Star Trek

Merde.

My guess is she was based on Natalya Simonova, one of the forgotten Bond girls.

Edit: According to Memory Alpha, she's based on the Bong Girls from From Russia with Love and The Spy Who Loved Me. Shows what I know about James Bond shit.

(I still have no idea what the entendre is.)

edited 10th Aug '15 6:57:00 PM by johnnyfog

I can't see any double entendre in "Simonova", but I kind of can in Komononov.

Eh, kind of if you squint but I won't get into it on this site.

Do you think a Star Trek series could support a crew across an armada for an entire season or run? Like how Picard's senior staff gets spread across the blockade in Redemption part 2, but as a series concept. A bunch of people who've served closely enough to feel like a family, but on a group of ships instead of one.

Could have solved the criticism of crews stagnating in rank and post over seven years.

They should have tried. They were playing way too conservatively during TNG's run.

At least it leaves the concept open for revisiting should they ever do another Trek show.

I listened to Earl Gray's episode on characters in command and they spent a lot of time on Data's command stint on the Sutherland. They also referenced Data getting promoted to Picard's second in command when Riker finally accepted a command of his own, and Picard telling Data "someday you might command your own starship too" ... in another 25 years or so.

I always figured Starfleet wanted to promote those within the Enterprise senior staff, but at some point thought "Look this set of people keeps surviving anomalies, saving civilizations, and somehow stopped the Borg; let's keep em together and just see how it plays out."

The single ship concept is ultimately the one that is most flexible in terms of storytelling. Spreading out the cast over several ships would force a story that is not only extremely broad (telling the story of 3-4 ships over 1) but forces it into an anthology.

I rather liked the proposal that the Enterprise is where Starfleet sticks the dangerously idealistic, where they can do the least harm to the machinations back at Headquarters.

Deep Space Nine is arguably worse. Worf and Jadzia spend more time commanding the Defiant than Sisko does, but aside from the sparse promotions in season 3, Sisko making Captain in season 4, and Kira getting Colonel sometime during the Dominion War, everybody stayed where they were for a helluva long time despite having much more responsibility than expected when they were given that post. And my father pointed out that Worf's job description, "coordinating Fleet activity in the region", is a Vice Admiral's job.

Makes sense. DS 9 personnel, in all honesty, should have all been flag officers since their activities were essentially the kind of thing a high command would have done.

Only General Martok, as head of the KDF, made sense there, rank- and position-wise.

Sisko should have been a Vice Admiral or full Admiral, Kira should have made Major General, Jadzia and Worf should have been at least Captains or Commodores, Bashir at least a Commander, heck, even Odo should have been a DCI.

O'Brien is difficult because he's risen as far as he can without a commission.

Do we have a trope for something like Captain Sounds Cooler - that is, when characters are given ranks that sound more impressive to the audience (though only because the audience is used to having heroes be given those ranks in the first place) as apposed to the actual ranks they would have?

edited 13th Aug '15 12:51:24 AM by KnownUnknown

Do you think Star Trek has been so prevalent in media that Naval ranks are generally better known than Army ranks? It always takes me a moment to click over when I see a Captain outranked by a Commander.

Star Trek probably helped codify it as generations passed, but the whole swashbuckling genre probably had something to do with it too.

One of the things that drove me CRAZY about Voyager was Kim being an ensign for 7 years.

Even in a normal situation, he would have made LTJG in 2 years. In the extenuating circumstance that Voyager was in? He should have been at minimum a LT.

I mean, Tom "Yeah I Can Do That I Have Previously Undisclosed Training as Suitable For the Episode" Paris got dropped to ensign and promoted back to LTJG. And there was Harry. Just an ensign. A nearly-30 ensign.

One of several reasons I do not rewatch Voyager or have bothered to binge all the episodes like I have with TNG and DS 9....

Well, also consider that on the playground when you divide up for a game someone is designated "Team Captain." For the regular person who isn't able to name military ranks in order and differentiate between commissioned and enlisted, Captain has universal connotations of someone in command of a group and is a term used in just about all military branches.

I mean when you use the term Master Chief a good number of people will think of the Halo character.

I've heard that the reason a "Captain" is such a high rank in Navies vs other military organizations is because the term started as "the guy in command of such and so large group of people without many middle managers", and stayed that way in the other branches, but at sea that number of people was the complement of a boat once, and then boats got bigger but they'd gotten used to calling the guy in charge of the boat "Captain".

Man, I'm starting to wonder if that weekday afternoon run of Deep Space Nine actually got all the way through. I'm almost sure I saw "Who Mourns for Morn?" in that slot and not in first run, but it's halfway through season 6. I remembered it fizzling out shortly after Way of the Warrior (after a few years of cycling through TNG).

Maybe it's just that the cast introductions fizzled out after Way of the Warrior. When it started, they had a talking head box with one of the cast giving some commentary on the episode over the opening credits, and I remember Michael Dorn did at least one.

Thing I realized the other day: Neelix is the civilian in charge of Voyager's social hub, the Talaxians we see are merchants, and in his introduction he was devious and not to be trusted.

He's the Quark of Voyager. The Talaxians are a more rounded version of the Ferengi.

That makes sense for sure. It's not like Voyager stretched very far for plots in most cases anyway. I think one of the best things that show did was having Kristanna Loken in an episode.

They abandoned pretty much everything they had planned for the long-term plots by the end of season 2, except for the "stuck in the Delta Quadrant" thing, which they did seriously consider dropping in a ratings emergency.

It is something that happens with a lot of tv shows, rule of thumb is the premise should be capable of supporting at least 100 episodes (not accounting for British Brevity). Deep Space Nine was the first series to be built on an actual plot versus an open ended premise, and even it quickly kicked off the cold war and reconstruction themes of its first two seasons to focus on the Dominion as a new superpower diverting attention from those earlier topics.

Voyager had Failure Is the Only Option built into their premise, but they sidestepped it by whittling away the actual drama of the scenario to focus on the episodic problem. In almost every respect Voyager came back stupidly more powerful and advanced than when it left (even disregarding the ablative armor and transphasic torpedoes they got in the Grand Finale). They almost had the right idea with a few seasonal villains (Kazon, Maelon, Krenim, Hirogen), as it would reflect the idea of Voyager passing through different territories. But after the Kazon overstayed their welcome they worried the others would overstay their welcome.

The problem with Voyager was twofold:

• Like TNG, Voyager did TNG style tales after that series had bowed. Instead of trying to blaze a trail, it was as the Agony Booth put it'', "Comfort Food Television" for Trekkies.

• Berman was too gunshy, never using the premise, Bragga was the Rob Liefild of Star Trek: sloppy writing and the errors of TNG dialed Up To Eleven.

While some Trekkies didn't like DS 9 for "not going anywhere", other didn't like Voyager for being focused on getting home instead of exploration. The irony} was that B&B (and Jeri Taylor's Mary Sue) tired and failed to make Voyager "TNG's 8th season".