A friend of mine had a birthday recently, and she had a general Star Trek theme. For the purpose of the event, I wrote up a TNG/DS9 crossover fanfic comedy routine, and I wanted to post it somewhere enduring. Thus, without further ado...
10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine
1) Lieutenant Reginald Enidcott Barclay swore off holodecks, but decides that he can see one just once--he's on vacation, after all. So he goes down to the station to rent one of Qark's holosuites.
"Are you sure you can handle this?" asks Quark. "These simulations... they're a lot more intense than the ones you Federation people use."
Barclay scoffs. "Listen, I, I have put in more hours on the Enterprise holodeck than any three people combined. I... I can handle this." He says it again, to himself. "I can handle this."
"Well, ok." Quark hands him the disc for "Vulcan Love Slave, Part II: The Revenge." Barclay steps into the suite for his half hour session. No one on the Enterprise ever sees him again.
2) Odo asks for Deanna's advice in the gift he picked out for her mother. It's a replica 20th century flapper-style feather boa. Deanna, in the style of every first grade teacher who's had to evaluate a macaroni "I Love You Mommy": "..... She'll love it because it's from you."
3) Judzia and Worf invite Deanna and Riker to their quarters for a private dinner--or rather, Jadzia invites Deanna against Worf's better judgment, and Riker overhears and invites himself. Jadzia and Deanna quickly find they don't get along; they debate politics, and Jadzia finds Deanna's approach too manipulative, too passive, too indirect. Deanna, for her part, believes that Judzia is too aggressive and deliberately antagonistic. Finally, Worf intercedes, telling them there is no need to fight over him, as Jadzia has already won, and that they are both embarrassing themselves. There's a moment of silence, and then Jadzia comments, "you know, Worf, for someone who can be such a smooth talker when it comes to romance, you sure can put your foot in it." She turns to Deanna. "Did he try his line on you too? About being afraid of hurting you?"
Worf interjects. "Klingon mating is very physically--"
"He did!" says Troi. "Which is odd, because in actuality, he's such a tender lover."
They spend the rest of the night debating Worf's sexual prowess. Worf is so mortified he is still sitting silently at the table an hour after the dinner ends, frozen in embarassment.
Years later, Riker will remember the dinner as one of the best nights of his life.
4) DS9 Operations Chief Miles Edward O'Brien sneaks onto the Enterprise during the night shift. He goes to the transporter room, sets out his tools, and gets to work behind the console. The next day, the Enterprise transporter chief finds a surprise. Someone has welded a leather chair to the spot in front of his console, and left a big bow and a note: "You're feckin' welcome."
5) Qark runs into Guinan, and is instantly terrified. Years ago, she gave him some advice on running a bar, and by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, she's entitled to half his profits unless he can convince her to admit he earned his success on his own. He attempts to wow her with his state of the art holosuites, his Tellarians-eat-half-off Tuesdays, his dabo tables. She is thoroughly unimpressed, until she runs into Morn, who orders his usual. Guinan: "Quark, I have been tending bars for longer than most civilizations have had star travel, and I have never, never met anyone as demanding, as particular, as downright picky, as Morn. I don't know what you're doing here, but if you've got him as your regular, you must be doing *something* right. Consider the rule satisfied." (Because of course Guinan knew exactly what he was trying to do the whole time.)
6) Ro Laren and Kira have a series of long talks about their hopes and dreams for Bajor, and start a friendship that will last the rest of their lives. Not everything has to be a joke.
7) Riker contracts a STI from a dabo girl, and gets it treated on DS9 because he doesn't want Crusher to know. Unfortunately for him, Dr Bashir is miffed that Riker doesn't immediately acknowledge him as an equally smooth ladies' man, and "accidentally" lets slip the information. Beverley knows how to let a good joke mature, though, so she waits until Riker's next annual check-up to say "and tell me, Will, are you still experience a burning sensation in your armpits?".
8) Q pays a visit, unable to resist the two teams in one place. He runs into Garak, who introduces himself and tricks Q into doing some low level magical favors him. Q figures it out, promises to ruin Garak's family and disappears, but this was Garak's plan all along: from the beginning, he figured Q would turn on him, which is why he gave his name as a member of a rival house in the Obsidian Order. Point for the tailor spy-master.
9) Jake tries to bond with Wesley Crusher (who is still on the Enterprise, despite it being at least season 4 DS9 if Worf's on the station--don't worry about it), but even he's annoyed by Wesley's know-it-all-ism. In desperation, he tries to get Nog to talk to Wesley, but Nog's own Starfleet-born competitiveness places them in a loop of one-upmanship. Finally, Jake abandons them both, and a month later, his essay on how Starfleet instills an atmosphere of unhealthy competitive elitism in its cadets gets published in a space-zine.
10) On the last day of the Enterprise's docking, the two teams play a friendly game of baseball. Geordi and Data get really into sabremetrics; Riker absolutely destroys his body to make amazing catches; Deanna gets really competitive and uses her empathic abilities to play mind games with the enemy team (Rom eventually needs to be carried out in a stretcher.) The Enterprise crew illustrates why they're the best and the brightest, perfectly fusing together as a team and effortlessly winning the game. But the Deep Space Nine crew have a lot more fun.
Later Days.
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label star trek. Show all posts
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Monday, January 20, 2014
Space: The Old Frontier
If you ask people what their favorite Trek is, the odds are you'll get an answer based on age. Those who were around for the original series speak confidently about being around when it all started. Those who were teenagers in the 90s speak enthusiastically about Next Generation, and how it modernized everything into a sleek new appeal. Those born a few years later will defend Voyager (although generally, what they're actually defending is "hey, that Borg chick was hot, and the hologram doctor was cool). And I'm sure there's a generation now who will defend nuTrek as being the most exciting of all possible worlds.
No one defends Enterprise. No one.
But for my money, my favorite is always the black sheep of the group, Deep Space Nine. Yes, okay, it was riffing off, if not ripping off, Babylon Five. And yes, it was dark, in tone and in lighting. (Cardassians apparently are not the most gregarious of interior decorators.) But it had and has so much in its favor. First, it's still the only Trek that stayed in one place. Arguably, that's a point against it: exploration is ingrained as a Trek element ever since a certain ship set out on its five year mission. But being stationary meant that it could explore the cultures of the races around it much more.(Plus, from a fancy scholar perspective, there's a lot troubling about a civilization that has its roots in Western culture going around on a never-ending colonial expansion quest.) Yes, we still had episodes about the culture of the week, but there was a lot more chance to get really deep into the established cultures: Cardassian, Bajoran, Dominion, and even Ferengi. After DS9, there was depth to the Ferengi culture. That still seems like it should have been impossible.
Going back way back, I once set up some criteria for what I look for in a show: good set pieces, a long term plot, character development, dialogue, and characters. Dialogue is probably the weak point for DS9; not that it's bad, it's just that it can be hit or miss. It has some great one liners and great scenes, but also some real clunkers. This is the fate of a show with a lot of different writers. In terms of set pieces, there are some really appealing episodes; comedy-wise, the time-travelling "Trials and Tribble-ations" is a great salute to the original series. And "In the Pale Moonlight" is a wonderful take-down of Star Trek optimism for something more complex and sinister. Character-wise, it's an ensemble cast down to its core, with traditional Starfleet types (Bashir, the bright-eyed doctor, Dax, the cheery second-in-command, the workmanship of O'Brien, and and the brash captain style of Sisko) clashing with the more jaded world views of the revolutionist Kira, the isolated Odo, the cheerful skullduggery of Garak, and the scheming Quark. As for character development, I make fun of Voyager a lot, but the one thing it did absolutely right is center the later seasons around Seven of Nine's growth towards humanity, and the earlier seasons around the Doctor's experience of the same. The other characters are kind of splotchy--Kim, Paris, B'Lanna, Janeway, Chekotay sort of reach a certain point, and remain static. DS9, on the other hand, puts all of its characters on a trajectory, and you can see how their relationships and their selves evolve over time. And that leaves its high point, plot. More than any other Trek, Deep Space Nine kept its continuity. The war with the Dominion, its big overarching plot, lasted for whole seasons, and really gave a sense that something was going on that affected the entire universe. And you need to remember, this is the 90s--before DVR, Netflix, and streaming, networks were basically disincentivized to do dramas with continuity; if viewers missed an episode, the only possibility was to wait and hope it randomly showed up in the reruns. So for the long-form show to even exist, there had to be a struggle. (Which probably explains why Voyager adopted a more episodic approach.) That DS9 tried for that struggle, and succeeded to the degree it did, matters. It paved the way for later continuity-heavy sci-fi, such as Battlestar Galactica (not least because Ron Moore was one of the writers hired for later DS9 episodes).
But if I argued that my attachment to the show was entirely objective or historical, I'd be lying. It mattered to me. It matters to me. Basically, I watched the show through twice. The first time, I was in high school. I had spent most of my youth being culturally deprived, as my parents didn't have cable. (That mattered! I had a lot of strikes against me as a kid--not being able to relate to the shows the cool kids were talking about did not help! Although if I hadn't resorted to teh books instead, who knows where I'd be now.) So it was a big deal when my father the teacher gave me permission to use the elementary school's cable to tape whatever I wanted. I kind of went nuts with it; I remember spending long sessions staring at the TV guide, trying to decipher which channels on the elementary school TV corresponded to which stations in the book. It must have been season 5 or so before I caught on to the tail end of DS9 in my TV trawling, but I remember being hooked right away. Until then, I had been a STNG type--DS9 was too slow, and too political for my tastes. But the teenage brain was just in the right place for it, and thus, hooked. My brothers couldn't stand the show--they would watch Voyager with me, but didn't see why DS9 was worth taping. And we had only a single 8 hour cassette to capture a week's worth of television, so there were actually arguments over whether it deserved its place in the line-up.
And that's my interest in media culture--endlessly fascinating how we adapt something like the limitations of a 8 hr VHS tape into our lives.
The second time I watched through the series, it was in reruns. It was during the summer of 2002, which was... not a pleasant time in my life. Academically, I was still in full over-achiever mode, so that was fine. But socially, I was pretty much a disaster. I had made zero close friends in my first year of university, and I was literally spending the summer living unemployed in my parents' basement. Not a high point. The only interesting things that ever happened to me personally for four months were volunteer jobs at the local library and senior centers--which were educational in their own way, I guess. Deep Space Nine was the show on every week day at 2:00 pm--the last show, essentially, that I could watch before my family came home, and I no longer had the freedom of being alone. I want to emphasize at this point that my family has never been less than totally supportive of me--it was just my mindset at the time that any other human presence served to remind me that I was falling below my own impossible standards of success. And it mattered, then, that the last piece of my daily solitude was spending an hour with a bunch of oddballs who managed to get their shit together every week to keep the space trains running on time.
I'm bringing all of this up now because I'm currently reading my way through the AV Club reviews of Deep Space Nine. I've reached third season, and I came across this passage: "There’s a great scene early in the hour when Kira brings by a plant as a house-warming gift, and Odo, after initially not wanting to let her inside his new apartment, tells her excitedly about all his plans to try new shapes and new textures. It’s a sweet exchange between the two of them, but it also shows just how vulnerable and lonely Odo really is. He isn’t a cynic at heart; he wants to engage with life, he’s just terrified of risking a sense of self." I read that, and I felt such a pang of sympathy for Odo--and for my past self, remembering me watching that scene.
Hang in there, Odo-me. It gets better.
Later Days.
No one defends Enterprise. No one.
But for my money, my favorite is always the black sheep of the group, Deep Space Nine. Yes, okay, it was riffing off, if not ripping off, Babylon Five. And yes, it was dark, in tone and in lighting. (Cardassians apparently are not the most gregarious of interior decorators.) But it had and has so much in its favor. First, it's still the only Trek that stayed in one place. Arguably, that's a point against it: exploration is ingrained as a Trek element ever since a certain ship set out on its five year mission. But being stationary meant that it could explore the cultures of the races around it much more.(Plus, from a fancy scholar perspective, there's a lot troubling about a civilization that has its roots in Western culture going around on a never-ending colonial expansion quest.) Yes, we still had episodes about the culture of the week, but there was a lot more chance to get really deep into the established cultures: Cardassian, Bajoran, Dominion, and even Ferengi. After DS9, there was depth to the Ferengi culture. That still seems like it should have been impossible.
Going back way back, I once set up some criteria for what I look for in a show: good set pieces, a long term plot, character development, dialogue, and characters. Dialogue is probably the weak point for DS9; not that it's bad, it's just that it can be hit or miss. It has some great one liners and great scenes, but also some real clunkers. This is the fate of a show with a lot of different writers. In terms of set pieces, there are some really appealing episodes; comedy-wise, the time-travelling "Trials and Tribble-ations" is a great salute to the original series. And "In the Pale Moonlight" is a wonderful take-down of Star Trek optimism for something more complex and sinister. Character-wise, it's an ensemble cast down to its core, with traditional Starfleet types (Bashir, the bright-eyed doctor, Dax, the cheery second-in-command, the workmanship of O'Brien, and and the brash captain style of Sisko) clashing with the more jaded world views of the revolutionist Kira, the isolated Odo, the cheerful skullduggery of Garak, and the scheming Quark. As for character development, I make fun of Voyager a lot, but the one thing it did absolutely right is center the later seasons around Seven of Nine's growth towards humanity, and the earlier seasons around the Doctor's experience of the same. The other characters are kind of splotchy--Kim, Paris, B'Lanna, Janeway, Chekotay sort of reach a certain point, and remain static. DS9, on the other hand, puts all of its characters on a trajectory, and you can see how their relationships and their selves evolve over time. And that leaves its high point, plot. More than any other Trek, Deep Space Nine kept its continuity. The war with the Dominion, its big overarching plot, lasted for whole seasons, and really gave a sense that something was going on that affected the entire universe. And you need to remember, this is the 90s--before DVR, Netflix, and streaming, networks were basically disincentivized to do dramas with continuity; if viewers missed an episode, the only possibility was to wait and hope it randomly showed up in the reruns. So for the long-form show to even exist, there had to be a struggle. (Which probably explains why Voyager adopted a more episodic approach.) That DS9 tried for that struggle, and succeeded to the degree it did, matters. It paved the way for later continuity-heavy sci-fi, such as Battlestar Galactica (not least because Ron Moore was one of the writers hired for later DS9 episodes).
But if I argued that my attachment to the show was entirely objective or historical, I'd be lying. It mattered to me. It matters to me. Basically, I watched the show through twice. The first time, I was in high school. I had spent most of my youth being culturally deprived, as my parents didn't have cable. (That mattered! I had a lot of strikes against me as a kid--not being able to relate to the shows the cool kids were talking about did not help! Although if I hadn't resorted to teh books instead, who knows where I'd be now.) So it was a big deal when my father the teacher gave me permission to use the elementary school's cable to tape whatever I wanted. I kind of went nuts with it; I remember spending long sessions staring at the TV guide, trying to decipher which channels on the elementary school TV corresponded to which stations in the book. It must have been season 5 or so before I caught on to the tail end of DS9 in my TV trawling, but I remember being hooked right away. Until then, I had been a STNG type--DS9 was too slow, and too political for my tastes. But the teenage brain was just in the right place for it, and thus, hooked. My brothers couldn't stand the show--they would watch Voyager with me, but didn't see why DS9 was worth taping. And we had only a single 8 hour cassette to capture a week's worth of television, so there were actually arguments over whether it deserved its place in the line-up.
And that's my interest in media culture--endlessly fascinating how we adapt something like the limitations of a 8 hr VHS tape into our lives.
The second time I watched through the series, it was in reruns. It was during the summer of 2002, which was... not a pleasant time in my life. Academically, I was still in full over-achiever mode, so that was fine. But socially, I was pretty much a disaster. I had made zero close friends in my first year of university, and I was literally spending the summer living unemployed in my parents' basement. Not a high point. The only interesting things that ever happened to me personally for four months were volunteer jobs at the local library and senior centers--which were educational in their own way, I guess. Deep Space Nine was the show on every week day at 2:00 pm--the last show, essentially, that I could watch before my family came home, and I no longer had the freedom of being alone. I want to emphasize at this point that my family has never been less than totally supportive of me--it was just my mindset at the time that any other human presence served to remind me that I was falling below my own impossible standards of success. And it mattered, then, that the last piece of my daily solitude was spending an hour with a bunch of oddballs who managed to get their shit together every week to keep the space trains running on time.
I'm bringing all of this up now because I'm currently reading my way through the AV Club reviews of Deep Space Nine. I've reached third season, and I came across this passage: "There’s a great scene early in the hour when Kira brings by a plant as a house-warming gift, and Odo, after initially not wanting to let her inside his new apartment, tells her excitedly about all his plans to try new shapes and new textures. It’s a sweet exchange between the two of them, but it also shows just how vulnerable and lonely Odo really is. He isn’t a cynic at heart; he wants to engage with life, he’s just terrified of risking a sense of self." I read that, and I felt such a pang of sympathy for Odo--and for my past self, remembering me watching that scene.
Hang in there, Odo-me. It gets better.
Later Days.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Bibliophile: Wait, We're Still Doing These?
"Books are for mooks." --Timon the Meerkat
This is Bibliophile.
It's been a long time since I've done Bibliophile, a look at the new books available at a randomly chosen Canadian university library. In part, that's because the blogging bug in general no longer creates the itch in me it once did (note to self: come up with better metaphor), but also because, even in the compromised, 12 books per post version, it was still regularly taking over 3 hours to compose. So we'll play around with the format a bit, and see if we can't come up with something still useful, but less time-consuming. After the break, then, six new books from the University of Calgary. As always, a bolded H marks a book also held by the University of Waterloo.
(In other news, my computer reset on me, meaning I lost all unsaved work. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but I actually was working at the time for once, and lost five pages of the dissertation. Yes, I should have saved more frequently. I am aware of this fact. Believe me, I am aware of this fact. The level of my awareness could not currently be overstated. If the sounds of my curses could have been harnessed, the winter heating bill would be a thing of the past.)
This is Bibliophile.
It's been a long time since I've done Bibliophile, a look at the new books available at a randomly chosen Canadian university library. In part, that's because the blogging bug in general no longer creates the itch in me it once did (note to self: come up with better metaphor), but also because, even in the compromised, 12 books per post version, it was still regularly taking over 3 hours to compose. So we'll play around with the format a bit, and see if we can't come up with something still useful, but less time-consuming. After the break, then, six new books from the University of Calgary. As always, a bolded H marks a book also held by the University of Waterloo.
(In other news, my computer reset on me, meaning I lost all unsaved work. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but I actually was working at the time for once, and lost five pages of the dissertation. Yes, I should have saved more frequently. I am aware of this fact. Believe me, I am aware of this fact. The level of my awareness could not currently be overstated. If the sounds of my curses could have been harnessed, the winter heating bill would be a thing of the past.)
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