• 0 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 6th, 2025

help-circle
rss

  • It’s a comedy, so I hope so too! I imagine the planet, being a vacation/pleasure planet, will have a lot of kinks that are taboo to the Federation and that’s where you will find the narrative tension as they apply for membership. The planet will have a constitution at odds with the Fed, full of kinks. They might welcome species that have kinks not outlined in said constitution. They might welcome federation citizens that are exploring their non-Fed kinks on this planet.

    We’ve seen plenty of criticism of the Federation’s nanny-state. Lately, that criticism has come from the writers of the shows who seem to have lost the narrative that the Federation is our ideal. Sure, it has issues, but none of us should be ashamed of reaching for utopia. I hope the new show is a continuation of the SNW and Prodigy reboot of a less cynical Trek.


  • DS9 pulled off a political space drama that could rival Dallas or MASH and they got 7 seasons. I’m rewatching it again and I still can’t believe that prime time viewers would sit through these episodes that are just 2 people arguing the nuances of humanity for 45 minutes. It’s nothing like TV is today.

    As far as a movie, I think the TNG movies weren’t that Trek. They often took the characters in strange directions, favored more digestible plotlines, and wrote dialogue that you’d expect from AI. I value the television wellspring of Trek in the 90s/early 2000s. It is so cool, and that era is still bearing fruit today.

    I would like to see more of the DS9 characters, and like to see what a movie budget would do, but I don’t trust that a DS9 movie would’ve been given the reverence needed to make it right. It has been great to see Picard and the ST world in the later years, but I don’t know if it makes the lore any better. I’m not sure that we are any closer to another golden decade of ST.

    Thanks for posting this and helping me get some of my thoughts on DS9 coalesced. Do you have a DS9 movie plot you think would’ve worked? Those ‘golden years’ of Trek were also open to the most fan input, with concepts and entire scripts being submitted. If we had 26 episode seasons to play with, maybe they’d take our call.







  • When we talk about time travel in fictional universes, almost all of the narratives follow one of three “truths:”

    1. Time is one linear thread. What you do now will have consequence X and if you do something different it will have consequence Y. A simple illustration is the movie Sliding Doors. But the same can be said for Back to the Future or Bill and Ted’s. If you make a change to the prime timeline, it will ripple into the past/future. Your cousins will disappear from the 3x5 photo!

    2. Time has branches, a truly infinite number of universes and possibilities. Really, as far as I’m concerned, the best example of this idea is Rick and Morty. That show has the freedom to both cook our brains about the concept and also hold a mirror to its ridiculousness. You also see it more famously in the MCU, with their multitude of Lokis and such, though the TVA is still hell-bent on a prime timeline. But the multiverse is the natural order, with only 80s inspired bureaucracy to keep it in check.

    3. Time is a combination of the two, which leads us to Trek. Time is linear, so Jake Sisko can tell his dad to dodge a beam that travels at light speed. But time is also non-linear, so… I dunno… most of Voyager. When Seven came aboard with her temporal node all bets were off as far as what could even be considered a prime timeline.

    Moreso, the mirror universe is a parallel to our own, marching along at the same pace and whose characters are developing at the same rate as the prime timeline. So, there is no prime timeline, and no multiverse. Just the clean-shaven and the goatee universes.

    And to answer your question: yes, I think Trek trends toward a “prime” timeline. It’s honestly the way our brains work. With all the posturing of the wormhole aliens, we just don’t work in a non-linear fashion. And maybe more importantly, good stories don’t work that way either, Kurt Vonnegut aside. Time travel is wearing plot armor in EVERY movie and show because no one has a handle on it.

    Thank you for bringing this up. It’s something I think about too much.




  • We all have to ask why this is happening, because it sure as hell isn’t because of immigration or fentanyl. If the powers that be are trying to trigger another Great Depression, what is their end goal?

    In the US, since the 60s, we have been steadily marching towards the complete privatization of all industries. With the current administration clearly dismantling the federal government and saying things like opening up the public parks for private interests, I think this is their end game. The first Great Depression led to strong government intervention; now, with a mere shell of a federal government, the only ones poised to act after a second Great Depression would be entrenched corporations.

    They will buy all the land from bankrupt farmers and carve the US up into smaller corporate States. Individual Americans will own nothing. The corporate States will jockey back and forth to drive profits up at the expense of all natural and labor resources.

    It will be hell.





  • I just started my DS9 rewatch today, having just completed Voyager, Enterprise and SNW in my “COVID then RSV then ENT infection” couch-misery marathon. I saw the Q episode with Vash just hours ago - loved O’Brien’s reaction when he recognized Q.

    I think they developed Voyager and DS9 to be two halves of the Star Trek whole. Voyager was flung so far that almost every species was new, so right from the start it highlighted the awkward first handshakes the Federation had to endure. DS9 included (mostly) known species and highlighted the increasingly awkward second handshakes, and third, and on and on: the real work of diplomacy beyond first contact. It’s a political drama, The West Wing in space. Q has no patience for such intricacies, though that is what he often says he values so much in humanity.