I've lost track of how many times I've watched The Corbomite Maneuver this year alone. A perfect example of what Star Trek is all about.
Your honest opinion on the Berman era
- Thread starter Starflight
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TNG - Awesome
DS9 - Pretty good
Voyager - Sucked
Enterprise - Sucked more
By the time we got to Voyager we were just retreading too much. Same tired old stories and concepts with the same tired dialog with the same tired technobabble with the same tired cadence with the same tired music with the same tired fx with the same tired cinematography with the same tired everything. And Enterprise was just more of that.
All the TNG movies - Sucked
YMMV of course
Agreed! Star Trek has been my favorite tv show since I first saw it in 1972. Heck, I was born the day "A Taste Of Armageddon" first aired. I've watched Star Trek more times than I can count over the decades, but I've never rewatched TNG or DS9 in their entirety. I enjoy various episodes but just have no desire to rewatch it in it's entirety. Ditto DS9. About seven years ago I had a gig in another city and it wsn't going good at all. I was severly depressed and while channel surfing in my hotel room I found a channel that was running a Star Trek marathon. An honest to god Trekathon like they did when I was a kid. I hadn't watched Star Trek in at least a couple of years and man, just watching those old episodes made me feel like I was with family again and helped me get through that time. I was reminded of why I love that show so much. The next day they did TNG, but it wasn't the same thing to me, though I did watch it.
And that was just the first episode of the regular series and only the third Star Trek story ever filmed. TOS got so much right and from the very start that it's ridiculous to think how luck Roddenberry and the other producers were. And us.
Love a lot of Berman's impressive run, but when the burnout became first noticed, it was hard to overlook. When it became prominent, it became superficial fluff ("Flanderization").
Short version:
A lot of TNG, DS9, and VOY are good-to-great, with exceptions. ENT was when burnout was in full swing and even VOY was post-peak.
Long version:
TNG = good to great, though I was lukewarm at first as TOS truly was iconic. Seeing Gene's name helped, for some episodes but the massage oil planet was just laughable ("Justice" comes across far worse now, impossible as it otherwise seems as it was pretty bad from the get-go). But by 1991, small cracks were showing and the templating behind the formulaic storytelling became more and eventually too overt. Stories did get too variable in quality, even forgetting character traits to tell a story that previous seasons - for better or worse and in retrospect even the growing pains are far more watchable than season 5's and 6's soapoperaing - spent more time in trying to be consistent with. The new music style (designed to feel like 24th century life according to this show?) was also bland and right-on-cue. The movies felt so unlike the TV show with characters completely other than what they were set up to be and in rubberstamped situations, never mind the number of changed reasons for Data's emotion chip (ugh). Even in the theater for the epic new movies Q promised in exploring what's ostensibly really out there, a lot felt corny or dumb (the self-destruct in a particle collector being one of many obvious examples of contriving plot convenience but at least Picard didn't yell like Tarzan when swinging on the power cable...)
DS9 = good to great, season 4 is the pinnacle as they finally do something with moving the franchise forward (unlike 1998's reset button-loaded "Insurrection" flick), but also felt burnt out toward the end.
VOY = lost the original potential, but found a brief renaissance with the no-Queen-in-sight "Scorpion" that came out after Queen-loaded STFC from a couple years later (suggesting the Queen was a misfire and the dialogue in the movie wasn't the greatest either) and finding a new lease on life for a couple years. Sadly, burnout and stories shedding established continuity to try to find a new vibe made it harder to watch. (Granted, eschewing it to try something new can work, but if you rely on it for so many stories and established character traits and then ditch it for plot convenience, it doesn't always work.)
ENT = burnt out from the start and prequels rarely fill in gaps in any engaging way.
Short version:
A lot of TNG, DS9, and VOY are good-to-great, with exceptions. ENT was when burnout was in full swing and even VOY was post-peak.
Long version:
TNG = good to great, though I was lukewarm at first as TOS truly was iconic. Seeing Gene's name helped, for some episodes but the massage oil planet was just laughable ("Justice" comes across far worse now, impossible as it otherwise seems as it was pretty bad from the get-go). But by 1991, small cracks were showing and the templating behind the formulaic storytelling became more and eventually too overt. Stories did get too variable in quality, even forgetting character traits to tell a story that previous seasons - for better or worse and in retrospect even the growing pains are far more watchable than season 5's and 6's soapoperaing - spent more time in trying to be consistent with. The new music style (designed to feel like 24th century life according to this show?) was also bland and right-on-cue. The movies felt so unlike the TV show with characters completely other than what they were set up to be and in rubberstamped situations, never mind the number of changed reasons for Data's emotion chip (ugh). Even in the theater for the epic new movies Q promised in exploring what's ostensibly really out there, a lot felt corny or dumb (the self-destruct in a particle collector being one of many obvious examples of contriving plot convenience but at least Picard didn't yell like Tarzan when swinging on the power cable...)
DS9 = good to great, season 4 is the pinnacle as they finally do something with moving the franchise forward (unlike 1998's reset button-loaded "Insurrection" flick), but also felt burnt out toward the end.
VOY = lost the original potential, but found a brief renaissance with the no-Queen-in-sight "Scorpion" that came out after Queen-loaded STFC from a couple years later (suggesting the Queen was a misfire and the dialogue in the movie wasn't the greatest either) and finding a new lease on life for a couple years. Sadly, burnout and stories shedding established continuity to try to find a new vibe made it harder to watch. (Granted, eschewing it to try something new can work, but if you rely on it for so many stories and established character traits and then ditch it for plot convenience, it doesn't always work.)
ENT = burnt out from the start and prequels rarely fill in gaps in any engaging way.
While I agree Seven was initially brought on as eye candy but was proven to be FAR more than that, a lot of the other stuff about her you mention was early on. Her 'dating help' in "SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME", for example, is a direct result of her never being able to do that in her entire life, since the Borg don't date. It was another interesting aspect of her journey to finding her humanity again.
I definitely can't agree with you about them having 'mommy issues' just because a few of their villains were women.
The Borg Queen, while it did give a face to them but still started the defanging overall, made sense because it's a hive mind. What in nature has hive minds? Ants, bees... insects. And they have a queen. And the Borg were originally created as an insect like race... budget made the concept get changed to cybernetic life, but they kept the hive mind part. So it made sense to have a Borg Queen.
The Sphere Builders... so what if they were women? So no woman is capable of being a villain? (We also know next to nothing about them... they could have been a matriarchal society, which would easily explain why their leaders were the women we saw.)
I thought women were just as capable as men... which includes villainy.
Seems timely given my day in history just talked about a 22 year old Nazi leader in a camp who tortured women prisoners for her own pleasure.
But, Star Trek and feminism sometimes struggles.
I was born the same year and grew up with Berman Trek too. It wasn’t until it lost its steam (which for me was, sadly, Voyager, Enterprise and most of TNG movies) that I came to realise how much more I liked TOS and TOS movies. Obviously they’re a product of its time, like everything, (although that’s not always a bad thing) but the rewatchability is immensely greater somehow and it’s just beyond iconic in every way.
She definitely became something far greater than she needed to be. Kudos to cast and crew for that. But the dating advice wasn’t offered by someone who wasn’t sexually attracted to her. The Doctor may have been a doctor, even a hologram, but he was also attracted to her. And when he ended up as “Joe” in “Endgame,” it was with a blond Hollywood beautiful human woman. It should have been Janeway or someone else who showed her the ropes, not a studio executive-looking dude. It was male wish fulfillment fantasy played for laughs.
You’re looking at it as if this is real historical happenstance. There were no Sphere Builders. It was a conscious choice to make them all mysterious deceitful females. Hell, there weren’t even any females on the Xindi Council. Just foolish squabbling men honorable at least for being earnest in their brutality. Something inspired the writers to make them all females. Hell, have we ever had an all-male *baddie? It stands out as unusual when something like that happens.
* Jem’Hadar don’t count as they’re genetically engineered. Also they’re controlled by goo people who even there had both male and female dimorphism when they took forms. Plus there too it was a conscious decision to make them males to show how physically brutal and fundamentally unnatural they were: they also didn’t eat drink sleep rest or live very long and were all addicts. Again, choices.
Yeah I sometimes wonder about those Borg and it might be interesting if they’re like Species 001 or something. But that’s early concept stuff that didn’t even make it to “Q Who?” Remember that even in that episode they didn’t have them assimilating people either, just technology. They looked fully human and were cybernetically enhanced as babies. That changed with BoBW as we got another understanding (retcon) of them.
But what a retcon and how interesting one at that! When they did speak, even one-on-one to Picard, it was as a disembodied voice and that made them more terrifying. It really was the “Collective” speaking, not a single Khan/baddie. Best two parter ever and that’s all FC needed to be. The choice to make a Queen was kind of a hack move writing a good guy vs bad guy story, doing another Khan-Kruge-Klaa-Soren-Ru’afo-Shinzo-Nero-Khan-Elba thing again. And that it was a woman was at least kind of nice for a change, but she wasn’t a 10 foot tall mega-cyborg, she was sexy little number who seduced Data. She literally “blew” him and asked him, “Was that good for you?”
Again, any one of these you can write off but all these and scores of other things throughout the series/franchise, and remembering who their audience is predominantly, should be understood for what they are if you’re being honest and not just looking to offer spin. No one ever says yeah I’m just a sexist and like tits and distrust women. Heck it’s even natural to an extent, in a developmental Freudian, way. But when you’re a full grown adult and an artist, when you’re in charge of a major cultural phenomenon, you should yes be judged for what you put out. And indeed the same people today (cast and crew) would be aware of all this and try not to reproduce it just so. Not because they went woke but because they caught up to where many fans already were even then.
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The Doctor wasn't attracted to Seven before that episode, so the advice was given by someone not attracted to her. It was during the episode he started to feel an attraction. If this were a wish fulfillment, they would have ended up together. (My wife actually thought they should have gotten together. They had more in common and had better chemistry than when they shoehorned in her and Chakotay in the finale. I agree with my wife on this... Seven and The Doctor would have made much better sense.)
I mentioned the Sphere Builders because you listed them as an example. Not sure what you mean by saying "there were no Sphere Builders", since that race were the ones who built the spheres and they were the ones appearing to the Xindi Council.
Regarding the Borg Queen, I think you're overanalyzing it.
If he were a non sexual program it might have made internal sense — even though we watching it are still getting a certain message — but he wasn’t a non sexual program. From that moment on (or from the moment he became capable of having any kind of romantic feelings for anyone, a while before this episode) he should have passed the lesson plan to someone who wasn’t conflicted about it. That he was teaching her about sex was inappropriate at best. Also as a hologram he wasn’t the best teacher for her to reclaim her humanity. Basics maybe (elementary school), but when we’re talking hormones and finer nuances, you need a human (high school).
I mean that you’re treating the events of the franchise like they’re real historical events that just happened that way for no reason at all beyond the internal ones instead of because of the motivations of crew people creating them. There were no Sphere Builders in the real world Brannon Braga was just reporting on. They were created by male writers for a male audience at a certain point in the franchise. Considering that may demystify a bit of the narrative magic, but it does play a role in its creation.
I really don’t think so. Don’t knock me for noticing. Again, she wasn’t a giant female automaton like the rest of the Collective; she was a sensuous seductress actually getting it on with Data, her new lover after Locutus had the audacity to reject her. That comes from someplace inside the writer. One example of many. It was still entertaining but it was what it was.
I just don't see The Doctor like you seem to in that episode. He was trying to help Seven be more open as a person with interests past efficiency and astrometrics. Similar to how Vic Fontaine was helping Odo open himself up more emotionally in "HIS WAY".
I'm not looking at it from some historical perspective. I'm just going by what we have seen onscreen. And I don't see anything about the Sphere Builders that indicates any 'mommy issues' or female issues.
And I'm not knocking you about your thoughts on the Borg Queen. I just think it's an overanalysis of it.
This one's complex... (I don't remember much of 7, save for her being rescued from the Borg and her reclaiming her humanity in a number of genuinely interesting plot elements, and being more relatable than Data.)
Of all the ladies given skimpier outfits than the revealing uniform (esp. seasons 1 & 2), at least Seven had an interesting explanation involving what the Borg technology did to her epidermal layer. Troi, T'Pol, and others... eh, not so much, and why would Troi not be in proper uniform doing her professional work anyhow? May as well have her screeching in every episode "gag me with a spoon!" and other valleyspeak contemporary for the era, yuck... but I digress, odd but true.
As for personality, it juuuuuuuuust about works as Seven/Annika had been robbed of her humanity for the majority of her life (since age 5, was it?) as well as the human culture that 24th century was said to have exuded.
Serendipity (not always related to "plot armor") is a possibility as well, though The Rock's inclusion was a sappy sweeps weeks ratings grab for a story that could have been a lot better than "American Gladiators Shoehorned In Space" (for which the acronym is "A.S.S.", go figure). Indeed, there's a few episodes of Family Feud of the time where American Gladiators actors were featured and they play it up for every laugh as possible...
as for body violation, it was a time-tested Trek trope at that point.
Trek never was good at love triangles, the best by far was Troi/Riker as past-tense and the second-best was the Harry escapade "The Disease", which got so much wrong on so many levels when otherwise not being underwhelming... The show's very theme of "to seek out new life and new civilizations" is contrary to being navel-gazing on the attempted copulation of main crewmembers with one another. Let "90210" or "One Tree Hill" do that, they don't focus on exploring the cosmos.
^^, 100% that. It's a bit icky and yucky and NOT because prepubescent people might or might not be watching the show (since, yep, more than one reason can exist and Trek showed us some new reasons, if not unintentionally.)
Aso note how "Scorpion" also lacks the Queen and not for a very long time were the Borg proper scary* again... but makes a comeback in "Dark Frontier" because... exciting. Right?
* to be fair, making them proper scary all the time dilutes them faster, so having a one-off splinter group (even if the dialogue didn't sell it perfectly) with the events of "I, Borg" and "Descent" (part one, anyway) led to some interesting ideas and, indeed, a frightening inversion... which never got explored because the show was so far into navel-gazing that they brought back Lore as a sweeps week event instead of something with more substance, and there's plenty involving ruthless killer Borg as opposed to their regular gestalt routine. Oh well, at least the Bros of Soong will conquer all, moo-hahaha as they milk it to the farm and back, ugh...
I don't recall the Sphere Builders, which episode? (Was it ENT?) Were the Malon and Suliban in ENT?
That begs the neat question of why an emergency medical hologram would be programmed with... a libido... in the first place, as a standard issue subroutine as well... Even more fun, "Blink of an Eye" - if I recall correctly - suggests/implies/hints at the EMH getting jiggy with (at least one) of the locals during its time on the planet (and what powers that mobile emitter and how often does it need recharging, but that's not important right now). At least the EMH has the sort of sex object equality that Roddenberry might have wanted, based on one of his speeches in the 1976 album "Inside Star Trek" where he goes on and on about making people as sex objects and the audience heartily applauds!
(26:27 - 28:00 appx is where the "fun" is, but I do wonder what the audience was thinking based on what they heard and interpreted through it all... but, back in 1976, superbug strains of all those then-easily-treatable forms of yucky cooties hadn't developed yet so everyone thought it'd be a nonissue. Little did they know... but I digress.)
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