Scott Meyer
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How to Enjoy Your Own Geekiness
🕑 Added 2022-08-01 08:01:01 +0000 UTCUnsurprisingly, this one is based on an actual conversation Ric and I had, about how much we enjoyed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. We both particularly like how they handle the Gorn, but agree that setting them up as being so thoroughly terrifying will make it awkward on a later series, when a Gorn is the new weapons officer or something.
Some of you may be scoffing, but think about it.
On the original series, the big-bad was the Klingons.
In Next Gen, a Klingon was on the crew, and the first big-bad was the Ferengi. They didn't work out, so they brought in the Borg.
On Deep Space Nine, a Ferengi ran the space station's bar, and there was an antagonistic resistance group called the Maquis that wanted independence from the federation.
Half of Voyager's crew was former Maquis, and in a later season, they brought in a former Borg.
Enterprise bucked the trend, one of its many crimes.
Now get into heavy spoiler territory. You've been warned.
The first season of Discovery seems to also drop this trope, but by the end you find out one crewman is a secret Klingon, and the captain . . . THE CAPTAIN is from the evil mirror universe.
And, while it's a bit of a stretch, a crew-member on Strange New Worlds is a descendent of Khan.
I'm not complaining. They keep doing it because it works. I'm just saying, look forward to Ensign Gorn getting admonished for spitting acidic, egg-filled saliva at other crewmembers.
Comments
Kevin Kunreuther
ST:TOS 2nd season, introduced a Russian, Ensign Pavel Checkov, who would have been a Cold War enemy in the 1960's, as a helmsman on the deck, and of course from first season there is third officer senior helmsman Hikaru Sulu. FRom Wikipedia: "George Takei recalled Gene Roddenberry wanted the character to represent all of Asia, which symbolized the peace of the Trek universe in spite of the numerous wars in the continent. Roddenberry did not want a nationally specific surname, so he looked at a map and saw the Sulu Sea in central Philippines. "He thought, 'Ah, the waters of that sea touch all shores'," the actor recalled, "and that's how my character came to have the name Sulu."
Joel Ross
datah vs data. what an idiot!
