, but they should be happy with it because that's (hopefully) what they want and not what they just drifted into. Sadsack-Picard ended up there because he has no passion or ambition, this was bore out when he went to talk to Riker and Troi about the possibility of moving up in the world and they laid out his performance history. I get the feeling that someone in his job who was actually doing what they love wouldn't have been shunted off to busywork half the time.

I pretty much agree with these interpretations. I think Abigail Nussbaum put it best when she argued that the episode is about Picard learning to accept both sides of himself, the brash risk-taker and the contemplative worldly man, and learning how he needs both to be the man he is. I do wonder if this point would have been made a little clearer if a bit more time was spent with Lt. (j.g.) Picard to get more of a sense of his life. According to Memory Alpha, in an earlier draft there was a scene where Picard went to Engineering, and Geordi treats him pretty much the same way he treats Barclay. The writers may have dropped that scene thinking it was redundant, but I think it might have helped.

On a related note, Jeb's! posts on "Chain of Command" reminded me of something Peter David once wrote about Jellico. I think it was in the first New Frontier novella where the Enterprise-E crew meet Jellico again, who's since been promoted to admiral and is running a starbase. There's a few paragraphs where Riker is musing about Jellico as a person, and he comes to the conclusion that ultimately Jellico is a limited personality. He's a good captain and a good admiral, but he's someone who is only going to grow so far and no farther. By contrast, Picard is a man whose horizons are limitless. To put it another way, Jellico is prime Starfleet material, but no omnipotent energy being would ever choose him to act as a representative of all mankind.

You know, Peter David put a lot of crazy crap in his Trek novels, but his characterization is fantastic when he puts his mind to it. Hell, he even made John Harriman into a good character and a decent Enterprise captain.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2017 19:25

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb! Repetition posted:

Cardassians are such eternal assholes

In Ocett's defense, you do have to be a special kind of bastard to be able to pull off pigtails in your late 40s.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2017 03:44

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Cythereal posted:

Chimera

I've seen discussion of this episode elsewhere as an allegory for homosexuality, that Laas is the openly gay man rejected by society and Odo the deeply closeted or at most bisexual man trying to pass in a homophobic society. I can see why some would read this episode that way, but I don't personally buy it.

I think Odo's writing and character development in general has been spotty during the Dominion War. He keeps swinging between basically a fascist ready to jump into bed with the Founders (and indeed he does) and the brooding, conflicted loner... who's basically a fascist, just a benevolent, it's-for-your-own-good type. A cardinal sin of the writing around Odo's character in these final seasons, I think, is refusing to dwell on and examine his actions during the season six opening arc. There's no fallout for his actions even though the Alpha Quadrant would have fallen due to Odo's inability to keep it in his pants if Sisko hadn't taken a leap of faith.

As it is, I'm stumped by what this episode is supposed to mean or do. Maybe it's setup for later episodes.

For me, I felt episodes like "Children of Time" and "Chimera" are, on a certain level, stories about Odo being confronted with his own immortality. It's an issue that never really came up before, probably because Odo was too immersed in the day-to-day business of policing DS9, but alternate-Odo and Laas are glimpses of what he would probably become over a few centuries. Dunno if this is spoilers or not, but I believe these meetings were crucial for the decision he makes in the final episode.

Baronjutter posted:

It's funny trek always presents aliens as deep down all the same and all differences are down to culture, except the founders seem genetically predisposed towards severe dictatorship and obsession with an extremely structured authority with them in control or they get angry and paranoid.

That was at least partially by design. There's an interview or something with Ira Steven Behr discussing the creation of the Dominion, and he emphasized that one of the things he wanted to do with them, as opposed to every other antagonistic Trek race, even the Borg, was to make them more unsettling and alien the more you knew about them.

Also, it may be anti-Trek, but I like the idea that, in a galaxy full of humanoid species we can be friends with, at the end of the day there are still some barriers that cannot be crossed. The Federation can never truly understand the Founders, since all of their society and culture is based in the Great Link, which no humanoid being can ever access. As a result, the Federation can never properly understand the worldview of the Founders, and they are too powerful as a political and military force to just be ignored or steamrolled. Ultimately, the only thing the Federation and Dominion can do is agree to stay out of each other's way.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2017 19:35

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

8one6 posted:

Also aren't the Rozhenkos ethnically Jewish Russians? Or did they not make that explicit anywhere?

I thought they were Belarusians, but I don't believe their faith was ever explicitly named.

Nessus posted:

Regarding the matter you spoilered:

I think it was discussed and considered repeatedly during the original series, but they didn't want to cut up the model. It DID happen in the comics, and of course to the film's Enterprise-without-letters. The TNG tech guide also says they built computer models about a saucer landing based on the three times it DID happen...

I have seen some sketches for TMP that also depict the refitted Enterprise undergoing a saucer separation after a Klingon attack. However, I think the idea was that the Galaxy class was unique in that it could undergo saucer separation and the two sections could act as autonomous vessels and reconnect. For earlier ships like the Constitution, saucer separation was a one-time deal, and the only way you could reconnect the two sections would be to tow them to a shipyard and manually weld them back together.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2017 19:06

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Cythereal posted:

[...]The Krenim join the alliance during the Iconian War during a mini-arc that boils down to "Did no one learn ANYTHING from Year of Hell?!"

Well, the events of "Year of Hell" were erased from the timeline after Janeway kamikazed Annorax's ship, so technically speaking...they never learned any lessons in the first place.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2017 00:05

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Angry Salami posted:

I had a rather nasty experience playing the Klingons in a game where the Andorians founded the Federation instead of Earth - giving them a Militarist ethos instead of the usual Pacifistic, and giving them the 'Democratic Crusader' AI personality. They went on a mad rampage against everyone around them, 'liberating' world after world. In the end, I was forced into an unholy alliance with the Cardassians and the Romulans just to try and contain them...

Heh, there was actually a story in one of those "alternate timeline" story collections where the Andorians wound up founding a "Federation." IIRC, the premise with that one was that Surak was either never born or his reforms failed, so there was no Vulcan/Romulan split and the Vulcans had all but warred themselves into extinction.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2017 06:01

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Jeb!'s posts prompted me to watch SFDebris' video for "Second Chances," and he made an interesting suggestion. As we've mentioned, the TNG writing staff was flirting with the idea of killing Will off, promoting Data, and putting Thomas at the conn. SFDebris took the idea, but gave it a little twist; instead of killing Will, have him finally accept a promotion and get a ship of his own. The idea would be that the events of "Chain of Command" would set off a period of soul-searching in Will about the state of his career, and this would only be amplified by meeting his double, an echo of the man he was before he decided to devote himself entirely to getting the big chair. Will would come to the conclusion that he was stagnating by staying as first officer of the Enterprise, which would motivate him to finally grab the brass ring and bring his character arc to a close, all while shaking up the character dynamics of the show without having to write Frakes out of the series.

Personally, I prefer seeing the same faces year after year, but even I admit the idea has legs.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2017 00:18

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 10, 2024 02:08

Marshal Radisic: Oct 9, 2012

Ben Nerevarine posted:

Riker does get his own command in Titan. I mean, books and all so canon's out the window, but it's definitely an idea that's been explored.

Oh, I agree with you, it's just that Riker was introduced at the beginning of TNG as an up-and-comer just champing at the bit for a command, only to finally take one some fifteen years later. Heck, one of the main conflicts in "Best of Both Worlds" is over how Riker isn't accepting a new command, and that came just three years into the show's run. It's a petty complaint in the grand scheme of Trek complaints, but one the fans have argued on and off about over the years, and that premise I jotted down would have been a way to resolve that earlier in TNG's run. On the other hand, we wouldn't have gotten "Defiant" and "Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast," if that had happened, so take your pick on which timeline you prefer.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2017 03:20

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Star Trek: *hits blunt* The higher, the fewerrrrrr

«‹›6 »