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Or how like every third episode is a SPECIAL EPISODE!! including some random filler poo poo where the B plot is Chakotay mastering the intricacies of making a milkshake with help from spirit guides e: bad snipe so; I watched “Masks” for the first time in a long while last night and I actually think that episode’s reputation for incoherence is completely undeserved. For a collision of stock Trek plots (“[crew member] is all hosed up and weird this week!” + “an inscrutable alien probe is messing with us”) this is a really nice show. The idea of the ship being transfigured into a mythic landscape is a rich premise that the show almost doesn’t have enough time to confront. I can’t believe they thought this idea was worth one episode while “Gambit” or “Descent” was worth two. In the end once the characters figure out what’s going on the plot just kind of evaporates spontaneously. Like “Genesis” (and many many Voyager episodes) it’s kind of spoiled by this lame reset button ending. But while it’s going on it’s quite awesome, with the ship configuring itself into a moodily lit Hidden Temple looking thing, snakes on a photon torpedo, and Spiner playing a whole bunch of roles. I enjoy him best at the start when he is steadily losing his mind to the archive’s signal — he does a good job selling Data’s confusion and distress without going over the top — and as the imperious solar goddess Masaka. It’s flawed no doubt, but not hard to understand at all. I think somewhere between this and Dramatis Personae was an absolute 10/10 episode that never got out. skasion fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 11:43
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I like it, just because I like any episode with Picard geeking out over archeology, and the alien myths feel enough like a real mythology that it doesn't seem like it's just random stuff happening arbitrarily.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:00
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My all-time favorite misleading promo was for Enterprise's "Cogenitor". They extracted the handful of jokey bits about humans not understanding the culture/sexual practices of the 3-gender species, and made it look like a drat Rob Schneider movie.
Sir Lemming fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 13:16
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Sir Lemming posted:My all-time favorite misleading promo was for Enterprise's "Cogenitor". They extracted the handful of jokey bits about humans not understanding the culture/sexual practices of the 3-gender species, and made it look like a drat Rob Schneider movie. Oh man I'd love to see this promo.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:19
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skasion posted:Or how like every third episode is a SPECIAL EPISODE!! including some random filler poo poo where the B plot is Chakotay mastering the intricacies of making a milkshake with help from spirit guides I adore Masks - it’s legitimately top 10-15ish TNG for me. I think what’s really holding it back is some budget constraints and the hilariously quick wrap-up at the end because they hit the 45 minute mark and needed the episode to end. Give that show a bit more money and make it a two-parter, and you have yourself some great high concept, borderline insane science fiction.
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Aug 7, 2018 13:19
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Tom Guycot posted:Oh man I'd love to see this promo. Found it  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNYOdu59gew ROB SCHNEIDER IS... ...EMBROILED IN A LIFE-OR-DEATH ETHICAL DILEMMA ABOUT HOW OUR NOTIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS APPLY WHEN MEETING AN ALIEN SPECIES FOR THE FIRST TIME
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Aug 7, 2018 13:23
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Sir Lemming posted:Found it I cannot read anything starting with "Rob Schneider is" without hearing it South Park-style in my head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxYA6duF-9E
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Aug 7, 2018 13:27
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HD DAD posted:I adore Masks - it’s legitimately top 10-15ish TNG for me. I think what’s really holding it back is some budget constraints and the hilariously quick wrap-up at the end because they hit the 45 minute mark and needed the episode to end. Yeah I don’t know about top 10. it kind of bothers me that Picard solves everything by going “idk I’ll wing it and hope we don’t all die, I guess”. A number of elements in this episode seem to be leaning towards some kind of “intuition > objectivity” theme that the show never really capitalized on. But I’ve read people who rate this as one of the worst or even the worst episode of TNG and that’s bugfuck insane to me. I was definitely thinking that with modern virtual sets they could have gone absolutely apeshit on the transformation. They make do pretty well though. e: I guess what really bugs me about the extremely abrupt ending is that it makes the episode flop thematically. What, this was all part of Data’s quest to become more human? Really? Data didn’t do this intentionally, the dude was a passive receptacle for the archive’s contents. The people of the archive aren’t human and probably weren’t even “real” people in any sense. To top it all off, Data already has a whole bunch of people inside him because Soong fed him all the Omicron Theta colonists’ personal data, as per “Silicon Avatar”. To me, this story as written has nothing to do with Data’s character. It should be all about Picard investigating the myth that the story is about. Why did these people fear and hate their sun-god so much that they made a gigantic spacefaring library whose sole purpose is to reveal that fear and hate to others? “Sun out of control” and “sun and moon are a couple pursuing each other” are bona fide mythic themes, but the show just uses them without commenting on why they were used or what it means to the characters that they are used. skasion fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 13:30
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Sir Lemming posted:Found it I loving lost it at a whole new meaning to close encounter of the third kind.
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Aug 7, 2018 14:01
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Gonz posted:Fleet Admiral Picard but he’s evil now because almost all Admirals are evil and murderous. Picard is an admiral but he's turned into Avery Bullock, Riker is his Stan Smith
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Aug 7, 2018 14:29
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Sir Lemming posted:Found it Hahah. Oh man, those old promos...
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Aug 7, 2018 14:35
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Riker got promoted to Admiral in the Titan book series recently. It was pretty sudden, but it was due to the Chief Admiral of Starfleet needing someone he knew he could trust close to him during a conspiracy involving a Bajoran becoming UFP President after his predecessor is assassinated.
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Aug 7, 2018 14:49
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FlamingLiberal posted:Riker got promoted to Admiral in the Titan book series recently. It was pretty sudden, but it was due to the Chief Admiral of Starfleet needing someone he knew he could trust close to him during a conspiracy involving a Bajoran becoming UFP President after his predecessor is assassinated. I blame the parasites.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:04
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Timby posted:With Voyager / Endgame, I just remember thinking it was such a hilarious cop-out that the big reveal was that the reason the Borg could get anywhere so quickly wasn't because they had transwarp drive, but they had a super-secret network of Space Tunnels. Also how ridiculous it was that they had a tunnel right to the heart of the Federation and yet could never be bothered to swing a few cubes in.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:09
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Also how ridiculous it was that they had a tunnel right to the heart of the Federation and yet could never be bothered to swing a few cubes in. If I were Borg, I'd just send cubes along like it's a tower defense game, just forcing the Federation to constantly advance their tech and tactics, and then just flood em with cubes
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Aug 7, 2018 15:24
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A wheelchair-bound friend of mine posted this article on facebook, about how science-fiction spaces typically are not handicapped-accessible: https://io9.gizmodo.com/staircases-in-space-why-are-places-in-science-fiction-1827966642?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=io9_facebook It made me think of that DS9 episode where they make the station wheelchair-accessible for Melora. I guess they just ripped out all the ramps and stuff once she left the station? Really inconsiderate of any future disabled visitors. At least the Enterprise-D was pretty accessible, unless the power went out and the only way between decks was ladders.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:40
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I mean, there really aren't many non-contrived reasons to need a wheelchair in space. The ability to lock poo poo off in case of a breach is far more important. It's like asking why submarines aren't accessible with the added benefit of "we should be able to fix that poo poo by then" Imagine being colorblind on the TOS enterprise. Good luck with the controls!
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Aug 7, 2018 15:50
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There are a lot of other issues that also go along with that episode. For example, that the Federation makes a huge point about how eugenics was bad, and the eugenics war was bad, and genetic tinkering is bad, and yet it is made very clear that for example inheritable physical disabilities no longer exist. Yet, obviously there are species that have advantages and disadvantages with respect to others, and diversity like that is OK, but not within a species apparently. So, for example, you could be a frail alien, and that is fine, but if real human will be adjusted or forbidden from existing.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:54
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Mountaineer posted:A wheelchair-bound friend of mine posted this article on facebook, about how science-fiction spaces typically are not handicapped-accessible: Anti-gravity chair. Bam, done.
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Aug 7, 2018 15:58
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I think for Melora and maybe other people confined to a chair(I don't personally know any) it was important for her to be responsible for her own locomotion, so using a gravity chair she controls with a joystick would feel unacceptable compared to manually piloting a chair with wheels, so long as she had the ability to do so
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Aug 7, 2018 16:03
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Pick posted:There are a lot of other issues that also go along with that episode. For example, that the Federation makes a huge point about how eugenics was bad, and the eugenics war was bad, and genetic tinkering is bad, and yet it is made very clear that for example inheritable physical disabilities no longer exist. Yet, obviously there are species that have advantages and disadvantages with respect to others, and diversity like that is OK, but not within a species apparently. So, for example, you could be a frail alien, and that is fine, but if real human will be adjusted or forbidden from existing. I mean, just corrective prosthetics like Geordi's or maybe a goddamn HOVERCHAIR will be possible in the 24th freaking century A.I. Borgland Corp posted:I think for Melora and maybe other people confined to a chair(I don't personally know any) it was important for her to be responsible for her own locomotion, so using a gravity chair she controls with a joystick would feel unacceptable compared to manually piloting a chair with wheels, so long as she had the ability to do so This is perfectly reasonable, but maybe not in every single imaginable place.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:03
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The only good thing about that episode is high quantities of the Klingon chef
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Aug 7, 2018 16:11
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Yeah they say Melora was only in the terrible chair because Cardassian gravity tech sucks and breaks Federation antigrav.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:23
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And they were originally going to have her in a hover chair but the effects cost too much or something so they just got a regular wheelchair instead.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:31
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Cythereal posted:Anti-gravity chair. Bam, done. A normal chair, and liberal use of the transporter.
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Aug 7, 2018 16:34
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Didn't that one admiral/diplomat in TNG have a hover chair?
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Aug 7, 2018 17:05
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McTimmy posted:Didn't that one admiral/diplomat in TNG have a hover chair? The admiral's "hover chair" in Too Short A Season was such a fiasco that I think someone got fired over it, and in any case it became a recurring gag/grimace in the props department; whenever a script called for a potentially complex prop, someone would ask "this isn't going to be another chair, is it?" If I remember right they managed to blow over $10,000 (in 1988 dollars, remember) on that drat thing.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:21
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Easy answer, make your person in the hovering chair so alien that CGI/puppets work for them. See Rigel in Farscape.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:25
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 I just wanted to say I love how much this ends up looking like a TNG post-credits opening.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:26
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bull3964 posted:Easy answer, make your person in the hovering chair so alien that CGI/puppets work for them. See Rigel in Farscape. A puppet would've been more convincing than that guy in old man makeup doing whatever he was trying to do, honestly
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Aug 7, 2018 17:30
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After The War posted:
Thursday, 8:00-9:00: Star Trek: TNG "Astroman Posted" Jeb! Repetition is trapped in a time loop and must craft the perfect shitpost in order to break free. The Bloop learns an important lesson about page snypes.
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Aug 7, 2018 17:35
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well i was posting in the DISCO thread and then
The Bloop fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Aug 7, 2018 |
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Aug 7, 2018 17:42
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:The admiral's "hover chair" in Too Short A Season was such a fiasco that I think someone got fired over it, and in any case it became a recurring gag/grimace in the props department; whenever a script called for a potentially complex prop, someone would ask "this isn't going to be another chair, is it?"
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Aug 7, 2018 17:46
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My favorite bad makeup is Siddigs gray hair in the stupid mind attack episode
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Aug 7, 2018 17:58
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Big Mean Jerk posted:Apparently they're giving the Klingons their hair back for Disco season 2, which should help hide a lot of the more extreme changes. Everything I've seen about Discovery season 2 can be summarized as "fans hated this so we're changing it"
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Aug 7, 2018 18:00
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Pick posted:My favorite bad makeup is Siddigs gray hair in the stupid mind attack episode
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Aug 7, 2018 18:02
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Aug 7, 2018 18:05
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FuturePastNow posted:Everything I've seen about Discovery season 2 can be summarized as "fans hated this so we're changing it" If only that had happened after Enterprise S1 instead of until S4.
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Aug 7, 2018 18:10
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FuturePastNow posted:Everything I've seen about Discovery season 2 can be summarized as "fans hated this so we're changing it" "We were always planning it this way. We didn't change anything"
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Aug 7, 2018 18:15
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FuturePastNow posted:Everything I've seen about Discovery season 2 can be summarized as "fans hated this so we're changing it" I almost feel bad for laughing at this poo poo because they really are caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand if they did nothing and keep on as they have been, the show would continue to be almost a parody (and there's still no guarantee they've moved beyond this, what with all the production shenanigans) on the other hand all this backtracking and "oh no really we'll make it like the Star Trek you know and love for realsies this time" feels even more desperate and pathetic than ENT's attempts to boost ratings from back in the day
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Aug 7, 2018 18:18
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