Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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redbirdjazzz
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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by redbirdjazzz »

G. Keenan wrote:
April 9 21, 9:07 am
redbirdjazzz wrote:
April 8 21, 10:04 pm
G. Keenan wrote:
April 8 21, 3:48 pm
thrill wrote:
April 8 21, 7:58 am
G. Keenan wrote:
April 7 21, 10:34 pm
. I mean, the Oceans 11 episode where the entire senior staff pulls off a heist to save Vic's club from his childhood stickball rival from the old neighborhood in Philadelphia? They put that in prime season 7 real estate where there were only like 5 episodes left to wrap everything up, and they do that? Hysterical.
ESPECIALLY when there's 5 eps left. That's so funny. What a choice!

Once Gul Ducat mercs Jadzia Dax, you can't go back to fun time dumb time episodes like this. Stakes are too high. That's the climax of the penultimate season. How do they come back from the big cliff hanger? Captain making gumbo and Ezri Dax getting like 10 starring episodes, just because Rick Berman wants to bang the actress that replaced the actress he killed off because she wouldn't bang him and wanted a second job on a sitcom. Half the final season is fluff.
You're not wrong.
Not wrong, but I love the Vic Fontaine stuff, for the music and aesthetics, sure, but also because that’s the only place Nog felt safe after losing his leg in the war, and then everyone else fell in love with it while spending time there to help Nog readjust to life on the station.
Me too, but I can see where thrill is coming from as a sci-fi fan. Having so much "fluff" in the final season didn't bother me because my experience of DS9 was that the fluff is where the show's strengths are. Sure, there's the war with the Dominion, but we all know the Federation is going to prevail in the end.

I'm surprised we didn't get a two-part episode where Julian and Miles get trapped in their Alamo holodeck and have to find a way to win the battle to terminate the program.

Moooooooogie!
Damn right!

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thrill
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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by thrill »

Let's be honest, liking the dumb parts of star trek is crucially integral to being a star trek fan. I, too, liked the fluff, even in the final season. It was just funny re-watching it with a post-peak TV aesthetic because TV has gotten so much better at storytelling. Imagine a show doing that today, when all shows are designed for you to just let one episode roll into the next via a streaming service.
CardsofSTL wrote:
April 8 21, 3:02 pm
ghostrunner wrote:
April 8 21, 2:58 pm
How is Discovery these days?
I think season 2 is the best season they have done so far; but season 3 was one of the most inventive new Star Trek seasons for reasons that if I share would be a major spoiler to anyone who has not seen the series.
Discovery and Picard are worth watching from a vfx standpoint alone. If you've ever wondered what star trek on TV would be like with movie-level effects and budgets, look no further. Some of the visuals are stunning.

Power rankings:

2
3
1

Season 2 was excellent, full-stop. Season 1 was visually incredible. I was in the minority in really liking the scary klingons because a fat guy in tons of makeup never really made me take klingons as seriously as warriors as the writers wanted. The new klingons would actually be terrifying to encounter. Season 3 has some very high highs but also some very low lows. There are three other important factors that limit Disco's greatness in my mind. Two are writing-based and one is extremely nerdy.

First being that the extreme shifts in plot every season prevent it from settling into a good groove. They want the plot direction changes to be a feature, not a bug, but so far it's been more bug for me. Second, the limited episode runs prevent the quiet character building moments that we're used to from Trek shows. We rarely get a glimpse into any character's emotional life outside of Burnam. Longer seasons allowed ancillary characters to get spotlighted in valuable ways that made us attached to a Deanna Troi or a Miles O'Brien over the arc of a long series. Also, there's a bit too much yass qween virtue signaling that dates it to a millennial sensibility that I don't think is necessary.

Third - the nerdy one - the technology underlying the Discovery was so far advanced compared to the era in which it was developed that it would have necessarily been a plot in TNG, DS9, and Voyager. ESPECIALLY DS9 and Voyager. There's simply no way a ship like Discovery could exist, play the role that it did in the Klingon war, and not be a plot point in those series based on narrative timeline, and that lead to a plot device that Cards excluded in his answer about the end of S2 and all of S3. I think the show was ill-conceived and much of the personnel changes at the top of the production team reinforce that. After season 1, they re-designed Klingons and laid the groundwork for correcting the spoiler I'm tip-toe'ing around in this paragraph.

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CardsofSTL
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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by CardsofSTL »

thrill wrote:
April 12 21, 9:13 am


Second, the limited episode runs prevent the quiet character building moments that we're used to from Trek shows. We rarely get a glimpse into any character's emotional life outside of Burnam. Longer seasons allowed ancillary characters to get spotlighted in valuable ways that made us attached to a Deanna Troi or a Miles O'Brien over the arc of a long series.

This is my biggest beef with Discovery. I want to know more about this crew; we are getting Burnam and Tilly overload as far as backstory but not much from the rest. Arguably we get more information about season long guest stars than some of the crew that have been there from day one.

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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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G. Keenan
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by G. Keenan »

I'm nine episodes into Voyager. Currently, the crew is being collectively seduced on some planet called Sikaris (sp?)

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CardsofSTL
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by CardsofSTL »

G. Keenan wrote:
April 14 21, 8:50 pm
I'm nine episodes into Voyager. Currently, the crew is being collectively seduced on some planet called Sikaris (sp?)
The Sikarians are referenced later in Star Trek Picard which is a lovely little bit of continuity in the franchise. Voyager has some dud episodes; that one is more mediocre than dud to me.

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thrill
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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Wait until he gets to the episode where Tom breaks warp 9. Holy [expletive], talk about all-time wonderfully bad Trek. I was stoned watching it and every development was essentially the galaxy brain meme but in my own head.

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CardsofSTL
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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thrill wrote:
April 16 21, 9:05 am
Wait until he gets to the episode where Tom breaks warp 9. Holy [expletive], talk about all-time wonderfully bad Trek. I was stoned watching it and every development was essentially the galaxy brain meme but in my own head.
The name of that episode is Threshold. I am not such an encyclopedia that I remember a lot of names of episodes; but I remember that one. And I still have nightmares.

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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by Michael »

I'm curious to know everyone's thoughts on Tuvix. Would you have made the same decision as Janeway?

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thrill
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by thrill »

The only thing I would've done differently is have the doctor put him in medical stasis immediately until a fix was discovered rather than let him develop deep awareness, social connections, and a function on the ship.

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