Star Trek

For a lot of introverts, the stage is a safe way to get that kind of thing out. You've got a script, you've got a role you're playing, and people expect you to be doing things like that.

edited 27th Nov '17 5:43:15 PM by TParadox

I remember there’s one episode of Voyager, earlier on, where they encounter a tiny wormhole to the past and there’s a Romulan ship on the other side. That episode portrays the Romulan as being suspicious and distrustful, but when the Voyager crew ask him to tell the Federation that Voyager is still alive at the end of the episode, he agrees. The only reason he doesn’t is because he dies before he can.

If I wrote a Romulan story, I’d probably start from that portrayal. Suspicious and arrogant, but ultimately honorable and when one gives you their word, they will fulfill their end of the bargain to the best of their ability. I’d also throw in something about only using force when absolutely necessary, thus tying in the cloaking device to their culture. Because, why get into a fight when you can literally just sneak past your enemy? It saves resources and time and means the enemy will have fewer grudges against you. Because it’s hard for someone to go on a crusade against you out of revenge if you don’t kill very many enemies.

Well this really goes back to the original series, where they had some iconic Klingon enemies like Kor, Kang and Koloth, who were depicted as a Worthy Opponent to Kirk, while the main Romulan enemies were nameless and, while interesting characters, didn't get much facetime with Kirk. Having a direct enemy you can fist fight will always be easier to work with than a mind games villain.

Eh, if they can be done well, having both around is best. A fist fighting villain being backed by a mind games villain.

I didn't realize until double checking my information that Romulans only showed up in two episodes of the Original Series. Compare that to Klingons having seven episodes. Both were introduced early in the series with a long history with the Federation, helping them be seen as vital aliens in the Star Trek lore.

It was really TNG that pushed them forward, and it didn't do that nearly enough. No other series delved into them. They only factored into a few episodes (at least one) of DS 9, and none of the others really involved them.

It's interesting how nuanced the Cardassians' introduction was. Instead of one guy we got three, each with a different personality. There was the sneaky one who was looking at the Enterprise's specs without permission, the friendly one who was try to put the war behind them, and Marc Alaimo's Gul Macet, who seemed honorable and decent, but knew a lot more than he said.

2 1/2 actually. (since their ships show up in Deadly Years)

Speaking of aliens and now that we are out of Discovery for a while (and thus other topics can be explore), is it me or the people in charge of the alien designs in Voyager really drop the towel at some point?

I mean in latter seasons the make-ups are really really unimaginative and uncreative. I know this is the franchise that probably gave the Rubber-Forehead Aliens trope to the world but Voy took that to some extremes. I remember some aliens that were literally a guy with some small amount of plasticine in the forehead, like if the make-up department took 10 minutes doing that. I never felt DS9 was so uncreative with their aliens other than the Bajorans who were made like that on purpose as they needed lots and lots of extras.

And the thing is, to make someone alien you not always need to have a make-up, Farscape did a great job showing some really alien-looking people with body painting, wigs and eye lenses. Probably because they had a tighter budget and had to improvise, sometimes improvisation and short budget takes the best out of you creatively.

Sf Debris did a good job explaining how aliens can and show be designed. The staff at Voyager were undermined by a writing team that ran out of ideas. Hell, the first Voyager production numbers used the same numbers as TNG....

There were a lot of practical concerns, developing brand new aliens on a weekly basis across two television shows and a movie series (when you factor in the end of TNG, DS 9 second season, Generations and Voyager season one, they had three series in production and a movie at the same time). They realized about the third season of TNG that there wasn't much point in casting attractive actors/actresses if they were going to be placed under 10 pounds of latex. That was an explicit call for the Bajoran make-up as well as the Trill redesign. Apparently in the "Casablanca" episode of DS9, between Quark and his Cardassian love interest, during their kissing scenes they had to retouch the make-up because it was rubbing off on each other. Cardassian make-up itself evolved significantly before it really hit its stride, they were originally bronze colored, awkward puffs of chin hair with the spoon-head design looking like stuck on clay, removing the goatee, a switch to grey skin and more streamlined head design and it really emphasized their snake look.

It's the one-off and background aliens that tended to be the most generic, aliens designed to be recurring usually had the more interesting designs. The aliens with heavy make-up that really worked tended to be variations on the Proud Warrior Race and the Klingons: Jem Ha'dar, Hirogen and the fun subversion in VOY "Nemesis" (the Predator-esque aliens turn out to be the good guys). With some aliens like the Nausicaans you end up being distracted by the excess pieces flapping around as the character talked, or even smaller things like the Remans having long nails and consoles with buttons that don't really work with it.

What I do wonder is why they never thought outside the box. The mindset seems to be always: aliens are humans with some bumbs in the head and/or different ears. They never thought: Hmmm let's make this race humanoids with purple skin, or let's make these ones all have silver hair and orange eyes, these ones will be hairless with full black eyes... I mean, there are things you can do other than doing aways the same stuff.

edited 10th Dec '17 2:05:30 AM by Luppercus

Alternatively, you could have the aliens' distinguishing feature be, say, having only three toes on each foot, so after one shot establishing the three toe thing, you can just have the role played by actors without any special prosthetics.

Not really, Star Trek is the trope namer for Green-Skinned Space Babe. They also had a number of aliens with unusual appendages (three fingers, third hand, two thumbs, etc). They've been around long enough that nearly every trick has been used.

I do agree, though, that some of their best designs are the simplest. Jaylah worked out great because of the most basic use of black and white make-up, I barely realize she is wearing a headpiece. Chang from VI was also effective with a simple forehead ridge and eyepatch bolted on. In comparison Krell was obviously very restrictive for Elba to wear, with teeth so big it was a permanent open snarl.

The movies have sometimes had background races that are more imaginative than rubber foreheads. They look like they belong in a different franchise.

Well notice that I was mentioning Voyager specifically and not the other series or movies.

Well DS9 also had the largest number of recurring aliens, over 3/4ths of any major character (not extra) are the same 6 or so aliens: Bajoran, Cardassian, Jem Ha'dar, Vorta, Klingon, Ferengi, and most of those were already established. They were able to go really crazy with a couple of aliens like Morn but especially after the third season they hardly introduced anything new. By sheer numbers Voyager was bound to have some phone-ins.

Speaking of DS9 aliens, does anyone else see similarities between the Changelings' Great Link and the infamous Sea of Tang from Neon Genesis Evangelion?

Now I almost want to write a fic where the Federation encounters an alternate Dominion based on Earth that uses giant robots.

I guess VOY as the last of the series chronologically and with a constant flow of one episode alien get the end of the stick on alien design as they ran out of ideas for that point, no wonder ENT was more interested in exploring the classic races. But they do were lazy sometimes, they could use the think outside the box that other shows and other entrances in the franchise used.

Well, the Nausicaans were named for the Miyazaki movie, so at least some of the creative staff were anime fans.

Tangent rant: I'm starting to get bored of the whole "JJ/Discovery isn't real Trek" spiel. Especially since no-one spouting it seems to be explaining what "real" even means in this context and how those two entities don't qualify.

Is there a St. Elsewhere theory about those?

I suppose part of it is the visuals. I won't say original Trek was understated, but the low budget effects of the original, and the not-so-modern looks of the others kind of set a tone for older fans. They don't want Appletrek, they want the old stuff that doesn't look like Steve Jobs spat it out.

Another part is the modernization of the whole thing. This time I mean the story beats. Even though DS 9 went into things like what it meant to be a comfort girl, it didn't linger on the rape any longer than it had to, and it tried to bring some meaning to the characters out of it. Now, Discovery only recently got into that subject, so it's still a matter of time to see how they handle it, but given the Game of Thrones mentality people have been throwing around, there's a lot of distrust in the showrunners actually doing service to the franchise with it.

I have not watched Discovery, but concerning the JJ Trek, I can only say this: I loved the Trek series (especially TNG) because they featured a utopia. Yes, it was far from being perfect (nor realistic, but then again neither are transporters and warp speed), but at least it was trying to.
I did not sense any utopia in the first Star Trek film (have not watched any other), but yet another dark future where you could get clobbered by sailors in a bar for hitting on a crewmember, where women existed only as mothers, ex-wives or love interests, where you could get exiled on the other side of the galaxy because you made an admiral's dog disappear, and where it was perfectly OK to drop an unruly crewmember on a inhospitable planet. So this is why I personally say that these are not Star Trek for me (I like to refer to them as "Star Wars with Kirk", but my brother argues that I'm making a disservice to Star Wars).

It's really a matter of what one liked in Trek, anyway.

edited 14th Dec '17 2:14:35 AM by C105

It really doesn’t have the spirit of Trek let alone put in half the effort in the writing, characters and world building.

The movies sometimes tried on occasion like with Into Darkness ripping from one of the best original series Star Trek novels Dreadnaught and Battlestations wholesale but then threw whitewashed Khan in there to hijack everything without actually getting to the point of the books.

I can’t even say that about Discovery which is more a knockoff of the Battlestar Galactica Reboot and not at all Star Trek.

Right now The Orville is more Trek than Trek has been in 15 years.

It was really obvious from the start that it wasn’t going to be Trek when Pike called Starfleet an ‘Armada’ in the reboot movie.

edited 14th Dec '17 2:49:08 AM by Memers