See, I haven't watched the final 10 in a while—I'm working my way through the show again and I'm ALMOST there—but I actually kind of hate that. I can sort of see where the "DS9 isn't real Trek" crowd is coming from there, in that they worked out these complex villains who don't see themselves as villains, maybe even…

SPOILER? SOMETHING THAT'S CONFIRMED IN A FEW EPISODES BUT IS PRETTY OBVIOUS ABOUT WINN'S CHARACTER AT THIS POINT.

I have a vague recollection of them being mentioned in the episode with Riker's father, but I haven't watched TNG in like a decade, so don't quote me.

Yes, but then there's the Chekhov pronunciation.

If Star Trek villains are judged by the (negative) quality of the movie their machinations set into motion, then Khan still wins, because Into Darkness.

I guess, but we all know Starfleet Captains are cooler than Admirals and get to do all the cool stuff. Kirk never wanted to be an Admiral.

Oh, uh, didn't mean it as a shot at you, Zack. I'm just saying, the writers were going pretty inside with the Breen, and yes, it's kind of a "OK, whatever" moment when they join the Dominion unless you're pretty nerdily obsessive about this stuff. I only remembered them when they started to pop up on DS9 because I…

Yes, I'm just saying, they were mentioned a lot on TNG but DS9 actually had them DO things. It's true that having them play an actual role in affairs before the final episodes undercuts the joke a bit, but I still like it.

The Breen have been mentioned as far back as the early years of TNG as a vague "power in the quadrant" sort of race that never seems to do much except cause tension, to the point where (I believe) the writers actually said they saw them as a running gag. No, wait, actually their phrase was "a red herring", as in,…

Totally agreed. The first half of Enterprise S1 is at least a little interesting, because they play around with the ideas of the early days of Starfleet and the Federation, how slow and weak the ships are (and Mayweather's backstory as a guy who grew up on a slow interstellar transport is fascinating, even if they…

Really? I could have sworn it was Gamma.

Heh, you're making me want to check out Defiance. I LOVE that kind of intricate nerd shit.

It wasn't the big special effects that I missed so much as the sense of deep weirdness. The Black Lodge segments from Twin Peaks capture a lot of the sense of queasy weirdness that I got from that part of the book (and I can't help but think that's what Martin was going for to an extent). They could have kept that…

[Nerd nitpick] There are 30 extant episodes of Game of Thrones, and more coming in a few weeks.

Yep, "secondary worlds" have become sadly scarce in mainstream entertainment. I think it's because it's assumed that regular audience members can't handle worlds that are too much unlike their own, combined with nerds fetishizing (their idea of) "realism". Somehow "imagination" became lame and unserious.

But assuming the Dominion reformed, having a genetically designed, drug-addicted underclass, even one meant for more peaceful purposes, is more than a tad skeevy. You'd think that the ultimate goal would be to set them free from their genetic destiny. And I agree, Bashir or someone like him could easily devote himself…

You can argue that the Kennedy-era Neoliberal viewpoint was ALWAYS one of the more disturbing things about Star Trek (and manifests itself in the later shows as things like a hopelessly provincial and condescending view towards other races, humans being the boss of the Federation, etc.) Section 31 is just the writers…

Hey, I didn't say it was the ONLY thing.

Oh sure. But hey, if you're willing to buy that the Federation happened as we see on TOS and TNG without falling to powermongering assholes at any point in their history (other than the occasional rogue Admiral) then the idea of Section 31 as a bunch of ideologues who do bad things for the "right" reasons isn't hard…

There's also an episode where they claim to have found a stable wormhole to the gamma quadrant long before DS9 premieres. That one turns out to be a dud, of course, but clearly they liked the idea.