The H&I Star Trek Bitch and Moan Thread

And then Janeway lowered the shields and flew the ship over the surface of a blue giant to heat her coffee!

Ah, shore leave, a "pleasure" planet that spawns things randomly from your thoughts. We also learn in this episode that Sulu collects guns.

I like "Shore Leave".

I think I remember Brannon Braga crowing about the episode on Cinefantastique saying gleefully "we got to show Crusher having an orgasm onscreen".

By the way, Phil Farrand in his Nitpickers Guide for TNG absolutely destroyed the logic behind that episode pointing out the timeline, that according to the dialogue and what is shown in "Sub Rosa", Beverly Crushers grandmother would've been having sex with her "ghost lover" when she was a PRE TEEN CHILD!!! And noted that Beverly apparently believed her grandmothers "lover" she had heard about was a real human male.

Which means that Crusher had no problem with her "Nana" being raped by a pedophile.

What aren't mistakes like this obvious to the writers?

Note, there are some really great moments in "Spock's Brain".

For one this is the only episode I can think of that featured a planet full of hot women that Kirk didn't go in trying to bang or even flirt with. Instead he went in literally with phasers blazing.

Another was the moment in sickbay when Kirk walks in and asks McCoy why Spock is on full life support. McCoy hesitates then finally says "His brain is gone".

There is a quick cut to Kirks face and he screws up his features and silently mouths "His brain?". I swear its an outtake as though Shatner was thinking "I can't believe they left that line in there!"

You can't be serious. Unless you're someone who puts a premium on production values or makes a big deal about Voyager having a woman captain.

Voyager is plenty enjoyable for me outside of the major turkeys (I'm looking at you, "Threshold"), although for the most part it's a "keep it on in the background while I'm doing other things" kind of show.

I binged my "Fan Collective:Klingon", set, and got to "Barge Of The Dead".

Y'know, I don't hate it anymore.
Some of the lines are a little corny and dramatic, but Roxanne Dawson acts the shit out of it, and we get a pretty good condensed version of the Klingon religion out of it.
Yeah, I like it.
I mean, it's no "The Best of Both Worlds", but it's all right.
I feel kinda bad about being such a grouchy shithead when it was new.

Oh, but you can still nitpick it.
Like, Janeway lets B'Lanna go into near death for her vision quest?
Jesus fucking Christ!
Why not let her have the whole vision quest in the first near death?
But, whatever...

Voyager did have some boring and/or irritating characters.

Ironically, of the main cast I thought Kes was the most likable and most potentially interesting character. And they gave her the boot and completely fucked up her character and when she came back to the show.

Janeway was an awful captain and very inconsistently written. Steadfastly following Starfleet regulations in one episode, disregarding them in another. Doing crazy things to get her crew home in one episode, then deciding to stop and explore every anomaly in other episodes. She became increasingly shrill and hypocritical as well.

Chakotay and Kim were boring non characters. Tuvok was ok I guess but they rarely gave him anything to do. Once Seven showed up there was really no need for him anymore. Same with Belanna. Tom was irritating. Neelix and Holodoc even moreso.

Seven was just Data with tits and a nice ass. Although Jeri Ryan did well with what she was given that character destroyed the ensemble feel of the show. They could have just gone back to TOS days and just showed the Big Three cast members in the opening credits. The rest became window dressing.

Pretty good analysis of the character problems.

In regarding the character of Janeway I think she was a victim of the different ideas of two of the series creators. Jeri Taylor wanted the female characters on Star Trek to be basically "no different from the men", I think she was quoted to that effect in Cinefantastique. But fellow Voyager creator the late Michael Piller had an obsession with wanting the ensemble cast of each Trek series to be like a "family". And he wanted Janeway to be the "mother" of that family. You even hear dialogue several times in episodes where Janeway refers to the crew as "the family".

Can you even imagine Picard or Sisko (to say nothing of Kirk) talking like that? Needless to say the two competing visions of the Janeway character by Taylor and Piller did not mesh well.

Also in creating the characters, the producers seemed to have the idea that making them realistic or interesting meant making them irritating. Hence lots of the problems with Neelix, the Doctor, Belanna, and Tom Paris.

Finally, they almost completely dropped the idea from the pilot about combining the Maquis crew with the Voyager crew being a source of tension. The big reason for this was Brannon Braga did not like it and felt that this part of the series concept was forced on the writers by Berman and Piller. Braga would quickly say there was "nothing for Voyager in pushing the Maquis crew storyline".

After All Good Things, I could see Picard saying it.

Janeway was in a unique situation - the crew were literally the only members of their "culture" out that far. And only 150 of them - I know people with bigger lists of Facebook friends. Over time they WOULD have become family. And I think the E-D crew would have done the same.

As for Sisko, I think you're forgetting how community-oriented he was - having to balance being The Emissary to the Bajoran crew (check him lifting the little kid onto his shoulder when they retake DS9 from the Dominion in Sacrifice of Angels and asking Kira to tell him a story when he's concussed in Starship Down) and a confidant/pupil become mentor to the Daxes and father figure to Bashir.

As for Kirk? I think the implication of this conversation is clear:



OK, JJTrek, but even TOS Kirk said this:

Spock: I've lost a brother.
James T. Kirk: Yes. I lost a brother once. I was lucky I got him back.
Leonard McCoy: I thought you said men like us don't have families.
James T. Kirk: I was wrong.

Seven as "Data with tits" bothers me, because right from the start Seven is WAY more emotional than Data. When Data hijacks the ship and locks out the command codes, something is SERIOUSLY wrong. With Seven, it's because she got paranoid about all the odd coincidences about Voyager and started seeing patterns where there weren't any.

If Seven is like anyone, it's Worf - trying too hard to live up to a flawed ideal and occasionally butting heads with the senior officers when she doesn't get her way.

"When I first took command of this post all I wanted was to be somewhere else...anywhere but here. But now, five years later this has become my home, and you have become my family." -- Benjamin Sisko, "Call to Arms"

Couldn't disagree more see post #37.

She was like Data in that she was what SF Debris has dubbed the "royal smart person." Also in the sense that she was very strong, and because she didn't quite seem to understand how to be human. Actually it got to be rather annoying as potentially good episodes for other characters turned into another "Seven learns something" episode. Like that one where they found a lost Mars capsule was supposed to be a Chakotay episode but got turned into a Seven episode.

Yeah. What's wrong with Brent Spiner's ass?

The "family" thing seems completely appropriate for the situation, and I think Sisko, at least, would have responded in a very similar way. Of all the Trek captains, Picard probably would have struggled the most with Voyager's situation.

The worst thing the writers ever did to Janeway was the way they treated her in "Night," essentially having her spend the entire episode sulking in a rite of self-flagellation.

Picard would have lost it every year celebrating Picard Day while lost in space. And all the kids, "are we there yet?" Every so often.

Off hand, mainly that it is attached to Brent Spiner.

I thought that was known as Seasons 1-7.

Yeah, but he could have had so much fun visiting all the archaeological sites left behind by civilizations absorbed by the Borg

I thought that when the Borg assimilated a culture that that included taking everything.

I thought they just took technology.

I distinctly remember a scene in the where the Enterprise crew encountered a world laid barren by the borg

Yep.
"Best Of Both Worlds", starts with a planet with a whole city scooped out.

Yes and in "Q Who" Worf and Data refer to the damage to the planets the ship encounters before the Borg show up as "identical to that of the outposts along the neutral zone" (TNG, "The Neutral Zone". I think it was Data who said "all the machine elements have simply been scooped off the surface".

Oh yes, I'm sure the Borg have always had a policy of scooping up every single Twinkie wrapper and rotting farmyard fencepost on a planet no matter how inefficient and irrelevant that might be.

Maybe they found it's more efficient to scoop everything up and sort it on the ship than to figure out what's worthwhile and what isn't while it's still on the planet.

Or maybe the Borg just weren't thought through all that well...