Star Trek (TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, etc)

To boldly go...

(Confession: I mainly started this topic hoping laddical and Instant Monkey will continue their mini-reviews. I was loving them over on Snarkfest before it went blooey.)

Thanks!

Life hiccupped on me a few weeks back, but I'm looking to get back into it. Think I'll go back and redo "Skin of Evil", which I kind of skimmed over because it was written at the start of Shit Going Down.

I am getting so freaking excited about TNG on Blu-ray. It looks so much better - even the non-effects scenes are so much crisper and cleaner.

Skin of Evil deserves the full treatment.

Aw, thanks, LadyGayle; that's nice of you to say. I had so much fun doing that! I have every intention of going back to it. Starting classes -- I have two per week and one is Wednesday night and one is Saturday, so I ALWAYS have something almost due -- and the siren song of new fall TV knocked me off the wagon. I miss ol' TNG though. Watching that preview for the reedited Blu-Ray (which I am ALSO SO FREAKING EXCITED ABOUT) (even though I don't actually have a Blu-Ray player) this week made me all nostalgic. Both for a couple months ago and for 1987, heh.

Next Gen on Blu-Ray almost makes me want to get all the equipment I'd need to rip them and store them on a computer. I have the whole series ripped in crappyvision right now and we can watch them at any time from our Mac mini + put copies of random episodes on all the devices in the house, but they're obviously not shiny like Blu-Ray. Unfortunately that'd probably be a $1000 undertaking including the cost of the DVDs...

Okay, the review of "Skin of Evil" is written and I'm going back to my publishing schedule of M-W-F for TNG reviews. We'll see if I can squeeze in DS9 as well, but I don't want to overwhelm myself. So the review will be live at my blog tomorrow.

In short, I used to love "Skin of Evil" because I thought the idea of killing a main character was Big and Important and Daring. It wasn't until "Yesterday's Enterprise" came along that I considered how pointless and trivial Yar's death actually was, and as I've grown and developed my opinions on narrative and drama and learned more about the behind the scenes stuff that I was largely ignorant about, I've come to see "Skin of Evil" as the low point for the series. I would have cried and torn my clothes and all that if TNG had been cancelled after its first season, but I think that at this point I'd look back and point to an episode like "Skin of Evil" and say, "The show totally deserved it." Of course, that's assuming anyone would even care about TNG - or Trek at all - if it had disappeared after only one year.

Armus is practically the personification of everything wrong with the show at this point. He has no context, no motivation, he throws up arbitrary obstacles because he feels like it, and he's overcome, basically, by talking him to death. It's very easy to assign all kinds of nefarious motives to the producers in how they chose to deal with Denise Crosby leaving the show - all the moreso because it sometimes feels like Armus is actually speaking for them: "Yeah, we killed her because we could, because we thought it would be funny."

The second season has a lot of problems that stem from a truncated production schedule and sloppy writing, but I'll give it this - at its worst it doesn't seem to have anything as darkly cynical as "Skin of Evil".

Oooh, I love it when a plan comes together!

I hate "Skin of Evil," too, but more because it's just a bad episode overall, than because the evil oil slick killed Tasha. Hell, that might be a point in its favor (not a Tasha Yar fan), except no, because the episode just sucked that much. It's just about as awful as "Code of Honor" or "Justice."

Definitely a bad episode overall, but what I think sets it apart from run-of-the-mill crap like "When the Bough Breaks" or "Coming of Age" or even "Justice" is the attitude. "Justice" was inept and stupid in a way even those other episodes weren't, but aside from some prurient issues was not actively offensive. But with things like "Code of Honor" or "Skin of Evil" there's something sinister underlying the crappy writing. It's not *just* that they killed Yar, it's how and why.

Out of strange weakness, I rewatched (via Netflix) two Voyager bits that still get to me: Lt. Kelly's logs in "One Small Step" and Barclay's signal reaching Voyager in "Pathfinder". Love those scenes.

DS9 popped up streaming on Netflix lately, so my husband and I have been watching the Dominon War arc. I forgot how awesome this show is. They had the best uniforms, too.

I'm still on season 2, which has a few bad episodes - Second Sight anyone? - but is good in its own right. I'm awed that I love this show so much after all these years.

Yeah, i'm watching DS9 again too. I'm in middle of season 3 which is better than the first 2 seasons combined. I remember watching it, but must have only watched them randomly when they first aired.

I don't remember the Dominion arc taking such a long time to kick in.

Oh, yeah. The Dominion was a total slow burn. The only way I can justify it is if the wormhole on the Gamma Quadrant side is actually far away from Dominion territory. Especially since in the first two seasons they contact several species in the Gamma that have nothing to do with the Dominion.

I really could live without the slow burn though. I was watching it because so many of the novels reference the Dominion War in broad terms, but it would be nice to know a few more specifics. Unfortunately, there's a lot of standalone episodes.

I've decided to watch DS9 from the beginning. I've only ever seen the first two seasons, as the channel that was showing it in our area stopped carrying it after that. I liked it pretty well and I've always heard it's the best Trek series, so I want to see it all!

RiverThames wrote:Oh, yeah. The Dominion was a total slow burn. The only way I can justify it is if the wormhole on the Gamma Quadrant side is actually far away from Dominion territory. Especially since in the first two seasons they contact several species in the Gamma that have nothing to do with the Dominion.

Also, the Dominion probably began secretly infiltrating the Alpha Quadrant pretty soon after the wormhole was discovered. The Founders are a patient methodical bunch who didn't feel the need to rush into Alpha Quadrant.

Yeah, I can buy that the Dominion did some shady stuff way before they overtly started the war. I mean, our first introduction to them, really, was at the beginning of Season 3 with the Vorta/Founders putting the crew through imaginary tests to see how they would react to a war - pretty shady if you ask me.

And there were namechecks of the unknown "Dominion" throughout season two culminating in the first encounter with the Jem'hadar in the season finale.

I'm on vacation, yay! And I'm finally finding a moment to watch me some Star Treks. Here is Coming of Age, in which Wesley goes down to Relva 7 (I remember a radio interview with some cast members where Patrick Stewart said, when asked about the funny planet names, "We always seem to be orbiting someplace called Relva" and he is not wrong), which is the matte-painting-iest matte painting I have ever seen, to take the Starfleet Academy "entrance exams."

Instead of candidates having to achieve like a minimum score or whatever, the Academy runs its application process reality-show style, where four candidates "from" Relva (or whose starship dropped them off there) do a bunch of crazy tests and the one with the highest score wins a $100,000 contract with Cover Girl Cosmetics and the opportunity to sell their fashions on Bluefly.com. There is a Vulcan girl who has like .2 lines, a guy who gains big alien points with me for needing to carry around a thing in front of his face so he can breathe, and this annoying girl who is the worst actress ever and every line she says physically pains me. Wesley is of course the youngest and the smartest, just like Gene Roddenberry, and he only doesn't win the competition because he helps the alien breather. HE IS JUST TOO KIND AND AWESOME FOR THIS WORLD. Also he has a "psych test" (another thing this process has in common with America's Next Top Model) in which he has to save someone from an explosion and another guy just screams and freaks out and Wesley is like "Dude, just run to the door, what are you, an idiot?" and he doesn't and Wesley is like "Suit yourself, bro" and apparently this is his greatest fear, the end. Oh also this like Andre the Giant dude hassles him and because Wesley reads the encyclopedia all day for fun he realizes that the guy's webbed fingers mean that he's from a species that hates politeness, so Wesley hollers at him in the cutest dorkiest Wesliest nonscariest way ever and this large fellow literally goes "Friend!" just like Ludo in Labyrinth and this is also a test. Even after all this bullshit Wesley does not get into the academy, because there can be only one. Oh well.

Meanwhile an admiral fellow whose very face reminds me of someone eating a bowl of worms, I wonder why (spoiler) and Robert Schenkkan (I can't believe I still know how to spell that) from some Hyundai commercials of old show up on the ship and obnoxiously interrogate the crew, every single one of whom gets extremely unprofessionally and overdramatically butthurt about it, especially Riker as usual. We're treated to what is practically a clip show where we have lots of scenes of talking about all the stuff that has happened in the series thus far. They are looking for evidence of a "conspiracy" (more on that in a few episodes), but really it turns out the admiral just wants to hire Picard to run Starfleet Academy. But once Picard finds out that his best friend and favoritest most prettiest and smartest boy genius Wesley isn't going to be there he decides not to go. Also Remmick is clearly a Picard/Crusher shipper as he nosily asks several questions along those lines and intimates that Wesley is only allowed to drive the ship because JL is sweet on Bev and not because Wesley is the smartest most specialest and coolest and tallest and most awesome acting ensign ever, which is obviously ridiculous. Then Remmick decides he wants to serve on the Enterprise because it is the happiest and hard-workingest and spiffiest ship in the Fleet, and Picard makes an "Eeeeeerrrrrrrrrr" face and Remmick looks awkward and decides he will take that job selling Hyundais. But first his head will explode after he eats a crazy stop-motion scorpion thing, spoiler.

Oh, also some teenage Steve Sanders-esque asshole is pissed at his dad and he steals a shuttlecraft to try and run away and fucks it up in like two seconds. No wonder you didn't get into the Academy, moron. He starts freaking out (while everyone is watching on the viewscreen) and almost crashes into Relva 7, except Picard instantly invents a new maneuver (he is so good at thinking up maneuvers) to save him. And then later the kid literally runs into Picard in the corridor, when Picard is in his DRESS UNIFORM even, and instead of saying "Oh, excuse me, sir, oh, and by the way, thank you so much for saving my life" he just like ducks down and tries to run away. Jake Kurland: Worst Person Ever In All Of Space.

Finally, we get these words of wisdom from Worf (when Wesley is on the holodeck, true to his nature, not creating ladies for himself to hit on but obsessing over the upcoming psych test): "Thinking about what you can't control only wastes energy, and creates its own enemy." I need to hire Worf to come to my house and tell me that once a day.

Like I said on the old board, I do get a kick out of the two guys breaking character after the "psych test". It's like they work over in IT and every once in a while they get to do their little acting bits as a way to break up the week.

Nothing about that episode makes ANY SENSE. But at least "butthurt unprofessionalism" is a consistent character trait among the Enterprise bridge crew whenever their way of doing things is questioned in the slightest - it makes a "magnificent" comeback in Season 6 in "Chain of Command".

RiverThames wrote:Like I said on the old board, I do get a kick out of the two guys breaking character after the "psych test". It's like they work over in IT and every once in a while they get to do their little acting bits as a way to break up the week.

Heh, it's true. I was wondering how many of those psych tests they have to orchestrate, how many times they have trashed the environmental lab or whatever it was, and if those people had other jobs besides being in the tests. And I did laugh out loud when the "THE DOOR IS TOO FAR AWAY IT'S TOO LAAAAAAAATE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE THIS PART IS JUST TO MAKE THE TRAILER LOOK MORE EXCITING PROBABLY" guy came out and gave Wesley this sassy nod and walked off.

On the list that my sister and I made with funny names for all the episodes because we were total dorkwads who did not have lives, this next one was Fart of Glory. That about reflected my feelings for it back then, and I was really really expecting to be more into it this time and I kinda wasn't. The Klingon talk gets old soooooooo fast for me. THEY TALK IN ALL CAPS AND THEY DO NOT USE CONTRACTIONS. THEY USE FORMAL SPEECH. FOR THEY ARE WARRIORS AND INFORMAL SPEECH IS FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NO HONOR. THE BLOOD OF KLING (Kling? Really?) RUNS THROUGH THEIR WARRIOR HEARTS. THEY LIKE TO TALK ABOUT THAT SHIT A LOT. Also the one Klingon sounds like the Moviefone guy. I think the one who dies first but I forget.

This episode starts out with ACTION and ACTION continues throughout the whole thing. Except for a 20-minute digression in Act 1 where Picard and Geordi play with the VISOR transmitting thingy. When they turn it on there is like fairyland music that made me giggle. Then we get to listen to Picard being all old-man-with-an-iPhone about it forever. "What is that crazy-looking, awkward, ridiculous orange blob next to you?" "That's Riker." Heh. No matter that it's clearly human-shaped with a head on top of it. It IS cool to see VISOR-vision, but it's silly how long they spend dicking around, with Geordi giving Picard a seminar over the viewscreen, when the ship is about to explode. I guess they don't know they ship is about to explode right away, but they should still hurry the hell up. Although I did like "Data has some kind of crazy aura around him." "Well yeah, he's an android, doy."

Then they find the Klingons and the Klingonery begins in earnest. Mostly it's the Klingons and Worf talking about battles and glory and there are a bunch of moral dilemmas and identity crises for Worf. Like, you kind of know exactly how this entire episode is going to go the second you see the Klingons. It's nice to get Worf's backstory FINALLY, even though I know Russia is also in there somewhere, but I'm sure they'll make it fit. Worf IS an interesting character to have around; it's nice to see them DO something with him finally, here in episode 21, and seem to realize that there is this built-in tension that maybe Ron Moore should make 89 more episodes about. (I'm hoping it's just this episode and that I will enjoy the later Klingon eps more.)

Favorite bit was the non-segue when the Klingons ask to be shown around the ship. Literally it goes "PEACE MAKES MY WARRIOR HEART WITHER AND DIE. HEY IS IT COOL IF WE HAVE A TOUR?"

Also the weapon they make in jail is SUPER HILARIOUSLY RICKETY. I'm amazed they managed to keep it from falling apart long enough to fire it.

Well, happy new year, everyone! Time to watch Ryan Seacrest.

Five words: Entire TNG Cast To Reunite.

Instant Monkeys wrote:Five words: Entire TNG Cast To Reunite.

Amanda Tapping just got totally upstaged.