Facebook invents a new day in April
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@Xyro said:
I liked those Ferengi episodes; they were campy, fun, and usually made sense.
I hate to say it but... me too.
The episode where the Ferengi were the Roswell aliens was fucking hilarious. As was the episode where they tried to trade a (live) prisoner to release Quark's mom or something, but one of their pathetic squad of useless mercenaries they hired accidentally shot the prisoner, so they installed something in his spine to remote-control him.
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@Xyro said:
I liked those Ferengi episodes; they were campy, fun, and usually made sense. For as comical as the Ferengi were, their society was at least internally logical, unlike the otherwise much cooler Klingons.
I like the Ferengi race, but the Ferengi-heavy episodes were so tedious. It was always just Quark doing something unethical, jokes about how greedy the Ferengi are, jokes about how ruthless the Ferengi are.. They would have been okay subplots within a real episode, but as standalones it was like "Why??"
@Xyro said:
(How did Klingons ever settle down to invent space technology??)
I thought they stole it from an invading force.
@Xyro said:
Also, while Jadzia's on-screen death was pretty pathetic, Dax's return also made complete sense. The Dax symbiote was always part of the story, and the passing on of the symbiote was explained numerous times. I can't think of a better way to resurrect a character.
Why did they need to resurrect the character at all? The Dax symbiote was cool and all, but hardly integral to the primary story arc and unnecessary in the final season. And for most of that season, Ezri was just an annoying (albeit hot) spaz. There was no reason to bring Dax back (especially in such a ham-fisted fashion). At best, they could have just had someone say something like "Yeah, so the Dax symbiote made it back to Trill and is in a new host body; everything turned out okay with that dangling plot thread." My guess is Terry Farrell was the main sex appeal on the show and they figured they needed a replacement if they wanted to cash in with a post-show movie or two. But it felt like really sloppy writing for a show of (up to that point) reasonable quality.
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@Xyro said:
@morbiuswilters said:
I think fans just like it because it makes them feel smart "Oh, hey, I recognize that reference!"
Isn't that the whole MO of Family Guy?The entire MO of Family Guy is to piss me off with shitty writing and humorless "jokes". I'd rather watch a new episode of The Simpsons than that garbage.
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@blakeyrat said:
The episode where the Ferengi were the Roswell aliens was fucking hilarious. As was the episode where they tried to trade a (live) prisoner to release Quark's mom or something, but one of their pathetic squad of useless mercenaries they hired accidentally shot the prisoner, so they installed something in his spine to remote-control him.
Yeah, both of those were pretty funny, but it seemed like there were dozens of episodes about the politics of Ferenginar. It's like the Ferengi started out as the sleazy comic relief but at some point the writers were like "Hey, we should try making them into quasi-noble characters who play integral roles in the plot" so they had to come up ham-fisted ways of endearing them to the viewer. And it's not like I would have minded a few of the Ferengi making noble sacrifices, but that still doesn't mean you have to write entire episodes about Brandt.
TL;DR If they had cut some of the crappy episodes, they could have wrapped things up in 6 seasons and we never would have experienced the shame of Ezri.
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@morbiuswilters said:
And it's not like I would have minded a few of the Ferengi making noble sacrifices, but that still doesn't mean you have to write entire episodes about Brandt.
The actor who played Brunt also played Weyoun. My mind was blown I was particularly impressed when I came to realize that. What a great actor.
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@Xyro said:
@morbiuswilters said:
And it's not like I would have minded a few of the Ferengi making noble sacrifices, but that still doesn't mean you have to write entire episodes about Brandt.
The actor who played Brunt also played Weyoun. My mind was blown I was particularly impressed when I came to realize that. What a great actor.
Yeah, he's played like a dozen Star Trek characters. Definitely very good. I still think Marc Alaimo (Dukat) is the best actor on that show and one of the best villains of all time.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Yeah, he's played like a dozen Star Trek characters. Definitely very good. I still think Marc Alaimo (Dukat) is the best actor on that show and one of the best villains of all time.
The last season completely ruined both him and Kai Winn as villains, though. Dukat was great, but I actually liked Kai Winn more-- in the episodes before they made her into a cackling witch-monster-- because (with very few exceptions) you could always tell that she was doing what she genuinely believed was the right thing to do. She didn't desire power because she was an egotist or psychopath or whatever, she desired it because she genuinely thought she could do a better job of leading the planet. Which is how most "villains" in real life are. She even got that moment where, Kira was criticizing her motives on some action, and Kai Winn came back with that excellent speech about how she was fighting for Bajoran freedom, in her own way, just as much as Kira was in her own way. Hell, she was on the show like a half-dozen times before you even knew she was supposed to be considered a "villain".
Dukat was great until that episode where it turns out before he handed DS9 over to the Bajorans, he'd installed hundreds of booby-traps in the computer and all those booby-traps started doing stupid shit like replicating phasers on the bridge and trapping Cisco in a dump and whatever that episode was goddamned lame. Voyager actually did one of those goddamned lame episodes too, only with Seska as the villain. Goddamned lame.
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@blakeyrat said:
Dukat was great until that episode where it turns out before he handed DS9 over to the Bajorans, he'd installed hundreds of booby-traps in the computer and all those booby-traps started doing stupid shit like replicating phasers on the bridge and trapping Cisco in a dump and whatever that episode was goddamned lame. Voyager actually did one of those goddamned lame episodes too, only with Seska as the villain. Goddamned lame.
Howso? You mean you don't do that at work?
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@blakeyrat said:
The last season completely ruined both him and Kai Winn as villains, though. Dukat was great, but I actually liked Kai Winn more-- in the episodes before they made her into a cackling witch-monster-- because (with very few exceptions) you could always tell that she was doing what she genuinely believed was the right thing to do. She didn't desire power because she was an egotist or psychopath or whatever, she desired it because she genuinely thought she could do a better job of leading the planet. Which is how most "villains" in real life are. She even got that moment where, Kira was criticizing her motives on some action, and Kai Winn came back with that excellent speech about how she was fighting for Bajoran freedom, in her own way, just as much as Kira was in her own way. Hell, she was on the show like a half-dozen times before you even knew she was supposed to be considered a "villain".
Agree 100% on Kai Winn. I liked her as a villain because you could partially empathize with her. You felt like maybe she could be redeemed, but her downfall was pride. But then the writers were like "You know what this show needs? More unbelievable, cookie-cutter, remorseless, cackling bad guys!" and then her character sucked.
@blakeyrat said:
Dukat was great until that episode where it turns out before he handed DS9 over to the Bajorans, he'd installed hundreds of booby-traps in the computer and all those booby-traps started doing stupid shit like replicating phasers on the bridge and trapping Cisco in a dump and whatever that episode was goddamned lame.
I don't even remember that. I thought Dukat was badass throughout. I mean, when he had plastic surgery to turn himself into a Bajoran just so he could bury his Pah Wraith in Kai Winn's wormhole I was like "Holy shit, this guy is one sick fuck, I love it".
I do think he's the better "classic" villain just because he's so damn treacherous. Part of it is bearing and attitude, too; it feels like if Kai Winn got up in your grill you could just shove her down some stairs or smother her with a pillow, but running into Dukat would make me shit myself.
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@morbiuswilters said:
Agree 100% on Kai Winn. I liked her as a villain because you could partially empathize with her. You felt like maybe she could be redeemed, but her downfall was pride. But then the writers were like "You know what this show needs? More unbelievable, cookie-cutter, remorseless, cackling bad guys!" and then her character sucked.
"Yeah, let's have her LITERALLY POSSESSED BY A DEMON! That's the best way to handle a complex, morally-ambivalent, character!" Worst ever. DS9 would have been better if they never had a season 7.
@morbiuswilters said:
I don't even remember that. I thought Dukat was badass throughout. I mean, when he had plastic surgery to turn himself into a Bajoran just so he could bury his Pah Wraith in Kai Winn's wormhole I was like "Holy shit, this guy is one sick fuck, I love it".
Civil Defense. It was only season 3, which is weird because in my brain it was a much later episode, like season 6 maybe. It was still stupid though, although admittedly less stupid than the Voyager version of same. (For one thing, at least Dukat realistically had enough time with the DS9 computer to set up the traps, unlike Seska with Voyager's computer. Also, Voyager's version was a holodeck episode and those always suck*.)
Yeah but again, all that Pah Wraith stuff was shit. Total shit. Dukat came out better from it than Kai Winn, but it shat all over both characters. (And! In the final episode it even shat all over Far Beyond the Stars which is goddamned inexcusable.
*) BTW, reading that episode summary, it mentions that Seska's program "burnt out the transporter relays" to explain why they can't simply beam the crewmembers off of the holodeck. But... Voyager has shuttles. And the shuttles have transporters. And the shuttles have independent computers and power supplies... soooooooooo why not use the shuttle transporters to beam them off the holodeck? Once you notice that little plot hole, every "transporter is malfunctioning" episode in every Star Trek series becomes fucking stupid in retrospect.
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@blakeyrat said:
Worst ever. DS9 would have been better if they never had a season 7.
That's my central thesis. Obviously, the story arc involving the Dominion War needed to be wrapped up, but I think they could have trimmed some of the fat from the earlier seasons and still managed to fit it in.
@blakeyrat said:
Civil Defense. It was only season 3, which is weird because in my brain it was a much later episode, like season 6 maybe.
Oh yeah, I remember that one now. I thought the premise was kind of silly but I did like pre-recorded Dukat showing up on the station's screens repeatedly to tell the "rebels" that harsher measures were being taken against them.
@blakeyrat said:
Yeah but again, all that Pah Wraith stuff was shit. Total shit. Dukat came out better from it than Kai Winn, but it shat all over both characters.
I remember watching that laughable episode where a Pah Wraith possesses Jake and makes him fight a Prophet-possessed Kira and thinking "So, that's how it's going to be, is it?"
@blakeyrat said:
(And! In the final episode it even shat all over Far Beyond the Stars which is goddamned inexcusable.
I actually don't remember anything having to do with Far Beyond the Stars in that episode. What did they do?
@blakeyrat said:
*) BTW, reading that episode summary, it mentions that Seska's program "burnt out the transporter relays" to explain why they can't simply beam the crewmembers off of the holodeck. But... Voyager has shuttles. And the shuttles have transporters. And the shuttles have independent computers and power supplies... soooooooooo why not use the shuttle transporters to beam them off the holodeck? Once you notice that little plot hole, every "transporter is malfunctioning" episode in every Star Trek series becomes fucking stupid in retrospect.
It wouldn't be Star Trek if in nearly episode they conveniently forget that they have transporters and replicators. There are so many episodes where it's like "Just replicate a goddamn knife and stab the bastard!" (Or it turns out the transporters/phasers/shields don't work with the frequencies of a newly-discovered foe until some engineer figures out how to make it work against their frequencies, or whatever. That's what 24th century science is like: trying to pick up broadcasts from 200-mile-away city on your grandfather's AM radio.)
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@morbiuswilters said:
@blakeyrat said:
(And! In the final episode it even shat all over Far Beyond the Stars which is goddamned inexcusable.
I actually don't remember anything having to do with Far Beyond the Stars in that episode. What did they do?
Sorry it was not the last episode, it was the episode Shadows and Symbols, part of the whole 4-5 episode series that wrapped up season 6 and led into season 7. The "Pah Wraith" brings back the image of Far Beyond the Stars in order to, I dunno, torture Sisko? It was confusing to me honestly, but mostly I was pissed that it degraded the original episode.
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@blakeyrat said:
@morbiuswilters said:
@blakeyrat said:
(And! In the final episode it even shat all over Far Beyond the Stars which is goddamned inexcusable.
I actually don't remember anything having to do with Far Beyond the Stars in that episode. What did they do?
Sorry it was not the last episode, it was the episode Shadows and Symbols, part of the whole 4-5 episode series that wrapped up season 6 and led into season 7. The "Pah Wraith" brings back the image of Far Beyond the Stars in order to, I dunno, torture Sisko? It was confusing to me honestly, but mostly I was pissed that it degraded the original episode.
Oh God, yeah, that was so obnoxious. I didn't even understand what was going on. So the Pah Wraith can control Sisko's thoughts and make him believe whatever it wants? Aren't there, like, a million more useful ways to manipulate him than making him think he was in an old episode (which itself was, like, a dream or something)? Maybe what we saw were the producers trying to actually torture Avery Brooks by ruining his episode?
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@morbiuswilters said:
Maybe what we saw were the producers trying to actually torture Avery Brooks by ruining his episode?
Well, method acting. His role in that little segment was to act like a tortured artist, so they took a shit over his best work.
