New Testingstan

Michael Dorn voicing in the latest STO FE?

Sold.

Drumhead was a much more solid Picard episode than Qpid. Focusing as it did on principles rather than 'is awkward around a woman he likes. And a Half a Life was amazingly good considering it focused on two guest stars.

In other media, I've started reading 'A Rock And A Hard Place' an early TNG novel by Peter David. Which among other thing features O'Brien being a total dick to Troi over her empathy and poker. And Quintin Stone. Which i've read and seems likely can be seen as bit of prototype of Mackenzie Calhoun of the New Frontier novels. He's a scarred maverick who doesn't play by the rules! He acts only on his instincts which are uncannily accurate! <i> and he beat the kobayashi maru!</i> And people say Star Trek books are just published fanfic!

Okay, its not quite as mary suish as that because these traits don't make everyone love Stone in fact. It pretty much enrages all his commanding officers and Starfleet command assign him temporarily to as Picad's first officer to straighen him out. I've yet to read all the way through.

Still couple with some rather clunky dialogue, this is not nearly as polished as PAD's later works. I guess that's not that surprising.

Hey speaking of Qpid

LOL:

timmy wrote:Hey speaking of Qpid

YTMND still exists?

Nothing ever dies on the internet.

So I've been thinking about Into Darkness as of late. And I'm pondering: is there a way to make Khan the not!Badguy while still maintaining the general ending of Kirk dies but three days later awhile later he is resurrected to lead us to Heaven Boldly Go?

Would the movie have been at all improved had Khan not turned out evil and stayed the vaguely anti-hero/anti-villain he was sort of being portrayed as in the middle act?

Better yet, can we do all that without B-Cumber's character being called Khan, and can we get rid of the unbelievably unprofessional exchange between Uhura and Spock as they're booking it through the Qo'noS wasteland.

I really should watch that STID dvd i got for xmas...

or the ds9 s1 ones... (some how my ds9 collection started with 4 and carried on to 7 then looped back to 1)

So Double post because I did watch Into Darkness a couple of days ago now. And its one of those things I really wish I'd gone into at the time unspoilered. Because i'm sort of always wondering when the next spoilered thing comes up and whatever. So the film really felt like a lot of scenes strung together than a coherent narrative.

So some thoughts that I do remember in rough order most from early on;
-Pike is awesome. Though his scene does border on the old TNG 'let them die' approach to the PD, it is mainly about there's a race of primitives worshiping a saucer-and-nacelle shaped deity now.
-Quinto's sassy Spock is pretty good in the Pike scene.
-Did Kirk get demoted or not? He seems to have more rank badges than Spock does. I guess he could as a captain be a first officer to Admiral Pike captaining the ship but he is referred as 'commander' occasionally. NuTrek Starfleet's organisation system is weird and unclear.
-So Starfleet protocols go into so much detail that they state the exact, easily aerially bombarded, conference room they use in case of emergency? wow.
-Pike dead so soon? And so badly. Damn. I liked Pike.
-Scotty's accent is still absurd and now he's resigning. And Chekov takes over? Not say the actual assistant engineer? 'Main characters do everything' is painfully obvious here. Again Starfleet's organisation is weird and unprofessional.
-Mudd Incident. That's some fun fan service.
-Uhura gets to be really unprofessional! And then knife some klingons.
-Khan surrendering isn't suspicious at all. And Jim attempts and fails to beat him up post-surrender. Uncool.
-on the fanservice side. Section 31 reference is much less forced and horrible than I thought it was going to be. They just stole the name for Marcus' secret super-weapon design group rather than going to whole way.

Okay, after that... it's action scenes, wrath of khan retread, then painful quick wrap up and trite summary from Kirk. I have less thoughts on that. I think my brain had successfully switched off by then. There were individual scenes and bits i liked but as a whole it doesn't add up to much.

I think my biggest issue with the Abrams films is that too many of the characters sound like American college students.

Gands wrote:I think my biggest issue with the Abrams films is that too many of the characters sound like American college students.

And act like it too.

It's been bugging me ever since Spock said mentioned the word "prank," but it bubbled over when Pike describes Kirk's "epic beating."

Also the relationship squabbling in the shuttle ride down to kronos Qonos that klingon planet.

from a youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHsoPPynIIc :

"What I wanted to do was the American Revolution. They wouldn't let me, so we ended up doing Northern Ireland, which I felt made our people look incredibly stupid. I wanted it with Picard as Cornwallis and the Romulans would have been the French, who were in our revolution, trying to break this planet away. Suddenly Picard realized he's one of the oppressors. Instead we do 'Breakfast in Belfast'."
- Melinda Snodgrass, writer of Next Generation episode "The High Ground"


that would have been fascinating

So I'm watching through season 1 of DS9 and it really is interesting how it is in the early days. With a more hostile Kira. I'm up to the 7th (8th if you count the pilot as 2 episodes) which was Dax. Where they're trying to hash out the issues of whether Jadzia is culpable for the 'crimes' of Curzon. (oddly they say they'll look it up but we never find out what precedent says on the matter. obviously the trills must have a system.)

But what I was finding interesting was that out of three episodes so far. Bajorans have flat out been the villian. One who wanted to destroy the wormhole, one who had a grudge against Odo and one times they triggered a forgotten resistence booby trap. And that's more times than the Cardies have been antagonistic.

Also when do the Bajorans start making a big deal out of The Sisko and the Prophets in the wormhole because it barely came up at all in Emissary.

Crazedwraith wrote:So I'm watching through season 1 of DS9 und it really is interesting how it is in the early days. With a more hostile Kira. I'm up to the 7th (8th if you count the pilot as 2 episodes) which was Dax. Where they're trying to hash out the issues of whether Jadzia is culpable for the 'crimes' of Curzon. (oddly they say they'll look it up aber we never find out what precedent says on the matter. obviously the trills must have a system.)

aber what I was finding interesting was that out of three episodes so far. Bajorans have flat out been the villian. One who wanted to destroy the wormhole, one who had a grudge against Odo und one times they triggered a forgotten resistence booby trap. und that's more times than the Cardies have been antagonistic.

Also when do the Bajorans start making a big deal out of The Sisko und the Prophets in the wormhole because it barely came up at all in Emissary.

I quite liked early DS9. There were a couple of clunkers, but some really excellent stories too. As for The Sisko, IIRC they don't make a big deal about him being the Emissary until season 4's 'Accession'. Or maybe season 3's 'Destiny' as well.

Well, nobody died, so I think I'm still ahead of the Enterprise-D crew...

Heh, I got a crit doing that assignment awhile back

That's an awesome easter egg and now I need to go back and hope for a different result on that mission.

So i've been reading some of the Enterprise books that have come out since the series ended, and they actually cover some interesting ground regarding the Romulan War and the Birth of the Federation. It actually bums me out that the series was cancelled, because it was headed into a really important part of the trek timeline and with the season 4 crew at the helm it actually would have been done well.

RogueIce wrote:That's an awesome easter egg and now I need to go back and hope for a different result on that mission.

So I critted on the KDF version

aww man, watching some early episodes of tng
man
the ferengi are just so fucking shit

i was talking to a friend yesterday who told me the reason why he liked Enterprise and Voyager so much to TNG and DS9 was that the first two were so character based and DS9 was too plot based for him.

I loled.

a random line just popped into my head "bridge this is the captain how can we have a yellow alert in spacedock"

so captain stiles was surely a fairly experienced guy, he is a starship captain after all and not just anyone can get that position. how many times has earth been threatened on screen up to then? i think only vger.


with that little line it seems to indicate it prolly rarely if ever happened off screen either (at least up to then). perhaps the enterprise being the only ship near earth is pragmatically justified after all