I'm going to punch Cardassia out of orbit. Hold my calls.

December 5, 2014 8:19 AM

Shamus Young reviews Star Trek. (Almost) all of it.

Enterprise
Star Trek
The Next Generation
Deep Space 9
Voyager
Reboot movies

And Shamus Young previously on Metafilter:
Skyrim
Pixel City
Terrain Engine
Bowling with Rollercoasters
DM of the Rings

posted by lharmon (31 comments total)

While writing this series I looked up DS9 on Netflix and ended up watching Trials and Tribble-ations. In that episode, the crew of the Enterprise gets (sigh) pulled back in time and find themselves in the original series.

Uh, dude? You're watching Deep Space Nine. That's not the crew of the Enterprise. It's the crew of Deep Space Nine.

Yeesh.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:26 AM on December 5, 2014 [12 favorites]

He's gonna be pretty confused by the episodes when the Enterprise visits Deep Space 9!
posted by trackofalljades at 8:44 AM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Well great, I'm now watching Trials and Tribble-ations at work. This should make for a productive Friday.
posted by The Legit Republic of Blanketsburg at 8:54 AM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

The problem is that it’s pretty darn hard to imagine a world with no money.

The ghost of Iain M. Banks is holding on line 2.

Overall, these reviews seem very shallow and superficial. Shamus doesn't seem to have made an effort to complete his understanding of any of the series, he's just taken what he knows to be an incomplete and passing read and decided to hold forth on it.
posted by localroger at 8:58 AM on December 5, 2014 [6 favorites]

Yeah, this is not Shamus' best writing. The TNG review is great, but I think he ran out of interest or energy halfway through the week. DS9 really deserves more respect and love, you know?

But then he is the first place I've seen @RikerGoogling and that is just about the best thing I've seen on Twitter all week.

tinder radius light years
replicator troubleshooting bad oreos
cardassian butt photo
roast turkey correct phaser setting

posted by Nelson at 9:09 AM on December 5, 2014 [15 favorites]

"I saw Star Wars [released on May 25, 1977] before I saw Star Trek [The first regular episode ("The Man Trap") of Star Trek aired on Thursday, September 8, 1966]."

Well see, there is the problem. The reviewer should have started with Star Trek Episode One which came 22 years later.
posted by vapidave at 9:32 AM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm severely rattled by the civility on display in the dissenting comments. I need to completely reevaluate my mental model of the average Star Trek fan.

(Just teasing, Trekkies/Trekkers. *thumps heart with fist, points at you*)
posted by echocollate at 10:14 AM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Overall, these reviews seem very shallow and superficial. Shamus doesn't seem to have made an effort to complete his understanding of any of the series, he's just taken what he knows to be an incomplete and passing read and decided to hold forth on it.

I read the comments here before I went back and looked at Young's posts and I admit I initially thought "surely it cannot be that bad." In fact, it is worse. Even where he seems to have seen what he is reviewing, he only can muster up four or five paragraphs, which is about an order of magnitude less than, well, every other similar site covering the same ground.

And as you say, frequently he admits he hasn't really seen this or that series, but this is what he has heard. I am reminded of nothing so much of an episode of a boardgaming podcast I listened to a while ago, where the guy reviewing a game admitted he had never played it or seen it played, but then held forth for fifteen minutes on what was wrong with it. Ah.

And saddest of all for me was this:

I admit I’d love it if the Trek movies tried to approach sci-fi more like Gattaca, Moon, Inception, or Pandorum

I love DM of the Rings to a degree that stops just short of pagan idolatry. To find that Shamus Young would like these indifferent but well-crafted popcorn movies to be more like a selection of turgid, forgettable movies that mistake murkiness for profundity was to realize that maybe I don't respect Shamus Young's taste as much as I thought.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:17 AM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

Shamus Young is a ceaseless fount of wrong opinions.
posted by kafziel at 10:22 AM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

I'll add, I'm enjoying the comments way more than the actual reviews (specifically, the review of the first reboot). There's a really good mix of perspectives and reactions. There's a lot of love, some resignation, a little indignation and disappointment, but all very thoughtfully presented.
posted by echocollate at 10:23 AM on December 5, 2014

Paging Sara C. to the Star Trek watching thread.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:30 AM on December 5, 2014

As a TV/movie reviewer Shamus is a decent programmer.
posted by Splunge at 10:31 AM on December 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

It did make me decide to watch Trials and Tribblations. I gave up on DS9 some time after the first season because I got bored with the Hardassians and the Begorrans and also 'cause I'm a total buy-in to the "Paramount listened to the Babylon 5 pitch, said no thanks and then ripped it off for a Star Trek sequel" theory and I gots to have my grudges.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:51 AM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Shamus Young is a ceaseless fount of wrong opinions.


Come thou fount of wrong opinions
Tune my heart to sing thy grace
Streams of wrongness, never ceasing
Call for mocking to thy face
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:05 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

I gave up on DS9 some time after the first season because I got bored with the Hardassians and the Begorrans


DS9 is a lot like Buffy- it only really gets good about halfway through the second season. It gets especially good once Worf shows up and the war with the Gamma Quadrant begins. This episode alone nearly put me off the whole thing. Stay with it- it pays off.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:10 PM on December 5, 2014

I was almost immediately put off by this comment:

Far beyond the stars was terrible. It felt like a corny fan-fiction written by Avery Brooks as a love-in for Sisko.

That's about as wrong as wrong can be. Part of it is that I was expecting something that would be an episode-by-episode discussion of the different series, in the manner of the AV Club. (It helped that some of the regular commenters on DS9 in AVC included Rappin' Jake Sisko (the entries collected here, with annotations; SPOILERS) and Flirty Cardassian Waitress.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:53 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I've seen Voyager, DS9 and Enterprise all of the way through, at least twice this year. Just yesterday I started watching Voyager again. I sometimes think about doing something like Mr Young has done, or compiling a list of my favourite episodes from each series, etc.

Whatever jabber I come up with would be better than this piffle.
posted by Solomon at 1:58 PM on December 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Yes, DS9 deserves a lot more love. Why say something is a review when it's just a hastily formed opinion based on a few cursory glances?

With this in mind, I pronounce these reviews crappy, having only looked at two of them :)
posted by k8bot at 4:00 PM on December 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I was going to comment on his review of Deep Space Nine, but I kind of lost interest 2-3 paragraphs in. I'm sure it's a good review, and he's probably a good writer, but I just have nothing to say about it.
posted by jabah at 5:03 PM on December 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

Can't wait for his review of the Wire!

DS9 is the only Trek I can repeatedly watch and this will be true for as long as I live.
posted by juiceCake at 7:58 PM on December 5, 2014

He's not really paying attention, is he?

The problem is that it’s pretty darn hard to imagine a world with no money. We can dream up a world where travel is instant. We just make a cardboard set and write “Transporter” on the side. Boom. Now you go from A to B instantly. Done. But we can’t make a box for the technology that will replace money because we can’t picture how that would work.

But we can picture that, and Roddenberry did. The box is called a replicator, and it's powered by unlimited energy. When energy is limitless, it stops being something people have to pay for. When their replicator can produce any object or material they want without any cost, they have no need for money to buy things, except for land. I don't know if ST ever dealt with the land-ownership issue, but I'm sure it could be dealt with.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:19 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

Territory disputes are a big thing driving a lot of Star Trek politics, particularly the space-Palestinians on Bajor. Not so sure about individual plots of land although there is that one really sweet episode of Deep Space 9 with Kira trying to talk a cranky old Bajoran into leaving his farm before the Occupational Authority blows up the moon. Sadly the B-plot of that episode is Nog and Jake engaged in some trading hijinks. I can accept that gold-pressed latinum is not able to be replicated for some reason, but why are yamok sauce and self-sealing stem bolts so valuable?
posted by Nelson at 8:36 AM on December 6, 2014

for a real complete review of every goddamn Trek scap ever committed to film and a certain amount of pulp, please see Vaka Rangi. Only, budget some time. He's been at it for about two years now and is just now up to early TNG. Episode reviews are typically thoughtful, critically dense, and on the longish side.
posted by mwhybark at 11:26 AM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

I'm sort of ashamed to admit that I've seen Voyager, DS9 and Enterprise all of the way through, at least twice this year. Just yesterday I started watching Voyager again. I sometimes think about doing something like Mr Young has done, or compiling a list of my favourite episodes from each series, etc.

Do it! I just started watching Star Trek (DS9 and Voyager) a couple of years ago and I'm often bummed that I missed the time when the fandom was actually active. I have FEELINGS ABOUT KIRA NERYS that I need to discuss, damnit!
posted by chaiminda at 12:58 PM on December 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

The thing about the plausibility of transporters vs. moneyless economies is a great example of this person simply not thinking things through to any appreciable extent. In fact, transporters, as shown on the show, are pretty much impossible, and the people who do the show know this very well, to the extent that the semi-canon tech manuals refer to "Heisenberg compensators" as part of the equipment. The creation of post-scarcity societies, on the other hand, have been kicked around for quite some time, and have been a staple of science fiction for some decades. (Also note, via the above link, that they aren't always utopias.)

The specifics of the Federation model haven't been completely spelled out; not everything can be replicated (the replicators used for food and drink are relatively common, but "industrial" replicators--about the size of a large closet--are much less so, and they have yet to make one big enough to create even a small starship; apparently the technology doesn't scale well), the use of AIs to build stuff is restricted by the generally limited numbers of AIs in that universe, and there don't seem to be that many large-scale space habitats--in other words, it's not Iain M. Banks' Culture. So, yeah, it's more than a bit handwavy. But that's really just an invitation to discuss the matter, which, to their credit, some of the commenters actually do (as people have done online for about as long as the internet has been around).
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:02 PM on December 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

I have FEELINGS ABOUT KIRA NERYS that I need to discuss, damnit!


Such as the fact that, the Emissary notwithstanding, she's probably the most important figure in post-occupation Bajoran history (something that stupid Kai Winn certainly understood)? Or that Tora Ziyal was most likely her half-sister?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:45 PM on December 7, 2014

I don't understand how Ziyal and Nerys were related? Tora Naprem was Ziyal's mother, who was sent with her daughter on the Ravenok. Dukat did have a thing for Meru, Nerys' mother, cf Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night (the Bajoran lilacs episode), but unless I have my canon very wrong, there's no evidence that Nerys and Ziyal were related?
posted by Solomon at 3:15 PM on December 7, 2014

Dukat told Kira that Ziyal's mother was Tora Naprem. Dukat was also known for being extremely selective about the sorts of information he released, as well as their veracity. Kira Meru was said to have died in a Cardassian hospital seven years after the start of her involvement with Dukat. Did Meru die of illness, as officially stated, or in childbirth? Or did she not die at all, but instead was given a different identity, and sent to Ravenok?

This is all pure speculation, of course, and it's a good thing too- if Nerys had known this at the time of Ziyal's death, she would likely have killed Damar, instead of just beating the green out of him.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:35 PM on December 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Dukat was able to identify Naprem's grave by her earring. If she was really Kira Meru, wouldn't Nerys have noticed that the earring was the same?
posted by kafziel at 4:48 PM on December 7, 2014

Quite possibly, unless the grave actually belonged to Tora Naprem, and she had simply been given Ziyal following Kira Meru's death. Or Meru switched earrings when she switched identities. Or Dukat merely substituted the earring and lied about it (as he was wont to do).
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:13 PM on December 7, 2014

There. Are. Four. Lights!
posted by Splunge at 7:19 PM on December 8, 2014