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Enterprise Finale Airing Tonight
Tycoon Guy writes "Be sure to tune in to UPN tonight, where they're going to show the 'true finale' of Enterprise with the episode Terra Prime, followed by the post-season coda, These Are The Voyages. The latter will feature appearances by Troi, Riker, and a completely CGI Enterprise-D."
I have been a long time devotee of ST:TNG. I, like many others, never got involved with Enterprise. And from what I hear, that's a shame, as by all accounts, the show has really become much better toward the end. I do admit I had very high hopes to begin with, but found it stilted and uninteresting during the first four episodes and gave up. But I know I won't be alone watching the finale just to get a glimpse of "new" ST:TNG cast action and the familiar Enterprise-D, no matter how brief.
This will be the first time in almost two decades that a first-run Star Trek hasn't been on TV...the end of an era. Here's hoping that the Star Trek franchise can be revived at some point, even better.
Poor Scott Bakula. He was so brilliant on Quantum Leap, but Enterprise just sort of floundered in the shadow of its predecessors.
"Meanwhile, far in the future, Troi suggests that Riker use a Holodeck recreation of this moment in 'Star Trek' history to search for some command insights."
Who's the creative genium behind that one?
At least this show will get a proper ending and avoid the Farscape treatment.
I was wondering why all of our evening shift IT guys called in sick.
Turk: Let's play Steak. J.D.: What? Turk: Steak. The 1st person to finish their steak is the winner of Steak. -Scrubs
Yay, public TV sharing! It's hosted over at-
+++
NO CARRIER
Sadly enough, I've gotten into loud arguments about whether Picard or Kirk was the better captain. It's a symptom of my horrible geekdom. For those of you wondering, by the way, it's Picard.
Mentally, I never made it past the first episode. The Klingon in the cornfield was a touch much to stomache, and then when the electronics in Enterprise looked more sophisticated than in the Original Series, I just couldn't do it. I think trying to make a prequel to the Original Series, but having it tie into the later series whilst bypassing the Original, was a fundamental flaw. I really hope they don't try another Trek series until they have someone at the helm who truly understands what makes Trek great (hint: it ain't the technobabble).
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...finding a date for Friday nights...buhahahahahaha, like that'll ever happen...
Why do they have to cancel a fantastic show like this when there is so much drivel on television. This show was refreshing in its character depth and unique take on human colonization of space. I really enjoyed the sneak preview of the upcoming movie.
Huh? Enterprise? Meh. I thought we were talking about Firefly. HEY! Maybe the last episode will be a daring holodeck thriller featuring 19th century villians! I hope Whoopie has a guest appearance.
You must be joking.
It was Sisko by a long shot. He wasn't afraid to disipline people that needed it.
Truthfully, they killed the show - almost. Let it die in peace
The show suckedQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Sam leaps into the Enterprise D as Commander Riker and must save the relationship between him and Troi
:)
Oh wait..that was the good show with Scott Bakula
At the end of the episode, after he has resolved the problems facing "Enterprise", he will warp through time and space and reappear as George in Seinfeld and attempt to get the series started again. [Obligatory]
We'll probably have to wait a while. Personally, I don't want to see more Star Trek until they get Tweedledee and Tweedledum out of the producers' chairs. They stood on the shoulders of a giant and made a mess of his vision. Perhaps bring in some of the authors of Star Trek novels? Several of those books are pretty good reads... As for a time period, I'm thinking maybe post-Voyager (but not too long after).
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
For real action, my choice of Sci-Fi is Stargate SG-1. With the exception of Season 7, it doesn't suffer from that "let's sit in a room and push buttons" syndrome that Star Trek has had problems with since the original movies. If I want to watch people explore then I really want to see them leave the room, and SG-1 is always shooting outdoors. (It's really funny how all the planets that they visit seem to look a lot like the Vancouver, B.C. area though.)
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I see where you're coming from. But still, to make the set of Enterprise look less sophisticated than the Original Series would require them drawing on the walls with crayons or perhaps using vacuum tubes.
Sisko was cooler than either of them, but he not a starship captain. He was a base commander.
Between Kirk and Picard: Kirk, obviously.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In the blurb about "These Are The Voyages" on Trek Nation, Brannon Braga says:
"Some of the Enterprise cast members were very hurt that we would put Next Generation cast members on Enterprise."
They should have been more hurt that Braga and Company gave them such drek to perform in.
Maybe the next series or movie will be something actually *good*, instead of what ever rejected story line Paramount happened to have laying around the day someone said "Let's make a new Trek series!!!"
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
For those in New England, it will actually be airing in Saturday at 8pm instead of Friday since it's been replaced by baseball. What iritates me the most is that no mention of this is made on the UPN site - I simply stumbled upon it a couple of weeks ago.
While I'll agree that the writing could have been better for most episodes, the shifting program times of this and other shows without mention is what drives me to stop watching the shows I like. The fastest way to kill viewership (besides bad content) is unannounced show shedule changes. And, "we told TV Guide" excuses don't cut it.
I'm looking forward to these final episodes. While Enterprise has been a far cry from the quality of Battlestar Galactica, this last season has been better.
what most Sci-Fi still hasn't. That is that writing and telling a good story is still the most important element. They've gotten it right this season, but it was too late to save it.
Given the setting of this series, the logical place to start in the story was getting Earth established in the space of the era, meeting other species, forging alliances, making enemies, forming the beginnings of the Federation, etc. This is exactly what they've done this season and it's been brilliant. Had they started this way, the show would still be on the air.
But no, for the first two seasons we had Andy Griffith in space (yes it really was THAT boring), and then they had to trot out such over the top monstrosities as a war through time and huge insect aliens that wanted to annihilate earth. It didn't help that they broke continuity a lot with the other series (introducing the Borg, etc.). This is not the Trek that the fans came for and many of them left, never to return. Unfortunate but it reinforces one of the basic requirements of any fictional narrative that many people still don't grasp. If the story isn't compelling it won't be a success. Given the past success of Trek, you can't just slap the name on any piece of work and expect that alone to carry you.
Where it'll be preempted for basketball.
DOH! I spoke too soon - it'll be delayed two hours and aired at 9PM.
Wow, the season finale must be _important_ - usually they just go with Malcolm
at its usual 9PM and delay Enterprise until 2AM Saturday!
You never can tell when or if Enterprise will be on. No wonder it got poor ratings - we can't find it even if we try.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
I really hope they don't try another Trek series until they have someone at the helm who truly understands what makes Trek great
This last season has been very good. Manny Coto has been running it, not the Killer-B's. He has shown that he cares about original Trek. We've dealt with the nasty attitude of the Vulcans, the Klingon ridges, the initial steps of starting the Federation, dealing with Tellarite/Andorian/Vulcan hostility. Plus, of course, the killer "entire episode, including opening credits, is Mirror Universe" two-parter.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"It's dead, Jim."
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But he DID hold a Captain's rank.
Picard: Accomplished Shakesprean Actor
Sisko: Threatened, or performed, violent action on omnipotent superdimensional beings regularly.
Winner: Sisko, because he clangs when he walks.
By the end of DS9, Sisko did achieve the rank of Captain, so I think that qualifies him for consideration. Besides, he did something Jean-Luc never did: he punched Q and put him on the ground. Picard did yell at Q, maybe he even grabbed him by the uniform and pushed him against a bulkhead (I don't remember) but he never actually struck Q.
Y|
Is Glee codeword for vaseline?
click me
I agree that Picard was a better captain than Kirk, but there is a lot about star trek that bugged me, not the least of which was that Capt. Jelicho and Cmdr. Data were better captains than either of them. (Riker complained to Jelicho he was being too hard on the crew. HELLO! You were at war, Riker! It's not Jelicho's fault Picard never ran battle readiness drills.) Data was the victim of starfleet's basic pro-human bias. (Ever wonder why starfleet was topheavy with humans instead of the much longer lived vulcans?) It really galled me when Troi was promoted over Data. I wasn't even aware that she was an officer, I thought she was a civilian contractor (but she donned a uniform in later shows).
And another thing, Troi sure was hot, but God, I hated the way she abused Worf. "A Klingon does NOT [do X]!" "Well, I'm not a Klingon, but I know I would feel [feeling Y] if I were confronted with [situation Z] [and I think you damn well better change your behavior and act more like me by doing X even though I'm not a Klingon, or I will make a recommendation to Capt. Picard to include this "deficiency" in your officer's fitness report]." Which invariably concludes with Worf changing his behaviour to be more like a human-betazoid hybrid than the Klingon he is.
Sorry about that. Thanks for letting me vent my hyper-critical warp core.
More music, fewer hits
I did see a few episodes involving a terrorist attack on Vulcan, and I liked what I saw. However, it wasn't compelling enough to pick it up and try to get into it. I liked the scene where they were playing basketball on the ship, it really connected "us" with "them".
I might check out the coda.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Kind of like seeing the "progress" between Asimov's original Foundation Trilogy and the 500-years-later new Foundation novels mirror the 40-50 years progress in our world between the writing.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I'm with you on that one. Back when I was a young infantry officer in the Army, the three other lieutenants in my company and I used to get together at our CO's house to watch the latest Next Generation episode.
We would get into blistering arguments about the leadership styles of Picard and Kirk. Two of the guys came down in favor of Kirk, and three of us (including our boss, the CO), though Picard was a better leader. We actually had extensive discussions about it, comparing their actions on various episodes to examples from the Army's leadership manuals, books we'd read about leadership, and our own real-world examples.
A few months after these regular Trek sessions started, we were deployed to a rather remote part of Somalia. The CO asked his wife to record and send episodes, even though being a light infantry company we deployed with no real luxury items. Sure enough, several weeks after arriving in Somalia, we received a tape with two episodes. By then a heavy engineer unit had colocated with us, and we were able to phinagle a couple of hours on their TV late one night between patrols.
Strange though it may sound, that night spent watching Trek with a generator humming loudly outside in the hot Somali air was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Replace "Klingon" with "man", and "human-betazoid hybrid" with "woman" in the above statement, and you've got a stereotypical heterosexual relationship.
Hey, can someone tape that for me here in France? We haven't even seen the first of the "New" Gerneration series yet...
I have one word for you...
bittorrent
You're welcome. Every ST series, every year, every episode is out there.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
As groundbreaking as the original series was, it was still based on '60s concepts of how the future would look. Even the later series, which did a great job trying to keep continuity with the original, had a few huge problems to overcome. One of the best episodes ever, DS9's reprise of "Trouble With Tribbles" had to contend with the fact that the original Klingons looked more like Ming the Merciless than they looked like "modern Klingons" with the riged forehead and larger muscles. There was no way to reconcile that, so they just had Warf say "We Klingons do not talk about it." How could Enterprise possibly make technology that looked more advanced than ours, but less advanced than the original? (Maybe they could have it look like current military technology, which already looks pretty high tech--HUD's and virtual controls on a multifunction touch screen--you know, like they used in later star treks, but more "today looking" so it naturally looks less advanced.)
btw, I never watched Enterprise, I was already tired of the Star Trek universe by then (a few episodes of STV did that for me) but I hear that some of the actresses were pretty hot.
More music, fewer hits
You're kidding, right? That's a serious no-brainer.
7 of 9. As if there's anyone else that even comes close.
-- Gary F.
*BEEP*
*BEEP*
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
... we've been left with all the briliant reality tv shows....
M$ it's whats for diner!!!!!
Of course, I think the best thing Shatner ever did was a "book-on-tape" of the first chapter of Foundation and a somewhat obscure (to me at least) but nonetheless wonderful short story called "Mimsy Were the Borogoves".
Nah, Patrick Stewart is definitely a much better actor with the guy who plays Sisco (can't remember his name, my geek card will now be temporarily suspended) at a good second place. Shatner only lives off of poking fun at his own campy style.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Four more words:
Denny Crane.
Nansy Pansy.
I prefer to call her "10 of 10".
I always looked at it thusly, to say who was the better captain goes like this - "If I had to choose which captain? If I was serving on the ship - I'll take Picard, if I had a choice which captain I'd be? Kirk - all the way...."
As for the series final of "enterpoop"?
Waiter? I'll take a pitcher of Pan galactic gargle blasters and a funnel..
and make that two lemons on the brick please...
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
> Be sure to tune in to UPN tonight
as usual, no mirrors mentioned. tsk tsk tsk
The Mirror universe was clever, but I wished they'd put as much energy into the rest of the series. It was a brilliant premise and they botched it from the start.
The right use of the mirror episode would have been to pull a Dallas and just erase the entire series by admitting that all the preceding episodes were the mirror version. They could have a version of T'Pol enter and find herself horrified to see that there's a universe where she's just a sex object with emotions and pointy ears and not a regular crew member, a scientist, and a practicing emotionless vulcan. Then they wouldn't have to worry how they were going to link up all the temporal inconsistencies with the subsequent series either. We could have gone back with the good guys to our universe and lived happily ever after.What I liked about the original premise of the Enterprise series was the notion of putting some humor and adventure back into Star Trek. For as much as TNG was brilliant, it suffered in the end because it appears they had no more places where no man had gone before, and they turned inward to the mental. A lot of us think Space is about new starts, things that don't always work, a chance to rebuild and make up for past mistakes, etc. Here was a series where transporters didn't quite work, the universal translator wasn't debugged, people were not experienced diplomats, and there was a big chance of things going wrong, sometimes comedically and sometimes tragically.
It was to be a show about real adventure and uncertainty, showing how hard it was surviving in Space before the invention of the red shirt for expendible crewmen. Maybe with characters that came and went on shorter timelines than the whole series, if that's even possible in modern television qua business. My generation grew up with Star Trek to teach us about optimism and hope for the future. Those are things people needed to get the Space program going. But recently, we panic in real life when the space program loses even one life. That's not realistic. We need Star Trek to be brave enough to teach us that good lives will be lost, and that this is acceptable. I think we are losing that sense, and insisting on a completely planned experience both in real life and on the show.
Other than venue, the show has mostly just converged on the same old formula, made worse only by intensive pushes for a love story with T'Pol and the need to constantly be pushing to undress her, just as killed Lt. Yar's hope for being an equal. Yar's only really good episode was Yesterday's Enterprise, and it's probably not a coincidence that she had to be dead to do it. I grew up on the original series and loved its characters, but sad as it was, I really thought it a genius stroke to kill a main character in one of the movies (you know which one, but I'm trying not to spoil it). I thought "Yes! Finally we know they're playing for keeps. Now the uncertainty will be real..." This was to be a show about uncertainty, but it didn't deliver.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
IMHO Terry Ferrel is way hotter than Jeri Ryan. But then, I prefer exotic natural beauties over silicone-enhanced bleach-blonde barbie dolls.
Besides, Jeri Ryan is a prude.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Huh? The writing on DS-9 was fantastic. But yeah, Voyager was 100% cheese.
/. are just ads for BSG which while very good is not Star Trek, period. So it is no more relevant in the context of ST than Star Wars, or bloody Firefly or Buffy, etc.
Enterprise was always decent and in the last season, really good.
Most of the comments on Enterprise stories on
My personal opinion is that it wasn't the writers that killed Enterprise, but too many of the actual fans gave up on it too early. Come on-- TNG totally sucked when it first started, but picked up as it went on. DS-9 was the only series to really get off to a running start. Watch the first few episodes -- these guys knew their characters, and the writers in general knew where they were going.
-- John.
Captain Sheridan is indeed still the supreme commander to me. Politics, diplomacy, internal strife, war design, battle strategy, and in-the-heat-of-the-moment battle tactics. He could do it all. Man, I have to get Babylon 5 on DVD.
Ranking the captains by their displayed ability:
Sheridan > Sisko > Sinclair > Picard > Kirk
That's for sure. Picard was a geriatric weener.
Kirk is J.T. Fucking Kirk. Unless you're a homo or a retard there's no way you could think Picard's better.
The writers on that show actually planned out what would happen through an entire season before shooting the first episode, that let it develop the big stories it needed.
Jonathanjk.com
The Borg meant to augment her with silicon but accidentally used silicone.
Here's what I didn't like about it: There's all this really amazing stuff going on at Earth. Humans have just learned they're not alone. They've just received technology that basically makes economics impotent, as well as technology that allows them to spread throughout the galaxy.
What do they do? Go far, far away from Earth! Nobody cares about politics or other stuff. There's a species with three genders we've never heard of! There's a temporal cold war! How about making contact with the Romulans? Nobody wants to watch things about how people deal with life-changing events.
The last season has really picked up. The idea of Terra Prime is excellent. If they had run with this idea from the beginning, maybe they'd have a seven year run like TNG.
Obligatory: Berman and Braga killed it.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Brzt. Does Not Compute.
Andy Griffith's like a lot of other classic TV -- if you watch it now next to the latest crop of new sitcoms, you realize how well-written the thing was. Each episode's basically a little one-act play, and it's pretty tight writing. It's basically superior to Enterprise in the traits you're talking about, despite no story arc from episode to episode. That would explain why people still remember favorite episodes of Andy Griffith decades after its run ended, whereas Enterprise is dying of neglect despite a colossal built-in audience.
TV used to do so much better with character actors than it does now. The Mary Tyler Moore show wasn't episode after episode of "Mary goes on another date," you know? (Ted, Murray, Lou Grant, Sue Ellen, Rhoda, Phyllis, Georgette.)Heck, "Leave It to Beaver" looks like a friggin' Pulitzer Prize-winning play next to Voyager or Enterprise, and the cast of regulars was more interesting, despite them all being whitebread suburbanites.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
For the past I dunno, 4 weeks it's been replaced with some sort of game in which players hit a ball will a stick. I have to download it in order to see it
Yeah, but she was hot....
Why are you all looking at me like that?
The critical difference was that there hadn't been a Star Trek TV show since 1968, so the fans were far more willing to forgive the TNG cast and writers. Enterprise came something like thirteen or fourteen seasons into Star Trek series, and on the heals of the crap that was Voyager. Fans were expecting improvement, not idiotic temporal war crapola. They were hoping to see the foundation of the Federation, not soft porn. There was no room for forgiveness or patience this time.
I didn't see it at all. I thought the actors were for the most part mediocre, the characters rather wooden, and while things did loosen up slightly, all in all, it was just the same sort of schtick we'd seen with Voyager; uninspired drivel. After they brought the Borg back and totally smashed any notion of continuity, I stopped watching it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The 23rd century ships were actually sleeker and more high-tech, with more tactile gems instead of flat-panel displays. They employed three senses: visual, aural, and tactile, instead of two: visual and aural. The extra tactile dimension made them easier to use and a superior interface, particularly when dealing with many different species that might have different levels of one of these three senses (they have the other 2 to fall back on).
The ships were brighter, too, which I think you really need in deep space (Enterprise D was good for this too, though). Bright colors and brightly lit hallways will lift spirits. I can't defend the tricorders (those just looked bad), but as far as the bridge goes, in a way, I like 23rd century design over 24th/22nd. Sure, the special fx weren't the same, but consider the usability.
"Sadly enough, I've gotten into loud arguments about whether Picard or Kirk was the better captain."
*sigh*
There'll never be a Slashdot: The Next Generation.
"Derp de derp."
"You'vd got to be kidding. Jadzia Dax has it all over 7 of 9."
Except that if you do her, you're also doing an old man.
"Derp de derp."
So the first few seasons sucked but when they realized they were in trouble they started to get their act together and when they were cancelled they got even better? When I hold up this information next to the politics surrounding Firefly a theory emerges: The way to get good sci-fi is to give them the budget they need but keep them thinking they're about to get canned unless they make tv gold.
This has two benefits. I keeps everybody hungry and desperate which brings out the best effort. It also unites the fans and mobilizes them to do a lot of grass roots marketing.
by the end of DS9 sisko achived the rank of time traveling demi-god!
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
"that pictorial resurfacing was the reason she was asked to leave the show."
Denise Crosby felt that her character wasn't being explored enough, that's why she left the show. It's part of a hardcover i have and i can't remember the title for some reason. It goes through production and series problems, all the trials and tribulations of running a TV show, things like that.
IANALOOA
You got problems with his speech? How about his singing for chrissakes? ;)
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
The rank of Captain is not the same as position/title of ship's captain.
In the Navy, from which ST borrows its rank structure, Captain is both a title and a rank.
Captain, the rank, is equal to Colonel in the other services, and often has responsibility over thousands of sailors/employees. The Captain can be in charge of a base, a ship, or any unit of sufficient size to justify a manager/leader of that level.
Captain, the title, is reserved for the commander of a vessel, independent of rank. A small craft can be commanded by a LT, or even an Ensign. The crew addresses the person as Captain regardless of their rank.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
At least with fan films I can still get Star Trek:
New Voyages
Star Trek Hidden Frontier
Starship Exeter
Tales of the Seventh Fleet
Star Trek: Intrepid
USS Hathaway
Audio:
Star Trek: Pioneers
Star Trek: The Section 31 Files
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
That would be *Commodore* Decker (outranked Kirk, which is why he was able to endanger the Enterprise). His son was the guy in the first ST movie that ended up merging with V'ger and whasername played by Persis Khambatta.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
According to the court documents, Ms. Ryan claimed that her husband attempted to pressure her into having public sex with him in front of an audience.
I think Terry Farrel is cuter too, but calling Jeri a "prude" because she didn't want to screw her husband in a club where there were "cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," is a little unfair.
Whitestars cute? They look like plucked chickens!!
Picard is a wimp. Kirk is a man's man.
Picard trys to go by the Prime Directive, even if it means misery for people on the planet. Kirk always violated it, because he put the good fortune of others ahead of a buerocratic/pollitical idea.
Picard always tries to get out of fighting, if possible, tries to reason with Klingons, etc. Kirk knows that he has an edge in fighting, and that Klingons, etc won't listen to reason anyway.
Picard always is concerned for the safety of his crew, and never has the engineer exceed safety regulations. Kirk knows that his engineer is smart enough to exceed safety regulations without endangering the crew.
Picard is a prude, doesn't have many girlfriends. Kirk has a woman on every planet, and apparently spread his seed across the galaxy.
Picard does not know how to fight, someone stronger than him can easily take him out. When faced with a genetically engineered madman with ten times his strength, Kirk evened the odds with a pipe.
Picard is bald, even in the future there is no cure for baldness. Kirk lost some hair, but was smart enough to join the hair club for men or wear a toupee.
Picard crashed his ship due to his mismanagement. Kirk set his ship to self destruct so the Klingons wouldn't get it, and it would take some Klingons out when it blew up.
Kirk gave his own life to save Picard and the universe. Picard couldn't even save himself from his own clone, without having one of his crew (Data) sacrifice his life, because Picard is too much of a wimp.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Andy Griffith's like a lot of other classic TV
Classic TV and Sci-Fi are two very different genres. I just don't think Andy Griffith is a good model for a Sci-Fi show.
Sisko punching Q upside the head was the highlight of Season One!
This sig intentionally left blank.
Yes they were!
(your turn)
In the interests of fairness, I must interject that Picard's characterization in Nemesis is extremely spotty. There's no real reason for him to behave as he does, nearly destroying the ship and killing his entire crew. The "action-hero" machismo gives way to resignation, with no attempt to stop the death-ray maguffin after his clone dies. No matter what you say about Picard, I hardly think he'd give up if his crew was on the line.
That whole story was thrown together just so they could kill Data and rip off Wrath of Khan. The box office take reflects this.
Except that if you do her, you're also doing an old man.
That might not be so bad. She'd certainly know what a man likes...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You obviously haven't seen Army leadership manuals. Read FM 22-100 (the core Army leadership manual) and SH 21-76 (the Ranger Handbook), then we can talk rationally about this.
Innocent bystanders always get killed in war, and sometimes it's deliberate. Some armies inculcate a wanton disregard for human life in their soldiers, while others try their best to impress upon soldiers the importance of safeguarding the lives of noncombatants. You would more than likely be amazed at the risks we took in Somalia so we could be sure that we were not putting civilians in danger. I'm not in Afghanistan or Iraq, but my guess is that the situation is not uniform for every unit, and that in some cases there are commanders and soldiers who are acting with wanton disregard for human life. Then again, if you took random group of people and put them in a situation where combatants and noncombatants were closely mixed, you might very well find that the majority of them made mistakes and killed civilians. The Bush Administration went into Iraq ludicrously unprepared for a long-term occupation, which has led to a situation in which soldiers are spread too thin and are under tremendous stress, fighting an enemy that is willing to kill its own people in order to kill Americans.
As to your statement about other crimes, rape and killing of POWs is not condoned in American military manuals. People in your town all know that murder is wrong, but some people do it. That doesn't mean that your town is teaching people to murder.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
And vice versa.
Which is probably the pith of the arguments presented by the homosexual movements.
But also, conversely, probably the entire reason for sex.
(I say as my wife expresses disgust that I would be reading /. and laughing about this Star Trek thread.)
I agree it was terrible. An insult to the cast and the fans.
It was a crappy episode of STN:TNG.
It should have been about Enterprise and not about Riker.
To the cast: You did wonderful, you deserved better, and I and others will blot out this travesty and remember you for the good work you have done.
Cheers
Wax on, wax off baby!
My first memory of Star Trek is tangential. I came upon my older bother and sister in the TV room watching a spaceship on the tube. I asked them if Star Trek was on; they "shushed" me. I sat watching with them and slowly realized that it was a real space mission, not the TV show. This must have been Apollo 8, 9, or 10 in 1967 or '68 -- there were three people in the ship and I know it wasn't the first moon landing.
This early memory (I was born in '63) tells me that I knew at the time what Star Trek was, though I don't have distinct memories of the episodes or watching it during the first seasons.
While this is a time for geeks of my age to rejoice (we have the final Star Trek episode and the final Star Wars movie now - I was 14 in 1977 for the debut of Star Wars), Star Trek has always been closer for me. Going back to that time, the future then was a dark thing: Cold War, oil shortages, stagflation, Club of Rome, overpopulation . . . the list goes on. Star Trek provided an optimistic view of a future world - not without pain and suffering to achieve it, but a final world in which the differences of the '60's and 70's were achieved.
Well, boys and girls, we've reached that world; and not a little bit because there were fictional sources to point the proper way. Lt. Uhuru was the first major black character on a TV series. The Cold War is over; my beautiful wife is Hungarian, inaccessible before behind the Iron Curtain - today, we have a boy and a girl together. It's not because of Star Trek - but Star Trek was a touchstone for many of us here in the west - a common vision and means of communication.
There is a previous memory in this list of watching Trek in Somolia. My memory is watching Star Trek 4 in Taipei, Taiwan, in a youth hostel almost entirely populated by non-Americans. Yet they shared so many of the visions. Truly, Hollywood is a powerful tool. Too bad too few of those in control have the vision of Gene Roddenbery.