Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-trek/

xxxx-post to Tuomas

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the square, "stuffy" side of Trek! I kinda like how perversely dedicated TNG was to its anti-septic future at times!

...But even TNG had the borg to throw down with.

I was kinda disappointed when they introduced the "borg queen" character in First Contact. Kind of defeats the point of the Borg, no?

i remember ebert gettin a mad borg queen bone @ that movie

Yeah, the Borg queen thing was pretty stupid, especially if (as it was implied) she was the queen of all Borg and killing her stopped all of them. I guess Hollywood movies need to have one identifiable big baddie, having a race of anonymous baddies just isn't enough. (See also: the way that one Orc was promoted to the role of an "end-of-the-movie baddie" in the first LotR movie.) Also, her being the queen of all Borg made the victory in First Contact "cleaner": instead of defeating one Borg ship they defeated the whole race.

If you want to have an insect metaphor, it would've made more sense if each Borg ship had its own queen, and killing the queen only incapacitates that one ship.

the "extreme sports" scene with skydiving and swords, etc. I'd prefer ST to be ponderous and a bit suffy

thought this scene was pretty fun and dug the in-jokes. nod to sulu's inner swashbcukler in "the naked time" and red shirt guy bites the dust immediately!

whoops. just meant to quote the skydiving bit.

Good call Tuomas. I never liked the fact that Picard had been a bit borgy at one point, made them seem less scary and sinister in the sense that you could escape them. Queen Borg comes across as suppressed and horny. A very weird combination.

Alan N. otm re: skydiving. Tuomas OTM re: the Beastie Boys tho

yeah, beastie boys scene is kind of indefensible.

I am no defender but watching that scene in the cinema was pretty awesome.

I am rereading the Ebert review on first contact & he keeps calling them "Borgs." I thought the plural of Borg was Borg? What does the Federation style manual say on this?

not a star trek expert at all but clearly it should be "borg", as in the monolithic freakiness of "THE BORG"

hello!

ebert being inattentive to that pleasure in a positive review is frankly a black mark, but he earns back my goodwill in the nemesis review where he says "life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields".

(that's the same review where he calls star trek "kind of terrific, once" which i think is a really touching, measured way to praise it while still declaring yourself Done with it)

anyway i thought the abrams star trek was fun--driving home from the theatre, i pretended my dashboard gauges measured cooler things--and the only way in which it was an ideological break from the last few TNG movies was that it wasn't directed and acted like a playstation cutscene, but it and the original series have different pretensions. the complaint about it being "youthful" sounds odd but is actually totally otm because half the weird lovable brink-of-camp atmosphere of the old movies comes from all the performers being puffy.

I feel more charitable towards abrams trek despite its utter non-trekiness mainly due to the utter
non-trekiness of the spinoffs from DS9 onward, but got to disagree with the Borg queen-hate.

Yes, there's a lot of narrative putty to make her stick but if you've ever been in a student group with
no discernible leader, you'd have to agree that the borg as dictatorship is far more believable than a bunch of dudes arguing over the fonts on the dorm party flyers.

we beg to differ

BOOM

3 of 12 thinks we should make potstickers for the bake sale
4 of 8 hearts potstickers!
3 of 5 hates potstickers!
5 of 8 is allergic to gluten
3 of 12 wonders if potstickers are gluten-free
3 of 5 ate all the potstickers

That's what a queen-less borg would be like.

i ate all the potstickers

They eat all our potstickers... and we fall back. The line must be drawn HERE!

don't think the idea with the borg was that they voted

i was okay with the queen as like an avatar or whatever of the collective consciousness, or maybe i wasn't, i haven't seen it in forever.

although i guess if you were a race with a single collective consciousness like a million-headed hydra that could never be defeated why would you combine it all into one chick someone could shoot, so yeah

Re-watching the new Star Trek film and a few thoughts--

-They half-ass the time travel stuff, kinda stupid.
-Agree with Tuomas that it feels more like an action-sf film than a true Trek film.
-love young McCoy and Spock.

It's a very enjoyable movie, but I think if we keep along these lines we'll end up with a franchise of X-Men 3's.

it's no squire of gothos.

I thought the idea of the Borg was that they were programmed with a basic set of instructions and precepts and axioms and what not so that they would all come to the same "right" conclusion on what to do in any given situation. Also that their trials and errors would be recorded and go into improving the heuristics of this code.

I don't really see anything hard to believe about a self-learning, self-adjusting hive mind other than one has never actually existed before (sci-fi!) whereas totalitarian dictatorships are well known by most everyone and existed in history and currently exist (sci-fi???).

So, in conclusion - fuck the Borg queen. On all levels. ;)

Squire of Gothos William Campbell just died btw

(my dad knew him as a youth in Newark)

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

^

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dULOjT9GYdQ&feature=player_embedded

The other day, for no reason at all, I started thinking about that DS9 episode where it's revealed Ben Sisko was actually a crazy man in an asylum in the fifties(driven mad by RACISM!), scribbling stories about a space station on the walls of his cell. I really liked this at the time, it retrospectively adds an extra layer of PKD-style weirdness to the whole show. But I'm not surprised they didn't develop it any further, as I think if they went down that path it would be like pulling on the string that unravels the entire Trek universe. I mean, where do you stop with something like that? Is he writing ALL of it, even fucking Voyager?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lHgbbM9pu4

They went back to it at the beginning of S7. It's not that DS9 exists in Benny Russel's head. The first set of Benny Russell flashbacks are just visions the wormhole aliens sent Sisko bc they are not linear and they speak in metaphors, etc. When they revisit it in season 7, it's the evil worm hole aliens who send the vision to try to keep The Sisko from doing what he needs to do to defeat them and reopen the wormhole. Also it gives Avery Brooks a chance to chew the living hell out of the scenery. But there's no suggestion that they intended the DS9 universe to be a product of another character's imagination a la Bob Newhart was dreaming/Lost was in purgatory, etc.

I liked how Armin Shimmerman played a Communist (or so it is implied) in that dream-50s ep - of course he usually plays a Ferangi.

As a kid, I was completely terrified by the episode where Riker is in an insane asylum. I've avoided it ever since.

Ha, I loved that one!

"But there's no suggestion that they intended the DS9 universe to be a product of another character's imagination a la Bob Newhart was dreaming/Lost was in purgatory, etc."

I read somewhere they were about to put in an endcap scene where he looks in the window and sees his true reflection as Benny, suggesting exactly that! But they backed out at the last second.

'I thought the idea of the Borg was that they were programmed with a basic set of instructions and precepts and axioms and what not so that they would all come to the same "right" conclusion on what to do in any given situation.'

That wasn't the Borg; that was RoboCop! And even then four directives were too much to handle.

The reflection scene was included in the first Benny episode.

but then... that means... ....

The whole episode was ambiguous and open to interpretation. There was a lot of blurring of what was reality and what was vision, so it could be interpreted any which was you wish.

Is DS9 worth watching all the way through? I gave up on it somewhere in the 2nd season in its initial run.

somewhere after 2nd season it turned into a war opera, and it wasn't terrible, but some of the producer guys later did the battlestar galactica reboot and 24, and they kind of recycled a lot of the material from DS9 in it, so if you've seen the new BSG or Kiefer fighting terrorists, that's kind of what DS9 was. Fine enough as religious war epic, but religious war epic doesn't exactly embody Trek very well.

not to say that the spirit of Trek was totally absent -- there was a sub-arc about the Ferengi turning from a society of Reagan Capitalists to Al Gore-ian Socially Responsible Entrepreneurs.

lol nice. I've watched some BSG (S1) & enjoyed it, but not sure that I want to see the same themes played out at a Trekian pace.

Yeah, BSG did war and politics much better, building on what was done in DS9. Still, DS9 ended up being my favorite ST series, even it does feel pretty dated now (though you can say that for pretty much all the ST series).

DS9 is all the dark, murky stuff that Star Trek tried not to wallow in...thats why I love it. The opening face-off between Sisko & Picard never stops being awesome no matter how many times I see it, and I think sets the tone for the whole series.

Was it really Picard, or Locutus? (I don't know why I'm challenging anyone on this because I've never seen the early seasons of DS9.)

it was Picard.

DS9 is all the dark, murky stuff that Star Trek tried not to wallow in...thats why I love it. The opening face-off between Sisko & Picard never stops being awesome no matter how many times I see it, and I think sets the tone for the whole series.

OTM

IIRC it was Picard shortly after he was unBorged, so he was really pissed off. Or maybe Sisko was pissed off bc Picard had something to do with the decision that led to Jennifer's death? Or both.

Benjamin Sisko is one of my favorite TV characters. I love him so.