Pretty sure that’s been established as the concensus by now.
My contribution is that Harry Kim deserved to stay an ensign. Considering how often his impulse or libido resulted in disaster (or his own death), he would have been kicked out of Starfleet entirely. Lucky for him, they were stranded in the Delta Quadrant and Janeway needed bodies.
The ship in distress he decided to help. Turns out they were smuggling a cloak prototype to defend against a warring faction. Look at our little Ensign Kim, breaking the Prime Directive for the first time. They grow up so quick.
I think Harry picks up too many strays. If Voyager wasn't in the Delta quadrant, he would have gotten happily promoted up to Lt. Commander of some Miranda or California and retired as a mildly interesting officer who never did anything of note (or gets got in the cold open of some other more interesting ship's episode). In fact, that so many randos who just happened to be on Voyager can hang with the level of bullshit that ship got up to would be a statistical anomaly if it wasn't 100% certain that some Future Janeway stacked the deck during assignments for that mission to the badlands.
Strange New Worlds has painted itself somewhat into a corner by being a prequel.
It’s a great series, but if Spock and Uhura are in trouble, and the only way to save them is for that nice James Kirk fella to sacrifice himself, well, we know that there’s a twist coming.
This is always going to be the problem with series set before canon events and it’s long been an issue I had with them. I know it’s easier to write historical fiction in an established universe and you can dodge some of this by going back far enough (see: ENT); but, it is always going to feel hesitant and a bit uninspired.
I didn’t actually have a problem with the way Enterprise ended. Setting aside the actual quality of the episode, I think the framing device connecting the beginning and ending of this era of Star Trek was fitting given that this was the end of Star Trek for the foreseeable future.
Neelix is basically the only character on Voyager, the writing is so wildly inconsistent or not present at all for the human characters other than maybe B'ellanna. The writers so clearly did not give a shit on VOY.
ETA I guess it does become the Seven of Nine show eventually, hardly an improvement, but she is technically a character (mean Data with T&A and PTSD).
I loved Neelix, especially when it was revealed that pretty much all of his bowing and scraping and his jealousy could be explained by having extreme PTSD after seeing almost his entire species get wiped out, but it was always clear to me that Ethan Phillips played Neelix with a lot of sadness hidden behind his behavior.
After Kes left, he was also a much better character.
Mirror Kira was fun in that sense, but honestly, I don’t feel like the mirror universe stories added much to DS9 and there are other ways she can show her range.
Her episode where she’s supposed to evict a farmer from his land is one of the best examples of both Kira as a character and Nana’s ability as an actor.
I agree that she definitely had opportunities to show range in the character of Kira, but I was thinking of the many ‘alternate version of X character’ Star Trek plots that don’t involve the mirror universe they could have gone with if the goal was ‘this actor plays a totally different character.’ DS9 itself even did that, like with the Benny Russell episodes.
Big agree. I also want the option of having evil, edgy queers who aren’t from the mirror universe, but that would only make sense against a backdrop of more representation in general
Janeway was wrong to kill Tuvix and the ends did not justify the means. We have no idea how Tuvix would have performed long term, but he was generally better than the sum of his parts.
To kill a sentient being, effective in his role and pleading for his life, just so you can feel less sad, is a crime.
My 2nd hot take in this comment section: I actually enjoy Star Trek V - The Final Frontier an awful lot. Roasting Marshmelons, singing Row Row Row Your Boat, being one with the horse, killing “God”… What’s not to like?
Neelix and Kes should have been a father figure/orphaned little sister relationship. Neelix lost his sister in the metreon cascade. Kes lost her father not long before running away to the surface. Both should have played into those roles instead of the weird creepy relationship they went with. They wouldn't have needed to be shot out of a torpedo tube without Neelix's incessant jealously over every little thing.
Making Sisko the Emissary added a lot of bad habits to Star Trek that went against a lot of the ideals of early Trek. Kirk and Picard were both supposed to be competent humans, but only that far. Sisko led to writers creating those whose paths were dictated by fate, like Archer and Pike.
I don’t know anything about Archer (what was his destiny thing?), but I like what they’ve done with Pike. His knowing how he’s going to die (more or less) doesn’t change his competency as a captain, imo, just gives him some pretty good personal issues to grapple with, in a pretty Trekkie way.
But I have always enjoyed the dual destiny - that time is irrelevant to the wormhole aliens, so Sisko is only destined to become the Emissary because of normal practical human choices that he was going to make anyway.
It’s fun to watch him wrestle with the way he was raised resulting in his actions turning into a kind of pillar of faith for an alien race.
I've only seen a few episodes of TNG, but mine is Q is lame and unenjoyable. Maybe he gets better as the show goes on, but having the first episode involve him was a bad decision.
The pilot episode script was for a single episode about Farpoint, the suits decided it should be a 2 parter pretty late in the game. The writers tacked on the Q plot in a bit of a rush. I’m not a fan of the next Qpisode either, that one is just classic season 1 TNG badness, riffing too hard on classic trek before they found their own voice. His appearances get better and better.
TNG is pretty meh. I grew up with it, I’ve watched every episode at least twice, but now that I’m as old as Patrick Steward was when TNG started, I have a hard time caring about most episodes.
First Contact was an amazing movie. It had flaws, but it succeeded for the first time (for me, at least) at translating the in-universe fear the characters had of the Borg to the audience. There’s a difference between routine invincibility and scary. Throughout TNG, the Borg were merely another overpowered threat enemy that you had to be tricksy to beat. But in FC, they were terrifying, and I think the production team did an outstanding job. At times, it was like watching the first Alien.
I’m of the opinion that time travel stories are never good, at least when time travel is the focus rather than just an excuse to get to a fun setting.
Since time travel seems to be a physical impossibility, essentially any set of rules you create for it are just as valid/nonsensical. So you spend a bunch of time dealing with technobabble and paradox talk that has no hope of making sense outside of whatever the author needs for the story.
If time travel is said to be impossible yet it is so easily achieved in so many story lines in Star Trek than why didn’t they just invent a safe way to travel between periods.
And if there is an eventual temporal war than everything gets destroyed and all life is wiped out in the galaxy. There would have eventually been an extremist group that would have taken the technology to it’s fullest limits and traveled back to a period when the galaxy was very young. They would have severely altered everything to the point of not making any future possible.
It always annoyed me that engineers, scientists and technicians could always find a way to travel back and forth through time “just this once because of this reason” … yet no one takes up the science to recreate the event and bake technology to purposely travel back and forth through time.
How else do you explain Temporal Anomalies steering clear of Janeway (future/present/whenever) getting away with whatever? With exception to that incident with Sarah Silverman.
Well, you had me until Nietzsche. If only for the association of his rhetoric with the slog that was “The Brothers Karamazov” by Dostoyevsky. As to the ongoing debate relating to each person’s influence may not be proven, I find it hard not to disassociate such a blathering tale with their mutual misguided ideals.
I think the shows have actually fielded this issue rather well. Temporal investigations was the start, then the timecops in Voyager and SNW. The Trek timeline is in a constant state of flux to the point that the TOS bridge and the SNW bridge are supposed to be the same place, and the fact that time travel is so easy is a great explanation for how everything in the 'past' and future keeps changing on the whims of producers at Paramount.
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