eeeeeeeeeeeeeeep
that’s still surprisingly well handled though. in any other TV show of any other era it’d be a disaster. the plot is still kind of cringey once you realize where it’s going but not unintentionally so
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Troi is the worst director of HR.
The Denise Crosby weirdness just keeps getting weirder.
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Oh, agreed. I didn’t want to make it sound like the show was condoning Geordi’s actions, it’s just really strange to have someone like Geordi, someone that is more comfortable with machines than people (this is the cynical read on his friendship with Data, that he just sees Data as a machine and thus doesn’t engage his many weird hangups about social interaction), in a show that otherwise tries to commit itself to a utopia where humanity itself has actually become ‘better’ (not worth unpacking exactly what better means in this context, it’s the premise of this future and it’s been an undercurrent of star trek since the tos pilot episode)
wait does Tasha come back??
Just keep Yesterday’s Enterprise in mind for later. It’s not great.
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Not to knock TNG’s quality, but it’s always surprising when it overshadows TOS in conversations about Star Trek. Actual sci-fi writers were taking that show to weird places every episode, where as TNG was more buttoned down and played to the continuity nerds that had come to define Trekkies in the years since the original.
Picard is a better captain and character. In my viewing of TOS Kirk seldom had internal struggles - he’s a headstrong man with a strong internal locus of control. Picard is constantly trying to toe multicultural lines and broker deals that he doesn’t like.
I think the ensemble works better, too. The background characters on TOS are rarely fleshed out.
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And DS9 outdoes it on basically every other level, e.g. characters and multi episode arcs and general Space UN hijinks.
But TNG is for our generation I guess more of a cultural landmark, and the whole nostalgia factor helps a lot too
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i kinda like the way it’s the same thing every episode? how quickly the premise and complication are introduced, and the discussions ppl have about the problem of the week in the conference room or picard’s office. it’s soporific. idk maybe this is not specific to TNG as far as long-running series go though
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I’m really very fond of how many conference room/picard’s office scenes there are in TNG. I love that everyone’s first reaction upon encountering a situation is to discuss it. I know that this is half done so they can shovel some exposition in without spending their budget, but that’s what makes Star Trek (going back to TOS, but including basically all the good series) unique, that while it is space opera, ST has never been about action or even melodrama (some allowances can be made for Deep Space 9, being just exceptional in every way, but when it engages itself in Space Opera mode, it manages to be operatic instead of ‘like a soap opera in space’ which is the actual meaning of the term)
Like, rewatching the TOS series, which I’ve been doing slowly for the past few months, it’s striking just how much better the show works when the genre it is operating in is mystery or just straight up speculative fiction (emphasis on speculation) than when it tries to do action (it has never succeeded at action stories besides Wrath of Khan)
This is really what made Voyager and Enterprise such crap, every episode jumps straight to action, but they can’t sustain an action movie pace for the length of an episode so they develop the new habits of techno-babble (I mean it when I say that was a product of the Voyager era, techno-babble was much lighter and less a constant background noise even in TNG’s days. There was nonsense science but it was not commonly the only and exclusive solution to every situation like it became shortly after Voyager started)
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Have I ever posted on here about how my fantasy version of STID is, rather than an idiotic miscast retread of Wrath of Khan, doing it like a feature length film version of Space Seed? It’s actually an amazing episode, and it makes absolutely no sense to introduce Khan in the WoK remake without having Space Seed happen in the JJverse first.
That way they would have had the chance to clean up some of the weirdness of the alternate future history gene wars or whatever, and the movie could have still had most of the same beats as STID (the black ops dudes wanting to get Khan to … do wars for them… or whatever), and ended with Kirk finally displaying a little bit of maturity and having him exiled rather than killing him outright
…which would then come back to bite him in the ass in nu trek 3, which could then be a proper WoK remake only set in the weirdly embattled reality of the new series.
edit: just remembered that khan doesn’t actually die in STID. whatever the movie still sucks.
Remember when Geordi was stalking his favorite hot engineer scientist and she discovered the hologram and got upset. Good times, good times.
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I decided to watch ds9 a while back and I finished it recently. most of the time I just stuck it on in a little window while I did other stuff. I don’t like to do that but I wasn’t about to sit and watch every minute of seven seasons of 90s tv star trek. though I did that for daredevil too cause that show is just boring as hell to me but I wanted to see punisher. I slogged through for frank castles war and benjamin sisko’s war. anyway, I think babylon 5 was the better 90s war space show. it was written almost entirely by one guy and that guy seemed to care about plotting out every little war and political thing and how one thing leads to this other thing and etc. and that would guide what the characters did. ds9 felt the other way around, like they would just arbitrarily decide how the war was going based on whatever kind of story they wanted to tell about a particular character that day. I think people make a bigger deal out of the the dominion war than it actually is, it’s in the background most of the time. though nothing in b5 is a hair on the ass of the episode “beyond the pale moonlight”, and the one where sisko is a writer in the 60s. also seeing somebody be a Good Dad all the time was more alien than any of the alien shit. also I like b5’s garish 90s purple blue color palette more than sleep inducing 90s star trek beige and burgandy. but it was alright.
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i like bryan fuller’s stuff in general and the rumor seems to be that it’s an anthology series where every season is a different ship/time period
seems like it might be neat
I’m pretty sure new Star Trek will suck.