Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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thrill
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by thrill »

It's so [expletive] up. They just left Tom & Janeway's super evolved gecko babies on that planet and never looked back!

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

Post by G. Keenan »

thrill wrote:
April 21 21, 10:28 am
It's so [expletive] up. They just left Tom & Janeway's super evolved gecko babies on that planet and never looked back!
I really hope in some future Trek series they bring back their gecko babies, now a fully-fledged gecko society with a grudge against humans, having been abandoned by their parents like Frankenstein's monster.

Also, funny how warp 10 was a theoretical impossibility until they found some slightly better dilithium crystals than are available in the Alpha Quadrant. Find those, and warp 10 is easy.

Shouldn't they just rig voyager to go Warp 10 back to the Alpha quadrant now? Sure, there are side effects, but you'll have several days after returning to Earth to tell Star Fleet Medical to bombard you with anti-proton radiation and you'll be fine.

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CardsofSTL
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

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Image

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

Post by G. Keenan »

Please tell me you personally photoshopped that.

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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 21 21, 3:17 pm
Please tell me you personally photoshopped that.
I've had that for a while but I was not the originator. I think I got it off twitter or something a few years ago.

Arthur Dent
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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by Arthur Dent »

thrill wrote:
April 7 21, 1:28 pm
G. Keenan wrote:
April 7 21, 1:18 pm
Even Vic from the holo suites (fun sub plot, btw), gets to grow and fill out. That aspect of the show is very well done.
So there was never a moment for you where you questioned why the [expletive] people in 2404 are obsessed with a Vegas crooner FROM THE 90'S?! They could've recreated Sinatra. They could've recreated the Vegas lounge act glory days. They went with some rando?

AND THEN they gave Vic significant air time and character development in the home stretch of the war/series. I can't get a single arc dedicated the to the series best performer and character, Major Kira, but I have to put up with MULTIPLE Vic Fontaine episodes? [expletive] Nog processes his PTSD via holodeck hangs with Vic? Not his loving father and hot stepmom? Not with his best friend Jake, who he barely talks to in the final season? Don't get me started on the one weird writer who loved Vic and shoehorned him into major episodes. I love DS9, partly for it's flaws (like all Star Trek) but that production team and writer's room made some truly bizarre decisions that hampered that show's capacity for greatness.

Meanwhile Voyager keeps climbing in my esteem, mostly on the back of one man: The great Bob Picardo.
Isn't it the same motivation that brought Iggy Pop on to guest star as a Vorta? Ira Steven Behr sees the opportunity to hire musicians he's a fan of. The part of the heist episode where it appears Avery Brooks insisted on adding a line about how Vegas is racist before acting in the story line always made me wonder if this is a window into his alienation from the series.

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G. Keenan
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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by G. Keenan »

Arthur Dent wrote:
April 21 21, 6:40 pm
thrill wrote:
April 7 21, 1:28 pm
G. Keenan wrote:
April 7 21, 1:18 pm
Even Vic from the holo suites (fun sub plot, btw), gets to grow and fill out. That aspect of the show is very well done.
So there was never a moment for you where you questioned why the [expletive] people in 2404 are obsessed with a Vegas crooner FROM THE 90'S?! They could've recreated Sinatra. They could've recreated the Vegas lounge act glory days. They went with some rando?

AND THEN they gave Vic significant air time and character development in the home stretch of the war/series. I can't get a single arc dedicated the to the series best performer and character, Major Kira, but I have to put up with MULTIPLE Vic Fontaine episodes? [expletive] Nog processes his PTSD via holodeck hangs with Vic? Not his loving father and hot stepmom? Not with his best friend Jake, who he barely talks to in the final season? Don't get me started on the one weird writer who loved Vic and shoehorned him into major episodes. I love DS9, partly for it's flaws (like all Star Trek) but that production team and writer's room made some truly bizarre decisions that hampered that show's capacity for greatness.

Meanwhile Voyager keeps climbing in my esteem, mostly on the back of one man: The great Bob Picardo.
Isn't it the same motivation that brought Iggy Pop on to guest star as a Vorta? Ira Steven Behr sees the opportunity to hire musicians he's a fan of. The part of the heist episode where it appears Avery Brooks insisted on adding a line about how Vegas is racist before acting in the story line always made me wonder if this is a window into his alienation from the series.
Ha, I remember that moment for thinking to myself, really? Cisco is still salty that Las Vegas was a racist place 500 years ago?

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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by Arthur Dent »

thrill wrote:
April 8 21, 7:58 am
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.
I did not know this about Dax. Berman always struck me as a tool, but it's always depressing to learn how far it goes.

It's funny when people talk about being put off by these weird light episodes stuck in the middle of major drama as I hardly noticed watching myself. Another example is one of my favorite episodes, Explorers, where Sisko and Jake are on the ancient Bajoran light ship together. At the end, they make it to Cardassia where Dukat throws them a party, returns some artifacts to Bajor, and everyone shares a big hug. This comes right after The Die is Cast where the Bajoran/Romulan fleet gets wiped out in a Dominion trap. I'm not sure if it's because I experienced DS9 like other Trek as primarily episodic but with the addition of a longer arc on top or if it's just that I'm a fan of DS9's character development and appreciated that more than the big story. Still, it was a positive addition to have greater coherence between episodes compared to TNG, if nothing else, because it gave greater stakes for the characters if there are lasting consequences compared to just sailing off to a new world, but if they want to throw in a goofy holodeck episode in the middle of big war arc, I think I'm all for it.
Last edited by Arthur Dent on April 21 21, 7:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: 2020: The Year of Star Trek

Post by Arthur Dent »

thrill wrote:
April 12 21, 9:13 am
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.
I've made multiple attempts at Discovery and keep failing. I wasn't a fan of what they did with the Klingons, but it was when they started spending ages in the alternate universe in season 1 that I gave up. Tried again through season 2, which had some decent stuff and then just kind of lost interest with the far future season 3. I think my basic problem with the series is that while it shares Star Trek universe design elements, it just doesn't feel like Star Trek to me. The essence of Star Trek is a exploration of a world of utopian spirit, and that just seems totally missing in new Trek, so I don't really know what it is. Feels kind of like just one damn thing after another.

Exploring the contradictions of that utopianism is solid and I can think of a bunch of interesting ways to go with that. I wish that the desire for darker themes would try that direction instead of fairly played out grittier "realism". Some possibilities I've thought about:
-Do something with the civilian population. Why is the central institution of a utopian society a strict military hierarchy? Are the other series basically from the point of a lie Startfleet members are telling themselves?
-Star Trek tends to treat in world utopians as deadly extremist cults. Try questioning this. Maybe something related to the Borg. TNG has Borg collectivism leading directly to becoming evil conquerors and restoring the sovereignty of the individual as the only answer, but is that true? Is there a version of collectivism that does not delete the individual?

These ideas would maybe/probably suck, but I think you need some sort of themes in this area.

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AdmiralKird
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Re: Every Year is the Year of Star Trek

Post by AdmiralKird »

I really wish they'd make a new star trek show. It's been 16 years or so since Enterprise and practically every other show has been revived. I can only rewatch TNG/VOY/DS9/ENT so many times.

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