star trek

[Himu]

Voyager ep 3, Time and Again

I said,"WHAT?!?!" at least 4 times during this episode. Janeway and Paris hit some time fracture? Idk. And are sent back in time on some planet that is going to blow up. They do whatever and just try to blend in rather than sitting still and end up in some crazy adventure where anti-energy extremists are planning a terrorist attack that could have caused the destruction of the planet. Janeway and Paris have x amount of time to be found before they're caught in the explosion. The crew sets up a device to try to find as they use Kes to scout on the planet for clues. Turns out, they doomed the planet before even coming in the past, which is eerily similar and far more boring than the previous episode where they were stuck in a loop. The episode has bizarre characterization for Janeway: revealing themselves to be Starfleet without moments notice, having a gun locked on three of the terrorists with a clear view and just wasting time, caring about the prime directive 70 years away from home during an emergency situation only to throw away the PD within moments haste because she feels like it. But more than that, there's a bunch of awful technobabble this episode that makes it tedious to get through. The premise of the episode makes no sense and the way the crew tries to get Paris and Janeway out makes even less sense. It's a massive suspension of belief episode and just fails in a lot of ways for me. The ending was okay, but how everything managed to reset to the beginning of the episode is the definition of cumbersome.

Rating: C-

[benjipwns]

Benji plz read and give us your thoughts

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/the-dismal-frontier

I'm not sure about some of that gibberish or socialism jibber jabber, but it's Kurtzman. I think I pointed out here way back before Discovery even started that Kurtzman wanted to build up to a Klingon War in the films but JJ leaving and him breaking up with Orci derailed that thankfully, but then Kurtzman somehow got back into the franchise and then took over it. The article says it's not sure what Fuller wanted, but he was pretty clear on an anthology where it changed every season and could take place anywhere in Trek's timeline. Kurtzman wants KLINGON WAR.

The author also seems to quite downplay that DS9 was almost entirely taken over (aside from brief stops for baseball or heist hijinks in the holosuite) with a war plotline for its final two seasons and that the Federation also was revealed to be doing horrible things during it up to and including genocide. Now, where DS9 was distinct from DIS is that the Dominion War was used like much of DS9 to subvert traditional Trek. They couldn't warp away, so they had to deal with it. The show had established all the pieces, politics, threats and most importantly the characters for five seasons before finally pulling the trigger on the war. Then continued to make it extremely personal for those characters. Even doing things like taking a side almost background character in Damar and giving him a new purpose in life after Dukat went off the reservation. Promoting Garak to basically a full fledged crew member, one whose exile is ending in the worst way but is still willing to die with his friends. Establishing personal consequences for not only The Founders, but even Weyoun! Trek had never spent time with non-homebase characters like this, let alone "villains" of the show and... er "humanized" them. Enterprise would be the only other time it has done this.

Also, I'm surprised that in the year of our lord 2018 people are still quoting Gene on what "Trek really is about." Gene didn't agree with Gene ffs.

[Himu]

People always forget DS9. TNG is like the one utopian vision of Trek. DS9 could be said to be dismal but in the end has races that HATED each other band together and fight for the future and the common good. We see entire races evolve before our eyes because of the conflict. Conflict in Trek isn't bad! An utopia shouldn't and won't be easy. DS9 shows this. But the socialism thing is crazy. Star trek isn't socialist. It's post-scarcity.

I mean, take this quote:

This last part—Trek’s utopianism—is likely the key to its continuing prominence. Modern media fandom really began with Star Trek: in the 60s and 70s, Trekkies, mostly female Trekkies, created fanzines and the first real pop culture conventions. People liked the Star Trek universe created by Gene Roddenberry so much that they wanted to live in it, or barring that, talk about it constantly with people who understood why the camaraderie of multicultural nerds in space meant so much to them. The fans fought to keep the original series from being cancelled (and failed); and yet the show remained popular in syndication, and has since spawned thirteen movies and five more TV shows: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise—and now, in 2017-2018, Discovery, a show so odd, so off-putting, so vicious and violent and militaristic that it seems like an invader from another universe entirely.

 

I haven't seen Enterprise yet but DS9 isn't utopian and shows a dark side to utopias. Voyager is about a crew 70 years from Earth. Hardly utopian.

A big problem I've got with TNG and its die hards is that they define TNG to be the only legitimate interpretation of Trek.

[benjipwns]

lol look at this cac dingus: http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=39357.msg2296436#msg2296436

anyway, it had what i was looking for in terms of Kurtzman already told us what this was going to be about, to quote the author of that Current Affairs piece, "lurching from one hideous crisis to another. A sinister new captain! War! Misery! Despair!":

"The defining factor of Roddenberry's vision is the optimistic view of the future ... Once you lose that, you lose the essence of what Star Trek is. That being said…we live in very different times. Every day we look at the news and it is hard. It is hard to see what we see. I think now more than ever Trek is needed as a reminder of what we can be and the best of who we can be. Star Trek has always been a mirror to the time it reflected and [the topical question now] is how do you preserve and protect what Starfleet is in the weight of a challenge like war and the things that have to be done in war. [That] is a very interesting and dramatic problem."
—Executive producer Alex Kurtzman on the balance between classic Star Trek and new elements in Discovery

felt that the aftereffects of the first season would be felt moving forward: "The results of the war are going to allow for a lot of new storytelling that will be the result of everything that happens and the people that are left behind; the casualties, the things that have grown in Starfleet as a result of the war. That's what we'll inherit in the second season."

oh aha, here's the care post about Kurtzman I was thinking of more where I questioned the entire premise of being able to base a show around war while staying "optimistic" at the core and whether Kurtzman could pull it off: http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=39357.msg2297099#msg2297099

But it seems like it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of not only Trek as a franchise (or really any series), but the history of the real world and also producing successful dramatic story. Even more than that his own notions of what Trek is supposed to be literally two seconds earlier.

I only have Kurtzman's Trek to go off of, but he comes off with desiring a fetishistic glamorization of war for its bad parts. "The things that have to be done in war." And in the other quote how the second season will bring with it from the war "the things that are left behind; the casualties, the things that have grown in Starfleet as a result of the war"
...
"The things that have to be done in war." DS9 dealt with this, and in the only way possible, an endless tragedy for everyone. Everyone's morals and morale is broken, an entire species has nearly been wiped out and the show makes us feel for them despite them being the bad guys from day one (and despite their two representative characters for the end story arc being the most blatantly grey or worse characters on it), another race was targeted for deliberate genocide (let alone what the Federation was going to let happen in the Gamma Quadrant as a result from the Dominion collapsing), pretty much all the main characters relationships have been shattered during and by the war and personal sacrifices are made to the very end. The Romulans aren't friends now because of the war and don't stick around to celebrate. The Klingons are putting on a brave face, but as the show multiple times indicates they are finished as a power, maybe for generations, because of the war and their ways. (Their entire government was overthrown just recently in a conference room by their new Federation ambassador.)

There's no optimism and "a reminder of what we can be and the best of who we can be" in weighing the challenge of war and "the things that have to be done." There can't be. War is inherently a failure, a disaster. Especially an intergalactic one.

You have literally the universe given to you and you want to explore war? You'll never explore it even on the level of something like Homeland has done. You can't deal with the consequences like you claim other than to revel in the suffering of certain characters. Real war tears apart societies on a level you can never do on a show where you want to keep the main cast and keep the main premise well past it.

And again DS9 already did all this and pushed it to the brink of where it could go before we tumble over an event horizon of no return. The Federation was literally prepared to commit genocide and bring about the collapse of an entire civilization that had the potential to kill untold trillions because it could not fight the war indefinitely. (And they didn't even know what havoc Janeway was unleashing in the Delta Quadrant at the time.) An idea which, by the way, you'll recall was already less successfully attempted by two "bad" powers. And for all the wartime ethics "In A Pale Moonlight" toys around with which Garak rightly points out has been a line they've crossed many times in the past and Sisko knew he would be crossing from the start, in the end, Sisko risks literally everything, trillions upon trillions of lives, on Bashir successfully getting the cure from Sloane's mind AND Odo being able to convince the Founders to end the war in exchange. DS9 had to end because they couldn't cover the aftermath of what they DID do, especially on Cardassia, let alone wrestle with what they nearly did.

If your Trek is premised on exploring "the things that have to be done in a war" because we "live in very different times ... the news ... is hard" and your previous Trek films featured a faction of the Federation determined to be prepared for the next war (after untold billions died to a Romulan ship from a future alternate timeline) that is utterly ruthless and prepared to slaughter anyone to pursue this goal pre-emptively then I'm not sure how your Trek is going to ever be optimistic or about exploration or about really anything but just brutal terrible suffering for everyone in just crudely and clumsily handled ways.

more release period "talking about what the show will be" from producers/writers/etc.

Noting that the Klingons historically represented the Soviet Union, becoming friendlier with the protagonists of Star Trek as the Cold War ended, Harberts stated that in Discovery they and Starfleet would represent different factions within the modern United States, explaining that "what we really wanted to do too is understand two differing points of view and really explore it ... I frankly love what they represent. Not in terms necessarily of all the messaging, but in terms of learning about them and learning why they are who they are and making sure they aren't just the enemy. And then finding a way to come together. How do we bring everyone back together? What do we do? What does it take? It is a big challenge for us, but that is what season one is all about."

Berg elaborated that "one of the themes we are exploring is universal and is a lesson I feel like as human beings we have to learn over and over again—is you think you know ‘the other,' but you really don't. You have to sort of cognitively re-frame or break or deviate from your own point of view to really understand. You have to forget what you knew before. One of the big steps in that journey is how to understand yourself. You have to understand yourself before you can better see others. The show is called Discovery and it is called Discovery for a reason, because our characters are on a journey."

"One of the driving forces of this war was to not vilify either side. The show is often told from both points of view ... there are significant sections of the narrative that are purely from the Klingon point of view and in Klingon. That allows the audience to participate in the debate of who is right and who is wrong."
—Executive producer Akiva Goldsman on approaching the Federation-Klingon war from both sides

[Tasty]

Benji it's not DIS it's STD.

[Tasty]

Benji it's not DIS it's STD.

No, that's Kurtzman.

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[Tasty]

Nah, he's basically herpes. You can learn to love her again but it's unlikely.

Well said.

[benjipwns]

TOS -> TNG -> DS9 -> VOY -> ENT -> STD?!?

ST -> STT -> STD -> STV -> STE -> DIS?!?

I'm keeping DIS

[Tasty]

Watching the show is still a self-diss as a Trek fan so I guess DIS still sorta works. It's not as catchy as STD tho.

[Himu]

How could you take the wonderful premise of Voyager and make it about TOS like Twilight Zone encounters every week? Why do they ignore the fact they’re a lone starship lightyears from home without a starbase to fix the ship? How are they able to run around doing these dumb space errands without constantly refueling? Why aren’t they playing the Maquis vs Federation aspect of the cast? You’ve got the great pilot and then an alright episode and then ...

[Madrun Badrun]

Ya thats the most frustrating thing about voyager.  They take this cool premise that they are alone in the wild wests of space and then use that for like a whole 6 episodes. 

[chronovore]

Started watching DS9 again. The one where Quark meets his old Cardassian girlfriend (Bing Crosby's daughter, who was basically the semi-naughty brunette in every '80s drama ever), and then the one where Garak's pain-reducer-implant stops working and he gets nursed back to health.

This is some top-tier Trek, right here.

[VomKriege]

I'm watching the first episode of TNG and I'm pleasantly surprised at how they captured the stilted feel, bombast and adorable cheapness of the original. Does it stay that way or did the series slowly drift closer to the style you'd expect for a show made in the nineties (darker, edgier, blander and shot on videoer) ?

Did they also redo the FX shots for TNG or are those vintage ? It was jarring in TOS even if the glimpse we get of the original composites (in that one episode that wasn't remastered for some reason) is very rough.

[Himu]

TNG was remastered for blu ray. Season 1 and some of 2 have TOSness with sets. Season 3 onward are shot on location and the cinematography gets really good. Star Trek doesn’t have “gritty” aesthetic until Abrams. There’s a darker Trek show after TNG called Deep Space Nine but it’s hardly more bland in terms of special effects.

TNG looking like a 60’s show in season 1 also isn’t considered a positive so you’re a minority in that.

[Himu]

To test it yourself watch the intros (before the intro sequence starts) to Who Watches the Watchers (s3 ep4) and Darmok (season 5, ep 2) to see how the series aesthetic changes. Sure as shit isn’t TOS cheese. Season 1 looks like crap. Season 3 - 7 look fantastic.

[VomKriege]

Yeah I'm familiar with DS9 premise. The sixtyness faded quite a bit in the second part of the pilot (space jellyfishes notwithstanding), I guess they wanted to ease fans. That DeForest Kelley cameo was 

[benjipwns]

Early TNG has a lot of terrible sets, and they didn't do location shooting as much because they wanted the planets to look "more alien", and everyone recognized Vasquez Rocks' reuse in TOS, but it just looks like garbage where somebody forgot to composite in the backgrounds or build the other half of sets. "Hide and Q" is hilarious awful, I don't think even the remaster helps it much, though they took out the stoundstage echoes and shadows on the "sky" and such. The remasters try to clean up a lot of that in TNG to where they straight up replace backgrounds with new footage and mattes, which they didn't do as often on the TOS remasters except in extreme cases like the infamous tinfoil mountains in "Arena."

Much of the remasters goals were simply to make things look cleaner in HD but keep the overall look, but early TNG they did a bunch more reworking because it was bad and everyone agreed it was bad and it looks so out of place with seasons 3-7.

Here's a comparison for "Farpoint": http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/observations/encounteratfarpoint.htm

Probably my favorite example because in the original it's just a static unmoving picture around Riker, but in the remaster, it's animated footage with wind/moving stream/etc. Plus just the colors and detail on Riker/behind him on the ship are great:

[VomKriege]

Android fucking by episode 2

[Yeti]

Is it more shameful to fuck an android or a hologram 

[VomKriege]

TNG

Episode 3 : Oups that's a bit racist ? "I should forcibly take Yar as my wife !"
Episode 4 : Ferengis are fucking obnoxious "Yar should be nude !"
Episode 5 : Yar flashbacks to her CDPR wet dream of a rape planet. Is there any episode they won't bring her sordid sex life on ?

[team filler]

[D3RANG3D]

TNG

Episode 3 : Oups that's a bit racist ? "I should forcibly take Yar as my wife !"
Episode 4 : Ferengis are fucking obnoxious "Yar should be nude !"
Episode 5 : Yar flashbacks to her CDPR wet dream of a rape planet. Is there any episode they won't bring her sordid sex life on ?

Don't forget the space Irish episode.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

I like how they went to Yar's home planet and they were like rape gangs???

Her younger sister was in that episode and she was  .

[close]

[Himu]

Leaving Trek because of season 1 was a massive career fail. Like, it’s the first season and you leave mid-season for a massive hyped show like TNG? What kind of manager did she have that allowed her to do that?

[VomKriege]

TNG S1E7

Welcome to the FUCK PLANET populated by Swedish porn stars in terrible thongs. Man, did Roddenberry have a weird sex fixation when they wrote S1 ? At least it's not just the women who are horny this time round.

Edit : Oh it's also a jogging planet I can certainly believe some scripts were old mediocre ones repurposed.

[VomKriege]

And yeah I'm severe with the TOS FX reworks. The space shots are too clean but the ship establishing shots are OK, not too showy and not too jarring. There's some nasty bits like the ethereal lifeforms flashing out (on that seemingly pacifist medieval planet the Klingon try to occupy) though.

The specific example you gave for TNG did continue to stand out, I can't imagine how poor they were originally.

[Himu]

I still liked early TNG despite recognizing it was sort of bad. Season 2 is much better. Love that season. Dramatic improvement.

[VomKriege]

TNG S1E9 Hide and Q

Oh god you weren't joking about the set in that one. "Were we supposed to composite something into all that background green ?" 
Yar making a pass at Picard. Jesus Gene go wank yourself, all that pent up libido cannot be good.
 

[benjipwns]

Man, did Roddenberry have a weird sex fixation when they wrote S1 ?

He had a weird sex fixation at all times, difference on TNG season one was that he didn't have as many censors/editors as he had in the past. The novelizations he wrote often added weird sex stuff to them that was never shown or even in the scripts.

I'm pretty sure his ideal vision of everything off camera on the Enterprise-D was the other thousand people constantly boning in gender fluid ways. (Except Picard.)

[benjipwns]

TNG S1E9 Hide and Q

Oh god you weren't joking about the set in that one. "Were we supposed to composite something into all that background green ?" 

The remaster even doubled up the number of foreground rocks and rock formations.

[Himu]

Man, did Roddenberry have a weird sex fixation when they wrote S1 ?

He had a weird sex fixation at all times, difference on TNG season one was that he didn't have as many censors/editors as he had in the past. The novelizations he wrote often added weird sex stuff to them that was never shown or even in the scripts.

I'm pretty sure his ideal vision of everything off camera on the Enterprise-D was the other thousand people constantly boning in gender fluid ways. (Except Picard.)

And Geordi.

You’re slipping buddy.

[Joe Molotov]

Man, did Roddenberry have a weird sex fixation when they wrote S1 ?

He had a weird sex fixation at all times, difference on TNG season one was that he didn't have as many censors/editors as he had in the past. The novelizations he wrote often added weird sex stuff to them that was never shown or even in the scripts.

I'm pretty sure his ideal vision of everything off camera on the Enterprise-D was the other thousand people constantly boning in gender fluid ways. (Except Picard.)

And Geordi.

You’re slipping buddy.

Geordi fucked that hologram lady until the real her came on the ship and found the hologram sex doll version of herself.

[Himu]

Man, did Roddenberry have a weird sex fixation when they wrote S1 ?

He had a weird sex fixation at all times, difference on TNG season one was that he didn't have as many censors/editors as he had in the past. The novelizations he wrote often added weird sex stuff to them that was never shown or even in the scripts.

I'm pretty sure his ideal vision of everything off camera on the Enterprise-D was the other thousand people constantly boning in gender fluid ways. (Except Picard.)

And Geordi.

You’re slipping buddy.

Geordi fucked that hologram lady until the real her came on the ship and found the hologram sex doll version of herself.

Yes but Geordi was missing out that action until well into like season 4? 3?

“Another Coco no no?”
“Geordi, I think-“
“Yeah”
“I think we should be -“
“Friends, yeah.”

*jacks off to hologram when she leaves but can’t see so has to jack off to her voice*


 

[VomKriege]

So yeah that S1 of TNG is kinda meh so far. I don't mind the stiff sixties look but the stories are not very good on average. I never felt much for the characters / actors for the little I was familiar with : Picard is great, Q too, Data is better than I thought (still a less good Spock so far). Worf has potential but ia basically doing nothing for the moment. Troi and the Crushers are bad.

[Himu]

Troi and the Crushers never really improve. The rest are rock solid.

[VomKriege]

On second thought the stories themselves might not be the problem. I thought Justice (the planet of fucking and jogging) had interesting themes, but it's absolutely dragged down by the terrible design for the aliens. Same for the infected dying race popping up on the Betazoid planet to scoop Troi fiancé (the writing was corny too).

Yar had potential (with some interesting frailty and motivations) if she wasn't reduced to a sex symbol ( No slight to Crosby but you'd think Troi would be the one...) / RAPE GANGS every other episode but I take it they never fulfilled it. She feels like the TOS Yeoman in modern times, with most of the original sexism still in there.

[VomKriege]

TNG S1E12 Datalore

BROTHER 

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[Himu]

https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/98ussh/watching_tos_for_the_first_time_wow_i_am/

[VomKriege]

TNG S1E14 Angel One

TV show was warned for downplaying sexism, history of history of bothsidism, indecent hairy Frakes exposure.

[D3RANG3D]

How dare you minimize the men on that planets lived experiences.

[chronovore]

https://nerdist.com/star-trek-netflix-most-rewatched/

[Himu]

Fuck Voyager

[Himu]

From reddit

[–]
Borg
Borg
Borg
Borg
Borg
I heard Voyager only gets good when Seven shows up
Borg
Borg
I liked TNG, maybe I'll like Voyager too
Clues

[Himu]

On the other hand, I loved the Borg eps when I was a teen. I also have fond memories of Voyager as I watched it with my dad almost every week as a teen. So I have nostalgia for it. I want to push through so I can get to the Seven of Nine parts so I can relive my "first Trek" and see if I still like it but season 1 is so bad it drives me crazy.

[chronovore]

http://twitter.com/Marina_Sirtis/status/1036475963796676609/

[Tasty]

Frakes is in the alley outside.

[FatRiker]

Voyager is okay. It's the show where you turn your brain off for more than half of the episodes. You know, like your Uncle Frankie that got in that car accident where that metal rod in the back of his truck speared through his head and the doctors had to remove half his skull? That Uncle Frankie.

[Himu]

[Yeti]

I liked how Tom Paris was supposed to be this bad boy rebel pilot of Starfleet who didn't play by any rules but then they gave him all these grandpa hobbies like working on old cars and playing old-timey black and white holodeck programs. I was expecting him to be a Han Solo archetype when I first started the series but instead he was in serious competition with Harry Kim for most weenie crewmember of Voyager. They never really did much with his piloting skills, and they didn't seem to know what to do with him. I'm in the final season and it seems like his duties solely consist of being the Doctor's medical assistant and being a sensitive and caring husband to his irrational half-Klingon wife.

[chronovore]

Voyager is okay. It's the show where you turn your brain off for more than half of the episodes. You know, like your Uncle Frankie that got in that car accident where that metal rod in the back of his truck speared through his head and the doctors had to remove half his skull? That Uncle Frankie.

Christ. I actually have that uncle, except his name is "Bud."

[Rufus]

Pilots having any sort of meaningful input on a ship that size was always dumb to me. Hell, even shuttles probably have supercomputers on them that can do the job better.

The height of stupidity was Ryker taking manual control with a fucking joystick in Insurrection.

[benjipwns]

my favorite part about the Tom Paris and Harry Kim relationship on the job is that Harry stays an ensign for seven years...Tom gets a field commission like the Maquis members of lieutenant, Janeway knocks him down to ensign in that one episode as punishment, and then later she PROMOTES him back up to lieutenant

this combined with the fact that in another episode Janeway PROMOTES Tuvok to lieutenant commander totally implies she keeps Harry as an ensign just to spite him or something

[benjipwns]

maybe it's because he's a Harry Kim from another universe

[Himu]

Guys.

GUYS.

I AM WRITING IN CAPS BECAUSE I AM REALLY, REALLY EXITED FOR THE PICARD TREK.

Have you seen all the shit going on? There’s apparently this Pulitzer writer, Michael Chabon, who is a great writer attached as executive producer. They have drawn a map of the galaxy post Voyager and showed it off on instagram. WE (might) BE GETTING POST VOYAGER TREK!!!! Aughhhh!!!

And apparently Chabon is the real thing. Rick Berman hasn’t said shit about new Trek but when he found out about the new producer, he said nothing short of positive praise.

I’m really, REALLY excited for the Picard show guys!!

https://trekmovie.com/2018/09/04/rick-berman-endorses-michael-chabon-joining-star-trek-family-for-picard-series/

Look at the map!!

https://trekmovie.com/2018/09/01/picard-show-executive-producer-michael-chabon-reveals-his-star-trek-galactic-map-briefing/

[Joe Molotov]

I want to believe.

[Himu]

After the look of the bridge on the TNG movies I doubt it

[nachobro]

Top 3 Star Trek Bridges

3. 1701 Bridge



2. NX Bridge



1. Defiant Bridge

[Joe Molotov]

Low-key the actual best are the Klingon Bird-of-Prey bridges that always looked they were in a dingy tool shed or a set from Saw IV.

[FatRiker]

I hope Janeway is leader of the Federation in the new Picard show.

[Joe Molotov]

I hope Wesley is.

[chronovore]

Considering the Federation is usually corrupt and evil under their idealistic blanket, I agree.

Thanks for weighing in, Cindy.