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Arivia posted:@BioEnchanted: I don't want to spoil it in case you or others haven't seen it, but Babylon 5 has the best "trapped in a crisis situation and laughing moment" with G'Kar in the elevator. Also a DS9 spoiler but there's another memorable moment like this significantly later in the series. Very last episode actually, when Kira's party is really close to breaking into the Dominion HQ but Garak's explosives aren't strong enough to blow up the door. BioEnchanted posted:I loved their frustration in the pilot where they cannot understand that Sisko didn't understand what they meant by "But why do you exist HERE?!". Then that moment of Sisko admitting that for him at that point, his perception of time was not linear at all. It was a cool way of exploring grief and hyper-fixating on the thing that caused it. It's not a perfect episode, drags a little at times, but it's definitely aged well. I feel like that moment in particular would have people all over Twitter posting threads about how it's such a great portrayal of grief.
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May 28, 2023 23:20
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Arglebargle III posted:Nana Visitor hated episodes that paired Kira and Dukat because it was like a Mossad major having to go on a road trip with Adolf Eichmann. She didn't think Kira could ever warm to Dukat. I think it was a perfect example of writer/showrunner ideas and actor pushback working together to create the happy medium. Their character dynamic was ultimately really great because of that tension, and the show didn't really need to spell it out. Her exasperation was palpable every second she had to be onscreen with him. It's a contrast to modern stuff where it seems like nobody really cares, so if one person wants to do something they just let them.
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May 29, 2023 02:25
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For a female character on show still largely written by men, Keiko is pretty darn reasonable. They tried to write a wife character who had traits other than "wife" and while it wasn't perfect, people definitely reacted worse than they should've.
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May 29, 2023 12:46
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"The Quickening" is definitely underrated. They've done a lot of episodes vaguely like that throughout the franchise, where they go down to Planet of the Earth Tones and deal with Stubborn Village Elder. But that is by far the best version of it. It's like what they were trying to achieve all along. I suspect people were just so tired of the tropes at that point that they glossed over how good the episode actually was.
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May 29, 2023 17:35
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Beeftweeter posted:i thought "the quickening" was generally pretty well-received (imo as it should be). what are people's complaints about it? I guess I can't recall anyone actively disliking it, just ignoring it.
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May 31, 2023 00:55
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Atlas Hugged posted:I just smoked a big bowl in my bong or maybe three, but I keep thinking about "Move Along Home" and it's really gotten under my skin. Currently Trek fandom is in the "backlash to the backlash" phase where people say this episode is good, actually, but personally I still find it to be pretty boring. Quotable, but boring. The stakes are too low for it to be dramatic, and the game is too meaningless to be fun, and they don't fully explore the idea of learning why the aliens care so much about this in their culture. I guess the best thing I'd say about it is maybe it was a first step towards the series' eventual theme of how to really work through cultural clashes instead of just assuming the Starfleet way is always the best way.
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Jun 2, 2023 16:31
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BioEnchanted posted:I like the irony with the Gem Hadar in the episode with the crew in the tiny ship - their credo is "Obedience is Victory, Victory is Life" but one of the previous generation Gem Hadar notices that their superior officer is making bad calls, and when he tries to advise him he gets shouted down with "No, I am the first, you are the second, do as I say". This attitude allows them to lose to the protagonists because he keeps obeying despite his misgivings, until they are all wiped out, and his last words are "Obedience is Victory. Victory... is... life..." I won't say much other than they really do see these themes through to the end, which is one of the main reasons I love this show so much. It's gotten a reputation for being "dark and gritty" because it has a war, but it really explores the reasons why people go to war in the most Trek way possible. It's ultimately about various different cultures coming face-to-face with how flawed they are, and how they ultimately deal with it -- whether by reacting like a cornered animal and trying to re-assert their dominance, or being willing to move on to something new and better.
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Jun 3, 2023 20:23
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BioEnchanted posted:It feels Ezri Dax is a more effective counsellor than Troi was, she's always available to jump on a situation that could turn ugly and try to defuse it before things get to embittered. She's a great character even though she was dumped into the worst circumstances, from a creative standpoint, and hence gets attached to a few mediocre bits of storytelling. Ultimately she pulls through and has some standout moments despite everything.
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Jun 4, 2023 22:44
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Atlas Hugged posted:There were a lot of great Odo moments and episodes in season 1, but my biggest problem with them is that the more time we spend with Odo, the less impressive his makeup is. I'm sure this is one of those things that wasn't such a big deal when it was on broadcast TV in the 90s, but it really stands out here. Quark, the Klingons, and the other aliens have looked fantastic in their prosthetics, but Odo looks like a Muppet, I'm sorry. Not that I need to constantly defend DS9's honor, but both of those things sound like they're supposed to be that way?
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Jun 7, 2023 03:59
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Atlas Hugged posted:You can tell this show is fantasy because as soon as a villain is confronted with their own lies or evidence of wrongdoing, they immediately backdown even if they don't admit guilt. You're not wrong, but you do need to make some allowances for anything made before 2016. I mean that was the way they resolved plots in pretty much everything back then, because it still seemed like a safe assumption that people would actually care. And to some extent I do think an actual societal change happened on a fundamental level. "The Drumhead" from TNG has probably suffered even worse in this regard. At least DS9 has the advantage of letting a lot of the villains return and have a continued arc instead of just going away forever, which makes it somewhat more realistic. Anyone who doesn't literally die in a DBZ space magic battle usually isn't truly defeated. cenotaph posted:Yeah but they lived through Reagan proving nothing mattered and still kept beating that drum. Nothing truly comes out of nowhere, of course. But I don't think you can underestimate how much Fox News broke people's brains. (Combined with 9/11, of course.) Sir Lemming fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 9, 2023 13:35
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Atlas Hugged posted:Watching "Paradise". This episode actually aged kind of well, despite the fairly re-hashed "village planet" tropes. At the end, the leader's grand deception is revealed, but the villagers don't really care all that much because she got results. They don't care about their whole society being built on lies and intimidation, they're happy to just let one bad leader get arrested and continue what they were doing.
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Jun 13, 2023 16:21
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Gaz-L posted:DS9 does sort of change what it wants to be a couple of times, but I've always felt the complaint some had about the first two seasons is overblown and very much from the 'Trek should be zoom zoom zap zap spaceships' crowd. The early seasons are very much set in the context of Bajor rebuilding and it's a really interesting setting. About ⅓ of the first season is TNG rejects which do feel very much out of place with what the show became. The trick is the first season is not very long, so you can pretty much count those episodes on one hand.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:39
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I feel like at the time Enterprise was made, there was a big deal about "going back to basics" and having 3 main characters like TOS with the captain being the most important by far. (I can't prove that this was a backlash to the last captain being a woman and the previous one being black and also not a real captain for half the show, but...  ) And they got ⅔ of the way there at least, but they definitely should've worked on the other characters a bit. It's not the 60s anymore, we can handle it.
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Jun 28, 2023 12:49
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At least the Borg going to sleep & self-destructing was, in spirit, a very Trek way to resolve the conflict. As opposed to them finding a magic weapon or something. A hard sell as a resolution to the best cliffhanger of all time, though.
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Jul 11, 2023 12:25
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I see Section 31 as a stand-in for all the shady stuff the US government has ever done. You learn about this stuff and you have to decide whether you're going to throw up your hands and say "oh well, I guess that's just how things get done and we can't argue with the results" or you can say "no matter what it achieved, it's still wrong and we aren't going to do it anymore".
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Jul 14, 2023 12:20
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Nessus posted:If doing bad things did not sometimes lead to (conditionally) good outcomes, they wouldn't really be a temptation or dramatically interesting irony, they would be the equivalent of neurological injuries. That's perfectly put, and why I'll always prefer that Sisko never got literally put on trial for Pale Moonlight. It leaves you questioning what really makes something good or bad. The writers clearly think it's bad, but the question of why is more complicated than you can do in an hour, and they respect that.
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Jul 15, 2023 01:13
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Conscience of the King didn't do much for me but I know it's pretty generally well regarded. Alternative Factor certainly isn't though! It's the Manos of Star Trek, just a complete failure to ever get off the ground. It's not even funny-bad unless you're really into that sort of thing. Regarding the updated effects in the remaster, they're pretty bad and I definitely avoid them, but with the relatively low amount of effects shots in the show, I wouldn't say it really makes or breaks the experience. You're not really missing out on much. It's more just unnecessary.
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Jul 16, 2023 03:28
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The TNG remasters are generally regarded as an incredible achievement. There are some issues with season 2 where they used a different effects company, but you have to be pretty nitpicky for it to really bother you. It's still leagues better than what we ever expected to get, and the rest of the seasons are pretty much perfect.
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Jul 17, 2023 02:36
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I do love DS9 but I certainly wouldn't mind the intro being about a half minute shorter.
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Jul 23, 2023 20:43
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The TNG theme suffers a bit from the fact that it sounds so much better in the movies. The TV version sounds slightly rushed and lower budget by comparison. The DS9 theme has the advantage of being done by a frequent composer for the series, so they used it within the show a lot more. Even though the title arrangement is petty sleepy. Voyager theme is the best stand-alone. Last night I felt nostalgic for the days of watching whatever's on TV, so I put on Pluto and it turned out to be a good choice because "Duet" was on. (Well, first "Dramatis Personae" was on, but that meant I got to see all of Duet.) It's still great, but for whatever reason I'm compelled to try to nitpick it just to see if there are any ways it could be improved, or if it really is perfect. One nitpick is that it definitely feels of its time in the sense that the Internet was barely a thing yet, and so people are surprisingly in the dark about anything happening outside the station. It feels like it should've been pretty easy to Google Gul Darheel and find out that he's dead. But they do a pretty good job of explaining that away during Odo and Dukat's conversations, which lay out how the Cardassian government purposely keeps a tight lid on that kind of info and it's not easily accessible. Still a little hard to understand in this day and age, but not unprecedented -- it's similarly hard to know the whole truth about what's going on in Russia or China, for example. So that pretty much still works. My next possible nitpick is that Kira seems to assure Maritza that his plan was noble and might've worked, but it just wasn't right for him to die... Which I'm not really sure about, because it seems like someone would've eventually found out the truth, as they did within the episode. I can very easily imagine Gul Dukat hearing that the Bajorans are executing "Gul Darheel" and poking his head in to ruin their fun. I think it still works as Maritza's character motivation, I just don't understand why Kira seems to agree that it was a logical plan. Which brings me to my ultimate point, which is that I can't shake the feeling that the episode would've been even better if Maritza was supposed to have truly lost his mind. Like his guilt drove him into this really deep "method acting" sort of thing and he pretty much truly believed he was Darheel. His breakdown at the end would still reveal his true feelings about himself being a coward, but that could all still be done in third person -- talking about the cowardly filing clerk who tried to silence the screams and "died" in some sense. That whole monologue would still work, perhaps even better. (Maybe I'm just being dull and this was actually supposed to be happening in the episode, but it seems like he comes out of it too quickly for it to be an actual mental issue.) The only catch is, I'm not sure how he gets to the station in that version. I suppose he wouldn't have the presence of mind to turn himself in. So maybe the way they did it really was the only way for it to work, at least within budgetary constraints. Ultimately just a minor nitpick. The emotional core is all there. Sir Lemming fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Jul 24, 2023 |
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Jul 24, 2023 13:17
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MuddyFunster posted:I suppose I have to plump for TOS just out of comfort and nostalgia, but the TNG intro is getting increasingly delightful to me. I just like watching the ship go whoosh, I REALLY like the big glory shot at the end of it rising up and blasting away. If I had a complaint about it, it's that ugly detuned timpani thumping in the theme. BING! BONG! Generations is the most underrated score IMO, I assume because it's attached to a very unloved movie, but it was Dennis McCarthy's one shot at the big time and I think he really pulled it off. And since we were just talking about it, I feel obligated to once again post this allegedly unused version of the Enterprise intro with the Generations overture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfWgU1fj3nM TMP is probably my pick for the "best" score overall, in terms of just being like, an all-time great, legendary work of art. James Horner's scores do have a bit more pep though. ST6 also had a great one-off score by Cliff Eidelman. Really, the whole franchise has always been blessed with great music, especially on the film side. Regarding the TOS theme, it's nice, but its original arrangement is pretty hard to swallow. I like when it gets called-back in a few of the movies.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:48
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MuddyFunster posted:Okay, I was complaining about the out of tune timpani in the TNG theme, but now I'm starting an episode and it's... Not. It all sounds pretty good actually! I believe so, yes. I don't remember precisely which season but it used to sound much more '80s synth at the beginning.
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Jul 24, 2023 23:52
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FISHMANPET posted:Oh hey, does the viewing order of TOS matter all that much? I'm realizing that Paramount+ is showing them in remastered order which is different from original broadcast order, though I'm guessing in general everything is standalone enough that I'm not gonna miss much just watching in the default remastered order. There essentially was no order originally, so you're fine. There's no "real" first episode, just whichever one the network finally decided to air. The only continuity you'd notice at all would be if you jumped between seasons.
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Jul 26, 2023 00:54
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Those are 2 great episodes for sure. Survivors definitely starts out really unassuming, perhaps should've tipped its hand a little earlier to get the viewer invested. But it is great how it suddenly gets real.
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Aug 4, 2023 02:04
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Lord Hydronium posted:I feel like pretty much every so-called worst episode of Star Trek is automatically better than Code of Honor simply by virtue of not being extremely loving racist. Yes, Sub Rosa is absolutely in the "so bad it's good" territory, or at least "so schlocky it's good". There are quite a few bad TNG episodes that are totally dull and forgettable, but there's only one with a horny zombie grandma that shoots force lighting.
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Aug 12, 2023 11:44
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Even when it's not explicitly trying (i.e. the final seasons) DS9 feels like much more of a "watch it all the way through" series, whereas TNG belongs much more to the classic syndicated TV model. Both great in their own way.
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Aug 17, 2023 19:44
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skasion posted:
I still always get this title confused with "The Way To Eden" so I always have to do a double take.
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Aug 18, 2023 18:35
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The germ of a good idea in "The Enemy Within" was eventually fully realized in TNG's "Tapestry". It's a better way of using sci-fi magic to see what the captain would be like if he wasn't willing to take risks, which is a much better and less problematic way of framing it than "evil side and good side"
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Aug 19, 2023 03:17
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"The natural walk of a striptease queen", was it?McSpanky posted:If anyone had actually paid attention to "The Enemy Within" it's not "good side/evil side". It's more like ego and id. You're not wrong, but they do explicitly frame it that way -- "evil", "negative", "dark" -- in the episode itself. quote:SPOCK: We have here an unusual opportunity to appraise the human mind, or to examine, in Earth terms, the roles of good and evil in a man. His negative side, which you call hostility, lust, violence, and his positive side, which Earth people express as compassion, love, tenderness. quote:MCCOY: Jim, you're no different than anyone else. We all have our darker side. We need it! It's half of what we are. It's not really ugly, it's human. Spock is somewhat playing with "your human terms" here and he relates it to his own struggle with his 2 halves, which is all good stuff. But usually when an alien says "your human terms" we're not supposed to assume he's wrong, just that he's talking to the audience. It's not hard to get the wrong lesson from this, i.e. "we can't be too good, too compassionate, or else we won't be able to get anything accomplished". Like I was saying, "Tapestry" is a much healthier version of this same idea. It characterized the missing ingredient as a willingness to take initiative and take risks, which are qualities that can be abused, but are not inherently abusive. Whereas the former episode seemed to be saying "just don't be too abusive." Sir Lemming fucked around with this message at 12:27 on Aug 19, 2023 |
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Aug 19, 2023 12:24
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TNG has some good episodes and some awful episodes in basically every season. Season 1 might be the only season with no great episodes, perhaps.
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Aug 25, 2023 17:38
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Taear posted:I feel like I'm the only person who hates Far Beyond The Stars. I don't like any episode of a show that goes "Maybe it's not real??" I feel like you might be conflating it with the later episode that calls back to it, because it's only then that they really introduce any hint that the whole series might just be the vision. FBTS is pretty up-front about its intentions as a stand-alone parable, and pretty much just uses the technobabble (or spirituababble?) as a flimsy framework to hang it on.
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Aug 27, 2023 20:24
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I was reading some quotes from The Drumhead to remember some of the speeches mentioned here, and really, aside from the climax being a bit naive by today's standards, it's still a very effective message. It's also largely a prelude to what DS9 got into. No paradise is so perfect that you don't need to protect it -- but the difference is you're largely protecting it from internal threats, not external ones. It's like a great garden, you're never truly finished maintaining it. It's an ongoing process, and anyone who doesn't understand that arguably doesn't understand the virtues that got us here in the first place. You can also somewhat handwave the ending as being fundamentally optimistic about the best and brightest who would presumably be in charge of the courts in Starfleet, as opposed to the public at large, which would be much harder to believe.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:26
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Atlas Hugged posted:I didn't exactly hate the acting in The Deadly Years. It's just kind of a dull episode that drags on way too long. The competency hearing felt like a retread of The Doomsday Machine with the commodore being a benevolent fool rather than a suicidal maniac. The dramatic tension is all screwed up because we, and the characters, already know exactly what's happening and why it undeniably makes Kirk temporarily incompetent. It was a really weird choice for them to try to make that into a courtroom drama. There actually has to be an interesting argument for that to work, not just "no u".
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Sep 4, 2023 08:48
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Sure thing, which door is the turbolift again? The novelty wears off 5 minutes in and then it's just a dull retread of gangster tropes. I dunno, it seemed a lot more fun when I was a kid and hadn't watched a lot of other stuff. The Robin Hood TNG episode doesn't do much for me these days either. Like it has a few good lines & moments, but it's not really funny or clever enough to justify the whole hour. It was a fun diversion when they had nothing better to air that week.
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Sep 5, 2023 18:37
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ashpanash posted:DS9 started around season 5 of TNG, right? Ro's betrayal ep. was the penultimate episode of TNG season 7. So basically none of that would have happened. Middle of season 6 actually, but yeah. It's funny how after all their failed attempts to bring a character over to a spin-off, they finally settled on O'Brien. And even funnier that it worked so well, in a low-key sort of way. (And of course there was also Worf, but only later on.)
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Sep 7, 2023 12:14
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Those first few episodes of TNG are definitely a pretty big hurdle, but they've also been overstated. Once you're past those it's mostly an okay-to-good season, even though it has a weird vibe to it. And in hindsight that weird vibe is kind of fascinating. The characters aren't as likeable yet, but if any Trek series actually gets by more on plot and cool sci-fi stuff than the characters themselves, it's TNG. (I'm not saying it has the least likeable characters, I'm saying it's the one that most succeeds at not being character-driven.) Sir Lemming fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Sep 12, 2023 |
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Sep 12, 2023 11:09
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BonHair posted:Just make an animated sitcom with Gowron, Garak and Weyun going on adventures. Or rebuilding Cardassia I guess They might need to find Iggy Pop and see if he kept those neural stimulators around
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Sep 21, 2023 14:15
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Tunicate posted:Star Trek is about Space America going around in their high tech military vehciles showing all those silly foreigners why American values and morality are superior to whatever foreign gibberish they're going with. Exactly. As long as the Federation can be considered analagous to America, and the Federation (ergo America) is being portrayed as having already solved all its problems, it doesn't necessarily matter if Roddenberry suggests that those problems were stuff like capitalism, racism, traditional sexuality, or even religion. What matters is America fixed it and they're the good guys and they're winning. It's not unlike how even the most extreme right-wingers speak pretty highly of MLK, but from the angle that he fixed racism and now we must never confront it again. (Never mind how they would've treated him back then.)
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Sep 23, 2023 20:59
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davidspackage posted:I'm doing a rewatch, so I have seen Meridian before. I forgot that had Quark's deepfake plot. Many of the worst DS9 episodes have a fun thing you'd otherwise miss, like the singing Klingon chef. Fortunately the Klingon chef also shows up in "Playing God" thus rendering Melora one of the only truly skippable DS9 episodes. Not that Playing God is a classic or anything, but it's certainly more entertaining than Melora. (It's also got Quark reacting to the sonic vole-repellant device.)
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Sep 26, 2023 20:23
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MuddyFunster posted:
If you're curious, these were the last episodes to air in 1992, and DS9 premiered shortly after in January 1993. There's not really much to gain from trying to watch them side-by-side or anything, but there are one or two fairly inconsequential crossovers that happen.
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Sep 27, 2023 03:02
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