Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Miller]

RLM Mike was right when he said Star Trek wasn't so much scifi as a fantasy horror anthology show.

Mike says a lot of things, like "Star Wars is a small universe, it's impossible to tell new stories outside of the OT", or that Farscape is bad because it has puppets in it. It was nice to see him in a foetal position during the Picard reviews though.

 

[Uranus Pink]

They conveniently have a "they need to figure it out on their own" attitude when that stuff came up, I guess.

It is still the best option for everyone as the Q Continuum is not the galaxy's parents or "Big Brother." The lesser species need to figure things out on their own to learn to become better than what they were before.

 

[MooseGump]

The point of Discovery is to tell you that you're bad, cis white male.

and that this is the power of math, people

I actually recently started getting into Trek because of RLM and can see why they long for that classic optimism, but my favorite's still DS9. It does fuck me sideway when I started TNG Picard was released and saw the exact opposites at the same time

 

[ToroidalBoat]

dilithium

Why is "dilithium" even a thing anyway? Matter-antimatter reactions IRL don't need some made-up crystalline substance to work (making antimatter in the first place is another matter).

It is still the best option for everyone as the Q Continuum is not the galaxy's parents or "Big Brother."

Yet they mess with corporeal life from time to time anyway.

 

[Uranus Pink]

Yet they mess with corporeal life from time to time anyway.

Think of it as a free learning experiences in humility as there will always be a bigger fish than them in the galaxy.

 

[Miller]

Why is "dilithium" even a thing anyway? Matter-antimatter reactions IRL don't need some made-up crystalline substance to work (making antimatter in the first place is another matter).

If I'm not mistaken it's to make the warp field more stable.

 

[L50LasPak]

Why is "dilithium" even a thing anyway? Matter-antimatter reactions IRL don't need some made-up crystalline substance to work (making antimatter in the first place is another matter).

Dilithium is a real substance composed of two lithium atoms, or something. I think its toxic, relatively difficult to make, and we still haven't found any real industrial applications for it. The only reason its in Star Trek is because the substance was either recently discovered around the time the show was airing, or someone had just released a whitepaper on how to synthesize the stuff in laboratory conditions. I can't remember which off the top of my head.

Lithium was still being explored in the electronics industry at the time and consensus was that it had quite a bit of potential. That consensus turned out to be correct in hindsight since I'm pretty sure most of use are reading this thread on a device with a lithium battery in it. So the logic went that if lithium was this ultra cool material that could potentially revolutionize electronics, then dilithium must have even more potential. Turns out, no, right now it really doesn't unless you're a physics nerd. Classic example of writers just throwing something in because it sounded cool.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

Dilithium is a real substance composed of two lithium atoms, or something. I think its toxic, relatively difficult to make, and we still haven't found any real industrial applications for it. The only reason its in Star Trek is because the substance was either recently discovered around the time the show was airing, or someone had just released a whitepaper on how to synthesize the stuff in laboratory conditions. I can't remember which off the top of my head.

Lithium was still being explored in the electronics industry at the time and consensus was that it had quite a bit of potential. That consensus turned out to be correct in hindsight since I'm pretty sure most of use are reading this thread on a device with a lithium battery in it. So the logic went that if lithium was this ultra cool material that could potentially revolutionize electronics, then dilithium must have even more potential. Turns out, no, right now it really doesn't unless you're a physics nerd. Classic example of writers just throwing something in because it sounded cool.

Same thing with trilithium. Sounds cool, but no one knows just what the fuck it is supposed to do and how.

I mean, it's not that bad when you think about it, they at least tried to base their technobabble on something that is real.

 

[L50LasPak]

I mean, it's not that bad when you think about it, they at least tried to base their technobabble on something that is real.

Well I think it was pretty transparent that they blatantly used something that eggheads were gabbering about a lot at the time. Its saved in my opinion by the face that TOS always keep its technobabble pretty vague and down to earth. We screened some old 50s SF movie last night and I was honestly surprised at how much batshit nonsense technobabble those could get away with. Whoever wrote classic SF like TOS or The Twilight Zone knew that people weren't going to tolerate long technobabble sprees like that cheezy 50s drive-in schlock, so they really kept it tight in the scripts.

 

[King Dead]

So after watching a few episodes here and there over the years, I've finally started watching TNG in order. I'm only two episodes in (I can see why The Naked Now is a generally hated episode), but I just had to say...holy fuck do I hate Wesley. I don't know what the writers were thinking when they came up with his character, but that episode solidified my desire to see him shot out of an airlock. Over the course of 45 minutes, we see Wesley build a personal tractor beam, build another device to fake Picard's voice (which I find funny that that isn't really sci-fi anymore), use that to take over the ship, lock everyone out of engineering, almost get the entire crew killed, and then magically know exactly how to reroute the tractor beam's power in only a couple minutes to ram the ship they were towing into the exploding star's debris to give Data just enough time to repair the damage so they could escape. All that from a kid who's barely hit puberty, and all in one episode! He's such an obnoxious Gary Stu, it's no wonder he's such a reviled character. Unfortunately, I know it's going to be quite a while before he fucks off, so I'm just gonna have to deal with it for now.

Aside from that, I can definitely see how season 1 recycled a lot of old TOS stuff that never got made. It's got a lot of that early weirdness that you come to expect from a lot of shows, but it's still fun to watch, unlike nu-Trek. I'll power through and get to the better seasons soon enough.

Also, it's my personal headcanon that the reason Riker was able to hold off from the effects of the disease in that episode was because he's so horny all the time, he knows how to work with the constant desire to bone. Seriously enjoying how they played up Riker as the ladies' man, though.

 

[White Devil]

Part of the reason Wesley is so bad, besides being played by Soy Wheaton, is because he is the character stand in for Gene Roddenberry.

 

[MooseGump]

Wesley would have been a better character if every time he walked on screen someone socks him in the face

 

[AnOminous]

Part of the reason Wesley is so bad, besides being played by Soy Wheaton, is because he is the character stand in for Gene Roddenberry.

Whose full name is Eugene WESLEY Roddenberry. The writers didn't come up with him and hated him as much as the fans. But since he was the producer's pet, we had to put up with his antics for far too long before they finally had him leave with Space Pedo.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

So after watching a few episodes here and there over the years, I've finally started watching TNG in order. I'm only two episodes in (I can see why The Naked Now is a generally hated episode), but I just had to say...holy fuck do I hate Wesley. I don't know what the writers were thinking when they came up with his character, but that episode solidified my desire to see him shot out of an airlock. Over the course of 45 minutes, we see Wesley build a personal tractor beam, build another device to fake Picard's voice (which I find funny that that isn't really sci-fi anymore), use that to take over the ship, lock everyone out of engineering, almost get the entire crew killed, and then magically know exactly how to reroute the tractor beam's power in only a couple minutes to ram the ship they were towing into the exploding star's debris to give Data just enough time to repair the damage so they could escape. All that from a kid who's barely hit puberty, and all in one episode! He's such an obnoxious Gary Stu, it's no wonder he's such a reviled character. Unfortunately, I know it's going to be quite a while before he fucks off, so I'm just gonna have to deal with it for now.

Aside from that, I can definitely see how season 1 recycled a lot of old TOS stuff that never got made. It's got a lot of that early weirdness that you come to expect from a lot of shows, but it's still fun to watch, unlike nu-Trek. I'll power through and get to the better seasons soon enough.

Also, it's my personal headcanon that the reason Riker was able to hold off from the effects of the disease in that episode was because he's so horny all the time, he knows how to work with the constant desire to bone. Seriously enjoying how they played up Riker as the ladies' man, though.

Part of the reason Wesley is so bad, besides being played by Soy Wheaton, is because he is the character stand in for Gene Roddenberry.

I always thought he was sort of a child-prodigy self-insert character for younger audience members to go "I wanna be that guy!"... But he's easily the worst part about TNG and the only saving grace is that TNG also gave us the "shut up Wesley" scene, so we can always use that to put Wheaton in his whiny place.

 

[ProfDongs]

The only times I really remember Wesley being tolerable was during The First Duty since that was made to shit all over his character it seemed like, and the episode with him, Picard and that guy on the desert planet. Maybe Parallels as well but its been quite a while since I saw it.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

The writers didn't come up with him and hated him as much as the fans.

The writer's room had a board where they kept track of different story ideas for individual characters. The section for Wesley Crusher was simply labeled 'NAMBLA'.

 

[King Dead]

I always thought he was sort of a child-prodigy self-insert character for younger audience members to go "I wanna be that guy!"... But he's easily the worst part about TNG and the only saving grace is that TNG also gave us the "shut up Wesley" scene, so we can always use that to put Wheaton in his whiny place.

Normally, I'm against fans holding their dislike of a character against the actor who portrayed them because it's really not fair to people who are just doing their jobs, and it can really fuck up people who don't deserve it (like Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd from The Phantom Menace). However, considering Wil Wheaton grew up to become a soy-guzzling fucktard that ruins anything he touches, to the point of having his own thread on the farms with the equally insufferable Felicia Day, I'm all for it. I always enjoy how buttmad he gets anytime someone fires "shut up Wesley" at him.

Although, part of me wonders if it was the Wesley hate that made Wil turn out to be a faggot, or if it was completely unrelated.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

I never had a real problem with Wesley when I first watched TNG. The stories he was part of as a main plot weren't terrible either. If he had been kept as just some random kid growing up in the 24th Century (like Jake Sisko) rather than OMG GENIUS LIKE MOZART!! kid, he'd be a better character. "Where No One Has Gone Before" was a superb episode if you ignore all the Wesley parts.

This whole place, for example, was terrifying.

Whose full name is Eugene WESLEY Roddenberry. The writers didn't come up with him and hated him as much as the fans. But since he was the producer's pet, we had to put up with his antics for far too long before they finally had him leave with Space Pedo.

He left with Space Pedo three of four episodes before the finale ("Journey's End"), so we all had to put up with him for the whole series.

 

[Starscreams Cape]

Just watched TNG's "The Game" and a very fresh faced, nubile Ashley Judd bopping around the Enterprise.

I keep imagining she made it to Captain some day, and paid a princely sum to sit in that chair.

Lefler's Law #104 - "It's who you know and who you blow".

 

[Standardized Profile]

Why is "dilithium" even a thing anyway? Matter-antimatter reactions IRL don't need some made-up crystalline substance to work (making antimatter in the first place is another matter).

It channels the M/AM reaction products into a useful stream of plasma, instead of a rapidly-expanding hot particle soup.

So after watching a few episodes here and there over the years, I've finally started watching TNG in order. I'm only two episodes in (I can see why The Naked Now is a generally hated episode), but I just had to say...holy fuck do I hate Wesley. I don't know what the writers were thinking when they came up with his character, but that episode solidified my desire to see him shot out of an airlock.

I'm certain this happened at least once in Grin's recuts, but I'm not sure which episode. This might scratch your itch (just don't watch until the very end):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-31U8EC8sk