Star Trek Beyond - Farewell to a Franchise

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I’ve been watching the original series on Netflix and just saw the one where Spock steals the cloaking device from the Romulans. But in all the subsequent series and movies the Federation still doesn’t have a cloaking device. What gives?
 
didymus said:
I’ve been watching the original series on Netflix and just saw the one where Spock steals the cloaking device from the Romulans. But in all the subsequent series and movies the Federation still doesn’t have a cloaking device. What gives?
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Cloaking technology was forbidden in the Federation due to the Treaty of Algeron. That and it was just an underhanded technology that the Federation didn’t believe in. Kirk didn’t steal the cloak so hey could use it to cloak Federation ships, he stole it so they could find a way to penetrate it with sensors rendering it less effective.
 
I’ve just been reading The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison. It includes the original teleplay he submitted to Roddenberry plus a long introduction detailing how his script was butchered by Roddenberry and others and lies about him peddled by GR in his various biographies claiming that City on the Edge ran $66,000 over budget.
The funniest bit is that Shatner came to Ellison’s home and was the first to read the script. According to Ellison Shatner read it through then read it two more times slowly and Ellison realized he was counting his lines and how many scenes he would be in 😃

Ellison has always had a reputation for being sharp-tongued but even if his criticisms of Roddenberry are overblown they make a good counter to the “official” history. One point I think is dead on is Ellison’s claim that Roddenberry believed in the “perfectibility of human beings”. That is carried on through all the series.
 
Okay, I heard a stupid joke last night. What would have happened if Pope John VI had been assimilated by the Borg?

We would have an encyclical renamed, “Existence is fertile”.
 
Problem they had with the Borg, was the were TOO meanacing and TOO powerful. I mean they were essentially unstoppable. Yes the 1701-D stopped them in Best of Both Worlds, but the way the Borg were designed, with that inherent adaptability, they’d have found a way to defeat the method used to stop them in BOBW (not to mention that method required an assimilated individual to pull off anyway). They had to be softened up or the inevitable end result would have been an assimilated Alpha Quadrant. As it is if you read the post Nemesis book series, specifically Star Trek Destiny, the bring the Borg to a very satisfying conclusion that would have made for an epic movie or mini series. I mean how can several thousand cubes invading the Alpha Quadrant and generally being unstoppable not be epic.
 
What was the Deus Ex Machina that you view as having ended the Dominion War?
 
I agree about TNG not aging well. I’ve caught a couple of reruns on BBC America and, as often as not, the plots are soaked in technobabble. TOS doesn’t have that problem, generally.
 
MrZoom said:
I agree about TNG not aging well. I’ve caught a couple of reruns on BBC America and, as often as not, the plots are soaked in technobabble. TOS doesn’t have that problem, generally.
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Yeah I’ve been continuing my Voyager rewatch with my wife. We got to Course:Oblivion last night, which my wife had never seen. It had her in tears. It’s not the best acted episode but my wife is also not prone to crying at bad TV either. It really is a powerful and tragic story and one of a great number of Voyager episodes that thus far have aged very well.
 
😃

All the stars, directors, writers plus wives and widows of all the different ST incarnations have issued a statement against Trump.
In part:
Star Trek has always offered a positive vision of the future, a vision of hope and optimism, and most importantly, a vision of inclusion, where people of all races are accorded equal respect and dignity, where individual beliefs and lifestyles are respected so long as they pose no threat to others. We cannot turn our backs on what is happening in the upcoming election. Never has there been a presidential candidate who stands in such complete opposition to the ideals of the Star Trek universe as Donald Trump. His election would take this country backward, perhaps disastrously. We need to elect a president who will move this country forward into the kind of future we all dream of: where personal differences are understood and accepted, where science overrules superstition, where people work together instead of against each other.
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Vote for Hillary, resistance is futile.
 
MrZoom said:
I agree about TNG not aging well. I’ve caught a couple of reruns on BBC America and, as often as not, the plots are soaked in technobabble. TOS doesn’t have that problem, generally.
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The one bit of ST jargon that bothered be the most was “subspace”. Since normal space is three dimensions wouldn’t subspace have to be less, i.e., Flatland? Also, in the original series subspace signals were apparently limited by lightspeed: Uhura, “The message will take three weeks to reach the nearest starbase”. But later in the series subspace signals became instantaneous.

After that, use of terms like “M rays” and constant discovery of unknown forms of radiation. Please. We’ve already nailed down the radiomagnetic spectrum.
 
didymus said:
😃

All the stars, directors, writers plus wives and widows of all the different ST incarnations have issued a statement against Trump.
In part:

Vote for Hillary, resistance is futile.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s all the actors etc. that have featured in the show.
But a number of them.

I understand that there are people that have problems with Donald Trump and wouldn’t want to see him become President and I know it’s not officially Trek, but under the word ‘Trek’, that word is being used as a political tool to come out against one candidate and the statement basically endorses another, and that is uncomfortable to me.
 
MrZoom said:
I agree about TNG not aging well. I’ve caught a couple of reruns on BBC America and, as often as not, the plots are soaked in technobabble. TOS doesn’t have that problem, generally.
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That was a constant complaint when the show aired originally. In the early days of the World Wide Web there was a “particle of the week” page for pointing out the latest made up science in TNG.

Tom A.
 
didymus said:
The one bit of ST jargon that bothered be the most was “subspace”. Since normal space is three dimensions wouldn’t subspace have to be less, i.e., Flatland? Also, in the original series subspace signals were apparently limited by lightspeed: Uhura, “The message will take three weeks to reach the nearest starbase”. But later in the series subspace signals became instantaneous.

After that, use of terms like “M rays” and constant discovery of unknown forms of radiation. Please. We’ve already nailed down the radiomagnetic spectrum.
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TOS is fun to watch for that reason – they’re not sure what they’re doing, so sometimes it’s like a western in space instead of a Magic Hotel in space which prevailed in TNG and Voyager. They hadn’t even fixed what the Federation was. Voyager was such a weird failure from a series perspective: they’ve got a premise that’s primed for long-term drama, but instead they do “TNG with Better Graphics and a Weaker Ensemble Cast”. Too episodic, really. I know why they did it, because of syndicated episodes, but still.
 
_Abyssinia said:
I understand that there are people that have problems with Donald Trump and wouldn’t want to see him become President and I know it’s not officially Trek, but under the word ‘Trek’, that word is being used as a political tool to come out against one candidate and the statement basically endorses another, and that is uncomfortable to me.
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Yes, that was my thought…

Actually my first emotional reaction was: what do I care what Trek-connected people think? It may be my fave show and I do something TOS every day but I don’t make Star Trek my standard for real life. But that’s me.
 
I just want to know how Kirk goes from cadet to captain in one mission! It’s become a huge video game now, no real tale of the future anymore.
 
_Abyssinia said:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think it’s all the actors etc. that have featured in the show.
But a number of them.

I understand that there are people that have problems with Donald Trump and wouldn’t want to see him become President and I know it’s not officially Trek, but under the word ‘Trek’, that word is being used as a political tool to come out against one candidate and the statement basically endorses another, and that is uncomfortable to me.
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I was under the impression that it was only the cast of the reboot.

Hillary doesn’t exactly live up to the optimism of Star Trek either.
 
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