I learned last night that the actor who plays Garak in DS9 was in two episodes of my all-time favorite television show, the 1980s Twilight Zone. I’ve seen these episodes before, but it was fun to take another look at them now in light of Garak.
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And the bad guy in Dirty Harry
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the enemy of Dirty Harry… Clean Gary…
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Besides a robotic dog, Dr. Ira Graves had another robot with a frog-like head in his home on Gravesworld. (TNG: “The Schizoid Man”)
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season 2 gets at least one star for having federation officers immediately and without hesitation knockout ICE agents and free their captives and minus the same star for canonizing rick and morty as the first real life 21st century piece of art referenced in any trek show
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Still playing this, the GM was kind enough to set up a little adventure for my Silver Blood character, where we settle his people on a demon-class planet in the Federation, fraught with competing mining interests. I was able to negotiate a Horta-style compromise of labor in a hostile environment for the right to settle.
I now have retired this character and have moved on to a new one: One quadrillion of the sentient nanobots from TNG’s Evolution.
This colony will be Meet Dave-style puppeteering a robot body around as these lil guys embark on a mission of exploration aboard their starship-body, which is itself serving on much larger starship.
The question I have is this: Has there ever been any kind of robot shown in TNG/DS9/Voyager that wasn’t the exocomp or wasn’t a Soong-type android? The lore is surprisingly robot-light!
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If you count an autonomous intelligent probe, there was the Nomad in TOS.
Wow, my first Star Trek deep cut nerd pull! I feel like I just had my bar mitzvah or something
Edit: Wait shit you didn’t include TOS in your list, nm, I fail the nerd test
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Nomad is exactly the kind of pull I was looking for! Such a good robot-ass robot:
I kinda didn’t think to include TOS ones because in my mind they’re all just white guys with a lil’ jewel around their neck.
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Nice! Yeah, it’s a wonderfully non-anthropomorphic design.
BTW, love the idea of playing as those little nanobots from Evolution. I just watched that episode for the first time like a month ago! They’re one of those great one-off ideas that could have spawned a whole spinoff. Apparently in the original screenplay they were going to be uplifted sentient dust mites flying little airplanes around, lol
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There are sooo many episodes in the first season of ds9 where the crew or their bodies and minds get invaded by a virus, are affected by some strange space gas, and they turn on each other otherwise don’t act themselves. Which, besides the repetition just making these episodes a bit monotonous to watch in sequence, this doesn’t really work that well when you are just getting to know these characters and don’t have a great sense for just how changed they are by whatever is affecting them.
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I think that was a TOS/TNG tradition and everyone kind of knew it was stupid narratively but couldn’t help themselves
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Profit and Lace rules.
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Got to Duet in my DS9 rewatch last night and, wow, that is a wild episode! One of the best and real exemplary of that show’s unique character as a Star Trek show. And it seems like all the characters are established and their performances have found those characters completely. Really just great.
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This show is so strange to me in how it is coherent and broadly entertaining but I feel absolutely positively nothing watching it.
The good:
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Loved the scenes with Saru and Michael together, walking through the woods and chatting. Disco has needed to give its characters space like this for a while, it was real refreshing getting two people just chatting at leisure.
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The smugger couple is fun, I’m enjoying them so far.
All the shots of their ship doing something, like the countermeasures or the in-atmo laser barrage, was cool as hell. The effects for that ship look great.
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Enjoyed Frank quite a bit, really cool seeing another Soong-type android, with the implications that synths continued to grow and become a unique species, with all the variety that comes with.
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The two ships blocking the sandstorm was a cool use of the shields in-atmosphere, love seeing a creative use of the tech.
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Jet Reno gets another laugh-out-loud line from me during the interviews.
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Still really love the “absolute candor” aspect of NuTrek, and Michael with not-Shaw in the debriefing room was great. One of my favorite Michael scenes in a while.
The Bad:
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The “Red Directive” paints an incredibly bleak picture of where the Federation has ended up. So you are telling me that in the Federation, in the Federation of the future, you will be expected to just do a mission “for the security of the Federation” where you are not told what your are doing or why, and are thus not equipped to make any kind of moral determination? And you get a license to kill and are indeed told not to worry about causalities, because the ends justify the means? You cannot have this black ops shit if you want us to believe the Federation is a just organization. Even the Omega Directive required the captain to know what the aspect of critical importance was, so they could make moral determinations.
Shaw 2 says that he’s been on 7 different Red Directives during his career. These things apparently happen all the time, which is deranged.
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To the above, it seems super duper likely that Kovich is Section 31, and that Section 31 not only exists in the future, but exerts power at the highest level of the Federation. Even the President of the Federation is powerless to the whims of the space CIA, answerable to nobody.
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Really hope I’m wrong about this but if I am, who is Kovich answerable to? Why do they have a guy like this? Why is it so hard for NuTrek to imagine a government or navy that isn’t the 21st-century United States?
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Frank was a great new character, was interested in learning more about him. But, because he’s a morally grey character due to him being involved in buying/selling smuggled goods, he is instantly executed so that cosmic justice can be delivered. Continues the NuTrek tradition, alongside Sneed and Shaw of killing off any promising new unique character you introduce if they are not unambiguously a good-coded heroic character.
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Continues to drive me insane how reckless our heroes are. Starfleet blasts in to a desert planet, and because it is not a Federation planet, they immediately get into a shooting chase (on speeder bikes) with two smugglers they want. This rapidly escalates as the smugglers beeline for the mountain, at which point the Federation does an orbital strike on an explosives cache in the mountain knowing that there is a 30% chance this kills every man, woman, and child in the city. The bad guys then follow Starfleet’s example and try to blow up the mountain, causing the avalanche, and Starfleet scrambles to protect the city from the disaster they caused.
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I know this is just action movie logic but man does it not gel with Star Trek as an idea. You have to imagine Starfleet as this like Bad Boys cartoon cowboy justice org that causes death and disaster wherever their latest military adventure takes them.
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I truly legit thought for a cold-blooded moment that Michael was about to elect her boyfriend as the XO of the ship. Holy hell was I relieved that it was Shaw 2 instead. I have this dire feeling that when Shaw 2 eats it later this season it’s gonna be Booker that gets field-promoted from smuggler to XO of a Starfleet vessel within two years.
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The way they are collecting zelda keys that slot into a 3D-printed insignia makes me want to die. My prediction for this season is that they will get directions to a Progenitor Genesis device they used to originally seed the galaxy, and some guy will either intentionally or unintentionally try to activate it, destroying all life and/or remaking the galaxy in their image.
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Pretty watchable time travel ep where they do a tour of the previous Star Trek Discovery season finales. This really banked on us having a lot of affection for killed-off characters that only ever got like four speaking lines. I swear there was an entire character on the bridge, I want to say Reece, that died and his presence was supposed to be a big deal, but I could not remember if he had died and been replaced or not.
I did like how they solved this by breaking the warp bubble and exposing everything to the unshielded effects of faster than light travel. I feel like this would’ve killed everyone instantly but whatever, it was something new.
My memories of this entire episode of television are fading rapidly from my mind as I write this. Saru said… something about… it’s gone.
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