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

The question is “will it be better than voyager” which is still ‘maybe’

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this is the best parody of a teaser trailer

if only it was on purpose

i don’t think any star trek series were known for having a strong first season. or second. i kind of doubt cbs will have the patience for a third.

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ds9 season 2 is actually pretty strong! It gets overlooked a lot but it has two absolutely great early episodes (Necessary Evil where Odo has a film noir episode, and Whispers which may be the first let’s-make-O’Brien-suffer episode), the start of a lot of on-going plots and the first attempts at serialized storytelling in trek. As well, while there were a few bad episodes, they were still much improved over the worst of season 1.

Also you’ve totally lost it if you think Star Trek TOS season 1 was bad in any way. I’m pretty sure it’s the reason the show became such a phenomenon, because that first season was astoundingly well made.

eheheh i haven’t watched TOS since i was six and was hoping no one would call me out on it X)

i couldn’t get through season one of DS9 on my first attempt, but since i finally finished the temkin/tulpa TNG watchlist last week i’ll probably be giving it another shot soon. i certainly want to like DS9; i just have to develop some fondness for the new characters (i absorbed a lot of TNG as an impressionable kid and that made rewatching the show much easier). this time around i’ll probably go through the Greatest Hits of the first two seasons and 100% the rest.

I didn’t watch DS9 all the way until I was an adult, because I was basically not nostalgic for the characters (DS9 was the ‘boring one’ when I was a child, though it is by far my favorite now)

if you’re following the temkin guide just for those first two seasons, you should be ok. I wouldn’t avoid season 2’s episodes too much, since they’re generally not bad most of the time.

rambling:

i think what’s kept me from coming back to TOS is that i enjoy TNG mostly for People Hanging Out on a Spaceship (Ensign Ro’s constant clash with Starfleet, Data being himself, Riker’s insecurity revealed through the hatred he has for his clone), and only really enjoy the non-serial plot for its occasional breakout success (The Offspring, The Inner Light, Tapestry). the impression i’ve gotten of TOS is that, at its best moments, it’s an anthology of golden age science fiction (sometimes with one of roddenberry’s then-progressive social messages) in which the recurring characters are purely archetypal and mostly incidental. which is cool! but i would rather be reading that stuff then watching it through the filter of 60’s television.

and when it’s not at its best… most of my vague memories are of a dumb blonde secretary baffled by a voice-recognition typewriter, and lots of instances of kirk getting laid in space, first on one anachronistic alternate earth, and then another.

i am probably being really uncharitable to it! if there’s an episode that you’d think would be a good barometer for how much i’d enjoy the show, i’ll give it a try

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Just watch Amok Time from TOS. It’s the second season premiere episode but it is rightly considered one of the best of the show and a very good introduction to the characters.

Or if you just want a well executed goofy comedy episode, The Naked Time in season 1 is great.

Note these are just episodes to get you hooked on the show, I happen to think a lot of episodes are very well-written.

It’s not an anthology show of golden age sci fi the way Twilight Zone was, as it is very much a character driven space opera. Amok Time, in particular, works because it is about Kirk and Spock, and you couldn’t really tell the same story without them (Though the episode is so iconic that it’s been parodied for decades. You’ve probably seen a few parodies of it.)

there’s a new trailer out for star trek beyond today, it seems like it reveals a bit more of what the actual movie will be like

i think as fast & furious in space it will probably be excellent, as anything resembling a real star track it will probably remain mediocre

but i sort of appreciate that they aren’t even trying to do anything other than star trek flavored space action movies anymore, as long as they don’t reveal that the villain is actually christopher lloyd’s character from III in disguise or something

Klingon is real now. Guess we won’t see them in the movies.

Ka’plah into that dark dark night you goobers.

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Captain’s Log, Supplemental. Our orbit, tightening. Our need for efficiency, critical.

oh, okay

But unknown to us, a totally new and unusual disease has been brought aboard.

…wait, what?

kirk simultaneously providing a diegetic mid-episode recap and acting as an omniscient narrator to make sure we didn’t miss any dramatic irony is one of the weirdest and funniest tricks of bad writing i’ve seen any star trek pull

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Amok Time didn’t do much for me personally. i understand its significance as star trek’s first real “character episode,” and there are conflicts here that should be compelling: spock’s self-concept in conflict with his body, kirk caught in a fight to the death yet unwilling to kill (though it’s left delightfully ambiguous what was going to happen before kirk lost consciousness)… but i don’t know if these conflicts were resolved so much as escaped, and anyway a lot of the narrative drive is lost amid all the shots of dudes in aluminum foil shaking bells at each other as the show, in classic star trek style, struggles to fill its hour time slot (okay, that wasn’t really filler, but still, the attempts to establish mood are awkward at the best of times).

i enjoyed Naked Time for spock’s well-performed breakdown (better than Amok’s, actually!), for the Enterprise still using an operator and for this being the ship’s greatest weak point, for its sets coming closer to evoking an art deco navy cruiser than TNG’s commercial airline in space, for future tech sitting next to windex bottles, and for the eleventh-hour twist that comes out of nowhere, has no bearing on the rest of the episode, and yet radically changes the show’s canon in a way that it almost certainly will never acknowledge. but i like most of these things in kind of a mean-spirited way, so i’m probably going to move on to something else after this.

I still haven’t watched Enterprise, and it’ll be a long time before I do, so I can’t speak to its treatment of time travel, but otherwise it’s just kind of treated as something that’s understood, only moderately dangerous to pull off, but heavily regulated, Prime Directive-style.

I will argue that diegetically the logs he is reading from were dictated after the events of the episode, and kirk being a giant ham, WOULD inject dramatic irony into a logfile.

Nonetheless, since you didnt dig either episode, there’s only one more I would suggest you try, City at the Edge of Forever, which is also a character driven episode but one I did not recommend because its an outlier of Star Trek in a few ways. It is one of the few cynical TOS episodes.

my favorite rihanna song

I’d watch a stop motion animated Star Trek movie.

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What about a puppet show like Thunderbirds

i have a bad feeling about this new Trek. How many times will they destroy that ship. I’m happy Rihanna is finally getting some attention for a song of hers.