All Things Star Trek

[The_J]

Actually neither was really related to the stuff which I meant, but in the first post Valka made a good point, independent of that.

I basically just meant that they overdid it size-wise in Beyond, and that it relates badly back to the rest of the series.

Spoiler Season 3 of Discovery :

There is a scene where Michael and her beau are fighting on top of turbolifts inside Discovery, and the scale shown by the cameras depicts the internals of Discovery as being a giant cavern hundreds of meters long with empty space with turbolifts just floating within to their destinations. Completely and entirely nonsensical.

Spoiler :

I had assumed at that time point they're inside the Viridian, and that they had messed up the continuity of the plot in that series.
Inside that ship would have made more sense.

 

[Ajidica]

Finished up S3 of Disco. Like most of season 3, it was...... fine.

Spoiler :

I've never liked mystical magic in Star Trek. Godlike aliens, fine. They exist to provide a challenge Starfleet can't technobabble their way out of. The finale breaks out two examples of mystic magic. First, Booker has mystical magical empath abilities that let him talk with fungus? I don't have a problem with it in theory, Star Trek has plenty of empaths running round, but we only saw it mentioned twice. One during his introduction, and the second on his planet where his head glows and he drives away the floating jellyfish.

Then the source of the Burn is a magical child. Probably wasn't any good way to resolve the plot but I would have preferred something a bit more more science-y.

And once again someone didn't get the memo ships avoid wasted space and have huge open space inside of the Disco, which would force the ship to be several miles long to remain in scale, which is pure nonsense.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

The fact that you found a way to be offended by a related line of discussion is astounding. I'm never speaking to you again. Good god and good riddance.

O-kay... let's get something straight. For the past several weeks and even months, the conversation has had the tone of "shut up, Valka, we're talking." Even when I say something related to Picard/DiscoTrek, I get "go away" vibes (@warpus, you're the one I'm most upset with in this regard; you've had this going on for several months now, and I do not deserve it).

FACT: The_J made a comment about one of the nuTrek movies.

FACT: I replied to him.

FACT: He dropped a "like" on my comment, which indicates that he found it worth reading.

FACT: Warpus comes along and berates me for not making my post about DiscoTrek, even though that's not what The_J was talking about. The_J specifically referenced one of the movies that has zip-all to do with DiscoTrek.

FACT: Synsensa, YOU need to stop getting offended. In this case, I'm right, you're wrong, you can buy the friggin' t-shirt that way.

FACT: I've been a Trek fan longer than you've been alive, and while that doesn't make me automatically right, it gives me a perspective you can't possibly understand, and rather than give me an aggrieved attitude, you might just consider that I know some stuff and have a valid perspective as well.

SUGGESTION: If you want to talk about Picard/DiscoTrek exclusively so I don't pollute your discussion with my own perspective on other varieties of Trek, why not make a new thread? Or, you know, accept that more than one conversation can happen at the same time, and if the other(s) don't interest you, just ignore them.

Or I guess you could just tell me off. That always helps.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

Moderator Action: It seems that things are becoming a little heated. Let's all take a breath and calm down, shall we? Thank you.

 

[Ajidica]

Finished up Star Trek Picard.
I found myself enjoying the last four episodes a fair amount, even if the last episode committed one of my cardinal sins of writing.

Spoiler :

Specifically, Picard's fake-out death. There is nothing I hate more than a fake-out death sequence where we get all these scenes of characters being sad and mourning the loss and then Surprise! they are back and healthy ready to go on new adventures.
I really think they should have killed Picard off. He saved the galaxy, brought peace between androids and organics, and died surrounded by friends and allies.

If only the show hadn't wasted the first five episodes being all dark and mysterious, trying to act all "grown up" with gratuitous violence, gore, and so on; along with wasting the viewers time in taking forever to get going.
If you ignore the first five episodes, Picard was actually not all that bad.

Though one thing that bothered me was that the synths were all indistinguishable from humans. DNA, motor reactions, biological needs, etc. If you have a perfect organic copy of a human, how can they be considered synthetic life? I was getting some serious Battlestar Galactic vibes, and not in a good way.

Started watching Voyager with an episode guide at hand.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Started watching Voyager with an episode guide at hand.

Avoid "Threshold." It's stomach-turning and so awful that even the producers have de-canonized it.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, Threshold does at least demonstrate early on that Robert McNeill can act well.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, Threshold does at least demonstrate early on that Robert McNeill can act well.

I'm failing to recall what you're talking about. It's a revolting episode, in numerous ways.

It's not just the stomach-turning makeup and prostheses McNeill had to wear and deal with. It's the idea that Chakotay would dismissively abandon the offspring of crewmembers without even consulting them. No matter they were of a completely different species, it's morally wrong.

There are much better examples of McNeill's acting ability.

 

[Arakhor]

Well, yes, it's certainly a bad episode, but it would be much worse if he couldn't act that well.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

I dissent that anyone on Voyager was a good actor, and I've acted for a living.

-And the time Kes came back needed de-canonizing worse than the awful lizard sex one. That wasn't Kes...

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I dissent that anyone on Voyager was a good actor, and I've acted for a living.

-And the time Kes came back needed de-canonizing worse than the awful lizard sex one. That wasn't Kes...

You're comparing medieval re-enactment to a 7-year main cast job on a TV show? Apples and nothing even remotely approaching apples. They aren't the same sort of setting at all, and are certainly very different genres.

I'll give you Kes, though. Please, remove her from the entire series, because she added very little to it, and is part of the reason people have such a poor opinion of Neelix - all the writers could think of to do with him for the first three seasons was to make him possessive of her and jealous if she even talked to another male crewmember. When she left, Neelix was allowed to grow as a character.

Jeri Ryan and Robert Picardo get criticized a lot for having so many episodes dedicated to their characters, but the reasons for that just might include that they were the best actors on the show. Robert Duncan McNeill acted well enough that the writers were motivated to give Tom Paris a 7-year character arc that showed him growing and changing into a much better person by the 7th season than he was in the first season.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Not interested in discussing w/ you when you open w/ belittling my background that includes considerable formal study - that you don't know about, like a lot of things.

Anyone else, it's not a hill I'm real interested in defending, not because I'm not confident I'm right, but 'cause I'm not gonna reiterate the entire corpus of Stanislavski with a bunch of non-actor nurds on the nets, and absent a bunch of dry technical analysis that no one will read, it's all a matter of opinion not worth any real time and energy to kick around. I will further note, though, that it's nearly impossible to untangle a complex web of talent, casting intent, and how the directors in the room told them to do the line readings. Voyager clearly wanted Mulgrew's hammy style, and the soap opera acting wall-to-wall naturally follows. [shrugs] YMMV.

The fundamental failure of Voyager was on the writing level, anyway. That would be a bit more interesting/worthwhile to kick around.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

How about not dragging AC2 grudges over here, 'k?

I said you're comparing vastly DIFFERENT things. Not inferior. Different. Besides which I spent over 12 years doing theatre and in the SCA, so it's not like I'm completely unfamiliar with that sort of thing. It's just very different from doing TV.

And I'm entitled to think you're wrong.

Now on the matter of writing... yeah, that was a problem in many episodes. I'll agree on that.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

How dare you say that while pursuing your external grudge on someone posting on-topic for the thread. No more of your cheap-shots. I avoid you. I've been avoiding you. Please do not talk to (or about) me. Ever.

Any adults want to talk Star Trek? To the first manager who comes along to admonish us, I don't want to be in this - please keep that in mind.

---

Okay; I also think Shatner is a somewhat better actor than people give him credit for. Thoughts?

 

[Valka D'Ur]

How dare you say that while pursuing your external grudge on someone posting on-topic for the thread. No more of your cheap-shots. I avoid you. I've been avoiding you. Please do not talk to (or about) me. Ever.

Pot, meet kettle.

I'm pointing out that non-TV acting and TV acting are different in how well a character can be developed and how (s)he is perceived by an audience. I'd point that out no matter who tried to make them equivalent.

Okay; I also think Shatner is a somewhat better actor than people give him credit for. Thoughts?

He was very good when his mind was on it. There were times when all he wanted to do was ham it up, which of course would annoy his directors and co-stars.

I remember enjoying his performance in the first episodes of T.J. Hooker (any discussion of his acting ability should include his non-Trek roles).

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Voyager, as someone said on trekBBs years ago, was all about failure to meet its promise. The Maqui conflict premise. The inadequate establishment of Tom Paris' bad boy nature, told but never credibly shown. Everything about the failure of the Chakotay character, writing to acting impossible to untangle. Everything about Nelix throughout.

It hewed far closer to Star Trek as an adventure show than all the other revivals except Enterprise, and there's where a good deal of the pleasure we took in it resides -they flew around and blew stuff up and had battles- but the people were pretty weakly-conceived and poorly executed. -And the Maqui thing was an actual good idea. Pity.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Tom Paris was originally supposed to be Nick Locarno, from the TNG episode in which a group of cadets (including Wesley) lied and tried to cover up an illegal flying maneuver they did, that got one of their fellow cadets killed. Robert Duncan McNeill played Locarno.

The problem: Locarno was someone else's intellectual property, and would have cost $$$$$$ to use on Voyager. Therefore a new character was created that included a backstory very similar to that of Locarno, but tweaked and expanded somewhat.

Both Locarno and Paris (at first, in the first season) come across as smarmy and trying-too-hard to be charming. Picard, et. al fell for it at first on TNG, but I doubt they thought him very charming by the end of the episode, and I have doubts that any redemption of his character would have worked.

Paris, however, had more to his backstory, and more scope to branch out. Paris' 7-season redemption arc worked.

Voyager's best comparison to other Trek series is actually TOS. Janeway has a speech in which she sticks her 24th-century nose in the air and loftily proclaims that Sulu, Kirk, and so on would have been booted out of Starfleet for the way they conducted their missions, but she's oblivious to the fact that in many ways, she is very much like Kirk. Cowboy diplomacy, thy name is Janeway. And she blew the ship up a lot more times than Kirk did, too.

 

[Arakhor]

Moderator Action: I'll remind everyone of the mod text that has already been posted on this page. If you don't want to be in an argument, walk away. If you don't want to talk to someone, put them on your ignore list and be done with it. Otherwise, try to play nice. Thank you.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Now, Enterprise, I liked better than most people who like this stuff at all. Seven of Vulcan was a truly bad idea, though, being far, far, FAR too obvious what they meant to go for. Scott Backula and whatisname who played Trip where a couple of charismatic turd-polishers who were not holding back - decent TV acting for that kind of thing. The writing was no better than the other revivals, worse in that they had a helmsman on the bridge my sister tells me was pretty - who was barely on the show at all, and they really could have done more with Hoshi, who was pretty golden. Their Nelix-type Denobulan doctor was much easier to take than Neelix, wassisname the security guy needed work but was --- good enough, I guess.

The aliens and adventures were the same old kind of junk Voyager had just worn out, so that part was weaker, even with a somewhat better cast of characters. And there was Seven of Vulcan, w/ the director in the room telling her to read that line like Jerry Ryan. You couldn't look away or forget for a second how stupid the writers and producers must have thought we were to expect us to accept such an obvious refried character. She was nearly good-looking enough to get away with it. I do not think the least of how season four was so much better than the others was her gradual transition away from the grating speaking style of her template. She was ruining the whole thing a lot less by the end - and still nice to look at.

 

[Lexicus]

Okay; I also think Shatner is a somewhat better actor than people give him credit for. Thoughts?

rocket man, burnin out his fuse up here alone