Star Trek: Into Darkness

[Miasma]

What argument?


She really is pretty: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/hottest-stars-sci-fi-universe-gallery-1.39013


All the bits are in the right spots.

One of the reasons I stopped watching "Enterprise" after the pilot was the pandering "lets have these two hot people grease each other up for no reason" scene.  The more important reason I stopped watching was that it was terrible.  I'm sure there will be a legitimate reason for her to be undressed, clothing was contaminated by space cooties I reckon.

Fake edit:  DS9's main problem was that they tried to base an entire series on an immobile space station.  So it was nothing but one horribly contrived reason after another that plotlines had to keep coming to them.  It would be like making a cop drama where no one ever left the precinct office.  Eventually they just said "fuck it" and built themselves that ship...

[UnSub]

*primes grenade*

BABYLON 5!

*runs*

...

I liked DS9 more than a lot of the other Star Trek series I've seen, and I enjoyed Babylon 5 a lot too. Yes, both series have their terrible bits - almost any Ferengi-based episode in DS9 was terrible, and "Profit and Lace" was possibly a war crime - but so had all the other series. I liked the series conceit of a centralised space station rather than flying into new areas with very specific problems each week.

But yeah, "Profit and Lace":

[tgr]

The only star trek I didn't really like, was the voyager series, mainly because I didn't think they really handled the whole "hurr I'm a female leader" thing well enough early on, the humor in general was just slightly off-kilter for me, and I had a bit of a problem with the whole "we're down to 1 or 2 people left on the ship, and they're going to save the day with 2 seconds to spare" spiel going on in too many of its episodes.

But shitting on DS9 for being based on a space station that doesn't move all over the place, when that's what I would call one of its strengths because it encourages having more of a red thread going through it? Get out.

[Venkman]

The only star trek I didn't really like, was the voyager series, mainly because I didn't think they really handled the whole "hurr I'm a female leader" thing well enough early on, the humor in general was just slightly off-kilter for me, and I had a bit of a problem with the whole "we're down to 1 or 2 people left on the ship, and they're going to save the day with 2 seconds to spare" spiel going on in too many of its episodes.

I agree in general. But the two-parter Year of Hell was fantastic in general, and a standout for Voyager. Until the it-was-all-a-dream ending (which I called, but so didn't want to be right), I had it right there with Best of Both Worlds.

[Surlyboi]

Year of Hell was indeed 99% fantastic.

[Fordel]

Year of Hell was what the series should have been, and it was apparently originally planned as an actual year or season originally.


But that would've been interesting and successful, so they axed that idea  


-edit- I am a member of team redundancy team.

[Simond]

Reminder: BSG was, at least in part, Ron Moore going to Brannon & Brega "This is how you should have done Voyager!".

[Stormwaltz]

Voyager I'd consider hard sci. fi, which turned a lot of people off.  That series was really made for the Trek grognard to feast on technobabble.

GTFO. Playing invent-a-particle does not "hard" sci-fi make. Any time they wanted to excuse something silly, they'd have someone pop off a string of gobbledygook nonsense. First season BSG, THAT was a hard-SF show. Or at least as close as we're likely to get on mainstream TV. "Hard" is not technobabble exposition and pseudoscience plot gimmicks. "Hard" is thinking about the science and constructing a world that feels real and consistent on top of it.

For me what makes Trek is the strength of the characters. TNG had a great bunch, barring poor, bland Riker - who should have been a badass of the Kirk mold, but they watered down into a Picard Jr. DS9 had an even better group, because they could expand beyond the traditional ST character options of soldier, scientist, or politician. Bashir was the least interesting, at least until they retconned him as an illegal genetic experiment. Voyager, aside from Seven of Nine and The Doctor, had the blandest cast of any ST series. They were all Rikers - watered-down, low-risk versions of theoretically strong archetypes. I can't remember a single pertinent thing about Kim or Tuvok, and Paris coasted by on being vaguely annoying.

[Khaldun]

Voyager genuinely makes me angry. They took a premise which could have genuinely jumpstarted the franchise: Starfleet crewmembers who have to work with political dissidents who risked their lives to push back on the Federation to get home across an expanse of space where they know absolutely nothing about anything, and to get home will have to inevitably compromise at least something of their principles, and maybe not even get home until they're old or dead. If it wasn't going to be rebooted BSG, it could have been something more like Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep--maybe as you got into the galactic core things got weirder and more dangerous and not just guys-with-bumps-on-their-heads-who-have-slightly-variant-human-cultures thing. It could have been a glorious show. Instead, the guys who were showrunning it turned it into easily the worst of all the Trek series. Seriously, Enterprise had a more consistent tone and sense of what it was doing. There's nothing more hateful than a badly wasted opportunity.

[Sir T]

I agree in general. But the two-parter Year of Hell was fantastic in general, and a standout for Voyager. Until the it-was-all-a-dream ending (which I called, but so didn't want to be right), I had it right there with Best of Both Worlds.

I had to look it up but "Year of Hell" was that huge ship erasing stuff, and Voyager turning into a barely functional piece of scrap rather then the pristine holiday camp it always was. Yeah that was a pretty good 2 episode. And The cast exhibited *shock* EMOTION in their wooden acting.

[Lakov_Sanite]

They really tried to make Riker into Kirk but the truth is, Kirk as a character IS rather dull when he's put next to stronger ones like Picard. Punching lizards and fucking green women only goes so far.

[Surlyboi]

You can't have a Kirk without a Shatner. Frakes was not even close to Shatner.

[Soln]

The only thing I enjoyed about DS9 was Garick.  And the only good thing about Voyager was looking at Jerri Ryan.

But even Lawful Evil Garick they screwed up paring him off with Lawful Good Bashir and Lawful Neutral Odo.  Loathsome.

And turning Year of Hell into a delusion was a disappointment on an already terribad show.

[satael]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

[Furiously]

The ending of Year of Hell was what made me stop watching Voyager. It really is what the show should have been like all the time. And it was the best part of BSG.

[Ironwood]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

[UnSub]

Haven't seen "Year in Hell", but these parts of "Living Witness" (sorry, fan edit on YouTube) were the most interesting parts of Voyager I've seen to date. I think I'd seen three episodes of Voyager back to back where ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENED + holodeck episodes and then there was this. I would have watched this Voyager. 

[Merusk]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

Watch it the way I do: by listening to it as you do something else.  The terrible CGI and sets never come in to play that way unless there's some big action scene you want to watch.

[HaemishM]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

/grenade

Babylon 5 is still better than all the Treks put together.

[Lakov_Sanite]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

/grenade

Babylon 5 is still better than all the Treks put together.

As a whole? No, it was not.  It had some greatness to it sure but come on, there was so much stink on that show that hung like a cloud over the good stuff that I can't believe anyone could say that.

[Ironwood]

All this talk of Voyager and DS9 (and their characters) makes me want to watch Babylon 5 again since my (nostalgic) memories of that show are mostly based on interesting characters the show had. 

Don't.

It hasn't aged well either.

/grenade

Babylon 5 is still better than all the Treks put together.

Which has nothing to do with what I said, even if true.

[Merusk]

Yeah, he said it hasn't aged well. And it hasn't.  It's graphics were below TNG when it came out, and even TNG looks tired and sad when you watch the ship views. (One of the reasons I prefer models over CGI. It just ages so much better.)

Then there's the fashions and the costumes.  Vorlon: Cool as fuck when I first saw Kosh.  When I see him now all I see is a mottled toilet seat with a flashlight.

[Ironwood]

Exactly.

[HaemishM]

Other than some stuttering, I think the B5 CGI holds up quite well. Costumes... well, I'm not sure costuming on any TV show holds up after a decade. Especially futuristic sci-fi of any kind. The unitards of TNG have always looked kind of stupid. B5's costumes are a bit low budget but the makeup and acting IN the makeup helps that a bit. The hairstyles and makeup on TOS are Prisoner-level of WTF sometimes - thank you 1960's and LSD. Watch any 1980's shows and be astounded how bad some of them look.

The B5 pilot did look terrible and of all of them, that's the one that really suffers from time's passage.

[Khaldun]

End season 2 B5 to about first 1/3 season 4 is pretty good TV even if the effects and all that haven't aged well. Mostly good storytelling etc.  The bad episodes nestled in that run are almost worse than anything TNG, DS9, TOS could put up as competitors in the bad episodes, mostly because JMS when he's a bad writer is so excrutiatingly bad that nothing else compares (his comics are the same). But at its absolute peak, B5 is pretty much better than anything TNG or DS9 had to offer at the same time, even if their effects hold up better.

[Ingmar]

Just fast forward anytime Londo and/or G'Kar aren't on screen, and you'll have a great experience.

[Numtini]

What, for me, hasn't held up about B5 is I know the story and a great deal of the series was figuring out exactly what was going on and what was going to happen, particularly since it was the first series I can remember to do any sort of long term story arc.

[Ironwood]

If you'd read Lord of the Rings, the story didn't need figuring out.

 

[Simond]

At least Gandalf and the elves had the sense to fuck off when they weren't needed any more.

[Ratman_tf]

Year of Hell was what the series should have been, and it was apparently originally planned as an actual year or season originally.


But that would've been interesting and successful, so they axed that idea  


-edit- I am a member of team redundancy team.

Year of Hell was the epitome of what was wrong with Voyager.

"Let's tell an interesting story. Psyke! It didn't really happen!" 

[Fordel]

Well you obviously don't do the "lawl just a dream" ending and have them get home in the fucking rust bucket.

[UnSub]

If you'd read Lord of the Rings, the story didn't need figuring out.

 

Babylon 5 had marginally less homoerotic subtext. 

[Sir T]

[Ironwood]

Ahahahahahah.

Thanks.

[UnSub]

I did say 'marginally'.