GRcade

Yeah nothing I see about Lower Decks really gets me excited in the way Star Trek normally does.

I'm willing to give it a try but I'm going in with pretty low expectations, like Discovery season 3 level low.

I think a funny take on the "boring" starship jobs in Star Trek could be really good, but the cartoon doesn't look like it's my cup of tea at least from what I've seen of it. I'll give it a go at least.

Karl_ wrote:I think a funny take on the "boring" starship jobs in Star Trek could be really good, but the cartoon doesn't look like it's my cup of tea at least from what I've seen of it. I'll give it a go at least.

The premise of seeing what happens after the glitz and glamour of first contact is pretty solid.
There's still loads to do and room for plenty of fuck-ups.

Lagamorph wrote:Yeah nothing I see about Lower Decks really gets me excited in the way Star Trek normally does.

Maybe it's not meant for you. Did you consider that?

Somebody Else's Problem wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:Yeah nothing I see about Lower Decks really gets me excited in the way Star Trek normally does.

Maybe it's not meant for you. Did you consider that?

By that logic nobody can criticise anything though.

No one picked on Romulan Whisky. I'm ashamed of you all

Humble Bundle on Star Trek Adventures RPG books on at the moment. I think they're basically a Star Trek version of D&D?

That actually wasn't entirely terrible.
It was no where near good - but it wasn't offensively bad. I might have actually enjoyed it more than some Discovery/Picard because they were actively bad at worst whereas this is just...superflous

I assume we’ll all be watching Unbelievable!!! tonight?

I'm doing Fall Guys with friends.

I don't think other people know what Unbelievable!!! is though. You should explain. For them,

Basically it’s a stoner movie starring Snoop Dogg as the villain, but the entire supporting cast is Star Trek alumni. The other main characters are Ensign Kim and Tuvok, plus someone who was in DS9. Marina Sirtis, Nichelle Nichols, and something like 20 other Star Trek actors from TOS and the 90s franchise are all in it. Looks like an incredible train wreck, and it’s released today.

So Lower Decks has been alright so far.

I mean it's trying really hard to be Rick and Morty with a Starfleet skin, but it's not bad.

EDIT: I've also been rewatching Voyager and playing the Elite Force games. So it's been quite busy on the Trek front for me right now.

Cheeky Devlin wrote:So Lower Decks has been alright so far.

I mean it's trying really hard to be Rick and Morty with a Starfleet skin, but it's not bad.

EDIT: I've also been rewatching Voyager and playing the Elite Force games. So it's been quite busy on the Trek front for me right now.

I'm in the middle of a Voyager rewatch, too. I'm up to Season 6, and Paris got mindfucked by a shuttlecraft.

Somebody Else's Problem wrote:

Cheeky Devlin wrote:So Lower Decks has been alright so far.

I mean it's trying really hard to be Rick and Morty with a Starfleet skin, but it's not bad.

EDIT: I've also been rewatching Voyager and playing the Elite Force games. So it's been quite busy on the Trek front for me right now.

I'm in the middle of a Voyager rewatch, too. I'm up to Season 6, and Paris got mindfucked by a shuttlecraft.

Just on Season 4 myself.

I love how the EF games make only the most basic attempt to justify the fact that they're mindless blasters.
I'm sure Roddenberry would have approved of the "Personal Photon Launcher" and the Phaser shotgun thing I just got in EF2.

Didn't realise how long it had been since I last posted any views from my ongoing TNG rewatch, apparently the last lot was back in May. I blame the AYAMMM contest for stealing my Trek watching time!

I've now got to the end of season 4 and boy what a ride it has been!

Devil's Due - Picard manages to get a planet off their 1000 year old deal with the devil by using his favourite tool - an arbitration! This was a decent enough episode but lacked anything special to make it stand out. Also Kirk would have totally banged Ardra if it were him in charge when she appeared in the captains quarters to try and seduce Picard, I think that is the primary distinction between TOS and TNG at this point!

Clues - Otherwise knows as "the one where they ripped off Red Dwarf"! This was quite fun even if it didn't necessarily do much of interest with the memory wipe concept

First Contact - Riker goes to extreme lengths to have sex with an alien nurse played by Dr. Frasier Crane's wife. Despite the endeavour causing political disruption to a developing planet and pushing their space program back by generations, resulting in serious physical harm to Riker himself and almost resulting in his own death Riker declares that it was "worth it".

Galaxy's Child - Geordi's whole plot in this is quite creepy to watch here. The guy basically gets annoyed at Dr Brahm's for not living up to his weird holodeck simulated relationship with her and the show somehow awkwardly tries to make this her problem and not his. The stuff with the crew killing the space creature, discovering it had a child and subsequently reuniting it with its own kind is solid sci-fi fare and could probably have carried more focus to dilute the creepy Geordi factor.

Night Terrors - This was a pretty weak episode in all honesty, which is a shame because the central premise had everything needed for a good story. The Enterprise responding to a missing ship and falling foul of the same problem that saw the previous crew go mad and kill each other should have been great and the REM sleep deprivation being the cause is actually quite an interesting one that should have resulted in some more exciting events than just watching Picard get a bit crotchety! Things really go off the rails when we get the magic resolution of Troi decoding the "eyes in the dark, one moon circles" bullshit message from her nightmare - "they obviously want us to explode the rift by flooding it with Hydrogen!!"

Identity Crisis - Another fairly middling episode, albeit far better than the previous effort. Geordi reunites with an old colleague to investigate why the team that they were on years ago is starting to disappear when it turns out that they have all been infected by an alien parasite that is re-writing their DNA! The sequence with La Forge recreating the scene on the holodeck and working out that there was an invisible alien present during their original investigation was quite clever. Ultimately his discovery is too late to save him and Geordi transforms into an alien himself and is drawn back to the planet, fortunately the crew are able to locate him even after he turns invisible thanks to the help of a black light as the aliens show up in ultraviolet light (no explanation is given for why Geordi's visor which allows him to detect things in the ultraviolet spectrum didn't spot the aliens in the first place however! ) Now aware that the Enterprise has access to black light technology and fearing what it may reveal about his personal habits Riker quickly returns to the ship to give his personal quarters a deep clean

The Nth Degree - Reginald Barclay returns to wow us all with his acting, his skill at diagnosing and resolving complex technical problems with little difficulty, his ability to merge himself directly with the ships computer and a casual reluctance to accept the limitations of warp travel! This was pretty fun all in all, Dwight Schultz does an impressive job of portraying the ever expanding powers of Super Barclay without losing that innate "Barclay-ness" of the character. The main issue with this is that the idea an alien race is so curious about the rest of the universe that they will go to such lengths to augment/enhance the technology of other races in order to bring them across the galaxy directly to them rather than just strawberry floating exploring themselves doesn't really make much sense, but other than that this was enjoyable!

Qpid - The obligatory Q episode, and another great one! What more could you want - a returning flame for Picard, everyone playing medieval dress up, Worf moaning about not being a merry man, Troi being gooseberry fool at archery - this episode has it all! Picard is great as always in these kinds of episodes, having that perfect amount of gravitas to carry everything when it could so easily fall on its face.

The Drumhead - Picard exposes Satie as a witchunting moron and does it with his perfect style. A classic, and the sort of episode that we need more of. I'd take a hundred of these over most of the whizz-bang stuff we got in Picard.

Half a Life - Alright, who the strawberry float asked for another Lwaxana Troi episode?! This is pretty passable to be fair and is the first time that they really bothered to give Lwaxana anything like a real character beyond flirting with the Captain/anyone else currently in range. The level of bond that Lwaxana and Timicin seem to develop in such a short time is somewhat unbelievable but that's easy enough to overlook for what is a good story about relationships, death and the tension between the customs of the various species that make up the universe.

The Host - Crusher develops a crush on a man negotiating a peace treaty between two races, gets confused when he dies and it turns out that she actually fancies the parasite that was occupying the host body, and makes a commendable effort at resisting when Riker becomes the new host for her parasite lover. This story is a bit bizarre and the ending isn't well handled with the parasite moving into a female host which sours things somewhat but it was decent enough overall.

The Mind's Eye - Geordi gets kidnapped by the Romulans and inducted into their own personal Bourne style assassination programming scheme against his will. Using Geordi's visor as an interface they begin to subject him to imagery designed to torment him to the point where he will willingly follow their orders, they test his devotion by simulating one of Geordi's most common fantasies - murdering Chief O'Brien The Romulans, being led by a shadowy figure (...), are trying to get Geordi to assassinate a Klingon leader to destabilise the shaky Federation/Klingon alliance. TNG seems to be at its best when it is either doing episodes that explore human nature and the flaws of people either as individuals or collectively, or when focusing on the more well developed alien species and interactions like the Klingon's and Romulans and this episode is another excellent example of that.

Biggest issue with this episode is that the Romulans think that they can just send some random black dude in a visor to Risa as a stand in for La Forge, as if nobody is going to spot that they look different!

In Theory - D'Sora falls for Data because lets face it he's pretty adorable. Data gets to implement a detailed wooing subroutine where he seems to have programmed his relationship interactions based entirely off data from 1970s US sitcoms. There's also some stuff about a nebula and Picard decides to pilot a shuttle because he's a control freak. Basically this episode is crap.

Redemption (Part I) - Worf once again demonstrates that he is the TNG MVP in what is an absolutely cracking episode of TV. The Klingon side of TNG and Worf's place within it has proven to be an absolute goldmine for the show by this point and this episode does a fantastic job of pulling on those existing threads to deliver a season finale that is every bit as strong as The Best of Both Worlds from season 3

Aww man, Night Terrors is cool. The Crusher bit is freaky.

And creepy Geordi is creepy.

More like Geordie Engorge amirite

Jenuall wrote:
Clues - Otherwise knows as "the one where they ripped off Red Dwarf"! This was quite fun even if it didn't necessarily do much of interest with the memory wipe concept

Hologrammatical crewmember with superiority complex? Millions of lightyears from earth? Encounters with other humans lost in deep sleep to time? Hunted down a lot of the time by robotic villains who look human? Once had to fight a guy who wanted to erase the crew from history?

Isn't Voyager just a rip-off of Red Dwarf?

Carlos wrote:

Jenuall wrote:
Clues - Otherwise knows as "the one where they ripped off Red Dwarf"! This was quite fun even if it didn't necessarily do much of interest with the memory wipe concept

Hologrammatical crewmember with superiority complex? Millions of lightyears from earth? Encounters with other humans lost in deep sleep to time? Hunted down a lot of the time by robotic villains who look human? Once had to fight a guy who wanted to erase the crew from history?

Isn't Voyager just a rip-off of Red Dwarf?

Very true!

But this episode of TNG in particular is really similar to the Red Dwarf episode Thanks for the Memory - crew wakes up to find things don't quite add up, follows clues to piece together the fact that they wiped their own memories to hide something that they would be better off not knowing