Star Trek

Quick question, TNG introduced the "warp bubble" and "subspace" terminology. They kept using this on Enterprise and in First Contact talking about the Phoenix, right? There isn't any room left to suggest that those were innovations of the intervening period or successful parts of the Transwarp research?

Because it seems like those things might be an attempt to fix problems like "a cold start of the warp reactor in a collapsing planet's gravity field will cause you to end up two days before you started" and "if there's an imbalance between nacelles, you may generate an artificial wormhole that you can only escape from with an antimatter detonation dead ahead". Perhaps a subspace warp bubble even resists time travel by stellar slingshot.

I actually feel like the updated versions of TOS and TNG are very positive examples of a George Lucas Altered Version. The problem with an FX heavy television show like Star Trek is that the original footage could be scanned at a higher resolution and still look pretty good but FX stuff are often done with different film stock and frame rates, making it HD would look more like an upscale than a remaster. For TNG I don't think they added any original footage, but in some places included recreated footage matching the original as best as they can. For TOS they included more dynamic panning shots of the Enterprise and establishing shots of planets that have more life than a matte painting, but is done in the exact same spirit as the visual design of the original show rather than trying to update it.

^ To comment on the question, canonically the Starfleet warp drive is the same basic principle as what Zephram Cochrane designed. The "warp bubble" is the field around the ship that allows it to drop into subspace and move at FTL. It's implied that different species used different designs to achieve the same principle, Starfleet ships universally use nacelles. There are different tricks you can pull depending on the era and situation, from subspace tearing (Insurrection) to extending the field over another vessel. What Scotty did was a cold start of the engine to escape the planet's gravity well, and the combination of speed and gravity is what caused the time travel.

It's really one of those Early-Installment Weirdness things, in the original pilot they implied a significant time dilation effect was in play for their warp drive, causing constant new calculations for every warp jump. It's rooted in real astrophysics but is a headache for a running tv show. But if the chronometer is running backwards so should everyone else, if it's a time jump into the past the chronometer would either remain the same or reset once it aligns with the Federation communication network.

edited 14th Dec '15 11:24:25 PM by KJMackley

An HD of DS 9 would be really really nice, they cut so many corners in season 6 and beyond it wasn't funny. Hell the Defiant model was never made into an -A like it should have and every ship in S6 and 7 not named Defiant didn't even have a name or NCC labeled on them.

The Crystalline Entity is a great example of updating it. The original effect looks...nice I suppose, but it was a completely CG effect from 1987 for television. So they completely redid it because even the original file was completely gone.

They could have gone the Babylon 5 DVD route and just increased the resolution or zoom without actually doing any post processing worth anything.

I think the new version looks too vicious.

Examples like the Crystalline Entity was out of necessity. The original version would look like a glowing cauliflower in HD. The remastered version is cleaner and crisper with, appropriately, more of a crystalline structure. And looking vicious is appropriate, it's not supposed to be a gentle, harmless creature.

The old one was prettier. They do comment on its beauty.

edited 16th Dec '15 11:32:11 PM by TParadox

Well, I'm into season 6 of Deep Space Nine. The war has come.

Is it just me, or is the Dominon-occupied Terok Nor better lit than the Federation kept it?

Which is funny to me because Garak's complaint about the lights being too bright (season 2: The Wire) and the low illumination of Terok Nor under the original Occupation suggests Cardassians much prefer darker conditions. The Jem'Hadar have superior sight, so they certainly don't need better lighting either.

Thus the only way it makes sense to me is the amusing scenario of Weyoun (whom as a Vorta has apparently poor eyesight) insisting on the station being nicely bright despite the annoyance of every Cardassian (including Dukat, no doubt) there.

That and he probably covered it with an insistence that everything be bright and cheery like nothing has changed since the change in ownership.

Quark had a damn good point about how he wanted the Federation back, but this was infinitely preferable to the old Cardassian regime.

I've been rewatching DS 9 lately. I kinda forgot how damn much Quark got the focus. He's in almost every episode, often with a fairly significant role, and gets multiple focus episodes. Meanwhile, it took forever for Dax to get a focus episode where she was more than just a plot point.

The focus on Quark would be less bothersome except for one thing: An early episode had a woman complaining to Sisko about Quark putting a clause in her employment contract stating she had to sleep with him. That is a disgusting thing to do. It is absolutely reprehensible. And it makes it almost impossible for me to actually like Quark, because I keep thinking, "Sure sure, funny, ha ha, but he's also basically a sexual predator." It's not helped by the fact that he continually treats women as objects rather than people.

Also, the Ferengi in general make me really uncomfortable. Supposedly, they represent 20th Century humanity. The problem is, they're designed in such a way that they come across as Space Jews. They fit a lot of horrible Jewish stereotypes. So it always makes me a little uncomfortable seeing them.

That said, I also forgot how good the early seasons of DS 9 were. The first season of TNG was awful. Unwatchable garbage. But the first season of DS 9 was really strong. A couple weaker episodes, but most of them were really good. There's plenty of examination of difficult issues. The characters come in fleshed-out and developed. It very quickly establishes its own identity, distinct from previous Treks, and it seldom feels like it's just repeating previous Trek stories.

So, my general dislike of Quark and the Ferengi aside, I'm enjoying the rewatch. So far, I'm on episode 9 of season 2. So I've got a whole lot more to go through.

Quark appears in just about every episode and has a few feature episodes a season because he's one of the core cast. There's a mutual obligation between the cast and production team to get at least one scene in every episode if possible. There are rare exceptions where a schedule just doesn't work out or they simply can't fit the scene in, but the general rule is if your name is in the opening titles, you're gonna be in the episode.

A couple months ago, I saw a Tumblr post lamenting that Jadzia never got what she deserved. Every Dax episode was about past lives until the Klingons, and subsequently Worf, completely subsumed everything about her.

That's right, there really never was a Jadzia Dax episode. Just ones about Kurzon and the other hosts.

That's lame. It would have been nice seeing Jadzia just be a normal woman for once. She always came across as, well, I'm not sure what word to use. A ghost? A character rather than a person? It's hard to explain really.

At least with Worf and her death they raised the question of what really counts as a person. Is it just the sum of your personality and the facts about you, or is there something more that the rest of the world can never see? Like how Ezri can have her memories, yet she's still in the Klingon afterlife.

That's the greatest question we can ever ask, and there will never be an answer to satisfy us even if we get a true one.

Jadzia Dax as a character is an interesting idea but doesn't create a lot of interesting stories by itself. Worf originated as a look into Klingon culture, a society that is one of the classic Star Trek foes. Quark does something similar, as the Ferengi had very little development as a culture beforehand. But the Trill were just as much "modern American" as the rest of the human cast, and a combination of the fact very few Trill were actually joined and that Jadzia had hosts going back only a few hundred years meant they could only take it so far.

As for Jadzia not getting a spotlight, the episode where they had a ritual where past hosts were transferred to friends bodies so Jadzia could talk to them eventually became about her and the untold relationship between her and Curzon. Of course, the entire episode runs into a problem where Jadzia should know most of these things anyway by virtue of being joined, and didn't have a hand wave like with the serial killer host.

I only saw season 7 once, when it was airing, so I really don't recall Ezri being more than a neurotic mess, which she had reasons for being and I understand she worked through. However, the contrast leads me to consider the possibility that even though Jadzia's pansexuality, xenophilia, and wisdom were played as "I'm an 800 year old alien and your petty categories don't interest me", perhaps they are qualities particular to Jadzia.

Ezri actually got a lot of focus on her instead of Dax and ended up to be a lot more 3 dimensional than Jadzia who didnt exist outside of the old man Dax role.

They actually try kinda early on with her relationship with Kira mostly in Kira episodes but that faded to the background in season 4.

Hell Ezri actually has a family we actually see.

edited 9th Jan '16 11:11:15 PM by Memers

I do feel like Quark got a lot more focus than most of the cast, early on. He was an integral part of a lot of plots that had no real reason to make him so integral. Meanwhile, Dax was just There.

It's crazy how little they did with Dax early on. The first season Dax-focused episode had her silent through most of it, since it revolved around her refusing to defend herself at a trial. It was the first Dax episode, and she was more a plot point than a character. It happened with the next Dax episode, where a guy stole the symbiote from her.

It really took until the Klingon episodes for her to do things. It's a shame, because Farrell was great. She infused the character with so much warmth and intelligence and humour. She's someone you want to see more of. It was always fun seeing her in a Friend role, to various characters. But the writers couldn't seem to figure out how to explore who she was as a character, beyond being a friend and mentor.

Jadzia was far from a one note character, she was probably the most dynamic character on the show. Being a science officer first and foremost is Jadzia. It was that background that led her to even be a symbiont candidate. The primary character of Jadzia Dax was the conflict between who she is NOW versus what she knows of the previous hosts, from the buried Joran personality to the various Curzon affairs. Ezri was primarily just trying to understand what has happened to her.

Jadzia wasn't a one note character, but she wasn't really herself anymore after the joining. We get glimpses of her actual self here and there, but most of it seems subsumed in the Kurzon memories. The most we get is in that ritual episode where she seems a little different in dealing with Kurzon, and actually had to be told by Benjamin how to MAKE him sit down and talk with her.

As for why she didn't already know things about the hosts . . . she and Kurzon were able to repress memories of Joran. Why wouldn't the other hosts be able to repress or otherwise hide things too? And maybe not even on purpose. In the course of your own life you'll probably forget waaaay more than you'll remember. So maybe all the future hosts actually retain is the core essence of who a past host was. You don't retain everything, just enough to know what kind of person a post host was.

Actually, scratch that. It's not so much what they retain as what they have access to. Future hosts probably don't have access to every memory of a past host that the symbiote has. The symbiote holds something back until they think the past host would have wanted it told. Otherwise that whole ceremony thing could never happen in the first place.

In the case of Joran it was actually a conspiracy with the joining committee to suppress all traces of that host, as they have limited telepathic abilities to do so. Before the episode with the ritual it was implied that the current host had all memories of past hosts, which would make it more a novelty of being able to talk with... yourself... than actually being a sense of self-exploration.

I suppose the best rationale I can come up with for the ritual if you actually have all the memories of the old hosts and don't need to ask them questions is that if you can recreate the past host's personality and talk to them, they might say things that would surprise you based on just your memory of them.

Demanding Curzon tell her why he rejected her is a bad example, but the thing with noticing the one Kira guest-hosted keeping her hands behind her back is actually a great example of a tiny habit that was never fully conscious.

I thought of that as the same thing as talking with your younger self: you do have the same memories, but you don't know exactly what your younger self would answer. And there may be things that you simply have forgotten or dimly remember (or don't want to).

I suppose the real novelty would be the separation of the hosts personalities, being able to assess them as individuals rather than the conglomeration of different people. Kind of like the "talk to your younger self" idea but more about compartmentalizing major periods in your life.

Still, the major flaw in the episode is not the idea, but that she somehow wouldn't have known why Curzon initially disbanded her from candidacy and unopposed her reinstatement. Which, admittedly, would be a very strange memory to have. Every other Jadzia episode was clear that she retained specific memories of past hosts and not just generic impressions.

...of course even that is contrary to the original Trill episode of TNG, where the symbiont was the dominant personality blended with the host.

The original concept from "The Host" asserted that the host's personality was pretty much completely overruled in favor of giving the symbiont direct control. There's even a deleted scene where Odan comments that he has a bit of Riker mixed into his mind and it's an unusual thing that wouldn't happen with a Trill.

The episode completely fails to address the question of why anyone would sign up to be at best a passive passenger in your own body and at worst completely obliterated so an ancient worm can live on with your face.