Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

[Captain Syrup]

Shran.

And Phlox is ok. Most of the time he was there for slapstick, and then you'd get mildly creepy scenes of him admiring Borg tech. Seems there was disagreement over how morally upright he is.

 

[ProfDongs]

I'm really enjoying Archer on the warpath for the Xindi, kind of odd though how season 3 changes up the opening to be more upbeat when the show got much more grim.

 

[Captain Syrup]

I'm really enjoying Archer on the warpath for the Xindi, kind of odd though how season 3 changes up the opening to be more upbeat when the show got much more grim.

Knowing Berman he saw the cheery credits and didn't look any further.

 

[Ulkesh]

They're all terrible. There's not one lovable alien on ENT, except Phlox, I guess.

And the doofus from "Carbon Creek."

Soval is awesome, but I am a sucker for the “initial rivals slowly grow to respect and like each other.”
Ceasefire is great for that. “Your presence hasn’t been overly meddlesome.”

 

[Kerr Avon]

Soval is awesome, but I am a sucker for the “initial rivals slowly grow to respect and like each other.”
Ceasefire is great for that. “Your presence hasn’t been overly meddlesome.”

Soval works because Gary Graham had done scifi before, Alien Nation, which wasn't half bad except for the mpreg episode.

Pity he and Pierpoint didn't get a scene like Bakula and Stockwell did.

 

[L50LasPak]

I wonder if Gene would have been okay with Captain Sisko dropping a chemical weapon onto a planet and polluting the entire atmosphere in order to settle a personal vendetta.

Well he sperged about Undiscovered Country having some militaristic overtones that it basically killed him so yeah, I guarantee he’d hate genocidal Sisko.

In A Taste of Armageddon, Captain Kirk straight up threatens to nuke every city on an alien planet just because they've taken the away team hostage and keep trying to blow up the Enterprise. Scotty even confirms that he's fed the targeting data into the computers and will carry the order out. At the end of the episode there isn't a single line to suggest it was a feint or a bluff.

Gene apparently had no problem with this.

Going back to Phlox for a second. Half the time he was there for slapstick, and then you'd get mildly creepy scenes of him admiring Borg tech. Seems there was disagreement over how morally upright he is.

It says a lot about Phlox that his evil doppleganger in the mirror episode comes off as much more affable and approachable even though he's supposed to be an evil scientist and enjoy torture or whatever.

 

[Oats12345]

Honestly which captain sucked more Janeway or Archer?

 

[White Devil]

Honestly which captain sucked more Janeway or Archer?

Janeway should have never been given command. Archer, while a goody goody two shoes, did what he had to do when he had to do it.

 

[L50LasPak]

Honestly which captain sucked more Janeway or Archer?

Throwing my vote in for Archer. He's a mess, has no charisma, his moralizing never makes any sense and his speeches suck. His worst character trait is that he comes off as, at best, Captain Some Dude. And I like Scott Bakula too, I think he could have portrayed Archer as more arrogant and maybe a little bumbling and totally pulled it off. That would have clashed with the super-serious-this-is-just-like-the-moon-landings tone they wanted for the show though.

Janeway is a terrible person but at least she gets shit done and Kate Mulgrew can look intimidating when she wants to.

 

[White Devil]

Throwing my vote in for Archer. He's a mess, has no charisma, his moralizing never makes any sense and his speeches suck. His worst character trait is that he comes off as, at best, Captain Some Dude. And I like Scott Bakula too, I think he could have portrayed Archer as more arrogant and maybe a little bumbling and totally pulled it off. That would have clashed with the super-serious-this-is-just-like-the-moon-landings tone they wanted for the show though.

Janeway is a terrible person but at least she gets shit done and Kate Mulgrew can look intimidating when she wants to.

Imagine what terrible offspring that would result from Janeway and Archer fucking.

 

[UnKillFill]

Difficult to say.

Archer was legitimately batshit insane, and suffered from a major inferiority complex that even the show itself even admitted to. He was also casually racist against Vulcans, and only got even remotely as far as he did because of nepotism.

Janeway, on the other hand clearly suffered from multiple personalities. One of those personalities being pure evil. (The other personality wasn't pure good, mind you. It still had an absurd need for validation from her crew, it wasn't enough that they did what she said, she also psychologically *needed* them to tell her that she was right.) There may have even been more personalities than just those two, I'm not a psychologist.

Realistically, neither one of them should have ever been captain.

Obviously most of what I wrote just now was my rationalization of terrible/inconsistant writing, but if I was writing the shows I would have leaned in and made the mental breakdown of the captain in a situation they weren't prepared for be a major focus of the show.

 

[Captain Syrup]

Honestly which captain sucked more Janeway or Archer?

Janeway should have resigned herself to settling on an M-class planet. Would have saved an untold number of lives. The premise was flawed from the start, because the Quadrant is full of habitable planets and peaceful races. It was her decision to strand them there. Now she's going to turn the galaxy upside-down and shake its pockets to see what falls out?

Archer condemned the Valakians to die, essentially because they hadn't developed warp travel without help. There wasn't any Directive. He just invented that rule on the fly. He's guilty of genocide, but not on the same scale as Voyager.

Both are an embarrassment to the legacy of Star Trek.

 

[Kerr Avon]

It says a lot about Phlox that his evil doppleganger in the mirror episode comes off as much more affable and approachable even though he's supposed to be an evil scientist and enjoy torture or whatever.

And Billingsley bitches something awful when asked about that episode.

 

[L50LasPak]

Janeway should have resigned herself to settling on an M-class planet. Would have saved an untold number of lives.

Are you sure about that? She'd probably have become Kodos 2: Eugenics Boogaloo.

 

[Captain Syrup]

And Billingsley bitches something awful when asked about that episode.

He comes across as a flak in interviews.

"Obviously, it was a very controversial episode, and I appreciated that because I think that's one of the things that Star Trek was known for in its day, doing episodes that addressed interesting social issues in ways that were potentially controversial."

 

[Ulkesh]

Archer had a compelling arc in S3. It might’ve been a trite one (“I must sacrifice my humanity to save lives.” Never seen that before) but Bakula plays it well as a guy who honestly just wanted to be optimistic about the future and is punished for it. Through this he has some great scenes with Phlox (the one in Damaged is a personal favourite) and T’Pol. And this cynicism he develops carries over into the fourth season in a satisfying way.
Due to Voyager’s episodic nature I don’t feel as though Insaneway developed in any tangible way. On the one hand she starts treating the Doctor more like a person and you think she may’ve developed, the next she’s comparing him to a replicator (way more “racist” than anything Archer said about Vulcans). Her opinion of the Maquis flips on a dime in one episode; you almost forget they’re not even a full Starfleet crew. One episode she’s torturing a former Starfleet officer and giving the boot to Chakotay, the next she’s happy and chipper. Tuvix asks everyone to remember his death - no one does.
I liked Voyager well enough but I’m not ashamed to say Archer > Janeway. At least he developed meaningfully as a character.

 

[Uranus Pink]

In A Taste of Armageddon, Captain Kirk straight up threatens to nuke every city on an alien planet just because they've taken the away team hostage and keep trying to blow up the Enterprise. Scotty even confirms that he's fed the targeting data into the computers and will carry the order out. At the end of the episode there isn't a single line to suggest it was a feint or a bluff.

Gene apparently had no problem with this.

Point of reference for anyone interested; a standard TOS torpedo is armed with one kilogram of slush hydrogen and one kilogram of slush hydrogen antimatter which equals to a nuclear yield bit over 62 megatons.

 

[BIG BILL HELL'S]

Imagine what terrible offspring that would result from Janeway and Archer fucking.

This is one of those posts where I genuinely wish I could give it every sticker simultaneously.

 

[RumblyTumbly]

Janeway and Archer were characters that were victims of the shows they were in as they suffered the most from "Star Trek burnout". At least that's how I feel.

By the time Voyager came around, there was 7 seasons of TNG and movies, and DS9 was in full swing, so Voyager is coming along after all that material had been produced. I think they struggled to keep the show fresh. I said earlier in this thread that most of the Voyager characters feel like some kind of off shoot of someone we had seen previously. And with Janeway, it felt like they struggled with tying her character down. Sometimes she felt like a Picard imitation, and other times she felt like a slave to whatever the story needed her to be, which at times resulted in her looking like a lunatic or authoritarian whack job. Voyager wasn't a terrible show and definitely had its strengths, but it also felt like alot of the really good ideas were exhausted in TNG and DS9, and coming up with good material for Voyager felt like a struggle for them and Janeway, like many of the characters, suffered for that. That's not to say there were no good characters in Voyager (7 of 9 and The Doctor were the best) but it wasn't like TNG & DS9 where I liked almost everybody.

And then Enterprise gets the prize for greatest concept to lesser execution ratio. I would have hoped that going to the first Warp capable Star Fleet ship rather than keeping it in the TNG era would have opened up opportunities to freshen things up. And there were some really cool ideas in the set up. But in execution, the show just couldn't find its way and most of the characters were kind of dull. And then 9/11 happened, which definitely impacted the writing, leading to some heavy handed and obvious references to real world events. Because of that Enterprise was largely forgettable, and Archer was the least memorable of the captains because of it. Its a shame too, because again, conceptually I love the character being more of an unrefined cowboy type, which is perfect for the first Warp capable expedition, but the writing just never got on track.

So who is the weakest captain of those two? I'm not sure as I kind of feel bad that they couldn't live up to any potential they might have had. I don't think its the actors' faults at all.

 

[Uranus Pink]

Enterprise was fucked before the first episode aired as the promos had confirmed we weren't going to get the Earth-Klingon War which was something Trekkies have wanted to see for decades. Then Enterprise was dragging out the slow walking on starting the Federation-Romulan War which was the other war Trekkie wanted to see.