Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

BOO YA

I just learned what John de Lancie (Q) is up to these days:

Discord is the former ruler of Equestria, and the main antagonist of The Return of Harmony Part 1 and part 2. Once Discord escapes from his stone prison, Twilight Sparkle and her friends must act quickly to summon the Elements of Harmony in order to stop him. He is a representation of the disharmony of pony kind.

(spoilers for a Maquis episode but this scene is great)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS4L8owZinw

xp yeah he voices the villain in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Also he voices the father of the Desmond, the protagonist of the videogame series Assassin's Creed.

'the Desmond' lol I spekes Engerlish well good...

Those are good Sisko clips! The face he makes after he pops Q is the kind of weird acting flourish I have been talking about.

i love how he's a total peace & love hippie irl, it's kinda funny in contrast with the clipped brooding captainyness of sisko

avery brooks I mean, not Q

Hey you know that Jeff and I will be seeing Mr. Brooks on Sunday. And Patrick Stewart on Saturday. La di da

Duuuurh, don't know how I managed to miss it before but this show now makes a lot more sense when I realised that different races = DIFFERENT RACES

xpost omg u guys!! how exciting!!

Jesus, this show is significantly weirder than I remember. Siske negotiating with his memories in the wormhole is some budget Lynchian shit.

I generally like mannerist performances/disjunctive effects in all kinds of things so I expect once I get over the bends I will be a big Brooks/Sisko fan.

When he shows up with a goatee you're almost there, and when he shaves his head you will have arrived at your destination.

o

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Wait how big is this click pen -- are t there like 100 rules?

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

This is totally Avery Brooks coming through in the character. This was in the last episode before the final 9 episode story arc. Perfect setup.

xpost lol no not all of them, I think it has like 6 or 7 of them

i have totally blanked on that "he's just a man!" clip, how i could forget the Sisko rage

He was the original Barack Obama - after Sisko, the way had already been paved.

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".

― difficult listening hour, Wednesday, May 11, 2011 1:33 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Agreed, this is great:

I've also had it with the force shield that protects the Enterprise. The power on this thing is always going down. In movie after movie after movie I have to sit through sequences during which the captain is tersely informed that the front shield is down to 60 percent, or the back shield is down to 10 percent, or the side shield is leaking energy, and the captain tersely orders that power be shifted from the back to the sides or all put in the front, or whatever, and I'm thinking, life is too short to sit through 10 movies in which the power is shifted around on these shields. The shields have been losing power for decades now, and here it is the Second Generation of Star Trek, and they still haven't fixed them. Maybe they should get new batteries.

reading that i don't think ebert understands shields - they are protective, they get damaged by enemy fire, energy ablates, and they get less effective. it's not like there are batteries that are running down.

ds9 is spoilt a lot by the new agey rubbish and politics at the end, imo. i prefer voyager. but would watch both again tomorrow.

http://img31.exs.cx/img31/700/worfdance.gif

That moment when you realise that for months you have been block recording every TNG re-run to an online archive provided by your ISP.

Why not just buy the recent HD remasters?

Because I need money for Sparks remasters I forgot to buy in 2008.

Wasn't sure where to put this, but this is incredible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_BtmV4JRSc#at=43

there is no way in hell you're gonna get me to watch a youtube called that

It's great! It'll make you sniffle! It's a message he records, per the filmer's request, for her infant daughter to watch when she grows up.

Really beautiful, honestly. I think I first saw it on a pro gay marriage site.

I find myself in a strange position with the various star treks. They were always on TV on sunday evenings when I was a kid, and because I always used to watch anything that was science fiction, I always used to watch any star trek that was on. I think I must have seen large chunks of (what I now know to be) tos, ng, ds9 and voyager. I had a great time watching them too, very invested in plots and concerned about what was going on in each episode (but not interested at all in any longer season story arcs).

Watching them as an adult, they become embarrassing (hold on though, because I'm not just being a dick to star trek) because of the gulf between the grand ideas and the mundane execution:

* The spaceships don't look very interesting. The designs for monsters, planets etc are competent, and clearly done on an ad-hoc basis, but according to a strict style guide. They're kind of tokens. Here we are on a planet; but you're not going to get too excited about the specifics of this planet because it's just another planet done in a ST style.

* The characters all remind me somehow of American political interns or people giving presentations about their new business project. The quirks and traits are all rather flat, secondary to their professional roles. Relatedly, most 'alien species' just = slight transformations or extrusions of eyebrows, noses, lips.

* It is very condescending to alien cultures.

And with star trek, dr who, etc, I think it's worth looking at the anti-geek, anti-fan positions of people who don't like (say) star trek. It's often quite illuminating.

In the case of ST, surely it's because by default you'd expect that going on a space adventure should be exciting and thrilling; you should be hanging on to the edge of a cliff or having a gun battle, beads of sweat ought to be appearing on your brow, terrible beasts scraping at the door of your pod, etc.

ST (definitely from NG onward at least) completely subverts this and instead you watch our team of colleagues brainstorm, carefully consider the best way to neutralise whatever is threatening them this week, come up with a report, and action the program going forward within an acceptable timeframe. At the end there's time for some reflection and humour.

The anti-ST, anti-fan type of person probably finds this totally dishonest and feels short-changed.

ST (definitely from NG onward at least) completely subverts this and instead you watch our team of colleagues brainstorm, carefully consider the best way to neutralise whatever is threatening them this week, come up with a report, and action the program going forward within an acceptable timeframe. At the end there's time for some reflection and humour.

This is what I love about the show. I'm going to butcher this, but when news of the JJ Abrams movie came out, someone I follow on twitter said that as a TNG fan, his perfect Star Trek movie would be 1:15 of diplomatic wrangling re the prime directive followed by 20 minutes of reflective moralizing and I was like YES I would see that movie!

from DS9 onward though it was all-war stakes escalation all-the-time. there's a direct continuity between enterprise and nu-trek and it's not just scotty transwarping porthos.

TNG = an office in space. Very very different in tone and execution from OST

1:15 of diplomatic wrangling re the prime directive followed by 20 minutes of reflective moralizing and I was like YES I would see that movie!

This would be ludicrously awesome! Though I will admit that I would like any ST movie to include them blowing up at least one other spaceship, preferably borg or romulan. Beyond that, wrangling/moralizing is the way to go.

On season 4 of ds9 now. Like tng, the first 2 seasons are hard work, the 3rd is like ok this show has serious highs, season 4 is like, to paraphrase b Wilson on Rubber Soul, 'every single track is a gas'.

Man, professional nerds are the worst.

but... john hodgman is the best!

Is he in the same league as Wheaton or the guy who started Nerdist? I don't feel like Hodgman uses a Reddit account as a career tool.

well... he was college roommates with jonathan coulton

he writes artsy comic book reviews for The New York Times; definitely a professional nerd

artsy huh?

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

Dear Wil Wheaton,

I am glad that a dude who was a Hollywood celebrity from age 10 and appeared in TV Hits' cute guys pullout throughout his teens thinks being a nerd is awesome!

Personally I find being a nerd slightly less awesome, because not only do non-nerds still have the same opinion of nerds as they did in junior high, it turns out that other nerds are insufferable people who think they get to police how you love things and whether you've earned the right to love them, and nerds also like to declare that any person being less awesome than them isn't working hard enough.

Also your daughter may one day like to know that a female nerd will have to get used to hearing guys whine "why can't girls be nerds" and then "oh god but not you" if she's not cute or "lol you must be bad at nerd stuff, let me research your failings and make a list" regardless of cuteness, repeatedly, forever. Which gets tiresome.

Now, as you all were with the Star Trek talk...

Watching them as an adult, they become embarrassing (hold on though, because I'm not just being a dick to star trek) because of the gulf between the grand ideas and the mundane execution:

first thing i noticed seeing tng as an adult:

how many 'protocol' scenes there are, essentially all of someone really portentously telling someone else to drive the ship

i know that's analogous to all sorts of other functional devices in network tv scripts, but once i saw it, i couldn't un-see it : /

Idg the complaint about wheaton he doesnt really police anybody

riker driving the ship with a joystick also non-un-seeable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4x1K97JZG0

sorry Shakey, I like Wheaton OK (I mean I'm not really familiar with what he does these days at all but I get linked to his blog posts from time to time and have liked some of them a lot), just a few of the words he used in his speech pushed some buttons for me

nothing to do with WW at all actually and I shouldn't have put it here. ahem

I didn't have a problem with that spontaneous speech at all. Sure, he's in Hollywood, but he likely spends every waking hour doing nerdy stuff with nerdy people. He's a nerd lifer, and proud of it. I've been to conferences like that one before, and frankly I've never felt anything less than totally inclusive good vibes. WW seems like the sort who would stand signing autographs and shooting the shit as long as there are people waiting.