If you haven’t seen it yet may I recommend Stephen Fry’s Planet Word series: Fry's Planet Word - Wikipedia He does an amazing bit about accents in england and how quickly (like village to village) they can change. Also, Brian Blessed helps out in the cussing section and it is beautiful.
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Best story about Brian Blessed
"He is the oldest man ever to reach the North Pole and the Magnetic North Pole. Whilst there, he punched a polar bear – and I’m quoting the man himself directly here – “straight in its fucking face.”"
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It’s also notable that Farscape, Lexx and Blake’s 7 are basically three different versions of the same show, spread along a spectrum of how seriously they took themselves (Lexx at one end, Blake at the other, Farscape in the middle; just tweak the comedy/drama balance to move from one to the other).
A mix of political prisoners and “normal” criminals, persecuted by an Orwellian evil empire, steal a sentient super-ship and have morally ambiguous adventures featuring shifting alliances, treachery amongst the crew and a large civilian death toll.
The Grayza/Servalan thing is the most obvious link, but they’re all over the place really.
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I have a real problem with the pacing on most episodes. On DS9, they were really good at wrapping a storyline up within an episode, while the endings on many Voyager episodes seems rushed. DS9 was great about knowing when they needed to build a story over a couple or several episodes (or even an entire season) and Voyager tended to try and get a story told in an episode, even when it could have been told over two or more episodes. They rarely have a big of a detuning at the end of each episode, like DS9 almost always did.
But I don’t dislike voyager, even so. Just lots of the episodes leave me unsatisfied in a way that DS9 rarely did.
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Neelix. And Kes. And Harry. And Tom. And Chakotay.
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It seems a very useful formula which could be (potentially) light on the budget and fraught with drama. After all the nature of the characters alone promoted squabbling on the ship before they even get to the “strange new worlds”.
My guess is a ton of sectarian reconciliation efforts, Republic of Ireland adopting a far more secular government than it has right now and Northern Irish Protestants finding it far more advantageous to be in the EU than the UK.
[Admittedly akin to saying, “Playing the flute like an expert is done by blowing here and moving your fingers there”]
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My main problem with Voyager was that, far too often, the episode ended a certain way simply because they needed to keep up the premise of the show.
I mean, they encountered, what, seven different technologies that should have gotten them home sooner?
And then there’s stuff like the encounter with 8472 on the simulated Earth. 8472 clearly has technology that could get Voyager home faster than “decades” (or else that whole episode makes no sense), but the crew of Voyager seems completely uninterested in acquiring that technology.
And, no matter what, whether their ship is destroyed or buried in ice or captured or assimilated, you know that at the end of the episode, everyone is going to be back on the ship, headed for home (despite the fact that we know they can just make a copy of The Doctor, because they’ve left a backup copy behind on a planet). At least on TNG, there’s the possibility of harming diplomatic relations with a species, but in Voyager, humanity has never made contact with any of these species before, and probably won’t again for centuries.
It was decent, but it didn’t rise up to the level of DS9, or even TNG.
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Or, to bring this back to Trek, akin to saying, “All we have to do to bring out the best aspects of humanity is to transition to a post-scarcity economy.”
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Yes! I always thought that was a rather simplistic means of looking at our collective problems, as if they all stem to only competition for resources and once we all have enough, conflict ends and we all live happily ever after. Yet another reason to recommend DS9, for not just assuming that.
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Also Janeway.
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Yes to this. Janeway is a far better captain than she gets credit for.
Seven is a good character too (despite the crappy reason they replaced Kes with her and the ridiculous skin tight costumes).
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When I met my father in law (from Tyrone and I have family from a different part of Tyrone and spent summers there) I couldn’t understand his dialect! Cork people have no hope. I remember the first time I went to London as a kid hearing a loud Cork accent behind me on the tube and turning around to see a Jamaican…
I think it will happen when people don’t really care that much, when nationalism is an nightmare from the past. Practically it would take all the populations on the island passing a plebiscite, which isn’t going to happen. The Northern statelet is, post Good Friday agreement, post plebiscite, post reconstruction of its security services, and withdrawal of the army, a fully 100% valid and legitimate country and almost nobody disagrees with that.
I think the middle class unionists will get over any issues if they find it economically necessary to have border controls with Britain but not us, the working class loyalists will never anyway. I hope that nobody here or up North takes the opportunity to insult or humiliate them over it: it’s a practical step, not an ideological one. I mean, during the mad cow thing they unionist farmers union declared that their cows were Irish not British,
GIve me a call if you’re coming over! I met a Dutch friend from the internet after 20+ years last year (exotica music list!). He shamed me in what he already knew about what to do, but I’ll do my best
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The whole “post-scarcity” idea was always silly. At every turn, and not just in DS9, there is evidence of scarcity motivating behaviour and driving plots. Dilithium crystals, land/planets, medicines, command positions, whatever. OK, poverty has been eliminated on Earth, so let’s not show boring old present-day Earth: that was a good rule for TOS. But scarcity rears its ugly head so frequently out in space that there’s no sense pretending this franchise really portrays a post-scarcity society in any meaningful sense, even if we take it to mean the entire Federation is post-scarcity within its borders.
And let’s not mention the Prime Directive. We must never interfere. Never ever. Except almost every episode. Granted, many of them amounted to “See? See how interfering messes things up?” and that’s a fine message, but there’s also a good deal of Federation Knows Best. Hmm, these childlike people are being ruled by mysterious near-omnipotent beings, which means they’re not really less advanced than us. We must interfere for their own good! (There’s no logic like good old Cold War logic.)
That’s actually one of the things I liked about Voyager. I get and respect the criticisms, but there were a few episodes where the Federation is seen from the receiving end of Prime Directive flexibility, and it isn’t pretty.
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And they basically had an episode of, “Okay, well, this would have been where we took her character if we weren’t throwing her off the ship,” and then they threw her off the ship.
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But I think the criticism of that aspect of the Star Trek universe really started with DS9, though, where there is a constant negotiation between cultures and the decisions made by star fleet aren’t always positive ones. They are shown to be somewhat hypocritical and tone deaf a number of times in their decision making, Sisko included. In the Pale Moonlight is just one example of that:
As is the tension between Eddington and Sisko, not to mention the revelation of Section 31:
If Star fleet is America in space, then starting with DS9, you start to see the series take stock of American policy during the Cold War and how it wasn’t all justifiable.
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I only just read that apparently there are persistent rumors that Kate Mulgrew once stated that she assumed Janeway was bipolar, or played the character as if she was bipolar. In light of Robert Beltran’s well-publicized remarks, it would hardly be surprising.
…Oh look, he’s still chatty.
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