Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

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Chris
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Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Chaos Theater Ep. 020 - "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
- Download Now: 64 kbps - 155 mins, 29 sec. (2:35:29) 71.2 MB

Segment Breakdown for this Episode:

01. Intro: "What We've Been Up To" and "Slaying the Sacred Cow"
Runtime: 0:00:01 - 0:23:20

02. Discussion: "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
Runtime: 0:23:55 - 1:59:30

03. Outro: "Audible recommendations", "Chaos Theater Mailbag" and "Internet whoring"
Runtime: 2:00:05 - 2:35:10

Chaos Theater is back for 2012 with a show-killing beast of an episode! As always, we catch up on what we've been doing, and we grill up the sacred cow of oversensitivity in gender relations in video games. We then dip into the Star Trek well again with an in-depth discussion of The Next Generation. Since we previously discussed the movies, we stick only to the TV show this time. After that, we have our Audible recommendations, along with your voicemails and Mailbag questions. Next time, tap two mountains to summon Chaos Theater, as we discuss the card game Magic: The Gathering.

Music Featured in this Episode:
"Boing Zoom DAKOTA!" from Rock Candy 1 by Shadow
"Red Alert" from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith
"Evacuate" from Star Trek: First Contact by Jerry Goldsmith

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mobiusdiablo
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Ah TNG, how I remember this from the reruns. So bad sometimes, but I didn't know what was good. And Pedro, I do remember the Frerashacka or whatever it's called song in an episode, but I remember Picard being old and climbing up a vent shaft or something.

Now Chris... *checks PS3 account* Well that answers that. So have you beaten the game yet, or have you gone through multiple characters? And then again, can you REALLY beat Skyrim?
From 00 S2 ep 25

Tieria: As long as you keep looking down on them, you'll never understand them!
Ribbons: *has Newtype-y flash of AGE, of Kio and his UNDERSTANDING replacing his show* I DON'T WANT TO UNDERSTAND!
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

you can finish quest lines and explore all the caves/tombs/towers/ruins/dungeons but there's still procedurally generated content that keeps feeding you objectives as long as you keep asking npcs for work.
[[lorem ipsum]]
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

The bit where Picard and a different bunch of annoying kids were singing frère Jaques was a different episode than the one they mentioned.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

mobiusdiablo wrote:Ah TNG, how I remember this from the reruns. So bad sometimes, but I didn't know what was good. And Pedro, I do remember the Frerashacka or whatever it's called song in an episode, but I remember Picard being old and climbing up a vent shaft or something.
Arbiter GUNDAM wrote:The bit where Picard and a different bunch of annoying kids were singing frère Jaques was a different episode than the one they mentioned.
The episode in question is titled "Disaster". It starts with Picard taking 3 kids on a tour who won some contest or something, and the 4 of them get stuck in the turbolift when the Enterprise hits a quantum filament. (Resulting in another dead crew member via explosive instrumentation when the conn position blows up in her face.) They eventually have to climb up the turboshaft to a working door when they find out that the car could (and eventually does) fall to the bottom of the shaft. Picard uses the song to focus the kids on the task at hand rather then them being afraid and crying.

The episode is also notable for Miles O'Brien's wife Keiko giving birth to their first child Molly in Ten-Forward with Worf having to deliver her as the way to Sickbay is blocked.

And all that is from what I personally remember and not from a trip to Memory Alpha. Yes, I too am an old geek who watched the show when it originally aired at noon on Sundays after Ed McMahon's Star Search.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Wingnut wrote:The episode in question is titled "Disaster". It starts with Picard taking 3 kids on a tour who won some contest or something, and the 4 of them get stuck in the turbolift when the Enterprise hits a quantum filament. (Resulting in another dead crew member via explosive instrumentation when the conn position blows up in her face.) They eventually have to climb up the turboshaft to a working door when they find out that the car could (and eventually does) fall to the bottom of the shaft. Picard uses the song to focus the kids on the task at hand rather then them being afraid and crying.

The episode is also notable for Miles O'Brien's wife Keiko giving birth to their first child Molly in Ten-Forward with Worf having to deliver her as the way to Sickbay is blocked.

And all that is from what I personally remember and not from a trip to Memory Alpha. Yes, I too am an old geek who watched the show when it originally aired at noon on Sundays after Ed McMahon's Star Search.
That sounds about right with that. Yeah, I'm younger than most of you guys (I assume), I just heard and watched it in the mid to late 90's after I got home from elementary school because my mom would have it on. She'd switch between that and Law and Order, or whatever police show that was going on besides that.
From 00 S2 ep 25

Tieria: As long as you keep looking down on them, you'll never understand them!
Ribbons: *has Newtype-y flash of AGE, of Kio and his UNDERSTANDING replacing his show* I DON'T WANT TO UNDERSTAND!
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Haven't listened yet, but can't wait to. Incidentally, I'm currently watching through DS9.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

I had the feeling this was going to become Chris'es unofficial Star Trek cast :P
Ah TNG, I never saw it in all entirety, but I've seen occassional episodes of it.

TNG was one of my fav incarnations to watch.
So it's interesting to hear indepth discussion about it.

As for the mailbag.
Well Chris'es entry was rather funny, however I thought for Pedro, maybe he would bring up the time his Nia figure got damaged during a drunken party at his place and all.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Listened to the Arkham Asylum sexism bit - here's a counterargument, in case you're interested.

From http://kotaku.com/5873885/nerds-and-mal ... -arguments
"But they call her a ‘bitch' because they're the bad guys."

This qualifies as a derailment.

This one came up repeatedly in the context of criticism of Arkham City, a game that I (and other bloggers and journalists) dinged for being an excellent game with some troubling aspects. In this case, the various henchmen running around Arkham City constantly refer to Catwoman as "bitch" and make repeated comments about beating and/or raping her and Harley Quinn.

Now I will give you this much: yes, the characters saying this are criminals locked up in a city-sized jail, presumably with very few female inmates.

However, let's keep in mind that these are not real people. All of these characters are constructs without free will or animus. They aren't making jokes about "Riding the Harley" because that's just how they roll; someone had to decide that this is what they were going to say. Someone had to record those specific lines. This wasn't a case of emergent gameplay that took the creators by surprise – it was decided that whenever the player controlled Catwoman, the henchmen would call her bitch and threaten her with sexual violence.

Worth noting: these characters are violent offenders in a prison and male-on-male rape is rampant in the prison system. Yet nobody is telling Batman that they're going to make him their bitch or that they're going to bust out his teeth so that it feels better when they force Bats to blow them. Nobody's calling Batman a REMOVED or threatening to run a train on him after they beat him unconscious. Rape, after all, is a statement of power, domination and degradation… and who represents everything the criminals hate or resent more than Batman?

But they don't. Because they weren't designed to.

The writers and designers didn't include these behaviors or lines for when the player controls Batman. They did for Catwoman. This makes all of the difference.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Some things I've picked up from Patrick Stewart's various interviews as well as Wil Wheaton's various memoirs from his time on TNG
  • Patrick was uber uptight at the start of his tenure in TNG and one time lost his temper because he felt like the rest of the cast we're a bunch of slacking jokesters and yelled 'WE ARE NOT HERE TO HAVE FUN! later he loosens up and becomes one of the biggest goofballs on the cast

    Wil Wheaton's departure from the show was sparked by his role being reduced to helming the Enterprise bridge and saying nothing but 'Aye Capt' and he was offered a job to play Henry Thomas' role in the movie Valmont, but got screwed over by Rick Berman who basically forbade him from doing it and implying 'he belonged to Berman and will have no career outside of what he dictates' after that he said 'screw this' and left TNG for good.
Also, I think it's been mentioned in this or another related podcast, but I wholly agree, the roughest parts of the early seasons of TNG were mainly due to Gene Roddenberry and his ailing health and decreased direct involvement with the show were inversely related to how much better the show got.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

update: Actually if the 'sacred cow' was fake videogame feminism (wahhh, they turned all these girls into mindless sluts, it used to be such a pure game!), I'd be all for roasting that one.

And yes, Star Trek. I haven't seen the entire show, just random episodes I picked from someone's DVD collection. Luckily it seems like I watched all the best episodes, "Ethics" was probably the second or third I saw, and was a great introduction to Worf (for someone that had never seen the show) and his friendship with Riker.

But yeah, it seems like you guys had a lot of great things to say about DS9, so I'm glad I decided to watch the whole thing!
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Also continuing on the Roddenberry theme, another aspect of the ST that has greatly annoyed me since it was explored more deeply in the Enterprise series:

is why would Earth become the capital of the nascent United Federation of Planets when at the time, they were the technologically, culturally most primitive of the original charter species, had the smallest fleet with the fewest warp capable ships. That's like the last kid picked for the baseball team...being asked to captain it.

I know it's because human viewers want to indentify with a human oriented federation, but it makes zero sense.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Intergalactic pity party maybe? But there's an even bigger problem that has always bothered me, and that is why is Starfleet so overrun with humans? I'm guessing Earth in the 24th century has a couple of billion humans, which has to be almost tiny compared to the 150 member planets of the Federation. But on every starship, the crews are almost entirely human. Especially on a ship like the Enterprise-D, the Federation's flagship. I think an episode mentioned that the D's crew represented 13 alien races, which seems almost ridiculously small.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

If anything, you'd think the Vulcans would be the most predominant members of Starfleet in terms of organizational makeup since they were first species humans had contact with officially and largely aided humanity's ascendancy post-World War III and the establishment of both the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Well in that DS9 baseball episode, you had that one ship with an all Vulcan crew. Which also seems weird because even other ships don't have entirely human crews.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Chris wrote:Intergalactic pity party maybe? But there's an even bigger problem that has always bothered me, and that is why is Starfleet so overrun with humans? I'm guessing Earth in the 24th century has a couple of billion humans, which has to be almost tiny compared to the 150 member planets of the Federation. But on every starship, the crews are almost entirely human. Especially on a ship like the Enterprise-D, the Federation's flagship. I think an episode mentioned that the D's crew represented 13 alien races, which seems almost ridiculously small.
Remember in Star Trek 6 how the daughter of the Klingon Ambassador accused the Federation of being a 'Home Sapiens only club'. Even tho your point is valid and it doesn't make sense, at least they acknowledge it within the universe.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

kayone73 wrote:Remember in Star Trek 6 how the daughter of the Klingon Ambassador accused the Federation of being a 'Home Sapiens only club'. Even tho your point is valid and it doesn't make sense, at least they acknowledge it within the universe.
Klingon chancellor, you mean. Anyway, yeah they acknowledge it, but that's in the 23rd century. Why is the situation no better nearly 80 years later?
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Well, I'm sure we all know that the out-universe reason is budgets and time. In-universe? Um................... yeah, I got nothin'.
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Re: Ep. 020: Star Trek: The Next Generation

I rewatching the season 4 ep where Riker is disguised as an alien and discovered, the alien hospital worker convinces him to have sex w her because she's always wanted to 'do it' with an alien...and Riker does what Riker has to do :lol:
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