Comment Stream

Re: TNG S1: Symbiosis

NONI says: That doesn't make anything Tasha says untrue, and honestly the point she makes is fairly progressive for 1988. Her point is, "drugs are bad because it's easy to get stuck in a cycle of addiction and dependence,"

Yeah, it was cheesy, but the point was good: that drugs are often the result of other problems and suffering and it doesn't mean that everyone who went through those things and looked for drugs as a way out is a bad person, and that most of humanity doesn't grasp this any more only because we're so much better off that people don't usually end up in that situation.

And the ending of the conversation never gets enough credit. Basically...
Wesley: I still don't think I get it.
Yar: And I hope you never will.

Re: TNG S3: A Matter of Perspective

{{ Nolan makes a good point. I was once at a trial and literally every witness told another story about a fairly simple scene. They only had to describe an object somebody was carrying. It was everything from sticks, to bags and one even said cello case. It was unbelievable }}

Sure, but the example in this episode is more akin to, 24 hours later, not being sure if *you yourself* were carrying a cello or a pile of sticks.

Re: TNG S5: Violations

{{ Those commenters who saw Picard's speech at the end as condescending towards the Ullians seem to have misunderstood it. According to my understanding, Picard does not mean: We were once violent, *as you people still are today*, but we have gotten over it. He says: We were once violent, *as you people were in the past*, but we have gotten over it, *just like you people have*. }}

Also, people saying that he implicated the entire Ullian civilization because of one person's action seem to forget that he's reassuring a Ullian who had just expressed worry about the state of his civilization. He says in effect, "My people used to do things like this quite often, but it hasn't happened in so long, I thought we had risen above it." And Picard is encouraging them with "You can still rise above it, I know from the history of my own civilization that this is true."

Re: TNG S5: The First Duty

{{ That's literally the only way I can watch his Locarno scenes without my brain screeching to a halt, haha. It's not just the same actor-- it's the same CHARACTER, in basically every detail but name. }}

But it's not - it's two different incidents and two different reactions (in the 1st, someone dies because of deliberate recklessness, and the responsible party lies to save his own skin and throws the dead guy under the bus but gets found out by other people; in the 2nd, someone dies because of an honest mistake and the responsible party confesses of his own accord because his conscience gets the best of him).

Did this single individual, who I'll call Tomick Locaris, have *both* of them happen to him? Because they definitely can't be considered the same event.

And Robert Duncan McNeill himself has said he feels like the two characters are only superficially similar - that Locarno is just a selfish individual who never really changed even when he bit the bullet at the end, while Paris is a good person who just made a couple bad choices.

Re: TNG S7: Lower Decks

{{ [William B] I have a feeling that Picard opts to give Sito a second chance after "The First Duty" because he sees Wesley as needing a second chance and recognizes that it's not fair to apply that standard only to Wesley. }}

Hadn't thought of that before, but that makes perfect sense for Picard's character even if the writer's didn't specifically intend that at the time.

Re: TNG S7: Eye of the Beholder

"Troi doesn't do anything important normally? Providing/directing mental healthcare for 1500 people doesn't count?"

I think the point is we hardly ever see her actually do this as an important part of an episode.

Re: VOY S3: Rise

"Neelix says he can barely open his eyes... Tuvok gives him some motivation, and the next minute he is wide awake and saving the day. A good director would have made sure that this was acted properly.. that you could see how hard it was for him to carry on when injured so much."

Yeah that really bugged me too. Along with the awful special efforts - Jammer is being charitable in calling them "lousy" rather than "abysmal".

Re: VOY S3: False Profits

{{ an episode that seems to say "Look! The Ferengi are greedy and manipulative and like to take advantage of others! That's funny!" }}

That sums this one pretty well. The funny ones use the Ferengi for the purpose of comedy, not just use the fact that they are Ferengi as the comedy.

{{ She decides that if the wormhole can be harnessed to return to the Alpha Quadrant, she will be taking the Ferengi back with them. When Tuvok voices that this might be a violation of the Prime Directive, Janeway cleverly answers it }}

This one of the few good spots of the episode. Janeway makes a really tenuous leap to claim that the Prime Directive justifies intervention after all. Despite the obvious large stretch of reasoning involved, Tuvok says her argument is clearly logical and withdraws his objection. Told us a lot about Tuvok without either character having to say very much.

{{ When Tuvok "seals" the shuttle bay, the Ferengi phaser the shuttle bay door and fly out anyway. None of these events are even remotely believable. }}

Star Trek has an annoyingly long history of obviously ludicrous shuttle escapes that they don't even bother trying to justify. It may have started on TOS but in the "modern era" it started back in Coming of Age in season 1 of TNG and has been repeated probably a dozen times between TNG, DS9, and VOY. It's usually some variant of the following:

A: They are heading for the shuttle bay.
B: Lock it down.
A: Too late, they are already inside the shuttle and taking off.
B: Close the doors.
A: Too late, they've already made it out the bay.
B: Use a tractor beam.
A: Too late, they're already out of range.

Re: VOY S4: Living Witness

{{ Not much to add, except to say this: I much prefer this episode to the Mirror Universe set of episodes. The actors here get to act "bad" because of mistaken/revisionist history, which serves the overall plot. In the Mirror universe episodes, the characters are monstrously sadistic only for the purpose of comic relief, which makes their actions easily dismissed. }}

Agree 100%.

And seeing Tuvok with a psychotic grin as he attempts to speed up the deaths of thousands of innocents is CREEPY! And effective too, since he didn't ham up the rest of his performance. Tim Russ plays him with mostly the same stoicism, except for the giant grin of a sadist reveling in his skills at causing devastation, which makes it even more chilling.

One of the best parts about this episode is that it all really did happen in-universe. Normally when I see an episode taking place far in the future and the Voyager crew acting completely out of character, I expect a giant time-travel reset at the end.

Re: VOY S4: Unforgettable

I agree with several above commenters, Kellin would have been a lot more interesting if she was struggling with regret over her own recent choices to hunt down Defectors before becoming one herself.

{{ It appears that Voyager's policy for the imprisonment of aliens is that you can arbitrarily lock people up for enforcing their own laws on their own people }}

That one I get - you're on-board Voyager, you have to play by Voyager's rules. You want to hunt down and forcibly alter someone else's mind in the middle of space, that's one thing. Come on board someone else's ship who doesn't agree with that sort of thing and try it, you ought to get locked up. "Build your funeral pyre; beside it we will build a gallows. You may follow your custom, and we will follow ours"

You know, I want to give the writers credit for inventing The Silence a decade before Doctor Who did so (I wonder if the Who writers saw this episode and thought "We can do that, but better", or if it was independent invention). But I can't give them *too* much credit because it just didn't work here. That sort of thing really belongs more on Who than Trek anyway; Trek is rarely hard science, but this concept is too much into the fantasy realm.

Re: VOY S6: Tsunkatse

Not great, but hey, it was a lot better than The Fight.

{{ I expected "Tsunkatse" would fall in a similar vein (it's original title, in fact, was "Arena" before someone realized the title had been used previously in Trek). }}

Arena would have been a better title. Granted almost anything else would have been. I probably care more about episode names than most so if nobody else minds, no problem. But naming the episode after the fictional sport that outside of the episode we never hear of, especially when if you aren't familiar with the episode and just read a list of episodes you aren't even sure how to pronounce (it's not even in an Earth language, so why transliterate it using silent English letters?)? I always feel like episode titles just named after a One-Off Character are the weakest ones (Aquiel, Jetral). Not every title has to be poetic or amazing, but even something simple and generic like Blood Sport would have been better.

{{ There are stunt scenes and punches and spin-kicks and body slams. Should Star Trek be the WWF? I vote no, but I also vote that Trek can borrow whatever it wants within reason if it can utilize said borrowed material effectively. }}

I just don't think it did. The fight scenes were pretty bad. Supposedly expert fighters clearly just standing there leaving themselves open for attack without blocking or dodging because the script says it's their turn to get walloped. Also it bugged me that I never got a sense if Seven's ex-borg-ness actually gives her greater physical abilities or not. She acts like it does when she warns The Rock that despite the size disparity she can destroy him, but the episode never really shows it being the case.

And the training scenes were pretty weak despite JG Hertzler giving a good performance (also, man, was it the Totally Not Surprise of the month when he turned out to be her opponent?). She's working on her stances while talking to him and suddenly he attacks her out of nowhere and says she can't count on her opponent waiting for her to be ready. Uh what? She was stretching, not sparring. He follows it up by saying you can't let your guard down because an enemy could be behind you without you realizing it at any time. What?! This isn't warfare, it's a structured competition. Unless your opponent has a fake version of himself (like Arnie in Total Recall), no, he couldn't suddenly be behind you in the ring without you having any clue.

Also, if having everyone watch an ex-Borg get the crap beaten out of them is so good for ratings, it makes no sense at all that they'd set up for her to get killed in her second fight. Not an awful episode despite all my complains, but certainly not a good one.

I did like the poignant moment at the end when Tuvok tells Seven that struggling with difficult emotions doesn't mean she's failing at being human, but succeeding.

Re: VOY S7: Inside Man

{{ DPC - The admiral said it would take 2 hours to go 0.7 light years. That will be 2.86 hours (approximately) to go 1 light year.

2.86 hours/lightyear*30,000 lightyears (or 35,000, depending on the episode) = 85714 hours

85714 hours/24 hours day = 3571 days (rounded)

About a little less than 10 years (about 9.8 years). This is at full speed for that ship. Not sure how fast that ship could go, but it is over 3 times as fast as Voyager. Has technology improved that much? }}

It's established fairly well in various episodes of Trek that ships can't sustain the highest warp speeds indefinitely. The maximum distance you can travel in 1 year is less than 365x the maximum distance you can travel in one day.

Re: VOY S5: Relativity

{{ I usually LOVE Star Trek sci if high concept mysteries(conundrum, clues, night terrors, remember me, future imperfect, timescape, parallels, cause and effect)and this one was moving along fairly well until the whole reveal that crazy Braxton was behind it }}

I also really love the "watch the crew solve the sci-fi mystery" episodes most of the time, but it's funny, I figured out Braxton would be the saboteur way earlier. Or rather, I made a solid guess and was hoping I'd be wrong, and was disappointed to find out I'd been right.

I'm not usually someone who looks ahead and tries to guess the plot twists, but on the solve-the-mystery episodes I end up trying to solve things along with the crew (which is usually tough as sci-fi / fantasy are rarely a fair-play mystery since we don't know what is possible or not). In this case I realized "Hmm it's halfway through the episode and we still know nothing about the saboteur; if it were some unimportant one-off villain we'd have probably just been info-dumped a few things about him, so they must be building to some big reveal - oh geez who else could it be but Braxton, ugh."

Re: VOY S5: Gravity

{{ Tangent here, but Trek would've been immensely improved if the aliens had been cast with anyone other than SAG's whites actors. . . . . Give credit to TNG's "Code of Honor." They may have been grotesquely stereotypical, but at least they were more exotic than, say, those wusses in "The Hunted." }}

{{ I'm sorry, but I will never give any credit to TNG's "Code of Honor." }}

It's basically the Galbrush Conundrum, but with race instead of sex. With a large number of never-seen-again AOTW's (Aliens Of The Week), if they were Asian or Black or whatever, the portrayal would probably be considered racist. Which is not to excuse Code of Honor because that one actually *was* racist.

Re: VOY S5: The Fight

Somehow I watched this episode twice. I'm not sure what was wrong with me.

Re: TNG S3: Menage a Troi

Yeah this one was really creepy. Two women are kidnapped and stripped naked and then their captor takes them to a room with pretty much nothing but a bed, and the show thinks we're supposed to just be amused? The line in DS9 where Lwaxana basically says "Well, it was coerced - at first" didn't help either.

Re: TNG S3: The Price

re: {{ Troi's reaction to Ral was more like some kind of mind control think rather than any kind of attraction. Of course that might be how Betazoids work. }}

I wish they had made that more clear. I couldn't tell if we were supposed to think his full-Betazoid powers were mentally overcoming her half-Betazoid powers and inducing her to fall for him, or if we were supposed to think that Troi just had really crappy taste in men to fall so quickly for someone so transparently sleazy.

Re: DS9 S7: Take Me Out to the Holosuite

Watched it for the second time today (first time was a few years back). Liked it less this time. It's got a few funny moments but most of it is pretty dumb, and now that I knew the funny stuff it wasn't as good ... similar to Qpid in that regard.

* re: My fave is when Sisko is arguing with Odo and says to him "what were you doing, regenerating?" - yeah that's my favorite line too. Also, Sisko was right, Odo completely blew that call.

* Several have commented about Avery Brooks acting in this episode being good, but I didn't like it. It's too much of a forced "stereotypical angry sports coach" stuff (Paul Douglas and Danny Glover did it much better), and I never liked his raised-voice ov-er en-un-ci-at-ing when he's trying to portray Sisko as stern/angry anyway.

* Just interesting to note, Worf bats right but throws left. I know Rom is left-handed in this episode b/c Max Grodenchik couldn't convincing pretend to be bad enough at baseball without using his off hand, but I'm not sure if Dorn was throwing with his off-hand for the same reason or not.

* The show creators apparently forgot the way Bajoran names work, since the Major's jersey says "Nerys" for most of the episode (there is one brief moment where she's wearing a jersey that says "Kira" though).

* Is it just me, or did they do something subtly different with the Vulcan makeup in this episode than in all the others where Vulcans appear, to try and make them look more stuck up and smug?

* I get that with the DS9 crew they were stuck with the people they already had, regardless of whether the athleticism or lack thereof of the actor matched that of the character or not. But with the Vulcans, why not find 9 folks who all looked like they were decent athletes? The dude who gets up from the dugout to head back to home plate because he never touched it looks like he never had jogged or run a day in his life before.

* Kira may not have baseball instincts, sure, but given who else they had to work with, she should have been one of the team's better players. But Nana Visitor just can't even make it look like the feared warrior and freedom fighter has moved around outdoors much in her life. But then, she was always good at the "emotionally torn" stuff and not at the "look like she could assassinate you" stuff - her fight scenes have always looked unconvincing to me.

* Alexander Siddig seems decently athletic enough that I'm not sure why they never had his (genetically enhanced) character do much of anything in the game. Although maybe he really wasn't, which would have explained why they didn't want to show much of Bashir? Seems like his character would have been a little more convincing in the backflip-catch than Ezri's obvious stunt double was, although really they should have left that out altogether.

* I can buy the Federation having an Official Anthem ... but one that they play before sporting events where people hold their hats over their heart/shoulder, and that sounds so much like a generic western national anthem?

Re: TNG S3: The Ensigns of Command

One other -
Who Mourns for Adonais is from "Adonais" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (maybe not super obscure, but at least much more so than a shakespearian or biblical allusion title)

Re: DS9 S6: You Are Cordially Invited

The ending of this episode had me nearly dead from laughter.

Re: TOS S3: Turnabout Intruder

The last line of this is dumb, but so are most of the series' last lines.

TOS - "Her life could have been as rich as any woman's. If only, if only." - lousy
TNG - "Five-card stud, nothing wild - and the sky's the limit" - good
DS9 - "The more things change, the more they stay the stay" - dumb cliche plus wrong character
VOY - "Set a course - for home" - good call-back
ENT - "To boldly go where no man has gone before" - was nice before this, but already used too many times

Re: TOS S3: Whom Gods Destroy

The episode title made no sense to me until I found out that the full quote is "Whom Gods destroy, they first drive mad."

Re: VOY S1: Parallax

That scene in the staff meeting was so silly. I expected Torres and Janeway to yell "THIRD BASE!" at the end.

{{ I'm not saying B'Elanna isn't more talented, she might be. But LT Carey really got the shaft. What could and probably should have happened, is Carey should have got the job, then HE should have realized that he was in over his head over a few episodes, or half a season or something, then he should have surrendered the position much to B'Elanna's surprise. }}

This would have been so much better than what they actually did. Not that what they actually did was *bad*, it just wasn't great.

Re: TOS S1: Miri

{{ The notion of an "exact duplicate of the Earth" is put to absolutely no interesting use, and exists, apparently, for no other reason than so the plot could have a setting of "Earth, 1960." }}

I guess they saved money by not having to pay someone to draw new continents on a fake globe?

{{ I immediately thought of this episode, where Pollard's baby face couldn't quite disguise the fact that he was 28 and not prepubescent. }}

Yeah, Kim Darby really did look 14 or so, but Pollard was so obviously an adult.

{{ Kirk flirting relentlessly with Miri. That's not creepy. (come on I do know these crushes happen but the adult reciprocating and calling them pretty? I'm pretty darn sure they didn't intend it to come across this way, but eww }}

Even worse is how he ends up ripping her shirt, and then later holding her by the hair while she screams "NOO!" ... I mean yeah it's all not like that in context (she's yelling in denial about having the disease, not saying don't assault me), but still - *shudders*

Re: DS9 S1: Move Along Home

{{ How can you say this is worse than Voyager's "Twisted" or "Threshold"? }}

How can you say Twisted is on the level of Threshold?