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tzor
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Post by tzor » Mon Nov 02, 2009 2:59 pm

> PhoneLobster wrote:

> > Lago PARANOIA wrote:Wouldn't you like to see Kirk, McCoy, and Spock outwit Nazis? I sure would.

> The Nazi planet episode wasn't so great.
> Even Mobster planet was better. But still dumb.

I generally thought most of the "alternate earth" episodes were lame (although technically the mobster planet was a case of culture adoption, but for a culture to completely drop all their culture on the basis of a few alien books is a real far stretch). I do think there is only one exception to these plots, but only because I like Shattner's "E Plebnista" monologue.
(On a completely different note, if I were king, there would be a certain person in the White House - and following him all of congress - would be forced to view that monologue on a monthly basis.)
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Post by Crissa » Wed Nov 04, 2009 7:52 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HekpXSI-N_o
This is one of the things I like about Star Trek.
Although, it's said his accent isn't so good. Which is okay, it's just Eminem.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Wed Nov 04, 2009 8:27 am

Did the writers of Enterprise hate Vulcans or something?

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Wed Nov 04, 2009 11:01 am

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:Did the writers of Enterprise hate Vulcans or something?

Seemingly. In their defense, they were trying to draw a line through some canon plot points. Namely:

- The doctor on the flagship in TOS actually and specifically doesn´t like Vulcans and no one thinks this is completely fucking insane.
  The Vulcans started the federation and let humans join when we developed warp travel.
  Vulcans are a minority in the federation by TNG days and humans pretty much run Starfleet with only a passing nod to what Betazeds think.

That being said, it was all handled really badly. The temporal civil war was stupid. The Klingon conflicts were poorly realized, and so on and so forth. It was just badly done. And getting hit over the head ever episode with how Vulcans are dicks and humans are unadvanced was even worse.
Honestly, what they should have done is just go off into a different direction entirely. Supposedly the Federation is a lot more morally ambivalent back then. They could have conquered the Betazeds and the Trill. Do an entire two season arc about the morality of colonization. That would have been awesome, and produced genuine conflicts. After all, we know that it works out in the end and the symbiotes are genuinely happier and better off after they´ve been run by the more technically advanced Federation for 200 years. You get to draw all the lessons you want from Earth conquest and occupation stories.
Instead they decided to be lame. Instead of running with having no shields and going BSG on us with parts falling off the ship in combat they decided to just rant about losing power to hull plating. And instead of telling genuinely different morality stories based on genuinely different times, they just tried to tell the same morals in different situations and made everything stupid and predictable. So throughout all of Enterprise we´re left with the same take-home message as TNG: Picard is right, you should listen to Picard.
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PhoneLobster
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Post by PhoneLobster » Wed Nov 04, 2009 11:53 am

I should have mentioned this earlier.
Ancient web site with all you ever need (or want) to know about Enterprise.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Phonelobster's Latest RPG Rule Set
The world's most definitive Star Wars Saga Edition Review
That Time I reviewed D20Modern Classes
Stories from Phonelobster's ridiculous life about local gaming stores, board game clubs and brothels
Australia is a horror setting thread
Phonelobster's totally legit history of the island of Malta
The utterly infamous Our Favourite Edition Is 2nd Edition thread
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:28 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:The Vulcans started the federation and let humans join when we developed warp travel.

I thought that plot point was hastily thrown into First Contact (according to agonybooth.com anyway) rather than being something that was there from the beginning of the franchise or even into the TNG days?

> Vulcans are a minority in the federation by TNG days and humans pretty much run Starfleet with only a passing nod to what Betazeds think.

How did this happen?

> PL wrote:Ancient web site with all you ever need (or want) to know about Enterprise.

lol at episode 98's title. I heard that was a very fan-pleasing episode for all the wrong reasons.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Fri Nov 27, 2009 5:32 am

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yii8t0Rd ... re=related
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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RandomCasualty2
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Post by RandomCasualty2 » Fri Nov 27, 2009 5:43 am

> FrankTrollman wrote: Instead they decided to be lame. Instead of running with having no shields and going BSG on us with parts falling off the ship in combat they decided to just rant about losing power to hull plating.

Yeah, that part really annoyed me. The show really just made everything the same as any other Star Trek show without much in innovation or new ideas. It was almost like they were too afraid to be different.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Dec 28, 2009 4:51 am

Space Seed was rad to the max. I kind of wished that they made Khan a recurring villain, a threat to the Starfleet whose weakness was adopting to a more modern era. I personally thought that the 'limited to 2D thinking' part in Wrath of Khan was sheer brilliance.
Don't get me wrong, I really liked Wrath of Khan, it's just... sigh.... you know. It's hard to let go of a good character.
Also, Uhura on TOS has some amazing abs. I mean, I normally don't notice the attractiveness of actors on television, much less comment on it, but YEOW!

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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tzor
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Post by tzor » Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:05 pm

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:Space Seed was rad to the max. I kind of wished that they made Khan a recurring villain, a threat to the Starfleet whose weakness was adopting to a more modern era. I personally thought that the 'limited to 2D thinking' part in Wrath of Khan was sheer brilliance.

I loved that. There was a joke in that somewhere. Could you spot the joke? (Actually it was not intentional.) You see while Khan was limited to 2D thinking, Kirk, apparently was limited to 3D thinking under a uniform gravity field, because at no point did he significently change the oritnation of the ship except in two dimensions. (All Kirk did was "raise" and "lower" the ship in the third dimension. That's logical if you are a submarine, but not if you are a starship with full access to all avanues of rotation.)
The original series relied on the nature of being able to throw away the consequences of the plot after the plot was over. (I think there was one exception and that was it was easier to write a time traqvel epsiode after the first episode where they took the ship backwards in time, but even then that was a rare plot point and I believe it was only really used for the Gary 7 Spin Off episode which never happened.) This really was a good thing, genre world breaking shit happened all the time.
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Mon Dec 28, 2009 3:28 pm

By the way, Space Seed points out one of the biggest plot holes in the post original series universe. It was specifically stated from the pilot that the earth had been exploring interstellar space long before humans discovered warp drive. (There is a reference in the pilot that the event was relatively recent.) Cochrane didn’t go to the Alpha Centuri colony, he was from it when he invented warp drive. Khan’s ship may be a “sleeper ship” but it’s a full fledged sub-warp star ship, otherwise it would have never gotten even a few light years away from Sol. (Given the time period of around 267 years, a star ship going 10 psol – ironically that’s the fastest we can push science fiction star ships these days – the distance Khan would have been would have only been 27 light years. (That’s not far by the way, Vulcan is only 16 light years away - 40 Eridani A.)
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Fri Jan 01, 2010 8:58 pm

So, in your opinion, what are the two worst episodes of each series and why?

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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tzor
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Post by tzor » Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:51 am

Well it's hard since it has been so long. I would say in the original series the one I hated the most was the Hippies in Space episode, The Way to Eden. Apparently it was a victim of a massive rewrite, so much so that the original author (of the teleplay) pulled his name from it and used a pseudonym.
A lot of TOS will, like all great things, generally transends the generations, but this epsiode is so full of late 60's that it's sickening.
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tzor
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Post by tzor » Sat Jan 02, 2010 3:06 am

For ST:TNG, the worst in my not so humble opinion was Skin of Evil. While it may have been a matter of timing and Denise Crosby may have been tired of the two dimensional character, it certainly looked like the episode was a "FUCK YOU" to her for her involvement in a playboy issue one month before the epsiode aired.
The second isn't really an epsiode per se. ST:TNG almost started out as "kiddies in space" with some stupid fucking contest for a kid to appear on the Enterprise bridge. This whole fucking thing infects the first few epsiodes with such mind numbing stupidity that you want to bang you head against the bulkhead to make it stop.
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Josh_Kablack
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Post by Josh_Kablack » Sat Jan 02, 2010 7:48 am

I only remember two things about that episode:
* PC Death by random encounter.
* Really really crappy effects.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Wed Feb 17, 2010 4:48 am

So, Star Trek fans talk a lot about Gene Roddenberry's vision for Star Trek, but I have no idea what that is. I've heard the phrase 'betrayed Gene Roddenberry's vision' applied simultaneously to Star Trek II, Star Trek V, In The Pale Moonlight, Chain of Command, Star Trek: Nemesis, and the entirety of Enterprise.
As far as I can understand, it's a vision of a society nearly freed from want that devotes itself mostly to self-improvement and exploration? And a utopian society that values cultural relativism to the maximum as long as it doesn't involve exploitation, then it's time to break out the KIRK RAGE and PICARD SPEECH.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by K » Wed Feb 17, 2010 6:15 am

People bag on Enterprise, but it had two absolutely epic episodes.
These were the evil universe episodes where they even changed the intro sequence of Enterprise to be all war stuff with military music instead of the usual Americana muzak.
Basically it was all action and drama, and zero moralizing or good universe characters. This is the series they should have done.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Wed Feb 17, 2010 9:20 am

Gene had many 'rules'. One of them was 'no drums in the themes, they sound like war drums.'
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Post by Meikle641 » Wed Feb 17, 2010 10:26 am

Guess that rule went out the window for Voyager.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:05 am

Actually, it was some other instrument that /sounded/ like drums, but yes, it was thrown many times.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sun Feb 21, 2010 9:22 pm

What other rules did Roddenberry have? Which ones do you think were the important ones? Which ones did you think were 'good idea, bad application'? Which ones did you think were good at the time but hurt the production as time went on? Which ones did you think were just dumb?

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:05 pm

> Lago PARANOIA wrote:What other rules did Roddenberry have? Which ones do you think were the important ones? Which ones did you think were 'good idea, bad application'? Which ones did you think were good at the time but hurt the production as time went on? Which ones did you think were just dumb?

Rodenberry's rules are hugely extensive, and not to my knowledge published. A lot of them have to do with look and feel and branding. Federation ships are readily identifiable because warp nacels have to come in pairs and be visible from the front and be able to "see each other" along more than half their length. Those kinds of rules are important and give Star Trek a definite "look" - but I could imagine bending those rules and having it be OK.
A lot of the rules keep Star Trek futuristic looking even today. Tools have to be "used like a tool" which is why the communicators from TOS look like a 21st century cell phone, and the TNG hypospray looks like a 21st century hypospray. But perhaps his biggest demand was that when shit got all crazy, the characters would sit down and discuss options like rational people.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA » Mon Feb 22, 2010 6:55 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote:But perhaps his biggest demand was that when shit got all crazy, the characters would sit down and discuss options like rational people.

I don't know why, but that's one of the funniest things I've read in awhile. I think it's hilarious that anyone would have to point that out, but considering how overwhelming the Unspoken Plan Guarantee is (to the point where Ebert had to name it) it's so true.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

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Post by K » Mon Feb 22, 2010 7:14 pm

> FrankTrollman wrote: But perhaps his biggest demand was that when shit got all crazy, the characters would sit down and discuss options like rational people.

And that's why Star Trek is awesome as a franchise, and Enterprise is a failure as an example of that franchise.
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Wesley Street
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Post by Wesley Street » Wed Feb 24, 2010 5:54 pm

> K wrote:These were the evil universe episodes where they even changed the intro sequence of Enterprise to be all war stuff with military music instead of the usual Americana muzak.

Through A Mirror Darkly made up for every horrible Enterprise moment as it was a Trek continuity whore's wet dream.
- alternate universe opening credits? Check.
- alternate ending to First Contact where Cochrane shotguns the Vulcan explorers? Check.
- Sykes-from-Alien-Nation as goateed Vulcan captain? Check.
- USS Defiant from the "The Tholian Web?" Check.
- Gorn? Tholians? Check.
- every character one-upping the other in their complete and utter bastardness? Check.
- Enterprise cast members sporting Original Series garb at the end? Rebuilt Original Series corridors, bridge and rooms? Check.
Aside from The Emperor's New Clothes episode from DS9, (which was embarrassingly bad) I loved the entire Mirror Universe saga. It's a damn shame it never touched TNG because I would love me some Evil Picard. I hadn't purchased a Trek comic book in years until IDW put out new Mirror Universe stories.
Alternate universes and time lines were always Trek's strong suit. Yesterday's Enterprise (with its militaristic Mirror Mirror homages) and Parallels were both excellent examples of Good Trek.
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