Star Trek

I want to know what the deal is with that robot girl. I mean, if this was post TNG I'd say, sure, Data set a precedent. But this is long before Data was conceived.

edited 17th Nov '17 5:31:56 PM by WillKeaton

Several robots turned up in TOS (though built by extinct and/or enigmatic aliens).

The androids in I, Mudd and What Are Little Girls Made Of are particularly convincing.

Which one? The Daft Punk one on the Shenzou or the Freeza-looking one on the Discovery?

What if it's the same character with an upgraded head?

I'm not sure if Roddenberry was more obsessed with sex or with averting the Kennedy assassination. Oh okay, he was definitely more a pervert (and I do not use that term lightly) than a Kennedy fan, but he pitched "the Enterprise turns up in 1963 and accidentally prevents the Dallas shooting, undoing their future" for both the first and second movie, and then used that fact to claim credit for the success of TVH because "I told them to do time travel".

Apparently that Daft Punk character on the Shenzhou was just someone wearing a helmet.◊

I was just reminded of a thing I read in the early Voyager relaunch novels.

As much as it's a problem that Chakotay never got anything to do, and throwing him together with Seven at the last minute was motivated by Beltran complaining he had nothing to do, I'm still a little amused by the fact that in the novels, shortly after Voyager got home, Seven basically told Chakotay that since they weren't a generational ship anymore and everyone had the option to go their separate ways, it didn't make sense to continue to pursue a relationship anymore. Chakotay muses that the two big times on Voyager he was shut down, one was because they were stuck together and therefore it was inappropriate, and the other was because they weren't stuck together anymore and it therefore it was inappropriate.

Eh, Red Dwarf did it better.

Yep.

Tikka to Ride was the episode, I think.

Dukat often goes on about how merciful he was when he was in charge of Bajor. Now I know he was still a ruthless prick, but he insists that he was more benevolent than his predecessor. Who was his predecessor, and how bad was he?

The Emperor from Star Wars, who was famous for not being as merciful as Darth Vader? :P

According to the non-canon books, Dukat was the latest in a long line of short lived administrators who more less rubber stamped everything sent to them by the high command since Bajor was always a dead-end posting that no one wanted.

Dukat actually had some idea of reforming things when he was young and idealistic as well as making peace with the Bajorans (from a somewhat arrogant imperialist position) but had only limited power as head of the station not the entire Occupation. So while he was making magnanimous gestures, he was still part of the occupation which included labor camps where people died by the thousands.

Plus, half of 100 people killed for every act of resistance is still 50.

Dukat stopped screwing around and became the predatory snake we know and love when they reduced his rank from Legate to Gul.

edited 22nd Nov '17 1:14:04 PM by CharlesPhipps

I want the dry Department of Temporal Investigations to make an appearance again.

The agency shows up in Star Trek Online several times, you even work with one to try to change the timeline which was very awkward.

They also have their own book series in the Novel Verse. There aren't a lot of them, but they're out there.

It's interesting to hear people involved in production of the movies talk about their ideas they still love that didn't get into the movie, and usually my response is, "no, that's an awful idea!"

In Harve Bennett's Academy Days script, which I still think is a terrible idea even though the AOS is essentially the same thing, but at least has the decency to explicitly be a different universe where they can totally rewrite things, Kirk, Spock, and Bones are all senior-year cadets at Starfleet's Huntsville Alabama training grounds, and Kirk ends up having a great romance with a girl who "dies a terrible, sacrificial death" and therefore inspires him to do impossible things to save the world from the "deadly threat". This also serves to let the audience see "why Kirk never fell in love again".

A sequence that Undiscovered Country would've had except it cost far too much money gave each crew member their own entrance as they got the old gang back together. Which would've been good in the abstract if a bit meandering, but Kirk is described as being dragged out of bed away from Carol Marcus protesting that "I'm retired, check my retirement pay, I can't even afford to cross the street!" An early draft had Sulu arresting Kirk and delivering him to the Klingons, only it turns out Kirk let himself get arrested because he and the Federation President have a plan.

One of the draft writers for Voyage Home is smarting about how Bennett took away his ending where the crew is picked up from the water and think they're being taken into custody, then get confused as the shuttle goes directly to what is revealed to be the Enterprise-A.

And of course, Shatner still wishes he could've had his demons and rockmen in Final Frontier. Maybe the movie does end weakly, but I think that sequence he lovingly describes would've been even sillier than the confrontation with Not-God.

But then there's a lot of comedy and character beats in Final Frontier that I like that absolutely everyone in the book is down on. I like the campfire scenes, and absolutely nobody in the book does. They build up the friendship of these men. Maybe there could've been a more thematically appropriate campfire round than row row row your boat, and the Marshmallow Dispenser is the most ludicrous attempt at cross-promotional marketing in world history, but I like the heart of the scene.

There is often a disconnect between what the audience experiences and the process of writing/directing/acting in any given product. I was reading about "Schisms" where aliens from another dimension were abducting crew members for experiments and they were all keeping memory fragments of what happened. It's a reasonably well liked episode but the crew themselves hated it because of how the aliens looked when finally revealed.

I'm also not sure how much I favor what made it to the screen because that's what I'm familiar with versus what's actually better.

I think the problem with the Schisms aliens is they showed too much. They were supposed to be silhouettes in murky darkness, but you got to see all of them in the surgical lights over the tables.

I know the reason we know so little about Romulans. We have Cardassian characters like Gul Dukat and Garak, who we get to know quite well because they get lots of screentime. On the Ferengi front we get to spend a lot of time with Quark and his family. You want Klingons? We've got Worf, Martok and Gowron. But Romulans? The only recurring Romulan character who gets any screentime is Tasha's daughter. There was that one guy who defected to prevent a war, but he was only in one episode. So while other races get characters that we get to know quite well, we don't really get to know any Romulans, like, at all.

They keep ignoring or deferring opportunities to get to know the Romulans. Star Trek 3 was going to be Romulans, but Leonard Nimoy pointed out that the fans wanted the Klingons more.

You know the symptom of the reason. The symptom being that we don't get any Romulan characters to care about. But what's the cause of that? That's the cause we need to find and overturn. Of course, if that cause is "most members of the modern audience still don't care about the Romulans" then . . . well, not much to do about that, really.

ETA: Also, I don't fully remember much about three. Did we really learn much about the Klingons in that one, or were they just bad guys we occasionally saw doing stuff. I remember it was Christopher Lloyd playing the captain, but not much else.

edited 27th Nov '17 12:17:42 PM by Journeyman

Kruge is a very different Klingon. He's bombastic, but also reserved. He's a calculator. He would've made a great Romulan.

Lloyd had to be constantly reminded to speak into his communicator instead of screaming at the sky with his arms outstretched.

Well Lloyd just is bombastic. I've heard from fans that met him that he's an asshole, but I only heard one account and that could have been a bad day. There's probably plenty of one off contacts that left people thinking I'm an irredeemable prick.

My understanding of what he's like in person is that he's shy and introverted. He doesn't like doing interviews and public appearances.

So that fits.

Wonder how that jives with him being so loud on-screen in most things.