Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Yeah, the fact that you had a show with three out of the seven leads were women, yet run such that 2/3rds of them were gone by the end of the first season probably should have clued me in years later has to how fucked up the early show was run.

Still several steps ahead of the original Trek, it should be noted, and still pretty good for the 80s when your model was... uh... Plus they tried harder, bringing back Crusher, bringing on Ro later, and of course Troi becoming a much more fleshed out characte

ironic typo?

Pain in the 'R's?

Tasha Yar was an interesting character in theory, so it's sad that they couldn't really figure out what to do with her, and that they hired such a mediocre actor to play her. (Crosby's later appearances in the series are totally meh too.) When Ro was introduced, it kinda felt like she was Yar done right, and with a better actor too, so it's a shame she only became a recurring character and not a regular one.

But yeah, it's nice that they at least managed to flesh out Troi better in later seasons. I remember when I was watching the show as a kid, I didn't much care for her, probably because she mostly just did all the girly stuff, like emotions and all... But now that I've been rewatching the series on Bluray, I find that the girly stuff is often more interesting than the technobabble.

Thanks for "Time Squared" recommendations above. Watched it this weekend - Patrick Stewart's so wonderful and intense in the episode, such a weird contrast with the larky "Riker cooks an omelette" stuff at the beginning, which might as well be from a children's cartoon.

The soundtrack also has this great, spooky pulse effect running through the story - kind of John Carpenter-style - I don't remember TNG going in for that sort of thing very often.

Riker feeding everyone plain omelets and beer is so hilarious to me.

I love the Ron Jones-era music (they fired him in the fourth season I believe). It's totally John Carpenter-esque and weird and great. The music gets pretty boring after he left.

It's a great episode. I don't like the story much, as I dislike time travel plots generally, but it's a brilliant look at how Picard handles a tough unknowable situation, up there with the best Kirk centred TOS episodes.

I'm going to rep again for the https://twitter.com/TNG_S8 twitter thingy due to their feel for the "Riker makes an omelette" backstory

NB I do like that scene! Trek wouldn't be Trek without squareness and goofballery. (Maybe that's why I find Voyager unwatchable.)

Also why most of those movies were so bad

After watching other space odyssey television shows I've realized how much of a goody-goody all these federation noobs are in TNG

i like that the show existed before the era where all the protagonists had to be morally compromised badasses

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fp7G2kMyTTk/UksGD_tiuYI/AAAAAAAAIks/esSBtA_sCZQ/s1600/Kirk+Smirk.png

i hope you're not implying that Kirk was morally compromised

Kirk was basically LBJ with JFK's libido

paging dr. helen noel

kirk may have been a swaggering chauvinist but he was definitely a certain definition of hero, not a 2000s-era anti-hero

I figured DS9's "In the Pale Moonlight" was ST's feeble attempt to get on the moral compromise bandwagon.

Feeble?????

i love that episode. (garak!)
a lot of the war stuff Ron Moore wanted to do in DS9 clearly got transplanted to BSG, probably did a word replace of "changelings" for "cylons"

I watched DS9 after Battlestar and it ended up taking some of the shine away from BSG, which I had loved before, because some of the fundamental plotlines were so similar. But I don't see it as losing a Battlestar Galactica reboot so much as gaining a beloved Star Trek series so I think it worked out in the end.

DS9 definitely had a broader set of viewpoints in the main cast. With TNG, there are moments of nuance but it basically comes down to Riker occasionally being more aggressive, Troi having more empathy (lol), Crusher having more input on the biological differences between people, Worf having honor and tradition as priorities over other concerns. But for the most part, they're all in line with the Federation goals and mindset.

I'm mainly remembering Sisko's big announcement of sang-froid at the end. "If I had to do it all over again, I would!" That part I found feeble.

But seeing as the episode predates The Sopranos etc I guess it wasn't so much a bandwagon thing.

Garak and Quark definitely give DS9 a lot of extra flavour. There's no way a conversation like this could happen between any of the two cast regulars on any of the other Trek series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hdiuRMK3UQ

Completely different background but my recent viewing of Farscape with its "we're all on a ship, I guess we kind of like each other, shit happens" has been entertaining for its lack of a prime directive.

See also Blake's 7.

carl: BSG is still pretty great though, they definitely got to do more weird/dark/interesting things that would likely not have flown in the Star Trek universe, also it being actually made during the War on Terror and being more specifically relevant to the times

Sure! I'm still a big fan.

Trek wouldn't be Trek without squareness and goofballery. (Maybe that's why I find Voyager unwatchable.)

Wait, isn't Voyager all squareness and goofballery? (E.g. NEELIX ugh.) (Also Harry Kim.)

It is possible that I am wearing this hoodie at this very moment even...

http://www.syfy.com/_cache/assets/assets/heruniverse/2011-07/f88581900_131110953939.jpg

(garak!)

Garak == best.

Wait, isn't Voyager all squareness and goofballery? (E.g. NEELIX ugh.) (Also Harry Kim.)

True! But mostly just Janeaway and Chakotay are just zzzzz, and Picard and Riker are proud super weirdos.

I don't remember much of the goofballery in Voyager, but you're right, Neelix and the hologram Doctor were in it. Maybe they also went for Kim/Paris hijinks early on but it never really worked

kim / paris hijinks = that flash gordon thing that iirc went on for a while.

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Captain_Proton

right, right, that was their version of the TNG Sherlock Holmes stuff

Beyond just Neelix/Kim/Holodoc, what I remember from Voyager was this forced bonhomie, and also a lot of talk about how this far-flung in a distant quadrant behaved like it was just taking the scenic route back to the Alpha Quad., and that two-parter where they meet up with the other, hella ravaged Federation ship was an attempt to address the discrepancy.

voyager lacking goofballery? andy dick to the rescue!
http://www.startrek.com/uploads/assets/db_articles/e2723f6b6f9ba90e4e27374d673d32cba183cc54.jpg

Yeah, they tried that opposing camps conflict at the beginning - like DS9's Federation/Bajoran/Cardassian unease, but with the Federation vs. Maquis thing that more or less completely disappeared by season 3. It never felt right they were lounging through the Delta Quadrant, as if this were still TNG. (I don't think Moore worked on Voyager, but another theme in retrospect that nu-BSG re-appropriated - from the original BSG no less - and did something fresh with)

Yeah that Maquis thing always bugged (in addition to like everything about Voyager).

I recall RDM doing at least one script (B'Elanna and Klingon afterlife), and that AMA I linked to suggested that he was an exec producer for a season maybe? But yeah, I was just thinking about the parallels.

i thought moore did work on voyager and felt totally betrayed that the show's premise wasn't honoured the way he had assumed it was (rag-tag ship, low on fuel, alone) & thats why he put al that stuff into bsg

TrekMovie: On Voyager and Battlestar, it is a ship on its way to Earth with no infrastructure, there are some parallels. Would ‘Ron Moore’s Voyager’ be like Battlestar, if you were the showrunner?

Ron Moore: Yah…probably…when I was on my brief tenure on Voyager and I was starting to think in terms of what I wanted to do, I remember sitting with the writing staff and saying ‘I really think…that when Voyager gets damaged it should get damaged, we should stop repairing the ship, the ship should be broken down more and devolving a little bit more.’ One of the ideas I had is that they should start developing their own culture within the starship and letting go of Starfleet protocols and stop thinking of themselves as Starfleet people on some level, even though they still wear the uniform and still try to adhere to the regulations. I thought it would be interesting that by the time this ship got back to Earth, that it didn’t even belong at Earth anymore. That it sort of had become its own culture, it had formed its own civilization which was dissimilar to that which they had left behind…Now that you mention this there was somebody, I don’t think it was me, somebody had pitched the notion of them having to guard some alien ships they had encountered. It was a convoy and through some plot I can’t remember that they had agreed to protect and Sheppard through some hostile star systems on their journey. And they were going to be the warship tending the little convey of civilian ships. And I was really taken with it and really liked the idea and thought it would be cool and it was sort of Galactica. We might have even mentioned Galactica….but to your question, If I had been the showrunner from the beginning I probably would have sent it into a darker direction and sent it into a more harrowing journey yes. And made them more on the run and more less of a pretty journey getting back, and at the same time, I probably would have felt compelled to stay within certain boundaries of what Trek was and how Trek had established itself. So I don’t think I could have taken Voyager to the places I have taken Galactica, even if I did have the reins.

That's a good, honest response. He obviously wanted to do more with Voyager, but rebooting BSG gave him a lot more freedom that he would have otherwise.

ya exactly

bsg makes a lot of sense if you keep voyager in mind then

voyager could have ended up at the galactic boundary to find ronald moore reading a newspaper.

The Year of Hell story arc in Voyager puts them in much more dire circumstances and the ship is all beat to hell for an extended amount of time. But then it's a whole timeline tampering episode and they fix everything by the end and Voyager is once again pristine.

I remember liking that one. Great premise, Kurtwood Smith, etc.