#I was so worried we'd get all this build up for how bad society is and absolutely nothing be done about it...

[oborofollower7]

man idk

[amplifyme]

Episode catch up~

The Watcher and A Distant Shore: Both have their merits and demerits; but I will say I liked the cast and the creative choices the writers took (keeping The Watcher anonymous, having Joe recommend Cathy, the lady in Cali helping out after news of her friend's death, etc.) ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT-- and what an incredibly fitting context (Nan, you genius.) Father hovering around Vincent during those episodes, worried about his son (and Cathy, too) and trying to cheer him up and distract his mind (impossible.) Mouse and the shell and Vincent's dream and reaching Cathy. Overall, I liked both in their own ways and wouldn't mind rewatching. Also, Joe continues to be stellar (really grew on me), Jenn and Rita have interesting appearances. ...Although, Cathy, I do have a bone to pick with you throughout all of The Watcher.

Trial: Enjoyed all aspects of the case; and that the episode tackled the injustices and inabilities of the system, the victims, and the society at the time. But it's a start. And all the characters and Vincent's dreams of the boy and Pascal's appearance and Joe's ups and downs. And most of all, their superior was right: they needed Cathy to fight the symbolic war right up against the murderer's shark lawyer-- there's a reason this guy's their boss.

A Kingdom by the Sea: Those were actually CIA?? Baffled. Elliot's back and Cathy needed to put several breaks on the whole debacle before it escalated to Vincent having to kill, being torn up over the kiss, and feeling that Cathy's cut earlier and his stab now were signals of life. Father continuing his worried streak with no pushback and maximum support is sweet if veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery telling about his read on Vincent's emotional state. Elliot's father's death was quite the turn; and their rotten relationship definitely explains the dreams of a man who wanted to prove himself by building the biggest tower possible. Two things struck me: Cathy listened to Vincent tearing those men apart and kept traipsing away in the tunnels, not addressing it later and pretty much over it compared to Vincent; and she didn't seem to notice how deeply that affected him, addressing only his confusion and grief and hurt at her fluctuations with Elliot. And secondly, her dismissal of Elliot's contradictions-- a man who is able to live with two warring sides and not let it drag him down or back-- by saying: “How does it matter, Vincent? It’s… life"; and that is incredibly indicative of the core of their relationship. Cathy doesn't seek to understand: roses bloom out of blood sacrifices; life is beautiful; there is ugliness separate from beauty; contradictions don't mix; Elliot must be all bad or really good deep down and didn't realize it himself rather than an intriguing mix of the two; and Vincent's hands are her hands, beautiful, but the blood they shed does not (read: cannot) stain his soul. And she is very, very wrong about all of those things.

Can't wait to hear your input! :DDDDD

Squeeee, you're getting so close to the trilogy! The Hollow Men is the perfect episode to lead into it. Please tell me you plan on watching all three eps of the trilogy in the same sitting. And you must let me know before you start S3. I have things to tell you.

More below.

I really like The Watcher now. I wasn't crazy about it the first time I saw it, but there's gobs of foreshadowing in it that I didn't pick up on until after the trilogy aired and then after the show was cancelled and I did my first rewatch and had time to think hard about the series as a whole. Keep in mind we had to wait 7 months between S2 and S3. Which back then was a long time for network shows. Lots of time to go back and pick up all the threads missed the first time around. Also tons of rumors flying around that summer (some true, some not) about what was going to happen in S3, or if we'd even get one. The Classic fans had already circled the wagons and decided they hated S3 before it even aired. But I digress.

Not sure if you've noticed this or not, but other than once, after Cathy gets beat up in An Impossible Silence (where he keeps watch on her while still being as close to outside as he can get), Vincent never steps foot in her apartment. So it's significant in The Watcher that he's actually considering her invitation to come in, because that's a line he's drawn in his own mind about what's allowable behavior and what isn't.

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT-- and what an incredibly fitting context (Nan, you genius.)

Right?? I knew you'd pick up on that right away.

Mouse and the shell and Vincent's dream and reaching Cathy.

My favorite part of A Distant Shore was V & Mouse talking at the Mirror Pool (a scene GRRM wrote in order to get the ep up to the full running time) and Vincent in his chamber holding up the shell and then scooping up the sand and taking a big ol' whiff of the Pacific Ocean. Such a Vincent thing to do. Cast and crew loved working on this one since they all got to get off the sound stage and spend a few days at the beach. I remember being so amused that V & C acted like the four days she was gone was more like four months. 🤣

...Although, Cathy, I do have a bone to pick with you throughout all of The Watcher.

Care to elaborate??

Don't have much to add about Trial, except in response to this: there's a reason this guy's their boss.

I'm shoving my fist in my mouth so I don't let anything slip out. We'll touch on this later.

It was an okay episode, but nothing really memorable.

A Kingdom by the Sea (aka The Episode That Humanizes Elliot Burch). I adore this episode! I also adore Elliot.

Those were actually CIA??

Yep.

Cathy needed to put several breaks on the whole debacle before it escalated to Vincent having to kill, being torn up over the kiss, and feeling that Cathy's cut earlier and his stab now were signals of life.

Wasn't the scene on C's balcony that opened the show wonderful? Kissing her injured finger without thought and the heat of the look they shared and C refusing to let Vincent turn away from it. Lovely.

But, yeah, again with the death and desire symbolism, and blood as a sign of life. As Vincent said to Father, "The grave is a fine, safe place. But if we live, we bleed." That'll come back to haunt him.

Father continuing his worried streak with no pushback and maximum support is sweet if veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery telling about his read on Vincent's emotional state.

Like I've said before, Father knows his son very well. He has a lot of first-hand experience, after all.

Cathy listened to Vincent tearing those men apart and kept traipsing away in the tunnels, not addressing it later and pretty much over it compared to Vincent; and she didn't seem to notice how deeply that affected him, addressing only his confusion and grief and hurt at her fluctuations with Elliot.

Quick trivia time before I get to the meat of this. GRRM wanted the scene with V and C in his chamber to end with a kiss. He wanted V to lean in after she told him she wished it was him and take that kiss. Alas, Koslow nixed it. But I love that GRRM wanted it there. His scripts are always so, so good.

And meanwhile, as they're in the tunnels Elliot is like, "What the hell is that?? What was that??" Yeah, Cathy has grown very blasé about Vincent's killings, hasn't she? And she really seems blind to the effect it has on him. She's also blind to the duality within everyone, and specifically within Elliot and Vincent. I've always felt like Vincent posing those questions to her about the duel nature of man was him asking that question in relation to how she was able to process and justify what she sees in him, not Elliot. But it just flew right over her head, because despite what she thinks she knows about V, he tends to comes at things sideways, rather than directly. She never figures that out.

“How does it matter, Vincent? It’s… life"; and that is incredibly indicative of the core of their relationship. Cathy doesn't seek to understand: roses bloom out of blood sacrifices; life is beautiful; there is ugliness separate from beauty; contradictions don't mix; Elliot must be all bad or really good deep down and didn't realize it himself rather than an intriguing mix of the two; and Vincent's hands are her hands, beautiful, but the blood they shed does not (read: cannot) stain his soul. And she is very, very wrong about all of those things.

I have nothing to add to this. You've stated it perfectly. I'm so excited for you. You have no idea what you're in for. Buckle up, baby!

[signechan]

I mean, both are true.

The person ultimately responsible for how they use the tool is the human but if a tool is predominantly being used in harmful ways we should be able to, as a society, decide if its a thing we want in our communities.

Like, let's look at your examples. Money. We use money to pay for things, yes. Very simplistically the up side of this is that when we wish to aquire something that someone else has or charge others for our services, it's a neutral exchange token with an agreed value. Like, if we live in a barter system and I want to buy the latest kpop album, what on earth do I have that I generate in my roll in customer services that I can barter for that album? If we lived in a little community of 100 and I wanted to buy your extra chicken then barter might work out because we'd both know at harvest that I owe you a share or that when your son needs to build his house that's a favour you can call in for a few days labour but money allows us to live in larger communities and exchange with people who we don't know without worrying how they're going to pay us back. The downside is that for some people getting money becomes an end goal in itself. I believe there's always a problem with unequal distribution of resources because power differentials in all human societies (in our 100 person village, if you're looked up to and I'm an outside I might find it hard demanding fair trade for my chicken, and generational wealth can still exist if you're father and his father before him were both high up in the village and my father was bad at bartering, say, but money allows capitalism and the pursuit of money above all else and leads to larger power differentials than we could ever have in my 100 person village. Ultimately I do think money itself is a net good as it allows larger communities, movement between communities and roles in society that aren't directly related to personally making or gathering enough stuff to physically keep yourself alive, you can do other rolls and use money to trade for that stuff, but we also have an obligation to put limits on the system to stop people becoming ultra wealthy, which we've not done.

Guns for shooting. Ultimately a gun makes it much easier for you to kill something more quickly. Can you kill something without a gun, absolutely. But a gun makes it quicker and easier. There are legitimate reasons why a person may need to own a gun. If they live in a remote location with dangerous fauna they may need it as a protection, for example. If your country is directly involved in armed combat and your enemy also has guns and refused to stop murdering your people, you may need guns to prevent it being a one sided slaughter. Many people who own guns, though, particularly in america, do not have that direct need for them. They keep them for sport or out of a nebulous fear that they might need them in order to protect themselves (people in Europe, say, don't normally feel they need guns for this reason as having fewer guns in society as a whole makes it harder for criminals to get guns so the odds of any given assailant having a gun is much lower). This leads to a larger number of guns in circulation which leads to more accidents, more escalations of situations that could have ended as a shouting match or fist fight but which the presence of a gun turns into a death, the increased ease for bad actors to aquire guns and deliberately endanger others. I don't think having a small, controlled number of guns in society is a bad thing, the problem is when they become so ubiquitous that the dangers outweigh the benefits.

Unfortunately in both these situations money and guns have become so ubiquitous in a damaging way its hard to roll that back. When you've already got the ultra-wealthy and the systems we've created makes it hard for us to affect them, it's hard to change that system to more fairly distribute resources. Guns are so obiquitous in American society that it's very hard to roll it back. People will defend their right to own guns as they see them as necessary because of the threats created by the general public owning a lot of guns. Neither situation is hopeless but it's much harder to change when the system is already embedded.

AI, machine learning has good sides. It can run better anslysis of large data sets than a human. It can do things like look at photos of moles and use a database of pictures of health and cancerous moles to identify cases where intervention may be needed. That's amazing. It can also be used to spread misinformation, put people out of jobs, and steal from people who don't consent to having their data used for machine learning. Ultimately we probably should keep machine learning for the things it does well but we should have controls in place to be sure it can only be trained on data the company has legal rights to use (no public domain, the should have to demonstrate they or the company they purchased the date from had the legal right to use the data in this way and had compensated the recipient. Public domain was fine in print times but has effectively lost all meaning in times of the internet) and that the system actually does what it claims to do, preferably with a law requiring that companies still employ humans as part of teams like customer service with a legal minimum number of operatives needed per however many contacts so as to eliminate the problem we already have where, when you have a problem with a large company, its impossible to talk to a human (oh, that would be impossible you cry. There are industries like child care where we already require minimum staffing levels, it's far from impossible).

The good news with machine learning is that we're new to this. This is exactly the time when we should be investing in legal frameworks around machine learning, while it's still new enough and not embedded enough that we can't control it. But we need to move quickly because tech companies are moving quickly to make this embedded, to be able to say they just can't comply with legislation because oh no its making so much money and it's only ripping off small artists and won't someone think of the American economy.

Sure, the people ultimately responsible are the people who use the tool, but we do still have a job as a society to look at the tool, how we'd like it to be used, what we will do to people who misuse it, how prevalent we'd like it to be on our lives, what we're willing to give up for it. Because if we don't have those conversations and act now, the people who want to steal your art and fire their entire customer service department will get to decide for you and then it'll be too late.

‘AI is stealing from artists and—’ uh oh, careful! machine learning is a tool; nothing else. it only does what human people tell it to do. if you get ripped off by AI, you should point fingers at whoever is profiting from your work. otherwise, you may as well say ‘guns are shooting people’ or ‘money is paying for things’ lmao

[thegreaterlink]

Reviewing Star Trek TNG - S3E24 "Transfigurations"

THE PREMISE

The Enterprise beams up the badly injured occupant of a crashed ship in an unknown star system. When the survivor (Mark LaMura) awakens a few days later, he has no memory of who he is or how he got there, so they decide to name him "John Doe." Over time he recuperates and he begins to emit strange energy bursts with the ability to heal injuries.

MY REVIEW

This is my least favourite kind of episode to review. It's like eating a slice of dry toast - there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but the experience is so overwhelmingly blah that you're not really enjoying yourself either. Even with a bad episode I can have fun shitting on it.

Let’s just get this one out of the way so I can talk about “The Best of Both Worlds,” okay?

The mystery surrounding the nature of John Doe (I'll call him JD for short) is decently set up early on when Dr Crusher establishes a neural link between him and Geordi to stabilise his nervous system. Suddenly Geordi is more relaxed and charismatic, even managing to go out with Christy Henshaw, the girl he was chasing after shortly before he resorted to making out with a hologram.

As for JD, he makes miraculous progress, regenerating all of his organs within 36 hours of his arrival. The romance continues when Dr Crusher claims to have some kind of spiritual connection to him, though it doesn't go any further than that. It's unexpected to say the least, but at least it's not the strangest romance she'll ever have.

One might say it doesn't even hold a candle to it...

You all know it's coming. It's only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, JD gets tidbits of character development, such as remembering that he was fleeing from his home planet with others of his species. He asks Picard not to take him back there, at least not yet.

He also gives some vague exposition about how he's on some kind of journey which is somehow connected to the mutation in his body. Cool.

Sometime later, after spending nearly two months on board (this episode takes place over a strangely long time period) JD's strange energy emissions (remember those?) increase to the point where he's worried that they could hurt those around him - which would make more sense if we'd seen him bonding with anyone other than Dr Crusher - and he tries to flee the ship, accidentally injuring Worf in the process.

These yellow shirts are really getting the short end of the stick when it comes to deaths, aren't they?

No, of course Worf isn't dead. Well, he is for a few seconds, but JD brings him back. So it technically still counts.

Picard naturally wants an explanation, but JD (and probably the writers) just repeats what we already know. Thrilling.

Now, for the past few hours, the Enterprise has been followed by another ship which now hails them. They're of the same species as JD - called the Zalkonians, which sounds like it's from a bad episode of Doctor Who - and inform Picard that JD is actually a dangerous criminal who needs to be turned over immediately, but refuse to elaborate further... for some reason.

When Picard tries to negotiate, the Zalkonian captain concludes that JD has corrupted the crew, and somehow creates a field that drains the oxygen from the Enterprise in a matter of seconds, an incredibly deadly weapon which I'm willing to bet we'll never see again.

Hold on, let me check something.

Well, that's longer than I expected. We learned something today.

JD is of course unaffected, and by touching a panel he somehow spreads his power across the ship and restores the oxygen supply. Now, I've put up with a lot of treknobabble bullshit over the past three seasons, but there's bullshit and then there's horseshit. It's a very important difference.

Dr Crusher and JD head to the bridge, transporting the Zalkonian captain over to the Enterprise so they don't have to build another set. Although the captain (whose name is apparently Sunad, played by Charles Dennis) continues to insist that JD is a danger to society, JD finally explains the truth, because he's conveniently regained his memory now:

Basically the Zalkonians are about to undergo a massive evolutionary change, but the government was afraid of something they couldn't understand or control, they called the changes "evil" and had anyone showing such changes executed.

It's obvious that Star Trek has always been political, but after watching an episode like this, I can safely say that it's never been subtle with its commentary either. Fortunately it's not exactly targeted towards anything specific, so it gets a pass.

Plus my favourite episode of the last season and its debate about human rights can be applied to all kinds of issues, so it's not like I have any right to complain.

Anyhoo, JD fled with three of his friends to let the changes run their course, but he was the only survivor when the Enterprise crew found him. What an interesting reveal that the writers definitely had in mind when they started writing the script.

Suddenly the metamorphosis enters its final stage, and JD evolves into a morph suit with a glowing filter over it. Or maybe he's about to defuse. Who knows?

JD sounds (and before they ran out of money, was probably supposed to look) like a biblically-accurate angel as he tells Sunad not to be afraid, and that there's nothing stopping him from telling the other Zalkonians the truth about what's happening to them. Picard expresses his gratitude to JD (who is never given a proper name, so I can keep calling him that) for letting him witness the birth of a new species, JD bids goodbye to Dr Crusher and flies off into space. He must go now, for his planet needs him.

So the guy dressed all in white is persecuted for his beliefs, is thought to be dead but actually undergoes a change into a higher life form which ends with him ascending upwards to spread the good word?

Well, I've got egg on my face.

Overall, it's a nice little story with a likable guest star, but it isn't really anything to write home about. Though I admit it isn't quite as forgettable as I implied at the beginning.

6/10 - It's okay.