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Things you love about Star Trek

Cassie

Cassie

Touching the monolith
Staff member
I've been watching so much Star Trek since I got rid of DirecTV and went back to an OTA antenna. Every Star Trek series is on every night (except Saturdays), and they are on in order. So I've been thinking about Star Trek a lot! I was wondering what are your favorites. Not just episodes or series or characters, but other things like themes. For instance, there are lots of holodeck/holosuite themed episodes, and time travel themed episodes, and alternate universe themed episodes, etc. Also there are characters that maybe you don't like that much, but have had a few really good scenes that make you almost forgive them for being terrible (Neelix :rwmad: ). Anyway, just post what you want to post about!

I will go first!

Lwaxana Troi - not my favorite character, she's pretty annoying through all of TNG, but I loved her on DS9. My favorite Lwaxana scene is when she's trapped with Odo in the turbolift (The Forsaken), and she offers to hold Odo in her skirt when he can no longer hold his shape. I loved it when she took off her wig to make him feel less self conscious and embarrassed about his predicament. The friendship they had after that was very sweet.
 
TOS and DS9. I would say "when it felt like they were on a frontier", except somebody would point to ENT and VOY, and despite the settings for both, they never had that feeling.
 
Timeless (VOY) - One of the few times they spent the money on winter sets full of ice and snow. Plus, GEORDI!

Plus, cool gross Seven parts all cut up and stuff!

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Kirk and Kor in 'Errand of Mercy' - From watching the original series recently I've really grown to appreciate the character of Captain James Kirk even more. I mean, I always liked him but I noticed just how well written that character was (in the first two seasons anyway) and what a great role model he would be for ANYONE.



SORRY ABOUT THE POOR QUALITY but I think you can still see the greatness of the "go climb a tree" moment.
 
Neelix - I really do not like Neelix, and I dread seeing his dumb face at the start of Voyager because i know it will be a Neelix episode... but the one Neelix-centric episode that I really enjoyed was Riddles. Neelix and Tuvok are returning to Voyager on the Delta Flyer, and Neelix is annoying Tuvok (we are all Tuvok!) with riddles. Tuvok notices someone is downloading their data and gets out his tricorder and then is zapped by an invisible alien. The zapping causes Tuvok to go into a deep coma, and then when he wakes up he has lost his memories and his ability to control his emotions because his brain has been damaged. Neelix takes care of Tuvok through the episode while the doctor, the crew, and an alien named Naroq figure out who the secret aliens are. This different Tuvok befriends Neelix and through Tuvok we can finally appreciate Neelix. Tuvok told him he didn't want to go back to his old self, who merely tolerated Neelix, and then Neelix convinced him the ship needed him back and at that moment I thought THIS IS A GOOD NEELIX EPISODE.
 
The Magnificent Ferengi and Business As Usual (DS9) - Best use of the Ferengi race in all of Trek. Roddenberry didn't set them up very well in TNG, so they became comic foils over time. These two episodes took them to their comic extreme (TMF) and to their dramatic extreme (BAU).
 
I remember going over to a friend's apartment with another friend circa 1987 around 5pm on a Monday evening, getting baked, and discovering that TOS was in syndication on a local station at 6pm. I think it was "Whom Gods Destroy", which as you can imagine is much more interesting whilst stoned.

So we made a sort of ritual of it. Every Monday evening we would reconvene, get baked, and watch Star Trek. We dug through his closet digging for red, gold and blue shirts. We started doing audio commentary tracks while the episode was playing. We'd seen all the episodes before multiple times anyway, but it was a fun diversion from school and work at the time.

Star Trek: Let's find us some low mileage pitwoofies and help 'em build a memory.
 
When Voyager was put on Netflix I went through all my favourite episodes and after two or three I picked up on the connection they had. The ship always blew up at some point. Those what if stories are always so intruiging and they're the only way to explore certain ideas, so the reset button can usually be forgiven.
 
Timeless, Year of Hell, Relativity, Deadlock and Living Witness (the ship isn't destroyed, but it's set in the far future when everyone's dead). And there are bound to be others.
 
Khan Noonien Singh (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan) - I know this is a really obvious one, but he's still the best villain character Star Trek's ever had and that really deserves to be mentioned. Almost every Trek movie after TWoK tried to copy the success of the Khan character with a crazy vengeance obsessed villain, but Khan worked due to a specific set of circumstances, not just because he was a crazy and vengeance obsessed. It was fifteen years after Khan's first appearance in the original series, he's a mistake from Kirk's past returning to face an older Kirk struggling to accept his own mortality. The older Khan desires revenge, yes, but he's not gone completely insane. He's not just shouting about wanting revenge and doing crazy illogical stuff like blowing up Vulcan because Romulus blows up in the future. He's still highly intelligent and calculated and has a damn good reason for wanting to hurt Kirk. He feels like as complete a character as Kirk, Spock or anyone else in the movie. And he has that chest. Being played by Ricardo Montalban is also key. Other Trek villains might have been played by arguably better actors than Montalban (Benedicst Cumberbatch! Idris Elba! Christopher Plumer! Even a young Tom Hardy!), but none were absolutely as perfectly cast as Montalban and none gave as strong a performance in their Trek movies. And none were as well written.



 
Star Trek: The Motion Picture is an incredibly flawed film that I love to death because there's no other Star Trek that's like it. There's no other Star Trek that's so 70's, or that just goes "fuck it" and tries to do Star Trek's version of 2001, or that has Gene's totally crazy fingerprints all over it. It's a film that sometimes looks like total ass and at other times has some of the most beautiful imagery Star Trek has ever done. It's a film that showed now not to write the crew of the Enterprise in a motion picture, allowing for the amazing writing of The Wrath of Khan to say "Actually, no, here's how you do it". It's a film that has scenes where all the guys get horny for Ilia BECAUSE SHE'S JUST SUCH A SEXY ALIEN FROM A GENE RODDENBERRY SEX PLANET but then also at times it has lines like "It knows only that it needs, Commander. But, like so many of us... it does not know what." and you're like YEAH FUCKING RIGHT SPOCK JUST DESCRIBED THE HUMAN CONDITION.

Also it has some of the best music ever written for film ever.

 
The opening scene of Star Trek (2009) - You can say what you like about the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot movies. I certainly have problems with them (though mainly the second one.) But the opening scene of his first Trek movie is truly great. We're dropped right into the action and it's a type of action we've never seen in a Star Trek movie before. It's been seven years since Star Trek: Nemesis stunk up cinemas so the relaunched movie franchise had to impress and does so from the start. It looks like a huge budget blockbuster movie! Because it is! Nemesis also featured a big evil black starship but it never looked as impressive as Nero's insanely large Narada does, as it almost swallows up the U.S.S. Kelvin. The action is chaotic and exciting but there's a clear story we can follow here as Captain Robau goes over to the Narada, knowing he is not likely to return, and leaves first officer George Kirk as Captain and in charge of saving the lives of the crew. In only a couple of minutes screentime we can totally buy Robau as a badass leader. Ayel asks him strange questions about Ambassador Spock and the current Stardate, before Nero murders him in a rage. We don't know what's going on here yet but it's interesting! But the most important character in the scene is George Kirk, played by a pre Thor Chris Hemsworth. He gives a great performance in a small role, showing the promise that will one day make him a huge star! Then we realise we're witnessing the birth of James T. Kirk himself, as his father sacrifices himself to save everyone. It might be a bit cliched but it TOTALLY WORKS. Michael Giacchino's great music certainly helps as it replaces the sound of the battle. We've seen "RAMMING SPEED" scenes in Start Trek before but they've never looked this pretty or had this type of emotion as George hears his son crying for the first time moments before dying.



But that's not all! After the Kelvin's destroyed we get a really great shot of the tiny little escape pods flying away from the massive Narada, which transitions into the Star Trek logo as Giacchino's classic 'Enterprising Young Men' theme plays for the first time.



It's the best opening to a Star Trek movie and, call me crazy, probably the best scene J.J. has directed for any film.
 
Written within the same episode:

"Three Cardassians raped her and smashed her skull."

"Get the cheese to Sick Bay!"

(Voyager, S01E15 Learning Curve)
 
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