Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Polyboros2 said:
Seven beimg rejected from Starfleet is exceptional. Had Voyager died in season 3 and we gotten a late 00's Star Trek series with out talentless hacks behind it, a former Borg crew member is such an obvious go to it would almost be cliche.

"Oh, they just did Worf but with the newer big bads"

A diverse cast(that isn't just skin deep) is what draws people in on Star Trek, even fucking Orville gets that.

-Mr Spock in TOS(plus for the time you could argue Uhura and Sulu).
-Worf and Data, to a lesser extent Troi, on TNG.
-DS9 you have former Terrorist Kira(and the rather unique for Trek of the religiousness of Bajor), a seemingly unique Shape shifter, a symbiotic lifeform living with another person, a criminal Ferangi and his family, eventually a Glowie Cardasssian. I think DS9 is considered the best by some people cause it had so many characters that were alien in concept to a normal human character.
-Voyager starts a little weak, we get a Vulcan, which were kinda sparse in TNG and DS9, Nelix and Kes weren't given a lot of alienness, the Maqui are just wasted and almost forgotten by season 2, Bellanna just retreads Worf as a Klingotto, but weaker. The Doctor, what was essentially an appliance that grew into an individual as a consequence of necessity, was their best "different" character. While he similar to Data, he's a different enough take on it to not feel like a retread. Seven eventually joins and while it's joked that her massive Borg implants are what made her popular, it was more the the uniqueness of someone that largely grew up in a collective hivemind discovering individuality.

I didn't finish Season 1 of Picard, but it doesn't spend any time on developing characters anyways, so the girl that doesn't know she's an Android and the autistic Romulan murderer don't get to be explored and tell interesting stories with characters that don't think like normal humans. And from what I hear, they are just yeeted in season 2, and we have an all human cast for season 2(RLM stated it seems like they just soft retconned Android Picard)

I'm not sure about Brave New Worlds, I've not been talked into it yet, but I'm listening. However, to me, what makes a show feel like Star Trek is episodic nature, and a cast of characters with interesting distinctions from human beings.

Which is why I'm looking forward to it's cheap knock off that manages to do a competent job at playing with these tropes, the Orville.
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Ironically, the first episode of Strange New Worlds reminded me of one from The Orville.
 
YankeeTrader said:
Ironically, the first episode of Strange New Worlds reminded me of one from The Orville.
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I'm very turned off by it being a retread of TOS, not sure bothered by the politics cameo. I'd rather it been something new. If the show can keep up making competent Trek, I will give it a try.

YankeeTrader said:
On a side note, Ronald D Moore did a great job with that when he made he Galactica reboot. It's almost like he made a wish list of things from Voyager that bugged him and rolled them into his next project.
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He did a great job with the first episode of the series proper. 188 Minutes (what ever the number was) was a great an desperate feeling survival story. The rest of the season quickly sheds that feeling, and it feels like it becomes a soap opera with Lost like mystery boxes. I quit in season 3, and I was right to, it ended like all mystery box trails do.
 
Rather than have Voyager be a Trek version of Battlestar Galactica I'd have preferred it if the Delta Quadrant was well... alien and strange. It really feels less like the other side of the Galaxy and more like some Federation backwater pond.
Let them tool around in their high end federation vessel where all basic needs are met and they all get along, fine, but make the outside actual unchartered space. Put in more weird space phenomena and make the alien species have more depth and be far different from any other races they've met. Have the universal translator start having issues and spend at least a two parter on them having to learn another species language the hard way, have some aliens team up with them for a couple of episodes and follow them a long and just be vastly culturally different. Force them to negotiate or trade or interact with weirdo aliens just to figure out where they hell they are and what's in front of them. Have just mapping space be an actual problem that keeps popping up.

There was an excellent opportunity here to go back a bit to TOS goofy space cultures with perhaps a little less goofyness and it was entirely lost.

Also they had some definite problems setting up good villains. Kazon is bland as bland, the Phage is very much a one trick gimmick, and so on. They seem to have brought in the Borg exactly because of this, but even the Borg they couldn't get quite right. Still worked out since they got Seven from it though.
 
WhatIsThePunchline said:
Rather than have Voyager be a Trek version of Battlestar Galactica I'd have preferred it if the Delta Quadrant was well... alien and strange. It really feels less like the other side of the Galaxy and more like some Federation backwater pond.
Let them tool around in their high end federation vessel where all basic needs are met and they all get along, fine, but make the outside actual unchartered space. Put in more weird space phenomena and make the alien species have more depth and be far different from any other races they've met. Have the universal translator start having issues and spend at least a two parter on them having to learn another species language the hard way, have some aliens team up with them for a couple of episodes and follow them a long and just be vastly culturally different. Force them to negotiate or trade or interact with weirdo aliens just to figure out where they hell they are and what's in front of them. Have just mapping space be an actual problem that keeps popping up.

There was an excellent opportunity here to go back a bit to TOS goofy space cultures with perhaps a little less goofyness and it was entirely lost.

Also they had some definite problems setting up good villains. Kazon is bland as bland, the Phage is very much a one trick gimmick, and so on. They seem to have brought in the Borg exactly because of this, but even the Borg they couldn't get quite right. Still worked out since they got Seven from it though.
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Just going to quote myself.
Burn notice proved exactly the show Voyager could be. You had an adventure of the week in the A plot, then the arc story proceeds in the B plot. It would be easy for people to watch as they please, and reward hardcore fans with continuity.​

They could have even done it better in Voayger. You just have the episode start "Captain's log. After our battle with [reference enemies from last episode], we still have a hole on decks 4, 5, and 6. Our sensors have detected ores of tritianium on the 6th world of this system. With any luck, we'll be able to repair the hull by the end of the week."​

Then you have a story on that planet. Maybe there's aliens and we deal with the prime directive. Maybe there's a virus the Doctor has to cure. Maybe you just look at the difficulties the crew have trying to mine. (Can you just beam it out? Or do they have to drill?)​

If you followed the show, it would feel like episodes have consequences. But if you don't, you can still understand what's going on.​
 
Retink said:
Which episode was it that Neelix and Tuvac merged, that one was interesting.
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Watch it.

WATCH IT.

I did have a slight chuckle that they nearly screwed everything up over being emotional babies.

Still immensely dumb. Why the hell is this giant blast even happening?

Also they needed the Borg to come up with a solution that was used in Guardians of the Galaxy 1?
 
Polyboros2 said:
I'm not sure about Brave New Worlds, I've not been talked into it yet, but I'm listening. However, to me, what makes a show feel like Star Trek is episodic nature, and a cast of characters with interesting distinctions from human beings.
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SNW is definitely more traditional Trek fare. It's also a lot more human centric at first blush with only two named crewmen being aliens, namely Spock and the Chief Engineer Aenar, Hemmer who's played by Bruce Horak who seemed to actually go about re-watching the Season 4 two-parters about them, before reading "every scrap of Trek lore he could find". The fact the full amount on the Aenar can be written on a packet of smokes means he's had a bit of a free reign to help shape the character and potentially become the new "definitive" interpretation of a Star Trek Race in the way when I say "Ferengi" either Max Grodenchik, Armin Shimmerman or Aaron Eisenburg pops into your head. (With an honourable mention to the Chamelion that is Jefferey Combs)

It sounds increasingly like the actors had a bit of a say in how they feel their characters should be and develop from both Anson Mount's interview, and the one I found on Horak. The last time this happened was in DS9 to the point anything Robinson says can pretty much be taken as gospel canon, and he wrote the novel on Garak's rule and rebuilding of Cardassia.
 
Flexo said:
Watch it.

WATCH IT.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5-TfCiDIGI
I did have a slight chuckle that they nearly screwed everything up over being emotional babies.

Still immensely dumb. Why the hell is this giant blast even happening?

Also they needed the Borg to come up with a solution that was used in Guardians of the Galaxy 1?
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The murderer doctor looks so terrible as a Borg queen.

WhatIsThePunchline said:
Rather than have Voyager be a Trek version of Battlestar Galactica I'd have preferred it if the Delta Quadrant was well... alien and strange. It really feels less like the other side of the Galaxy and more like some Federation backwater pond.
Let them tool around in their high end federation vessel where all basic needs are met and they all get along, fine, but make the outside actual unchartered space. Put in more weird space phenomena and make the alien species have more depth and be far different from any other races they've met. Have the universal translator start having issues and spend at least a two parter on them having to learn another species language the hard way, have some aliens team up with them for a couple of episodes and follow them a long and just be vastly culturally different. Force them to negotiate or trade or interact with weirdo aliens just to figure out where they hell they are and what's in front of them. Have just mapping space be an actual problem that keeps popping up.

There was an excellent opportunity here to go back a bit to TOS goofy space cultures with perhaps a little less goofyness and it was entirely lost.

Also they had some definite problems setting up good villains. Kazon is bland as bland, the Phage is very much a one trick gimmick, and so on. They seem to have brought in the Borg exactly because of this, but even the Borg they couldn't get quite right. Still worked out since they got Seven from it though.
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The problem with Voyager is, it was just everyone behind the scenes of TNG wanting to keep hammering a paycheck. It was lazy, I'm guessing Lost In Space was a hook needed to get executives behind it, cause no one there really cared about it. There just keep hammering out low effort TNG scripts with different crew, and every once in a while a glimmer of potential shines through.
 
@Allanon
It seems like the various things I'm hearing about Roddenberry is that he's not particularly good at managing a franchise, much as he wasn't particularly great at writing science fiction. That he ended up credited with one of the biggest science fiction franchises in history is an amusing accident, apparently.
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Roddenberry was one of the most flawed SF magnates pretty much ever. Just about all of the episodes he personally wrote for TOS are horrible, including the fantastically stupid The Omega Glory which is my pick for the worst episode of TOS. There's also Turnabout Intruder which hates women so much it really gets uncomfortable even for the people who don't have a single woke bone in their body (it was written during a nasty divorce). He was also a sex addict who did drugs constantly, flip-flopped on his politics back and forth, and even wrote lyrics to the TOS theme that were never used just so he could cheat himself into getting royalties for them.

Still, its worth noting that the entire reason we're even having this pages long discussion about what is or isn't canon and the merits of it is because Roddenberry actually defied convention at the time of TNG and even had a strict canon policy in the first place. Neckbeards and nerds didn't really have these kind of restrictive arguments about what episodes of a TV show and what supplemental materials counted as canon until Roddenberry started making decrees about the subject. Specifically, one of the patient zeros was Franz Joseph's Starfleet Technical Manual which was written by a good friend of Roddenberry's, only for the two to have a falling out years later and for Roddenberry to suddenly declare the whole thing non-canon. Then TNG's canon policy got into the weeds of whether or not TAS and even some of TOS was canon and the whole convention of arguing about what did or didn't really happen in the Star Trek universe became part of the franchise.

I don't know shit about comic books so maybe they pioneered the whole arguing about canon thing but from what I can tell it didn't make the jump into TV/movieland until Trek started doing it.

I think it's a shame that people generally separate the visual mediums like TV and movies from everything else, as you say. I feel like that's a prejudice that existed from the time Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was written, where people who watch TV just sit and drool and are physically incapable of ingesting anything higher effort. Most franchises can be improved by including at least some of their written work as canon.
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Its true that there are some really good stories overlooked in EUs, but at the same time it is kind of an obvious problem that giving people homework or lists of obscure media they need to track down just to bring themselves up to speed is rather inconvenient. I've read/played a lot of the supplemental material for Star Trek, but I've been into Trek basically my whole life. For a newcomer, they're just going to want to watch the show.

Sometimes its the opposite, there are STO fans out there who've never watched a single episode because they prefer to play videogames and get bored if they have to sit still for 700 hours or however long the total runtime of the shows is.

To be fair this is also how I feel about Picard. It's never going to be canon to me no matter what the company says. If I ignore the whole Mikey Spock thing, I can accept Discovery as just a really lame entry into canon, but Picard contradicts and tramples over so much of existing canon and provides no benefit in return -- that I simply cannot accept it as canon. It's a self-deleting paradox.
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Oh, don't misunderstand me, I don't remotely consider NuTrek to be canon at all. I actually have a hard time even accepting Enterprise into canon because it contradicts TOS on a lot of fronts that I just can't ignore, like holodecks showing up fairly early on, the not-phasers and not-photon torpedoes instead of more conventional weaponry, the Temporal Cold War plot when the entire point of Enterprise was to get away from superadvanced tech, Romulan ships already having cloaking devices, and most of all those god damned knife-shaped nacelles that both the Klingons and Romulans use that look more like they belong with 24th century Dominion tech than anything else.

Enterprise is likeable and there are some parts of it I enjoy and would gladly consider canon, but there are parts of it that are just too ridiculous to take seriously. Kind of like TAS, though I acknowledge I have a much more generous opinion of TAS than most people do.

If I'm gonna be a hardass about STO's plotline I'm definitely not giving NuTrek a pass just because its on TV. NuTrek has pretty much shown everyone involved that there aren't really any canon rules anymore and its just up to each individual fan to pick and choose whatever they want to accept as part of the franchise. Some kind of split like this was probably inevitable since STO's fanbase is rather dedicated, but NuTrek pretty much made the split immediate and inarguable.

and I recall reading at some point that in s1 they weren't allowed to use star ship interiors that had the look and feel of TNG ships due to licensing reasons
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I think this is still just a rumor that nobody has been able to prove. I honestly think it gives Kurtzman too much credit though, I'm dead certain he had full freedom to use the old look of the shows and just threw it out the window because he wanted his fuckugly IKEA Genius Bar look.
 
Flexo said:
@L50LasPak

If you want a more literal example, there is the video game Elite Force;

And the Voyager episode, The Void
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It could be argued that Elite Force is harder to work into canon because it has the gameplay mechanics of an FPS game explained using Trek terms. All of the technology present in Elite Force actually makes plenty of sense for Trek, but it contradicts canon since we don't actually see anything remotely similar get used throughout the rest of Voyager, DS9, or any of the TNG movies, Especially First Contact where realistically that tech would have been extremely important.

Ponderous Pillock said:
But no, MUH JAN 6TH.
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Its cringe regardless of your political affiliation because it dates the show. It was cringe when Voyager did it, it was cringe when TNG did it, and it was cringe when TOS did it.

It also doesn't make any sense. If there is going to be a real deal second civil war in this country, nobody is going to fucking remember January 6th. There will be MULTIPLE and MUCH more important events that are acknowledged as the start. How many people, even Southerners, can even name more than one event in the extremely complex lead-up to the actual US Civil War? The one everyone agrees upon is Fort Sumter, the battle that started the war. Even if you press someone more knowledgeable in historical matters on the subject, they're much more likely to point to stuff like John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, or Bleeding Kansas, than they are some random protest or riot. And there were many such protests and riots in the lead-up to the Civil War. They aren't important.
 
VOY had its issues, but I really liked a lot of the characters in it. Hell, the EMH is one of my top favorite Star Trek characters. I really liked what they did with him.

So I hope he doesn’t appear in Picard.
 
SteelPlatedHeart said:
VOY had its issues, but I really liked a lot of the characters in it. Hell, the EMH is one of my top favorite Star Trek characters. I really liked what they did with him.

So I hope he doesn’t appear in Picard.
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EMH and Tuvok heavy stories were my jam
 
Flexo said:
Watch it.

WATCH IT.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5-TfCiDIGI
I did have a slight chuckle that they nearly screwed everything up over being emotional babies.

Still immensely dumb. Why the hell is this giant blast even happening?

Also they needed the Borg to come up with a solution that was used in Guardians of the Galaxy 1?
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Hearing all of their technobabble...

This must be what it is like for normies when they watch episodes of TNG or DS9 or Voyager.
 
Flexo said:
Oh I am aware of that. What makes it even dumber is when you're like, "then why not just host meals on the holodeck???
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Voyager ran the holodecks ragged. They ran tavern programs round the clock. They had Chez Sandrine, some kind of island resort, and after that they had Fairhaven. When the crew visits these taverns they're definitely eating and drinking. Deadly holodeck mishaps made more sense on Voyager, especially with the multi-deck expansions in Killing Game. That was a great two-parter.

As for dumb holodeck design, TNG also had no way to unplug or hard reboot their holodecks either.
 
Even the retarded 'holographic rights are human rights' episodes were tolerable because of Robert Picardo.

Was it ever stated why ubergenius Noonien Soong had trouble making emotionally stable non-psychotic androids, but Starfleet holographic systems just kind of accidentally shat out sentient entities?
 
Newman's Lovechild said:
Was it ever stated why ubergenius Noonien Soong had trouble making emotionally stable non-psychotic androids, but Starfleet holographic systems just kind of accidentally shat out sentient entities?
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Nope.

A common fan theory is that the holograms have the entire computer of the ship to work with to generate an AI while an android needs to cram all of that into something roughly the size of a human skull.
 
Newman's Lovechild said:
Even the retarded 'holographic rights are human rights' episodes were tolerable because of Robert Picardo.

Was it ever stated why ubergenius Noonien Soong had trouble making emotionally stable non-psychotic androids, but Starfleet holographic systems just kind of accidentally shat out sentient entities?
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Trying to “create” sentience vs an AI developing it on its own?
 
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