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dont even fink about it posted:The core problem is that Roddenberry's utopia free of interpersonal conflict is unrelatable and more importantly insanely boring. Yeah, but Trek's almost never actually like this because the writers generally knew how stupid this was and worked around it where they could. Star Trek's society as depicted isn't free from interpersonal conflict at all, or even free from trivial office politics and workplace drama.
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Dec 9, 2016 03:58
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I like how Damar is more good than Riker and Pulaski is more evil than Weyoun. edit- also how the guy who wanted to rule one world government is the most chaotic motherfucker to ever live
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Dec 9, 2016 04:30
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dont even fink about it posted:*Is a utopian post-scarcity society* Society can be post-scarcity on an individual consumer level and not a state level, though. Like there's actually nothing weird at all about the Federation being absurdly rich enough to provide a lavish life of luxury for all of its citizens while still needing to engage in international trade for other things.
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Dec 10, 2016 08:37
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I don't know, most of Lwaxana's episodes just seem unusually badly written, even for TNG.  Broccoli owns though
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Dec 20, 2016 01:17
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I get why it's done and all, but as a piece of dialogue it always feels super weird to have characters name events and places that are several hundred years old. Like, if you asked me to start listing off famous world leaders I'd end up naming a lot of 20th and 21st century leaders before I got back to names like Lincoln, Napoleon, or Henry VIII. It also seems kind of pointless since there's always some explicit context provided anyway.
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Dec 23, 2016 02:02
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WampaLord posted:Holy poo poo DS9 is like the tamest war story ever told, it's the furthest thing from grimdark. Eh, some of the Dominion war stuff actually is really dark in a kind of explicit way. Every single person who dies in "The Ship" dies for literally nothing, because the Vorta would have let Sisko take the ship and Sisko would have let the Vorta take the Founder. It's not even an ambiguous "was it really worth it?" kind of pointlessness, it's just a bunch of people who die for nothing. I think some of the edge comes off of DS9 because of the 90s production value, but the show really did go to some pretty dark places. Not that that's a bad thing.
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Dec 29, 2016 00:24
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skasion posted:I think this one is A Taste of Armageddon. It is. It's a great episode, but the best part is Scotty hanging out on the Enterprise repeatedly telling the rear end in a top hat diplomat to gently caress off and then being completely cool with potentially leveling every major city on the planet. Scotty owns.
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Dec 29, 2016 16:20
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The worst part about Enterprise's polarized hull plating wasn't even the fact that it was a transparent word substitution for shields (although that was pretty awful), but just that it sounded completely ridiculous. I just don't understand how anyone can be invested in the idea of cast members shouting out random percentages as a method of building tension. Hell, the final battle in Wrath of Khan is probably one of the most iconic battle scenes in the franchise and there are no shields.
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Dec 31, 2016 08:44
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:Viewscreens have been in Trek since the original series. It's just not plausible for those ships not to have a technology we have now. I can install a huge tv into my wall which displays a meadow or a view of some city, then it shows some dudes face when I get a Skype call. Video conference has been around for years, and it's simply a key part of Star Trek. What's the point of doing a somewhat distant prequel like Enterprise if you aren't going to remove or seriously alter some key parts of the setting? If you want to do a show with the same stories as TOS/TNG/VOY then you might as well just set the show in the same time period and be done with it. Not that I really blame Enterprise for this specifically, since Voyager had its own version of the same problem. Post-TNG Trek (other than DS9) just steadfastly refused to do anything interesting with the setting.
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Jan 2, 2017 00:31
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twistedmentat posted:Transporters are more of tool for the show not to have everyone pile into the Previa and leave the docking bay to travel down to the planet. Yeah, but that's exactly the problem. Like, okay, you don't have the budget for a shuttle take-off/landing sequence every episode or maybe you just don't want to waste time on that. Fine, so instead of falling back on a lazy option like transporters, how about you find a way to tell stories that don't involve putting a small away team onto a planet every other episode? This is the perfect example of a situation where you can use the fact that the show is a prequel to play with the Star Trek formula and come at the setting from a different angle.
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Jan 2, 2017 02:08
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bull3964 posted:It's all saccharine and empty. The actors are all just a little TOO comfortable in their roles. Instead of using that as an opportunity for growth for their characters, it's instead used sell a script that was trying to be just a little too silly and sanitized. I've been working my way through The Fifty-Year Mission, and one of the things I've noticed is how many people seemed to want to recapture the fun of TOS in Star Trek's later years. It seems like the real problem with that is that a lot of what modern writers see as "fun" in TOS really wasn't intentional. TOS writers were writing the best sci-fi they could for the time, but they were still locked into 60s TV conventions. You just can't replicate that feel with modern TV or film and have it come off as anything other than silly and forced.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:39
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Pwnstar posted:Something that I find alternately funny and interesting in Enterprise is that the crew are very unprofessional, I don't know what they trained for at Starfleet for. Or why Earth has Starfleet already at this point. Archer and Trip are always getting angry with Vulcans and yelling at how they are grown-ups now. Hoshi was having a breakdown because she found away missions too stressful. T'Pol says it's considered bad form to gently caress with a pre-warp civilisation but thats no fun, shut up nerd! There's actually some interesting stuff on this in The Fifty-Year Mission. The writers talked to astronauts to try to get a feel for how people would react under stressful situations, and when the answer was "like professionals with insane amounts of training in dealing with stressful situations" the writers decided that wasn't any fun. A lot of bad decisions in Star Trek writing seem to be the result of people knowing the right answer and doing something else anyway.
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Jan 12, 2017 05:10
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I still think Into Darkness is tied with Nemesis as the worst of the Star Trek movies. As much as I dislike V, I can still pick out a couple of scenes that I actually kind of like. Nemesis and Into Darkness are just completely irredeemable as far as I'm concerned. I guess I might dislike Nemesis a bit more just because it's such a terrible way for the TNG movies to end.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:48
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That O'Brien episode actually bothers me a lot less than a ton of other random existential crises that crop up in Star Trek episodes. I mean, in this case it totally is O'Brien. It's O'Brien from a little bit in the future, but it's definitely still him. Like, what does it even mean for past O'Brien to be dead and future O'Brien to be alive?
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Jan 16, 2017 09:52
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McSpanky posted:It's him from an alternate timeline, but one with an extremely small divergence (the few hours with the timejumps, as you pointed out). It's like in Farscape when John got twinned -- which one's the real John? Yes. Plus there's the weirdness of past O'Brien dying in a future that doesn't actually happen anymore. Unless you want to look at all time travel in Star Trek as just creating a whole bunch of parallel realities, in which case basically every major cast character in every series is dead anyway so who cares.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:03
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VitalSigns posted:Like yeah I figure eventually they'd accept they have a new O'Brien, but drat you'd think everyone would have to come to grips with it emotionally and maybe they'd at least do a memorial for the guy they knew who volunteered to die horribly from radiation poisoning to save them all? Yeah, but I mean even the idea of past O'Brien being dead is... questionable. A lot of it just comes down to Star Trek writers being super fast and loose with this stuff, but the future where that O'Brien died literally never happens. What does that mean for the O'Brien that came back? Is he really a different person at all? Hell, he shouldn't even exist. The fact that Star Trek timeline lets characters interact with their future/past selves is honestly super weird and nonsensical (more so than time travel in general, even) and leads to all kinds of situations that are hard to parse. Also it'd probably be super hosed up for the O'Brien that came back to see all his friends and loved ones mourning him while he's right there. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 00:17
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Duckbag posted:Galileo 7 stuff This is another episode that I love because Scotty gets to be an understated badass. Everyone else is losing their poo poo, but Scotty's just going about his business and fixing the shuttle. When the fuel lines break or whatever his response is effectively "welp, guess we're all dead now."  Scotty
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Jan 24, 2017 02:13
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twistedmentat posted:Maybe they sought to make a harder life for themselves in some weird attempt to capture a rugged individualism of the past. Even this doesn't work, because the Federation was totally willing to just relocate them to some other dumpy planet with as little or as much help as they'd like.
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Feb 5, 2017 21:05
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Subyng posted:I like Pulaski, I don't see how she's supposed to be a TNG version of Bones at all aside from her being kind of no-nonsense and it's a weird hang up to have about the character. ✔ Hates transporters ✔ Is racist for the record I like Pulaski, but she's totally a McCoy clone
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Feb 12, 2017 03:24
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Star Trek is like the worst show to do this kind of thing with too. It's not like you can just gently caress around with the design of a species and people will still be like "oh yeah, those must be Klingons because their foreheads are all weird." I mean, come on. Even a ridged forehead isn't a definitively identifying thing in Star Trek.
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Feb 12, 2017 07:09
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MisterBibs posted:That's because audiences never got over TNG as Their Trek in the first place. DS9 came around and audiences learned even early on (pre-Dominion) that it wasn't going to be another TNG. The numbers evaporated, and DS9 was left to do its own thing primarily because everyone involved realized it would never be Trek that got eyeballs enough to worry about what they were doing (according to The Fifty Year Mission), I don't know why this seems to be the narrative that's taken hold, because it really isn't what happened at all. Trek's audience was certainly declining after TNG, but DS9 was the number one first run syndicated show for the majority (maybe the entirety?) of its run. It was a ridiculously successful show. Its position as the red headed stepchild of the franchise was a top down thing, not something that came naturally from a lack of success.
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Feb 17, 2017 19:26
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MisterBibs posted:Someone posted a chart concerning the ratings of all the shows. After TNG there's this one-moment spot with DS9's premier where it pinged higher than even TNG, followed by a massive downward collapse soon after. At that time and place, being the #1 syndicated show wasn't much of a thing. Where are you even getting this info? This is the chart you're talking about and I was actually going to put it in my original post to help back up what I was saying:  Comparing it to TNG is ridiculous because TNG was an absurd ratings juggernaut. It's like Paramount bitching that JJTrek isn't pulling in Avengers money. It might be true, but it doesn't make it unsuccessful. Those ratings are perfectly good for the time it was airing and it was highly successful as a first run syndication show. This is what that downward slope is really showing:  quote:I would advise you to read The Fifty Year Mission, because DS9 was never a ridiculously successful show, and they mention it. None of the post TNG shows were even close to as successful. Worf's addition to the show was a desperate attempt to get the ratings up, for example. I just finished reading The Fifty Year Mission a few weeks ago, dude. DS9 was backburnered (which, of course, was a blessing in disguise so I'm not complaining) literally because Voyager had the ship and so Voyager was going to be the flagship franchise show. Of course they also hoped that Voyager would pull in better ratings, but that was never in the cards because Voyager was stuck on UPN and the definition of successful was rapidly changing. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 08:05 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 07:59
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AlternateAccount posted:Agreed. NDT's schtick in general is kind of weird in that way and a lot different than Sagan. Out of curiosity, have you read The Demon-Haunted World or much of Carl Sagan's work in general? The original Cosmos TV series may have been slightly more optimistic than the new one (I honestly don't remember enough of it to make the comparison), but NDT and Bill Nye really have nothing on Carl Sagan when it comes to being militantly anti-psuedo science. Dude clearly had no patience or tolerance for people in power denying scientific reality.
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Feb 26, 2017 04:36
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Kibbles n Shits posted:Yea and they handwaved this a bit when Castilo was like "all my family is dead" and Tasha was like "how do you know" and he's like "hunh guess you're right, I don't". To be fair, the episode kind of, sort of addresses this by making it clear that the Federation is hosed. Picard is going for a hail mary because he thinks everyone is going to be dead or subjugated in six months anyway.
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Mar 1, 2017 03:20
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VitalSigns posted:I mean it was nice that Jake rubber-banded his father back to the past and all so he wasn't lost in the astral plane or whatever, but was it worth the billions and billions of deaths? Timeline fuckery in Star Trek is all hilariously disturbing in its implications anyway. Don't forget that Voyager episode where Harry fucks up and the ship crashes on an iceball. Future Geordi pretty much says "hey, you know you guys are trying to just wipe us all out to save like 100 lives right" when he's chasing down Chakotay.
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Mar 1, 2017 05:08
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Bates posted:I'm only through the 1st season of TOS but it strikes me how much less technobabble there is. They have technology and devices that enable them to do a thing and then they do that and get on with the story. Also, random crewmen do things and have lines so it feels more like a ship with a crew rather than just the main cast with some extras hanging out in the background. It's neat. For all the poo poo that TOS gets about redshirt deaths, the first two seasons were actually pretty good about making the Enterprise seem like a ship with a crew that actually did stuff. There are several episodes where the landing party includes a full security detachment and most episodes had at least a couple of random experts come along on away missions. There were also more offhand comments about work being offloaded to ship departments rather than just "oh a bridge character did this." On an unrelated note, I don't get why so many of you guys are clamoring for a show that takes place in a completely different part of space or in a drastically different time period or whatever. Voyager and Enterprise should be proof that setting changes do absolutely nothing to solve writing problems. Discovery could be set in the prime universe in the Alpha Quadrant literally concurrent with the events of TNG and good writers could still make it feel fresh. Space is as big or as small as the writers want it to be, and there's no reason a show set in familiar territory has to cover familiar ground. On the other hand, poo poo writers will clearly find any excuse at all to drag up and retread old stories no matter how unique you make the setting.
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Mar 4, 2017 19:34
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MikeJF posted:It won't solve the issues alone, it's just a necessary step in what Trek needs to do, which is move forward and break from the existing stories and settings. Why is it a necessary step? Voyager was for all intents and purposes a completely fresh canvas, and look how that turned out. JJTrek was an actual reboot, and what did we get? A time travel movie kicked off by events in the prime universe, a pile of references to previous Star Trek films, and one good movie that still referenced poo poo from Enterprise to create motivations for its villain. Drastically changing the setting won't do anything because Star Trek doesn't have a coherent setting in the first place. Concepts like the Federation and Starfleet aren't straight jackets and there's no need to constantly reference canon or to really reference it at all, especially if you're writing a series about a ship that's out exploring. Writers who can't come up with new stories for a setting as fast and loose as Star Trek aren't going to be able to do it just because you've changed the scenery.
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Mar 5, 2017 21:09
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Eh, I think DS9 had more than enough personal nemeses for the main cast. I mean, by the end of the show you've got Weyoun, the Founder lady, Kai Winn, Dukat, and Damar, all with their own poo poo going on and way deeper development than Q ever got on TNG. It's hard for me to picture any point in the later seasons where you could drop a Q episode without him coming off as really underdeveloped compared to the rest of the show.
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Mar 11, 2017 23:30
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Well, TNG old person makeup is a little bit... special
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Mar 12, 2017 20:02
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Railing Kill posted:I'm in the same boat. I finished VOY last year and I hated it. The Doctor's bottle episodes are about half of the watchable episodes for me. ENT, on the other hand, seems to have turned a corner. I'm in the middle/end of season two, and it's getting alright/good on a consistent basis. It's not great, but it's better than VOY. I finally decided to force my way through Voyager a few months ago after bouncing off of it several times in the past (never getting past, like, season 2). I'm up to season 7 now and... yeah. I pretty much regret wasting my time and I'm only doing it out of some weird sense of completionism now. I don't really have a problem with Enterprise, though. I'm not in any rush to watch it again, but I didn't have to force myself through any of it and I found it mostly enjoyable. It's aggressively mediocre as a whole, but it's got a handful of good episodes and it was never offensively bad/boring for me in the way that Voyager is.
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Mar 16, 2017 07:53
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skooma512 posted:Allamaraine, if you can see Isn't Duet in season 1 of DS9? That's pretty much top tier of Star Trek. DS9 has far and away the strongest first two seasons of any of the series aside from TOS. Edit- Although, in the interest of full disclosure, I actually really like the Bajoran politics stuff and I wish it hadn't been more or less entirely dropped after the second season. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Mar 17, 2017 |
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Mar 17, 2017 05:36
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Railing Kill posted:Jake is one of the real-est characters in Trek, because he seems like a regular teen. He makes childish mistakes and has childish motives sometimes, but he also grows up into something real and down-to-earth. He's also not a loving wunderkind, so that helps. Jake is rad, and that includes his wardrobe. Jake and Nog work as characters because their role in any given story is almost never to just be "the kids." It's a stark contrast to how TNG and VOY used Wesley, Naomi Wildman, or those awful loving Borg kids.
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Mar 18, 2017 20:09
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Aren't all of the corridors in ST:6 from TNG?
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Mar 19, 2017 05:13
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Yeah, if tablets were as cheap as paper or even a book I'd have a million of them lying around. I mean, I use my iPad at my desk all the time as a way to keep documentation handy while I'm working even though I've got plenty of screen real estate on my monitors. Physical separation between logical tasks is actually pretty useful.
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Mar 19, 2017 08:06
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So, uh, I'm thankfully finally wrapping up my Voyager run through. I never thought I'd see someone outcreep Geordi on the holodeck, but somehow Seven pulled it off. This loving show.
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Mar 22, 2017 02:02
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willie_dee posted:Just finished Voyager via the episode guide which means I only watched about 30% of the episodes, very much enjoyed it, far more so than DS9, which felt like it was for children. 
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Mar 26, 2017 02:48
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Wheat Loaf posted:Then what was the one with Bashir's flying girlfriend called? I originally thought it was "Meridian" before twistedmentat listed them separately. Melora. Also bad.
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Mar 26, 2017 22:35
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skooma512 posted:Well, it seems like you watched all of DS9 but only cherry picked Voyager. 30 episodes out of 172 doesn't sound very good to me, I'm sure you'd hate Voyager if you sat through it sans guide. I'm in season 7 watching all but the most egregiously dumb episodes (since season 4 when I was doing every last one) and I'm starting to get sick of it. I just got through watching all of Voyager (all of it  ) for the first time and I honestly don't think I could pick 30 episodes that would beat even a random selection of DS9 episodes for me. Like, here we are talking about how bad Meridian is, but there were entire stretches of Voyager that I found just as boring and pointless as that episode. Which isn't to say that Voyager has no high points, but they're so few and far between that I stopped caring.
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Mar 27, 2017 01:03
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Railing Kill posted:I mean, there is no universe in which "Workforce" is worth watching. It's little hints like that, the things that show VOY fans aping UPN marketing from 20 years ago, that make me think these people are brainwashed. "Workforce" is boring as hell, and it doesn't matter that it was hyped in the same way that every two-parter was hyped back in the day. It's on there just because it is a two-parter. It was terrible, as was the rest of the series that isn't on the list, and some that is. "Workforce" is amazing for just how aggressively pointless and boring it is. The core of the story is literally that aliens capture the Voyager crew so they can... erase their memories and give them decent jobs and lives? What? It's like some alternate reality version of the show where Janeway gave up on trying to get back to the Alpha Quadrant and everyone just settled down to live a normal life on some planet. The fact that Voyager's writers managed to drag a premise that thin out for two whole episodes makes it even more bizarre. SG-1 also did pretty much the exact same plot a year earlier, except SG-1's version is a halfway decent episode.
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Mar 28, 2017 02:21
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"Move Along Home" is like a weird, misplaced Voyager episode in the same way that "Q-Less" feels like a weird, misplaced TNG episode. I'd definitely put it in my top five worst DS9 episodes, but... I don't know. I don't find it unwatchable or anything, even though a whole lot of it is cringe inducing.
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Apr 1, 2017 06:56
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