Star Trek: Keeping Up With the Cardassians

[williamjm]

20 hours ago, Lightning Lord said:

Cool. Something to do when I finish up Voyager. Thanks!

I don't know what the series arc is, but judging from episodes 1-13, I'd guess it is "Archer has had a massive inferiority complex about and intense hatred of Vulcans. Now he finds redemption and realizes his love for T'pol."

Season 3 had a season-long story about the response to an alien attack on Earth that happened in the season 2 finale. It was a more coherent story arc than anything Discovery has managed.

Throughout the show there was also a 'temporal cold war' story arc which I felt was less successful.

[Impmk2]

Haven't watched Enterprise for a decade now, but I'll echo that both S3 & S4 are both very much worth watching. Certainly better than the bulk of Voyager.

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, williamjm said:

Throughout the show there was also a 'temporal cold war' story arc which I felt was less successful.

Apparently the show-runners didn't quite know what they wanted to do there. They had an idea, but no idea what they wanted to do with it, nor what the endgame was, which led to the whole storyline ultimately being wrapped up at the start of Season 4 from what I recall, to simply get it out of the way so that Manny Coto could focus on telling his 2-3 parters instead. 

[Werthead]

Enterprise vs. Voyager is an interesting one. I think Voyager easily has better characters - Seven and the Doctor are far more interesting characters than anyone on Enterprise and both have good arcs - and also better high points. However, it does far worse low points than anything on Enterprise and it's almost twice as long, with a huge number of boring to awful episodes to wade through.

Enterprise I think has a more interesting, coherent storyline. Even in Seasons 1 and 2 where there's mostly stand-alones, they do maintain continuity like the gradually increasing distances from Earth, the Andoria/Vulcan stuff that is building towards the founding of the Federation and so on. They also pay much more attention than Voyager to things like the ship being damaged and actually still being damaged a week later. That said, they do betray the prequel premise with the Ferengi and Borg turning up and the idea of it being hard and slow to get anywhere is undercut as soon as Episode 1 when it takes them 5 days to get to Qo'noS at Warp 5 which puts the Klingon homeworld unfeasibly close to Earth.

Season 3 is a step up but the Xindi storyline isn't good enough to sustain an entire 26-episode season and there's lots of longueurs. They do get some good episodes out of the storyline but really it's a strong opening set of episodes, a few good ones at the end and then a whole lot of effective stand-alones bookended by "whilst we're looking for the Xindi..." teasers. Season 4 is basically just stand-alone stories but some of the stories are 2-4 episodes long rather than being single episodes. Some of them are solid, some of them are meh and some of them are unnecessary. After DS9 said, "Sure the Klingons changed their appearance, whatever, move one," the very last thing you then need is an agonisingly contrived multi-part episode explaining precisely why some Klingons lost their ridges. That completely undid the joke that DS9 was making (both shows wielding bludgeons where DS9 used a precision laser scalpel is a common problem).

Both shows are mediocre and not great, but Enterprise is more consistently average than Voyager, whose quality could lurch from fucking unwatchable to surprisingly good with no rhyme nor reason.

Quote

Throughout the show there was also a 'temporal cold war' story arc which I felt was less successful.

Enterprise wasn't supposed to exist, and as Voyager was wrapping up Rick Berman campaigned heavily for them to have 3-4 seasons off just to recharge before doing a new show (he'd just produced 21 seasons, mostly of 26 episodes apiece - well over 500 episodes in total - in fourteen years), but Paramount basically said he could make the new show or they'd fire him and get someone else (which might have been a better idea, frankly). So Berman said okay, but only if they could make it a prequel because he was burned out on the whole 24th Century vibe. Paramount said yes but they had to keep the post-Voyager timeframe in the game somehow so they came up with the Temporal Cold War as a way of touching base with that timeline. I get the impression they never really liked doing it and it was just there to keep the studio happy.

[Vaughn]

Trek 09 is on cable at the moment. For all the writing issues with these movies, the casting is spot on.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Both shows are mediocre and not great, but Enterprise is more consistently average than Voyager, whose quality could lurch from fucking unwatchable to surprisingly good with no rhyme nor reason.

And let's not forget the questionable decision to have a pop rock song as part of the opening credits on Enterprise. 

[Lightning Lord]

Voyager is something I usually put on in the background when I am doing something else. It is, often, terrible. But there are characters I enjoy and Janeway is actually shown to be wrong from time to time. I don't like the reset button on every episode. However, the premise was "Will Voyager make it home" and the obvious answer is "yes," so I just try to ignore it. There is plenty of stupid (the Kazon are a lot of it), but a cast that is somewhat likeable helps me stay with it.

Enterprise, in the first half season, didn't offer me any characters to enjoy. The ones on the screen the most were usually cringe-inducing. It probably wasn't that bad, to be honest. I just had many other things vying for my attention, so I dismissed Ent and moved on.
With these recommendations, though, I will give it a go when I finally wrap up The Mandalorian Firefly.

[Werthead]

In the midst of other discussions, we should pause to consider Legate Damar of the Cardassian Union advertising wine in a very surreal fashion.

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

16 minutes ago, Werthead said:

In the midst of other discussions, we should pause to consider Legate Damar of the Cardassian Union advertising wine in a very surreal fashion.

 

Not watched it, but I can almost hear hin say:

“Good wine ... for my son ... for all our sons.”

[Derfel Cadarn]

Watching TOS episode A Taste of Armageddon.

So apparently Starfleet has a general order to annhilate an entire planet. The fact its 24 rather than a higher number suggests it wasn’t an afterthought chucked in at the end.

[Toth]

43 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Watching TOS episode A Taste of Armageddon.

So apparently Starfleet has a general order to annhilate an entire planet. The fact its 24 rather than a higher number suggests it wasn’t an afterthought chucked in at the end.

I think that order comes up several times in TOS, usually with Kirk trying to threaten someone into submission. The wiki also says that Garth of Izar's use of the order caused the mutiny that had him put into a mental asylum, so it seems it's an actual order and not something Kirk came up with to bullshit himself through the situation (which I honestly wouldn't have put past him).

I guess the order is quite telling in regards to how many things are out to kill you in the Star Trek universe that even the pacifist Federation has a legal framework to commit Exterminatus. XD That a Federation ship has enough firepower to glass a planet can't be doubted though, we shouldn't forget that photon torpedoes despite their flimsy cannon ball image are supposedly antimatter warheads several times the magnitude of modern day nuclear bombs.

[Werthead]

Lower Decks is now available worldwide via Amazon Prime,

Rewatching it now and enjoying it again. The humour probably won't be for everyone, but the spirit and soul of Star Trek is present and correct and the premises of each episode are generally semi-serious (with a bit of tweaking they'd work for any of the live action shows). Where it pokes fun at Trek tropes it generally does so quite gently and in a good spirit (the captain constantly wondering how they can peacefully resolve a situation with an enemy actively shooting at them whilst the tactical officer melts down in the background).

I also like the idea that someone at Starfleet Command a few years earlier was apparently leaking the latest after-action reports from the Enterprise-D, possibly in disbelief at some of the stuff they were reading, and all of Starfleet was following along on what was happening next. "What, the Borg are back? And they've teamed up with Data's what?"

The episode where they also poke fun at the JJ movies and the endless flybys of the main ship in The Motion Picture is also pure genius.

Spoiler

"It's a movie! Who gives a shit about the rules? You can do anything you like with beaming in a movie! Who cares?"

 

[IlyaP]

19 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The episode where they also poke fun at the JJ movies and the endless flybys of the main ship in The Motion Picture is also pure genius.

  Hide contents

"It's a movie! Who gives a shit about the rules? You can do anything you like with beaming in a movie! Who cares?"

*chef's kiss*

That's certainly sold me on seeing this show. 

[Jaxom 1974]

57 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Lower Decks is now available worldwide via Amazon Prime,

Rewatching it now and enjoying it again. The humour probably won't be for everyone, but the spirit and soul of Star Trek is present and correct and the premises of each episode are generally semi-serious (with a bit of tweaking they'd work for any of the live action shows). Where it pokes fun at Trek tropes it generally does so quite gently and in a good spirit (the captain constantly wondering how they can peacefully resolve a situation with an enemy actively shooting at them whilst the tactical officer melts down in the background).

I also like the idea that someone at Starfleet Command a few years earlier was apparently leaking the latest after-action reports from the Enterprise-D, possibly in disbelief at some of the stuff they were reading, and all of Starfleet was following along on what was happening next. "What, the Borg are back? And they've teamed up with Data's what?"

The episode where they also poke fun at the JJ movies and the endless flybys of the main ship in The Motion Picture is also pure genius.

  Hide contents

"It's a movie! Who gives a shit about the rules? You can do anything you like with beaming in a movie! Who cares?"

 

Agree 100%.

I wondered if they could pull off more of a sitcom format with this, and they did it brilliantly.  

[Werthead]

Michael Dorn has a new idea for a Worf show, which made me go, "oh no," in expectation of another vanity project idea, but it's actually superb.

The notion is that the Klingon Empire has finally run out of steam, it can no longer maintain itself as an empire based on conquest and war, and the various, long-conquered worlds are starting to rebel and drift out of control. Shades of post-WWII breakup of the French and British empires, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. Dorn's idea is that different factions form, some wanting to double down on conquest and tyranny, and other progressive forces wanting the Empire to transition to a more civilised, more democratic society. There's also the idea that the Klingon military is having difficulty maintaining itself, so agrees to let Starfleet personnel work on Klingon ships (the idea being they'd fought side-by-side during the Dominion War). But some Klingon houses and factions are, of course, completely unhappy with the idea of the Empire as a sinking ship and want to take them back to their old ways of conquest.

This is a great idea, overcoming the problem of the various other all-Klingon show pitches (by, presumably, not having an all-Klingon cast, just mostly-Klingon) and also by being superbly thematically aligned with the end of DS9, when Ezri pointed out that the Klingon Empire is on the verge of a major collapse by trying to prolong its romantic image of being all about honour when it's really a brutal, colonialist power built on a paradigm that cannot continue indefinitely and is increasingly corrupt and rickety. And she gets Worf to agree with that idea, which is the catalyst for him to kill Gowron and install Martok. This is a great natural extension of the idea.

My only problem with it is that Kurtzman would probably try to fuck it up somehow (maybe insisting on all the Klingons looking inexplicably weird yet again?). But with a decent writing team in place, it could be great.

[IlyaP]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

This is a great idea, overcoming the problem of the various other all-Klingon show pitches (by, presumably, not having an all-Klingon cast, just mostly-Klingon) and also by being superbly thematically aligned with the end of DS9, when Ezri pointed out that the Klingon Empire is on the verge of a major collapse by trying to prolong its romantic image of being all about honour when it's really a brutal, colonialist power built on a paradigm that cannot continue indefinitely and is increasingly corrupt and rickety. And she gets Worf to agree with that idea, which is the catalyst for him to kill Gowron and install Martok. This is a great natural extension of the idea.

Where do I sign up? Can we have this now? Yesterday? Please? This sounds *awesome*. 

[sifth]

On 1/24/2021 at 8:29 PM, Werthead said:

Michael Dorn has a new idea for a Worf show, which made me go, "oh no," in expectation of another vanity project idea, but it's actually superb.

 

So long as the Klingons don't look like orcs from the Lord of Rings movies, I'm fine with this.

[IlyaP]

10 hours ago, sifth said:

So long as the Klingons don't like orcs from the Lord of Rings movies, I'm fine with this.

And as long as they don't look and sound like Russian stereotypes or parodies, I'm also fine with this. 

[Werthead]

It's the 25th anniversary of Threshold, one of the worst episodes in Star Trek's entire history.

I don't think it's the worst-ever one, though. Spock's Brain, Code of Honor and Up the Long Ladder are worse, as are the two Voyager "Irish holodeck" episodes. But it's definitely up there.

Shout-out to Lower Decks, who brought in some more Warp 10 Sex Newts and gave them the medical treatment they deserved, rather than mockery.

[Vaughn]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

It's the 25th anniversary of Threshold, one of the worst episodes in Star Trek's entire history.

I don't think it's the worst-ever one, though. Spock's Brain, Code of Honor and Up the Long Ladder are worse, as are the two Voyager "Irish holodeck" episodes. But it's definitely up there.

Shout-out to Lower Decks, who brought in some more Warp 10 Sex Newts and gave them the medical treatment they deserved, rather than mockery.

'Let That Be Your Last Battlefield' is the kind of episode where you're embarrassed for everyone acting in it for what the writers did to them.