The Greatest Philosophy Question Ever Asked!

I've been pondering. After all, this is the greatest philosophy question ever asked.

I go with Star Trek.

It had a life. It survived character changes. It survived everything.

Star Wars was good, especially the first two. But things fizzled out--pour moi.

Live long and prosper.

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@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

I think Captain Picard is far more shrewd then Kirk. I'd place my trust in him.

And anyhow, no navy would ever put a young guy like Kirk in charge of hardware like that. Not old enough to have paid his dues.

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@mysteryman,

mysteryman wrote:

The answer is easy...Star Trek

I have seen every episode of every Star Trek series ever made, including the animated one.
The best of the series was IMHO Star Trek: Voyager.

Kate Mulgrew, who played Cpt Janeway on Voyager, had never seen any episode of Star Trek before she got that role.

Of course, the most important question is this...
If the world was coming to an end, who would you want to be in command of the Enterprise and save the world, Cpt Kirk or Cpt Picard?

I have to agree with you, voyager is also my favorite out of the entire series. But as far as living in the star trek universe, id rather pick star wars.

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NEITHER!!!
DUNE ROCKS!!!!

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@hamilton,

hamilton wrote:

NEITHER!!!
DUNE ROCKS!!!!

Well, the books do at least.

Star Trek was far more ambitious than Star Wars which was essentially a space western. TOS confronted a lot of issues for the times including racism, sexism, and cold war politics. Later shows maintained that belief in a higher humanity that can overcome adversity, both external in internal to make the universe a better place. Star Wars is great fun but doesn't have more to it than good storytelling ... plus you have Jar Jar Binks and Ewoks to consider. Of course it is older, but I think the amount of fan fiction and independent novels written about Star Trek dwarf those in the Star Wars universe and include explorations of the other relevant cultures in the Star Trek universe. My favorite Star Trek novel is The Final Reflection, detailing the rise of an early Klingon commander from orphan to the captain first assigned to go to Earth. Star Wars never bothered to fill out the cultures of all those aliens; they are just window dressing. Of the four, my favorite series was DS9, both because the characters were so flawed and because they overcame those flaws. The only complex character in Star Wars is Vadar and his redemption always seemed a little simplistic to me. Best Trek movie: First Contact.

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@engineer,

I must mention the new Star Trek.
I was not expecting it to be any good but was I wrong!
It was great with a solid script and brilliant casting, Karl urban even
got bones voice spot on.
it augers well for the future and I cant wait for more.

http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/star-trek-2009.jpg

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@tsarstepan,

Love that quote "Pick a side, we're at war."

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@mysteryman,

mysteryman wrote:

Of course, the most important question is this...
If the world was coming to an end, who would you want to be in command of the Enterprise and save the world, Cpt Kirk or Cpt Picard?

That's a no-brainer--Kirk's a loose cannon. You'd want Picard, who acts like an honest-to-god naval officer.

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@Thomas,

I can't agree with that. Just because Kirk/Shatner acts like a drunken cowboy, and just because they had some really phony time-travel episodes doesn't entitle them to the palm. The 1981 movie Outland was the true first melding of the western and sci fi genres.

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@Setanta,

I saw that as the support film for Bladerunner. Unfortunately Blade Runner was on second, so I had to sit through all of it. Had it been the other way round, I wouldn't have lasted the course. I did think the heads blowing up looked pretty cool though.

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Babylon 5 fan. The show was less inclined to do what most popular sci fi shows do in that with B5 while the "scenery" changed the normal aspects of the human condition remained and employed as the critical feature for examination of the storyline and not the "scenery." The program reminded me much more of the science fiction of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi than any of the shows/films mentioned above.

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Star Trek.

No contest.

Despite the incredible special effects, Star Wars always left me feeling disappointed.

Star Trek attempted, and very often succeeded, in rendering classic sci-fi tales to the medium of TV and then film.

With Star Wars, the inspiration of George Lucas wasn't the great sci-fi stories and novels of classic writers like Asimov, Sturgeon, Pohl, Bester, Lem et al but cheesy serials like Commander Cody and Flash Gordon.

Of course I loved those serials too when I was a kid and they aired on WOR Channel 9 in NYC, but their appeal turned to camp when I became an adult.

There is virtually nothing intellectually stimulating about the Star Wars movies with the possible exception of the character of Darth Vader, but even that was pretty hackneyed and Lucas selected perhaps one of the worst young actors in modern Hollywood to portray the conflicted Anakin Skywalker.

I was amazed when Harrison Ford revealed himself to actually be a good actor in The Mosquito Coast.

The best performance in all of the Star Wars movies was delivered by Frank Oz as Yoda or maybe the guy who played Darth Maul.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I can't agree with that. Just because Kirk/Shatner acts like a drunken cowboy, and just because they had some really phony time-travel episodes doesn't entitle them to the palm. The 1981 movie Outland was the true first melding of the western and sci fi genres.

Notwithstanding the unfounded jab at Shatner, I have to agree.

I don't think the episode in which the "Away Team" found themselves squaring of against the Earps at the OK Corral inolved time travel, but it was hardly a blending of genres. Give some credit to the writers for adopting the then contraversial revisionist notion that the Earps were the real bad guys and the Clantons were poor innocents.

Outland was indeed High Noon in space.

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

The "jab" at Shatner is not unfounded--he's a crap actor. From the paranoid airline passenger on The Outer Limits/i] to T. J. Hooker, Shatner has proven that with the exception of Sonny Tufts, he's the least competent actor to ever get wide-spread exposure.

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@Setanta,

"TAlent" and success and popularity as an actor are mutually exclusive concepts. Shatner takes part in being a cartoon of himself and Im sure hes worried about what Roger Ebert says all the ay to the bank.

Shatner has an interview show on the Biography Channel and hes a real hoot thereon. He does a cross between Mike Wallace, ANdy Rooney, and Rosanne Rosanna Danna.
Shatner enjoys doing Shatner and it shows.

.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

The "jab" at Shatner is not unfounded--he's a crap actor. From the paranoid airline passenger on The Outer Limits/i] to T. J. Hooker, Shatner has proven that with the exception of Sonny Tufts, he's the least competent actor to ever get wide-spread exposure.

Patrick Stewart is RSC, Shatner has no ego. Shatner has a gift for comedy.

Whenever I want to piss off a Star Wars fan, I wax lyrical about Jah Jah Binks. Something along the line of, 'I never really liked Star Wars until Jah Jah came along, he's so cool, why can't the other characters be more like him?' tends to kick things off nicely.

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I'll be blunt. I'm at war with your divisiveness. I'm not going to play that game. Wink

I love both Star Wars and Star Trek, and I've found things to hate about both, too. Star Wars Episode IV was like heaven when I first saw it at Mann's Chinese theater in Hollywood. The line was only about a dozen people deep, but the auditorium was packed. And afterward, the line went nearly a mile around the block. That opening scene, when the spaceships went overhead, had me melting in my seat.

The first season of Star Trek TNG was gag awful! Lame dialog, poor story lines, tired ideas. But season five had two of my all-time favorites of all science fiction -- "The Inner Light" and "Darmok." Powerful stories, almost spiritual in their impact.

The first several Star Trek movies were odd-awful and even-blissful. I'm glad the latest installment broke with that tradition.

Star Wars created a rich universe, full of interesting detail, but it had a poor sense of galactic scale. It seemed to take a moderately long time to go to the next star system, but not much longer to go clear across the galaxy. That's like taking 15 minutes to walk to the neighborhood store, and another 30 minutes to walk from Los Angeles to New York! Yikes!

And some of the dialog in Star Wars was entirely lame -- like Yoda after seeking the younglings' help with Master Kenobi's star map in Episode II.

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@farmerman,

The Canajuns consider him a great comedian, although i personally don't see it. However, the question was whom one would want in command of Enterprise in a life and death situation. Pesonally, i would prefer Jean-Luc Picard, who has all the attibues of a naval commander to someone who is a joke, and the more so if he's playing as a joke.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

The Canajuns consider him a great comedian, although i personally don't see it. However, the question was whom one would want in command of Enterprise in a life and death situation. Pesonally, i would prefer Jean-Luc Picard, who has all the attibues of a naval commander to someone who is a joke, and the more so if he's playing as a joke.

I'd rather have this guy,

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01208/2nd-troughton_1208532i.jpg

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lol theres a riff trax wrath of kahn commercial at the bottom of my screen...
this site is too smart.

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The Greatest Philosophy Question Ever Asked!

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