io9 
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San Francisco, 1:37 PM
Tue Dec 15
26 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/13/09
Anyway, I'm becoming convinced that it's impossible to know what space battles will really look like. Maybe it will be ships of the line pounding away at one another broadsides. (Cool!) Or fighters doing high-G dogfights while firing guns at one another. (Awesome!) Or moon-sized space stations with planet-destroying anti-proton beams in an x-ray containment laser. (Yeah, baby!)
Bring it on.
12/13/09
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12/12/09
The White Stars (the whole Minbari fleet), Vorlons, Shadows, and The First Ones were all carefully designed to be unique (and I'm still wondering about some of those cultures/life forms on those ships/entities). The Vorlons were the only really unusual ships on television until the rest of the B5 ships were introduced. No other show had designs like that, until Farscape came around.
Put them in a blender, go PEW PEW = good TV.
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12/12/09
On an unrelated note, the suicidal destruction of the Asgard home planet brought tears to my eyes.
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12/12/09
I share your pain. Even the clip-show episode where Hammond tells the representatives of Canada, France, China, and Great Britain about the stargate was cool, thanks to Thor's appearance.
Senator Kinsey: "Commander Thor..."
Thor (with a finger up): "Supreme Commander..."
Take that, Kinsey!
About Atlantis, I was afraid the premise of the Wraith (a vampiristic creature yadda yadda yadda) would make the show suck, but I think the writers did a great job of making them interesting.
And some of the very best episodes are McKay-oriented. "The Tao of Rodney" and "The Shrine" are amazing feats of acting by David Hewlett.
12/12/09
I'm looking forward to Atlantis, I've heard that Woolsey will eventually become even less of a dick (a process started in SG-1) and that Carter is commander for a season (Carter is my favourite).
12/12/09
Well, I won't spoil Atlantis for you, so I'm not going to comment on any details. Suffice it to say that I like Atlantis as much as SG-1 and, by that, I mean that I like them both.
Enjoy your Atlantis ride.
12/12/09
What's next? Rant on how Karateka on the C-64 didn't have good shading or something?
12/12/09
Just because I didn't like the end-result it doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the effort, difficulty, and pioneering work involved.
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(Take that, Nostradamus. )
12/11/09
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12/11/09
I've never understood the incessant griping about the reuse of fairly standard FX shots. The costumes aren't changed for every scene, the sets aren't redesigned and rebuilt for every episode, and the characters aren't recast every season (well, usually).
12/12/09
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12/11/09
And wow whatever arguments I had against my nerd status just went poof.
12/11/09
Defiant had the prototype ablative shielding that was later deployed in a more perfected form on Voyager.
12/12/09
Voyager also had an infinite supply of red shirt ensigns, shuttle crafts, photon torpedos, over night repair of the most incredible damages, and not to mention 1000 and 1 uses for nanoprobes to somehow solve all their problems by the end of the episode
12/11/09
But the best part was that despite all this awesome, the resolution came down to philosophy and psychoanalysis. Hell, the whole battle can be said to be a cosmic-scale intervention. "You guys are being total dicks and hurting the ones you profess to love. Quit it."
Although, the scenes of the Battle of the Line in the B5 prequel movie were wondrous just for the sheer NUMBER of ships on screen.
12/11/09
Mostly really good characters who evolved nicely over time. Garrick, Worf and Dax especially.
They took weaknesses like the Ferengi and the fact that they never went anywhere and turned them into strengths.
Some really good early Ron Moore exploring the importance of religion.
Great huge fleet actions like you showed above.
Sure, it wasn't perfect but it was really darn good.
12/11/09
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I've always thought that it was the Trek that "got it". The right mix of drama, action, humour and darkness, plus good characters, writing and storylines.
Plus I had (have) a huge crush on Dr. Julian Bashir.
12/11/09
12/11/09
@Xicer: I dunno. It seems that whenever I claim that DS9 was the best of Trek, I get a lot of backlash. Don't know why.
@Ghost_in_the_Machine: That was one of the things I liked about it most. They used money. They got involved in local politics. they made deals with the devil because they had no other choice and the might of the federation was too far away to give them choices. All sorts of things that Kirk and Picard would never think of.
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12/11/09
I always liked the fact that they weren't afraid to show the Federation getting their butts kicked every now and then.
12/11/09
12/11/09
That said. I am a staunch detractor of DS9. I could explain why but it all boils down to: I never gave it a chance (on principle alone) and so the window of opportunity is pressure welded shut with rust and failure.
Plus Odo. *shivers*
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12/11/09
DS9 is my favorite Trek after TOS. I doubt you'd get much in the way of disagreement.
I also loved this article. I love the capitol ship battles of the 90s. If the 80s copied the dog fights of Star Wars, the 90s copied the battle of The Wrath of Kahn. Nicholas Meyer wanted a sea battle with heavy capitol ships, not fast fighters. Later battle scenes combined fast ships and larger ships.
12/11/09
@Howard Blair: It's so nice to be on a site where we can talk about this stuff without invoking godwin's rule or calling each other gay. I agree Sisko was weak, but it was such an ensemble show that the other characters picked up the slack - again turning weakness into strength. Not only do I disagree that this was the worst, I don't even agree that "Enterprise" was the worst. I enjoyed it. By far and away the worst Trek was "Voyager." After the finale I turned to my wife and said "Thank god that's over."
The official Dr Eilio Lizardo ranking of trek (tm) goes:
DS9
TOS
TNG
Enterprise
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Voyagerr
12/11/09
I loved the relationships that developed over the course of the series. It wasn't a 'we're the main characters so we all know each other.' Bashir and Garrick, Bashir and O'brian, the intense and fairly complicated relationship between Sisko and Dukat...
To say nothing of the character arcs. I'm thinking specifically of Dumar here. What a complete and total tool that guy was... and look where he ended up.
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12/11/09
Ugh, so many typos. Time to go read "Santa Olivia" for #io9Bookclub, then to bed.
This has been a lot of fun.
12/11/09
Yepp....
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12/11/09
It started by arriving at just the right time. When TNG premiered, I was old enough to watch it but not enough to really appreciate it. But with DS9, I was hooked from the very first episode.
Then there was the complexity of the subject matter... No zooming in, solving the aliens' problem and zooming out again... Instead, the crew of DS9 had to deal with the politics of a single planet and the ramifications of it. They had to deal with fascinating issues of science, religion and post-colonialism. They had to consistently deal with the influence of a single alien enemy. There was no zooming around anyways, safe and secure on a utopian spaceship. They had to find ways of making the diverse community of the space station work. And they still got a little first contact in there from the wormhole.
And then the series kept evolving. Though the whole Klingon war season was a bit of a waste, it did provide one of the best individual scenes in the whole series. Compare how DS9 fares against a whole fleet of Klingon warships vs. the first episode when it almost got blowed up by three Cardassian vessels. It went from being a backwards nowhere station to the most important installation after Earth itself. The Federation's relationship with Bajor kept evolving, and we saw the full breadth of war, from foreshadowing to aftermath. And the characters... The sheer scope of DS9 has actually prevented me from going back to watch it again, since I know what a huge investment of time it would be. I always thought that it should have been followed by a series that took a long, expansive view of Federation politics with a sizeable cast of characters, picking up where DS9 left off. Too bad it was followed by Voyager and it's prequel, Enterprise.
But I generally find that, despite what was said above about Voyager, it's actually DS9 that's the red-headed stepchild. My experience is that it is a fairly divisive show with a tendency towards love-it or hate-it dialectics. It does stand out from the norm of Star Trek shows, still, and that provokes extreme reactions.
12/12/09
Sisko... was... weak...
Sisko... weak...
I'm sorry, I don't understand the idea you're trying to communicate, because it makes no fucking sense no matter how many times I read it.
12/12/09
@Russell Dovey: More the actor than the character. He didn't really sell the pain of his loss and how it affected his relationship with his son. The presence of his son reminded me of the failed Wesley experiment (nothing against Wil Wheaton, just Wesley) and as was stated above, he always sounded like he was out of breath. I never liked Hawk or Spenser for hire so I was prejudiced as well.
Despite all of that, The Cisco definitely grew on me as time went by and I never despised him the way I did most of the characters on Voyager. I was always hoping Janeway, Chakotay, Neelix, Harry Kim, Seska and early Kes would die horrible, painful, slow deaths drawn out over several episodes. Paris, Tuvok and Torres were less annoying and would be permitted quick, clean deaths.
Interesting, if you check his IMDB page, Avery Brooks never acted much at all after DS9.
12/12/09
I like Sisko because he was shouty and unintrospective at times. Eddington, in the episode from which the above quote comes, clearly was in the right and had no qualms about letting Sisko know it. In return Sisko, got shouty and used his appointed power to silence a Federation "threat" deviating from the normal operation of Starfleet authority. I do that too sometimes (but in a non-Federation context, obviously), so it's easy to relate to Sisko.
12/12/09
Regarding his relationship with his son, I thought he did pretty well in portraying how overprotective one would be of your son after you both lost the most important person in your life to a Borg attack.
Jake was okay, IMO, a little over-serious (like all kids on Star Trek except Nog, must be a Federation disease) but at times I really thought he was this guy growing up in a weird place, with no roots except his dad's cooking to keep him sane.
Mostly I agree with you about Voyager's characters, although me and my brother recently had a great time watching it all the way through, about a season per three weeks. Janeway was the exception I'd pluck from your list there, and I'd replace her with Paris.
Although Harry Kim was hilarious, because he was basically Meg from Family Guy, except in space. Doomed from the start.
I'm hoping that someone at Paramount takes a tab of LSD and decides to make a DS9 movie, so Brooks can make a comeback at least one more time. It'll never happen though.
12/12/09
My main memory of this show was how frustrating it was to get episodes about "the kids" or some peuso-romantic episode. Bizarrely out-of-sync with the audience I think? I think this probably not as frustrating on DVD. On tv, with all the waiting, reruns and the hiatus, it was torture.
12/12/09
And of course Odo's latinum bucket.
Woot.
12/11/09
Some of those battles would have been the best *film* battles had they been on the big screen.