How DS9 and Voyager ruined Star Trek

CorSec · Post by **CorSec** » 2003-09-02 08:42pm

I can't change anyone's mind or opinion about any of this, but I'm enjoying watching season 4 of DS9. Up until this, I'd only seen a handful of episodes. I probably enjoy it for many of the same reasons I enjoyed Babylon 5. That's not to say that they are equal in all respects. I simply find them both entertaining.

To say that it was DS9 and Voyager that ruined Star Trek is a bit overboard. The shows, individually and together, were more a symptom of what is wrong with Star Trek rather than the cause itself.

Macross · Post by **Macross** » 2003-09-02 11:04pm

Alyeska wrote:Yes, I do freely admit that. DS9 took time to figure out its place. It took the first two seasons to figure out what worked and the 3rd season to start bringing things about. DS9 truly got good on its 4th season and that is when I really started watching the series. I guess that is an advantage I had. I never really watched the series untill the 4th season.

I really enjoyed the first two seasons of DS9. Sure they had a couple of stinkers, but they also have a couple of excellent episodes. The first season episodes "Progress" "Duet" and "Tears of the Prohpets" are all outstanding episodes in my opinion. The second season "The Cirle" story arc was also excellent and very well done. . Out of all the series (with the exception of the original series), I believe that DS9 had the strongest first two seaons.

Super-Gagme · Post by **Super-Gagme** » 2003-09-02 11:42pm

I never liked Star Trek before DS9 and I haven't liked Star Trek since DS9. TNG/TOS had almost nothing about "home" that it made the Federation and local politics/borders etc seem more like a mystery than the "frontier". I liked DS9 for exactly what it was Politics/War/Bashir&O'Brian I honestly can say I haven't seen another Movie/Show/Game/Book that covered a war from that kind of perspective so well. Sure B5 was good but honestly I sometimes found myself a bit bored and got the feeling that they couldn't act and the scripts were badly done. I like structure and polictics in my Sci-fi and DS9 gave me exactly that.

If the Earth/Romulan war breaks out in Season 5 like it should I may start to watch Enterprise...

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2003-09-03 01:48am

I don't think Mike is saying that the concept of DS9 is what ruined ST, it's the execution that did it in. Same goes for Voyager. Voyager was a good concept. The writers blew it, massively. DS9 was an okay concept (although I think it lent itself more to "soap opera in space", which is a style I'm not a big fan of) but they also sabotaged ST with the Dominion.

Why couldn't the Dominion have been a race so utterly alien that even the Federation (whom I now see mirrored to a small degree in Keith Laumer's Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne) couldn't establish any sort of dialogue with them? A race with whom none of the AQ powers could communicate would have been a good idea. A race whose psychology so mystified the AQ races that their actions were unpredictable and their motives shrouded in mystery. Instead we get xenophobe shapeshifters.

Lord Poe: You vastly oversimplify. "The Cage" was a fairly 'cerebral' episode up until the last few minutes. TWOK was hardly an action film. TNG's battle sequences were usually very short affairs. The action was in a sensible quantity in all of those examples.

But once we hit First Contact, and they got good box-office income, they went fucking berzerk. Picard picked up that goddamn phaser rifle in First Contact and hasn't let go since. DS9 opted to have more and bigger battles, culminating in episodes where we spend minutes on the Defiant bridge as the camera shakes constantly (wtf, are they in a storm or something?) and the bridge panels are sparking more than a 4th of July fireworks show. Voyager got so taken with the battles that it started tossing more torpedos than they said they had. Oh, and the infinite shuttle cheat code as well. Enterprise is now introducing some fucking "strike team" or whatever the hell that is.

And what's been the result of this dumbing-down? Lower and lower ratings. Star Trek doesn't need to be an action series. It needs to be an adventure series, and that sometimes includes a battle here or there.

Maybe Picard's rifle breaking in Nemesis could be symbolic of the fact that by trying to prop up Star Trek by aiming for the lowest common denominator, they're breaking the franchise.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-09-03 09:19am

Uraniun235 wrote:Why couldn't the Dominion have been a race so utterly alien that even the Federation (whom I now see mirrored to a small degree in Keith Laumer's Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne) couldn't establish any sort of dialogue with them? A race with whom none of the AQ powers could communicate would have been a good idea. A race whose psychology so mystified the AQ races that their actions were unpredictable and their motives shrouded in mystery.

Not only would this be a refreshment, but it would also be way more realistic than all that "Universal Translator" nonsense.

MKSheppard · Post by **MKSheppard** » 2003-09-03 02:47pm

Darth Wong wrote: - Regions of space where the laws of physics are truly different, meaning that the part of the ship which intrudes into this region immediately starts disintegrating and everybody in that section dies

Already mostly done with the TOS ep Defiant

Trogdor · Post by **Trogdor** » 2003-09-03 06:17pm

I agree with Darth Wong in the respect that revealing most of all four quadrants was a HUGE mistake, but I don't think that DS9 ruined trek. Even with the Gamma quadrant revealed, there was still the Delta Quadrant. (I haven't seen most of DS9, so I'll reserve comment on the Dominion) I think Voyager was really what killed it. Besides, wussifiying the Borg and revealing the final quadrant, I don't think it did the Delta quadrant species well at all. While watching, one has to wonder, why haven't these people been assimilated yet? Seriously, I was expecting the Delta Quadrant species to be nearly uber-powerful or unique in some way that makes them difficult to assimilate. Instead they're just normal for the most part, so why were the Borg going as far as the Alpha Quadrant with unassimilated species so close to home? It never made sense to me.

TheDarkling · Post by **TheDarkling** » 2003-09-03 06:29pm

so why were the Borg going as far as the Alpha Quadrant with unassimilated species so close to home? It never made sense to me.

The Borg sent a signal from the AQ telling them to come on down and Voyager did show a few species getting assimilated by the Borg and others fighting losing battles against them.

apocolypse · Post by **apocolypse** » 2003-09-03 09:28pm

TheDarkling wrote:
so why were the Borg going as far as the Alpha Quadrant with unassimilated species so close to home? It never made sense to me.
The Borg sent a signal from the AQ telling them to come on down and Voyager did show a few species getting assimilated by the Borg and others fighting losing battles against them.

Plus weren't some of the species (at least the Kazon) considered by the Borg as not worth assimilation? IIRC the queen said it would take them further from perfection.

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-09-04 01:34am

MKSheppard wrote:
Darth Wong wrote: - Regions of space where the laws of physics are truly different, meaning that the part of the ship which intrudes into this region immediately starts disintegrating and everybody in that section dies

Already mostly done with the TOS ep Defiant

You're thinking of "The Tholian Web". Darth Wong's complaint is probably that no such idea has even been attempted since.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-09-04 01:38am

Indeed, DS9 gave us a much less imaginative, less inventive view of space than TOS or even the relatively derivative TNG did. Even the mighty Jem'Hadar were basically just redecorated Klingons in nature. You'd think that an interstellar empire which can engineer the ultimate warrior from a petri dish would be able to come up with something better than yet another rampaging two-legged berserker with bad skin.

Super-Gagme · Post by **Super-Gagme** » 2003-09-04 07:34am

Darth Wong wrote:Indeed, DS9 gave us a much less imaginative, less inventive view of space than TOS or even the relatively derivative TNG did. Even the mighty Jem'Hadar were basically just redecorated Klingons in nature. You'd think that an interstellar empire which can engineer the ultimate warrior from a petri dish would be able to come up with something better than yet another rampaging two-legged berserker with bad skin.

I think it would be more fair to blame this on the writers/string pullers because the premise of the war/dominion/prophets etc was very good but when big joe up top says he doesn't want to spend a lot of money on it then your stuck with humanoid aliens of every sort.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-09-04 08:52am

Darth Wong wrote:You'd think that an interstellar empire which can engineer the ultimate warrior from a petri dish would be able to come up with something better than yet another rampaging two-legged berserker with bad skin.

I'd like to see some centauroid aliens... or some other sort of quasi-humanoid.

(I once made background - but not rules, let alone models - for a self-invented Warhammer 40K species called the Klatoa who looked like anthropomorphized bear/puma crossbreeds, but with four arms. Although they were by no means warlike, their 4-armed physique have them an advantage many other humanoids lacked. As for centaur-like aliens... the idea is almost criminally underused in sci-fi)

Joe Momma · Post by **Joe Momma** » 2003-09-04 03:06pm

Darth Wong wrote:Even the mighty Jem'Hadar were basically just redecorated Klingons in nature. You'd think that an interstellar empire which can engineer the ultimate warrior from a petri dish would be able to come up with something better than yet another rampaging two-legged berserker with bad skin.

Even taking budgetary limitations into account, the characterization of the Jem'Hadar and the Dominion as a whole could have been much better. Making the Jem'Hadar an actual martial culture instead of a bunch of screaming fanatics would have been a start.

But why not use the Dominion as an interesting opportunity to put the Federation in a moral bind? Why not have the Dominion genuinely necessary for maintaining order in the Gamma Quadrant? What if that part of space had been a morass of horrific warfare before the Founders stopped the violence with an iron fist? Is freedom more important than peace? There are plenty of real-life examples where the removal of a brutal dictator resulted in even uglier violence once the factions under that former rule were free to pursue old grievances.

And there's no reason you couldn't continue to feature the mystery of the unknown under these conditions, either. Look how many oddities Kirk and his crew encountered even in well-known Federation space. Hell, discovering mystery in your backyard can be even more dramatic than finding it in a foreign place, if presented properly.

-- Joe Momma

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-09-04 10:47pm

To take a page from Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, it would have made for a more interesting situation if the Dominion people were never seen, that they never attempted to even contact the Federation, that they remained mysterious throughout the war, and at the end of the whole thing when contact is finally made, through Odo, that the war came down to the Dominion people —the Founders— being unable to even comprehend the concept of individual intelligence and this was what touched off the conflict from the beginning of a disasterous first contact between Federationists and Founders; that and the inability of the two sides to understand the other's basic thinking. The revelation of the Founders and that Odo was actually one of them (a fact unknown even to himself) could have been delayed until the end of the series.

If you had to have a war show, the creation of anything other than bog-standard Space Nazis would have made for a more interesting storyline.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2003-09-05 09:19am

Patrick Degan wrote:To take a page from Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, it would have made for a more interesting situation if the Dominion people were never seen, that they never attempted to even contact the Federation, that they remained mysterious throughout the war, and at the end of the whole thing when contact is finally made, through Odo, that the war came down to the Dominion people ?the Founders? being unable to even comprehend the concept of individual intelligence and this was what touched off the conflict from the beginning of a disasterous first contact between Federationists and Founders; that and the inability of the two sides to understand the other's basic thinking.

This would be interesting.... although hasn't this been done before to some extent?

Anyway, this would make the Dominion much more scary since our ignorance of their appearance would cause us to guess what they look like..... such a Dominion could look like clichéd-but-creepy Stereotypical Grey Aliens, something out of H.P. Lovecraft's twisted imagination or something even weirder.

TheDarkling · Post by **TheDarkling** » 2003-09-05 02:32pm

The idea behind the Dominion is that they are the Federations evil twin, unlike the Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians, Tholians etc the Dominion is made up of many races (although only three primary races do the heavy lifting) and they are also largely based upon trade, they like exploration and the founders motives for creating order are understandable.

I don't think they fleshed it out enough but that was the idea behind the Dominion.

Frank Hipper · Post by **Frank Hipper** » 2003-09-05 02:52pm

Darth Wong wrote:Indeed, DS9 gave us a much less imaginative, less inventive view of space than TOS or even the relatively derivative TNG did. Even the mighty Jem'Hadar were basically just redecorated Klingons in nature. You'd think that an interstellar empire which can engineer the ultimate warrior from a petri dish would be able to come up with something better than yet another rampaging two-legged berserker with bad skin.

Enterprise is taking that to a reverse extreme.
Compare Klingon nacelles on the new ships in Enterprise to Dominion nacelles. BOOOOO!

Patrick Degan · Post by **Patrick Degan** » 2003-09-06 01:08am

TheDarkling wrote:The idea behind the Dominion is that they are the Federations evil twin.

And that's why they're boring as hell.

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2003-09-11 04:54am

Patrick Degan wrote:To take a page from Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, it would have made for a more interesting situation if the Dominion people were never seen, that they never attempted to even contact the Federation, that they remained mysterious throughout the war, and at the end of the whole thing when contact is finally made, through Odo, that the war came down to the Dominion people —the Founders— being unable to even comprehend the concept of individual intelligence and this was what touched off the conflict from the beginning of a disasterous first contact between Federationists and Founders; that and the inability of the two sides to understand the other's basic thinking. The revelation of the Founders and that Odo was actually one of them (a fact unknown even to himself) could have been delayed until the end of the series.

If you had to have a war show, the creation of anything other than bog-standard Space Nazis would have made for a more interesting storyline.

The problem would be for B&B to maintain any sense of mystery. The moment the ratings showed a slip, they'd instantly make an episode revealing the "TRUE FACE OF THE DOMINION!!", and hype it up as much as they could, regardless of the fact it would weaken the whole plot arc.