Comment Stream

Re: DS9 S6: Valiant

This episode makes me cringe so hard. From the hammed up awful acting of actors playing Watters, Shepard and especially Peldon, to the directorial choices of Vejar such as showing the console screens PROJECTING on to the cadet's faces (wtf) - I felt bad for all involved.
Every once in a while when I do a series rewatch, I approach this one thinking "ok it can't be THAT bad". Mistake.
Then I promise myself I'll never watch it again.

Re: TOS S1: A Taste of Armageddon

@Richard: "I find it hard to believe that people would voluntary walk into a disintegration chamber.... I would imagine that self-preservation is a pretty strong instinct throughout the galaxy."

++++

The episode addresses this point.

Mea--the hostess--says she has no greater wish to die than Kirk or anybody else, but that to her it's preferable to the alternative.

In war, there isn't just death.....there is pain, and suffering, and mutilation, and torture.

Take, for example, the conflict in Syria. It isn't just the deaths from the bombs being dropped on people. Thousands more beyond just the dead are injured, crippled, left bleeding in the streets. Their wounds can become infected, limbs lost. Among the survivors, homes and schools are destroyed. Basic services disrupted, water systems damaged and non-functional. Supply lines are cut, there are food shortages and hunger. Disease runs rampant with no functional medical facilities to treat it. Soldiers/Rebels tend to be fairly barbaric in personal combat, often taking prisoners, torturing enemies, raping civilians.

War is not sanitary. War creates secondary and exponential unintended suffering far beyond deaths from the primary attack.

And even in killing, not all deaths are brought about the same. Most combat deaths are not instantaneous and painless like a disintegration chamber. People spend minutes or hours bleeding out from bullet wounds or shrapnel. Choking to death on nerve agents. Drowning in the ocean after a sub or battleship is sunk. Having their flesh burned off their bones by bombs. Spending several days agonizingly bleeding to death in your home next to your family under 500 pounds of rubble.

As Spock says, there is a certain logic to a war ravaged civilization wanting to do away with all of those secondary harms. None of the Eminians *want* to die, but given the choice between a horrifically painful death where your face and limbs are blown off and you bleed out in some muddy ditch or a clean instant painless death where you merely step into a "disintegration chamber"......one can see the appeal.

Re: TNG S4: Redemption, Part I

>Jammer: "I for one would like to know what it is about the Klingon High Council that continues to see a point in following a family name when it obviously can do nothing but lead the Empire to ruin."

++++

The trappings of individual wealth and power are galactic constants.

Duras' supporters wouldn't see it as ruin. They would see a Duras chancellorship (whether by Council vote or by violent coup) as the best means for increasing their own wealth and power enhanced. Like many aristocrats, those aligned with Duras would view their own gains of power as being "for the good of the Empire."

If Duras wins the Civil War, his supporters will enjoy even greater influence and control over those who were defeated. And the more battles Duras wins, the more other houses will see the futility of standing against Duras and will be tempted to switch sides and join the "winning" faction in order to survive and avoid their own ruin.

I don't think the forces that lead to Duras' power within the Empire is a difficult concept to understand. To the contrary, it is something of a natural byproduct of aristocratic rule. Wealth and power and influence are all intertwined. Power inevitably consolidates among a few individuals or groups who place their own wealth/power ahead of the good of the rest of society, and the whole body becomes a corrupt organization that pays just enough lip service to "the good of the Empire" to cover their own larger aims of consolidating wealth and power.

Klingon culture is a blatantly aristocratic caste-based society. Some earlier ancestor of the Duras family likely managed to acquire control over a critical planet, or set of resources, then used that power to obtain additional power. Passed down through the generations, that control led to more power. Duras' family power earned them the loyalty of subjects and legions of warriors, which beget access to superior battleships and weapons technology, which beget exclusive access and control over additional resources, which attracted partnerships with several other Houses who saw that their own wealth and prestige could be enhanced by allying with the House of Duras, which beget more of all of the above.

Re: ORV S1: Majority Rule

Possible explanation for the cloaking device.....it cloaks the ship visually, but not to any sensors.

So maybe you can use a cloaking device to project visible light from behind the ship to the front, thus making it appear invisible to the naked eye.....but any of the other countless devices that can make device that can scan for metal, or scan for life signs, or whatever a warp core is made of would still be easily spotted by any advanced civilization.

Which is also in keeping with some of the Star Trek stories over the years. Cloaked ships tended to have very high energy signatures. Those who knew what they were looking for and how to find it (radiation surge, plasma leak, a tachyon detection grid) could spot a cloaked ship.

In this universe--unlike the superpower that the ST Federation is portrayed as--the human-centric Union is considered to be a technologically pedestrian species in comparison to the Krill and several others. So their cloaking technology might be good enough to fool the cameras and radar of a primitive, barely space-faring world, but it makes sense it would be useless against the scanners of the other adversaries who can easily detect the signature radiation from a warp core regardless of whether or not someone see it just by looking out their window.

Re: 'Discovery' is here; should you pay for CBS All Access to watch it?

Taking an iconic story focused on the betterment of humanity through a set of optimistic moral ideals, set in a post-scarcity society which no longer values the acquisition of wealth.....and then putting that story behind a paywall that requires people spend $6/month to even get access to it in the hopes that the popularity of the story drives up subscription rates.....is definitely solid Ferengi move.

Well played, Grand Nagus Moonves.

:)

Re: Star Trek Into Darkness

I remember a few years back when the first ST reboot film came out, I read an interview Abrams gave talking about the time travel plot line wiping clean all the past histories of the crew and the necessity for it.

He said something to the effect of, while Star Trek has a deep and rich history to draw from, sometimes the weight of that history can act like a shackle ball & chain for writers, weighing you down from telling new and interesting stories because you have to carefully fit every part of your story into all the existing pieces.

I know Jammer's made that point before. After 40+ years, 5 series, 10 feature films, nearly 1,000 hours of stories between the mediums....Star Trek did kind of burn out under it's weight. A lot of the stories had been done before. A lot of the galactic real estate has already been covered. Voyager had to go to the other end of the galaxy to find any real estate to work with. Everywhere Enterprise went, it had to be careful not to step on and break any of the countless hours of TV, movies, and expanded universe stuff to come.

As terrified as I was of a JJ Abrams-brand Star Trek reboot and what I saw in the trailers leading up to the release, when I read those remarks from him, I begrudgingly accepted them. He was right, to an extent. You can't introduce a brand new Star Trek crew for a couple movies. TOS-Kirk Trek was the best candidate for a CGI reboot, and while I believe they could've still done a new movie with Kirk & Co. within the existing universe, I could concede that it would be hard to squeeze in a new meaningful entry between 3 years of TV and 6-7 feature films, up to Kirk's death. Abrams had a point....the time travel device cleaned the slate for new fresh movie ideas to come for.

So even if I didn't like it, the first reboot did it's job adequately enough, the crew was pretty well done, and the movie wasn't as bad as I feared it could've been. Abrams did what he felt he needed to do, connected the two universes while preserving the old one, and cleared himself the space he needed to boldly go forth and tell new stories where no Trek had gone before. It at least piqued my interest.

So what did Abrams do with all his hard-fought cinematic space and freedom? Ripped off Wrath of Khan. Badly. Word for word, in some cases. Even Melania Trump thought it was too blatant (:P)

Seriously though.....WTF?!

I have a bunch of other quibbles that are mostly just your standard plot hole and scientific impossibility sci-fi gripes, which many folks have already covered.

But it pains me to no end that they went to all that trouble to wash away the old Trek universe (to the disgruntlement of many existing Trek fans) and then just went: "Okay, new story ideas now, people, new stories. We've got a new film to create, what are we going to do? Any new ideas? Anybody? Anybody at all? So, we've got nothing, huh?!" "Well, we could just do Wrath of Khan again. I hear Trek fans liked that movie" "Brilliant! Alright, lunch!"

I haven't watched any of the trailers for ST: Beyond (I refuse to on principle) but I'm going to go out on a (I think pretty sturdy) limb here and just assume that the Enterprise gets destroyed at some point in ST:B (presumably by self-destruct after the villain army tries to take it over). And I'm just calling it now, ST Reboot:4 involves time travel that takes the crew back to 20th/21st century Earth (toss-up on whether they just go present-day, 1980's flashback, or possibly full on 1960's retro).

+++++

One major plot line issue though.....I know it's a reboot, and in this new timeline everything is bigger, more militarized, darker, and everything has changed.....but Khan Noonien Singh wasn't supposed circa-21st century Steve Rogers minus the spandex and vibranium shield. Yeah, he had a genetically enhanced brilliant intellect, and he had more strength than Jose Canseco & Mark McGwire's love child.....but Khan was still ostensibly a human. Khan can't jump 30 feet straight up as if he were playing hopscotch. In the original Space Seed, Khan was an extremely strong opponent, but non-roided Kirk ultimately defeated Khan on his own in one-on-one hand-to-hand, combat thanks to a cheap lightweight 1960's PVC--errr, uhhh, I mean, a totally solid hard spaceship pipe (probably made of vibranium, or something) and cracking him in the back with it.

Seriously, go re-watch the Spock-Khan battle scene in STID (or not), and then watch the end Kirk-Khan battle scene from Space Seed on YouTube. That's the same guy Kirk fought and won against? I know we're trying to modernize some of the old special effects a bit, and yeah, those old TOS scenes could be quite cheesy at times.....but Space Seed looked much more like something based in reality.

Re: DS9 S6: The Sound of Her Voice

The worst part is, some of the problematic details of this episode could have been worked out with just a little extra thought. Shorten the Defiant's trip to 3 days (eliminates the ridiculous 2 week absence of the Commander of the 9th Fleet in the middle of a war to rescue one escape pod), and have the time distortion be like a month. A month would be far enough into the past for the mission to be futile from the beginning, but not so far into the past that the entire plot requires the viewer to suspend belief that the Defiant crew never mentioned the date or even bothered to look up her ship's records.

Re: DS9 S3: Past Tense, Part I

I have mixed feelings about this episode.

On the one hand I like the message that it tries to convey, which is the message that's really at the heart of the entire Star Trek franchise....it gets better.

Star Trek itself is an admittedly rose-colored utopian view of what humanity can achieve. Unfortunately, for all its utopian ideology spread out over almost 50 years, Star Trek is deafeningly silent on the particular specifics of how we get from here to there.

One of the most interesting and yet ultimately useless exchanges in this episode is that conversation between Sisko and Bashir as they walk through the Sanctuary. Bashir asks how they could let things get this bad and Sisko says he doesn't know. But the answer is obvious and repeated by other characters throughout....because there simply aren't enough resources to feed and house and medicate and employ everybody in society.

We've grappled with those problems for centuries. Right now, there is no viable economic solution to that. Arguably the biggest hurdle we face between getting from here to there over the next 300+ years is the economic front....and yet the economics of life in the Federation are the most underexplored facet of the entire Star Trek genre. They've explored virtually every obscure social, political, and scientific theory to date, and yet they have largely completely ignored explaining something as basic as how Sisko's dad operates a restaurant in a world of replicators and no profit motive.

I love that this episode begins to touch on some of those issues that bridge the gap between our current world and the ideological world of Star Trek, but in an episode where the primary villain is an economic system that is out of control, they basically punted on any discussion of how to actually address any of the very real economic problems. Give people a chance to work. Okay. Doing what? I have no job openings. I love Star Trek's idealistic message, but a message devoid of any practical application is useless.

Say what you will about the transporter "technobabble," but at least the writers put in some effort to logically explain how Sisko, Bashir, and Dax were transported into the past. That was a lot more effort than what they put into explaining how Earth overcomes the economic problems of the 21st century. The existence of the Sanctuaries and the actions necessary to eliminate them are a whole hell of a lot more complex than just some more "caring" and not "giving up."

Re: DS9 S3: Past Tense, Part I

@Latex Zebra: "The thing that I don't get is how a riot influence so much in the future. Surely World War III would have been the biggest game changer." - Probably true. But while WWII was the biggest game-changer of the 20th century, there were still plenty of political, economic, and social turning points in the decades prior to Pearl Harbor that heavily influenced how we went into that war and how we came out of it. If the Sanctuary problem wasn't addressed when it was and the economic divide among the classes grew worse and worse to the point where change became significantly harder to achieve (with potential ramifications for which factions "win" WWIII), that could have had significant consequences. Imagine how different today's world would look if the US that didn't have the economic or manufacturing strength to win either WWI or WWII. The economic impacts of the Gilded Age and Great Depression, as well as the social impacts of Reconstruction and the Progressive movement are still with us a century later.


@Yanks: "This is the standard Rich guy = bad, blah, blah…...If this episode "preaches" anything, it's that the government can't be the solution." - I disagree.

First, this isn't about "Rich Guy = Bad." It's about a lack of empathy and human compassion for those in lower classes. The bad guys aren't bad because they are wealthy, they are "bad" because they've stopped caring about other people to the degree that millions of people are locked up in a de facto prison. Some are locked up for the "crime" of being unable to obtain adequate care for their mental illnesses, and that lack of empathy extends in this episode to people who lose their jobs and are unable to support themselves (or in our current vernacular, the "moochers"). It's the same reason the Ferengi are so grotesquely portrayed. The problem with the Ferengi is not their wealth, it's their excessive unconscionable pursuit of wealth to the exclusion of any compassion or consideration for the well being of anybody but themselves.

Second, Star Trek IS big government. Star Trek's "solution" to the ills of the 20th & 21st centuries is a one-world government, later superceded by a larger Federation government that encompasses roughly 10% of the entire galaxy. Starfleet itself (the organization shown in every iteration of Star Trek) is the military wing of that government. So you'll be hard-pressed to argue that Star Trek is making a case that government is "never the solution," when the government of Star Trek is basically omnipresent to the viewer. Not every government solution IS the answer, but good government solutions CAN be the answer. And the problem isn't really government.....it's power. Removing government power from a situation like poverty doesn't automatically solve a problem. All it does is create a vacuum where someone else with power will step in. In our current climate, that power vacuum will likely be filled by a small group of extremely wealthy and powerful people acting on their own accord, accountable to nobody but themselves. If we're lucky, the elite oligarchs who take control of our society in the absence of strong government will be benevolent. But if they aren't? That's what democratic govt is supposed to do. We put the responsibility of solving society's ills in the hands of a democratically elected Congress, ultimately accountable to the people. If you remove that responsibility of government, the problem of homelessness doesn't go away.....it just shifts to a small group of people like Bill Gates, or Elon Musk, or the Koch brothers, or the Waltons, or Rupert Murdoch who can handle the situation however they personally choose, accountable to nobody but their own whims. And if they choose to exercise their power in a way that benefits them to the detriment of society, so be it.

Re: DS9 S3: The Abandoned

Data was (or at least was argued to be) a sentient being, even though he is little more than a byproduct of his own programming.

In TNG's "Measure of a Man," Picard argues that sentience requires merely intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. It's unassailably clear that the Jem Hadar boy possesses all these things. That he chooses to to become a warrior and rejoin his people is no different from a Klingon orphan who grows up and chooses to embrace his Klingon heritage. There may be some troubling moral feelings about letting the child returning to the people who genetically manipulated him and forced him to be addicted to drugs as a way of controlling him, but in this episode, he did little but attempt to defend himself when faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life being a lab experiment.

This also differs from the situation with the Borg Hugh who, although maybe not directly personally responsible for the attacks on the Federation, was to an extent a soldier in an army that the Federation was in an open war against.

To this point in DS9, the Federation was not yet at war with the Dominion or Jem Hadar. There were some battles and skirmishes, but no war. To take a clearly sentient orphan boy who had yet committed no crime and sentence him to a lifetime as a prisoner to be scientifically experimented on simply because he belonged to a race of people that the Federation feared additional conflicts with would have been.....well, inhuman.

By that logic, when Worf was a small boy, the Federation should have imprisoned him in a laboratory and performed all kind of genetic experiments on him, simply because he was a member of a race of warriors whom the Federation had previously fought with. Turning the Jem Hadar boy into a lab rat would have been no different than turning baby Worf into a lab rat. The JH's genetic engineering and drug addiction are irrelevant.

Re: DS9 S2: The Jem'Hadar

A few points:

-In addition to the Odyssey being a Galaxy-class starship like the Enterprise, it was not lost on me that Captain Keogh looked an awful lot like Captain Picard.....just to add to the visceral reaction of seeing the ship kamikazed in the end.

-Trying to arrest and detain the female Vorta the moment Sisko learned something was up was the prudent thing to do. Sisko is a Starfleet officer, which means he probably thinks more like a security or military officer than a spy. He was more eager to eliminate the threat than to try to draw it out to see what could come from it, especially since it seemed pretty evident that both Sisko and Starfleet had no real idea yet of the depth of the threat the Dominion posed. Besides, in Sisko's view, arresting her and then interrogating her WOULD have given them a decent amount of information.

-Where did the Vorta beam to? True, they never answered that question. But after all the episodes of all the years where Starfleet personnel escaped by transporting onto some ship that was hidden in some sensor blind spot, or using planetary interference to sheild from sensors, or what have you, it's probably fair to assume something similar.

-To answer why you'd send a starship after 4 people, the answer is simply it was a rescue mission. How many times was the Enterprise (TOS or TNG) put in peril in an attempt to rescue just one or a handful of the bridge officers?

-It's possible only a few of the Vorta were genetically engineered with that telekinetic ability.

-Sisko wasn't spineless in telling Quark/Nog it was a father-son trip, he was spineless (so to speak) in telling that to Jake. Ben wanted a father-son trip, Jake wanted to bring his friend along. Dad protested, Jake begged, Dad gave in. It's a fairly classic parenting dilemma. Father wants to spend time with son, growing son prefers the company of his friend over his dad. Throw in the bit about a school science project, and Dad felt guilty about both putting his own desire for time with his son ahead of his son's wishes to spend time with his friend and possibly interfering with a school project. He doesn't give into Nog, he gives into his own son's preference for independence and what he feels is right as far as facilitating learning for the both. He objects to Quark, but once he allows Nog on board, he knows better than to forbid Nog's guardian to go along.

Re: DS9 S2: Tribunal

Agree with others about the hackneyed ending. How is a random judge supposed to personally know about a surgically altered spy? Even leaving the story the same, it would have been enough to just call up a high-level Cardassian official and threaten to publicize the identity of the Cardassian spy if they don't let him go. Or to threaten war.

And I, too, didn't understand why they didn't make a bigger deal of the fact that O'Brien was wrongfully arrested (kidnapped in Federation space!) and then sentenced to death under false charges.

The parallel to the Sandiford case is incomplete. I do agree that drug smuggling charges are not worthy of execution (frankly, I'm generally against the death penalty in most cases, even involving murder). But regardless of my personal stance on the death penalty, the particulars of that incident bear little resemblance to the DS9 episode beyond a foreign government issuing a capital punishment sentence.

Sandiford was arrested in Indonesia for a crime she admitted to in fact, albeit under extenuating cricumstances. Regardless of her reasons for the crime, she was smuggling drugs, and she was arrested on Indonesian soil.

For the Sandiford incident to match the DS9 episode, Indonesian government forces would have needed to invade a British territory, arrest Sandiford on British territorial soil, remove her without any extradition hearing, then convict her of a crime in their courts based on physical evidence of drugs that the British government knows was planted in her bag by an Indonesian spy for the express purposes of discrediting the British government. If THAT were the case, I'm pretty sure the Brits would have said something.

Re: DS9 S2: The Wire

@Asian James - "Interestingly enough, my girlfriend (who is watching DS9 for the first time) disagrees. She thought it was pointless since it didn't progress the story at all. The frustration came about when she was left with not having learned anything about Garak. I told her that she learned more than she thinks..."

You're right. I don't remember how I felt when I first watched this episode in its original airing 20 years ago, but going back and watching them all now, this episode is concrete evidence to me of something that none of the other Star Trek series did particularly well.....establishing back story for use in later arcs.

Most Star Trek episodes throughout the entire franchise provide little to no foreshadowing. Sure, later episodes might draw upon earlier ones, and one early season plot might lead to a series of events later in that same season, but in general this kind of long-arching development that I loved about DS9 and am appreciating even more now. Other Trek iterations paint one picture in an episode, then later episodes would build on that picture and maybe add in some minor details. DS9 paints the details, then fills in the picture later. It just requires some patience and delayed gratification to get the rest filled in.

I know I'm responding to your post 2 years after the fact, so I can only presume the two of you finished watching the series by now (if you're still even together-LOL). But this episode was arguably one of the best at providing the outer details, while leaving the rest of the picture to be filled in later (or at least more of the picture, since you never see the whole thing). The biggest question I have is whether the writers had a set backstory for Garak that they purposefully intended to flesh out over time, or if this episode was done as a way to leave them some creative wiggle room that they could more easily play with in the future. Either way, it was brilliantly done.

The exchange between Bashir and Garak identifies this beautifully, and provides an awesome writer's wink at people like your girlfriend who feel they didn't learn anything about Garak. That exchange might as well have gone....

VIEWER: The story was pointless. We didn't learn anything truthful about Garak.
DS9 WRITERS: My dear Viewer, everything in that episode about Garak was true.
VIEWER: Even the lies?
DS9 WRITERS: *Especially* the lies!

And that is the truth. The actual truth is only a matter of perspective (a recurring theme itself throughout the series). What matters in this episode are the details, which Garak keeps imploring Bashir (and us!) to pay attention to.....

You learn that he DID work for the Obsidian Order. You see the first signs of his relationship with Tain, and Tain's with Garak. You see that he wasn't just a spy, but a very important and powerfully connected one.

And while you can't actually fully believe what Garak says, given Garak's penchant for fabricating lies out of the truth (including his explicit statement that his lies ARE the truth) and given the number of actions he takes throughout the series *against* the Cardassian Empire, and his general lack of any animosity and even some empathy for the Bajoran people, I think one can reasonably infer that his "lies" about his actions on Bajor in this episode (especially since all 3 of his own stated reasons for exile involve some variation of NOT killing Bajoran resistance fighters when he had the chance) probably bore some measure of truth to them. The specific reason for his exile is trivial. It's probably enough to assume that he simply engaged in some compassionate behavior during the Occupation in violation of a brutal directive from the Order (likely something involving either innocent civilians or children), and that his disobedient act in betrayal of his duty was enough to get him exiled. As Tain alludes to in this episode, if he *really* wanted Garak killed, it probably would have been done....which also offers a foreshadow on Tain's "fondness" for Garak.