Star Trek 4

Discussion in 'Media Central' started by Diacanu, May 13, 2018.

  1. Uncle Albert

    Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

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    Lexa Doig would have improved Disco by a solid 50% just by existing in their world.
    :bailey:
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  2. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    There were plenty of reasons to dislike Disco that had nothing to do with that. Hell, I'm still laughing about the tech - oh, sure, we had holodecks and holocommunications for the last 100 years. So what it's canon that holodecks showed up first on TNG and every cutting edge ship until the end of the show had a main viewscreen, not a holocommunicator.

    You are allowed to not care about stuff like that, but many people do. Latest audience score on RT for Disco season 4 - 19%.

    If you are going to do Trek, respect Trek, or be honest enough to call it a reboot.
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  3. Spaceturkey

    Spaceturkey i can see my house

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    I think that was the point, that S3-4 abandoned any attempt to be Trek, which jibes with the RT score. The eight centuries time jump effectively removed it from existence in the trek universe, which is a shame because they were certainly trying to work adjacent and mindfully of what'd come before despite what a clusterfuck that canon can be.

    Otherwise, yeah... we have holo tech now. Other than a lack of prescience in TV writers 60 years ago, why wouldn't it be available on a 23 century starship?

    I mean sure, we could still have data on cassette tapes, CRT screens, and glowy gumdrop analog interfaces too, but that'd start to be historic settings rather than futuristic.

    It doesn't take much more than a change in punctuation to accept. Sure, an interactive, tangible holodeck was a new thing on TNG. But holocommunications a century earlier? no reason that isn't comparatively a kinescope compared to HDTV. Frankly, the retro look to the phasers of s1-2 was more important to the show's aesthetic.

    Still, evades the point that the number one complaint is still "woke trek" becuase people that'd stroke it to a Horta get squicked out that two dudes might have a loving relationship.
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  4. Spaceturkey

    Spaceturkey i can see my house

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    oddly enough, she may have driven away some of the same segment of fanbase...

    lexadoig22.jpg
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  5. NAHTMMM

    NAHTMMM Perpetually sondering

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    Future Spock finally does some time travel stuff and rights what once-will go wrong, the Romulan star doesn't explode, nobody dies, Nero doesn't go back in time, Vulcan doesn't implode, we don't get a Kirk with the morality of a street gang leader as the captain of Enterprise.

    As it should have been all along. :bailey:
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  6. Uncle Albert

    Uncle Albert Part beard. Part machine.

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    I helped Nog use a Krenim ship to go back in time and save the Hobus system. Just ended up with an assimilated Star Empire.
    Last edited: Sep 29, 2022
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  7. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    LOL, fuck no. They chose actively to rewrite canon, over and over and over again. Because we really needed a 3rd iteration of Klingons, completely different culturally than what went before. We had to have a mutiny on a Federation starfleet vessel, despite saying that never happened. We had to have the fastest Star drive that made the entire premise of Voyager ridiculous. We have to ignore 50 years of tech assumptions, not only by handwaving it away, but by saying the Enterprise was BROKEN and couldn't refit with the new tech, because fucking Montgomery Scott couldn't get it to work.

    They chose writers that went out of their way to dismiss Trek. Well, I happen to like the 50 years of Trek that came before.

    You like it because it's woke. That's fine, you are allowed to. But no, it was not in any way 'respectful' of Trek.

    Or it's fans.

    If you need to reboot the entire thing to get your story to work, do that.

    They lied and said they didn't. Another insult to the fans.

    I went in with an open mind, but they mad so many mistakes they could have avoided, and that was simply cause they didn't care.
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  8. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    Here's my head-canon for the holograms.
    On Pike's tenure on Enterprise, they broke, and Pike didn't like them anyway, so he ripped them out.
    Pike got fried by radiation being a hero, Kirk looked up to him, sought to change as little as possible in his honor, kept the holograms out.
    Kirk saved the whole damned universe in "the alternative factor" and the rest of the 5 years mission was cherries on top after that, so holograms were kept out even after the TMP refit, thinking that was Kirk's preference, not Pike's.
    Future Enterprises were kept 2-D to mistakenly honor Kirk.
    Similar ships had similar legacies, and they magically were all the ships we saw in TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY.
    All the ships we didn't see? Holograms.

    Klingons? The "imperial Klingons" were pure-breeds before they interbred with some other race to become the Klingons we're used to.
    The different races gain ascendency in the high council over the decades, and the families in the high council decide who gets captaincies, who decide who gets crew assignments, thus deciding who we see interact with Starfleet.
    Where were the Imperial Klingons during TOS/TNG/DS9/VOY?
    Interacting with all those offscreen ships with holograms.

    All those adventures are in shows that haven't been made yet.
    Easy-peasy.
  9. 14thDoctor

    14thDoctor Oi

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    It should have been Andromeda, but they blew it because they wanted to make each season a self contained story. :(
  10. Spaceturkey

    Spaceturkey i can see my house

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    well, that just killed any expectation for honest discourse. Still not sure what this "woke" issue is anyways? that there's queers and coloreds in the future? (see, if you can make a dumbass dismissive comment, I can at least give you the dumbass dismissive response to it)

    We had an EXPERIMENTAL stardrive using a technology that was abandoned.

    You may wanna look into the nuclear bomber program... no, not dropping them. planes powered by an onboard reactor-it was a thing that fortunately didn't happen.

    Or maybe the avrocar? or any of these things that flew, but weren't practical

    Point being the history of flight alone in the last 120 years is filled with ideas that didn't work very well, if at all. The 'shroom drive is pretty forgivable in that context. A least it doesn't turn people into salamanders that exist everywhere at once...



    There's never been a mutineer of any sort in starfleet. Fuck, how many times did some idiot take over any one of the enterprises?

    But hey, "We're Starfleet, we don't lie", right?

    unless of course we're trying to draw the Romulans into a war with a zimmerman telegram

    or fuck with some android brains

    or it's otherwise convenient to the plot.

    But I suppose that it isn't a lie to withhold the truth?



    Besides Scotty not being on the Enterprise at the time, how many games does your Nokia from 2002 play? There's probably better comparisons, like trying to run a mac OS on a PC, but hopefully you get the idea. the holotech remained buggy because it was fundamentally incompatible... not a big deal. Actually quite a realistic obstacle in any century.
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  11. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    CNN tried that bullshit where they green screen you into a fake Star Wars style hologram, and everyone laughed it off the screen.
    That just happened in our lifetimes.

    We actually had the tech to video-phone since the 60's but it ate up 10 switchboard circuits, and cost a fortune.
    We had a video phone in the 90's that compressed the data stream, but it looked like shit.
    We have clear picture phoning on phones now, and most people would rather text because it's cheaper.
    Even when price isn't an object, it's quicker.

    Plus, audio phone hides your sneer of contempt and obscene gestures.
    Never mind being woken out of bed with bed-head, drool, dandruff, etc, etc.
    Lotta reasons not to want picture.

    I can totally buy future people preferring screens to holos, and flip communicators to screens.
    :shrug:
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  12. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Well, you certainly succeeded at that!

    We? LOL. OK.

    Indeed. But the Spore Drive worked great, but had a negative impact on ecology. Notice that didn't stop them from using it once they knew that in emergencies.

    You think maybe someone might have remembered we could teleport anywhere in the universe when they learned they had a ship trapped in the Delta Quadrant?

    Just use it once and zip back. They used it for less, indeed were using it again in the future, weren't they?

    Yep, that's a famously dumb episode that is routinely mocked. Welcome to pretty much the entire run of Disco. :D


    Oh, I get it. You don't actually know shit about the show. Well, that makes this make more sense then. LOL.

    Spock clearly said there had never been a mutiny in Starfleet in TOS in The Tholian Web.

    Turns out there was, it was just his sister.

    Not only that, she was convicted as a matter of public record.

    Maybe you find a different way to write that scene.

    Or to protect your sister that was a clearly known mutineer just 10 years ago. That is never mentioned or even hinted at. Despite everyone in Starfleet she meets after her conviction knowing she's a mutineer. Huge plot point in the first season, no?

    Again, maybe you write less shitty shows?

    But then, they do like treating TOS as if they were mental invalids that had no idea what was actually going on.

    Wow. I can easily emulate a MAC OS on a PC. Literally did it four days ago. :)

    Again, NO ONE uses holocommunicators. We see huge numbers of ships in TOS, TNG, DS9, and VOY. Not a single one has a holocommunicator, even when it is explicitly stated that the Galaxy class, the Defiant Class, and the Intrepid class are the most advanced ships in the fleet. When Will Riker is completely amazed at the Enterprise-Ds new holosuite when he's introduced to it, clearly not ever having been onboard a ship with it. No one mentions 'wow, I wish we could use the better technology they created 100 years ago.' LOL.

    So why do you feel the need to defend this obviously massive dismissal of the 50 years of Trek going before?

    Well, maybe it isn't because you like the social message. Maybe it's you just are a casual?

    It's a reboot. So call it a reboot. But they didn't. Explicitly said it wasn't. Just more crap show running.

    A shame, too, some of the cast was great.

    And by the way, liking Trek because it's 'woke' - the social messaging - is absolutely fine. Trek has long been on the forefront of social change expressed through it's fictional medium. That wasn't a criticism - and I said so in the comment I made.
    Last edited: Sep 30, 2022
  13. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Yeah, but there's been hundreds of ships since Pike and Kirk. We've seen quite a few of them from their bridges. They all use the view screen. Other cultures with holographic technology? Also use a central viewscreen. Guess the Romulans really revered the hell out of Pike and Kirk! 24th century Klingons? All the races in the Delta Quadrant?

    Why the need for such ridiculous contortions? It's a valid criticism, that they could have gone away with by just calling it a reboot.

    Imperial Klingons actually came from the FASA RPG. They didn't include that in canon. There were Klingons and then the TOS era Klingons who were genetically engineered by Phlox to include Augment DNA to protect the Klingon race from complete decimation by a plague. Hell, even when they did Trials and Tribbleations they didn't have an answer yet but they at least addressed the question. It was a great moment on what was consistently a well written show.

    I would have LOVED a new subrace of Klingons. It would have fit the story great, a different group of old Noble Houses that ruled the Empire during this time, dramatically opposed to the new Human looking Klingons. Hell, they would have made the perfect foil for the social message Disco was trying to portray - the MAGAts, anti-vaccine MAGAts at that. But they didn't think of that (and yes, anti-vaxxers on the far right were already a thing). They lose the war with the Federation and are forced to retire to a subsection of the Klingon empire. They could be used again later then. Nope. These are the Klingons, always were the Klingons, we aren't going to address the difference.

    Anyway, people are allowed to like the show, even if the primary reason they like it is the social message. That's very Trek.

    Personally I don't think the social message is enough to overcome what in my opinion was bad writing. I'm hardly the only one in that regard.
    Last edited: Sep 30, 2022
  14. Raoul the Red Shirt

    Raoul the Red Shirt Professional bullseye

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    I understand and can appreciate the notion that these conflicts with what was in TOS or elsewhere are bothersome to the point where it greatly diminishes some people's enjoyment of the later shows.

    I wish people could appreciate that these types of conflicts just don't bother some people, or they realize that TOS and other shows inherently/internally have such conflicts and just handwave them, and that their enjoyment of subsequent Trek isn't just because of the social message.

    At least for me, if conservatives took over Trek and started pumping out shows, I would not care that an episode made in the 60s said that there never had been a mutiny in Starfleet, and an episode under the conservative regime contradicted that. (I would also question if he is discounting at least some of the events in TOS that could be considered mutiny prior to The Tholian Web, such as Gary Mitchell's attempt to kill Kirk in Where No One Has Gone Before, but I don't remember that aspect of Tholian Web).
  15. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    :unsure: :think:
    No, YOU'RE the religious zealot.
    Kim Jong Un told me so!
    :dendroica:

    Man, that works for anything!
    :diacanu:
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  16. Amaris

    Amaris Witch of Winter

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    Yep. My phone can do live video chat if I wanted.
    I don't. I'd rather fire off a quick message, or a brief phone call, and be done with it.

    I can do the same thing on my computer, but I don't. I HATE the idea of live video conferencing as anything other than a requirement for your job.
    I think when it comes down to it, no matter how amazing it is, people will often choose the easiest, simplest method that requires the least amount of effort.

    I used to have a VR headset, but it was so bulky, and starting up anything was so time consuming, I just ended up getting rid of it because I was more likely to use my flat monitor 99.9% of the time.
    It's also why I'm expecting the Metaverse to just collapse any day now, it's just Instagram with lots of extra steps and shitty animation.

    Oh, and all of that aside, the Klingons used holography in Star Trek VI during the call between Chancellor Azetbur and President Ra-ghoratreii.
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  17. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    You know the neat thing about being a tech geek and a history nerd? You learn that there were all kinds of technology that were developed and didn't go anywhere for decades, if not centuries. Even stuff that seems obvious.

    I'm not talking things like Babbage's difference engine, but the steam engine (developed in ancient Greece, and never really used until the 18th Century), the Baghdad battery, radio (yeah, there was a guy who beat both Marconi and Tesla to the idea), lightbulbs, the telegraph, and more. Heck, if you want a more recent example that now seems shocking: Smartphones. Apple didn't invent them, there were various versions of smartphones around since the late 90s. What Apple managed to do was to figure out how to repackage the concept in a way that was broadly appealing to people (even if they didn't like Apple products). And shit, white people didn't even begin eating tomatoes until long after they showed up in Europe! They thought they were poisonous.

    Let's also not forget that all SF has a rather scattershot record of actually predicting tech (and how it's used). Prior to the early 1970s, almost none of the SF created predicted things like the internet. I can't find it now, but some folks who are experts in designing computer interfaces did a breakdown of ones in popular movies and TV shows. Turns out, that most of them would be shit for actual use, because they're too flashy and complicated to convey actual information.
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  18. Amaris

    Amaris Witch of Winter

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    Indoor plumbing existed in 3000 B.C. in the Indus Valley (located in modern day India). It's wild just how long some things have been around that few people adopted until much, much later.
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  19. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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    The Romans had under floor heating. The Chinese were using natural gas for cooking before Rome was a thing. And while they might have been the ones to invent gunpowder, they weren’t the ones who invented guns.
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  20. Tuckerfan

    Tuckerfan BMF

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  21. We Are Borg

    We Are Borg Republican Democrat

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    Pretty much this. Not sure if they don't care or they just don't know how to run a show.

    The so-called "wokeness" stuff never bothered me. Trek has always been progressive.

    What bothers me about Discovery -- particularly the last two seasons -- is that at best, it's simply uninteresting. At worst, it has awful writing, direction and acting.

    On the plus side, without Discovery we may not have gotten Strange New Worlds.
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  22. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    A fact I'll never stop rubbing in the faces of regressives.
    :diacanu:
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  23. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    You guys are missing the point - they did explicitly say that holocommunicators became the norm in Disco and that there was something wrong with the Enterprise as to why it wasn't adopted there.

    But nowhere to be found in the next 60 years of Trek.

    And this is not only an extant society without any intervening collapses of civilization, like Rome, but also one that was constantly expanding, was a post scarcity society, and encountering new tech.

    This is not at all similar to ancient failed civilizations. Harappa died ironically due to lack of water, as their rivers dried up due to climate change. Rome's fall is discussed ad nauseum.

    Once we reached the renaissance, can it be said any tech has truly been lost?

    You guys will really bend over backwards to protect the mistakes they made on this show.
    Last edited: Oct 16, 2022
  24. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    I mean, clearly holodeck technology was brand new to Riker, who was astonished by it when he boarded the Enterprise and it was described as a new feature.

    So they had holodecks in the TOS era (except, of course, Kirk's ship), but they lost the technology in the intervening 90 years so a commander in Star Fleet would have no idea it existed? No crash of civilization, no great purge of knowledge, they just forgot? LOL.

    That's bullshit, and you know it.

    You just don't want to admit it.
  25. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    Sorry, you had 2 months to participate in that argument to its conclusion.
    We've all moved on.
    :bailey:
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  26. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    Then there's no need to participate while I destroy your feeble arguments. Just leave them there for the next person to come along and laugh at. :D
  27. Diacanu

    Diacanu Comicmike. Writer

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    *Cuts Demi off*
    Nopegotojail!
    :bailey:
  28. Demiurge

    Demiurge Goodbye and Hello, as always.

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    200.gif
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  29. shootER

    shootER Insubordinate...and churlish Administrator

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    Riker is from Alaska. :ramen:
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  30. 14thDoctor

    14thDoctor Oi

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    I think a lot of the apparent discrepancies that people see in Discovery comes from two faulty assumptions:

    1. Fads don't exist in the Star Trek universe.

    2. Every new technology is going to be embraced by everyone.

    Do Discovery Klingons look weird and different? They sure do. Part of that is the advancement of makeup and special effects and budget increases since the last time new Klingon characters were introduced, but I have no problem with the idea that fashion and style can change radically from decade to decade. Especially considering in TOS we only saw proper KDF ships crewed by Klingons that were altered by the Augment virus, while in DSC we see ships personally owned by individual houses and crewed by "regular" Klingons.

    Imagine aliens watching a West Wing prequel about George Washington, and seeing humans go from the first picture to the second.

    upload_2022-10-16_18-0-34.png

    upload_2022-10-16_17-59-53.png


    As for holo-communicators, they were in use before the Dominion war, but then in Nemesis Admiral Janeway is communicating with Picard over a viewscreen. Maybe people just aren't comfortable with them? I remember when cellphones made pagers obsolete because calls were superior to short written messages, but today I use my phone more for texts and emails than actual calls. That's not a continuity error, that's just humans preferring to communicate a certain way. I easily could imagine the same species that prefers texts to video calls also preferring video calls to letting someone else see a complete three dimensional representation of themselves. The Romulans don't need to see Picards entire ass just so he can tell them to get the fuck out of the neutral zone. :async:


    Oh, and Riker may have been impressed by holodecks, but I'm sure you've seen people with iPhones fawning over newer versions of iPhones even if they're only slightly better.
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