That’s fair. My definition of lady’s man may not be as derogatory as it is generally perceived. I meant only that he was popular with the ladies in the show and with audiences of the time. Not that he chased women. Though that interpretation does seem to be how SNW leans at times. Less in a sexist way and more like he just needs to be in a relationship for some reason.
Something modern audiences and the hate mongers on youtube refuse to acknowledge. Most Star Trek doesn’t actually get great until the 3rd or 4th season.
I often think about Sisko and the episode In the Pale Moonlight.
And I wish that the series didn’t have him ascend to godhood because it would have been really cool to see him as an admiral and have his war crime come out. I’m not anti-sisko or anything. I just think it would have been an interesting story for the new up-and-coming commander/captain. Like what we have seen with Riker and others.
Imagine Nog finding out what Sisko did and having his own moment of figuring out what it means to be a leader.
If only…
There are at least three episodes where a female character either shows interest in Spock romantically or discusses a romantic history. The episode with the sky city and the episode with the farm spores come to mind. I can’t do a deep dive at the moment. I suppose you could include Chapel. It was never outright said mind you, but there was enough implied to draw conclusions, which SNW has done.
I think “gimmick” has become the colloquialism that is used to describe this season. It may not be the most accurate. To me, a gimmick episode is like “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang,” the heist episode of DS9, or “Qpid,” the Robin Hood episode of TNG. They happen, they’re fun. They’re episodes where the series steps away from its normal tone and genre voice to have a little laugh. They aren’t every episode.
Time travel, MU episodes, and reality warping don’t make it a gimmick episode. It’s when you can tell it’s writing to be reminiscent of something else entirely for the whole episode. The problem is that the gimmick episodes don’t usually have as much substance. I really liked the soap opera episode because, at the end, we got to see Pike go to therapy and mourn his daughter. How much heavier could that have been if it was just a situation where thoughts were being manifested into reality with everyone on the ship being ‘haunted’ by the emotions that they’re ignoring? To be fair though, DS9 did that with “If Wishes Were Horses.”
This did happened in the horror episode that was trying to be Event Horizon and it didn’t resolve anything. So maybe the issue isn’t the gimmicks, Maybe it’s just that they’re laying the gimmicks on too thick and more often than not using them to try to hide some writing issues.
Stepping out of the show’s genre is fun, but it weakens the message (or it hides the fact that there isn’t one).
I’m frustrated that for a moment it seemed like Spock couldn’t stand to be single. La’an ends their casual thing and he soon after calls his ex. It’s a bit of a bad look. Like he got with La’an to forget Chapel, then called T’Pring to help forget La’an.
It just hit me the wrong way.
Though I rationalized it by remembering that Spock was hinted to have been a ladies man in ToS before he became all about the science and logic.
I can’t say. I watched Enterprise well after it’s air date and only because I try to be a completionist. I like to think it gives me some level of clarity in my critiques of the show. I’m not as biased by nostalgia for it’s predecessors. Though there’s a fine line between a gimmick and a show’s stated premise. The show’s premise was a prequel. It ventured into gimmicks when it started doing three part episodes to try to speed run the premise that it ran away from with the temporal cold war. A few novelty episodes a season isn’t a bad thing but when it becomes 70% of your show I think you have a problem.
To add to your point about VOY I think they missed the other side of the coin too. Not just wear and tear on the ship but the upgrades. We’re told many times that they added borg tech though out the ship. With a digital ship they missed a real opportunity to have it slowly change over time like a Vidiian. Yes show us the scars of battle but also show us how the ship has changed. It could have been as simple as a splash of green in the lighting. Unfortunately they always reset to zero.
They’re def not all bad. “Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass” and “Off-Hour” were great. Though I did just flat out skip “Once La’An a Time.”
The best way to enjoy ENT is to remember that they aren’t federation. They’re just astronauts. It makes the show way better. The unfortunate thing is that they didn’t know how to write that and the show suffered from all that post 9/11 drag that had to make everything darker.
The only good part of season 3 was Seven’s arc. The rest was just the cost of getting to watch it.
‘Flockroaches’
over here in America, we had a friend in our group that outright refused to switch to signal. Not to make it seem like it’s the only factor, but that friend is no longer around, and we all use Signal.
Be that as it may, I prefer to go by what a series shows us that a character can do rather than just assume some non-existent subtext. Other’s have mentioned that Sisko is half Prophet. At that point in the show we didn’t know that and at least on TV it was never demonstrated that being part Prophet gave Sisko anything other than some precognition (excluding his god-fight with Dukat). Saying that Sisko would have beaten Shran (A person who’s culture was highly militant and had ritual fights to the death), because he got away with punching Q once is just…bad theory.
I’m not saying Shran would wipe the floor with Sisko. I just think that speed wins out over strength. Sisko’s body is built for brawling. Granted he’s also a tactician, but so is Shran.
If nothing else it would be a good fight, but I’ve gone way to deep on this for a meme.
Sisko punched Q once, and Q was so entertained that he didn’t do anything about it. Don’t play.
It’s a funny joke, but lets me real. Shran would probably win that fight.
I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.
It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.
The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.
It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.
I would not have enjoyed that. no.
Well, there’s always the holodeck.
Let me pitch you on this:
It’s a children birthday party on the Enterprise. Ten Forward is a bar and obviously out as a location so they go to the holodeck. A dozen or more children and their parents crammed into the Star Trek equivalent of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza simulation.
And then the safety protocols fail.
Five Nights at Flotter’s.