That said it’s weird how much Lower Decks and Strange New worlds seem like they exist in the same universe as each other but barely in the other NuTreks, even though SNW is a freaking discovery spin-off
That episode and the one right before it are the best Trek anything in decades the more I think about it
I could not stand Lower Decks’ dialogue on its first season but this is perfectly fine: I tolerate Discovery where others loathe it, I have not watched a second of Picard. I’m glad these shows aren’t homogenous. I will try again with this season
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I was so distracted by DS9 I missed that it has General Martok being voiced by the guy who actually played General Martok
God I know it’s fan service but they’ve been having enough fun with it I don’t care
finished my slow-ass rewatch of Voyager, and man, Endgame feels so sudden
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I’m really hoping they have live-action segments with the LD voice actors generally looking like their counterparts, acting against the SNW crew. That would be an absolute treat with this group of actors.
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now I’m onto the episode where the DS9 crew do a casino heist
man, DS9 rules
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I can’t sit through more than 10 minutes of non-TNG/DS9 trek and I’ve probably watched every episode of both at least twice
more power to everyone who tries to like star trek that wasn’t produced between 1987 and 1999
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fun to read leguin in an old tv guide enjoying TNG
My Appointment with the Enterprise
An Appreciation
By Ursula K. Le Guin
For years now I’ve had an appointment with the crew of the Enterprise, two nights a week. It’s hard to remember that at first I didn’t like the program. I said things like, “If Q knows everything, how can he be so stupid? And if Wesley is 15, how can he know everything?” But then I caught a rerun of “The Offspring,” in which Data builds a daughter, and I was hooked.
It’s been fascinating to watch Brent Spiner develop the physical and psychological subtleties of a role that might have been just another jerky android. The casting of the show was superb from the start. Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, and Majel Barrett brought depth and complexity to the conventionally feminine roles of Dr. Crusher, Counselor Troi and Lwaxana Troi. Many of us wish that Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) and Ens. Ro (Michelle Forbes) had stayed on board to shake things up, but at least we got Whoopi Goldberg wearing those great hats. The lead male actors, all impressive separately, were also great team players, their characters changing and deepening in relation to one another.
Worf (Michael Dorn) was my first love. That voice, Richter 6.5-that forehead-those dark, worried eyes-those ethical problems! The glimpses of Klingon dynastic struggles were like Shakespeare’s plays about the kings of England, full of quarrels and treachery and kinfolk at each other’s throats-just like a family Christmas. I love that stuff. Worf, caught between two worlds, was a powerful figure, tragic. Being in love with him I thought was safe, until I saw the episode in which Capt. Picard (Patrick Stewart) lives a whole life in 25 minutes, and then the one where he revisits his home and brother in France. Such a strong, sensitive, intelligent man, so short, so bald, so beautiful-well, so I’m a bigamist.
My favorite episode may be the one where Picard is alone with Capt. Dathon (Paul Winfield), an alien whose language is all myth and metaphor. A beautiful idea, and the way the alien’s soul shone through his ugly, piggish, snouted face was magic.
The Next Generation never had a simplistic concept of Us/Nice/Real People vs. Them/Ugly/Villains. Of course, there are bad guys out there. When the Klingons turned into real people, the Romulans and Cardassians were waiting-but they keep turning into real people, too. The Borg was a great embodiment of Evil-mechanical evil, absence of souL Hence the power of the episode where Picard, the very soul of the Enterprise, became a Borg: Anybody, even the best man, can lose his soul. This is a genuinely scary idea, a mature concept. Violence, on The Next Generation, is shown as a problem, or the failure to solve a problem, never as the true solution. This is surely one reason why the show has such a following among grown women and men.
Lots of young people watch it, too, of course, and, recently, at a conference about science fiction, one of them told me why: “A lot of science fiction shows us a future just like now, only worse,” she said. “I like The Next Generation because it shows us a future I could live in.”
What I myself like best about it is the way it transforms vision. The best example of this magic is Geordi’s visor. At fist, I saw Geordi (LeVar Burton) as a blind guy with a prosthetic device. I don’t know when the transformation happened-when I began to see him, and got uncomfortable when he took his visor off. I felt this discomfort even in one dream sequence where his eyes were perfectly normal. Who cares about “normal,” when what you care about is Geordi?
This is what science fiction does best. It challenges our idea of what we see as like ourselves. It increases our sense of kinship.
And it was Gene Roddenberry’s legacy to a great writing and production team. Naturally fearless and innovative, Gene never stopped learning. He knew television’s power to persuade by showing, and wanted to use that power well. On the Enterprise, we see the difference of racial and alien types, gender difference, handicaps, apparent deformities, all accepted simply as different ways of being human. In this, The Next Generation has been light-years ahead of its predecessors, its imitators, and practically everything else on television. The continuing mission of the Starship Enterprise has been to take us out of the smog of fear and hate into an open space where difference is opportunity, and justice matters, and you can still see the stars.
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In the first pitch document that we sent to the network… we opened with a question asking, “What if we just did Star Trek?” And they said, “Okay.”
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Lower Decks is back on. was a little surprised at how fast they wrapped up the big drama but it’s sort of in line with the show’s ethos in general. they have set up semi interesting season stakes though. the bozeman theme park was actually inspired it actually makes perfect sense with how the TNG crew reacted to Cochrane in first contact. Cromwell is 82 and still kickin, vegan diet treated him right
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they were not brave enough to go the full roger rabbit route but yes boimler and mariner will be in live action on SNW
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First ep of Lower Decks this season was pretty rough but I really liked this second one, particularly the Mariner stuff. I like when she fucks up and has to fix it.
Kinda weird how the Predator alien was just a taurian
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Great interview with Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan, starts at 4:00
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Loved this latest ep, “Room for Growth”, a lot. I think this season’s really shaping up to be a good one.
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Watched this one again, a few things I particularly liked:
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Animation seems a lot more expressive this season, feels like more gags are just about the characters’ physicality rather than general craziness.
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Mariner’s rapidly-growing certainty that the Bold Boimz strate will get him killed gets a laugh out of me every time.
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It’s kind of insane that they ever killed of Shax, considering what a pillar of this show he is. I love his sub-plot with T’Anna, with he being the more reserved of the two. You can absolutely see how these two would be into each other.
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Enjoying how this show is at once very horny and also not at all horny, with everyone in this Starship Troopers-like post-shame military where there’s nothing erotic about nudity, everyone’s just horny for calibrating Heisenberg compensators.
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Still feel like Rutherford is the weakest character, but eps like this really go a long way toward giving him more character moments. It’s nice seeing him get mad or fuck up every now and then, feels like he’s normally so blandly affable. It’s deranged how he for some reason has a vulcan cyberbrain thing and it just never comes up in the show, three seasons in.
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Love whenever they bring in those fucked-up TAS three-arm aliens, or any TAS elements for that matter.
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I feel like mushroom-trip sequences tend to fall really flat, but they work here due in large part to LD going whole hogg on animating each thing they were hallucinating and keeping it consistent. Really enjoyed that bit, particularly the egg-hatching gag.
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Glad to finally get more proper Rutherford backstory. He’s been really underserved by the show in general. Kinda wild that this is the first time, even vaguely, that we have got anything close to verification of the post DS9 timeline of Sisko, despite there being four (or five sorta) entire tv shows that take place after the end of DS9. Delighted the consipracy theorists mentioned the weird bugs from “Conspiracy” that were just weirdly never mentioned again because I think IRL they were just replaced with The Borg from a narrative standpoint. I honestly think Lower Decks should pick up on that plot and close it off that could be fun.
also how dare they
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Goddddd Rutherford cannot carry an episode