Well maybe you're right but this trend of setting shows before the original sure is damn annoying!
JB
Trek two parters
- Thread starter Pauln6
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Well maybe you're right but this trend of setting shows before the original sure is damn annoying!
JB
What is an Rhaandarite, Paul? Forgive me if it's pretty well known and I've just missed the plot somehow!
JB
Exactly my point! They were one of the TMP background races, sometimes referred to as Vegans (not necessarily of the vegetarian variety). The internal security station was manned by Billy van Zandt and there were a couple more as background extras. They're a race where there is no obvious outward biological difference between males and females, although females wear jewellery. They are very long-lived, they keep growing as they age, potentially to over 10 feet in height. In the TMP Era novel Ex Machina, they are portrayed as having a complex hierarchical society with emphasis on teamwork so they make better followers than leaders. In many ways some of their species background fits Saru quite well.What is an Rhaandarite, Paul? Forgive me if it's pretty well known and I've just missed the plot somehow!
JB
Admittedly, the makeup in Discovery is more interesting, but I just despair at the introduction of new 'established' race after new 'established' race instead of applying racial tweaks to create cultures as well established as the Vulcans.
Similarly, Efrosians have almost no canon culture or species traits. Make his skin dark blue and you have a re-imagined Betelgeusian!
I am probably biased since TMP started the ball rolling with its new races, but I had well over a year to absorb and let my imagination run riot over the TMP aliens because so much merchandise came out before I watched the SLV on Itv. I loved the notion of an asexual warrior race that reproduced through cloning (Arcturian), a race where men and women look identical to outsiders (Rhandarite), a religious predator species who was a humanoid eagle/ leopard hybrid (Betelgeusian), a species with an acute temporal sense and ability to affect the time stream locally to effectively 'teleport' very short distances (El-Auran, I mean Kazarite - who also maybe look like Ktarians), Fluorine breathing aliens with superior vision and electromagnetic senses (Zaranite), an empathic species that can sense and manipulate pheromones and influence brain chemistry (Deltan), and a robust Saurian species with excellent lung function to allow them to survive hostile environments while producing excellent alcoholic products (Saurian).
Any of these would have been more fun than the poorly thought out Betazoids.
When I look at the bumpy headed monocultured one-off species that we got, it just feels like a missed opportunity. Compare Trek to the recurring pak'ma'ra, Gaim, Minbari, Vree, Narn, or Centauri. Admittedly, the Brakiri were a bit lame and the Abbai were merely a thumbnail, and the Vree were most often a joke ( in that they'd been joy riding to Earth and tormenting the natives for centuries) but even so...
I suppose DS9 did work a bit harder since the station was stuck in one place.
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Actually Takei is a decent actor. I think he just struggled to make hammy dialogue sound convincing. With a free reign to adjust his dialogue, I think he would have been fine in something like Discovery, where the focus was not on him to carry the show but to provide support to a younger cast.
If you haven't seen World Enough and Time, I highly recommend it. By far Takei's most powerful performance as Sulu.
Yeah, Georgie boy did okay in his Voyage To The Bottom of The Sea episode that he did in the sixties and The Six Million Dollar Man one in the seventies!
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Nicholas Meyer. It’s a memo regarding Harve Bennett’s treatment, “Return to Genesis,” which eventually became Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
I had a feeling you were referring to those silent guys from ST:TMP, Paul! It is strange how none of those aliens seen on the bridge or in the background have ever been explored since...
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My mistake. It was super late and I missed the proper noun Nick Meyer.
I think this has been proven wrong. Where's @Harvey at?
The pacing of most TOS episodes was perfect to me. Not sure I'd really would have wanted them expanded.
I agree but if we are just having some fun here - maybe "Conscience of the King"?
I think it could have been used to fix up some of the flaws of the episode that were there to fit all the action in one episode.
Kirk and McCoy claiming coincidence for all the murders made them seem stupid in retrospect. In a true murder mystery you would have a few red-herring suspects thrown in to distract our heroes.
We saw the poison being administered so we knew from early on that something was up - if it were a two-parter I would have made the accidental poisoning seem more realistic or perhaps a suicide attempt and not let the audience know. Maybe have Leighton have a few enemies to perhaps have another reason for his murder.
I wouldn't have Riley there by accident either - have Kirk admit he requested him there.
To carry it to two episodes you might have to make the romance more real or the danger to the Enterprise real such as sabotage
I also wouldn't Kirk had Spock "research" into Tarsus - in a two parter I would have left Spock (and us) in the dark as long as possible.
We could also have had some flashback scenes from Tarsus.
When TNG came out and through the 90's I definitely had the feeling that we were supposed to forget TOS and think of TNG as the REAL Star Trek. ENT often felt to me like a TNG prequel rather than a TOS prequel. That moment in The Naked Time when the crew realizes time travel is possible is a huge moment...which is completely undermined by having a freakin' temporal cold war in the first season of ENT so that the TOS crew should have known all about time travel. We had to have the Borg episode and the Ferengi episode. BAH! Finally by the last season they wised up and started going back to TOS plots, but too little too late. And don't get me started on that stupid TNG final episode of ENT as if I wanted to see Ryker and Troi at that point. WAY overestimating my interest in TNG.
George thought his image was immensely dashing and heroic in those days. For the Transporter Room scene in ST3, he said somewhere that using his leather jacket as a cape that swept around behind him was "very Sulu-esque." Really. Like Sulu-esque was a thing.
It's been (I guess) 20 years, but he and Grace Lee Whitney guest starred on one of the worst episodes of Star Trek Voyager. Poor Grace was so rusty and wooden, she almost made George's performance look good. But between them and the stiff dialogue they were given, it was pretty bad.
To be fair to George, I should mention that Nichelle and Walter were equally terrible in the films. The three of them were fine in the TV series, but in the movies they seemed to be winging it, with either no preparation or no attention to their craft, or both.
Yeah, but I'm fine with stunt casting up to a point. Grace was no longer acting professionally so it's understandable if her acting muscles were not finely honed. George can do it though and has done it since. He seems more at ease with emotions than technobabble.
I hadn't considered Conscience as a contender but that's an interesting approach - make it an Agatha Christie style tale. I could see Rand being more heavily involved too - disapproving of Lenore, maybe accidentally discovering one of her plots, possibly even becoming one of her victims. I always thought it would have been great, and entirely in character if Rand had ignored Kirk's orders to run to his cabin with her tricorder to help locate the phaser.
I agree but I always thought that when TNG first came out that it went too far in complementing TOS and it was only when it assumed it's own identity that it became good! ?Both DS9 and VOY also gave the nod to TOS in their adventures but it was ENT being the first show that I felt was trying to ignore TOS and as you said became more of a TNG prequel than TOS! Plus yes why would you end a series with it all either being a history lesson or Riker watching it all in the Holo-Deck? Surely that's telling it's fans that we know you don't really like this show much so we'll give you what we think you like!
JB
I think "The Enterprise Incident" could easily be made into a two-parter. They could use the extra time to explain why Kirk and Spock accepted the mission in the first place, how they knew the Romulan Cloaking device would work aboard the Enterprise and why they never used it again. Perhaps they could have had Spock done some preliminary work in seducing the Commander by having him showing his "fake" dissatisfaction with Starfleet policies in some public forum.
There are only a few first run television series that I watch. When the boob tube gets monotonous, I watch TOS.
Yeah, this is a contender. I love the episode but it's massive plot holes drive me nuts. Adding some more details and 'mission Impossible ' style solutions could have made it a great episode.
Showing the set-up of the mission would ruin the surprises...but it would be worth it if Kirk had to take a shuttle to an isolated planet to get the mission from a self-destructing data tape. "Good luck, Jim."
I think a bit more build up to make Kirk's attitude less jarring at the start, a bit of racist banter to make Spock seem more likely to defect, and finish episode 1 with Kirk's death. Episode 2 could then have been padded, with a couple of other crew being part of the IMF team to plug some of the gaping plot holes and dim-witted way the Commander left herself so open.
Thing was in the episode, Kirk and crew act like Balance of Terror had never happened! They speak of the cloaking device and it's implications as though they know nothing about it despite their encounter with a cloaked ship two years earlier but even Chekov remembers it when they crossed the Neutral Zone in The Deadly Years! 
JB
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