Star trek: the animated series has cool aliens (the blakeyrat is watching star trek thread)
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Trillapalooza.
Actually, just Trill. Which was my guess before I googled, given that Bajorans come from Bajor and Betazoids come from Betazed. The writers weren't long on imagination.
After Voyager I'll probably watch DS9 because, while originally I gradually stopped watching around the time the war started, I mostly liked the show. That might be another couple of months at the rate I'm going, however.
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Oh man you'll love it.
A few days ago, I found that episode where Odo investigates a "cold case" from 7 years previous-- when Kira was a freedom fighter infiltrating the station. The ending to that episode is the most non-Star Trek, and at the same time one of the greatest, ever.
Roddenberry would have double-died if he had been alive to see DS9, but all the changes they made to his universe were for the better.
Also the episode with Garak's brain plug-in. That episode is amazing. The plot point of how the brain plug-in burnt-out. The reveal of who the "Elim" in all his various stories really was. The last lines: "Garak, of all of those stories you told me, which are true?" "My dear doctor, they're all true." "Even the lies?" "ESPECIALLY the lies."
The Cardassians were better villains than the Romulans and Kazon put together.
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The Cardassians were better villains than the Romulans and Kazon put together.
That's true, but it's also a low bar. Much of Star Trek is pretty friggin' lazy.
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Well the Kazon were certainly lazy (gang-bangers in SPACE! Wait? We need to add a bit of complexity? How about they're escaped slaves. Why not.)
Romulans ... ok, they were also lazy. But the real problem is that in the Next Gen era, Romulans were just not very scary at all. There's maybe one episode where they present an actual threat. (Although, admittedly, they are one of the baddies who completely pulled the wool over Starfleet's eyes with their fake ambassador. So there's that, I guess.)
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That's true, but it's also a low bar.
well there were the borg.... although if the borg really had all that power (i saw their "hub system" on VOY and that was basically the SOL system wall to wall full of borg cubes and other ships) why didn't they just steamroll the whole mass across the federation. there's no way the federation could have kept up their resistance with the rate of attrition of their starships (the borg simply blew them up faster than the federation could hope to build them, and the federation rarely managed to blow up a borg ship, and even when they did they did it with heavy losses)
it's not like the borg had to devote that much effort to fighting species 8472... they could have totally taken a week off to stamp the federation into the ground without breaking a sweat.
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well there were the borg
I was speaking in generalizations. However, WRT the borg, their home appears to be the Delta quadrant, and even for them it was a long way to Federation space. Don't forget that their introduction involved Q flipping Enterprise halfway across the galaxy or whatever.
As for 8472, the Borg most certainly did devote tons of effort to fighting them, and they were even losing. (Having watched those episodes recently it's fresh in my mind.)
One has to assume that the Borg had limited forces in the alpha quadrant, or else something else was going on (because the events of 8472 in voyager were years later) that they never told us about.
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There's maybe one episode where they present an actual threat.
I believe you're thinking of "Defector". THAT was vintage Star Trek, tension building throughout the episode until it got so thick you could cut it with a knife.
well there were the Borg
Given an earlier episode on TNG when the Federation and the Romulans were trying to figure out who had blown away their outposts along the neutral zone (all indicators in retrospect point to the Borg), this event is what kept things from making the Romulans become the big threat of the Alpha Quadrant. Tomalak was the exception; he became the antagonist that represented Romulan expansionist interests at the expense of the Federation (see Defector above, and several other episodes like "Future Imperfect" [ok that ended up never happening, but the theme is reinforced in that episode nonetheless]). However, once Q sent the Enterprise to its visit to the Borg, Tomalak's appearances became virtually nonexistent.
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I believe you're thinking of "Defector".
That clip reminds me: the Federation was stupid for continuing to not use cloaking devices when the Klingons and the Romulans had them.
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That episode says that as long as the Federation is allied with the Klingons they don't need their own cloaking device.
Anyway, they'd already been working on one at that point in the show. It's on the Defiant, which DS9 states was originally built to fight the Borg during/after season 4. And it had a Romulan observer attached to ensure it wasn't "abused".
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That episode says that as long as the Federation is allied with the Klingons they don't need their own cloaking device.
I'm sure you can figure out examples where that wouldn't be true, but any episode where the Enterprise needed to be stealthy itself, rather than having secret backup, would count.
And it had a Romulan observer attached to ensure it wasn't "abused".
Heh. I don't remember that--must have missed the episode. At any rate, treaty with the Romulans is precisely why the Federation doesn't have it, but it's still stupid.
Of course, if they did have it, it would break every time it would have been useful because the writers were mostly hacks.
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Romulans ... ok, they were also lazy. But the real problem is that in the Next Gen era, Romulans were just not very scary at all. There's maybe one episode where they present an actual threat.
I kinda liked that they were always there, a hidden threat. Are they posing pussies? Are they about to unleash Galactic War III in a week? Somewhere in between?It'd have been cool to have more actual instances of their power but I thought they were very well done. Big fan of Cardies, Klingons, Romulans and Borg. Ferengi were the only major(?) race I hated on trek.
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I kinda liked that they were always there, a hidden threat. Are they posing pussies? Are they about to unleash Galactic War III in a week? Somewhere in between?
Maybe, but I don't think we actually even saw them destroy a single ship on-screen. Sure their battleships looked impressive, but did they ever even get in a fight?
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Yeah that's the issue. No real payoff for all the mystery. Romulan blue balls. At least they got to be pretty tough in the Dominion War, so it retroactively means they WERE a threat in TNG at least... flimsy but it's something! In the Trek world it's better than nothing like waaay too many species had.
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The only episode I clearly recall a Romulan ship firing in is the episode where Picard, Troi and I think LaForge? find the ship frozen in time. And then the Romulan ship was only firing because a disguised hostile black hole alien took it over.
Other than that, I'm 95% sure they never even fired a weapon.
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That clip reminds me: the Federation was stupid for continuing to not use cloaking devices when the Klingons and the Romulans had them.
Not completely.
They violated the treaty per the episode "The Pegasus". Nice to see some reality in an otherwise "ideal" future.
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That was about the time they were stewing on the DS9 concept. Frankly, Roddenberry's death was the best thing to happen to 1990s Star Trek.
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The only episode I clearly recall a Romulan ship firing in is the episode where Picard, Troi and I think LaForge? find the ship frozen in time. And then the Romulan ship was only firing because a disguised hostile black hole alien took it over.
Other than that, I'm 95% sure they never even fired a weapon.
IIRC, you're correct on all counts with regard to the series.
ST:TNG Nemesis, on the other hand, makes up for some of that.
Except that, now that they can fire while cloaked, why don't they take over the Alpha Quadrant?
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They violated the treaty per the episode
Yeah, and they had to hide to do it. Remember that Kirk stole a Romulan cloaking device.
But I meant, on an ongoing basis, the way the Romulans and Klingons used it.
Of course, like I said, since most of the Star Trek writers were hacks, it's just another thing that would have to break down constantly to artificially create plot tension.
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Except that, now that they can fire while cloaked, why don't they take over the Alpha Quadrant?
Balance of power, one assumes. If they tried that, everyone else would gang up on them.
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Except that, now that they can fire while cloaked, why don't they take over the Alpha Quadrant?
Impossible!
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The only ship that could fire when cloaked was that Bird of Prey from Star Trek VI, which was a one-of-a-kind prototype, and obviously an unsuccessful one. It also became temporarily visibly detectable while firing (that is, you couldn't get a phaser lock, but if you were looking out the window at the right time you'd see it), which future Starfleet ships probably took note of when designing their weapon targeting systems.
Then again, Next Gen takes place like 70 years later, so it's hard to imagine neither the Romulans or Klingons continuing that research for that long...
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This episode of DS9, Fascination, is approximately 57 hours long. The plot is Momma Troi comes to the station and she has mental brain worms that makes people all fall in love with each other or some shit and then the viewer stabs himself in the eyeball with a rusty needle.
I'd skip forward but the next episode is that horrible 2-parter where they go back in time to the near-future and the viewer dies of boredom about 15 minutes in.
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I'd skip forward but the next episode is that horrible 2-parter where they go back in time to the near-future and the viewer dies of boredom about 15 minutes in.
Then... skip those episodes too?
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Watched Voyager Dark Frontier last night. It's a two-parter, but Netflix has it as a single double-length episode. Mostly decent, although as always, full of weird stuff. The Borg sphere is only 8 light years away, but it took them (IIRC) two days to get there. Then later, they have Borg transwarp, which, in Voyager, is not the same thing as it was in the TOS movies, and lets them go to the Borg home...cluster thingy in space and fight the Borg Queen, last seen dead on the Enterprise. I thought that was a moderately silly tie-in back to the First Contact movie.
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After all the boring episodes comes Heart of Stone, which is actually pretty damned good. Both the A and B plots have great scenes... Odo's explanation of his name, and Nog's reasons for wanting to join Starfleet.
And the twist ending in the A plot is a heart-breaker. "She said something you'd never say." "What was that?" "... just a slip of the tongue. Nothing important." Poor Odo.
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I watched Course: Oblivion, which was the second episode, last night. It was better than the first episode, although it would probably have been cool to have been longer. I wanted to smack Janeway, though, for being stupid longer than she should have.
[spoiler] They had a new engine that would cut their travel time by a factor of 10-20. Go back, find a cure for the problem, and then turn around and return to the Alpha Quadrant! If the problem is solvable at all, you're still going to be massively ahead.[/spoiler]
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Also, just watched The Fight, which was really good. One of the problems was that Chakotay misunderstood what was happening to him, and he was fighting the knowledge he needed, because he thought it represented something entirely different. I'm sure someone who wasn't made out of oak could've made the episode a lot better, but it was still pretty good, and probably a highlight of his acting.
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The best thing in DS9 is the Defiant (when it's not the crappy CGI model) and it's turbo-quad-forward-firing-phasers. A Star Trek ship you have to actually AIM at the enemy!?
Just finished watching the two-parter Improbable Cause, and The Die is Cast. I love me some Garak. "You know the saddest thing about all this? I really am a good tailor."
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Many of my favorite Trek-universe characters come from DS9, and they're all minor supporting roles. Garak (you know damn well he was a spy, and everyone else knew it too, but he was just so damned charming), Leeta, Vic Fontane. If they hadn't had that damn doctor I think I'd like living and working out near the Bajoran wormhole.
(Worst holodeck program ever: A Day At The DMV With Julian Bashir)
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Hey, Bashir was the only Arab in all of Star Trek as Alexander Siddig liked to say. I liked him up until they ass-pulled the thing about illegal genetic engineering.
But you liked Vic Fontane, and that is objectively wrong.
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Sez you. Vic Fontane was a holo-construct who was self-aware before Voyager's Doctor, and unlike both Voyager's Doctor and TNG's Professor Moriarty was perfectly content to be a holo-construct. That shows class.
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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect
Want a quick way to show how dangerous one of your unknown characters is? Simple, make him do well or win in a fight with a character that the audience already knows is tough. This establishes him as willing to fight and marks him as sufficiently dangerous.
I think I found the TV Tropes site through this site a while ago. There's some good info on there about Star Trek and other shows/movies, it's a major timesink though.
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You Must Be New ThereTM
TVTropes is a well-known time sink (among people who've ever been there)
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TVTropes is a well-known time sink
I think it's quite possible to sink there and never resurface.
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In the DS9 episode "Bar Association", Worf's quarters get robbed and he complains to Odo, saying, "breaches in security never happened on the Enterprise!"
Odo goes, "oh, really?" and pulls out a padd and starts listing off every TNG episode where they have a security breach, it's pretty funny.
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Watched Equinox, the 5/6th season cliffhanger, last week. I thought it quite good, for Voyager. The crew encounters another Federation ship that wound up in the Delta Quadrant the same way, but one with only half the crew of Voyager. They rescued the other ship from an alien attack, and eventually discover Equinox was doing wildly unethical things. This made me realize something: several episodes in the 5th season, and later the 6th, were much better than the first few seasons. I think the writers must have finally hit their stride, although there was far too much recalibration, compensation, and modulation, still. It's too bad they didn't do it 3 years earlier.
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The next episode, Survival Instinct, brought up an incident in Seven's past with the Borg. This time there wasn't any real combat so the writers lost their usual crutch, and turned in another relatively excellent performance (for this show, that is, of course.)
Seven confronts past actions, and in the end chooses to own up to the consequences. The guest actors turned in a performance that wasn't "look at us acting!" which helped, too.
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Barge of the Dead would have been a lot better if the Klingons weren't so lame. The people in charge made a huge mistake when they didn't use The Final Reflection's version of Klingon culture, instead giving us the crude caricatures we actually got.
That makes me think: imagine if talented and competent writers got together and rewrote a bunch of Star Trek stories. That would be awesome.
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I liked Equinox. One of the good ones.
The next episode, Survival Instinct, brought up an incident in Seven's past with the Borg.
I'm not sure if this is the episode I'm thinking of, but I really liked the concept of the Borg "virtual world" (I can't remember its name) that allowed dissidents to experience independence without breaking apart the collective. One of the few good Borg ideas Voyager brought to the table. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the similar concept in the Matrix sequels.
Barge of the Dead would have been a lot better if the Klingons weren't so lame.
I remember it being more dull than anything. I usually like Torres.
I'm watching DS9 "Hard Time", which is one of my favorites. A group of aliens accuse O'Brien of a crime (it's one of the "O'Brien Suffers" genre of episode DS9 did about once a season), and their punishment is, instead of actually putting someone into prison, they implant the memories of 20 years of prison in your mind. So you have 20 years worth of memories of a tiny cramped cell, tortured, insufficient food...
But it turns out the "memory recording" of the prison had a cellmate, Ee'char. "Be well."
I actually didn't like how that story ended. My "2/3rds through" plot was that it turns out that, unknown to the government who created the torture memory, Ee'char was an engineer who had secretly inserted himself into the memory recording for the sole purpose of cheering up fellow prisoners and helping them get through the experience. Their ending was fine, but I like my head-canon better. It also better explains why Ee'char appears to him after the implanted memories are over, and serves as a kind of councilor.
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Ugh I forgot how Deep Space 9 doubled-down on the mirror universe episodes. There's like 84 of them. And one comes right after a brilliant "O'Brien Suffers" episode.
What I'd rather watch:
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I'm not sure if this is the episode I'm thinking of, but I really liked the concept of the Borg "virtual world" (I can't remember its name) that allowed dissidents to experience independence without breaking apart the collective. One of the few good Borg ideas Voyager brought to the table. It made a hell of a lot more sense than the similar concept in the Matrix sequels.
You're thinking--I think--of Unimatrix Zero, which I think was seventh-season stuff. This was the mini-collective from Seven's "original" unimatrix, which I don't think means what the writers thought it should mean.
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I remember it being more dull than anything. I usually like Torres.
Yeah, it was that. A large part of it was "tell me what I'm supposed to do" whining. Feeling Pinkie Keen did that far, far, better, although obviously not quite the same.
As for Torres, I liked the idea behind her character, but Roxanne Dawson kind of overplayed it, so the result was it always felt like there was too much. That also might have been down to the whole syndication "can't really have character development" rules, though.
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Ugh I forgot how Deep Space 9 doubled-down on the mirror universe episodes. There's like 84 of them. And one comes right after a brilliant "O'Brien Suffers" episode.
The mirror universe episodes were frankly fairly tedious except for the original. But at least they generally weren't as bad as the books, which were like bad fan fiction, and borderline erotica. Well, they attempted that; it was actually more trashy.
What I'd rather watch:
Have you seen Ensign Sue?
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The episode where Quark loses his bar and everybody else at the station gives him "old ugly" glasses and alcohol and Sisko stores furniture-- anyway it's the weirdest remake of It's a Wonderful Life possibly ever made ever.
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Alice: fluff. I don't think Robert McNeill acted that episode well.
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Riddles: meh. Not bad, but struck me as a reprise of Tuvix with a less-offensive ending. Not that I preferred dumb/artist/cook Tuvok.
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Dragon's Teeth wasn't bad, but it felt like it was only 80% done, somehow. It might have been better as a mid-season two-parter.
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One Small Step: they ran into a space thing that had captured an early Earth ship and towed it around for 400 years. Pretty good "Seven explores humanity" episode. The other half of the plot (it wasn't really a B-plot, as the A- and B-stories involved the same set of characters) was more forgettable: "how do we get out of the space thing before it takes us unretrievably far away?" I'd rate the episode cromulent+, which was better than the previous 3.
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The Voyager Conspiracy: pretty good. Seven hooks some kind of Borg information aggregator into her alcove, that lets her process links between events better. It has an immediate benefit when she deduces there's parasites in the power grid. Then, predictably, things go awry when she can't integrate all the information. Entertainingly (for the audience, but not the crew) she manages to create two opposing conspiracy theories out of the same sequence of events spanning the entire timeline of the show, briefly pitting Janeway and Chakotay against each other. The conspiracy theories themselves were ridiculous, and, as mentioned, sort of counterpositives to each other in that it's almost impossible for both to be true. It does potentially give you a bit of an insight into how the moon landing hoax kooks and 9/11 Troofer morons managed to come up with their conspiracy theories, though.
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