Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Michael Wade]

The guy weighs 150 lbs soaking wet, and he looks like he could own just about anybody. Real Arthur Fleck energy:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_GQkU3tRs50

Shame he was so good in the role it typecasted him. For me his acting is so incredible its hard for my brain to realize they are the same actor.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Shame he was so good in the role it typecasted him.

There is a good moment in the documentary with Andy. He says Garak validated his career and cleared up any "bitterness" he had at "the business."

 

[Trig.Point]

Somebody earlier mentioned B5 and a certain character in it waving. I'll agree that it's a lot better if you actually know *why* he's waving, (and I would never spoil that) but even totally stripped of context, it's still a fun little gif.
View attachment 2122542

Talk about set up and pay off... They developed Mordon's routine of asking "what do you want", then Vir as a sort of clown who actually had a backbone and a keen sense political sense hidden under the surface.

That scene where they meet is just brilliant, It's not just that Vir lashes out verbally at Morden, he makes it clear that he understands even if Mollari doesn't, that Morden is a cancer.

 

[Captain Syrup]

he makes it clear that he understands even if Mollari doesn't

Londo knew.

I think it was a mix of 1) watching everything he worked so hard for go down the drain, and 2) I played by the rules, and look where I am. I'm going to take what I can now, because why shouldn't I have it?

We'd all do the same thing, or be sorely tempted.

G'kar never sought glory; so there wasn't anything for Morden to exploit there. There is a good line from that show Burn Notice which explores some of this:

Working covert ops, you learn to exploit weakness: you manipulate greed, fear, pride to make people do what you want. But when you're dealing with true believers, those weaknesses aren't there. All you can do is help, or get out of the way.

 

[Exceptionally Exceptional]

There is a good moment in the documentary with Andy. He says Garak validated his career and cleared up any "bitterness" he had at "the business."

The role of Garak showed just how absolutely brilliant of an actor Andrew Robinson actually is. I've rarely seen a character in Star Trek with such a flair for the dramatic, and he sells it marvelously.
I could hold up this scene (hell, this entire episode) against any major Hollywood production and it wouldn't be found lacking. It was so absolutely well written and acted that it just makes me want to binge every Garak episode there is.

 

[Trig.Point]

Londo knew.

I think it was a mix of 1) watching everything he worked so hard for go down the drain, and 2) I played by the rules, and look where I am. I'm going to take what I can now, because why shouldn't I have it?

We'd all do the same thing, or be sorely tempted.

G'kar never sought power; so there wasn't anything for Morden to exploit there. There is a good line from that show Burn Notice which explores some of this:

That scene with Vir looking up at Morden's head on a pike was pretty great. It overshadowed what happened just before though, when Morden lived just long enough to realise he'd become a liability to Lando, and that that the Centauri might look and sound ridiculous, but they also had a innate pragmatism to them.

There was an Irish historian whose name I can't remember who said when talking about the Irish civil war, said that 'There's nobody more ruthless than a pragmatist'. That scene like all good Sci Fi, can be compared to a dozen different historical events.

 

[RomanesEuntDomus]

That scene with Vir looking up at Morden's head on a pike was pretty great. It overshadowed what happened just before though, when Morden lived just long enough to realise he'd become a liability to Lando, and that that the Centauri might look and sound ridiculous, but they also had a innate pragmatism to them.

There was an Irish historian whose name I can't remember who said when talking about the Irish civil war, said that 'There's nobody more ruthless than a pragmatist'. That scene like all good Sci Fi, can be compared to a dozen different historical events.

Spoiler that shit, you fucking faggot.

 

[Captain Syrup]

the Centauri might look and sound ridiculous, but they also had a innate pragmatism to them.

Centauri are similar to Cardassians in that they're a proud people. Duty and honor mean nothing to Morden.

Just as Weyoun is incapable of understanding art or history. He thinks nothing of giving chunks of the empire away, or bombing the jewel of Cardassia back to the stone age. A fatal mistake.

 

[Trig.Point]

Spoiler that shit, you fucking faggot.

Mate it's a 25 year old TV series, get a fucking grip.

 

[WaltherPPGAY]

You could say that Trek had unfair advantages. Better FX budget, the Paramount lot, RSC actors. The acting on B5 is wildly uneven: the regulars are good. The villains of the week are dreadful.

Hot take: Trek also benefits from a writer's room, whereas B5 is the work of one guy. And protection from editors is not always a good thing. There are scenes where characters stop and quote pop philosophy to each other. Sometimes it works:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZjToVZTqCbw
And other times you get this:



For god's sake, man. Gimmie a chance to absorb your coffee-table wisdom before dropping another bomb on me.

On the other hand, B5 had perks that Trek didn't have. The megacorps, for starters. Which gave us "commercial teeps" (Talia) and the riveting stuff with Edgars on Mars.

I've bounced off B5 a couple times (the big head gentlemen, in season 4 I think it was, kill my interest every time.) but I think it did have one other benefit from a solo writer that TNG lacked: a coherent moral center.

I just recently finished a watch of all of TNG and I will say that as much as some people like RLM may laud its morality based episodes I found them lacking, with but a couple of exceptions. The basis for the show was Roddenberry and his vision doesn't gel very well with the writers that came after, and the writers that came after would have wildly inconsistent views from one another.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

Thank you for mentioning Weyoun. That reminds me of one of my all time favorite Star Trek exchanges:

Weyoun: The Founder - she wishes to see me. She has to be told about this.
Damar: Oh, I'm sure she'll understand. But if she doesn't, I look forward to meeting Weyoun 9.

 

[Antarctic Hellbeast]

Centauri are similar to Cardassians in that they're a proud people. Duty and honor mean nothing to Morden.

Just as Weyoun is incapable (by design, as it turns out) of understanding art or history. He thinks nothing of selling chunks of the empire away, or bombing the jewel of Cardassia back to the stone age. And he pays the price.

View attachment 2123944

Really gets the noggin joggin at the "directors and screen producers" in hollywierd who basically act and live like Weyoun verbatim and how ST really went downhill over the 2010s.

Those faggots are literally not capable of understanding or caring about art or history either.

 

[Thomas Highway]

What made Babylon 5 such a standout show was that the plotline and narrative had already been developed for a set amount of seasons. There wasn't a need to churn out scripts to milk a show.

One of the reasons DS9 is better than TNG.

 

[Flexo]

Whoa, how did I lose track of this thread for way too long?

Funny you say that, the creators of Masters of Orion were eventually behind Star Trek: Birth of the Federation which is more or less Master of Orion with Star Trek races and technology. By all accounts its a pretty good game that has a huge fucking mod scene still to this day.

I played the shit out of that game - still have my original CD too. If anything the worst part about it is doing "just one more turn" and the next thing you know it's Monday.

I was speaking about battles specifically though, and about their technical and visual accuracy. So yes I did leave those out. The problem with this point of view is that both of us see those moments for what they are, the great writing, the excellent score, the way the scenes are timed and shot, the performances from the actors, etc. But the dumbing down takes its toll as a newcomer to the franchise is probably just going to see "cool battle, this is what they want more of right?" and then its suddenly a lot easier to figure out why Discovery is all flashy eyecandy.

Nobody (neither me or, I think, RLM) is denying the good writing Deep Space Nine had. Its that approach of turning Star Trek into a flashy space opera with swarms of fighters and turrets spewing out projectiles every which way and all of the other crazy stuff we saw on the screen that fundamentally clashes with TOS and TNG's approaches to space combat.

We also have to remember that a lot of space battles were a factor of special effects. TOS, TNG, and the movies had battles the way they did because the only way to do spaceships then was with model work. The battles were kind of slow and "lumbering" because you had to move cameras around these massive physical objects.

By the time of DS9, CGI was reaching the point of it being cheap enough for TV shows to afford. Now instead of needing to film a giant model of a Galaxy-class spaceship 7 or 8 times for a battle, you just have your graphics hardware render them. That's literally all it is - the effects became affordable so they started doing more grandiose battles. Heck just track the battles seen on screen in DS9. A lot of them are still very "old" style in the first half because SFX were in the transition phase at the time which is why you don't get very much conflict on screen.

Notice how little you see of the dominion fleet in that scene or the conflict? Notice also how often ships "repeat" in those scenes. You'll see more than one identical ships just positioned and resized to convey depth. (That's how you can always tell which period of the ship effects you're in.) Way of the Warrior - S4 is the transition moment. That's when you see they got the CGI going and could start adding variety to the combat and have more diversity among the ships. (Notice how several of the klingon ships diverge in flight paths while the dominion ships in the previous clip were always very rigid in formation.)

Basically, yes. That, and the hatred the modern media has for Orange Man will not go away anytime soon. So expect more "HOO-RAH" moments of them fighting a new threat that's evil because it stands for Orange Man and all his friends. These leftists will unwittingly go so far to the right that they will make George Bush II look like a peace-loving hippie.

George Orwell pointed out decades ago that the Left always has use for 2-minute hates and wars as needed.

 

[Captain Syrup]

I look forward to meeting Weyoun 9.

FOUNDER: "If our cloning facilities were operational, I would eliminate this Weyoun immediately."
WEYOUN: O_O

 

[AnOminous]

So was David Letterman, who actually voiced Butt-head's dad in the movie.

Other fun and completely off-topic fact: David Letterman was fired from his first TV job as a weatherman for reporting "hail the size of canned hams."

 

[Thomas Highway]

George Orwell pointed out decades ago that the Left always has use for 2-minute hates and wars as needed.

 

[Flexo]

You all are going to make me quote memory alpha on Starfleet's uniform timeline at this rate...

Idris Elba

Idris Elba is already in the Kelvin timeline.

Probably either a writing oversight or a budgetary issue. But honestly it would have been kinda cool to see away teams strapping on backpacks, tactical gear, and other shit before a mission. It's only logical that you may need more than a damn tricorder on a potentially hostile alien world. There's all sorts of shit that could happen.
What if the transporter shits itself right after beaming you down? What if a Borg cube shows up and your ship has to fuck off at maximum warp? Now you're stuck there with no supplies. Good job.
You could either hope that you find suitable food, water, and shelter on a world you know nothing about that could potentially contain hazards your tricorder cannot detect, or you could bring your own shit and be absolutely sure you'll survive.

Again, probably just nobody thinking about it in the writing room, budget limitations, massive Federation overconfidence, or maybe people are just kinda weird about certain things in sci-fi.
Think about it, there's some things that sci-fi likes to ignore when it really shouldn't.
Think about Star Wars. Why didn't Luke wear sunglasses? He lives in a desert on a planet in a binary star system, said planet is locked in such an orbit with the suns that both will be in the sky during the day for most of the year. Brutal amounts of sunlight. Why no sunglasses?

People tend to either omit this shit from personal taste, or because they just don't think about it.

The transporters from the start were a bit of a problem. Ideally, they would set up something like a stargate system, where an initial landing crew would take down a shuttle and set up a "receiving" transporter pad for then the important bridge crew to beam back and forth on. Then you'd have all your answers then like having the shuttle stocked with supplies. Plus solve drama issues like the crew now unable to just "teleport out" of danger but have to get back to their base camp instead.

It would be interesting to see a bunch of ENT characters get stranded on some planet that does have a fauna and flora, but everything is so strange and alien, that the characters don't know how to deal with it. Maybe their waterfiltration system is not capable of dealing with whatever is going on on that planet, maybe some of their gear is perfectly fine to use for a certain task anywhere on Earth, but it fails horrendeously on that planet, for some reason.
It could be an interesting learning experience for the crew, where they realize that whoever picked their survival gear put together something based on what militaries on Earth use, but it doesn't take into account other planets.

Enterprise kind of did it.

And as usual for Enterprise, f*d it up.

Star Trek (Ent): Strange New World

Star Trek Reviews

sfdebris.com

What other sci-fi shows from the 90's/early 2000's would you recommend?
Whenever there is mention of DS9, Babylon 5 usually follows - unfortunately I know next to nothing about this series and never watched it. I remember Space: Above and Beyond from that time, which ended in such a trollish way I am mad about this 25 years later. What other series are worth seeing for TNG/DS9 enthusiast?

Stargate.

Heck just go to SFDebris.com and check out his reviews - he's done a lot of shows in that time period. See which ones sound entertaining to you.

 

[XYZpdq]

The role of Garak showed just how absolutely brilliant of an actor Andrew Robinson actually is. I've rarely seen a character in Star Trek with such a flair for the dramatic, and he sells it marvelously.
I could hold up this scene (hell, this entire episode) against any major Hollywood production and it wouldn't be found lacking. It was so absolutely well written and acted that it just makes me want to binge every Garak episode there is.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=TNCw_avF_Qg

if you ever want The Final Answers Of Garak then Robinson wrote a book (handed a ghost writer his backstory notes) of all of Garak's adventures previous to DS9, so you get the full story about being a gardener for the Romulan Ambassador, why Garak had claustrophobia, etc, like literally all the shit he wrote up for himself for backstory to work on as emotional memory sorta roboteched into "oh by the way doctor, you wanted to know about things so here's a bunch of crap to spew at you as we rebuild Cardassia"

Spoiler that shit, you fucking faggot.

legit this

Other fun and completely off-topic fact: David Letterman was fired from his first TV job as a weatherman for reporting "hail the size of canned hams."

so that is the true meaning of canned hams

but it's an important warning that A Stitch In Time really does answer all mysteries about Garak, and you might like them more as just mysterious mysteries
I liked it but I've seen plenty of people who were happier with "here there be dragons"

 

[Flexo]

but it's an important warning that A Stitch In Time really does answer all mysteries about Garak, and you might like them more as just mysterious mysteries
I liked it but I've seen plenty of people who were happier with "here there be dragons"

Spoiler

It also really torpedoes the idea that Garak is gay as it reveals he had a crush on Cardassia for many years. (maybe bi, but definitely not gay)

I would be more than a few people hated it for that reason.

Of course part of the fun is that since it is an autobiography by Garak the tagline for the book should have been: "It's all true - especially the lies."