Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Federation politicians are depicted as being incredibly weak and puppets of their Starfleet advisors. Don't get me started on Federation ambassadors...

And that's why corrupt hawk admirals show up in TNG and on. Ambassadors end up fucking up, even Spock since he nearly caused a Romulan invasion of Vulcan. Yeah, I know they used a deep-fake, but they could do so because Spock engaged in secret negotiations with Pardek and no one knew about it, which is why everyone assumed he defected at first.

 

[Tookie]

Never watched much of the new BSG, but there's a scene I saw where someone commits suicide and someone who knew them on the "Airforce One"-type presidential cruiser gets drunk and staggers to the big whiteboard with the numbers of survivors on the fleet and wipes away the last digit (which conveniently was a 1) and strolls out of the room. It was a very effective scene to highlight that every single person in that fleet mattered. Sure, the people involved in that scene were main characters, but even just having a fixed number of survivors gives the audience the feeling of continuity. Something big happens, a ship gets blown up, and the number is lowered drastically. It's still a huge number and we'll never even see 10% of these guys, even just for a short glimpse, so for all intents and purposes, the number is meaningless, but it symbolizes that the fleet is limited in size and resources - even human resources.

There's also a good scene where someone enters the cabin and goes something to the effect of "The number of survivors changed", people are a bit saddened by this until that other person says "such-and-such gave birth" and it's a small glimmer of hope in that situation that the number goes up for once...

Carrying over damage from one episode to the next would have also been a decent thing. Maybe show Voyager staying at some space station to overhaul their ship every once in a while and stay there for a few episodes. They wanted to cling to the episodic nature of Star Trek and I can see why (being able to just watch an episode on its own is a good thing after all), but I feel that particular show and setting wasn't fit for that kind of approach. A shame, really.

Much of the BSG reboot was due to Ron Moore's frustrations with Voyager refusing to do anything like that.

 

[rabo]

I totally forgot about Latent Image. That episode is one of the best pieces of the show. The mystery and the pay off are really good and easily en par with the family episode. It's actually a bit of a shame that it also highlights one of the weaknesses of Voyager in an indirect way.

Imagine if the woman that "went missing" in that episode was a recurring side character that we'd have seen here and there in smaller parts throughout the show before that point. Stuff like that would have severely improved the show. Unfortunately, they never gave us a well-defined crew, it was always just randoms in the background that barely did anything. Had the rest of the crew been a bit more fleshed out, to make us really feel this isn't a bridge crew of like 7 or 8 people that do all the work and a bunch of faceless no-names running in circles in the corridors, that would have been rad.

They actually started doing that in Season 1, there's a lot of regulars, Ensign Durst, Lt Carrey, Ensign Hogan, Crewman Jonas, Ensign Kaplan, even Seska begin with that role.

And they proceed to kill off almost every one of them within the first season:
Durst: Gets his face ripped off for a Vidian doctor and is assumed to have been harvested for organs
Hogan: Died to a cave monster when they were stranded on that M planet by the Kazons
Jonas: Betrays crew to Kazons, humiliated by being killed by Nelix.
Kaplan: Dies in the first, but the certainly not the last, of Chakotay's shuttle crash.
Seska: Betrays crew, died to sabotaged phaser emitters.
Carrey: I saved the worst one last, Carrey loses his shot at Chief engineer to a progressive promotion policy, again a white man passed for a job by a foreign woman. I kid, I kid, but then he proceeds to vanish for 6 seasons, only to be brought back in the 7th season, when Voyager is almost home, to be made an example and killed in that episode. Poor guy.

The only other regulars we see is the Extra Ayala which appears every where in all sort of costumes and hardly ever get a speaking line. But usually if they wanted some kind of Star Fleet security extra they'd go for him. Plus he's one of the few extra who gets named.

Baxter shows up twice, one to get talked down to by the doctor and one more time to deliver some lines in the Twisted episode but then vanishes to never show up again.

There's a few more background extra that are named, like Culther and Fitzpatrick but that's about it.

Really wasted potential.

And then you have Vorik who after get turned down by his boss, then gets beat up by her, and gets to hang around and is assumed to made it home despite the luxury of having a lot of spoken lines in engineering. I think they realized they killed off everybody in engineering and they needed somebody around to deliver some of these lines.

Edit: Bonus, I was reading up Vorik, he's played by the son of producer Jeri Taylor, well no fucking wonder he got more respect than every other extras,

 

[BScCollateral]

Exactly. Voyager was uniquely set up in that it could do episodic stories while STILL having ongoing arcs by utilizing the ship and crew.

To be honest, I think it would be very difficult to pull off a background-character arc.

"We need you for a week's work next week, and then we need you to commit to another week in three months unless we change our minds." What if the actor gets an offer that overlaps? Not impossible, but hard to pull off. You might almost need to have the entire season planned out in advance, and shoot parts of every episode before hand.

 

[rabo]

To be honest, I think it would be very difficult to pull off a background-character arc.

"We need you for a week's work next week, and then we need you to commit to another week in three months unless we change our minds." What if the actor gets an offer that overlaps? Not impossible, but hard to pull off. You might almost need to have the entire season planned out in advance, and shoot parts of every episode before hand.

You're acting like this was never done before. Barklay was like that. And DS9 has a massive list of such regular characters, they weren't starfleet officers, but that doesn't make a difference. Think of Gawron's actor, Robert O'Riley would very much be in this situation where he would be called to work a week every few months.

 

[Flexo]

To be honest, I think it would be very difficult to pull off a background-character arc.

"We need you for a week's work next week, and then we need you to commit to another week in three months unless we change our minds." What if the actor gets an offer that overlaps? Not impossible, but hard to pull off. You might almost need to have the entire season planned out in advance, and shoot parts of every episode before hand.

Eh....... DS9 would like a word.

Not saying it wouldn't be a challenge, but creativity thrives in such challenges. While Voyager could have used a lot more planning, they could have done it by the seat of their pants too.

"Who can we get this week?"
{answer}
"Ok. Bob's story is the one we're advancing then."

 

[Miller]

To be honest, I think it would be very difficult to pull off a background-character arc.

"We need you for a week's work next week, and then we need you to commit to another week in three months unless we change our minds." What if the actor gets an offer that overlaps? Not impossible, but hard to pull off. You might almost need to have the entire season planned out in advance, and shoot parts of every episode before hand.

Like people have said before me, it's possible, just look at DS9: Garak, Nog, Martok, Gowron or Shran, he was so great that they even thought about adding him to the main cast in the 5th season of ENT.
Also before an actor signs a contract to play a character on a show he/she is informed of the type of character (one-off, regular, semi-regular, etc.) and the possible storylines if the character is well received by the audience.
An actor being unavailable for an episode happens all the time. I might be wrong but I think it's one of the reasons why they killed off Kai Opaka and why Wynn became more important.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

You're acting like this was never done before. Barklay was like that. And DS9 has a massive list of such regular characters, they weren't starfleet officers, but that doesn't make a difference. Think of Gawron's actor, Robert O'Riley would very much be in this situation where he would be called to work a week every few months.

Yeah. Star Trek had lots of character actors that we now see on the Orville they could have called upon.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

There's also a really easy way to have a certain character show up in many episodes in small but notable scenes with an insanely low amount of work:

Pre-made snippets that can be shot in one day and then used here and there in a "neutral" way.

Say, you have a character named Jack that you want to embed into the plot every now and then and at any other time, you want to scatter around small scenes where he has minor interactions with main characters, so the audience keeps attached to the character.

Scene: Tom and Jack sit in the lounge finishing their meal, before they part ways, Kim pops around a corner with a data pad, they greet each other, Jack leaves, saying that he can't stick around, cause he doesn't want to be late for his shift. Kim and Tom then start a conversation while Jack is seen leaving in the background.

A scene like that is very easy to put anywhere in literally any episode. I guess you could come up with a couple of similarly structured scenes with various situations that are easily cut into an ongoing episode. Key, of course, is avoiding to make it too many scenes of the same type. Like if we always see Jack part ways with some main character before they enter a dialogue with some other main character, that's not a particularly good thing, but you get the idea. A scene of Jack standing at a busted console going "Relais 47 is patched, try it again!" could be cut into some random fight/attempt to get out of an anomaly or whatever. If it turns out to be too goofy, try to fix it, lampshade it or abondon it.

Means you can get a lot of mileage out of a single day of shooting stuff and use that in between episodes where you don't have that actor doing something more proactive in the plot.

 

[Flexo]

Pre-made snippets that can be shot in one day and then used here and there in a "neutral" way.

That was done with Geordi in some of TNG when LeVar had to be out for medical reasons so they reused several shots of him doing "engineering things" for many scenes.

It's why in Best of Both Worlds part 2 it's O'Brien in the room with Data and Crusher helping Picard instead of Geordi - LeVar was unavailble.

(oh man, speaking of secondaries - why not O'Brien?)

 

[Quintex96]

(oh man, speaking of secondaries - why not O'Brien?)

Because O'Brien is an in universe monkeys poor. He wished to be more than the teleporter room guy and got a life of pain as a result.

 

[Flexo]

Because O'Brien is an in universe monkeys poor. He wished to be more than the teleporter room guy and got a life of pain as a result.

So he would be perfect on Voyager!

 

[Quintex96]

So he would be perfect on Voyager!

"In Miles darkest hours, he would always pull out a photograph, smile, and return it to his pocket before proceeding woth the task at hand. He would never show it to anyone and would always deflect when asked. One day to satiate my curiousity I stole it from his pocket while we were playing darts. I was expecting a picture of Keiko and Molly- His wife and daughter but to my surprise it was a picture of a starship, Intrepid class if I remember correctly with the words 'it could always be worse' be written under it. I never quite understood what it meant, but now I do. I have no idea what forsight Miles O'brien posesses but that ship was cursed the moment it left this godforsaken station and hell came back with it"- hypothetical Julian Bashir, DS9 Season 8/STP Season 2

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

Has the process of democracy ever been depicted in Star Trek, ever? Never seen an episode about the Federation election, for example.

Is the Federation even a democracy? Its flag is just the UN flag... IN SPACE, which suggests an intergovernmental body. And by the TNG era it gives off a kind of European Union vibe (atheistic gay technocracy, smug yet complacent assumptions of its own supposed benevolence, pretending to value diversity while imposing stifling conformity where everyone is pretty much the same except for funny forehead bumps).

It's not a dystopia in the 1984 sense (or what Verhoeven thought he was doing in Starship Troopers), but it could be a kind of Brave New World type of hell where everyone's material needs are met and any form of cultural or ideological dissent is lovingly and ruthlessly crushed (hey... where did all the Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists go? They just magically evolved, you say? Same thing with all those folks who sympathized with Terra Prime? Huh.)

Sure, the Mirror Universe folks are theatrically evil, but are we sure the Federation are really the good guys? What if they're literally mirror images of each other - not opposites, just different perspectives. Soft, reasonable, urbane totalitarianism versus a high camp, melodramatic, but at least honest version of the same damn thing.

And how do we know Praxis just "exploded", anyway? That's pretty convenient for the homo sapiens club that is the Federation, don't you think? Dilithium crystals can't melt duranium beams.

I always got the impression the federation exists in a post scarcity society which makeas most of our economic models redundant. It's socialist in the sense capitalism is pointless if you can't really sell anything of worth to anyone.
Plus I think it's important to consider that star trek is utopian fiction, I'm a socialist but don't really think the heaven on earth in star trek is achievable, but it is a nice aspiration.

The economics of Star Track are a mess. If it's a post-scarcity society, how do they explain Chief O'Brien?

So it's understandable that people would still want to work as starship captains in a future utopia where everybody's rich. Power, pussy and adventure will always motivate men. What motivates O'Brien? He's a blue collar guy working a lonely, boring, shitty job (I believe spiders were mentioned at one point), getting little respect from his peers and zero respect from his awful, awful wife.

He could be drinking margaritas on the beach at Risa, or something, or literally anything. But instead he's stuck in a dead end job he clearly hates, on a space station next to the puckered butthole of the Alpha Quadrant, suffering spiritual and literal torture for... what, if he doesn't need the money?

 

[melty]

HOW DOES IT HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE??

I feel like I'm reading some idiotic fan fiction where Greta whats-her-name cried so hard it caused all of the oil on earth to blow up and then everybody had to sit and think about their impact on mother earth.

That's twilight zone/black mirror shit - not Star Trek! (and it's super dumb regardless)

A lot of these just seem like rejected doctor who plots. I liked the doctor who reboot for the first few years, but it got a little old with this kind of stuff. There were like four seasons in a row of "the universe is going to be destroyed because of x!" I think in the worst case, the universe was going to be destroyed because the Doctor's ship that he has been using for thousands of years blows up and that blows up the universe. Like he's just been travelling around in a universe-ending weapon all this time and nobody knew. But the rest of the season was pretty good, so people were forgiving.
Now Star Trek has done like three seasons in a row of this, right? Counting Picard and if you count the burn as a galaxy-destroying event. I haven't actually watched the most recent season and don't intend to.

It's not a dystopia in the 1984 sense (or what Verhoeven thought he was doing in Starship Troopers), but it could be a kind of Brave New World type of hell where everyone's material needs are met and any form of cultural or ideological dissent is lovingly and ruthlessly crushed (hey... where did all the Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists go? They just magically evolved, you say? Same thing with all those folks who sympathized with Terra Prime? Huh.)

Maybe this is why there are so many random colonies that fall out of contact with Starfleet until whatever alien race runs that sector decides they are a problem and tries to kick them out. The federation is a private federation of planets and can do whatever it wants, you can colonize your own planet if you don't like it. Except they actually let people do this and even help them out.

 

[Miller]

where did all the Moslems go? They just magically evolved, you say?

 

[ditto]

Is the Federation even a democracy? Its flag is just the UN flag... IN SPACE, which suggests an intergovernmental body.

DS9 has Federation grand juries and the Federation Supreme Court which suggests it's just the USA in space. But the Federation anthem is pure EU: soppy strings and no lyrics.

Geordi is muslim.mp4

I can't tell if this is parody or no. Geordi a black muslim??!

Sisko should never have pulled that shit about "our people".

 

[Miller]

I can't tell if this is parody or no. Geordi a black muslim??!

Not only that but the girl thinks that Somalia being majority muslim is a cool thing. She seems to forget that Somalia is not a free country, that if you aren't muslim and refuse to get converted you're a dead person.

 

[Sexual Chocolate]

A lot of these just seem like rejected doctor who plots. I liked the doctor who reboot for the first few years, but it got a little old with this kind of stuff. There were like four seasons in a row of "the universe is going to be destroyed because of x!" I think in the worst case, the universe was going to be destroyed because the Doctor's ship that he has been using for thousands of years blows up and that blows up the universe. Like he's just been travelling around in a universe-ending weapon all this time and nobody knew. But the rest of the season was pretty good, so people were forgiving.
Now Star Trek has done like three seasons in a row of this, right? Counting Picard and if you count the burn as a galaxy-destroying event. I haven't actually watched the most recent season and don't intend to.

[/QUOTE]

Another similarity: Star Trek was science fiction. Even when the science parts were powered by handwavium and technobabble (FTL, inertial dampeners, transporter beams), the writers were trying to tell a story set in a universe with (somewhat) logical and consistent rules that bore some resemblance to the actual universe with its annoying causality and physical properties that don't just go away when it's convenient and shit.

Dr. Who isn't science fiction, because there's no real (or even pretend) science in the premise - it's more of a fantasy, lightly glazed in random dialog that sounds vaguely sciencey. But science doesn't really drive the plot, it's the other way around. Like how the sonic spanner or the Tardigrade do whatever the writer needs them to do, because there's no consistent in-universe set of rules or limitations, it's just a sandbox for characters to emote in. You could replace all the references to "science" with "magic" and it wouldn't make any real difference to the show.

Nu-Trek isn't science fiction either, it's the same as Dr. Who. "Science" fiction for people who don't know much and care less about science (like the I Fucking Love Science crowd, they don't care about learning, they care about pretty pictures and being perceived as smart). The plot seems to be mainly people crying and/or being sassy in a fantasy setting that just happens to be in the future.

 

[Drag-on Knight 91873]

Is the Federation even a democracy? Its flag is just the UN flag... IN SPACE, which suggests an intergovernmental body. And by the TNG era it gives off a kind of European Union vibe (atheistic gay technocracy, smug yet complacent assumptions of its own supposed benevolence, pretending to value diversity while imposing stifling conformity where everyone is pretty much the same except for funny forehead bumps).

It's not a dystopia in the 1984 sense (or what Verhoeven thought he was doing in Starship Troopers), but it could be a kind of Brave New World type of hell where everyone's material needs are met and any form of cultural or ideological dissent is lovingly and ruthlessly crushed (hey... where did all the Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists go? They just magically evolved, you say? Same thing with all those folks who sympathized with Terra Prime? Huh.)

Sure, the Mirror Universe folks are theatrically evil, but are we sure the Federation are really the good guys? What if they're literally mirror images of each other - not opposites, just different perspectives. Soft, reasonable, urbane totalitarianism versus a high camp, melodramatic, but at least honest version of the same damn thing.

And how do we know Praxis just "exploded", anyway? That's pretty convenient for the homo sapiens club that is the Federation, don't you think? Dilithium crystals can't melt duranium beams.

The economics of Star Track are a mess. If it's a post-scarcity society, how do they explain Chief O'Brien?

So it's understandable that people would still want to work as starship captains in a future utopia where everybody's rich. Power, pussy and adventure will always motivate men. What motivates O'Brien? He's a blue collar guy working a lonely, boring, shitty job (I believe spiders were mentioned at one point), getting little respect from his peers and zero respect from his awful, awful wife.

He could be drinking margaritas on the beach at Risa, or something, or literally anything. But instead he's stuck in a dead end job he clearly hates, on a space station next to the puckered butthole of the Alpha Quadrant, suffering spiritual and literal torture for... what, if he doesn't need the money?

As I've said earlier in this thread, the Feds are the Imperium of Man that exile their malcontents to other planets. Except they don't call it exile; they call it colonization. Where the colonies have to engage in trade with the Federation for spotty patrol from vastly overextended ships.