ENT - Bound

[CharlesPhipps]

I feel like I'm the only person here who found this a fairly stereotypical Poison Ivy plot as well as an amusing retcon for, "Oh, the Orion Slave Girls aren't actually slaves! They're actually the people in charge!"

This discussion is just damn weird all round.

[Salamon2]

My take is that the Ferengi were intended to be the Golden Age of Capitalism in space, while the Orions are more like Barbary pirates in space. While Star Trek was sold as Wagon Train To The Stars, the whole feel evokes 18th and 19th-century European oceanic exploration. You’ve got Kirk and his crew mostly off on their own having adventures and not often reporting to anyone else, and then here’s these green guys causing trouble. Never an existential threat to the Federation as a whole, but not quite easy to be sorted out once and for all.

Essentially Horatio Hornblower in space (my father, a fan of both, would likely agree if he was still alive) is how I think of it.

[url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVWqxD_O2Ss[/url]

Plus a few other Romance tropes thrown in for good measure, but updated for the future because of it's setting in space.

Romance meaning:

<"The romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the villains the threats to their ascendancy. This is the general character of chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the Renaissance, bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and revolutionary romance in contemporary Russia. Yet there is a genuinely "proletarian" element in romance too which is never satisfied with its various incarnations, and in fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking for new hopes and desires to feed on.

...

The essential element of plot in romance is adventure, which means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At its most naive it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages goes through one adventure after an other until the author himself collapses. We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness. However, no book can rival the continuity of the newspaper, and as soon as romance achieves a literary form, it tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor [186] adventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds off the story. We may call this major adventure, the element that gives literary form to the romance, the quest.">

Star Trek is essentially a form of Romance which rarely goes beyond the "sequence of minor adventures"--which in seafaring Romance expressed itself as journeying from island to island (Hornblower is of course one example here, but a more fantastical example would be CS Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where each island has its own "mini-quest" that serves as character building exercises for the overall main quest of finding the lost Lords of Narnia), while in Star Trek it's journeying from planet to planet; in fact recent attempts to try and move beyond that to a more structured quest have had mixed results and reactions in the fandom (Voyager's find our way home; DS9's find a way to live with the Bajorans--those are the stated overall quests announced at the beginning of the shows, with minor adventures here and there having ups and downs in the overarching narrative of that story; etc.). Enterprise tries to have an overarching narrative with the Time Civil War... but I am only partly through Series 3 so I have no idea what they do with it. I sometimes cheat by looking ahead like with this episode's review, but overall it appears that it went nowhere.

So yeah, that the Orions are "Barbary Pirates" and the Ferengi are "Golden Age Capitalists" makes sense. Both would likely learn to deal with one another, but not really want to cooperate with each other.

My thing is, I understand the appeal of say DS9 era Ferengi. Exploration of the Orions... I have yet to really see tackled well outside of say of "Star Trek Continues". The worst use of the Orions IMO was in Season 1 of Discovery. Beyond the obvious fan service, what else can be done with the Orions? Obviously the potential is there, given Chuck's review. I actually like Chuck's suggestion of making "Orion Slave Girl" a 9 - 5 job which in turn forces the writers to have to write about sexual workers' rights. That's actually an interesting premise idea that would open up the Orions in a manner similar to how DS9 worked on the Ferengi.

But besides that, what else could be done with the Orions? I mean, Star Trek has them in their setting, there's no undoing that, so what are we going to do with them moving forward to keep them from just being a relic of a mid-20th Century romanticization of vaguely Ottoman-esque sex trafficking.

[lightningbarer]

*snip*

lightningbarer reading back through your post history all you've done is troll and derail this thread and discussion.
I'm throwing you a warning and a week ban. Don't post in this thread again. If you do similar again I'll just assume you're only here in bad faith and I'll make it permanent.

Here's an idea Fixer

Suck my dick and take this shithead community and stuff it up your own asshole, I got a week ban while not insulting people, not trolling and literally only saying one thing.

You and those like you are going to do what you do every time and destroy things while blaming everyone else.

Bye you fucking loser faggots

[clearspira]

*Coughs politely*

Anyway back to the episode. This episode is a good example as to why Archer is a bad captain even when he is not facing a crisis. Promoting the new guy (I forget his name) to chief engineer only to effectively sideline him just because his mate wants to come back on board is pretty foul. I can't remember what happens to this guy but I am fairly certain that he is gone by the end of the series.

[Steve]

*snip*

lightningbarer reading back through your post history all you've done is troll and derail this thread and discussion.
I'm throwing you a warning and a week ban. Don't post in this thread again. If you do similar again I'll just assume you're only here in bad faith and I'll make it permanent.

Here's an idea Fixer

Suck my dick and take this shithead community and stuff it up your own asshole, I got a week ban while not insulting people, not trolling and literally only saying one thing.

You and those like you are going to do what you do every time and destroy things while blaming everyone else.

Bye you fucking loser faggots

Your foul-mouthed juvenile petulance has earned you a month ban. Consider it strike 2. If you come back and repeat this behavior in any thread I'll make it strike 3 with a perm-ban, confident that nothing of value will be lost to this community.

Y'see, if you had half a brain cell or an iota of impulse control and really felt like you'd been unfairly banned, you would have PMed me and/or TexasRed to protest and we would have investigated, then laid out whether or not it was earned. Which, from what I've seen, it was, but you don't seem self-conscious enough to recognize that, otherwise you'd have cooled off before earning your initial ban in the first place.

[Meushell]

*Coughs politely*

Anyway back to the episode. This episode is a good example as to why Archer is a bad captain even when he is not facing a crisis. Promoting the new guy (I forget his name) to chief engineer only to effectively sideline him just because his mate wants to come back on board is pretty foul. I can't remember what happens to this guy but I am fairly certain that he is gone by the end of the series.

He was first suspected as the saboteur in Terra Prime, though not in any other episode between that and Bound...which kind of proves your point. That, and when he was first a suspect, my first thought was that it was because of his treatment here. I’m not even sure if he was in Terra Prime or just mentioned.

[Admiral X]

It actually really annoyed me that the show basically made that character an ass monkey the same way Atlantis did to that one scientist starting in 38.