USSBurritoTruck

Do people not like “Ferengi Love Songs”?

I very much enjoyed that in season one, each Klingon house had their own uniform, and customs. In the TNG era there is a uniformity to the Klingons, which flattens them to monoculture. Even the simple touches of having House Mo’Kai engage in facial scarification, or House Kor wear war paint implies an expansion to their culture that makes me far more interested in them.

Also, I’ve always enjoyed the scheming Klingons, like the ones we see in TOS, or the Duras Sisters, so Kol really appealed to me as an antagonist.

The new prosthetic seemed like a natural progression of what we saw from TOS, to TMP, to “The Search for Spock” and TNG. I do think the decision to make them all bald in season one was a miss, but it’s otherwise a good design that effectively communicates the ferocity the species is supposed to have.

I wonder if they wanted them to all be bald if it wouldn’t have made more sense to have T’Kuvma’s followers be bald, and the others that arrive after he lights the beacon engage in tonsure once T’Kuvma becomes a martyr.

Oh, and the elongated craniums on the women was also an odd choice that I’m glad was walked back for season two.

The timeline fluidity is a bit of a frustration for me as well, despite the fact that I've been reading comic books for 30 years, and it doesn't bother me a whit when I see a flashback to Spider-Man's origin and people have smart phones or whatever. But even trying to reconcile Spock claim in "Space Seed" that the last of Earth's World Wars took place in the 90s, with the implication in "Encounter at Farpoint" that a war was fought with atomic weapons leading up to the mid-21st century.

Part of the problem, obviously, is that they every decided to give anything actual dates. I understand the inclination though; no doubt in 1967 when they were sitting down first build out this world, they wanted to present the idea of WWIII to be looming on the horizon. A lot of the people viewing this when it aired episode would remember being shown videos telling school children to duck under their desks for protection in case of a nuclear attack. But then Voyager travels to 1996 in "Future's End" and there's no indication that humanity just went through the third World War.

Hell, in TOS, continuity wasn't maintained episode to episode for some things. In "Balance of Terror" they hadn't added photon torpedoes to canon yet, so the Enterprise was firing phasers bolts with proximity explosions at the Romulan Bird-of-Prey. There are a handful of different names for the organization the crew serves before Starfleet was named in "Court Martial" and even after that, they still called it Spacefleet Command one last time in "The Squire of Gothos".

Anyways! Obviously I think the subject of continuity in Star Trek is pretty interesting in and of itself, and I would argue that visual continuity aside, the new iterations from Disco onwards have been fairly mindful of canon. There are occasionally things that skirt the line, but very little that actually break continuity. A big one for me is the site-to-site beaming. In "Day of the Dove", Kirk asks if it's ever been done and Spock discusses how dangerous beaming from one point on the ship to another is, and how it requires pinpoint accuracy, but in Disco they do it all the time, and usually just with a voice command to the computer. I also don't like how fast the transporters on Disco and SNW work, but I don't think that rises to the level of a continuity violation.

The idea that the new wave of Trek is lousy with continuity errors is, in my opinion, largely perpetuated by people looking for reasons to dislike the shows, and who don't know canon as well as they believe.

I can tell from your shoes that you're a person of refinement and affluence.

Okay, but do you prefer TNG’s Ferengi episodes, or TNG Ferengi episodes?

Yeah, most of my pins are from various podcasts.

I do have a couple vegan pins, and until it sadly fell off, I did have a COVID-19 Vaccinated pin designed to look like the Ninja Turtles logo. Those are the most political things I generally wear.

I would argue that there are some fairly significant differences between SNW's Klingons and TNG's, just as there were differences between TOS's, and differences every time they showed up in a TOS era movie.

Hell, Michael Dorn's prosthetic for Worf changed significantly between seasons.

That sort of thing is not a continuity violation. At least not in my mind.

Who actually wears badges and pins in North America however unless they are usable in cosplay?

I have a bunch of pins on various bags. I don't like the Fansets ones that much, though.

Obviously people can say whatever they want, but I personally don't see any value in dragging something down when instead I could be lifting the thing I do like up. Like, imagine going in to the job at the end of the week and saying, "Hell yeah, I love Fridays!" and some sad sack co-worker is all, "Yeah, but don't you just hate Mondays?" Buddy, why? What would be the point in being so negative, when instead you could be positive?

Or, let's give another example: I personally think "Picard" was a bad television series, which started out kind of a mess, and got worse with every season. I know other people really enjoyed season three, but I think it is the single worse season of Trek, and it's not even a contest. Now, imagine if every time someone made a post praising, some other series or new episode, I jumped in with, "Yeah, at least this one was better than season three of PIC." What am I actually contributing to the conversation?

Furthermore, I don't consider, "This doesn't feel like [X]," to actually be criticism. Critique is detailed analysis. "I don't like this because it's not what I want it to be," is just whining. Critique is an important aspect of art, but too many people confuse their hot takes as valid criticism. You brought up Shives, and while he and I disagree on a lot of things -- and agree on others -- regarding Trek, I would never say that he is not detailed in his videos. Biased, sure, but we all are. I can't speak to the specific example you gave, but I know that at least in his scripted videos he generally isn't dropping hot takes like that. Sometimes they make their way into his more off the cuff unscripted videos, but I would be staggered if he's ever released something that was solely focused on saying one show is good because it isn't as bad as another show he dislikes.

One issue with the more-recent shows is that they don’t have a lot of continuity, to the extent that they would seem to implicitly contradict each-other (and themselves, between seasons)

Can you give some examples?

I was actually saying this is the way the ships function on each series based on the analogies given previously.

Okay, well that's patently ridiculous. How is Kirk's Enterprise a monarchy in TOS, but an anarchy in TAS? How does the Discovery crew function as a dystopian society, especially in seasons two and three? Where is your evidence that the NX-01 is a military dictatorship? How is the crew of Deep Space 9 a communist society, but Voyager's crew are capitalistic?

Where is your supporting evidence for any of this?

I'm not sure I follow the central thesis of what you're trying to articulate here.

Are you saying that the way the ships function is similar to the government model you've assigned them? Or that most of the cultures the ships encounter follow those models?

Are you able to give some actual examples from the shows demonstrating that the comparison holds true over the multiple seasons each iteration of Trek had, or anything at all to support your claim?