Star Trek

Or Profit and Lace. {shudder}

Voyager had its moments, as goofy as it could be individual episodes often had an understated approach to its characters and stories. They did best when secluding different characters together and let the story be about them. The first episode that came to mind is "Gravity" where Tom and Tuvok are stranded on a planet and befriend a woman who falls in love with Tuvok. "The Chute" is another example. I certainly recognize that DS9 was more consistent, but the overall series was so ensemble oriented that any given episode just bounces around the cast, and this includes the extended cast, which had a tendency to make the series A LOT more melodramatic.

That episode is probably my personal worst DS9 episode (which is very close to be my favourite Trek series, along with TNG). DS9 season 7 had an awful lot of fillers. And too much Vic Fontaine singing (at least the character was fun).

I'd mostly agree with you on Vic, but seeing as he helped give us It's Only a Paper Moon, I'm not gonna fault him too much.

I think the absolute biggest flaw with Voyager is that it swings back and forth between using the premise really badly (Is this the thing that will get us home, in episode 5 of season 2? It isn’t? Well, we’ll just go through this again in two episodes) or almost not at all. They got better on that front later on, with getting minor boosts over time but the show did get kind of infuriating in the last couple seasons when at least twice they did a microcosm version of the main premise that was significantly better put together than the show itself. (Like, the Void episode.)

OK that one was to Vic's merit, but I think that by that time I was annoyed enough by the hologram (especially compared to the treatment the Doctor got in Voyager) to have not enjoyed this episode at his fullest.

Concerning Voyager (of which I have seen only the two first seasons), I like the fact that they introduced occasional aliens that would not have been realistically possible within the context of the balance of power of the Alpha & Beta Quadrants, such as the Vidians, or plots that could not take place in or around Federation space. Those were the most interesting uses of the setting, unlike the "Oh look, we have a way to go home!" plots.

edited 16th Feb '18 7:18:14 AM by C105

So I actually kind of like this take on the Constitution design.

I keep learning things I don't like from Memory Beta.

Last time I was looking up Lore and found out there's a short story that reveals every Lore appearance from Brothers on is actually Data trying to prevent an alternate future where Soong-type androids oppress the galaxy by discrediting androids.

This time, arguably less obscure, I went to look up if any novels dealt with Dr. Crusher's first term as head of Starfleet Medical, the one she left in Season Two for due to her actor's critical employment failure and then showed up the next year almost like nothing had happened. I can't find good information about the novels cited for that part of her life, but I did find out that the relaunch novels aborted her second term in that office. I think this is saying that she hadn't even gotten there before she was captured and listed as Missing: Presumed Dead so Picard could go rescue her and confess his feelings for her. I'm certainly happy the relaunch novels got them together, but I'd rather it wasn't at the expense of her career.

Paramount kinda screwed the pooch on the Star Trek EU-they kinda just threw stuff at the wall, and had almost anyone who wanted to write submit stuff-so the early Trek novels are basically canonized fanfic, including some from the original actors. They finally seemed to get it together when paramount decided on TNG; they contracted out the license to FASA, who went on to produce a consistent, if mediocre universe. Then Paramount doesn't like a couple of decisions and they pull the license-next thing you know, we have technical manuals and novels getting spit out at a prodigious rate with minimal oversight and even less continuity.

And it devolved into what we have today; there have been a few attempts to reign it in like the relaunch series, but they have never done a clean sweep like Disney with Star Wars. Now, the licenses are all over the place, there seems to be no central canon authority, and we have several distinct universes only occasionally interacting-the 'new;' timeline, the Star Trek Online timeline, the 'original' timeline where most of the early novels were set, and the 'modern' timeline that ended with Voyager and Nemesis that was wiped by both the new timeline and Star Trek Online.

The Kelvin Timeline explicitly and emphatically did not overwrite the Prime timeline.

The Relaunch novels seem to be made in a spirit of "there's no interest in telling more stories in the 24th century on for the screen, so we'll do it ourselves!"

Apparently there's pretty much no ancillary media for the Kelvin Timeline because Bad Robot didn't want anything out there that might contradict something they could want to do in the next movie (at least as of press time for The 50-Year Mission), and so Pocket Books just went all in on the Prime universe.

There's two or three Discovery books, but apparently they're going to rest the Trek novel license this year.

Interesting-I was dredging from memory. Anyway, the lack of cohesion and oversight is a serious problem.

The relaunch stuff actually has a lot of cohesion. It's all about building continuity now that the TV and Movie departments won't.

Glad to hear it-I gave up after reading 3 different novels that might as well have been in three different universes. Though I have always been partial to FASA's original world building, so I guess I am just an old Fogey.

The relaunch novels are also canon with Star Trek Online as well.

Some of them are, at least.

I don't think I've ever heard about the novels handling the destruction of Romulus, but I know STO uses it as the catalyst for making the galaxy less friendly than DS 9 and Nemesis left it, and therefore more amenable to Let's You and Him Fight gameplay.

Not to mention using it as an excuse to give the Romulans some badly needed development.

That was dealt in a series of comics which are also still canon.

I know the comics have worked with it, but those are fairly disconnected with the novels still, aren't they?

The comics are completely canon to STO but not the Destiny books I believe. There are 2 different stories on how Data lives for example the Destiny books and the comics / Star Trek Online.

• Destiny books Soong is still alive in an Android body and finds B-4 after he is captured by the Breen, he transfers Data into another body.
• In STO Geordi uses Data’s emotion chip to make Data the dominant personality since they need his help to fight species 8472, Data hates this and creates a program to delete himself but B-4 hijacks it and deletes himself instead. Data takes the hint and goes back to work (but saved a backup of B-4) he makes Captain of the Enterprise by the time of the comic proceeding with those events. An STO short story set after that is him privately activating another android body he calls ‘brother’.

There was a Waypoint preview in the FCBD Star Trek comic headlined by Mirror Broken where Geordi commands a vessel and Data is his first officer, but due to an earlier adventure, Data took over the ship's computer's duties and had taken to just projecting holograms of himself all over the ship, to the point where in the scene in the comic the bridge was only staffed by Geordi and like eight holographic Datas.

While I really want to read those novels, I have come to believe that rather than dealing with backed up personalities and conflicted identities, what would've happened if I got to write B-4 after Nemesis would be that Data doesn't come back in the ineffable sense conveyed by "reconstructing" or "recovering" his personality, but instead B-4 slowly integrates Data's memories into the development of his own neural net and quickly becomes almost Data, but with some clear differences born from having assimilated those experiences from a different perspective and not being constructed and programmed exactly the same as Data. So you get a very Data-like character who you can almost fool yourself into thinking is Data, until he does or says something Data wouldn't have.

Like, my headcanon is that Soong hard-coded some things into Data to try to avert what happened with Lore from happening again. He programmed Data to suppress and deny the more complex emotions that can't be removed from an advanced AI matrix without removing sentience, venerate humanity as his unattainable goal, and be psychologically unable to compose speech with contractions (though he's quite capable of quoting and has been known to slip at times). B-4, or Beta as he might come to be known after integrating Data's experiences, would then be perfectly capable of contractions, have a full suite of emotions, and recognize the difference between self-actualization and becoming a talking primate from Earth.

So what does everybody hope for from Season 2 of Discovery?

Personally, I just hope for the title. Discovery. Exploration. Going to new worlds and meeting interesting civilizations. I mean, this whole first arc was pretty cool and it did end in a very Star Trek fashion with a warrior learning to compromise and settle things peaceably, but Trek should be about both that AND exploring new worlds.

The first season was the first time a Trek show (kinda) lived on more than one ship and I am completely here for that. I'd love to see a story that takes place across half a dozen ships working together on different pieces of the same mission.

I'd love it if they did a small fleet instead of one ship. It really feels like they stretch themselves too thin when they have a single ship, even a grand one like the Enterprise D, roaming on its own.

It would help with the problem of long-running shows keeping the same crew together for an unrealistically long time. Would've been nice to see Picard get promoted into a Commodore in command of a detachment of ships captained by Riker, Data, Worf, and Crusher. DS 9 especially lends itself to Sisko being made an Admiral in charge of coordinating war strategy and Dax and Worf commanding ships under his flag based at Kira's Deep Space Nine.