Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Yeah, a rather disturbing one, and if the most common interpretation is true, one that reflects very poorly on Roddenberry.

ok i will do some extra curricular reading

Harlan Ellison, among others, tells some stories about what went on in that bungalow.

it will always be significant to me that a banal line from it ("i'll go along with this charade until i can think my way out") was plagiarized for no reason by bob dylan
I just looked this up and it said they were both citing an earlier source.

imo the worst season 1 episode by a long long way is mudd's women. not just sexist but really boring. (the other episode with harry mudd isn't that bad, iirc.) 

http://dylanfilm.atspace.com/tj.html

Bogart in a film called Tokyo Joe.

oh that does make sense for mid-80s dylan (just before brownsville girl). can imagine him catching that on tv one afternoon, as i had imagined him catching the squire of gothos. dunno why it crops up (slightly distorted) in the trek episode tho lol. think it was one of michael gray's books i got that loose connection from.

re mudd’s women i think of this post a lot

mudd's women was one of the three stories roddenberry pitched for the star trek pilot. he was using the fantastic allegorical power of sci-fi to tell the story of a pimp who lives in a cave.

― Einstein, Kazanga, Sitar (abanana), Wednesday, August 10, 2016 8:10 PM bookmarkflaglink

ok i will do some extra curricular reading

I think people also talk about it earlier in this thread? Certainly ILE was where I found out about it.

Yes, there is some discussion upthread.

Vulcanian?

daily voyager repeats now on season 3 in the UK. they go back in time and space to... Earth 1996. that'll save on props. and i bet it'll be somewhere in the los angeles area... (see also ST:IV)

LA, yes. also with guest slots from sarah silverman and ed begley jr.

Lol.

Lower Decks S2 premieres next Friday... the 13th! BUM BUM BUMMMM.

wahoo

For a split second I wondered why you were telling us about the horny yacht crew programme.

need a supercut of

JR OFFICER: In visual range.

CAPTAIN: On screen.

(*a small blur*)

CAPTAIN: Magnify!

Have recently been watching Star Trek Continues, which faithfully re-creates the look & feel of the original series and has episodes which follow on from TOS as well, e.g. "The Fairest of them All" after the events of "Mirror Mirror".

All the episodes can be found here (are free to view on YouTube): https://www.startrekcontinues.com/episodes.html

some good guest stars too! Erin Gray, Colin Baker, Sophie Aldred. Getting Chris Doohan in to play Scotty was a nice move.

Didn't know this existed. Thanks!

Cool. How does that compare to Phase II?

oops, *not* Sophie Aldred, Nicola Bryant! Getting Ace and Peri confused. The makers were presumably Who fans, at any rate.

Lou Ferrigno plays an Orion slave trader. Guess he's used to playing green people.

How does that compare to Phase II?

Don't know. Haven't seen it.

I just watched the first episode (or I guess first two episodes) of Prodigy and it's actually pretty good: the lead is annoying but the rest of the crew seems interesting, the jokes mostly avoid being cringey (some were real lolz), and the reveal at the end really hit me hard, and I'm not even that much of a Voyager fan.

i tried but i felt like i was watching a videogame & ingesting sugary cereal through my eyes lol

This is fun:

The Trouble with NFT's pic.twitter.com/hEluFsA60Z

— Jellicle Josh (@joshuamartian) November 17, 2021

Magnificent.

love it lol

today's voyager was the civilisation that had never heard music until the doctor started singing. leader of this civilisation = paul williams, lol.

!

love that episode. Watching all of Voyager during the pandemic was a great move.

horror channel repeats are nearing the end, i think, and they are getting to be quite a bit more varied, possibly disjointed. Irish village in the holodeck, the doctor sings, the planet they are orbiting evolves 1000s of years in a month... might be less obvious if these were one a week and not one a day.

lol i also watched voyager for the first time over the past year and literally the only episodes i skipped were the irish village in the holodecks x2

fuckin hated how they reduced the borg to rubes tho

(nevertheless the planet that evolved 1000s of years in a month was *awesome*)

but honestly most of the characters (maybe all of the humans?) were annoying af. the doctor, seven and tuvok were maybe the only ones i cared enough about to care about

(i mean the doctor was largely an asshole but at least interesting about it)

Doctor + 7 + neelix + tuvok make the show IMO. Paris and Torres and Kim all dud as fuck

Finally getting round to DS9 (lol shuddup), and cannot unsee the Bablyon5 theft. Its ok, but its... blatant. I'm enjoying it though. Up to start of S2 3 parter with the Bajor/Cardassia conflict around the religious extremists. Which is one of the B5 things I noted (Quark getting branded on the forehead, same as a Minbari did by an extremist in B5).

And maybe it is just me, but Vedek Bareil is SO much like Sinclair from B5 in his Valen persona!

The writers interviewed in "The Fifty-Year Mission" didn't bring up B5 much. Apparently Ira Steven Behr was trying to copy the light serialization in primetime dramas of the time, but he messed it up. The primetime dramas like ER and NYPD Blue would have the characters go through arcs while the basic episode setup remained the same. In DS9 there are substantial changes in the situation the characters are in, but the characters themselves don't change much.

I couldn't get past the first season of B5 for what it's worth, so I don't know about particular similarities.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Babylon_5#Premise_and_storylines

Agreed about Voyager, though I also liked the Captain and Kess along with Tuvok, the Doctor, Seven, and Neelix. There's something very funny about the Captain that I really enjoy, maybe it's her penchant for replicating weird beverages. "Replicator: warm broth." What a weirdo!

I also still think some DJ or rapper should name themselves Yung Tuvok, because those episodes were awesome.

Also loved the way the Pon farr played out for Tuvok, too.

I’m not sure why I didn’t mention Janeway; I like her too

Or should I say KATIE O’CLARE

i like Janeway but I have zero feelings for Voyager

The entire TOS was on sale in the iTunes store for $20 and good grief I am so devoutly old testament Trek.

i just recently watched TOS all the way through for the first time & found it v enjoyable. Also: so visually interesting! I find those colors so comforting, they remind me of late night tv as a kid <3

Conversely I am now on the third season of TNG (enjoying immensely) and I still can’t recover from the “Marriott hotel conference center” aesthetic of the Enterprise. Like they took such a hard visual turn away from TOS because it was the times and late 80’s tv looked terrible as a rule but jesus the ~lack~ of visual interest still makes me want to die inside.

Marriott hotel conference center

Irlol/otm

there's a rick berman quote about how hot chicks who can actually act are already in movies -- and by suggestion that he'd had to settle for those who can't

but even apart from being an incredible asshole, he's *wrong*

I constantly am baffled by people who remark (negatively) on TNG's anesthetics, but then I grew up watching it so I just take it as given.

also you are a youngun, no?

It SHOULD look like a conference center imo, that is where ppl have meetings to peacefully sort out the problems of the universe via bureaucratic solutions.