#andre bormanis

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Snapshots from Episode 11 of The D-Con Chamber - The Best of Season 1

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Dominic Keating and the F-Bomb Plushie 💣

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[weerd1]

ENT Rewatch Starlog, 15 January, 2024: Episode 3.03 “Extinction”

A humanoid alien is pursued through a jungle by other humanoids in environmental protection suits. He almost makes it to a shuttle before they surround him and incinerate him with flamethrowers. 

Trip goes to T’Pol’s quarters having missed two neuro-pressure sessions. He offers her some of his Georgia peaches he stocked up on before leaving Earth, and insists she try one.

They are interrupted when Archer calls T’Pol to the situation room.  He’s been reviewing the Xindi database and has discovered a third Xindi species, the Arboreals. He also has found a nearby uninhabited planet which the Xindi have visited in the last few weeks.

Archer, T’Pol, Hoshi Sato, and Malcolm Reed head to the surface where they find the Xindi landing craft and an incinerated body; the body is NOT reading as Xindi, and shortly, neither are Archer, Reed, or Sato. They have mutated into the same type of humanoid incinerated by the hunters. T’Pol has started to transform, but only suffers some minor physical changes and is still aware of who she it. The other three believe themselves to be a different species, and want to find what they believe to be their city, Urquat. 

Phlox figures out some of what’s going on from orbit, and Tucker takes a shuttlepod down to recover the crew they believe have been altered by the Expanse somehow. After a struggle, they get Reed back to the ship, but T’Pol stays to try and care for Archer and Sato as much as she can. Phlox studies Reed and realizes it is a virus that has rewritten his physiognomy, and that T’Pol’s Vulcan biology should make her immune. They need her DNA to synthesize a cure. Trip remembers the peach she took a bite of, and with that saliva, Phlox goes to work.

Another ship approaches and warns Enterprise that they’ve been fighting this virus for six decades and the only cure is eradication. They intend to kill everyone exposed. Tucker manages to convince them T’Pol is immune, so the aliens send a team to the surface to capture her but still burn Archer and Sato. Meanwhile, Primal-Archer has found the city Urquat which is now just rubble. The virus was designed as the only way to propagate a species that was otherwise facing extinction. The kill team finds them, but Tucker and a MACO risk the transporter to intercept them and get the crew back to Enterprise.

The ship flees, pursued by the alien guardians, but a recovering Archer and Hoshi are able to convince them there is a cure. They share it with the guardians.

As they are healing, Phlox says he will destroy the samples of the virus. Archer stops him, mentioning that they came into the Expanse to save their species, and that virus is all that’s left of another one; he won’t be party to destroying them. Phlox puts the sample in stasis.

I didn’t realize how hated this episode apparently is. To me, it’s perhaps a little hokey in places, but is a fine retelling of a repeated Trek trope. This calls back to Geordie on TNG being altered into another race in “Identity Crisis” (making it fitting that Levar Burton, saying he’s “ashamed” of “Extinction” or not, directed this episode). There are aspects of “Genesis” from TNG with the reversed evolution to a more primal state, or even “Masks” with what’s left of a now extinct civilization trying to preserve itself.  Both of those are of course Brannon Braga episodes of TNG, but this one was written by science advisor Andre Bormanis. I’m willing to say though that this theme reaches back to the Original Series episode “All Our Yesterdays,” where Spock, thrown 5000 years into the past, begins to lose the civilized tendencies of Vulcans because they were savage then; does it make a lot of sense? Know, but can make for fun performances and that’s what I feel we get here. What’s not to love about Primal-Archer and Primal-Reed fighting over who gets to eat a giant egg filled with grub worms? (In the end they shared, kind of sweet.)

Archer’s decision NOT to destroy the virus because maybe someday the species that made it CAN live again is a pretty great step for a man who almost put someone out an airlock the episode before. A nice reminder that despite the dire situation, the point of Star Trek is that even then the better nature of Humanity CAN exist, and indeed should. Star Trek in that way is always relevant. 

Next Voyage: The NX-01 crew faces what in espionage terms is referred to as the “honey pot” in “Rajiin.

(Images taken from the main website for @trekcore; I am happy to remove the images if asked.)

[giffingthingsss]

Condensed Commentary: Countdown

Chris Black & Andre Bormanis

[starplusfourletters]

Me when the orville tries to do the borg, the death star, and picard s1 all in the same episode: OKAY WHO FORGOT TO FEED THE WRITERS

[checks byline] oh. Brannon Braga & Andre Bormanis. I withdraw my previous question

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Brannon Braga’s comments were actually so much worse than I expected:

"It was my feeling that Seven Of Nine should have died. If you watch the episode ‘Human Error’ written by Andre Bormanis, it was not only a heart breaking episode in that Seven Of Nine learns, as she begins to explore her human emotions, that she can’t experience them. There’s a Borg chip inside her that will kill her if she tries to do so. First of all, that’s kind of an interesting ‘rape victim’ analogy or whatever you want to call it, about a damaged woman who can’t get past what happened to her, but I also always saw it as a crucial episode that would set up the finale.

"This was a woman who knew she was neither here nor there. She couldn’t go back to the Borg, nor would she want to, but she could never be fully human, so she was doomed. And I wanted to have her sacrifice herself to get her shipmates home."

Observation: In Voyager Seven's romantic storylines are heavily associated with becoming more human and less borg. Dating is framed as a necessary part of her human journey FROM something TO something else and, let's be honest, as a necessary part of her being a woman too.

Observation 2: In Picard, her romantic association with Raffi is reaffirmed after she accepts the Borg parts of herself. This romance is not framed as an end goal or a part of a transformation. Instead it rests on the idea that Seven can only open up to someone else when she accepts that she is both Borg and human.

That a huge difference there is in those two approaches and what a difference it makes to a character's journey.

[cultfaction]

The Orville Season 3 Ep. 3: Mortality Paradox

The Orville Season 3 Ep. 3: Mortality Paradox

This week’s episode begins with Lieutenant Talla Keyali (Jessica Szohr) returning from shore leave as the crew receive a strange signal from the planet named Narran 1 which was always believed to be uninhabitable. They travel to the planet to investigate the signal. Upon arrival, the away mission team of Captain Ed Mercer (Seth MacFarlane), Commander Kelly Grayson (Adrianne Palicki), Lieutenant…

[dominickeating-source]

The Best of Season 1 | The D-Con Chamber - Ep. 12

Here we are, folks! Our first season under our belts - can you believe it?! What an unbelievable journey we've had bringing this show to life. From the laughs to the secrets shared, thank you for joining alongside us as we've had the privilege to dive deep and learn some interesting details about the lives of our first seasons' guests.

[speedygal]

Midnight Blue. The Orville. 1 hour and 27 minutes. Dir. Jon Cassar. Written by. Brannon Braga & Andre Bormanis.

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The Orville proves it’s one of the best sci-fi shows on TV with S2 finale

Enlarge / The crew of the USS Orville stands ready for new adventures in season 2 of The Orville. (credit: Fox Broadcasting)

Fox's sci-fi series The Orville closed out a terrific second season with an ambitious finale that showcased all the elements that make this such an intellectually and emotionally satisfying show.

(Some spoilers below.)

Season 1 of The Orville admittedly had a rocky start, at least in terms of critical reception, garnering just a 19 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it debuted. Viewers begged to differ: they gave the freshman series a 91 percent favorable rating, won over by its skillful mix of humor and drama. That's a tough balance to pull off, but The Orville succeeds admirably. Season 2 won even more fans. This is a smart series that combines humor and witty dialogue with cutting-edge science, ethical musings, the occasional literary reference, and genuine heart. (For more on the science behind the series, see our interview with writer/producer Andre Bormanis.)

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The Orville proves it’s one of the best sci-fi shows on TV with S2 finale published first on https://medium.com/@HDDMagReview

[techbotic]

The Orville proves it’s one of the best sci-fi shows on TV with S2 finale

Enlarge / The crew of the USS Orville stands ready for new adventures in season 2 of The Orville. (credit: Fox Broadcasting)

Fox's sci-fi series The Orville closed out a terrific second season with an ambitious finale that showcased all the elements that make this such an intellectually and emotionally satisfying show.

(Some spoilers below.)

Season 1 of The Orville admittedly had a rocky start, at least in terms of critical reception, garnering just a 19 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it debuted. Viewers begged to differ: they gave the freshman series a 91 percent favorable rating, won over by its skillful mix of humor and drama. That's a tough balance to pull off, but The Orville succeeds admirably. Season 2 won even more fans. This is a smart series that combines humor and witty dialogue with cutting-edge science, ethical musings, the occasional literary reference, and genuine heart. (For more on the science behind the series, see our interview with writer/producer Andre Bormanis.)

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Orville proves it’s one of the best sci-fi shows on TV with S2 finale published first on https://medium.com/@CPUCHamp

[scootoaster]

How the writers of Cosmos bring science to life

Cosmos: Possible Worlds finds hope for humanity’s future in stories from its past. (Cosmos Studios/)

Since 1980s, the television show Cosmos has woven together threads from physics, astronomy, neuroscience, ecology, and other fields while teaching and entertaining along the way. It’s a daunting challenge, but one that the show’s writer and executive producer, Ann Druyan, relishes.

She’s been deeply involved in the program since its original incarnation, Cosmos: A Personal Voyager, which she co-wrote with her husband, the late physicist Carl Sagan. In the show’s third installment, which will air on March 9 on National Geographic, Druyan expands on the lessons and themes of its forerunners. She hopes that the new season—entitled Cosmos: Possible Worlds—will inspire viewers to work toward an improved future by highlighting scientific progress from the past.

Druyan and her co-writer and director Brannon Braga recently sat down with Popular Science to explain how they turn scientific discoveries into binge-worthy entertainment. The following interview has been edited for length and contains mild spoilers.

With science being so vast and deep, how do you pick the topics for each episode?

Druyan: I've always believed that we're a story driven species. Over the intervening years between seasons we go out hunting for science stories that work on many different levels, which is important to make them accessible to everyone. I'm not a scientist and I know if I don’t understand something most other people won’t either and that's no fun.

During our research, for example, I found a story of a man named Oleksandr Shargei. His life was one of relentless persecution and disappointment, and yet he had an epiphany in a WW1 trench about a practical way of landing on the moon—not a direct surface-to-surface flight, but the idea of a lunar orbiter. And the amazing thing is, in the midst of his suffering, he had the foresight to address future lunar astronauts in his writing. “Be not afraid,” he urged them, “there is no technical obstacle to accomplishing this.”

To me that's a multiple-level story. It has a brilliant guy you’ve never heard of, an inspired idea, perseverance in the face of terrible obstacles, and a deep contribution to humanity’s scientific endeavors. Sometimes your dreams die with you, and sometimes other people pick them up and take them the moon. That's Cosmos.

Cosmos is known for waxing poetic about life and the universe. What’s the writing process like?

Druyan: Cosmos is completely scripted. In fact the only ad lib in the entire history of the series was with Carl and the apple pie sequence in season one. [“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,” he quipped, “you must first invent the universe.”]

After we gather all our stories, Brannon and I sit in a room together for a year or two writing, refining, and bouncing stuff off each other. It’s so much fun. When we’re really happy with our scripts, we involve this immense family of literally 987 people. We counted. This is a huge undertaking. Then we might go through forty or fifty iterations of an effects shot before we’re all completely satisfied. Finally, [astrophysicist and narrator] Neil deGrasse Tyson comes in and says the words that we wrote.

How has the show’s recent reincarnations evolved from the original Cosmos?

Braga: The effects. Even since 2014 [when the second season aired], the quality and the amount of visual effects we can do has improved. Just watching the trailer with Ann, I was thinking, “Wow, this looks better than Star Wars. And it’s real!”

Dryuan: Our Visual Effects Supervisor, Jeff Okun, really did the impossible. Brannon and I had these dreams of what we would see but he and his team really exceeded our wildest expectations.

You mix live footage with computer simulations, animation, and even stop-motion photography. What’s the significance of using these different mediums?

Dryuan: I have wanted to tell the story of Nikolai Vavilov [a Russian botanist] for over 20 years. I fell in love with this guy and his amazing story, as well as that of his colleagues and their astonishing willingness to pay the greatest possible price for our future. Brannon and I were both so taken by this notion. If only we cared about our future as much as they did.

I love all the 2D animation sequences, but I have to say that there was a particular humanity and drama in Vavilov’s life, and somehow the stop motion gives it almost an otherworldly feeling. There’s just so many ways to show things. We want to walk on so many different legs, because we're depicting not just the physical universe but also these islands of perception of the other forms of consciousness on this planet. One 2D animation sequence represents a bee's point of view, for instance. I think that's another very effective tool.

Braga: And a lot of the time in the show’s conceptual stages, we have to decide how we’re going to show something. We cover everything from bee funerals to quantum mechanics, so we’re lucky to have so many visual mediums at out fingertips and so many talented people.

Speaking of visual effects, you highlight black hole mergers and planet formation, which are both active areas of research right now. How do you make sure you stay accurate and on top of the latest science?

Dryuan: We’re very lucky to have Andre Bormanis [the science consultant for various seasons of Star Trek] as our science monitor. We also had a dozen scientists advising us and checking the scripts. We all make mistakes, but the idea is to have a lot of redundancy. We were always going for verisimilitude. Nature is more beautiful than anything we can invent.

Brannon mentioned that beehive scene, for instance. When a bee is dying, it will secrete a micron of a particular substance as a signal, and immediately the other bees know to act as pallbearers and carry it out of the hive before it becomes a threat. In order to get a shot of this process, Bannon had to find the absolutely best bee cinematographer on the face of the Earth, and he was able to recreate the scene with this perfectly healthy bee kicking and screaming while the other bees carry it out. We try to get the science right and we go to great lengths to do that.

You film on location all across the globe. How do you view the role of place and geography in your storytelling?

Dryuan: In order to inspire people to wake up from their stupor and act in defense of the planet and its many inhabitants, I think it’s important to convey the diversity of locations and conditions on this planet. We've looked at a few other planets, and they’re not as interesting and this one! It's so rich in diversity because that's what life does. It reworks the sky. It reworks the surface. And we wanted to pay tribute to that as often as we can.

In the present environmental circumstances that we find ourselves in, there’s this darkness casting a long shadow over our future. But we believe humanity has what it takes to bring about a great future, and that’s what wanted to depict in Cosmos. Because we believe in that future, not in a pie in the sky way but in a real way, based on our long history of scientific progress and discovery. We have what it takes to get there.

Cosmos: Possible Worlds premiers March 9 on National Geographic, and you can check out a trailer for the show here.

[multiprises]

« Today marks the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one… There is life on Mars. »

Crossroads, Mars, 1.06

Everardo Gout (D), Paul Solet & Andre Bormanis (S), 18/12/16

[lyricsoffreedom]

André Bormanis Star Trek science consultant