Topic: The Chit-Chat Thread

Star Trek, @ThanosReXXX .... Although I'm afraid I don't remember exactly which film or episode covered it

@ThanosReXXX I can imagine. We use a Cisco VOIP setup for the agency, so I feel your pain.

Our EHR platform is down. Again. Ironically, I had already spent the morning organizing, digitizing, and filing any paperwork I had, before the system went down. So I've got nothing to do but play games and surf the web.

@BruceCM And you're on to the next round! Well done, sir.
It's from the first movie, Star Trek - The Motion Picture:

You mean like these songs ??

@ThanosReXXX Yeah, now you can be stuck in an elevator listening to those two songs!

I think I'm gonna go to Sonic's down the street and get a chili dog.

@HobbitGamer I listen to these acronyms and paperwork you discuss regularly and I think I've determined your identity. You work for Initech, don't you?

@Anti-Matter No. No I don't... I meant sweeping orchestral melodies that were always awkwardly at odds with the rest of the events going on in the scene of the movie like the B-grade low budget film it was.

@NEStalgia Well, seems like I have to correct myself here: it was just in the news again and it's not a meteor but a comet, and it comes from another solar system, instead of from another galaxy, like I said earlier.

It will make a one-time trip past our sun, on the 7th of December, after which it will never return to our solar system again. It will do this at an approximate speed of 30 kilometres per second, which translates to approximately 18.6 miles per second. And the distance to Earth will be a mere 290 million kilometres/180 million miles...

@NEStalgia Some people on here don't really seem to know the difference between romantic and erratic music...

Lols, I was more into Next Generation when I was young, @ThanosReXXX .... But I obviously watched the films, too

@BruceCM I've watched all series and all movies, including all the reboots and the CBS/Netflix series Star Trek Discovery.

I like the recent reboot films, too, @ThanosReXXX .... Not got Netflix for their series I quite liked DS9 & Voyager, too but not as much! Did see most of the original series in the end, though
Have a Neelix cookie or something

@BruceCM Well, if you don't have Netflix, then there's always streaming or downloads...
It's actually a pretty good series. Currently, they've made two seasons and the third one is coming up. Contracts for it were signed in February.

Voyager is much derided, but I'll always have a soft spot for it. TNG seemed a lot better 30 years ago than it does today for some reason.... Back in the day Voyager could never stand up to TNG. In hindsight, it aged much better than TNG. In a way it's my favorite, though I fully acknowledge DS9 is a superior television show overall.

@NEStalgia I would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you and that meddling Zelda!

My take:
DS9
TNG
Voyager
TOS
Enterprise

Yeah, I remember hearing about it when it was coming & started, @ThanosReXXX .... I'll probably get around to that, sometime
I haven't seen any of those for 20+ years, @NEStalgia, so I dunno about that! Both Voyager & DS9 did have some great episodes & I wouldn't like to say which was better overall.

@BruceCM DS9 had a lot of great episodes. Voyager....the more time goes by the more it stands out in some ways as the more "intellectual" Trek. DS9 was a bombastic nail biting story arc with great characters that developed really well. TOS was pretty much a spaghetti western in space...which was Gene's design. He knew what 1960's audiences loved. He was a TV man through and through. TNG is weird in ways I never realized at the time, but it has a dramatic shift in direction when Gene left. It was kind of unsteady in the beginning. It felt like it tried to be more "serious" than TOS while reliving the glory of the fist and it was never really finding its niche. Plus, Gene's obsession with "child geniuses" made the focus on Wesley Crusher start to consume the whole show, and forcing the character in started breaking plot believably.

Nobody likes Wesley Crusher. Not even Wesley Crusher (Will Wheaton) likes Wesley Crusher.... Plus, Will was already a known (child) actor prior and hadn't signed on as full time cast, it was supposed to be juggling with other work and Gene kept casting him which is why he (thankfully) left eventually

But CAAAAAAAAAAAptaaaaaaaainnnnnn........

It was also plagued by the season 3 SWG writer's strike.

Once Rick Berman took over it gained focus and became the show everyone remembers, and was consistent. It was the best in many regards...but in hindsight, some of the production tropes of 80's television haunt it still. Voyager at the time was the campiest and cheesiest compared to the larger than life cast of TNG. No individual cast member stands out in the same way as Piccard, Riker, Data. Perhaps Neelix stands out in the same way as Wesley... But in hindsight, where TNG focused on topics and questions more relevant in its own time, surviving hostile environments, and ill defined "space life forms", and a focus on Cold War concepts of truce and getting along vis a vis Klingons, Voyager was a bit more cerebral and timeless in it's topics. TOS was more physical exploration - planets, plants, alien weather hostile conditions, space phenomenon. Things that seemed relevant during the early days of the Space Shuttle and the plans for the ISS. Voyager tackled things like diseases, mental limits, (non)linearity of time, sociology of dealing with native populations, civilizations built on different situations. Where TOS got to focus on "uninhabited space" and "known political entities, as a power of force" with so called "non-interference" when things were really interfered with. Voyager delved more into having to deal with other civilizations and having to adapt to THEM, even clandestinely. And yes, the occasional "random space monster."

It lacked grandeur and bombast, but in hindsight the stories were a lot more subtle, but timeless. And the characters, while not larger than life H-E-R-O-E-S like TNG, were in a lot of ways less cardboard and more fleshed out. The last season or two that become a Borg-fest and 7of9 obsessed got boring though. Final seasons usually disappoint though....

DS9 is technically the best actual show. The writing and story telling were above the norm, with production values to match.

And then there's poor Enterprise. It actually grew on me a whole lot the second time around. Such a shame they completely broke and redid the story and then cancelled it. It lacked coherence at first, then stopped kind of abruptly just when it got good.

@NEStalgia I tend to agree on your verdict of the series. Personally, I also really like Enterprise and Discovery as well, though.

On a side note: apparently, there's a series about Picard in the making, so TNG is also going to make a return, well... kinda...

@ThanosReXXX Oh and I forgot the best part of TNG that got even better in DS9: Worf. Mike Dorn is forever awesome! (He shows up occasionally as a VA in games as well.)

Yeah I heard about the Picard series. Not sure I can imagine how they'll piece it together in a way that doesn't seem like a name recognition cash grab, but if it does go together that's really cool.

@NEStalgia And there he goes again, editing in an entire text wall after the fact...

Funnily enough, I agree with most of that too, so I don't have to edit my previous comment to reflect a perhaps different sentiment because of your text wall edit.

As for Voyager, I certainly feel like at least two out of nine points in that show stood out. The back wasn't too bad either... (oh, man, I've been WAY too involved and delved far too deep into that weird anime game discussion, and the opposing reviews that people posted)

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Star Ocean 1st Departure R....