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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’d like to see Discovery discounted almost entirely.

It definitely had its moments, particularly with the Mirror Universe*. But the future stuff was particularly if not spectacularly dull.

The dystopic future Star Trek is the worst form of Star Trek. Go make a not-Warhammer series with that gak. It's all kittens, lolipops and rainbows over here not dark edging cringe teenager horsegak

Dunno.

DS9 dug into the reality of the Federation quite nicely. And it managed to develop not just multiple characters, but at least four cultures (Bajoran, Cardassian, Ferengi and Dominion, with depending on how you look at it, the Dominion being multiple cultures).

About the only race not give much exploration would be the Breen, who being a mystery was kind of the point of them, and so I can give the writers a pass on that one.

Yeah Breen being a mystery is kind of their thing (one of the few left in ST). Even Lower Decks didn't try and break that with them when they touched on an encounter with them.

Plus the Breen came into the war late as allies. So there wasn't the same multiple seasons to have them around and explore them at a slower pace and peel back the veil of their secrets.

Though was it the last season of Discovery which not only revealed what they look like under their Boussh costumes*, but managed to make it super disappointing? Or am thinking of another spin off?

*I still don’t know how they got away with that one, because it’s not even close to being subtle. Spesh when Major Kira impersonates one!

the main problem with arcing seasons at the moment is that they hardly ever have the right balance of content

like with Picard, the full seasons doesn't have more content or development than a single TNG episode, just takes 10 times as long and still ends without clearing up everything or picking up lose ends later

on the other side, Discovery kind of tried saving the galaxy in each episode that got boring soon and no one really cared at the end

overall, a good show needs to have the right balance between episodic and season arcs to have room for character development and showing the wider world, and keep things interesting with a bigger story

Hence why Orville is a good show, it gets the right balance to explore each characters culture but still have a story arc

I get the feeling part of the Orvilles strength is potentially Seth's influence and confidence at getting further seasons. Picard felt like each season had to justify the next which meant doing big long running arcs is hard.

It's the same issue Babalon 5 hit way back in the day. You can't guarantee that you'll get X number of seasons right out of the gate which is often why season 1 is quite self contained. Even then you might not get a golden handshake of X number of seasons after that to really develop long arcing stories.

DS9 likely had some safety net because it was the only ST at the time (not one of several like we have now) and it was in the shows prime so there was a good momentum behind it.


It likely goes deeper than that too; writers and producers and such likely avoid long arcing storylines because series that end mid season or get messed up (looking at you Firefly for a prime example of the crazy mess that can happen to a show when higher ups want to kill it). When you've that pressure there's likely a big amount of influences that encourages short, snappy stories and plot wrapups and such. Which then makes it really hard to try and break out of that mindset when creating a new show.

You can see some of the influence when you see interviews of TV show teams that land a film contract and suddenly they don't have 40mins they have 1.5-2 hours to work with and its a huge shift in mindset and approach they have to learn to work with that much time in one go

Changing it up a bit.

Have decided to put my Paramount+ sub to good use, and watch the various Borg episodes. Because I want to pinpoint when I felt they first became boring.

The problem as I see it with the Borg is they never got to have their own DS9 style series. The closest we get is Voyager and because of the mechanics of that series there's only 1 starfleet ship for them to ever engage with so they kind of have to always fail against 1 ship. The rest of the time its mostly against the Enterprise that they have to fail - again 1 ship.


We never really see the Borg do a Dominion style invasion where you get an actual sense that they've led to political and social changes or there's there's a good chance they can actually wipe out a major faction or destroy the Federation etc... We never really see the Borg go to War.

We get hints it happened a bit at the start of Picard series 1 with the Romulan situation; but one downside is a LOT of that happens "off screen" and again its 1 cube, 1 group of Borg.



What we really needed to make them feel a threat was a proper invasion. Multiple Cubes; multiple lost battles; lost worlds and CORE/Major lost elements. Not just fringe "you only heard of it this episode and never again" worlds; or single ships taking out entire Cubes.

The Battle of Worf should have been one of many battles against the Borg over a prolonged series akin to how we saw the Dominion War play out.

Is that not partially explained by Species 8472 causing a major hiccup though?

That (and I’ll be watching them in order, so will be a day or four before I can really comment further ) had it not been for that considerable spanner in the works, they might well have come after the Alpha quadrant mob handed?

Yeah but again that's happening a lot offscreen and once more its basically just Voyager solving things on its own.

Sure there are story reasons why we never got a full Borg Invasion, but the thing is because we never had a huge prolonged war they always remained trapped in that "baddy of the week" and "two episode end of season special baddy" Category.

Even with the films they are quite small adventures. First Contact is basically a handful of Borg on the Enterprise*. The longest we actually get is Picard seasons 2 and 3 though then its still predominantly a very small number of Borg at once and its all resolved very quickly.

Again no prolonged war stress like we got with the Dominion.


I've said it before - for all their vast power, influence, numbers and threat; the Borg never actually invaded the Alpha Quadrant. A few single cubes were sent; a few scout ships. But we never got them fully invade with multiple cubes; taking worlds; building a front line; tearing up whole fleets and more. Yes they are a threat, but increasingly they are a threat we are told about rather than shown. With the greater reserve of their forces being held back. Voyager got the closest and evne then they ended the whole season on a virus that wiped out the Borg in basically one hit.

*yes there's a Cube that's defeated right at the very start

Forgot they kicked off in Q Who, not Best of Both Worlds.

But as an amusing(ish) aside, anyone else sometime see the intro bit for TNG, and think it makes the Enterprise look like it’s trapped in some hellish one way system?

I think the problem with the Borg is that they are the ultimate losing scenario.

With the Dominion there's cultural and political tensions between Gamme Quadrant races and their Cardassian allies. The addition of the Breen to the alliance causing more instability and distrust. The Dominion's use of Cardassian troops much in the same way as they use the Jem'Hadar and Vorta without caring the Cardassians can't replace their losses like the clone races can.

Planets and sectors taken by the Dominion can be retaken or have local resistance fighters (like on Bajor).

None of that applies for the Borg. They're the ultimate NPC enemy. They don't feel, they don't have politics, they don't have alliances, they don't have any aspect of normal war that can be influenced.
They're a major threat but a seriously boring one from a story telling perspective.

If you take the fall of Betazed from DS9, it's a big deal because a major (at least in the TNG era) Federation world has fallen to the Dominion.
But it can still be retaken by the Federation if the Dominion is beaten back.
If the Borg take Betazed the whole planet is a write off. It's population is gone. There's nothing to win back. It's boring.

And the Borg don’t Want to invade, to wipe everything out. If you get wiped out you stop advancing and they don’t get new stuff to steal. They have their whole big region of turf and they weren’t even conquering their own quadrant. They just occasionally ice cream scoop out a sampling of the latest developments to see what’s new and cool and useful, while their supreme awesomeness only encourages people to develop more/faster.

 Gert wrote:
I think the problem with the Borg is that they are the ultimate losing scenario.

With the Dominion there's cultural and political tensions between Gamme Quadrant races and their Cardassian allies. The addition of the Breen to the alliance causing more instability and distrust. The Dominion's use of Cardassian troops much in the same way as they use the Jem'Hadar and Vorta without caring the Cardassians can't replace their losses like the clone races can.

Planets and sectors taken by the Dominion can be retaken or have local resistance fighters (like on Bajor).

None of that applies for the Borg. They're the ultimate NPC enemy. They don't feel, they don't have politics, they don't have alliances, they don't have any aspect of normal war that can be influenced.
They're a major threat but a seriously boring one from a story telling perspective.

If you take the fall of Betazed from DS9, it's a big deal because a major (at least in the TNG era) Federation world has fallen to the Dominion.
But it can still be retaken by the Federation if the Dominion is beaten back.
If the Borg take Betazed the whole planet is a write off. It's population is gone. There's nothing to win back. It's boring.

That’s a good point; the Borg are more like a plague or natural disaster. You don’t liberate worlds from the Borg, you rebuild them (and at that point, is it even worth it?)

Ok doke. First two Borg stories watched.

Q Who

Clearly powerful, and mysterious. And that mystery is tantalising. Guinan provides some much needed exposition.

Best of Both Worlds Pt 1

Now we really start to see just how serious a threat they are. Assimilation grants them the victim’s knowledge and experiences. Get the right victim, and a war can be over before it’s begun.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Changing it up a bit.

Have decided to put my Paramount+ sub to good use, and watch the various Borg episodes. Because I want to pinpoint when I felt they first became boring.

Descent part 1

Watched Wrath of Khan with my kids after bribing them with being able to watch "flight of dragons" afterwards.

I still kinda get bothered by how "nerfed" the enterprise is in the first two movies because they're still working the bugs out for refits and/or it gets disabled really quickly. But maybe that just makes it a good compelling movie because it bothers me so much. At least we haven't gotten to the third movie that shouldn't exist... they went and revealed Kirk has a son and then kill him and destroy the enterprise in one whole movie, its like cooking a delicious meal just to flip the table over.

The Flight of Dragons is awesome. Hope they enjoyed it enough to forget the Ceti Alpha Eels going into Chekov’s ear scene.

Best of Both Worlds

Threat considerably escalated where a single Cube obliterates loads of Federation ships with seemingly contemptuous ease, and little if any lasting damage.

But we also start to see potential exploits (being able to use Locutus to switch them off, then create a charging loop).

Still an interesting threat and species.

Next up? I Borg. Which I’ll admit I don’t have especially fond memories of.

 Overread wrote:
To be fair Rafaella is basically a "broken" character and a very rare example of an addict with a broken past that we see in Star Trek. Personally I think its a challenging role to play because a lot of elements will end up with her doing things and having attitudes that are not your ST norm and are not endearing.

"Broken" is fine - but have her deal with that not be given everything cos... reasons

Putting a neurotic mess struggling with addiction in charge of warships seems stupid even by the most nepotistic Star Fleet standards

She’s on the fast track to Starfleet Admiral.

The Borg are always interesting in TNG. They got overused in Voyager and became just the badguy of the week. For me, they started to jump the shark when 4 members of Voyager got assimilated on purpose to infiltrate them for some reason. Like if you can do that on purpose and come back from it then they have lost their menace.

I’ve a mixed opinion on I Borg.

HUgg’s story is an interesting one, and definitely deserves exploration. But, I’m not convinced this episode told that story particularly well.

It’s Descent up next I think. Which isn’t really a Borg story, but a Data/Lore one.

 KamikazeCanuck wrote:
The Borg are always interesting in TNG. They got overused in Voyager and became just the badguy of the week. For me, they started to jump the shark when 4 members of Voyager got assimilated on purpose to infiltrate them for some reason. Like if you can do that on purpose and come back from it then they have lost their menace.

Part of the ethos of Star Trek is that no one is evil and they all just need to join the Federation and be civilised....a more subtle version of the old colonial ideas - its even on ocassion called out on the show by Quark etc.

It does mean that bad guys are always becoming "good guys"...or at least not as bad guys unlike 40k or Fantasy where there are unredemable bad guys

It’s also demonstrated whenever an alien or hybrid crew member is torn between their culture and the Federation’s ideals.

Now, duty aside? It’s always presented as the alien culture being lesser and objectively the worse choice.

This is best explored with Worf, where his actions can be entirely in-keeping with Klingon culture, but clash with his duties and obligations as a Starfleer officer.

It’s then bungled with Torres, where the Klingon part of her outlook is always in the wrong.

I think what makes Worf really work as a character is the fact that his knowledge of Klingon culture is not from firsthand experience for a lot of the show. He was raised by humans, and what he knows of Klingon culture was from reading the histories and legends of the Klingon and this colours his performance and perception of Klingon identity. "Klingons do not laugh" for example.

This then causes him untold issues when he actually experiences how Klingon culture actually is in practice.

Worf is basically like if someone learned about Bushido and the honour of samurai from revisionist history texts of the late 19th, early 20th century and was then dropped into the Sengoku period when they went to see it firsthand.

Yet, his view on it does influence other Klingons in how they act.

Whilst a good few years down the line, his initial contact with Martok, where he shames Martok’s son’s behaviour, and straight up tells him “I cannot take what he does not have” in terms of the son’s honour is one of my favourite bits of any show.

I don’t want to do Worf a disservice by saying he has a childlike view of Klingon culture, but there is a certain naive purity which works for him, because he’s not been raised in the complexities of house rivalries and that. And so he has a habit of being able to cut through a lot of the politics by simply not knowing it’s there in the first place, instead going simply by what is honourable.

The thing is Worf knows about Klingon Culture from outside impressions and written accounts. He aims to behave as a Klingon should behave.

It might not even be a fully romanticised impression, its one built by reading the rules of being a Klingon and actually aspiring and trying to live by them.

That's why his behaviour can influence other Klingons because he's basically behaving "as he should" with some elements of Federation upbringing mixed in here and there. Which works because by that stage the Federation and Klingons have been allies for quite some time.

On one hand you can say he has a child-like understanding; on another you could say he has a pure understanding. Or undiluted by years of drift from the ideal that follow.



We see this in regular society too - there are laws and rules by which we should live, but various factors arise which causes most of us to twist/bend or adapt those rules. Go long enough and within social groups and those twists and turns become new "rules" that might not be formally written down, but the group accepts as modifications. Go long enough and you can drift quite a long way from the original which means if the original gets brought back up it can be embarrassingly far if its pointed out.



Basically most people treat rules like the PotC Pirates Code. That is until Worf/Edward Teague turns up to remind you that they ARE rules

Worf can effectively be seen as a proxy for the children of immigrants or of minorities who, feeling disconnected geographically from what they perceive is their cultural heritage and isolated and othered by the culture they are in, go hardcore into their heritage culture without any firsthand experience of what that culture actually is, based often on hearsay and stereotypes.

Contemporary to the time that TNG was airing you had this happening in parts of the black community of the US, with afrocentric thought quite prominent in African American culture at the time. This performance of blackness, of "African" identity, was often based on a stereotypical perception of "African" identity as a generalised whole, rather than of the individual cultures that make up the peoples of Africa in reality. African American descendants of slaves would not know which African culture they had descended from, after all, so many created their own, not even necessarily consciously, by lifting elements from all over the continent. Taking a particular colour palette of clothing from here, a style of clothing from there etc.

While I do think that they did a good job with klingons in TNG, but I still don't find their transformation from bitter enemies of the federation into reluctant allies. In TOS they conquered (and enslaved) worlds and had presumably done so in the past and seemed like they were going to continue to do so if not for organians, and I know the organians had been mentioned in books but their imposed peace between klingons and federation never seemed to be mentioned after that episode.
Yes they blew up their moon in a movie, but they were an empire, that explosion should have only effected one planet.

Its kinda like how the romulans getting blown up from one super nova never made sense to me either, the event is too thin of a chain for the heavy weight in story telling its supposed to hold up.