Star Trek

Nope, Chief O'Brien wasn't really noticed even when he was named and never really took off as a fan fav until Deep Space Nine. The main cast was what got most fanfics and shippers going.

It was after Turn of the Millennium and The New '10s when binge-watching allowed Chief O'Brien's Character Development to be seen. Still his fans are dwarfed by the Garak/Bashir fandom.

Back then? Meh.

edited 2nd Jul '15 7:44:48 PM by TairaMai

After having seen a few episodes of the A-Team yesterday, I've gotta say Barclay seems to have tamed down. It would have been funny to see him face down Worf just to get his goat, and then give up with a smirk.

O'Brien was never really an Ensemble Dark Horse on TNG or DS9, but was liked by the production and audience enough that he stuck around. He filled a niche that was desperately needed on the show, a working class regular guy. It's the same reason Ro Laren was introduced, no one was comfortable making the core characters go into a gray morality area so they had to introduce it with non-Roddenberry characters. They really wanted to promote Laren to cast member multiple times, for TNG, DS9 AND Voyager, but the actress preferred a more relaxed schedule.

I didn't know they considered Ro for Voyager as well, but I guess she'd be easy to fit in among the Maquis crew.

Now I'm wondering if Seska is as much a Ro expy as Kira was.

I think it is one of those things considered in the early stages, not quite as official as early documents for DS9 describing the character and role. I think Torres would be the closest analogue in the show proper but before deciding firmly that the Captain would be female she might have been considered for the Chakotay first officer role too. The Maquis were in fact created specifically for Voyager and you could view Ro Laren's sendoff in TNG season 7 somewhat as a Sequel Hook.

Yeah, I know the Maquis were created to set up Voyager, but they decided to dump the interpersonal conflict concept so quickly it turned out that Deep Space Nine did infinitely more with them.

Apparently there's a new movie coming out?

A new movie? Sauce man! The sauce, we need it!

There's been coverage of it for months. Simon Pegg's co-writing it, a director he likes to work with is heading it, and they've all but confirmed that the title is "Star Trek Beyond".

Robert Orci is a nice guy, but his love for the Government Conspiracy and desire to ape Wrath of Khan (twice, Google it for spoilers if you wanna be spoiled), kinda soured me on his writing. He's also one of the "brains" behind the Michale Bay Transformers movies. And so seeing Pegg get some new writers is a good thing.

I also remember reading somewhere that Pegg was called to make the script less Trekky, or something like that. Given how un-Trek I found the reboot (have yet to watch So D), this puts my hopes very low.

He's also said he wants to do new things rather than rehashing old content, which indicates he gets what the reboot was supposed to be.

So is it just me, or does Worf feel like a different character on Deep Space Nine? Some of it is circumstance: he's left his Enterprise family and been transplanted into One We Made Earlier, and he has a new look with the red suit and long braid. Some of it is also a new dynamic: TNG keeping him around meant they had to pay lip service to the down and dirty approach, but it really didn't fit the show, leaving him to get constantly denied or demonstrate the Worf Effect, but Deep Space Nine is all about the down and dirty approach, so he gets to show how competent he really is.

But it all adds up to a very unfamiliar familiar character.

You kind of answered your own question, twice.

Worf is in a different environment with different characters, called upon to perform a different task. So yes he will come across as a different character. Kind of like how Batman in Justice League was much more of a team player than previously shown in Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond.

Others are small and deliberate writing tidbits. Michael Dorn agreed to come to DS9 only if The Worf Effect was ignored and that he was written as being an atypical Klingon, ie more than just obsessed with honor. The scene with Quark where he orders prune juice instead bloodwine, then proceeds to kick the ass of a Klingon captain just to get the attention of Martok, was specifically to solidify the deal.

Worf's development just happened to develop very naturally in that regard because working with the likes of Sisko played to his strengths and after years of dealing with the glaring flaws and hypocricies of the actual Klingon Empire, eventually being less inclined to the idealized notions of honor made sense.

If the staff hadn't run The Worf Effect into the ground Worf and developed him like the rest of the cast they could have had DS 9 Worf years early.

That's asking a lot, look at how Data was written. One episode he's awesome, the next he's confused with some simple idiom (*cough* Bragga *cough).

The Red Shirt was a comedy trope when the TNG pilot first aired, the writers should have known better.

The Worf Effect was largely from the first three seasons of TNG. The bat'leth was introduced in the fourth season specifically to counter that problem, a combination of Michael Dorn wanting a unique Klingon weapon (instead of trying and failing to grapple with enemies) and Ronald Moore, the Klingon guru, wanting to further develop Klingon culture. Afterwards the mek'leth was created for DS9 because "Klingons with bat'leths" became iconic and Worf needed a new weapon that was unique to him.

I would love to pick Ira Behr's brain sometime. He really put those TNG characters through hell — it's almost as if he isn't creatively satisfied playing with someone else's toys, so he turned them into his own.

Worf is a much darker character the moment he steps into DS9. He is bitter over his exile and the destruction of the only home he knows, the Enterprise. He quickly comes to realize that he never *really* acclimated to humans, it was just the Enterprise.

Then comes the further drama with Kurn and Gowron... Worf is the most tragic character on the show. Odo loves Bajor. O'brien "suffers" monthly, but he never really changes — he values his job and his family, and the show isn't quite cruel enough to remove those. Worf the character who suffers, truly suffers.

Worf needs a hug

So, having watched a decent amount of both TNG and DS 9, I have to ask...

Is it, like, a requisite for being a Starfleet Officer that your kids will become time travelers at some point? It's something that they should really start warning people about.

They do, but people still join up. I mean, how fucking cool is it to have a history changing son or daughter?

Given that more than one of them involved the kids messing with time because their parents died horribly, seems like reason to be wary.

Then again, maybe they leave that out of the pamphlet.

Though in retrospect, I guess Jake didn't technically do any time traveling himself.

I'd call that a selling point. "Don't worry, no matter how horrible a death you face, we'll secretly give your kids the tools to go back in time and save you from it!" Read that in Patrick Stewart's voice. You know you want to.

Why do I get the impression the Temporal Integrity Commission hates the rest of Starfleet and their cavalier approach towards time travel?

Not that the rest of the universe is much better. It still gets a chuckle out of me that "Time's Orphan" happens because Molly O'Brien basically tripped over an abandoned yet totally working time portal in The Middle of Nowhere, Bajor.

Anyway, I've been hopping around DS 9 the same way I did TNG, watching it episode to episode rather than season to season - though since this show is more plot and continuity focused I'm still holding off on certain plotlines (at least, not in full) until I get earlier info.

In any case, "In the Hands of the Prophets" is a very interesting episode, if only because it's one of the few times Sisko shows that despite being ruthless, often authoritarian (to a degree) and typically willing to forgo others' feelings and qualms in order to do what's right, he still holds the idealism that defines Starfleet and characters like Picard in his heart.

Sisko alone turns an anvilicious episode into a slightly different anvilicious episode, and ultimately gives it a much better anvil to drop at that.

edited 12th Jul '15 1:16:16 AM by KnownUnknown

They double as continuity cops. Basically, they're disgruntled Trekkies listing all the errors, and the Captain just smirks at them like, "genie's out of the bottle, fellas".

edited 12th Jul '15 6:34:07 PM by johnnyfog