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This thread is so bubbly and cloy and happy, just like [Star Trek]
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It's a prime example of why Voyager sucks.
They introduce this interesting plot thread. Then this plot thread has development, and resolves what few arcs there are on the other Voyager. Instead of taking this novel idea and running with it, they essentially do the Star Trek equivalent of torture porn for these characters for a good 45 minutes, then give a "Oh, all their efforts, all their struggles---Were for nothing!" aesop.
Like I posted before, it's made even worse by the fact that in all likelihood the real Voyager could have fixed the situation with techno-babble at the end of the episode. Doubly so since the entire existence of this second ship is directly on Janeway and co's head. They were the ones that spawned them. So them just cruising through the debris field at the end of the episode, probably smashing up little bits of a never before seen lifeform, quickly takes a very dark and morbidly hilarious turn.
And all that happened because the writers just didn't want to do a multi-episode arc.
This is also why Dark Frontier is simultaneously the best episode and the worst episode of Voyager. Dark Frontier was basically the equivalent of a Voyager movie for TV. And they pretty much side-lined B&B to make it and brought in a special effects team. The episode was so good, it actually won awards. And it put the menace of the Borg back into the Borg.
Thing is, it also brought up an interesting myth arc for the show. The Borg were not actually defeated whenever Voyager waved their hands at them and their ships randomly blew up. Nor was their appearance in First Contact so much of a defeat rather then them unknowingly (for the Federation) changing the terms of the war. Rather, after Picard and company whooped their asses, they retreated out of the conventional range of the Federation's means of travel to design a fool-proof way to infect them. Hence, the idea of a self replicating nanite virus. Which they had already finished, but for some sick reason, the Queen wanted Seven of Nine to put the finishing touches on.
The idea that the Borg weren't just "there" to menace the crew and were actually fucking with them over an actual agenda that the crew couldn't even begin to process was something that the TV movie established quite firmly. They went from being a collective of space zombies that got taken out by a random torpedo, to a nigh eldritch abomination style threat that simply saw the loss of a cube or two as acceptable losses compared to the long term gains they stood to make.
Janeway also turned into Rambo and pretty much stormed a cube (Sitting in the center of what was basically Borg HQ.) by herself, too. Which actually made her seem like the neurotic, insane badass the writers tried to play her up as.
Then, the main writing team gets the show back next episode, and they deliberately side-line and pretend this hugely successful movie never happened. Until they hit the finale. Which is when they realized they actually spent so much time dicking around with reset buttons that they still had something like 50 episodes left at the rate they were getting Voyager closer to Earth.
So, they brought (crazy) Future Janeway in. And they basically ret-conned this massive plot development that could have put Janeway up on par with Sisko in terms of "action captains" if they had pursued it properly into a way to end the show. Future Janeway even uses the virus to give a (very badly written) CSI Miami style one liner to the Borg Queen in the final moments of the show. Which I assume was the closest B&B could get to showing them wanking off to the script they wrote without the censors coming down on them.
You'd think after that display, that whoever OK'd B&B to write for Enterprise's "series finale" would have looked back and realized what a horrible idea it was to give them total creative control over something they felt spurned over.
Or, you know, because it's a great lynch-pin in the tragedy of their existence.
In fact, having Voyager save them or some such would have been a cop-out. The episode is somewhat notable for following through on it's emotional arc.
It's a tragedy. They are supposed to end badly.
I think the fact that Voyager ALWAYS does that shit makes it less cool. Yes, Voyager is set up to be an episodic show, but so was TNG to an extent, and yet they still managed to run plotlines through the series. I've stated this before, but again, probably my least favourite Voyager moment was the episode where the Doc has a nervous breakdown when he had to randomly choose one patient over another. It ends on this really poignant bit where he's just in the Holodeck freaking the fuck out, and Janeway's just sitting there watching him do it and being with him as he does it.
Next episode, that happened?
To be fair, there were some times when Voyager remembered the shit it did, like giving the Hirogen holograms to hunt, and I liked how that little bit was recalled and twisted around, but then you run into Voyager's over-the-top moral preachitude combined with black and white morality combined with ridiculous villains and that ruined those few episodes for me. Blech. It's not like Voyager was incapable of being good... it was just that whenever it was for a little brief second, it would snuff it immediately rather than risk going and exploring that thread a little further.
All they had to do is write it so that they got small fragments of the data in the time capsule. They don't even have to retrieve the whole thing. Otherwise, it's just tragic torture porn for the sake of watching the crew suffer.
And you can have tragedy without catharsis too.
It was a crappy episode with the added problem of trying to be better than it could hope for. It's like a quadrapalegic trying to win dancing with the stars.
And it's voyager. The bar is low. For a voyager episode, they did a good job with the premise.
I agree happy ending or no the episode would still be a voyager episode. I just think they were out of their league to begin with and it showed.
Right, but that's a preference, not a critique of the form of tragedy itself.
Tragedy with a bleak ending can easily have a place in Star Trek. Why couldn't it?
The slime crew strove till their last moment to give their lives meaning. There's something very Star Trek in that. That they didn't succeed in the fashion they wanted doesn't change that.
Spock left his brain behind, Data copied himself into B4, the Doctor had regular backups allowing him to be killed or lost more times than any five other characters.
Then on the never-really-died list, Seska got picked up by the Kazon. Geordi and Ro had their funeral, Mayweather almost did, and Hoshi dreamed she did. Harry Kim was replaced by his double from the copy Voyager, as was Wildman.
Most or all of the crew was killed off and the ship destroyed in every series only to be brought back by temporal or dimensional shenanigans - not counting the silverbloods Voyager managed to do this three times that I can remember, but DS9 managed to do it more times in a single episode when O'brien kept randomly jumping forward and backward through time.
When they thought Stewart might leave the show, they set up to take him off Enterprise in a way that he could return as a recurring Borg villain. And the real masterpiece of character resurrection is Tasha Yar, the only one who they never left a lifeline for, who still managed to pull off an alternate universe time traveling half-Romulan identical twin rape baby, a resurrection story worthy of comic books.
Well, it's not that the writers lack the stones typically, but that the actors have contracts and there are producers and studio executives and agents....
As for tragedy without happy resolutions in Star Trek, I always thought Lore's death was quite characteristic of this. Anything dealing with Data's family was fairly tragic.
The EU is slightly better in that regard. Janeway died recently and is not going to come back any time soon. That said, they did bring back
They shouldn't have killed Lore off IMO. He's fascinating and dangerous enough to be a constant threat to the Enterprise.
Man, looking at
He had it better than Harry Kim. :lol:
*eye twitch*
Photon.
Photon.
Torpedo.
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Mora. Mora Pol
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Last we heard he had just been dismantled, not vaporized or blown up or anything. They should have someone reassemble him. Maybe that guy who wanted to take apart Data in that episode where they established his rights! And then it all goes horribly wrong.
Silly me, I should have known that it'd be much better to make up a whole new android.
Spoilers for the Next Generation EU
Not any specific scene, just the entire movie in general. It's a pretty heinous movie.
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MONSTER!
It's no worse than First Contact.
Agreed.
Anyone ever played that?
They made a SNES DS9 game? The only DS9 game I remember was a PC game of which I only played the demo and I think it was playing kind of like Tomb Raider. It may have been Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen.
Now that I think about it, I played a lot of Star Trek games:
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (NES)
Star Trek: The Next Generation (NES)
Star Trek: Armada (excellent)
Star Trek: Armada II (also great)
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force (great)
Star Trek: New Worlds (terrible, or maybe I was just terrible at playing it? I should reinstall it...)
Star Trek: Away Team
Star Trek Online
And then a bunch of Star Trek demos because I couldnt afford to buy all the Star Trek games I would have liked to have played (Bridge Commander, Starfleet Command series, Star Trek: Klingon Academy, and probably a couple others Im forgetting).
I...Im tempted to play Star Trek: Legacy even though its received abysmal reviews.
Naw. I've watched a few videos of it, and it looks godawful, though. However, I was really pleasantly surprised with the PC game. Worf's levels were probably the most difficult, since he has limited ammo. Thus, you are encouraged to bat'leth people to death. It seems funny that the game shows just how bad an idea it is to run around with a sword when everyone else has guns, though.
It's seriously the greatest. The modding community is still around, and there've been some really impressive mods for it.
First of all, the Pah'Wraith cult is supposed to be an oppressed minority, yet this place is huge and ornate. It must have cost the equivalent of billions of dollars to construct. Where the hell did they get the money?
Secondly, how am I supposed to believe that Kira would willingly go to help the Pah'Wraith cult, even if one of their leaders is an old friend? Remember, from her point of view, these guys are devil worshippers! And Kira isn't some lapsed-Prophetian or whatever; her faith is very important to her. NO WAY would she come over here to help these guys out.
Also, they couldn't get Avery Brooks or Colm Meaney to lend their voices. The guy who does Sisko's voice isn't bad, although the contrast with Brooks is jarring. However, the guy who voiced Chief O'Brien seemed to be under the impression that he was supposed to be voicing Scotty.
I'm guessing you're referring to Crossroads of Time. I played a little of it, but I got stuck at this part where you have to take a runabout through the wormhole. They decided this would be a good place to throw in one of those sequences where you have to quickly dodge obstacles as you're racing to the other side, like the level in the Genesis Aladdin game where you escape the Cave of Wonders. Unlike that level, though, which gives you clues as to where the obstacles will appear, the wormhole level (if I recall correctly) didn't. I think you could take a couple hits, but after that your shields went down and you were fucked.
Yeah, same. It was like the Battletoads Jetbike levels. IMMEDIATELY RESPOND TO EVERYTHING AT BREAKNECK SPEED OR DIE!
I also seem to recall a TNG PC game that was kind of an adventure game. And terribly difficult, in that there was little indication of what you could pick up, interact with, combine, etc. It turned into "Click the everything till you find something that works together" the game.
Yup! That's the one. Gonna go ahead and throw out there that you're not missing much: in addition to the mechanics described above, you also have large, slow loading, slow to traverse areas literally filled with nothing. Before you get to a screen where you click everything both in your inventory, and in the environment, then in your inventory again (if you'd picked up anything). Then you walked through the giant crossroads area, and did it again in another area, then backtracked to previous areas once you'd acquired everything and had to somehow make an ancient door open and goddamn it was stupid.