I liked TNG...but

[RobertScorpio]

To me TNG was PHASE TWO all over again. And to those who say it wasn't? Well, I have the PHASE TWO book and on more than one occasion in that book they say TNG pretty much borrowed from PHASE TWO's format...

Which brings me to DS9. The reason I like DS9 more than TNG is because DS9 is the more original of the two shows. The Captain is some dude who has a kid and hates Picard (well, I could identify with that..wink wink) and pretty much the rest of the crew and characters (Quark) were so 'un-trekky'.

I know many didn't like the first season or so with all the Bajoran stuff going on...but I did. I know many prefer their STAR TREKS out on ships going from planet to planet. But me? I found the final two seasons of TNG very boring because nothing new was really being found. And Voyager-Enterprise in the years to come seemed to be running out of new ideas and were retelling stories told to us on TOS and TNG but with new actors and new bumpy headed aliens..

DS9, with its rich bench of back-up characters, just got better as it went. Some don't like the show as it moved into the Dominion arc; I did. It was fun finally seeing these galactic powers, Feds--Roms--Klingons--Cardassians, duking it out.

But the most rewarding part of DS9 that none of the other TREK shows, including TOS, really had was the evolution of the characters...

Picard and Janeway pretty much seem like the same people they were at the start. Not Sisko...not at all.

Kira? She goes from being this anti-federation Bajoran to a respectable officer who realizes the reality of the situation.

Bashir? hardly the person we first met.

Nog? Ummm...shoplifter to an officer in Starfleet?

Jake? Quark? Dukat?

DS9 told a story. Was it always A+ material? No. But I liked the characters because I watched them grow in depth, and that to me is far more important than Phasers and Shields and Borg-implants. CHARACTER CHARACTER CHARACTER....

And that is why I liked TNG...but I loved DS9.

(reaching for my hankie to dry my eyes...I miss this show)


Robert
Scorpio

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I agree completely.

I never cared for Voyager because it tried to sell us on things that don't work, things like setting the ship far away. How does that matter? Because there are new worlds out there? So what.. there new worlds close to home. I had an offer to write Trek stories for a fan fiction site, and they liked my stuff, but their premise was awful, they had a ship stranded not in another quadrant but in another galaxy but to me it made no difference. They said to me, think of all the interesting things we could do, how to make it as alien as possible. I'm like, screw that, ST is about the human condition, and part of that rides on finding human aspects of aliens. Part of that also rides on how a "perfect society" (the Fed) would really work.. are the values themselves overlooked in order to preserve them?

The big difference between TNG and DS9 is the episode "The Hunted" (TNG), where the former warrior leads a rebellion against the planetary government. At the end of the episode Picard leaves, to let what may happen play itself out. The ending was perfect for TNG, the message was clear, that the government would have to bring these warriors into their society. At the end of the episode E-D warps out, and Picard says "if the government survives the night..."

DS9 is about what would have happened if Starfleet didn't just warp away...

 

[Thor Damar]

I raise a glass of the Finest Kanar to the above!

 

[Robotech Master]

My favorite Treks are TOS and DS9 but I think TNG provides a necessary bridge between the two.

With these three shows you see an evolution of storytelling methods, themes, character development, and other ideas.

And, to me, TNG sort of represents the flipside of DS9 (or vice versa). You can't truly appreciate DS9's frontier feel/ dark themes if you don't first see the Federation from the point of view of the flagship of the fleet.

Voyager and Enterprise, on the other hand, did not advance the franchise in any way and actually regressed Trek as a whole.

 

[RobertScorpio]

DS9 is about what would have happened if Starfleet didn't just warp away...

Yes...you nailed it. Sisko had to live with the choices he made. Kirk, Archer, Picard and Janeway, could piss all over a planet and just leave, and go on their marry way.

Sisko had to make choices that Starfleet didn't like, but Sisko had to live with. That to me is a harder task that going from planet to planet..

Voyager tried to do what GR tried to do in the first season of TNG. Distance it's self from what TOS had done. GR even says this many times. He wanted to show there was more to space than Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans. Okay, its a good idea on paper. But...it didn't work. And eventually they gave up and brought the Klingons and Romulans and Sarek back.

Oh well..DS9 did a great job. AND, I might say, made TNG creations, Cardassians and Feringi and Bajorans, far better than they were on TNG...

Rob

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

My favorite Treks are TOS and DS9 but I think TNG provides a necessary bridge between the two.

With these three shows you see an evolution of storytelling methods, themes, character development, and other ideas.

And, to me, TNG sort of represents the flipside of DS9 (or vice versa). You can't truly appreciate DS9's frontier feel/ dark themes if you don't first see the Federation from the point of view of the flagship of the fleet.

Voyager and Enterprise, on the other hand, did not advance the franchise in any way and actually regressed Trek as a whole.

I agree completely, and I take nothing away from TNG. In fact, as it went on, I became intrigued by how serialized it seemed to be getting.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

DS9 is about what would have happened if Starfleet didn't just warp away...

Yes...you nailed it. Sisko had to live with the choices he made. Kirk, Archer, Picard and Janeway, could piss all over a planet and just leave, and go on their marry way.

Sisko had to make choices that Starfleet didn't like, but Sisko had to live with. That to me is a harder task that going from planet to planet..

Voyager tried to do what GR tried to do in the first season of TNG. Distance it's self from what TOS had done. GR even says this many times. He wanted to show there was more to space than Klingons and Vulcans and Romulans. Okay, its a good idea on paper. But...it didn't work. And eventually they gave up and brought the Klingons and Romulans and Sarek back.

Oh well..DS9 did a great job. AND, I might say, made TNG creations, Cardassians and Feringi and Bajorans, far better than they were on TNG...

Rob

I agree too.
Also note that Roddenberry toyed with a premise similar to VOY when he created TOS. When, on paper, the ship was called the Yorktown and not teh Enterprise, he had the of stranding it in space nad having it be lost and trying to get home. Then he had the good sence to realize: this is television, and it needs drama. Why don't I give the ship orders froma higher authority every episode? It didn't atter if individual eps deviated from those orders, but it gave the show credibility that it ahd them.

Plus it makes sense for the shows close to home. At the beginning of seasons, the producers can make little changes in the sets or the personel, even the uniforms, that can be explained away by saying the ship docked for a while, or whatevr. By stranding VOY and having no Starfleet of starbases, you had to wonder why there new extras, or a repainted set, all that.

 

[RobertScorpio]

My favorite Treks are TOS and DS9 but I think TNG provides a necessary bridge between the two.

With these three shows you see an evolution of storytelling methods, themes, character development, and other ideas.

And, to me, TNG sort of represents the flipside of DS9 (or vice versa). You can't truly appreciate DS9's frontier feel/ dark themes if you don't first see the Federation from the point of view of the flagship of the fleet.

Voyager and Enterprise, on the other hand, did not advance the franchise in any way and actually regressed Trek as a whole.

I agree completely, and I take nothing away from TNG. In fact, as it went on, I became intrigued by how serialized it seemed to be getting.

I agree...kind of. But I see TNG in this way. It was TOS done in the way GR had originally wanted TOS to be done. What do I mean? It has been suggested by others, Shatner-Nimoy come to mind, that Roddenberry originally saw TOS as a ensemble show. But Asimov told GR at some point in the first season that the american TV public, at that time (mid 60s) would not buy into an ensemble show. They liked their shows to have a "STAR" and supporting characters; i.e. GUNSMOKE.

So, Roddenberry took his advice and we got K/S and sometimes K/S/M.

And, from what I have read through the years, GR didn't like how Kirk was seen as some kind of "John wayne" cowboy and all that (Republican view of the world) baggage that came with that. And, also, by the early 80s, he had issues with Shatner and all that...

so he creates TNG. The captain, Picard, is this nice fellow. But when it comes to 'balls'...he is some what lacking. Meaning; GR wanted the captain to be a more 'ask questions first' kind of guy. (Shatner pokes fun of this with his comparision of the two in one of those great TV GUIDE stories they did way back when in TNG's glory years)

So...to me? TNG is really TOS, but done how GR wanted it to be done. The story telling is pretty much the same, with gradual attempts to serialize the show...but not that you could really tell.

DS9 says, ummmmmm, the viewers are smarter these days. The Xfiles shown, as did BAB-5 (Ds9's sister) that viewers could handle arc shows..they had memories!!!...

TNG, a very good show; but, to me, was telling stories in a out-dated mode, but told them well. DS9, with its rich canvass of continuity, took it further. And it did alienate viewers who don't like that kind of story telling, and Enterprise-Voyager would go back that the other way (towards TNG-TOS style of writing)....but once I was exposed to DS9's kind of story telling, there was no going to one-shot episodes and a sometimes there/sometimes not continuity...

Rob

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

 

[RobertScorpio]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

if they are? Good. I hate the PD. I can't stand it. So....if Sisko pissed all over it..good for him!!

Rob

 

[Damask]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

I dunno. I mean we've seen episodes where people were gambling to raise money for blankets for war orphans. Given the resources of the Federation why not replicate a few million?

Likewise Bajor nearly ended up in a civil war thanks to one piece of farm machinery.

The Federation just seemed to be administrating DS9 and Bajor did look after itself.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

if they are? Good. I hate the PD. I can't stand it. So....if Sisko pissed all over it..good for him!!

Rob

do you use the PD in your fiction?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

I dunno. I mean we've seen episodes where people were gambling to raise money for blankets for war orphans. Given the resources of the Federation why not replicate a few million?

Likewise Bajor nearly ended up in a civil war thanks to one piece of farm machinery.

The Federation just seemed to be administrating DS9 and Bajor did look after itself.

Interesting you should bring that up... it seems like, once you have a replicator, you are pretty much set. It has limited capacity and can only be in one place at a time, but it can create almost anything you could need.

The hard part, it seems, is actually getting them. Out on the frontier, they are evidently not very common. The replicators on DS9 didn't work very well in the early years, as I recall. Bajor had some industrial replicators but they only had so many. Raw materials are always in finite supply, so it's possible the Feds simply couldn't build industrial replicators quickly enough. When I think "industrial replicator" I think of something more like a factory, that has to be built out of smaller (probably replicated) components.

The Feds likely had better things to do than keep sending a bunch of junk to Bajor, anyway. Bajor's economic problems only seemed to improve once the area became a trading hub, which no doubt got the Feds to pony up more replicators and other supplies. Plus, the Bajorans benefited from all the new trade.

 

[Myasishchev]

One thing I always wondered... isn't the whole show a violation of the Prime Directove/ i mean Bajor isn't a part of the Federation, but the Federation is there helping them. Just by being so influential, aren't they violating the Pd

They were invited. Punch was served.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

+note: the PD did apply to Bajor. Picard ("Emissary") and Chakote (from "The Seige") mentioned it.

 

[Myasishchev]

As I understand it, the directive of non-interference applies to everybody. But contact alone doesn't violate that directive, if the species in question is warp capable, or otherwise already know about the big boys. Contact is interference per se only when the less advanced people don't know about the wider universe.

Bajor is like my sublight arkship hypothetical: when a bunch of impulse-riding semi-cavemen show up in Earth orbit, the Federation can't turn off the lights and pretend they're not home. Same deal with Bajor--their recognized world government asked for cultural and economic aid, particularly help administering the crazy future-technology they inherited from Cardassia, and the Federation obliged as they always do.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

But the Bajorans were not backwater bumpkins. They were warp-capable centuries before even the Cardassians. They just never, evidently, had expansionist desires.

The Federation wasn't allowed to meddle in their political or cultural affairs, which was why they didn't like Sisko being the Emissary, but the Federation certainly provided a lot of material support to the Bajorans post-occupation.

 

[CaptainStoner]

Well. TNG was not Phase 2. Phase 2 never happened. But, of course, TNG inherited much from Phase 2/TMP, including sets, as well as whole scripts. But it's just not accurate to say TNG was Phase 2 reheated. Phase 2, after all, was to be Kirk's crew.

I have just made it to S7 of DS9. One thing I've really liked about this show is how smooth the transitions have been. S1 of Ds9 doesn't have that awkwardness other Trek shows have - in this sense it's more like TOS. The characters are there, fully formed, in rhythm, right from the start. And the transition to Ezri, which I watched the last 2 nights - smooth as can be, a breath of fresh air actually. (And cute as a bug doesn't hurt either).

 

[Thor Damar]

But the Bajorans were not backwater bumpkins. They were warp-capable centuries before even the Cardassians. They just never, evidently, had expansionist desires.

The Federation wasn't allowed to meddle in their political or cultural affairs, which was why they didn't like Sisko being the Emissary, but the Federation certainly provided a lot of material support to the Bajorans post-occupation.

Dukat thought they where but then he was a typical Imperialist looking to justify his conquest of the Bajorians by imagining that he was helping to civilize them. And to make matters worse he expected to be loved by the people he oppressed!
Dukat certainly made DS9 even more interesting.

 

[neogothboy74]

But the most rewarding part of DS9 that none of the other TREK shows, including TOS, really had was the evolution of the characters...

Agreed. Continuity & Character Development. These are what I look for in a series, and DS9 had them in spades. Next Gen was ok, but DS9 is where Trek took off for me. It's funny because I remember this special that aired right around the finale of Next Gen called "Journey's End" (not to be confused with the actual episode of the same title) and there were interviews with the creative peeps behind Next Gen, and Rick Berman was trying to describe how we'd seen the characters 'grow' over the years and the examples of this were almost comical, with him pointing out that when the series started LaForge was one of the youngest members of the crew (which obviously didn't change) and that Riker had grown a beard. lol. That was the character developement on Next Gen. lol On DS9, there was more character development for the 30 odd recurring characters than for the main characters of all the other Treks combined, which made me care about DS9's characters more; they felt real. And at the end of DS9 we had an actual ending with crew members going their separate ways. It was just the best possible Trek.