Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

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.

It is deeply satisfying. That's a good way to describe it.

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.

Yeah, that one is really amazing. First time I saw it was a year or two ago, and it made me consider facets of that war that I had never thought of before.

kirk makes out w a hot native, a bear, bites spock, etc.

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080103020843/startrek/images/thumb/3/37/Harry_Mudd2266.jpg/500px-Harry_Mudd2266.jpg

First time I saw it was a year or two ago, and it made me consider facets of that war that I had never thought of before.

i mean it's not actually analogous, is the thing, right? it's only analogous to the shallowest of the then-official lines: an evil empire is interfering with a bunch of agencyless third-worlders to promote its own power. no explanation of why the two local sides are fighting except that the klingons disrupted their edenic pacifism. there's not even any space french. i do like the space bear, tho; it's a guy in an elaborate suit after several episodes (e.g. the gangster one) where they didn't even bother to put makeup on the aliens.

i guess it's more of a space gorilla really.

episode's still fascinating and recommended tho because bones is the antiwar voice in it and there's real tension between the show's general pacifism and its support for u.s. foreign policy, even if its final decision is unambiguous. roddenberry did the teleplay: this is happening in his soul! so it's a really pure example of what i was saying i liked: utopianism trapped in its time. but it's kinda hard to watch for me.

this line of mccoy's (i'm just on memory alpha now) kinda terrifyingly cuts through the episode:

"Jim, that means you're condemning this whole planet to a war that may never end! It could go on for year after year! Massacre after massacre!"

but make no mistake bones does not make policy

rip kang! i didn't know he was in the brando julius caesar, that's almost my favorite shakespeare movie.

lol you inspired me to watch that one

tyree was married to twiggy! his wife nona is married to zubin mehta!

rip kang :(

RIP. Watching "Day of the Dove" now. Had forgotten it was written by Jerome Bixby.

One of yr better shipboard episodes.

Although it might have some third season clunkiness to it.

Guy in college way back when used to always quote Kang's line "You will die of suffocation in the icy cold of space."

Man that would be a shitty fortune cookie.

Yup.

I think he used to slightly misquote it, leaving out the "suffocation" part. Also, I thought he said he was quoting Khan and wondered if he had seen a different version of "Space Seed" from the one I saw.

khan says "it is very cold... in space."

as the punch line to the good ol Klingon Proverb about revenge.

OK, "Day of the Dove" is fine when the Klingons are onscreen, some of the other stuff with the Enterprise crew is like a rehash of "The Naked TIme" from the first season.

we have no devil, Kirk.

What's next, the roar of crowds?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZGqkvQ__bY