Star Trek

Okay, I've gotten confused by an issue I can't discuss with the person I'm having the conversation with because half of it is spoilers to her.

Do we know for certain that the El-Aurian refugees on the Lakul were displaced by the Borg? It's recent enough to make sense that the Borg would have been into the far reaches of the Alpha or Beta quadrant, but I'd gotten the impression that when Guinan turned up in 1800s San Francisco her people were already scattered. That it happened so long ago that when the Federation was formed, there were just El-Aurians all over and the story of why was so old nobody really bothered to ask and that's why Starfleet didn't know about the Borg.

Not that it's not still devastating when a culture that's capable of crossing the galaxy loses their homeworld. We saw the results of that with the destruction of Alt-Vulcan. It just means that there are many survivors who aren't refugees because they were already living elsewhere.

And I've only seen the episode with flashbacks to Seven of Nine's childhood once, but I've seen it noted that her family went off to study the Borg before the events of Q Who (not sure if that's stated in the episode or if it was just worked out from her age) and it would make a lot of sense if they got word of the story of what happened to the El-Aurians and said "why is nobody investigating this?"

Side note: would there have been a good place for Guinan in First Contact aside from her being Picard's voice of reason yet again instead of Lilly?

edited 25th Sep '16 12:19:48 PM by TParadox

Well, her people were nearly destroyed by the Borg, so there might be something there.

Still haven't seen First Contact, though, so I couldn't really say.

Guinan said in "Q-Who" it was only a hundred years ago, taken literally that means the El-Aurian genocide took place in the 2260's at the earliest. Really, her appearance in 1890's San Francisco was a weird development. Memory Alpha says El-Aurians are natural wanderers, but given we knows they are three years travel from Federation space in the advanced Enterprise that is like wandering from the United States to the Australia without even knowing it is there.

The Borg timeline was also confusing at first but makes sense in retrospect. Guinan identified the Borg in their first appearance, so it's not like the Federation had no one to let them know.

And then there was the time they popped up in Enterprise but they never learned what they were called so history went "that was weird" and dismissed it.

That actually adds to it. It's the idea that this threat has been heard about and indirectly seen for hundreds of years but it took a direct confrontation with the Federation flagship to make it publicly known.

I'm sorry, you guys, but this is a Spock I can get behind:

http://jackfrost-edflake.tumblr.com/post/150665604472

Very much not safe for work due to language.

No offense, but... that ain't Spock. That's Mr. Mc Coy, which honestly makes a lot more sense. Because damn it Tam, he's a doctor, not a scientist!

edited 26th Sep '16 8:04:21 AM by kkhohoho

Dammit, Jim, can't you tell the two of us apart?

It's the...blue shirts, Bones!

...That was pretty good, though.

Oh hell. My face is so red right now you wouldn't believe it. It is Mc Coy. Blast.

Still a funny rant though.

I saw some panels from a vintage Trek comic where Spock accuses Bones of having no interest in science, and Bones responds, "Please, let's discuss this more in my fully equipped medical laboratory."

"You mean your beads and rattles?"

Science is one thing, but Bones was never too thrilled to be out in space, he distrusted the transporters, which were the most commonly used high technology in the show, and his berating of Spock's logic could sound like being dismissive of science as well. I wonder what it would look like if the roles were reversed, as they usually are in real life - with the human scientist gushing over this nebula or that star cluster, while the calculating alien surgeon creeps out everyone on board.

So, I understand DSC (though I keep calling it STD in my head) will have a ship design different from the teaser concept. With the rather negative reaction to the latter, that's good to hear. I wonder what the uniforms will look like though - somehow, I can't really picture the show going for beehive dos and go-go boots, overwhelming nostalgia notwithstanding.

And another random pondering - with no replicators on board 23rd century vessels, what will the routine drink order be, if they decide to (retroactively) continue the tradition? "Coffee, freshly ground", perhaps?

edited 27th Sep '16 12:05:18 AM by indiana404

Well, on Kirk's Enterprise, you order your food by sticking data cards into the reader.

The new Star Trek series will have a different ship? HA! That ship looked like a 5 year old tried to make the Enterprise out of legos and gave up because her mommy said there was waffles in the kitchen. I hope the new ship looks better.

Have I mentioned how I hate episodes that start after what should be the inciting incident? In this case, I'm whingeing about Resolutions, which begins with Janeway and Chakotay waking up after weeks in stasis and being told they have to stay on the leper planet.

In Medias Res is a well established dramatic device though.

Probably wouldn't be so bad if it was the middle of an action scene, or stranded on an uncharted planet with no way to call for help, or one of O'Brien's annual personal trauma sessions. Something with stakes. Star Trek occasionally does this thing where they start in the middle of a story, then take a bunch of time to enumerate the details of daily life under that routine, before getting to the actual plot— why this is happening, what's being done about it, how this affects the other crew members, the emotional impact on whichever characters are central to the story.

All that gets pushed back in favour of the new normal— which of course is never going to stick. The latter is acceptable, but the stories just seem like they would work better without the artificial 'variety' of messing around with story structure.

edited 4th Oct '16 4:00:21 PM by Unsung

I have nothing wrong with starting in the middle of the story to get you wondering, "why is this going on, and will it be okay?" I just think starting with "while you were out some things happened, they're not happening anymore, but they caused these changes to the norm" is where the "episodes have to be self-contained" paradigm sucks the most. It feels like they wrote a story, realized they were way over time, and cut act one down to five lines of As You Know.

There's a lot of those things that I think would be better served by building through a previous episode. In this case, the previous episode could have either started with Janeway and Chakotay getting infected and then Mulgrew and Beltran get the week off while their characters are in stasis, or it somehow happens during or after the climax of the previous episode, and gets left for next week.

Another big example: "Data went to a conference a month ago and we haven't seen him since, but now he's inviting us to his lab and introducing a brand new android to us." You could build that mystery of what Data's up to for a few episodes and give Spiner a break.

edited 4th Oct '16 4:00:11 PM by TParadox

That sounds pretty cool, honestly. If only serialization had been a thing back in the '90s. As it is, if you wrote characters out of an episode or two, they'd probably be worried that they were going to be written out of the series entirely.

There are a lot of episodes where an actor was busy doing something else that week and they just have one contractually obligated scene, if that.

Deep Space Nine has such a big core cast, they rack up a lot of no-shows. I'm not sure why Cirroc Lofton was still in the title credits by the end, he has so many episodes he's not in.

Yeah, seriously. Title credits be damned; DS 9's core cast was HUGE, at least for a Primetime TV show. I've just gotten to the midway point of Season 5, (Purgatory's Shadow/Inferno's Light,) and so far, we've got...

• Sisko
• Kira
• Odo
• Julian
• O'Brian
• Dax
• Worf
• Garak
• Quark
• Rom
• Nog
• Jake
• Leeta
• Keiko
• Kassidy

That's a whopping 15 characters right there. Granted, those last four aren't all that important in the grand scheme, but they still show up enough that they count. Throw in a bevy of reoccurring characters like Martok, Brunt, and the Grand Nagus, and DS9 probably had one of the largest casts in TV-dom at the time. And I love it for it.

edited 4th Oct '16 7:24:58 PM by kkhohoho

Yeah, DS 9's a different animal entirely. Heh.

I just love that everybody there has some kind of purpose. As opposed to the two live action shows that came before it which could be split up into a main trio and then some other guys and gals.

You mean the one live action show, right? Because TNG made sure to give everyone a purpose. In fact, their 'purpose' was about all there was to roughly half the cast.

• Picard: The Captain
• Riker: The XO
• Geordi: The Engineer
• Crusher: The Doctor/Pseudo Sc
• Troi: The Councilor
• Worf: Chief of Security
• Data: Operations Officer (Though in reality, he was a cross between a flight navigator, an engineer, and a bloody mathematician.)
• Wesley: The Wunderkind Ship Navigator

Everything had something to do, had some sort of personality, and actually got some focus every once in a while, even if most of the characters still weren't all that interesting. The point is, it was an Assemblage Cast, and everyone had some sort of 'purpose' at some point or another. This is in contrast to TOS, where Kirk, Spock, and Mc Coy were outright superior to everyone else, Scotty and Chekhov were kind of important but still played second fiddle, and Sulu and especially Uhara mainly just sat there and looked pretty. It almost makes me want to read 'The Sundered', because that book is supposed to be all about Sulu as Captain of the Excelsior and might actually flesh the guy out decades after the fact.

Anyhoo, the point is, TNG was the first Trek show to have a proper assemblage and give every character some sort of 'purpose'. It's just that DS 9 was the first show to not only do so, but also to make most of that assemblage actually interesting. Say what you will about TOS, but at least the characters it did focus on weren't as dull as wet cardboard.

TNG was very much an ensemble show, but in the sense of "we have seven characters to pick an A-story protagonist and a B-story protagonist from this week"

I disagree. You have 3-4 primary characters and then the rest for TNG, Its like Picard, Riker, Data and Wes or Worf depending on the season then the rest who occasionally get a once every other season focus episode.