Comment Stream

Re: DS9 S1: Dax

Just a bit of trivia; I was a fan of Northern Exposure, and remembered Anne Haney, who played the arbiter in this episode, as having a similar guest role on that show. To quote directly from IMDB:

"Anne Haney plays Judge Percy, who hears arguments that Chris Stevens should not be extradited because he is not the same person as he was in the past. Also, in Dax (1993), Anne Haney plays a Bajoran arbiter presiding over Dax's extradition hearing and tasked to determine if Jadzia Dax and Curzon Dax are two different people."

Re: ORV S3: Shadow Realms

I was very disappointed with this episode. All the plot holes have been already mentioned. Apart from the scenes in the mess hall, I was struck by the absence of any crew on board other than the core main cast. It felt cheap, as well as puzzling.
However, I don't get the criticism for Anne Winters, I think she's really good. Her acting in the first episode was great.

Re: TNG S4: Future Imperfect

There are multiple comments here that ask "Who stays on one ship for 15 years?" that are a riot.

Uhhhh... this crew does. As in that's exactly what they did!

Re: TOS S1: Space Seed

I'm surprised with all these lengthy responses I haven't seen anyone state the obvious (maybe some folks are beating around the bush with the "people like this exist" comments):

Marla McGivers has a fetish!

She's a submissive whom the 23rd century has no place for and she knows it (I don't think this is actually realistic, I imagine Federation society would have found some healthy outlet for these people, but it's an interesting concept).

She falls in love with Khan so quickly because she's *already* been in love with him: he's what she's been waiting for her whole life. Khan is not just the man of her dreams: he's the only man for her in the entire galaxy, a mythical unicorn that by some miracle she's managed to stumble upon.

She's never actually been in this kind of relationship before and doesn't know how to do it in a healthy way, she has to learn it as she goes, and that includes how far exactly she's willing to go, and how far she isn't. It's pretty cool that Star Trek was exploring BDSM themes way back in the 60s.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

(I've been commenting here a LOT, I'm taking a break after this one, I promise!)

Both of Nicholas Meyer's Star Trek films are these meta deconstructions of different aspects of the TV show:

TWOK is about Kirk having to deal with long-term consequences now that his problems can't just be wrapped up and left behind in convenient weekly "episodes."

TUC is about the inevitable nasty implications of simple black-and-white, Good Guys and Bad Guys tropes of episodic genre television when you try to run them through the complexities of a real-life geopolitical event.

Meyer's very well-read (to the point where I can imagine him being kind of a snob, even) but I wonder whether this was all intentional or if it just sort of happened because that's where his interests lean.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

@Booming
All good. I think we all are more or less on the same page and just haven't found the-one-size-fits-all description of the concepts we're talking about. :)

Nicolas Meyer has said that his final conversation with Rodenberry just before he died was a heated argument over the film, something he deeply regrets. From what I understand this lead to a small compromise: the theatrical cut removed the scenes featuring Colonel West (his proposal of a starfleet military operation, and the reveal that he was the "Klingon" assassin in disguise) so that Starfleet would look less warmongering and corrupt (and by extension the conspiracy feels more Klingon-involved), and then Meyer got to have his preferred cut on the video release.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

@Silly
"The parallels with the Coke War were very clear when the movie was released"

Indeed, in particular I recognized the allusions to the Pepsi Peace Accords almost instantly!

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

On a positive note: how wonderful is it that Dr. McCoy is the *least* racist member of the crew here? He recognizes Gorkon's sincerity right away and wants to see it all work out. And even when he objects at the suggestion that Klingon culture will be annihilated, he insists that it's not true rather than getting defensive about how maybe their culture really ought to be annihilated. I get the feeling that for Bones racism is old hat, been-there-done-that, and he knows better than anyone that it's all BS. It's a really underappreciated way to sendoff his character.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Put another way, racism is wrong because for us humans here in our reality, it's a concept that is fundamentally not true. In fiction, though, you can make circumstances where it is true: it's not immoral to be prejudiced against the Borg collective, or the creatures from 'Aliens,' or any number of fantasy "races" consisting of demons or monsters who are by their nature malicious.

That's the way TOS treated the Klingons, and honestly that wouldn't even necessarily be that terrible of a thing except it *also* wanted the Klingons to be analogues for various modern real-life human peoples, usually Russians and "Orientals" (it would've helped immensely if the villainous Klingons were specifically a political group rather than an entire race/ species - Nazis rather than Germans - but alas...).

While I think deep down Kirk still knows better (which is the saddest part), you almost can't even blame Kirk's attitude when all his life the only redeemable thing Star Trek has shown him of the Klingons is the time they grudgingly apologized (for hunting him down for sport) and managed to behave themselves at a cocktail party to make up for it (again: for trying to kill him, out of boredom).

It's good that Rodenberry was committed to showing that the Klingons could be something more than barbarians, but he wanted to do so in a way that proved them inferior to the Federation/ Humanity (Star Trek's analogue for "the West"), which is, well, racist, and exactly the kind of framing that created the problem in the first place.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

"Let me ask you more directly. It is your view that if the Federation is portrayed as not racist and another state-like entity is portrayed as racist, and the Federation then helps that entity to overcome that racism, then that story is in itself always racist? "

The answer's no. The issue is that the Klingons were specifically invented to be a bad race and that Rodenberry insisted that they again be the bad guys in a story about how racism is bad. The trouble (and irony) with that seems lost on him.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

An allegory about human racism and why it's wrong doesn't work if the racism is true and justified. A story in which the enlightened people teach the bloodthirsty savages the error of their ways would have been a cringe-worthy earnest endorsement of white man's burden (not to mention sounds like a really tedious film to watch). The best you could probably hope for is one where the Klingons reform themselves independently of the Federation, but then you've rendered the latter rather superfluous the and that story would best be told form the Klingons' perspective.

The story that Nimoy and Meyer went with is the one that feels truest if it's going to be a commentary on contemporary humanity (which is explicitly what they were going for): the Federation and the Klingons discover they were both wrong about each other.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

On another note, I'll disagree with fans and Nicholas Meyer about Saavik being the traitor. It would have been shocking and hurtful, yes--largely because it isn't very believable. Saavik is not conniving or duplicitous. I can see her perhaps objecting to peace with the klingons, but she'd make her opinion known, and she'd either refuse the mission or, like Kirk, suck it up and do her duty.

Valeris, on the other hand, has a coldness to her that informs her treachery. She casually bends the rules when it suits her (suggesting Romulan ale; firing a phaser in the kitchen) and is not very forthcoming (of her presence outside Kirk's quarters; of her misgivings to Spock), a combination that makes it very, very believable when she's found to be a conspirator.

In short, Valeris being the villain is a betrayal to the other characters. Saavik being the villain would have been a betrayal to *her* character.

(I also think it was a touch of brilliance that Kim Cattrall shaved her sideburns for the role. It makes her look slightly "off" in exactly the most appropriate way.)

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

The thing that really hammered in for me why Star Trek VI was important was when I read that Rodenberry's initial reaction to the story was that the crew couldn't be racist... it had to be *the Klingons* who were struggling with their prejudices, and the Federation would show them the error of their ways.

Because, you know, the Klingons. They're not enlightened like the Federation. They need help, sort of like children. They're the bad guys, not the Federation. It has to be that way because Star Trek isn't racis--bwahHAHAHahaha, come on now!

'The Undiscovered County' lays bare the hypocrisy of Star Trek and works to correct it. The Klingons were the villains, an example of everything the opposite of humanity's ideals, to be wrong at every juncture, and to top it all off they looked and sounded like a hodge-podge of every "scary foreigner" stereotype all in one. The Klingons as originally conceived were a Bad Race.

The crew couldn't hope but to grow racist against Klingons... Star Trek was freakin' racist! And I for one am glad that the series didn't just try to pretend that wasn't the case but rather tackled it head on and had the courage to be self-deprecating about it. It turns what could've been an embarrassment to be ignored into a part of a larger and meaningful story arc.

Re: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

It is supposed to be shocking and sad to see the Star Trek crew be so blatantly racist. There are a couple of things going on in 'Undiscovered Country' with the racism.

The first is about age. "Is it possible that we two, you and I, have grown so old and inflexible that we've outlived our usefulness?" Here to be "old" is less a physical condition than a mental outlook, a lazy (or to be more charitable, weary) cynicism masquerading as wisdom. The crew's racism is a parallel/ byproduct of being "old."

And like age, racism sneaks up on you. How can the crew of the Enterprise be racist? Didn't you see their idealistic young 60s selves? Didn't they have a party with the Klingons in the previous film? "I can't be racist, I have Klingon friends!" It happens. It happened right under their noses, but the crew has become old.

You want to know when you've really grown old, when it's time to pack it in and retire? It's when your experience becomes a liability rather than a benefit. The crew's experiences with the Klingons now work against them, which ties into the second thing TUC is doing with the racism...

Re: DS9 S7: Take Me Out to the Holosuite

"Meanwhile, something like hockey, which you suggest is complicated, is bewilderingly simple: puck goes in goal, number goes up. "

Well, assuming you know what a "puck" and a "goal" is and what they're for. To an ignorant observer, one is just a flattened piece of rubber and the other is a wooden framework covered in netting.

Re: ORV S2: All the World Is Birthday Cake

Not sure that Kelly and Bortus would actually been let go after they murdered many prison guards.

Re: TOS S2: Return to Tomorrow

If Sargon and his race could make android bodies for their minds. Why did they not make them in the past, instead of putting their consciousness in the sheres. They certainly could have done so in the past and escaped the planet in ships. Building them perhaps underground .

Re: VOY S7: Prophecy

I've been rewatching Voyager on Netflix. I found this thread because I was wondering if it was Avery Brooks as a Klingon... He seemed very familiar and I realized it was his voice that sounded familiar- his inflections are just like Avery Brooks.

Re: VOY S3: Future's End, Part II

Not a fan of this episode AT ALL. So much so I did an immediate google search to see if anyone else agreed with me.

Thank you for creating this review site.

Love Star Trek! Especially TNG and Voyager (hence going back and watching yet again)

My main problem is the ridiculous plot holes. The villain being able to have such a high level of understanding of future tech. The horrible dialog, especially the 'uh-oh' death line. I was cringing the whole time.

Re: ENT S2: A Night in Sickbay

Thanks for the review. Agreed with pretty much all of it.

Archer's character had seemed to me to have been written as that of a self-entitled 12-year-old, so arguably this episode showed he'd matured a year or 2. But it was very silly.

I did like the bit where Archer spoke to T'Pol about the "tension" and she gave him a verbal slap, but other than that pretty bad.

It also annoys me when Archer talks about how "Porthos needs fresh air as well". Yeah, how many crew members are there? And how many of them get 'fresh air'?

The decontamination zone is getting annoying for its use as a plot device.

Re: ENT S2: Minefield

I didn't see the comparison with Shuttlepod One. Maybe I just enjoyed Trip and Reed more than Archer and Reed. I'd watch Shuttlepod One several times, but not this one.
I liked last week's though, can't please everyone all the time.

Re: ENT S2: Shockwave, Part II

I was expecting it to be pretty bad from watching other tv shows. Part 2 always cheats part 1.
I thought this was really good. I like Silik's character and but it was weird how Archer managed to overpower the ship like that.
Some of the action scenes felt like padding.
But I like it. Promising start to series 2 (I'm watching these rather late you'll gather, just found they're on Netflix).
As for 'hammy', I really like Enterprise but I feel that some of the acting's like that every week. The speeches worked for me and Archer was just Archer.

Re: ENT S1: Shockwave, Part I

I loved that episode.

Re: ENT S1: Shuttlepod One

Regarding Red Dwarf's Marooned - I haven't seen it for a while but by my recollection that worked because we knew the characters a lot better, whereas this was in series 1.

Also, I think Reed is a deeper character than Rimmer.

And RD is comedy sci-fi (partly depending on which series) whereas Enterprise is sci-fi drama with some comedy thrown in. And I think we learned more about Reed and Tucker than we did about Lister and Rimmer in the 2 episodes.

(this is mostly my opinion obviously....)

Re: ENT S1: Shuttlepod One

Definitely one of my favourites of season 1.
2 men in a room winding each other up and exploring their characters. I thought Trip got too many of the punchlines, but that his frustration was fair enough.
The airlock bit was a bit silly though.

Regarding Reed as the lady's man, I thought his actions suggested the opposite. He knew (or had known) a few women and still had strong feelings for them.