I mean, it has a weird vibe, but that's intentional. In that sense it kind of hearkens back to TOS in a way that I like, with that creepy, Twilight Zone feel. TNG does a lot of great things in its run but it has a shortage of creepy episodes.
The plot is just "warring AIs possess Data and the computer and try to use the Enterprise to recreate their civilization," which isn't that...unusual? It's a very sci-fi 101 plot. It's like one of those TOS episodes with an evil computer ruling a planet except instead of one computer there are like ten.
The real-world reasoning (I think someone at memory alpha literally says this) "hey, Brent Spiner loves playing different parts, let's give him like six different parts to play in the same episode."
I don't think the episode super works due to budget issues and running out of time - it feels like it stops just as it's getting going - but if it's a failure, it's an ambitious failure, which I always like better than being meek and playing it safe and boring.
The writer, Joe Menosky, is one of my favorite Star Trek writers and one of the most underrated, imo. All his episodes take big swings without doing violence to the integrity of the characters or the setting.
Probably my most watched episode of TNG is Night Terrors, I really love the light horror vibe in TNG format. Scared the shit out of me when all the corpses sat up in the cargo bay with the musical sting.
I mean, it has a weird vibe, but that's intentional. In that sense it kind of hearkens back to TOS in a way that I like, with that creepy, Twilight Zone feel. TNG does a lot of great things in its run but it has a shortage of creepy episodes.
The plot is just "warring AIs possess Data and the computer and try to use the Enterprise to recreate their civilization," which isn't that...unusual? It's a very sci-fi 101 plot. It's like one of those TOS episodes with an evil computer ruling a planet except instead of one computer there are like ten.
The real-world reasoning (I think someone at memory alpha literally says this) "hey, Brent Spiner loves playing different parts, let's give him like six different parts to play in the same episode."
I don't think the episode super works due to budget issues and running out of time - it feels like it stops just as it's getting going - but if it's a failure, it's an ambitious failure, which I always like better than being meek and playing it safe and boring.
The writer, Joe Menosky, is one of my favorite Star Trek writers and one of the most underrated, imo. All his episodes take big swings without doing violence to the integrity of the characters or the setting.
Probably my most watched episode of TNG is Night Terrors, I really love the light horror vibe in TNG format. Scared the shit out of me when all the corpses sat up in the cargo bay with the musical sting.
Schisms is another great horror themed episode. It's really great re-watching that with surround sound, the clicking is really creepy.
The best thing about Masks is that Brent Spiner might have the best range of any of the main TNG cast, but is in the role that by design gives him the least if it weren't for the occasional excursions to the extended Soong family. There's a reason why he keeps getting possessed or duplicated by the holodeck or whatever.
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
+5
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
The thing that I find interesting is that the new shows do action really well. Or at least, to a standard much higher than their predecessors. Everything from the space battles to the hand-to-hand combat is significantly better.
sure, but TNG and DS9 aren't good because they had action scenes
I mean, it has a weird vibe, but that's intentional. In that sense it kind of hearkens back to TOS in a way that I like, with that creepy, Twilight Zone feel. TNG does a lot of great things in its run but it has a shortage of creepy episodes.
The plot is just "warring AIs possess Data and the computer and try to use the Enterprise to recreate their civilization," which isn't that...unusual? It's a very sci-fi 101 plot. It's like one of those TOS episodes with an evil computer ruling a planet except instead of one computer there are like ten.
The real-world reasoning (I think someone at memory alpha literally says this) "hey, Brent Spiner loves playing different parts, let's give him like six different parts to play in the same episode."
I don't think the episode super works due to budget issues and running out of time - it feels like it stops just as it's getting going - but if it's a failure, it's an ambitious failure, which I always like better than being meek and playing it safe and boring.
The writer, Joe Menosky, is one of my favorite Star Trek writers and one of the most underrated, imo. All his episodes take big swings without doing violence to the integrity of the characters or the setting.
Probably my most watched episode of TNG is Night Terrors, I really love the light horror vibe in TNG format. Scared the shit out of me when all the corpses sat up in the cargo bay with the musical sting.
I was literally midway through writing a reply about this episode and then I scrolled down and noticed you'd beat me to it.
The episode doesn't quite work because I think the Troi stuff ends up being too silly. But the entire atmosphere of the episode is fantastic. It's got a great vibe going on. They are stuck, they don't know why and no one can dream and it's making them all slowly go nuts. It's one of the episodes that I think makes space feel really dangerous and isolating. They are all alone out there.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
Honestly the Star Trek bits, while excellent and obviously done with love, are almost superfluous to Lower Decks; as a zany cartoon it stands on its own merits, and the pornographic lens-flare filled shots of the Cerritos are just sauce.
The thing that I find interesting is that the new shows do action really well. Or at least, to a standard much higher than their predecessors. Everything from the space battles to the hand-to-hand combat is significantly better.
sure, but TNG and DS9 aren't good because they had action scenes
many "character walks down hallway with tense music scenes" in TNG, DS9, or hell even Voyager, have more tension and narrative weight than most fight scenes in Disco
the fight scenes and space scenes are all well done but I don't really feel weight in many of them, especially because of their propensity to have scenes with a thousand different things onscreen at once
Did a writer confirm they were going for a Brexit metaphor? Because that's a pretty god awful attempt at one when the possibility of Earth leaving the Federation is right there. Romulus is more of a refugee crisis thing.
The thing that I find interesting is that the new shows do action really well. Or at least, to a standard much higher than their predecessors. Everything from the space battles to the hand-to-hand combat is significantly better.
sure, but TNG and DS9 aren't good because they had action scenes
Both (especially DS9) had some great action scenes, though. Discovery has a problem with action scenes, nothing seems to have any weight.
Look at Battle of the Binary Stars (shooting starts at about 1:30). USS Shenzou takes more than 30 hits (even at half speed and putting paper over the rest of the fleet so I didn't get distracted by the dozens of other shots I couldn't keep count) in the opening volley, and the bridge hasn't even shown any tension when they cut back to it, they're only NOW calling battle stations. There's several seconds of further exchange before they have a contained hull breach and a console explosion, but the guy's ok and makes it to sickbay on his feet. We even hear more hits and explosions without any reaction or acknowledgement. We see the T'plana Hath, shields down and adrift, supposedly in mortal peril, just cloaked in explosions and sponging bullets like a mob in a poorly balanced looter shooter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKeZ4eqYQ5I
And this battle is probably one of the least offenders in this way, the battle at the end of S2 was far more ridiculous in every way mentioned and a few more to boot.
Now, Sacrifice of Angels (foreplay stops and the actual fleet-on-fleet action starts at around 1:30 as well) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8eQ3jTwfk
Despite being much larger fleets, in the opening exchange we see only seven initial shots fired by the Dominion, destroying a couple small ships and severely damaging a Miranda, followed by only four shots from two Federation ships putting a Galor adrift. We see the Defiant take only one direct hit before going back to the bridge and the place is a madhouse - smoke and exploding consoles, shaky camera, stuntmen jumping around like ragdolls.
Discovery battles don't seem to have any weight. Ships line up and throw buckets of popcorn at each other to minimal effect and usually one side wins because of circumstances not directly related to the battle, like a brand new ship showing up and ramming the admiral's ship or the Red Angel opening the time portal.
DS9's battles (and TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and TOS all for that matter, but DS9 has a monopoly on the big fleet battles for fair direct comparison) don't involve the massive exchange of ordinance, even the USS Guns-on-an-Engine wasn't just spraying fire downrange, and when it lit up its guns, somebody's day was about to get ruined. And it's not an era thing, because like I said, both Enterprise and TOS were this way, and they bracket Discovery in the timeline.
Even Nemesis, for all its faults, had a great battle. Here, two ships of the line built to sponge damage and anchor a fleet, are slowly grinding each other to dust, and in the entire battle fewer shots are fired than in the first few seconds of Battle of the Binary Stars, but by the end all the Enterprise can do is sluggishly ram the Scimitar, and all the Scimitar can do is watch and start replicating clean pants.
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
The thing that I find interesting is that the new shows do action really well. Or at least, to a standard much higher than their predecessors. Everything from the space battles to the hand-to-hand combat is significantly better.
sure, but TNG and DS9 aren't good because they had action scenes
Both (especially DS9) had some great action scenes, though. Discovery has a problem with action scenes, nothing seems to have any weight.
Look at Battle of the Binary Stars (shooting starts at about 1:30). USS Shenzou takes more than 30 hits (even at half speed and putting paper over the rest of the fleet so I didn't get distracted by the dozens of other shots I couldn't keep count) in the opening volley, and the bridge hasn't even shown any tension when they cut back to it, they're only NOW calling battle stations. There's several seconds of further exchange before they have a contained hull breach and a console explosion, but the guy's ok and makes it to sickbay on his feet. We even hear more hits and explosions without any reaction or acknowledgement. We see the T'plana Hath, shields down and adrift, supposedly in mortal peril, just cloaked in explosions and sponging bullets like a mob in a poorly balanced looter shooter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKeZ4eqYQ5I
And this battle is probably one of the least offenders in this way, the battle at the end of S2 was far more ridiculous in every way mentioned and a few more to boot.
Now, Sacrifice of Angels (foreplay stops and the actual fleet-on-fleet action starts at around 1:30 as well) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8eQ3jTwfk
Despite being much larger fleets, in the opening exchange we see only seven initial shots fired by the Dominion, destroying a couple small ships and severely damaging a Miranda, followed by only four shots from two Federation ships putting a Galor adrift. We see the Defiant take only one direct hit before going back to the bridge and the place is a madhouse - smoke and exploding consoles, shaky camera, stuntmen jumping around like ragdolls.
Discovery battles don't seem to have any weight. Ships line up and throw buckets of popcorn at each other to minimal effect and usually one side wins because of circumstances not directly related to the battle, like a brand new ship showing up and ramming the admiral's ship or the Red Angel opening the time portal.
DS9's battles (and TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and TOS all for that matter, but DS9 has a monopoly on the big fleet battles for fair direct comparison) don't involve the massive exchange of ordinance, even the USS Guns-on-an-Engine wasn't just spraying fire downrange, and when it lit up its guns, somebody's day was about to get ruined. And it's not an era thing, because like I said, both Enterprise and TOS were this way, and they bracket Discovery in the timeline.
Even Nemesis, for all its faults, had a great battle. Here, two ships of the line built to sponge damage and anchor a fleet, are slowly grinding each other to dust, and in the entire battle fewer shots are fired than in the first few seconds of Battle of the Binary Stars, but by the end all the Enterprise can do is sluggishly ram the Scimitar, and all the Scimitar can do is watch and start replicating clean pants.
That is a good point, Trek space battles have generally not been super cinematic, or fast paced, but what they have been is weighty - every weapon strike seems to have an impact of some sort
For me, my favorite is Undiscovered Country
The Klingon warbird is a tiny ship, but its invisible, and its hurting two gigantic ships of the line and hurting them bad with every single strike
I mean the weapons in Star Trek are generally very powerful compared to a more "contemporary" sci-fi setting like the expanse.
Photon torpedoes have a max yield of around 50 Megatons, and the phasers are, in canon, able to melt whole planetary continents. A hit should be meaty and dangerous, not gnats zipping around a giant.
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
Since most people I know, even people that watch star trek, have not watched The Motion Picture, it's really hard to explain how good of a joke this is or why I laughed so hard at it.
I mean the weapons in Star Trek are generally very powerful compared to a more "contemporary" sci-fi setting like the expanse.
Photon torpedoes have a max yield of around 50 Megatons, and the phasers are, in canon, able to melt whole planetary continents. A hit should be meaty and dangerous, not gnats zipping around a giant.
My favorite bit: Because photon torpedoes weren't sufficiently destructive, quantum torpedoes use a photon torpedo warhead to destroy a small piece of the universe and explosively release its vacuum energy. That's some Fall of Adam level shit.
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
Since most people I know, even people that watch star trek, have not watched The Motion Picture, it's really hard to explain how good of a joke this is or why I laughed so hard at it.
the music is really really really what makes the joke good
but damn is that music a cocktease, i want that real theme!
I mean the weapons in Star Trek are generally very powerful compared to a more "contemporary" sci-fi setting like the expanse.
Photon torpedoes have a max yield of around 50 Megatons, and the phasers are, in canon, able to melt whole planetary continents. A hit should be meaty and dangerous, not gnats zipping around a giant.
My favorite bit: Because photon torpedoes weren't sufficiently destructive, quantum torpedoes use a photon torpedo warhead to destroy a small piece of the universe and explosively release its vacuum energy. That's some Fall of Adam level shit.
Or the chroniton torpedos that bypass shields by being outside the linear flow of time, only for the finally adapted shields being able to hold them off after a lot of trial and error..
The myriad number of hits in Disco always felt so extremely silly to me.
+3
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
The thing that I find interesting is that the new shows do action really well. Or at least, to a standard much higher than their predecessors. Everything from the space battles to the hand-to-hand combat is significantly better.
sure, but TNG and DS9 aren't good because they had action scenes
Both (especially DS9) had some great action scenes, though. Discovery has a problem with action scenes, nothing seems to have any weight.
Look at Battle of the Binary Stars (shooting starts at about 1:30). USS Shenzou takes more than 30 hits (even at half speed and putting paper over the rest of the fleet so I didn't get distracted by the dozens of other shots I couldn't keep count) in the opening volley, and the bridge hasn't even shown any tension when they cut back to it, they're only NOW calling battle stations. There's several seconds of further exchange before they have a contained hull breach and a console explosion, but the guy's ok and makes it to sickbay on his feet. We even hear more hits and explosions without any reaction or acknowledgement. We see the T'plana Hath, shields down and adrift, supposedly in mortal peril, just cloaked in explosions and sponging bullets like a mob in a poorly balanced looter shooter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKeZ4eqYQ5I
And this battle is probably one of the least offenders in this way, the battle at the end of S2 was far more ridiculous in every way mentioned and a few more to boot.
Now, Sacrifice of Angels (foreplay stops and the actual fleet-on-fleet action starts at around 1:30 as well) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8eQ3jTwfk
Despite being much larger fleets, in the opening exchange we see only seven initial shots fired by the Dominion, destroying a couple small ships and severely damaging a Miranda, followed by only four shots from two Federation ships putting a Galor adrift. We see the Defiant take only one direct hit before going back to the bridge and the place is a madhouse - smoke and exploding consoles, shaky camera, stuntmen jumping around like ragdolls.
Discovery battles don't seem to have any weight. Ships line up and throw buckets of popcorn at each other to minimal effect and usually one side wins because of circumstances not directly related to the battle, like a brand new ship showing up and ramming the admiral's ship or the Red Angel opening the time portal.
DS9's battles (and TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and TOS all for that matter, but DS9 has a monopoly on the big fleet battles for fair direct comparison) don't involve the massive exchange of ordinance, even the USS Guns-on-an-Engine wasn't just spraying fire downrange, and when it lit up its guns, somebody's day was about to get ruined. And it's not an era thing, because like I said, both Enterprise and TOS were this way, and they bracket Discovery in the timeline.
Even Nemesis, for all its faults, had a great battle. Here, two ships of the line built to sponge damage and anchor a fleet, are slowly grinding each other to dust, and in the entire battle fewer shots are fired than in the first few seconds of Battle of the Binary Stars, but by the end all the Enterprise can do is sluggishly ram the Scimitar, and all the Scimitar can do is watch and start replicating clean pants.
That is a good point, Trek space battles have generally not been super cinematic, or fast paced, but what they have been is weighty - every weapon strike seems to have an impact of some sort
For me, my favorite is Undiscovered Country
The Klingon warbird is a tiny ship, but its invisible, and its hurting two gigantic ships of the line and hurting them bad with every single strike
I haven't tried to count but I'm pretty sure Discovery takes more fire from equiv-tech weapons in S2 than the Borg Cube did when up against the entire Federation fleet in First Contact
I was surprised that I cared when the Solvang was destroyed, they're practically throwaway characters, but Lower Decks had been so tame as a comedy show that I wasn't expecting an entire ship of officers and families to get killed like that - and by showing us that crew in a previous episode we know that's exactly what we were seeing
the writers did a good job of not pressing on the gas in that regard until the last episode
override367 on
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
It's almost like, and hear me out here, Lower Decks was well written
+13
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Lower Decks having this kind of low-budget, plinky-plink, dude-in-a-basement-with-a-synthesizer-cause-it's-covid opening theme that then, in the next-to-last episode, gets a grand orchestral treatment and turns out to be one of the best Star Trek themes in 25 years is a kind of perfect unintentional metaphor for the entire show.
When it comes to Star Trek battles I just think they've almost never really been that visually interesting. Realistically it's mostly been two ship models hanging near each other in the shot while people scream ever lowering percentages at the captain and consoles explode in honestly pretty silly ways. DS9 got a bit more into it by the end it was generally nice to see but I think few of them end up being all that memorable.
When people think of the really famous action sequences in Star Trek, none of them are really sold on flashy visuals imo. Wrath of Khan is, as someone correctly pointed out earlier, a bunch of early-90s teenagers trying to masturbate to scrambled cable porn on a friday night combined with shots of models next to a fog machine. Undiscovered Country is a lot of shots of a ship decloaking and firing and then a lot of shots of models getting holes shot through them.
Which is to say that the most memorable fights in Star Trek imo have almost always been anchored on good editing and storytelling rather then flashy visuals and lots of wooshing ships and cgi explosions. Some of the fights from the Abrams Star Trek films are goddamn gorgeous honestly but they are also just so forgettable because there's no weight to any of it in terms of characters or story.
There's definitely a certain slow ponderous feel to a lot of Star Trek ship battles but I think more then anything they've just always succeeded when they do succeed because we care and because there's a narrative arc you can feel to the whole affair and it gets around the fact that there was rarely a lot of face paced whoosy action going on.
"fast paced whooshy action" was a lot harder to do back in the pre-CGI days, with physical models that had to be lit and photographed with motion control rigs and then carefully composited together. now, it's just a question of how big is your render farm.
I'm biased, of course, but I think the happy medium is somewhere in the vicinity of that big setpiece in "Sacrifice of Angels".
I realized my list doesn't have a place for stinkers like The Outrageous Okona. Maybe that could be a character assassination one, since everyone in the main cast turns into Okona fanboys for no reason?
Or maybe I should add another section for "c'mon, this is just embarassing"
The Outrageous Okona is not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be. It's main flaw is it relies on telling instead of showing. That and the even at the time old fashioned morality play.
Picard literally calls it that in the episode, so I think it's fine, since he's pointing out how silly the whole thing is. My grandmother was very amused to see small child Billy Campbell, and now might give Prodigy a shot.
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
I definitely laughed at this joke both during the show and just now while rewatching it. But I still love all the ship porn with beautiful swelling orchestrals in the background and was one of the tiny few who didn't think that that scene in The Motion Picture was too long. Give me 2hrs of that shit and I'd watch it, especially if James Horner were writing the score.
Cambiata on
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
I realized my list doesn't have a place for stinkers like The Outrageous Okona. Maybe that could be a character assassination one, since everyone in the main cast turns into Okona fanboys for no reason?
Or maybe I should add another section for "c'mon, this is just embarassing"
The Outrageous Okona is not nearly as bad as some people on the internet make it out to be. It's main flaw is it relies on telling instead of showing. That and the even at the time old fashioned morality play.
I admit I'll always feel a strange nostalgia for the dated camp and silliness of the S1-2 episodes, many of which were just aping the "morality plays" of the TOS era. I think they're part of what made TNG so widely appealing while still being incredibly brilliant at times. The writers were willing to try just about everything from parables to political drama to going full-on Twilight Zone when they really wanted to explore a spooky sci-fi premise. That's why a show like Picard rings somewhat hollow to me, it's basically taking all that goofy history and squeezing out just one action sci-fi arc that can never really deviate from its theme on an episode by episode basis. It tries to present us with consequences that Picard has to face for his actions but just for one event in his life that honestly shouldn't even rank among the top 10 in his career.
The Ent-D has literally flown to other galaxies and realities and encountered entities outside our plane of existence. After all that, seeing Picard have to deal with petty bureaucracy and skeptical newscasters or people complaining that he has a nice vineyard while they have to live out of a trailer or whatever just feels wildly anachronistic and obtuse. Like the showrunners wanted to subvert TNG's optimistic premise without taking into account the sheer scope of what the show has actually explored. It honestly feels more like a Q episode where we see how Picard's life could've turned out if X rather than a followup to TNG itself.
The Ent-D has literally flown to other galaxies and realities and encountered entities outside our plane of existence. After all that, seeing Picard have to deal with petty bureaucracy and skeptical newscasters or people complaining that he has a nice vineyard while they have to live out of a trailer or whatever just feels wildly anachronistic and obtuse. Like the showrunners wanted to subvert TNG's optimistic premise without taking into account the sheer scope of what the show has actually explored. It honestly feels more like a Q episode where we see how Picard's life could've turned out if X rather than a followup to TNG itself.
Its harder to get around that when its an event which transformed Picard from a decorated admiral into a retired wine maker for 20 years. Bureaucracy proved to be the one villain that beat Picard.
Harry Dresden on
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Billy Campbell saying the line "now that's sex appeal!" is equally as cringe as when Wesley says to Tasha Yar, with all the subtlety of an after-school special, "why would anyone abuse drugs?"
Honestly people being able to watch that episode and not have their own skeleton escape their body out of embarrassment is what I was trying to explain earlier in the thread. You can make something absolutely terrible and there will still be people who hold it in fondness, but there will be a lot more such people around if the terrible thing you made was part of a beloved and culture-changing franchise like Star Trek.
I bet there are even people who like Code of Honor. I wouldn't want to meet any of them though.
"If you divide the whole world into just enemies and friends, you'll end up destroying everything" --Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind
Man, I've been rewatching TNG because of this thread, and I skipped seasons 1 and 2 (I have seen them more than all the others combined) and I have realized something. Those seasons REALLY were that bad. But starting in or around late S2 early S3 the quality of writing just absolutely skyrockets. I am literally finished Drumhead (S4E21) as I write this and I couldn't stand this episode as a kid when it aired. As a 40 year old man living in 2020, I was absolutely goddamn rivetted. Patrick Stewarts acting combined with this writing is just... fantastic.
I find it funny to hear the argument that "Disco is for a wider audience while LD is for fans versed in the minutia of Trekdom". My gf dislikes sci-fi and won't sit down for an episode of Disco, but loves LD and watched the entire show with me. And I know I'm not the only one in this situation.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
I definitely laughed at this joke both during the show and just now while rewatching it. But I still love all the ship porn with beautiful swelling orchestrals in the background and was one of the tiny few who didn't think that that scene in The Motion Picture was too long. Give me 2hrs of that shit and I'd watch it, especially if James Horner were writing the score.
Yeah that scene is hilarious but ALSO kind of a love letter to the scenes its parodying, it's not mean spirited at all.
Billy Campbell saying the line "now that's sex appeal!" is equally as cringe as when Wesley says to Tasha Yar, with all the subtlety of an after-school special, "why would anyone abuse drugs?"
Honestly people being able to watch that episode and not have their own skeleton escape their body out of embarrassment is what I was trying to explain earlier in the thread. You can make something absolutely terrible and there will still be people who hold it in fondness, but there will be a lot more such people around if the terrible thing you made was part of a beloved and culture-changing franchise like Star Trek.
I bet there are even people who like Code of Honor. I wouldn't want to meet any of them though.
The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!
The Ent-D has literally flown to other galaxies and realities and encountered entities outside our plane of existence. After all that, seeing Picard have to deal with petty bureaucracy and skeptical newscasters or people complaining that he has a nice vineyard while they have to live out of a trailer or whatever just feels wildly anachronistic and obtuse. Like the showrunners wanted to subvert TNG's optimistic premise without taking into account the sheer scope of what the show has actually explored. It honestly feels more like a Q episode where we see how Picard's life could've turned out if X rather than a followup to TNG itself.
Its harder to get around that when its an event which transformed Picard from a decorated admiral into a retired wine maker for 20 years. Bureaucracy proved to be the one villain that beat Picard.
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Gates really sells that moment, too.
Schisms is another great horror themed episode. It's really great re-watching that with surround sound, the clicking is really creepy.
I was literally midway through writing a reply about this episode and then I scrolled down and noticed you'd beat me to it.
The episode doesn't quite work because I think the Troi stuff ends up being too silly. But the entire atmosphere of the episode is fantastic. It's got a great vibe going on. They are stuck, they don't know why and no one can dream and it's making them all slowly go nuts. It's one of the episodes that I think makes space feel really dangerous and isolating. They are all alone out there.
Honestly the Star Trek bits, while excellent and obviously done with love, are almost superfluous to Lower Decks; as a zany cartoon it stands on its own merits, and the pornographic lens-flare filled shots of the Cerritos are just sauce.
many "character walks down hallway with tense music scenes" in TNG, DS9, or hell even Voyager, have more tension and narrative weight than most fight scenes in Disco
the fight scenes and space scenes are all well done but I don't really feel weight in many of them, especially because of their propensity to have scenes with a thousand different things onscreen at once
Patrick Stewart talked about it many times. I think it's bananas to compare the EU to the Federation even though Brexit was bad, but I'm a commie leftist so
Both (especially DS9) had some great action scenes, though. Discovery has a problem with action scenes, nothing seems to have any weight.
Look at Battle of the Binary Stars (shooting starts at about 1:30). USS Shenzou takes more than 30 hits (even at half speed and putting paper over the rest of the fleet so I didn't get distracted by the dozens of other shots I couldn't keep count) in the opening volley, and the bridge hasn't even shown any tension when they cut back to it, they're only NOW calling battle stations. There's several seconds of further exchange before they have a contained hull breach and a console explosion, but the guy's ok and makes it to sickbay on his feet. We even hear more hits and explosions without any reaction or acknowledgement. We see the T'plana Hath, shields down and adrift, supposedly in mortal peril, just cloaked in explosions and sponging bullets like a mob in a poorly balanced looter shooter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKeZ4eqYQ5I
And this battle is probably one of the least offenders in this way, the battle at the end of S2 was far more ridiculous in every way mentioned and a few more to boot.
Now, Sacrifice of Angels (foreplay stops and the actual fleet-on-fleet action starts at around 1:30 as well)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs8eQ3jTwfk
Despite being much larger fleets, in the opening exchange we see only seven initial shots fired by the Dominion, destroying a couple small ships and severely damaging a Miranda, followed by only four shots from two Federation ships putting a Galor adrift. We see the Defiant take only one direct hit before going back to the bridge and the place is a madhouse - smoke and exploding consoles, shaky camera, stuntmen jumping around like ragdolls.
Discovery battles don't seem to have any weight. Ships line up and throw buckets of popcorn at each other to minimal effect and usually one side wins because of circumstances not directly related to the battle, like a brand new ship showing up and ramming the admiral's ship or the Red Angel opening the time portal.
DS9's battles (and TNG, Voyager, Enterprise, and TOS all for that matter, but DS9 has a monopoly on the big fleet battles for fair direct comparison) don't involve the massive exchange of ordinance, even the USS Guns-on-an-Engine wasn't just spraying fire downrange, and when it lit up its guns, somebody's day was about to get ruined. And it's not an era thing, because like I said, both Enterprise and TOS were this way, and they bracket Discovery in the timeline.
Even Nemesis, for all its faults, had a great battle. Here, two ships of the line built to sponge damage and anchor a fleet, are slowly grinding each other to dust, and in the entire battle fewer shots are fired than in the first few seconds of Battle of the Binary Stars, but by the end all the Enterprise can do is sluggishly ram the Scimitar, and all the Scimitar can do is watch and start replicating clean pants.
I'd really like to see an episode of Lower Decks where they actually have to sit down and have a full 10 minute conversation in the briefing room about how to solve a crazy engineering problem or whatever, while Mariner is losing her mind in the background.
"I saw a boob! fire all torpedoes!"
I mean the show is VERY aware of the tropes, so it might happen..
Edit:
Lower Decks 1x09 Spoiler, a really great joke from the episode
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTTXy4y1jn4
That is a good point, Trek space battles have generally not been super cinematic, or fast paced, but what they have been is weighty - every weapon strike seems to have an impact of some sort
For me, my favorite is Undiscovered Country
The Klingon warbird is a tiny ship, but its invisible, and its hurting two gigantic ships of the line and hurting them bad with every single strike
They actually had them on the ground, too.
Photon torpedoes have a max yield of around 50 Megatons, and the phasers are, in canon, able to melt whole planetary continents. A hit should be meaty and dangerous, not gnats zipping around a giant.
Since most people I know, even people that watch star trek, have not watched The Motion Picture, it's really hard to explain how good of a joke this is or why I laughed so hard at it.
True, I just didn't notice them on the schematic before, because it went by so fast
Ground transportation is very important for second contact missions.
My favorite bit: Because photon torpedoes weren't sufficiently destructive, quantum torpedoes use a photon torpedo warhead to destroy a small piece of the universe and explosively release its vacuum energy. That's some Fall of Adam level shit.
the music is really really really what makes the joke good
but damn is that music a cocktease, i want that real theme!
Or the chroniton torpedos that bypass shields by being outside the linear flow of time, only for the finally adapted shields being able to hold them off after a lot of trial and error..
The myriad number of hits in Disco always felt so extremely silly to me.
I haven't tried to count but I'm pretty sure Discovery takes more fire from equiv-tech weapons in S2 than the Borg Cube did when up against the entire Federation fleet in First Contact
Episode 10 spoiler
the writers did a good job of not pressing on the gas in that regard until the last episode
When people think of the really famous action sequences in Star Trek, none of them are really sold on flashy visuals imo. Wrath of Khan is, as someone correctly pointed out earlier, a bunch of early-90s teenagers trying to masturbate to scrambled cable porn on a friday night combined with shots of models next to a fog machine. Undiscovered Country is a lot of shots of a ship decloaking and firing and then a lot of shots of models getting holes shot through them.
Which is to say that the most memorable fights in Star Trek imo have almost always been anchored on good editing and storytelling rather then flashy visuals and lots of wooshing ships and cgi explosions. Some of the fights from the Abrams Star Trek films are goddamn gorgeous honestly but they are also just so forgettable because there's no weight to any of it in terms of characters or story.
There's definitely a certain slow ponderous feel to a lot of Star Trek ship battles but I think more then anything they've just always succeeded when they do succeed because we care and because there's a narrative arc you can feel to the whole affair and it gets around the fact that there was rarely a lot of face paced whoosy action going on.
I'm biased, of course, but I think the happy medium is somewhere in the vicinity of that big setpiece in "Sacrifice of Angels".
I definitely laughed at this joke both during the show and just now while rewatching it. But I still love all the ship porn with beautiful swelling orchestrals in the background and was one of the tiny few who didn't think that that scene in The Motion Picture was too long. Give me 2hrs of that shit and I'd watch it, especially if James Horner were writing the score.
I admit I'll always feel a strange nostalgia for the dated camp and silliness of the S1-2 episodes, many of which were just aping the "morality plays" of the TOS era. I think they're part of what made TNG so widely appealing while still being incredibly brilliant at times. The writers were willing to try just about everything from parables to political drama to going full-on Twilight Zone when they really wanted to explore a spooky sci-fi premise. That's why a show like Picard rings somewhat hollow to me, it's basically taking all that goofy history and squeezing out just one action sci-fi arc that can never really deviate from its theme on an episode by episode basis. It tries to present us with consequences that Picard has to face for his actions but just for one event in his life that honestly shouldn't even rank among the top 10 in his career.
The Ent-D has literally flown to other galaxies and realities and encountered entities outside our plane of existence. After all that, seeing Picard have to deal with petty bureaucracy and skeptical newscasters or people complaining that he has a nice vineyard while they have to live out of a trailer or whatever just feels wildly anachronistic and obtuse. Like the showrunners wanted to subvert TNG's optimistic premise without taking into account the sheer scope of what the show has actually explored. It honestly feels more like a Q episode where we see how Picard's life could've turned out if X rather than a followup to TNG itself.
Its harder to get around that when its an event which transformed Picard from a decorated admiral into a retired wine maker for 20 years. Bureaucracy proved to be the one villain that beat Picard.
Honestly people being able to watch that episode and not have their own skeleton escape their body out of embarrassment is what I was trying to explain earlier in the thread. You can make something absolutely terrible and there will still be people who hold it in fondness, but there will be a lot more such people around if the terrible thing you made was part of a beloved and culture-changing franchise like Star Trek.
I bet there are even people who like Code of Honor. I wouldn't want to meet any of them though.
Yeah that scene is hilarious but ALSO kind of a love letter to the scenes its parodying, it's not mean spirited at all.
The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!
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and he was told to never give up his ship...