Classic Star Trek Megathread: Waves and waves of jambalaya

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Classic Star Trek Megathread: Waves and waves of jambalaya

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Jake just goes through ten vests a day as part of his writing process

# ¿ May 31, 2023 11:38

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 02:38

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

I like the general idea of "11:59" -- that our family myths and legends we take inspiration from or pride in are often overblown, and even if we find out the truth about them we tend to hold onto them anyway -- but I think it would've been better if they had gone in a more anthology format with it instead of focusing on Millennium Gate for 80% of the runtime. Also show us the story of Harry Kim's great-great-uncle, or that prizefighter Seven's got on her PADD or whatever, instead of spending 10 seconds on it before jumping back into the Lifetime special movie

# ¿ Jun 18, 2023 19:09

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Beeftweeter posted:

what's the third cardassian faction, the detapa council? i always figured they were something of a non-entity because even dukat becomes a part of it at one point, it seems to be sort of beneath the central command in their social hierarchy

the Detapa Council was the civilian legislature that nominally controlled both the military and the Obsidian Order

they didn't have any actual power up until the Order got itself blown up and the dissident movement helped the Council restore its authority over the military, which lasted for like a month before the Klingons invaded and forced them into exile, and then eventually it was moot because Dukat singlehandedly negotiated Cardassia into the Dominion

# ¿ Jun 19, 2023 05:36

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Sash! posted:

There's a problem with that: there's nothing smarter than anyone has already designed. There's not a whole lot of combinations of how to make a government work and most of them are clearly right out the window based on everything else that's been mentioned in the show (there being an explicit president rules out a parliamentary system, etc.). There's a strong central figure or there isn't. People elect representation or they don't. And so on and so on.

There are countries that have both a president as head of state and a prime minister as head of the legislature, like Italy, though I imagine Italy is probably not the country you'd want to look to for models on how to build a stable, representative federal republic

# ¿ Jun 27, 2023 18:04

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

poor Ethan Phillips in the back there looking like he had to sneak into the cast photo

# ¿ Jun 28, 2023 14:52

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

beltran looks comfy as gently caress

# ¿ Jun 28, 2023 21:18

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

There was a commercial resurgence of jazz in the late 80's in the form of smooth jazz, so it was a genre that sounded modern at the time but with enough of a legacy that it wouldn't be completely weighed down by shifting contemporary trends

Now I'm imagining if TNG came out about 5 years later and Riker is into swing revival

# ¿ Aug 1, 2023 15:44

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

thotsky posted:

Not if it's Hitler!

Presumably all of her ancestors decided it was super cool, but La'an is explicitly unhappy with the reaction people have to the name, falling in love with the first person who doesn't immediately raise an eyebrow when she introduces herself.

It's ridiculous.

She's also a person with a fairly unhealthy relationship to pain and hardship, consistently choosing to bear the full brunt of it rather than mitigate it or share it with others, so she doesn't want to take that target off her back because she feels like she doesn't deserve to

# ¿ Aug 15, 2023 16:21

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Arivia posted:

what's The Volume?

The big wraparound LED screen they use where TOS would use painted backdrops and TNG would use Cave Set #1 or Cave Set #2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvFVO9UlAiA

# ¿ Aug 20, 2023 16:36

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

ashpanash posted:

Yeah, this was my take, too. People were attracted to her because (in the story) she was literally designed that way. Like she had overwhelming subspace psychic pheromones or something. And everyone on the Enterprise was freaked out and disturbed by it. But that doesn't mean there aren't situations where you have to grin and bear it for the sake of diplomacy. And that also doesn't mean that you aren't affected by the same forces everyone else is.

The real disturbing part is definitely the end, because Picard (and the audience) think they're doing the right thing by not indulging carnally and just approaching it intellectually, but it turns out it doesn't matter. She was designed to mate and that's exactly what she did, and her life is probably going to be worse off for it. A good ol' twilight zone twist: 'Nice try, rear end in a top hat.'

one particular read of the ending that I like is that she's just reflexively giving Picard exactly the kind of goodbye a stoic, married-to-the-sea captain like him would want, that he's more satisfied with grimly seeing her off with a "hope he likes Shakespeare, too" than he would be with actually marrying her

# ¿ Sep 17, 2023 14:31

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

I think her presence in the story makes enough sense because she only gets really invested in it (beyond the level of "it'd be nice if these assholes listened to Reyga") after a couple of autopsies and some medicobabble

# ¿ Oct 4, 2023 15:56

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

nine-gear crow posted:

I think part of what makes Parallels great just on a foundational level is that, you're completely right, it should NOT be a Worf episode, and yet it completely is. Worf rarely is a character that has Weird poo poo happen to him (on TNG, anyway, DS9 is a different ball game). That's like Riker or Troi or Crusher, and on very rare occasions Geordi or Picard. Most of Worf's episodes are about him beating the poo poo out of people or reclaiming his honor, or beating the poo poo out of people to reclaim his honor, or having poo poo fall on him, or how much him and Gowron just wand to violently hatefuck each other. So having a Weird poo poo episode purely centered around Worf is a rare treat.

the best Weird poo poo episodes are the ones where the character is faced with a situation that's totally out of their wheelhouse, like Data having to figure out what dreams are in "Phantasms" or Troi waving a phaser around and yelling at Romulans in "Mask of the Enemy", and Parallels is probably the peak of that just by putting Worf in a pretty simple parallel universe scenario

# ¿ Oct 13, 2023 13:31

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Paradoxish posted:

The scene where he decks the Maquis dude that's acting up is low key pretty great and does a lot to establish Chakotay as someone who understands that he's straddling two worlds and needs to make it work.

...and there probably aren't even three scenes in total like that throughout the entire series because the writers just utterly gave up on him. Although, I guess it's kind of a mercy killing given the alternative.

every Voyager character basically has two "things", Chakotay's were "Maquis leader" and "kinda Mayan", and you could tell that the writers got sick of both ideas really early on

even in the Seska episodes in season 3, Chakotay was mostly just there to frown and feel betrayed rather than have any active role in the plot

# ¿ Oct 30, 2023 18:37

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

No Dignity posted:

Yup! The real worst episode of Voyager is going to be some go-nowhere S6 episode we've collectively forgotten where Chakotay gets held captive by a species of unreasonable carictures and then the episode just kind of ends when Voyager rescues him. Those placefiller episodes are the real dregs of Star Trek imo

I think this gives too much credit to Season 6 because the writers had forgotten Chakotay existed by that point

# ¿ Nov 16, 2023 03:23

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

MikeJF posted:

Yeah but we were saying that that's mega American, I assume you're American (or America's Hat maybe). As an Aussie I'm pretty sure I've literally never seen root beer in my life.

Starfleet Academy's in San Francisco, at least, so I can see alien cadets going off campus to tour the Olde Americana tourist trap district and getting hooked on stuff like root beer, moon pies and Jell-o salad

# ¿ Nov 18, 2023 01:21

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Taear posted:

The root beer one is very specifically saying "humans love root beer" which is pretty different.

Like sure who cares about baseball other than north america and Japan, but it's fine that Sisko does. It's not saying "The entire federation likes this", it's just him.

tastes change, maybe like how water polo and Parisses Squares apparently displaced baseball as a major sport amongst everyone besides Sisko and a handful of weird colonists, there was a root beer renaissance in the late 2100s

# ¿ Nov 18, 2023 22:08

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

nine-gear crow posted:

Canadian A&W has the better everything, honestly.

last time I went to an A&W in the US they were all sold out of root beer, which is something that I would think ought to be impossible

# ¿ Nov 19, 2023 20:02

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Atlas Hugged posted:

Yes, but it's more like weeks between stops and the inspector always fucks off to some other locale to do another mission between inspections.

Like imagine a truck crossing the United States at the Mexican and then Canadian borders. Unless the same patrol vehicle followed them the whole way, which doesn't happen because Janeway is able to rescue telepaths in their space, then you have to assume that they have a way to "fly" across their own territory. But this doesn't make sense given what we know about warp and transwarp technology.

There's just a gap in logic there that's never really addressed.

they kinda-sorta address it -- the inspector's assistant is constantly on Janeway about course deviations away from the route that the Devore imposed on them as the condition for allowing them to cross, and it sounds and looks like the route is circuitous enough that the inspector assigned to them can easily catch up to them by flying through regions that Voyager's not allowed to enter

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 02:09

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Humans would be a mix of people who forget to tip at all, people who tip the exact percentage listed in the Federation travel guide and no more, people who casually leave a couple bars of latinum as a tip on a cup of coffee because they don�t feel like taking cash home, and people pretending to be the first group to get away with not tipping unless they�re called on it

# ¿ Jan 27, 2024 19:51

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

disaster pastor posted:

Discounting O'Brien's early appearances in red because they didn't know what they were doing with him, there's at least one.

Voyager has a few background crewmen in red too, but I don't think they do anything more recognizable than sit at stations or hold PADDs so it's impossible to extrapolate what they're doing

# ¿ Feb 14, 2024 21:57

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

the DS9 story tied up neatly enough that I wouldn't really want a direct DS9 sequel, but the show did set up enough non-Gamma Quadrant, non-Bajor hooks that I think could provide a couple seasons of a post-DS9 show -- Klingons and Romulans getting involved in rebuilding Cardassia, the Breen suddenly becoming a major player in quadrant politics, maybe a resurgent Maquis looking for revenge

# ¿ Mar 8, 2024 22:15

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Taear posted:

Buddy, your items are not your life.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2024 14:49

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Thaddius the Large posted:

I wasn�t being ironic at all, I�ve admittedly not watched the last few seasons of Discovery but I don�t see us getting a Trelane or Kevin Uxbridge from the general tone or tenor of what I did see, which is one of the reasons I�m less a fan of that series. I want more inexplicably weird allegorical stories in my Star Trek!

Season 3's climax revolved around what was essentially a magic space child's tantrum, and the stuff in Season 4 where they're having philosophical discussions about how to communicate with something that seems physiologically incapable of recognizing your sapience and convincingly ask them to stop erasing your planets has some echoes of "we have no law to fit your crime", so I think they're at least aware of those aspects of Star Trek, they just aren't really delivering on them in a satisfying way

# ¿ Mar 11, 2024 20:03

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Technowolf posted:

Nah, the last two would find a way to stab each other in the back at the same time

or they're taken out by the seventeen dead engineers who all put a dead man's switch on their hidden ship self-destruct routine

# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 12:53

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

The Last Call posted:

Now forget about that ever happening for it shall never show up again in the entire series.

hmm

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 18:34

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Feldegast42 posted:

I've said it before but Voyager is comfort food Trek, its just not as good as TNG or DS9

Yeah, I'd finally gotten around to watching it and there's only a handful of episodes that are outright bad, but conversely only a few that are unarguably good, too

The show plays it exceedingly safe for the whole run, and while it squanders a lot of opportunity and declines to make any real big swings, it's rarely incompetent or incoherent, either

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:51

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

zoux posted:

Absolutely not joking about skipping 11:59

it's not a good episode but I think it's fun to see Kate Mulgrew in Lifetime movie protagonist mode

# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 21:16

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

counterfeitsaint posted:

Is "The People's Joker" what we're calling the first Joker movie now, or the second one? The second one isn't out for a few more months right? Either way it sounds pretentious as gently caress and therefore quite fitting.

it's neither, it's an unauthorized indie parody

# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 11:20

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 02:38

The Chairman: Jun 30, 2003; But you forget, mon ami, that there is evil everywhere under the sun

Apollodorus posted:

I will... conSUME... some of your burnt, replicated... SWINE meat. Because it is what ... you HUmans... call a �special... ocCASion�, and ... for that reason ... only.

# ¿ May 8, 2024 15:33

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Classic Star Trek Megathread: Waves and waves of jambalaya