Star trek: the animated series has cool aliens (the blakeyrat is watching star trek thread)





  • Odo is doing a guest spot on Enterprise. Episode Oasis.

    He looks totally different without the makeup, but his voice is distinctive enough you just know everybody's going, "hey, it's Odo!"

    EDIT: not only does it guest-star Odo, but the episode is a rehash of a DS9 episode that starred Odo. Huh.



  • Malcolm: "It can't be ethical for a doctor to cause this much pain!"

    Phlox: "My oath is against causing harm. I can inflict as much pain as I want."

    Haha.



  • Voyager: Future's End.

    Tuvok is wearing a do-rag. I'm speechless.



  • Tim Russ = the best


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Bort said:

    Tuvok is wearing a do-rag.

    Presumably there were no mechanical rice-pickers around.



  • Enterprise is not a good show, but one thing I appreciate: when Enterprise gets its ass-kicked near the end of season 2, it stays ass-kicked. It doesn't get magically-repaired between episodes like Voyager always did.



  • Well, of course not. Enterprise takes place before some genius realized that the same principle that allows the transporter can also be used to create replacement parts out of thin nothing.


  • BINNED

    Cue plotline of:

    A: Oh noes! The high energy faucet thiggamabob is broked and we have no spares! We need to find an alien culture that uses whacahmacallits as well and buy an incompatible part from them that we'll patch into our system using quantum duck tape!
    B: Dude, replicator?
    A: You can't replicate faucets, don't be silly!
    B: Why not?
    A: Quantum!


  • FoxDev

    Provided that you put enough matte/energy into the system.... Sure, that could work.



  • After re-watching some Voyager, I'm come to the conclusion that Neelix is basically the Jar-Jar Binks of Star Trek.

    Seeing Tuvok fucking murder him for being an annoying retard in the episode "Meld" gave me great satisfaction:

    Star Trek Voyager: Tuvok Kills Neelix – 02:54
    — marshmallowmarshall



  • I liked Neelix, once Kes left.

    That episode where he dies, then becomes depressed when he realizes there's no afterlife, is one of my favorites. And that's despite it featuring Chakotay, A.K.A. The Human Boredom.

    So you know it's good.



  • Season 3 of Enterprise, with the Xindi plot, is actually pretty damned well-constructed and clever. It suffers from two flaws:

    1. We had to wade through 2 seasons of stupid moronic "temporal cold war" bullshit to get to it and
    2. It ends with the UNIVERSE'S DUMBEST CLIFFHANGER

    (Also did you notice the Xindi aquatic ship ends up stranded in 1945 too? And nobody notices or comments on this? At all? WTF.)



  • @blakeyrat said:

    UNIVERSE'S DUMBEST CLIFFHANGER

    [spoiler][/spoiler]



  • Dumber than that. About equal to this one:



  • What the fuck? I came back to this thread and now the image is bigger than my dhromebook's screen and the 1px blurring does absolutely nothing to hide the spoiler.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    No, that one's more like "assholiest cliffhanger".



  • The 4th season of Enterprise is:

    1. Nothing but shameless fanwank

    2. Shockingly better than all other seasons



  • Also when they do a Mirror Universe episode, they go ALL FUCKING OUT.

    They re-edit the scene from First Contact so the humans shoot the shit out of all the Vulcans (carefully edited so they didn't have to pay James Cromwell any money), they change the theme song (arguably to a significantly better one than every other episode has) and opening montage to show only warships, it's awesome. Like... actual effort.

    I bet some editor was cackling with glee, having a blast doing that alternative montage.

    EDIT: I especially like the scene where they go to the bridge of the Constellation Class Defiant, using the old 1967 sets (or more likely the duplicate built for Vegas) and are all like, "wow it's so high-tech!"



  • @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT: I especially like the scene where they go to the bridge of the Constellation Class Defiant, using the old 1967 sets (or more likely the duplicate built for Vegas) and are all like, "wow it's so high-tech!"

    There doesn't seem to be "futuristic" fiction that isn't set in the distant future of the 1980s. CRT monitors everywhere.



  • @ben_lubar said:

    There doesn't seem to be "futuristic" fiction that isn't set in the distant future of the 1980s.

    Normal Enterprise has LCD screens. Or... I don't get what you mean.



  • This has always bothered me.



  • That's not true; Star Trek ships that are drifting do not meet like that. Also, Empok Nor in DS9 the abandoned unmaintained space station always appears at a weird Bat Man-villain-esque angle.

    Presumably they all have some agreement to stay lined-up with the galaxy disk or something, just like they have an agreement to all use the same "hailing" communication handshake method which is just never mentioned explicitly by the show.

    (Although the "hailing" method makes less sense in Voyager, since those civilizations never contacted ones that contacted Earth so... whatever, don't think too hard about it.)


  • BINNED

    Your mind just wouldn't process it right

    Disagree! I'm completely fine with this. I don't see the big problem with it, really.



  • Well they also have magical gravity (except for one spot halfway between the grav-plate and the I-forget, where you can sit on the ceiling), so your mind is always expecting down to be consistent.

    I always plan saucers or cylinders for big ships, so as to have them rotate for centrifugal gravity, and it can be a pain to get your mind into the right frame of reference, but I feel much better for having something at least vaguely plausible, and when there are 180 degrees of 'down' just in one ship it's a lot more comfortable to have two ships that don't line up. Shuttles and small craft just won't have gravity.



  • @CarrieVS said:

    Well they also have magical gravity (except for one spot halfway between the grav-plate and the I-forget, where you can sit on the ceiling), so your mind is always expecting down to be consistent.

    Only Enterprise mentioned the grav-plating, all other series left it unsaid. IIRC. I like the episode where the mirror universe guys defeat the Gorn by turning up the gravity over a specific plate to 20g so the Gorn can't move.

    Oh wait, that episode where Sisko builds the ancient Bajoran solar sail ship he mentions he "cheated" by adding grav-plating. So it's been mentioned as a throwaway.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Only Enterprise mentioned the grav-plating, all other series left it unsaid.

    But they do have some unexplained means of having gravity in all the series, which is what I meant. The thing about the 'sweet spot' that they have in Enterprise I only mentioned in passing, it wasn't essential to my point.



  • @Onyx said:

    Your mind just wouldn't process it right

    Disagree! I'm completely fine with this. I don't see the big problem with it, really.

    It's how they managed to catch Khan and his crew off-guard in that cloud ("his pattern suggests two-dimensional thinking").



  • @da_Doctah said:

    It's how they managed to catch Khan and his crew off-guard in that cloud ("his pattern suggests two-dimensional thinking").

    They didn't rotate the ship, they just changed "altitude".

    Apparently Khan never learned to fly a jet while he was dictator of Earth because both Kirk and Khan kept moving the ships like they were aircraft the entire time. And Khan didn't even have basic dogfighting skills.

    (Of course when you think about it, with the viewscreens all spazzy, the target lock and scanners not working at all, the winner of that battle was really more due to luck more than anything else. Even the movie recognizes that Khan's BEST tactic would have been to hold outside the nebula with his sensors going and wait for Enterprise to emerge. There was no reason to believe Kirk had reinforcements coming.)



  • Don't the ships have forward-firing weapons anyway? And while I'm at it -- when folks have cloaking and such, why has nobody been tinkering with things like sensor jammers?

    Filed under: turning your whole entire ship just to aim is a drag



  • @tarunik said:

    Don't the ships have forward-firing weapons anyway?

    In old-school ships, the phasers are on turrets and the photons have guidance systems. (Enterprise has the sfx budget to actually show this on-screen, but even in Original Series they refer to "phaser turrets".) So not really.

    In new-school Trek, the phasers fire out of these weird conductive glowing strip things that can fire in any direction and also fire multiple beams in multiple directions at once.

    EDIT: the DS9 Defiant has forward-firing quad-phasers, I don't think it's ever mentioned how "aim-able" they are, but in the effects we see on screen they generally fire directly forward. One imagines they'd have at least a FEW degrees of aim, but who knows.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    In old-school ships, the phasers are on turrets and the photons have guidance systems. (Enterprise has the sfx budget to actually show this on-screen, but even in Original Series they refer to "phaser turrets".) So not really.

    In new-school Trek, the phasers fire out of these weird conductive glowing strip things that can fire in any direction and also fire multiple beams in multiple directions at once.

    My memory was bad then...thanks!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Only Enterprise mentioned the grav-plating

    There was quite a bunch of instances in TOS where they got hit in... something that screwed with gravity, and it was a big plot point in The Undiscovered Country.

    I can't remember what it was, but they weren't handwaving it.


  • BINNED

    @blakeyrat said:

    Apparently Khan never learned to fly a jet while he was dictator of Earth because both Kirk and Khan kept moving the ships like they were aircraft the entire time.

    Yeah, what's up with that? You almost never see any ships moving on what would be the vertical axis (if you consider that the ship is always laid down horizontally, from the perspective of the crew).

    Only times when I can remember seeing that is Voyager and shuttles landing / taking off. Maybe in some docking sequences.

    OK, it might look silly on the screen, but it seems weird to me that they always fly like they are aircrafts.



  • @Maciejasjmj said:

    There was quite a bunch of instances in TOS where they got hit in... something that screwed with gravity,

    ?

    There was one in The Animated Series.

    And yes, it came up in Undiscovered Country, I forgot about that. Pretty sure they still didn't call it "grav-plating" specifically. PEDANTIC DICKWEED HO!



  • Or maybe it was TAS. Makes sense, it would be easier to animate than actually film.


  • BINNED

    @Maciejasjmj said:

    Or maybe it was TAS. Makes sense, it would be easier to animate than actually film.

    Oh, just make everyone wave their arms really slowly and have a single pen on a string floating about. That's what being in a zero gravity environment looks like, according to old SciFi movies anyway.



  • YouTube is amazing, but it's not "Moon Zero Two low-gravity scene" amazing, alas.

    It does have the MST3K episode:

    MST3k 111 - Moon Zero Two – 1:37:02
    — analogkid01

    Anyway, it deserves a... special mention for its "portrayal" of low gravity.


  • BINNED

    Oh man, been ages since I saw that. They just move real slow, don't they?

    Also, holy hell, I clicked around on the timeline trying to figure out if I'm remembering what movie it is correctly, and what seems to be the main character was a doctor in the Andromeda Strain. I never figured that out until now.



  • @Onyx said:

    Oh man, been ages since I saw that. They just move real slow, don't they?

    Yeah. Low gravity = slow-mo and bad acting.

    But even worse/weirder, they slow down THE BACKGROUND MUSIC. Because... gravity would make the sound system slower?

    Also turning off gravity on the moonbase is literally just a light switch on the wall.

    @Onyx said:

    Also, holy hell, I clicked around on the timeline trying to figure out if I'm remembering what movie it is correctly, and what seems to be the main character was a doctor in the Andromeda Strain. I never figured that out until now.

    Moon Zero Two was definitely an under-appreciated, uh, "gem". The movie's stupid as all hell, yet it somehow has this really charming personality. Which is helped by the "2001: A Space Odyssey but with a budget of $24.99" effects and sets.

    I mean, there's no way that stinker of a script could have ever produced a good movie (the "Moonopoly" joke alone should have gotten the writer stoned to death-- oh and "Moon Fargo" instead of Wells Fargo is not only the worst joke ever, but not even really a working joke at all), but damned if they didn't put their hearts and souls into it anyway.

    Also perhaps the nadir of Hammer Films.




  • BINNED

    Since this is pretty much "The Star Trek thread" now... This just landed in my YT suggestions:

    CITY BENEATH THE SEA (1967) NBC UNSOLD PILOT – 11:01
    — Tommy Retro's Blast From The Past!

    Relevant bit from description:

    In 1967 Irwin Allen produced this network promo for NBC as a potential replacement series for Star Trek. It combines themes and plot-devices from all of Irwin Allen's previous series (specifically Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea), as well as several subtle (yet obvious) nods to Star Trek.

    "Nods"? You think those are "nods", uploader? The ripoff factor, it's off the scale Cap'n!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Onyx said:

    The ripoff factor, it's off the scale Cap'n!

    Ye canna break the laws o' Hollywood, Cap'n!



  • I didn't know that was a unsold pilot before it became a TV movie. I haven't watched it in years.

    Irwin Allen is pretty awesome. He certainly had his own style.



  • Star Trek: Insurrection is on Netflix now.

    Goddamned is this not the worst Star Trek movie? This is the worst Star Trek movie. From the entire plotline, to the smallest details.

    "We don't believe in technology. Well except that blacksmith. And that concrete bridge. And that sluice gate and irrigation system. And those wooden chairs obviously from Ikea."

    Also F. Murray Abraham!? Scarface? Amadeus? No, his crowning achievement: Star Trek: Insurrection. Christ, he must be terrible with money for his career to end up how it did.

    That joke Data makes about "I can be used as a flotation device" I think actually gave me cancer. I'm pretty sure I have cancer now after watching that.

    And the more you think about the Bak-u, Jesus these people are dicks. They have a planet which magically cures and de-ages everybody who stays there for a few weeks. They have a population of only 600. In a single village. They refuse to let the Federation use the other 98% of the planet they aren't using as a health cure.

    WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE ASSHOLES.

    Frankly, I'm with Admiral Dougherty. Relocate those dicks.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Frankly, I'm with Admiral Dougherty. Relocate those dicks.

    Yeah, they really fucked up the story on that one. I have to assume they thought people would be sympathetic to the people who were being forced out of their homes.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    And then, of course, they had Nemesis, which was just an awful piece of shit and killed the franchise.



  • Yeah, all-told Nemesis is probably worse. But goddamned.



  • but is Insurrection worse than Generations?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Absolutely. Generations was not nearly as bad. It didn't take itself so seriously


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