Live Long and Prosper; the Trek Thread

[McParadigm]

Shatner’s ability to jack-off billionaires for personal benefit and then reflect this profoundly hard about it without ever nudging into self-reflection is why only he can be Kirk.

[bada]

Just watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the first time in......40 years? This was the Director's Cut. Like Star Trek 5 it's been consigned in my mind after a viewing or two as one of the not good ones. I could never bring myself to say bad. After a fresh viewing its still not one of the good ones but like Star Trek 5 it has its moments. Almost if not exclusively when the Kirk, Spock and McCoy are together. What a magic combination those three. I had forgotten, or it went over my head when I was a little kid how important Spock's realization that pure logic was ultimately unfulfilling and how profound that moment was to his character arc. The movie is vital if only for that moment. The Motion Picture was certainly....by far....the most Star Trek of the big screen efforts. Most cinematic too though I think to its detriment. The following films because of their budgets felt more intimate and the universe more lived in. Everything here feels way too cold. The awe and wonder on the characters faces never matches the visuals. It never really occurred to me that Star Trek 4 was basically a rewrite of the first movie but The Voyage Home felt like a movie this feels like a long TOS episode. Still it's worth a watch. I'll give it a clearly compromised and biased 3 out of 5 stars but I don't see myself watching it again for another 40 years.

[BurtReynolds]

I forgot to cancel my Paramount+ trial so I decided to try to get through Voyager again. I have tried a couple of times and couldn't get past season 2, but this time I succeeded! Well, sort of. I decided to just skip past the first 2 seasons.

- Season 3 was as horrible as the first two seasons. Excruciating. Just abysmal writing. Occasionally, an episode would have a decent premise, but they'd drop the ball hard. The characters, besides Janeway and The Doctor, are just death. The borg offshoot and dinosaur episodes are ok, but that's about it.

- I only moved on to season 4 to see the end of the Borg 2-parter, and it was surprisingly decent, so I decided to trudge on...and wow, it really does get better! Seasons 4 and 5 are pretty enjoyable. Seven isn't just a set of immaculate breasts. She really saves the show. the writing gets much better, and all the Borg episodes are solid.

- Season 6 and 7 are a noticeable step down from 4 and 5, but still watchable, and nowhere near as awful as the early seasons.

- The series finale sucked. It felt like the series was cancelled and they had to quickly wrap it up, but apparently that was not the case. Very disappointing.

- I love Kate Mulgrew's Janeway, but the writers really handicapped her with terrible, contradictory choices. She's kinda hateable at times.

- Too bad the actress playing Kes crashed out hard. She had potential. Her return episode is one of the worst episodes in the series. Too bad.

- Neelix is terrifying. A true demon straight from hell. Nice guy, but he belongs in a cage.

- The aliens look like shit in the early seasons, but look pretty cool later. Some of the best and worst makeup in Trek.

- wayyyyyy too many holodeck episodes! More than 2 is too much, but they doing them. I had to skip through a couple of them (the lowest rated episodes of the series).

- Nice to see Barclay again, but did we really need 6 or 7 episodes? No, we did not.


All in all I am glad I watched the later seasons.


Should I try to grind through Enterprise now?

[LoathedVermin72]

Voyager is just okay IMO. There's one great episode ("Mortal Coil"), but I kept waiting for the show to shift into a higher gear somehow and it never gets there. I did wind up becoming pretty attached to the cast by the end, though, and was pissed off by the insanely abrupt anticlimax of the bullshit finale. FWIW, there were two novels published later that acted as a supplementary ending, but I read the first one and it sucked so badly they I didn't bother with the second one. Really a shame they blew the ending.

[BurtReynolds]

Yeah it never touches TNG or DS9, but I'll take few good TNG-lite episodes. The two-parters are usually pretty good.

[LoathedVermin72]

Well I think it's much better than DS9 but that's a different topic ha

[BurtReynolds]

Kinda weird that besides Patrick Stewart, Colm Meaney was the only actor who had any success after Trek.

[wease]

Kate Mulgrew did pretty well.

[BurtReynolds]

Decided to watch DS9 again instead of Enterprise.

Oh my god this is like night and day! The writing is so amazingly good. I think I can confidently say its better than TNG now. It's decades ahead of its time.

- Like all the shows, the first seasons are a bit weak, but not as weak as I remember in this case. Seasons 1 and 2 are um...quirky... but (mostly) not terrible. Season 3 was actually the weakest for me (except for the introduction of The Dominion), but then the show takes off.

- Such amazing antagonists! Kai Winn, Gul Ducat, Damar, the Dominion in general, and EDDINGTON! Poor Eddington was right. But even a thoroughly detestable character like Kai Winn has understandable motivations. You almost feel sorry for her at the end. The character writing really is top notch.

- Lots of other great characters, too. Garak is a great tragic character. Worf is actually useful in this series. The Ferengi had no right to be as good as they were, but I found myself actually looking forward to most of their episodes.

- Jadzia and Bashir are probably the weakest characters. Jadzia never really has any development, and Bashir is just annoying (but at least making him genetically enhanced added some interest to him).

- The war stuff is great. I love how you are legitimately rooting for the Cardassians by the end.

- The acting is...well...it's Star Trek. Avery Brooks is batshit insane throughout the series. The way he says, "WHAT?!" a couple of times in the show is laugh out loud funny. But you gotta love Sisko. Nana Visitor is trying a bit too hard at first, but she's much better towards the end. She improves as her hair improves.

- A bit too much klingon stuff. They are a silly, ridiculous race. But I did like the general guy.

- Once again, the holodeck episodes are brutally bad. Anytime Vic Fontaine showed up on screen, I skipped ahead. And he showed up way too much in the last season. Just abysmal.

Now onto Enterprise.