Star Trek

There are variations with the aging process. In real life we mere humans maintain physical prime around 20-30 and, sadly, progress downhill from there, and barring individual medical reasons live to be 80-90 (you rarely hear "died of old age" when someone passes at 60). That's mostly from good nutrition and sanitation, with advanced medicine even those with medical issues are living much longer.

In Star Trek it seems that with increased medical technology humans prime might have shifted from 20-40 but they still start feeling middle aged in their fifties, and the far end of their lifespan approaches 150. They do very much show that age.

Sarek was played by a actor in his forties and mentioned he was over 100 years old, as Spock was in his thirties and looked it the implication was a highly prolonged physical prime for Vulcans.

The Ocampa only lived 9 years, which likely means they reached physical maturity by 2, look like a normal adult until about 7 and then quickly become elderly.

Did.... did this show just become a hard prequel to Star Trek the original series, as in, hey time to follow around Pike and Spock on space adventures???

or S3 is going to cover Discovery’s crew in 3187, which is just past the farthest point in the Star Trek timeline, Just beyond Danials and Voyager’s Temporal agents .

I'm going to bet they make a layover in the Picard series.

How well is this series doing anyhoo?

I mean, second season does feel like improvement over first, but I dunno if that helps it much .-.

Like Netflix, CBS All-Access isn't releasing viewership numbers. They did renew it for season 3, so it can't be doing that bad.

Looks like the fans complaining about all the prequels are finally getting their wish.

I did like how they fleshed out Pike's backstory in S2.

And did they finally confirm that Number One's name really is Number One? It's the name she gave at her debriefing.

Edit: I see Pike called her "Una" at one point... but maybe that's the nickname?

Edited by alanh on Apr 20th 2019 at 11:53:56 AM

Subtitle's said Noona, so I don't know what that was all about.

And I think they were being cheeky and cutting back after she stated her name and rank, to her just stating her position.

Una means one so *shrugs*

I was watching some Season 1 TNG and man, did I stumble into some weird shit. The Enterprise takes on some delegates from two species that hate each other, lizard people and furry people with huge facial hair. The meat of the episode is about Picard being possessed by an energy being, but when that wraps up Riker says maybe Picard should take a nap. Then Tasha walks in and tells Picard that one of the lizard people delegates is missing and there's a pool of blood outside his quarters. Picard is like "couldn't this have waited?" No dude, this is the kind of thing you need to know about now. Then Tasha continues on and she's pretty sure the furry delegates have eaten the missing lizard guy. Picard is like "Maybe I SHOULD take a nap. Number One, you deal with this," and it's treated like some big joke. Hur hur hur, one of the delegates ate somebody, isn't that wacky? Episode over now. Like, what the hell Star Trek?

Edited by WillKeaton on Apr 24th 2019 at 11:45:01 AM

If anything, season 1 TNG is more uneven and whacked out than most of TOS. You can feel Gene's fingerprints on most of the stories, even the ones he is not credited with rewriting.

Yup. It's the season with gems like Code of Honor, after all.

ETA: Though it does have some good ones too, like Haven. I really need to rewatch that series. I love it so much.

Edited by Journeyman on Apr 23rd 2019 at 12:10:39 PM

Code of Honor was entirely on the director, the original script they were written as reptilian aliens of the week. The director did the casting and made the whole thing just racist.

Edited by Memers on Apr 25th 2019 at 7:55:54 AM

Wil Wheaton in his review even mentions the performances by the guest cast are actually pretty decent, and the script by itself is maybe derivative but not horrible. But casting exclusively black actors with African accents as an alien race making a tribal demonstration to a naval superpower was a bit too on-the-nose to avoid Unfortunate Implications.

I think the best of season one TNG was probably "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "The Arsenal of Freedom," they still have their season one flaws but really take advantage of their bigger budget.

I always liked ‘insert those Binary Numbers here’

I was actually thinking of that one too, but for some reason thought it was second season.

Was watching Voyager. Shit happened to Chakotay, so B'Elanna pulls out a medicine wheel. Now I know enough about Native American culture to know that's a plains thing, but it made me wonder, "What the hell tribe is Chakotay supposed to be from?" Memory Alpha say he's supposed to be from Central America, and also possibly Mayan, but the writers kept adding more and more traits from most definitely not Mayan tribes. There's an essay about how Chakotay's people's heritage makes no sense here.

Chakotay makes more sense once you learn that the crew based his character on a bunch of BS a fake expert on Native American culture fed them.

Edited by kkhohoho on May 8th 2019 at 8:26:51 AM

Was his tribe even named?

In "Tattoo" his tribe was said to be descended from "The Rubber Tree People," which seems to be based of the people of Central America.

They also had a Frenchman with a Westminster accent. I think there was a handwave about cultural blending during WWIII.

I thought that the justification for Picard's accent was just that that was how the UT rendered his specific accent in English.

If Picard was a true Frenchman he would have destroyed the Federation right then and there for that

My personal explanation was that France had been successfully invaded by England (or had been the destination of a huge amount of British refugees) during WWIII.

I think in universe the universal translator is supposed to operate more like how it was portrayed in Star Trek Beyond, you see and hear them speaking a foreign language with a brief delay for the computerized translation, so you wouldn't get a clean rendering of their accent (accents themselves are just pronunciations, it's local terminology and specific grammar choice would be difficult to provide perfect equivalents). The fact they speak perfect English to us is a convention of the medium. Enterprise even nodded to that idea when Hoshi was rigging up the first major universal translators for diplomatic meetings, as everyone had clunky devices attached to their shoulders and protesters were shouting words that were not being translated.