Dalek and Warcry's Endless Star Trek Thread

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Unicron
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Post by Unicron »

inflatable dalek wrote:Seven of Nine certainly kept her mad passionate love for Chakotay hidden well for four years.
Yeah, that certainly came out of nowhere. I kept expecting something between her and the Doctor.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

And despite loving him so much she shags a holodeck version of him, she doesn't know the real Chakotay is vegetarian.

But why would the writers remember he's a vegetarian when it was last mentioned as long ago as two episodes previously?

It was also nice finally, finally, after six and a half years, for Janeway to get some sex with an actual real flesh and blood person in that two parter that was basically The Killing Game but "What if the aliens who give them all false personalities put them to work in a factory rather than an episode of Allo Allo?"

When Janeway was at it with that hologram (everyone on this show is shagging on the holodeck. No wonder Barclay likes them), the Doctor encouraging her to go at it was a really weird scene because for all he prattled on about love transending boundaries it was basically a lengthy chat about how sex dolls are great as it was impossible to take Irish O'Irish seriously as anything but a hard light dildo with legs.
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Post by Tetsuro »

I remember a friend of mine complained about that episode because of how uncharacteristically horny Janeway was in that episode. The Oyland episode, not Workforce.

But then, it's not like consistent characterization is one of Voyager's defining traits. I always did find the relationship between Seven and Chakotay really did come out of nowhere, and it's just one of the many things that are just left hanging at the series finale.

In one hand, I kinda wish Elite Force II had just kept the Voyager setting because the Enterprise-E setting was pretty much wasted since only Picard and Barclay show up out of all the TNG characters and it might've given us some kind of a proper epilogue to Voyager, but in the other, I shouldn't have to settle with what is essentially non-canon EU for some kind of resolution.

Still, I'm tempted to read some of those DS9 novels that continue where the TV show left off. Sisko just bugging off and leaving behind a son, a wife and an unborn child left me wanting.
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Post by Unicron »

Tetsuro wrote:Still, I'm tempted to read some of those DS9 novels that continue where the TV show left off. Sisko just bugging off and leaving behind a son, a wife and an unborn child left me wanting.
It's not like he had much choice there. The Prophets were all like 'you did your job so now you get to hang out here in the glowy white space'.

The ending to Voyager always bugged me. They made it back to Earth, yippee. And then what? Aside from Janeway becoming an Admiral, we know nothing of what happened to anyone. Did anyone else get promoted? Were the Maquis arrested on arrival? Was the Doctor shipped off to mining duty like his brothers?
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I did read recently they tried to put Seven in Nemesis. First as a threat to Marina Sirtis if she didn't sign up ("Don't want to accept this pay package? Fine! We have another Star Trek Babe right here!") and then as a cameo at the wedding.

The latter of which Jeri Ryan refused point blank on the grounds it would make no sense for her to be at the wedding of two characters who were strangers to her.

Which is a sharp contrast to Jonathan Frakes' "I thought the idea of the last Enterprise episode was terrible, but I never say no to Star Trek" paycheck philosophy.
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Post by Tetsuro »

Unicron wrote:The ending to Voyager always bugged me. They made it back to Earth, yippee. And then what? Aside from Janeway becoming an Admiral, we know nothing of what happened to anyone. Did anyone else get promoted? Were the Maquis arrested on arrival? Was the Doctor shipped off to mining duty like his brothers?
I think they were trying to make the future scenes represent that, but since Admiral Janeway erased that timeline, none of it mattered.

I was just reading the transcript to Message in a Bottle, and I remembered something that bothered me about the subplot in that episode. Harry Kim tries to create a new EMH from scratch, but they already had demonstrated the ability to recreate real people on the holodeck with the Cardassian Josef Mengele, so why didn't he just take an existing MD in the database and use that as a template?
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Post by Warcry »

Tetsuro wrote:Still, I'm tempted to read some of those DS9 novels that continue where the TV show left off. Sisko just bugging off and leaving behind a son, a wife and an unborn child left me wanting.
The novels were really good, and did a great job of carrying on the dangling threads left at the end of the series and making a compelling story out of them, and as long as you don't mind that half of the cast is original characters (which is a given considering how the show ended) and that they rope in Ro Laren on a flimsy pretext, it was an enjoyable run. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that for about a decade, the DS9 "relaunch" novels were the best thing going in Star Trek fiction. But Pocket had a major editorial shakeup and the series just ends...no, that's not even the right word. The series just stops in the most unsatisfying place possible, with a major conflict looming that was set up to pay off plot hooks that they'd been setting for about six years.

The good news is that the series is broadly divided into two "seasons", plot-wise. The first season (from Avatar to Unity) addresses most of what you want to know, and does so quite well. Taken on its own merits it's satisfying as all hell, and in a lot of ways Unity felt to me like the ending that the TV show should have had in the first place. The second season is kind of a mess. It spends a lot of time addressing loose ends from the previous books that probably didn't need addressing as an excuse to do character development (no great sin in an ongoing series that was set to run in perpetuity, but knowing what actually happened...), and once the plot really starts rolling...the axe fell because the new editor wanted to rope all of the 24th century Trek cast into the dire Borgfest that the TNG relaunch had become, and to do that they had to time-skip the DS9 people three years forward with zero closure and zero regard for the fact that it was their most popular series and their readers had been following it religiously for a decade.

(Yes, I'm still mad.)

As long as you either stop at Unity or go into the later stuff accepting that you won't get any payoff, it's worth reading.
Unicron wrote:The ending to Voyager always bugged me. They made it back to Earth, yippee. And then what? Aside from Janeway becoming an Admiral, we know nothing of what happened to anyone. Did anyone else get promoted? Were the Maquis arrested on arrival? Was the Doctor shipped off to mining duty like his brothers?
I like to think that Harry Kim was still an ensign well into his 50s. I mean, if what he did during the run of the show hadn't earned him a promotion...

I get that there's not much room for advancement on a solo ship lost on the wrong side of the galaxy, but hell, Tuvok and Paris both got promotions through the course of the series (in Tom's case, after being very deservingly demoted). Janeway could have at least tossed an extra pip the guy's way out of sympathy. How much must it have sucked to watch the convict who's been stripped of his rank twice get made a lieutenant again while he's stuck being an ensign for life?
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Post by Heinrad »

Well, if Star Trek Online can be considered canon(it probably can't, if for no other reason than your character goes from lieutenant junior grade to Fleet Admiral in less than a year. Jeez, people get promoted fast after the TOS era....), Tuvok becomes an Admiral, both Harry Kim and Tom Paris are Captains, I think Tom's daughter is a Lieutenant Commander, Seven's doing scientific type stuff, and Neelix is.....well....still Neelix.

I still can't believe that part. Less than a year. You stop a war with the Klingons, fight a very brief war with the Borg, fight a major war with the Vardwaar, fight a "If we don't win this, what the Dominion invasion would have done to us is nothing" war against the Iconians, and at the end of it all.... I'd guess it's been maybe 4 months since you graduated from Starfleet Academy.

Out of utter curiousity, is this editorial shakeup why they're haven't been any New Frontier books for a while?
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Post by Warcry »

Heinrad wrote:Out of utter curiousity, is this editorial shakeup why they're haven't been any New Frontier books for a while?
I think a lot of that was due to Peter David's health -- he had a stroke in 2012 that understandably slowed him down a lot. Though the latest book came out a couple years ago and it was eBook-only, which doesn't exactly sound like a vote of editorial confidence.

And to be honest, while I've enjoyed New Frontier a lot, it feels like a series that's long since run its course, and I'd guess that plays a role too.
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Post by Tetsuro »

Since we're talking about the novels, is there any book that deals with the holographic Moriarty? Last we saw him, they stuck him in a virtual reality box, but through Voyager they now technically have the ability to give him the true mobility that he wanted.

Then again, considering he also took Enterprise hostage, the Federation probably isn't going to feel that charitable towards him.
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Post by Warcry »

He appears in the recentish novel "The Light Fantastic", which I don't think I've actually read. The modern TNG books don't really engage me, since almost all the Enterprise crew has been moved off of the ship and they brought Data back from the dead in a ratings gimmick only to make him absolutely nothing like the Data people actually care about.

Has anyone watched Discovery yet? Apparently it premiered this week but I haven't heard a single word about it anywhere, and the summary of the first couple episodes sounds like...well, exactly like what I'd expect from a Trek TV show from the people responsible for the recent soulless movie reboot.
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Post by Heinrad »

I'm watching it now. For a show set prior to TOS, it's running into the same problem Enterprise had: it's looking more like something modern than something set prior to The Cage. The uniforms follow the jumpsuit asthetic from Enterprise, the bridge of the Shenzhou(I think I'm spelling it right), looks like a slightly less busy version of the Kelvin minus the lensflares, the Klingons just look odd and sound less like what we're used to and more like actors struggling to speak Klingonese under heavy duty prosthetics, and they're using a lot of TNG sound effects. Starfleet's got a metric buttload of Miranda classish type frigates, nobody's talked to the Klingons for a hundred years...... and the CBS app just crashed. I've got a hunch.... Ah, there we go. Now I can see if they're going to do what I thought they were going to do. If they do, I'll be annoyed. Sadly not surprised, just annoyed. They did. And they wonder why I prefer TOS......

Don't get me wrong. It's a good show. It definately has TNG/DS9/VOY aesthetics running through it. Harry Mudd, of all people, will be showing up. But, correct me if I'm wrong, the Federation didn't go to war with the Klingon Empire until Errand of Mercy, when the Organians told both sides "I don't think so, children".

My only major complaint, although I'm going to have to watch Enterprise again to see if they made the same mistake is USING THE TOS ENTERPRISE ARROW FOR ALL OF STARFLEET!!!!!!! If you're setting a show in that time period, GET IT RIGHT!!!!!!!!

Yeah, it's a nitpicky thing. So I'm into episode 3 now, and we seem to be butting heads between a Star Trek tone and a BSG tone. Actually, I think the tone seems to be in Stargate: Universe. It's good, but don't go into it expecting regular Star Trek.

EDIT: Given all the shots of the Discovery they've shown, it looks a lot like the Dreadnaught from Into Darkness, at least around the saucer section.
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Post by Heinrad »

Actually, after giving it some thought, here's my verdict: if you want something that feels like TOS/TNG/VOY/ENT Star Trek, and you don't feel like paying CBS, watch The Orville. Despite what the critics think, I actually like the show and think it's pretty good. A friend of mine who hates Star Trek due to a childhood incident involving his family and a Star Trek marathon loves The Orville. Discovery is good, and it does feel like Star Trek, but there's no sense of joy or hope for a better future to it. That could be setting, I admit, and there are reasons they have the look they do involving who actually holds the rights to what between CBS and Paramount(and after looking at my copy of Star Trek Beyond, I don't see a CBS logo on it anywhere, so having it look this way must have been a conscious decision on somebody's part.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Christ. Enterprise is shit. I mean really shit. You might think Voyager is a bit shit, but that's nothing compared to Enterprise.
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Post by Warcry »

The first two seasons in particular were so spectacularly bad that I probably turned off more episodes in the first ten minutes than ones that I watched all the way through. It definitely got better later, but in spite of a few stretches of episodes that I really enjoyed in the final season, "better" mostly just meant "still bad, but at least watchable".
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I think something's gone wrong with season 3 on Netflix. They've accidentally replaced it with a bitter and angry 24 knock off made by people who completely misunderstand what made 24 a success at what it did and staring a Scott Bakula impersonator who has had a stroke and can only scowl.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I finished Enterprise!

It was like watching a beloved relative succumb to dementia and then have a rabid Donald Trump come and bite them in the dick.

Thank God for Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis coming along for the finale to remind us what proper Star Trek characters are like. I know the regulars hated that, but frankly they're in no position to moan after being so terrible and they're lucky to have had a four year break from wanking off tramps behind the bus station.

The first Abrams film still stands up very nicely though apart from the admittedly big issue of Kirk being useless. I heard a podcast recently describe the plot as "Mediocre white guy takes all the credit" and that's hard to argue against.

But it's also lots of fun, probably the best executed set pieces of any Trek film, a nice big scale (finally they bother to write the rest of Star Fleet out rather than just having the Enterprise be the only ship defending the centre of the Federation's government), mostly likeable cast and looks surprisingly good in our post new Star Wars world. Shame the sequels, for all their pros and cons, never quite capitalised on its success.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Finished Discovery!

Not a perfect show, but generally a very enjoyable one and one you could easily say had the best first season of any of the sequel series if that weren't a backhanded compliment.

The nice thing is, where it did stumble, it was because it was trying to be a 2018 TV show, rather than when Enterprise failed because it was made by tired hacks.

The Mirror Universe was, against the odds, the highlight (because Jason Isaacs went fully off the leash and Michelle Yeoh is never less than awesome) and perhaps the finale back at the war wasn't as strong, but yeah, looking forward to more.

Hell, even the OTT Klingon make up that made it hard for the actors to speak has won me over now I know there was a proper plot based reason for you not being able to recognise who was under all that (a twist that fooled me so well I didn't realise that actor was pulling double duty even after the connection between those characters was explained!).
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Post by Mr_Hi_n_Mitey »

Yeah, I heard that a lot of people disliked the ENTERPRISE series. I am not pleased with the DISCOVERY series based on the fact that it goes backwards in time, not forwards. Otherwise, I am one of the few people here in my hometown of RVA USA that dig STAR TREK pretty well; after all, I just finished watching its ANIMATED SERIES circa a year ago. "Once Upon A Planet", "Beyond the Farthest Star", "One of Our Planets Is Missing", "The Slaver Weapon", "The Ambergis Element" and "The Infinite Vulcan" are my top favorite episodes from this dark cartoon series that was released from Filmation way back in the early 1970s. Most everyone else here in my hometown digs STAR WARS (especially anything concerning the Galactic Empire and its Sith architects) and/or any supervillains/superheroes from DC/Marvel comics.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

So there's apparently several new Trek projects in development, including one with the return of Patrick Stewart as Picard. Considering that, according to the flashforward in All Good Things, he'd be fully in the grip of SPACE dementia by now, that'll give him the chance to do the whole Logan again.

More worryingly, Discovery has lost its show runners after accusations of harassment from the other writers. But hey, folk were saying it should be more like TNG, a bitter writing room with a revolving door is a return to those days.
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