#me tng

[just-seeing-everything]

Watching Picard right now 🍿🥪

Thinking about how La Forger are a family that work in the federation for generations, mostly engineers and captains.

But Silva is a pilot. Technically a "black sheep" of the family, although I doubt George would ever have any kind of hate for his daughters.

I know the episode talk about this. But I just came to realize almost every pilot in star trek is come kind of black sheep.

First example that came to my mind is Tom Paris

Just thinking about this

[galactic-magick]

Star Trek makes me soooo crazy cuz you got Picard saying things like "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose."

And Data saying things like "I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."

And Bashir saying things like “You can't go through life trying to avoid getting a broken heart. If you do, it'll break from loneliness anyway."

And Odo sayings things like "It has been my observation that one of the prices of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice."

And I’m just supposed to be normal about it???

[marxistgnome]

Memes shared by kids who grew up on starships I think they should have sea scout/land scout beef with kids that grew up on Starbases

[abiscuit]

I love Star Trek, I love how every time a federation ship goes into the romulan neutral zone there is also immediately a romulan ship. Like girl, what were YOU doing in the neutral zone?

[positronichead]

The comment on levar burton’s unprompted daforge posting………

[corvigae]

Autistic girlies when the TNG episode implies that Data does have emotions but he experiences/presents them differently than most people

[manmadedonut]

horrifying sentence

[hollis-art]

Ode to Spot, by Data Soong

[cchipollo]

this is for the q fans i think

[steakout-05]

hey wait i just had a thought. what would Data's handwriting look like. do you think whenever he has to handwrite he just perfectly prints New Times Roman in size 14 onto the paper in three seconds or something. wait imagine if he wrote in Comic Sans

[spirk-trek]

she is to me what leia's gold bikini was to straight boys

[blondie-drawings]

I recently got a bunch of TNG novels at a charity shop and this passage from the FIRST BOOK is making me feel craaaaazy

[psybrepunk]

Once again thinking about this photo of Brent Spiner in the makeup chair for TNG because maybe it's just me but this is a modern renaissance painting.

[t00thpasteface]

he can only handle the shrimp colors for so long

[fastdrawfarmboy]

For your consideration.

[writergeekrhw]

In the special features for Star Trek, the producers and writers often refer to Trek as a "period piece" in the same vein as Jane Austen or Bonanza, just set in the future instead of the past.

With this in mind, 90's Trek had very distinctive language usage. It is formal, even stilted at times, but it comes off as erudite and evolved. Even Patrick Stewart has commented how he could always tell when Star Trek was on TV because he'd hear the dialogue and recognize that distinctive formalness.

From a narrative perspective, this choice falls in line with the whole "humanity has evolved" theme. But from a technical writing standpoint, it seems to have served a much more important purpose of setting the time period by scrubbing the dialogue of any time-stamped, current slang.

So in this future universe setting, casual, current language (such as F bombs) would be akin to one of us using slang from the 1600's. It's jarring not because it's crass (for some it is), but because it cracks the suspension of disbelief that what we are watching is set in different time period because they are using our language, not theirs.

I apologize for the massive run up to this question (maybe I've completely missed the mark with my musings) but what were the instructions you were given that gave DS9's dialogue that "period piece" feel?

Good observations regarding language use in Star Trek.

There were no specific instructions on how to write "proper" Star Trek dialogue. It was mostly learning by doing. But we adhered to the same unwritten rules as TNG, and that could be gleaned from reading scripts and watching episodes. Once I started on the job, a few things became quickly apparent to me:

Avoid slang.

Avoid religious expressions.

Generally, dialogue between Starfleet characters should be respectful (or even warm), slightly formal, and thoughtful.

Playful is fine, but not too goofy.

Use metric units.

Most aliens don't use contractions or use them minimally.

There are probably plenty more that I learned (and adhered to) unconsciously, but those were the ones that jump out in memory.