Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

yeah it's so great that they made the kirk character the second-in-command who basically spends half the time barking out the orders picard can't be bothered to

Episode generator
http://www.bargaintuan.com/sttngplotgen/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vcCojlE9AQ

once TNG gets rolling it can be pretty good, but the first season is so fucking awful. it's just episode after episode of numbing incompetence, albeit with a few memorable camp moments here and there. it makes for a tough contrast with TOS where the first season was the best.

(i know TNG starts in 87 but it feels so 90s. i started in 1987 too and i feel pretty 90s.)

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Monday, June 18, 2012 11:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

boy do i disagree! TNG is as 80s-to-the-core as magnum PI. well it's probably more accurate to say that the 80s seasons are super 80s-y; by the end of the run it does feel like a very 90s show. but i mean look at these guys:

http://i.imgur.com/ZYRvj.jpg

just offscreen: an orange julius and a theater showing beverly hills cop ii

plus the smug new age touchy feeliness that is the show's foundation just reads california, 1980s to me

TNG was god to me when i was a kid but now i greatly prefer TOS. TNG's brand of humanism seems deeply creepy and fucked up now, the enterprise and its crew often come off like a megachurch in space. TOS was possessed of a more hotblooded brand of utopianism that feels more human to me, and also lends itself to drama much more naturally. plus the characters are way better and i find it more aesthetically appealing, especially the colorful expressionist art direction.

A lot of early TNG badness is pretty much recycled TOS badness, so it's kind of strange to compare them because they are the same badness!
later TNG badness was more like Twin Peaks badness. It was basically Twin Peaks in space during the low moments.

Horny club-handed nurse was LIlith from Cheers! Kirstie Alley was supposed to reprise Saavik role in that Frasier cameo at the end of Yesterday's Enterprise but that never happened. TNG has aged better than Cheers, I think. If you listen to the Borg battle in First Contact, you can hear Frazier on the com traffic.

Horny club-handed nurse was LIlith from Cheers!

Ah! I thought she looked familiar!

cheers has aged super well imho

ive actually been watching both a lot lately thanks 2 netflix

there's this really bad teaser that starts off great. everyone explains to woody what this one far side cartoon means. it's pretty funny to hear people try to explain far side cartoons, and you realize there could be just an entire tv series where people just sit around explaining far side cartoons. but, the writers have kind of written themselves into a corner, so woody gets mad for really no good reason at all, except lazy writing.

also really terrible: carla is upset that her nephew or someone is going to be named benito mussolini. that's the major plot! how do they resolve this? they name the kid benito mussolini.

the teaser where lilith stuffs her whole fist into her mouth is pretty great, but the closest this series comes to "city on the edge of forever" is that episode where Norm has existential nightmares about his job firing people.

Never really watched much of TOS but I got a lot of love for TNG, sure it's no less cornball than TOS in general, but some of the episodes are seriously intense & determined, in particular the headfuck episodes like Frame of Mind and Remember Me are just awesome. Any TOS episodes that might push similar buttons?

that weird alien avatar that kid clint howard used to scare kirk will give you nightmares forever, if that's what you were looking for:
http://static.flickr.com/72/154780386_ae28500d09.jpg

That is SO AWESOME!

oh man, I used to always have to look away when that popped up at the end of the credits

and yet still not as frightening as his true form

Loved when Futurama did their big Trek episode, and then did the closing credits in the style of TOS.

http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/7/7b/Kifbalok.jpg/180px-Kifbalok.jpg

William Burroughs VIII

"They say... that wrinkled earlobes are a sure sign of... wait a minute, I don't have any earlobes."

"When I became captain of the Fesarius, I decided to extend asylum to certain citizens who were persona non grata elsewhere in the area on account of their disquieting and disgusting habits."

Replace "David Gerrold" with "Harlan Ellison," still true!

never really watched trek growing up, was sci-fi skeptic in general really, knew and enjoyed some of the movies, caught a few episodes of tng when it was on and somehow got the impression that as it was 'actually' good it was 'actually' better than tos. watching tos now via netflix/amazon i can see that i was RONG. i'm still very early in just yet but so far of the ensemble that make up the core in the movies (ie NOT yeoman rand, which really feels like this dark secret my trekkie friends have kept from me over the years) are really great, when the writing or plot is subpar they really carry it thru and when you actually get a great episode like the one i just watched 'mudds women' it raises it to another level, nimoy is fantastic which is no surprise but what has surprised me is just how great shatner is on this, can't believe now that 'who is the best captain' is even a discussion.

otm

TNG was god okay to me when i was a kid teen, but now i greatly prefer TOS. TNG's brand of humanism seems deeply creepy and fucked up now, the enterprise and its crew often come off like a megachurch in space. TOS was possessed of a more hotblooded brand of utopianism that feels more human to me, and also lends itself to drama much more naturally. plus the characters are way better and i find it more aesthetically appealing, especially the colorful expressionist art direction.

― Black_vegeta (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, June 19, 2012 9:29 AM (1 week ago)

this too

wait, mudd's women was one of the clunkers. it's kind of messed up on a lot of levels but the conclusion makes no sense at all. the only worse ending that comes to mind is the one where spock goes, "oh i'm not blind after all, i have an extra eyelid that I forgot about BECAUSE VULCANS ARE SO GOOD AT FORGETTING STUFF"

what has surprised me is just how great shatner is on this, can't believe now that 'who is the best captain' is even a discussion.

― balls, Tuesday, July 3, 2012 3:28 AM (1 hour ago)

yeah for sure -- don't wanna spoil in case you haven't seen it yet but shatner is especially good in 'city on the edge of forever,' and the last few minutes of that episode is the single most shattering moment in ST history. nothing in TNG or any of the movies (except maybe end of wrath of khan) really touches that for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toG6aSQFF7Y

mudd's women for me feels like the first one i've seen so far where the show is fully formed and confident, sulu's on the bridge and not just some oddball hobbyist, spock is less of an outsider asshole they feel the need to mock w/ song, villain is actually charismatic and somewhat surprising, no yeoman rand. nice tension between the crew also, scottie reminds of so many old boiler techs i knew in the navy, this general sense of 'fuck everybody who doesn't actually make this ship go and i'm who actually makes this ship go', his exasperation w/ the situation here keeps popping up here to the point that kirk finally actually snaps at him. i also really liked that my 'wtf these women aren't even that attractive' is addressed in the story!

Mudd's Women is an atrocity.

We're almost through the first season of TOS and I've found that the episodes I like the best are the ones with few or no women in them. Return of the Archons had a great story, but it went completely off the rails when Kirk talked the computer to death. I also really liked The Devil in the Dark. But I'm pretty tired of Kirk's smug moralizing about the essential nature of "man" at the end of most of the episodes.

Also that whole "relentlessly sexist" thing, which is why I prefer eps w/out women. Then I don't have to deal with soft focus tight shots of their faces, or stripper music while a crew member leers at them, or soft tinkling music while a crew member falls in love with them, or the tired tired TIRED plotline of "beautiful woman is really ugly, tricks crew into popping boners for her," or yet another plot line that revolves around a woman who is supposedly a scientist completely throwing her professionalism out the window because she gets wind of a dude in a pair of tight pants, putting the crew into grave danger, because women! Amirite, dudes??!?!?! Just ugh. Endless ugh.

FYI the actor who played Yeoman Rand developed a huge drinking problem and stopped appearing in the show after awhile.

! I never knew that was what happened to her!

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

Hey guys you should never watch the Sean Connery 007's.

Patrick McGoohan pwns pwns PWNS Connery & TOS on pretty much every level. There's some really good TOS episodes though, but stuff like Mudd's Women is like last episode of LOST territory. Does Kirk even get to do a flying jump kick in it?

Majel Barrett >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Grace Lee Whitney

That's an unfair comparison because Majel Barrett is the best.

what kinda amazed me when i watched space seed (original khan episode) was how i almost preferred it to st2... khan is such an interesting manipulative character, way more intriguing than in the movie (where he still rules)

i love the scene in that episode where kirk tricks him into sort've revealing who he is, and instead of getting angry like your standard villain khan just smiles and murmurs, 'excellent...excellent.' like he's so thrilled at having a worthy adversary at last.

totally. it's kinda more intriguing to me than the movie's roaring bad guy (who, like i said, still rules)

love mudd's women, balls otm. TOS is often more interesting for the characters and chemistry than for the ideas and storytelling, and mudd's women is one of the episodes that gets by on the former (though yeah, sexism).

Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan is just so well done, so well paced, and so classic in every way. Space Seed is good but TWOK is just miles away better than any other Star Trek product. Khan as a character may be fleshed out better in the TOS but some of his line readings of the film are just godlike.

i love it when he goes KHANNNNNN

Kirk does land a flying jump kick in space seed. just sayin.
Balance of Terror? (the one with spock's dad as romulan captain) is a pretty good if you want to see submarine battle in space a la wrath of khan.

'i, of course...remember you.'

they're still running with shields down.

of course! we are one big happy fleet!

allow me to introduce you to the only remaining... indigenous life form of ceti alpha v.

i don't know you. but you... i never forget a face.

(even faces that did not appear in the original episode)

Return of the Archons had a great story, but it went completely off the rails when Kirk talked the computer to death.

i posted about this upthread i think but the end of this episode made me lol so hard when kirk just blows up this computer that's been controlling the entire civilization for a million years or whatever, and his idea of postrevolutionary support for the terrified and confused people whose lives he's just fundamentally disrupted (in an unusually egregious violation of the prime directive) is to just say "HOPE YOU'RE UP TO IT" and beam away blithely. which reminds me of another one: "admiral kirk... never sent anyone to check on our progress."

"You are in a position to demand nothing. I, on the other hand, am in a position to grant nothing."

"I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round Perdition's flames before I give him up! "