Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- Thread starter SHIELD Agent 47
- Start date
There are people who think "Far Beyond the Stars" was a waste of an episode? There's a Romulan on the grassy knoll and my head is doing a JFK impression.
Buffy's Once More With Feeling, the instigater of it all, was actually important. The dance spell revealed a person's inner feelings. It was when Buffy's friends realized she was undergoing PSTD or whatever and was trying to kill herself. I think it's when Spike realized he loved Buffy or others figured it out too.
Built into the theme and gimmick of the episode, too, since the conceit was that people in musicals can sing things they would never say. Buffy's reveal that she had been in heaven, not hell, and that part of her regrets coming back was something epic, just an incredible move to drop that on the audience in that form.
I also don't doubt SNW will make some attempt for the episode to leave some significance in the overall story. This whackadoo crossover episode was important for Uhura and as I saw noted on Trekyards of all places, the actual payoff of "Ad Astra, Per Aspera" for Una.
I may have started the "waste of an episode" idea, so I should clarify that I didn't mean to equate that the way Axaday did with not advancing the plot. I meant that if someone doesn't like musicals, then a musical episode is an all-consuming episode gimmick, and they're likely not to enjoy anything about the episode. In fact, I'd consider "Ad Astra, Per Aspera" a "waste of an episode" from my perspective, because it was a trial episode played straight and I find them painfully boring. I felt I'd got little or nothing for my time and just had to wait another week for an episode, so it's a wasted opportunity for me when it might have been an episode I would have enjoyed. But there's no denying it's a significant episode within an ongoing plot arc, it ended quite an interesting one.
Plot's not the only way for a thing to have value within a show. Like, you know, "Far Beyond the Stars", which advances themes instead, and affects what the events mean instead of what happened next. And SNW is a deliberately episodic series, too!
Edit: I do think the odds of a gimmick episode also being "skippable" from a plot sense are somewhat higher by convention, but call that correlation rather than causation.
I also don't doubt SNW will make some attempt for the episode to leave some significance in the overall story. This whackadoo crossover episode was important for Uhura and as I saw noted on Trekyards of all places, the actual payoff of "Ad Astra, Per Aspera" for Una.
I may have started the "waste of an episode" idea, so I should clarify that I didn't mean to equate that the way Axaday did with not advancing the plot. I meant that if someone doesn't like musicals, then a musical episode is an all-consuming episode gimmick, and they're likely not to enjoy anything about the episode. In fact, I'd consider "Ad Astra, Per Aspera" a "waste of an episode" from my perspective, because it was a trial episode played straight and I find them painfully boring. I felt I'd got little or nothing for my time and just had to wait another week for an episode, so it's a wasted opportunity for me when it might have been an episode I would have enjoyed. But there's no denying it's a significant episode within an ongoing plot arc, it ended quite an interesting one.
Plot's not the only way for a thing to have value within a show. Like, you know, "Far Beyond the Stars", which advances themes instead, and affects what the events mean instead of what happened next. And SNW is a deliberately episodic series, too!
Edit: I do think the odds of a gimmick episode also being "skippable" from a plot sense are somewhat higher by convention, but call that correlation rather than causation.
I'm going to just copy your homework in my hand-writing.
I enjoyed "Far Beyond the Stars", but I didn't really care about the vintage Sci-Fi angle of it. The inclusivity message was ahead of its time in classic Star Trek tradition and was probably mostly lost on the ultra-conservative middle America white teenager that was watching it. I enjoyed it for seeing all the aliens out of their makeup.
But you've convinced me that I was somewhat barking up the wrong tree. The main thing that spoils an episode like that or "The Magnificent Ferengi" (there are more, but I don't feel like wracking my brain) is as you said that if you aren't into a caper with 7 idiotic little trolls, there isn't going to be anything for you. And that was before the days that you could just go to the next episode. (Something you STILL can't do on some silly streaming services.) If it isn't plainly obvious, I did NOT care for "The Magnificent Ferengi". The only thing I liked about it was the conceit that when you approach an old abandoned space station, you tend to do it cockeyed.
At least, back in the old days, if you didn't like an episode, you still had nearly two dozen more per year that you might.
Now we get 10 episodes every year/year and a half, and when the misses generally outnumber the hits, you can't really blame folks for having some trepidation.
Now we get 10 episodes every year/year and a half, and when the misses generally outnumber the hits, you can't really blame folks for having some trepidation.
Sometimes I think there's a universally accepted convention for having ships aligned to the galactic plane and that unpowered ships and stations are actually listing due to their lack of station-keeping. Other times I'm pretty sure it's just a visual convention. XD I still think it's weird in a similar vein that ships orbit planets the wrong way up, aligning the vertical with the planet's axis so the planetary sensor isn't even pointed at the planet. Though, of course, it's the same TV convention.
There may be a common courtesy of aligning when approaching, though I would tend to break that if I were approaching a hostile and had a better defensive angle.
In the classic scene we see of a Starfleet ship orbiting a planet, I'm not sure what the distance is and what the gravity is. If it is considerable, it would be nice if they would go bottom down and turn down their artificial gravity to save power.
It IS neat to see Empok Nor off plane, though.
I enjoyed the Disney+ version of Hamilton, and it made me realize that was probably the best way to watch a live musical performance. Edited, composed of multiple shows to get the best take, and filmed from about 50 angles.
My only complaint about it was that it kind of comes out of nowhere, but other than that, its Star Trek doing exactly what Star Trek should be doing.
There is something to that for sure.
I have seen Matilda the Musical live because it came once ever to a place 100 miles from me and the scheduling worked. Then they put a cinematic version of Matilda the Musical on Netflix and really it takes every advantage of a staged musical and adds the advantages of a movie and comes up with something very nice.
Opposite here. I don't live in NYC, but seeing anywhere less than 6 shows a year is almost unthinkable to me. Last couple seasons have been fairly jive though.
The Bitter Suite did it just as well and did it first. It needs more respect. We don't talk about Lyre, Lyre
We roughly manage that. I live in the middle of the triangle made by OKC, Tulsa, and Wichita and they don't all get the same shows. But they all just get about half a dozen each a year and we can select what we want.
Just using perspective, a "standard parking orbit" in TOS is usually pretty far out - well beyond the low-Earth-orbit used by the ISS or something.
If you consider the original Enterprise was only about 1000' long (or roughly the same size as the aircraft carrier Enterprise), for it to appear this big alongside the Earth means they're way out there. Subsequent shows frequently show the ships closer to the planet (where the planet takes up most of the background) but assuming roughly Earth-sized dimensions, they're still a ways out.
As for gravity, by definition a stable orbit would be one in which the ship is "falling" around the planet (while moving fast enough to "miss" it). So you can't just turn off the grav generators.
And in fact you'd use more power if you stopped orbiting and used the ship's own power to stay aloft while turning off the gravity nets, because you'd be supporting the whole mass of the ship against gravity instead of applying the same acceleration to the mass of the crew, and if anything doing so with a less efficient system.
I still think it's weird not to orient to the ground in orbit though. I suppose it means you can see the planet out the window more easily, but you could still see it below you in the tall windows with what I think is a more natural angle. I also still don't understand why the Connie would have a planetary sensor dome that it doesn't point at planets.
I still think it's weird not to orient to the ground in orbit though. I suppose it means you can see the planet out the window more easily, but you could still see it below you in the tall windows with what I think is a more natural angle. I also still don't understand why the Connie would have a planetary sensor dome that it doesn't point at planets.
As someone who actually liked the first season of Disco, SNW has done 10x the job of actually making the Klingon War A Thing and I appreciate it. Haven't felt conflict like this since The Siege of AR-558. But JFC this season is going to be a weird binge with the super heavy PTSD war drama sandwiched between the comedy cartoon crossover romp and the musical
Screw you, Siege of AR-558! You took Nog's leg!
War in Star Trek seems to be Top Gun as long as you're on a ship and The Things They Carried the moment you beam down, and somehow that seems to actually be consistent across series. What Discovery saw of the war with the Klingons, most of it happened from a ship perspective. DS9 did the cool ship stuff as well as the wildly understaffed and underequipped field hospital episode. With the exception of how that Protocol 12 stuff was handled the first time we saw it, SNW hasn't had the need or opportunity to make the Federation-Klingon war related stuff "cool" at all, unless I'm forgetting something obvious as I tend to do, most likely from S1.