Tenebrae

Yeah, I NEVER get that... "The transporters are shot!" Uh... you've got at least 2 shuttlecraft on board and last time I checked, they all have transporter systems... I suppose there is the fact Worf was there for the wedding but you'd think he'd been away for so long, that there'd be people more familiar with the ship... but I understand it's because we ALL know Worf and they probably didn't want to have another Hawk.

Low brow isn't the expression that came to mind... Anyway, if you're going to restrict Star Wars exclusively to the films, it's at something of a disadvantage because you've got 12ish hours of film vs. 3 solid weeks of film and TV shows. I suppose one could argue that is both an advantage and a disadvantage in this kind of debate but really, didn't Star Trek give us a fairly persistent vision of the galaxy with all that? Weren't we ALWAYS hanging out with a bunch of Starfleet types? I'd also question whether we know more about how the Star Trek universe works... we seem to have the contrast between the colonies - which are rubbish - and Earth which is regularly depicted as a utopia. Everything is very homogenised as well. Alien races might well have different shaped/coloured ships but for the most part, they're humanoids who speak perfect English and probably are pretty similar to us, living in similar futuristic cities on similar planets. Oh sure, they might randomly kill everyone that gets to 60 or something like that but they're not so different. With Star wars you got a good variety of planets -no M class malarky... you've got a long history to draw from... science praise KOTOR, PRAISE! I find it strange that people are being so disparaging of Star Wars... ok, the prequels were kinda lame but you're trying to tell me a Star Destroyer isn't awesome? That Jedi aren't awesome? That a blaster isn't cooler than a phaser? That Believe me, I've had my fill of both franchises but I always feel Star Wars will just always be cooler. There's not really much coolness in jumping into your shuttlecraft and going to warp, getting in your Ebon Hawk, punching it etc. etc. That's pretty cool. And I know my sci-fi cool, boyos.

Yeah, despite that whole "Ageing program" they stuck in to season 7 of TNG, I think that Brent Spiner was fairly adamant that he wasn't going to keep on playing Data indefinitely because it would be fairly implausible for an android to have the onset of a paunch etc. And presumably, he wanted to put the role behind him because even though he said he enjoyed the part... I think that every real actor wants to go on and do something else after 7 seasons and 4 feature films... So, this was a chance to give him a send off. Personally, I thought it was kind of lame because you know any other day of the week, he'd have been able to get out of there somehow... but then I think the idea of B-4 was that they'd be able to have SOME relatively non-contrived way of "resurrecting" Data if the need arose. I have to side with GorunNova though, I don't think any of the Star Trek films have really done it for me... well, First Contact was fairly cool but even so, it wasn't blowing me away with awesome. Nemesis's problem was that it was far too ponderous and pompous - even by the standards of Star Trek, which is saying something. We occasionally escape the long winded musing of Patrick Stewart about the nature of time, to see his clone engaging in diabolical musings. They even managed to make the space battle at the end rather tiresome and boring - "KEEP FIRING AT SPACE!" etc. It had a LOT of pacing issues... To be honest, it's not surprising so much of this film ended up on the cutting room floor (unedited, it ran to over 3 hours). Not really a fitting swansong for the TNG crew... AND WHY DOES WORF ALWAYS COME BACK?! Did they just think after First Contact - eh, we don't need to explain Worf being here... Wrath of Khan not cheesy? KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!

Ah, yes... the decades old question. This one was spawned by the thread about the new Star Wars games - Force Unleashed... which looks pretty awesome. The thrust of the tangent which I instigated was... why are Star Wars games so much more capable (an empirically provable fact) of awesome than Star Trek? This breaks down into what is Star Wars vs. what is Star Trek? Star Wars is a galaxy at war... pretty much good vs. evil - every time. Star Trek is... a complication. Not only in the sense that it's complicated - multiple races and factions, no singular dominant force... a mish mash of morality etc. but also that the continuity is more than a little muddied... Does anyone have any new insight into the age old battle?

A hint at Tennant's exit, eh? I'd rather Donna exits... into some form of crushing device... that tragically killed Catherine Tate in real life. Still, she's not really saying a huge amount in this episode either... and we dodged contemporary Earth (read, London) again. Shocking. The guy becoming Ood felt so contrived. It was almost as if someone went "oh, we've got a few extra minutes and some special effects money to blow!" Overall, a fairly middle of the road episode... We've yet to see any real fear factor though.

To be honest, recent videos make it look like it's aimed at the 5-8/mentally retarded demographic. Lots of primary colours! Not very much else... to be honest, greater potential means more disappointment. People should stop eating up the hype. Even if it's awesome, it won't be half as awesome as the decade or so of hype has said it will be.

Yeah, well... to be honest - it's generally better to have your savings in a bank. You may have to haemorrhage what meagre interest you gain to the frakking government to pay for poor people to have more babies but your money is pretty safe... I mean, if that guy hadn't shot people... they may have made off with his money... and where would he have been?

United Europe? I'm working on it... bwhahaha.

If you watch the Star Wars prequels, good doesn't win... which makes it more than a little irritating that everything stacks AGAINST the Empire from that moment onward. Star Trek is... FAR more pretentious. You'd never see Darth Vader going "yeah, it might be CALLED the Dark Side - but we're pretty progressive".

I think it's that and also the fact Star Wars is really more about "bang! ZOOM! POW!" visual spectacles, be they epic space battles, epic land battles or epic one on one duels... What does Star Trek give you? Sure, a few of those but the fights are usually small - I think only DS9 gave us more than a couple of ships at a time... TNG was pretty low on ship to ship, DS9 probably made up for that, Voyager had some but it was usually a bit one on one... Enterprise was usually similar, seldom epic... and I don't think there was ever the depiction of land battles - again DS9 had it but only from a very blinkered view. Star Trek is just... not as cool. As the joke goes - Picard goes through an asteroid field at 1/4 impulse - Han Solo floors it. I think the problem is that if you do FPS in Star Wars, you've got the obvious Force options. Toss people around, whip out your lightsabre, go good/evil etc. Or perhaps, jump in your starfighter and go whoop some bad guys in a big ol' space battle... or of course, engage in a big land battle etc. etc. With Star Trek you've got pretty much two options, as it seems. By the numbers FPS with your phaser in hand (or if you're adventurous - BATLETH!) or flying your big ship around doing a bunch of stuff. I think Star Wars is just simpler, so to speak... it's pretty much a straight forward good vs. evil type situation most of the time - which is very much predicated by the nature of the dichotomy of the force - light and dark... there's precious little middle ground as it goes. By contrast Star Trek is... after a fashion, complicated - although, a lot of that is due to the total lack of continuity but inherently the galaxy is a different place... Even if we ignore the dozens of god like entities that litter the Alpha quadrant there are lots of species with different values and things are never quite that simple.

Yeah, it was like that in Buffy. Angel tries to give CPR and of course, can't... I'd say there's a significant difference between NEEDING to breathe and being able to draw breath... perhaps the point is that lack of use causes the relevant muscles to atrophy? I think there are a lot of problems with his situation... of course, all a trifle irrelevant now.

And it's going to be canonical... apparently. Yeah, I've seen this and it looks great... I'm going to have to unleash the power of the Dark Side if those little b*tches don't port it to the PC. Just why are Star Wars games so much more prone to awesomeness than Star Trek ones?

Hmm... of course, then you'd have had three very powerful enemies duking it out. Which might have been somewhat excessive.

Ah yes, having failed to make a theme park where robots could go more than a few hours without murdering innocent tourists, they turned their sights to global domination... that's what they call in management speak "a horizontal business move".

If you get that worked up, you probably shouldn't look too hard for all the other stuff that is ham fistedly edited together... you may cry.

ISPs are getting hauled over the coals for their blatant lies - which is to say if I sold you a car and said it could do "upto 120mph" but actually it turned out that was only if you strapped a rocket onto it, I might be prosecuted for fraud or some such but that ISPs somehow get way with it. Similarly, "unlimited" broadband is seldom without limits because "fair usage" usually means "die bandwidth hog!" To be honest, it's a good way for them to make money by bending customers over when they exceed their limits... and of course for those with "unlimited" the ever popular throttling. As the article TetsuoShima helpfully posted in another thread points out - these warnings of the end times when traffic slows the Internet to a stop are perpetual favourites for ISPs - for various reasons... The infrastructure does need to be upgraded but asking the BBC to do it is at best, idiotic.

Yeah, I noticed UK ISPs piped up to say "WAAAAAH THE BBC IPLAYER WILL DESTROY THE INTERNET! The BBC should pay us money if they're going to start using the Internet!" Yeah, or you could stop being cretinous time wasters and invest in network infrastructure rather than asking the BBC to line your pockets with public money... seriously, why even the BBC? I'm betting youtube generates far more traffic but anyway, yes - this is a perennial doom and gloom story up there with climate change and cancer scares.

He's worse than dead... HIS BRAIN IS GONE! Join Starfleet - and die horribly on alien worlds.

This episode couldn't possibly be qualified as filler. Filler is an episode of SGA when Rodders and pals get stuck in a room for an entire episode, this was advancing the plot, developing characters etc. Hence, not filler. The Starbuck going crazy thing was pretty funny... I don't think that she was ever that far off it anyway but it made sense for Adama to send her off to investigate, it's a chance to find Earth... they can't really pass that off. The Cyclon subplot... well, I fail to see how killing people who can resurrect really helps... but I suspect it's been done to show the growing differences. I find it hard to see how the outcome can be anything BUT civil war. There is only betrayal.

They've mentioned the Shadow Proclamation a few times but even though it has been mentioned twice in a week, it's not like the Doctor was shooting off about it all of season 3. Anyway, I'm sure all of you will be shocked to hear me say I thought this was actually a pretty good episode. Maybe that's because it's always just such a relief to escape contemporary London... but I really enjoyed the setting. The fact the episode was more serious than last week was good - the back slapping humour that is so obvious a child would find it patronising never does much for me - and we had some suspense before we actually had a clue as to what was going on (compared to last week where we instantly knew it was Adipose up to some sinister plot). Tate said mercifully little... It's obvious why they're using the character. She's not there to swoon over the Doctor and meekly do what he says... if she could do that without the Avery Brooks style of acting, i might be able to tolerate her. Just. The story was fun, it was all interlinked and we had the element of the predetermination, mystery, suspense. They didn't give the game away in the first 30 seconds. Which I approve of... it's not quite the multiple episode arc with lots of cliffhangers but it's as close as you can get in a single episode. The effect were pretty cool - even if a giant lava monster being fazed by a water pistol is monumentally improbable. As is typical of RTD's MO, it overdid the schmaltz and angst... but it was still fun. It'll be interesting to see the Oooooooood next week.

I suppose that's one way to get people interested in stats. I hadn't realised that there were anywhere near that number of fatalities in TOS... That makes life on the death ship Voyager seem trivial by comparison.

What you talkin' 'bout? You're saying the 3 lines of dialogue in First Contact didn't make it sound easy? It was almost as easy as "Mr. Data - MAKE IT SO!"

No, I wasn't saying it'll be the worst Star Trek ever... with Final Frontier, Generations, Insurrection, Nemesis... it would have a hard time. I was saying - here is why the FANS (my cynicism means I shall never be one) think it will be bad. I agree, a film can't be judged until it is released... and I suppose even then, although any judgement I pass will be definitive that others may have their view. Maybe we should agree to agree?

For a while I thought about rebutting you. Then I thought "I don't really care that much". I've stated my points, you're going over points I've covered. This discussion is going around in circles. It's at the "I'm right, you're wrong" stage.

Either side could win - given any context. Happy now?