Star Trek (TOS)

Cafe Society
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121

Maybe, but I’d think that’s a little bit obscure for most of its viewers. I mean, TNG did fine with what… an 8 or so character ensemble (Picard, Riker, Worf, Data, Crusher, LaForge, O’Brian, Troi)?

I can see them thinking it might be good to pare that back a little bit, but what I was getting at is that they had Anthony Montgomery, Linda Park and Dominic Keating all listed as main cast members, and then we got VERY little about their characters. I mean, we only really got Reed when he intersected with Tucker as his buddy, and we only got Soto when she was called upon to do some kind of linguistic stuff, and Mayweather was pretty much only doing helmsman stuff. Meanwhile, we got to find out what kind of toilet paper Tucker, Archer and T’Pol like, and all sorts of Denobulan nonsense from Phlox.

Don’t get me wrong- I didn’t dislike Phlox, but I haven’t understood the absolute flaming need for every Star Trek crew to have an alien included. I mean, Phlox and even more so, Neelix seemed shoehorned in for the sake of having aliens on the crew. Worf at least, was sort of the alien spiritual successor to Spock, in that he was human and alien simultaneously, giving the viewers and writers an easy in to alien customs, physiology, etc… and in Worf’s case, something of a window into being an outsider in one’s own society.

But Phlox and Neelix were neither- we just got fish-out-of-water type stories with them, as they were both straight-up aliens brought up on alien worlds.

I’m with you- if someone’s supposed to be playing a full-blooded Vulcan, they’re going to seem somewhat robotic or wooden to your average human, unless they’re played along the lines of Tim Russ’ Tuvok, who was clearly having emotions, but suppressing them. But individual Vulcans are going to vary in how much they show their emotions.

I mean, I can’t say if Blalock is a good actress or not; I haven’t seen her in anything else. But she did a credible enough job as a Vulcan I thought.

122

Has everyone forgot Kirstie Alley? Saavik was great. And not at all wooden.

And become Empress. That was pretty awesome.

123

Mark Lenard was great as Sarek: he wasn’t just calm, but relaxed, with a bit of a wry grin; and philosophical, sure, but not robotic; he’s just a guy who lets you know what his preferences are, and thinks pretty highly of his wife and his son, and can come across as generally positive, and is willing to mess you up in self-defense if you want to start a fistfight or something.

124

IIRC, Saavik was half Romulan.

125

Only in novels and comix, apparently, leaving the canonicity of her dual heritage unestablished (if Wikipedia is to be relied upon).

Watched “Wolf in the Fold” last night. Whoof.

The misogynistic objectification of women was bad enough, but Piglet being Jack the Ripper may have left a permanent scar on my psyche.

126

Scotty: “You mean, all these women…”
Kirk: “Yes they are all whores. But then, aren’t all women, deep down.” Well, maybe he didn’t say the last, but this episode sure makes me think he’s thinking it,

Even worse, Kirk &co aren’t so sure that Scotty isn’t the killer, becauser, after all, it was a WOMAN that blew up the thingamajig that caused his injury. So naturally, and red blooded manly man would murder women over that. Who wouldn’t, amirite?

I actually like Piglet as Saucy Jack, but when you get to the bottom line, Scotty actually WAS the killer. Just some futuristic mumbo jumbo and handwaving on the less sophisticated locals gets Scotty off,.

127

You all realize, of course, that the episode was written by Robert “Psycho” Bloch? :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Can’t get any more mysoginistic than that!

128

Enterprise I think had a better rationale than most, in that Humans were just starting to go out into the Galaxy. Phlox had not only studied Human physiology, he probably had more experience with non-Humans than any Human doctor at the point. The Vulcans wanted an observer on the Enterprise because they were still worried about Humans running amok.

TOS having Spock was a happy accident of sorts.

The Next Generation I think was the one that really threw aliens into the mix where not really needed, and didn’t always make good use of them. The Animated Series had a LOT of aliens, but animation made that easy (and that series also firmly established Kirk’s middle name as “Tiberius”). That was probably the worst offender for gratuitous aliens… but then, it was also supposed to be a multi-species Federation so why NOT have more aliens?

With Tuvok I was getting a little tired of "every ship has a token Vulcan (which, thank Og, did not happen on Deep Space Nine). Neelix was not just cook but local guide. That at least made sense. Did we need another Klingon aboard, too? Just as happy they got rid of Kes, felt she was unnecessary, and Seven of Nine was there more for catch the eyes of male Humans watching the show than anything else, at least to start (another role where the actress was called inept and wooden, but again,that was the character. I haven’t seen Jeri Ryan in a lot of other stuff but she seems a competent actor).

Saavik was supposed to be half Romulan and half Vulcan and have some issues suppressing her emotions to Vulcan levels.

One thing I liked about the character was that she was not just another half-human/half-X character. If humanoids from different planets with biochemistry so different as to have different colored blood can interbreed (whether that’s naturally or via advanced genetic manipulation) there should be a LOT of mixed breeds out in the galaxy. Really, a Vulcan/Romulan at least makes sense given that they shared a common ancestor, and not that far back in history.

Oh, yeah, he did a lot with Sarek and I agree, a lot of it was his laid-back, relaxed, serene aura. I think spending a lot of time on Earth and marrying a Human might have loosened him up a bit, and doing so probably made him a more effective Vulcan Ambassador to Earth. Clearly, Sarek likes Humans, when a lot of other Vulcans clearly don’t.

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Phlox made the most sense in-story, but the fact remains that by the time Enterprise was on the air, the formula was basically “a few humans and a few aliens, one of whom ought to be a Vulcan”.

That’s the thing- there wasn’t really a need for Phlox, even if he actually made sense. They just had to fill in the formula.

130

It wouldn’t have been so “formulaic” if they hadn’t treated it as formula in prior series.

Voyager, for instance, could have had an all-Human crew that just encountered aliens most episodes. And they would have saved on make-up special effects without having to re-do main characters every episode.

Really, the aliens became token minorities.

131

Did you mean Enterprise? Because that seems to be a lot of change just to get rid of one annoying alien. Neelix may have bothered a lot of people, but only half the main cast was human. And I’ve not seen people too upset about any of the rest. Even with Kes, the argument is just that she was underutilized, and that Seven got too much focus due to her late arrival and strong development. She and the Doctor (another non-human) in fact are generally seen as the best characters of the show.

I could see Enterprise being all human, though. The formula it would break, however, would not be the inclusion of an alien. It would be not having a character from outside examining humanity. Still, all they needed was the Vulcan for that.

So I guess they just wanted some new alien with a culture to explore. Not sure why they couldn’t pull that off with just the Andorians, though,. Or, heck, the much more thorough investigation of Vulcans.

132

And Bones really died, but they wanted him alive, so the Machine created a replacement?

133

I just figured the (automated) medical facilities were actually superior (Bones was only “mostly dead”, and mostly dead is a little alive.)

But I like your idea.

134

We should make (Hi Opal!) lists of the shit that happens to the primary characters.

Kirk:

  • split into Jekyll/Hyde halves
  • duplicated by Dr. Corby
  • had fake memories embedded in his mind
  • got transported to a distant rock to fight a reptile
  • got sprayed with radiation-suppressing happy-pollen
  • watched the woman he loved die to save all time
  • got almost killed by his First Officer
  • got almost killed by the alternate universe barbarians
  • barely saved from destruction by the doomsday machine
  • almost died of old age
  • ended up a gladiator to entertain disembodied beings
  • got a fatal bite from a one-horned monster
  • got trapped in a glow globe while a deity occupied his body
  • got replaced by a computer
  • became a pseudo-Romulan
  • became a native-american-type after losing his memory
  • got trapped floating in a strange inter-dimensional zone
  • got sped up zillions of times faster than normal
  • got emotionally twisted by some female’s magic tears
  • got trapped in someone else’s past
  • got trapped in a psychopathic woman’s body

And after been subjected to all that, we are supposed to believe he is still reasonably normal (and not some facsimile that got mixed up with the original).

135

Considering all the other whack things that happen to other crew members, too, he might actually be “normal” by Star Fleet standards.

136

I am reminded of the bit in Scalzi’s Redshirts where one of the tip-offs about “The Narrative” is that the characters aren’t totally nucking futz after the trauma conga lines they’ve been through.

137

I remember being really young when I first saw this, like, under 10, and thought to myself “why would aliens have not only the same factions as we do on Earth but they’d somehow end up naming them similarly enough that Kirk was able to figure out what was going on based on the labels?” I mean, like, ffs, how does that pass a scriptwriting process?

Like, you can’t just make an analogy and the viewers figure it out? You have to literally say “ohhhh I see, one side calls themselves the Yangs, that’s like Yanks! And the others the comms, that’s like communists!” Not only is that so wildly implausible that it makes no sense, but it smashes the audience across the face so hard that they can’t be doing anything but assuming you’re a complete moron as a viewer.

That show could be anvilicious as fuck. I remember once they had two factions that hated each other because one was white on the right side and black on the left, and the other was the reverse. Okay, so that’s anvilicious enough by itself. But then Kirk had to remark that the planet of these people was in the “southern side of the galaxy”

Fucks sake. It’s not like people didn’t know how to write in the 1960s. We had amazing literature and even amazing sci-fi in this period. It’s not like good storytelling hadn’t been invented by then. I don’t know how major television productions could be so incredibly stupid.

138

I always hated the episodes where the culture they encountered was just like one on Earth, whether Romans or Chicago gangsters or Nazis or Native Americans. But the worst ones of these were where the similarities were due to “parallel evolution,” like the Yangs and the Kohms. At least the ones where the similarities were due to rogue Star Fleet officers or transplanting earlier Earth cultures had some smidgen of plausibility. They still were extremely lazy, though.

139

Keep in mind that Roddenberry’s intent was to take current issues on Earth and set them on alien planets, where they could be addressed with less risk of the show being censored or boycotted.

140

Current issues like Chicago gangsters? (Admittedly that one was played as a joke.)

Yes, I’m well aware that Roddenberry often used the show to highlight contemporary issues. However, it very often was ham-handed.

One of the more dreadful ones was “The Mark of Gideon,” in which the solution to overpopulation on a planet, caused by their refusal to use artificial contraception, was to deliberately infect the population with disease to kill enough of them off. Having adults die was regarded as morally superior than using birth control. This was seen as a perfectly acceptable solution by Kirk. Now this could have been an absolutely brutal critique of such views on Earth, but it wasn’t played that way.