The two elder sons died between episodes?
The Milky Way is a dangerous place, especially to people who are lactose intolerant...
Least favorite type of episode
- Thread starter gakelly
- Start date
The Milky Way is a dangerous place, especially to people who are lactose intolerant...
The two elder sons died between episodes?
They show up in novels and stuff.
Is that even relevant?
It is to me. Feel free to ignore it if it's not to you.
About holodeck episodes. I didn't mind them in small doses. On a long journey, of course characters needed some kind of morale boost. It didn't make sense on Voyager that they could run it when they were low on energy. They had some excuse like "The holodeck has incompatible energy matrices!" No, that makes no god damned sense, it shouldn't have been running when they were resource strapped. Like it could have been a big deal "We finally have enough reserve energy to give people holodeck time again!"
Holodecks should have usually been a side thing though, something characters do in downtime. Having entire episodes revolve around them was 9 out of 10 times a horrible idea, especially constantly having people's lives endangered in the holodeck.
Showing holodeck adventures as a cold open that gets interrupted by the story, or a venue for parties was fine. Constantly revolving entire episodes around them maybe worked 5 times in the whole franchise.
Holodecks should have usually been a side thing though, something characters do in downtime. Having entire episodes revolve around them was 9 out of 10 times a horrible idea, especially constantly having people's lives endangered in the holodeck.
Showing holodeck adventures as a cold open that gets interrupted by the story, or a venue for parties was fine. Constantly revolving entire episodes around them maybe worked 5 times in the whole franchise.
I think most of Voyager's holodeck episodes are fine with the exception of the two "Irish village" ones which are really stupid!!!
Well, Heroes and Demons never did anything for me, either.
The only defenses for TOS might be:
(a) the show was just starting out and finding its feet - even the un-aired pilot had Spock emoting with devil grins over something as boring as wind passing through a flower that made a noise in turn to being blown on by said wind
(b) 1960s TV usually had self-contained installments that did not have later episodes reflecting or referencing earlier ones (though season 3 did have a couple examples of this, such as "Turnabout Intruder")
That said, it bugged me too that Spock offhandedly says "oh, an ancestor of mine" - then in the next season it turns out said fossil was his own daddy... That's a little bit of a big jump... My guess is, someone in the writer's room recalled at the time "Didn't Spock mention someone who got busy with a human? Let's not look at the script for precise verbiage but we'll make it big and say it was Spock's father as it'll be impactful and Spock's real popular now, so why not." (Even to this day, shows stumble on an idea and then change course later on. Is there a show where they plan everything out so perfectly before even a single inch of film is used? A great example of this is Amy Farrah-Fowler... In the 1990s, Roseanne wanted another child, which started out as a girl but was switched to a boy on a whim - but it was before this point when the show "jumped the shark" and the show continued to get worse anyhow.) All that said, audiences are said to be more sophisticated nowadays, so it seems par for the course that when a script spoonfeeds the audience plot and character setup that there's a consistency. Can there be a middle ground? Was there even one back in the day? Such burning questions. Answered next week. So stay tuned - same bat-time, same bat-channel!
)Of course, the popularization of "alternate universes" or "alternate timelines" could be used to explain away all these discrepancies. At least in Trek; for non-sci-fi shows, the equivalent trope is "dream sequence". JR knows all about that... Or for a dumber example, look up Martin and Philip on 1985's immense, ill-fated debacle known as "V".
Still, it's all a bit lame where all setup is rendered pointless for a stunt? Especially when the setup was a stunt? For Spock's case, it wasn't... just throwing out ideas and revisiting them later and given this was 1966, having to wade through dozens of scripts or episodes if one didn't remember probably took more time than anyone with a word processor and mechanism to search all files for particular keywords to hasten the finding process...
It'd be fun to be a fly on the wall to hear the discussion that led to the first episode's creation... and what led to the second one. Was it a good idea made bad or was it just dumb? I don't ask that because I'm part Irish either, those episodes were subpar by VOY's own standards.
Well IMO it's not as bad a the other two, it's not very good but the two "Irish ones" are abysmal.
In "I, Mudd" Kirk mentions events in "Mudd's Women":
In "By Any Other Name" KIrk mentioned events which happened in the episodes "Where no Man Has Gone Before" and "A Taste of Armageddon"
In "The Trouble With Tribbles" the Organian Peace Treaty is mentioned. which seems to make the episode a sequel to "Errand of Mercy":.
"A Private Little War" might also be a sequel to "Errand of Mercy":
And "Day of the Dove" might also be a sequel to "Errand of Mercy":
"The Deadly Years" might be a sequel to "Balance of Terror":
"Whom Gods Destroy" might also be a sequel to "Balance of Terror":
"That Which Survives" might be a sequel to "The Devil in the Dark":
"Turnabout Intruder" seems to be a sequel to "The Tholian Web" and "The Empath". Kirk in the body of Janice Lester says:
Didn’t she fall victim in one of Falk’s last role?
No that was a ruse. He was given a jar of poisoned jam by a woman who was avenging the death of her lover (he was a criminal found out previously by Columbo and apparently died as a result, I am not sure how maybe he killed himself) so she pretended to be an admirer of Columbo and gave him that jam to give to his wife and Columbo pretended to do so and even ate some in front of her and simulated agony and so she told everything and the cops came and put her away... suffice it to say It wasn't one of his best jobs...
Episodes with an unnecessary and unrelated Klingon subplot added to it, and instead of cutting the unrelated Klingon subplot, they cut the scenes that actually relate to the main plot, which is supposed to be an allegory for a real-world event and would have added depth to the main characters, because the episode is 10 minutes overlong. i.e “The Expanse”
I never found a pattern to episodes I do not like. There are of course some I do not like at all, but they seem more or less random to me. I do not like the Irish-village-holodeck-episodes of VOY, I do not like quite a few episodes of the first two seasons of TNG or the first of ENT or DS9.
Albeit, one thing comes to mind: Recycled plots... for example there are DS9 (Shadowplay) and ENT (Oasis) episodes featuring a sole survivor creating his folks via holo tech. That really annoyed me.
Albeit, one thing comes to mind: Recycled plots... for example there are DS9 (Shadowplay) and ENT (Oasis) episodes featuring a sole survivor creating his folks via holo tech. That really annoyed me.
It all depends on the individual episode for me, I might like one episode of a particular type but not another. But if I a had to pick one it might clip episodes. But the likes of SG-1 managed to do these well more often or not because they often used them as a way to advance the overall narrative
Auberjonois played in both, which an amusing coincidence.
I hate the mugatu and not just because it's so obviously a guy in a slightly changed gorilla suit but because the physical strength and the deadly venom are an aberration. Note that in nature animals that have venom would be helpless without it. Small snake, scorpion, spiders... Who's ever heard of a tiger or a hippopotamus with venom?
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