Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Michael Wade]

Same guy did the story for Hidden Evil

And was a lead writer on the Journeyman Project games , which I highly recommend.

I never played Hidden Evil, but from the walkthough I saw it looked like a a neat, resident evil tank controls, star trek game.

Picard and data are the only regulars in it, and they are not playable. They are mission control for the OC character Sovok. A human raised by Vulcans who can somehow do the nerve pinch. He's ok if forgettable, but that makes him leagues better then that STD chick.


The plot is presented as a sequel to Instruction and the TNG chase episode, where it turns out romulans financed the S'ona and there's a precursor base on Baku

It goes a bit more into their lore and reveals they all died out because of a civil war that involved out of control engineered war monsters. They bring back Salome Jens, and some of the insurrection cast for a handful of scenes.

The biggest negative I can say about it is that it looks kinda clunky and the monsters dont look as scary or memorable as they should. There is however, one cool part where Sovok gets his hands on a cloaking belt and has to metal gear solid his way though a romulan base.




It also has quite possibly one of the funnest objectives in star trek history.

and to make it even funner Patrick repeats that line completely straight faced at least twice.

Apparently her husband and her went on vacation in Germany and he demanded she participate in some sort of swapper or BDSM club or something, she refused.

Dammmm. She made the right call dumping him. Shame that particular historical crossover bit us in the ass

Ah, now I'm thinking about Voyager.

"So the idea is they're lost, low on resources, fighting to survive in unknown space. But that's scary to write, so we're giving them unlimited supplies and fuel and we'll just have them mention every now and then that they have to conserve resources"

I feel like they have such a good premise and they just... ignore it? The premise is so strong and there's so much they could do with it but they ignore every issue and plot device it could bring into the story. Like you could REMOVE the whole "lost in space" aspect and the show wouldnt change, and that is saying something. "Oh we're low on food" Just kidding. "We're low on fuel" Just kidding. They even replace their fucking shuttles. Voyager writers were scared of writing the premise they put forth so nothing makes sense. Voyager should have went the way of the Equinox.

The one great thing I can say about Voyager, is that it tended to have a much darker tone with its episodes of the week. Tuvix is one example, but the atmosphere on a lot of the other episodes were uniquely isolating and dangerous. A lot of the aliens were super aggressive and had fucked up ways of doing things. They were also rather liberal and inventive with the gore on voyager.

 

[Ishtar]

I’m trying to think, did voyager have any real equivalent to DS9’s ferengi comedy hour?

 

[Great President of McHell]

I’m trying to think, did voyager have any real equivalent to DS9’s ferengi comedy hour?

That captain proton holoprogram they did a couple of times is probably the closest things, I honestly hated a lot of the holodeck shit on voyager but those ones were kind of funny.

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

I never played Hidden Evil, but from the walkthough I saw it looked like a a neat, resident evil tank controls, star trek game.
View attachment 3049507
Picard and data are the only regulars in it, and they are not playable. They are mission control for the OC character Sovok. A human raised by Vulcans who can somehow do the nerve pinch. He's ok if forgettable, but that makes him leagues better then that STD chick.


The plot is presented as a sequel to Instruction and the TNG chase episode, where it turns out romulans financed the S'ona and there's a precursor base on Baku


View attachment 3049505

It goes a bit more into their lore and reveals they all died out because of a civil war that involved out of control engineered war monsters. They bring back Salome Jens, and some of the insurrection cast for a handful of scenes.

The biggest negative I can say about it is that it looks kinda clunky and the monsters dont look as scary or memorable as they should. There is however, one cool part where Sovok gets his hands on a cloaking belt and has to metal gear solid his way though a romulan base.




It also has quite possibly one of the funnest objectives in star trek history.

View attachment 3049530

and to make it even funner Patrick repeats that line completely straight faced at least twice.


Dammmm. She made the right call dumping him. Shame that particular historical crossover bit us in the ass



The one great thing I can say about Voyager, is that it tended to have a much darker tone with its episodes of the week. Tuvix is one example, but the atmosphere on a lot of the other episodes were uniquely isolating and dangerous. A lot of the aliens were super aggressive and had fucked up ways of doing things. They were also rather liberal and inventive with the gore on voyager.

There was that one episode where the entire ship and crew got cloned somehow without knowing, but the clones didn’t know they were clones and they all started falling apart and dying. I don’t remember the specifics, but it ends with the remaking clones finally catching up to Voyager in an attempt to save themselves only to die and disintegrate right before real Voyager noticed them.

 

[Captain Syrup]

I’m trying to think, did voyager have any real equivalent to DS9’s ferengi comedy hour?

The obscenity which is Fair Haven.

That captain proton holoprogram they did a couple of times is probably the closest things

I freakin' love Captain Proton.

---

Trivia: "Lonzak" is played by Nicholas Worth, who you may remember from Darkman. He was also great in Red Alert 2. The nicest bad guy you'd ever want to join. Has a pet turtle. (That's important.) "Finally Soviets have reached the Moon!"

 

[SteelPlatedHeart]

Looking it up, it was a season 5 episode. “Course: Oblivion”

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Course:_Oblivion_(episode)

 

[Living Dead Girl]

I feel like a lot of the inconsistency with janeway also comes down to to the writers being completly spineless. They could have had her completly adhere to the prime directive while in the delta quadrant or chose to diregard it and do whatever it takes to get home, either option would have caused long lasting conflict with the crew and I guess thats too much trouble. To avoid that her moral code is instead whatever the episode needs for the plot to happen, some days they wont share thier technology no matter what and other they're just handing out replicators left and right.
It's not like they couldn't have done both either, It would have been really cool if there was a slow degredation of her values over time as the situation becomes more dire. Of course that was never a problem though because theres an intergalactic supermarket always within range in the delta quadrant.

what I'm saying is, why couldn't we have had a show about the Equinox instead?

This is EXACTLY what I'm saying. The Equinox was genuinely compelling, a story of people degrading into the absolute worst versions of themselves and doing anything they could to survive, a dark and realistic story of being lost and hopeless in space. Voyager was like that, but for babies who don't care about character development or high stakes plot.

 

[Ishtar]

This is EXACTLY what I'm saying. The Equinox was genuinely compelling, a story of people degrading into the absolute worst versions of themselves and doing anything they could to survive, a dark and realistic story of being lost and hopeless in space. Voyager was like that, but for babies who don't care about character development or high stakes plot.

Okay I disagree here. The Equinox is like an entirely different ship in a very different context. It’s a small science based ship with a smaller crew and far less resources.

Voyager on the other hand is basically a navy cruiser(the equinox being a patrol boat and the enterprise an aircraft carrier or battleship, loose analogy I know) it has a larger crew, more resources, people with some training in dealing with the situations voyager finds itself in.

The equinox likely didn’t have a holodeck, it didn’t have the resources or facilities for an astrometrics lab, or to construct the delta flyer or the replicator tech voyager had. Voyager is a big enough ship, with enough people that barring the Year of Hell situation, it will generally be okay for the most part. It’s combat capable, and capable of extremely fast speed.

And even then we see voyager trading with aliens all the time, occasionally getting into conflict, and even doing repairs when necessary. Hell there are instances in the show where the crew are working long shifts. Something like 20 hours IIRC. And there’s that episode where they are basically just traveling through space and Janeway tells the story of her ancestor at the turn of the 21st century.

People that wanted voyager to be constantly struggling for resources or food or fuel or whatever don’t seem to realize that…it is the 24th century, and for that reason IU technology can actually solve most of the immediate problems a smaller or primitive ship would have.

As it is, Janeway pretty much breaks the fourth wall in the pilot episode-speaking to the camera to say “we will be one ship one crew, we will be explorers, we will seek short cuts home whenever possible, we’re basically going to be running things in a Roddenberryian way, now set a course for earth!”

Voyager is not BSG, and it was never intended to be.

 

[Living Dead Girl]

Okay I disagree here. The Equinox is like an entirely different ship in a very different context. It’s a small science based ship with a smaller crew and far less resources.

Voyager on the other hand is basically a navy cruiser(the equinox being a patrol boat and the enterprise an aircraft carrier or battleship, loose analogy I know) it has a larger crew, more resources, people with some training in dealing with the situations voyager finds itself in.

The equinox likely didn’t have a holodeck, it didn’t have the resources or facilities for an astrometrics lab, or to construct the delta flyer or the replicator tech voyager had. Voyager is a big enough ship, with enough people that barring the Year of Hell situation, it will generally be okay for the most part. It’s combat capable, and capable of extremely fast speed.

And even then we see voyager trading with aliens all the time, occasionally getting into conflict, and even doing repairs when necessary. Hell there are instances in the show where the crew are working long shifts. Something like 20 hours IIRC. And there’s that episode where they are basically just traveling through space and Janeway tells the story of her ancestor at the turn of the 21st century.

People that wanted voyager to be constantly struggling for resources or food or fuel or whatever don’t seem to realize that…it is the 24th century, and for that reason IU technology can actually solve most of the immediate problems a smaller or primitive ship would have.

As it is, Janeway pretty much breaks the fourth wall in the pilot episode-speaking to the camera to say “we will be one ship one crew, we will be explorers, we will seek short cuts home whenever possible, we’re basically going to be running things in a Roddenberryian way, now set a course for earth!”

Voyager is not BSG, and it was never intended to be.

It's okay to be wrong sometimes. If Voyager wasn't meant to feel the effects of being in uncharted space then that shouldn't be the premise, or they should stop whining about how they're low on resources. Either they're fine or they're not, they can't flip flop on it when the plot calls for it.

 

[L50LasPak]

Who's willing to bet Kurtzman and his kike friends are going to fuck up portraying the evils of fascism and go full Starship Troopers accidentally making a fascist nation look better than the dysgenic democracy we live in.

Bold of you to assume they can do even that right.

Chakotay’s animal guide is a girl.

I noticed in the wiki article that Janeway's guide is a lizard. Hilariously, that episode predates Threshold by quite a few seasons.

They even replace their fucking shuttles.

To be fair to the writers, Voyager doesn't actually replace any of their shuttles that get destroyed... they just inexplicably have new ones because the writers didn't keep track. I'll let you be the judge of whether that's an improvement or not.

The one great thing I can say about Voyager, is that it tended to have a much darker tone with its episodes of the week. Tuvix is one example, but the atmosphere on a lot of the other episodes were uniquely isolating and dangerous. A lot of the aliens were super aggressive and had fucked up ways of doing things. They were also rather liberal and inventive with the gore on voyager.

Voyager doesn't hesitate to murder people or show dead/dying civilizations at the drop of a hat, which I have to admit is actually pretty impressive. Most of the time this is just in service to a lame attempt to raise the stakes on screen or some insane technobabble plot, but the show definitely wasn't shy about death and suffering, and occasionally its legit pretty impressive.

Okay I disagree here. The Equinox is like an entirely different ship in a very different context. It’s a small science based ship with a smaller crew and far less resources.

Voyager on the other hand is basically a navy cruiser(the equinox being a patrol boat and the enterprise an aircraft carrier or battleship, loose analogy I know) it has a larger crew, more resources, people with some training in dealing with the situations voyager finds itself in.

This is kind of splitting hairs, but Voyager is also supposed to be chiefly a science vessel, just a much bigger one that's fully equipped while the Equinox is more of a weedy little survey ship. Its commonly accepted to be why Voyager gets its ass beat in a lot of battles and needs to technobabble a way around an enemy, since combat isn't really the ship's primary mission, and also why it can technobabble much harder than even TNG could.

Still I do overall concur with the sentiment that the Voyager struggling plot is overrated. Mainly I don't think the writers actually had the ability to pull it off. Some stuff though is just lazy writing, like Voyager inexplicably having more photon torpedoes. They couldn't put in even a single line about manufacturing more of them, even as a handwave? Really?

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Okay I disagree here. The Equinox is like an entirely different ship in a very different context. It’s a small science based ship with a smaller crew and far less resources.

Voyager on the other hand is basically a navy cruiser(the equinox being a patrol boat and the enterprise an aircraft carrier or battleship, loose analogy I know) it has a larger crew, more resources, people with some training in dealing with the situations voyager finds itself in.

The equinox likely didn’t have a holodeck, it didn’t have the resources or facilities for an astrometrics lab, or to construct the delta flyer or the replicator tech voyager had. Voyager is a big enough ship, with enough people that barring the Year of Hell situation, it will generally be okay for the most part. It’s combat capable, and capable of extremely fast speed.

And even then we see voyager trading with aliens all the time, occasionally getting into conflict, and even doing repairs when necessary. Hell there are instances in the show where the crew are working long shifts. Something like 20 hours IIRC. And there’s that episode where they are basically just traveling through space and Janeway tells the story of her ancestor at the turn of the 21st century.

People that wanted voyager to be constantly struggling for resources or food or fuel or whatever don’t seem to realize that…it is the 24th century, and for that reason IU technology can actually solve most of the immediate problems a smaller or primitive ship would have.

As it is, Janeway pretty much breaks the fourth wall in the pilot episode-speaking to the camera to say “we will be one ship one crew, we will be explorers, we will seek short cuts home whenever possible, we’re basically going to be running things in a Roddenberryian way, now set a course for earth!”

And that is why Voyager's execution didn't work, at least not from a characterization standpoint. They did have plenty enough to remain a TNG-lite show and that is contrary to a quadrant where they should be scarcity. The replicator is very useful, but even in this show, it couldn't just make all the complex alloys and materials they needed for all that fancy Borg technology nor could it just make bacon and coffee all the time. The most difficult aspect of Star Trek writing assignments going back to TOS was how to make sure technology didn't resolve the problem in ten minutes, hence the Prime Directive. Voyager didn't have consistent reasons to follow OR break the rules.

If one wanted to show that Voyager's crew was fundamentally different from the Equinox crew, Voyager should have been noble poor in comparison to Equinox's savage poor. "Yes, things don't quite work as well as it did years ago. Yes, Tom Paris is overworked and we can't do much about it, but we make the best of it." Which BSG does really well.

What we see instead is TNG-lite captain scolding Ransom for being a poor desperate savage jacking it to Seven of Nine.

 

[Ishtar]

If one wanted to show that Voyager's crew was fundamentally different from the Equinox crew, Voyager should have been noble poor in comparison to Equinox's savage poor. "Yes, things don't quite work as well as it did years ago. Yes, Tom Paris is overworked and we can't do much about it, but we make the best of it." Which BSG does really well.

TBF, Tom Paris does work like three jobs. He’s the pilot, regularly goes on away missions, and works as the doctor’s assistant, while maintaining a relationship with a super high maintenance wife/girlfriend.

 

[Uranus Pink]

Okay I disagree here. The Equinox is like an entirely different ship in a very different context. It’s a small science based ship with a smaller crew and far less resources.

Nova class which the Equinox is one of, is short range science and scout vessel. Star Trek Online lore on it haves the Nova class as the better armed and protected scientific and research replacement for the older, smaller and infinitely more combustible Oberth class.

Voyager on the other hand is basically a navy cruiser(the equinox being a patrol boat and the enterprise an aircraft carrier or battleship, loose analogy I know) it has a larger crew, more resources, people with some training in dealing with the situations voyager finds itself in.

Intrepid class cruiser was for long range and duration exploration missions. Replacing the older Constellation and Cheyenne class cruisers in that function.
In Star Trek canon, official and unofficial works the Federation leadership loathes the idea of having ships with the battleship, battlecruiser, monitor and other warlike designations. So officially the closest to having not!battleship are the larger heavy cruisers. Like the Ambassador, refited and modernized Galaxy, and Sovereign classes.

 

[Michael Wade]

There was that one episode where the entire ship and crew got cloned somehow without knowing, but the clones didn’t know they were clones and they all started falling apart and dying. I don’t remember the specifics, but it ends with the remaking clones finally catching up to Voyager in an attempt to save themselves only to die and disintegrate right before real Voyager noticed them.

Yeah when Voyager did horror or drama, it did so in a unique way none of the others could pull off. (Aside from maybe Ds9, but even that still had its own feel) Im particularity fond of the episode where the doctor temporarily goes insane when he remembers he let one of the crew die to save Harry

 

[Captain Syrup]

Voyager was like that, but for babies who don't care about character development or high stakes plot.

At the time it had the weakest cast of any Trek. Lots of ludicrous episodes and it morphed into Gilligan's Island too quickly. DS9 is more cerebral, witty, socially conscious.

Divorced from the original bad associations I had with the show, it's still better than STD/Picard and all the other filth they slapped a Trek label on. There are some very strong performances on the show and it is, overall, entertaining Trek.

 

[Ishtar]

Two of my favorites have to be Counterpoint and Prey.

 

[Great President of McHell]

At the time it had the weakest cast of any Trek. Lots of ludicrous episodes and it morphed into Gilligan's Island too quickly. DS9 is more cerebral, witty, socially conscious.

Divorced from the original bad associations I had with the show, it's still better than STD/Picard and all the other filth they slapped a Trek label on. There are some very strong performances in the show and it is, overall, entertaining Trek.

View attachment 3050832

As much as I criticise Voyager it did have some of the coolest scifi concept episodes of all the treks, blink of an eye and year of hell come to mind as really memorable one-off adventures that have few equals in the other series.

 

[Ishtar]

Also unironically Jeri Ryan is a great actress who does understated emotion really well.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Voyager doesn't hesitate to murder people or show dead/dying civilizations at the drop of a hat, which I have to admit is actually pretty impressive.

chakotay ends up coming off as extremely racist and stereotypical.

And the aliens who happened to be his tribe's ancient spirit guides? F*ck right off.

 

[Ishtar]

Unpopular opinion, but I would feel extremely confident and generally safe if I were a crewman on Voyager. Proportionally speaking-Voyager does not suffer that many losses after the first episode, and I would know Janeway would always be willing to blow shit up and go Ellen Ripley on my behalf.

Janeway always tries to be diplomatic and friendly, but she'll throw down if she has too. So I gotta say, I'd be confident in her to get me home if I were on Voyager.