Old school

[mhalachai]

I'm re-watching season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and all those things I didn't see when I was eight are really apparent now. Like, the Holodeck's sex-doll potential? Yeah. Ew.

Have some unrelated potentially meaningful XKCD

Comments

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

What I keep seeing about the holodeck is how few people use it for creative purposes. Play the MC in a pre-millenial classic, sure. Get brainwashed, fake-pregnant, and brainwashed by homicidal aliens into the WW2 French Resistance, yeah. Take art lessons from Da Vinci, okay. Try a sex change, try a species change, swim in a star (holodeck safeties ON to the MAX), leapfrog asteroids, hike the Marianas Trench or some alien equivalent, fly, swing a Buster Sword and perform some anime battle physics, play the MC in a non-Western/non-Terran/non-pre-millenial story, save the world from Darkness, go to Disneyworld, test environmental changes a/o terraforming on different planets, ride a talking horse on a rainbow... nah.

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

I know! Those ideas would have been so cool. Maybe it was the budget, I dunno, but it seems like the writers were trying too hard to tie the show back to recent history.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

*just now noticed she said "brainwashed" twice* I want a holodeck. I'd use it much better than they do. *emo* I think I'd start with inputting all my favorite fics, and then I'd go do some terrible things to Professor Hojo from FF7 and dump Jenova in the reactor core... and then I'd code a fic of CSI:Miami staged as a Kabuki play, because Horatio posing while the narrator declares the crime scene staged? Priceless.

... and now I want to find out which Starfleet officer plays an onnagata.

I think I heard an interview recently, maybe it was for a documentary? But one of the writers said that the holodeck opened up their possibilities to stage pieces in other genres. Which, okay, yeah, I can understand that you feel like doing a Western this week instead of a scifi. But still, the sheer potential that was lost...

We need a new Trek. Not like Enterprise where they screw over the universe trying to retcon more "interesting" stuff in, but something well-researched. Maybe not the front lines/frontier/mysterious "70 years from home". Surely there can be adventures inside the actual Federation? You've got all these planets with different ideologies, histories, cultures, instincts (man oh man, to be any kind of sociologist in the Federation!), environments... let's have Andorians, Tellarines, Bynars, Horta, the cat-people and bird-people and lizard-people, the people who speak solely in cultural allusion, the people so alien that seeing them causes madness in humanoids... let's have the Starfleet Tech Corps., the Starfleet Red Cross (whatever they're called), the Starfleet Disaster Response, the diplomats, the celebrities of sports and art and things humans would never think of to acclaim. And let's have the holodeck where you can do creative things that have eff-all do to with 20th-century Americana.

[shoebox-rhymes.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHAHA!!! NOW we know why it had such a huge fanbase. has. whatever. lol. i was in junior high watching it, so it totally didn't occur to me either. ::grins::

[ccmom.livejournal.com]

Why do you think they had to "schedule" time in the holodeck? OMG I didn't go there. *laughs*

Loved the comic. Wish I had that scavenger hunt list.

[houses7177.livejournal.com]

"Why do you think they had to "schedule" time in the holodeck? "

Augh! AUGH! You went there, and now my brain is stuck there. *cries*

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

life was so much easier in 1987 when we were young and would never have understood that.

*passes the brain bleach*

[ccmom.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was.

*reaches out for the brain bleach*

[auradania.livejournal.com]

You *didn't* get that?
I mean, what do you think Deanna was doing with Barclay when she was in her holodeck goddess outfit? (ep: http://www.tv.com/Star+Trek%3A+The+Next+Generation/Hollow+Pursuits/episode/19055/summary.html) I always thought that the better question was, how did she as a therapist think that this was a remotely 'normal' thing that her patient was doing...?

[mhalachaiswords.livejournal.com]

I was eight! (Or maybe 10 when that one came out). Also I think I've blocked most of the Barclay eps out of my head - I can't deal with the embarrassment level of most of those :O

[lanoger.livejournal.com]

DS9 went there fairly often because the holosuits were a private enterprise run by Quark. He was always suggesting someone try Vulcan Love Slave or somesuch.

Okay, I was going to go on about how the Enterprise-D was a serious Starfleet vessel (wessel?) and how Jean Luc ran a tight ship, but I got stuck on the phrasing and my mind broke.

Sorry.