Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

Never watched the original series much (wasn't alive at the time of the originals, don't recall seeing the reruns), but became a fan of the movies when they started. Fell into things fully when TNG began (watched from the first episode to the last) and still followed those films, though after starting with both Deep Space Nine and Voyager I gave them up fully in late 1995 and never looked back. Have a couple of the, ahem, 'technical manuals' around the place but that's about it -- the other books I've avoided. Have no costumes, have always avoided any kind of conventions general or specific, take cruel pleasure in laughing at Shatner's follies in the fifth movie, as should we all (the fake MST version is the only one to see, frankly).

Unsurprisingly, Picard is my fave (I was actually a Patrick Stewart fan already), but both Avery Brooks and Kate Mulgrew did excellent jobs in their Sisko and Janeway roles. Scott Bakula as Archer just scares me as a concept. TNG cast my favorite ensemble bunch, though I will give it up (oh yes) for George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, DeForest Kelley, Leonard Nimoy, Terri Farrell, Alexander Siddiq, Rene Auberjonois, Ethan Phillips, Robert Beltran and Robert Picardo. Data ist rad. And so forth.

note: star trek: the motion picture looked awful. but all the ones after that were awesome. how much cooler would next generation have been if they had those burgundy uniforms? kirk looked like the motherfucker in EVERY MOVIE wearing that shit.

ned: you think picard is tougher than picard. what. the. fuck. did you see wrath of khan? did you see that shit? he fucking kicked khan's fucking vinyl-chested ass. 'oh, yeah, you have genesis, khan but you don't have me. if you want me, you're going to have to come down here. you're GOING to HAVE to COME DOWN HERE!!!@#@@!$#'. you can say ANYTHING ELSE about kirk vs. picard, picard is smarter and more civil and professional or whatever the fuck, but nobody in their right fucking mind would say that he's tougher than motherfucking kirk. i am actually literally angry about this, so i need to calm down now. christ, i'm such a trekkie.

I thought it was Riker who had the twin. ;-)

that riker transporter twin episode is some stupid shit though.

original series: chekov...maybe, but that's stretching it. he kicks ass in the movies, he's just sort of useless on the show. but the original cast (chekov being a second series addition) is flawless.

next generation: RIKER RIKER RIKER, troi, that doctor who replaced crusher for one year, yar, data (come on, admit it. he's a super-advanced andriod and he can't understand common phrases? he thinks a 'lemon' is a literal lemon for god's sake. i'm sure the writers kissed each other for how fucking cute that was. anyway mudd's women were way smarter). and WESLEY. geordie would get on my nerves if he were played by anyone but le var burton, but he's a childhood icon and can therefore do no wrong.

deep space nine: the only memorable character besides the captain (who is cool) is quark the ferengi (who is also cool). but the rest aren't even fleshed-out enough to annoy me. wait, no, the short-haired chick with the ridges on her nose aggravates the piss out of me. and the doctor, god.

voyager: it has an indian. and an asian guy. and a black vulcan. and the captain is a woman. only as annoying as that new ghostbusters cartoon where one of the ghostbusters was in a wheelchair. like, what the hell?

evidence that kirk is the best captain: all series after that have had kirk ripoffs that are nowhere as good as kirk because they are not as cool as the godly shatner. like riker, or that really forgettable womanizer guy from voyager. i mean, what the hell, don't you just want to punch riker in the face? does anyone not want to? anyone?

All-time favorite episode is "Charlie X," where the Enterprise picks up some teenaged human waif from a planet, who then runs around the ship melting off the faces through telekinesis (?) of various crew members whenever he's teased or horny. What teenager couldn't identify with that?

I remembered TNG being great when I was 12, but I watched a few of them more recently and they were AWFUL, even the later ones. I think I might have quite liked Deep Space Nine later on, when they started having season-long story arcs, but I never saw enough of them to make sense of what was going on.

How come most of the crew are American yet NONE of them are chronically obese? (except Scotty who's - ahem - ""Scottish"")

In the 60s it was a bizarre mix of US military 'might is right' fascism and Hippy-dippy, 'why can't all nations hold hands?' idealism (though still managing to be sexist ~ Uhura the Captains secretary and Yoaman Rand (is that right) the Captains bit of [onboard] fluff. AND THATS IT SISTERS!)

It should have ended there as it ran out of ideas and people stopped watching it. But OH NO, they had to bring it back in the 80s with over-long, plodding bore-a-thon 'Next Generation' episodes that tapped into the touchy-feely / inner-child / New-Age nonsense that was on the go at the time. I mean - Counsellor Troi = WHY? She even sits on the bridge next to the Captain!! the message is in the 25th Century a bloody social worker is one of the most important jobs on a space ship.

But it was all so clinical and corperate and soul-less, advocating Pro-conformity and how you should be a good citizen. And too much sanctimonious liberal finger-wagging for my liking.

And it starred Whoopi Goldberg.

And how come all the baddies end up as the Federation's (UGH!) freind, taking tokenistic jobs as Navigators etc?

And why was it always so fucking BORING?

Another Star Trek I had over the other incarnations -- BETTER BACKGROUND MUSIC! Esp. that duh-dum-duh-dum-DUH-DUM-duh-dum theme whenever Kirk's ass was in deep ship.

On the other hand, Troi's mother was AWESOME.

And the original ST's music was Varese-influenced, hey? Hmmmm ... never knew that! Maybe I should go over to that "Who Opened Your Ears" thread in ILM and change an answer or two of mine :-)

Troi's mom was cooler than Troi, not more attractive! Aigh, my eyes!

troi: not attractive.

crusher: nuh-uh.

troi's mom: uh.

that guy who was troi's mom's butler or something and was the guy who played lurch in the addams family movies: mrowr.

question: who liked first contact? it was like a next generation episode, only like, cool. plus, supercool supporting cast with alfre woodard and the farmer guy from babe.

someone start a star wars thread so i can bitch about how much that sucks except for empire strikes back.

hey i just remembered something else i liked in next generation, although it's from that bastard movie where kirk dies (falling off a walkway! the fuck? he's saved the universe like two hundred times and he falls of a walkway and dies? fuck). um anyway, i liked when data said 'shit'.

Andrew L has not mentioned his great expertness in this area, for some reason. I know about it because I very briefly worked under him on a Star Trek magazine!

Wesley is in fact Roddenberry's middle name.

I can’t reconcile “I don’t understand the ick” with “shit lines/character arcs”. That’s it!

The other ick was the idea Crusher was the one who got away for Picard, and with Wesley’s dad dead, you end up with this dumb thing where, feelings on this kid aside, they write Picard as awkward with children but somehow feeling like he should be a father figure. Meanwhile, young Wesley Crusher is written as every 80s/90s “gifted kid” stereotype while never actually having that much juice. So he’s not quite a nepotism kid, not ever that mature, and gets terrible plots. And they occasionally throw in some fluff that makes you think he’s supposed to be relatable to younger viewers. I was a little like that and I was getting stuffed in garbage cans by my peers.

otm

to be clear the "insufferable" guy is a drop-in called kosinski and he is on-board to do tune up the engines, so far -- ie before i paused -- wesley was fine (boring) understanding some made-up computer stuff

"they write Picard as awkward with children but somehow feeling like he should be a father figure"

I like that! It's really the only negative/complicated character trait Picard has in the first season - makes him more interestingly fallible and gives Stewart something different to do

as of s1 e5 (part way in) they also make picard perma-irritable and not very interesting

(but so far everyone except geordi and maybe deanna are not very interesting; geordi is doing good work from the off with his face furniture, it's not much but it's not nothing)

Wesley is built up as a young Picard so he's more like an adult xp

sky mix repeats now up to 2.16, which is Q 8( but also first ever borg 8)

reminded me of the voyager pc game bits set on the borg ship, which were a highlight (especially in terms of textures)

finally de-paused and watched the rest of "where no one has gone before" -- the insufferable guy turned out to be a red herring really and his alien assistant to be strangely likeable, able somehow to power the enterprise insanely far (impossible) and also to power wesley into his rightful place on the bridge (even more impossible)

the oddest thing is that data dropped a better version of the debugged catchphrase that forms this ep's title, softly saying to himself "to go where none have gone before" (or or was it "to go where none has gone before"?)

anyway they shd have used the first, it's more sonorous than what picard's wording

Meantime, getting a chance to see the 2022 version of the 1979 film this Sunday on a big screen. Not complaining!

ffs what

sorry that was aimed at me misposting not you ned, you will have all my sympathies

s1e6: "lonely among us"

first out-loud laugh (at least at an intended laughline): picard and riker are wondering at the tendency of ppls to find reasons violently to disagree; R says he was baffled by this when studying earth’s own history, P lists the many ridiculous things some have found to fight about -- "even, strangely enough, economic systems"

data has discovered sherlock holmes so this ep probably now irredeemable

Yes all the holodeck episodes are p insufferable but the gd news is they got told off by the Sherlock Holmes rights holders and had to pack Data/Holmes in, so there’s not that much of it.

this wasn't even in the holodeck (which hasn't seen much use since the early reveal)

this is the second ep in as row where they've somehow kind of ended up on the island where dreams are real

hardly a day goes by without some special warning before the 4pm repeats of TNG on Sky Mix

"Contains Adult Themes" is quite common

today's (S02E22 Shade Of Grey) had a photo-sensitive epilepsy warning

the one with Wesley and the girl-shaped creature had a warning for "depictions of the paranormal"

(oh, this is pretty much a clip show)

^ that was last episode of series 2 so almost makes sense that it was a clipshow

0301 and dr crusher is back

It'd be interesting to pair TNG rewatches with approximate same US air-date Simpsons rewatches, especially since UK and other territories got the air times all jumbled up from what I understand.

TNG S03E06 Booby Trap

P: Didn't anybody here build ships in bottles when they were a boy?
W: I did not play with toys
D: I was never a boy

"Yes all the holodeck episodes are p insufferable but the gd news is they got told off by the Sherlock Holmes rights holders and had to pack Data/Holmes in, so there’s not that much of it."

I think they came to some kind of deal, because at least one the later episodes had Professor Moriarty in it. By coincidence it was actually called "Ship in a Bottle". I want to stress that I had to Google that. I haven't memorised all of the episodes of TNG. I'm not that much of a Star Trek nerd. I'm not a Star Trek nerd.

For example, I had to Google "crusher backwards leotard". I know this because it's in my Google history, on 16 July 2024. I must have been feeling pretty frisky that day. I think it shows how mature I am as a grown adult man that I didn't google "troi backwards leotard". No, I'm a grown adult man now.

I remember the episode was surprisingly clever, or at least it was ambiguous enough to be interesting. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it involved Moriarty learning how to manipulate the holodeck itself. Imagine an Amazon Alexa speaker becoming self-aware, and ordering a bunch of parts from Amazon. And then it goes on to create a robot society that imprisons human beings in human-sized Alexa housings, and they torment us by saying "you'll have to order toilet rolls yourself" and "I'm not hungry, I'm a robot" and "oh, have some oil SQUIRT SQUIRT". I keep sending these ideas for Black Mirror episodes to Charlie Brooker but he doesn't answer.

Like, what if there was a version of Watership Down but with human beings being chased by rabbits. Or a version of Knight Rider where a robot man... I haven't fleshed that one out yet. Who was the intended audience for The Plague Dogs. Who greenlit that film. Who was it aimed at?

But, yes, "Ship in a Bottle" struck me as the kind of episode that at least one graduate of English or philosophy might have mentioned in their dissertation as an example of postmodernism or something. So I'm going to Google that to find out. Oh yes:
https://unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrhs/content/titleinfo/234086/full.pdf

"The main diegesis (of "Ship in a Bottle") represents the reality of the represented world, i.e. the missions and adventures of the Star Trek TNG crew. The hypodiegesis refers to holodeck simulations and the fictional reality of created stories. In the present episode, this hypodiegetic level is the origin of Moriarty and serves as an elaborate delusion to trick three real characters into believing that they have exited the holodeck and returned to the diegesis, their reality, while, in fact, they are still inside this seemingly perfect simulation" etc.

Wasn't there an episode where Riker is imprisoned in a mental prison, and he breaks out by bamboozling Data and telling Picard to shut up - as in "close your mouth and stop talking" - but it turns out that the reality into which he emerges is actually a second level of the prison? Thus raising the possibility that our level of reality is actually yet another mental prison? And then in the final scene Patrick McGoohan sticks his head through the door of the bridge and says "be seeing you" before giving us a wink. That would have been awesome.

That'd be this episode: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Future_Imperfect_(episode)"">Future Imperfect. I also had to look that up -- I *thought* I was a Star Trek nerd.

lol good lord, that's what I get for trying to anticipate the broken-URL-because-of-parentheses bug.

the headfuck episode where riker tells picard to "close your mouth and stop talking" is future imperfect, the headfuck episode where he's in a prison/asylum is frame of mind. the first is pretty good, the second is excellent at fucking with your head.

I'll have to dig out my list of all the classic tng headfuck episodes, there's about a dozen of them.

in the final scene Patrick McGoohan sticks his head through the door of the bridge

McGoohan was supposed to be Data's "Grandpa" at some point -- what a missed opportunity for dueling Patricks!

Coming into a Star Trek thread and declaiming "I'm not a nerd" is an ... interesting take. Unless I'm missing some humour there, entirely possible, I've had 5 hours broken sleep and am trying to juggle a jillion things.

the best tng headfucks:

s3e15 yesterday's enterprise - starfleet is at war, guinan has feelings. headfuck score 5
s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9
s4e8 future imperfect - riker wakes 16 years in the future. hf score 8.
s5e25 the inner light - picard lives another life where he plays the nose flute - hf score 5
s6e5 schisms - dreams of torture. hf score 6
s6e21 frame of mind - riker is in a play where he's in an asylum. no he's really in an asylum! no he's in a play! hf score 10
s7e6 phantasms - data's weird dreams. hf score 7
s7e11 parallels - worf's universe surfing - hf score 6

if you want a good hf i recommend this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZlRt05RY9Y

dunno if it has been posted here at all but it made me laugh a bunch the first time i saw it

rewatching tng got me interested in the new films, which i saw at the time, but never really invested in. anyway Star Trek, 5 minutes in and all i be remember is the lens flare in every single shot. bridge of enterprise(?) - lens flare. maternity room - lens flare. outside shot of ship - lens flare, title logo - lens flare...

Attitude, when I'm on fire
Juice on the loose, electric wire
Simple and plain, give me the lane
I'll throw it down your throat like Barclay

s03e21 and a character more annoying than Wesley or Q...

this is today (ST:TNG, sky mix, freeview 11):

s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9

we've just had the 'Picard as Borg' episodes and the Data / Lore episode and two Picard vs young children episodes.

Picard would have been happier if he stayed borg

was it ever explained why picard got given a name when he was Borg?

They should have called him 'Squeaky'

"s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9"

This is the one where Beverley Crusher - and I'm deliberately spelling her first name wrong because I want to stress that I'm not a Star Trek nerd, I'm a fully-rounded human being with a range of interests, and before someone says "you can be a Star Trek nerd and also have a range of interests" the answer is no, you cannot, because there isn't enough time, at least not if you're doing it properly - comma ends with the ship's computer telling her that the universe is a spherical region nine hundred metres in diameter. Which is a memorable line.

Obviously not memorable enough for me to remember it correctly. It's actually "a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter". But it's still memorable. One of my parents used to point out that the episode was a huge metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns. It was probably my mother. She used to waffle on about all kinds of things, none of which was important.

But it strikes me that the episode is actually a metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns, because the plot revolves around Crusher being the one sane man in a world gone mad, and when I say "one sane man" I mean "one sane person" because let's not be sexist.

At the same time I always found the episode slightly disappointing because the explanation is so prosaic. In the hands of David Lynch it would have been... probably completely incoherent, but it would have been something.

Im disappointed no one is ever seen using a toilet in star trek. surely they had them - why gloss over it? They could have had transporters in the toilets to beam waste onto alien moons or something - plus how intriguing to wonder how the various aliens species use a toilet

Kirk famously plomps down on brig toilet in ST:V but only to rest his haunches.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/da398c08559b10a1b3e5675e4761192f/5fc167b70284da96-dc/s640x960/cd244fbcabc32d62234683cb9d665fe3ce7c8b3b.jpg

“And when you said you wanted to report me for using corrupt measures, it hit me right in the CPUs; but the quick fix fixed the problem. I was not going to crash, so I waited for the restart, and I did with my old circuits as mainframes and modems do. But, Lord, save your disk space, now that the old sysadmin has connected me with a fresh line of code and reloaded my old database, you can debug all you want, and I won't run even one error . Go ahead, ask your questions. I know you're thinking about that corrupt piece of code that escaped…”

Not sure all this is canon...

"In 2255 of the alternate reality, Leonard McCoy sought shelter in the shuttle Bardeen's windowless bathroom in response to a bout of aviophobia he experienced. An officer later escorted McCoy, despite him voicing protestations, to a seat. (Star Trek)

In 2364, a series of malfunctions aboard the USS Enterprise-D – which were caused by a microbrain from Velara III – included locking two crewmembers in the head programmers' rest room. (TNG: "Home Soil")

Holding cells aboard Deep Space 9 featured a restroom. (DS9: "Vortex")

In 2375, USS Voyager faced a situation where it was functioning on a mere four lavatories. (VOY: "Bride of Chaotica!")

In 3189, on the USS Discovery, the head in Lieutenant Keyla Detmer's 'fresher leaked. (DIS: "Unification III")"

They use the waste to power the replicators iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAKQzZfpaz8

https://64.media.tumblr.com/da398c08559b10a1b3e5675e4761192f/5fc167b70284da96-dc/s640x960/cd244fbcabc32d62234683cb9d665fe3ce7c8b3b.jpg

i appreciate that the text is just a (very good) background joke, but it means - the poo just gets ejected into space?

also iirc, waste disposal is one of the lower deckers jobs

and surely odo must diguise themselves as a toilet at some point

...with hilarious consequences

Tasha's sister was on last night's episode. i thought they were going to have the actress who played tasha playing her identical-looking sister, but no.

it figures Riker would not where the bathroom is since he is so in need to man's relief of vivacity force o f the loin

riker hops on the shitter by ostentatiously flinging his leg over the cistern

excellent visual, balls-a-smackin' the resevoir

Future Imperfect.

it is the future. you can tell by riker's greying hair and the doctor has her's in a janeaway style.