Rocketboy1313 wrote:Shouldn't, logically the energy creature (or several) have been bouncing around the ship causing issues while the delegations end up in some kind of mini-war in the halls as the havoc caused by the energy ghost is enough of a distraction for them to do so? Eventually the ghosts possesses the ambassadors and they learn a lesson about the connectivity of all life and blah blah blah?
Instead there are two plots happening so far apart from one another they could be edited out and put in different episodes and no one would notice.
For a while when I'd stopped watching Star Trek, I remembered the Anticans and the Selay, but I forgot exactly what episode they were featured in all the time. Their designs were memorable, but I could never put my finger on where they were from. It was several years until I found out again, and I guess this is why.
I wish there were more alien designs like these two lol. Also like those fish people from that one Lwaxana episode. Or, alternatively, have them featured more often. Star Trek had too little variety with the forehead aliens; it would've been so refreshing to see something out there once in a while, in a good episode. Why do these first season episodes squander the concepts that were given to them.....
Another alien design I quite like is the Benzites from one of the yet unreviewed first season episodes, "Coming of Age". Was there some kind of surplus in visual design budget in early TNG or something?
ScreamingDoom wrote:I hope this is the case. There's some mid-level Federation bureaucracy that signed off on Nimbus III back in the day and now it's current bureaucrats are desperately trying to make the thing work on some level, since if it gets officially cancelled, there goes a chunk of their funding (or whatever resource allocation is used in the Federation).
I totally want this to be a thing now, for every disaster in Federation history. Like, after the Sybok incident the Federation gave up on diplomacy (and projectile weapons, since the missing prototype from the South Paradise City Weapons Laboratory was recovered full of pebbles and nobody could be bothered fixing it, anyway when would bullets ever come in handy against anyone, why even bother), and retasked Nimbus III to be an equipment allocations centre, first job delivering essential components to the Enterprise B in time for its shakedown cruise. Then they decided to take advantage of its position on the edge of then-explored territory, and made it the home base for the new Enterprise C, with all the supplies and repair yards needed to support a planned 30+ years of exploring unknown space. Briefly used as a forward bioresearch post, discovering a new insectoid species staff described as 'a superior form of life'. Tried to re-establish its diplomatic credentials after the embarrassing Antican-Selay Mutual Extinction Incident by drawing up with the terms of the Federation-Cardassian peace treaty, then stopped work on that Moriarty thing Picard kept emailing about in order to concentrate on inventing bio-neural gel packs. Going to work every day in the hopes of fulfilling colony founder Admiral Archer's prediction that "Man, this planet is going to be awesome one day."
Crowley wrote:Alternatively, perhaps it would be possible to store a... let's say "fractal pattern" of how the structure of meat is built up in a living being, and then the computer just picks a random number to use as the seed to extrapolate the pattern. That would certainly take more time, but I imagine people would be willing to wait at least a few minutes to have more variety in their food.
I wrote a whole thing about exactly this a couple pages back. Was interested to see what people thought, but everyone was too busy arguing politics to notice.
MissKittyFantastico wrote:This may be an odd thing to take away from the episode (although, anything that lets me ignore the rest of it) but the first time I saw this one, I really wanted to know more about Parliament.
i think its actually one of those planets from the original series, where some immortal god-child forces people to fight to the death for it's petty amusement. whenever the federation president gets tired of dealing with a group of especially undiplomatic diplomats, he calls for a 'special peace conference' on 'parliament'.
Last edited by J!! on Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Nessus wrote:I wrote a whole thing about exactly this a couple pages back. Was interested to see what people thought, but everyone was too busy arguing politics to notice.
Ah, sorry, I managed to miss that part. Fractal terrain generation was a comparison that came to my mind as well, though my mind first goes to computer games from some thirty years ago that used that to provide thousands of unique maps when they obviously did not have the storage space to store them all directly. Also, this quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri:
"The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them."
MissKittyFantastico wrote:
I totally want this to be a thing now, for every disaster in Federation history. Like, after the Sybok incident the Federation gave up on diplomacy (and projectile weapons, since the missing prototype from the South Paradise City Weapons Laboratory was recovered full of pebbles and nobody could be bothered fixing it, anyway when would bullets ever come in handy against anyone, why even bother), and retasked Nimbus III to be an equipment allocations centre, first job delivering essential components to the Enterprise B in time for its shakedown cruise. Then they decided to take advantage of its position on the edge of then-explored territory, and made it the home base for the new Enterprise C, with all the supplies and repair yards needed to support a planned 30+ years of exploring unknown space. Briefly used as a forward bioresearch post, discovering a new insectoid species staff described as 'a superior form of life'. Tried to re-establish its diplomatic credentials after the embarrassing Antican-Selay Mutual Extinction Incident by drawing up with the terms of the Federation-Cardassian peace treaty, then stopped work on that Moriarty thing Picard kept emailing about in order to concentrate on inventing bio-neural gel packs. Going to work every day in the hopes of fulfilling colony founder Admiral Archer's prediction that "Man, this planet is going to be awesome one day."
Ha ha ha! Oh man, that whole thing made me laugh. Even better if it went back in time, too.
Before Nimbus III became the Planet of Galactic Peace, it had small research facility on it where Dr. Richard Daystrom developed the M5 Multitronic unit.
And before that, Dr. Phlox established the Federation Medical Ethics Board on the planet.
I wish there were more alien designs like these two lol. Also like those fish people from that one Lwaxana episode. Or, alternatively, have them featured more often. Star Trek had too little variety with the forehead aliens; it would've been so refreshing to see something out there once in a while, in a good episode. Why do these first season episodes squander the concepts that were given to them.....
I think these guys' designs are so memorable partly because in early TNG they still were doing aliens that didn't even have token rubber foreheads so were indistinguishable from humans and such creative designs as these really stand out as interesting. Same goes for Skeletor from Worf's holodeck programme - that's an alien that's really stuck with me and I kinda wish we'd seen more of them that weren't holo-characters.
I looked up the Selay on Memory Alpha to see if there was anything else written about them and their culture.
Apparently not. It's extremely sparse. They just have a couple of background mentions in other materials but never appear again. Feels like a waste of good makeup and prosthetics.
I might be more used to Star Wars where the lack of new material up to 1999 means that even the ice cream maker guy that ran through Cloud City got a name and backstory eventually.
I'll just have to insert my own new headcannon that other than being snake people, they're a bunch of easily relatable average joes that got into a genocidal war with Anticans over a well developed sense of smell and a suggestion of a shower that was taken as the worst insult imaginable.
Thread ends here. Cut along dotted line.
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'It is a weird juxtaposition that these aliens have such elaborate make-up (that borders on being better than many series regulars....like Talaxians, picking a RANDOM example) but we also have that side by side with TOS-style "They live on a different planet and have the same outfit, erego, aliens. Trust us" in Code of Honor or Justice. I guess that's just the growing pains of figuring out what they could do with the budget.
