Star Trek: All Good Threads...

[Ran]

26 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

On the TV series side of things what Disney has done with Star Wars and Marvel so far. Maybe they could buy the rights to Star Trek too? Or do they already own them?

No, Paramount is part of ViacomCBS, a competitor to Disney. I don't think Disney would be allowed to purchase them by regulators in the U.S.

 

[Toth]

16 minutes ago, Ran said:

No, Paramount is part of ViacomCBS, a competitor to Disney. I don't think Disney would be allowed to purchase them by regulators in the U.S.

There are regulators in the USA?

[DaveSumm]

It’s funny how Disney are perceived as the only ones capable of putting together a coherent universe. Understandable, as all the other ones keep fucking it up...

[SpaceChampion]

Onto the final 9 episodes of DS9.  Was thinking this is the best Trek series ever, but then the first three of these were kind of boring, but fine it's setting things up. 

Now on the 4th and Kai Winn tells her assistant Solbor that the Pah-wraiths are the true Bajoran gods, he freaks out and she stabs him, then she turns to Dukat and tells him "it's over!  the Pah-wraiths sent you to destroy me!"    WTF WHO WROTE THIS??  This is giving me serious cognitive dissonance.

 

[RumHam]

2 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

the best Trek series ever

It depends how you compare DS9 and TNG. My kneejerk reaction is to say TNG is better but I bet if you did math DS9 would win.

TNG has lower lows, takes longer to find it's footing and was apparently held back by stupid roddenberryisms like "let's avoid personal conflict between the main characters" 

TNG has higher highs too though, I think. 

2 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

Now on the 4th and Kai Winn tells her assistant Solbor that the Pah-wraiths are the true Bajoran gods, he freaks out and she stabs him, then she turns to Dukat and tells him "it's over!  the Pah-wraiths sent you to destroy me!"    WTF WHO WROTE THIS??  This is giving me serious cognitive dissonance.

That shit is terrible. I think the writers needed to stall that plotline. but that whole romance was gross. 

[Caligula_K3]

The final nine episodes of DS9 are so good in some ways (like the occupation of Cardassia, resolution of the Dominion War) and so bad in others (Pa Wraiths! Dukat in the fire caves!) that it's hard for me to understand how the same writers wrote them at the same time.

Edit: speaking of...

 

[SpaceChampion]

Well I'm done.  It's true, the Cardassian rebellion was handled well.  The amount of people killed as the Jem'hadar levelled cities was shocking realistic -- nearly a billion -- unlike other shows which would have kept counts of the dead like this much much lower.

And I enjoyed the grim irony of Kira having to teach them guerrilla tactics, the mechanics and ethics of terrorist cells, etc.

The Jem'hadar seemed to get conveniently weak for the good guys to win.  Simply getting the Romulans on the side of the alliance doesn't seem enough.

Bit too much Vic Fontaine.  Bit too much Ezri, though I liked her.

The problem of Trek painting in broad strokes when portraying their alien races remains.  But I get it, they're more used as archetypes than a serious exploration of the complexities of alien societies.  The point is to show how similar they all all, despite all the differences, I suppose.

The final battle above Cardassia Prime was just hand-waved away with a line "we project losing as much as 40% of our forces".  And then they're drinking bloodwine!  Ok, clearly the budget ran out there.

 

 

 

[Derfel Cadarn]

I liked the relationships between Kira, Garak and Damarr, Kira having to deal with the fact he murdered Ziyal, which he then has to deal with. 

Also the joke about his hidden mountain fortress. And Garak’s pissed off smile when he shoots Weyoun, whose big mouth gets him killed yet again (by Worf a few episodes prior, and Worf’s surprise when Damarr just laughs over the body).

I also liked Damarr laughing when the new Weyoun arrived. 
“I’m pleased you find the death of my predecessor so amusing.”

”Oh you misjudge me. I miss him deeply.”

[Plessiez]

The Pah-Wraith plot would have been a lot closer to tolerable -- though still pretty bad, I think -- if they'd just cut the Dukat part of it out entirely.  Have him not appear in the series again after Waltz and just let Winn be the main villain for all of that stuff.  (Cut him out of the Season 6 finale too, I guess: if Jadzia Dax was being written out anyway, she should really have died in the episode where she and Worf go on a joint mission and Worf is supposed to leave her behind.)

I understand that the writers were unhappy about fans being too symapthetic to Dukat, but the way that they reacted to it by having him turn into a completely different character was pretty awkward.

The Cardassian rebellion plot with Kira and Garak and Damar is really good though.

[Werthead]

 

 

Quote

The Jem'hadar seemed to get conveniently weak for the good guys to win.  Simply getting the Romulans on the side of the alliance doesn't seem enough.

Something they definitely should have mentioned more through the series was Starfleet closing the tech gap to the Dominion. When we first meet the Dominion, their weapons and shields are far more capable than the Federation or Klingons or Romulans or Cardassians. Apart from the Defiant destroying two Jem'Hadar ships with alpha strikes (the Jem'Hadar weren't expecting a Federation starship to unload that amount of firepower in one go), the Alpha Quadrant powers comprehensively get their arses handed to them consistently in Seasons 2-4. Once a Jem'Hadar warship is captured early in Season 5, the Federation are able to reverse-engineer its weapons and shields. You see the fruits of that in the Season 5 finale when Weyoun is looking incredulous as the Dominion and Dominion-enhanced Cardassians ships are unloading everything they have at DS9 and the station is just taking it and sending back twice as much in interest (ending the battle with fifty Dominion ships destroyed, which was far more than they were anticipating).

The Dominion still seem to have a significant edge in single ship-to-ship combat going into Season 6 but the Federation and Klingons catch up fast, which is why they start the war on the back foot but by Operation Return have gained the initiative and retain it all the way to the Breen entering the war, and that advantage is checked by the Klingons discovering they can negate the Breen EMP weapon easily.

I think it's the combination of the allies closing the technological gap, if not exceeding it, plus the addition of the third-most-powerful political entity into the Alpha Quadrant to the already in-conflict two, that allows them to get the upper hand. Not dissimilar to the Second World War (the Germans had an impressive technological advantage at the start of the war but this rapidly closed and the scope of the war expanded and they suddenly found themselves simultaneously at war with the three great global superpowers at the same time, which was not the original geostrategic plan).

Quote

The final battle above Cardassia Prime was just hand-waved away with a line "we project losing as much as 40% of our forces".  And then they're drinking bloodwine!  Ok, clearly the budget ran out there.

There was no final space battle. Odo talked to the female changeling and she ordered the Dominion forces to surrender before the final assault began.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Imho they maybe made the pre-Breen Alpha Quadrant Dominion too powerful. The initial Dominion fleet that reinforced Cardassia wasn’t that massive in season 5 (compared to the mega-fleets all sides fielded in seasons 6 and7). They get 5 convoys of reinforcements by the end of season 5 (the one we see looks to be several dozen ships, according to memory alpha).

While shipyards and ships are built on Cardassia, for the initial part of the war they only have the Jen Hadar who arrived prior to Call to Arms; the Dominion doesnt clone them in the Alpha Quadrant until well into season 6. 
 

So I’m unsure how, three months into the war, the Dominion was able to field 1200 ships against the Federation taskforce sent to liberate DS9 when, despite big successes, they’ve spent 3 months losing ships and (at that time) irreplacable Jem Hadar troops. 
The Alpha quadrant powers never truly face the full strength Dominion, just the initial (smallish) fleet sent to Cardassia, and everything built there. And Cardassia was still recovering from the beating the Klingons handed down in Way of the Warrior.

[Jay21]

On 4/14/2021 at 5:44 AM, Caligula_K3 said:

The final nine episodes of DS9 are so good in some ways (like the occupation of Cardassia, resolution of the Dominion War) and so bad in others (Pa Wraiths! Dukat in the fire caves!) that it's hard for me to understand how the same writers wrote them at the same time.

I agree 100%. DS9 is my favorite of the 90s era trek, but Season 7 goes off the rails with those Pa Wraiths and the whole Ducat undercover as a Bjorn storyline.  Really hurt the finale for me, but the highs of DS9 still outweigh the lows imho. Of al the shows they bring back from the dead, this is the one I would like to see more of.

[Werthead]

45 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Imho they maybe made the pre-Breen Alpha Quadrant Dominion too powerful. The initial Dominion fleet that reinforced Cardassia wasn’t that massive in season 5 (compared to the mega-fleets all sides fielded in seasons 6 and7). They get 5 convoys of reinforcements by the end of season 5 (the one we see looks to be several dozen ships, according to memory alpha).

While shipyards and ships are built on Cardassia, for the initial part of the war they only have the Jen Hadar who arrived prior to Call to Arms; the Dominion doesnt clone them in the Alpha Quadrant until well into season 6. 

So I’m unsure how, three months into the war, the Dominion was able to field 1200 ships against the Federation taskforce sent to liberate DS9 when, despite big successes, they’ve spent 3 months losing ships and (at that time) irreplacable Jem Hadar troops.

 
The Alpha quadrant powers never truly face the full strength Dominion, just the initial (smallish) fleet sent to Cardassia, and everything built there. And Cardassia was still recovering from the beating the Klingons handed down in Way of the Warrior.

My sense was that some of the Dominion fleets that came through the wormhole off-screen were absolutely massive. They only looked small because they were reusing footage from In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light. In Call to Arms Sisko complains about the absolute volume of Dominion ships that's some through and Weyoun gives him a BS excuse about the Cardassians being jittery.

There's also six months solid between the Dominion and Cardassian allying and the outbreak of war, which is plenty of time for the Dominion to churn out hundreds, if not thousands of ships, especially if the bulk of the ships they're building are Cardassian spaceframes (which are cheaper and easier to build, albeit not as effective as Dominion ships).

I'd say the numbers are generally fine until the Season 7 closing arc when Gowron says he's going to deploy 1500 ships from the KDF to augment the front lines and Sisko tells him he'll be outnumbered 20-to-1. The Dominion-Cardassian-Breen Alliance being able to field 30,000 ships seems ludicrous, unless they're going all the way down to fighter-class ships in that count.

As for the "full strength" Dominion, I actually think they were facing a lot of it. If we consider that the Dominion was founded 10,000 years ago and has been the dominant power in the Gamma Quadrant for 2,000 years, it's very likely that the Dominion was actually in a non-mobilised state when the Federation encountered them. The Dominion doesn't seem interested in exploring the galaxy for the sake of it, they haven't run into the Borg in the other direction etc, and they seem content with fleecing the member worlds and neighbours they have. I think when they encountered the Federation and the wormhole, they didn't actually have anywhere near as many ships as they needed for a full-scale war and went into full production mode straight away, but for the most part had to respond to incursions with the relatively small "police" force of Jem'Hadar ships they kept around during peacetime. This would explain the three years it took them to be ready for war, versus the Alpha Quadrant powers whose mutual antagonism had kept them with large fleets for years (and the Federation still crash-building new fleets to face the prospect of a Borg attack).

This would also explain the very hit-and-miss nature of the AQ powers encountering Dominion forces when they enter the Gamma Quadrant, and why we don't see anything other than the small patrol ships until Season 5, when the Dominion is ready to go full-tilt into war. Hell, when the Cardassian-Romulan fleet destroys the Founder homeworld in Season 3, only six months after first contact with the Dominion, they're not stopped from doing so (the Founders seem narked off by having to abandon it) and they only send 150 patrol ships to stop them (that's still enough, of course), not hundreds or thousands of ships with the heavy cruisers and battleships we see later on. 

Obviously the sheer size of a Gamma Quadrant Dominion fully mobilised for war pouring ships constantly through the wormhole would have meant game over, but it took them a while to ramp up for that.

[Jaxom 1974]

Found myself watching TNG season 2 episodes last night...specifically, "The Royale"...and it just was a flare of sparked nostalgia...there isn't a lot of great stuff in Season 2 beyond, "Q Who", but there are some interesting and fun episodes like, "The Royale"...the show still has that earnestness that's meant to be so serious, but there is that sense that they wanted to break out more with the fun...

[Durckad]

"The Royale" feels to me like a leftover, B-rate TOS episode (and knowing the writing issues in season 2 it very well might've been). It's not bad but it's just barely a step above being skippable. I think most (all) of my enjoyment of it comes from how perturbed all of the characters are at being involved in such a stupid scenario. It's an interesting set up for an episode that's really not very interesting in its execution.

Season 2 is pretty interesting in how it's just all over the place in quality. Some really, really bad mixed in with some true classics and also a bunch of episodes that feel like they were just thrown together at the last minute. Still a pretty significant step up over Season 1.

[RumHam]

https://www.pcgamer.com/star-trek-borg-is-a-90s-fmv-game-that-doesnt-completely-suck/

I saw a picture the other day of John De Lancie in Borg makeup and was confused. Apparently it's from that game which I now want to track down and play. But I'll probably settle for watching the cut scenes on youtube. 

[Derfel Cadarn]

18 minutes ago, RumHam said:

https://www.pcgamer.com/star-trek-borg-is-a-90s-fmv-game-that-doesnt-completely-suck/

I saw a picture the other day of John De Lancie in Borg makeup and was confused. Apparently it's from that game which I now want to track down and play. But I'll probably settle for watching the cut scenes on youtube. 

I played that back in ‘98. Never wuite completed it. They fucked up the uniforms; the future scenes had earlier uniforms than the Wolf 359 scenes which had the newer ones.

[Jaxom 1974]

3 hours ago, Durckad said:

"The Royale" feels to me like a leftover, B-rate TOS episode (and knowing the writing issues in season 2 it very well might've been). It's not bad but it's just barely a step above being skippable. I think most (all) of my enjoyment of it comes from how perturbed all of the characters are at being involved in such a stupid scenario. It's an interesting set up for an episode that's really not very interesting in its execution.

 

See, I just don't agree.  Yes the premise is borderline farcical. Yes, it's hammy and twisted.  But to me, it harkens back to all the silly things about the TOS that we love.  Yes, it's paint-by-numbers in many ways, but I do not get the sense of perturbance that you get...

[Durckad]

Yeah, personal preference and all that, but those silly things in TOS like the Nazi planet or the Mob Planet is not really what I watch Star Trek or even TOS for. It's what I tolerate when I watch them and The Royale is no different. I'm pretty sure the genesis of the episode was all "Hey, we can use a 1940's casino set for a few days... how can we make an episode around that?"

It's not offensively bad like many, many other episodes, but, uh, I have absolutely no nostalgia for those types of Star trek episodes.

As for the perturbance, I'm talking more about how Worf, Riker, and even Picard just seem genuinely annoyed that they're all caught up in a faithful recreation of a bad 1940's pulp novel. It's a pretty fun way to take the episode but just not enough to save it for me. 

TLDR, people on internet have different opinions on Star Trek. The world is ending.

[Jaxom 1974]

Wait. What exactly are you watching Trek for, particularly the 60s TOS, if not for the examination of various sci-fi tropes telling moralistic stories regardless of how ham fisted or heavy handed the various episodes might treat their subject matter...?   YMMV