BigJKO

A Dedicated Thread For Talking About Star Trek Episodes

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Shaka, when the walls fell.1  The river Temarc in winter.2 
 
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra shirt.3  Temba his arms wide.4
 
I am the biggest nerd. Also the shirt lists Earth and San Francisco as two separate locations.
 
1Stop, you guys are doing this wrong.
2Listen to me.  This is how you should be saying it.
3That Darmok and Jalad shirt
4Give it to me

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A pessimist might say that it sounds like stunt hiring and telling the fans what they want to hear...

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but this is like EXACTLY what i want to hear! 

 

“Moral dilemmas, human issues, complex characters, and a genuine sense of optimism: These are the cornerstones of Star Trek and are what have made it such an influential and beloved franchise for the last 50 years,” Roddenberry said. “While I will always be humbled by its legacy and the legions of fans who are its guardians, it’s a genuine honor to be joining a team of imaginative and incredibly capable individuals whose endeavor it is to uphold the tenets of Star Trek’s legacy while bringing it to audiences in a new era and on a contemporary platform.”

 

Honest, it's just the "sense of optimism" part that gets me. We need that now! haha. 

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I am taking it upon myself to introduce a friend to Star Trek. I want her to see at least some of TOS so I have been working on a skip/watch list. Here are the episodes I think are worth watching, looking for thoughts and more recommendations.


Episode - Reason its worth watching.

The Naked Time - fun episode, gets referenced in TNG.

Arena - Kirk vs. Gorn

Space Seed - Khan

A Taste of Armageddon - Conflict a society that is set in their ways for insane reasons
The City on the Edge of Forever - Interesting plot relating to messing with timelines

Mirror Mirror - First of the mirror universe episodes and possibly the best one

I, Mudd - Has possibly the best Spock line in TOS "Logic is a little tweeting bird chirping in a meadow. Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. Are you sure your circuits are registering correctly? Your ears are green. "

The Trouble With Tribbles - required, gets referenced in great DS9 episode

By Any Other Name - a very silly episode

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Might be worth throwing in "Mudd's Women" to go with "I, Mudd." I don't remember it being particularly good or bad, but it makes "I, Mudd" a lot better.

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Might be worth throwing in "Mudd's Women" to go with "I, Mudd." I don't remember it being particularly good or bad, but it makes "I, Mudd" a lot better.

Yeah i am debating that, Mudd's women is pretty bad, but might be important to set up I, Mudd. Not sure i want to rewatch the first one to find out :)

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I would consider The Corbomite Maneuver to be an essential episode. It contains some pretty major Kirk speeches that basically make the case for ​Star Trek as a whole. Plus, it has Clint Howard.

 

The Devil in the Dark similarly lays down the Trek thesis, and is just good.

 

The Doomsday Machine is a good action show.

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Oh, yeah, Doomsday Machine is probably one of the more memorable episodes, even though it's not as Star Trek-y as most episodes.

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I started netflixing my way through Voyager, and dang, it sure uses technobabble poorly. It's not my favorite device in the best of circumstances, but it has its purpose. It can be a quick contrivance to raise the stakes or close off dramatic dead ends. You can save yourself a lot of scenes of trying various solutions before settling on the crazy last resort by saying, "I've run a series of simulations. The only possibility is to put my dick in the plasma stream, Starfleet regulations be damned!"

 

It's just bad when a conflict begins and ends as technobabble, rather than the tech stuff serving something more relatable. Of course, I can't single Voyager out for this; all the series do this, and TNG has a big pile of clunker episodes where the entire A or B plot is just a stream of tech diarrhea. This first season of Voyager just seems particularly thick with it. Thick with diarrhea. 

 

I guess a good rule of thumb would be that tech is good when it offers a narrative shortcut, but bad when it acts as padding.

 

It doesn't help that Janeway is tech literate, so there's no proxy for the audience asking the nerds to tone it down. Torres is all, "The jim-jams are bunged up with McGriddles--" and Janeway jumps in and completes the sentence "--so we need to generate a 360 behind-the-back power dunk!" followed by them excitedly looking at each other and punching shit into their computers. It's like the least dramatic thing in the world. It's what I imagine it's like for my wife when she hears me talking excitedly to someone about video games... or about Star Trek, I guess!

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The last time I've watched Voyager episodes has been more than 10 years ago, but I somehow remember one episode that was so thick with the technobabble that Janeway got so annoyed she favored the religious explanation instead.

 

Anyone know what episode that was...?

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Is that the episode where the psychic girl was dying because of some temple on a planet and the doctor couldn't fix her so Janeway found God and the psychic girl got better?

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Has the Next Generation episode "Justice" already been discussed? It's really bad. Also why has Beverly Crusher never been court martialed?

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As a kid the idea of breaking a rule I didn't know about and getting in huge trouble terrified me. Seeing it as an adult, I came away from it thinking the resolution was really weak and the premise paper thin. Also how does the Prime Directive work when you are already openly interacting with a species?

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As a kid the idea of breaking a rule I didn't know about and getting in huge trouble terrified me. Seeing it as an adult, I came away from it thinking the resolution was really weak and the premise paper thin. Also how does the Prime Directive work when you are already openly interacting with a species?

 

The Prime Directive states that they can't interfere with another culture (unless asked to or said other culture interferes with them first).  They're allowed to interact so long as the interaction doesn't influence the other culture's development.  The Prime Directive doesn't just apply to less advanced species, it applies to all of them.  For example, Picard refused to get the Federation involved in the Klingon civil war because it was an internal dispute within the Klingon Empire.  Interference would have violated the Prime Directive.  Of course there are times the rule is bent or even broken.

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Of course, after you derive a new Prime Directive from the original by breaking/bending the rules, it's Prime Directive Prime, then Prime Direction Double Prime, and so on.

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Erm, I think you'll find that the PRIME Directive is already an offshoot from OUR timeline where it's just a plain old Directive.

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AV Club just did a mostly-rubbish article in their Q&A format where each of their writers answers the same question. This week the timely question was which other characters would you like to see have a civil war?

 

One of the writers gave a very enticing and well thought out Star Trek answer (albeit one I'm sure has been suggested many times):

 

Over its incredible seven-season run, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine gradually explored, questioned, deconstructed—and more often than not ultimately championed, albeit with some key caveats—just about every important value and idea of Gene Roddenberry’s mythos. One logical endpoint for this would be to pit the crew of Deep Space Nine against that of The Next Generation, the franchise’s most high-minded and nakedly idealistic incarnation. The narrative building blocks for this are already there: The DS9 pilot established that Benjamin Sisko held Jean-Luc Picard responsible for the death of his wife, and both Worf and Chief O’Brien would face potentially divided loyalties in a showdown between the two crews. What’s fascinating about this is that each crew could very plausibly appear, if not truly villainous, then at least dangerously misguided to the other, and there’d be all the space that hardcore Trek fans could ever want for some deep philosophical wrangling about the true meaning of the Federation’s ideals. Do Sisko and company too easily compromise their principles and undermine the very values they fight to save, or does the Enterprise’s ability to zip from one corner of the galaxy to the next mean they never really have to engage with the consequences of their actions? I’d see this as a three-part miniseries: the first from the Enterprise-D’s perspective, the second from Deep Space 9’s, and then the third where the crews come together and realize that, whatever differences there may be in their situations and approaches, they’re really not so different. I’m sure the respective fan bases would come together just as easily.

 

Apart from that last bit about a big happy ending, I think this is a really cool idea.

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Of course, after you derive a new Prime Directive from the original by breaking/bending the rules, it's Prime Directive Prime, then Prime Direction Double Prime, and so on.

 

While it has been proven that there are infinite Prime Directives, the Twin Prime Directive conjecture, which supposes that there are infinite Twin Prime Directives, has yet to be proven (although it is believed to be true).

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