What's funny is that the opening & theme music for the Mirror Universe is perfect. To bad they didn't do something similar for Enterprise's standard opening.
Why didn't they just admit they wanted to make Babylon 5?
lol wut?
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mrt144King of the NumbernamesRegistered Userregular
What's funny is that the opening & theme music for the Mirror Universe is perfect. To bad they didn't do something similar for Enterprise's standard opening.
Why didn't they just admit they wanted to make Babylon 5?
lol wut?
The music just seems more suited for B5 than Star Trek. To me at least. Look, I only got 4 hours of sleep last night.
Bashir seemed very Extroverted actually. Or at least his persona was. He was always talking peoples ears off and pushing everybody a little to much.
Introverted can simply mean that you gain more energy from independent activity. Bashir was always working, staying in his lab to late hours researching something. Even his relationships were mostly one on one. He never really seemed like the life of the party, so to speak. More like the chatty smart guy who is a little grating. People are sort of a sounding board for him.
Lucid on
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
edited March 2012
So I can't figure out if this is horribly racist, or horribly funny.
Yeah, and if earth was doing a big 'this is our first exploratory ship, let's go be diplomats' it's hard to believe they wouldn't have consulted the vulcans and gone along some sort of sane route of introduction to the local species in their part of the galaxy.
Well the humans hated the Vulcans because they wouldnt help them go faster or whatever and the Vulcans wouldnt give them anything beyond their basic starcharts or something. Not the best explanation, but whatever.
Yeah, but you'd think that Earth wouldn't want to go and prove the Vulcans right, and instead give their ship to the best Earth has to offer.
I think Archer is supposed to be one of the best pilots, and he has experience designing ships or something. Hoshi is the best translator they have to offer, Engineer guy is supposed to be their best engineer. Helms guy is well acquainted with space? They should have brought a diplomat though.
Hoshi is the super-linguist who can claw out subtleties of meaning and nuances of grammar that would slip past an Elcor. Therefore she is the butt-monkey and the useless idiot running around being afraid of thigns and getting in trouble while most of the aliens speak perfect English.
Archer is the son of a famous warp scientist, a good engineer and pilot himself, a well-established officer with lots of experience in both command and piloting and a man with a strong moral compass. So of course he knows how to do nothing and spends most of his time making terrible speeches in defense of moral compass that spins like a gyroscope. Also he spent quite a bit of time working with the Vulcans, which is why he keeps mistrusting and bitterly resenting them and having no respect for their lifestyle or culture.
Dr. Phlox is an alien, and to be honest he's pretty much everything Neelix was SUPPOSED to be (witty, charming, a little bit alien but with a little "local flavor"). He cures things with home remedies as (or more) often than Western Medicine because Rick Berman is secretly a goddamn hippie. He also spends a lot of time vacillating between being a tough "executive decisions" triage doctor who can and will cut off a leg to save the body and an insane bleeding heart who will let you die of gangrene because amputation is morally unacceptable mutilation of a subject.
and then there's the whole attempted genocide of the breenValakians thing
Charles "Catfish" Tucker was a master engineer because he spent his early years learning how to fix boat engines out in whatever swampy mudhole he called home. I'm detecting a pattern of "stupid is smart, ivory tower is stupid, luddite life is best life" here. Otherwise if you can get past his southern drawl and country-boy tropes he's just the engineer. It would be like if O'Brien was Irishing it up every other episode and drinking whiskey while shouting "bloody jaysus an' begorrah" or the like.
Travis Mayweather, Pilot, spacer kid, fairly competent but young. He's Ensign Wesley Crusher in the later seasons of TNG with a little more experience and without the baggage of his earlier, terrible appearances. Supposed to be a super pilot, but mostly they just had him show up and talk about having been a spacer kid at autistically awkward times.
Malcolm Reed, a British naval officer stereotype, as well as the most competent man on the entire ship, a creative engineer, and the only man with a plausibly military demeanor. Unsurprisingly he was therefore outranked by most folk and spent a lot of time being the, "voice of reason that no one listens to," with a side order of, "hauling everyone's fat out of the fire and getting no thanks for it."
T'Pol was a highly skilled agent and experienced ambassador, having spent much time observing and dealing with alien (that includes humans) culture. She knew her way around the the 'frisco jazz clubs and the brutal drinking halls of Quo'nos and had dignity, skill and experience. So of course she tarted about in Sexy McSexypants and played the "uptight librarian with a smoldering sensual core" fetish-bait character to be the object of antagonism and lust throughout the series.
Every single one of these characters COULD have been good if the scripts had been handled by someone other than a pack of buffoons. Hell half of them still weren't that bad, they just weren't good either and the writers saw no reason to mkae the effort.
I agree with all of that, and still find Enterprise likeable and very watchable. I can't really explain it, but where I find Voyager complete tripe I really enjoy Enterprise. I even think it does some things better - the cameraderie of the crew is much better than in DS9, for example, where it's a little bit artificial for my taste.
I recently rewatched all of Enterprise (having watched it once when it first came out) and really enjoyed it.
Apart from the final episode which was just terrible. Killing off a main character just to show how dangerous space can be (after they all survived on their original voyage and all the years later) ? Bullshit.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
Yeah, and if earth was doing a big 'this is our first exploratory ship, let's go be diplomats' it's hard to believe they wouldn't have consulted the vulcans and gone along some sort of sane route of introduction to the local species in their part of the galaxy.
Well the humans hated the Vulcans because they wouldnt help them go faster or whatever and the Vulcans wouldnt give them anything beyond their basic starcharts or something. Not the best explanation, but whatever.
Yeah, but you'd think that Earth wouldn't want to go and prove the Vulcans right, and instead give their ship to the best Earth has to offer.
I think Archer is supposed to be one of the best pilots, and he has experience designing ships or something. Hoshi is the best translator they have to offer, Engineer guy is supposed to be their best engineer. Helms guy is well acquainted with space? They should have brought a diplomat though.
Hoshi is the super-linguist who can claw out subtleties of meaning and nuances of grammar that would slip past an Elcor. Therefore she is the butt-monkey and the useless idiot running around being afraid of thigns and getting in trouble while most of the aliens speak perfect English.
Archer is the son of a famous warp scientist, a good engineer and pilot himself, a well-established officer with lots of experience in both command and piloting and a man with a strong moral compass. So of course he knows how to do nothing and spends most of his time making terrible speeches in defense of moral compass that spins like a gyroscope. Also he spent quite a bit of time working with the Vulcans, which is why he keeps mistrusting and bitterly resenting them and having no respect for their lifestyle or culture.
Dr. Phlox is an alien, and to be honest he's pretty much everything Neelix was SUPPOSED to be (witty, charming, a little bit alien but with a little "local flavor"). He cures things with home remedies as (or more) often than Western Medicine because Rick Berman is secretly a goddamn hippie. He also spends a lot of time vacillating between being a tough "executive decisions" triage doctor who can and will cut off a leg to save the body and an insane bleeding heart who will let you die of gangrene because amputation is morally unacceptable mutilation of a subject.
and then there's the whole attempted genocide of the breenValakians thing
Charles "Catfish" Tucker was a master engineer because he spent his early years learning how to fix boat engines out in whatever swampy mudhole he called home. I'm detecting a pattern of "stupid is smart, ivory tower is stupid, luddite life is best life" here. Otherwise if you can get past his southern drawl and country-boy tropes he's just the engineer. It would be like if O'Brien was Irishing it up every other episode and drinking whiskey while shouting "bloody jaysus an' begorrah" or the like.
Travis Mayweather, Pilot, spacer kid, fairly competent but young. He's Ensign Wesley Crusher in the later seasons of TNG with a little more experience and without the baggage of his earlier, terrible appearances. Supposed to be a super pilot, but mostly they just had him show up and talk about having been a spacer kid at autistically awkward times.
Malcolm Reed, a British naval officer stereotype, as well as the most competent man on the entire ship, a creative engineer, and the only man with a plausibly military demeanor. Unsurprisingly he was therefore outranked by most folk and spent a lot of time being the, "voice of reason that no one listens to," with a side order of, "hauling everyone's fat out of the fire and getting no thanks for it."
T'Pol was a highly skilled agent and experienced ambassador, having spent much time observing and dealing with alien (that includes humans) culture. She knew her way around the the 'frisco jazz clubs and the brutal drinking halls of Quo'nos and had dignity, skill and experience. So of course she tarted about in Sexy McSexypants and played the "uptight librarian with a smoldering sensual core" fetish-bait character to be the object of antagonism and lust throughout the series.
Every single one of these characters COULD have been good if the scripts had been handled by someone other than a pack of buffoons. Hell half of them still weren't that bad, they just weren't good either and the writers saw no reason to mkae the effort.
I agree with all of that, and still find Enterprise likeable and very watchable. I can't really explain it, but where I find Voyager complete tripe I really enjoy Enterprise. I even think it does some things better - the cameraderie of the crew is much better than in DS9, for example, where it's a little bit artificial for my taste.
I recently rewatched all of Enterprise (having watched it once when it first came out) and really enjoyed it.
Apart from the final episode which was just terrible. Killing off a main character just to show how dangerous space can be (after they all survived on their original voyage and all the years later) ? Bullshit.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
Except for the theme song - holy fucking Christ, it's shit. After a few eps I could skip past that fucker to the second it finished. And if I happened to skip too far ? I accepted a few missed seconds of show a fair price to pay for never having to listed to that fucking abortion again.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
That's how I always understood the Enterprise Ferengi episode: as a light-hearthed joke. It succeeds quite well at it - Ferengis roaming the ship stealing anything that's not nailed down and most things that are, only to be stopped by Tucker in his underwear.
I choose to believe that no one on the writing team ever wanted this episode to be taken seriously.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
That's how I always understood the Enterprise Ferengi episode: as a light-hearthed joke. It succeeds quite well at it - Ferengis roaming the ship stealing anything that's not nailed down and most things that are, only to be stopped by Tucker in his underwear.
I choose to believe that no one on the writing team ever wanted this episode to be taken seriously.
Maybe, but then they brought up slavery (which is a real, interesting, but decidedly not light-hearted subject in the piracy/raiding dynamic). And in order to make it work they had to make the entire ship so very badly designed, with it's completely open air system and lousy decontamination protocols, essentially making the whole joke work by making EVERYONE stupid.
Still, if we're talking about good things, I liked the fact that the aliens in Silent Enemy were more than just rubber-forehead aliens. They were all-out freakity-freaks, and while they were still bilateral-symmetry bipedal semi-humanoids it was still progress, relatively speaking.
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Only to have that perception all undone by a certain Season 5 episode, although I thought it was a brilliant retcon (because it explains so much about his personality). It probably could have only worked based on the foundation of the character they already laid for Bashir.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
That's how I always understood the Enterprise Ferengi episode: as a light-hearthed joke. It succeeds quite well at it - Ferengis roaming the ship stealing anything that's not nailed down and most things that are, only to be stopped by Tucker in his underwear.
I choose to believe that no one on the writing team ever wanted this episode to be taken seriously.
Maybe, but then they brought up slavery (which is a real, interesting, but decidedly not light-hearted subject in the piracy/raiding dynamic). And in order to make it work they had to make the entire ship so very badly designed, with it's completely open air system and lousy decontamination protocols, essentially making the whole joke work by making EVERYONE stupid.
Still, if we're talking about good things, I liked the fact that the aliens in Silent Enemy were more than just rubber-forehead aliens. They were all-out freakity-freaks, and while they were still bilateral-symmetry bipedal semi-humanoids it was still progress, relatively speaking.
I remember liking that episode for it's simplicity. It never goes out of it's way to unalien the threat. These guys are attacking you for unknown reasons and you must deal. Welcome to the final frontier, there are no cops waiting around the corner.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Only to have that perception all undone by a certain Season 5 episode, although I thought it was a brilliant retcon (because it explains so much about his personality). It probably could have only worked based on the foundation of the character they already laid for Bashir.
Yeah, but even then he still had to spend time, take exams, actually get a doctorate before anyone would listen to him. Doesn't matter where the talent came from; it's not the only reason he succeeded.
I enjoyed most of Enterprise. It was moody and often very cliche but in amounts I could stand. Only thing I remember really bugging me were several episodes somewhere in the middle where they just could not get T'Pols eyebrows right. They were drawn on horribly uneven and you could still see her real eyebrows. Yet they still insisted on doing close ups of her face. Way to break immersion for me, jerks!
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
I tried to marathon Enterprise once.
I didn't even get out of the first season. Maybe I should try again but skip to the middle of season 3.
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Only to have that perception all undone by a certain Season 5 episode, although I thought it was a brilliant retcon (because it explains so much about his personality). It probably could have only worked based on the foundation of the character they already laid for Bashir.
Yeah, but even then he still had to spend time, take exams, actually get a doctorate before anyone would listen to him. Doesn't matter where the talent came from; it's not the only reason he succeeded.
Yeah, I was talking about the Child Genius part. It turns out that he was. :-P But this was a later season retcon, and it was good that they didn't decide to make him a Child Genius right off the bat. Just dedicated and hard-working, if a little abrasive.
Guys, with all the talk of Star Trek novels and stuff I've ending up compiling a list of TNG novels set between the end of the series and Nemesis (and thus the relaunch books), in chronological order and including Kindle availability. Why am I wasting my life carrying out pointless tasks like this? I... I don't know. Thought it might be useful though, so here it is.
Enterprise-D
Intellivore
Ancient Blood (also available in omnibus)
Crossover
Kahless (also available in omnibus)
Do Comets Dream?
Tooth and Claw
Dujonian's Hoard (also available in omnibus; individual volume and omnibus not on Kindle)
The Soldiers of Fear (also available in omnibus; omnibus not on Kindle)
Enterprise-E
Ship of the Line
Rogue
Behind Enemy Lines
Tunnel Through the Stars
Immortal Coil
The Q Continuum
The Battle of Betazed
I, Q
Gemworld (not on Kindle)
Diplomatic Implausibility
Maximum Warp, Book One
Maximum Warp, Book Two (not on Kindle)
Doors Into Chaos (not on Kindle)
The Genesis Wave (Book Three and omnibus not on Kindle)
Genesis Force
A Hard Rain
A Time To... series
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Only to have that perception all undone by a certain Season 5 episode, although I thought it was a brilliant retcon (because it explains so much about his personality). It probably could have only worked based on the foundation of the character they already laid for Bashir.
Yeah, I like the impression it adds to "Our Man Bashir", because it turns why Bashir enjoyed the holodeck programs so much on it's head. Rather than living out fantasies of being super-capable... Bashir gets to act at his full capabilities and nobody thinks it's strange.
He's also a solid example of character growth. People on the station wanted to airlock him for most of the first two seasons, but he matures, they get used to him, everything works out.
I think that's why even in the early days he wasn't as derided as Wesley: He's annoying, but the characters don't tolerate it. It's like Kai Winn: Good God she's annoying, but the characters know that so you don't have that meta-annoyance. You accept her annoyance as necessary for the plot.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Only to have that perception all undone by a certain Season 5 episode, although I thought it was a brilliant retcon (because it explains so much about his personality). It probably could have only worked based on the foundation of the character they already laid for Bashir.
Yeah, I like the impression it adds to "Our Man Bashir", because it turns why Bashir enjoyed the holodeck programs so much on it's head. Rather than living out fantasies of being super-capable... Bashir gets to act at his full capabilities and nobody thinks it's strange.
Which foreshadows Bashir becoming an agent for Section 31.
Just finished watching "Take Me Out to the Holosuite"
Am I the only one who noticed Cirroc Lofton (Jake Sisko) and his tight pants with a GIGANTIC BULGE??
Kind of rekindled my old crush on him. I don't think it was an athletic supporter as later on in the show it had... uh... outline shape.
I didn't really notice, but you know they have, erm, "shaped inserts" for that sort of thing. Thank you to The Daily Show for that tidbit. As for the episode I was too busy watching the combination of Berman's Fantastic racism and what I presume was the results of some writer watching baseball-themed anime.
The best part about Take me out to the Holosuite is that Rom plays the bumbling idiot who knows nothing about baseball and makes Sisko mad with his ineptness.
The actor? A minor league prospect. He had to switch hit and throw to even be able to pretend he is that bad at baseball.
I prefer to think of the bulge as real. As for the racism.... is that the stereotype that all Vulcan are stronger and faster than humans or... what?
Also, the black captain and his son love baseball and are better at sports then the entire team combined.
Also, all Vulcan's look alike.
I suppose you could read racism into pretty much anything if you look close enough.
Well, the black captain and his son are better specifically at baseball than anyone else on the entire team, who up until that point, had never played baseball. And it's certainly not as if it were suddenly decided that Sisko would be an incredible player without precedent - his investment in the sport goes back to the very beginning of the show, specifically out of his respect for a game that went irrelevant due to the world's obsession with fast-paced diversion. It was always a very personal thing that never had anything to do with the presumption of latent athleticism.
Now, if none of the crew, Sisko included, had never played baseball before, and then he and Jake were incredible, that would smack of some racism.
I prefer to think of the bulge as real. As for the racism.... is that the stereotype that all Vulcan are stronger and faster than humans or... what?
Also, the black captain and his son love baseball and are better at sports then the entire team combined.
Also, all Vulcan's look alike.
I suppose you could read racism into pretty much anything if you look close enough.
Yeah, that's not racism. The show established long before that episode that baseball was dead and that Sisko and his son were oddities for still playing it. So the idea that they would be better than anyone else at a sport they are the only two people on the station to practice semi-regularly is not really a stretch, and has nothing to do with race.
Well, it does portray the Vulcans in question as dicks. But the implication is that these specific Vulcans are dicks, not all Vulcans.
It's also a pretty good episode for how absolutely dumb the premise is.
It has a lot of heart without either forcing the characters to behave out of character or descending too deeply into mawkish sentimentality, beyond perhaps the choice to let Rom play at the end.
Also, this is a point in the series where absolutely everyone knows how to write and perform these characters, and so just watching them interact is pretty damned charming. One of the greatest parts of DS9 is that it would occasionally take an episode to slow down and just spend some time with these people you've been essentially living with on that station for seven years.
Vulcans can be dicks, as in the case with Sulak. But they don't often enough show Vulcan as they are; striving to be emotionless. Like humans, some vulcans are better at it than others.
Vulcans can be dicks, as in the case with Sulak. But they don't often enough show Vulcan as they are; striving to be emotionless. Like humans, some vulcans are better at it than others.
I'm surprised more Vulcans aren't villains. Burying emotions to such a degree is a slippery slope to amorality.
Vulcans can be dicks, as in the case with Sulak. But they don't often enough show Vulcan as they are; striving to be emotionless. Like humans, some vulcans are better at it than others.
I'm surprised more Vulcans aren't villains. Burying emotions to such a degree is a slippery slope to amorality.
There is an episode in Season 7 with the Vulcan serial killer where he kills because logic demanded it.
Well, it does portray the Vulcans in question as dicks. But the implication is that these specific Vulcans are dicks, not all Vulcans.
It's also a pretty good episode for how absolutely dumb the premise is.
It has a lot of heart without either forcing the characters to behave out of character or descending too deeply into mawkish sentimentality, beyond perhaps the choice to let Rom play at the end.
Also, this is a point in the series where absolutely everyone knows how to write and perform these characters, and so just watching them interact is pretty damned charming. One of the greatest parts of DS9 is that it would occasionally take an episode to slow down and just spend some time with these people you've been essentially living with on that station for seven years.
It has some of the best Worf lines out of TNG and DS9, too.
The image on the monitor was slightly edited, but the real scene is literally exactly the same in intent and what it shows, just a different annoyance. Worf is not amused.
I also stand by my belief, and apparently the belief of other commenter's, that that's the best Rick Roll on youtube. The mug is fucking brilliant.
Edit: Actually, Worf was awesome from the moment he got his first DS9 episode. I think it must have been part of his contract that he wouldn't be used to "Worf Effect" the monster of the week if he played a role in DS9.
That ending is one of the coldest ice burns in the show. Apparently the actors knew it too, because going off of his face, Martok looks like he isn't sure whether to laugh, or smack him.
Vulcans can be dicks, as in the case with Sulak. But they don't often enough show Vulcan as they are; striving to be emotionless. Like humans, some vulcans are better at it than others.
I'm surprised more Vulcans aren't villains. Burying emotions to such a degree is a slippery slope to amorality.
There is an episode in Season 7 with the Vulcan serial killer where he kills because logic demanded it.
I always thought that was more because the Vulcan had been driven utterly insane by the war. They make a big point about how the war is taking a humongous toll in lives as the seasons stretch on, and more than one character was negatively affected by it.
I prefer to think of the bulge as real. As for the racism.... is that the stereotype that all Vulcan are stronger and faster than humans or... what?
The stereotype that all Vulcans are raging superiority-complex assholes. That episode alone is just kind of dumb, but taken in context with the characterizations in Enterprise, the interpersonal dynamics between archer and T'Pol (where Archer is always portrayed as "right" and the Vulcans as "stupid smarty-pants") and the fact that this pattern went away when other people had directorial control leads me to the conclusion that Rick Berman is racist against Vulcans. One of the reasons I liked Tuvok (aside from having few clear memories of him) was that he managed to not be a raging dickbag all the time. He'd be a jerk, but he'd get over it, and occasionally he'd just not be a jerk in the first place.
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ArchonexNo hard feelings, right?Registered Userregular
I prefer to think of the bulge as real. As for the racism.... is that the stereotype that all Vulcan are stronger and faster than humans or... what?
The stereotype that all Vulcans are raging superiority-complex assholes. That episode alone is just kind of dumb, but taken in context with the characterizations in Enterprise, the interpersonal dynamics between archer and T'Pol (where Archer is always portrayed as "right" and the Vulcans as "stupid smarty-pants") and the fact that this pattern went away when other people had directorial control leads me to the conclusion that Rick Berman is racist against Vulcans. One of the reasons I liked Tuvok (aside from having few clear memories of him) was that he managed to not be a raging dickbag all the time. He'd be a jerk, but he'd get over it, and occasionally he'd just not be a jerk in the first place.
Keep in mind that T'Pol was actually supposed to be revealed as half Romulan eventually. Which is why she had the superiority complex mixed with constantly showing emotion. The show got axed despite the new writing team bringing it out of the shitter in the final season, otherwise it would have been part of the focus of next season. Also, that was going to go with the big Romulan War that explained just how the Romulans became the threat they were in TNG, that we never really learned much of in prior series.
Then for some inexplicable reason, they brought Berman and Braga back to do a "Series Finale" that made no sense whatsoever, and of course the series finale was pretty much a cock-slap to the face of every Star Trek fan ever, ensuring that future TV series probably will never come about in the original universe.
So most of the script that the newer (competent) writers made was relegated to the "Enterprise Relaunch" novels. Which practically no-one ever even read, because of that final B&B moment, and the overwhelming shittiness of all but one season. Also, because it's a Star Trek novel.
The other Vulcans were basically space elves in Enterprise. They had a big story in one of the last post-original-writing-team seasons where they resolved this, and most of the asshole Vulcans were basically outed as bigots or incompetent assholes (Turns out their culture was just as bad about those things as ours.), and which started the trend of them shifting towards ToS era Vulcans. To be fair to them, I do remember a fair number of them lightening up as time went on. Though some stayed assholes until they got their comeuppance.
There was a surprising amount of internal consistence to how the ENT vulcans worked. Though most of that was brought about by a last minute save after ratings plummeted and the new writers realized they needed to subtly retcon most of the horrible shit that B&B and the prior writers had retconned out of prior series to be able to stick with the actual canon.
I suppose I really need to watch that last episode. I know B&B thought of it as a "a valentine to Star Trek fans," (biggest delusion is best delusion!) and I know it was a great big cockslap to the face of the cast and crew who had done the "real" ending and were now being upstaged (on multiple levels) by two primping primadonnas and the 3 actors willing to commit the atrocity because they needed the paycheck.
But I'm not sure where it insults the fans directly, because it seems like such a chore to sit down and watch thatany episode to sift it for good bits.
edit: Also, there are a lot of instances where Archer is just a total cockbag to T'Pol when she's being the reasonable (if undiplomatic) one, and the narrative makes it clear that Archer is "in the right" according to B&B. I mean it's all subtle (ish) but most racism is, and once I started seeing it I couldn't stop.
Vulcans can be dicks, as in the case with Sulak. But they don't often enough show Vulcan as they are; striving to be emotionless. Like humans, some vulcans are better at it than others.
I'm surprised more Vulcans aren't villains. Burying emotions to such a degree is a slippery slope to amorality.
There is an episode in Season 7 with the Vulcan serial killer where he kills because logic demanded it.
Edit: Actually, Worf was awesome from the moment he got his first DS9 episode. I think it must have been part of his contract that he wouldn't be used to "Worf Effect" the monster of the week if he played a role in DS9.
That ending is one of the coldest ice burns in the show. Apparently the actors knew it too, because going off of his face, Martok looks like he isn't sure whether to laugh, or smack him.
I always wondered what Jadzia says to Worf in the bar scene. I don't know Klingon and they never explain it. It sets up their relationship so nicely, with her needling him in an subtle amusing way. Right off the bat you can see the foundation of their relationship being built.
Jadzia was the best Dax and losing her was losing the majority of none-farce humor in the show(indeed the franchise).
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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lol wut?
The music just seems more suited for B5 than Star Trek. To me at least. Look, I only got 4 hours of sleep last night.
AFRICA! THE FINAL BATTLEGROUNDFRONTIER (for when we get done wrecking Iran for Israel in two to three years).
I recently rewatched all of Enterprise (having watched it once when it first came out) and really enjoyed it.
Apart from the final episode which was just terrible. Killing off a main character just to show how dangerous space can be (after they all survived on their original voyage and all the years later) ? Bullshit.
Especially loved the Ferengi episode - great scenes of them stealing the Captain's chair, and prying off the nameplate with a crowbar.
Except for the theme song - holy fucking Christ, it's shit. After a few eps I could skip past that fucker to the second it finished. And if I happened to skip too far ? I accepted a few missed seconds of show a fair price to pay for never having to listed to that fucking abortion again.
That's how I always understood the Enterprise Ferengi episode: as a light-hearthed joke. It succeeds quite well at it - Ferengis roaming the ship stealing anything that's not nailed down and most things that are, only to be stopped by Tucker in his underwear.
I choose to believe that no one on the writing team ever wanted this episode to be taken seriously.
It also helps that he's not a child genius that we're supposed to be wowed by, but actually an adult who got his great skill not just through talent but hard work, training, and years of schooling.
Maybe, but then they brought up slavery (which is a real, interesting, but decidedly not light-hearted subject in the piracy/raiding dynamic). And in order to make it work they had to make the entire ship so very badly designed, with it's completely open air system and lousy decontamination protocols, essentially making the whole joke work by making EVERYONE stupid.
Still, if we're talking about good things, I liked the fact that the aliens in Silent Enemy were more than just rubber-forehead aliens. They were all-out freakity-freaks, and while they were still bilateral-symmetry bipedal semi-humanoids it was still progress, relatively speaking.
I remember liking that episode for it's simplicity. It never goes out of it's way to unalien the threat. These guys are attacking you for unknown reasons and you must deal. Welcome to the final frontier, there are no cops waiting around the corner.
Yeah, but even then he still had to spend time, take exams, actually get a doctorate before anyone would listen to him. Doesn't matter where the talent came from; it's not the only reason he succeeded.
I didn't even get out of the first season. Maybe I should try again but skip to the middle of season 3.
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Ancient Blood (also available in omnibus)
Crossover
Kahless (also available in omnibus)
Do Comets Dream?
Tooth and Claw
Dujonian's Hoard (also available in omnibus; individual volume and omnibus not on Kindle)
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Yeah, I like the impression it adds to "Our Man Bashir", because it turns why Bashir enjoyed the holodeck programs so much on it's head. Rather than living out fantasies of being super-capable... Bashir gets to act at his full capabilities and nobody thinks it's strange.
Am I the only one who noticed Cirroc Lofton (Jake Sisko) and his tight pants with a GIGANTIC BULGE??
Kind of rekindled my old crush on him. I don't think it was an athletic supporter as later on in the show it had... uh... outline shape.
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Uhhh, no I think it was just you.
I didn't really notice, but you know they have, erm, "shaped inserts" for that sort of thing. Thank you to The Daily Show for that tidbit. As for the episode I was too busy watching the combination of Berman's Fantastic racism and what I presume was the results of some writer watching baseball-themed anime.
The actor? A minor league prospect. He had to switch hit and throw to even be able to pretend he is that bad at baseball.
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Also, the black captain and his son love baseball and are better at sports then the entire team combined.
Also, all Vulcan's look alike.
I suppose you could read racism into pretty much anything if you look close enough.
Well, the black captain and his son are better specifically at baseball than anyone else on the entire team, who up until that point, had never played baseball. And it's certainly not as if it were suddenly decided that Sisko would be an incredible player without precedent - his investment in the sport goes back to the very beginning of the show, specifically out of his respect for a game that went irrelevant due to the world's obsession with fast-paced diversion. It was always a very personal thing that never had anything to do with the presumption of latent athleticism.
Now, if none of the crew, Sisko included, had never played baseball before, and then he and Jake were incredible, that would smack of some racism.
Yeah, that's not racism. The show established long before that episode that baseball was dead and that Sisko and his son were oddities for still playing it. So the idea that they would be better than anyone else at a sport they are the only two people on the station to practice semi-regularly is not really a stretch, and has nothing to do with race.
It's also a pretty good episode for how absolutely dumb the premise is.
It has a lot of heart without either forcing the characters to behave out of character or descending too deeply into mawkish sentimentality, beyond perhaps the choice to let Rom play at the end.
Also, this is a point in the series where absolutely everyone knows how to write and perform these characters, and so just watching them interact is pretty damned charming. One of the greatest parts of DS9 is that it would occasionally take an episode to slow down and just spend some time with these people you've been essentially living with on that station for seven years.
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I'm surprised more Vulcans aren't villains. Burying emotions to such a degree is a slippery slope to amorality.
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There is an episode in Season 7 with the Vulcan serial killer where he kills because logic demanded it.
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It has some of the best Worf lines out of TNG and DS9, too.
Actually, Worf was fucking amazing in DS9.
The image on the monitor was slightly edited, but the real scene is literally exactly the same in intent and what it shows, just a different annoyance. Worf is not amused.
Edit: Actually, Worf was awesome from the moment he got his first DS9 episode. I think it must have been part of his contract that he wouldn't be used to "Worf Effect" the monster of the week if he played a role in DS9.
That ending is one of the coldest ice burns in the show. Apparently the actors knew it too, because going off of his face, Martok looks like he isn't sure whether to laugh, or smack him.
Edit:
I always thought that was more because the Vulcan had been driven utterly insane by the war. They make a big point about how the war is taking a humongous toll in lives as the seasons stretch on, and more than one character was negatively affected by it.
The stereotype that all Vulcans are raging superiority-complex assholes. That episode alone is just kind of dumb, but taken in context with the characterizations in Enterprise, the interpersonal dynamics between archer and T'Pol (where Archer is always portrayed as "right" and the Vulcans as "stupid smarty-pants") and the fact that this pattern went away when other people had directorial control leads me to the conclusion that Rick Berman is racist against Vulcans. One of the reasons I liked Tuvok (aside from having few clear memories of him) was that he managed to not be a raging dickbag all the time. He'd be a jerk, but he'd get over it, and occasionally he'd just not be a jerk in the first place.
Keep in mind that T'Pol was actually supposed to be revealed as half Romulan eventually. Which is why she had the superiority complex mixed with constantly showing emotion. The show got axed despite the new writing team bringing it out of the shitter in the final season, otherwise it would have been part of the focus of next season. Also, that was going to go with the big Romulan War that explained just how the Romulans became the threat they were in TNG, that we never really learned much of in prior series.
Then for some inexplicable reason, they brought Berman and Braga back to do a "Series Finale" that made no sense whatsoever, and of course the series finale was pretty much a cock-slap to the face of every Star Trek fan ever, ensuring that future TV series probably will never come about in the original universe.
So most of the script that the newer (competent) writers made was relegated to the "Enterprise Relaunch" novels. Which practically no-one ever even read, because of that final B&B moment, and the overwhelming shittiness of all but one season. Also, because it's a Star Trek novel.
The other Vulcans were basically space elves in Enterprise. They had a big story in one of the last post-original-writing-team seasons where they resolved this, and most of the asshole Vulcans were basically outed as bigots or incompetent assholes (Turns out their culture was just as bad about those things as ours.), and which started the trend of them shifting towards ToS era Vulcans. To be fair to them, I do remember a fair number of them lightening up as time went on. Though some stayed assholes until they got their comeuppance.
There was a surprising amount of internal consistence to how the ENT vulcans worked. Though most of that was brought about by a last minute save after ratings plummeted and the new writers realized they needed to subtly retcon most of the horrible shit that B&B and the prior writers had retconned out of prior series to be able to stick with the actual canon.
But I'm not sure where it insults the fans directly, because it seems like such a chore to sit down and watch thatany episode to sift it for good bits.
edit: Also, there are a lot of instances where Archer is just a total cockbag to T'Pol when she's being the reasonable (if undiplomatic) one, and the narrative makes it clear that Archer is "in the right" according to B&B. I mean it's all subtle (ish) but most racism is, and once I started seeing it I couldn't stop.
That episode was entertaining.
I always wondered what Jadzia says to Worf in the bar scene. I don't know Klingon and they never explain it. It sets up their relationship so nicely, with her needling him in an subtle amusing way. Right off the bat you can see the foundation of their relationship being built.
Jadzia was the best Dax and losing her was losing the majority of none-farce humor in the show(indeed the franchise).
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