The Star Trek Thread

[Mothra]

Yeah, it's pretty baffling that Dal was made the captain when Gwyn is clearly the most qualified/capable. Definitely just them doing it because he's the main character, I guess, which sucks.

I could really stand for Gwyn to get more stuff to do. If she's gonna be the dramatic and tortured one, give her some stories to play out.

[Thad]

Yeah, I don't love the finale separating her from the rest of the crew, either.

Though that could be one of those things like her amnesia that only lasts one episode, so maybe no big deal. We'll see.

[Mothra]

My company just gave me Paramount+ for free, so I've been doing the sane thing and starting a re-watch of Star Trek: Enterprise.

God, I love this show. I know it's perhaps the clumsiest Trek ever attempted, but I love the concept and they actually stick to their guns on the idea of the show pretty well.

Wild how few actual good characters there are, though. Just like... ya got Phlox, ya got Trip, ya got Hoshi... sometimes T'Pol is decent... then it's just Shran doing the heavy-lifting. Not exactly the murderers row like TNG, DS9 and even Voyager.

Anyways, I'm loving it.

[Büge]

I wish they'd gone with the original plan of doing the whole first season on Earth where they build the ship and they don't launch it until the last episode.

[Mothra]

Yeah, it's at its best when it's as close to its original concept of "The Right Stuff" in Trek. Would've loved to see them earn every inch of space they crawl to.

As it is, the fact that they are literally the only Starfleet vessel out there, completely on their own, goes a long way to making every little decision an act of crazy exploratory bravery. There are zero assurances they aren't going to get blown up instantly by some nausican raider or whatever, lost with all hands.

My favorite bits on the show are how terrified everyone is of being teleported, and how fucking insane it is to be actively using the Warp 5 reactor when it's a completely new technology. Hoshi has this line the second she sees it of, "Should you really be standing that close to it?"

[Thad]

"Spock's Brain" is perhaps the most prescient episode of Star Trek: TOS.

In that it anticipated what it would look like if you fed the scripts for all the previous episodes into a circa-2010 ML algorithm.

[Friday]

Shran doing the heavy-lifting.

one does not cast Jeffrey Combs in a Trek role and expect him to not carry.

[Thad]

[Thad]

We've been working our way through TOS. We're more than halfway through season 3 and I know everybody talks about how the budget cuts made for a lot more bottle episodes, but I gotta tell you the most visible budget cuts are in the hairpieces.

But we took a detour and jumped ahead to Encounter at Farpoint. And now I understand why it has a rough reputation! The potential for greatness is there but boy it's a mess.

Pilots are hard. You have to introduce all the characters and give them something to do. And usually you don't really know who the characters are yet. Picard, for example, is not Picard yet; he's just Kirk with an accent. And Q isn't really Q yet, either; there's not much sense of a playful trickster god trying to prove a point, so much as a generic omnipotent alien who the captain succeeds in beating at his own game.

And "generic" about sums up the plot! It sure is a Fontana/Roddenberry script. Or, three Fontana/Roddenberry scripts mooshed together, more like. It feels less like a two-part episode than two distinct episodes, each with a half-baked, stock TOS plot that isn't quite enough to sustain a complete episode, even granting that TNG episodes are 5 minutes shorter than TOS episodes. And on top of that, it has to introduce all the characters. Which consists in part of McCoy showing up, in a scene that does three things:

1. make it clear that Shatner and Nimoy said "no";
2. beg for the cutting room floor;
3. explain in dialogue that Data is very similar to Spock, for those in the audience who missed the first part, and the ones who saw the first part but still need someone to explain that to them because they're drunk, high, or just really fucking stupid.

And look, I like seeing DeForest Kelley show up and ham it up. But it makes no sense and it kills the momentum dead.

So yeah, it is a mess, and from what I understand the show gets worse from here before it gets better. But the potential is there! It is a great cast, and eventually it would get writers who knew what to do with them.

Well, most of them. Oh, Tasha Yar, we hardly knew ye.

[Friday]

Yeah Encounter at Farpoint might be the best season 1 ep. I'd have to go look at my tier list but it's possible it scored the highest.

*goes to other thread*

okay, I gave it a B (mostly for potential and cutting it a bit of slack for being the pilot), along with Hide and Q, Arsenal of Freedom, Conspiracy, and Heart of Glory (though Heart I said was the bottom of B.)

Datalore was the highest rated for the first season at A. Mostly for the scene with Lore and Worf in the turbolift.

I stand by those ratings. You don't get to a truly great episode until Measure of a Man, in season 2.

And then you hit season 3, and the series goes fucking crazy.

And Q isn't really Q yet, either; there's not much sense of a playful trickster god trying to prove a point, so much as a generic omnipotent alien who the captain succeeds in beating at his own game.

That's how he was originally meant to be, yeah. He's like that in Hide and Q still. Then in Q Who (another great season 2 ep) they redesigned his character to be the trickster god who will kill your crew in order to prove an important point about your complacency and arrogance and not just because it's funny.

Actually, I think after Q Who he never kills anyone again, outside of an assisted suicide in VOY.

[Mongrel]

Encounter at Farpoint will always hit a major nostalgia button for me. Watching it and knowing where they're gonna go makes it a bit more exciting than the episode has any inherent right to be.

Also it's always fun to see that early TNG idiosyncrasy where the costume department leaned really heavily on neatly quilting garish, extremely-90's (even though, yes, it was '87) fabrics as a visual code for futurey-wutchery clothes, especially in memorably and hilariously inappropriate uses like Q's "soldier" costume.

Of course eventually they left only the Romulans as the banner bearers for quilt-wear, which actually worked when juxtaposed with their similarly infamous shoulderpads. But it was still funny even then.

[Thad]

It's a lot like Star Trek: TMP, really. A whole lot of table-setting, too much fan service, and they've even got the lingering exterior shot of the Enterprise while Theme from Star Trek: TMP plays.

And the resolution to what's happening at Farpoint feels a lot like the V*GER reveal. It's a bit of TOS formula -- the last-minute twist concerning the nature of the alien foe -- that can often feel perfunctory and anticlimactic. Okay, sure, space jellyfish, and they're not the bad guys. That's a very Star Trek resolution, but maybe not the best thing to lead off with in Trek's triumphant return. Again.

[Mothra]

I'm continuing to power through season 3 of Picard, and I've assembled some key takeaways here.

I've also been making longer posts for each ep which I could post here if there was any interest, but they're mainly just bulleted lists of things that drove me insane about it

• The story for this season absolutely sucks shit and anyone that tells you otherwise is either a Wil Wheatonesque permasimp or has deluded themselves into desperately hoping, Lost-style, that everything is going to pay off in a cosmically fantastic way in the two episodes they have remaining this season, despite every conceivable indication that this will turn out like the last two seasons, and to a slightly lesser degree, every season-ender of Discovery.

• The TNG cast is great and they pretty effortlessly interact with each other in a believable way. It does feel like this is how these characters would act after 30 years of not seeing each other much. Worf and Riker and the highlights, they carry a lot of this show.

• There are seven sets total for this show. You have the bridge of the Titan (a redress of the Stargazer set from S2), the hallways of the Titan, the medbay, a meeting room (a redress of the medbay), the bridge of the Shrike, a small set that is meant to represent the brig of the Shrike, and lastly, a holographic re-creation of the random local LA bar that is meant to be Guinan's new spot in the future. So, with these seven sets, all action of this show takes place on the Titan, which is not the end of the world! TNG had just a few sets! But they are cloaked in complete darkness and are visually dreary and dull, so you are always hoping they're going to get the fuck out of here. That never happens. They're just on this ship the entire show.

• All characters will argue with each other for seemingly no purpose, then make up immediately after, all for the sake of some kind of drama. A good example is when the Titan is being chased by the Shrike through a nebulur, both Riker and Picard agree that the Titan is no match for the better-equipped Shrike, so they decide to flee. Later in the episode, Picard, unprompted, starts pleading Riker to turn and fight the Shrike. Riker disagrees, and finally, he relents and they try to fight, but this ends up crippling the Titan. Riker turns to Picard and says, "You've killed us all..." all dramatic, as the episode ends. At the start of the next episode, Riker goes to Picard and tells him that, Picard was right, they should've turned and fought, and that everything is fine between them. THAT'S THE WHOLE THING.

• There is a new character named JACK CRUSHER who is the secret half-brother of Wesley and he is a rough-n-tumble cheap Jameson-drinkin' Okana who does that thing where he's got multiple huge secrets that all characters should know about, but he keeps them secret until it's dramatically appropriate for it to be limply revealed to everyone. He has psionic powers including mind-reading and astral projection, none of which have been explained yet (two eps from the finale), but the answers to which have been teased at the end of every episode.

• Your typical episode will involve characters wandering around the extremely dark hallways of the Titan, having shootouts with motorcycle-helmet aliens until there is a ship action, where a thing will shoot at the Titan but miss, and then they warp away. They will visit the LA bar to do a dialogue scene. At the end of the episode, they will say, "No we will find out the REAL reason all this crazy stuff is happening..." as they zoom in on Jack Crusher. In the next episode, they will never not return to that Jack Crusher thing until the tease for the next ep, or they will quickly abandon what they were about to do, due to some kind of emergency.

• Section 31 continues to operate with the blessing of Starfleet Intelligence, and runs an active black site called the Daystrom Institute where they keep all the worst weapons the Enterprise has encountered during its mission, perform grisly torture experiments on their enemies, and keep the CORPSES OF IMPORTANT CAPTAINS AND CREW MEMBERS FOR EXPERIMENTATION including Data who they resurrected yet again, making this the third time he has died and come back from the dead for more Brent Spiner appearances.

• Brent Spiner is very fun still, even if he's given terrible material to work with. He also carries a lot of this.

• There is a big reveal that the main bad guys this season are the changelings from DS9, who have decided to get revenge on the Federation because Section 31 did torture experiments on them during the Dominion War. This is later revealed to be not the actual real villain of the season, who is a mysterious floating head the show has not yet begun to explain, two episodes from the end of the show. Real Snoke shit up in here.

• People are getting vaporized constantly on this show, like, 5 per episode, at least.

[Mongrel]

I'm amazed the show is even still going, honestly.

No way in hell could you pay me enough to watch it though.

[beatbandito]

There is a new character named JACK CRUSHER who is the secret half-brother of Wesley

Making Wheaton do all the press tours while giving a spot in the series for his character to a new actor actually makes all this worth while.

[JD]

I'm told that Instagram videos are rated based on the metric of people who watch all the way to the end, with the result that you are often recommended videos whose sole purpose is to goad you into watching to the end for a promised payoff.

Discovery and Picard do this.

Picard season 3 sets up this big mystery about Jack for the specific purpose of not revealing it until the end, so that you'll keep watching the show. It's not a quest so much as a mystery that they just tease the viewer with so they won't hang up. The entire Federation is always at stake, and there are always convoluted reasons for why Picard and crew are literally the only people capable of stopping it.

[Friday]

All the rest of the bullshit aside, the constant, pointless drama between the characters is what drives me the most insane. It's like these people are on a reality tv show, like Big Brother or Jersey Shore or something. They fight nonsensically and completely emotionally, like teenagers.

It's funny because remember how Gene Roddenberry had a rule that the characters couldn't have anything like that going on and how it stunted writers because the core of writing stories is character conflict? And once he died it freed up the writers to write character conflict?

Yeah, maybe he was on to something.

[Thad]

I watched Let That Be Your Last Battlefield and the detail I'm most fixated on is that the script bothsides the fuck out of the conflict but you still come away seeing Frank Gorshin as the clear villain.

Or at least I did. Maybe I'm just swayed by my biases, but I don't think so. My theory is that all the bothsiderist "aren't these guys both too extreme?" talk was a deliberate choice to get network approval for the script, but it seems pretty clear whose side the people making the show are actually on. Casting Frank Gorshin does a lot of the heavy lifting toward making Bele unsympathetic, but it's not just that; Bele's the guy who uses his power to take control of the Enterprise. All Lokai does is steal a shuttlecraft from some other crew we don't even see; his is clearly the far lesser infraction, no matter how sternly Kirk lectures him about it. It seems pretty obvious that the episode stacks the deck while feigning impartiality. Which isn't a bad rhetorical trick, really.

Could be I'm off-base. I'm sure the episode's production has come up before, though all Wikipedia really says about it is that NBC rejected it the first time it was proposed.

[Büge]

I'm told that Instagram videos are rated based on the metric of people who watch all the way to the end, with the result that you are often recommended videos whose sole purpose is to goad you into watching to the end for a promised payoff.

Discovery and Picard do this.

Picard season 3 sets up this big mystery about Jack for the specific purpose of not revealing it until the end, so that you'll keep watching the show. It's not a quest so much as a mystery that they just tease the viewer with so they won't hang up. The entire Federation is always at stake, and there are always convoluted reasons for why Picard and crew are literally the only people capable of stopping it.

Verilybitchie did a video recently on the Rings of Power series, and the way they explained it was that the show was written not to tell a story, but to be discussed on social media. I imagine the same goes for Picard, Discovery, any given MCU series, etc. They're written so they can be bolstered by algorithms on Instagram, Tiktok, and Youtube thanks to review aggregators and talking heads that analyze and conjecture about What's In The Box.

[Friday]

And the fact that inevitably What's in the Box is something fucking stupid and sloppy and nonsensical doesn't matter.