Star Trek - The Beyonder

etchazz

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in Roddenberry's defense imo it is important to have something like that. Millions of scientists, engineers, doctors, etc are where they are because of Trek and the utopian vision it said was possible. Millions of people who were bullied or alone or looking for a role model felt like there was a good future out there because of Trek.

While as an adult I love all the cynical, dark movies and shows like Hannibal, GoT, Fringe, etc I do wonder sometimes if our entertainment has gotten way, way too "realistic" to keep the imagination of kids lost for an hour or two in a perfect world. The only two shows I can think of that are something Roddenberry would like are Once Upon a Time and Parks and Recreation, and the only movies that come to mind are cartoons and... ugh, the Star Wars prequels.
the problem with this is while it sounds really awesome in theory, it would make for a boring ass show. a television series with absolutely no conflict? then why the fuck would i watch it?
 
Man i could not stomach Enterprise for more then 2 episodes or 3 , when they had that shower scene with that vulcan and the other dude i was like ok fuck this show. Voyager only because of the Doctor , such an awesome character and fuck the others. DS9 was good, actually enjoyed a majority of the episodes quite a few good characters on there. TNG because it introduced me to the Star Trek world , my main attraction to this is the exploration of space and interaction with other species....when i was a kid i could not wait to do that from growing up watching Lost In Space and then watching TNG , yeah so much for my dream of space exploration. Fuckers , never really enjoyed the original series...so cant comment on that. As for the movies , none of them really stood out for me really all average for me.
 

Phazael

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Enterprise suffered from having too much time travel. When they got away from that, it had a nice gritty TOS feel to it. Of course, the two part evil universe episode was arguably the best episode of the entire series.

Voyager was mostly unwatchable for the first three seasons, minus a couple bright spots. Later seasons got better, but they kept changing writers and overused the Borg eye candy way too much. When it focused on the Doctor, Chekote, or Tuvok, the later seasons were at their best. The stupid bottle episodes with no connection to the main story arc (see the return of the Demon World aliens or anything involving Torres or Paris as the central plot point), it got horrible. Mainly it suffered from a revolving door of writers until DS9 ended and they had one consistent writing team. The worst Voyager episodes (anything Kes centric) are still better than any Counselor Troi or Wesley Crusher episodes of TNG, however. The real problem is that it lived in the shadow of the far superior DS9.
 

Azrayne

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Having just watched DS9 in completion, am I the only one who hated the episodes with the whole 'alternate timeline' thing going on? It just felt forced, and other than an opportunity to see the characters as darker and edgier versions of themselves (ok, they get points for lesbian Ezri), those episodes just didn't seem to offer much to the show and it's continuity. I nearly groaned every time a regular character popped up dressed in black leather or whatever and I realized it was one ofthoseepisodes. But I did a bit of reading about the series after and it seems that everyone else loved them. What's the appeal?
 

j00t

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TNG worked well having a mostly new adventure every week. there were a few overarching plots but they were fairly sparse and more just like, oh hey, it's a Q episode!

Voyager really did itself a disservice by continuing that trend. you are out in the middle of nowhere trying to get home. i'm gonna need more than one throwaway line a week for that to be suspenseful. instead we get a ship that gets blasted to hell and back by the end of each episode and the beginning of the next there is absolutely no mention of it at all. everything is operating at peak efficiency and we are in no immediate threat of running out of supplies. seriously? how do you repair your hull? how do you replace your torpedoes? even with some dumb handwaving for food replicators and clothing, you're going to need supplies AT SOME POINT. there was such a minor focus on that aspect that it felt so disingenuous to the story.

DS9 was great, but you really had to be prepared to watch an episode. there was so many dry episodes in the beginning that there were times when you watched it only because you've given, what, 9 seasons (tos and tng) and something like 8 movies at this point to the franchise... you watch it out of duty, not out of enjoyment. Then somewhere in season 2 or 3, you don't know where, but all of a sudden you find yourself immersed in what's going on. DS9 was an absolutely brilliant story and the only way for it to work that way was to have a season and a half of straight set up.

Re: Roddenberry. I'll always remember an interview I saw with Patrick Stewart. The interviewer asked him about how he felt stepping into the captain's chair for the first time. He said it was incredibly daunting because so many people were expecting Kirk 2.0 and then got a classically trained, balding, Shakespearean actor. He said that someone confronted him about it in front of Roddenberry. They said, Mr Stewart, wouldn't you think that in the 24th century, we'd have a cure for male-pattern baldness? and before Patrick stewart could answer, Gene Roddenberry stands up and says, ma'am, I think that in the 24th century, no one will care about male-pattern baldness.
 

ShakyJake

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Voyager really did itself a disservice by continuing that trend. you are out in the middle of nowhere trying to get home.
What annoyed me about Voyager, especially in seasons 1 and 2, was how they kept running into the same aliens (I think they were called the Kazons). I assume Voyager was traveling in a straight line back home. They were technologically superior to these Kazon jackasses yet they somehow managed to keep running into the same individuals again and again. How is this even possible when the Kazons had slower vessels? Repeated encounters with the Borg made sense since they were kinda everywhere and clearly had superior trans-warp tech.

Despite this, Voyager did have some excellent episodes here and there.
 

iannis

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Having just watched DS9 in completion, am I the only one who hated the episodes with the whole 'alternate timeline' thing going on? It just felt forced, and other than an opportunity to see the characters as darker and edgier versions of themselves (ok, they get points for lesbian Ezri), those episodes just didn't seem to offer much to the show and it's continuity. I nearly groaned every time a regular character popped up dressed in black leather or whatever and I realized it was one ofthoseepisodes. But I did a bit of reading about the series after and it seems that everyone else loved them. What's the appeal?
Yeah, the Darkside of Xeen DS9 episodes weren't great. Odo is a dictator! Everyone is evil!

They needed padding I guess, and the writers wanted to do something a little different. I didn't hate them the first time but they don't much bear a second viewing. It is different when it was weekly as opposed to shotgunning them on netflix.
 

PatrickStar

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The love of DS9 in this thread I think is indicitive of how most fans feel about the quality of the series.

Therefore it fucking pisses me off we never got a DS9 movie!
 

Siliconemelons

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What annoyed me about Voyager, especially in seasons 1 and 2, was how they kept running into the same aliens (I think they were called the Kazons). I assume Voyager was traveling in a straight line back home. They were technologically superior to these Kazon jackasses yet they somehow managed to keep running into the same individuals again and again. How is this even possible when the Kazons had slower vessels? Repeated encounters with the Borg made sense since they were kinda everywhere and clearly had superior trans-warp tech.

Despite this, Voyager did have some excellent episodes here and there.
They explained why in the first batch of episodes- they had to go through the kazon space- for quite a while- they did show maps etc it was literally about 1/4 of their way- and they couldn't just get past the ones they pissed off and move on- they kept calling ahead and telling their bros "hey capture this ship, get replicators yo" they did some plot-point jumps in distances to get rid of the kazon and move on, borg space was also explained- but usually that was doneso in astrometrics where most of us just thought of it as ASStrometrics as we just drooled at 7of9's backside while she looked outward and explained things like said maps on the scree.

The //-verse DS9s where awesome, I loved that they called OBrien smiley.
 

iannis

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The love of DS9 in this thread I think is indicitive of how most fans feel about the quality of the series.

Therefore it fucking pisses me off we never got a DS9 movie!
To be fair there wasn't a lot they could do that involved the entire cast. Sisko became space jesus and the dominion was finally and definitively repulsed. They won the war! And that was pretty much the entirety of the DS9 story.

I respect that they ended the story and didn't leave it open for some potentially craptacular movies. There are some movies they could have done but they would have been more like high budget extended episodes. And I think most of those DS9 actors were ready to move back into stage/other countries movies (O'Brian played a couple of drunken irishmen!)
 

Phazael

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It is also important to remember that Ron Moore is the guy behind the bulk of the DS9 writing, the same guy who made the reimaged BSG series. Roddenberry's health declining around season two and the series vast improvement are not coincidences. Basically, when Moore got to do more long term arcs and had less interference from Roddenberry, the series became the best of the franchise.
 

Malakriss

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They could in theory have more Gamma Quadrant exploration which provides both a DS9/wormhole and Dominion tie in, but that would be too far removed from established species and suffer from the same issues that early Voyager experienced.
 

j00t

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No, early voyager sucked because the characters were neutered and denied any chance to grow. Chekotay and Paris has great setups and then were forced to go back to being boring characters. On top of there being absolutely no real sense of urgency. Oh... Don't let's not forget the prime directive. DON'T BREAK THE PRIME DIRECTIVE except arbitrarily when it doesn't affect the plot to do so. Voyager would have been awesome if chekotay killed janeway and turned voyager into a pirate ship
 

Fadaar

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I think the main reason I liked DS9 best (and I'd barely consider myself a Star Trek fan) of them all is the fact that it did have an over-arching story to it. I like TNG for what it is, individual stories bottled up into a single episode (most of the time) that are, for the most part, self-contained. However when you have a long running show like the various Star Trek series, you need an overall plot eventually.
 

pysek

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If you read around, you'll see many writers of TNG wanted just that, but Roddenberry was dead set against it. It wasn't until he was just dead or was too sick to fight them we got some stuff like Troi/Worf romances and other, less episodic, stuff going on. DS9 was after Roddenberry and so the writers were much more free to have overarching plotlines and stories that paid off over multiple episodes/seasons.
 

TomServo

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It is also important to remember that Ron Moore is the guy behind the bulk of the DS9 writing, the same guy who made the reimaged BSG series. Roddenberry's health declining around season two and the series vast improvement are not coincidences. Basically, when Moore got to do more long term arcs and had less interference from Roddenberry, the series became the best of the franchise.
Wrong. Ira Steven Behr was the show runner, wrote more episodes than anyone and had final say on every aspect of the show. Moore didn't even join until season 3 and was mainly responsible for the Klingon stuff
 

etchazz

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I think the main reason I liked DS9 best (and I'd barely consider myself a Star Trek fan) of them all is the fact that it did have an over-arching story to it. I like TNG for what it is, individual stories bottled up into a single episode (most of the time) that are, for the most part, self-contained. However when you have a long running show like the various Star Trek series, you need an overall plot eventually.
this is the exact reason why i liked TNG. i liked the fact that there wasn't an overarching story (for the most part) and that each episode was self contained. they were out exploring the galaxy; only makes sense that they would get into different adventures depending on where they were exploring. because DS9 was a station, it makes more sense that there would be more of an overarching story because you basically have the same people in the same spot. i tried to get into DS9, just never could. the characters on the show just weren't interesting enough for me. voyager was just fucking awful. female lesbian captain? janeway is much better on NTSF:SD:SUV
 

Phazael

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Wrong. Ira Steven Behr was the show runner, wrote more episodes than anyone and had final say on every aspect of the show. Moore didn't even join until season 3 and was mainly responsible for the Klingon stuff
Ron Moore had his hands all over the series from Season 3 onward. Seriously, compare S3-7 of DS9 to the new BSG series, then compare S1-2 to all of the other trek work Behr was attached to. Behr spent all of his time emulating Roddenberry, but he did contribute a lot to character writing (he was the reason TNG suddenly got watchable around season three). Moore was the co-executive producer, along with Behr, though Behr was the showrunner. Don't get me wrong, a lot of what was right about DS9 was Behr's character writing, but the military and battle focused episodes of both DS9 and TNG were largely Moore's work. Its pretty obvious when you watch and compare it to the new BSG.