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

Just started season 3. It is definitely getting better, like I said I am a slap so I was enjoying even season 1. The “sexy” scenes are pretty lame, but I have liked a lot of the baby’s first federation touch that is through the show. I am not a huge Bacula fan but he is a serviceable captain, Flox is just great though.

I didn’t hate neelix. There was something right about him being odd and alien and helping them along. I felt like there was some substance that they let slide with him though.

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Like everything else about the show, neelix suffered from the laziness of the writers. The character concept was fine. Quriky outsider that they keep around to act as a guide to local space, except they drop the latter part entirely and he just becomes another schmo except in the moments when the writers need a text dump to explain the premise of an episode and then suddenly neelix is an expert on the borg or some shit despite eking out an existence nowhere near borg space prior to the start of the show.

The same kind of laziness can be seen in how they encountered more borg after they already passed through borg space because borg episodes were consistently popular even when they were bad (which was almost always).

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… but I liked 7 of 9’s arc.

I did say ALMOST always. 7 of 9 is some sort of miracle. They cast an actress purely because of the size of her tits but then it turned out she could actually act (I only say this because this is obviously what the producers did. They tried to repeat this in Enterprise but Jolene Blalock was utterly incapable of acting so we were stuck with the worst vulcan for 4 years) and the writers found some inspiration in excavating her character for pathos.

The “funny” thing is that they cast her based on that, and then still made her wear basically a hard shell under the costume to make them bigger. With all this in mind, yeah, it is kinda amazing she turned out to be a decent character.

The Episode is called Nth Degree not Nth Dimension

Oh no, the continuum is going to come strip of my user title. 申し訳ありません。

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Is is weird that after hearing Abe from Hellboy got cast in the new series, I’m a little disappointed they’re backing away from lazy forehead aliens and getting into fancy suits and motion capture territory?

I think Voyager gets a bad wrap. People say it was ‘poorly written’ or has ‘inconsistent characters’ which is pretty funny. I mean sure you can point to some bad episodes in any syndicated show running 20+ episodes a season. For it being a wacky sci-fi characters did do some odd things. But each character had a core, mostly every story a point.
I think it’s less that Voyager is so great, but that what are we comparing it to? Next Gen? Characters would act completely differently and let all kinds of things go between episodes or re-learn a lesson once a season, Barkley being possibly the worst offender, yet his character made for some interesting moments because he was allowed to be flawed and not just temporary wrong.
Voyage wasn’t the ‘flagship’ and there was always to be tension in the crew, and they weren’t supposed to be as adept. Honestly it’s the one time we get a crew that felt more human than the ideals of people represented upon the Enterprise (NX) included.

Enterprise the show, gets a bad wrap as well. There are some terrible moments for hardcore fans in the first season, but it ends up showing growing pains and true tension with Humanity heading for the stars that it always resonated with me. Then to say anyone is portraying a Vulcan poorly with bad acting is… illogical? I mean acting is essentially best as I understand delivering lines and stage ques not just as on script but with believable emotion. If Vulcan’s aren’t supposed to display emotion, wouldn’t bad acting make for a good Vulcan?

This is an interesting thread also present in Beyond so maybe I should revisit ENT.

Voyager is actually My First Trek and I have fond memories watching it with my dad. He (a gay man) loves the Doctor and Seven because they (whether intentionally or not) explore coming to terms with identity.

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In hindsight, why the fuck didn’t Voyager or Enterprise have queer characters? Trumpeting a Sulu-hug in 2016 was weird.

ds9 did!

though at this point, pointing to ds9 and saying ‘look they already did it years ago’ is redundant.

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So, here’s the deal with T’Pol. Throughout the first season and parts of the later seasons, she’s always playing up the wrong emotions in any scenes she’s in, and it’s always some flavor of ‘angry’ as if that’s the only feeling she could consistently hit. Both Nimoy and Tim Russ could usually convey some kind of mood through their acting choices. It’s not like they were wooden blank-slates when on screen. Vulcans always have a kind of informed emotionlessness: we’re told that they don’t have or display emotions but they’re still played by human actors who still have and display emotions in their performances, even if tamped down by a degree of stoic reservedness.

T’pol on the other hand is basically angry or horny in any given scene, and both of those are absolutely the wrong cues for a vulcan character.

They even try to retcon/explain why the vulcans were so out of character in Enterprise by saying they’ve been secretly controlled by romulans or something.

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have they said it’s going to be mo cap yet? abe sapien was an actual costume and i think a lot of his other characters were too

don’t rule out new patterns on forehead ridges just yet, this is star trek after all

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voyager has a wonderful cast of talented actors but you can tell the lead writers were kind of fundamentally valueless. it definitely had great individual episodes but no real voice to it. i don’t mind that they didn’t have like ds9 level arcs but when you are very episodic having consistent characters matters a lot more

the maquis and feds would have tension/disagreements for like a little bit of season 1 and then like twice a season randomly

janeway is the wildest inconsistency willing to straight up torture one day and pacifist to the point of sacrifice the next. however much she wanted to get home in an episode was basically decided by whatever would cause the most story conflict. even kate mulgrew has said this in interviews

it wasn’t growing pains or character arcs it was just whoever was writing it

it’s like the difference between the tng movies picard and show picard except week to week and even crazier

they did a better job with the doctor/seven as far as overreaching plots go but even seven’s good character development was saddled with also runing the borg

and yes the level of bullshit tecnobabble deflector dish solutions is at a much higher level and straight up worse writing than tng

harry was definitely an accidental prototype for the various bland non-characters of ENT

i still actually enjoy the show a lot but it is a mess

Enterprise…

Yikes

First of all the theme song is great don’t let anyone tell you otherwise but

I watched the whole show and still could not really, truly tell you how Archer, Hoshi, Reed, or Mayweather, would act in a given situation beyond “they would do science” or “they would fight”.

Like just imagine those four playing poker together. How would they bounce off each other? What would the dynamic be like?

Bakula is great but it’s like he had a stick up his ass for the majority of the time.

Perfectly pleasant people, but they mostly don’t really have character traits so much as background descriptions.

This is where VOY is definitely head and shoulders better. The crew at least had a basic rapport with each other

Enterprise does have interesting actual characters: Phlox and Trip and Shran (who might have joined the crew in a season 5) all actually have personalities!

The time travel thing also really dragged everything down.

I guess they were trying to do a TOS thing where they only had main trio, but that really doesn’t work unless the stories are balanced for that. And it kind of just miraculously, barely worked on TOS because of Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley’s sheer charisma

anyway all the shows and movies are my good precious babies forever and i love them all* even the animated series
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*okay not nemesis or threshold or code of honor

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The absolute ice coldest repudiation of Roddenberry that DS9 ever really did was making all Humans and Vulcans in the mirror universe be conquered and enslaved because Kirk convinced Mirror Spock to seek peace. That’s way dirtier than any of the rest of “how the sausage gets made” stuff they did tbh

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Regarding Star Trek: Fuck J. J. Abrams alternate timeline bullshit.

I dunno I like that the only rule of the mirror universe is ‘no matter what things turn out for the worst’. It’s just the darkest timeline from community

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They had too much fun making Mirror Enterprise because there was way more passion than on the rest of the series

Anyway please subscribe to my weekly newsletter about how the entire Mirrorverse is a direct sequel to the television show 24

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