Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

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.

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

― socki (s1ocki), Wednesday, July 31, 2013 10:56 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

lol, otm

Personally I find being a nerd slightly less awesome,

Yeah I'm finding the WW thing suspicious too.

Possible argument why being a nerd is actually not a good look would be like: if you are a nerd you probably live in a rich western country* and can afford to, should you wish, read lots of novels + poetry and go to classical music concerts**, except you don't, you prefer to sit around watching often quite tacky*** pop culture artefacts that you like precisely because they are bad and qua consumer-critic u have a slave relationship to the text**** unlike e.g. Roger Ebert.

* Hmmm probably less true with the internet and culture distribution, let's not make too many assumptions about the geography of culture consumption
** Well hang on is any of this stuff really better than pop culture hmm hmm and you can't really tell someone what they should like?
*** Hmmm some sci fi and other 'nerd' films tv games are undeniably well-produced
**** But what about fan-fiction and all that. Also perhaps it's more honest or vital to love a text like you're still a teenager than to be 'tasteful'?

Pretty sure his point was not that it's cool to be a nerd, but that if you are a nerd you will have plenty of company, and that's cool.

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.

this is totally true but real talk: fuck these people, they have literally everything else. let us have our space deliberations over space problematics. that's why the same guy being in charge of both star wars and star trek (and approaching the latter like the former) is so symbolically awful. regardless, tho, TOS is much closer to this pulp-adventure ideal than TNG.

you're more or less otm about the planet/alien design; you have to make your peace with that stuff/learn to find it endearing/whatever. similar are the countless TOS episodes where a planet is, gasp, Just Like [Time Period] Earth, because they had those costumes lying around. (my favorite of these is probably the planet of nazis, although i love "miri" for reasons unrelated to the set design.) i love the look of the TOS starship interiors tho: all those minimalist flat-colored walls, the identical hallways, spock's lil meditation chamber.

what i love about trek (besides spock/bones banter or data playing poker) is how clearly each series (just talking about tos/tng here cuz i'm saving ds9 for after i work through all of tng) is not just a utopian fantasy but a utopian fantasy dreamed up by a really specific historical time, with all the inevitable oversights: the way kirk upends entire social systems in the name of Freedom and brusquely abandons the aliens to deal with the fallout, the way tng furrows its brow so earnestly hard trying to Respect Plurality and still ends up with an episode where all the aliens are honor-obsessed black people carrying spears. the shows are about a time when we've more or less overcome our demons and yet there are still demons the shows don't even realize are there -- i don't find this depressing but somehow encouraging, because the general contours of the dream (liberty/equality/fraternity/spaceships) are exactly the ideals that allow us to see the places where the shows don't measure up. (and lest all this sound like condescending head-patting weren't-the-60s-quaint, i should emphasize even though everyone already knows it that TOS, at least, was practically radical just for putting uhura on the bridge.) i like all the endless episodes where kirk or picard find themselves having to justify humanity to snobbishly godlike aliens who can't see our potential; similarly i like that spock's disagreements with humans aren't just about Logic Vs. Emotion but about different ways of dealing with emotion, with violence, with the darkness that ("amok time" reveals) is an even more alarmingly fundamental part of vulcans than of humans. (all the star trek aliens are just distorted humans, obv, exaggerations of parts of ourselves, all with something to teach us, and kirk's job as Captain is to synthesize them. the spock-bones-kirk relationship is p much hegelian, right? morbz upthread somewhere calls them "his fire-and-ice counselors".) the shows are about finding ways to live better without changing ourselves unrecognizably, which in our neoliberal population-management dystopia is... a window. a breeze. something that looks forward, whereas star wars (from the first line) only looks back: reshuffles our mythic past. naturally it makes fewer mistakes than trek, makes you cringe less; it stakes nothing.

sorry that was a big mess. also ohgodi'madork

similar are the countless TOS episodes where a planet is, gasp, Just Like [Time Period] Earth, because they had those costumes lying around. (my favorite of these is probably the planet of nazis, although i love "miri" for reasons unrelated to the set design.)

the one where they get stuck on the "old west" planet and have to re-fight the OK corral gunfight is even more blatant, tho that one actually has a genuinely creepy, surreal vibe that i enjoy -- and it's kind of cool to see wyatt earp et al portrayed as belligerent, gun-crazy nutjobs.

the one with the planet where everyone's a 20s gangster cracks me up. kirk was born to negotiate with that planet.

sorry that was a big mess.

No, it was a big otm, espesh:

the shows are about finding ways to live better without changing ourselves unrecognizably, which in our neoliberal population-management dystopia is... a window. a breeze. something that looks forward, whereas star wars (from the first line) only looks back: reshuffles our mythic past. naturally it makes fewer mistakes than trek, makes you cringe less; it stakes nothing.

It is probably relevant that ST characters have entered popular mythos with their titles intact. Captain, Mister, Doctor, Commander, etc.

ha yeah! only important job title in star wars is "darth".

U could probably also make an aesthetic point about how the USS Enterprise is kind of a flying saucer (which is a magical flying machine from pulp sci fi, before we really could go to the moon) ... but it also has extra bits attached to it, the warp drive engines (which are a result of we can actually go to the moon and thinking seriously abt how a long distance spacecraft will work). The design of the spacecraft, straddling old and new notions of space travel, is synchdoche for the show which itself straddles old and new visions of the future AND for the time period of the show's creation which was also all about this!

But I also think the crew of starfleet vessels are much more like the borg than they imagine, and closer than the writers and producers of the show imagine

would watch a spinoff show of borg in conference rooms debating things with future-powerpoint

"we are borg, we want thai food for lunch"
"we had thai food yesterday"
...
"resistance is food truck"

XP to myself

Even if captain picard (was it?) does have that moment where he tries explaining Dante to a Romulan - his connection to the fabric of what we have so far called 'humanity' (culture, thought, emotion, life, history), was much more tenuous, out there in the freezing silent dark, lightyears from earth, than he realised.

your herbs and spices will be added to our own

i just put on an episode and spock is going ham on bones about the limitations of empathy. "i've noticed that about your people, doctor: you find it easier to understand the death of one than the death of a million. you speak of the objective hardness of the vulcan heart. yet how little room there seems to be in yours." omg. bones looks so crestfallen.

Also, having watched BSG old and new, I feel very strongly that 'being on The Battlestar Galactica' is to 'being on the Enterprise', as 'being in an oligarch's new-build mansion' is to 'being in a Tudor manor house'.

i don't really remember anything about the borg's origin story. retrospectively i kind of wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't some hint of 'we did this to ourselves w/ technology!!' back there somewhere. which would be a bit of a letdown. but as i remember it, it was more like: suddenly, there's this hostile adversary/'civilization'/class of entities that comes out of nowhere, and is horrifying, and is destroying/assimilating everything in its path for no other reason than because that's what it does.

if that's more or less accurate, then: A+ fictional world-making/'character'-creating. massacre at wolf 359 was effectively unsettling to jaded/naive teenaged me!

actually, checking -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29#Origin

it seems that the gloss on the borg would be 'THEY did that to themselves', which is pretty much exactly where you would expect it to be situated to cause problems for the pluralistic TNG view of intra-universe relations.

the way kirk upends entire social systems in the name of Freedom and brusquely abandons the aliens to deal with the fallout

haha yes. sometimes i wonder how this played to viewers of the time as Vietnam was getting worse and worse, the tet offensive happening like halfway through the series, etc.

i think some of the art direction and sets in TOS, when it comes to the alien planets, are pretty incredible. some of it anyway

there might be later stuff i haven't seen that fleshes out their backstory but nah that's exactly how they're introduced, at least: q warps the enterprise out a kajillion light-years to introduce them to the borg as a lesson about their unpreparedness for the dangers of the universe. whoopi goldberg freaks out because she recognizes them as the species that destroyed her homeworld and knows there's No Reasoning With Them. they seemed designed from the beginning to resist klingon-style rehabilitation: they have absolutely zero tolerance for things that aren't themselves. hive mind aside, they're a little like the krikkiters in life, the universe, and everything, who sail for the first time out of the dust cloud surrounding them, see the infinite expanse of the universe, and conclude "it'll have to go."

xps.

so did they try to undo that unrehabilitatability when jeri ryan came on the scene? (or maybe picard did w/ some philosophical musings after he came back from assimilation, i don't recall - remember him being kinda depressed and ptsd and pensive.)

oh, see, i don't even know about post-tng stuff, so i shouldn't. i do remember picard's ptsd from first contact tho. the borg are Always A Part Of Him and stuff.

like he's got a darkness now or smthn? or an urge to PERFECT?

The Borg backstory is only fully addressed extra-canonically in the Destiny Trilogy books but I will again encourage anybody who likes TNG/DS9 to read those because they are great.

One more plug for the whole DS9 relaunch book series, which I have almost read through completely. ;_;

i think some of the art direction and sets in TOS, when it comes to the alien planets, are pretty incredible. some of it anyway

would vote in a star trek planets poll. some of the best ones are in the shittiest episodes. i don't really like "the apple" but it has that great lush jungle with the giant robot idol. problem is that they've all been fucking touched up, much more tastefully than star wars but nevertheless, and i'm not o.g. enough to have seen the 60s versions.

haha yes. sometimes i wonder how this played to viewers of the time as Vietnam was getting worse and worse, the tet offensive happening like halfway through the series, etc.

there's a really queasily specific didactic vietnam allegory in "a private little war" where the klingons have begun arming one side of a tribal war on a little peaceful planet of condescended-to noble savages and kirk makes the painful decision to involve the federation by arming the other side, thus maintaining "a... balance of power!" worst violation of the prime directive ever. meanwhile: kirk makes out w a hot native, a bear bites spock, etc.

he calls the weapons "serpents. serpents for the garden of eden."

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20081206015854/memoryalpha/en/images/4/45/RigelVII-Holberg917G_fortress.jpg

problem is that they've all been fucking touched up, much more tastefully than star wars but nevertheless, and i'm not o.g. enough to have seen the 60s versions.

you can switch between the original and remastered effects on the blu-rays. i think one of the dvd editions has the original effects too

oh cool. i don't think you can on netflix but who am i kidding that's not how i've been watching them. i can prob find the originals then if i track down another, you know. copy.

I second reading the Destiny Trilogy. The borg origin is very satisfying.

Just thinking about it makes me want to read it again.