Amph [NERRRD] Observations, rhetorical questions, comments & 55 Years of Star Trek (General Thread)

Yeah, wait until it get consistently good in season 3. There are actually some really good ideas in seasons 1 and 2, but they were never really followed up on, which is actually kind of a shame, because Wesley in particular potentially could have had an awesome character arc.

 

and that's how Captain Picard Day was born, I guess. Good job, Riker!

 

Judging by how he lives his life these days, it worked.

 

Yeah, with older shows it’s definitely rarer when they hit the ground running. There are arguments, for example, that seasons 1 and 2 of Frasier are its absolute best, and at the time the reaction was outright astonishment that anything could be that good from the jump.

 

The impression I get is that, at least for the original series, the first season and a half are much better regarded than late Season 2 and Season 3.

 

Well, IMO, one exception where a show is better in the early run than the latter is Lois & Clark, at least in terms of the villains. Having Luthor as the overall villain of Season 1 was better than some of the hokey ones in Season 4 (the weakest of the series). Not to mention there was something better about Lois & Clark's chemistry when she didn't yet know he was Superman.

 

Yeah, especially considering that Frasier was spun off of Cheers, and Cheers is ranked up there with The Simpsons, I Love Lucy and MASH as one of the best sitcoms in the history of television.

 

I couldn't disagree more - I tend to peg quality TOS more or less precisely to Gene Coon having control - but I agree that it should be regarded as an uncharacteristic show when you're trying to track trends. Like, it literally got brought back from cancellation for the sole purpose of extending its episode count to get it syndicated, and then went on to be the source material for one of the most well-known fictional settings in human history. This is somewhat atypical.

 

Some of the characters were really different in Season 1 and 2, especially Picard and Data (who openly showed emotions). And the lore was different too (The Federation was at peace for a very long time. So no war with the Cardassians. And the Klingons were Federation members. Not to forget the way humanity was presented in this seasons). That's why in my headcanon the timeline was changed at some point because of some time travel (Temporal Cold War?)...

 

By the way, with ships as weak as that, i really wonder why the Klingons didn't conquer them at day one of their invasion of Cardassia in DS9. And not to forget the different makeup. Proof for another timeline change??

Edit: Added an additional point.

 

TV shows back then-- and TV shows now-- changed as they went along and didn't have their universes set in stone. Cardassians, meant to be one-episode aliens, were not the same as the Cardassians who showed up around the time DS9 premiered. Borg in "Q Who?" had no interest in assimilating people-- growing new drones themselves-- and in "Best of Both Worlds" it was almost stated outright that Picard was a special exception. The Founders sending individuals of their own species to explore the galaxy makes no sense given their xenophobia and mastery of genetically modified slave races.

Ideas change and sometimes for the better. I'm not sure why we have to come up with dumb in-universe explanations. As a franchise that's over 50 years old and with, what? over a thousand hours of filmed content? Trek has never been all that consistent

 

I’m not sure that the Cardassians were ever intended to be aliens of the week. Picard’s speech at the end of The Wounded is very prophetic. I would not be surprised at all if a lot of the ideas that were rejected for TNG ended up in DS9.

 

At the very least, the later uniforms for the Cardassians were better than the first.

 

It's fitting that Marc Alaimo played the first Cardassian ever seen on both TNG and DS9: Gul Macet in TNG, and of course, Dukat in DS9.

 

Armin Shimerman also played one of the first Ferengis. The Ferengi are another race that changed a lot since their introduction, going from being marauders who are supposedly a legitimate threat to Starfleet to weaselly space capitalists (who somehow never enslaved or conquered anyone).

 

It's not enslavement when you pay them absolute-minimum wages and it's not conquering when you buy the land

 

In retrospective, it's interesting that Season 4 of TNG was the first time that the Federation was shown to have been at war at the time of the first seasons. Not only with the Cardassians but also with the Talarians. While Season 1 - 3 presented the Federation as having been at peace for a long time.

I especially remember Season 2's "Peak Performance" where after contact with the Borg, a strategist was needed to come aboard the Enterprise to train the crew because starfleet actually didn't know enough about warfare after such a long time of peace.

 

Well, they may be wars in name only, especially when compared to the Dominion War, or even the Federation-Klingon conflict during the 4th season of DS9 and part of the following season.