Star Trek: I miss Hemmer (spoilers)

[Ran]

7 hours ago, Rippounet said:

I just can't buy that a race of apparently mindless predators could be so technologically advanced

I think we're to take it that the mindless stage is the hatchlings and younglings, and that as they move into later stages the Gorn become increasingly intelligent. One of the producers or writers was interviewed and suggested that the Gorn on the Cayuga may not even be a fully-adult Gorn. Presumably very few Gorn reach full adulthood, and end up running the show, coming up with the message to the Federation about the demarcation line.

[SpaceChampion]

I seen it said somewhere the Gorn aren't even a single species, more like a genus of species, so the one in TOS can be different like the genus of apes include human, gorilla, chimps, etc.

[sifth]

Part of me wishes this SNW came up with a new race, instead of the Gorn, for their lizard monsters. It's my only real issue with this series.

[Rippounet]

12 hours ago, Ran said:

I think we're to take it that the mindless stage is the hatchlings and younglings, and that as they move into later stages the Gorn become increasingly intelligent.

I know, but...

12 hours ago, Ran said:

Presumably very few Gorn reach full adulthood, and end up running the show, coming up with the message to the Federation about the demarcation line.

That was my initial guess as well, but if there's few adult gorns, who builds the spaceships?
There's already a lot of minor issues for the Gorn to become space-faring, but IIRC they also imply they have a limited ability to communicate (with "light signals," right ?), and possibly no written language. So if it takes a bit of time for a gorn to become sentient... how did they develop a culture and science?
Now of course, the next episode/season should answer those questions, but I already fear that the answers aren't going to be satisfying. It seems to me the point of the Gorn is precisely to be this mix of advanced/efficient and primitive/barbaric, presumably so our heroes can show their ability to resolve things peacefully even with the worst possible antagonist.

 

[Jaxom 1974]

How do, if at all, do the Gorn mesh with the representation of the species from the fourth season on Enterprise...? It's like everyone forgot about that...

[Spockydog]

The Gorn have been a technological civilization for hundreds of thousands of years. They have opposable thumbs, are extremely intelligent, and are light years beyond having to insert infinity into their equations in order to balance the books. They have evolved to be telepathic, have technology beyond our wildest dreams. And they are hongry.

 

 

 

[Denvek]

8 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

How do, if at all, do the Gorn mesh with the representation of the species from the fourth season on Enterprise...? It's like everyone forgot about that...

Any differences there can be explained by that being a Mirror Universe Gorn, regardless of whether or not that actually makes sense.

[Jaxom 1974]

5 hours ago, Denvek said:

Any differences there can be explained by that being a Mirror Universe Gorn, regardless of whether or not that actually makes sense.

That's the thing...wasn't it a stowaway Gorn? It was trapped on the Defiant that went to the mirror universe...or was that the Tholian...? I can't remember exactly...

 

[Denvek]

I don't recall there being a stowaway - the Tholian was just someone they tortured for information on where the Tholians had taken the Defiant, and the Gorn was a mercenary trying to stop the Empire from stealing it.

[Rippounet]

If we're going wide/wild, Lower decks had a brief scene of a Gorn wedding in Season 1... 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Rippounet

[IheartIheartTesla]

Review of Ep 10 SNW (shamelessly stolen from the internet): I guess the Gorn tried that in a small town.

[IheartIheartTesla]

On 8/14/2023 at 7:56 PM, Rippounet said:

The Gorn don't make good antagonists for me, I just can't buy that a race of apparently mindless predators could be so technologically advanced, they feel like a caricature from war propaganda.

Consider humans......

At any rate, its a good point; reminds me a bit of the debate around the Tamarians. Namely, how could a race that speaks entirely in metaphors become a spacefaring race with technology superior to the Federation? You'd spend 3 days trying to fix the plasma flow through the secondary conduits of the naecelles, just explaining to your colleagues what you mean. Or simply asking for a metric allen wrench. However, there may be other communication pathways through which this is made easy.

[Rippounet]

I dunno about you but I've listened to a few songs from the musical episode on a regular basis in the past few weeks. I really like the first one, "Status report" and the "I'm ready/I'm the (e)x" duo. Quite the earworms.

To avoid ST withdrawal I watched a bit of Voyager. Didn't quite watch everything back in the day - wasn't easy to get, didn't quite enjoy it as much as other ST shows. I focused on what are considered the "best" episodes, in case I'd missed them.
At first the magic operated, and I found myself really enjoying the episodic format, that makes it really easy to pick and choose the "best." Found some of these plots truly well written, perhaps more "sci-fi" than recent ST shows...
But the more I watched, the more obvious the flaws became. Janeway, the Doctor, and Seven are good characters, but others go from ok (Torres) to bland (Kim, Paris). Because of the episodic format, the character development is minimal and clumsy, and the writing is inconsistent. I can't quite reconcile the Janeway in "Scorpion" with the same character in "Equinox" for instance - morally speaking, it doesn't seem to compute.
In the end, I think my personal favorites are the doctor-centered episodes "Message in a bottle" and "Tinker, tailor, doctor, spy," with an honorable mention for "Year of hell." Dunno if I'll go back to it.

To stay in the 1990s, I also re-watched Buffy's "Once more with feeling," which I really hadn't liked back in the day... And, nope, lol, still didn't work. Buffy and Spike do have decent songs, but only Marsters can sing. Xander and Anya's duo is funny - but forgettable nonetheless. The baddy is good, but his interaction with Dawn is a wee bit cringy (or maybe Dawn was a cringy character full stop )... Anyway, continued a bit with season 6 and enjoyed the far superior "Tabula rasa" and "Doublemeat palace." They reminded me why I liked Whedon, initially - though imho, he only ever came back to the level of Buffy with Firefly - which I should definitely re-watch one of these days.

[Lord Varys]

18 hours ago, Rippounet said:

To avoid ST withdrawal I watched a bit of Voyager. Didn't quite watch everything back in the day - wasn't easy to get, didn't quite enjoy it as much as other ST shows. I focused on what are considered the "best" episodes, in case I'd missed them.
At first the magic operated, and I found myself really enjoying the episodic format, that makes it really easy to pick and choose the "best." Found some of these plots truly well written, perhaps more "sci-fi" than recent ST shows...
But the more I watched, the more obvious the flaws became. Janeway, the Doctor, and Seven are good characters, but others go from ok (Torres) to bland (Kim, Paris). Because of the episodic format, the character development is minimal and clumsy, and the writing is inconsistent. I can't quite reconcile the Janeway in "Scorpion" with the same character in "Equinox" for instance - morally speaking, it doesn't seem to compute.
In the end, I think my personal favorites are the doctor-centered episodes "Message in a bottle" and "Tinker, tailor, doctor, spy," with an honorable mention for "Year of hell." Dunno if I'll go back to it.

The way I recall it in some phases/episodes there is clearly going something on between Chakotay/Janeway and also the Doctor and Seven. They seemed to have been written as if they were destined to become closer in the long(er) run which is why things suck in that field.

Janeway is often a very great character ... until she acts completely out of character because of some silly writing nonsense. Worst is the episode where some moron writer wanted her to be 'Harry's mommy', coming down hard on him for having a kind of affair with an alien crew mate from another ship. Especially since that was a very late episode it is completely ludicrous.

Voyager was badly suited for episodic story-telling in any case, being the one which most ideally suited show for continuous storytelling ... but even if you tell different stories in every episode, you do have to keep your characters straight. Even if there is no real character development intended, their values and morality should remain roughly the same. Janeway cannot champion moral value X in one episode only to go for Y (which is more or less antithetical to X) in another episode.

[Toth]

20 hours ago, Rippounet said:

In the end, I think my personal favorites are the doctor-centered episodes "Message in a bottle" and "Tinker, tailor, doctor, spy," with an honorable mention for "Year of hell." Dunno if I'll go back to it.

Personally I would also add "The Void" and "Blink of an Eye" as episodes with simple premises that still ooze Star Trek core philosophy. "The Void" being about the Voyager being stuck in a miniature universe where everyone stranded there has to fight for dwindling resources, but coming out on top by seeking alliances and building a miniature Federation. "Blink of an Eye" is an episode about the Voyager getting stuck in the gravity well of an inhabited planet where time is rapidly advancing, with especially Chakotay gleefully keeping track about its civilizations' progress, with a side plot showing the cultural impact of "the sky ship" until they eventually sending a space capsule up.

All in all, agree with your takes on the show. Voyager was never my favourite either and I would have wished that a scarcity of resources and survival would have gotten more room. They incorporated a rebel crew... that more or less instantly adapts because after all they all had Starfleet background anyway. And Voyager as a deep space exploration vessel was astonishingly well equipped for exactly this kind of ordeal, not to mention that replicator technology made most scarcity plots void. As long as they scooped up enough deuterium for the ship's reactors, there was just no way they'd ever run out of food or replacement parts.

[Rippounet]

2 hours ago, Toth said:

Personally I would also add "The Void" and "Blink of an Eye" as episodes with simple premises that still ooze Star Trek core philosophy. "The Void" being about the Voyager being stuck in a miniature universe where everyone stranded there has to fight for dwindling resources, but coming out on top by seeking alliances and building a miniature Federation. "Blink of an Eye" is an episode about the Voyager getting stuck in the gravity well of an inhabited planet where time is rapidly advancing, with especially Chakotay gleefully keeping track about its civilizations' progress, with a side plot showing the cultural impact of "the sky ship" until they eventually sending a space capsule up.

As a matter of fact, I did watch "Blink of an Eye" and enjoyed it. It's certainly a great sci-fi story, so great that it has since then been imitated by The Orville. However, it also contains glaring flaws/plotholes that I found difficult to overlook, which is why I didn't mention it.

The spoiler tag is probably unnecessary (the episode is 23 years old ), but you never know:

Spoiler

It's never made clear just how fast time goes by on the planet. Using the numbers initially mentioned (IIRC, by Chakotay), I tried to do a quick bit of maths, and concluded that the writers themselves had fucked up, as Voyager couldn't have stayed long enough in orbit for several centuries to pass on the planet...
But what really annoyed me was that at the end, when the planet starts shooting missiles at Voyager, it's said that they are shooting one "every three months," and the shields are weakening fast...
There's just no way for Gotana-Retz (the alien) to take his time for goodbies before going back down, because three months on the planet would be a few seconds on Voyager. And even if that's not the case, there's still no time for an emotional goodbye... So that scene was a bit ridiculous.
OTOH, it seems that the two spaceships/rockets that tow Voyager away appear almost immediately after the shooting stops... Which really doesn't make sense.

So the short version is that the passing of time on the planet is completely inconsistent within the episode, and that's rather annoying and ironic, given that this is central to the plot.

OTOH, I haven't re-watched "The void," and I like the plot. It feels vaguely familiar, so I may have watched this one fifteen years ago. Will try to rewatch it in the next few weeks, thanks for the tip.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Rippounet

[IheartIheartTesla]

So no one liked "Bride of Chaotica" where Janeway/Mulgrew vamps it up? Or "Someone to watch over me", the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady knock off? I think the latter was what kicked off the Seven/Doctor saga.

At any rate, the actors playing B'Elanna and possibly Beltran as well are MAGAts or MAGA-adjacent, so its soured my appreciation of the show a fair bit.

[Toth]

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

As a matter of fact, I did watch "Blink of an Eye" and enjoyed it. It's certainly a great sci-fi story, so great that it has since then been imitated by The Orville. However, it also contains glaring flaws/plotholes that I found difficult to overlook, which is why I didn't mention it.

That's just one of many. Assuming their civilization evolves THIS rapidly, Voyager could have stuck around for a few more weeks and they probably would have overtaken Federation tech, maybe offering them an upgrade or two to get home faster. But really, it's one of these episodes where the premise is fascinating enough that I can excuse having to shut my brain off. The historian in me just considers the data Voyager collected there to be worth its hard drives in latinum.^^

5 hours ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

So no one liked "Bride of Chaotica" where Janeway/Mulgrew vamps it up? Or "Someone to watch over me", the Pygmalion/My Fair Lady knock off? I think the latter was what kicked off the Seven/Doctor saga.

"Someone to watch over me" is really funny, yes, agreed. The Captain Proton saga... eh, not really my cup of tea. I remember I spent the episode embarrassed for everyone involved for some reason.

[IheartIheartTesla]

Yeah, fair enough. I only bring some of the silly episodes up as a counterpoint to those (no one here of course) who seem to think a musical is not Trek, somehow. There has been so much stuff in Trek ranging from the profound to the absurd that I accept it all. With varying degrees of enjoyment of course, but everything is part of the sausage.

Edited August 23, 2023 by IheartIheartTesla

[Werthead]

On 8/21/2023 at 7:50 PM, Lord Varys said:

The way I recall it in some phases/episodes there is clearly going something on between Chakotay/Janeway and also the Doctor and Seven. They seemed to have been written as if they were destined to become closer in the long(er) run which is why things suck in that field.

Chakotay and Janeway were totally boning on that that plane where they were both stuck for months, but they decided not to continue on the ship, feeling it would be bad for morale.

The Doctor/Seven was a fan-favourite pairing (and they end up together in the Millennium novel trilogy) but never the main idea from the writers, despite them having far more in common and more chemistry than Seven/Chakotay (urgh).