Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Never watched the original series much (wasn't alive at the time of the originals, don't recall seeing the reruns), but became a fan of the movies when they started. Fell into things fully when TNG began (watched from the first episode to the last) and still followed those films, though after starting with both Deep Space Nine and Voyager I gave them up fully in late 1995 and never looked back. Have a couple of the, ahem, 'technical manuals' around the place but that's about it -- the other books I've avoided. Have no costumes, have always avoided any kind of conventions general or specific, take cruel pleasure in laughing at Shatner's follies in the fifth movie, as should we all (the fake MST version is the only one to see, frankly).

Unsurprisingly, Picard is my fave (I was actually a Patrick Stewart fan already), but both Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew did excellent jobs in their Sisko and Janeway roles. Scott Bakula as Archer just scares me as a concept. TNG cast my favorite ensemble bunch, though I will give it up (oh yes) for George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy, Terri Farrell, Alexander Siddiq, Rene Auberjonois, Ethan Phillips, Robert Beltran and Robert Picardo. Data ist rad. And so forth.

note: star trek: the motion picture looked awful. but all the ones after that were awesome. how much cooler would next generation have been if they had those burgundy uniforms? kirk looked like the motherfucker in EVERY MOVIE wearing that shit.

ned: you think picard is tougher than picard. what. the. fuck. did you see wrath of khan? did you see that shit? he fucking kicked khan's fucking vinyl-chested ass. 'oh, yeah, you have genesis, khan but you don't have me. if you want me, you're going to have to come down here. you're GOING to HAVE to COME DOWN HERE!!!@#@@!$#'. you can say ANYTHING ELSE about kirk vs. picard, picard is smarter and more civil and professional or whatever the fuck, but nobody in their right fucking mind would say that he's tougher than motherfucking kirk. i am actually literally angry about this, so i need to calm down now. christ, i'm such a trekkie.

I thought it was Riker who had the twin. ;-)

that riker transporter twin episode is some stupid shit though.

original series: chekov...maybe, but that's stretching it. he kicks ass in the movies, he's just sort of useless on the show. but the original cast (chekov being a second series addition) is flawless.

next generation: RIKER RIKER RIKER, troi, that doctor who replaced crusher for one year, yar, data (come on, admit it. he's a super-advanced andriod and he can't understand common phrases? he thinks a 'lemon' is a literal lemon for god's sake. i'm sure the writers kissed each other for how fucking cute that was. anyway mudd's women were way smarter). and WESLEY. geordie would get on my nerves if he were played by anyone but le var burton, but he's a childhood icon and can therefore do no wrong.

deep space nine: the only memorable character besides the captain (who is cool) is quark the ferengi (who is also cool). but the rest aren't even fleshed-out enough to annoy me. wait, no, the short-haired chick with the ridges on her nose aggravates the piss out of me. and the doctor, god.

voyager: it has an indian. and an asian guy. and a black vulcan. and the captain is a woman. only as annoying as that new ghostbusters cartoon where one of the ghostbusters was in a wheelchair. like, what the hell?

evidence that kirk is the best captain: all series after that have had kirk ripoffs that are nowhere as good as kirk because they are not as cool as the godly shatner. like riker, or that really forgettable womanizer guy from voyager. i mean, what the hell, don't you just want to punch riker in the face? does anyone not want to? anyone?

All-time favorite episode is "Charlie X," where the Enterprise picks up some teenaged human waif from a planet, who then runs around the ship melting off the faces through telekinesis (?) of various crew members whenever he's teased or horny. What teenager couldn't identify with that?

I remembered TNG being great when I was 12, but I watched a few of them more recently and they were AWFUL, even the later ones. I think I might have quite liked Deep Space Nine later on, when they started having season-long story arcs, but I never saw enough of them to make sense of what was going on.

How come most of the crew are American yet NONE of them are chronically obese? (except Scotty who's - ahem - ""Scottish"")

In the 60s it was a bizarre mix of US military 'might is right' fascism and Hippy-dippy, 'why can't all nations hold hands?' idealism (though still managing to be sexist ~ Uhura the Captains secretary and Yoaman Rand (is that right) the Captains bit of [onboard] fluff. AND THATS IT SISTERS!)

It should have ended there as it ran out of ideas and people stopped watching it. But OH NO, they had to bring it back in the 80s with over-long, plodding bore-a-thon 'Next Generation' episodes that tapped into the touchy-feely / inner-child / New-Age nonsense that was on the go at the time. I mean - Counsellor Troi = WHY? She even sits on the bridge next to the Captain!! the message is in the 25th Century a bloody social worker is one of the most important jobs on a space ship.

But it was all so clinical and corperate and soul-less, advocating Pro-conformity and how you should be a good citizen. And too much sanctimonious liberal finger-wagging for my liking.

And it starred Whoopi Goldberg.

And how come all the baddies end up as the Federation's (UGH!) freind, taking tokenistic jobs as Navigators etc?

And why was it always so fucking BORING?

Another Star Trek I had over the other incarnations -- BETTER BACKGROUND MUSIC! Esp. that duh-dum-duh-dum-DUH-DUM-duh-dum theme whenever Kirk's ass was in deep ship.

On the other hand, Troi's mother was AWESOME.

And the original ST's music was Varese-influenced, hey? Hmmmm ... never knew that! Maybe I should go over to that "Who Opened Your Ears" thread in ILM and change an answer or two of mine :-)

Troi's mom was cooler than Troi, not more attractive! Aigh, my eyes!

troi: not attractive.

crusher: nuh-uh.

troi's mom: uh.

that guy who was troi's mom's butler or something and was the guy who played lurch in the addams family movies: mrowr.

question: who liked first contact? it was like a next generation episode, only like, cool. plus, supercool supporting cast with alfre woodard and the farmer guy from babe.

someone start a star wars thread so i can bitch about how much that sucks except for empire strikes back.

hey i just remembered something else i liked in next generation, although it's from that bastard movie where kirk dies (falling off a walkway! the fuck? he's saved the universe like two hundred times and he falls of a walkway and dies? fuck). um anyway, i liked when data said 'shit'.

Andrew L has not mentioned his great expertness in this area, for some reason. I know about it because I very briefly worked under him on a Star Trek magazine!

he has an inner eyelid!

Believe I have tried work an analogy about the extra eyelid ex machina#onethread into conversation more than once.

デウス・エクス・マキナ

a mysterious alien device on a planet with a predominantly american indian culture erases captain kirk's memory, and he begins a life with them as a member of their tribe

they think he's a god and call him kirrok

he says: "my dreams about the strange lodge that passes through the sky have returned"

Star Blecch:

https://imgur.com/gallery/QNfDT?fbclid=IwAR3zYQgPqiz3nGNyAcFAIO6l7fun_Hz2ajWzc7jx4_PYU6qwu3Bun78po4g

RIP to a legend pic.twitter.com/w676sHiBM0

— Star Trek Minus Context (@NoContextTrek) July 25, 2022

Flying pancake ep of TOS was the 1st sci-fi I ever saw on TV! I was a bit too young to know wtf was going on, but the image of those things falling from the ceiling stuck with me.

rip x 2

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PGMAAOSwwE5WZOwC/s-l500.jpg

To me Warner will always be the Bab5 character in "Grail".

HOW MANY LIGHTS, TRAYCE?

I'm intrigued as to whether there is an agreed shark jumping point for Discovery or if one should just pooh pooh it from the get go. Like

Ups and downs in the first two seasons; second season is better but won't make much sense without watching the first. Third seasons starts well but then I gave up. Suggest watching the Pike/Spock/Number 1 episodes and pooh-poohing the rest.

The first season is like a season-long "Naked Now" -- everyone acts weirdly out-of-character before you get a chance to know what they're actually like (although what they're actually like isn't much of an improvement). Not sure it was a good idea to launch the first new series in a fifteen years totally in media res.

I think I'll give up on Discovery, I haven't grown to like any of the characters too much, in fact I'm getting increasingly sick of some of them. I don't want to be one of those negative fan people but this and Picard have been hugely disappointing - the latter quite depressingly so. Stewart should have said no, as it turns out.

On a brighter note, Lower Decks is back soon!

Strange New Worlds is great if you've not seen that

I watched the first two episodes and liked them - I think ST still works better as an episodic series, really

Agree about Picard and Disco, and I'm indifferent to the cartoons, but Strange New Worlds is a total gem.

Discovery jumped the shark immediately but there were occasional signs of life in the first couple of seasons - the doctor (sometimes), Jason Isaacs and Michelle Yeoh are fun to watch and stand out because everyone else sucks all the energy and joy out when they're on screen.

DISCO kind of is two different series, the first two seasons, and the last two. The first two seasons are overly grimdark, with a lot of gore that felt gratuitous and meant simply to shock. As for the last two season, I've been struggling to articulate why I find it to be so bad. I think it's wildly inconsistent main characters, complete indifference to secondary characters, and bad long-term storytelling where characters suddenly have some interest/ability/backstory meant to only serve the immediate story beat (Saru and Michael start out as rivals with a bunch of resentment and then suddenly become BFFs, as just one example), and just really shabby sci fi writing (admittedly that's kind of Trek tradition, but it's not always been so sustained).

PIC just gets into some aimless plots and is too caught up in allegory and then "DO YOU SEE?" of it all.

Sometimes I kind of feel that DISCO and PIC both took all the wrong lessons from DS9.

I did find the first two seasons of Discovery invigoratingly ambitious with its bug-eyed determination to show it wasn’t your grandpa’s Star Trek anymore. It totally failed to land this ambition and ended up pleasing nobody, but the attempt was a wild ride. Agree the Pike/Spock stuff was good fun.

Season 3 set-up was kind of interesting? But then you could feel the energy fading as the season went on. Season 4 felt like one of those later seasons of Voyager where the franchise only existed because there kind of had to be a Star Trek show and everything felt tired and defeated.

have never felt the slightest urge to watch Picard! nothing i have seen on here or elsewhere is making me reconsider.

Yeah I'm more of a DISCO fan than many but it was really up and down.

- Klingon war plot: bad and confusing (and that FONT)
- Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs: good
- mirror universe baddies: awesome
- Stamets and the spore drive plot: started off annoying, got really iteresting esp when Culver "died"
- red star/Spock/Pike section: engaging and interesting story
- Section 31/Control plot: this needed a lot more expanding. Needs a spin off! What the hell was all this about, it seemed important then just went pffft
- initial jump to future: some fun bits with the nasty courier dude and Books story
- the rest: it just... sort of went all over the place. The Burn's cause was stupid, the planet destroying black hole or whatever was stupid, the constant feelings an crying and whispering was stupid. Tarka had potential but ended up annoying. Gah!

Oh I forgot all about the Ash plot! I liked him.

klingons themselves were also pretty wtf for a while in Disco too

but yeah i think i was
s1 first half: uhh no?
s1 2nd half: wait, ok YES
s2: Hell Yes!
s3: wait. this? no.
s4: please stop with this.

like they just kept doubling down on everything that annoyed me or so it seemed lmao

i do still like the characters tho?
i just want them to get to do more like, missiony story stuff and less therapy. or how about NO therapy

I have completely blanked out on how the planet destroyer super alien edge of the galaxy plotline shook out

The future jump would have been a perfect moment for them to switch gears into episodic adventures - what better situation for a lot of non-universe-in-the-balance problems and how the only spore drive ship in existence can help solve them!

Tie for worst scene: weepy eulogies for Space Hitler vs. "I feel seen"

That “I feel seen” was a low point of not just Star Trek but all human cultural activity ever

That and "you got this".

Maybe I'm being cantankerous but I thought the Mirror Universe stuff was bad fanservice! (Same goes for PIC even though I think technically what we saw wasn't MU.) They should've just left it as a goofy one-offs like DS9 did, not whole season-long arcs.

mirror universe was what finally got me onboard iirc

MU stuff went on too long but it started off pretty funny - dominatrix Tilly lol

give her the respect she deserves, it's KILLY

mirror universe was fun at first, and i suppose you have to go there if that's your endgame with lorca

absolutely no need to go back in s03 tho

IMO MU is worse in DS( (Im watching DS9 at the mo). Kira's MU version is SO hammy.

Worse in DS9 that should have said.

Love hammy Kira

the DS9 mirror episodes are all kind of goofy, at least, unlike 'let's teach space nazi a two-episode lesson in flashback and then have everyone mysteriously mourn her'

also everyone -- kira not at all least -- does a nice job of chewing every bit of scenery in sight

DS9 did a weird job of MU, but the Benny episodes and the actual time traveling to California are great

Those who really like MU Tilly and, oddly, Chase Masterson’s character should try playing Star Trek Online where they’re all over the place

RIP Nichelle Nichols

RIP wonderful lady <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs4mbHLAFuU

Damn. RIP. And I was just thinking of rewatching the execrable ST V, featuring Uhura's insane fan dance. And oh crap, David Warner is in that one, as well, isn't he?

The doc about nichele nichols & integration of nasa space program- Woman In Motion - is on paramount plus & well worth a watch

drunk history version if u dont have p+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-uJOzkrJV4

smithsonian posted a photo of her red uniform & i lost it

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgsHKsRPgoJ/

"Damn. RIP. And I was just thinking of rewatching the execrable ST V, featuring Uhura's insane fan dance. And oh crap, David Warner is in that one, as well, isn't he?"

He was also in VI - in which Uhura has to flip through a Klingon-English dictionary in order to answer a Klingon hail, despite the fact that (as Nichols herself pointed out to the director) she was the head of communications on Starfleet's flagship.

The films didn't utilise her very well. Even when communicating with the baddies was the focus it was done by Kirk or Spock, e.g. in The Motion Picture, where Spock works out that V'Ger is using a NASA code at a high frequency.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/enterprise_rollout_at_palmdale_w_star_trek_crew_sep_17_1976_0.jpg?itok=h2O-JhNy

had no idea about this which is kind of amazing

She often recalled how Martin Luther King Jr. was a fan of the show and praised her role. She met him at a civil rights gathering in 1967, at a time when she had decided not to return for the show’s second season.

“When I told him I was going to miss my co-stars and I was leaving the show, he became very serious and said, ‘You cannot do that,’” she told The Tulsa (Okla.) World in a 2008 interview.

“‘You’ve changed the face of television forever, and therefore, you’ve changed the minds of people,’” she said the civil rights leader told her.

She definitely was mis- and under-used a lot both in the show and the movies, but she was able to be memorable when actually given the chance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPQvVBaOx2E

I’m curious how much Celia Rose Gooding’s role on SNW has been structured to attempt to balance that out

Can't find a YT of it, but Nichelle Nichols has a small, but memorable part in Mister Buddwing - a 1966 film where amnesiac James Garner wanders the streets of Manhattan in search of his identity while a hip Kenyon Hopkins soundtrack plays.

she also plays the villain in the fun Isaac Hayes film Truck Turner