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Eighties ZomCom posted:The most unbelievable aspect of that episode was the thought of Americans adopting Celsius. there's still time!!
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Mar 4, 2023 20:35
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DoubleCakes posted:Watched "Crossover" from DS9. It's interesting to return to this mirror world where things are generally worse for people. Is it an alternate universe– a split in the timeline? I think it's something stranger and more based in symbols than physics. It's always unpleasant to see our characters behave so nastily but it was refreshing to see Quark do good things. We also get Bashir blowing away Mirror!Odo in spectacular fashion. it's the same universe as "mirror, mirror" in TOS. DS9 further explores it but it also shows up in enterprise ("in a mirror, darkly") and discovery (multiple episodes and characters, all pretty bad)
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Mar 4, 2023 23:51
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Feldegast42 posted:tbh the ds9 ones aren't all that hot either, although the cast seemed to be having a ball doing them i completely agree, they're not excellent episodes by any means. the ds9 ones are kind of like the two-parter on enterprise: they're just sort of hammy vehicles for the cast to goof around in and for weird poo poo to happen to the characters that would otherwise be completely out of bounds. this is the way discovery totally lost sight of this though, which really makes the whole thing suffer because they decided to make it part of the larger whole. terrible choice imo
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Mar 5, 2023 04:49
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FlamingLiberal posted:The most disappointing thing to me is that when they wanted to make a good stand-alone episode they could. In Season 1 the episode that similar to 'Cause and Effect' from TNG has the crew getting killed by Harry Mudd in a timeloop. Then in Season 2 the episode where they go back to Talus IV from 'The Cage' is also pretty good. yeah, imo you're not wrong. most of the disco episodes i'd say were actually good are the ones that are one-offs similarly some of the "short treks" are pretty good, and some of them are literally set on discovery — "calypso" is the example that comes to mind, and it doesn't even feature any of the actual cast. it's one guy we never see again and the ship's computer e: if you have paramount+ https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/video/jtw1dLB8cbhey8G_CO1Sy71rplDuvH_q/ (and if you don't, it's, uh, around) Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Mar 5, 2023 |
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Mar 5, 2023 05:29
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Angry Salami posted:I really disagree. Mirror, Mirror was a serious episode that had something to say about imperialism and about the characters, it wasn't just a comedy romp. I much prefer Discovery trying to take that approach than Ds9's approach of wasting everyone's time with some wacky bullshit that has nothing to do with the rest of the series. mirror, mirror is a good, serious episode, you're right; it does have something to say, and it says it well. that was more in reference to the DS9 set, which is a bit more of a complex subject the mirror episodes of DS9 do not start out as being ridiculous. "crossover" is mostly serious: it tells us what happened to the terran empire, how humans are now subjugated under the cardassians, klingons and bajorans ("the alliance"), and also has a lot to say about what that means for them similarly "through the looking glass" is not on its face a silly episode either, but it is less grandiose about its aims, and that's fine. the rest of them though? i agree, if the goofiness is off-putting to you, don't watch them; you won't like them. ultimately though the entire premise of having a "mirror universe" itself is examined, and (imo of course) they rightfully conclude that it's pretty silly. "evil" characters become caricatures, but that line is blurred because, well, it's the mirror universe — there are no "good" characters from our point of view i'm not going to defend what they did with the intendant at all because i also disagree with it, but i think characterizing what the theme is as, in essence, "might makes right" is missing the point. ultimately we're talking about space imperialism no matter which way you cut it, and, well: it is the mirror universe, after all, and our heroes stem from the terran empire. they're not trying to make that point, i think. it's more that a human is a human, no matter if they're from the terran empire, or the federation this is basically the same point "mirror, mirror" makes; spock is spock, and kirk recognizes this. it leads to lasting change, which doesn't turn out to be a good thing in that setting. later in DS9 the alliance is overthrown because they eventually get sloppy and sadistic, while being comfortable in doing so. these are the same things that leads to the terran empire's downfall in the first place it's appropriate, i think
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Mar 5, 2023 06:11
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oh lol i completely forgot to mention discovery, probably because i've only seen them once or at most twice anyway, i don't believe there are entire episodes set within the mirror universe, except perhaps the final episodes of the first season? my issue with them is not really about the setting, it's that they had a pretty decent character in lorca and then kneecapped this by making him from there (same with georgiou). it's just a lazy way to explain why a starfleet captain might be a bad person, i think. it would have been much more interesting and less of a cop-out to make lorca just a hosed up guy from "our" universe we don't need bad characters to come from somewhere else. there are bad people everywhere, why do this
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Mar 5, 2023 06:19
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Powered Descent posted:Come to think of it, I'm a little surprised no one has used this incident as support for a Dimensional Prime Directive: interference with a less-ethically-advanced civilization, even if well-intentioned, can lead straight to disaster. there kind of is. we're told that "normal" transporters don't exist in the mirror universe to prevent the exact kind of thing that happened in "mirror, mirror". obviously that means it was unilaterally imposed by one side, but it makes sense, i think: the event is not very well known here — it seems to be handwaved away as Normal Space Stuff — but it's infamous there, because it led to the fall of an empire
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Mar 5, 2023 16:26
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Der Kyhe posted:the only 32nd century that can never ever ever happen. i gave up on watching discovery, so i'm not sure what this means and i'm genuinely curious. could you elaborate?
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Mar 5, 2023 23:39
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Der Kyhe posted:They made it clear that via time traveling, there was a person stuck in the future where all intelligent life in the galaxy was wiped by the AI enemy they were working against. That person had a time-traveling gizmo that enabled that person to jump back in time to try to fix the timeline, but had been unsuccessful so far. oh i did see up to there (and a little bit further but not much i guess), i guess i just didn't really think it through. i see your point, and yeah, that future setting was why i basically dismissed the series after that lol i guess there's something of an argument to be made about there being multiple possible timelines as the outcome of every decision a la "parallels", but i never got the sense that disco was trying to accomplish anything like that. to me it just seemed like they realized they painted themselves into a corner with the prequel setting, decided that wasn't the show they wanted to make, and then used a hamfisted plot device to try and course-correct i mean, i also get why spock, pike and the enterprise show up in that season; they were setting up a spinoff. but i thought it was really bizarre that they were just like "ah yeah, discovery? that never happened and nobody will ever mention it again". that is one hell of a way to make the audience not care at all about it
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Mar 5, 2023 23:58
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Timby posted:I think part of the problem isn't necessarily the Bajoran politics (which can be a bit of a slog, admittedly), but more that Philip Anglim, who plays Bareil, has all the charisma of a Totino's Party Pizza that was baked and then left in the fridge for two weeks. We're supposed to buy that Kira's head over heels for him, but he's just dull as dishwater. it's this, the bajoran political stuff can be pretty interesting (anything with kai winn is maddening, and that's intentional), but yeah: bareil is just loving boring
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Mar 6, 2023 01:42
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i mean, if you want us to accept that they have a spore drive, fine. if they can theoretically travel anywhere, why keep it confined to this galaxy? going to andromeda and dealing with the kelvans or something would even fit in with the time period the show was originally set in. make the spore drive break down and they get stuck there as an explanation for why nobody knows anything about the ship. you could even re-tread voyager since people evidently love that crap by making them attempt to get home and fail, which would be the more interesting choice, and it would allow the writers to do their grimdark poo poo occasionally god this isn't hard paramount 
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Mar 6, 2023 02:35
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Tiberius Christ posted:Everybody wants to go to the Andromeda galaxy but no one ever wants to go to the Triangulum galaxy even though they're about the same distance away why not both? they can go anywhere
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Mar 6, 2023 03:30
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i still think a rotating anthology series set in different eras with a different crew featured in each season could've been interesting. of course now we know that the execution would have been terrible but it's a decent idea
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Mar 6, 2023 05:34
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quark's nose in the first couple of episodes actually becomes rom's nose but yeah rom is very different, iirc he's just "PIT BOSS", not even rom. it's actually fun to watch his character arc: rom isn't a typical ferengi, even if he starts out as one. he realizes this and strives to be different, and eventually succeeds to the point he becomes grand nagus it's an excellent character eventually
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Mar 6, 2023 16:59
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brooks does make a couple of weird decisions wrt delivery. it gets much better later on, but he definitely has a distinctive cadence, kind of like shatner i remember complaining about that too when i first watched DS9, but it honestly i think it grows on you. it did for me anyway
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Mar 6, 2023 17:34
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DS9 probably has the best ensemble cast out of them all i think, and that's including guest stars — it's easy to forget, but weyoun, rom, nog, garak, damar, martok, dukat, winn, keiko etc. all aren't main cast, but they're certainly main characters the whole thing is just really well done, and if anyone is on the fence about watching it because of the core concept i implore you to give it a shot
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Mar 6, 2023 17:59
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DoubleCakes posted:I watched All Good Things... and I realized that I had seen it before. In fact, because of the bookending parallels between it and the pilot, I remembered it as the pilot because of it's use of the Q courtroom stuff. I recognized that scene where Q takes Picard to the origins of life on primordial Earth and when I watched the actual pilot (years ago now at the start of this TNG marathon) I was confused as that scene wasn't in it. riker doesn't really have an arc, that's true; he's the first officer, his job can basically be boiled down to "enforcer" for captain picard. basically once a decision is reached, it's up to him to get the crew to fall in line i guess there's an argument to be made that that is riker's arc, though. he's given promotions several times, just to decline them. he even comments in BoBW that he's resenting becoming too comfortable in that position ...which is fine imo. i can relate to that a lot, actually: when i was younger i was much more ambitious, slowed down a bit with experience, and got stuck in something of a rut as well, lol. it might not be the most dramatic arc, but it's certainly a realistic one Timby posted:I mean, there's a first time for everything, but I have never seen All Good Things... referred to as "flat." lol right? "all good things..." is a fantastic episode, and i do have some complaints about it, but it's certainly not boring. the jumping around is intentional, Q is loving with picard so that he can properly put him "on trial". saving humanity is incidental, i guess thematically it's on point, and as a narrative device it was effective enough that  cribbed from it for some desmond episodes (i don't remember which ones specifically, iirc there are at least a few)
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Mar 7, 2023 05:11
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Big Mean Jerk posted:AGT isn’t just one of the best Trek series finales, it’s one of the best series finales in general and that’s a really hard thing to land. yeah, agreed. i would have been happy with it as a bookend, the movies are in comparison a far worse continuation (and obviously picard is just heinous). the ending hits almost the perfect note: the show isn't really over, the crew has more adventures together. we just don't see them and that would have been completely fine
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Mar 7, 2023 05:23
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trek finales usually are terrible: "turnabout intruder" is misogynistic as all hell, "what you leave behind" is up its own rear end about being a send-off, "endgame" is just a mess, and "these are the voyages" isn't even an episode of enterprise, for gently caress's sake in comparison to those "all good things..." is a masterpiece. as noted it's not just the best trek finale, it's one of the best finales i've seen out of any series e: oh, i forgot "the counterclock incident". it's fine, actually. the story is a bit weird, and it doesn't really make logical sense, but i like to think more adventures also just happened off-screen until TMP Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Mar 7, 2023 |
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Mar 7, 2023 05:45
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Penitent posted:Having Tasha back as well as the Season 1 uniforms and look was a cool touch. yeah it really was, the bridge redress, command division o'brien and the old worf wig were pretty neat too. excellent way of communicating what period of time it was without being explicit about it
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Mar 7, 2023 05:53
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Timby posted:Turnabout Intruder is a horrible, misogynistic episode and emblematic of Gene Roddenberry's view of women, but it was produced in an era when "series finales" weren't really a thing (outside of The Fugitive in 1967). So while it was the final episode of The Original Series, it wasn't the series finale, if that makes sense. Big Mean Jerk posted:I wouldn’t even count Turnabout Intruder or TATV at this point. yeah true. personally i always thought "all our yesterdays" was probably way more appropriate as a finale, even if it wasn't intended as such either; it has the same "not the whole cast" problem, but it'd be a way more fitting conclusion than "turnabout intruder", which doesn't even really have any redeeming characteristics of note as for "these are the voyages", yeah, i don't even really consider it an episode of enterprise, it barely keeps up the pretense that it is one. similarly they could have stopped with "terra prime" and i think people would have been far less pissed off
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Mar 7, 2023 05:57
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No Dignity posted:T'pol and Trip mourning their daughter was a very fitting end for Enterprise's cancellation because it was about the premature death of something very close to them before it ever had a chance to grow and fufill its potential yeah. "terra prime" and "all our yesterdays" are actually thematically pretty similar; they both show loss (on enterprise, it's the space baby, on TOS, it's sarpedion), and deal with it differently "terra prime" is more about accepting that loss and moving on while "yesterdays" is essentially the opposite; on sarpedion, people retreat into the past to escape their fate, but the planet's destruction is inevitable anyway either one would work as a finale, i think
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Mar 7, 2023 17:57
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Strom Cuzewon posted:I really love this as part of Trek. It manages to feel almost optimistic about nuclear hellfire - yeah, we hosed up, we almost wiped ourselves out, but we grew and overcome it. I think it would be a bit too end-of-history to have us smoothly transition from modern neoliberalism to glorious space utopia. part of it is that the vulcans happened to be in (or near, i guess) the solar system, so when they see that these hu-mons have strapped themselves to a missile that had just decimated the planet's population, they feel like they should check it out and see what's going on. we see in enterprise that the vulcans had been interested in earth for hundreds of years at that point, and are probably only familiar with us as primitive savages in first contact itself the vulcans don't do any of the warp drive guardrails bullshit they do in enterprise. they're just giving us a, uh, vulcan hello
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Mar 7, 2023 19:33
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Epicurius posted:I think the deal with first contact was that it was a coincidence. A Vulcan scout ship juat happened to be nearby when the Phoenix launched and went into warp. it's this, they weren't around for the borg attack (because it is stopped by the enterprise-E pretty quickly) and even then most of the borg stuff happens on the ship there's even a small story beat about them having to move the enterprise into a position where the vulcans won't detect it. it's maybe three lines at most e: mike
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Mar 7, 2023 19:54
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DoubleCakes posted:Tribunal DS9: Cardassia is looking more fascistic than ever even if you can feel the budget in this episode. The B-plot isn't interesting and the episode ends anti-climatically. Is this the first time a female Cardassian has been on screen? we see female cardassians in (lol) "cardassians", but they're not adults, and iirc there's nothing to establish them as explicitly female anyway. you might be right i think "tribunal" is an excellent episode, it's pretty well written i think, but there isn't really a B-plot, imo. there's boone setting up o'brien, but he's revealed to be a cardassian spy, not a maquis, so it's in service to the broader A-plot ...i guess you could say o'brien's vacation is the B-plot, but that's also basically just a plot device to give the cardassians an opportunity to capture him off of the station. what are you referencing specifically?
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Mar 8, 2023 00:53
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FlamingLiberal posted:In TNG's The Chase, the Cardassian commander is a woman ah yeah, that aired a year before. good catch
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Mar 8, 2023 02:11
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jeeves posted:Don’t even try to look at logic in First Contact: the movie makes the Borg monumentally stupid even before the loving Queen is introduced. lol you're completely right, the premise of the movie doesn't make sense, buuut Tunicate posted:
i mean, even if this is a stretch (and i think that's probably right, honestly), the idea that their shields would deflect something like blunt force trauma is also negated by data being able to manhandle a borg or for worf to he able to pull out their tubes. it's an energy shield for energy weapons, not a literal bubble
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Mar 8, 2023 03:23
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the advanced shielding is energy shields that block specific frequencies. So a phaser puts its energy in some specific frequency and they block that. An impulse (like hitting someone over the head with a hammer) by definition has equal energy at every frequency - making it impossible for shields that defend against specific frequencies to provide protection against it
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yeah, the borg attack in first contact doesn't make any sense. why wouldn't they just beam down a hundred borg drones and assimilate the whole compound? why even bother with that, anyway, when they could obliterate the place from orbit with one shot? i guess there's a chance that there would be survivors and the underground phoenix might survive a bombardment, but we're talking about the loving borg here, i think they'd be able to figure something out (of course the actual answer is that they wanted to do a zombie flick on the enterprise-E, but still)
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Mar 8, 2023 03:47
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Aoi posted:The issue is even more fundamental than these valid points. i guess you could make the argument that the people they're assimilating are the ones who would develop that technology (or their descendants), so they could just force them to develop it as borg instead but that's kind of a stupid justification anyway. the borg weren't even interested in assimilating people at all, at first
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Mar 8, 2023 04:48
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Elder Postsman posted:Remember New Providence? lol exactly, there isn't much that is squarely outside of the borg's capabilities. it's just lazy
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Mar 8, 2023 04:56
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dr_rat posted:As Janky as they could be, I do miss matt paintings. Not that you can't do that with CG, but I think often just because it is so easy there's not as much care put into them. Also they just seem to have a more stylized fantastical feel to them. I mean they were probably going for looking as real as they could get it, but their always did seem to be a bit more individual style to them. the remasters have digital mattes, i think
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Mar 8, 2023 05:24
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first contact is an entertaining movie. if you don't really think about it, it's very enjoyable on the same level as any other blockbuster, which is probably what they were aiming for the problem is, that was a pretty successful formula. almost every trek movie that came after it tried to replicate that success and largely failed. the jjtrek movies are pretty blockbustery too, but at least those seem a little more appropriate because the cast is younger
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Mar 8, 2023 06:13
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it's been a few years since i've seen first contact, do they ever explain why there was just one cube attacking earth anyway? if they were gonna attack the federation again, why not send, i don't know... five? ten?
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Mar 8, 2023 07:10
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MikeJF posted:That'd be like the US sending multiple aircraft carriers to take on Fiji. Yeah, the first time we sent one somehow the Fijiians planted a bomb or something and took it out but that was a fluke, we don't need to send five aircraft carriers the second time, their navy is three speedboats, just another one will do. i mean, i get the analogy but there are apparently tens of thousands of borg cubes (or whatever it was on voyager). maybe send... two? lol it always seemed kinda weird to me that they were like "ok, the federation defeated us once, let's do the exact same thing again without any changes. surely this time will be different"
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Mar 8, 2023 07:46
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mllaneza posted:Fun fact, she makes an appearance in Lower Decks as the captain of a California-class ship. she's also the three-boobed lady from total recall lol
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Mar 8, 2023 17:15
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Nessus posted:More Excelsior imo yeah. if california and texas get a class i like to think it's a reference to the new york state motto 
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Mar 8, 2023 18:21
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i don't really have a problem with picard's characterization in first contact. you can see him go from being the by-the-books starfleet officer to taking things very personally, because, well — it's incredibly personal for him. the borg were supposedly defeated, now they came back, and there wasn't really anything he could do about it beyond following them into the past, now they're assimilating his ship in order to assimilate humanity in that past; it's a great way to establish personal stakes for him, considering there is no backup the problem is that they didn't mash the reset button afterwards. they keep him in this state and that's just not who he is, jean-luc seemingly doesn't learn from this experience, and the films and series that occur afterwards use it as a pivotal moment which it might be, and that's fine, but it's losing sight of the character he used to be also Beeftweeter fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Mar 8, 2023 |
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Mar 8, 2023 18:53
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nine-gear crow posted:I'm gonna be That Guy and say that I actually like the Excelsior II better than the Obena-class. The Obena looks like an ugly kitbash. An Excelsior desperately trying to be a Sovereign. The Excelsior II actually looks like a modernized take on the ship profile. they're both fine imo. the obena looks like a heavily revised version that, well, is probably pretty similar to a kitbash: it looks upgraded with poo poo they had laying around, which makes sense if you consider that following the dominion war they probably had a bunch of half-useful parts literally floating around the excelsior ii looks like it's something completely different so the name is probably inappropriate, but it's not a bad design
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Mar 8, 2023 19:13
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TheDeadlyShoe posted:the excelsior ii's neck is ridiculous lol. lol yeah it looks like a frog the saucer is fine though i think, if that's the direction starfleet design went in general then  i guess it makes sense
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Mar 8, 2023 19:31
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davidspackage posted:Watching the TOS season 3 episode Elaan of Troyius. The plot's goofy and the Elasians are dressed like pizza slices, but I really love Elaan. I think it's really rare when an actress in TOS gets to have a role with some meat on it, and she knocks it out of the park, drat. the pizza pirates are pretty funny elaan has the same problem that a lot of female characters do on TOS imo: her characterization is very patriarchal. she's not a strong character on her own, she needs kirk to literally yell at her and tell her what to do, and she falls in love with him almost immediately and yeah all of that makes sense considering the production time period, but it's still pretty distasteful i think
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Mar 8, 2023 19:59
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