Isn’t that what culture is supposed to do? Explore ideas? Why is this something to lament (if that’s what you’re doing)?
I’d read somewhere (GRUMBLES FROM THE GRAVE?) that Heinlein’s agent was trying to line up a TV series remake of the FUTURE HISTORIES stories when STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND was a bestseller. The agent’s contact at the production studio was fired and the project got dropped, but Roddenberry knew this was happening.
In theory, we could have gotten William Shatner in the role of Lazarus Long. Talk about a mindbender!
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That’s one of my favorite scenes in all of Trek.
Eh, I don’t recall the Borg talking about infecting Earth with the nanoprobes the Doctor modified. They infected Species 8479, and I suppose you could argue they must have used it to take over the Enterprise E in First Contact.
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Not lamenting at all. An honest query. 
[quote=“GulliverFoyle, post:23, topic:79289”]Eh, I don’t recall the Borg talking about infecting Earth with the nanoprobes the Doctor modified.[/quote]“Dark Frontier” was the episode where 7 of 9 was having a lengthy chat with the Borg Queen, wherein she discussed the possibility of an assimilation virus (having recognized the failure of the more circuitous route in First Contact).
It was in the episode “Dark Frontier.” The Doctor, Species 8479 and First Contact had nothing to do with it.
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Oh yeah. I was confusing it with Scorpion. I’d totes forgotten about that part near the end.
I wonder how much was coincidence and how much was Trek writers really trying to get the drop on JMS.
Sadly, Crusade was pretty horrible. And I say that as someone who think B5 was better than any of the Star Trek series. The B5 movies and Lost Tales were quite good. I never could understand why the Crusade characters turned out so…meh. Except the techno-mage guy, but he was from B5.
B5 and DS9 were both “Casablanca” in space.
Voyager was the Star Trek take on the Odyssey. Babylon 5 Crusade lifted its plot from Space Battleship Yamato.
Crusade
Aliens had infected Earth with a nanotech virus, but it would take a couple years to adapt and start killing people in large numbers. Until the intrepid Crusaders can find a cure for it.
Yamato
Aliens have bombarded Earth with planetary nukes. In a year all humanity will die unless the intrepid crew can travel to another galaxy and retrieve the device to clean the earth.
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B5 did have that great line
[Ivanova implies that a woman is promiscuous by telling the captain]
"Good luck, Captain. I think you’re about to go where every man has gone before.
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That’s certainly a valid comparison. Although apparently the nanotech virus crisis was only the starting point and was going to be resolved early in the series.
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It seems there were some intentional references to Blakes 7 (a show described as “whose ambitions far exceeded the capability of a 1970’s BBC TV series budget”). J. Michael Straczynski is an inveterate SF fanboy. I would be almost certain he was familiar with that series.
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I’d have still liked to see where it went. B5 didn’t really find it’s footing until season 2, so maybe Crusade would have gotten better. Certainly the B5 universe deserves more installments.
Ivanova had some great lines. Really though, that was B5’s strength, JMS was a master of writing witty dialogue. G’Kar and Lando were the best dysfunctional couple in TV history. I feel like with Crusade he just hadn’t found those characters’ voices yet.
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Always wondered whether the discovery of tribbles led to an exploding industry in furwear (“Its real Tribbleskin!”), taxidermy and barbecue (I am sure there was something edible under all that fur)
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Not really sure where that sentence comes from. We never really see the society itself, we just see the imperialistic, militaristic arm of that society. As the author says, the society behind the Starfleet and the Federation was purposely not fleshed out, so I’m not sure why he would turn around and say something like that.
I certainly enjoyed the hell out of it when I was a kid, but as an adult it’s hard not to notice that it was basically a wet dream of the Project for the New American Century projected into outer space.
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Mkay. I always thought that the only reason that humans weren’t violent and vicious people in the 23rd century was because the Vulcans showed up and held us at gun point for over a century. Isn’t that the plot of several episodes in Enterprise and even the TNG Movie where the crew of enterprise-D goes back in time to work with zephram on breaking the warp barrier? That’s the real problem with Abrams’ Star Trek Without a Vulcan civilization to hold them accountable, humanity would go way off the rails.
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One nitpick (not necessarily with your comment). From the three seasons of DS9 I watched, I definitely remember a specific window/pylon being the best one for watching the wormhole. Did they ever actually indicate the station rotated? I know the shots on that super-long opening sequence weren’t totally static, but I remember those being pans, also I definitely didn’t get the impression that floors were concentric within that outer ring.
@stinkinbadgers The bits in Starship Troopers at least about military service being a prerequisite for citizenship were straight out of the book, so that was seems like a pretty militaristic society.
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I can’t stop grokking it.
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Well, I’m not sure you can really plot the ideologies presented in his work along a linear trajectory of increasing conservatism, though. After all, the hippie classic Stranger in a Strange Land was written a couple of years after Starship Troopers.
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Yes, you’ve finally caught him out after all these decades: Star Trek was actually a thinly-veiled parable of American supremacy. How very clever you must be to have figured that out.
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Oh, look! Junior got to use that insult he learned this morning from the big boys! Run along, Junior, and tell mommy what a big man you are!
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I usually see that cited as a short-sighted weakness in real military services: the way they punish people for choosing to stay in a position where they know they can do the most good, instead of “advancing” to their level of incompetence. If we can accept the bare idea that an organization exists with military-style organization but broadly peaceful goals, it only seems natural that they’d dispense with a lot of the stupid, selfish machoness of real-world militaries.
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