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MikeJF posted:The only thing that was said about Spock being first is that his mother described him as the first of "his kind" in Starfleet, I believe. Easy enough to say he was the first human/Vulcan, especially given that Immunity Syndrome established entire ships full of Vulcans in Starfleet during TOS. Do you know where it says that? In Journeg to Babel, Amanda just says, about Sarek's opposition to Spock joining Starfleet "Vulcans believe that peace should not depend on force."
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Jan 21, 2020 18:56
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MichiganCubbie posted:If the entire shipyards were wiped out, and Mars is "still on fire to this day," how did only 90,000 people die? I'm pretty sure they also said that the populace of Romulus was also about 900 million, so I'm assuming this is Star Trek's traditional problem with scale.
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Jan 24, 2020 21:34
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The Lord Bude posted:Maybe it's the Ferengi Embassy. Or maybe Earth has a bunch of Ferengi expats now? Franchise of Quark's Bar, Grill, Gaming House and Holosuite Arcade.
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Jan 26, 2020 02:43
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Grand Fromage posted:You now have information about that civilization and that asteroid. However, Earth does not. From your Earth telescope, you won't see that asteroid explode for ten more years, yet your ship already blew it up. This isn't just an artifact, it's real. In Earth's frame of reference, that asteroid has not blown up yet and will not do so until ten years in the future. But your FTL ship already has that information and event from Earth's future. Time's all messed up now. I'm not a physicist, but I don't see how that's time being messed up so much as that there's normally a delay in getting information. We were talking before in the thread about spoilers, and I guess new episodes air in the rest of the world the day after they do in the US. So, if I watch the new episode and post, "We find out in this episode that the Picard show is just a holodeck simulation put on by Commander Riker to figure out what he should do about the Pegasus", and somebody reads that and is thereby spoiled, because he knows information before he could watch the episode, I haven't messed up his timeline. I've just been a jerk. If I'm the pilot of the FTL ship and blow up the asteroid, then come back to earth and say, "I blew up an asteroid.", isn't the only reason earth doesn't know that without my telling them because it takes time for the signals to propagate? My telling earth that the asteroid is blown up just means they'll know about it before they could naturally detect it, but even if I did nothing, ten years from now, they'll see that I blew up the asteroid. eta: And again, not a physicist, never took physics, don't know anything about relativity. Just trying to understand the analogy.
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Jan 26, 2020 23:28
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Maybe this is a dumb thing to point out in general, but science fiction is always about the present. It's either, "What if this present trend continues", or "What if what we're afraid of happens", or "What if what we hope for happens". It's always a mirror of current fears and hopes.
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Jan 27, 2020 04:46
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TOS wasn't utopian, though. It was better than real life, in that we had overcome racism and nationalism on earth and such, but there was still war, there was still hardship. I mean, in the show, we find out that Captain Kirk grew up in a colony, where in a response to food shortages, the governor killed half the population so the other half could live. You have a starship captain who, when stuck on a planet, decided the way to bring the people of the planet together was Nazism. You have miners trying to make a living by working on dangerous planets in the hope they'll strike it rich and be able to buy a bride. From a strictly narrative purpose, you can't have heroes in a utopia. The reason we root for characters like the Enterprise crew is because they're trying to make things better....Kirk stands up and says, "You're not going to oppress the miners so you can live in luxury in your sky cities", "You're not going to commit suicide just because a war simulaton says you should." Picard says "You're not going to take apart Data so you can figure out how to make a race of robot slaves", "You're not going execute Wesley just because he walked on the grass." We're rooting for them because they're standing up to injustice. And that's the thing. If the Federation is really a utopia, then while it's a pleasant place for the people who live there, it's a terrible place to tell stories. It's the same reason that Iain Banks Culture stories (and the Culture is pretty much an actual utopia) are pretty much never set in the Culture. They're all people from the Culture outside the Culture, because while the Culture is a great place to live, it's really boring.
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Jan 27, 2020 06:41
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twistedmentat posted:They also have Commadores that also go insane. I don't think I've ever sat through one of their reviews. I feel guilty about it,because the guy can't help the way he talks, I guess, but its just really hard to sit through.
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Jan 27, 2020 07:05
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Kazy posted:Did the rest of the Federation not send any ships? And I think RLM does have a good point about writers conflating Starfleet and the Federation a lot. Starfleet is the Federation's navy. They're the ones who have the ships. We don't really see anything suggesting that individual planets have their own fleets, I don't think. There are civilian ships, but they aren't generally portrayed as big enough to make any meaningful difference, and plus, they're private property and I assume the Federation can't just seize them.
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Jan 27, 2020 15:28
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:He was a historian who had never read any book on WW2 that wasn't written by David Irving. I headcanon he was just a nazi who used the "whoops wasnt me it was this other guy" excuse. Kirk and spock come off as exceptionally stupid in that episode by buying that bullshit. I mean of course, the real life reason was that, in the late '60s, the mainstream historical opinion of Nazi Germany was that, while it was incredibly evil and genocidal, Germany under the Nazis was efficient and Nazism was a unifying force for non Jewish Germans. It wasnt until the early '80s, I think, that historians started doing in depth studies of the Nazi economy and governmental structure and realized that it was remarkably inefficient and self sabotaging.
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Jan 27, 2020 17:05
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gohmak posted:For good reason. It’s a poorly written pretty show with nostalgic cues I agree with most of that, but I wouldn't call Red Letter's stuff "pretty".
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Jan 30, 2020 02:11
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Is it also part of the reason this was so traumatic is that the attack was on Mars? Mars isn't some frontier colony. It's in Earth's solar system. It was the second place, after the moon, that Earth colonized. It was the first planet terraformed. It was the first of the human colonies to get independence, and its declaration of independence (The Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies) is one of the foundations of Federation lore. Humans brag about having an ancestor who was one of the original colonists of Mars the way American brag about an ancestor on the Mayflower. It was the site of Starfleet's biggest shipyards, and was the last line of defense for Earth. And now it's a planetary graveyard. Mars's wealth, its history and culture, its economic importance, its prestige, its military significance, none of that saved it. So, now, when Mars itself is in ruins, and maybe some of the people there can still be saved, we should just forget about that, and carry on with some quixotic mission to evacuate Romulus and Remus, even though the fleet we were building to do it got destroyed?
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Feb 3, 2020 16:30
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MichiganCubbie posted:Slightly off topic, but wasn't Riker raised on either Mars or the Moon, or am I completely misremembering it? I know he's from Alaska, but I thought he grew up on one of those. If Memory Alpha is to be believed, and they're generally pretty good at pedantic lists, the only actual Martian characters we see are a TOS crewmember who gets possessed by aliens, this TNG extra who is in a bunch of episodes, and Simon Tarses, the ensign from The Drumhead who's accused of sabotaging the Enterprise after it comes out he lied about his Romulan ancestry. Wait a minute....Martian, secret Romulan, already suspected of a previous bombing incident... hmm.
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Feb 3, 2020 16:53
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I mean, to be fair, this is the same Federation that has an official policy that if you don't have warp technology and your planet is facing destruction, they respect your unique culture too much to keep you from all dying. So that attitude isn't entirely out of character for the Federation. And I'm not arguing the decision to let the Romulans die without helping them isn't an immoral decision. I'm saying that the Federation makes immoral decisions all the time, while the Federation is one of the more benevolent of the big star empires in the Star Trek universe, it's still pretty nasty, and that one of the themes throughout Star Trek since the beginning... TOS, DS9, and yes, TNG, is that the main characters stand up for what's right, often in the face of a Starfleet willing to let bad stuff happen or make pragmatic decisions that betray their stated ideals. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 3, 2020 18:19
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Betazoid LSD just blocks your telepathic abilities so you can lie on the floor and tell all your friends how useless you are now for some reason. "Oh, man, I can feel my mind contracting! I can no longer feel the interconnectedness of all living things!"
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Feb 7, 2020 22:19
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nine-gear crow posted:Coming of Age. Season 1 TNG. Part of Wesley's Starfleet entrance exam involves the waiting room he's in suddenly bursting into a catastrophic fireball, critically wounding one person and trapping another. The trapped dude can be saved easier than the injured dude, but is too scared to move so Wesley has to abandon him in order to save the untrapped but injured person, leaving them behind to horrifically burn to death. Bonus is that that's how his father died.
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Feb 15, 2020 23:03
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just another posted:You'd think that at some point in TNG or DS9, it might have come up that there was a militant faction in Romulan Society that was in direct opposition to the Tal Shiar, but I guess not, let's go with this storyline anyway because it's a cool idea. Except, we don't really find out anything about the Romulans in TNG or DS9. They weren't a developed species.
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Feb 17, 2020 05:40
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I'm sure you know this, but addiction isn't related to physical circumstances. In today's society, rich, successful people become addicts, and theres no reason to assume that's not true in the future either.
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Feb 28, 2020 17:44
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This all happened right after the Dominon War, right, which saw the invasion of multiple Federation planets, including the homeworld of some Federation species, like the Betazed and Benzar, as well as an enormous death count. I can sort of see, even before the Mars attack, a lot of Federation planets and citizens say, "Maybe we can not be the big drat heroes for once and let somebody else save the day, while we deal with the immense costs of rebuilding and mourning our dead?"quote:Why is the Senator who loses his head pissed off at Picard rather than the Romulan state? To what extent if any did the Romulans evacuate their own planets and why are people not blaming them for the people who could not be saved rather than Picard? They're pissed at Picard and the Federation because the Federation tried to help them, which destroyed their pride. Romulans are xenophobic supremacists. For the Romulan government to agree to Federation help and then have the evacuation collapse anyway, means the Romulans sold their soul to the Federation and still let them destroy them. Epicurius fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Feb 29, 2020 |
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Feb 29, 2020 01:11
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Rios beams down to Freecloud.
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Mar 1, 2020 15:33
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Kazy posted:I mean it would make all the holograms looking like him make sense. Or he just has a weird sense of humor. The other "He's not a hologram" point is that he's a former Star Fleet officer who was an XO of a starship, and then resigned his commission after his captain was killed.
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Mar 1, 2020 16:06
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Maybe the Q are holograms. Really makes you think.
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Mar 1, 2020 18:42
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Tiggum posted:Really seemed to be pushing that idea that replicator food is the equivalent of microwave dinners again. Which is really weird and dumb. I've never eaten replicator food, so who knows. It's a pretty constant thing throughout Star Trek though that when people have the chance to eat non-replicated food, they take it.
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Mar 5, 2020 15:15
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Tiggum posted:A) That's always been dumb. Even if you want to assume that replicated food isn't worse than non-replicated food, then in a society like the one TNG proposes, which is largely post scarcity, and you can have all the replicated food and replicated cabinets and replicated clothing or whatever you want, then that stuff becomes valueless, and what becomes valuable is the stuff that you can't get that way. Those become the status symbols. Everybody can have a piece of pizza, but to eat pizza you made (or Joseph Sisko's gumbo,), becomes a big deal, because you can't just get that from a replicator...somebody had to put in the work to do it. A homemade cabinet or a homemade shirt becomes a big deal, because somebody had to make it.
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Mar 5, 2020 16:00
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Tiggum posted:Sure. That doesn't explain why someone would have never seen a tomato before though, or why the food served to the workers in the earlier episode was so bad. No comment on the second, but if she's eaten replicated food all her life, why would she have necessarily seen a raw, unprocessed tomato before?
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Mar 5, 2020 17:14
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Tiggum posted:Because they're a good and popular food? Have you not eaten raw unprocessed tomatoes before? In salads, I guess. I've never just bitten into a whole tomato.
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Mar 5, 2020 18:21
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Comrade Fakename posted:You are literally complaining that “why can’t our characters be happy?” “Why can’t this new show be just like how I remember the old shows to be - white noise that some people in this thread have mentioned they genuinely used to fall asleep, and that I apparently don’t actually remember very well because the best of those shows starred a man whose wife was indirectly murdered by the lead of the show it spun off from, and the survivor of a holocaust that ended days before the series started?” Just wanted to point out that in TNG, Captain Picard started dating the widow of his former first officer, who's death he caused. Big David and Bathsheeba vibe there.
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Mar 8, 2020 14:27
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I liked the third season, for the most part. It had weak episodes, sure, but it had a pretty decent narrative throughout the season, and a lot of the episodes were good.
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Mar 8, 2020 21:18
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The ENH is just adorable.
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Mar 12, 2020 17:11
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AndyElusive posted:Remember when Data said "Holy poo poo!" in Generations? How about we do that EVERY EPISODE OF PICARD. I mean, it's mostly Admiral 'cussin' Clancy. Language doesn't bother me much, though.
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Mar 13, 2020 18:12
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Giggs posted:- Why are the Zhat Vash exclusive to women? Feels a lot like someone decided it wasn't special enough and like an inexperienced DM, aka a bad writer, chose a dumb thing. I couldn't help but laugh at the sudden stupid suicide-fest. I think they're drawing some from Diane Duane's Romulans, and they come across as kind of matriarchal. And both the Zhat Vash and the Qowat Milat seem to be female only organizations.
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Mar 14, 2020 03:01
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So nobody agrees with Odo? BASHIR: I can't believe the Federation condones this kind of activity. ODO: Personally, I find it hard to believe they wouldn't. Every other great power has a unit like Section thirty one. The Romulans have the Tal Shiar, the Cardassians had the Obsidian Order. I mean, he's sort of got a point.
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Mar 15, 2020 17:53
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Angry Salami posted:Bullshit. People hated Section 31 right from the start - it was dated '90s black helicopter conspiracy nonsense right from the start. The entire concept was that "We all know naive liberals are too weak to make the Hard Choices so there must be secret Hard Men doing what's necessary to preserve Freedom." It was garbage in DS9, it's garbage now. It's obviously been a while since DS9 was on, but I don't remember people hating Section 31 in particular. I remember a lot of people hated DS9. It was "too dark" and "not really Star Trek", but I can't think of a lot of DS9 people who had really strong negative feelings towards the Section 31 episodes.
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Mar 18, 2020 16:03
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I'm also of the "it was ok" school of thought. The pacing was bad, and I feel like there could have been more character development than we got. Also, the ex-Borg thing didn't really go anywhere. But, Picard was still Picard, I liked Rios, Raffi, Elnor, and Jurati. (Soji was very much a blank slate, which was intentional, I'm sure, but it also meant that there wasn't a lot memorable about her). There were funny moments, it was generally inspiring, and I'll watch next season.
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Apr 2, 2020 19:07
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Craptacular! posted:Star Trek’s original idea was, “the future is this wild new non-judgmental place where tolerance is the norm and intolerance is relatively minor or limited to the intolerant.” People are racist, but they’re racist to Klingons because their culture is tribal warrior people and the Federation views tribalism as outdated and conflict as a total last resort. A lot of Star Trek's idea, honestly, was just, "What if Great Society Liberalism but in space?' The Klingons weren't bad because they were a tribal warrior people (they weren't a tribal warrior people until TNG's reimagining of them). They were bad because they were the space Soviet Union....an aggressive totalitarian empire that enslaved the people they ruled over. The Federation was post-racial, but that wasn't particularly uncommon. You saw that in a lot of 1960s and 70s science fiction...the idea that we would eventually solve the problem of racism and racial hatred and recognize our common humanity.
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Apr 27, 2020 06:02
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Senor Tron posted:It's a super 80's thing because the 80's and early-mid 90's were the last time that there was the general assumption that things would always get better as time goes on. So you use titles like "The Next Generation" because people automatically associate that as "Oh, this is what happens next so it must be even better!". This is obviously written by somebody who never saw DeGrassi: The Next Generation. Stuff never got better for those kids I think they just used the title, honestly, to say, "Hey, remember how you liked Star Trek? Well, it's back!
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May 18, 2020 16:54
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CubanMissile posted:I was thinking it might be fun to include Curzon Dax on the Pike show, he seemed like a cool guy. Then I pictured some modern trek version where he’s just a drunk gambler pinching waitress rear end all day with zero redeeming qualities who only ever seems to remember or mention his past lives when the plot calls for a quick cheap solution. From DS9, it sounds like that''s what Curzon was like.
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May 22, 2020 21:33
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xerxus posted:Spock's Pon Farr in TOS was 2267, which means the preceding one was 2260. Disco Season 2 ended in 2258. It hurts me that I know this, but we find out in Amok Time that that was Spock's first Ponn Farr, due to the fact that he's half human, and that, when it happened, he didn't even know if it was going to happen at all.
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May 28, 2020 12:41
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Isn't that pretty common in television? It's not like all the scripts are written before the shooting starts. They finish a script, the script gets shot, and while they're shooting that script, the writers are writing the next script. It's a continuous development cycle.
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May 31, 2020 15:11
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Astroman posted:I will never forgive them for not showing how they got to the past. I mean, we don't know what mechanism got them to the past, but we know Daniels did it. "PHLOX: Captain Archer is dead. He was on the Xindi weapon when it exploded. Are you responsible for sending us back in time? (Daniels nods feebly) " And Daniels had taken Archer through time in a previous episode using future technology. So the answer is "29th century time travel magic". In TNG, we don't know how Q sent them to Sherwood Forest, or how Kevin Uxbridge committed genocide on the Husnock either. It's not really important to the story.
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Jun 14, 2020 03:44
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Astroman posted:True, but it flies in the face of established storytelling in the Trek universe: every other intance of time travel was accompanied with some sort of visual sfx cues. I mean, sometimes, and sometimes you had the beginning the episode "Assignment Earth", which started: quote:Captain's log. Using the lightspeed breakaway factor, the Enterprise has moved back through time to the twentieth century. We are now in extended orbit around Earth, using our ship's deflector shields to remain unobserved. Our mission, historical research. We are monitoring Earth communications to find out how our planet survived desperate problems in the year 1968. Or Captain's Holiday, where the bad guys are from the future, and they just show up. They don't pop into existence. They just show up and say "We're from the future". My point being, there's a long tradition in Star Trek of halfassing it. Would it actually have been a better episode if, instead of Daniels saying he brought them back in time, he said, "I brought you back in time using a inverse temporal depolarizer, but they won't be invented until the 26th century." Epicurius fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 17:06
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