Star Trek

I was watching DS9 today and man, I forgot how Gowron's eyes bulge in every scene he's in. Every time he's on camera I think his eyeballs are about to explode. I haven't seen eyeballs bulge like that since King K. Rool.

Edit: Great men do not seek pagetoppers; they have pagetoppers thrust upon them.

Edited by WillKeaton on Oct 11th 2018 at 7:50:10 AM

When I was a kid, I thought Gowron was a good guy until later in DS 9 he lost the way. Then when I was older, I rematched the episode we first met him in, when he's the candidate to replace K'Mpec who isn't Duras, and not only does the episode make a point of showing Gowron try to bribe K'Ehlyr, but it was pointed out to me that we actually never found out who planted the bomb, because Worf kills Duras for unrelated reasons and now Gowron is unopposed.

Gowron's pretty definitely a better choice than Duras, but was he ever actually fit to be the Chancellor of the Empire?

Nope. Which ends up playing a big role in Worf's arc in DS 9.

For TNG, when the most major conflict is between the part of the Empire loyal to the Chancellor and the part loyal to the secretly Romulan-backed Duras house, Gowron comes out pretty well. The worst thing I can think of Gowron doing is telling Worf, "yes, it's an outrage that the Council did that to you, but give me some more time before I fix it". It's DS 9 Gowron that does all the really unstable stuff.

If memory serves the entirety of the Dominion war was set between First Contact and Insurrection. What, preciously, was the flagship of the Federation Fleet doing during that time?

Edited by WillKeaton on Oct 12th 2018 at 5:29:41 AM

He's still a petty asshole who only wanted the position for personal gain.

Actually, Insurrection is during the Dominion War. It's underplayed, but the Enterprise is so busy diplomacy-ing due to the Federation being desperate to grab any ally they can that it leads Picard to lament that they used to be explorers, and then the reason the Federation is helping the Son'a despite them being obviously shady folks asking for help doing something obviously shady is because they're the only Alpha Quadrant people with the ability to mass-produce Ketracel-White, and the Feds really really don't want them to side with the Dominion.

I think First Contact is set in the period of rising tensions when war seems inevitable but hasn't started yet. I think the Klingons are still broken with the Federation, but that doesn't come up at all. The Borg just show up on the Federation's doorstep at a very bad time and of all the other fronts that might actually be of concern while they're distracted by the Borg, the Enterprise is sent to patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone alone and everybody realizes they're just being stuck safely out of the way because Picard might still be compromised by the Borg.

Gowron was more of a reverse Churchill, he was needed to help purge the empire of the toxic Duras influence, but he was too paranoid to properly lead the Empire against the Dominion. Martok, like Worf, had a more outsider/blue collar view of the empire that made them better positioned to get things done.

Presumably staying off the front lines to avoid getting blown up and generating a free morale disaster for the already badly pressed Federation. In the original background material, the Federation did something similar with the original Constitution class-they were eventually put into service in the latter stages of the 4 Years War against the Klingons; they acquitted themselves well in combat, but the conflict turned into a real meat grinder and there were only a dozen of them, so the Federation pulled them off the frontline to avoid any combat losses of their premier ship class.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Oct 11th 2018 at 11:52:34 AM

For all that we enjoy the shared universe concept of 90s/00s Trek, there's very, very little sharing going on. Deep Space Nine doesn't begin exploding the status quo until TNG is off the air and Voyager is out of the way in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager held off on using the Borg until after First Contact so they didn't step on any toes, the TNG movies make brief excuses as to why they aren't participating in the war and then do their own thing ("Mr. Worf! What the hell are you doing here?"), and when Voyager references the war, it's usually "we're at war, but nevermind that now".

The one good example of shared continuity as opposed to communal toybox-ing I can think of is when Voyager got an episode out of B'elanna becoming suicidal because she found out the Dominion wiped out all the Maquis back home, but I think that was something learned months after the fact.

Thank you for clearing that up. I now feel I have a much better understanding of both Insurrection and the Enterprise's role in the war.

Edited by WillKeaton on Oct 12th 2018 at 5:30:27 AM

I'm over halfway through the third season of TOS and I don't find it bad as I was led to believe. It's creative at least, more creative than going down to whatever leftover set was available, which is what half of the second season was.

Spock's Brain and The Children Will Lead would like to say hi.

The second half of season 3 is when everybody gave up. By the nature of their lead time, they knew they were airing in the Death Slot and nothing mattered anymore.

I finished TOS. Next I'll watch the cartoon, which I'm told might as well be canon.

Depends on who you ask and when. At one time, the line was, "if it's on screen, it happened". But then for a while TAS was considered at best ancillary and at worst an embarrassment, except for the parts people like, which is basically Yesteryear and little else.

TAS is... okay. There are some decent eps and Yesteryear is brilliant, and Uhara gets more of a role, but a lot of it is just forgettable. It did introduce the Holodeck or at least a prototype years before TNG, so that's something. It also tried to have more alien crew members, including some three-armed oddity and a catgirl of all things, but it didn't really do anything with them. They do show up in New Frontier and play a bigger role there, but as far as the show is concerned, they're non-consequential.

According to David Goodman, Picard had an Edosian (the orange three-armed, three legged people) CMO on the Stargazer.

Ah, TAS.....introducing the wide eyed 70's public audience to the Cat Girl in her natural accoutrements: a mini skirt and no shoes.

Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Oct 17th 2018 at 9:25:28 AM

TAS has its moments, but a lot of the dated things from TOS are exaggerated because of the 70's tv animation and tv actors who don't know how to do voice acting. It does manage to be a bit bigger in scope because they don't have to worry about set building, costumes and fx budget, but it can still be a bit of a chore to watch it.

M'Ress and the Caitians are canon too. You see one in Star Trek IV, an admiral no less.

The Kzinti though were not an original Star Trek creation, despite appearing in Star Trek III and V... CBS had forced Star Trek Online to rename and redesign their backstory a bit and are called 'Ferasan' which I would assume would be their name if they ever appear in canon again.

Edited by Memers on Oct 18th 2018 at 1:30:23 AM

Huh. A Lincoln Enterprises book calls the Caitians related to the Kzinti, and Larry Niven agreed with that.

Ugh, and for no good reason, the twin humans with cat-tails Kirk slept with in Into Darkness were Caitians per Lindelof.

Edited by TParadox on Oct 18th 2018 at 10:37:45 AM

Yeah, its something that has come up quite a bit over the years.

STO turned them into a reverse Romulan with the Caitians leaving the Kzinti/Ferasan homeworld for Cait in the distant past over Kzinti/Ferasan's war mongering, the Kzinti/Ferasan are still allied with the Klingons too like in TAS.

And really? Not furry enough.

Edited by Memers on Oct 19th 2018 at 9:38:14 AM

I'd been thinking recently that since the Klingons were the USSR allegory and the Romulans are sometimes spoken about as an allegory for China as an extension of that, if they'd had that in mind from the beginning, they might have had Vulcans be the ones that left, to further extend the metaphor by making them the galaxy's Taiwan (ROC).

That doesn't really work unless the Vulcans themselves were hiding the fact that they left their original planet for Vulcan and that isnt really logical, by the 2300s at least, since they would have no reason to and every reason to warn Starfleet of a possible proto-vulcan warlike race out there.

At bare minimum Spock would know.