Star Trek Meme: Day 3
Day 3 - Who is your least favorite character?
At first I t hought: I don't have one, in any of the series/movies. Then I reconsidered. But let's define what I mean by "least favorite" first. The criteria isn't "being a villain"; there are some villains I'm very fond of indeed for, well, reasons (Kai Winn, you manipulative scheming Renaissance Pope in space, let me introduce you to Rodrigo Borgia!), while I entirely see the damage they do. There are also villains I feel the requesite "boo-hiss" impulse for, and villains I find boring but not an issue otherwise. I'm also not talking about liking one of the heroes just a bit less than the others. However, both with heroes and villains there are characters who just grate you the wrong way, both by themselves and by what they're doing to the larger narrative. And those are the kinds I'm listing now. Again, separately for each incarnation.
TOS/ TOS Movies: Sybok (from Star Trek: The Final Frontier, for those of you lucky enough to not have watched it). Giving Spock an unexpected!half brother this late in the game was always going to be tricky and would have been very hard to pull off well or at least satisfyingly. Making that half brother essentially a Californian guru putting everyone in touch with their feelings while seeking god was a disaster. (Every now and then, I wonder whether some in the script writing department wanted to do an early satire on Scientology and Ron Hubbard, but given Sybok dies heroically, I don't think so.) And that's before we get to the retcon of Vulcans in general (Sybok's mother was "a Vulcan princess"? What the hell? Amanda gives birth in a cave instead of a hospital?) and Spock's family in particular. No wonder that, novels aside, Sybok was never mentioned again.
TNG: Another guy from the movies: Shinzon from Star Trek: Nemesis. (Not for nothing was this the last of the TNG movies.) He's played by a young Tom Hardy who isn't to blame for the overall disaster, I hasten to add. Also, as opposed to the unexpected!half brother for Spock, the basic concept of making the antagonist Picard's clone so Picard gets to fight a younger version of himself isn't doomed for failure from the get go. It's not original, but ST did the doppelganger antagonist concept often and sometimes very well. Hardy doesn't come across as very Patrick-Stewart-y, but Shinzon's growing up is so radically different from Picard's that you can blame this on nurture versus nature. (Though it makes the clone concept kind of pointless; usually you do doppelganger villains to confront the heroes with their flaws and dark sides, and for that to work there needs to be some resemblance.) No, the big problem with Shinzon is two fold: a) he's connected to a horrible, late in the hour retcon about the Romulans. The hole idea of the unexpected!Remans as a Nosferatu looking slave race staging a revolt not even led by a Reman but an evil white savior is just...someone should have said "back to the drawing board" very early in the development. And b) Other than leading a take-over of Romulus (because getting one planet = a successful coup against an empire), Shinzon's main way of expressing his villainy in order to make the audience hate him is by mentally raping Troi. Boo, hiss, alright, but against the writers and producers for resorting to the laziest of all props to signal "villain". In short, Shinzon is far from the only thing wrong about Nemesis, but he embodies a lot of it, and thus he gets to be on this post's list.
DS9: The Prophets. Which will surprise no one who's been reading my DS9 ramblings for longer than five minutes. To recapitulate: my biggest problem with the Prophets isn't that they're super powerful aliens who are occasionally used as (literally) dei ex machina, and I like the explorations of what faith means in, say, the episode where Odo is dealing with the deserter version of Weyou who worships him as a god (as all the Vorta are genetically programmed to do), and Kira points out that she feels this way about the Prophets. No, my problem is that in the later seasons of DS9, as opposed to the early ones when they were still very sparingly used and unscrutable, we're supposed to take the Prophets as good. (And in a battle with the Pagh Wraiths as evil.) This despite the fact the later seasons also introduce the big retcon about Sisko's origins which makes the Prophets into rapists, and never acknowledges there's a problem there. The whole "Prophets versus Pagh Wraiths" subplot is my least favourite later season plot line, full stop, and my least favourite part about the finale. (Leaving completely aside that at the time of broadcast, the comparison to Babylon 5's Shadows versus Vorlons and the way this had been solved by Sheridan & Co. rejecting both for the unscrupulous way they used the younger races, was inevitable.) In short: the Prophets make me grind my teeth in the worst way. Ill thought out and executed characters tend to do that.
Voyager: Chakotay. I'm sorry, Chakotay fans! Most of the time, it's Beltan's one-expression performance, some of the time, it's that I don't get why all the interesting women (Torres and Seska in the earliest seasons, Janeway throughout and Seven in the finale) are into him. But as opposed to all the other examples, it probably comes down to an entirely irrational "he just rubs me the wrong way".
Enterprise: well, one reason why I stopped watching early on (and then years later
bimo persuaded me to watch the fourth season, which turned out indeed to be enjoyable) was Captain Jonathan Archer. Not just the wooden performance. ENT was the ST show which was influenced by 9/11 in the worst way, and Archer's resulting atttitude wasn't what I want from my Starfleet Captains. But really, the best thing about Archer was his dog (and thus I loved the beagle gag in Reboot!Star Trek), and otherwise he was immensely forgettable to me, which is a problem when it's the leading man. I don't have to like the Captains best to enjoy an incarnation of Star Trek; in fact, Picard aside, I usually don't. But I have to find them interesting. (Which I do in all other cases.) If the show doesn't manage to give me that, well, then the character is a problem for me.
Reboot Star Trek: don't have one, really. I have some conceptual problems (to put it mildly in the second case), but I do like the entire reboot ensemble. As far as the villains go, they suffer from Khan Wannabeness (yes, the guy from the first movie, too, because sadly the enduring legacy from ST: Wrath of Khan was to give all subsequent scriptwriters a "we must come up with a Khan like villain" complex), and Marcus is your standard evil Admiral, but they don't make me want to tear my hair out the way Sybok and Shinzon do. So: no candidate here.
Day 1 - Which Star Trek series is your favorite?
Day 2 - Who is your favorite character?
Day 3 - Who is your least favorite character?
Day 4 - What was the first episode/movie you watched?
Day 5 - What was the first Star Trek series you watched?
Day 6 - Your favorite canon pairing? (Canon being the series and the movies, including the reboot.)
Day 7 - Your favorite non-canon pairing?
Day 8 - Your favorite actor/actress? (Not the same as character.)
Day 9 - What's your favorite episode?
Day 10 - What's your favorite species? (Humans are a species as well.)
Day 11 - What's your least favorite species? (See question 9 about species.)
Day 12 - What's your favorite funny moment?
Day 13 - What's your favorite dramatic moment?
Day 14 - What's your favorite Star Trek quote?
Day 15 - How did you get into Star Trek?
Day 16 - Are you involved with Star Trek fandom?
Day 17 - Have you read any of the books? If so, which ones?
Day 18 - If you could be any species in the Star Trek universe, what would you be?
Day 19 - How did the Star Trek reboot affect you?
Day 20 - Of the minor characters (one shots, not the recurring ones) who’s your favorite?
Day 21 - Which Star Trek food would you want to try at least once?
Day 22 - Which Star Trek world would you want to visit at least once?
Day 23 - Is there anything you'd want to change about Star Trek? Why?
Day 24 - Is there anything about Star Trek that has disappointed you?
Day 25 - How has Star Trek changed you?
Day 26 - Lots of Star Trek Parodies out there. Which do you dig?
Day 27 - What would you cross over with Star Trek?
Day 28 - Your favourite friendship in Star Trek?
Day 29 - If you could tell Gene Roddenberry one thing, Star Trek related or not, what would it be?
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1086929.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
At first I t hought: I don't have one, in any of the series/movies. Then I reconsidered. But let's define what I mean by "least favorite" first. The criteria isn't "being a villain"; there are some villains I'm very fond of indeed for, well, reasons (Kai Winn, you manipulative scheming Renaissance Pope in space, let me introduce you to Rodrigo Borgia!), while I entirely see the damage they do. There are also villains I feel the requesite "boo-hiss" impulse for, and villains I find boring but not an issue otherwise. I'm also not talking about liking one of the heroes just a bit less than the others. However, both with heroes and villains there are characters who just grate you the wrong way, both by themselves and by what they're doing to the larger narrative. And those are the kinds I'm listing now. Again, separately for each incarnation.
TOS/ TOS Movies: Sybok (from Star Trek: The Final Frontier, for those of you lucky enough to not have watched it). Giving Spock an unexpected!half brother this late in the game was always going to be tricky and would have been very hard to pull off well or at least satisfyingly. Making that half brother essentially a Californian guru putting everyone in touch with their feelings while seeking god was a disaster. (Every now and then, I wonder whether some in the script writing department wanted to do an early satire on Scientology and Ron Hubbard, but given Sybok dies heroically, I don't think so.) And that's before we get to the retcon of Vulcans in general (Sybok's mother was "a Vulcan princess"? What the hell? Amanda gives birth in a cave instead of a hospital?) and Spock's family in particular. No wonder that, novels aside, Sybok was never mentioned again.
TNG: Another guy from the movies: Shinzon from Star Trek: Nemesis. (Not for nothing was this the last of the TNG movies.) He's played by a young Tom Hardy who isn't to blame for the overall disaster, I hasten to add. Also, as opposed to the unexpected!half brother for Spock, the basic concept of making the antagonist Picard's clone so Picard gets to fight a younger version of himself isn't doomed for failure from the get go. It's not original, but ST did the doppelganger antagonist concept often and sometimes very well. Hardy doesn't come across as very Patrick-Stewart-y, but Shinzon's growing up is so radically different from Picard's that you can blame this on nurture versus nature. (Though it makes the clone concept kind of pointless; usually you do doppelganger villains to confront the heroes with their flaws and dark sides, and for that to work there needs to be some resemblance.) No, the big problem with Shinzon is two fold: a) he's connected to a horrible, late in the hour retcon about the Romulans. The hole idea of the unexpected!Remans as a Nosferatu looking slave race staging a revolt not even led by a Reman but an evil white savior is just...someone should have said "back to the drawing board" very early in the development. And b) Other than leading a take-over of Romulus (because getting one planet = a successful coup against an empire), Shinzon's main way of expressing his villainy in order to make the audience hate him is by mentally raping Troi. Boo, hiss, alright, but against the writers and producers for resorting to the laziest of all props to signal "villain". In short, Shinzon is far from the only thing wrong about Nemesis, but he embodies a lot of it, and thus he gets to be on this post's list.
DS9: The Prophets. Which will surprise no one who's been reading my DS9 ramblings for longer than five minutes. To recapitulate: my biggest problem with the Prophets isn't that they're super powerful aliens who are occasionally used as (literally) dei ex machina, and I like the explorations of what faith means in, say, the episode where Odo is dealing with the deserter version of Weyou who worships him as a god (as all the Vorta are genetically programmed to do), and Kira points out that she feels this way about the Prophets. No, my problem is that in the later seasons of DS9, as opposed to the early ones when they were still very sparingly used and unscrutable, we're supposed to take the Prophets as good. (And in a battle with the Pagh Wraiths as evil.) This despite the fact the later seasons also introduce the big retcon about Sisko's origins which makes the Prophets into rapists, and never acknowledges there's a problem there. The whole "Prophets versus Pagh Wraiths" subplot is my least favourite later season plot line, full stop, and my least favourite part about the finale. (Leaving completely aside that at the time of broadcast, the comparison to Babylon 5's Shadows versus Vorlons and the way this had been solved by Sheridan & Co. rejecting both for the unscrupulous way they used the younger races, was inevitable.) In short: the Prophets make me grind my teeth in the worst way. Ill thought out and executed characters tend to do that.
Voyager: Chakotay. I'm sorry, Chakotay fans! Most of the time, it's Beltan's one-expression performance, some of the time, it's that I don't get why all the interesting women (Torres and Seska in the earliest seasons, Janeway throughout and Seven in the finale) are into him. But as opposed to all the other examples, it probably comes down to an entirely irrational "he just rubs me the wrong way".
Enterprise: well, one reason why I stopped watching early on (and then years later
bimo persuaded me to watch the fourth season, which turned out indeed to be enjoyable) was Captain Jonathan Archer. Not just the wooden performance. ENT was the ST show which was influenced by 9/11 in the worst way, and Archer's resulting atttitude wasn't what I want from my Starfleet Captains. But really, the best thing about Archer was his dog (and thus I loved the beagle gag in Reboot!Star Trek), and otherwise he was immensely forgettable to me, which is a problem when it's the leading man. I don't have to like the Captains best to enjoy an incarnation of Star Trek; in fact, Picard aside, I usually don't. But I have to find them interesting. (Which I do in all other cases.) If the show doesn't manage to give me that, well, then the character is a problem for me.
Reboot Star Trek: don't have one, really. I have some conceptual problems (to put it mildly in the second case), but I do like the entire reboot ensemble. As far as the villains go, they suffer from Khan Wannabeness (yes, the guy from the first movie, too, because sadly the enduring legacy from ST: Wrath of Khan was to give all subsequent scriptwriters a "we must come up with a Khan like villain" complex), and Marcus is your standard evil Admiral, but they don't make me want to tear my hair out the way Sybok and Shinzon do. So: no candidate here.
Day 1 - Which Star Trek series is your favorite?
Day 2 - Who is your favorite character?
Day 3 - Who is your least favorite character?
Day 4 - What was the first episode/movie you watched?
Day 5 - What was the first Star Trek series you watched?
Day 6 - Your favorite canon pairing? (Canon being the series and the movies, including the reboot.)
Day 7 - Your favorite non-canon pairing?
Day 8 - Your favorite actor/actress? (Not the same as character.)
Day 9 - What's your favorite episode?
Day 10 - What's your favorite species? (Humans are a species as well.)
Day 11 - What's your least favorite species? (See question 9 about species.)
Day 12 - What's your favorite funny moment?
Day 13 - What's your favorite dramatic moment?
Day 14 - What's your favorite Star Trek quote?
Day 15 - How did you get into Star Trek?
Day 16 - Are you involved with Star Trek fandom?
Day 17 - Have you read any of the books? If so, which ones?
Day 18 - If you could be any species in the Star Trek universe, what would you be?
Day 19 - How did the Star Trek reboot affect you?
Day 20 - Of the minor characters (one shots, not the recurring ones) who’s your favorite?
Day 21 - Which Star Trek food would you want to try at least once?
Day 22 - Which Star Trek world would you want to visit at least once?
Day 23 - Is there anything you'd want to change about Star Trek? Why?
Day 24 - Is there anything about Star Trek that has disappointed you?
Day 25 - How has Star Trek changed you?
Day 26 - Lots of Star Trek Parodies out there. Which do you dig?
Day 27 - What would you cross over with Star Trek?
Day 28 - Your favourite friendship in Star Trek?
Day 29 - If you could tell Gene Roddenberry one thing, Star Trek related or not, what would it be?
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1086929.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.