TNG and Dead Ringers
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o i didnt know about this thread
been watching ds9 w @digs just watched the episode where sisko recreates an ancient bajoran spacefaring vessel to try to make it to the denorios belt and he gets to cardassia and the cardassians do fireworks to congratulate him ;_____;
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What i remember from that ep is Jake asking how to use the bathroom on the sail ship and Sisko just hand waving it away with “You’ll figure it out!” I think that was the only reference to a toilet in the entire series. Enterprise had several, but the rest of that era of Trek just avoided the subject altogether.
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data’s mom episode was on tonight and as always i’m impressed with how fantastic Fionnula Flanagan is at being wildly entertaining in what is basically a just a two hander with her and Spiner. just great tv. also she is easily the most convincing technobabble delivery system outside of Burton who is the king of course.
also reminded me of her fun vulcan diplomat character from enterprise which definitely made me try to remember if there were any other vulcans with a non american accent. i can’t think of any off the dome.
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tng is genuinely so crazy to me, like i can be moved nearly to tears by Picard’s strong but empathetic leadership style and the aspirational vision of humanity at it’s best in one scene and then be just like jaw agape as Riker gets to fuck another hot alien babe in the next… the writers for this show could really do it all
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This is why Star Trek is the best regular TV franchise ever. They did literally everything. There’s a lot of writing about “Roddenberry’s Vision” and “The True Purpose of Star Trek” but Star Trek is something you can do basically anything with.
Like how the Modern Era Star Trek lineup has been: Star Trek as Prestige, Star Trek as Bad Legacy Franchise, Star Trek Adult Swim series, Star Trek as Star Trek, and Star Trek as serialized Kids Show from the 2010s.
And even when it’s shit, even when I don’t like it, even when I think it’s thrown away a handful of core values that did really seem to be the heart of all the old Treks…that’s why all of them feel at least a little like Star Trek. Because Star Trek is a lot of stuff, and has shades of everything in it at some point.
In The Pale Moonlight and Profit and Lace both came from DS9, Star Trek has always been Variable in good and bad ways.
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I gave the first episode of Enterprise another go and I still hate all the characters. I think this will forever be something I catch partial episodes of on late night tv.
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The characters stay bad IMO, but if you want to experience the series at its best* just start with the last ep of season 2 and go from there
*Just OK
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I legit think Regeneration may be the best Borg related episode in all of Trek.
But the characters aren’t that interesting as a whole, and they pretty much don’t develop Hoshi or Travis at all, which was a huge missed opportunity. And Reed barely gets a personality. So much potential overall with that series, wish it could have finished out it’s seven seasons. I suspect the overall opinion of the show would be higher.
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Though Enterprise’s cast is mostly mid, I like Phlox a lot, he has that balance of “we found a weird shockingly good character actor” and “we accidentally put this guy in a position that makes him uniquely suited for a bunch of storylines we can’t do with any one else”.
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yeah I really liked Phlox too. Somehow combining Voyager’s best (dr hologram) and worst (neelix) characters creates something very delightful
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If you skip to when enterprise is almost good, you should still find time for the worst episode of enterprise, which was in season 1 I think. That’s the one where the captain refuses to apologize for his dog pissing on a sacred tree because his dog subsequently became ill.
Edit: its season 2 episode 5. There’s no star trek I hate more than this episode
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Ooof, yeah, A Night in Sickbay is a travesty all around. I don’t know what the writers were thinking. I did love how obvious it was when they used a stuffed dog for Porthos, though
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I like the concept for the Peter Weller make earth great again 2 parter, and I absolutely love that they essentially had Riker quantum leap into the show for the finale.
One day maybe I’ll try to follow the time travel war thing, but now doesn’t feel like that time.
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section 31 movie is terribly made and terribly written and embarrassing for everyone involved and was super obviously retrofitted from the bones of a tv show BUT on a basic conceptual level if they were going to do Star Trek: Suicide Squad or whatever, they picked a very fun assortment of trek aliens to be in a crew together: wacky cyborg, star trek vi shapeshifter, deltan, alive irish germ in a vulcan robot, loose 90s augment, space hitler herself, and rachel garrett for no reason. like if you look at it from the fanfilm perspective or like a random unrelated syfy original movie it’s kinda fun. there are many neat things to look at in the first half. like extremely low bar here but way more fun than any other section 31 thing except the first couple ds9 eps and the lower decks episode. i’m glad michelle yeoh got too famous though, as a tv show it probably would have more opportunities to piss me off. anyway just watch the fifth element instead
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section 31 is sort of definitive proof that every universe ending grimdark threat that discovery dealt with would be much more tolerable and entertaining in a shitty little 90 minute movie than a 13 episode season of television with the same amount of actual plot
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Carbon Creek is a pretty good Enterprise episode that stands on its own if you only want to watch a few eps of the show. If it were a little longer it could almost be a Star Trek TV movie.
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Holy moly was Section 31 a rough watch.
You can forgive the editing and pacing and shitty CG and bad fight choreography, which you can blame on the series having to be compressed into a movie after Yeoh opted not to do the series after winning an Academy Award, and it sitting on the shelf for constant re-edits, and Paramount not putting much money into it. Really really reminds me of Suicide Squad 2016 in that way.
It’s a lot harder to forgive the core of the story of Section 31 being not about Section 31 in any way, but instead fully focused on new loose ends from Georgiou’s fucking awful Mirror Universe backstory, and further, a revenge plot where Bad Man Must Be Killed Or Universe Is Destroyed. I think then you’re left mainly to try to get something out of the character interactions, which are unfortunately not there, though the actors (well, Sam Richardson) do a good job selling it regardless.
There are a few cool, fun ideas in here, particularly the microscopic alien character, the special effect for shapeshifting, and the special effect for the garbage hauler’s magnetic beams, things you could maybe see them doing something with over the course of a longer series. As it is, though, woof.
I’m really, really glad this thing got shelved and the worst we had to endure was this movie. It’s so much more efficient to map out the season, cherry pick the best parts, and put together a movie that reveals that your best ideas for Section 31 standalone series absolutely sucked shit.
In terms of damage to the Trek world, S31 managed to get a knife in the kidneys by establishing that Section 31 is conclusively not a secret shameful cult or whatever for the Federation, but instead a normal part of Starfleet, like Starfleet Intelligence, where a standard Lieutenant like Rachel Garrett just gets assigned. She is a commissioned officer who gets orders to lead this group of murderers on an illegal missions to violate their treaty and extra-judiciously execute the high-ranking member of another civilization. Cool.
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