The Star Trek Thread, 3.0

That was the episode that made my Dad, an old school Trekkie, abandon ENT. "Vulcans don't lie!"

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

That was the episode that made my Dad, an old school Trekkie, abandon ENT. "Vulcans don't lie!"

They do in Braga-world. I don't know if I'd have them lie, but some of my Vulcans wouldn't be above having secrets.

Here's a smattering of dialogue I've written for "Broken Bow", from the Starfleet Medical scene. This would be right before Archer meets T'Pol and (an unconcious) Shran. FYI: Vulcan Captain Vanik would be a recurring character (he appears in the episode "Breaking the Ice"). He's like the Vulcan Kirk in terms of his importance.

This just a trial run here. I imagine my "Broken Bow" might even be the equivalent of a three-part episode. There would be more to the story, more intrigue.

EXT. SAN FRANCISCO -NIGHT

22nd century skyline.

INT. STARFLEET MEDICAL - HALLWAY

Archer rounds a corner to meet ADMIRAL FORREST and COMMANDER STILES. The three are friends, Archer shakes Forrest's hand.

ARCHER: Admiral.

FORREST: Jonathan.

Archer slaps Stiles' back.

ARCHER: Brad.

STILES: (Emphasizing the word) Captain.

Archer and Stiles shake hands, and the three begin walking down the hall. Stiles points to Archer's rank insignia.

STILES: That extra pip weighing you down?

ARCHER: (laughs) Not too much. So what's the story here?

STILES: What you might call an alien visitor. Shot by a farmer in Oklahoma.

Archer's faces reads confusion at the point.

ARCHER: What?

STILES: Yeah, and it's a first contact. An Andorian. The Vulcans are in there now.

ARCHER: I'm sure this is making us look good. Is the Andorian going to make it?

Forrest stops them.

FORREST: We think so. But it's a hell of a situation.

Archer waits to hear more.

FORREST: The Vulcans want to take him prisoner. Extradite him to Vulcan.

ARCHER: Why?

FORREST: They say he's a terrorist. From what little they've told us about the Andorians, they're involved in a planetary dispute with the Vulcan High Command.

ARCHER: Well, how long do we have?

FORREST: The Vulcans have a ship in orbit and want to take him as soon as he can be moved. (Stressing the name) Captain Vanik's ship.

ARCHER: (Surprised) Captain Vanik. This sounds like an important terrorist.

FORREST: Let's get in there before we find an empty biobed.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

That was the episode that made my Dad, an old school Trekkie, abandon ENT. "Vulcans don't lie!"

Oh come on! I mean, they've always fibbed about one thing or other, going back at least to ENTERPRISE INCIDENT. And the Vulcans in Little Enterprise were, if I remember, probably better at rationalizing than being rational.

so much squandered potential. Well, at least they didn't pee all over the end of the 23rd century. Still think this is potentially the most interesting era of Trek, how you get from the frontiersmanship and political paranoia seen in later TOS flicks to the boring paradise of TNG. I've always thought the turn of that century has the potential for a MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS or WILD BUNCH kind of TREK, something that puts characters and their times in strong relief. You can tell I just LOVE westerns that are set too late, the ones that old books call movies with 'western elements.'

I personally find the period between ENT and TOS be the most fascinating, but I would still love to see an EXCELSIOR miniseries.

Did you ever watch season 4 of ENT? I recall you said you hadn't. I'd still recommend at least that.

Actually, an early 23rd century EXCELSIOR story could be pretty cool with Sulu being different from his younger counterparts and saving the day. Better yet, an alternate universe where Kirk didn't die on the Ent-B, comes out of retirement in the 2310's and saves the universe one last time. And maybe dies in the process, a heroic death that doesn't involve falling of a bridge and rolling down a hill like a punk. That would be a fun script to write. Bones being all, "I'm too old for this shit." Kirk slaps his back, "You're as young as you feel, Bones. Spock, don't you age?"

I saw a used copy of THE JOY MACHINE. Didn't pick it up, though. Anyone read it?

I gotta say, ENT is tough going. I may skip it. I've been wanting to see TNG again. An episode a night should last the right amount of time to pick up TOS next spring. I do TOS every other spring. No more chain marathoning for me.

I saw a few 4th season ones earlier this year, but all I really remember is stuff with Peter Weller, which was kinda interesting.

My thing has always been the E-B rather than EXCELSIOR ... I still haven'tever read Peter David's E-b novel because I've had my own take on it since the night GENERATIONS came out. It is kind of LORD JIM in terms of a man's moment of cowardice being something he spends his life trying to atone for ... yeah, Harriman, a.k.a., 'the guy who got Kirk killed.' (or so they think.)

I love the notion of opening this series with dockworkers burning the word Enterprise and the designation NCC-1701-B off the hull ... it is such an embarassment and PR nightmare they are going to pretend there wasn't even an E-B.This is still in a political paranoia era, so you can get into Oliver Stone type stuff. Harriman's crew can't even transfer, because nobody will take them. Eventually the ship (still without a desigantion) gets sent on a mission that Starfleet and/or the Federation intends for failure ... and against all odds, Harriman & co bring it off, but basically get themselves in even deeper shit politically because of this.

I saw it as maybe 3 or 4 90min TV movies, climaxing with the the name being put back on the hull, but with the Enterprise folk dealing as much with internal Fed issues as exploration,because they feel if they don't, that the next generation won't get to explore any strange new worlds. A few years after I wrote this out, I saw DS9 and section 31 and realized that fit right in, too.

This whoele thing also kind of riffs on something Jack Sowards came up with for TREK II's backstory, that the 'boldly go' motto had been abandoned when Kirk hit age 50, and Starfleet is just protecting borders, so Kirk is questioning his career choices and what his life has been about. Thought that was an AWESOME notion (right up there with Wolfe's 'after the fall of the fed' idea that eventually morphed into the unfortunate ANDROMEDA.)

Based on that the ENT-B side of things sounds much more interesting. In some ways an ENT-B show appeals more than Excelsior even with Sulu's presence in the latter. It's an Enterprise, pure and simply and in a time of history where the Romulans play into things a bit more.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

I saw a used copy of THE JOY MACHINE. Didn't pick it up, though. Anyone read it?

You can see why it wasn't picked up. It's very much like Return of the Archons and all the other Kirk beats the machine type episodes.

I love the Harriman/Lord Jim idea. That story has always appealed to me. That would be better than EXCELSIOR, though sadly not do-able at this point.

In longhand, I wrote 100 utterly terrible pages of a TREK novel -- SINK THE ENTERPRISE! if you can believe it, and even if you can't -- in the wake of TMP while working at a Winchell's Donuts early in 1980, so based on that, I know, I absolutely KNOW, I could not write TREK in prose, it would have to be a script (sigh.)

I've never read a whole Trek book. I found my copy of Shat's COLLISION COURSE, but the bookmark had fallen out, I don't know how much I had read, and I can't be arsed to read the whole first half again. Trek in prose... just doesn't sound quite right to me anyway. Though I did find a hardcover "Prime Directive" at Half-Price Books. Maybe shoulda got it.

But sink the Enterprise in what? You had too much sugar in those donuts.

There is so much Trek fiction and so little of it any good. Marco Palmeri's reign at Pocket Books in the early 2000s is the high-water mark so far as I'm concerned. The biggest problem is usually that the characters are either not themselves at all, or broad caricatures of themselves.

Lemme guess, is Spock ever written as a douche?

I may give up on my current ENTERPRISE run in favor of TNG.

Watching FARPOINT (well, it's on pause). It may be a misfire, but it's more vibrant and entertaining than anything I saw in my aborted ENTERPRISE run. You can't fault Roddenberry & co. for not trying. I'm really looking forward to going through TNG. And as I watch it, ENTERPRISE (though I like S4) and VOYAGER do not exist.

TOS/TNG/DS9. The only TV Trek that really matters.

There is no VOYAGER In this dojo, eh?

I'm cool with that. Watched maybe two-thirds of the first 3 seasons, and parts of about 20 episodes after that, and ... I just don't care. At all. Though I think the color and contrast on the bridge looks nice and rich.

trevanian wrote:

There is no VOYAGER In this dojo, eh?

I'm cool with that. Watched maybe two-thirds of the first 3 seasons, and parts of about 20 episodes after that, and ... I just don't care. At all. Though I think the color and contrast on the bridge looks nice and rich.

When Voyager got swept into the DQ, they entered an alternate universe. Preferably the Hobo Riker universe. That show frakked up too many things to be included.

If I ever go to a convention, I'm going as this guy:



Damn, if I'd thought of it I'd have somehow rented the Blu-ray of FARPOINT. Watching it the regular way I feel like I'm watching it through Gene's rose-tinted glasses which he uses when he looks at humanity.

The White Tuxedo wrote:

Watching FARPOINT (well, it's on pause). It may be a misfire, but it's more vibrant and entertaining than anything I saw in my aborted ENTERPRISE run. You can't fault Roddenberry & co. for not trying.

And music. Even McCarthy's stuff in the early seasons had some real flamboyancy to it, before Rick "I hate personality" Berman demanded him to score "non-emotionally".

Wish I had the music.

Back to FARPOINT.

I used to have the Ron Jones BEST OF BOTH CD, but I got tired of it after awhile. Still, there were some good cues there, and in the 1st season ep that reintroduces the Romulans.

But my fave, hands down, is Chattaway's TIN MAN. Not the humanistic stuff, the big brassy movie music stuff.

TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint"

I couldn't hope to rip this episode a new one any better than sfdebris, so I'll just give my impressions.

After wading scrotum-deep through the Chinese industrial sewer that is VOYAGER, and suffering through the tedium of ENTERPRISE, I found this first episode of TNG to be at the very least refreshing. It's not a very good episode, but it's vibrant and imaginative, with more balls than VOYAGER and unfettered by the canon constraints of ENTERPRISE.

It's a good thing they had to make it feature-length and add Q because he's by far the best thing about the episode, and de Lancie is quite entertaining. The second best thing about this episode is the story idea of Farpoint Station. Sadly it's not explored well. I think Q's trial being tied into that story works better than the actual story itself. For one, the big aliens are basically living replicators. That's it. So the weird happenings aren't that weird. And the investigation into those happenings isn't laid out well.

Then you have the poorly executed establishment of these characters that makes some of them seem like assholes.

It's a mess.

I do like that Picard was more of an ass in the early seasons, though the writers definitely didn't know how to get it quite right save for a few moments like when the red alert klaxon goes off and Picard orders "Shut off that damn noise! Go to yellow alert." And get off his lawn. But I understand that Picard being more of a authoritative hardass veteran is to contrast Kirk's more maverick cowboy act, and that was one of the things Gene was absolutely right about.

DS9 S5
DS9 S7
DS9 S6
TNG S4
TOS S2
DS9 S4
DS9 S2
DS9 S3
TOS S1
TNG S3
DS9 S1
VOY S4
VOY S5
TNG S5
VOY S2
VOY S1
TNG S6
TNG S2
ENT S4
TNG S7
VOY S3
TOS S3
TAS
ENT S2
ENT S3
VOY S6
VOY S7
TNG S1
ENT S1

Something like this, maybe.

I'll put ENT S4 over any season of VOYAGER. Though VOY S4 was all right.

TNG: "The Naked Now"

Well, I thought it came off better as a whole than FARPOINT. At least it's more coherent. But it's pretty bad in a lot of places. Wesley Crusher. They're gonna kill him off soon, right? Right?

And horny Yar is ruined by the spit curl. Who is she, Superman?