Twenty years later, I put a few things together

[starlady]

My roommates have been making their way through the middle three Star Trek series (they're not watching ENT like sensible people and I can't convince them to watch TOS, like highly illogical people), and the penny has finally dropped for me that DS9 is in many ways (particularly in the first three seasons) playing off B5, while VOY is playing off Farscape. Or rather, both VOY and Farscape are dealing with very similar setups and issues, but Farscape explicitly goes about dealing with masculinity in a way that VOY just…doesn't, in the initial seasons. Masculinity and its fragility are consistent problems on Voyager, and Janeway and Torres (and to a lesser extent Kes and even Seska) are consistently forced to deal with the problems they cause, but VOY doesn't really do anything about them the way Farscape does; the Star Trek show treats the symptoms rather than the root causes.

In so many ways I'm glad they made DS9 when they did, because they could never make it now, but for VOY it's just the opposite, and I really wish it had been made in this era rather than 20 years ago.

ETA: And of course Stargate: Atlantis is the unification of both these strands of sci-fi: space station + we've been flung to the far side of the [$very large unit of space]. Note, of course, that neither SGA nor VOY could maintain that isolation forever.

Comments

[starlady]

That is true and fair. It's interesting to realize just how much my own personal history has influenced the way I view Trek overall; I watched the movies as a very young child (I saw VI with my parents in theaters), which honestly are the better versions of TOS from a character perspective anyway, so I had a lot of affection and nostalgia by the time I watched TOS in syndication on SciFi in the late 90s.

[recessional]

I would say if you can convince them that II and IV are worth watching, II just because it's got SO MANY echoes through the rest of even the TV serieses, and IV because it's actually a well-constructed little movie, (and poooossibly III just to fill in that plot point and also because the bit with the crew stealing the spaceship is awesome even if much of the rest is ABSURD), buuuut yeah.

My big problem going back to TOS is that Kirk bored the shit out of me. Everything always worked right for him! And you could tell, in his character. He never got interesting to me until after the events of Khan - after hitting a point where nothing HE could do could stop an outcome he found unacceptable. He became much more interesting to me, and I felt much more likeable as a character, after that.

(This is part of why I like AOS:Kirk more. When he rejects outcomes he doesn't want, he does it knowing full well the universe doesn't give a shit, and that the universe MIGHT WIN, and he's doing it anyway. TOS:Kirk prior to Wrath of Khan does it with the expectation that he'll Just Be Clever Enough To Win.)

/DIGRESSION!!!!

[starlady]

I have to admit that I like all of the original cast movies except 5, and even 5 has about 25 minutes of redeeming moments in amongst the dreck. But you're certainly right about original versus AOS Kirk.

I also think that at least a handful of TOS episodes are worth watching because they're continuously called back to later on in the franchise, and I am going to probably curate a list for my roommates. Also since DIS is apparently set after VI, I'm going to do my best to get them to watch that one too.