Star Trek Thread: Nemesis 2: Nemeses, etc. (Part 1)

[Alyx]

I don’t like Lower Decks. I don’t really expect that to change. I’ll probably watch a few episodes here and there, but I’m not really holding out any hope that I’ll like it any better.

I’m still holding out a little hope that Picard gets better. Marc Bernardin got hired on as a writer/producer for season 2. He seems like the sort of guy who gets Trek and could sway the writers in the right direction. If Season 2 is bad I’ll probably stop watching.

The Orville is the good Trek show right now. I’m looking forward to Season 3.

TNG had a bunch of two part episodes where the hook was whether or not Captain Picard was going to get replaced, but the answer always ended up being no. If The Orville did one of those but the answer was yes, we might actually get a show on par with TNG.

[VastleCania]

i charged my oculus quest so i could watch deep space 9 on a fake tv in a fake cabin

[VastleCania]

actually this is kinda like running the holodeck so you can play the dead sport of baseball or whatever so i think we’re officially in the future now folks

[Sleazy]

re:today’s lower decks: i liked that mariner finally played something that is not classical or jazz at one of those goofy little ship recitals although i wished she played “i hate you” specifically. the miles o’brien gag at the end was the best use of canon possible hahaha. still wish the orion girl was more well defined as a character, but it’s still pretty solid. also i remembered the tv show “other space” (which also had eugene cordero) and maybe that actually was my favorite trek parody overall

[Mothra]

God I would kill for another season of Other Space. Right in that Galaxy Quest vein of being parody in concept but quickly running with its own thing.

Could never get enough of:

• The crew casually revealing how radically values have progressed or changed in the future without patting themselves on the back about it.

• Joel essentially being a millennial space boomer.

• Neil Casey’s character having absolutely everything wrong with him for being a vat-grown PARTS THE CLONUS HORROR slime clone.

[u_u]

yeah other space was great! there’s another animated netflix circle-eyes show called “final space” and whenever i see it i think it’s an other space spin off and get disappointed all over again

[swarm]

The Kirk drop kick is back, baby!!!

[Mothra]

The best part of this latest ep was them establishing that everyone in Starfleet defaults to either the Double-Fist Kirk Back-Whammer or the awkward jumping double-kick when embroiled in a battle to the death.

[Mothra]

Okay I’ve finished Star Trek Continues. Overall, very impressed. They really nail the TOS feel, particularly in the mannerisms of the core cast. Somehow they managed to do this without feeling like everyone’s doing impressions.

It is ALSO a lot like TOS in that like half of them suck. I would say every episode has good parts, but only certain episodes are all-the-way good. The bad ones are just boring. The good ones are delightful.

Star Trek Continues: All Episodes

Episode 1: Pilgrim of Eternity - Alright, but can skip. Sequel to “Who Mourns for Adonis?” Apollo’s actor returns and is good, Kirk is good, their scenes are solid TOS Trek. A little rough character-wise otherwise. The McCoy actor is weird, he later gets replaced by someone way better. I never really cared for the Greek Gods thing so this one didn’t really land for me.

Episode 2: Lotani - Sucks, skip. This one’s about the Orion slave girl trade, which like, yeah they shouldn’t tolerate slavers in the 23rd century, but it’s sorta just a slog to watch.

Episode 3: Fairest of Them All - Pretty fun ep, but not much story-wise. This is a direct sequel to the mirror universe episode, following mirror-Spock as he attempts to take control of the Terran Empire.

Episode 4: The White Iris - Eh? Kinda boring. A little bit of a sequel to “Requiem for Methuselah,” which I’ve never seen. Kirk deals with guilt over various deaths and losses throughout the show. This does mark where they change McCoy’s actor, and the new one is like one of the best actors on the show.

Episode 5: Divided We Fall - Watch. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. Standard TOS premise of “Kirk and Bones somehow get sent back in time to the U.S. civil war.” Cool seeing the character of M’Benga come back as the next ranking medical guy.

Episode 6: Come Not Between the Dragons - Watch, this was an enjoyable one, if a little cheesy sometimes. Good practical effects on the rock monster, and it’s fun seeing the crew lose their minds. A little heavy-handed with the ending though.

Episode 7: Embracing the Winds - Skip. Tiresome episode about income inequality (sorta), mostly with the entire episode involving Kirk arguing for the enstatement of the first female captain of a Constitution-class ship.

Episode 8: Still Treads the Shadows - Watch. A little cliche with the duplicated Kirk, but it goes in a cool direction as it goes on.

Episode 9: What Ships Are For - Must-watch. Loved this one. Very classic TOS, good story, good acting.

Episode 10 and 11: To Boldly Go - Watch. Loved seeing some returning characters, great speech by Kirk to close out TOS and set up the movies. Sequel to “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.

[Sleazy]

re:“moist vessel”

i mean kind of a low bar but this weeks lower decks is honestly one of the best star trek episodes in years? just like a perfect mix of high concept scifi and character stuff. great visual gags, great exploration of real dirty lower decks concepts, just actually good sitcom writing. like this is really showing the potential of doing the reverse roddenberry where everyone is flawed and no one gets along. was like a solid futurama episode which is much more than i thought they could pull off. i hope if they get a season 2 they can build on this kind of thing. cant wait for memory alpha to explain “clean the cum out of the fuck filter”

[Mothra]

Rough first quarter but yeah the entire core plot of this was great. Fun concept, great visuals that ride out the animated format for all its worth. Actually had moments right out of a cool TNG ep.

Almost wish they’d dropped the main guy/cyborg/tellarite stuff entirely to make more space for the orion girl’s plot.

[swarm]

Yeah if we get a T’Ana + Tendi focused ep this season I’ll lose it.

[boojiboy7]

@Mothra

Double-Fist Kirk Back-Whammer

This is called a “double axe handle” and pro wrestlers use it all the time and it is never not funny to me. Also it has a whole history of being used on DBZ.

[Mothra]

@boojiboy7

double axe handle

My wrestling friends also call it the “Masher”:

In professional wrestling, the double axe handle is a staple move. Everyone does it, it’s generic and does no damage. But in olden times, coming off the top rope and hitting someone with a double axe handle would absolutely clobber them. So it’s been my half-ironic favorite move for a few years, where I’m always loving when people land a good masher.

But the top-rope DAH is also prone to being a flying nothing, where you jump off the ropes with seemingly no plan of your own, as a setup for your opponent to counter you. And a good flying nothing is truly great in a way that only the best double axe handle could be.

Apparently it was a staple of cowboy movies and old Bond movies back in the day, and the stunt coordinator for TNG/DS9/VOY just drew from what he remembered of TOS as a kid:

From this:

According to Dennis Madalone, who served as stunt coordinator on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, that isn’t necessarily the case. As he revealed in an interview with Motherboard, the later Trek series gave him free reign when coordinating the fight scenes, allowing him to draw inspiration from the Kirk/Gorn fight.

“It was something I saw as a kid - when I saw Kirk fighting back then, that was the one move that stuck in my mind.” Madalone explained. “That was a move that looked more realistic [for Star Trek] than the old cowboy punches, because those didn’t work for me in any futuristic context.”

From this:

The way Madalone tells it, there was very little oversight from the higher-ups on set regarding how fights should look. It was up to him. (This likely precludes the notion that there’s some thought-through, in-universe explanation for the move.) Madalone was simply after something that looked uniquely Star Trek . He had a green light to do what he wanted, and he wanted to make the show’s action look “futuristic,” he said.

“When you’re doing something in the future, you can’t show the old cowboy punches,” Madalone said, referring to the fighting style on Western TV shows. You know the move: The good guy leans back, winds up one arm, and lands a righteous haymaker. In contrast, Madalone said, “the double-hit looked modern, futuristic, and not barbaric.”

That’s not to say that Madalone is claiming to have invented the double ax-handle on television. He had inspiration, including the original 60s Star Trek series and Westerns.

I looked around online and found a few threads where Trek fans attempt and fail to theorize any in-canon reason why Starfleet would use this move all the time. The diehard ones are completely baffled because there is truly no explaination for why anyone would use the move:

“The punch takes away everything about a punch that makes it dangerous,” Corey Erdman, a boxing analyst who hosts The Breakdown podcast on Showtime Sports, said over the phone. “By clasping your hands together, you’re taking away your own torque and hip mobility. If you punch with one hand, you can have full force. If you clasp your hands together, it’s going to be painfully slow.”

I love the idea that it’s used constantly for some completely valid reason we’re just never, ever told. Like it’s the optimum anti-alien technique for most non-human species or something.

Anyways, I’ve seen it used on Discovery a few times (I think Michael uses it in the fight with the nanobot-infused bad guy in S2), so it’s heartening to see the legacy carried on.

[boojiboy7]

Oh yeah, at one point I made a James T. Kirk in a 360 era WWE game just so he could drop the Axe Handles as his finisher. It was solid.

[Mothra]

TrekCore.com ➡️Spoilers After Saturday @ 9AM ET⬅️ (TrekCore)

There it is. Was Ash, turns out.

[ticky]

I’m finally watching through TNG (mid S3) and DS9 (early S6) having grown up around Voyager, and I think I’m starting to understand why Voyager seems to get a bad rap.

Voyager is cool but very tied to having to come up with new things for the characters to do in largely the same set of circumstances each week. TNG and DS9 have the run of the entire Alpha quadrant and all its geopolitics and meanderings. But it means that while Janeway is busy reprimanding the EMH for plagiarising Data’s homework for the third time, TNG is trying to handle de-escalation of a botched first contact and DS9 grapples with the uneasy feelings of seeing tragedy approach and trying to work out the path of least harm.

I also have to wonder how much of my being dazzled by TNG is the incredible cast and how much is that it’s the only modern one which will probably ever get a decent transfer to digital

I love Voyager still, but I think I’m learning that I love this era of Trek in general. Perhaps as semi-concurrent takes on an idea they each stand on their own merits but in isolation the balance is worse? hmm

[VastleCania]

voyager is horny
tng is corny
ds9 is…warry? losing the momentum here
farscape is corny and horny
but they’re all…good…

[VastleCania]

farscape is star trek btw, in case anyone wasn’t aware

[ticky]

Voyager is so horny I don’t understand why it’s the one my parents thought it was okay for me to see, lmao. I feel like TNG is pretty horny too, just in a much more extremely boring-80s-heterosexual way and less of a “oh hi jeri ryan here are your character’s casual clothes what do you mean why does it have a corset of course heels are practical on a starship”

EDIT: fuck I forgot that one of the last Voyager eps I saw was the one where the EMH kept having horny dreams about the women crew members fighting for him, jfc

DS9 feels like the one in which interpersonal relationships felt most valued and explored? I really like the way it handles characters

and wow, don’t remind me I need to watch more of Farscape someday…