Agreed. DS9 explored the layers of Starfleet, Federation and politics far better than the other series. From the lowly engineering crew on the night shift (Rom hangs out with them one episode), to shell-shocked Marines and up to the ultra secret Section 31 and other happenings at Starfleet Command. Maybe their budget allowed for more characters with lines, but that was what always bothered me about TNG…most of the time the Enterprise and their ‘senior staff’ seemed to exist in a vacuum…being the only tight circle of buddies able to solve the most pressing problems of the galaxy.
I should probably post my own fics there. Across six stories, I have two or three Gary Stus and none of them save the day, or are ever in a position to save the day.
I do describe a character that vaporizes her own heart, though. It’s a suicide following the massacre at Wolf 359, something I always thought got brushed aside a little too casually. Heck, the Marines still talk about the Lebanon barracks bombing, and Wolf 359 supposedly had about forty times as many casualties. Heck, it had almost triple the casualty count of September 11th, but in the Paul Bunyon universe of Star Trek, nothing counts unless thousands and thousands of people are dead, and even then, not for long. By the time Enterprise got on the air, it’s not enough to have 11,000 casualties - you need seven million for anyone to care and even then, once we find out the Xindi aren’t so bad after all, the characters just shrug it off and any lingering hatreds are treated as a personal character flaw.
Her wheels?
That one’s so bad, it’s good.
They’re wheel… and they’re spectacular.
Okay, is this it? (Urban Dictionary)
I don’t see why the bed would have to be visible from the corridor to show off Teri Hatcher’s body.
Woman, when passing construction site.
Legs.
My point is that the bed was in a ridiculous position.
I’m not going to let this one go as this has been one of my biggest gripes with Trek ever.
What you’ve said is fine for individual words, but there are scenes in which whole conversations are carried out in Klingon in front of other people who clearly can’t understand it because it’s in Klingon. In DS9 a Klingon insults Odo in his own language but Garrick understands them and makes a snide response, clearly annoying the Klingon because he didn’t want to be understood. Odo even says to Garrick “I didn’t know you spoke Klingon” - why would ANYONE need to learn to speak Klingon? You all have universal translators!!!
Similarly there are times when Klingon words are used that have direct English equivalents, so it’s not a matter of there being no comparable word. Again - in DS9 when the Klingons invaded Cardassia the fleet was signalled to head out by the fleet commander sending out a signal, Dax says “Martok sent one word to the fleet: Encha” and everyone looks at Worf who translates it as “begin”. If encha can simply be translated as begin then why do you need a Klingon to translate that? Why can’t the UNIVERSAL BLOODY TRANSLATOR do it?
It simply seems like the writers of the show liked the idea of Klingons having their own language and kept working it in despite the fact that each time they did so it served as a shrieking siren to the fact that NO OTHER ALIEN SPECIES IN THE SHOW DID THIS.
There’s a scene in one of the movies where Uhura is trying to speak Klingon, because the person on the other end of the comm would recognize the universal translator. But she’s making a bit of a hash of it. So why doesn’t she just speak into a translator, get it to repeat the phrase in Klingon, and then she can just mimic those sounds in her own voice?
That scene was just another blatant case of “we’ve gone to the trouble of creating an actual working Klingon language and we’re damned well going to use it”.
But you’re right, the crew pulling out text books to try and conjugate Klingon manually makes no sense.
I was trying to remember if they were using actual books. If they were, that makes even less sense. I thought everything was on those little plastic memory card things.
Oh, I won’t argue. I hate Trek’s inconsistency with this as well, just as I dislike fantasy stories in which characters go to an “alien” world in which everyone speaks English. The fanwank I used came from my own rules from writing such stories with a mechanical translator.
I had a third rule as well – the idea that a given translator had to have its vocabulary programmed into it, and as a result archaic words might not come through. But that won’t work for (filmed) Trek, because their translators are magic.
I suppose the line got cut in the script, but in the novelization it’s explicit that the universal translator has been sabotaged to prevent just that.
Add to that the fact that we meet several Klingons who speak fluent English but seem not to have a translator (this is in TNG) but none of the command staff seems to, and you’ve got some unfortunate implications about federation jingoism on your hands.
It makes even less sense when you realize that the communications officer of a Federation Starship not knowing Klingon, in that era, would be like the communications officer of a USNavy Aircraft Carrier not knowing Russian, in 1965.
Yes, in that gawdawful “comic” scene in The Undiscovered Country, they were looking at actual books on the Bridge.
And why is there a big pot on the stove, boiling a chicken or something? Were the guys who wrote this movie suddenly struck by the fear that the fan base was getting older and wouldn’t understand high-falutin’ technology like computers and food synthesizers and such, so they needed familiar low-tech items like books and pots so as not to angry up the blood?
Scylla, his goat well sexed. 
That…makes even less sense - how could the universal translator translate into Klingon, but be so obvious they can’t use it…but not be able to translate into Klingon? Did they need an actual Klingon in the room for it to work or something?
I mean that it wasn’t working AT ALL. That is, ordinarily they’d have been able to fake it using the UT. And of course no one ever thought, “Hey, we have about a dozen shuttlecraft down in the hanger, and they all have independent computer systems–let’s use one of those!”
Apparently the actress who played Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, complained about that scene because she thought that an officer in Uhura’s position (and with her long career) would have been familiar with the language of Starfleet’s primary antagonist, but the director wanted to show books on the Enterprise (and why not? Is it any more or less realistic that photon torpedoes are manually loaded in the movies?)
I don’t mind the books so much, but it would have helped if she seemed a BIT more familiar with the language. That said, having studied several foreign languages, you pretty much HAVE to be familiar with a language to make much use of a dictionary in a conversation without having some very long pauses in the dialog. But then, Joe Schmoe in the audience won’t know that.
That said, the scene DOES give some potentially unfortunate implications about the Klingon empire: Maybe their language is diverse enough that its’ reasonable to expect a merchantman to have difficulty with whatever passes for “Standard” Klingon (kinda like how Cantonese and Shanghai-ese can be very VERY different from Mandarin Chinese). That, or it is entirely reasonable for Klingon military members to assume that members of their own merchant marine can’t speak their own language fluently (this could say something about Klingon merchantmen OR just the arrogance of Klingon warriors)
As far as Klingon having words that don’t translate, there was an episode of TNG where a Romulan officer was trying to torque Worf off by using some very rude Klingon insults aimed at him (and probably his family). Riker then replied with some Romulan insults back, basically pointing out how classless of the Romulan it was to do that, especially in public.