Star Trek

[Trenacker]

Yes, that's correct. A&E.

Also, don't forget Master & Commander (2023).

For those who need more nautical nonsense, Black Sails is decent fun, but it's the characters and story that hold you, not the very unconvincing sets.

[Buster's Uncle]

That's a Bolitho story?  And M&C is Hornblower-like?

[Trenacker]

To clarify, Forester, O'Brian, and Reeman/Kent seem to have produced highly similar stories about Royal Navy men and their adventures. To the best of my knowledge, there is extreme similarity between the stories told by O'Brian and Reeman/Kent.

Forester's hero was Horatio Hornblower. His series was published between 1937 and 1967 and translated to film in 1951 (Gregory Peck starring) and 1998-2003 (Ioan Gruffudd starring).

O'Brian's heroes were Jack Aubrey and his pal, surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin. His series was published between 1969 and 2004 and translated to film in 2003 as Master & Commander: Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany starring). In general, that film is universally praised for its realism. It was also just very good fun.

Under the pen name Alexander Kent, Douglas Reeman wrote the Bolitho series from 1975 to 2011.

In the last few years, James L. Haley produced a much smaller run of novels called the Putnam series focused on the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812 in particular, which were both good and unique.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's a moment in the second episode of TNG, Naked Now, between Picard and Crusher -when Picard coughs weirdly- that makes no sense until you've seen the running joke in the Peck Hornblower movie...

[Buster's Uncle]

Been up to something...

[Buster's Uncle]

?

[Buster's Uncle]

Just Kirk.

[Buster's Uncle]

Some adjustments...

[Buster's Uncle]

Just Marta.

[Buster's Uncle]

W/ some refinements-

[Buster's Uncle]

[Buster's Uncle]

It hit me, out of the blue the other day, what those parallel Earths are for...


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-They're playing Civilization.  -On God Level.

[Geo]

Parallel Earths 1 through 7?

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, the Roman and Yang worlds for sure - Miri's world is probably more like a first-person shooter potting grups/zombies; they only visited that one city, and it may explain the global lack of clouds as something to do with omnipresent sunlight.

The gangster and nazi planets are canonically handwaved as Earth interference/contamination, but it's really unlikely how thoroughly it took in either case - Quick Start?

-And once you start down that rabbit hole of looking at the nature of reality that way, many episodes look like a game - Landru and Vaal?  Outwit the AI.  Arena with the Gorn?  Almost explicitly set up like a game.

-Somebody must love a Space Patrol genre game called Star Trek w/ mostly Kirk as the player character...

[Ordnael]

I actually liked Chakotay, but I think his character was too subordinate to stand out. It made sense for the XO of a starship but undercut the value of his presence in a sci-fi drama that needed to captivate viewers. Chakotay would have been much, much more interesting had they let him keep his Maquis raider, or even if they had done a few episodes centered on flashbacks from time to time. And indeed, I think the show missed a second change at the same opportunity when the writers destroyed the U.S.S. Equinox.

In theory, the level-headed Chakotay was the oil to the hard-charging Janeway's troubled waters, but Janeway was always inconsistent herself, and by the middle seasons any tension was completely gone and they acted as one. It didn't help that Tuvok was equally as devoted to the chain of command, leaving characters of much lower rank (Paris, Seven, Neelix, and the Doctor) to repeatedly get themselves in hot water. That, in turn, contributed to the idea that none of them ever really learned. Neelix's final episodes were terrific, and the end of his arc was fairly satisfying, but it wasn't lost on me that he had gone too quickly from world-class buffoon to seasoned explorer.

To be fair, Star Trek has had "the captain/XO" problem elsewhere. Enterprise seemed to avoid it by placing T'Pol temporarily outside the normal chain of command and pushing tensions down a layer or two (e.g., T'Pol vs. Tucker, Reed vs. Hayes) but Discovery ran too hard and too fast in the opposite direction. Michael Burnham should have been drummed out of the service, never to return, for the way she repeatedly and unapologetically flouted the chain of command, placing herself and others in harm's way. Even The Next Generation struggled to juxtapose Picard and Riker but for the obvious difference in their personalities. I can't recall Riker really doing other than what Picard would have intended. When they did choose to provoke conflict, it was not because Riker disagreed with Picard; rather, he was under orders not to reveal classified information, a trick they tried again in the final season of Enterprise to divide Malcolm and Archer.

Another thing I think Voyager didn't have was individual villains that stood out in the same way as those of Deep Space Nine and Enterprise. Again, this was a problem shared by Discovery, which tended to pit the crew against dangerous phenomena or versions of their darker selves rather than new actors who ccould stand on their own two feet.

Silik, Degra, and Shran were all standout characters played by exceptional actors. Voyager had interesting antagonists for sure. I always liked the Malons, the Hirogen, the Krenim, and the Vaadwaur conceptually, but the closest Voyager got to a morally complex villain was Annorax, the Krenim scientist featured in the two-parter Year of Hell.

Star Trek is all about how the ends only very rarely justifies the means. It works best when there's somebody who is on the bleeding verge of convincing you that, just this once, the ends are all that counts.

Good read

"Another thing I think Voyager didn't have was individual villains that stood out"

Are we forgetting Seska?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Seska

"Michael Burnham should have been drummed out of the service, never to return, for the way she repeatedly and unapologetically flouted the chain of command, placing herself and others in harm's way."

Well yeah, but we wouldn't have Discovery without Michael. And it's not the first time a loose cannon gets it right. Mariner does her stuff a lot but also rises to bridge material eventually...heck Spock goes haywire for Pike. Sisko goes out of his way to hunt a morally right Eddison destroying a colony in the process and he resorts to Garak to draw the romulan to fight the Dominion....So yeah lots of wrongs to fix bad situations to go around in Star Trek...and I like it...though it is ironically fun to witness them going on about the Prime Directive to drop it the next moment even if justifiably so...rules are meant to be broken I guess (why is the Kirk dancing gif not in the smileys list yet?]