i would honestly have bought them saying that Nick Locarno is a pseudonym he used at the academy to not be known as an admiral’s son. like Mariner not going by Freeman in the show that ironically now makes this impossible
I agree, Locarno at the con would have significantly upped the ante for Voyager. We did see a hint of it in the pilot when Janeway bails Paris out of the penal camp, but the over the course of the first season they pretty much shrugged it off and he is such a Milquetoast character for most of the show.
I suspect that it had to do with the WGA contract at the time that TNG was in production.
Writers with a script credit got specific residuals for characters they created in a script according to what Beyer wrote. So, taking a one-off character and putting them in a main cast role in a new show would be providing creator credits for the entire show.
Chief Miles O’Brien is a different story altogether. Colm Meany was originally contracted as a background regular as the transporter chief but without a name. These kind of roles are reliable and keep actors eating while allowing them to audition for other roles.
According to what I heard at a Creation Con panel back in the early 90s, the showrunners eventually decided to give the character a name. Colm Meany wasn’t advised, nor was his agent — so Meany actually was raising a complaint that he was being replaced without notice, only to find out he’d been upgraded to a named part.
I find that absolutely fascinating if it’s somehow true - I would assume that anything written for Trek, like any other major franchise, is strictly “work for hire” and the individual authors have no rights to their work. It’s hard to imagine it any other way.
Not disputing that she said it, I just truly don’t understand it.
Kirsten Beyer actually is on the record saying that this was confirmed to her when she was writing the Voyager Full Circle novels.
In those books, she has the incident and the consequences as part of Paris’ backstory that gets thrown in his face in a legal proceeding back on Earth.
My recollection is that she printed this in an author’s note in the specific book so it must have had legal clearance for the tie-in literature.
Yeah, the official story is that Locarno was too fucked up for audiences to forgive. Jeri Taylor said:
“We had liked the idea of a character like Tom Paris ever since we had done “First Duty” and had Lecarno [sic.]. We didn’t make Lecarno the con officer, because he was somewhat darker and more damaged. We felt Lecarno couldn’t be redeemed and we wanted to be on a journey of redemption.”
Personally, I think Locarno would have been a great choice, because while I like Tom Paris just fine, Voyager utterly failed at selling the idea that he was in need of redemption or a “bad boy” of any kind.
And yet if someone tried to make a space show about a Starship stranded far from Earth with a Captain Marystreet who loves coffee, the lawsuit would be epic.
the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don’t get royalties for the entire run of Voyager
This is a very common claim, but I find it very dubious. You never hear about this sort of contract in American television. I don’t think anyone made a lot of bank when Chief O’Brien joined DS9.
Every time you hear the name “Nick Locarno”, it’s because Admiral Paris’ staff (so that he could claim plausible deniability) have used illegally obtained temporal technology (via Section 31) to “dub” that name over any mention of Tom Paris. Unfortunately, the device required so much power, it overloaded after one of the ST TNG transmissions, and could not be sustained for any of Tom’s admissions (visual or verbal) in the Voyager transmissions (likely due to being outside of the signal radius). :-P /s
It’s amazing how they made a different character for purely narrative reasons alone, and the fact that the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don’t get royalties for the entire run of Voyager is just a big wacky coincidence. Funny how that works out.
Barclay was evading real life conflict and pressure for sure, but also doing erotic power play with holo-versions of his crewmates… I think that last part was an early taste of our current deepfake porn reality 😬
Either way, Lower decks made it clear that into the 2380s, cleaning out the holodeck biofilters was still the worst job on a starship:
Barclay is pretty autism-coded. I think his time in the holodeck was mostly problematic because the rest of the crew wanted him to be faster/more productive at his job. He was avoiding conflict for sure but in a neurodivergent-affirming future there could be ample support around those side effects.
But I was just playing on Minuet’s claim that she’s as “real as you need me to be.”
There may be a joke flying over my head here, but Barclay only appears, having rather consequential holo addition issues, two full seasons after the Bynars’ upgrades?
the number one reason to want to live in the star trek universe. just move to risa and spend the rest of your life having fun with all the horny visitors and locals. yes i seek jamaharon, you can tell by the horgahn tattooed on my ass :3
no, this was the early season. when Kazon/sesksa stole the transporter tech. she wanted to retrieved it from kazon Mistram ship, and the cullah said"any attempt to enter our ship is an act of aggression” she responds by saying"im usually easy to get along with, most of the time, and i dont like BULLIES and i dont like you,” and she eludes to “bullying her way” to get back the tech.
Is that the one she gave to those stealth aliens that did experiments on everyone while ordering the ship right through the middle of some big fuck-off star anomaly?
They probably could, technically speaking. The “audio clip show” episode they did on Prodigy felt a little graverobber-y, though. I loved seeing Spock and Odo again, even in animated form, but I thought the archival restrictions on the dialogue emphasised that.
On the other hand, I would spit bile at any attempt to “reanimate” (ie, deepfake) late actors on the show. It was creepy when Star wars did it with Peter Cushing, and it’s the same now, with “genAI”.
One exception IMO might be Majel Barrett. As I understand it, she consented before her passing to having her voice and speech patterns digitised for such a purpose. Somehow, it would be fitting for her to always be the voice of Trek computers ❤️
Hear, hear. I do wonder, wiþ þe large archive of Spock audio, if þey couldn’t have cobbled togeþer an episode wiþ Spock purely re-using audio, no vocal imitators – AI or oþerwise – needed.
Well, TOS was 110-115 years prior in-universe, and I guess Kirk and Spock would be fairly legendary by the time of LDS.
Fun fact, Spock would canonically still be around during LDS; it’s only 5 years after the series finale that he prevents the Romulus supernova from taking out a large part of the galaxy, and inadvertently causes the Kelvin timeline. But I guess with Nimoy’s passing they didn’t want to cameo Spock on the animated show. Accept no substitutes!
Wow. Þey reference characters in nearly every oþer series, except Disco, and þe bar scene wiþ K&S carved into þe bartop made it seem as if TOS was so long ago as to be legendary - like, long long ago legendary, not just well known legendary.
And to the point of Morn’s lifespan, another mention from Memory Alpha:
In 2401, “Morn of Luria” was identified as a known associate of the Ferengi Sneed in his Starfleet Criminal Record.
That’s a reference to the latter half of Picard season 3, and suggests that Morn was still hustling (and probably alive) some 20 years after his LDS appearance 🙂
He doesn’t exactly need to be immortal. This only takes place six years after DS9 ended, both Kira and Quark are still around. Of course, Quark did have that hologram installed, so you never know if Morn took that day off to visit his mother.
Correction the network didnt cancel the show: the network itself was canceled and enterprise did well ratings wise but it was expensive to produce and didnt do well enough for anothe network to pick up
I think Enterprise immediately being like “TIME TRAVEL COLD WAR” was one of the biggest narrative problems with Enterprise. It didn’t let Enterprise stand on it’s own, but was constantly shadowed by future events. IMO they should have spent more time writing ahead of the show to figure out what the overarching storylines should be rather than just figuring it out as they went.
Didn’t we see Sisko’s encounter with the Borg in the very first episode? Sure, they never visited the station, but lots of other aliens never visited the station that we still consider to have been part of DS9, like The Founders
The Founders strengths are genetic engineering and the ability to maintain individuality inside of a collective. I think both of these have been shown to absolutely crush the Borg and the Founders would see the Borg as a fitting solution to the solids.
The issue is then you have poked God Emperor Sisko of the sacred temple. A being with unending rage against the borg, a willingness to commit war crimes, and the ability to exist outside of time. Sisko is the only captain who faced a power scaling issue of his own power being too high as he was literally born with plot armor.
Nah, Baseball is the true sport of the prophets that Sisko brought to Earth by timetravelling in order to save humanity from a rogue Klingon faction that encountered earth before the Vulcans made contact. Inside the baseballs were genetic modifiers that would turn the Klingons into looking like humans and it embarassed them so bad they fled.
A timeloop is formed, which is why Sisko keeps the baseball in his office to remind him of it.
The Borg fear Baseball because they recognize it represents power over reality itself.
I was sure that’s the way they were going to go with it. They should never had species 8472 (their introduction simply increased the problem of Star Trek establishing whole other realities existing, and then forgetting about it for subsequent stories) and have the Borg encounter The Founders and not be able to assimilate them because their shapeshifters, after that point essentially have the stories be the same.
I was done with the Borg when they introduced a Queen.
Just like Zerg and Tyranids. I understand that narratively you need characters for stories, but coupling those completely alien swarm intelligences to discreet “Queens” commanding the swarm takes away this very alienness and transforms them from a terrifying force of nature you can never truly understand into yet another rulers personal army.
it also sorta"retcons” ties into how the borg found earth in the first place in the future(explained at the end of the episode.
spoiler
_the borg sent a signal in 2256 towards delta quadrant after PHLOX was partially assimilated he heard the signal in his mind, and the computer analyzed the coordinates deep in the delta quadrant. T’pol said it would take 200 years to reach borg space if at all, and archer said they only delayed the war until 24th century(right around the time tng discovered attacks on the neutral zone in the first season , since the borg came to investigate around that time )
ds9 like other trek series needed thier “own ship of the series” im guessing thats why they had defiant instead of the station. also they stopped exploring when the dominion invaded, never went back to exploring space after that.
i wonder when the borg discovered the transwarp hub, they wouldve likely used to invade the gamma quadrant at some point. 8472 likely weakened thier influenced throughout the galaxy, hence they never encountered the borg in the series.
it shouldve went with romulan war buildup, instead of the xindi arc. they are always teasing ROMULAN in the series. s5-7 were suppose to have shran join the crew, but the NETWORK CANCELLED THE SHOW.
DS9 was too far away from where borg would attack, and first contact was happening around the same time of ds9, when they had to move defiant off-screen to fight the borg.
He wanted to mess with the Borg. He designed a ship to mess with the Borg. They didn’t show up in his part of the woods so he demonstrated what happens when someone has a ship designed to mess with the Borg.
RetroFed
Well yeah, the basic AI training has been done, so obey your big tech overlords and work harder, slave.
They don’t care about how you feel, only about what you produce.
Yes! As with many things Voyager, it set up a good premise only to move on from it an episode or two later.
For a second, Number One, I believed I saw bicycles.
I don’t mind the old captchas as at least they were solvable
The new ones are so much worse. It asks things like “select the shapes that represent a since of urgency”
i would honestly have bought them saying that Nick Locarno is a pseudonym he used at the academy to not be known as an admiral’s son. like Mariner not going by Freeman in the show that ironically now makes this impossible
I agree, Locarno at the con would have significantly upped the ante for Voyager. We did see a hint of it in the pilot when Janeway bails Paris out of the penal camp, but the over the course of the first season they pretty much shrugged it off and he is such a Milquetoast character for most of the show.
Ego the size of a planet on that kid. Must have impressed the Admiral.
I suspect that it had to do with the WGA contract at the time that TNG was in production.
Writers with a script credit got specific residuals for characters they created in a script according to what Beyer wrote. So, taking a one-off character and putting them in a main cast role in a new show would be providing creator credits for the entire show.
Chief Miles O’Brien is a different story altogether. Colm Meany was originally contracted as a background regular as the transporter chief but without a name. These kind of roles are reliable and keep actors eating while allowing them to audition for other roles.
According to what I heard at a Creation Con panel back in the early 90s, the showrunners eventually decided to give the character a name. Colm Meany wasn’t advised, nor was his agent — so Meany actually was raising a complaint that he was being replaced without notice, only to find out he’d been upgraded to a named part.
I find that absolutely fascinating if it’s somehow true - I would assume that anything written for Trek, like any other major franchise, is strictly “work for hire” and the individual authors have no rights to their work. It’s hard to imagine it any other way.
Not disputing that she said it, I just truly don’t understand it.
Oh, you mean Nicholas Thomas Locarno-Paris?
Kirsten Beyer actually is on the record saying that this was confirmed to her when she was writing the Voyager Full Circle novels.
In those books, she has the incident and the consequences as part of Paris’ backstory that gets thrown in his face in a legal proceeding back on Earth.
My recollection is that she printed this in an author’s note in the specific book so it must have had legal clearance for the tie-in literature.
Yeah, the official story is that Locarno was too fucked up for audiences to forgive. Jeri Taylor said:
Personally, I think Locarno would have been a great choice, because while I like Tom Paris just fine, Voyager utterly failed at selling the idea that he was in need of redemption or a “bad boy” of any kind.
And yet if someone tried to make a space show about a Starship stranded far from Earth with a Captain Marystreet who loves coffee, the lawsuit would be epic.
This is a very common claim, but I find it very dubious. You never hear about this sort of contract in American television. I don’t think anyone made a lot of bank when Chief O’Brien joined DS9.
Every time you hear the name “Nick Locarno”, it’s because Admiral Paris’ staff (so that he could claim plausible deniability) have used illegally obtained temporal technology (via Section 31) to “dub” that name over any mention of Tom Paris. Unfortunately, the device required so much power, it overloaded after one of the ST TNG transmissions, and could not be sustained for any of Tom’s admissions (visual or verbal) in the Voyager transmissions (likely due to being outside of the signal radius). :-P /s
It’s amazing how they made a different character for purely narrative reasons alone, and the fact that the characters are legally distinct so that the writers of that episode don’t get royalties for the entire run of Voyager is just a big wacky coincidence. Funny how that works out.
lol. My guess would be either really, really long and covers every possible scenario or extremely short and brutally honest.
I wonder what a Ferengi End-User License Agreement says.
10g¡c41
what would be t’pol’s hacker name?
Me: I know Suus Mahna.
T’Pol: Demonstrate.
T’Rinity
“We can rebuild him. We have the Tylenol”
Now we just need to get Iggy Pop out here to threaten to kill an old woman.
Mitch tells me to say hi.
Lol, that would certainly make the station regulations much more concise.
Why doesn’t Odo just put up a sign that says “nobody I don’t like allowed”
Plot twist: I will use the holodeck to simulate being a starfleet captain
Oh, so jealous. TBF, it’s still hilarious on fourth and fifth watching.
Great arguments. I still get to watch Lower Decks for the first time. Be jealous.
Barclay was evading real life conflict and pressure for sure, but also doing erotic power play with holo-versions of his crewmates… I think that last part was an early taste of our current deepfake porn reality 😬
Either way, Lower decks made it clear that into the 2380s, cleaning out the holodeck biofilters was still the worst job on a starship:
Barclay is pretty autism-coded. I think his time in the holodeck was mostly problematic because the rest of the crew wanted him to be faster/more productive at his job. He was avoiding conflict for sure but in a neurodivergent-affirming future there could be ample support around those side effects.
But I was just playing on Minuet’s claim that she’s as “real as you need me to be.”
There may be a joke flying over my head here, but Barclay only appears, having rather consequential holo addition issues, two full seasons after the Bynars’ upgrades?
The upgrades from 11001001 made that concern inconsequential.
Let’s be honest: you’re gonna end up like Barclay, with a holo-porn addiction instead.
the number one reason to want to live in the star trek universe. just move to risa and spend the rest of your life having fun with all the horny visitors and locals. yes i seek jamaharon, you can tell by the horgahn tattooed on my ass :3
Worfle, the daily game where you guess Worf’s name every single day
The script where Alexander interns behind the counter for a week just writes itself.
If a bit squirmy.
no, this was the early season. when Kazon/sesksa stole the transporter tech. she wanted to retrieved it from kazon Mistram ship, and the cullah said"any attempt to enter our ship is an act of aggression” she responds by saying"im usually easy to get along with, most of the time, and i dont like BULLIES and i dont like you,” and she eludes to “bullying her way” to get back the tech.
No apple juice, on orange juice, only prune juice.
Is that the one she gave to those stealth aliens that did experiments on everyone while ordering the ship right through the middle of some big fuck-off star anomaly?
Gagffles sound delicious.
On the flip side, the less you work the more people love you.
Other than the alternate timeline Ed Begley Jr Odo from “Children of Time”, I dare say this is the happiest we ever see him.
Testing… Testing…
Whew, it wasn’t my time to be hit with the ban hammer! 🥳
I don’t think Odo could have found a role he was more suited for.
Youuuuu’re OUTTTA HERE!
Man, I would hate to be a mod. All the work and most of the hate. Thanks for keeping this place running.
or JANEWAYS bully speech.
Call me an epicurean, but
and
On you, not “to” you.
Double dumbass to you!
Moopsie! – Moopsie, LD, S04E02 “I Have No Bones Yet I Must Flee”
“Don’t talk to me! I’m pissed off!” – Shaxs*, LD: S1E09 “Crisis Point”
*Holodeck recreation of Shaxs
“I don’t have a life, I have a program.” - EMH (VOY s2e9 “Tattoo")
100% agree on all points
They probably could, technically speaking. The “audio clip show” episode they did on Prodigy felt a little graverobber-y, though. I loved seeing Spock and Odo again, even in animated form, but I thought the archival restrictions on the dialogue emphasised that.
On the other hand, I would spit bile at any attempt to “reanimate” (ie, deepfake) late actors on the show. It was creepy when Star wars did it with Peter Cushing, and it’s the same now, with “genAI”.
One exception IMO might be Majel Barrett. As I understand it, she consented before her passing to having her voice and speech patterns digitised for such a purpose. Somehow, it would be fitting for her to always be the voice of Trek computers ❤️
Hear, hear. I do wonder, wiþ þe large archive of Spock audio, if þey couldn’t have cobbled togeþer an episode wiþ Spock purely re-using audio, no vocal imitators – AI or oþerwise – needed.
Well, TOS was 110-115 years prior in-universe, and I guess Kirk and Spock would be fairly legendary by the time of LDS.
Fun fact, Spock would canonically still be around during LDS; it’s only 5 years after the series finale that he prevents the Romulus supernova from taking out a large part of the galaxy, and inadvertently causes the Kelvin timeline. But I guess with Nimoy’s passing they didn’t want to cameo Spock on the animated show. Accept no substitutes!
Wow. Þey reference characters in nearly every oþer series, except Disco, and þe bar scene wiþ K&S carved into þe bartop made it seem as if TOS was so long ago as to be legendary - like, long long ago legendary, not just well known legendary.
TIL.
And to the point of Morn’s lifespan, another mention from Memory Alpha:
That’s a reference to the latter half of Picard season 3, and suggests that Morn was still hustling (and probably alive) some 20 years after his LDS appearance 🙂
I know, it messes with viewers’ minds that LDS is actually set in the later end of the 1990s shows’ timeframe. According to Memory Alpha,
LDS begins just a couple of years after Voyager returned to Earth!
Really? I got þe impression LD was farþer in þe future. But, I didn’t try to work out þe timelines, eiþer.
Did Morn lose his last hairs since DS9 ended? That latinum poisoning really ages a Lurian.
He doesn’t exactly need to be immortal. This only takes place six years after DS9 ended, both Kira and Quark are still around. Of course, Quark did have that hologram installed, so you never know if Morn took that day off to visit his mother.
Ooo, I don’t recall… was þat a Morn hologram, or is he essentially immortal?
ugh, morn. guy never shuts up.
the XINDI /temperolacold war was too strange, shouldve been the later seasons, and not dragged on the whole series.
oh yea at the time the 1st 2 episodes were 2million each, so the episodes got more expensive since, no doubt.
Correction the network didnt cancel the show: the network itself was canceled and enterprise did well ratings wise but it was expensive to produce and didnt do well enough for anothe network to pick up
Well, that’s cool!
I guess my memories of ENT are fuzzy because I only watched it once.
I think Enterprise immediately being like “TIME TRAVEL COLD WAR” was one of the biggest narrative problems with Enterprise. It didn’t let Enterprise stand on it’s own, but was constantly shadowed by future events. IMO they should have spent more time writing ahead of the show to figure out what the overarching storylines should be rather than just figuring it out as they went.
I know I actually had to look it up twice to make sure I was correct and also not having another dimentia episode
Dark gods!… 96… 96… I’ve seen first contact on the big screen when it came out… I’m old as fuck.
Also Season 8 of DS9 would have revealed that Sisko had laser eyes this whole time and just chose not to employ them
Didn’t we see Sisko’s encounter with the Borg in the very first episode? Sure, they never visited the station, but lots of other aliens never visited the station that we still consider to have been part of DS9, like The Founders
The Founders strengths are genetic engineering and the ability to maintain individuality inside of a collective. I think both of these have been shown to absolutely crush the Borg and the Founders would see the Borg as a fitting solution to the solids.
The issue is then you have poked God Emperor Sisko of the sacred temple. A being with unending rage against the borg, a willingness to commit war crimes, and the ability to exist outside of time. Sisko is the only captain who faced a power scaling issue of his own power being too high as he was literally born with plot armor.
Nah, Baseball is the true sport of the prophets that Sisko brought to Earth by timetravelling in order to save humanity from a rogue Klingon faction that encountered earth before the Vulcans made contact. Inside the baseballs were genetic modifiers that would turn the Klingons into looking like humans and it embarassed them so bad they fled.
A timeloop is formed, which is why Sisko keeps the baseball in his office to remind him of it.
The Borg fear Baseball because they recognize it represents power over reality itself.
It wasn’t so much the baseball itself but what it represents (a bazooka that shoots baseballs)
Unless there is some caveat like the nanites don’t work on the founders or Jem Hadar I don’t think it would be much of a contest
Then again the talking apes from earth seem to keep them at bay pretty well
im going to buy you a “done with the borg since ‘96” tshirt
Honestly they could just bring Enterprise back it would be an improvement over constantly producing subpar Star Trek shows that no one really wants.
I was sure that’s the way they were going to go with it. They should never had species 8472 (their introduction simply increased the problem of Star Trek establishing whole other realities existing, and then forgetting about it for subsequent stories) and have the Borg encounter The Founders and not be able to assimilate them because their shapeshifters, after that point essentially have the stories be the same.
I try to take those characters as manifestations of the collective rather than a true individual.
Still not as heartbreaking as the Firefly cancellation. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that one.
I was done with the Borg when they introduced a Queen.
Just like Zerg and Tyranids. I understand that narratively you need characters for stories, but coupling those completely alien swarm intelligences to discreet “Queens” commanding the swarm takes away this very alienness and transforms them from a terrifying force of nature you can never truly understand into yet another rulers personal army.
it also sorta"retcons” ties into how the borg found earth in the first place in the future(explained at the end of the episode.
spoiler
_the borg sent a signal in 2256 towards delta quadrant after PHLOX was partially assimilated he heard the signal in his mind, and the computer analyzed the coordinates deep in the delta quadrant. T’pol said it would take 200 years to reach borg space if at all, and archer said they only delayed the war until 24th century(right around the time tng discovered attacks on the neutral zone in the first season , since the borg came to investigate around that time )
when the artic expidition found the wreckage from first contact sphere.
ds9 like other trek series needed thier “own ship of the series” im guessing thats why they had defiant instead of the station. also they stopped exploring when the dominion invaded, never went back to exploring space after that.
i wonder when the borg discovered the transwarp hub, they wouldve likely used to invade the gamma quadrant at some point. 8472 likely weakened thier influenced throughout the galaxy, hence they never encountered the borg in the series.
it shouldve went with romulan war buildup, instead of the xindi arc. they are always teasing ROMULAN in the series. s5-7 were suppose to have shran join the crew, but the NETWORK CANCELLED THE SHOW.
DS9 was too far away from where borg would attack, and first contact was happening around the same time of ds9, when they had to move defiant off-screen to fight the borg.
I’d like to see a Borg vs Dominion war.
That is because the borg were afraid of Sisko’s baseball.
He wanted to mess with the Borg. He designed a ship to mess with the Borg. They didn’t show up in his part of the woods so he demonstrated what happens when someone has a ship designed to mess with the Borg.
To be fair the writers of WoK intended it to feel like Das Boot than a dog fight.
To be fair, in WoK they mainly just bumbled around blind in a nebula. It wasn’t exactly a dogfight!
How do you think Sisko learned to not mess with the Borg?