The Gaming Den

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Why do people hate Ferengi so much? Granted, their introduction into TNG was pretty ridiculous (the Neutral Zone I think?), but Quark is pretty awesome. Is it because they're strawmen capitalists? Or that they look like goblins?

It's mostly because they're exaggerated versions of the traditional stereotypes of the Jewish merchant. Big ears, big nose, obsessed with profit to the exclusion of all else, highly negotiable ethics.

The fact that Armin Shimmerman (who IIRC is Jewish) made them interesting and meaningful regardless is awesome.

FrankTrollman wrote: I'm on the fence about the Pah Wraith demon lord thing. I think that might have been over the line. But his ascendancy all the way up to supreme leader of Cardassia works pretty well.

I also appreciate the fact that he does have virtues. Just... not very many of them. He's not a cartoonish lord of darkness (except at the very end), he's just a kind of banal guy who happens to be willing to hurt other people to claw his way to the top. The fact that he has personhood means that it doesn't feel like stupidity when people take mercy on him. If he was presented as monolithic in his villainy, the fact that people repeatedly choose to not slit his throat when he surrenders would come off as retarded rather than virtuous.

-Username17

The problem with Dukat is that people latched onto those virtues and the writers didn't like that, thus they stripped him of those virtues and turned him into a demon lord. Because they didn't want people rooting for Space Hitler.

Dukat ends up being emotionally destroyed by the consequences of his own flaws and mistakes. And that's great. If they'd left it at that it would have been wonderful. Instead they made him a demon lord for no good reason.

That was problematic.

Actually, the entire Pah Wraith plotline was pretty stupid and added an unnecessary dualism to what had been an interesting religion.

Making Sisko half Prophet and having him ascend to a higher plane of existance was also pretty stupid, given that his role as Emissary was to work the Prophets' will in the temporal realm there was really no need to have him undertake a cosmic adventure. Simply having him guide Bajor though that particular time of crisis was enough, or should have been.

The thread title question is now inaccurate, for me, at least. There are lots of things I *liked* about Star Trek. But by and large those properties are no longer part of the franchise.

I haven't seen the reboot movies, and I have no intention to. Judging by what I've heard and read about them - and I've actually done a modest bit of research into them - my decision to avoid them was quite correct.

Good! I'm keeping Chris Pine all for myself!

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Even with the disclaimer, that was a bit too creepy for my tastes.
[/TGFBS]

Fine, O Great Fence Builder.

Keep Chris Pine. I'll be chatting with Zoe Saldana.

In your opinion, what were the worst episodes of each series of Star Trek that don't really show up on most 'worst of Trek' lists? So no Outrageous Okona or Threshold or A Night In Sickbay.

By the time we exclude most of the traditionally-cited 'worst episodes', it's not individual episodes that bother me as much as thematic elements that I don't like.

The Kazon species from Voyager would be a good example. There's no single episode that's concentrated terrible regarding them - they're just a very weak and uninteresting opponent, a manifestation of poor storytelling. Every bit where they're present is in some limited way bad, but they don't ruin the entirety of the episodes they're in - they're not terrible enough for that.

I grew very, very tired of the 'Holodeck malfunctions' episodes. I was also tired of the writers not thinking through the implications of ST technology, or when they decided to meddle with the interesting aliens they created. (Giving the Borg a 'Queen' is a good example of that - it's a misunderstanding of how hive minds work even in reality, and a pandering to the supposed ignorance of the viewers. Like the "humans are batteries" thing in The Matrix. It's jarring and insulting.)

Don't even get me started on Species 3589 or whatever they're called. Terrible Zerg/Alien ripoff, nonsensical plots. On a similar note, giving Odo a romantic interest in Kira - I love both the characters, but romantic love is deeply based in biological drives and there's no reason Odo would experience that kind of pair-bonding. I was troubled that it was the best way the writers could think of to give him emotional depth. They tend to make 'aliens' that are just humans with facial prosthetics.

The times where actual scientific concepts are grossly misused are troublesome. Such as Voyager finding a 'crack' in an event horizon in 'Parallax'.

I hated Roddenberry's insistence that there be no interpersonal conflicts or problems, since everything would be great in the future. The man was great at crafting compelling television in the late 1960s, not so much late 1980s / early 1990s. His death was very sad and one of the best things to happen to ST: TNG.

I'm sorry this isn't precisely what you asked for, but I find your question very difficult / impossible to answer.

Occluded Sun wrote:On a similar note, giving Odo a romantic interest in Kira - I love both the characters, but romantic love is deeply based in biological drives and there's no reason Odo would experience that kind of pair-bonding. I was troubled that it was the best way the writers could think of to give him emotional depth.

My memory might be failing me, but didn't they 'solve' that quandry by introducing another Founder whom he had a much greater biological attachment to and then just having him pretty much go 'I don't give a flying fuck' to Kira for awhile because the Great Link was just that awesome?

Another example is what we see of the planet Vulcan on the Enterprise series. The aesthetic reminds me of old-school Japan, with wood being the dominant element.

On a planet which is almost all desert and whose largest plant is nearly as tall as a human being. There are reasons Vulcan's development lagged behind Earth's despite developing interplanetary spaceflight when some human civilizations were forging bronze for the first time.

Even if you don't consider 'extended universe' material to be canonical, it's absurd for a Vulcan home to be so like a traditional Japanese structure.

Whether wood would be an acceptable building material has more to do with growth rates than with adult heights. If they have fast growing but small woody plants on their planet, I could see them going crazy for jointing. And that in turn would make their buildings tend to look Japanese or Dutch.

I totally agree about the Kazon. Not only were they poorly designed, but the whole concept was that their ships were slower than Voyager and Voyager was going in a straight line. How was there more than one encounter with those assholes? The fact that there were any repeat Kazon characters broke suspension of disbelief. I could see different Kazon ships getting subspace heads up about Voyager, but the fact that individual Kazon people showed up more than once was beyond acceptable.

-Username17

Occluded Sun wrote:The thread title question is now inaccurate, for me, at least. There are lots of things I *liked* about Star Trek. But by and large those properties are no longer part of the franchise.

I haven't seen the reboot movies, and I have no intention to. Judging by what I've heard and read about them - and I've actually done a modest bit of research into them - my decision to avoid them was quite correct.

I'd agree with this. Modern Star Trek is nothing like it used to be. It's just a sci-fi action series now.

For me, Next Gen and Voyager were the peak of the whole star trek concept. It really captured a kind of attitude and ambition that's almost entirely missing in most sci-fi. Most sci-fi is just modern drama, economics and politics set in a futuristic environment with more advanced weaponry. Star Trek wasn't. Roddenbury had the vision to imagine a future where things fundamentally worked differently.

Dezzy wrote:For me, Next Gen and Voyager were the peak of the whole star trek concept.

While most of Voyager was garbage, the initial concept of the show was good. Shame the rest of it was mostly shit and bad writing.

I submit that even the initial concept of Voyager was crap. 'Finding a way home' is really difficult to do well, especially in an episodic format, because there's a real tendency for the plot hooks to involve a possible way home, and the audience know those cannot possibly work because it's got to be back to status quo by the end credits.

Voyager's concept was extraordinarily lazy: more starship exploring. The fandom had mostly been won over to non-starship exploring perspectives by DS9, and were clamoring for a series about Starfleet Academy, or Section 31, or Temporal Investigations, or dinosaur-riding psychic warlords on pre-Surak Vulcan, or any fucking thing that wasn't TNG warmed over. But the executives decided that instead of doing something new and interesting, they would do the other thing.

Well, that, and the whole 'finding a way home' plot makes it extremely difficult to do continuity outside of the main cast. If that was the major arc for one or two seasons you could work with it, but as angelfromanotherpin and FrankTrollman noted it ended up making most of the encounters and discoveries feel like filler. Or ended up making them feel contrived when they did manage to have some continuity.

I would have loved a Voyager that was like Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, only not sucking all that is ass. Christ, you want to know of a show that had wasted potential? That fucking one.

quick question as interlude: how many intelligent non humanoid alien species did they actually bother to introduce?
And by this i mean completely alien, not just humans in disguise.
Even the changelings were just humans in disguise with some bad cgi added to them . .
I'm talking about things like the small parasitic aliens that live in the throat of other species and control them.
Things like the Crystal Lifeform.

As for a Roddenberry show with wasted potential:
Earth: The Final Solution . . errr . . conflict . .

Fuck you, Andromeda was a great show. It started sucking in the end with the crew being stuck in that like, pocket dimension, though.

"I'm telling you, the guy's huge...he's like a Greek god or something!"

Classic.

There are several episodes of the first season of Earth: Final Conflict which were actually quite good. I own the DVD set and thus I know. There were plenty of terrible episodes in that season as well, which makes it hard for people to reach the good stuff. And best pseudo-human aliens ever.

I acknowledge the point about fast-growing woody plants. Vulcan doesn't have them, at least in the beloved Extended Universe material like Diane Duane's Spock's World.

Voyager had several very memorable episodes for me, most especially Sacred Ground (that's a terrible but brief summation). ST has a long record of being hostile to faith systems, which I approve of as a rationalist, but rarely the show goes beyond criticizing dogma and touches on the parts of the 'religious experience' that people still know and value.

Star Trek: Temporal Investigations would have been awesome. And it would have given them a great excuse to not only use more of their status-quo-preserving scripts (for a good cause!) but to bring back Q and have him be snarky. Having the Q turn to human beings to settle their civil war (what) would be like humans turning to blue-green algae to settle their existential and political crises. Lame.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I submit that even the initial concept of Voyager was crap. 'Finding a way home' is really difficult to do well, especially in an episodic format

... Farscape.

Stargate Universe.
Also, arguably: Battlestar Galactica

Farscape probably handled the concept about as well as it's possible to. Most of the episodes were not actually about getting home, and also there was only really ever one get-home macguffin and it was tied in to a much larger conflict.

SG:U was pretty good, but I think that the get-home overplot only ever brought it down. Imagine if the show had gone full Alpha Centauri and every scene it had spent wallowing in pointless homesickness was replaced with a scene about actual social priorities in conflict.

Finding the way (home) was done in the original Battlestar Galactica with Lorne Greene and Dirk Benedict already.

So, I finally saw the Gazelle speech. It was awful, but the amazing thing is that it's awful in a variety of subtle ways that makes it hard to express your revulsion succinctly. Anyone want to take a stab at it? Or how about just some Enterprise hate in general?