Something I just realized, it sure is convenient that the chief engineer returned to active duty this week when she was needed to stand watch on the bridge while captain and XO are away.
The Last Ship - Discussion Thread (spoilers possible)
- Thread starter Scout101
- Start date
Has there ever been a show where people who should actually be going out on missions are the main characters and the command crew who should realistically stay behind are the supporting characters?
Mister Fandango
Fleet Captain
Battlestar Galactica. Both versions, really, but especially the original.
Begs the question, what would a command centered show consist of?
Space: Above and Beyond comes to mind.
12 o Clock High, but there the Group commander lead the big missions personally.
I remember watching that show (SAAB) when I was younger and wondering why the "Fighter Pilots" were also the ones doing ground missions in several of the episodes. You don't see a lot of Navy Pilots doing ground recon, extraction, sabotage, etc, missions. Great, you can land your fighters on the ground . . . is it really the best use of assets to have your "pilots" be the ones fighting on the ground? If one of them gets killed do you just abaondon the fighter too?
It didn't happen every episode but a couple of those missions seemed a bit "far fetched" in terms of allocating assets.
^^^But there are excuses, like if there are enough recruits for multipurpose Marines but not enough for divisions that are exclusively Infantry or exclusively Air Wing, which actually would make sense during a war where whole planets are objectives. Boots on the ground will always be scarce, so you need a way to supplement them.
And to add to the above shows, Black Sheep Squadron and Rat Patrol.
War movies provide an example. Ones like Tora Tora Tora!, Sink The Bismarck!, and Midway all focused more on command staffs than on frontline forces. A series like that would probably star the managers of a command center and throw scenes intermittently to the front lines.
Oh! Just thought of a TV example. My avatar's miniseries Op Center.
And to add to the above shows, Black Sheep Squadron and Rat Patrol.
War movies provide an example. Ones like Tora Tora Tora!, Sink The Bismarck!, and Midway all focused more on command staffs than on frontline forces. A series like that would probably star the managers of a command center and throw scenes intermittently to the front lines.
Oh! Just thought of a TV example. My avatar's miniseries Op Center.
This is great, I described this show to a friend as Star Trek on a navy ship. He got hooked on the episode where the away team had to investigate that starbase that housed all those Cardassian POW's and the captain had to order the ship to fire the photons on their position.
Ooh, this could be fun, Trekify The Last Ship. The Nebula class USS Nathan James is all that remains of Starfleet after a devastating plague has crippled most of the Alpha Quadrant. Avoiding outbreak by being in the Beta Quadrant out of comms-range, supposedly to test out new equipment, it turns out this mission was a ruse for visiting Vulcan scientist Dr. T'Scott trying to find a cure.
There's also a Romulan Warbird out there trying to stop the Nathan James from finding a cure so they can develop a cure and control it themselves.
There's also a Romulan Warbird out there trying to stop the Nathan James from finding a cure so they can develop a cure and control it themselves.
Last edited:
The West Wing? It was almost always the staffers, and not Bartlet, Leo or Hoynes, sent to the Hill.
Also, that wasn't the only time pressure. They needed to wrap everything up by the end of the hour, and they still had at least one commercial break to go.
On the real, though, of course you're right. If I were Chandler, I would have been considerably more polite to El Toro, and demanded similar courtesy from my men. Sure, he was a bad guy, but given the circumstances, being macho dicks was hardly wise or professional, as the guy correctly pointed out.
Not gonna lie, I was also a bit alarmed by their murder of his men. The rational and corect thing to do would be to return to the ship, resupply, and announce by loudspeaker at night that El Toro's regime was going down, and that his men should surrender individually and unarmed immediately or face the consequences. I know, they were theoretically all cartel guys already, but...
I was also unclear what happened to the older daughter. It sounded like the baddies just took her across the river to get infected, so chances are she stuck to the riverbank and was still clean, no? Or did they straight-up do her in?
Grrr, I see that mistake I made. I've now corrected it, I had "plaque" written instead of "plague." I don't know why I keep making that mistake here lately, it really is getting embarrassing.
It wasn't really made clear past she was being taken to the infected side. I suppose if the baddies wanted to be real dicks about it they could have brought her there and broken her legs or something so she couldn't just walk away, but who knows, since we immediately shifted to preventing the second one from being raped.
And let's not go too nuts with the trek parallels, guys. So far it's only been one episode that was totally trek-like. Past Chandler being real-world Kirk we're still watching Space Battleship Arleigh Burke.
Yes, that would have brilliantly let the cartel guys setup the villagers as human shields/hostages. Resupplying and going in with a covert team is smart. Announcing over a loud speaker that "we're coming to get you" is not.
So the episode where they beam over to Guantanamo space station for supplies to find it deserted, run into a few klingons there and have to command the ship to fire photons on their position to stop them. That didn't feel too "trek parallel" to you?
What about the episode where they find the derelict space liner full of dead passengers and scavenge it for fuel?
Every episode so far with just a few terminology changes could easily be from a trek show.