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Star Trek: There! Are! 4! shows!


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19 hours ago, RumHam said:

Does this feature a fan being strapped into a chair and being forced to watch Profit and Lace five times in a row?

Star Trek's flirted with horror before, sometimes very effectively (WhispersThe AssignmentThe QuickeningEmpok NorWolf in the FoldFrame of MindFirst ContactConspiracy kinda) and other times very much not (GenesisSub fucking Rosa). Not sure if they could keep that kind of thing up for a whole season, let alone a whole show though.

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I guess the venue they might explore this horror thing could have to do with the Gorn as presented in SNW.

It could be a show set between TOS and TNG following up on the Gorn and why they have, so far, not played a role in the setting.

Alternatively, and since La'an took a leave from the Enterprise at the end of the first season of SNW, a new show could cover an expedition into Gorn space headed by La'an.

Another way to do it would involve exploring other non-humanoid aliens we saw in all the other shows, possibly them weirdo colonizing parasites from the first season of TNG, the Breen, etc.

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Finished Strange New Worlds Season 1. It was okay. Better than Discovery Season 1-2 and both seasons of Picard, but otherwise not that great. I think I enjoyed Season 4 of Discovery more.

Also started Prodigy. It's solid fun, although the animation feels a bit stilted and the main protagonist is mildly irritating. It is interesting to not set out the show's location or time period (other than being post-Voyager) at all and having to fit together what happened. 

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Surprisingly lukewarm on Strange New Worlds @Werthead … I assume from its omission you think Disco S3 is better? I haven’t seen Season 4. Personally I thought it wiped the floor with everything since 2005.

Prodigy takes a few episodes before it starts demonstrating what it’s actually about. The pilot felt more like an episode of Clone Wars or something. Once they start attempting to emulate a real crew I think it gets really good.

 

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I was thinking about the horror thing the other day, and this might be a terrible idea but I'd love for it to be about a mostly Vulcan crew. I might be way off base here, but seeing Vulcans try to continue to suppress their emotions in the face of something like the Gorn could be a lot more interesting than just a generic 80% human crew. 

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6 hours ago, Werthead said:

Finished Strange New Worlds Season 1. It was okay.

I too am surprised by your reaction. I don't consider myself a Trekie and I thought this has easily been thr best live-action Trek among the new shows. Its finale was brilliant.

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Strange New Worlds I think had a myriad number of problems. There was a very weird distribution of character focus, so we had almost zero development of Ortegas, Hemmer or Number One but a fair bit for everyone else. The treatment of Number One, one of the more mysterious OG Star Trek characters, is particularly inexplicable. We know nothing about her but they quickly just gave her a name and then gave her Bashir's backstory from DS9 and then brushed everything under the carpet and suddenly it becomes a major thing in the finale to give a cheap cliffhanger to the season.

They also pulled the exact cynical shit some of the other shows pulled by killing off a character who had little development and expecting us to care (Hemmer). It wasn't quite as bad as when they killed off the random cyborg in Season 2 of Discovery as Hemmer had had a few good lines (usually cutting comic relief), but not far off.

You also have the ongoing massive problems with continuity and not really even trying to make things line up with the time period, so the OG Enterprise is somehow vastly more luxurious and spacious than the 110-year-more-advanced Enterprise-D. And I don't know why they call the aliens the Gorn as they are nothing like the Gorn whatsoever. I'm also unclear on why the Balance of Terror episode has things almost like the original timeline but several otherwise inexplicable changes (like Sulu and McCoy not being present, but Scotty is).

Some of the episodes were also genuinely sub-Discovery-at-its-worst horseshit, like the one with them LARPING some kind of medieval bullshit on the ship. If you're going to remake Qpid or something similar, you really need writers who can sell it, and they don't have those. Again, there was also the ultra-cynical, "now this will program the audience to emote," thing by killing off (or just as well) M'Benga's daughter and wrapping up that plot rather abruptly rather than letting it play out longer. I also wasn't hugely keen on the Alien rip-off episode. Doing a Star Trek spin on Alien with its own style, like TNG's Conspiracy (not the greatest of episodes either), is reasonable, but just remaking Alien only not as good feels like a massive waste of time. The episode with the planet with the floating city and the hilariously literal "would you let one child suffer if the whole world benefitted?" ethical conundrum was also badly contrived.

To be fair, several of the other episodes were decent, the actors are all great (I wasn't sold on Nurse Chapel to start with but the actress really did a great job) and some of the arcs were quite well-done. The Spock/T'Pring relationship was well-handled, and of course Anson Mount is an excellent lead. It was a better first season than either Picard or Discovery's, but it still has a lot of the problems with plot contrivance, failure to adhere to established continuity, overreliance on flashy vfx, lack of dramatic tension ("Is the Enterprise, which we know survives for another 25 years past this episode, going to be destroyed?") and occasionally terrible dialogue the other shows have endured.

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All fair points. I guess I just enjoyed seeing them attempt to be more like OG Star Trek even if it didn’t always land. The continuity thing I’m just gonna have to get over, Discovery fucked it for the whole franchise and now we’re stuck here. The visual continuity that (for example) Doctor Who enjoys has been ruined for Star Trek. And all for no discernible reason; almost nothing changes if you set Discovery in the early 25th century where Picard is now. Call Pike something else, make Spock some other Vulcan. That’s it. 

I think Season 2 of Strange New Worlds has the potential to be great, there’ll almost definitely be an Ortega episode and they’re in a good position to move forward with the other characters. And we have the Lower Decks crossover to look forward to.

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8 hours ago, Werthead said:

Strange New Worlds I think had a myriad number of problems. There was a very weird distribution of character focus, so we had almost zero development of Ortegas, Hemmer or Number One but a fair bit for everyone else. The treatment of Number One, one of the more mysterious OG Star Trek characters, is particularly inexplicable. We know nothing about her but they quickly just gave her a name and then gave her Bashir's backstory from DS9 and then brushed everything under the carpet and suddenly it becomes a major thing in the finale to give a cheap cliffhanger to the season.

They also pulled the exact cynical shit some of the other shows pulled by killing off a character who had little development and expecting us to care (Hemmer). It wasn't quite as bad as when they killed off the random cyborg in Season 2 of Discovery as Hemmer had had a few good lines (usually cutting comic relief), but not far off.

You also have the ongoing massive problems with continuity and not really even trying to make things line up with the time period, so the OG Enterprise is somehow vastly more luxurious and spacious than the 110-year-more-advanced Enterprise-D. And I don't know why they call the aliens the Gorn as they are nothing like the Gorn whatsoever. I'm also unclear on why the Balance of Terror episode has things almost like the original timeline but several otherwise inexplicable changes (like Sulu and McCoy not being present, but Scotty is).

Some of the episodes were also genuinely sub-Discovery-at-its-worst horseshit, like the one with them LARPING some kind of medieval bullshit on the ship. If you're going to remake Qpid or something similar, you really need writers who can sell it, and they don't have those. Again, there was also the ultra-cynical, "now this will program the audience to emote," thing by killing off (or just as well) M'Benga's daughter and wrapping up that plot rather abruptly rather than letting it play out longer. I also wasn't hugely keen on the Alien rip-off episode. Doing a Star Trek spin on Alien with its own style, like TNG's Conspiracy (not the greatest of episodes either), is reasonable, but just remaking Alien only not as good feels like a massive waste of time. The episode with the planet with the floating city and the hilariously literal "would you let one child suffer if the whole world benefitted?" ethical conundrum was also badly contrived.

To be fair, several of the other episodes were decent, the actors are all great (I wasn't sold on Nurse Chapel to start with but the actress really did a great job) and some of the arcs were quite well-done. The Spock/T'Pring relationship was well-handled, and of course Anson Mount is an excellent lead. It was a better first season than either Picard or Discovery's, but it still has a lot of the problems with plot contrivance, failure to adhere to established continuity, overreliance on flashy vfx, lack of dramatic tension ("Is the Enterprise, which we know survives for another 25 years past this episode, going to be destroyed?") and occasionally terrible dialogue the other shows have endured.

I mean it's not like it's the first time a Star Trek show has ripped off a classic sci-fi horror film. I recall the DS9 season 3 final, being very similar to The Thing, even down to everyone trying to use blood tests to see who's real and who's fake.

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Prodigy's last episode (Masquerade s1x15) was great fun, a solid combination of action, drama and comedy (with a surprisingly strong return of the TNG bit character Okona, much improved upon the original version, actor Billy Campbell having fun with this one). Good action for Kate Mulgrew as well, who effectively gets to voice multiple characters including Janeway herself (now a vice-admiral). The serial plot in this show is really well done.

I agree with Werthead on Strange New Worlds: good things about this show, but the underdevelopment of certain characters (in particularly Una, who got focus in exactly one single episode) is puzzling and the episodes are up-and-down.

 

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3 hours ago, Wouter said:

Prodigy's last episode (Masquerade s1x15) was great fun, a solid combination of action, drama and comedy

Though the moral of the story was a bit confused. Dal's "mistake" was instrumental to their survival!

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Up to date on Prodigy and it's become a very good show. The reasons for them not being able to talk to Janeway directly feel a bit contrived and it feels like there's at least 300 ways to get around it (including writing a note to pass to Janeway explaining the situation), but I'm more willing to overlook that in a kids' show where they only have 25 minutes to tell a story.

It is amusing having these two ludicrous starships tearing around the galaxy with the proto-warp drive and the quantum slipstream drive basically rendering all prior speed limitations in the Star Trek universe moot and everyone else is stuck tootling along.

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On 11/27/2022 at 8:07 PM, felice said:

Though the moral of the story was a bit confused. Dal's "mistake" was instrumental to their survival!

Without Dal's enhanced powers, Rok or Gwyn could still have pulled any of their usual tricks (or Murf could have manifested his "bloodlust" right away). But it was fun this way.

What I think the moral was, is that Dal tried to make himself better but he ended up being useless for much of the episode (in particular at the elevator fight), whereas his friends (including Gwyn) accept and prefer him the way he is. His confidence needs a boost. His jealousy was pretty funny though.

His background will play an important later, once they are ready to apply to Starfleet for real.

21 hours ago, Werthead said:

Up to date on Prodigy and it's become a very good show. The reasons for them not being able to talk to Janeway directly feel a bit contrived and it feels like there's at least 300 ways to get around it (including writing a note to pass to Janeway explaining the situation), but I'm more willing to overlook that in a kids' show where they only have 25 minutes to tell a story.

It is amusing having these two ludicrous starships tearing around the galaxy with the proto-warp drive and the quantum slipstream drive basically rendering all prior speed limitations in the Star Trek universe moot and everyone else is stuck tootling along.

Gwyn was retroactively proven right to run away from Ascencia, though. She was shocked at the mention of her father, and Ascencia wanting her to point out the location of the Protostar right away.

And now, I think they are too afraid of Janeway/the Dauntless (with the Diviner on it - if he isn't gone after this episode) to consider any of the more obvious options, as most of those entail approaching the Dauntess way too close for comfort. They could have sent Okona with a message, and he may yet end up talking to Janeway. It looks like Janeway is close to figuring out the gist of what is going on, anyway.

The speed of the ships is indeed ludicrous, considering the Protostar can already do warp 9,97 without its third nacelle and engine core, and the Dauntless is at least as fast in regular warp. Wonder which is faster when they activate the non-conventional part of their propulsion systems.

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1 hour ago, Wouter said:

The speed of the ships is indeed ludicrous, considering the Protostar can already do warp 9,97 without its third nacelle and engine core, and the Dauntless is at least as fast in regular warp. Wonder which is faster when they activate the non-conventional part of their propulsion systems.

Voyager could indefinitely sustain above Warp 9 as a cruising speed and hit Warp 9.975 for brief periods. Even the Enterprise-D could only manage between Warp 7 and 8 as a cruising speed before that, and had severe trouble maintaining even Warp 9.6 for brief periods. So the "standard" warp drive is still impressive but not massively moreso than the direction of tech over the prior 20-30 years anyway.

The proto-drive and quantum slipstream are real gamechangers, but the proto-drive seems to be more powerful. In the series so far they've been in the Delta Quadrant (first few episodes), Gamma Quadrant (one episode) and the Delta-Beta Quadrant border region (a lot of the rest), and the Beta Quadrant (specifically the Neutral Zone) in the last few episodes. That's tens of thousands of light-years, and they said earlier on the proto-drive can jump them 4,000 light-years at a time. It would have taken Voyager four years to travel that distance.

The quantum slipstream is fast but not quite as fast as that. IIRC, a sustained burst of it in Voyager allowed them to travel 300 light-years in an hour. An upgraded version later allowed them to travel 10,000 light-years but it was unclear how long they spend in the slipstream, possibly several days.

Of course, the Dauntless' quantum slipstream may be significantly superior, with the possible integration of Borg transwarp tech and also an additional ten years of refinement by the best Starfleet engineers.

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Some people think Frankes is hinting at the possibility of more TNG stuff after Picard:

Quote

Frakes teases that the ending of Picard season three is also begging for more adventures set in this era of Star Trek. “As you’ll see by the end of the season, it’s ripe for a continuation of some version of what we’ve established in the show. Not more Picard, but certainly, Next Gen is alive and well.”

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-picard-season-3-next-generation-reunion/

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On 12/1/2022 at 3:38 PM, RumHam said:

Some people think Frankes is hinting at the possibility of more TNG stuff after Picard:

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/star-trek-picard-season-3-next-generation-reunion/

I wonder if they're pulling a Logan. This could be the last hurrah of Picard (and if they want to give him a great death scene, they need to be banking that soon) but perhaps the other actors could do something else afterwards.

It does feel a bit of a stretch given their ages, though. Burton is 65, Sirtis is 67, Dorn is 69 (as is Colm Meaney), Frakes is 70, McFadden and Spiner are 73 (Stewart is 82). They're all looking excellent for their ages - the lean and now-vegan Dorn looks better as Worf in the trailer than he did in Nemesis - but I'm not sure we can have a full, multi-season show with the gang back together, and there's too many of them to do a handing the baton over kind of thing. Maybe they could do an animated series set after Nemesis, or even between First Contact and Nemesis when they're all on the Enterprise-E? Spiner can still do Stewart's voice of that era, so it'll be more cost-effective!

To put that in context, Shatner was only 63 when he played Kirk for the last time (canonically) in Generations.

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