Old monster to return (spoiler)
Soze
Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
The Doctor
All right ...
--
Member - Liberal International This is doc...@nl2k.ab.ca Ici doc...@nl2k.ab.ca
God, Queen and country! Never Satan President Republic! Beware AntiChrist rising!
http://twitter.com/rootnl2k http://www.myspace.com/502748630
Merry Christmas 2009 and Happy New Year 2010
pbo...@aol.com
I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
monsters.
Phil
Alan Sailsbury
As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
The Doctor
The Doctor
pbo...@aol.com
> In article <a40400ba-85fa-4ad4-93ab-733d88010...@t19g2000vbc.googlegroups.com>,
>
> pbow...@aol.com <pbow...@aol.com> wrote:
> >On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> >> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
> >> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>
> >I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
> >of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
> >monsters.
>
> >Phil
>
> Give him a cahnce. REcall ST:TNG ?
Sadly, I do. I gave it a chance for seven years, and at its best it
still only approached barely watchable.
Phil
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:a58957af-8c9f-4cca...@j4g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
So you watched the entire run then since it lasted for seven seasons.
Agamemnon
"Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
news:7oqjjuF...@mid.individual.net...
> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
So no Ice Warriors again for another season.
How about a story where global warming causes the Antarctic glacier to
completly melt in 2020, which unleashes an invasion of Earth by the
Silurians and the Sea Devils, plus some assorted CGI dinosaurs?
Maybe I should do the script for my Christmas offering for 2009 after the
huge success of Planet of the Cybermen, which or course was designed to be
filmed around Northampton which is where the 11th Doctor as chosen by Steve
Moffat is from.
pbo...@aol.com
> <pbow...@aol.com> wrote in message
That was rather the point, Aggy. If I hadn't seen the whole run, I
wouldn't be in a position to say it was crap from start to finish,
would I?
Well, okay, season 6 had a few good stories, but there hasn't yet been
a Trek series with a lower ratio of quality to dross.
Phil
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:fcd21ae3-43c9-4079...@m26g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
And you watched the entire run even though you hated it?
>
> Well, okay, season 6 had a few good stories, but there hasn't yet been
> a Trek series with a lower ratio of quality to dross.
So you didn't watch Voyager then?
>
> Phil
pbo...@aol.com
I watched it as a kid; I was less discriminating back then (though
even then I caught it in bits and pieces while it was on permanent
loop on BBC2, rather than making a habit of watching it from start to
finish). I rewatched a lot of it in sequence as an adult because I had
more-or-less fond memories of it as a kid - but it was almost
uniformly terrible. I made a particular effort to catch up on the
episodes regarded as especially good, and those don't stand up either
- Best of Both Worlds was certainly good by TNG standards, but its
famed cliffhanger was underwhelming and it's been massively overhyped
over the years.
True, lots of shows one has nostalgic memories of as a kid don't
withstand adult scrutiny - classic Who is possibly the prime example.
The difference is, even while it was mostly crap, dreadfully acted,
badly scripted, wholly devoid of characterisation and with
preposterous stories, Who was nearly always *fun* (even during the
McCoy era). TNG compounded being rubbish (a scene in the appropriately-
titled "Disaster" where they decide to vent a fire into space and
manage to survive decompression by holding onto a railing is pretty
much as bad as the Myrka scene, albeit with better effects) with being
not only deathly boring, but also by being preachy and taking itself
so seriously it hurt.
>
>
> > Well, okay, season 6 had a few good stories, but there hasn't yet been
> > a Trek series with a lower ratio of quality to dross.
>
> So you didn't watch Voyager then?
Yes I did. That's why the higher proportion of crap in TNG is so
strong an indictment.
Voyager suffered from being too serious just like TNG - but did at
least have Bride of Chaotica, and was rarely as preachy.
Its characters were stereotypes who never developed, just like TNG -
but unlike TNG they were at least more interesting to start with, and
the Doctor didn't get a reset button pressed at the end of every
'character' episode the way Data did.
Even Voyager had less technobabble and fewer deus ex machina endings
(not hard since TNG had a deus ex machina ending nearly every week)
What's more, when Voyager did good stories, they were good stories -
when TNG did good stories they almost never transcended the qualifier
"good ... for TNG". Several Voyager stories are on a par with some of
DS9's strongest; few if any of TNG's are in the same league.
Conversely, only a couple of Voyager's worst were as bad as the worst
TNG had to offer.
Phil
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:aafc4c2a-09bb-4c53...@o28g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
You must have been watching a different Voyager or a different TNG. Voyger
was dire for the first 3 series until they got rid of that 3 year old Ocumba
girl whatshername (who was only supposed to have lived to the age of 2) who
was Neelix's girfriend and brought in 7of9 and even then everyone still had
to put up with Neelix. And like 7of9 wasn't a copy of Data. Not.
And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you serious.
It was a allegory of the Bosnian War and was trounced by Babylon 5 which it
ripped off (or was it the other way around since I seem to remember Babylon
5 being shown first). DS9 was only good for the first season and maybe the
first half of the second up until they brought in the Changelings as the
recurring villains and then made them the subject of the entire story line
of every episode. At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what happened
in the previous seasons, but the entire premise of Voyager was what made it
worse than DS9 since you knew they'd never get back to the Alpha Quadrant
until the final episode and their warp speed calculations for it taking 70
years at warp 9 made no sense at all.
TNG was far superior since you could watch almost any episode in any order
you wanted just like TOS, and you could more or less do that with Enterprise
until they ruined it by concentrating on that ridiculous Temporal Cold War
(sound familiar). But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which lasted
the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the Beta
Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager, by which time it was to late for
season 4 which was more like Doctor Who in having multipart episodic stories
to save it.
>
> Phil
The Doctor
The Doctor
Alan Sailsbury
>
>
> Maybe I should do the script for my Christmas offering for 2009 after
> the huge success of Planet of the Cybermen, which or course was designed
> to be filmed around Northampton which is where the 11th Doctor as chosen
> by Steve Moffat is from.
>
Yeah send it to Moffat Aggy. Let us know how you get on.
The Doctor
pbo...@aol.com
And of course TNG season 3 was fantastic, yes? I did say Voyager was
mostly crap - but it was still mostly better crap than TNG. And it did
have some strong stories in its early years - Emanations, Jetrel, Non
Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG have
any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3? Of
all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a couple
of real stinkers.
until they got rid of that 3 year old Ocumba
> girl whatshername (who was only supposed to have lived to the age of 2)
Age of 10, wasn't it, but she had her lifespan magically extended if I
recall? Don't remember, but you're right - she was appalling. Still,
she was a minor enough character in some other characters' episodes to
be almost tolerable at times.
who
> was Neelix's girfriend and brought in 7of9 and even then everyone still had
> to put up with Neelix.
The only problem I have with Neelix is the makeup. They seem to have
intended him as the series' comic relief at the start, but when they
decided to more-or-less ditch that angle the clown makeup became a
distraction. In the event, while he could be intentionally irritating
in other characters' stories, I can't recall more than one or two
Neelix episodes I didn't like, and several were among the best the
series had to offer.
And like 7of9 wasn't a copy of Data. Not.
But Data was a copy of Spock. Every Trek series has a Spock clone -
Voyager for no terribly obvious reason had two. I was never a huge fan
of Seven of Nine, whose main virtue in terms of the series was not
being Kes, but she was one of the focal characters in one of Voyager's
best-ever, One Small Step.
> And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you serious.
Yes - few people who've seen it past about season 2 (possibly season
3) would disagree.
> It was a allegory of the Bosnian War
No it wasn't. The Bajoran/Cardassian story arc was an allegory of WWII
(indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift from
a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had even
started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
all that popular.
But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why would
that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
Message of the Week storylines.
and was trounced by Babylon 5 which it
> ripped off (or was it the other way around since I seem to remember Babylon
> 5 being shown first).
DS9 was shown first - which is why it was in season 5 when B5 was in
season 3. Despite that B5 fans often claim that Stracynski, being
apparently rather dim, very naive or both, shouted out minute details
of his plots years before he made the show, so that DS9 could copy him
down the line (oh yes, the same people also claim the Borg were based
on his original idea for the Shadows).
Either way it hardly matters - in fact I've often said that it makes a
good yardstick that they used so many similar stories, because it
facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but was
poorly-scripted, badly acted (except for Londo and G'Kar, who were
pretty much the only reason to watch the show), overly pretentious and
ultimately with a good-vs-evil space fantasy storyline that, once you
got over the novelty of a sci-fi show that didn't contradict its own
continuity every other episode, was far too simplistic, unsatisfying
and shoddily-handled to stretch out to a four year run (although it
was supported by a few strong subplots that were markedly more
interesting than the Shadow War).
DS9 was only good for the first season and maybe the
> first half of the second up until they brought in the Changelings as the
> recurring villains and then made them the subject of the entire story line
> of every episode.
You didn't watch much DS9, did you Aggy? The Changelings were
introduced at the start of season 3 - they appeared in all of three
other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of season
3 onwards...
At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what happened
> in the previous seasons,
That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash in
on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling driving
an entire series. But DS9 did have its standalone stories as well as
the main arc.
but the entire premise of Voyager was what made it
> worse than DS9 since you knew they'd never get back to the Alpha Quadrant
> until the final episode and their warp speed calculations for it taking 70
> years at warp 9 made no sense at all.
What bothered me slightly more was that they made Voyager's premise
the rush to get home and then only mentioned it every so often - after
the pilot I think it was about episode 4 before anyone even thought of
it again.
> TNG was far superior since you could watch almost any episode in any order
> you wanted just like TOS,
Why does that make it superior? Is modern Who superior to classic Who
simply because you can watch the episodes in any order (for the most
part), while you have to watch the old ones in serials (and in Key to
Time, as an entire season)?
and you could more or less do that with Enterprise
> until they ruined it by concentrating on that ridiculous Temporal Cold War
> (sound familiar).
Episode 1, you mean. I'm among the few who liked the idea of the
Temporal Cold War, the writers just didn't have much idea how to do a
story arc - rather than actually doing a 'temporal cold war' they did
a 'let's have an excuse to use time travel whenever we want to ignore
continuity' story.
But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which lasted
> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the Beta
> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
better season than the previous ones. You just appear not to like arc-
driven storytelling in general - no wonder you dislike so much modern
TV.
by which time it was to late for
> season 4 which was more like Doctor Who in having multipart episodic stories
> to save it.
It all formed part of one arc - you had to see the Eugenics War story
to make sense of the Klingon story, for instance. Surely the fact that
they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
were chopped into smaller chunks?
Phil
Mr.Smartypants
> "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
>
> news:7oqjjuF...@mid.individual.net...
>
> > But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> > Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
> > to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>
> So no Ice Warriors again for another season.
>
> How about a story where global warming causes the Antarctic glacier to
> completly melt in 2020, which unleashes an invasion of Earth by the
> Silurians and the Sea Devils, plus some assorted CGI dinosaurs?
And after the glacier melts an exploration team discovers the 4 lost
funnels of the Titanic which *someone* (hint, hint) lost years before.
Hulahoop
and please post his response
I could do with a laugh
Regards
Ged
Soze
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message news:f5c91955-170f-45e2-a035-
> DS9 was shown first - which is why it was in season 5 when B5 was in
> season 3. Despite that B5 fans often claim that Stracynski, being
> apparently rather dim, very naive or both, shouted out minute details
> of his plots years before he made the show, so that DS9 could copy him
> down the line (oh yes, the same people also claim the Borg were based
> on his original idea for the Shadows).
DS9 was first shown in january `93, Babylon 5 in february `93. I`ve still
never seen any DS9 past the first half of S1 but I`ve repeatedly heard it
didn`t become interesting until it`s 4th series. I loved Babylon
5...admittedly it hasn`t aged well watching it again now but it still
remains a landmark piece of SFTV IMO.
pbo...@aol.com
> <pbow...@aol.com> wrote in message news:f5c91955-170f-45e2-a035-
> > DS9 was shown first - which is why it was in season 5 when B5 was in
> > season 3. Despite that B5 fans often claim that Stracynski, being
> > apparently rather dim, very naive or both, shouted out minute details
> > of his plots years before he made the show, so that DS9 could copy him
> > down the line (oh yes, the same people also claim the Borg were based
> > on his original idea for the Shadows).
>
> DS9 was first shown in january `93, Babylon 5 in february `93. I`ve still
> never seen any DS9 past the first half of S1 but I`ve repeatedly heard it
> didn`t become interesting until it`s 4th series.
It's not so much that it wasn't interesting, more that it wasn't doing
anything new - seasons 1 to 3 were mostly just standard Star Trek
stories. But season 1 was pretty terrible; sadly you missed its
highlights if you only saw the first half, since the final two stories
of season 1 were very strong, IMO the best first-season episodes of
any Trek. The writers effectively relaunched the show in season 4 with
a new pilot - on the downside it lumbered the show with Worf, who
served mostly to show just how little his character had developed in
seven years on the Enterprise in comparison with the DS9 cast's
development in four, but it paved the way for better things and even
gave the Star Trek universe an interesting Klingon character, if you
can believe it.
I loved Babylon
> 5...admittedly it hasn`t aged well watching it again now but it still
> remains a landmark piece of SFTV IMO.
I agree that it was a landmark, and that's also why it's aged so
drastically in only a few years - it was the first high-profile SF
show (despite its Star Trek links and higher ratings, DS9 was never a
terribly 'high profile' show) to try arc-based novelesque storytelling
of the sort that's now expected in drama in all genres. That made it a
trendsetter, but also destined to age badly since it sold itself so
heavily on something that wasn't a novelty for very long. Like a lot
of first attempts, B5 executed its ideas very poorly in retrospect -
novelesque storytelling it may be, but it's not a novel you'd choose
to read. The central plot was thin and story angles that had been
building up to conclusions in some cases for years were routinely
resolved with deus ex machina, swept under the carpet (Narn/Centauri
conflict? Oh by the way, it's not there any more) or more or less
forgotten. This is not a fault B5's successors have avoided by any
means, but comparing it with, say, Battlestar Galactica, the newer
show has stronger ideas to play with in the first place.
Lord of the Rings in Space doesn't impress any more. Heroic good vs.
evil fantasy has been superceded by stories that examine the motives
of the people involved on both sides. Stories where all the
protagonists end up as leaders of their respective factions are tired
and predictable. People want story concepts a bit more refined than
"there's this big war against an evil menace from the beginning of
time", and their politics more sophisticated than caricatures of
delegates arguing in debating chambers until Our Heroes make an
impassioned speech that brings everyone on-side. And perhaps above all
the very idea of 'space operas' has been out of fashion since Star
Trek bit the dust - sci-fi shows don't "do" space any more, and BSG
only got away with it by pretending as hard as it could that it wasn't
set on spaceships.
Having said all that, not all of B5's faults can be laid at the
passage of time - far from it. Lots of old space operas are still
enjoyable for the nostalgia. As I mentioned before, B5 was badly-acted
and the dialogue was mostly poor. I was watching it at the time, and
right from the start the effects struck me as being very poor quality
even on a limited budget. Stracynski's defence was always that Star
Trek had much more money, but most of that money did not go into
effects (though a lot probably did on sets) - Star Trek is notorious
in all incarnations for using Blue Peteresque materials to create its
effects. Something as simple as a model spaceship of the sort they
could manufacture and make a profit on for less than £20 produced
better results than computer graphics right up until the very end of
Voyager's run, and yet B5 insisted on using CGI that wasn't up to
scratch several years earlier. And you can do a lot better with cheap
wigs and rubber suits than B5 ever managed for its aliens (what *were*
they thinking with the Centauri and Minbari?)
Phil
The Doctor
Mr.Smartypants <bunghol...@lycos.com> wrote:
>On Dec 18, 1:45=A0am, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@hello.to.NO_SPAM> wrote:
>> "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
>>
>> news:7oqjjuF...@mid.individual.net...
>>
>> > But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>ere
>> > to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>>
>> So no Ice Warriors again for another season.
>>
>> How about a story where global warming causes the Antarctic glacier to
>> completly melt in 2020, which unleashes an invasion of Earth by the
>> Silurians and the Sea Devils, plus some assorted CGI dinosaurs?
>
>
>
>And after the glacier melts an exploration team discovers the 4 lost
>funnels of the Titanic which *someone* (hint, hint) lost years before.
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> Maybe I should do the script for my Christmas offering for 2009 after the
>e
>> filmed around Northampton which is where the 11th Doctor as chosen by Ste=
>ve
>> Moffat is from.
>
TRolls chronic liar MSP.
The Doctor
Hulahoop <sween...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>On Dec 19, 4:12=A0am, Alan Sailsbury <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>> Agamemnon wrote:
>>
>> > Maybe I should do the script for my Christmas offering for 2009 after
>d
>> > to be filmed around Northampton which is where the 11th Doctor as chose=
>n
>> > by Steve Moffat is from.
>>
>> Yeah send it to Moffat Aggy. Let us know how you get on.
>
>and please post his response
>
>I could do with a laugh
>
>Regards
>
>Ged
LOL @ Ged.
Alan Sailsbury
Perhaps Aggy could also send his CGI submission of the Titanic to The
Mill for their appraisal. :-)
The Doctor
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:f5c91955-170f-45e2...@v30g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
The early years were the worst years of it. It didn't have any good stories
there at all.
> Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
> bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG have
> any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3? Of
> all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
No way. The pilot was the worst of all of the ST pilots. Even the title was
ridiculous. It might as well have been called The Janitor. That's how
exciting it was.
> probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a couple
> of real stinkers.
You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being terrible
until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
>
> until they got rid of that 3 year old Ocumba
>> girl whatshername (who was only supposed to have lived to the age of 2)
>
> Age of 10, wasn't it, but she had her lifespan magically extended if I
In the final series she was 9 or 10 so she started off at 3.
> recall? Don't remember, but you're right - she was appalling. Still,
> she was a minor enough character in some other characters' episodes to
> be almost tolerable at times.
Except you had to put up with Neelix as well so almost all the episodes were
intolerable.
>
> who
>> was Neelix's girfriend and brought in 7of9 and even then everyone still
>> had
>> to put up with Neelix.
>
> The only problem I have with Neelix is the makeup. They seem to have
> intended him as the series' comic relief at the start, but when they
> decided to more-or-less ditch that angle the clown makeup became a
> distraction. In the event, while he could be intentionally irritating
> in other characters' stories, I can't recall more than one or two
> Neelix episodes I didn't like, and several were among the best the
> series had to offer.
Only after they stopped using him for comedy.
>
> And like 7of9 wasn't a copy of Data. Not.
>
> But Data was a copy of Spock. Every Trek series has a Spock clone -
> Voyager for no terribly obvious reason had two. I was never a huge fan
> of Seven of Nine, whose main virtue in terms of the series was not
> being Kes, but she was one of the focal characters in one of Voyager's
> best-ever, One Small Step.
>
>> And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you
>> serious.
>
> Yes - few people who've seen it past about season 2 (possibly season
> 3) would disagree.
>
>> It was a allegory of the Bosnian War
>
> No it wasn't. The Bajoran/Cardassian story arc was an allegory of WWII
No it wasn't. It was Bosnia. It concentrated on getting the Bajoran and
Cardassians to make peace with each other in the same time as the Rambullet
fiasco was going on between the Bosnian Serbs (Cardasians) and Muslims
(Bajorans). WWII wasn't the Nazis invading Israel and then them making up so
DS9 was not an allegory to WWII.
> (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift from
> a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals and was
screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia were being held. All that obviously went over your head.
> introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had even
Which was all about the break-up of Yugoslavia, with Ro and then Keira being
a Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighter.
> started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
> was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
> all that popular.
What? It became even more political and thus even worse in later years.
>
> But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why would
> that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical stories,
they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on are
current.
> there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
> Message of the Week storylines.
TNG's messages are better in the long term.
>
> and was trounced by Babylon 5 which it
>> ripped off (or was it the other way around since I seem to remember
>> Babylon
>> 5 being shown first).
>
> DS9 was shown first - which is why it was in season 5 when B5 was in
> season 3. Despite that B5 fans often claim that Stracynski, being
> apparently rather dim, very naive or both, shouted out minute details
> of his plots years before he made the show, so that DS9 could copy him
> down the line (oh yes, the same people also claim the Borg were based
> on his original idea for the Shadows).
Oh, so he stole the Shadows from the Cybermen too?
>
> Either way it hardly matters - in fact I've often said that it makes a
> good yardstick that they used so many similar stories, because it
It was all exactly the same story. An almost extinct race of superpowerful
aliens who once ruled most of the galaxy make the Captain guy into some sort
of prophet when then becomes some sort of superbeing in the final episode.
> facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
> consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but was
Nope.
> poorly-scripted, badly acted (except for Londo and G'Kar, who were
> pretty much the only reason to watch the show), overly pretentious and
> ultimately with a good-vs-evil space fantasy storyline that, once you
> got over the novelty of a sci-fi show that didn't contradict its own
> continuity every other episode, was far too simplistic, unsatisfying
> and shoddily-handled to stretch out to a four year run (although it
> was supported by a few strong subplots that were markedly more
> interesting than the Shadow War).
It ran for 5 years plus another year with its spin-off Crusade.
>
> DS9 was only good for the first season and maybe the
>> first half of the second up until they brought in the Changelings as the
>> recurring villains and then made them the subject of the entire story
>> line
>> of every episode.
>
> You didn't watch much DS9, did you Aggy? The Changelings were
I watched all 7 seasons.
> introduced at the start of season 3 - they appeared in all of three
They were introduced in the episode where whatshisname, Odo, discovered his
home planet on the other side of the worm hold. Was that in season 2 or 3?
> other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
> arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
> Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of season
> 3 onwards...
Which was the best season of the entire series of Babylon 5.
>
> At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
>> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what
>> happened
>> in the previous seasons,
>
> That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash in
> on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling driving
> an entire series.
Yer, like Doctor Who wasn't doing that already. What was the Key to Time
series all about and Trial of a Time Lord? What about the Arc in Space to
Genesis of the Daleks arc?
>But DS9 did have its standalone stories as well as
> the main arc.
>
> but the entire premise of Voyager was what made it
>> worse than DS9 since you knew they'd never get back to the Alpha Quadrant
>> until the final episode and their warp speed calculations for it taking
>> 70
>> years at warp 9 made no sense at all.
>
> What bothered me slightly more was that they made Voyager's premise
> the rush to get home and then only mentioned it every so often - after
> the pilot I think it was about episode 4 before anyone even thought of
> it again.
>
>> TNG was far superior since you could watch almost any episode in any
>> order
>> you wanted just like TOS,
>
> Why does that make it superior? Is modern Who superior to classic Who
> simply because you can watch the episodes in any order (for the most
> part), while you have to watch the old ones in serials (and in Key to
> Time, as an entire season)?
DS9 carried on the same storyline for 7 whole series as did Babylon 5. At
least in something like Buffy you got a different storyline each series and
that was closer to something like the Key to Time series in Doctor Who than
the continuous drawn out story of DS9.
>
> and you could more or less do that with Enterprise
>> until they ruined it by concentrating on that ridiculous Temporal Cold
>> War
>> (sound familiar).
>
> Episode 1, you mean. I'm among the few who liked the idea of the
> Temporal Cold War, the writers just didn't have much idea how to do a
> story arc - rather than actually doing a 'temporal cold war' they did
> a 'let's have an excuse to use time travel whenever we want to ignore
> continuity' story.
>
> But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
>> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which
>> lasted
>> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the
>> Beta
>> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>
> I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
> much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
critically received season of the entire series and on par with TOS and
season 2 wasn't too far behind. It was season 3 which ruined it.
> better season than the previous ones. You just appear not to like arc-
> driven storytelling in general - no wonder you dislike so much modern
> TV.
>
> by which time it was to late for
>> season 4 which was more like Doctor Who in having multipart episodic
>> stories
>> to save it.
>
> It all formed part of one arc - you had to see the Eugenics War story
> to make sense of the Klingon story, for instance. Surely the fact that
No. The Klingon story worked by itself.
> they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
> were chopped into smaller chunks?
Yes, they were better stories too, but by then it was too late, season 3 had
destroyed its audience base.
>
> Phil
Agamemnon
"Alan Sailsbury" <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote in message
news:v7-dnbiup68Av7HW...@bt.com...
Which of course would only reflect badly on Nod since it was done using his
software and his model.
Alan Sailsbury
How come his was FAR SUPERIOR to yours then?
Agamemnon
"Alan Sailsbury" <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote in message
He used a different model and software from those he provided me with.
The Doctor
The Doctor
Alan Sailsbury <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>Agamemnon wrote:
>>
>> "Alan Sailsbury" <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote in message
>> news:v7-dnbiup68Av7HW...@bt.com...
>>> Hulahoop wrote:
>>>> On Dec 19, 4:12 am, Alan Sailsbury <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>>>>> Agamemnon wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Maybe I should do the script for my Christmas offering for 2009 after
>>>>>> the huge success of Planet of the Cybermen, which or course was
>>>>>> designed
>>>>>> to be filmed around Northampton which is where the 11th Doctor as
>>>>>> chosen
>>>>>> by Steve Moffat is from.
>>>>> Yeah send it to Moffat Aggy. Let us know how you get on.
>>>>
>>>> and please post his response
>>>>
>>>> I could do with a laugh
>>>>
>>>> Regards
>>>>
>>>> Ged
>>>
>>> Perhaps Aggy could also send his CGI submission of the Titanic to The
>>> Mill for their appraisal. :-)
>>
>> Which of course would only reflect badly on Nod since it was done using
>> his software and his model.
>>
>
>How come his was FAR SUPERIOR to yours then?
>
TRollsbury trolls again!
pbo...@aol.com
Watch the ones I mentioned again.
> > Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
> > bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG have
> > any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3? Of
> > all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
>
> No way. The pilot was the worst of all of the ST pilots. Even the title was
> ridiculous. It might as well have been called The Janitor. That's how
> exciting it was.
Yes, it had a crappy title - Star Trek stories often do. Is "The
Cage", "Encounter at Farpoint" or "Emissary" any more enthralling?
None of the Trek pilots have been terribly good, but "Caretaker" was
strong by the standards set before - the characters were better-
defined at the start, the setting seemed to have been given more
thought than "Let's go explore" (the Kazon could have become a lot
more interesting than the gangland Klingons they were turned into
based on what "Caretaker" gave us).
> > probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a couple
> > of real stinkers.
>
> You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being terrible
> until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
TNG was universally considered as being terrible until the
introduction of the Borg at the end of season 3. DS9 was universally
considered as having not become good until season 3 or 4. Voyager just
produced slightly better-quality crap for the most part in its early
years, and as I say did have a few strong stories. Even Cathexis
wasn't as bad as If Wishes Were Horses, and that was better than a lot
of TNG season 1.
> > recall? Don't remember, but you're right - she was appalling. Still,
> > she was a minor enough character in some other characters' episodes to
> > be almost tolerable at times.
>
> Except you had to put up with Neelix as well so almost all the episodes were
> intolerable.
See below.
> > who
> >> was Neelix's girfriend and brought in 7of9 and even then everyone still
> >> had
> >> to put up with Neelix.
>
> > The only problem I have with Neelix is the makeup. They seem to have
> > intended him as the series' comic relief at the start, but when they
> > decided to more-or-less ditch that angle the clown makeup became a
> > distraction. In the event, while he could be intentionally irritating
> > in other characters' stories, I can't recall more than one or two
> > Neelix episodes I didn't like, and several were among the best the
> > series had to offer.
>
> Only after they stopped using him for comedy.
That's the odd thing. No Neelix-centred episode in the show's entire
run was done for comedy - in season 1 he had Phage (episode 4) and,
towards the end of the year, Jetrel. Not exactly laugh-a-minute
episodes.
> >> And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you
> >> serious.
>
> > Yes - few people who've seen it past about season 2 (possibly season
> > 3) would disagree.
>
> >> It was a allegory of the Bosnian War
>
> > No it wasn't. The Bajoran/Cardassian story arc was an allegory of WWII
>
> No it wasn't. It was Bosnia. It concentrated on getting the Bajoran and
> Cardassians to make peace with each other in the same time as the Rambullet
> fiasco was going on between the Bosnian Serbs (Cardasians) and Muslims
> (Bajorans).
The peace treaty was a minor subplot in season 3 - I'm talking in
terms of the overall story idea, which was of a people recently freed
from oppression and hard labour in concentration camps after being
liberated as a result of peace between the Cardassians (Germans) and
the Allies (Federation).
WWII wasn't the Nazis invading Israel and then them making up so
> DS9 was not an allegory to WWII.
An allegory is not the same as an analogy - it's not *analogous* to
WWII (mixing as it did comparisons between the Bajorans' suffering
with the Holocaust with a story of an invasion of formerly sovereign
territory and the subsequent resistance based on the French experience
during the war). It is, however, intended as an allegory for the
hardships of that war. The success of that allegory is testified to in
the fact that its messages can be extrapolated to other conflicts,
such as Bosnia, but WWII was what was in the writers' minds when they
produced it - indeed at least one DS9 staff writer is on record
describing the Cardassians as Nazis, and as I mentioned Duet was
consciously pilfered from a story about a 'war criminal' put on trial
who turns out to be an innocent masquerading as the real criminal in
order to bring his crimes to light.
> > (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift from
> > a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
>
> Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals
No, the writers originally, and deliberately, framed it around an
account of the Nuremberg Trials, and later adapted it to reflect the
story I mentioned above, called The Man in the Glass Booth. Even the
Cardassian character's first name is based on the name of a Nazi
concentration camp commander:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duet_(DS9_episode)#Background
and was
> screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
> Yugoslavia were being held.
It was aired in June 1993. The first tribunal was held in 1994, and no
major figures came before the tribunal for years afterwards - yet the
story was about a key perpetrator of atrocities.
> > introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had even>
> Which was all about the break-up of Yugoslavia, with Ro and then Keira being
> a Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighter.
Ensign Ro aired in 1991. The Bosnian War began in 1992. In the episode
in question, Ro wasn't any kind of guerilla fighter (that wasn't until
season 7 - and if you want to know what the inspiration for that was,
look up the name 'Maquis'), but was actually on a mission to persuade
the Bajorans to stop attacks on Cardassia for the sake of the
Federation-Cardassia treaty.
> > started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
> > was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
> > all that popular.
>
> What? It became even more political and thus even worse in later years.
I meant Bajoran political stories were dropped - more because the
Bajorans were boring than the politics were, I suspect. After all, the
original premise of DS9 was that the crew's job was to bring Bajor
into the Federation, but they wrote that story out of the series in
season 5 in favour of going down the Dominion War route.
> > But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why would
> > that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
>
> It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical stories,
> they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on are
> current.
The above discussion illustrates that that's not the case - the show
was an allegory for events 50 years earlier, and yet it still worked
well enough as a commentary on then-current conflicts that you
believed it was a deliberate reference to Bosnia. That, indeed, is
what allegory is for - to evoke particular events as a way of making
general points. "Far Beyond the Stars" was set in the 1950s, but
certainly wasn't intended to be relevant only to the 1950s.
> > there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
> > Message of the Week storylines.
>
> TNG's messages are better in the long term.
TNG's messages were vacuous and patronising. "Be nice to disabled/
foreign/gay/insert whatever here people" - nothing the sort of people
who tend to watch Star Trek are likely to need drilled into them, let
alone as blatantly or forcefully as they were and with so little
substance beyond "...because it's a nice thing to do". No examination
of why the villains of the piece *aren't* nice to them beyond "the
villains aren't very nice people", and the writers genuinely expected
their simplistic caricatures to be taken seriously. A classic case is
Roddenberry's belief when he started the show that the Ferengi would
actually work as the series' main villains; he didn't see them as fun
caricatures of capitalist excess, he actually seemed to believe
capitalism could be meaningfully characterised with one-dimensional
greedy stereotypes.
> > Either way it hardly matters - in fact I've often said that it makes a
> > good yardstick that they used so many similar stories, because it
>
> It was all exactly the same story. An almost extinct race of superpowerful
> aliens who once ruled most of the galaxy make the Captain guy into some sort
> of prophet when then becomes some sort of superbeing in the final episode.
Except for making the captain into some sort of prophet, none of that
happened in DS9. We never found out what the Prophets were, but
there's no indication their power ever extended much beyond the local
area - I always liked to imagine they were what the Bajorans would
eventually evolve into, and that their actions were intended to guide
and protect their ancestors, being free from time as they were.
An example I like to bring up, because it was exactly the same
storyline in both series, is the end of the Shadow War vs. Sacrifice
of Angels in DS9 season 6.
DS9: Over six episodes, Sisko organises a counterattack against the
Dominion to retake the station, and succeeds in fighting through to
the wormhole, the resistance on the station having bought him time to
try and avert a fleet of Dominion ships arriving. Based on a
relationship with the Prophets established early in the series and
their known powers over the wormhole, he persuades them to close it to
Dominion shipping, saving the station. The war carries on for another
year.
B5: At the start of season 4, Sheridan finds God at the bottom of a
hole, who resurrects him with magic powers previously unsuspected in
the B5 universe. He comes back to the station with Sheridan for no
especially good reason. Sheridan manages to organise a meeting on his
ship with the feuding Vorlons and Shadows who, it turns out, are
basically overgrown kids who got bored looking after the lesser races
and decided to play with each other instead. But it turns out they're
just lonely, and are happy to be sent home by God after Sheridan
promises the lesser races will behave themselves and won't start
fighting among themselves again straight away. Because only someone
who's been stuck down a hole for millions of years would buy this, God
does so and the Shadow War that's been built up for over two years is
over.
Riight...
Now, I'm not defending DS9's take on it, which was pretty lousy. But
here's the thing: not only is it only the culmination of a short arc,
and not the exclusive focus of the series to that point, but DS9
manages without much effort to incorporate its version into the
existing framework already established by the series, using
established races and abilities for the universe, and it does so a
posteriori, rather than planning it from the start of the show's run.
In contrast we're told again and again that Stracynski had his entire
series mapped out in detail before he started - and even with that
edge he still has to resort to inventing new superbeings with new
magic powers, and reinventing who the Vorlons and Shadows are in the
process, in order to achieve the same resolution. In other words, what
DS9's writers came up with between seasons was far superior to
something Stracynski had been working on for a decade or more.
> > facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
> > consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but was
>
> Nope.
Okay, in what way is the above a better resolution in B5 than in DS9?
> > poorly-scripted, badly acted (except for Londo and G'Kar, who were
> > pretty much the only reason to watch the show), overly pretentious and
> > ultimately with a good-vs-evil space fantasy storyline that, once you
> > got over the novelty of a sci-fi show that didn't contradict its own
> > continuity every other episode, was far too simplistic, unsatisfying
> > and shoddily-handled to stretch out to a four year run (although it
> > was supported by a few strong subplots that were markedly more
> > interesting than the Shadow War).
>
> It ran for 5 years plus another year with its spin-off Crusade.
But there was no story arc in season 1, just disconnected Star
Trekesque stories, so that can't count towards the length of the main
story.
Crusade is interesting, is that its fate tells you a lot about B5.
From the couple of episodes I saw, Crusade was basically identical to
B5 in story structure, effects, acting quality, and writing style,
differing only in the fact that the novelty had worn off and the
attention-grabbing characters (like Londo) weren't in it. The fact
that it sunk like a stone before the first season was even half-done
shows just how much B5 relied on those elements.
> > introduced at the start of season 3 - they appeared in all of three
>
> They were introduced in the episode where whatshisname, Odo, discovered his
> home planet on the other side of the worm hold. Was that in season 2 or 3?
Opening story of season 3.
> > other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
> > arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
> > Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of season
> > 3 onwards...
>
> Which was the best season of the entire series of Babylon 5.
So, why do you think it's a problem if DS9 became all about the
Changelings, since that seemed good for B5?
> > At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
> >> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what
> >> happened
> >> in the previous seasons,
>
> > That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash in
> > on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling driving
> > an entire series.
>
> Yer, like Doctor Who wasn't doing that already. What was the Key to Time
> series all about and Trial of a Time Lord? What about the Arc in Space to
> Genesis of the Daleks arc?
I said "driving an entire series", not story arcs within a series.
> > Why does that make it superior? Is modern Who superior to classic Who
> > simply because you can watch the episodes in any order (for the most
> > part), while you have to watch the old ones in serials (and in Key to
> > Time, as an entire season)?
>
> DS9 carried on the same storyline for 7 whole series as did Babylon 5. At
> least in something like Buffy you got a different storyline each series and
> that was closer to something like the Key to Time series in Doctor Who than
> the continuous drawn out story of DS9.
Yes, you're describing the differences between the two types of show.
That doesn't address the question "Why does that make one superior to
the other?"
> > But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
> >> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which
> >> lasted
> >> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the
> >> Beta
> >> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>
> > I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
> > much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
>
> What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
> critically received season of the entire series
It is? By whom? Enterprise was roundly panned until season 4, as I
recall.
and on par with TOS and
> season 2 wasn't too far behind. It was season 3 which ruined it.
I was in Oz when season 3 aired - it ended its run at 1am on first
viewing, since it was shuffled to later and later slots as viewing
figures got worse (from which it obviously wasn't going to recover -
who'd be watching Enterprise at 1am?) I suspect the same sort of thing
happened in the US, the only market that matters to US programme-
makers. This, I suspect, was a legacy of the worsening viewing figures
over the first two years, but it makes comparisons difficult when each
season (and even parts of seasons) are shown at different times of
day.
> > they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
> > were chopped into smaller chunks?
>
> Yes, they were better stories too, but by then it was too late, season 3 had
> destroyed its audience base.
Correction: seasons 1 to 3 had destroyed its audience base. Ratings
started out low for Star Trek and got progressively worse - I don't
think that can be extrapolated to a critique of season 3 per se.
Phil
The Face of Po
Agamemnon got out a spraycan and scrawled the following:
> "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:7oqjjuF...@mid.individual.net...
>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>
> So no Ice Warriors again for another season.
But on the plus side, no Krotons :-D
> How about a story where global warming causes the Antarctic glacier to
> completly melt in 2020, which unleashes an invasion of Earth by the
> Silurians and the Sea Devils, plus some assorted CGI dinosaurs?
There's nothing wrong with ripping off the finale of "The Kraken Wakes",
but it'd be a bit of a letdown to replace the mysterious unseen
xenobaths with people in rubber suits, just to get a returning monster
in.
--
Happiness will prevail
Mr.Smartypants
He provided you with several and you made the choice which one you
wanted to employ.
You did a shit render because you have no f***in' clue about such
things.............and you lost the bloody funnels!!
Alan Sailsbury
> I was hanging out with the cool kids in rec.arts.drwho when
> Agamemnon got out a spraycan and scrawled the following:
>> "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote in message
>> news:7oqjjuF...@mid.individual.net...
>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>> So no Ice Warriors again for another season.
>
> But on the plus side, no Krotons :-D
>
I think Aggy's making one of his assumptions. Unless Moffat has stated
that the Ice Warriors AREN'T coming back there's no reason to assume it.
pbo...@aol.com
Does it strike anyone else as an odd coincidence that we have a thread
titled "Old monster to return" just before Aggy shows up again?
Phil
peachy ashie passion
I assumed it called him
The Doctor
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:7ce2d6f0-4f9c-417f...@e27g2000yqd.googlegroups.com...
I've seen them at least twice. They're still not any good.
>
>> > Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
>> > bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG have
>> > any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3? Of
>> > all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
>>
>> No way. The pilot was the worst of all of the ST pilots. Even the title
>> was
>> ridiculous. It might as well have been called The Janitor. That's how
>> exciting it was.
>
> Yes, it had a crappy title - Star Trek stories often do. Is "The
> Cage", "Encounter at Farpoint" or "Emissary" any more enthralling?
Yes.
> None of the Trek pilots have been terribly good, but "Caretaker" was
> strong by the standards set before - the characters were better-
Nope. It was boring.
> defined at the start, the setting seemed to have been given more
> thought than "Let's go explore" (the Kazon could have become a lot
No they could not. The Kazon are one of the main reasons the first 3 series
were terrible. It was much better with the board.
> more interesting than the gangland Klingons they were turned into
They behaved like gangland Klingons from the start.
> based on what "Caretaker" gave us).
They should have been ditched from episode 1 onwards.
>
>> > probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a couple
>> > of real stinkers.
>>
>> You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being terrible
>> until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
>
> TNG was universally considered as being terrible until the
> introduction of the Borg at the end of season 3. DS9 was universally
But not as bad as Voyager.
> considered as having not become good until season 3 or 4. Voyager just
Nope. Season 3 and 4 was when it got stuck up its own arse with all that
changeling and political crap. Season 1 was the best. Season 7 was the worst
and it wasn't just because Jadzea was killed off because Teri Farrell left.
> produced slightly better-quality crap for the most part in its early
> years, and as I say did have a few strong stories. Even Cathexis
Nope.
> wasn't as bad as If Wishes Were Horses, and that was better than a lot
> of TNG season 1.
Nope. Nothing on Voyager season 1 was better than TNG season 1 or even DS9
season 1.
So they should have confined him just to those then.
>
>> >> And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you
>> >> serious.
>>
>> > Yes - few people who've seen it past about season 2 (possibly season
>> > 3) would disagree.
>>
>> >> It was a allegory of the Bosnian War
>>
>> > No it wasn't. The Bajoran/Cardassian story arc was an allegory of WWII
>>
>> No it wasn't. It was Bosnia. It concentrated on getting the Bajoran and
>> Cardassians to make peace with each other in the same time as the
>> Rambullet
>> fiasco was going on between the Bosnian Serbs (Cardasians) and Muslims
>> (Bajorans).
>
> The peace treaty was a minor subplot in season 3 - I'm talking in
> terms of the overall story idea, which was of a people recently freed
> from oppression and hard labour in concentration camps after being
> liberated as a result of peace between the Cardassians (Germans) and
> the Allies (Federation).
Nope. The Federation didn't play any part in the Cardasian Bajoran war nor
in the liberation of Bajor. The Bajorans liberated themselves by using
terrorism against the Cardasians which is why it is an allegory to the
Bosnian conflict. The oppression that was alluded to was communism under
Serb dominations and there was no Cardasian extermination programme of
Bajorans. The camps we saw were analogous to the Russian gulags. The back
story was that the Bajoras were once just as bad as the Cardasians and had
being their oppressors to begin with before the Cardasians freed themselves
and turned the tables. This was analogous to the Muslims being the
oppressors of the Serbs and other Christians during the time of the Ottoman
Empire. You clearly don't know much history. The Federation was NATO which
intervened to force the peace after the rebellion had already began by
picking its own war with the Serbs/Cardasians because they were still
Communists.
>
> WWII wasn't the Nazis invading Israel and then them making up so
>> DS9 was not an allegory to WWII.
>
> An allegory is not the same as an analogy - it's not *analogous* to
> WWII (mixing as it did comparisons between the Bajorans' suffering
> with the Holocaust with a story of an invasion of formerly sovereign
Complete and utter rubbish. WWII was NOT about the Jewish holocaust. It was
about Hitler and Muslim invading the whole of Europe and slaughtering tens
of millions of people. The Caradians didn't invaded and nearly conquer the
Federation and its territory.
> territory and the subsequent resistance based on the French experience
Poppycock. The resistance was based on the Bosnian Muslim terrorism against
the Serbs.
> during the war). It is, however, intended as an allegory for the
> hardships of that war. The success of that allegory is testified to in
> the fact that its messages can be extrapolated to other conflicts,
> such as Bosnia, but WWII was what was in the writers' minds when they
NO IT WAS NOT! DS9 was based almost entirely on the conflict on Bosnia.
> produced it - indeed at least one DS9 staff writer is on record
> describing the Cardassians as Nazis, and as I mentioned Duet was
So were the Serbs.
> consciously pilfered from a story about a 'war criminal' put on trial
It was based on the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
> who turns out to be an innocent masquerading as the real criminal in
> order to bring his crimes to light.
>
>> > (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift from
>> > a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
>>
>> Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals
>
> No, the writers originally, and deliberately, framed it around an
> account of the Nuremberg Trials, and later adapted it to reflect the
That's because the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was also
based on the model of the Nuremberg Trials.
> story I mentioned above, called The Man in the Glass Booth. Even the
Adapted to fit the Bosnian conflict. Didn't you ever watch the news when the
programme was being shown for the first time?
> Cardassian character's first name is based on the name of a Nazi
> concentration camp commander:
So what.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duet_(DS9_episode)#Background
>
> and was
>> screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
>> Yugoslavia were being held.
>
> It was aired in June 1993. The first tribunal was held in 1994, and no
> major figures came before the tribunal for years afterwards - yet the
> story was about a key perpetrator of atrocities.
The first tribunal might have been held in 1994 but the entire process of
setting up the tribunals and capturing the war criminals started years
before that. At the time the story in question was being written war
criminals tribunals for the former Yugoslavia had already been given the go
ahead and stories about war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia were
plastered over every TV news programme and newspaper.
>
>> > introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had even>
>> Which was all about the break-up of Yugoslavia, with Ro and then Keira
>> being
>> a Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighter.
>
> Ensign Ro aired in 1991. The Bosnian War began in 1992. In the episode
The break-up of Yugoslavia has already started long before that.
Croatia held a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia on 19 May 1991.
Slovenia began its rebellion against Yugoslavia on 27 June 1991 and declared
independence on 7 July.
FYROM declared independence from Yugoslavia on 8 September 1991 and in the
followin month the Serbs began threatening the Bosnian Muslims with
extermination.
Ensign Ro aired on October 7 1991 which was the same day that Croatia
declared independence from Yugoslavia.
> in question, Ro wasn't any kind of guerilla fighter (that wasn't until
> season 7 - and if you want to know what the inspiration for that was,
> look up the name 'Maquis'), but was actually on a mission to persuade
So they used the name of the French resistance in WWII. So what. They were
hardly likely to use the name of the Croatians or Bosnian Muslim resistance
organisations which had already been formed in Yugoslavia.
> the Bajorans to stop attacks on Cardassia for the sake of the
> Federation-Cardassia treaty.
And at the time that the story was being written the break up of Yugoslavia
was hitting the news headlines almost every day.
>
>> > started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
>> > was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
>> > all that popular.
>>
>> What? It became even more political and thus even worse in later years.
>
> I meant Bajoran political stories were dropped - more because the
> Bajorans were boring than the politics were, I suspect. After all, the
What, like the whole of seasons 6 and 7 were dedicated to the struggle for
control of the Bjoran religion and government and Bajoran political stories
were dropped? Are you serious.
> original premise of DS9 was that the crew's job was to bring Bajor
> into the Federation, but they wrote that story out of the series in
> season 5 in favour of going down the Dominion War route.
Because they wanted to copy Babylon 5's storyline of the Shadow War.
>
>> > But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why would
>> > that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
>>
>> It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical
>> stories,
>> they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on
>> are
>> current.
>
> The above discussion illustrates that that's not the case - the show
> was an allegory for events 50 years earlier, and yet it still worked
Nope. It was an allegory for contemporary events which were on the news
almost daily just like season 3 of Enterprise was an allegory for 9/11 and
the events which followed it.
> well enough as a commentary on then-current conflicts that you
> believed it was a deliberate reference to Bosnia. That, indeed, is
That's because it was.
> what allegory is for - to evoke particular events as a way of making
> general points. "Far Beyond the Stars" was set in the 1950s, but
> certainly wasn't intended to be relevant only to the 1950s.
>
>> > there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
>> > Message of the Week storylines.
>>
>> TNG's messages are better in the long term.
>
> TNG's messages were vacuous and patronising. "Be nice to disabled/
> foreign/gay/insert whatever here people" - nothing the sort of people
> who tend to watch Star Trek are likely to need drilled into them, let
> alone as blatantly or forcefully as they were and with so little
> substance beyond "...because it's a nice thing to do". No examination
> of why the villains of the piece *aren't* nice to them beyond "the
> villains aren't very nice people", and the writers genuinely expected
> their simplistic caricatures to be taken seriously. A classic case is
Yer right, so every TV news programme and newspaper article describes why
Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Ladin aren't nice people, or for that
matter George Bush and Tony Blair. Not once have they done anything like
that. We're just told that so-and-so is bad and so-and-so is good because
that's whose side we're on. Even with the Falklands War we were always told
the Argentineans were always bad.
> Roddenberry's belief when he started the show that the Ferengi would
> actually work as the series' main villains; he didn't see them as fun
> caricatures of capitalist excess, he actually seemed to believe
> capitalism could be meaningfully characterised with one-dimensional
> greedy stereotypes.
Which is what it is, and the people who engage in it are nothing more than
thieves.
>
>> > Either way it hardly matters - in fact I've often said that it makes a
>> > good yardstick that they used so many similar stories, because it
>>
>> It was all exactly the same story. An almost extinct race of
>> superpowerful
>> aliens who once ruled most of the galaxy make the Captain guy into some
>> sort
>> of prophet when then becomes some sort of superbeing in the final
>> episode.
>
> Except for making the captain into some sort of prophet, none of that
> happened in DS9. We never found out what the Prophets were, but
You obviously missed the final episode of the series.
> there's no indication their power ever extended much beyond the local
> area - I always liked to imagine they were what the Bajorans would
> eventually evolve into, and that their actions were intended to guide
> and protect their ancestors, being free from time as they were.
It was already revealed that the Wormhole Beings were what the ancient
Bajorans had already evolved into before they left the planet and moved
inside the wormhole to a new level of existence. It's almost exactly the
same explanation that Babylon 5 gave for the Vorlons at the end of Season 4
but it had more or less been revealed in Season 3.
>
> An example I like to bring up, because it was exactly the same
> storyline in both series, is the end of the Shadow War vs. Sacrifice
> of Angels in DS9 season 6.
>
> DS9: Over six episodes, Sisko organises a counterattack against the
> Dominion to retake the station, and succeeds in fighting through to
> the wormhole, the resistance on the station having bought him time to
> try and avert a fleet of Dominion ships arriving. Based on a
> relationship with the Prophets established early in the series and
> their known powers over the wormhole, he persuades them to close it to
> Dominion shipping, saving the station. The war carries on for another
> year.
>
> B5: At the start of season 4, Sheridan finds God at the bottom of a
> hole,
That happened at the end of Season 3.
> who resurrects him with magic powers previously unsuspected in
That all happens in the first few episodes of Season 4.
What Stracynski had originally planed after the Series 3 finally was
supposed to have spanned Season 4 and Season 5, but since Season 5 had not
been commissioned and everyone though that Season 4 was going to be the last
he had to fit two seasons worth of storyline into Season 4 including the
series final episode which after Season 5 got the go ahead he moved to the
end of Season 5 and replaced the Season 4 ending with something else.
>
>> > facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
>> > consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but was
>>
>> Nope.
>
> Okay, in what way is the above a better resolution in B5 than in DS9?
>
Because by that time DS9 had its head stuck up its own ass.
I agree that the ending of Season 4 of Babylon 5 was disappointing but what
led up to it was much better than what led up to what essentially was the
same scenario in DS9.
>> > poorly-scripted, badly acted (except for Londo and G'Kar, who were
>> > pretty much the only reason to watch the show), overly pretentious and
>> > ultimately with a good-vs-evil space fantasy storyline that, once you
>> > got over the novelty of a sci-fi show that didn't contradict its own
>> > continuity every other episode, was far too simplistic, unsatisfying
>> > and shoddily-handled to stretch out to a four year run (although it
>> > was supported by a few strong subplots that were markedly more
>> > interesting than the Shadow War).
>>
>> It ran for 5 years plus another year with its spin-off Crusade.
>
> But there was no story arc in season 1, just disconnected Star
> Trekesque stories, so that can't count towards the length of the main
> story.
>
> Crusade is interesting, is that its fate tells you a lot about B5.
> From the couple of episodes I saw, Crusade was basically identical to
> B5 in story structure, effects, acting quality, and writing style,
> differing only in the fact that the novelty had worn off and the
> attention-grabbing characters (like Londo) weren't in it. The fact
> that it sunk like a stone before the first season was even half-done
> shows just how much B5 relied on those elements.
>
The entire premise of Crusade when it was finally made was totally
ridiculous given the title. Originally Crusade was intended to be the story
of the resistance against the Shadows and set in parallel to Season 4 of
Babylon 5, but when the main arc of Babylon 5 was resolved in Season 4 and
not 5, Crusade was completely changed and the only thing that remained was
the title which was totally ridiculous since it was about them searching for
an antidote to a virus released by the Shadows allies to wipe out all life
(now I wonder where I've seen that done before, Revelation of the Daleks
more or less) and not the Crusade against the Shadows or even their allies
as everyone was promised.
>> > introduced at the start of season 3 - they appeared in all of three
>>
>> They were introduced in the episode where whatshisname, Odo, discovered
>> his
>> home planet on the other side of the worm hold. Was that in season 2 or
>> 3?
>
> Opening story of season 3.
We you couldn't tell which was the end of season 2 and the beginning of
season 3 from the way the BBC showed it all back to back without a break.
>
>> > other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
>> > arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
>> > Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of season
>> > 3 onwards...
>>
>> Which was the best season of the entire series of Babylon 5.
>
> So, why do you think it's a problem if DS9 became all about the
> Changelings, since that seemed good for B5?
Babylon 5 didn't have the equivalent of Changelings infiltrating the
Federation and Changelings all over the places. You hardly got to see the
Shadows at all.
>
>> > At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
>> >> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what
>> >> happened
>> >> in the previous seasons,
>>
>> > That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash in
>> > on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling driving
>> > an entire series.
>>
>> Yer, like Doctor Who wasn't doing that already. What was the Key to Time
>> series all about and Trial of a Time Lord? What about the Arc in Space to
>> Genesis of the Daleks arc?
>
> I said "driving an entire series", not story arcs within a series.
The Key to Time series was an entire series as was Trial of a Time Lord.
>
>> > Why does that make it superior? Is modern Who superior to classic Who
>> > simply because you can watch the episodes in any order (for the most
>> > part), while you have to watch the old ones in serials (and in Key to
>> > Time, as an entire season)?
>>
>> DS9 carried on the same storyline for 7 whole series as did Babylon 5. At
>> least in something like Buffy you got a different storyline each series
>> and
>> that was closer to something like the Key to Time series in Doctor Who
>> than
>> the continuous drawn out story of DS9.
>
> Yes, you're describing the differences between the two types of show.
> That doesn't address the question "Why does that make one superior to
> the other?"
Because you can watch most episodes of ST TOS and ST TNG and individual
stories of Doctor Who in any order you like. It's impossible to watch an
episode of something Heroes by itself let alone in any order you like. Is
that still going btw?
>
>> > But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
>> >> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which
>> >> lasted
>> >> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the
>> >> Beta
>> >> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>>
>> > I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
>> > much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
>>
>> What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
>> critically received season of the entire series
>
> It is? By whom? Enterprise was roundly panned until season 4, as I
> recall.
Nope. Enterprise was critically acclaimed until season 3 ruined it.
>
> and on par with TOS and
>> season 2 wasn't too far behind. It was season 3 which ruined it.
>
> I was in Oz when season 3 aired - it ended its run at 1am on first
> viewing, since it was shuffled to later and later slots as viewing
> figures got worse (from which it obviously wasn't going to recover -
> who'd be watching Enterprise at 1am?) I suspect the same sort of thing
> happened in the US, the only market that matters to US programme-
> makers. This, I suspect, was a legacy of the worsening viewing figures
> over the first two years, but it makes comparisons difficult when each
> season (and even parts of seasons) are shown at different times of
> day.
It was a result of the story arc of Season 3 being total crap, and most of
the individual stories being not much better and its attempt to allegorize
9/11.
>
>> > they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
>> > were chopped into smaller chunks?
>>
>> Yes, they were better stories too, but by then it was too late, season 3
>> had
>> destroyed its audience base.
>
> Correction: seasons 1 to 3 had destroyed its audience base. Ratings
No. Season 1 created a bigger audience base. It was getting huge critical
acclaim when Season 1 was showing on Sky. Season 3 ruined it. Even form the
first episode you could tell if was going to be crap. It had no hope. What
became Season 3 should never have been written. They should have carried on
in the manner of Season 1 and ditched the Temporal Cold War altogether. In
fact Star Trek TNG came pretty close to committing suicide at the end of
Season 1 when it did that story about the Federation High Command being
infiltrated by parasitic aliens from another galaxy which too over peoples
bodies who were preparing an invasion, which wasn't followed up on TNG but
which was redone as the Changeling infiltration of Federation High Command
in DS9 and is one of the things which ruined DS9 since by the end DS9 became
nothing more than politics.
> started out low for Star Trek and got progressively worse - I don't
> think that can be extrapolated to a critique of season 3 per se.
>
Ratings were always low for Enterprise in the US because it changed networks
or its syndication scheme as I recall. That wasn't the case in the UK.
> Phil
pbo...@aol.com
So why watch them at least twice?
> >> > Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
> >> > bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG have
> >> > any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3? Of
> >> > all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
>
> >> No way. The pilot was the worst of all of the ST pilots. Even the title
> >> was
> >> ridiculous. It might as well have been called The Janitor. That's how
> >> exciting it was.
>
> > Yes, it had a crappy title - Star Trek stories often do. Is "The
> > Cage", "Encounter at Farpoint" or "Emissary" any more enthralling?
>
> Yes.
But by your logic, "Emissary" could just as easily have been called
"The Diplomat" - not very exciting, is it?
> > None of the Trek pilots have been terribly good, but "Caretaker" was
> > strong by the standards set before - the characters were better-
>
> Nope. It was boring.
So were the others, except The Cage (and the 'second pilot' for TOS
was arguably the worst of the lot).
> > defined at the start, the setting seemed to have been given more
> > thought than "Let's go explore" (the Kazon could have become a lot
>
> No they could not. The Kazon are one of the main reasons the first 3 series
> were terrible. It was much better with the board.
The Borg in Voyager were practically as boring as the Kazon. The Kazon
had three big problems:
1. Being Klingon clones.
2. Being overused.
3. Having recurring characters in a series where they shouldn't
logically be able to keep up with Voyager (oh yes, and the recurring
characters were dull too).
> > more interesting than the gangland Klingons they were turned into
>
> They behaved like gangland Klingons from the start.
They behaved like gangs, but I wouldn't say they behaved like Klingons
in their first appearance. The idea of a sector broken into feuding
gangs engaged in perpetual resource wars could have been done well in
a Mad Max sort of way. Instead it wasn't.
> > based on what "Caretaker" gave us).
>
> They should have been ditched from episode 1 onwards.
I think they were fine in episode 1 - I'd largely agree with the
"onwards", though (although I did like a couple of the season 2 Kazon
episodes - the one with Nog and the one with the Kazon's former
oppressors), but it's a tradition in Star Trek since TNG that the
races introduced in the pilot will become a recurring feature of the
show, and often major villains.
> >> > probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a couple
> >> > of real stinkers.
>
> >> You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being terrible
> >> until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
>
> > TNG was universally considered as being terrible until the
> > introduction of the Borg at the end of season 3. DS9 was universally
>
> But not as bad as Voyager.
Watch "The Naked Now" sometime, if you can stomach it. Universally
regarded as one of the very worst stories Star Trek in any incarnation
has produced - I think it was the second episode of TNG's first
season.
> > considered as having not become good until season 3 or 4. Voyager just
>
> Nope. Season 3 and 4 was when it got stuck up its own arse
Okay, "almost universally", as in "by everyone except you".
with all that
> changeling and political crap. Season 1 was the best. Season 7 was the worst
> and it wasn't just because Jadzea was killed off because Teri Farrell left.
Season 7 was a mixed bag - I hated what they did to Dukat and (after a
very strong crisis of faith episode) to Winn. Dukat's final episode
should have been Waltz, or possibly even Sacrifice of Angels (having a
major villain leave the show because he went mad would make a
refreshing change from having to have him killed in a final
apocalyptic battle with the hero), with any subsequent appearances
done only as flashback episodes. But season 7 had very strong episodes
- Dogs of War (the penultimate episode), the Nog arc, Damar's
development over the second half of the season.
> > produced slightly better-quality crap for the most part in its early
> > years, and as I say did have a few strong stories. Even Cathexis
>
> Nope.
If you can still say that after watching If Wishes Were Horses,
there's probably something very wrong.
> > wasn't as bad as If Wishes Were Horses, and that was better than a lot
> > of TNG season 1.
>
> Nope. Nothing on Voyager season 1 was better than TNG season 1 or even DS9
> season 1.
Any volunteers to adjudicate on this by watching, say, Jetrel,
followed by any TNG season 1 episode and any season 1 DS9 episode
except Duet or In The Hands of the Prophets (both of which are indeed
better than any first season Voyager)?
> >> > who
> >> >> was Neelix's girfriend and brought in 7of9 and even then everyone
> >> >> still
> >> >> had
> >> >> to put up with Neelix.
>
> >> > The only problem I have with Neelix is the makeup. They seem to have
> >> > intended him as the series' comic relief at the start, but when they
> >> > decided to more-or-less ditch that angle the clown makeup became a
> >> > distraction. In the event, while he could be intentionally irritating
> >> > in other characters' stories, I can't recall more than one or two
> >> > Neelix episodes I didn't like, and several were among the best the
> >> > series had to offer.
>
> >> Only after they stopped using him for comedy.
>
> > That's the odd thing. No Neelix-centred episode in the show's entire
> > run was done for comedy - in season 1 he had Phage (episode 4) and,
> > towards the end of the year, Jetrel. Not exactly laugh-a-minute
> > episodes.
>
> So they should have confined him just to those then.
I didn't mind him at all. He was *meant* to be annoying, after all.
> >> >> And now you're saying that DS9 was the best of the bunch? Are you
> >> >> serious.
>
> >> > Yes - few people who've seen it past about season 2 (possibly season
> >> > 3) would disagree.
>
> >> >> It was a allegory of the Bosnian War
>
> >> > No it wasn't. The Bajoran/Cardassian story arc was an allegory of WWII
>
> >> No it wasn't. It was Bosnia. It concentrated on getting the Bajoran and
> >> Cardassians to make peace with each other in the same time as the
> >> Rambullet
> >> fiasco was going on between the Bosnian Serbs (Cardasians) and Muslims
> >> (Bajorans).
>
> > The peace treaty was a minor subplot in season 3 - I'm talking in
> > terms of the overall story idea, which was of a people recently freed
> > from oppression and hard labour in concentration camps after being
> > liberated as a result of peace between the Cardassians (Germans) and
> > the Allies (Federation).
>
> Nope. The Federation didn't play any part in the Cardasian Bajoran war nor
> in the liberation of Bajor. The Bajorans liberated themselves by using
> terrorism against the Cardasians which is why it is an allegory to the
> Bosnian conflict.
What, the conflict in which NATO drove the Serbs out of Bosnia? I'm
not seeing that as a case of liberation through terrorism. It was
suggested early on (in Duet, in fact) that the Cardassians left Bajor
as a political decision, and implied in later episodes that that
decision was related to a desire to avoid conflict with the
Federation, rather than being forced out - and the Federation moved in
to make sure they didn't change their minds.
The oppression that was alluded to was communism under
> Serb dominations and there was no Cardasian extermination programme of
> Bajorans.
Watch Duet again.
The camps we saw were analogous to the Russian gulags. The back
> story was that the Bajoras were once just as bad as the Cardasians and had
> being their oppressors to begin with before the Cardasians freed themselves
> and turned the tables.
No, there wasn't any story of that kind in the background - it was
stated again and again that the Bajorans had been peaceful before a
military government on Cardassia decided to annex their planet after
centuries of, so far as is suggested, peaceful technological rivalry.
> > WWII wasn't the Nazis invading Israel and then them making up so
> >> DS9 was not an allegory to WWII.
>
> > An allegory is not the same as an analogy - it's not *analogous* to
> > WWII (mixing as it did comparisons between the Bajorans' suffering
> > with the Holocaust with a story of an invasion of formerly sovereign
>
> Complete and utter rubbish. WWII was NOT about the Jewish holocaust.
Hence my comment "it's not analogous to WWII".
It was
> about Hitler and Muslim invading the whole of Europe and slaughtering tens
> of millions of people. The Caradians didn't invaded and nearly conquer the
> Federation and its territory.
They did invade and conquer Bajor - no one ever said anything about
the Cardassian/Federation conflict being an allegory for WWII, only
the Cardassian/Bajor conflict.
> > produced it - indeed at least one DS9 staff writer is on record
> > describing the Cardassians as Nazis, and as I mentioned Duet was
>
> So were the Serbs.
The Serbs were members of the German fascist party in the 1930s and
40s?
> > consciously pilfered from a story about a 'war criminal' put on trial
>
> It was based on the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
No, Aggy - look at the source material. It was about trials of Nazi
war criminals.
> >> > (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift from
> >> > a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
>
> >> Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals
>
> > No, the writers originally, and deliberately, framed it around an
> > account of the Nuremberg Trials, and later adapted it to reflect the
>
> That's because the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was also
> based on the model of the Nuremberg Trials.
I see. So rather than base it on the Yugoslav trials in order to make
a story about those, they decided to base it on the original trials to
make a story about Yugoslavia? Yep, that makes sense ... to you.
> > story I mentioned above, called The Man in the Glass Booth. Even the
>
> Adapted to fit the Bosnian conflict.
No, adapted to fit Deep Space Nine, in which there wasn't a Bosnian
conflict. Tell you what, watch the original film, then watch Duet and
tell me which bits needed to be modified specifically to reflect the
Bosnian conflict.
Didn't you ever watch the news when the
> programme was being shown for the first time?
Yes. I also watched DS9 when it was being shown for the first time.
They were on different channels/different times of day. Strangely I
managed to avoid getting the two confused - tell me, did you think the
news bulletins at the time were about a crew on a far future space
station, by any chance?
> > Cardassian character's first name is based on the name of a Nazi
> > concentration camp commander:
>
> So what.
So why do you suppose that conscious allusion was made, and not just
to any camp commander but to the one made notorious by Schindler's
List, and so in the public imagination? Why was the Cardassian not
given a name resembling, say, Rabadan?
> > and was
> >> screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
> >> Yugoslavia were being held.
>
> > It was aired in June 1993. The first tribunal was held in 1994, and no
> > major figures came before the tribunal for years afterwards - yet the
> > story was about a key perpetrator of atrocities.
>
> The first tribunal might have been held in 1994 but the entire process of
> setting up the tribunals and capturing the war criminals started years
> before that. At the time the story in question was being written war
> criminals tribunals for the former Yugoslavia had already been given the go
> ahead and stories about war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia were
> plastered over every TV news programme and newspaper.
And yet the writers strangely decided to tell a story that bore no
relation to those particular war crimes and instead focused on a
concentration camp.
> >> > introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had even>
> >> Which was all about the break-up of Yugoslavia, with Ro and then Keira
> >> being
> >> a Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighter.
>
> > Ensign Ro aired in 1991. The Bosnian War began in 1992. In the episode
>
> The break-up of Yugoslavia has already started long before that.
A year before that.
> Croatia held a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia on 19 May 1991.
>
> Slovenia began its rebellion against Yugoslavia on 27 June 1991 and declared
> independence on 7 July.
>
> FYROM declared independence from Yugoslavia on 8 September 1991 and in the
> followin month the Serbs began threatening the Bosnian Muslims with
> extermination.
>
> Ensign Ro aired on October 7 1991 which was the same day that Croatia
> declared independence from Yugoslavia.
Yes, Aggy, rather than, say, writing the story at the start of the
year with the rest of the season, they decided to write it within a
few days between the Serbs threatening the Bosnians and the episode
airing - and to imagine a resistance movement that didn't yet exist.
> > the Bajorans to stop attacks on Cardassia for the sake of the
> > Federation-Cardassia treaty.
>
> And at the time that the story was being written the break up of Yugoslavia
> was hitting the news headlines almost every day.
So what? The death of Michael Jackson hit the news headlines almost
every day for a couple of months earlier this year, and yet you don't
find sci-fi writers scrambling to turn it into plots. There are
*always* wars in the news, usually as major headlines - it's rather
rare for sci-fi shows to reflect any given current event (part of the
reason critics lauded Battlestar Galactica so highly is that it was a
rare case that did), and Star Trek has never been especially topical.
> >> > started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
> >> > was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
> >> > all that popular.
>
> >> What? It became even more political and thus even worse in later years.
>
> > I meant Bajoran political stories were dropped - more because the
> > Bajorans were boring than the politics were, I suspect. After all, the
>
> What, like the whole of seasons 6 and 7 were dedicated to the struggle for
> control of the Bjoran religion and government
No they weren't. The Bajoran first minister disappeared from the
series without trace early in season 5 (it was never explained why
Winn was basically doing his job in seasons 5 and 7), and the only
stories dealing with control of the government were the season 2 three-
parter and Shakaar near the end of season 3. The mystical pah-wraith
crap wasn't a political storyline - the religious internal politics
storyline had been done on season 2 - it was just an excuse to go down
the good-vs-evil mythic fantasy route and give Dukat superpowers.
> > original premise of DS9 was that the crew's job was to bring Bajor
> > into the Federation, but they wrote that story out of the series in
> > season 5 in favour of going down the Dominion War route.
>
> Because they wanted to copy Babylon 5's storyline of the Shadow War.
Pretty much, but as ever the DS9 version worked better than the B5 one
for the most part - the villains were less stereotyped and the war was
presented as more of, well, a war, with lots of things happening in
the background, people losing friends and colleagues on other fronts
etc. B5 just used it to show off special effects of 'planet
killers' (one stupid idea at least that DS9 didn't borrow). And you
can't claim that any of the interminable debate sequences in B5 to get
potential allies on board was even close to the quality of "In the
Pale Moonlight".
> >> > But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why would
> >> > that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
>
> >> It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical
> >> stories,
> >> they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on
> >> are
> >> current.
>
> > The above discussion illustrates that that's not the case - the show
> > was an allegory for events 50 years earlier, and yet it still worked
>
> Nope. It was an allegory for contemporary events which were on the news
> almost daily just like season 3 of Enterprise was an allegory for 9/11 and
> the events which followed it.
I'll buy that the season opener was an allegory for 9/11, but as I
recall the world didn't respond to 9/11 by sending a team to negotiate
with bin Laden...
> >> > there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
> >> > Message of the Week storylines.
>
> >> TNG's messages are better in the long term.
>
> > TNG's messages were vacuous and patronising. "Be nice to disabled/
> > foreign/gay/insert whatever here people" - nothing the sort of people
> > who tend to watch Star Trek are likely to need drilled into them, let
> > alone as blatantly or forcefully as they were and with so little
> > substance beyond "...because it's a nice thing to do". No examination
> > of why the villains of the piece *aren't* nice to them beyond "the
> > villains aren't very nice people", and the writers genuinely expected
> > their simplistic caricatures to be taken seriously. A classic case is
>
> Yer right, so every TV news programme and newspaper article describes why
> Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Ladin aren't nice people, or for that
> matter George Bush and Tony Blair.
News programmes aren't intended as morality plays.
Not once have they done anything like
> that. We're just told that so-and-so is bad and so-and-so is good because
> that's whose side we're on. Even with the Falklands War we were always told
> the Argentineans were always bad.
And this is a core problem with things like TNG - the smugly superior
hypocrisy known as 'political correctness', which simultaneously tries
to promote tolerance and acceptance of groups with fashionable labels
while trotting out exactly the same kind of crap about people who
don't fall into those groups as those people would have us believe
about their favourite bugbears.
> > Roddenberry's belief when he started the show that the Ferengi would
> > actually work as the series' main villains; he didn't see them as fun
> > caricatures of capitalist excess, he actually seemed to believe
> > capitalism could be meaningfully characterised with one-dimensional
> > greedy stereotypes.
>
> Which is what it is, and the people who engage in it are nothing more than
> thieves.
Wow, you fit right into the target audience, don't you? Let's all fly
the flag for extending tolerance and understanding only towards people
we like (and so tolerate and understand anyway)!
It raises the puzzling question of exactly who these propaganda pieces
are intended for. The very people who'd benefit from taking their
messages on board - such as being less greedy or considering the
consequences of their actions - are alienated by being portrayed as
stereotypes, while for the rest of us it comes across as not only
patronising, but a positive disservice to the people it professes to
promote tolerance for, by giving the impression that the arguments for
treating them with respect wouldn't withstand scrutiny without having
to caricature their opponents. It's hard to escape the conclusion it's
just intended as self-aggrandising fantasising by the PC lobby, with
no intent at wider social relevance.
It's sometimes hard to escape the feeling that the political left is
so averse to religion purely because they want a monopoly on
sanctimonious preaching that bears no relation to reality...
> >> > Either way it hardly matters - in fact I've often said that it makes a
> >> > good yardstick that they used so many similar stories, because it
>
> >> It was all exactly the same story. An almost extinct race of
> >> superpowerful
> >> aliens who once ruled most of the galaxy make the Captain guy into some
> >> sort
> >> of prophet when then becomes some sort of superbeing in the final
> >> episode.
>
> > Except for making the captain into some sort of prophet, none of that
> > happened in DS9. We never found out what the Prophets were, but
>
> You obviously missed the final episode of the series.
No, final episode doesn't reveal anything the rest of the series
didn't.
> > there's no indication their power ever extended much beyond the local
> > area - I always liked to imagine they were what the Bajorans would
> > eventually evolve into, and that their actions were intended to guide
> > and protect their ancestors, being free from time as they were.
>
> It was already revealed that the Wormhole Beings were what the ancient
> Bajorans had already evolved into before they left the planet and moved
> inside the wormhole to a new level of existence.
When? It's my take on it, but I've encountered people who haven't run
into that idea or thought of it - it certainly wasn't made explicit in
the show.
It's almost exactly the
> same explanation that Babylon 5 gave for the Vorlons at the end of Season 4
> but it had more or less been revealed in Season 3.
Ah, maybe you're confusing what was said in B5 for what was said in
DS9 - after all, if you're convinced they're both the same what was
revealed in one *must* have been in the other too, right?
> > An example I like to bring up, because it was exactly the same
> > storyline in both series, is the end of the Shadow War vs. Sacrifice
> > of Angels in DS9 season 6.
>
> > DS9: Over six episodes, Sisko organises a counterattack against the
> > Dominion to retake the station, and succeeds in fighting through to
> > the wormhole, the resistance on the station having bought him time to
> > try and avert a fleet of Dominion ships arriving. Based on a
> > relationship with the Prophets established early in the series and
> > their known powers over the wormhole, he persuades them to close it to
> > Dominion shipping, saving the station. The war carries on for another
> > year.
>
> > B5: At the start of season 4, Sheridan finds God at the bottom of a
> > hole,
>
> That happened at the end of Season 3.
Thought the season 3 cliffhanger was Sheridan crashing his ship into
the hole?
> > Now, I'm not defending DS9's take on it, which was pretty lousy. But
> > here's the thing: not only is it only the culmination of a short arc,
> > and not the exclusive focus of the series to that point, but DS9
> > manages without much effort to incorporate its version into the
> > existing framework already established by the series, using
> > established races and abilities for the universe, and it does so a
> > posteriori, rather than planning it from the start of the show's run.
> > In contrast we're told again and again that Stracynski had his entire
> > series mapped out in detail before he started - and even with that
> > edge he still has to resort to inventing new superbeings with new
> > magic powers, and reinventing who the Vorlons and Shadows are in the
> > process, in order to achieve the same resolution. In other words, what
> > DS9's writers came up with between seasons was far superior to
> > something Stracynski had been working on for a decade or more.
>
> What Stracynski had originally planed after the Series 3 finally was
> supposed to have spanned Season 4 and Season 5, but since Season 5 had not
> been commissioned and everyone though that Season 4 was going to be the last
> he had to fit two seasons worth of storyline into Season 4 including the
> series final episode which after Season 5 got the go ahead he moved to the
> end of Season 5 and replaced the Season 4 ending with something else.
Except that Stracynski knew this from the start and had always had a
season 4 ending worked out in case the show ended early.
> >> > facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
> >> > consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but was
>
> >> Nope.
>
> > Okay, in what way is the above a better resolution in B5 than in DS9?
>
> Because by that time DS9 had its head stuck up its own ass.
That's not much of an argument...
> I agree that the ending of Season 4 of Babylon 5 was disappointing but what
> led up to it was much better than what led up to what essentially was the
> same scenario in DS9.
As above, I disagree - in DS9 there was only a short build-up, and
most of those episodes were pretty strong. In B5 most of the weakest
stories of season 3 were those relating to the Shadow War (the high
points were the rebellion against Earth stories), and the season 2
stories introducing the Shadows were dire.
> >> > introduced at the start of season 3 - they appeared in all of three
>
> >> They were introduced in the episode where whatshisname, Odo, discovered
> >> his
> >> home planet on the other side of the worm hold. Was that in season 2 or
> >> 3?
>
> > Opening story of season 3.
>
> We you couldn't tell which was the end of season 2 and the beginning of
> season 3 from the way the BBC showed it all back to back without a break.
I only caught DS9 on its first run midway through season 3, so caught
everything earlier on video (which from season 3 onwards were numbered
by season).
> >> > other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
> >> > arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
> >> > Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of season
> >> > 3 onwards...
>
> >> Which was the best season of the entire series of Babylon 5.
>
> > So, why do you think it's a problem if DS9 became all about the
> > Changelings, since that seemed good for B5?
>
> Babylon 5 didn't have the equivalent of Changelings infiltrating the
> Federation and Changelings all over the places. You hardly got to see the
> Shadows at all.
You're vastly overstating how often the Changelings (except the female
one) showed up - in the entire series I can think of three others, not
counting the one that died in The Ship. Still, I'm not seeing how a
storyline about enemy agents who can infiltrate the Federation is less
interesting than stereotype evil superbeings who just aren't seen very
often.
> >> > At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
> >> >> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what
> >> >> happened
> >> >> in the previous seasons,
>
> >> > That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash in
> >> > on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling driving
> >> > an entire series.
>
> >> Yer, like Doctor Who wasn't doing that already. What was the Key to Time
> >> series all about and Trial of a Time Lord? What about the Arc in Space to
> >> Genesis of the Daleks arc?
>
> > I said "driving an entire series", not story arcs within a series.
>
> The Key to Time series was an entire series as was Trial of a Time Lord.
I'm using 'series' in the sense of, well, a full series (the way
Americans use it, simply because it makes more sense to have different
words for a series and a season than it does to call both a 'series').
Key to Time and Trial of a Time Lord were seasons.
> >> > Why does that make it superior? Is modern Who superior to classic Who
> >> > simply because you can watch the episodes in any order (for the most
> >> > part), while you have to watch the old ones in serials (and in Key to
> >> > Time, as an entire season)?
>
> >> DS9 carried on the same storyline for 7 whole series as did Babylon 5. At
> >> least in something like Buffy you got a different storyline each series
> >> and
> >> that was closer to something like the Key to Time series in Doctor Who
> >> than
> >> the continuous drawn out story of DS9.
>
> > Yes, you're describing the differences between the two types of show.
> > That doesn't address the question "Why does that make one superior to
> > the other?"
>
> Because you can watch most episodes of ST TOS and ST TNG and individual
> stories of Doctor Who in any order you like. It's impossible to watch an
> episode of something Heroes by itself let alone in any order you like.
That's still just saying that's the sort of storytelling you prefer,
not that it's better. You can't normally read a book by picking it up
at random chapters and skipping to another random chapter out of
sequence when you reach the end - that doesn't make it a bad way of
storytelling. Quite the reverse.
Is
> that still going btw?
Supposedly. Last time I checked the BBC were still listing season 4 as
'coming soon', though it started in the US at the same time as the
current season of House (which just reached its mid-season break in
the UK). Maybe they decided not to pick up season 4 after all.
> >> > But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
> >> >> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line which
> >> >> lasted
> >> >> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in the
> >> >> Beta
> >> >> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>
> >> > I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
> >> > much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
>
> >> What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
> >> critically received season of the entire series
>
> > It is? By whom? Enterprise was roundly panned until season 4, as I
> > recall.
>
> Nope. Enterprise was critically acclaimed until season 3 ruined it.
By which critics?
> >> > they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
> >> > were chopped into smaller chunks?
>
> >> Yes, they were better stories too, but by then it was too late, season 3
> >> had
> >> destroyed its audience base.
>
> > Correction: seasons 1 to 3 had destroyed its audience base. Ratings
>
> No. Season 1 created a bigger audience base. It was getting huge critical
> acclaim when Season 1 was showing on Sky. Season 3 ruined it. Even form the
> first episode you could tell if was going to be crap. It had no hope. What
> became Season 3 should never have been written. They should have carried on
> in the manner of Season 1 and ditched the Temporal Cold War altogether.
Season 1 focused more on the Temporal Cold War than any other. Season
3 ignored it almost until the end of the arc.
> > started out low for Star Trek and got progressively worse - I don't
> > think that can be extrapolated to a critique of season 3 per se.
>
> Ratings were always low for Enterprise in the US because it changed networks
> or its syndication scheme as I recall. That wasn't the case in the UK.
Maybe not, but US ratings are what determines whether an American show
gets another season, not 'critical acclaim'.
Phil
john smith
<snip>
>
> Maybe not, but US ratings are what determines whether an American show
> gets another season, not 'critical acclaim'.
>
> Phil
That definitely *wasn't* true of "The Wire" and, indeeed, most other HBO
series. It's probably far more true of the mainstream non-subscription
channels, of course...
Agamemnon
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:93605a96-c41f-4daf...@k19g2000yqc.googlegroups.com...
I missed a few. There's still a few I've never seen as well.
>
>> >> > Sequitur, Mortal Coil and a few whose name I can't remember off the
>> >> > bat, and the Vidiians were an interesting idea at first. Did TNG
>> >> > have
>> >> > any stories considered 'good' by ANYONE until the end of season 3?
>> >> > Of
>> >> > all the Trek series, I think Voyager had the strongest pilot, and
>>
>> >> No way. The pilot was the worst of all of the ST pilots. Even the
>> >> title
>> >> was
>> >> ridiculous. It might as well have been called The Janitor. That's how
>> >> exciting it was.
>>
>> > Yes, it had a crappy title - Star Trek stories often do. Is "The
>> > Cage", "Encounter at Farpoint" or "Emissary" any more enthralling?
>>
>> Yes.
>
> But by your logic, "Emissary" could just as easily have been called
> "The Diplomat" - not very exciting, is it?
Or The Ambassador. Both as still much better titles than The Janitor, I mean
Caretaker.
>
>> > None of the Trek pilots have been terribly good, but "Caretaker" was
>> > strong by the standards set before - the characters were better-
>>
>> Nope. It was boring.
>
> So were the others, except The Cage (and the 'second pilot' for TOS
> was arguably the worst of the lot).
No.
>
>> > defined at the start, the setting seemed to have been given more
>> > thought than "Let's go explore" (the Kazon could have become a lot
>>
>> No they could not. The Kazon are one of the main reasons the first 3
>> series
>> were terrible. It was much better with the board.
>
> The Borg in Voyager were practically as boring as the Kazon. The Kazon
Nope. The Kazon were not only boring but a pain in the arse.
> had three big problems:
>
> 1. Being Klingon clones.
Yes, but it was being Klingon clones but not having the charisma of Kingons.
> 2. Being overused.
Yes. Shouldn't have been used at all.
> 3. Having recurring characters in a series where they shouldn't
> logically be able to keep up with Voyager (oh yes, and the recurring
> characters were dull too).
Yes. Just when you had thought you were rid of them they appeared again out
of nowhere and ahead of the USS Voyager.
>
>> > more interesting than the gangland Klingons they were turned into
>>
>> They behaved like gangland Klingons from the start.
>
> They behaved like gangs, but I wouldn't say they behaved like Klingons
> in their first appearance. The idea of a sector broken into feuding
> gangs engaged in perpetual resource wars could have been done well in
> a Mad Max sort of way. Instead it wasn't.
Not even in a Mad Max king of way because Mad Max was ridiculous. Look what
happened to Waterworld or whatever it was called which was Mad Max set on
water.
>
>> > based on what "Caretaker" gave us).
>>
>> They should have been ditched from episode 1 onwards.
>
> I think they were fine in episode 1 - I'd largely agree with the
> "onwards", though (although I did like a couple of the season 2 Kazon
> episodes - the one with Nog and the one with the Kazon's former
> oppressors), but it's a tradition in Star Trek since TNG that the
> races introduced in the pilot will become a recurring feature of the
> show, and often major villains.
Oh, you mean like the aliens with big foreheads from The Cage. Yer right.
>
>> >> > probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a
>> >> > couple
>> >> > of real stinkers.
>>
>> >> You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being
>> >> terrible
>> >> until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
>>
>> > TNG was universally considered as being terrible until the
>> > introduction of the Borg at the end of season 3. DS9 was universally
>>
>> But not as bad as Voyager.
>
> Watch "The Naked Now" sometime, if you can stomach it. Universally
> regarded as one of the very worst stories Star Trek in any incarnation
> has produced - I think it was the second episode of TNG's first
> season.
Was that the one where Yar has sex with Data? That was a good one.
>
>> > considered as having not become good until season 3 or 4. Voyager just
>>
>> Nope. Season 3 and 4 was when it got stuck up its own arse
>
> Okay, "almost universally", as in "by everyone except you".
>
There is no doubt about it. It got stuck up its own arse, like it or not
> with all that
>> changeling and political crap. Season 1 was the best. Season 7 was the
>> worst
>> and it wasn't just because Jadzea was killed off because Teri Farrell
>> left.
>
> Season 7 was a mixed bag - I hated what they did to Dukat and (after a
> very strong crisis of faith episode) to Winn. Dukat's final episode
> should have been Waltz, or possibly even Sacrifice of Angels (having a
> major villain leave the show because he went mad would make a
> refreshing change from having to have him killed in a final
> apocalyptic battle with the hero), with any subsequent appearances
> done only as flashback episodes. But season 7 had very strong episodes
> - Dogs of War (the penultimate episode), the Nog arc, Damar's
> development over the second half of the season.
The show got stuck up its own arse. What was all the crap about Doctor
Bashir being genetically engineered using banned Eugenics technology
supposed to be for? So they could make him into the new Spock after Jadzea
left? It was riddicuouls. He'd never shown any of his amazing mental
abilities in the first few seasons. The writers created then from nowhere.
And he was and you think that that is going to make people like Voyager.
Not.
The Caradasians were forced out of Bajor by the terror attacks against them
by the Bajorans and the fact that they were fighting on two fronts with the
other front being against the Federation, which is why the Marquis was
formed when each side had to hand over colonies to the other to keep the
sides apart.
>
> The oppression that was alluded to was communism under
>> Serb dominations and there was no Cardasian extermination programme of
>> Bajorans.
>
> Watch Duet again.
>
> The camps we saw were analogous to the Russian gulags. The back
>> story was that the Bajoras were once just as bad as the Cardasians and
>> had
>> being their oppressors to begin with before the Cardasians freed
>> themselves
>> and turned the tables.
>
> No, there wasn't any story of that kind in the background - it was
> stated again and again that the Bajorans had been peaceful before a
> military government on Cardassia decided to annex their planet after
> centuries of, so far as is suggested, peaceful technological rivalry.
Nope. It was revealed that the Bajorans had previously been a warlike race
which had oppressed the Cardasians.
>
> > > WWII wasn't the Nazis invading Israel and then them making up so
>> >> DS9 was not an allegory to WWII.
>>
>> > An allegory is not the same as an analogy - it's not *analogous* to
>> > WWII (mixing as it did comparisons between the Bajorans' suffering
>> > with the Holocaust with a story of an invasion of formerly sovereign
>>
>> Complete and utter rubbish. WWII was NOT about the Jewish holocaust.
>
> Hence my comment "it's not analogous to WWII".
>
> It was
>> about Hitler and Muslim invading the whole of Europe and slaughtering
>> tens
>> of millions of people. The Caradians didn't invaded and nearly conquer
>> the
>> Federation and its territory.
>
> They did invade and conquer Bajor - no one ever said anything about
> the Cardassian/Federation conflict being an allegory for WWII, only
> the Cardassian/Bajor conflict.
Well it wasn't. It was allegorical to the Bosnian War.
>
>> > produced it - indeed at least one DS9 staff writer is on record
>> > describing the Cardassians as Nazis, and as I mentioned Duet was
>>
>> So were the Serbs.
>
> The Serbs were members of the German fascist party in the 1930s and
> 40s?
The Serbs were being accused of being like the Nazis, which the found
extremely offensive since they had fought against the Nazis whereas the
Croat had conspired with them
>
>> > consciously pilfered from a story about a 'war criminal' put on trial
>>
>> It was based on the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
>
> No, Aggy - look at the source material. It was about trials of Nazi
> war criminals.
Nope. It was allegorical to the War Crimes Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia. That was the event which was current in the news when the story
was written not the Nazi war crimes trials.
>
>> >> > (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift
>> >> > from
>> >> > a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
>>
>> >> Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals
>>
>> > No, the writers originally, and deliberately, framed it around an
>> > account of the Nuremberg Trials, and later adapted it to reflect the
>>
>> That's because the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was also
>> based on the model of the Nuremberg Trials.
>
> I see. So rather than base it on the Yugoslav trials in order to make
> a story about those, they decided to base it on the original trials to
> make a story about Yugoslavia? Yep, that makes sense ... to you.
They couldn't base it on the actual Yugoslav trails since they hadn't taken
place yet. The staging of the War Crimes Tribunal was announced prior to the
scripts for DS9 being written so the writers decided to used the Nuremberg
Trials as the basis for their allegory to the Yugoslav trails
>
>> > story I mentioned above, called The Man in the Glass Booth. Even the
>>
>> Adapted to fit the Bosnian conflict.
>
> No, adapted to fit Deep Space Nine, in which there wasn't a Bosnian
DS9 was a deliberate allegory to the Bosnian conflict.
> conflict. Tell you what, watch the original film, then watch Duet and
> tell me which bits needed to be modified specifically to reflect the
> Bosnian conflict.
Watch the news.
>
> Didn't you ever watch the news when the
>> programme was being shown for the first time?
>
> Yes. I also watched DS9 when it was being shown for the first time.
> They were on different channels/different times of day. Strangely I
> managed to avoid getting the two confused - tell me, did you think the
> news bulletins at the time were about a crew on a far future space
> station, by any chance?
Fool.
>
>> > Cardassian character's first name is based on the name of a Nazi
>> > concentration camp commander:
>>
>> So what.
>
> So why do you suppose that conscious allusion was made, and not just
> to any camp commander but to the one made notorious by Schindler's
> List, and so in the public imagination? Why was the Cardassian not
> given a name resembling, say, Rabadan?
You clearly don't understand allegory. Allegory only works and is only used
as a medium when the events are are fresh in peoples minds. That means the
Bosnian War not WWII. The Bosnian War was on the news almost every day, not
WWII.
>
>> > and was
>> >> screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
>> >> Yugoslavia were being held.
>>
>> > It was aired in June 1993. The first tribunal was held in 1994, and no
>> > major figures came before the tribunal for years afterwards - yet the
>> > story was about a key perpetrator of atrocities.
>>
>> The first tribunal might have been held in 1994 but the entire process of
>> setting up the tribunals and capturing the war criminals started years
>> before that. At the time the story in question was being written war
>> criminals tribunals for the former Yugoslavia had already been given the
>> go
>> ahead and stories about war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia were
>> plastered over every TV news programme and newspaper.
>
> And yet the writers strangely decided to tell a story that bore no
> relation to those particular war crimes and instead focused on a
> concentration camp.
Wrong. They told a story which was allegorical to the Bosnian War which they
conflated with Nazi war crimes since everyone was being brainwashed by the
media at the time that the Serbs were as bad as the Nazis so they must have
committed the same crimes.
>
>> >> > introduced (in TNG's Ensign Ro) I'm not sure the Bosnian war had
>> >> > even>
>> >> Which was all about the break-up of Yugoslavia, with Ro and then Keira
>> >> being
>> >> a Bosnian Muslim guerrilla fighter.
>>
>> > Ensign Ro aired in 1991. The Bosnian War began in 1992. In the episode
>>
>> The break-up of Yugoslavia has already started long before that.
>
> A year before that.
>
>> Croatia held a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia on 19 May
>> 1991.
>>
>> Slovenia began its rebellion against Yugoslavia on 27 June 1991 and
>> declared
>> independence on 7 July.
>>
>> FYROM declared independence from Yugoslavia on 8 September 1991 and in
>> the
>> followin month the Serbs began threatening the Bosnian Muslims with
>> extermination.
>>
>> Ensign Ro aired on October 7 1991 which was the same day that Croatia
>> declared independence from Yugoslavia.
>
> Yes, Aggy, rather than, say, writing the story at the start of the
> year with the rest of the season, they decided to write it within a
> few days between the Serbs threatening the Bosnians and the episode
> airing - and to imagine a resistance movement that didn't yet exist.
Wrong. The writers know full well what was happening in Yugoslavia and it
was written as an allegory to those events and the break-up of communism.
>
>> > the Bajorans to stop attacks on Cardassia for the sake of the
>> > Federation-Cardassia treaty.
>>
>> And at the time that the story was being written the break up of
>> Yugoslavia
>> was hitting the news headlines almost every day.
>
> So what? The death of Michael Jackson hit the news headlines almost
> every day for a couple of months earlier this year, and yet you don't
> find sci-fi writers scrambling to turn it into plots. There are
Why would they. It doesn't make good science fiction or any kind of science
fiction for that matter.
> *always* wars in the news, usually as major headlines - it's rather
> rare for sci-fi shows to reflect any given current event (part of the
Yer, and what do you think AOL/WW3 was allegorical to? WMDs ready in 45
seconds. Yer.
> reason critics lauded Battlestar Galactica so highly is that it was a
> rare case that did), and Star Trek has never been especially topical.
>
>> >> > started. There was also more to DS9 than that - in fact that aspect
>> >> > was toned down in later years because the political stories weren't
>> >> > all that popular.
>>
>> >> What? It became even more political and thus even worse in later
>> >> years.
>>
>> > I meant Bajoran political stories were dropped - more because the
>> > Bajorans were boring than the politics were, I suspect. After all, the
>>
>> What, like the whole of seasons 6 and 7 were dedicated to the struggle
>> for
>> control of the Bjoran religion and government
>
> No they weren't. The Bajoran first minister disappeared from the
> series without trace early in season 5 (it was never explained why
> Winn was basically doing his job in seasons 5 and 7), and the only
> stories dealing with control of the government were the season 2 three-
> parter and Shakaar near the end of season 3. The mystical pah-wraith
Nope.
> crap wasn't a political storyline - the religious internal politics
Yes it was. The Bajoran priestess woman was trying to gain political control
of Bajor and eventually she did and almost destroyed it in the final season
and killed Keiras boyfriend before that in order to get to power.
> storyline had been done on season 2 - it was just an excuse to go down
> the good-vs-evil mythic fantasy route and give Dukat superpowers.
>
>> > original premise of DS9 was that the crew's job was to bring Bajor
>> > into the Federation, but they wrote that story out of the series in
>> > season 5 in favour of going down the Dominion War route.
>>
>> Because they wanted to copy Babylon 5's storyline of the Shadow War.
>
> Pretty much, but as ever the DS9 version worked better than the B5 one
No it didn't.
> for the most part - the villains were less stereotyped and the war was
> presented as more of, well, a war, with lots of things happening in
> the background, people losing friends and colleagues on other fronts
> etc. B5 just used it to show off special effects of 'planet
> killers' (one stupid idea at least that DS9 didn't borrow). And you
Well actually they did. The Canadians or Changelings got hold of a the
Genesis Device technology and were going to set it off at the end of the
final season if I remember correctly, or was that Season 3 of Enterprise.
B5 just used Mass Drivers which were equivalent to large nuclear bombs that
could destroy areas the size of Whales, not entire planets. Or are you
getting it mixed up with Andromeda which used Point Singularity Bombs which
could destroy entire solar systems?
> can't claim that any of the interminable debate sequences in B5 to get
> potential allies on board was even close to the quality of "In the
> Pale Moonlight".
Which one was that?
>
>> >> > But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why
>> >> > would
>> >> > that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
>>
>> >> It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical
>> >> stories,
>> >> they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on
>> >> are
>> >> current.
>>
>> > The above discussion illustrates that that's not the case - the show
>> > was an allegory for events 50 years earlier, and yet it still worked
>>
>> Nope. It was an allegory for contemporary events which were on the news
>> almost daily just like season 3 of Enterprise was an allegory for 9/11
>> and
>> the events which followed it.
>
> I'll buy that the season opener was an allegory for 9/11, but as I
> recall the world didn't respond to 9/11 by sending a team to negotiate
> with bin Laden...
They sent in troops to root him out and destroy Al Qaeda and that is what
the Enterprise was sent to do against the Xindi.
>
>> >> > there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
>> >> > Message of the Week storylines.
>>
>> >> TNG's messages are better in the long term.
>>
>> > TNG's messages were vacuous and patronising. "Be nice to disabled/
>> > foreign/gay/insert whatever here people" - nothing the sort of people
>> > who tend to watch Star Trek are likely to need drilled into them, let
>> > alone as blatantly or forcefully as they were and with so little
>> > substance beyond "...because it's a nice thing to do". No examination
>> > of why the villains of the piece *aren't* nice to them beyond "the
>> > villains aren't very nice people", and the writers genuinely expected
>> > their simplistic caricatures to be taken seriously. A classic case is
>>
>> Yer right, so every TV news programme and newspaper article describes why
>> Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Ladin aren't nice people, or for that
>> matter George Bush and Tony Blair.
>
> News programmes aren't intended as morality plays.
Morality plays don't go into the motivation of the villains. They only go
into the motivation of the heroes. When did the Bible ever examine the
devil's real motives and his opinion of god? Not once.
They are intended for people who have not yet become greedy capitalists so
as not to become them. Just look at the bible. (Oh dear, I bet Yads is going
to love this. It's almost a pity I have him killfiled as a troll. Maybe I
should release him since it's Christmas, Would Christmas still be Christmas
without him?)
It was.
>
> It's almost exactly the
>> same explanation that Babylon 5 gave for the Vorlons at the end of Season
>> 4
>> but it had more or less been revealed in Season 3.
>
> Ah, maybe you're confusing what was said in B5 for what was said in
> DS9 - after all, if you're convinced they're both the same what was
> revealed in one *must* have been in the other too, right?
No.
>
>> > An example I like to bring up, because it was exactly the same
>> > storyline in both series, is the end of the Shadow War vs. Sacrifice
>> > of Angels in DS9 season 6.
>>
>> > DS9: Over six episodes, Sisko organises a counterattack against the
>> > Dominion to retake the station, and succeeds in fighting through to
>> > the wormhole, the resistance on the station having bought him time to
>> > try and avert a fleet of Dominion ships arriving. Based on a
>> > relationship with the Prophets established early in the series and
>> > their known powers over the wormhole, he persuades them to close it to
>> > Dominion shipping, saving the station. The war carries on for another
>> > year.
>>
>> > B5: At the start of season 4, Sheridan finds God at the bottom of a
>> > hole,
>>
>> That happened at the end of Season 3.
>
> Thought the season 3 cliffhanger was Sheridan crashing his ship into
> the hole?
Er?
He jumps down some huge well to his doom after being told "If you go to
(whatever it was called) you will die".
Which was to squeeze his original arcs for seasons 4 and 5 into just one
season.
>
>> >> > facilitates comparison. Wherever the stories came from, DS9
>> >> > consistently told the same stories better. B5 had its moments but
>> >> > was
>>
>> >> Nope.
>>
>> > Okay, in what way is the above a better resolution in B5 than in DS9?
>>
>> Because by that time DS9 had its head stuck up its own ass.
>
> That's not much of an argument...
>
>> I agree that the ending of Season 4 of Babylon 5 was disappointing but
>> what
>> led up to it was much better than what led up to what essentially was the
>> same scenario in DS9.
>
> As above, I disagree - in DS9 there was only a short build-up, and
> most of those episodes were pretty strong. In B5 most of the weakest
> stories of season 3 were those relating to the Shadow War (the high
> points were the rebellion against Earth stories), and the season 2
> stories introducing the Shadows were dire.
Nope.
The Shadows were not stereotype evil superbeings. For a start they didn't do
anything themselves. They supported other races own ambitions which they
thought would advance their own purpose, which is exactly what the Vorlons,
the supposed good guys did as well, on order to advance humanoid kind. In
the end it was revealed that both were as bad as each other and both were
told to leave.
>
>> >> > At least with Voyager you can still watch individual
>> >> >> episodes on a one of basis without having to know much about what
>> >> >> happened
>> >> >> in the previous seasons,
>>
>> >> > That's just a style of storytelling - DS9 and B5 were early to cash
>> >> > in
>> >> > on what's become the modern fashion for narrative storytelling
>> >> > driving
>> >> > an entire series.
>>
>> >> Yer, like Doctor Who wasn't doing that already. What was the Key to
>> >> Time
>> >> series all about and Trial of a Time Lord? What about the Arc in Space
>> >> to
>> >> Genesis of the Daleks arc?
>>
>> > I said "driving an entire series", not story arcs within a series.
>>
>> The Key to Time series was an entire series as was Trial of a Time Lord.
>
> I'm using 'series' in the sense of, well, a full series (the way
> Americans use it, simply because it makes more sense to have different
> words for a series and a season than it does to call both a 'series').
> Key to Time and Trial of a Time Lord were seasons.
They are both called Programmes.
Of course it makes it a bad way of story telling. The whole idea of a story
is to follow the impact of one event on another or the historical cause of
that event and that can't be done at random. Even Herodotus which isn't
written in chronological order but does the equivalent of flashback has a
linear plan to it, not a random plan.
>
> Is
>> that still going btw?
>
> Supposedly. Last time I checked the BBC were still listing season 4 as
> 'coming soon', though it started in the US at the same time as the
> current season of House (which just reached its mid-season break in
> the UK). Maybe they decided not to pick up season 4 after all.
Season 4 being Chapter 5 right?
>
>> >> > But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
>> >> >> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line
>> >> >> which
>> >> >> lasted
>> >> >> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in
>> >> >> the
>> >> >> Beta
>> >> >> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>>
>> >> > I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
>> >> > much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
>>
>> >> What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
>> >> critically received season of the entire series
>>
>> > It is? By whom? Enterprise was roundly panned until season 4, as I
>> > recall.
>>
>> Nope. Enterprise was critically acclaimed until season 3 ruined it.
>
> By which critics?
By everyone.
>
>> >> > they were better stories was more important than the fact that they
>> >> > were chopped into smaller chunks?
>>
>> >> Yes, they were better stories too, but by then it was too late, season
>> >> 3
>> >> had
>> >> destroyed its audience base.
>>
>> > Correction: seasons 1 to 3 had destroyed its audience base. Ratings
>>
>> No. Season 1 created a bigger audience base. It was getting huge critical
>> acclaim when Season 1 was showing on Sky. Season 3 ruined it. Even form
>> the
>> first episode you could tell if was going to be crap. It had no hope.
>> What
>> became Season 3 should never have been written. They should have carried
>> on
>> in the manner of Season 1 and ditched the Temporal Cold War altogether.
>
> Season 1 focused more on the Temporal Cold War than any other. Season
> 3 ignored it almost until the end of the arc.
You must be joking. The Temporal Cold War was riddled throughout Season 3.
>
>> > started out low for Star Trek and got progressively worse - I don't
>> > think that can be extrapolated to a critique of season 3 per se.
>>
>> Ratings were always low for Enterprise in the US because it changed
>> networks
>> or its syndication scheme as I recall. That wasn't the case in the UK.
>
> Maybe not, but US ratings are what determines whether an American show
> gets another season, not 'critical acclaim'.
Well clearly it was the lack of success of Voyager which forced Enterprise
to change networks then.
>
> Phil
Ignis Fatuus
So you Are starting to understand the 'relative' nature of ratings.
Perhaps Now you'll begin to understand the differential between
performance figures from 1965 and figures from 1976.
The Doctor
john smith
"Ignis Fatuus" <Ig...@fatuusisland.com> wrote in message
news:imkti55hi39lb1e3u...@4ax.com...
What *are* you banging on about now?
The Doctor
tRoll off john smith.
pbo...@aol.com
So you decided to watch ones you had seen in order to make up for it?
There are a few Voyager episodes I've never seen. I've never had any
desire to rewatch a full season I didn't like just to find them (which
is why I never saw the Kes story in season 6, and I think there are
probably a few stories in that dreadful Galactica 1980 Borg kids
storyline that I missed - thankfully).
> > But by your logic, "Emissary" could just as easily have been called
> > "The Diplomat" - not very exciting, is it?
>
> Or The Ambassador.
Still not on the edge of my seat with excitement. Anyway, wasn't that
the title of a TNG episode?
> >> > None of the Trek pilots have been terribly good, but "Caretaker" was
> >> > strong by the standards set before - the characters were better-
>
> >> Nope. It was boring.
>
> > So were the others, except The Cage (and the 'second pilot' for TOS
> > was arguably the worst of the lot).
>
> No.
Okay, I admit it's got competition in "Encounter at Farpoint", but you
have to admit "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was pretty bad.
> >> > defined at the start, the setting seemed to have been given more
> >> > thought than "Let's go explore" (the Kazon could have become a lot
>
> >> No they could not. The Kazon are one of the main reasons the first 3
> >> series
> >> were terrible. It was much better with the board.
>
> > The Borg in Voyager were practically as boring as the Kazon. The Kazon
>
> Nope. The Kazon were not only boring but a pain in the arse.
And the Borg weren't?
> > had three big problems:
>
> > 1. Being Klingon clones.
>
> Yes, but it was being Klingon clones but not having the charisma of Kingons.
Which is saying something.
> >> > more interesting than the gangland Klingons they were turned into
>
> >> They behaved like gangland Klingons from the start.
>
> > They behaved like gangs, but I wouldn't say they behaved like Klingons
> > in their first appearance. The idea of a sector broken into feuding
> > gangs engaged in perpetual resource wars could have been done well in
> > a Mad Max sort of way. Instead it wasn't.
>
> Not even in a Mad Max king of way because Mad Max was ridiculous. Look what
> happened to Waterworld or whatever it was called which was Mad Max set on
> water.
Why not look at, oh I don't know, Mad Max instead? I agree Mad Max
clones are crap - never saw Waterworld, but Reign of Fire (Mad Max
with dragons) ranks as just about the worst film I've ever seen. But
Mad Max was fun.
> >> > based on what "Caretaker" gave us).
>
> >> They should have been ditched from episode 1 onwards.
>
> > I think they were fine in episode 1 - I'd largely agree with the
> > "onwards", though (although I did like a couple of the season 2 Kazon
> > episodes - the one with Nog and the one with the Kazon's former
> > oppressors), but it's a tradition in Star Trek since TNG that the
> > races introduced in the pilot will become a recurring feature of the
> > show, and often major villains.
>
> Oh, you mean like the aliens with big foreheads from The Cage. Yer right.
There's a reason I said "...a tradition in Star Trek since TNG".
> >> >> > probably aside from TOS the best full first season, with only a
> >> >> > couple
> >> >> > of real stinkers.
>
> >> >> You must be joking. Voyager was universally considered as being
> >> >> terrible
> >> >> until the arrival of 7of9 in Series 3 or 4.
>
> >> > TNG was universally considered as being terrible until the
> >> > introduction of the Borg at the end of season 3. DS9 was universally
>
> >> But not as bad as Voyager.
>
> > Watch "The Naked Now" sometime, if you can stomach it. Universally
> > regarded as one of the very worst stories Star Trek in any incarnation
> > has produced - I think it was the second episode of TNG's first
> > season.
>
> Was that the one where Yar has sex with Data? That was a good one.
No idea, but if it was a "good one", almost certainly not.
> > with all that
> >> changeling and political crap. Season 1 was the best. Season 7 was the
> >> worst
> >> and it wasn't just because Jadzea was killed off because Teri Farrell
> >> left.
>
> > Season 7 was a mixed bag - I hated what they did to Dukat and (after a
> > very strong crisis of faith episode) to Winn. Dukat's final episode
> > should have been Waltz, or possibly even Sacrifice of Angels (having a
> > major villain leave the show because he went mad would make a
> > refreshing change from having to have him killed in a final
> > apocalyptic battle with the hero), with any subsequent appearances
> > done only as flashback episodes. But season 7 had very strong episodes
> > - Dogs of War (the penultimate episode), the Nog arc, Damar's
> > development over the second half of the season.
>
> The show got stuck up its own arse. What was all the crap about Doctor
> Bashir being genetically engineered using banned Eugenics technology
> supposed to be for? So they could make him into the new Spock after Jadzea
> left?
Huh? The only similarity between Jadzia and Spock was their job title.
And Bashir never did make a lot of use of his genetically enhanced
talents outside the couple of episodes that focused on them.
As for what it was for, it was so they could have an anti-
discrimination story that they could (a) tell in a novel way, and (b)
which acknowledges current concerns about the possibilities of some
near-future technology. Oh, and to tell a good story - TNG take note,
a good morality play works best when it's actually intelligible and
enjoyable as a story in its own right, not when it's just a vehicle
for preaching.
It was riddicuouls. He'd never shown any of his amazing mental
> abilities in the first few seasons. The writers created then from nowhere.
So? Writers always come up with new ideas they want to incorporate
into a show - he'd never shown any interest in playing James Bond in
the holosuite before season 4 either. There was nothing inconsistent
with what we'd learned about Bashir previously in that retrofit - we
already knew he'd done well in his class (and only avoided being first
because he deliberately gave a wrong answer) and that he was regarded
as having done very good work on his own projects. Beyond which, for
most of his appearances Bashir wasn't called on to do anything
especially intellectually demanding, so why would he necessarily have
stood out?
> >> > That's the odd thing. No Neelix-centred episode in the show's entire
> >> > run was done for comedy - in season 1 he had Phage (episode 4) and,
> >> > towards the end of the year, Jetrel. Not exactly laugh-a-minute
> >> > episodes.
>
> >> So they should have confined him just to those then.
>
> > I didn't mind him at all. He was *meant* to be annoying, after all.
>
> And he was and you think that that is going to make people like Voyager.
> Not.
It's called characterisation, Aggy. There genuinely are annoying
people in the world - characters like Neelix are just an
acknowledgement that not everyone in the universe is a perfect
Starfleet officer or whatever. Doctor Who's done it with K-9, Jackie,
Donna and Sylvia before now.If anything, it may have made the Neelix
episodes stronger in that they evoked sympathy for a character people
wouldn't otherwise be inclined to find sympathetic - and in turn, may
have fostered tolerance towards unwittingly irritating people in real
life (though I admit that bit's a stretch).
Anyway, as a fan of the show that gave us Wesley Crusher (and come to
that, of the one that gave us Adric), you're hardly in a position to
complain about shows because they have annoying characters.
> > The camps we saw were analogous to the Russian gulags. The back
> >> story was that the Bajoras were once just as bad as the Cardasians and
> >> had
> >> being their oppressors to begin with before the Cardasians freed
> >> themselves
> >> and turned the tables.
>
> > No, there wasn't any story of that kind in the background - it was
> > stated again and again that the Bajorans had been peaceful before a
> > military government on Cardassia decided to annex their planet after
> > centuries of, so far as is suggested, peaceful technological rivalry.
>
> Nope. It was revealed that the Bajorans had previously been a warlike race
> which had oppressed the Cardasians.
Where? Are you sure you aren't thinking of the Voyager race that
oppressed the Kazon?
> >> > consciously pilfered from a story about a 'war criminal' put on trial
>
> >> It was based on the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
>
> > No, Aggy - look at the source material. It was about trials of Nazi
> > war criminals.
>
> Nope. It was allegorical to the War Crimes Tribunal for the former
> Yugoslavia. That was the event which was current in the news when the story
> was written not the Nazi war crimes trials.
Aggy, the DS9 writers weren't writing the news. There is a difference.
> >> >> > (indeed one of its best early stories - Duet - was a direct lift
> >> >> > from
> >> >> > a short story about a Nazi war criminal), and when it was first
>
> >> >> Nope. It was about Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian war criminals
>
> >> > No, the writers originally, and deliberately, framed it around an
> >> > account of the Nuremberg Trials, and later adapted it to reflect the
>
> >> That's because the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was also
> >> based on the model of the Nuremberg Trials.
>
> > I see. So rather than base it on the Yugoslav trials in order to make
> > a story about those, they decided to base it on the original trials to
> > make a story about Yugoslavia? Yep, that makes sense ... to you.
>
> They couldn't base it on the actual Yugoslav trails since they hadn't taken
> place yet.
Ah, an allegory based on the Nuremberg Trials that was intended as an
allegory for something that hadn't happened. Yep, looking more
convincing all the time...
> >> > story I mentioned above, called The Man in the Glass Booth. Even the
>
> >> Adapted to fit the Bosnian conflict.
>
> > No, adapted to fit Deep Space Nine, in which there wasn't a Bosnian
>
> DS9 was a deliberate allegory to the Bosnian conflict.
Strange how I've been providing evidence to the contrary while your
evidence so far consists of repeating "It was in the news at
approxiimately the same time, so it must be".
> >> > Cardassian character's first name is based on the name of a Nazi
> >> > concentration camp commander:
>
> >> So what.
>
> > So why do you suppose that conscious allusion was made, and not just
> > to any camp commander but to the one made notorious by Schindler's
> > List, and so in the public imagination? Why was the Cardassian not
> > given a name resembling, say, Rabadan?
>
> You clearly don't understand allegory. Allegory only works and is only used
> as a medium when the events are are fresh in peoples minds.
No, Aggy, that's just your claim - I've pointed out it doesn't work
that way already. And it's a circular argument to claim that allegory
only works for contemporary events on the basis that you imagine a
particular story to be an allegory for those events by virtue of the
fact that it was contemporary with them.
> >> > and was
> >> >> screened just at the time that the War Crimes Tribunals for the former
> >> >> Yugoslavia were being held.
>
> >> > It was aired in June 1993. The first tribunal was held in 1994, and no
> >> > major figures came before the tribunal for years afterwards - yet the
> >> > story was about a key perpetrator of atrocities.
>
> >> The first tribunal might have been held in 1994 but the entire process of
> >> setting up the tribunals and capturing the war criminals started years
> >> before that. At the time the story in question was being written war
> >> criminals tribunals for the former Yugoslavia had already been given the
> >> go
> >> ahead and stories about war crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia were
> >> plastered over every TV news programme and newspaper.
>
> > And yet the writers strangely decided to tell a story that bore no
> > relation to those particular war crimes and instead focused on a
> > concentration camp.
>
> Wrong. They told a story which was allegorical to the Bosnian War which they
> conflated with Nazi war crimes since everyone was being brainwashed by the
> media at the time that the Serbs were as bad as the Nazis so they must have
> committed the same crimes.
Aggy, they told a story that was very nakedly about the particular war
crimes committed by the Nazis, and a story which no one except you has
ever interpreted as being about the Serbs (check, for instance, that
Wikipedia link, which mentions specifically that Duet was the first
episode that openly made the link between the Cardassian occupation
and the Nazis). If you're watching it and assuming it must be about
the Serbs despite the fact that the Serbs never worked Bosnians to
death in concentration camps, iit seems you're the one who's fallen
prey to that "brainwashing".
> >> Croatia held a referendum for independence from Yugoslavia on 19 May
> >> 1991.
>
> >> Slovenia began its rebellion against Yugoslavia on 27 June 1991 and
> >> declared
> >> independence on 7 July.
>
> >> FYROM declared independence from Yugoslavia on 8 September 1991 and in
> >> the
> >> followin month the Serbs began threatening the Bosnian Muslims with
> >> extermination.
>
> >> Ensign Ro aired on October 7 1991 which was the same day that Croatia
> >> declared independence from Yugoslavia.
>
> > Yes, Aggy, rather than, say, writing the story at the start of the
> > year with the rest of the season, they decided to write it within a
> > few days between the Serbs threatening the Bosnians and the episode
> > airing - and to imagine a resistance movement that didn't yet exist.
>
> Wrong. The writers know full well what was happening in Yugoslavia and it
> was written as an allegory to those events and the break-up of communism.
They might have known what was going on in Yugoslavia. At the time,
nothing similar to the events in Ensign Ro
*was* going on in Yugoslavia, so it's completely irrelevant. The
Cardassians were still in charge of the planet at the end of the story
and weren't depicted as being in any way in decline, which hardly
suggests an allegory with the break-up of communism.
> > *always* wars in the news, usually as major headlines - it's rather
> > rare for sci-fi shows to reflect any given current event (part of the
>
> Yer, and what do you think AOL/WW3 was allegorical to? WMDs ready in 45
> seconds. Yer.
There's a difference between allegory and satire, Aggy. There was no
allegory in AoL/WW3 - just RTD taking the piss. A government decides
to start a war as a get-rich-quick scheme, with overly blatant
references to the Iraq invasion - that's parody, not allegory. No
serious social point was intended.
Besides which, even that story took place two years after the events
it parodies, so by your own rules it can't be an allegory for them.
> >> What, like the whole of seasons 6 and 7 were dedicated to the struggle
> >> for
> >> control of the Bjoran religion and government
>
> > No they weren't. The Bajoran first minister disappeared from the
> > series without trace early in season 5 (it was never explained why
> > Winn was basically doing his job in seasons 5 and 7), and the only
> > stories dealing with control of the government were the season 2 three-
> > parter and Shakaar near the end of season 3. The mystical pah-wraith
>
> Nope.
Okay, point me to a season 5 or later episode in which Shakaar
appears. I don't think he was even in "Rapture", the story that ended
the "Bajor-wants-to-join-the-Federation" arc.
> > crap wasn't a political storyline - the religious internal politics
>
> Yes it was. The Bajoran priestess woman
"Priestess woman"?
was trying to gain political control
> of Bajor
Keep up, Aggy, that happened in season 3.
and eventually she did and almost destroyed it in the final season
> and killed Keiras boyfriend before that in order to get to power.
She didn't kill Bareil, and she was already in power (see season 2)
when he died. In the final season she got duped by Dukat into trying
to make a power-grab, but not for the Bajoran government - she wanted
to rule the galaxy at that point like any good supervillian. All that
was part of Dukat's evil scheme against Sisko, nothing to do with
Bajoran politics.
> > for the most part - the villains were less stereotyped and the war was
> > presented as more of, well, a war, with lots of things happening in
> > the background, people losing friends and colleagues on other fronts
> > etc. B5 just used it to show off special effects of 'planet
> > killers' (one stupid idea at least that DS9 didn't borrow). And you
>
> Well actually they did. The Canadians or Changelings got hold of a the
> Genesis Device technology
They did? Weird Al was right, after all - time for a pre-emptive
strike against Canada!
and were going to set it off at the end of the
> final season if I remember correctly, or was that Season 3 of Enterprise.
Well, it wasn't in DS9. There was one story, in season 6 I think,
where a Changeling masquerading as Bashir tried to blow up the Bajoran
sun, but they didn't have planet killers roaming around the place.
> B5 just used Mass Drivers which were equivalent to large nuclear bombs that
> could destroy areas the size of Whales,
Blue whales, humpacks or belugas?
not entire planets. Or are you
> getting it mixed up with Andromeda which used Point Singularity Bombs which
> could destroy entire solar systems?
No, I'm thinking of the Vorlon and Shadow spacecraft the series itself
called "planet killers", and described going around randomly blowing
up planets belonging to their enemies.
> > can't claim that any of the interminable debate sequences in B5 to get
> > potential allies on board was even close to the quality of "In the
> > Pale Moonlight".
>
> Which one was that?
Sisko, with Garak's help, tries to persuade the Romulans to join the
anti-Dominion alliance.
> >> >> > But even if it was an allegory of the Bosnian war, so what? Why
> >> >> > would
> >> >> > that have made it bad? Allegorical stories are often the best, and
>
> >> >> It makes it unwatchable today. That's the problem with allegorical
> >> >> stories,
> >> >> they only work in the time that the real life events they are based on
> >> >> are
> >> >> current.
>
> >> > The above discussion illustrates that that's not the case - the show
> >> > was an allegory for events 50 years earlier, and yet it still worked
>
> >> Nope. It was an allegory for contemporary events which were on the news
> >> almost daily just like season 3 of Enterprise was an allegory for 9/11
> >> and
> >> the events which followed it.
>
> > I'll buy that the season opener was an allegory for 9/11, but as I
> > recall the world didn't respond to 9/11 by sending a team to negotiate
> > with bin Laden...
>
> They sent in troops to root him out and destroy Al Qaeda and that is what
> the Enterprise was sent to do against the Xindi.
I thought their mission was to persuade the Xindi humanity wasn't a
threat - after all, you don't send one spacecraft to destroy a
species. Unless it's a Vorlon planet killer.
> >> >> > there was hardly anything as heavy-handed or unsubtle as TNG's Moral
> >> >> > Message of the Week storylines.
>
> >> >> TNG's messages are better in the long term.
>
> >> > TNG's messages were vacuous and patronising. "Be nice to disabled/
> >> > foreign/gay/insert whatever here people" - nothing the sort of people
> >> > who tend to watch Star Trek are likely to need drilled into them, let
> >> > alone as blatantly or forcefully as they were and with so little
> >> > substance beyond "...because it's a nice thing to do". No examination
> >> > of why the villains of the piece *aren't* nice to them beyond "the
> >> > villains aren't very nice people", and the writers genuinely expected
> >> > their simplistic caricatures to be taken seriously. A classic case is
>
> >> Yer right, so every TV news programme and newspaper article describes why
> >> Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Ladin aren't nice people, or for that
> >> matter George Bush and Tony Blair.
>
> > News programmes aren't intended as morality plays.
>
> Morality plays don't go into the motivation of the villains. They only go
> into the motivation of the heroes. When did the Bible ever examine the
> devil's real motives and his opinion of god? Not once.
The Bible isn't a morality play - it contains things it wants to be
taken as moral messages, but when it does so in the form of parables,
going into the motives of the 'sinner' is exactly what it does. But in
any case, it's a pretty heavy indictment of a morality play if you
have to justify its approach on the basis that that's how religion
does it - if you want to be preached to, join a religion. Secular
morality ought to have no place for moral instructions handed down
from on high - and there's no point to a moality play that amounts to
a sermon. The intent of a morality play is to show people why they
should do the right thing.
> >> > Roddenberry's belief when he started the show that the Ferengi would
> >> > actually work as the series' main villains; he didn't see them as fun
> >> > caricatures of capitalist excess, he actually seemed to believe
> >> > capitalism could be meaningfully characterised with one-dimensional
> >> > greedy stereotypes.
>
> >> Which is what it is, and the people who engage in it are nothing more
> >> than
> >> thieves.
>
> > Wow, you fit right into the target audience, don't you? Let's all fly
> > the flag for extending tolerance and understanding only towards people
> > we like (and so tolerate and understand anyway)!
>
> > It raises the puzzling question of exactly who these propaganda pieces
> > are intended for. The very people who'd benefit from taking their
> > messages on board - such as being less greedy or considering the
> > consequences of their actions - are alienated by being portrayed as
> > stereotypes, while for the rest of us it comes across as not only
> > patronising, but a positive disservice to the people it professes to
>
> They are intended for people who have not yet become greedy capitalists so
> as not to become them.
And how will they persuade them not to become them? TNG might have
portrayed the Ferengi as being the enemies of our heroic crew - but
they also portrayed them as making quite a lot of money when Picard
didn't get in the way... Nothing about *why* the Ferengi were to be
disliked, just an appeal to peer pressure ("We think they're bad, so
you should too").
Just look at the bible. (Oh dear, I bet Yads is going
> to love this. It's almost a pity I have him killfiled as a troll.
I'd be surprised by this common sense, but I thought you'd killfiled
everyone?
> >> > there's no indication their power ever extended much beyond the local
> >> > area - I always liked to imagine they were what the Bajorans would
> >> > eventually evolve into, and that their actions were intended to guide
> >> > and protect their ancestors, being free from time as they were.
>
> >> It was already revealed that the Wormhole Beings were what the ancient
> >> Bajorans had already evolved into before they left the planet and moved
> >> inside the wormhole to a new level of existence.
>
> > When? It's my take on it, but I've encountered people who haven't run
> > into that idea or thought of it - it certainly wasn't made explicit in
> > the show.
>
> It was.
Once again, when?
> >> > An example I like to bring up, because it was exactly the same
> >> > storyline in both series, is the end of the Shadow War vs. Sacrifice
> >> > of Angels in DS9 season 6.
>
> >> > DS9: Over six episodes, Sisko organises a counterattack against the
> >> > Dominion to retake the station, and succeeds in fighting through to
> >> > the wormhole, the resistance on the station having bought him time to
> >> > try and avert a fleet of Dominion ships arriving. Based on a
> >> > relationship with the Prophets established early in the series and
> >> > their known powers over the wormhole, he persuades them to close it to
> >> > Dominion shipping, saving the station. The war carries on for another
> >> > year.
>
> >> > B5: At the start of season 4, Sheridan finds God at the bottom of a
> >> > hole,
>
> >> That happened at the end of Season 3.
>
> > Thought the season 3 cliffhanger was Sheridan crashing his ship into
> > the hole?
>
> Er?
>
> He jumps down some huge well to his doom after being told "If you go to
> (whatever it was called) you will die".
I thought he flew his ship into the well?
He'd already worked out how to do that, is the point I'm making.
> >> >> > other stories that year, and hardly at all after that until the war
> >> >> > arc got under way in season 6. Completely unlike B5 in which the
> >> >> > Shadows were the subject of the entire story from the start of
> >> >> > season
> >> >> > 3 onwards...
>
> >> >> Which was the best season of the entire series of Babylon 5.
>
> >> > So, why do you think it's a problem if DS9 became all about the
> >> > Changelings, since that seemed good for B5?
>
> >> Babylon 5 didn't have the equivalent of Changelings infiltrating the
> >> Federation and Changelings all over the places. You hardly got to see the
> >> Shadows at all.
>
> > You're vastly overstating how often the Changelings (except the female
> > one) showed up - in the entire series I can think of three others, not
> > counting the one that died in The Ship. Still, I'm not seeing how a
> > storyline about enemy agents who can infiltrate the Federation is less
> > interesting than stereotype evil superbeings who just aren't seen very
> > often.
>
> The Shadows were not stereotype evil superbeings. For a start they didn't do
> anything themselves. They supported other races own ambitions which they
> thought would advance their own purpose,
You're the one going on about the Bible - you do know how the devil's
supposed to work, right?
One of the most absurd efforts at characterisation in B5 has to be the
attempt to make the Shadows seem more 'rounded' by having an episode
that said "They're not evil, they just want to persuade other people
to kill one another and further their own ends at other people's
expense". Yep, right, not stereotype evil beings at all. Remind me
which definition of 'not evil' you're running with again, JMS?
I mean it doesn't make linear novel-writing bad because you can't jump
between chapters as you like. Yet you seemed to be arguing that series
like Heroes, with that sort of linear novelesque structure, are worse
by nature of that story structure than series like TNG or Dr Who that
you can just pick up at random episodes.
The whole idea of a story
> is to follow the impact of one event on another or the historical cause of
> that event and that can't be done at random. Even Herodotus which isn't
> written in chronological order but does the equivalent of flashback has a
> linear plan to it, not a random plan.
So, once again, why is linear storytelling worse than being able to
watch episodes in any order you like?
> > Is
> >> that still going btw?
>
> > Supposedly. Last time I checked the BBC were still listing season 4 as
> > 'coming soon', though it started in the US at the same time as the
> > current season of House (which just reached its mid-season break in
> > the UK). Maybe they decided not to pick up season 4 after all.
>
> Season 4 being Chapter 5 right?
I think so - they turned one season into two 'chapters', didn't they?
> >> >> > But Enterprise really failed in season 3 when they tried
> >> >> >> to make it an allegory of 9/11 with a totally boring story line
> >> >> >> which
> >> >> >> lasted
> >> >> >> the whole season and with the new alien races they encountered in
> >> >> >> the
> >> >> >> Beta
> >> >> >> Quadrant, being as bad as those in Voyager,
>
> >> >> > I agree the Xindi arc wasn't a very interesting story, but it was a
> >> >> > much better-written arc than what had come before and it made for a
>
> >> >> What? Season 1 of Enterprise is generally agree to have been the best
> >> >> critically received season of the entire series
>
> >> > It is? By whom? Enterprise was roundly panned until season 4, as I
> >> > recall.
>
> >> Nope. Enterprise was critically acclaimed until season 3 ruined it.
>
> > By which critics?
>
> By everyone.
Which everyone?
> >> > started out low for Star Trek and got progressively worse - I don't
> >> > think that can be extrapolated to a critique of season 3 per se.
>
> >> Ratings were always low for Enterprise in the US because it changed
> >> networks
> >> or its syndication scheme as I recall. That wasn't the case in the UK.
>
> > Maybe not, but US ratings are what determines whether an American show
> > gets another season, not 'critical acclaim'.
>
> Well clearly it was the lack of success of Voyager which forced Enterprise
> to change networks then.
Voyager went for 7 years and mostly had higher ratings than DS9 - in
fact it was its network's flagship show. If Voyager's ratings hadn't
been good enough, Enterprise wouldn't have got a season 1, let alone a
season 4.
Wasn't it after season 2 (i.e. before the Xindi arc) that they
rebranded Enterprise "Star Trek: Enterprise" in the hopes of boosting
flagging ratings?
Phil
FunkyM
> On 18 Dec, 10:25, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@hello.to.NO_SPAM> wrote:
>
> Its characters were stereotypes who never developed, just like TNG -
> but unlike TNG they were at least more interesting to start with, and
> the Doctor didn't get a reset button pressed at the end of every
> 'character' episode the way Data did.
It's funny you say this because there was an episode of Voyager where
the Doctor literally got the reset button pressed on him.
pbo...@aol.com
That's why I said he didn't get it pressed at the *end* of the
episode. ;-)
Phil
FunkyM
lol! Suppose you're right, but IMO in the TNG finale "All Good Things"
Brent Spiner does a good job of showing that the Data character did
develop over the course of the 7 seasons, albeit subtly.
pbo...@aol.com
Only seen that once, so I'll have to take your word for it. Still,
Data's reset button is pretty infamous.
Phil
Peter J Ross
<al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
> pbo...@aol.com wrote:
>> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>>
>> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
>> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
>> monsters.
>>
>> Phil
>
> As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
--
PJR :-)
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The Doctor
Peter J Ross <peadar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>In rec.arts.drwho on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:08:43 +0000, Alan Sailsbury
><al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>
>> pbo...@aol.com wrote:
>>> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
>>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>>>
>>> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
>>> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
>>> monsters.
>>>
>>> Phil
>>
>> As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
>
>Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
>flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
>
What makes you think she was bad?
pbo...@aol.com
> In rec.arts.drwho on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:08:43 +0000, Alan Sailsbury
>
> <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
> >> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> >>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
> >>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>
> >> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
> >> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
> >> monsters.
>
> >> Phil
>
> > As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
>
> Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
> flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
I didn't notice any problem with her acting, I just didn't find her
memorable as either an actress or a character - I've never understood
why people seem to have latched onto her as a character to bring back.
From comments Moffat's made in the past, he's not sure either.
Phil
Alan Sailsbury
> In rec.arts.drwho on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:08:43 +0000, Alan Sailsbury
> <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>
>> pbo...@aol.com wrote:
>>> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
>>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
>>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
>>> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
>>> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
>>> monsters.
>>>
>>> Phil
>> As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
>
> Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
> flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
>
>
She's attractive. I'm heterosexual. So sue me.
Soze
"Alan Sailsbury" <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote in message
Well, quite. Aside from this I thought she played the `everygirl` sort of
character better than Billie Piper did. Not that I disliked Piper (although
she began to grate in the second series).
Alan Sailsbury
True, although I like Billie Piper very much. I don't know why liking
Sally Sparrow or Rose sets some gay Whovians off in a bitchfest and I
don't care. The characters were good and I liked the eye candy. Capn
Jack was there for the ladies/gay fans and Rose & Sally were there for
us straight fans (and some lesbians no doubt). So stick that up your
shute PJR you big mary.
pbo...@aol.com
> "Alan Sailsbury" <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote in message
>
> news:QJCdnUxu7v5VZ67W...@bt.com...
>
>
>
>
>
> > Peter J Ross wrote:
> >> In rec.arts.drwho on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:08:43 +0000, Alan Sailsbury
> >> <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>
> >>>> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >>>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> >>>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels
> >>>>> were
> >>>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
> >>>> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
> >>>> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
> >>>> monsters.
>
> >>>> Phil
> >>> As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
>
> >> Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
> >> flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
>
> > She's attractive. I'm heterosexual. So sue me.
>
> Well, quite. Aside from this I thought she played the `everygirl` sort of
> character better than Billie Piper did. Not that I disliked Piper (although
> she began to grate in the second series).
That's a bit odd because Moffat says he wrote her as being overly
middle-class... Then again, in modern Britain that's pretty much what
'everygirl' is and Billie Piper's 'working class heroine' is a rather
outdated archetype. Still, of the vast list of potential companions in
modern Who who would be better than Billie Piper, Sally Sparrow
doesn't rank that high for me.
Phil
pbo...@aol.com
> Peter J Ross wrote:
> > In rec.arts.drwho on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:08:43 +0000, Alan Sailsbury
> > <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>
> >>> On 15 Dec, 23:15, "Soze" <I...@salsbury42.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
> >>>> But not as old as I`d hoped when I saw a similar headline...apparently
> >>>> Moffat disclosed in a radio 3 interview today that the weeping angels were
> >>>> to return in series 1 / 5 /30 ( delete as applicable ).
> >>> I'd be happier about this if Moffatt's last hadn't suggested he's out
> >>> of ideas beyond recycling his own stories even when he's using new
> >>> monsters.
>
> >>> Phil
> >> As long as Sally Sparrow returns as well I'm all for it!
>
> > Why? Do you like laughably bad acting in general, or only when a
> > flat-faced blonde is the perpetrator?
>
> She's attractive. I'm heterosexual. So sue me.
So? I'm ot, but that doesn't mean I'd want every pretty boy to appear
on new Who to become a recurring character - I'd rather have actors
who can play the parts they're set. Not saying whoever played Sally
Sparrow couldn't, but if Blink and that character weren't brought up
so often here, I doubt I'd remember so much as the name, let alone the
character it belonged to.
Phil
The Doctor
The Doctor
Alan Sailsbury
>
>
> That's a bit odd because Moffat says he wrote her as being overly
> middle-class... Then again, in modern Britain that's pretty much what
> 'everygirl' is and Billie Piper's 'working class heroine' is a rather
> outdated archetype.
Er, not to the thousands who ARE working class!
john smith
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:ef28ed29-8fe8-4854...@o28g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...
Where do you live? Tunbridge Wells? I'd've said today's 'evergirl' is more
of a Vicky Pollard type!
john smith
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:14e39930-e587-4de6...@j24g2000yqa.googlegroups.com...
Phil comes out for Christmas! Good on yer, mate! Better man the
battlements now, eh? ;-)
The Doctor
Said the catapaulting troll john smith.
pbo...@aol.com
> <pbow...@aol.com> wrote in message
And here I thought I'd been commenting on pretty boys here for years
now...
Phil
pbo...@aol.com
It's not the fact that she *is* working class - it's the fact that her
*being* working class is the core of the archetype. In both the media
and the wider UK, class-based stereotypes - positive or negative -
lack social relevance in a context where most people no longer regard
their assigned 'class' as a key part of their identity, or as
something to cling to in opposition to the other classes. Working
class identity is a rather meaningless conceit in a society with no
significant manufacturing base, where no part of the political
establishment remains to represent a perceived aggregate 'working
class interest', and where everyone and their dog aspires to describe
themselves as belonging to "Middle England" (except the Scots, Welsh
and Irish).
Contrast Donna and Rose - both what would still pass for what remains
of the British working class. Donna's class, however, was never an
overt part of her character - rather it was portrayed as what it was,
a particular situation she was in that prevented her from realising
her full potential, and her storyline was all about showing her that
potential.
Not so Rose - the fact that she was from a housing estate was drummed
into the viewer time and again, the first thing we learned about her
was that she had no A-Levels, her family was portrayed as having
'proper' old-fashioned class pride (Mickey - "So you think you're
better than us?" Jackie - "That shop's giving you airs and graces"),
and she spent all her time showing that her poor working-class girl
could hold her own just as well as the Doctor - which isn't really the
companion's role in any case, but just emphasised her character's
prominence as a propaganda piece. Ultimately I think this is what made
her character less satisfying certainly than Donna, but also than
Martha - she was there to fly the flag, and giving her a personality
was secondary to that.
Phil
john smith
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:d0af2ed9-e528-410a...@j14g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
Phil
Me too! But nobody else seems to have noticed! ;-)
Soze
"john smith" <the_jo...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:yjcZm.7$tB...@newsfe28.ams2...
Or cared perhaps! I think it`s only Yads and Aggy that get offended by
homosexuality in here and they are 2 of the group`s certified loons.
pbo...@aol.com
If it helps, I had you figured out...
Phil
The Doctor
Stephen Wilson
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:8e2307a5-f10f-4abb...@26g2000yqo.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Me too! But nobody else seems to have noticed! ;-)
>
>If it helps, I had you figured out...
If it helps, I've never been particularly concerned one way or the other...
Alan Sailsbury
Sorry, too long. Couldn't be bothered to read it. Be concise.
Alan Sailsbury
Yeah who gives a shit except for loony bigots like Yadda Yadda Hey and
Aggabumnumb?
The Doctor
The Doctor
Alan Sailsbury <al...@yahoo.comm> wrote:
>Stephen Wilson wrote:
>> <pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
>> news:8e2307a5-f10f-4abb...@26g2000yqo.googlegroups.com...
>>>> Me too! But nobody else seems to have noticed! ;-)
>>> If it helps, I had you figured out...
>>
>> If it helps, I've never been particularly concerned one way or the other...
>>
>>
>
>Aggabumnumb?
>
Said psychotic troll Trollsbury.
john smith
<pbo...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:8e2307a5-f10f-4abb...@26g2000yqo.googlegroups.com...
Phil
I'm not sure if "help" is what I'm after, but cheers for the sentiment! ;-)
john smith
"Stephen Wilson" <stephen.wils...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:hPcZm.920$oQ5...@newsfe25.ams2...
Me neither! What's the big deal?
peachyashiepassion
Including me. Go figure.