Technomages: Ren Faire fans with a better App Store than anyone else.  THAT'S ALL.

@avclub-d7f43e1fb2d4977c86163d9b0cb07814:disqus Not really.  I think even with the explicit references to Joran Dax, he's mentioned playing Beethoven.

"because the Trill are so boring"

Well, yes and no.  Bajor feels like it has its own culture, despite the physical resemblance.  I guess my point is, so much of what's "Trill", in as much as we get from DS9, is all about the symbionts and the joining.  So when that aspect is taken out of the equation, what else is there? 

One thing I realized about Trills— remove the symbiont element of their culture, and they are near indistinguishable from humans.  I mean, take for example

Cardassians, deep down, want you to know they've won.  Founders could give a damn.

I did like they changed up "gives birth" cliches, that for Bajoran women it's this utterly serene, relaxed experience, and breaking that relaxation screws up labor. 

Especially since, culturally, it's closer to "I.R.S." 

She's the winner of "The Worf Effect"— i.e., the one who gets creamed to show how tough the bad guy is.

Farscape
DS9
Firefly
Babylon 5
(gap)
BSG
(Big gap)
Punching myself in the face
(more gap)
Lexx

At least it's not a cave.  Rewatching TNG/DS9/VOY era Trek… they really loved those cave sets.  Which sometimes made no sense, like ones where the cave was integrated with technology in a very lame way.  The hospital in "Nor the Battle…" or Damar's resistance headquarters in DS9-S7 stand out….

You pointed out what's Crichton's best asset in these early episodes: the fact that everything is bizarre to him, which gives him a perspective that everyone else lacks.  For everyone else, life on Moya is relatively "normal", so when something outside their framework happens, they don't know how to react.  John's…

@twitter-143538532:disqus Of course, said plan never really leaves the drawing board/prototype stage.  And really for no reason other than, "Screw it, never mind."

@avclub-92a4841c9f86965effbc29fa6eae9f77:disqus The real shame about the finale is the core idea— Riker (or anyone from 24th century, but Riker was a good choice) looking back at Archer's Enterprise and the formation of the Federation— that core idea is GOLD.  But they went and did as much wrong with it as they…

I could never see the Technomages as anything other than posers with a Radio Shack catalog….

I've said this before in a variety of ways, but it comes down to Roddenberry buying his own mythology too much.  In TOS, the idealized, hopeful future for humanity was the setting.  In TNG, it became the theme.  If not the plot.

Although, @avclub-b3fe4f5a8793b5499e143cdf1253caff:disqus and @avclub-bd847fd835b2c6025557898b6aff7b2d:disqus, Voyager does milk a bit of story out of the fact that

@Mighty_Ponygirl:disqus Ben is Glory?  Glory is a Founder?

Gene would have loved "Let He…" I think.  It had moralizing AND mostly naked people.  It's all his favorite things.

It works if you justify it as not an actual Vorta ability, but something they used to set up the "escape" from the Jem'Hadar in that episode.  The "control" collar didn't do anything, as Quark discovered, it was just a complicated lock.  The Vorta's psychokinetic blast was as much of a McGuffin in the scenario.