Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Only the laggards are still into TNG. The hip kids are into DS9 now. Bajoran earrings are making a big comeback, yo.

And even though the male characters rarely get a chance to look stylish, I just love the ceremonial dress uniforms Picard and Riker wear when meeting with important guests. So ballin'!

yeah... as in they were gettin balled by other dudes

respect to nana visitor but michelle forbes rocked the earrings and nose wrinkles first and best

the last line of "the most toys" is the coldest moment in the entire series

The SF Debris review notes that if it were Lore instead of Data, that episode would be about five minutes long.

in non-ST news, canadian-filmed (I think) BBC America science fiction drama Orphan Black is going to have Michelle Forbes *drudge siren*

didn't Kivas also have a girlfriend who was de facto his captive and who helped free Data?

Yeah, but it remains unclear whether she's his "girlfriend", or whether he just enjoys torturing her? Maybe Kivas is bisexual, or omnisexual, or whatever his species calls it. He definitely gives a human gay vibe though.

The SF Debris review notes that if it were Lore instead of Data, that episode would be about five minutes long.

To be fair, one of the first things Kivas asks from Data is whether he is permitted to hurt others; and when Data says no, he uses that to his advantage. Plus he has that force field protecting him... If Data couldn't penetrate it, I don't think Lore could either.

the last line of "the most toys" is the coldest moment in the entire series

I read from somewhere that both the scriptwriter and Brent Spiner felt that Data did indeed fire his phaser intentionally. But apparently some higher authority (Roddenberry?) said Data shouldn't be able to do that, so they made the ending more ambiguous. I like it more like that!

If Data couldn't penetrate it

Quotes taken out of context.

I read from somewhere that both the scriptwriter and Brent Spiner felt that Data did indeed fire his phaser intentionally. But apparently some higher authority (Roddenberry?) said Data shouldn't be able to do that, so they made the ending more ambiguous.

there's nothing really ambiguous about what happens in that scene imo -- data saying 'i cannot allow this to continue' doesn't make any sense if he's not about to fire, otherwise what's he going to do, just keep standing there?

roddenberry was notorious for objecting whenever the characters did something he personally considered 'out of character.' drove the TNG writers crazy, and was partly behind his clash with harlan ellison on 'city.'

data saying 'i cannot allow this to continue' doesn't make any sense if he's not about to fire, otherwise what's he going to do, just keep standing there?

Well yeah, it was obvious Data *wanted* to shoot... But the ambiguous bit was whether he was able to overcome his "do not kill except for self-defense" programming or not.

there's a brief flash before beamout and then the super-shifty "Perhaps SOMETHING occurred during transport" WINK WINK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_skkBMvlWBw
"Perhaps something occurred during transport, Commander."
The look on Riker's face - he's so not convinced.

oh weird, i swore there was a flash. did they edit that out?

roddenberry was notorious for objecting whenever the characters did something he personally considered 'out of character.' drove the TNG writers crazy, and was partly behind his clash with harlan ellison on 'city.'

"He had Scotty selling drugs!"

There are moments when Gene showed symptoms of Lucas Disease when he would get in the way of his writers' better instincts. By all accounts, dude was the drag behind the early seasons of TNG, but those who took over eventually would drive the ship straight into the rocks themselves.

i sort of love the insane purity with which he explicitly disallowed conflict aboardship in those early seasons. no conflict in the future. drama without conflict. meanwhile the entire mechanism of TOS is the (sometimes vicious!) spock-bones-kirk dialectic; that's like the #1 thing people like about it.

He seems like maybe he was a nice guy and happened to initiate a big franchise but was not a big brain really?
I mean hey gene we'll just have him say something must have happened during transport. No prob, right?

No conflict, or zippers.

everything is unified

I agree that in terms of mechanics, the show worked better outside of roddenberry's "the future is awesome" box, but they basically turned star trek into a non-stop religious war/terrorism opera. (and I guess that's what the producers really had their heart into, because they went on to do the same exact thing with the battlestar reboot and 24)

oh, otm. when i read r.d. moore complaining abt roddenberry i'm always on roddenberry's side even tho he's gone too far. without that silly futurism it's just a tv show.

as opposed to a tv show with silly futurism in it. clearly superior.

non-stop religious war/terrorism opera

I don't recall this really happening with TNG but the last seasons are a blur and I'm sure there's stuff I never bothered to watch...? or are you referring to DS9 and after

DS9 definitely, but the Bajoran/Cardassian thing got started in TNG, and esp. TNG season 7, though I don't remember if it was more than one episode.

it's interesting in the early cardassian episodes on TNG, the action is represented by a few blinking triangles on a computer screen and dramatic music when one of the triangles stops blinking, and knitted brows.

by DS9 it's just full-on battle porn.

carl agatha + tuomas otm abt troi's atlantean dress btw, it elevates entire episodes.

(through effort we may all be able to just leave that verb there)

I agree that no conflict at all is pretty silly for a TV series, but OTOH one thing I really like about TNG is that all the main characters have this great, easy-going camaraderie going on, with little soap opera drama between them. (Of course it helps that the main actors themselves have a good chemistry with each other, once they settle into their roles after the soul-searching of season one; in my opinion TNG had one of the best ensembles in any American TV series.) Like, when the series starts Riker and Troi used to be a couple, but that's already way in the past, and yet it's pretty obvious they're still occasionally humping each other, but both of them also get to fuck several guest stars too... And I think most other series would've gotten some big jealousy drama out of it, but in TNG it's not big deal, Riker and Troi just roll with it. Apparently that was because of Roddenberry's vision of how sexuality would be in the 24th century, and TBH it's not a bad vision. Even today, you don't get to see too many series that'd be as sex-positive as TNG was 25 years ago.

weirdly tho even tho people (well mostly bones) are angry or stubborn more often in tos, tng is still way more of a soap opera. the soapiest thing in tos is amok time. or maybe the one with sarek. oodles of tng episodes are abt someone having a Character Journey while something perfunctory threatens the ship.

Tuomas is OTM all over this thread.

xp see every episode where Worf's son Alexander or his mother turn up.

the problem w that approach is that I find so many of the TNG characters inherently boring

i'm being unfair cuz character arcs are not "soap opera" they're just fiction, drama. the characters in TOS are all shallow archetypes. maybe that's just what i want these shows to attempt. there's that onion av club television-optimist tone of just being BOWLED OVER every time someone has two consecutive coherent emotions on a tv show and i am underwhelmed by a lot of that stuff in tng. xp ha.

yeah shallow archetypes work better for me in this context tbh where everything is a brightly colored allegory and ACTION

But it's not really about the action! That's the biggest thing I love about ST, especially TNG, that it actually believes in its non-violent utopia, that the ultimate solution to most conflicts tends to be negotiation and peacemaking. (This, BTW, is the reason I hated the new ST movies, because they discard this idea altogether in favour of standard space opera action.) And you can't have shallow characters doing that. When Picard dressed down the rogue Starfleet captain who's about to reignite the war with the Cardassians in "The Wounded", you gotta hear the conviction in his words! In most American sci-fi shows/movies the rogue captain would be the hero (especially considering that he has understandable reasons for doing what he does), but here he's antagonist to Picard's pacificist hero. So yeah, I don't mind the boringness, I think it's that's what makes the series unique.

I agree w you in general, totally down w the non-violent Utopian vision at the core, but then tbh Kirk plays the rogue captain role plenty. and he will always be my favorite.

Tuomas is OTM all over this thread.

― Jeff, Saturday, February 22, 2014 12:09 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree! I'm really enjoying your posts, Tuomas. They are very thoughtful and it seems like we approach the show similarly (and with similar enthusiasm). Like I am so on board with this - "That's the biggest thing I love about ST, especially TNG, that it actually believes in its non-violent utopia, that the ultimate solution to most conflicts tends to be negotiation and peacemaking."

From the LA Times, January 1968. A group of Caltech students protesting NBC planing to cancel Star Trek.

http://scontent-b-sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1/1779214_288895557930907_1159522594_n.jpg

I should say that it wasn't necessarily Roddenberry's original vision that was the issue(tho his idea that there would be no religion at all in the future is weird), but rather his execution of such.

From the LA Times, January 1968. A group of Caltech students

Either that, or a group of hipsters, February 2014.

tuomas otm in this thread - what i love about TNG is that the dilemma is rarely a technical or violent one to be solved - it's almost always a moral choice that needs to be made

Wow @ that photo

DRAFT SPOCK

"tho his idea that there would be no religion at all in the future is weird"

not any weirder than "no need for money in 23rd century"

ds9 really flipped the script on this: "let's make the main character a messiah, and turn the ferengis into objectivist merchant heroes"

true about THE SISKO but the Ferengi thing was always a silly joke

i love TNG and DS9 both for their takes. I did crack up when evil Section 9 showed up in the nu-Trek sequel

I was in undergrad from 94-00 and so was spared much of the weirdness of DS9 and Voyager.

they are comedy but from the very first episode, the seedy commerce that qwark represents is shamelessly touted as the lifeblood of community, and later ferengi-style horsetrading is vindicated as the solution to resource scarcity on multiple occasions. nog totally rubs it in jake's face, too.

oh yeah roddenberry would be doing backflips in his grave over federation stasi

eh, the couple of "heroic" occasions that Quark rises to were mostly a story function, making him not a completely boring one-dimensional character. he got maybe like one episode a season where he was a good guy

you're right about Roddenberry probably flipping over in his grave though - think about the conception of the Ferengi in their first TNG episode *shudder*