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The General Star Trek Thread of Earl Grey Tea, Baseball, and KHHHAAAANNNN

Man God

Non-Canon Member
Yup which is why I hated Archer at first, dude had no experience or even any protocol to follow and instead of being a good Captain and at least listening or taking the advice of the only person on board that has any clue on what they're doing, he belittles her or just completely ignores her and fucks things up.

The episode where he gets mad at Tripp for interfering with that alien who's bred to produce offspring just pissed me off because that's exactly the type of BS he was always doing. He had just finished going to trial with the Klingons for meddling. It's not till around mid-season 3 that I started to like him better but if I'm ranking Captains it's Picard/Krik>Sisko>Janeway>Archer.

Trip even tells him that he was just doing what Archer would do and Archer just denies it without really thinking about it. He freed that entire prison camp of Suliban and they were lawfully detained.

Trip is a bit of an asshole in that episode but he's not wrong either, The other Trip was a slave used for breeding and nothing more to those enlightened people. I think the better ending would have been for Archer to grant asylum after all that and the aliens to just go LOL no and beam her off before scooting because they too are kinda assholes.
 
Trip even tells him that he was just doing what Archer would do and Archer just denies it without really thinking about it. He freed that entire prison camp of Suliban and they were lawfully detained.

Trip is a bit of an asshole in that episode but he's not wrong either, The other Trip was a slave used for breeding and nothing more to those enlightened people. I think the better ending would have been for Archer to grant asylum after all that and the aliens to just go LOL no and beam her off before scooting because they too are kinda assholes.

Yeah that would have worked better, The whole episode I kept thinking how Archer was going to be the one to interfere too lol
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I think broadly the problem with a bunch of writers working on episodic television with characters trying to hew to a non-interference policy is they're invariably going to look like inconsistent assholes. (Archer was a humorless dick aside from that anyhow, but it certainly didn't help things.)
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
I think broadly the problem with a bunch of writers working on episodic television with characters trying to hew to a non-interference policy is they're invariably going to look like inconsistent assholes. (Archer was a humorless dick aside from that anyhow, but it certainly didn't help things.)

At least with Enterprise you have the excuse that there are no rules. T'Pol will tell Archer what the Vulcans do (which is roughly the beta version of the Prime Directive) and then Archer will just do whatever he feels. They interfere with a couple of pre warp civilizations, they get involved in internal matters and they also do the opposite on a case by case basis.

It's certainly more interesting than the same hamstrung by the Prime Directive lets see how we can possibly bend this to save some lives episodes you see on the rest of the series if only because that premise was done to death.

A more charitable read on the character in that particular episode is that Archer just had the time of his life with the other captain and didn't really take in what Trip was doing so he gave the other Trip back to them without a fuss and berated Trip on screwing up a first contact with a benevolent and advanced alien race. A scene or two after the normal end of the episode with Archer apologizing to Trip would have made all the difference especially considering how devastated he must be.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Really what annoys me most about Enterprise is probably all the people who say Trip is an idiot, and there's really no good reason for it other than they instantly think anyone with a southern accent is a redneck.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
Really what annoys me most about Enterprise is probably all the people who say Trip is an idiot, and there's really no good reason for it other than they instantly think anyone with a southern accent is a redneck.

It's because he sounds so much like George W. Bush. I remember it bugged the hell out of me when the show premiered. He's actually one of the more interesting crew members.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
I actually liked Trip, he had a personality. I mean Reed and Sato just blending into their consoles and Phlox was the only other likable character.

And you don't even mention Mayweather!

Reed is pretty good because his character is supposed to be the guy who just quietly does his job and is super bland and British.
Which is why he is more or less a spy.
 
And you don't even mention Mayweather!

Reed is pretty good because his character is supposed to be the guy who just quietly does his job and is super bland and British.
Which is why he is more or less a spy.

lol completely forgot about him the only thing I remember about him is that he had a girlfriend that was a spy or something.

Yeah with Reed they tried with the whole conflict with the MACOS and the episode where he loses one of them but if boring and bland is what they were going for then kudos they nailed it lol
 

Fuchsdh

Member
Pulling out the MACO bit as underpinning Idris Elba's crisis of confidence in the Federation's goals was easily one of the best bits of Beyond, a shame it was just half-cooked.
 
I didn't really get it at first because I hadn't watched Enterprise yet but yeah they could have done much better with it, same thing with ITD.

I liked ITD but after watching Space Seed I was disappointed they didn't do more with Khan,
 
Yup which is why I hated Archer at first, dude had no experience or even any protocol to follow and instead of being a good Captain and at least listening or taking the advice of the only person on board that has any clue on what they're doing, he belittles her or just completely ignores her and fucks things up.

The episode where he gets mad at Tripp for interfering with that alien who's bred to produce offspring just pissed me off because that's exactly the type of BS he was always doing. He had just finished going to trial with the Klingons for meddling. It's not till around mid-season 3 that I started to like him better but if I'm ranking Captains it's Picard/Krik>Sisko>Janeway>Archer.

Archer has his whole "Vulcans held my dad back" chip on his shoulder. So when T'Pol says don't do things he defies her because he believes she just trying hold him back like his dad was held back and that he actually capable of doing what he wants to. T'Pol like all Vulcans believe humanity too reckless and needs hold back.

Sometimes he is right, sometimes she is right, both Archer and T'Pol evolve together and realise there is a middle ground.

I actually really liked it about them both.
 
Archer has his whole "Vulcans held my dad back" chip on his shoulder. So when T'Pol says don't do things he defies her because he believes she just trying hold him back like his dad was held back and that he actually capable of doing what he wants to. T'Pol like all Vulcans believe humanity too reckless and needs hold back.

Sometimes he is right, sometimes she is right, both Archer and T'Pol evolve together and realise there is a middle ground.

I actually really liked it about them both.

Yeah I got that and it was a good way of creating conflict and it was nice when they eventually earned each others trust (and their friendship arc was nice) my problem was that he was the Captain, and he should be putting the safety and well being of his crew first and the fact that he keeps doing it for awhile after he's gotten himself and his crew into trouble was the annoying part. He was too cocky and arrogant for too long,
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
So I just watched four more episodes of Enterprise while cooking and cleaning up.

The Shipment is one of my favorite episodes. I love the Xindi guy in this episode who is devastated that some world he doesn't even know is going to be blown up in part due to his work and just goes on faith with Archer to help out. Some real solid acting here.

Twilight is the bleakest episode of Trek full stop, even though you can see the giant reset button a mile off. Mayweather dies in the cold open and no one ever even mentions it. Everyone else dies as well. The bridge getting phasored into space is particularly brutal shot.

North Star...a freaking western in the middle of the delphi expanse. Okay. Still a good episode and a nice change of pace going from everyone dies to alien slavery and racism. People kidnapping humans to be slaves has a poor track record in Trek, I'm pretty sure everytime it happens the humans break out. The costuming in this episode is dope as hell and the exaggerated western I'm shot poses are out of bounds in the final fight.

Similitude...contains probably the strongest acting performance in any Trek show by a regular, and it's only real competition is The Visitor. This is a very well done Sophie's Choice with a sci fi twist. Also of note is probably the best acting job by a child with young trip, he does a great job sounding like Trip would if he was ten.

The next episode I think is another off pace one with them stopping a Xindi plot on earth via time travel.
 

Fuchsdh

Member

Ach, good luck with that.

They're actually doing a showing in Brooklyn, which is nice. Was sad that last summer I missed the screening of Star Trek II on the flight deck of the Intrepid, Meyer showed up to that one.

Also, this news reminded me I still had a Fedex envelope with my first-pressing messed up version of the directors cut on Blu-Ray. Hopefully they will still honor a year-old package delivery date :p
 
Ach, good luck with that.

They're actually doing a showing in Brooklyn, which is nice. Was sad that last summer I missed the screening of Star Trek II on the flight deck of the Intrepid, Meyer showed up to that one.

Also, this news reminded me I still had a Fedex envelope with my first-pressing messed up version of the directors cut on Blu-Ray. Hopefully they will still honor a year-old package delivery date :p

yeah sucks not having any trekkie friends :/

oh that would have been awesome,
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
Vulcans are great in general in Enterprise. It's fun because they are, without a doubt, 100% correct about humans not being ready for the dangers ahead. Meanwhile Archer and Forrest are correct that the Vulcans are holding them back and resent them for it. You learn as the show goes along that the Vulcans see themselves 1500 years ago when they first came together as a race and embraced logic, and are scared that the humans did it in less than 100 years.

They also have their own internal problems, some of it because they refuse to deal with any difference in their religious beliefs and part of it because the Romulans have been secretly fucking with them for awhile now.

The other great thing that this series (and Voyager with Tuvoc) tackles is that Vulcans are in fact quite emotional. You may go, but Man God, isn't this the primary point of Spock/Bones relationship in the original series? Yes, but he is half human. Then when his dad develops emotions in TNG we're supposed to believe that is all because of a degenerative disease. The DS9 serial killer Vulcan who just lost it. But with Tuvoc and all the Vulcans in Enterprise they finally confirm what we've known all along, pure blooded Vulcans are just tamping everything down 24/7 and actually do love, have a sense of humor, are jealous, etc, etc.
 

maharg

idspispopd
The other great thing that this series (and Voyager with Tuvoc) tackles is that Vulcans are in fact quite emotional. You may go, but Man God, isn't this the primary point of Spock/Bones relationship in the original series? Yes, but he is half human. Then when his dad develops emotions in TNG we're supposed to believe that is all because of a degenerative disease. The DS9 serial killer Vulcan who just lost it. But with Tuvoc and all the Vulcans in Enterprise they finally confirm what we've known all along, pure blooded Vulcans are just tamping everything down 24/7 and actually do love, have a sense of humor, are jealous, etc, etc.

? This was *always* the explanation for Vulcans. The reason Spock and Sarek with a degenerative disease are incapable of holding back their emotions is because they do not have the emotional control capacity that vulcans normally do. The idea has always been that Vulcans have incredibly intense emotions but they evolved through some means to be able to control it.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
? This was *always* the explanation for Vulcans. The reason Spock and Sarek with a degenerative disease are incapable of holding back their emotions is because they do not have the emotional control capacity that vulcans normally do. The idea has always been that Vulcans have incredibly intense emotions but they evolved through some means to be able to control it.

Surprisingly enough they don't actually confirm this until Voyager (and don't really dive deep into it until Enterprise) because we just don't see a lot of Vulcans after Spock and we don't see them living their day to day lives and just how it works. They talk about it from time to time with Spock but they don't do a deep dive until much later on after basically not having major Vulcan characters in DS9 or TNG.
 
Sarek and Spock do cameos, and there's like one Vulcan lieutenant on board.

DS9 is pretty much just the asshole captain in the baseball episode and the serial killer, both in season 7.

Wasn't there also one episode when qwark had a plot about trying to saduce some random Vulcan federation officer.
 

Askani

Member
Came back at the right time to see some other comments.

Just finished Voyager. Not great, but there's some good Trek in there with the bad. Series Finale is hot garbage though. It's as bad as "All Good Things" is great. Bad plot. Episode is basically "Here's an 'I win' button for you. Go home now.". Flyby slap at the Borg for some reason. Didn't make me super care about anything. Romance angle felt rushed and forced. Tuvok disease would have been interesting character arc for the whole last season or two but also feels rushed and forced and wasted. Didn't see the actual homecoming. Cements Janeway as the worst captain.
 
Just randomly watched this TNG ep where an entire planet has been blasted to shit by an alien invasion, but there are inexplicably two elderly survivors. It turns out that
the old man is actually an immortal alien being who watched his planet's people, including his wife, get blown to bits by the aliens, but he couldn't do anything because he refuses to kill. But then he went into a fit of rage and genocided every member of the attacking aliens' race
. Pretty disappointed with the resolution to this one, which was basically just Picard saying, "Welp, this is crazy and we can't deal with the magnitude of this, so, uh, let's just go and pretend it all never happened."
 
You can always watch Babylon 5 (for free on some weird but legal streaming service) if you're in need of more Sci Fi.


It's been less than a week and I need my sci-fi fix, is www.go90.com the website you're talking about? It seems to have a bunch of series I've never heard of but Babylon 5 is on there and the only place I've found that I can stream it lol
 

Walshicus

Member
Just randomly watched this TNG ep where an entire planet has been blasted to shit by an alien invasion, but there are inexplicably two elderly survivors. It turns out that
the old man is actually an immortal alien being who watched his planet's people, including his wife, get blown to bits by the aliens, but he couldn't do anything because he refuses to kill. But then he went into a fit of rage and genocided every member of the attacking aliens' race
. Pretty disappointed with the resolution to this one, which was basically just Picard saying, "Welp, this is crazy and we can't deal with the magnitude of this, so, uh, let's just go and pretend it all never happened."

Well, what could they really do?

I really enjoyed the backstory that the Star Trek Online guys gave the Husnock, including their slave races. Was a lot of fun integrating that into the Stellaris Star Trek mod's story.
 

DBT85

Member
Just randomly watched this TNG ep where an entire planet has been blasted to shit by an alien invasion, but there are inexplicably two elderly survivors. It turns out that
the old man is actually an immortal alien being who watched his planet's people, including his wife, get blown to bits by the aliens, but he couldn't do anything because he refuses to kill. But then he went into a fit of rage and genocided every member of the attacking aliens' race
. Pretty disappointed with the resolution to this one, which was basically just Picard saying, "Welp, this is crazy and we can't deal with the magnitude of this, so, uh, let's just go and pretend it all never happened."

Literally nothing else they could do. Would be like trying to take on Q in fight.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
I guess Sisko was on leave.

Q is actually possible to reason with. He ultimately likes messing with humans.

The omnipotent being in that episode was simply ready to fuck shit up if he got angry. As Picard pointed out, his actions had already cost him the only thing he cared about. Leaving him alone was a kind of punishment anyhow. Unlike Kirk I imagine Picard left a "no one bother with this planet" note in Federation logs.
 

Mugsy

Member
Q is actually possible to reason with. He ultimately likes messing with humans.

The omnipotent being in that episode was simply ready to fuck shit up if he got angry. As Picard pointed out, his actions had already cost him the only thing he cared about. Leaving him alone was a kind of punishment anyhow. Unlike Kirk I imagine Picard left a "no one bother with this planet" note in Federation logs.

Also the Federation does not practice Capital Punishment (other than going to a certain planet) so what are they going to do, sentence him to prison? Living isolated on this planet is basically the same thing.
 

Man God

Non-Canon Member
There's a pretty good TNG based Podcast called "The Greatest Generation" that uses Kevin Uxbridge as a running gag.

He's also a damn good card in the Decipher CCG.
 
Well, what could they really do?

I really enjoyed the backstory that the Star Trek Online guys gave the Husnock, including their slave races. Was a lot of fun integrating that into the Stellaris Star Trek mod's story.

Literally nothing else they could do. Would be like trying to take on Q in fight.

I totally agree there was nothing else they could do! Same thing my gf said when I complained to her about the ep, lol. I just think I would have just liked a bit more thoughtfulness from Picard than "uhh, let's get the hell out of here," haha.
 

MC Safety

Member
I liked the bit in Enterprise where they revealed Vulcans have a heightened sense of smell and that humans have a terrible odor.

There was an episode where Archer visits a Vulcan sanctuary, and a Vulcan asks T'pol how she can stand the smell. And then she has to share a blanket with Captain Stinky.
 

nOoblet16

Member
Finished Enterprise. What an inappropriate finale. It's not a bad episode, just an awfully final one.
It's borderline disrespectful if you ask me, firstly we have a series finishing earlier than it was suppose to just when it got really good (season 3 and season 4), secondly we have the fact that they let the cast get overshadowed by people who had nothing to do with the show for 4 years. Seems like a final attempt to get some interest by throwing in a bit of TNG in there..
 
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