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Nessus posted:I believe their original plan was for the Ferengi to be the modern-day version of the Klingons as recurring antagonists, but it just didn't all gel well for whatever of a thousand reasons, so they didn't do that. I do think that the Ferengi are (accidentally) the most nuanced alien race Trek ever presents, though. I always kind of wonder how TNG would have turned out if The Battle had aired before The Last Outpost - it's both a much stronger episode and the only time the Ferengi work as a threat. I wonder if the writers would have brought back the Romulans so quickly if they still thought the Ferengi were viable as a recurring enemy, rather than them being completely laughable in their debut.
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Jul 3, 2016 16:04
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To be honest, it did weaken Ziyal for me that they went through three different actors in as many episodes; it's hard to get a grip on a character when it feels like they're radically changing after every appearance. (Plus, the last casting change felt like it was at least partially motivated by someone realizing "Crap, Garak and Ziyal is creepy as hell; quick, age her up a decade or so!")
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Jul 10, 2016 07:27
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T.C. posted:Star Trek is certainly a product of its time, but a bunch of that hokiness and silly humour was the result of decisions to actively insert fun and lighthearted stuff into the show. Wait, wait, are you saying The Trouble With Tribbles and A Piece of the Action were intended to be humorous?! That's crazy!
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Jul 11, 2016 06:18
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Baka-nin posted:Well actually in DS9 the Terran Empire collapsed because Spock's reforms made them less brutal and murderous, the DS9 mirror universe is ruled by the Klingon-Cardassian-Bajoran alliance, so the comic pantomime villainy is a little more understandable. I still find myself skipping most of the later MU episodes though. I'm glad TNG and Voyager never bothered with them. "You see, it turned out that liberalizing only weakened us and allowed the untermenschen with their deviant sexualities to overrun us and destroy our civilization!" Christ, I hate DS9's take on the mirror universe.
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Jul 16, 2016 06:36
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Next Gen onwards uses a different system for warp speeds than the original series, probably to stop writers constantly inflating warp speeds for dramatic effect. I think Threshold was the first time it was mentioned on-screen, but defining 'Warp 10' as an infinite, unattainable speed goes back to the TNG writer's bible. Warp 10 in TOS is a bit more than Warp 8 on the TNG scale. Neat behind the scenes detail: Nichelle Nichols put her foot down and demanded the writers find someone to translate those handful of lines into Swahili - the original script just used English, but she thought it important that Uhura's background be acknowledged directly. (Plus, as you mentioned, if she remembers her first language, it implies she wasn't entirely mind-wiped, and maybe her memories were just scrambled, which is a hell of a lot easier to swallow than the alternative...)
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Jul 16, 2016 12:35
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Nessus posted:That's awful though. I never got much into B5 but I hear the cast were all like some kind of rock star-curse-having assembly. But maybe I just have had my perspective colored by people who were really into B5. Babylon 5's cast seems to be dying off faster than TOS's. At this point, I wouldn't be suprised if Walter Koenig ended up the last one standing...
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Jul 29, 2016 04:39
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Evek posted:Pretty sure the only living people are the three survivors of the Franklin and the alien crews were their food. The rest of his army is the swarm drones. Yeah, I figured the only 'real' people in his army were himself, the big thug guy who killed Jayla's family, and the woman who lures Enterprise in.
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Aug 1, 2016 05:50
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Skin-tight spandex with no give whatsoever meant they were constantly pulling down on the actor's shoulders.
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Aug 4, 2016 16:45
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It's one thing to homage movies occasionally, it's another thing to bring your space show to a grinding halt so you can make an off-brand Rat Pack pastiche. Our Man Bashir is doing it right; Vic Fontaine just feels like someone on the writing staff wanted to be working on a different show.
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Aug 6, 2016 17:47
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:B5 season 1 is better than Dr. Who. This is fact, not conjecture. TNG season 1 is better than Dr. Who. This is fact, not conjecture.
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Aug 7, 2016 14:41
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WickedHate posted:I don't get the hate for Time's Arrow. I loved that one as a kid, and it's the only reason I know who Jack London is. I can't stand Jack London, racist piece of poo poo, so I find it hilarious that the episode has it that his entire writing career starts just because Twain is trying to get him to go away...
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Aug 9, 2016 05:14
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Timby posted:Man, gently caress ILM's ship designs. I can't think a single one they did that I genuinely liked. You don't like the Bird of Prey? How can anyone not like the Bird of Prey?!
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Aug 12, 2016 04:29
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WickedHate posted:Dolphins in space ships are actually a somewhat uncommon trope in sci fi, but it exists aside from Gunbuster. It's because of the whole "their the smartest animals ever" thing, I think, so everyone takes that to me we can just put a helmet on them to raise their IQ a bit or give them telepathy and boom, uplifted. Nobody ever wants to uplift Elephants. They're just as smart, and have just as much of a right to have space adventures. 
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Aug 17, 2016 09:23
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WickedHate posted:This is pretty cool, but I don't get Sisko being Worf's second officer. I always thought he was given DS9 as an out of the way pity command to last him a bit till he retires, because of the whole "traumatized by Wolf 359" thing. I've read it, the justification was that Sisko had been building the Defiant instead of commanding DS9, so he was assigned to it because he knew its systems best. It's not a particularly good story - at least, I didn't enjoy it. It's one of those "What if?" stories that just uses the alternate universe as an excuse to kill off as many main characters as possible. A pity, since I really liked the initial setup of "What if the Bajoran occupation never ended?", but then it just becomes "And then the Changelings take over this planet! And then they kill all these people! And then this planet explodes!"
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Aug 18, 2016 14:44
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Geeze, man, he's just a military officer from a rival nation who's been running a secret society for decades built around recruiting young people into abandoning their culture and adopting his weird ideology. What's suspicious about that?!
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Aug 19, 2016 14:53
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Rhyno posted:So do we have confirmation that souls don't exist in Trek other than Thomas Riker? Because I was thinking about Quantum Dupe Harry and Naomi again and it dawned on me that when the crew of Voyager dies there's already a dead version of each of them in the afterlife. There's also dozens of dead Next Gen characters after "Cause and Effect"...
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Sep 4, 2016 04:24
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Yet another example of why the Pah Wraiths were a terrible idea that should have stayed a one-off "Make O'Brien Suffer" idea.
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Sep 7, 2016 13:44
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Roxann Dawson does a bunch of directing now too.
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Sep 9, 2016 05:00
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Isn't there a female security officer in the landing party in "A Taste of Armageddon"?
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Sep 14, 2016 15:14
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Pwnstar posted:Yeah its cool but but theres also stuff like when Kirk says "one God is enough for us" to Apollo and theres a few other mentions that I assume were forced in by the network because they really don't gel with the whole feeling of the show beforehand. Hilariously, that episode exists because NBC shot down a previous script where the crew meets God. "But they can hang out with Satan, right?" "Sure!"
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Oct 1, 2016 05:05
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Didn't the Futurama writers say part of the inspiration for Zoidberg was thinking about what being treated by McCoy must be like from Spock's point of view?
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Oct 8, 2016 07:27
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Fister Roboto posted:ok so i can maybe buy that a transporter accident can turn people into children, kind of Unstable molecules!
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Oct 10, 2016 05:55
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Duckbag posted:I think the biggest offense is still saying that indians were uplifted and taught spiritualism by space aliens, brought to another planet by "presevers" as a sort of living natural history exhibit, and, even in the utopian space future, will still be getting oppressed by the government. TOS did make practically the same claims about the ancient Greeks, so at least it's equal opportunity...
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Oct 16, 2016 15:36
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Nessus posted:You and I both know that the Ferengi would convert to Objectivism or perhaps Scientology. Prosperity Gospel
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Oct 28, 2016 09:04
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I thought it was kinda weird how you have "It's Only a Paper Moon", with it's theme of 'Don't hide away in Vic's fantasy world, you have to face reality', then just a few episodes later you have "Badda-Bing Badda-Bang", which was basically 'Everyone, drop everything! We need to hang out in Vic's fantasy world!'
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Oct 31, 2016 13:02
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McNally posted:Isn't it a matter of context? "Don't hide away in Vic's fantasy world FOREVER, you have to face reality" vs "the hideaway we go to so we can unwind from the grim reality we face needs some attention" was how I saw them. It just felt kind of thematically weird that Vic's had been used twice as an unhealthy escape from reality - in "Paper Moon" and Worf sulking there in the season 7 opener, but then in the same season you get an episode that's all about how awesome Vic's is and how everyone should be trying to stop it
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Oct 31, 2016 15:25
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We're one step closer to the post-atomic horror!
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Nov 9, 2016 11:26
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Genetic tinkering seemed to cause gooniness in the people Bashir worked with in those couple of episodes, maybe that's the real killer flaw. That made a lot more sense to me than "Oooh, we're still scared of Khan!". If your genetic 'enhancements' half the time leave your kid worse than when you started, yeah, that's going to get banned as unethical.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:50
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"Charlie Smith" "A Taste of Cheesecake" "Monday's Child" "Sheep in the Fold" "The Obsolete Computer" "Specter of the Club" "For the World is Hollow, But I Have Yet to Test My Hypothesis" "Whom Gods Inconvenience" "Day of the Pigeon"
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Nov 17, 2016 05:13
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Pwnstar posted:Voyager was the first Star Trek I watched because my girlfriend really liked it and grew up with it. Janeway was her favourite Captain who she looked up to as a kid. I remember getting very annoyed at basically everything but especially that Janeway refused to sacrifice her Federation morals to get her crew home faster. I think at one point Q offered to take them home instantly if she slept with him and she refused? I said Janeway was a psychotic, power hungry, glory hound. After I'd been a jerk for a while we switched to DS9 and I was all over that poo poo. Ethics, am I right? 
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Nov 26, 2016 03:18
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MisterBibs posted:Conspiracy is an interesting duck because (at Roddenberry's insistence) it's not a conspiracy. It's an alien invasion, because the notion of humans betraying their fellow humans? gently caress that! To be fair, I think it would have been pretty stupid to have the Federation on the verge of a military coup in season one, then just go back to random exploring for the rest of the series.
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Nov 29, 2016 04:13
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The least they could have done was make it Captain Riker on the Titan, so at least you'd have a theme of "Hey, the Enterprise crew are inspiring the next next generation!" rather than "Hey, remember that one episode from ten years ago? That was a good one, right?" (It doesn't help that there's no way to make the new scenes make any sense in the context of The Pegasus...) EDIT: Jinx!
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Dec 4, 2016 06:20
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I'm cool with it just being if you want to run a little restaurant and beam to Hawaii every weekend, you'll never have to worry about how much it costs, but if you're managing an entire planet's reconstruction or building a warfleet or just want to own your own moon, yeah, you're going to need to worry about trade and finances and things. There's an economy on a civilization's level, but it really doesn't affect individuals.
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Dec 10, 2016 12:59
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:I like the idea of the mirror universe and the regular one being entangled to the point of people coincidentally appearing in the same place on both sides. And it goes both ways, too. Like, maybe Vic looks like he does because he's the doppelganger of the guy in the mirror universe who doesn't have an equivalent living person. And maybe O'Brien got posted to DS9 because Smiley went to Terok Nor first. It's more of a Dark Tower interpretation, granted, but it's more sensical than a straight parallel world. When a redshirt on TOS dies abruptly, it's because his mirror counterpart just got assassinated.
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Dec 14, 2016 06:15
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TheBigAristotle posted:This reminds me of one of the more surprising but somehow not-surprising moments in that Star Trek 50 book. They could have compromised and had a different inexplicable choice of song play over the credits every episode!
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Dec 15, 2016 03:58
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Namaer posted:I don't understand the character of Kirk's son at all. He has no relationship with him, and we as the audience don't really get to know him. His death in the movie is treated as this crazy heightening of the stakes, but it just felt like this awkward tonal shift that wasn't earned at all. Kirk's son is the worst part of Wrath of Khan. He's got this weird mistrusting Starfleet plot that goes nowhere, he doesn't contribute anything to the plot, and having him be Kirk's son seems like an overly-literal way to address the film's theme of aging that's already handled perfectly fine by the Enterprise being crewed by cadets. I'm not surprised they killed him off at the first opportunity.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:55
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Namaer posted:I'm watching The Outrageous Okona and it is loving awful. How did this episode get past the writer's room? It feels like the writers accidentally made an episode with two 'B' plots and no main story.
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Jan 12, 2017 05:40
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Duckbag posted:Really, really, the biggest issue is how the hell a chemically-propelled ship from pre-Warp Earth could wind up in an "unexplored section" of space in the first place. The same way V'Ger did! And Nomad. And Pioneer 10. And that poor bastard from The Royale. And that probe from Voyager that ended up poisoning some Delta quadrant world.
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Jan 15, 2017 12:14
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I think the idea with both O'Brien and Kim is that the timeline diverged into two either during or just before the episode, not that there was always an alternate timeline that was the same up until that point. There is no 'other O'Brien' until the timeline starts getting screwed up - there was only one, which briefly became two, one of which died, the other resumed being the only O'Brien. There isn't a 'Parallels' style alternate universe that's now missing 'their' O'Brien. It's more like Will and Thomas Riker - they were the same individual for the first twenty or so years of their lives.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:58
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Remember that time some dude cloned himself to frame Odo, and then while investigating the 'murder' they accidentally created another clone of him, and then at the end of the episode just threw in a line about sending the clone off to make a new life? That's gotta be a weird life to have - "Yes, I know all your records say I'm a criminal convicted of murder, but I'm actually a clone the cops made by mistake while investigating him."
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Jan 17, 2017 10:08
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