Star Trek

[Geo]

Yeah, well, TNG were my haydays for Star Trek.
Probably because I'm a GenX'er, and too young at the time TOS was broadcast in Europe to understand much of what was going on on screen, though I did see a fair amount of TOS.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think if I had a time machine and worked down my priorities list to fixing TNG?  AFTER trying to see to it neither Roddenberry nor Berman was in charge -the latter would obviously rather have worked on LA Law and held real Star Trek in contempt; the former had lost his mojo for good- I think I would definitely look around for coffee-table books about the Wonders of the Universe/Stars, and make the writing staff read them.

THAT'S something the original danced up to a lot, but didn't have the FX budget to really tackle.  TNG was plainly done by people who didn't geek for outer space, even though they could have done the effects...

[Trenacker]

My favorite Trek was the Enterprise Xindi Arc. The same arc panned by critics as a heavy-handed commentary on 9/11, which it was.

I thought the story of explorers-turned-desperate-warriors was simply cool, and I appreciated the serious ethical dilemmas that such a mission routinely presented to the crew. I came to appreciate Archer, T'Pol, and Trip especially. Malcolm wasn't very likeable and the rest of the bridge crew was severely underdeveloped, but Degra and Silik are some of my favorite antagonists and I really liked Shran's redemption arc.

[Buster's Uncle]

The same arc profoundly HATED by me as a heavy-handed commentary on 9/11, which it was.  We've talked about it before.

I don't want crap I despise having in the real world soiling my escapist fantasies.  I found that entire season unwatchable - and I always liked that show a lot more than most trekkers seemed to have.

[Metaliturtle]

Seems like there's a lot to Star Track that I haven't seen.

[Buster's Uncle]

The Vulcan chick was hot.

[Metaliturtle]

well now you have my attention

[Buster's Uncle]

The Vulcan chick was hot and in her underwear, some.  Not making that up for the joke.

[Buster's Uncle]

Enterprise.  Google T'Pol.

[Buster's Uncle]

Now, Enterprise is a complex subject; I loved the basic idea of a retro prequel, but what I loved was the notion implied that it would be Captain April on the first voyage of the real Enterprise.  Commit to the retro thing, looking to Forbidden Planet for style inspiration.  -So, severe disappointment for me right there out of the gate.

-Knobby Klingons in a prequel to knobby-less Star Trek a Very Thoughtless 'Idea', too.

AND - there was the hot Vulcan chick.  No getting past that their contempt for the material and the audience was so profound that they thought they could get away with such an obvious reskin of Pieces of Eight from Voyager.  Full Stop - no getting past that, not with the directors in the room telling Ms. Blalock to give all her weak lines the same harsh-voiced reading Jeri Ryan would have as basically the same character.  No getting past that the Berman/Bragga clique had no ideas they hadn't already used up.

Google Mr. Smith, a Reagan-era one-season NBC show about a talking genius orangutan - nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, maybe, but you have to not make too plain your estimation for that to work.



Next, I praise Enterprise, not bury it...

[Buster's Uncle]

So first off, Scott Bakula and Conner Trinneer.  As I've said over and over, two charismatic turd-polishers.  -This, before anything else, was good about that show; not ACTORs!, just two good-looking leading men types who knew how to lean into naturalistic performances.  Bakula, not because of any 'SF' credentials -Quantum Leap was solidly fantasy- but a distinct everyman quality to most of his performances in anything he's done.  An excellent choice to carry a show as the lead, and a glaring departure from the soap opera and Shakespearean actors hacking it out on all the previous shows.

People complain rather bitterly about the collectively-butthole portrayal of the Vulcans, but I think they're missing something important - it makes sense of how Human people treated Spock a generation or so later.  That had never made sense, and this -lingering resentment of Vulcans- is the only example I can think of where anything TNG and after enhanced and made sense of something in Star Trek instead of undermining continuity or just screwing it up.

What they did with the Andorians was consistent with a vague sense Star Trek conveyed of a passionate and dangerous people.  Likewise, the Tellerites as argumentative.  Those were really carefully thought-out by someone who'd done the homework for once.

The premise precluded holodeck stories -something TNG used up completely halfway through its run, but they'd never let up on for over a decade- and LENT itself to gee-whiz wonder of the universe stuff.

And T'Pol, a truly Bad Idea, slowly got easier to take throughout the run, as her voice got softer - fer realz.  She was bearable, the last season, as they finally found their way.


I think, but do not know, that all those good ideas were Manny Coto.  The quantum leap in quality the fourth season appeared to all be him; I bet he slipped the Good Ideas into the series bible in pre-production, but got out-voted a lot by the hacks...

Does anyone know when he started on the show?

[Buster's Uncle]

-Also, everything they did with Hoshi was gold, and you have to think that was mostly the actress, who did a lot with a little at first.

Wassisname the helmsman must have sucked beyond words, BTW, as my sister tells me he was pretty, yet was barely even on the show, ever.

[Buster's Uncle]

Spoiler:

I think I just figured out where the Original Earth is...

[Buster's Uncle]

I was SURE I'd posted a detailed reasoning that Star Trek Earth wasn't the original, citing a lot of evidence and specific episodes - and over a half hours' searching gave me goose eggs until I searched the CFC Star Trek thread and found I'd wasted it on them.

From 28 August, 2015:

I'm thinking of the multiple parallel Earths they found, including Miri's world.  I'm thinking of the generic Native Americans in Paradise Syndrome who were transplanted so recently by the Preservers that Spock thought he recognized the tribes from across the lake. -Probably circa only 500 years ago, when Europeans introduced smallpox and were about to ruin everything for the natives.  -It couldn't have been much longer back, and that supplies a motivation for a rescue transplant.

-The Preservers -who may or may not have any connection to Sargon's progenitor race, but it's a neater story if they do- were around, alive and active, THAT recently.

I'm thinking about humanoids, often indistinguishable from European-descended earthlings, everywhere.  (It must annoy the living crap out of the Klingons and Romulans if the same holds in their territories.)

I'm thinking about Miri, from a world that not only looks like Earth -without clouds for some reason- who is running around, an immortal little girl already 100 years old right. now. in a city that looks like 50's US gone to seed.

I'm thinking about the Comm's father in Omega Glory -Captain Tracy certainly believed it hard enough to turn traitor and mass murderer- who is already 800 right. now. on a world that must have even had its own Thomas Jefferson to write that US Constitution somewhere in the neighborhood of over 1,000 years before we did.

We don't know what year it was on the Roman world -though it looked like 60's US, AD. 1,000 is possible, but it could be anytime a few hundred years after the western Empire fell on our world, to give them time to develop the tech- but it had a Jesus (or close enough) in its far past.

Some parallel world's histories were based on a model we hadn't gotten to yet.


Earth is not the original Earth, QED.


-And SOMEbody(s) very powerful, old and patient is clearly active out there -for more than a thousand years, at least, and until very recently, if not currently- with a deep interest in humans and (massive long-running) historical -or something- experiments.

[Buster's Uncle]

This is haring off during an extended speculation about Spock and Vulcans in the Valjiir thread:

Most known intelligent races are of a similar physical type (psychologically, too, Vulcans being the result of an extremist cultural adaption from an emotional race; one fancies that, given a common language, a Mongol and pre-Reformation Vulcan would have no trouble finding common ground).  Klingons aren't much of a variation even if you count the movie/TNG, etc. hairy turtle heads.  Andorians have antennae and are blue and otherwise standard.  Tallosians have big bald heads and powerful illusion-casting powers, but otherwise, pretty humanoid.  Even Tellerites could be of the same stock, two fingers and a snout not being much in the way of variation.  We've seen red people and even a black-and-white race of mime-looking bigots with impressive mental powers.  Following the same line of thinking, it may be significant that Organians and Metrons choose to manifest as utterly unexotic stock humanoids (they're more likely doing it for Kirk's sake, but they could be reverting to their natural pre-energy-being-evolution forms for all we know).

As it happens, there's definitely a majority type running around, that just so happens to look exactly like us Earth European-descended types.  (For the purposes of this discussion, we'll ignore how unlikely real world modern anthropological evidence makes it that white folks is th' -whatchcall- base type, and likewise the real world reasons.)  Planet after planet after planet is full of people who looks like their forebears came over on the Space Mayflower.  Even the planet that seems to dominate the interstellar political entity of which Vulcan is part, while enjoying some racial diversity, looks dominated by humanoids completely indistinguishable visually from Landru's people, Emminiarans, Akkarans, Yangs, Space Nazis, Zeons, (it's a really long list, especially if you throw in suspect cases like Plato's Stepchildren, Miri's people and the Greek Gods, and this is no attempt at a complete list) --- Whitey Is Everywhere, and Vulcan has to deal with Whitey.  Incidentally, Amanda is white.

...In fact, ignore that I mentioned Whitey - that's too distracting from the real point, which is that humanoids at least superficially identical to Earth Humans are everywhere in our part of the galaxy.  In fact, I suggested to Mylochka when we were talking about a series of Klingon POV adventures, that they consider something like "Klingonoid Pale" the standard alien type, for  comic effect, but also because that's certainly the case on the Federation side of the border...