Lower Decks - "Moist Vessel"

[CharlesPhipps]

They've absolutely had full blown comedy episodes plenty of times. I Mudd, A Piece of the Action, All three Tribble episodes, Star Trek 4, every single Ferengi focused episode, about half the episodes with Q, about half the episodes with Troi's mother, the Bashir James Bond episode, the baseball episode, the Vic Fontaine Oceans 11 episode, the black and white old sci-fi episodes of Voyager, they do comedy episodes all the time.

The jokes don't always work, but they absolutely do episodes where they're just being goofs and not taking it too seriously.

Some people undoubtedly believe there's a serious environmental message in the Tribbles episodes and its not meant to be...funny.

*puts in monocle*

But yes, I will actually say Lower Decks improves from the first two episodes (which were the most try hard) and the early misfires here to become its FUNNIEST *AND* best when they dial it back 2 degrees from 11 to 9. When Mariner is not psychotic, when Boimler is not a kiss ass, and they're exaggerated but not cariactures--they're at their best.

By which I mean Season 2.

Season 1 has some great moments and some genuinely great episodes (the holodeck movie parody and season finale) but that's only after they realize they don't have to appeal to Rick and Morty.

[Makeshift Python]

It did make it stagnant. Voyager so wanted to keep the TNG tone they completely wasted most of their unique elements. There was still enjoyment to be had but still.

Famously Ron Moore said it was the most unhappiest writers room he'd ever been in. The writers all wanted to write TNG and talked extensively about how they loved everything about TNG from Klingons to Ferengi to the Federation's inner politics and Borg. He said that all of them (except for him) were quietly fuming or not so quietly fuming they were stuck with a premise that made all of those elements impossible to use.

UPN was no help because they wanted Voyager to be their TNG.

It's funny how after TNG ended, that writing staff essentially split in two, one migrating over to DS9, and the other on VOYAGER. Those that went to DS9 did so because they craved to do something very different from what TNG did, but they also had at their disposal the established Alpha Quadrant that they could play with down the line.

Those that went to VOYAGER did it because they wanted to keep making TNG stories with new characters. Except the show Michael Piller was creating turned out to be something the writers hated working on. And Piller ultimately left VOYAGER because the writing staff were not engaging with what he wanted to do. Scuttlebutt is that some of the writers lead by Brannon Braga told Berman either Piller would leave or they would leave.

It's too bad Piller passed away, because I wonder if he would have ever opened up about his frustrations with VOYAGER. We hear more about it now from other writers because time has passed enough for them to be open about it. Even Ron Moore admits when he was deciding to join VOYAGER, the writers at DS9 were trying to discourage him from doing that because they knew it would be a mistake. And they were right.

[CharlesPhipps]

Here's the article on his experience that has some of the worst formatting of all time. However, the TLDR version is, "Ron Moore starts talking about Voyager 1/3rd of the way down and then it becomes twenty pages of him ranting how much he hates everything about it and you realize Battlestar Galactica was two years of him letting his hate flow before he ran out of ideas about how much he hated Voyager."

https://www.lcarscom.net/rdm1000118/

And if you don't believe me, read it.

"You are reducing it to its lowest common denominator, and what’s the point of that? What do you get out of that? You just get a so-so kind of television experience.”Moore asks, “How many space anomalies of the week can you really stomach? How many time paradoxes can you do? When I was studying the show, getting ready to work on it, I was watching the episodes, and the technobabble was just enervating; it was just soul sapping."

"God damn, they know science. That is really cool. Look how they figured that out. Hey Edna! Come here. You want to see how Chakotay is going to figure this out. He’s onto this thing with the quantum tech particles; it’s really interesting. I don’t know how he is going to do it, but he is going to reroute something. Oh my God, he found the anti-protons!’ Who cares? Nobody watches STAR TREK for those scenes. The actors hate those scenes; the directors hate those scenes; and the writers hate those scenes."

There's an extended part about "Equinox" that basically just shows that the Pegasus/BSG thing with Caine was what he wanted to do with it. Apparently, Moore was all about the psychotic evil Starfleet crew.

[CrypticMirror]

Voyager oughta have been less sanitised and squeaky clean, but NuBSG was far too dark and too much of an over correction in the opposite direction. Even DS9 trended too far down that rabbit hole by the end of its run.

[Mabus]

And speaking of comedy, the tone of Star Trek has already been set by almost 700 episodes. While some episodes were more light-hearted and comedic, both animated and live-action, they were never comedies, unless you count the unintentional ones.

They've absolutely had full blown comedy episodes plenty of times. I Mudd, A Piece of the Action, All three Tribble episodes, Star Trek 4, every single Ferengi focused episode, about half the episodes with Q, about half the episodes with Troi's mother, the Bashir James Bond episode, the baseball episode, the Vic Fontaine Oceans 11 episode, the black and white old sci-fi episodes of Voyager, they do comedy episodes all the time.

The jokes don't always work, but they absolutely do episodes where they're just being goofs and not taking it too seriously.

What I meant is that apart from Star Trek V, none of the comedy episodes/films from the old series were just a series of gags. A full blown comedy is one where every single scene needs to have at least something funny or amusing in it. Like Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Coming to America for example. The comedy Trek episodes still aren't in the same league as most true comedy film or series, so on a scale from 1-10, I'd put them around 5 maybe 6.

I never said Trek doesn't have comedy, I said comedy was never the main thing Trek is known for. But in 7-800 episodes and 13 films, having 2 comedy films and few comedic or light-hearted episodes is a long shot from "Trek can work as a comedy".

[RobbyB1982]

All three of those films you mentioned have a ton of scenes that are about moving the plot along and not making jokes.

Outside of something like a later Leslie Neilson film where its a joke every 20 seconds, very few comedies are on full-joke mode 100% of the time. Even Ghostbusters, considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, has tooooons of dry plot moments where at most you'll get a Bill Murray quip, but nothing actually comedic going on because the plot has to move and the characters have to character. Plenty of Trek episodes hit that same ratio.

[Mabus]

All three of those films you mentioned have a ton of scenes that are about moving the plot along and not making jokes.

Outside of something like a later Leslie Neilson film where its a joke every 20 seconds, very few comedies are on full-joke mode 100% of the time. Even Ghostbusters, considered one of the greatest comedies of all time, has tooooons of dry plot moments where at most you'll get a Bill Murray quip, but nothing actually comedic going on because the plot has to move and the characters have to character. Plenty of Trek episodes hit that same ratio.

Trek never leant too hard on the comedy side because the setting is not something that allows everything to be funny or turned into a joke, unlike other sci-fi comedies where that's the norm. And when it tried to do so, the results were bad (The Final Frontier, A Night in Sickbay, etc.)

Compared to the three examples I gave, the typical Star Trek comedy films and episodes are less jokey and rely on fewer jokes or funny situations than most typical comedies. So, like I said, on a 1-10 comedy scale, they're somewhere in the middle, while my three examples are in the 8-8.5 range, they have more jokes and funny gags than a typical Trek film/series, but less than a spoof film like Spaceballs that is, well, a spoof.

[Procstar]

Whether he hates the first two or not, I look forward to when he finally covers those.

I can say that the first episode wasn't what sold me on the show immediately. It was episode 2 that did it, specifically how it ended with Ruthford and Tendi in the Jeffrey's tube.

I think he just considered those two to be the pilots of sorts, according to his Episode 3 look. He saw Episode 3 as the "true" start to the series and he effectively explained everybody's dynamics relatively easily.

Maybe he can compile them in a double episode, but I think he has gotten the gist of the cast for the show.

[TGLS]

I'm getting the odd feeling they're going to be Christmas 2022.

[stryke]

I'm getting the odd feeling they're going to be Christmas 2022.

Oh dang that'd be great. Even better if you also stuck in 'Mugato, Gumato' aka the one decidedly unfortunate ep of season 2.