Do you watch Star Trek?

[on the rocks]

For Lower Decks fans, they did a crossover episode with Strange New Worlds this summer and it was pretty entertaining, provided Lower Decks is one of your favorite series.  The actual voice actors for Boimler and Mariner play live action versions of themselves and do pretty well with all the mannerisms that are normally up to the animators to pull off.

I've been wanting to comment on it two specific things.  First of all, the episode should have been a Lower Decks episode and not a Strange New Worlds episode.
And secondly, I don't want to sound to shallow here, but live action Mariner is noticeably "thiccer" than animated Mariner. 

[on the rocks]

With season 4 of Lower Decks in the books, time for a thread bump.

They did a lot of fun stuff with Tendy this season.  It's kind of an animation trope where the seemingly meek character turns out to be a bad-ass, but it's a fun one, and they used it with Tendy very well. 
Tendy and Rutherford were more or less shipped for an episode, and the pay off of their forced coupling not resulting in them catching feelings was a good way to defy expectations.

The show continues to excel at peppering itself with Easter eggs from past series either as simple background gags or major plot elements.  That's what makes it so enjoyable to watch; you can tell the people who make this show give a fuck about Star Trek.  Can't say the same about the other new Treks (excepting Picard season 3).

If I have one overarching complaint, it is one that can be applied to basically all modern shows.  Too few episodes.  They try and cram in as much action and plot as they can in this tiny little 8 or 10 episode seasons now days and there's basically no time to really flesh out the characters and come to care about them.  I get it; the economics are different.  They're going after eyeballs right now instead of racking up episodes for those sweet syndication dollars.  But 20+ episode seasons give writers room to breathe.  They get challenged on scifi shows because you've gotta save some budget here and there so you can afford to do cool shit for the "big" episodes.  Which leads to character heavy episodes that broaden the universe and get you to care about the people who will be affected by the main character's decisions.

Disco fails at this hard.  Pretty much the only time they ever explore a character other than Michael Burham is to either bring the entire episode to a screeching halt so they can whine about their feelings, or they have to cram something in right before the person is killed off.
That show had so much potential, too.  For example, it works the same if they didn't shoehorn Burnham in as Spock's adopted brother.  She could have done all the same shit being raised by some other Vulcan and Spock was just her school chum or something.  And they shot their wad too early with the parallel universe stuff.  No Star Trek series ever dipped its toes into that in its first season.  You have to have characters the audience is invested in and knows pretty goddamn well before you confront them with alternate versions of them.

The best part about Lower Decks is it retains the optimism and aspiration one sees in all the "retro" Star Trek series.  Something that is sorely missing from the new live action shows.  You see glimmers of it in Strange New Worlds, but not consistently enough.  I know there's a lot of heavy shit going on in the world and it's difficult to write about a positive future for humanity, but c'mon... now, more than ever, man!  Lower Decks gets it!  Even though they're now boxed in by future canon thanks to Picard's first two seasons, it's still the best new Trek.

[on the rocks]

Time for another bump because Disco's final season started this week.

Slight spoiler alert, but they are dipping into a major loose thread left hanging by a Next Generation episode. One that really feels like someone should have followed up on, but the franchise immediately ignored for 30 years.  Probably because it was too universe shaking to invest screen time in.  So that part I like.  This season's going to pick up a story we last saw in like 1992 or something.

What I don't like is, and I'll be happy to be wrong about this, but I can see most of the season arc already.  For starters, it's clear to me already the current antagonists are going to turn into 'good guys' later this season.  You've got this Bonnie & Clyde duo they seem to be setting up to be sympathetic characters in coming episodes, so no doubt they're going to flip loyalties at some point and start working with the Discovery crew against the real villains.  I'm calling that right now.

The other thing I'm disappointed with is, at least to start, this season is basically an expanded version of another TNG episode (well, two actually).  They've dropped two episodes and so far it's a basically "Gambit".  That was a season 7 two parter where it was a race against the bad guys to solve puzzles and look for clues to assemble all the pieces of a terrifying 'mcguffin' they can't let fall into enemy hands.  Or if you're reading this as a non-fan of Trek; it's Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Same basic idea.
If it ends with, "Oh this thing is too powerful for anyone to have..." and they destroy it, I'll be disappointed.  We've all seen Frodo toss The One Ring into Mt. Doom already, you know what I mean?

[AliceInTheCities]

First of all I liked little girls since first time I saw one, way before Star Trek. With Star Trek, I really liked TNG (the next generation). Then in the decreasing order of preference: Star Trek Enterprise (the prequel) I really really hate they stopped that series. It had drawbacks but it was good overall. Third place for me is Voyager. Disliked the captain but otherwise intersting premise, good episodes and who can forget the lovely Borg Seven-of-Nine.

I tried to like Deep Space Nine but it did not grow on me at all.. Hated the Captain who, at times, sounded to me like a soprano eunuch (such a far cry from Picard ) and while the other characters were good, I just couldn't care enough for spending time at a station (whatever happened to seek out new places and civilizations). I just need folks to go places as a prerequisite.

The most recent thing (with Picard now turn into some fossil) I did not even bother to try as I dislike much of the new directions in TV and movies.

[on the rocks]

Voyager also had Naomi Wildman in a lot of episodes, so that was a bonus for that series.
Enterprise was taken away as it was hitting it's stride.  Fucking Les Moonves.  The asshat who ran Paramount at the time; the same one who got Me Too'd a few years ago.  Serves him right.
If the industry had been more accountable in the early 00's he would've been out and maybe Enterprise could have had a seven season run like the previous three shows.

[DropsOfJupiter]

And secondly, I don't want to sound to shallow here, but live action Mariner is noticeably "thiccer" than animated Mariner. 

Ok. Before I get all excited and actually try watching Strange New Worlds...................good thicc or bad thicc? Like am I going to go watch this and be all excited for hot thicc Mariner and then find out that she had an extra 130 pounds of pancake batter poured into her leggings with her, or is she going to look like she has thighs made for playing ice hockey and doing olympic tier triple jump?

Also I super love Lower Decks.

[on the rocks]

I would call it 'athletic thicc'.  Not like those fat chicks they try and rebrand, but the kind where she's got child-bearing hips but still looks good in tight pants.

[LikelyHuman]

then find out that she had an extra 130 pounds of pancake batter poured into her leggings with her

I don't know if I just like rooting for the under-dog, but Enterprise and Voyager were always my favorites. I always thought much of the criticisms for Voyager weren't very valid. People mention their first few seasons kind of meandering and trying to find out what they were doing, but it's not like the first three seasons of The Next Generation really aged well, and with Deep Space Nine they kind of figured out, "Oh... Yeah, space exploration, we need a ship," mid-way through.

I have a friend who keeps suggesting I check out Lower Decks, but I just haven't really wanted to yet because I feel like it being animated will be too different and take me out of it. I mean, not that I don't like animation, but not sure if it will hit the same. Besides that though, he hated Voyager and loved Deep Space Nine, so it kind of makes me question that I'll like Lower Decks if he likes it so much, but he seems to suggest it based on my love for Voyager.

I really liked Strange New Worlds, but I only watched the first season. Kind of weird feeling on that one... I kind of don't want to get invested into it, have to wait six months for the second half of a season, get 10 episodes of it every two years, etc. and then just have it crash and burn in quality very soon into its run. I'm basically just going to sit on it and wait until it's either done, or has a handful of seasons to binge watch. I did that with Game of Thrones too, and felt vindicated that I waited when everyone groaned about how bad its last season was.

[on the rocks]

I've said before, Lower Decks is written by people who get Star Trek.  Much more so than most of the live action stuff that has been made since Enterprise ended.  It's not all gold, but it's entertaining.  The pacing can get a little frantic since they're shooting for that 22-24 minute runtime.  At the very least they'll sprinkle Easter Eggs from the entire franchise throughout every episode and it's quite rewarding to catch them.  The best thing they do is revive the "alien of the week" format that made all the Legacy shows so rewatchable. 

Being animated, they can drop in all kinds of legacy characters and not have to worry that the actors have aged out of the roles.  There's a whole episode set on DS9, for example.  Another one where Rom is definitely still Grand Nagus with Leeta at his side.  Yet another where they're helping set up Voyager at the Fleet Museum.

For my money, though, the best new Star Trek is actually the three seasons of The Orville that Seth MacFarlane made.  Easily half the episodes could have been legacy Trek stories. The Orville is to the small screen what Galaxy Quest is to the theaters.

[on the rocks]

Fuck me, Paramount has cancelled Lower Decks.  This next season will be the last one.
Stupid fuckers.  This was the best show you've put out since you started making new Trek again a few years ago.

It's the streaming ecosystem, man.  Make people jump thru hoops to watch your shit and then act surprised when people don't watch your shit.  Or pirate it.
Put these goddamn shows on TV!  Duh!  You're telling me it's more important to churn out some more dogshit reality shows and nationally broadcast those? 

What pisses me off is this cartoon is super cheap to make compared to all the high-budget shows the same platform makes.  I don't think any of these streaming services are making money anyway.  The business model is flawed because the customers have to find you.  When you broadcast things, you can find your viewers. People channel surf and they see something interesting and boom, new viewer.  It doesn't work that way with streaming.  You have to consciously pick a show and start watching it.  You can't stumble upon shows that way.  Lower Decks would have done fine on broadcast because of this.

Alright, ranting over.  This just brings out all the issues I have with the industry as a whole right now.

[on the rocks]

Disco's been done for a couple weeks so let me revisit some thoughts at the start of the season.

What I don't like is, and I'll be happy to be wrong about this, but I can see most of the season arc already.  For starters, it's clear to me already the current antagonists are going to turn into 'good guys' later this season.  You've got this Bonnie & Clyde duo they seem to be setting up to be sympathetic characters in coming episodes, so no doubt they're going to flip loyalties at some point and start working with the Discovery crew against the real villains.  I'm calling that right now.

I'm gonna give myself half credit on this.  They started to go that way, but then the antagonists flipped the script and sided with the real bad guys toward the end for a while.
The Breen made okay baddies, though they were a little too "storm troopery' in their deference to authority.  Like none of them could see their leadership was terrible? 

If it ends with, "Oh this thing is too powerful for anyone to have..." and they destroy it, I'll be disappointed.  We've all seen Frodo toss The One Ring into Mt. Doom already, you know what I mean?

This however, I got exactly correct.
Okay, technically the mcguffin at the center of the season isn't "literally" destroyed, but it is for all intents and purposes, if one knows anything about physics.
And then they threw in this last thing that annoyed me, saying this one old guy character was the same as this one young guy time travel character from Star Trek Enterprise.  Just out of no where, completely unearned.  Like it made no difference.  Just some pathetic nostalgia pull.  And because it's the finale, they're doing all these oh good bye to everyone scenes.  But because we only know really know like three characters in this show, this montage is basically like, Oh who was that?  What did they do?  I have no idea.
You can't miss that which you didn't get to know.

For a series that started with so much promise given the era and events it began with, they generally dropped the ball on Disco. (heh) And they kept that up right to the end.

[on the rocks]

Small bump for the Trek thread because we passed a historical event in the Star Trek canon this week.
This was the week of the "Bell Riots" portrayed in a 1995 two part episode of Deep Space Nine.

Some of the crew get zipped back to 2024 by some sort of technobabble and land on the streets of San Francisco. They arrive in a city beset by massive economic problems.  So many people out of work and unhoused that they've been herded into so-called "sanctuary districts" by the government.  They're basically walled ghettos rife with criminal gangs. People in there are unable to find work because they've been tossed into a sanctuary district, so they're stuck living off rations provided by the government and sleeping where ever they can.  Meanwhile, society's elite just sort of shrug about the dehumanizing conditions within.  And the middle class is just glad they're not in one themselves.

It's a fascinating bit of futurism from 30 years ago, because in some ways, they were right on about some of the problems facing society.  Many large cities, especially west coast cities, have massive homeless populations with governments periodically evicting their encampments.  Income inequality has indeed become a massive burden on society with those at the bottom being treated as less than human at times.  And politicians indeed make empty promises about doing something to fix it.

The people writing it looked around mid-90's LA and just extrapolated a little, it seems, and by doing so, they weren't that far off.  It hasn't yet come to creating something like a "sanctuary district" but things aren't great.  We've spent the last 30 years mostly only building housing for the high end of the income spectrum.  Gleaming condo towers and sprawling, suburban "McMansions".  Or those dreadful copy-paste 3-6 floor mixed-use buildings that look the same all over the world and are always priced just high enough to be a strain on one's budget.
No one builds affordable housing.  It's either greedy real estate types who want more profit, or armies of Karens and NIMBY's whining about parking or thinly veiled racism about the "wrong people" moving into the neighborhood.  "It's too tall, it'll make a shadow!" That kind of thing.

There are things the didn't get close at all, though.  Especially the way they portrayed how the internet might work 30 years from 1994.  It's a big plot point about how the people in the sanctuary district need credentials to get online so they can broadcast their grievances to the rest of the country.  There was no inkling that everyone would be carrying around internet connected devices in their pockets.  Phones in actual 2024 make this whole plot device moot.  And as with all scifi from before the Millennium, all the computers have 4:3 aspect ratio monitors.

The two part episode is from DS9's third season and is called "Past Tense".
In case my rambling made anyone curious.

[zack89]

I remember a few episodes where they go back in time to our near future, relatively speaking. I may be remembering this wrong, but I recall one TNG ep where they went to modern L.A. and Worf had to dress all gangsta with a doo rag to hide his forehead.

[on the rocks]

Oh that was Voyager and it was Tuvok wearing the bandana to hide his ears.
Guest starring Ed Bagley Jr and Sarah Silverman.

[zack89]

Oh that was Voyager and it was Tuvok wearing the bandana to hide his ears.
Guest starring Ed Bagley Jr and Sarah Silverman.

Ah okay.

"I'm a lyrical scientist, my rhymes will meld with your mind. My verses are traveling in your general direction at warp 9." - Tuvok Shakur