Root of all the ENT bashing/hating?
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3D Master
Rear Admiral
I am civil. Make no mistake, I'm civil. If I didn't remain civil, it'd be a lot worse.
I never said that a morality tale can't be good drama - I said preachy bullshit morality tales can't be good drama. Like TNG and onward. Star Trek first and foremost told good drama, if it had a moral tangent to it, it only was there as part of the good drama. Star Trek was good drama first, not marality tales. Your quote even says so.
All revolving around the Doomsday Machine. Not the two old fogies on the back of the Machine trying to get their retirement home.
Not only can't you read, don't have the smarts to understand what something is about, you have the attention span of fly.
Let me explain it to you:
In early post I likened that the Doomsday Machine did not degenerate into a story about not putting people in a retirement home. Which is what happened with Rogue Planet.
I just kept going on that tangent and make it even more blatant to try get some people to understand the bloody obvious. Obviously it's wasted on some people.
And once again: IT SHOULD NOT BE A SETTING! Are you really this ridiculously dense?
If they are good writers, THEY ARE! You do not waste the Doomsday Machine on two old people trying to get to their retirement home. The same you don't waste a Rogue Planet on some alien that's hunted.
You don't need a Rogue Planet to meet some hunting aliens. Some hunting aliens CAME to the DS9 in a DS9 S1 episode, hunting Aliens could have come to the Enterprise after their invisible prey stowed away on it. Even if you want to have it on a planet, you STILL don't waste the Rogue Planet on it. You get some average run of the mill planet. A episode with a Rogue Planet should star the Rogue Planet. The same the episode with the Doomsday Machine starred the Doomsday Machine - not two old people on its back trying to get to their retirement home.
You're an idiot. It's plain and simple, you're an idiot. If you can't see how that hunting alien is nothing but those two old people on the back of the Doomsday Machine getting to their retirement and revolving the Doomsday Machine on those two folks instead - you're an idiot. It's that simple, there's no way around it.
I do not call anyone on idiot for disagreeing with me. I make aspersions to anyone's intelligence, I only state the truth. If he is incapable of understanding what I've been saying post after post, and then even write it down explicitly, word for word, he's an idiot. If he can't grasp that turning Rogue Planet in some story about some hunting aliens and an alien being hunted that could be done anywhere else, is the same as turning The Doomsday Machine in some story about two old folks on its back trying to get their retirement home - he's an idiot.
We don't have top bring Nicholls into it--GR himself used the morality tale angle to justify the SF trappings back when SF was still getting no respect. He himself compared Trek to Gulliver's Travels (in addition to Wagon Train and Horatio Hornblower). GR said he created Trek to slip political allegory under the radar of the censors and sponsors. I'm sure Serling did pretty much the same with Twilight Zone.
How long did it take you to figure out that "Similitude" was a series of arguments for and against Stem Cell research?
It's really difficult not to be using fiction as a mouthpiece for ideas, and it might even be impossible.
It's really difficult not to be using fiction as a mouthpiece for ideas, and it might even be impossible.
I thought he compared it to Magnificent Seven, more like a spaghetti western in space.
Science fiction has *always* been about reviewing moral topics in the guise of looking at it from the future when we're farther removed. Way before Roddenberry put out Star Trek, writers were looking at moral issues: Stranger in a Strange Land was written in 1961 and deals with many issues including religion, Sirens of Titan was released in 1959, I Robot was released in the 1950s ....
You know, maybe you've hit on something. The genre these days, especially on television, is less about moral issues and their impact. Instead, it's more about neat guns, babes in skin-tight clothing and ships. I wonder if Dr. Who is the only sci-fi now on television that deals with more "gray matter." (Interesting topic for the sci-fi general forum.)
You know, the one criticism I have about Similitude is that they didn't spend nearly enough time hand wringing about whether to clone Trip. Trip bonked his head, ended up in a coma and Archer pretty much made up his mind to clone. Also, Phlox didn't really raise a lot of objections to the idea. I guess to really address stem cell research, I would've liked for that to have been a point of contention more. Like in Enemy Within, Kirk, Spock and McCoy spend a lot of time discussing what makes a man -- both his good and negative qualities. Without aggression, Kirk has no ambition or leadership qualities. And without kindness and mercy, evil!Kirk is left to rape (literally), lie and pillage what he wants to get what he needs. *That* was a thorough discussion with a clear message while making an interesting story.
I'm curious as to what kind of sci-fi story you'd like to see involving a rogue planet, 3D Master. To me, it's just a planet with no solar system around it. How and why it came to exist could be an interesting story, but the story would be about those forces or creatures, not the planet itself.
You've now earned yourself a warning for flaming. Any comments, make them via PM please. Keep it out of the forum.
This is the way TNG would have handled the episode. More hand wringing about the issue until we "eyerollingly" got the point. I like that they put the issue out there for us but instead of dwelling on it, they moved to how the mission at hand would be affected.
The heavy handed approach to moral issues is what hurt episodes like Stigma and Chosen Realm. The subtle approach works much better.
You been prattling on about "morality tales" since page three without qualifiers. Expressing a rather large distaste for them used in conjunction with "Awesome SF Concepts". Which you see as a "waste". Again with no qualifiers. I simply disagree and feel you can combine the two and create good drama.
TOS could be very preachy, with all the finesse of a slegehammer to the head. Fans even joke about Kirk's Moral of the story speechs where he explains why humans doen't suck or why humans won't play what ever game the AOW has set up.
Well if you read the quoted material you'll see that to Roddenberry "morality tales" were the type of drama (good or bad) that he wanted to use Star Trek to tell. "Awesome SF Concepts" were clearly secondary and tangential to those stories.
There is no need to invent any "old fogies" for the episode to be a "morality tale" since the moral and morality of "Doomsday Machine" is clearly centered around Decker and the choices he makes and his obsession. In the end its his sacrifice than helps save the ship.
Trust me I got it. It was just so incredibly lame as to be laughable. The whole "attempting to be clever but failing" line was your clue.
You're asking if I'm dense?
Yeah, I get that you think that. Just beacuse you think that doesn't make it a hard fast rule or wrong. There is nothing wrong with using it a setting to tell a "morality tale." Could it be used in a better Story? Sure. They are writers, some of their work will be good and some will be bad. But you do waste the Doomsday Machine on a story about a man's decent into madness and obsession following a tragedy.
Right then you or someone else would be bitching about ENT ripping off DS9. No you dont need a Rogue Planet to tell that story, but it does make it more interesting and ties in better with the explorer aspect of the show than it would be if set on the ship or just another planet.
The Doomsday MAchine is not the "star" of the episode. Decker is. The DM is just a prop. It the catalyst that sets the story in motion.
nah, I just disagree with you. That doesn't make me an idiot. Your analogy is weak as is the rest of ytour arguement. Its based on your opinion and nothing more. Mine at least draws upon quotes from Star Trek's creator as to his intent for the show.
The topic of Similitude wasn't about the pros and cons of cloning, it was a story about a guy who looked exactly like another guy, but was really different. Everyone understands that a cloned human being wouldn't have the same memories as the person he was cloned from. If you use the social issue as a passing comment, not the context of the story, you're not really dealing with the issue.
Yeah, TOS was preachy, but it was good!
So was TNG.
I only read the first and last page of this thread, but two things that bothered me most about ENT were:
1. Changing the Vulcans. To me, the vulcans were always protrayed as the noble, wise and intelligent beings of the galaxy. But in ENT they were protrayed as duplicitous and unehtical. (episodes concerning Vulcan-Andorian stuff)
2. The theme song. SciFi theme songs are almost always, grand orchestral intrumental pieces. It wasn't a bad song, it was just not what I was accustomed to.
I haven't watched season (most of) 3 or 4 yet. Waiting for the dvds to come down in price.
1. Changing the Vulcans. To me, the vulcans were always protrayed as the noble, wise and intelligent beings of the galaxy. But in ENT they were protrayed as duplicitous and unehtical. (episodes concerning Vulcan-Andorian stuff)
2. The theme song. SciFi theme songs are almost always, grand orchestral intrumental pieces. It wasn't a bad song, it was just not what I was accustomed to.
I haven't watched season (most of) 3 or 4 yet. Waiting for the dvds to come down in price.
I know. Thats the reason I disagreed with your desire for more hand wringing on the issue of whether of not to clone Trip. I think more hand wringing over the issue would have turned the episode into a heavy handed preachy TNG-like affair. It turned out much better as a story about forcibly sacrificing a life for a friend and valued crew member.
Not so much all Vulcans as much as just Spock. =/ Sybok, for instance, was willing to kill the whole of Kirk's crew to meet with God. That Vulcan from DS9's "Take me out to the Holosuite" was a right out snob, not unlike most of the Vulcans we saw on this series.
Personally, I'm glad they weren't all noble. That would have been boring to watch.
I loved "Enterprise." It's the only one of the post-TNG Trek shows that I give a damn about. I liked the art design enormously (though I'd have been happier with more color, as Sam notes) and the characters particularly.
Modern Trek characters are generally enervated and mannered; quite an assortment of good character actors have invested parts of their careers in salvaging poor-to-mediocre material on these shows. I found the "Enterprise" characters to be generally an improvement on this, although nowhere near as plausible or interesting as better characters on much other modern TV.
There's no contradiction there at all, since Picard carefully did not describe any detail of the first contact. The reason for this, BTW, was that the writers who made that up had no specific idea what Klingon first contact had been like - the concept just sounded real, real good. The basic premise, though, was not that armed conflict had immediately occurred but that humans had managed to offend Klingons by rushing in without understanding much about Klingons as a species and applying human values to situations (hence the process of covert observation shown in the episode "First Contact") - and the behavior of Archer and company in "Enterprise" was entirely consistent with that.
As for contact coming "too soon" - there was no canonical date established for Klingon first contact prior to "Broken Bow," so the contact couldn't have been "too soon."
Modern Trek characters are generally enervated and mannered; quite an assortment of good character actors have invested parts of their careers in salvaging poor-to-mediocre material on these shows. I found the "Enterprise" characters to be generally an improvement on this, although nowhere near as plausible or interesting as better characters on much other modern TV.
There's no contradiction there at all, since Picard carefully did not describe any detail of the first contact. The reason for this, BTW, was that the writers who made that up had no specific idea what Klingon first contact had been like - the concept just sounded real, real good. The basic premise, though, was not that armed conflict had immediately occurred but that humans had managed to offend Klingons by rushing in without understanding much about Klingons as a species and applying human values to situations (hence the process of covert observation shown in the episode "First Contact") - and the behavior of Archer and company in "Enterprise" was entirely consistent with that.
As for contact coming "too soon" - there was no canonical date established for Klingon first contact prior to "Broken Bow," so the contact couldn't have been "too soon."
Picard got it right. He said 200 years. McCoy got it wrong. He said 50 years.
Now we're used to Archer being the slow ugly step child, but Picard doesn't have rose coloured blinders we do, so by Picards Stadards Broken bow was a complete clusterfuck... Aliens were fighting in North America without Starfleet noticing, which is a sign of the times and a lead up to the Xindi Probe that man can't control the boarders of even it's homeworld, then the Vulcans were immediately alienated because the humans insisted they ignore and piss on Klingon tradition, then the Vulcans hijack completely humanities mission of exploration into the galaxy, and that's even if Picard didn't know that the Vulcan High command was in the pocket of Romulus, then the Captain was shot in his first attempt to get along with other people on a planet which had been trading medical supplies with Earth for at least 30 years given the age of Peter Weller despite Starfleet security knowing dick about Rigellian biology when they couldn't identity their DNA after some Rigellians stole Phlox alsoin seaosn 4... Archer then exacerbated the temporal cold war into a very bloody and real war in the present by stirring the Klinons into a bug hunt against the Suliban... How many Suliban do you think were mass exterminated by the Klingons after the fingers of the Cabal were noticed in Broken Bow? The Klingon Fleet would have laid waste to their home world and fought the Tandarians for the right to kill the lot of them first! ...And that's even without... Can some one give a translation of what the Chancellor of the high Council said in Klingonese? ( Transcript + translation page says it's gobbly gook. Some bout death and a torpedo.)
That seems disasterous to me?
Now we're used to Archer being the slow ugly step child, but Picard doesn't have rose coloured blinders we do, so by Picards Stadards Broken bow was a complete clusterfuck... Aliens were fighting in North America without Starfleet noticing, which is a sign of the times and a lead up to the Xindi Probe that man can't control the boarders of even it's homeworld, then the Vulcans were immediately alienated because the humans insisted they ignore and piss on Klingon tradition, then the Vulcans hijack completely humanities mission of exploration into the galaxy, and that's even if Picard didn't know that the Vulcan High command was in the pocket of Romulus, then the Captain was shot in his first attempt to get along with other people on a planet which had been trading medical supplies with Earth for at least 30 years given the age of Peter Weller despite Starfleet security knowing dick about Rigellian biology when they couldn't identity their DNA after some Rigellians stole Phlox alsoin seaosn 4... Archer then exacerbated the temporal cold war into a very bloody and real war in the present by stirring the Klinons into a bug hunt against the Suliban... How many Suliban do you think were mass exterminated by the Klingons after the fingers of the Cabal were noticed in Broken Bow? The Klingon Fleet would have laid waste to their home world and fought the Tandarians for the right to kill the lot of them first! ...And that's even without... Can some one give a translation of what the Chancellor of the high Council said in Klingonese? ( Transcript + translation page says it's gobbly gook. Some bout death and a torpedo.)
That seems disasterous to me?
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