Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation

[ooo-baby]

True, I don't have an encyclopedic memory or anything of the show, but it does seem like often times there were discussions of it taking weeks or longer for messages to get to Starfleet Command and back, therefore Kirk had to make his decisions with no guidance from his superiors.

Kirk, Spock, and the original crew were also time travelers:

operating outside the reach of Starfleet, going where no man had gone before. Starfleet could not follow, track, or control them. They were pioneers truly going where no man had gone before.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

It's funny you chose that episode, as that was the result of an accidental temporal excursion. (In "Assignment: Earth" Starfleet sends Enterprise back to 1968 for temporal observation, "City on the Edge of Forever" is a discovery complicated by having to retrieve a wayward officer, and in TAS' "Yesteryear" Spock is required to use the Guardian to close a causality loop. The Voyage Home is when Kirk acts on his own initiative to go back in time to find respondents to the Cetacean Probe. )

Of course, back in the mid-22nd Jonathan Archer took a step (or perhaps a leap?) back to 2004 to thwart a Xindi bioweapon plot, and this in an era when the Vulcan Science Directorate insisted that time travel was a mathematical impossibility. Let's give credit where it's due here.

 

[ooo-baby]

Kirk could take the Enterprise wherever he wanted:

And there ain’t nothing Starfleet could do about it.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Kirk could take the Enterprise wherever he wanted:

And there ain’t nothing Starfleet could do about it.

But, Kirk would acknowledge that he was walking on the same path trodden by other explorers before him -- Magellan, Christopher (of the manned Saturn mission fame), Archer, Garth, Pike.

Now, if you want to see tough decisions made with no body of prior knowledge and no Federation framework....

(For context: the NX-01 stopped at the Vulcan monastery at P'Jem (orbiting what we know as Luyten's Star), only to find it under siege by angry Andorians insisting that said monastery was hiding a forbidden espionage outpost....)

 

[ooo-baby]

I never watched Enterprise. I heard it was prematurely canceled.

This Jonathan Archer is very Kirk-like.

 

[Kup]

He’s also fond of gazelles, or so I heard anyway.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

I never watched Enterprise. I heard it was prematurely canceled.

Much like TOS, Enterprise was indeed Screwed By the Network (UPN in this case rather than NBC), and its last episode "These Are the Voyages" was, like TOS' "Turnabout Intruder", not necessarily the episode one would want as a last memory of the show. It didn't help that people were talking loudly about "franchise fatigue" during the show's run, and arguably making an "exploring strange new worlds" show in the aftermath of 9/11, with a confusing "Temporal Cold War" teasing everyone worried that a prequel series could only break continuity, was only extra zeitgeist complication.

But, it got over a lackluster second season, and seasons 3 and 4 had writing generally knocking it out of the park (to use a Berman-era baseball analogy).

This Jonathan Archer is very Kirk-like.

Or, as the events of Enterprise are about 110 years prior to TOS, you could say that James Kirk is very Archer-like....

 

[ooo-baby]

This is what happened to the last guy who tried to take command of Kirk’s USS Enterprise:

Kirk overruled Starfleet command.

 

[Lobjob]

Much like TOS, Enterprise was indeed Screwed By the Network (UPN in this case rather than NBC), and its last episode "These Are the Voyages" was, like TOS' "Turnabout Intruder", not necessarily the episode one would want as a last memory of the show. It didn't help that people were talking loudly about "franchise fatigue" during the show's run, and arguably making an "exploring strange new worlds" show in the aftermath of 9/11, with a confusing "Temporal Cold War" teasing everyone worried that a prequel series could only break continuity, was only extra zeitgeist complication.

But, it got over a lackluster second season, and seasons 3 and 4 had writing generally knocking it out of the park (to use a Berman-era baseball analogy).



Or, as the events of Enterprise are about 110 years prior to TOS, you could say that James Kirk is very Archer-like....

I would love a modern show to revisit the temporal cold war. Talk about a "legacy" experience.

 

[ooo-baby]

William Shatner deserves kudos for his acting chops:

as well as Patrick Stewart:

 

[Axaday]

But, Kirk would acknowledge that he was walking on the same path trodden by other explorers before him -- Magellan, Christopher (of the manned Saturn mission fame), Archer, Garth, Pike.

I wish there had been a line in TOS that Archer could have been built from.

 

[ooo-baby]

I like how they added the Supernova special effects at the end of this Original Series episode:

 

[Darth_Prime]

So I’m watching Generations now, and a couple of things bother me.

1) why didn’t Riker know about any weekness of the Bird of Prey? Seems like something he should know.

2) why did they initially return fire with phasers instead of unloading with torpedos?

I get the answer is they wanted to kill if the D to make way for a new Enterprise. But it just seemed like such a silly thing for a guy like Riker to do.

 

[ooo-baby]

Why was Head of Security Officer Yar killed off? Wasn’t she Lieutenant Data’s lover?

I think they had sex in a Next Gen episode where all the female crew members got really horny. I remember Deanna Troy walking up to Riker and begging him to make love to her.

I heard Yar left of her own free will but I also heard she was pushed off the show. I don’t believe she would just walk away from that Star Trek money.

 

[Axaday]

Why was Head of Security Officer Yar killed off?

The actress wanted to leave the show.

Wasn’t she Lieutenant Data’s lover?

No.

I think they had sex in a Next Gen episode where all the female crew members got really horny.

Yes

I heard Yar left of her own free will but I also heard she was pushed off the show. I don’t believe she would just walk away from that Star Trek money.

You usually can't get to the for sure truth in things like this, but I've never heard that she was pushed off. She said she wasn't getting to do anything interesting and actors like to do interesting stuff. And I figure it is probably true. I don't think she hit anything big in the next 6 years after she left, but she hoped she would.

 

[Donocropolis]

In her defense, the show wasn't actually that good when she decided to leave. Next Generation really started picking up steam somewhere in season 2 (though still with the occasional clunker episode).

And she did return later as a frequent guest star, both as Tasha in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and often as Tasha's half-Romulan daughter.

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

I wish there had been a line in TOS that Archer could have been built from.

The closest we got for a TOS link was this after-the-fact LCARS file shown on the Constitution-class Defiant after its plunge through interphasic space in "In a Mirror, Darkly":

As one can see, it also cemented the references to "Archer IV" given in TNG, linking it to the unnamed class M planet visited early in Enterprise that had the hallucinogenic pollen.

But as we didn't see a tiny saucer amongst the vessels along the wall of Picard's Ready Room, there had been, prior to Season 4, a lot of worries that Archer's voyages were Not Supposed to Have Happened, or that (shades of Discovery some years later!) at least not in the same timeline that led to TOS and TNG. A fair number of us wondered if the Temporal Cold War plot was intended as an escape hatch in case someone wrote something that Michael Okuda couldn't fit into existing chronology (I often marvel that he still has hair....) and then, during that same troubled second season I mentioned earlier, with fans and critics alike deriding the series as a "franchise zombie"... they did a Borg story and it paid off.

Basically, if the Trek timeline had changed, it was due to events in 2063. However, they also set up a closed causality loop, as way back in late TNG Season 1, outposts on both sides of the UFP-Romulan Neutral Zone had been disappearing, scooped up by what we later learned was the Borg....

 

[Tuxedo Prime]

Wasn’t [Tasha Yar] Lieutenant Data’s lover?

They were... intimate.
However, as she was not exactly in her right mind when she seduced him, he respected her wishes to neither try that again nor mention it, and if you watch Season 2's "Measure of A Man", he is clearly conflicted at being compelled to reveal those events.

I heard Yar left of her own free will but I also heard she was pushed off the show. I don’t believe she would just walk away from that Star Trek money.

As Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy themselves have said and written, becoming "the faces" of an iconic genre franchise can be as much of an albatross as it can a steady paycheck. It's the same reason David Duchovny took two years off The X-Files....

That said, years later we learned that it was Gates McFadden who was pushed, apparently because she wouldn't sleep with one of the producers....

 

[ooo-baby]

We’ll never get this kind of nod to Americana ever again:

Only Kirk and the Original Series had the guts to do this.

 

[ooo-baby]

As Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy themselves have said and written, becoming "the faces" of an iconic genre franchise can be as much of an albatross as it can a steady paycheck. It's the same reason David Duchovny took two years off The X-Files....

That said, years later we learned that it was Gates McFadden who was pushed, apparently because she wouldn't sleep with one of the producers....

I think Shatner, Nimoy, along with Adam West have made a lot of money just going to sci-fi and comic conventions.

Why didn’t Gates McFadden sue Star Trek? And why did she come back?