inflatable dalek wrote:Mind, I'm really into the period where the "We don't watch Babylon 5 at all" protests start sounding really weak. Especially as they've using B5's unfairly sacked effects team for the big battles now, what did they use for their show reel?
I had no idea that happened. Yeah, it's pretty hard to deny if they poached staff from the other show.
inflatable dalek wrote:That two volume oral history of Trek thing that came out last year apparently has some disparaging quotes from Berman about her, something along the lines of "You can't get beautiful women who are also good actors" (!).
Well, he's not entirely wrong even if he's being a jerk about it. I'm sure there are a lot of actresses who are both talented and beautiful, but the talent isn't mandatory and it's certainly not what gets their foot in the door in Hollywood. There's a lot of stunningly beautiful "actresses" out there who can't act their way out of a paper bag but go on to long careers anyway, because acting talent isn't what they're hired for.
inflatable dalek wrote:Arena is a good counterpart, the Gorn do terrible things to that Federation colony. But at the end Kirk accepts they need to at least talk and the Gorn might have had a prior claim on the planet and mistook the Feds for invaders. If Sisko had been in that episode, he'd have been bashing the Gorn's brain in with the rock shouting "WHO'S YOUR DADDY!".
That depends. If we're talking about early-run, hair-and-no-beard Sisko he'd probably have done the same as Kirk. He didn't become completely obstinate until about half-way through the series.
I blame the promotion to captain. Obviously it went to his head.
inflatable dalek wrote:I mostly agree, but Excelsior's can still hold their own, the one in Paradise Lost only loses against the Defiant because O'Brien's pumped it up a bit without them knowing. I'd take one of those bad boys over a "Whoops, there goes another one!" Galaxy Class any day of the week.
Worf was trying really hard
not to kill anyone when he was fighting the
Lakota, though. A few quantum torpedoes to the drive section would have settled things pretty quickly.
And honestly, as much as we laugh at the Galaxy-class for blowing up so often, in the Dominion War battle scenes the Galaxies we saw were basically invincible, while Excelsior- and Miranda-class ships were getting cut in half by a single blow from the bigger Dominion ships. And heck, a handful of Maquis Raiders were able to cripple the
Malinche.
The funniest thing about the Galaxies is that the generic background fodder were super tough but any ship that was actually important to the plot was almost certain to eventually die. Somewhere, the crews of
Venture,
Challenger and
Galaxy are praying that they never get a guest star role in anything.
inflatable dalek wrote:Oddly Sovereign's don't seem to be held in high regard by Star Fleet, the Enterprise can't be the only one in service (and based on how bored Picard is in Insurrection she doesn't seem to have been doing any war stuff anyway) but they never show up for the battles.
I think the most reasonable in-universe explanation is that it's just too new of a design to have gotten too many of them built. It took seven years after the
Galaxy was launched before they'd finished constructing
Enterprise and
Yamato, and almost a decade after that before the Galaxy-class became a regular sight in Starfleet. The Sovereign class isn't quite as big volume-wise, but it's still damned huge and I'm sure it took ages to build one. And since the
Enterprise-E was apparently one of the first of her kind too, there were probably less than ten of the things in service across the whole Federation during the Dominion War.
Of course, that doesn't explain why they'd waste one of them on random diplomatic junkets in the middle of the conflict, so I'll just assume that Picard had pissed off an admiral or two that month.
inflatable dalek wrote:Mind, sending Intrepid classes into battle would be a bit mental. They're small science ships, it's not like one could single handedly destroy the entire Borg collective.
They're really not, though. They're built for science and exploration, yes, but we're not talking about an equivalent to the Oberth- or Nova-class here.
Voyager was bigger than a Constitution-class starship and had as many weapons as a Galaxy-class. It probably doesn't have the same endurance as the bigger ships but it's no pushover either.
inflatable dalek wrote:Didn't realise the "We won't publish unless you make the lead white" thing was direcly based on something that happened in real life as well.
To one of the authors of the episode, you mean? Or just in general? Because I'm sure stuff like that has happened way more than just once.
inflatable dalek wrote:I suppose no one on the production team knowing how to deal with Bashir's ethnicity and so them just writing his counterpart as white is a bit of a problem as well.
Actually, a light-skinned Middle-Eastern man being treated as white is not at all out of character for that period. I don't know if it was different in Europe, but on this side of the ocean most people really had no idea about anyone from that part of the world. As long as they didn't dress like Yasser Arafat, have an obviously foreign name or really dark skin, no one would have noticed or cared. In Siddig's case, the English accent and relatively fair skin would have meant that most folks would have just assumed he was a Brit with a tan, especially with a name like "Julius Eaton".
Of course, all of that changed rather quickly after 9/11...
inflatable dalek wrote:And I know everyone at the time was like "You could have set this today with no changes", but it really is striking how nearly 20 years later a piece of TV set in the 50's still feels so resonant. The casual acceptance of racism from people who aren't strictly racist but see it as status quo ("It's not about what's right, it's about what is!" being the key line) and the American police not needing an excuse to mistreat black guys especially.
I don't think you could strictly set the episode now, but I agree with the spirit of what you're saying. The entertainment industry at least tries to have minority representation nowadays, which hurts the main plot of the story...but the basic point of it all is just as true now as it was then.
If anything, the general public's opinion of black people has
gotten worse since then. Back then the stereotypical image of a black man was as something subservient and inferior -- nowadays it's a heavily-armed ghetto thug. They've gone from being seen as "lesser" to actively dangerous. I don't consider that an improvement.
inflatable dalek wrote:Just finished Change of Heart (a title that kind of gives away the fact Worf will have a Change of Heart at the end). Terry Farrell was right, if they were going to kill Dax because being in the middle of a terrible war was a good time to off a regular it should have been in this episode. Even beyond it being a surprise to do it in the middle of a season, even beyond it having a direct impact on Worf, even beyond her eventual cause of death not really being dealt with (everyone hates Dukat anyway and he and Worf never meet in the last season, so what's the point? I think it comes up once after Ezri is settled in)...it actually would have been a death related to the war, which being zapped by a man possessed by the devil wasn't.
I'd never considered this before but you're totally right. This is totally where Jadzia should have died. It's not like she did all that much in the back half of the season anyway.