Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Coming into a Star Trek thread and declaiming "I'm not a nerd" is an ... interesting take. Unless I'm missing some humour there, entirely possible, I've had 5 hours broken sleep and am trying to juggle a jillion things.

the best tng headfucks:

s3e15 yesterday's enterprise - starfleet is at war, guinan has feelings. headfuck score 5
s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9
s4e8 future imperfect - riker wakes 16 years in the future. hf score 8.
s5e25 the inner light - picard lives another life where he plays the nose flute - hf score 5
s6e5 schisms - dreams of torture. hf score 6
s6e21 frame of mind - riker is in a play where he's in an asylum. no he's really in an asylum! no he's in a play! hf score 10
s7e6 phantasms - data's weird dreams. hf score 7
s7e11 parallels - worf's universe surfing - hf score 6

if you want a good hf i recommend this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZlRt05RY9Y

dunno if it has been posted here at all but it made me laugh a bunch the first time i saw it

rewatching tng got me interested in the new films, which i saw at the time, but never really invested in. anyway Star Trek, 5 minutes in and all i be remember is the lens flare in every single shot. bridge of enterprise(?) - lens flare. maternity room - lens flare. outside shot of ship - lens flare, title logo - lens flare...

Attitude, when I'm on fire
Juice on the loose, electric wire
Simple and plain, give me the lane
I'll throw it down your throat like Barclay

s03e21 and a character more annoying than Wesley or Q...

this is today (ST:TNG, sky mix, freeview 11):

s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9

we've just had the 'Picard as Borg' episodes and the Data / Lore episode and two Picard vs young children episodes.

Picard would have been happier if he stayed borg

was it ever explained why picard got given a name when he was Borg?

They should have called him 'Squeaky'

"s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9"

This is the one where Beverley Crusher - and I'm deliberately spelling her first name wrong because I want to stress that I'm not a Star Trek nerd, I'm a fully-rounded human being with a range of interests, and before someone says "you can be a Star Trek nerd and also have a range of interests" the answer is no, you cannot, because there isn't enough time, at least not if you're doing it properly - comma ends with the ship's computer telling her that the universe is a spherical region nine hundred metres in diameter. Which is a memorable line.

Obviously not memorable enough for me to remember it correctly. It's actually "a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter". But it's still memorable. One of my parents used to point out that the episode was a huge metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns. It was probably my mother. She used to waffle on about all kinds of things, none of which was important.

But it strikes me that the episode is actually a metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns, because the plot revolves around Crusher being the one sane man in a world gone mad, and when I say "one sane man" I mean "one sane person" because let's not be sexist.

At the same time I always found the episode slightly disappointing because the explanation is so prosaic. In the hands of David Lynch it would have been... probably completely incoherent, but it would have been something.

Im disappointed no one is ever seen using a toilet in star trek. surely they had them - why gloss over it? They could have had transporters in the toilets to beam waste onto alien moons or something - plus how intriguing to wonder how the various aliens species use a toilet

Kirk famously plomps down on brig toilet in ST:V but only to rest his haunches.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/da398c08559b10a1b3e5675e4761192f/5fc167b70284da96-dc/s640x960/cd244fbcabc32d62234683cb9d665fe3ce7c8b3b.jpg

“And when you said you wanted to report me for using corrupt measures, it hit me right in the CPUs; but the quick fix fixed the problem. I was not going to crash, so I waited for the restart, and I did with my old circuits as mainframes and modems do. But, Lord, save your disk space, now that the old sysadmin has connected me with a fresh line of code and reloaded my old database, you can debug all you want, and I won't run even one error . Go ahead, ask your questions. I know you're thinking about that corrupt piece of code that escaped…”

Not sure all this is canon...

"In 2255 of the alternate reality, Leonard McCoy sought shelter in the shuttle Bardeen's windowless bathroom in response to a bout of aviophobia he experienced. An officer later escorted McCoy, despite him voicing protestations, to a seat. (Star Trek)

In 2364, a series of malfunctions aboard the USS Enterprise-D – which were caused by a microbrain from Velara III – included locking two crewmembers in the head programmers' rest room. (TNG: "Home Soil")

Holding cells aboard Deep Space 9 featured a restroom. (DS9: "Vortex")

In 2375, USS Voyager faced a situation where it was functioning on a mere four lavatories. (VOY: "Bride of Chaotica!")

In 3189, on the USS Discovery, the head in Lieutenant Keyla Detmer's 'fresher leaked. (DIS: "Unification III")"

They use the waste to power the replicators iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAKQzZfpaz8

https://64.media.tumblr.com/da398c08559b10a1b3e5675e4761192f/5fc167b70284da96-dc/s640x960/cd244fbcabc32d62234683cb9d665fe3ce7c8b3b.jpg

i appreciate that the text is just a (very good) background joke, but it means - the poo just gets ejected into space?

also iirc, waste disposal is one of the lower deckers jobs

and surely odo must diguise themselves as a toilet at some point

...with hilarious consequences

Tasha's sister was on last night's episode. i thought they were going to have the actress who played tasha playing her identical-looking sister, but no.

it figures Riker would not where the bathroom is since he is so in need to man's relief of vivacity force o f the loin

riker hops on the shitter by ostentatiously flinging his leg over the cistern

excellent visual, balls-a-smackin' the resevoir

Future Imperfect.

it is the future. you can tell by riker's greying hair and the doctor has her's in a janeaway style.

also iirc, waste disposal is one of the lower deckers jobs

Ha yeah they make that explicit in a LD episode when Boimler is forced to clean the holodeck ... errr... filters.

Data's Day in which Brent Spiner gets to show off his tap dancing

More like Gates McFadden showing off her dancing -- she choreographed the routine (as well as various sequences in Jim Henson productions).

oh, didn't know that. i knew about Old Yellow-Eyes is Back so he obviously had a background

reminded me of 7 of 9 torch singing in that one episode, which always felt like Jeri Ryan was fed up of type casting.

rip tony todd

DS9's fourth season was when I started watching it and having his two episodes as Old Jake and then Kurn convinced me that the ugly Trek stepchild was good, actually, so Tony Todd was instrumental in getting me into my favorite series. RIP TT.

I just had the MOST stressful week, and when I got home from the trip I put TNG on and what episode was up? Fuckin Sub Rosa.

Dear god its worse than I even remembered.
Highlights:
- Bev picks up the bog-ordinary iron candleholder and Deanna exclaims 'oh what a BEAUTIFUL thing!' as if it was some filligree masterpiece
- why is Bev suddenly wearing granny nighties in the evening? Even ON THE SHIP?!
- worst Scottish accents this side of the Simpsons, full of dinnae cannae och ooh
- "we rebuilt 18th century Scotland on another planet because why the hell not"
- fuckin everything else.

I've never seen that one, I really must check it out.

It's a hell of a trip.

This is what they took away from us making every season of every show 9 episodes long.

Granted, 26 episodes of Discovery might have been a war crime.

Burnham and Spock talk about their feeling instead of stopping the destruction of the universe… for three entire episodes.

Honestly I'd take that over what I just watched. but I get it, some of Disco's "lets discuss things earnestly even though we're to be blown up in 20 mins" shit was stupid.

As a palate cleanser (got the night to myself) I just rewatched Lower Decks - ie, the TNG ep not the cartoon. Its really good. What they did to Sito was horrible, she was cannon fodder.

just watched sub rosa, looooolll / holy shit. "well my grandmother may have been unknowingly manipulated and abused her whole life (with anaphasic energy!) but at least she got some great sex out of it!"

I daresay this has all been covered before but:

if he lived in the candle why did he have to reanimate grandma's corpse?
what did the giant storm have to do with anything?
if grandma was so happy how did mad jock mctavish know the ghost was bad news? how did he know it had been around for generations? how did he know it was to do with the candle? how did he get up to the ship and how did he know where to go fiddling in the innards?

not to mention the absolute loons willing to recreate and live in not only a landscape but the architecture and clothes of 600 years ago.

Somebody’s never met Ren Faire people

Rennies? Feel like I’ve heard them describe themselves as Rennies.

if grandma was so happy how did mad jock mctavish know the ghost was bad news? how did he know it had been around for generations? how did he know it was to do with the candle? how did he get up to the ship and how did he know where to go fiddling in the innards?p

LOL I didnt even think about all this it was so bad! But yike, yes.

TNG: In Theory

data gets a girlfriend, random things break. includes the quite gruesome image of a crew member embedded in the floor, see Act Four here:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/In_Theory_(episode)

the season pass changed between seasons so i only saw the start of the two part corss-season finale about worf

today's episode: Ensign Ro, the start of a long crush

they are taking about her as if she has a history, but i don't think we've seen her before. Memory Alpha has her playing a different character in season 4.

I'd forgotten or not realised that! I looked it up - yeah she played someone called Dara with a ridonkulous hairdo.

Identifying with Reg Barclay a lot lately tbh. “I’m nervous about everything! Everybody knows that.”

been catching up on the christmas backlog. 2 of the last 3 episodes have been I Borg and The Inner Light which have got to be in any list of top 10 ST:TNG episodes, i think

Two hugely popular but somewhat divisive episodes

I haven't seen I Borg in a long time. I do remember liking it, but for some it marked the beginning point of the Borg becoming Just Another Species. But that was probably inevitable anyway.

The Inner Light is probably a top five for me, though I find it funny how easily Picard seems to brush the whole thing off after it's over. Hey, this is episodic genre TV, so you'd better be back on your feet in time for next week's adventure

I didn't think Inner Light is considered divisive -- everyone likes it. Except me, because I don't think I ever really connected with the villagers much.

There are two common criticisms I've seen: one is the "magic technology" aspect, in which a species that appears to be roughly on our present-day technological level (if even that) somehow made an interactive lifetime simulator that could be transmitted and downloaded into an alien explorer's brain. That doesn't bother me personally and I think it's better left unexplained.

Secondly, the whole ethical issue of the story. The probe drags Picard into this other identity, with no consent sought or explanation given, and once he's in the programme, he's given no choice but to accept it. It only really happens inside half an hour, but for him it's a whole adult lifetime. And yes he does accept it, and takes an opportunity to travel the road not taken, and gains a happy family and community...but still. It doesn't ruin the story for me (in fact it kinda makes it more interesting, maybe?), but there is a troubling aspect that isn't really acknowledged in the script.

last two were DS9 / TNG crossovers but only Bashir seemed to be around

today, Starship Mine, and there's tuvok, minus the pointy ears, and evil. (apparently he also played a klingon in ds9 before voyager)