Why do they still let Braga do TV shows?

[Captaindemotion]

Did anyone go this nuts over Kirk's boot kicking Kruge off the cliff?

There was actually a fairly lengthy thread in the Star Trek movies XI- forum about nuKirk destroying Nero's ship ('Fire absolutely everything') and I brought up that scene to suggest that nuKirk wasn't all that different from primeKirk. It did generate quite a few ranges of opinion. I'm too lazy to look for it but it should be easily enough found.

 

[FPAlpha]

Eh...He said he'd do it again...

You're not getting it.

Sisko didn't do it. The people in charge of the show not only avoided having him do it, they avoided having him make a decision about it before it occurred - even the decision to look the other way.

Things don't happen by accident in scripts, or because the characters decide to do things. If the producers had been willing to show Sisko as capable of and willing to plot an assassination "for the greater good," they'd have done so. That's just not gonna happen in Star Trek, though, and there was no chance of it happening on DS9.

Cop out.

I don't see that as a cop out at all. Sisko is a highly intelligent man, he knew Garak and his background and this is exactly why he chose to involve him in this mission. Sisko is still a Starfleet officer and couldn't assassinate a foreign official so he used a deniable asset in the full knowledge what would/could happen.. Garak says it right to his face exposing the lie Sisko has told himself so he can live with it.

It doesn't matter if Sisko planted the bomb himself or not.. he could have stopped Garak at any point (even have him thrown into the brig to be absolutely safe) but he didn't and that makes him just as guilty, if not more so.

This is what makes the episode so good and so different from the rest of Star Trek (and someone was saying here that if Roddenberry were alive he would have nixed that story.. he not only would have nixed, he would have burned it and maybe contemplated firing the writer) because it showed us "realistic" people who have to make hard decisions that don't always coincide with Federation morals but are necessary.. it made Sisko a member of Section 31 because that's the kind of operation they would do.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I love how everyone "defending" In The Pale Moonlight is essentially proving Dennis' point for him.

It is interesting, isn't it?

This is what makes the episode so good and so different from the rest of Star Trek (and someone was saying here that if Roddenberry were alive he would have nixed that story.. he not only would have nixed, he would have burned it and maybe contemplated firing the writer) because it showed us "realistic" people who have to make hard decisions that don't always coincide with Federation morals but are necessary.. it made Sisko a member of Section 31 because that's the kind of operation they would do.

I already pointed out upthread that Jim Kirk got his hands dirty in A Private Little War, teleplay credited to none other than Gene Roddenberry. Remember TOS?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Perfect allegories for Korea or Vietnam.

Social commentary for an ongoing concern, and a very recent memory, not just wanking about hypotheticals.

Remember how McCarther told the press that he was going to nuke North Korea?

Better a limited conflict surely, than have Russia retaliate openly with their atom bombs?

(I have Delenn and G'kar yelling at each other in my head right now.)

 

[Captaindemotion]

(I have Delenn and G'kar yelling at each other in my head right now.)

That certainly explains a lot of your posts!

 

[TedShatner10]

Braga's best work was on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And Robert Maxwell's avatar is horrifying.

 

[TremblingBluStar]

Unfortunately for the fans of Firefly/Serenity, neither the series nor the movie were black comedy. They were entirely serious, to the point of pomposity. But fans of Firefly and the new BattleStar Galactica are entirely committed to Taking Nonsense Seriously.

You think Firefly was too serious?

Braga's best work was on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

If by best you mean "only good", we are in agreement. I'm sure he's a competent producer, and knows how to get a show made quite well. However, in my opinion, he's a crap writer who doesn't have a single good idea bouncing around his noggin.

 

[Agent Richard07]

Also, a lot of the decisions made on ENT were imposed on Braga by the UPN executives. For instance, Braga didn't want to include time travelers in the show at all, but the network insisted on having some aspect that moved forward from the 24th century because they didn't have faith in the idea of a straight prequel.

I never knew that. I thought it was the result of his seeming love of time travel.

 

[Anwar]

Braga gets a LOT of flak for stuff that wasn't his fault in the first place.

 

[Captaindemotion]

^ Like I say, why let facts get in the way of a good rant?

 

[Ian Keldon]

The general audience prefers X-Factor, Dancing With The Stars, Strictly Come Dancing and the like to most quality dramas on tv. It's got nothing to do with quality.

Nonsense. The "general public" likes all kinds of things, some of which you'd approve of and some you don't. Dragging out the old "we know more about quality than Joe Sixpack and that's why we like what we like" line doesn't wash.

It's funny that the examples you select all have to do with people competing and demonstrating actual talents and skills - some of them well, and some quite badly - as opposed to being fantasy stories that take place in simplified settings featuring narrowly idealized characters. Skiffy fans prefer the latter? Who'da thunk?

Faux populism doesn't become you Legion.
Real-i-TV, et al is lowbrow pandering at it's worst. It's mindless escapism at it's best. It requires no real thought or other intellectual investment to "get" Dancing with the Stars. It's ironic that you hold shows like that up as "quality" when in general you come across as one of the most "elitist" posters I've seen on this board.

 

[M'rk son of Mogh]

^^^

You make it sound as if the only criteria for quality entertainment has nothing to do (or minimally) with being entertained.

 

[Ian Keldon]

^^^

You make it sound as if the only criteria for quality entertainment has nothing to do (or minimally) with being entertained.

No, I'm saying that there is a vast difference between entertainments for the masses and more refined entertainments. There's a time and place for both, but neither should be mistaken for the other.

No one thinks that quality is reliably associated with popularity.

Then why did you make exactly that argument?

{quote]However, the oft-raised fannish objection that "failure demonstrates no inadequacy in something I like, because most people like dumb stuff" is thoughtless, defensive bullshit.[/QUOTE]

No, it's an entirely accurate description of the situation all too often.

"In The Pale Moonlight" has good points, but it cops out with regard to the "compromise of principles in war" - the worst that has to be done is done by someone else, someone we already know to be morally compromised (and certainly not a member of the regular cast!) then presented to Sisko as a fait accompli. The Hero is rescued from having to make a decision about the real dirty work. Like much of DS9, the episode pretended to be tough-minded, but was so only by the standards of Star Trek - which is to say, thematically and in terms of content lagging far behind other popular entertainment of the 1990s.

Horsecrap! Obviously you didn't watch the ending, where he takes ownership of the situation when he declares "I can live with it", even though he hates himself for doing so.

Exactly. This is another good example of how DS9 fed trekkies a little frisson of edginess while continuing to color inside the lines for the most part. Star Trek fans who were fascinated by and emotionally involved with the Franchise ate this stuff up - but the majority of those television viewers who had watched TNG didn't buy into it and drifted away over time.

As opposed to Captain "I'm always right" Picard, the CinC of self-righteous certitude? I can see why the "perfect people" fans wouldn't go for a more nuanced and realistic CO like Sisko.

Can't say that they're missed though.

The writing on DS9 was pretty good for Star Trek, but usually in the service of nothing really any more challenging - uhm, war is bad, m'kay? - than TNG or Voyager.

Hardly. I could spend all afternoon debating any number of other examples of DS9 offering up far more substantive and meaty social commentary than either the "perfect people" of TNG or "Captain Hypocrite" Janeway.

...Sisko is every bit as morally and ethically guilty as if he had pulled the trigger himself.

Except that he's not - he gets to be all shocked and outraged at an assassination that he gets to insist that he wouldn't have condoned, and he gets to go on being the star of the show.

Again you aren't taking the last scene into account. Sisko hates what happened, and hates himself because in the end he CAN live with what he's done. As he himself pointed out "It's easy to be a saint in Paradise".

 

[stj]

....Sisko is still a Starfleet officer and couldn't assassinate a foreign official so he used a deniable asset in the full knowledge what would/could happen....it showed us "realistic" people who have to make hard decisions that don't always coincide with Federation morals but are necessary....

Assassinating a Romulan Senator provides a casus belli for war between the Federation and the Romulan Empire. Using Garak was using a known Cardassian agent (and who isn't to say that he wasn't a provocateur posing as a dissident/defector all along?) means that Sisko risked getting the very worst opposite result.

The plot of In the Pale Moonlight is complete nonsense. Which means that it's effort to assert that "we" have to do nasty things in the name of survival is supported only by nonsense. Only people who've already committed to this kind of "morality" are eager to overlook the idiocy of the story.

A Private Little War[/I], teleplay credited to none other than Gene Roddenberry. Remember TOS?

Yes, well, better late to comment than never.

The Vietnam War of course was a major issue but television then as now was afraid to address the issue directly. What happened in this war was the French tried to reestablish their colonial empire but the Communists managed to defeat them in a regular military battle at Dien Bien Phu, despite US/NATO support. At this point, the US and the French partitioned the country, moving most of the collaborationist government from Hanoi to Saigon. When the guerrilla war against the collaborationist government continued, and the transplanted collaborationist government appeared to be losing support, the US permitted a coup against the leader, intervened with a massive army and tried its best to more or less annihilate everyone with massive bombing, even Laos and Cambodia.

The fictional story of course was that there was this innocent little country called South Vietnam, really truly a separate country, which was aggressively assaulted by the terrible Communist monolith. The monstrous subversive powers of the dread Communists required a heroic intervention, even against those who wickedly tried to use a legalistic subterfuge of Laotian and Cambodian neutrality as cover for their villainy.

A Private Little War starts with the fictional premises of the Vietnam War, which is timorous and disingenuoys. But then it promptly states that intervention by troops and bombing was wrong, and even suggests that even support by arming the supposed victims was a moral wrong, even if a necessary one. I imagine Roddenberry hoped that the critical aspect would be the takeaway but false premises have a way of falsifying the whole story.

You think Firefly was too serious?

Of course I think the the Mal/Inara romance was supposed to be genuinely bittersweet, instead of just a couple of idiots. Of course I think that River's mad dialogue was actually supposed to express a cryptic wisdom unattainable by the merely mundane, instead of pathetic nonsense. Of course I think that Jayne was supposed to be at bottom a man with human feelings and a kind of moral code and common sense, instead of a vicious, ignorant thug. Of course I think that Simon was going to grow out of being an effete liberal snob and become a real man, instead of being a reasonably decent human being already. Etc.

And to be blunt, I quite sure you think those things too, including the etc. Your problem is that this things are amazingly stupid. That's why I don't take them seriously. But the show did.

The characters joked. (And they were mostly good ones, being a Whedon show.) But the show treated its pretensions with enormous solemnity.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I imagine Roddenberry hoped that the critical aspect would be the takeaway but false premises have a way of falsifying the whole story.

I concur that the parallel with Vietnam is false; the premise that the Federation's side is being victimized would have paralleled more closely the Korean War (identifying the Federation side with the American/UN side, of course). Evidently, according to http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/A_Private_Little_War_(episode)#Script, Roddenberry actually toned done the Vietnam references present in the original story.

P.S. My quote is broken in your post.

 

[sidious618]

Braga seems to have had an asshole personality and certainly had some crazy political views but I liked a large number of the stories that he actually wrote. Even his failures usually contained a big idea of some sort. I just think he shouldn't have been running the shows because the writing he tends to favor is high concept and that doesn't work for a long term show (well, usually). Contrary to what most people say, I don't think Coto did a better job than Braga did in season three with the Xindi. I'm not a fan of the first two season of Enterprise but I thought season three was a nice step up in quality and Braga has to be given credit for that.

 

[stj]

P.S. My quote is broken in your post.

Yes, sorry about that, don't know how I did that.

 

[Harvey]

I concur that the parallel with Vietnam is false; the premise that the Federation's side is being victimized would have paralleled more closely the Korean War (identifying the Federation side with the American/UN side, of course). Evidently, according to http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/A_Private_Little_War_(episode)#Script, Roddenberry actually toned done the Vietnam references present in the original story.

Interestingly enough, I've been doing some research into that episode in the past few months; according to everything I've found, Roddenberry actually played up the Vietnam allegory angle compared to Don Ingalls' original story and teleplay. Ingalls confirms as much in a 1991 Starlog interview about his two Star Trek episodes.

The notion that Roddenberry toned down the allegory seems to have originated from Allan Ashermann's Star Trek Companion, which seemingly draws this conclusion from exactly one line in Ingalls' teleplay comparing a character to Ho Chi Minh.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I concur that the parallel with Vietnam is false; the premise that the Federation's side is being victimized would have paralleled more closely the Korean War (identifying the Federation side with the American/UN side, of course). Evidently, according to http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/A_Private_Little_War_(episode)#Script, Roddenberry actually toned done the Vietnam references present in the original story.

Interestingly enough, I've been doing some research into that episode in the past few months; according to everything I've found, Roddenberry actually played up the Vietnam allegory angle compared to Don Ingalls' original story and teleplay. Ingalls confirms as much in a 1991 Starlog interview about his two Star Trek episodes.

The notion that Roddenberry toned down the allegory seems to have originated from Allan Ashermann's Star Trek Companion, which seemingly draws this conclusion from exactly one line in Ingalls' teleplay comparing a character to Ho Chi Minh.

Now my curiosity is piqued. (Glad I qualified my remarks as strictly being according to what I was citing.) Is the Ingalls script available anywhere?

 

[DWF]

As opposed to Captain "I'm always right" Picard, the CinC of self-righteous certitude? I can see why the "perfect people" fans wouldn't go for a more nuanced and realistic CO like Sisko.

Picard wasn't perfect heas far from it, he admitted to such in First Contact the ep. not the movie, but then he pretty admitted to in the movie as well. Of course he also started out hating children.