Star Trek

Enterprise too the Voyager faults and went Up To Eleven.

x5 @5102; I'm not sure that follows. Yes, you don't need to rush anything out unfinished to get paid, but there'll still be the same pressure on, for example, academics to keep publishing. Or popular bands under pressure to get their next album out soon. :)

I think you'll still get "populist rubbish", because there's plenty of people who want to do something famous rather than something good.

I did say FEWER excuses to put out cheap schlock. Not necessarily no pressure to. However, if you no longer have to do it just to survive, you're more likely to tell fans, "chill out. It'll be out when it's out and you can't rush me if you want it to be good."

As for the populist shtuff, meh. It's never been everything in the world and it never will be.

Finally onto Deep Space 9. I get to see what the fuss is all about.

In about a season and a half, you get to see what all the fuss is about.

edited 18th Mar '15 2:23:06 PM by TParadox

I know. But I'm going to wade through the slow stuff to see it all.

Weirdly, DS9 arguably has the strongest callbacks to TOS. The Mirror Universe saga, Dax's relationship with the three most popular Klingons who met Kirk, and of course, Trials and Tribble-ations.

Voyager did a throwback episode too, but Trials is better than Flashback, and putting an episode inside a beloved TOS episode is better than putting an episode in a memory of a scene immediately before a small moment in the third-best TOS movie.

But Sulu gets to shine, like Doohan in "Relics" Takei probably has more lines in that episode than the entire TOS and movies combined.

Just wait for S2's 'Paradise'; IMO, kind of a TNG S1 Throwback.

With added racial overtones from putting a black man in a hotbox as a punishment in a rural community.

Well, it does have that added bonus, in addition to hearing how often life-thief Alixius has some good points, and how much she gave the colonists—just how was she planning to spread her philosophy past that planet?

Someone might find her books after they'd all died out?

So, are Lwaxana's continual assertions that Picard's thoughts about her are almost totally lascivious truth, flirty lies, or self-delusion?

I think she's just fucking with him personally.

A lot of exaggeration on her part.

There are some episodes in early DS 9 that I quite liked, but I loathed Paradise. And I did not even pay attention to the racial overtones.

It occurred to me later on, while writing a fix-fic, that both Sisko's and O'Brien's ancestors likely saw such treatment.

The Stockholm Syndrome thing at the end? Actually understandable. Not calling this monster out on her actions, permitting her the delusion of a martyr and evangelist? ST at its worst. The new sort-of leader should have at least told her off.

Could be. Lwaxana is a Denny Crane type of character, the senile has-been who can bring the juice when you seriously need it. Like all Betezoid women of a certain age, her empathic abilities are being polluted by hormones, so even if she sensed Picard's disdain her mind would just re-wire it into something lewd.

Just an aside, but Lwaxana reminds me a bit of my own mom. She began suffering from various health issues in 2002 which compounded one after the other; the latest in a 60 year streak of bad luck. Now I notice the tragic side to the Lwaxana character. She was my least favorite, easily, as a kid.

edited 22nd Mar '15 12:25:23 PM by johnnyfog

RE: Paradise...

Arrgh... allrighty then, this is why I hate a lot of 90's "science fiction": some of it was creative writing exercises gone amok, the other bits?

Good Old Ways and All-Natural Snake Oil. This ep is the latter.

I get it, my daddy loved working with handtools, he even built a TRS-80 computer with wooden cases for the monitor and the cpu. But he was an electrician and my mom was a nurse. She came from a culture of folk remedies, but she was could recite the Physician's desk reference chapter and verse.

All through the 90's it was "nature is better", "get back to nature" and "if we just got rid of technology things would be better".

The villiagers only survive because the Federation is there to bail them out. If their dear leader had never run into Sisko & Co? Disease would have wiped them out, the Borg, the Dominion, the Frengi heck even the Packleds could have taken them.

They were having a resource crunch: a boy was severely punished for stealing a candle. He just wanted to not be in the dark (ha ha screenwriter!). Imagine if there was a disease that only Dr. Bashir could cure? Or a predator that needed phasers to be taken down. The village would have been so screwed. That's where the coda falls flat. Yes they have a "community", but only because they shared trauma.

But all hail the "back to nature" narrative. And it's crap. That the villain used technology to create her "utopia" should have been a red flag to the community. They can still have their little nature preserve, but why not some better shelter? A replicator? Medkits so children don't die.

But no, back to nature. In my headcannon, the Dominion needed their system in their chess with the Federation. And they all rode back on a Fed Starship because there was something in the planet that only Starfleet medical could cure.

And BTW....'PDR: The Musical...it was a flop

This show's alright. Nothing special yet, since I'm only on episode 9. The one with the game. I'm finding Sisko's attitude to be a mixed bag. I like it when he's snarky, but when he gets angry it kind of annoys me.

I once heard Brooks's acting as Sisko described as "he can do 'simmering angry black man' and 'shouting angry black man'."

I don't necessarily agree with that assessment, but that's certainly what the scripts gave him.

Sisko's character was pretty meh in the first few seasons. It wasn't until the episode Explorers, that episode was when they figured out the character and hit it out of the park.

edited 20th Mar '15 2:31:53 AM by Memers

Last night I bought a bunch of comics including the "Doctors Crossover" special Flesh and Stone.

It's about the most obvious way to get all the doctors of Star Trek working together in one story, feels rushed, and the work Crusher, Bashir, and Pulaski do as a unit could be done by one person, so of them only Pulaski feels really utilized effectively because she at least gets a moment to question the Voyager EMH's abilities on techno-racist grounds.

Things that are convenient: Crusher, Bashir, and Pulaski sharing the same transport to a conference for no particular reason; McCoy's retirement colony being so close by; and Phlox being involved in an incident McCoy's medical team was responding to back in the day.

It's an Eigen Plot, but one assembled from Ikea with no instructions and five missing pieces.

edited 21st Mar '15 9:32:36 PM by TParadox

He clicks in the Season Three opener. Dax comes to his quarters and starts to sermonize about his character — "You're a builder, you don't like authority, you are cool, but rude", etc.

It's not elegant but it works, at least for Avery. He gets this spring in his step which wasn't there before.

Isn't that also about the time they started letting him wear a beard? He's a lot more comfortable with the beard and bald.

Season three he got the goatee, season four he got to shave his head. It was a progressive thing, it's the personal look Avery Brooks prefers, but he was in some well liked TV movies in the late 80's and the producers wanted to make sure Sisko would stand out as his own character. Now no one remembers "Spencer for Hire" and he's best known as Sisko.