Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Apropos of nothing, but Shakey, I will nobly let you revise your ballot to reflect any recent viewings of Trek series.

Cause and Effect is so much fun.

there were some stinkers later in season 5 but when it's bad it's still entertaining as hell. possibly the worst episode next to the one with Data learning comedy from Joe Piscopo, "Cost of Living", based on Troi's mother being basically a manic pixie dream girl mostly hanging out with Worf's son Alexander as they both holodeck to a futuristic artists colony with dreadfully tacky takes on whimsy. it's like Cirque Du Solei on bad acid, this episode.

i last saw "The Perfect Mate" where Famke Janssen plays a space harem girl who has mutant sex powers and tries to seduce Picard. this show is insane.

I will nobly let you revise your ballot to reflect any recent viewings of Trek series.

heh don't worry that won't be necessary none of TNGs best beats TOS's best

xp welp, brb, skipping ahead to that Famke Janssen joint

well they ruined The Borg. "I, Borg" may have worked story-wise but it's a bit too close to being a Full House episode.

Cause & Effect is really good but for real twilight zone brainfuckery try Parallels, Remember Me, Frame of Mind...

Frame of Mind is awesome!

i need to see this full house episode where danny comes to terms with adopting a child soldier whose army kidnapped uncle joey and turned him into a killing machine.

S3E17 iirc

Here, this is suitably annoying, you guys enjoy. Dudes who work on the American Libertarian magazine _Reason_ decided to make a "funny:"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgRlzFIgm1E

"I, Borg" may have worked story-wise but it's a bit too close to being a Full House episode.

I was thinking more "Small Wonder" but yes otm

The drawback of (TNG's) utopian premise was that it did away with most of the interpersonal conflicts that are the bread and butter of episodic television dramas, including the original series. Picard and his crew were all human carbon copies of Spock—even-keeled, rational, and almost impossibly ethical. (Spock himself says so of Picard in “Unification,” the one “Next Generation” episode in which he appears.) That left little room for identification. You could aspire to be more like Picard, the very model of compassion and culture, but you could never truly understand his moral universe. He was nothing like us twenty-first-century humans. He was too alien.

http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-enduring-lessons-of-star-trek

That is why it's great SF! Not interested in future worlds where the people behave exactly like us.

uh ppl are still very horny in star trek. completely relatable.

couldn't relate to all those starchy TNG stiffs

lotta conventional wisdom in that piece and telling that its example of tng is darmok, ie the literal peak, and not any of the 28395329423 episodes about relationships in the workplace. despite being constantly maligned the first couple seasons (w roddenberry's draconian anti-conflict rules in place) are much closer to the advanced cerebral ideal that piece describes than the later, more dramatic, "better" stuff.

also

Tellingly, the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. “The City on the Edge of Forever,”

augh

so so many tng episodes entirely about crew members' (very human, very 90s) feelings. maybe a little metaphorical quantum reverse flux in the warp dampeners to be resolved along with their inner turmoil. nothing wrong w this but it shouldn't get a reputation as the brainy conceptual one.

with some minor exceptions that piece is mostly otm imo. It's strange that it doesn't address my biggest complaint about TNG, which is that it *looks* worse than TOS. The muted colors and bland design add to the air of uniformity and stiffness, which is a huge contrast to the deliberately bright and vibrant and odd TOS.

it does seem a little unfair to criticize TNG for not having anything similar to the Kirk-Spock-McCoy troika (which is what all that "interpersonal conflict" is really a reference to - none of the other TOS crewmembers ever argued about anything! OK maybe Scotty occasionally). The trio's perfectly formed dramatic motor was some real lightning-in-a-bottle type stuff that would be impossible to replicate imo.

well there were guest character conflicts too

there's plenty of that in TNG

the "guest-character-upsets-crew-dynamic" is a regularly used plot device - Q, Lore, Troi's mom, Worf's family etc.

I've never liked the clunky design of TOS (especially when compared to 2001, which TNG looks a lot closer to)
But almost anyone who has seen both can draw the bridges from memory.

Not so with ds9, voyager, enterprise.

jeez, the original series budget was not in the same galaxy as Kubrick's. or TNG

It's strange that it doesn't address my biggest complaint about TNG, which is that it *looks* worse than TOS. The muted colors and bland design add to the air of uniformity and stiffness, which is a huge contrast to the deliberately bright and vibrant and odd TOS.

Like TOS, they shot every TNG episode on film, but the flat lighting and dull colors of TNG make me think they lit it for video. I think someone in production didn't know what the fuck they were doing. The PC-case-gray ship interior doesn't help. The TNG remasters enhance the colors but can't fix it all.

What color should it have been?
Presumably the TNG movies were more professionally lit but those don't strike me as more flattering or iconic representations of the ship or crew.

best tng was the ep where everyone de-evolves into primitive animal versions of themselves. data's cat turns into an iguana.

lol going to find and watch that one now. the comments on imdb are mostly rumination into whether Brannon Braga has any idea how evolutionary things work. judging by his work since then, the answer is probably still no

I love the voyager episode that does more or less the same except that people are EVOLVING into herptiles ('threshold')

Yeah the one where Paris and Janeway as lizards breed?!?

So fucked up

I would describe them as giant river salamanders

otm

What color should it have been?

TNG also had a composer, Ron Jones, who got fired for making music that was "too distracting". After he was fired they just used a small bag of cues, a type of score more common in cheaply made shows. So yeah, I believe TNG had big production blunders.

TNG is clearly not flat-out iconically beautiful like the original Trek but I still think it looks great, especially the remasters, and it's dated really well compared to other late 80s/early 90s shows - try watching it against an episode of LA Law or Seaquest or Quantum Leap, if you want to look at what "bland" really is. There are well-directed, iconic moments in every episode, even the shittiest ones. The set design makes some bad colour choices but it's super memorable. And the actors, in spite or their varying abilities and styles, are all fascinating to watch. Very few things in TOS match Picard's best moments in TNG.

Obviously ditching Ron Jones was a mistake. I don't get the "conflict" thing though - there are plenty of disagreements on the show. And the characters never struck me as blandly-too-perfect.

Like TOS, they shot every TNG episode on film, but the flat lighting and dull colors of TNG make me think they lit it for video. I think someone in production didn't know what the fuck they were doing.

Ha! Just last night my wife, who is watching these episodes for the first time like I am, saw "11001001" and said, "The lighting person on this show did not know what they were doing."

First Contact is the best looking of the TNG movies by a long, long way.

HI DERE

ok i tried color-correcting TNG; it did not work
http://i.imgur.com/A4ltSOx.jpg

who knew the future would be so beige

the future's so bright, you gotta wear beige

was close to making that v joke, but figured I would get shit for none of the costumes actually being beige

eh, i still think it looks pretty cool. luxury UN!

sometimes the future loops beige on itself
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/St1-cast_publicity_shot.png

I put it to you that this is all accurate.

http://imgur.com/gallery/wpZ4w

i'm on the final season of TNG! the really good episodes are sort of few and far between now and they are kind of loosing the plot a bit.

it's kind of unfortunate how they handled The Borg imo. they were never as strong as those first couple of episodes, everything after they took over Picard is a little meh.

Data having dreams is an interesting idea but i feel like they are relying on the fish-eye-lens trick way too much. i loved seeing him struggle and asking Picard what to do, Picard telling him to use them as inspiration, and Data setting out to manically re-create his dream imagery through paintings. absolutely hated HATED Data stabbing Troi in "Phantasms". i was convinced that was a dream as well and it would turn into Inception a bit but no, they go full horror mode for it, and it's a bit too much to take. especially how everyone quickly brushes it off. if you had an android that was suddenly suffering from nightmares and hearing voices telling him to "Kill them" and then violently attacks a crew member wouldn't you do more than just confine him to quarters for a bit?

"Frame of Mind" from Season 6 was pretty entertaining, reminding me a bit of the Bjork video about the play where the play is about them writing the play etc. on the one hand i felt like they were leaning a bit hard on Riker going crazy for the latter half of season 6, but he's a convincing enough actor to pull it off.

"Ship in a Bottle" is a great holodeck episode. Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes LEAVE THE HOLODECK, something that should be literally impossible, and the episode is a great mystery that has a cool Inception-style payoff. sorry i keep referring to that movie lol

"Starship Mine" was probably the most impressive of the past 2 seasons, basically Die Hard In Space. what a great premise: the Enterprise is evacuated for a standard cleaning procedure and top staff gathered to a dull diplomatic meet-and-greet when Picard overhears an opportunity to go horse riding. upon going back to the ship to get his saddle, he discovers it is being infiltrated by terrorists, and one-by-one he has to take them out, reclaim his ship, etc. all while a giant fatal space laser is slowly sweeping the ship from front to back. SO GOOD.

ship in a bottle is the best tng ep

YES i love the solution they come up with

picard breaking the fourth wall in his closing remarks is A+++

It's a mean trick they pull (in Ship in a Bottle), and ridiculous that a self aware AI spontaneously generates and they basically go 'lol' and then shut it up in a cupboard and forget all about it. A bit like the stuff in Plato's Stepchildren that can give anyone godlike psychokinesis, but is never mentioned again. Or the gate in The City at the Edge of Forever - "many such journeys are possible!", nah mate we've had enough.