Prouvaire @ Prouvaire @kbin.social

Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually del

---

Read more

Posts

2

Comments

114

Joined

2 yr. ago

DECKD WK 1, EP 1 & 2
Solved in 3

⚪⚪⚪⚪⚪
⚪⚪⚪🟢⚪
🟢🟢🟢🟢🟢

https://www.playparamountplus.com/DECKD

Too used to playing Wordle rules,which is a disadvantage here.

Boimler has his Starfleet recruitment poster seen in “Those Old Scientists”, but Number One’s face is obscured every time it’s on screen.

I'm 99% sure they were just being subtle (which I like), but 1% of me wonders if there's something in the actors', in this case Rebecca Romijn's, contract that says they have to be compensated if their likeness is used, even a cartoon likeness. And if so, sometimes the budget doesn't quite stretch far enough.

This episode reminded me of what Mel Brooks purportedly said: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die."

Also, Spork was one of the Vulcan proper names submitted by Bob Justman to Gene Roddenberry during the show's production: https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/star-trek-planet-vulcan-proper-names

T’Lyn is able to combine all the Tuvixed beings into one creature, which is then described by Tendi as a “Non-sentient blob of meat,” handily circumventing the ethical dilemma presented by “Tuvix”.

It really doesn't. It's like you lobotomising someone before you suffocate them with a pillow. Sure you turned the non-sentient blob of meat back into their constituent parts, but you're the one who created the non-sentient blob from a bunch of sentient beings in the first place (second place).

I own all (I think) of the TOS era Bantam novels and short story collections from way back (though some in their UK Corgi editions), and just about all of the early Pocket novels (the first 50 or so); as well as a fairly comprehensive selection of early non-fiction books, including some obscure ones like The Making of the Trek Conventions by Joan Winston, Letters to Star Trek by Susan Sackett and Star Trek Intragalactic Puzzles by James Razzi.

https://youtu.be/tRsYJej2RtI

Exactly. Just as binary digit got abbreviated to "bit" and a collection of (eight) bits became known as a "byte", I figure something similar would happen for quantum digits - qubits - quads (because "qubytes" sounds awkward and "quants" sounds like something you couldn't get say on network television).

In my head canon quad is a fundamental unit used in quantum computing, which I assume is a technology in common use in Trek.

A Jellico cat perhaps?

One could argue that "Skin a Cat" makes a more profound point amidst the silliness. Which is that (as Azetbur has pointed out) "the Federation is nothing more than a homo sapiens only club".

Obviously there are real world reasons why human (and primarily American) cultural references abound in Star Trek, but it's always irked me that, for instance, there would be an entire class of Starfleet vessels named after cities in one United States state - ie, the California class. Why not have all the ships in this class named after towns in, say, the ShiKahr district of Vulcan instead? I think that would do a better job of world building, representing the Federation as a body that's more than just a bunch of humans with a handful of token aliens. Or, better yet, have all the ships ships named after smaller cities in a range of UFP member planets?

edit: typo

I'm not familiar with Pete Holmes but it would have been nice to have Paul Wesley voice Kirk to provide some aural continuity.

I watched "Too Many Cooks" in preparation for Very Short Treks and so thought "Skin a Cat" was tame in comparison. I enjoyed it. 'Twas silly.

I would not presume to debate you.

That is wise.

I've always maintained that TWOK is not just a really good Star Trek movie, not just a really good science fiction movie, but a really good movie period. It transcends the franchise and the genre, which I don't think can be said of any other Trek movie.

It's a movie that's about something meaningful - getting older, confronting mortality and legacy, and renewal through sacrifice. Kirk starts out feeling old, worn out, but ends with him saying "I feel young". Maybe it's a little trite when put so bluntly, but it's executed in an elegant and impactful way.

TWOK evolves Kirk in a way we hadn't seen before. He is a different person at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning (or throughout the TV show). Less cocky, more aware of the consequences of his actions, because it literally cost him his best friend.

Spock's death scene was the first time Star Trek ever made me cry. You can argue that TWOK is more militaristic than Star Trek normally was, but the themes of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice is pure Trek idealism. One could even argue that TWOK is about exploration, but an inner journey not an external one: Kirk encounters for the first time (by which I mean in a way that truly hits him) "death, the undiscovered country" (the film's working title).

In David Marcus and Saavik TWOK introduces what might have been a new generation of characters, to whom the torch might have been passed if they hadn't been killed off and sent to the home for pregnant Vulcans, respectively, in later movies. In either case, these two new characters - especially in light of Spock's death (a death sadly temporary, to the franchise's long-term detriment) - tie into the themes of mortality and legacy.

TWOK has what's arguably Shatner's finest performance - certainly in Star Trek, maybe ever. Everyone else is also in top form.

TWOK has the best antagonist. So compelling was Khan that they keep on trying to remake the "so-and-so is out for revenge" story. Montalban was so good Paramount even launched a "For Your Consideration" campaign to get him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod. And Montalban's Khan easily has the best chest of any Trek villain.

Even though Khan is the best villain, Khan and Kirk actually never physically meet. Their entire confrontation is carried out over comms. They never get into a fistfight or even breathe the same air, something that took me years to realise. Because theirs feels like the most visceral, tense and personal battle of any movie.

Even though TWOK was made on a very limited budget, a lot of the production design and visual/special effects hold up - there's a reason why Robert Fletcher's monster maroons are so iconic for instance. So many effective little moments. Eg the Genesis simulation (one of the first uses of CGI in a movie), though primitive by today's standards, still looks really cool because of the way it was storyboarded by ILM, with the camera sweeping ahead of the Genesis effect, then the effect catching up to it.

The battle scenes have real weight. I've always thought that Meyer's conceptualisation of starships as capital ships - rather than as jetfighters - made for better fight scenes. The entire movie is basically Roddenberry's "Horatio Hornblower in space" idea realised (hence touches like the bosun's whistle and the old-fashioned look of the uniforms), an idea which carried over to how he staged the battles, with Enterprise and Reliant squaring off like galleons at sea.

Speaking of battle sequences, the "gatling gun" phaser effect is still the best phaser effect in Trek. And you've never felt the pain of the ship getting hit as acutely as the "can opener" shot: another example of a shot which is unremarkable at a technical level today, but which still has an emotional impact. Ditto the Ceti eels.

Horner's music is arguably the best of any of the movies. There are individual tracks in other movies that might rank alongside or above the best of Horner's tracks - eg Goldsmith's First Contact theme or Giacchino's "Enterprising Young Men" - but as a whole I don't think you can surpass TWOK's score.

There are so many iconic moments and lines. "Aren't you dead?", the Dickens and Melville quotes, "I never forget a face, Mr... Chekov", "I don't like to lose", "He's so... human. / Nobody's perfect Mr Saavik", "I have been and always will be your friend", "Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human".

Is it a perfect movie? No. Eg while a lot of production design works, some of it looks cheesy (like Meyer's obsession with blinkety lights). Some of the supporting characters aren't utilised as well as they might have been. (But then, the TOS movies have all been Kirk movies - it's worth remembering that TOS was not an ensemble show, but one with a clear primary, secondary and tertiary character.) But the elements in TWOK that don't quite work don't detract from its overall impact and quality.

reddit has the ability to hide post vote counts for a certain time to mitigate this. It's a feature that's worth bringing across.

(I also think it's worth capping the number of upvotes and downvotes a post/comment can get - and to do so asymmetrically, eg no more than 10 downvotes and 100 upvotes.)

and we get close up enough on Batel to see that the patch on her shoulder reads “USS Enterprise”.

I figure Pike got her one from the Enterprise gift shop. She's probably got one of Pike's pajama tops too.

Or maybe midgets.

Another musical theatre Star Trek fan who finally caught up with the episode. Obviously I loved it. The writers took their cue from "Once More With Feelings" and used the "very special episode" conceit to progress seasonal character arcs (as they did with "Those Old Scientists"). You could tell was the intent even from the "previously on" recap with a bunch of relationship tensions ready to be revealed through song. (The bunnies reference was a nice nod to the Buffy episode.)

I knew Celia Rose Gooding could sing (although, sadly, she was off when I saw Jagged Little Pill on Broadway), so the actor whose vocal chops surprised me most was Christina Chong. I see from her wikipedia entry that she was actually in the Elton John musical Aida in Berlin, so that makes sense now.

Maybe my favourite minor running gag was how the characters always heard and acknowledged the backing music - in dialogue or with just a glance. I could go on a pretentious detour on mimetic vs diegetic music, but won't.

But I wasn't blind to some of the episode's flaws either. The biggest to me was that the songs lacked the craft and polish of really good musical theatre songs, with (for instance) many imperfect rhymes and awkward prosody (putting the stress on the wrong syl-LA-ble of a word). Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show that I loved, suffered from the same issue.

A minor complaint is that I didn't think we need the rules of musical theatre to be so explicitly lampshaded by the characters, although La'an treating it as security (and personal, emotional) risk was cute - and in character.

Is there somewhere a list of the songs that Ford was parodying in How Much For Just The Planet? Even though I'm a huge musical theatre nerd, I didn't get some of the references in the book and it always bugged me.

(And speaking of John M Ford: Personally I still regret that the Klingon culture that the franchise developed through TNG and subsequent shows differed so much from the one Ford created in The Final Reflection.)

Alien of the Week shows like TOS and TNG. No season long arcs, no dramas where the events in the episode are less important than the character development [...] SNW was supposed to be that

I remember that during SNW's development one of the producers explicitly stated that while the stories would be episodic, there would be character arcs that ran through the season. So SNW was never intended to be as standalone as TOS or TNG were.

It didn't help that they cast people who sounded like they'd done a couple plays in high school and never had a paying acting job in the decades since.

I'm only talking about the English speaking actors of course.

in TOS there was very little rhyme or reason to the Stardates

The explanation Roddenberry gave was that a stardate was dependent not just on time but location, but the real world reason was that the episodes were aired out of production order.