#elementary podcast

[frenchtoastcomix]

The Abbott Elementary/War on Cars Super Bowl crossover that nobody asked for, based on a conversation at my job

[qpr-competition]

WELCOME TO THE QPR COMPETITION

the matchups in round 1 are as follows

part 1:

Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens vs Peri Dubois and Abel Moreau from Entropic Float

Sonic and Shadow from Sonic the Hedgehog vs Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes from Elementary

Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus from The Locked Tomb series vs Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist

John Watson and Sherlock Holmes from ACD's collection of stories vs c!Ranboo and c!Tubbo from Dream SMP

Arthur Lester and John Doe from Malevolent podcast vs Polly and Yaretzi from Hello From The Hallowoods

Abed Nadir and Troy Barnes from Community vs ART and Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries

Team Rocket from Pokémon vs Mane 6 Ensemble from My Little Pony

Timothy Stoker and Sasha James from The Magnus Archives vs The Doctor and The Master from Doctor Who

part 2:

Jesse Cosay and Lake from Infinity Train vs Joe Tazuna and Sara Chidouin from Your Turn To Die

Miles Edgeworth and Phoenix Wright from Ace Attorney vs Kris and Susie from Deltarune

Oscar Wilde and Zolf Smith from Rusty Quill Gaming vs Mollymauk Tealeaf and Yasha Nydoorin from Critical Role

Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from Lord Of The Rings vs Loid Forger and Yor Forger from Spy X Family

Hunter and Willow Park from The Owl House vs Arepo and God Of Arepo from Tumblr Folktales

Sakuko Kodama and Satoru Takahashi from Koisenu Futari | Two People Who Can't Fall In Love vs Compton Boole and Cassie O'Pia from Psychonauts

Lapis Lazuli and Peridot from Steven Universe vs Kazuki Kurusu and Rei Suwa from Buddy Daddies

Nepeta Leijon and Equius Zahhak from Homestuck vs The Scooby Gang from Scooby-Doo

see you at 6 pm GMT 17th February for the first half of the first round!

[bestqprshipbracket]

Best QPR Ship Group 3 Round 3

[old-skyguy]

Creepypastas and their TMA alignments, I think.

Jane-the hunt

Jeff-the slaughter

BEN-the spiral/the vast (need to draw this because he's my favorite and I just know this would look sick as hell) maybe the web because of the whole ARG.

Nina-the corruption

Eyeless Jack- the flesh/the dark

Toby- the desolation/the buried

Clockwork -the end

Slenderman- the eye(ran out of ideas)

Laughing Jack- the stranger

The Lonely isn't included because I feel like that applies to most of them.

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Katherine Pulaski

By Ames

We may have only had Dr. Pulaski for one season of The Next Generation, but that didn’t stop her from leaving an impression. Your hosts here at A Star to Steer Her By are big fans of her character and also of Diana Muldaur’s performance of the cantankerous and brilliant doctor who graced the Enterprise-D’s sickbay during Dr. Crusher’s time away from the ship (more on her next week!). She even made a couple of our top characters lists from TNG!

There’s a lot of negative feelings about the McCoy knockoff in the Star Trek community, and we’ll cover some of those below, but overall we have to give credit to the good doctor for how much she grew in only the twenty episodes we had her. By the end of season two, she was viewing Data as a peer, saving lives left and right, and fighting for the rights of other species. There’s no telling how much better she’d get if she stuck around. So raise a cup of Klingon tea to the best CMO of the Enterprise (I said it!) with our highlights below and elaborated upon in this week’s podcast episode (timestamp for this one is 58:29). Fight us, haters.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Crammed full of crumpets We’ve made a running gag on the podcast about how Professor Moriarty stuffed the doctor full of crumpets in “Elementary, Dear Data” but there’s more to this episode than crude jokes and blue humor. Pulaski ran with the Holmesian scenario in the holodeck, proved to be stalwart and brave in a hostage situation, and totally rocked the period attire!

At least someone still remembers quarantine procedures While the whole thing did backfire on her, Pulaski’s actions in “Unnatural Selection” kept the rest of the crew safe. She was willing to risk her own health on her hunch that the augmented children weren’t carrying any pathogens, but let’s give her credit for taking the child and Data out in a shuttle so that, if (and when) things went wrong, things were contained.

Knives and bearskins! When the biobeds are on the fritz due to the contagion in “Contagion” and her staff is whining that the bone knitter isn’t working, Pulaski pulls some tried and true methods out of her back pocket – make a splint! It may be archaic medical technology, but it’ll do in a pinch and having that kind of medical knowledge saves the day (or saves someone’s leg at least).

Generous doses of PCS I just really love the sweet little moment during “The Icarus Factor” when Dr. Pulaski is tending to some crewmember suffering from the flu and says part of her prescription is PCS – Pulaski’s Chicken Soup. It shows how much she cares about her patients and gives the audience that warm feeling of having someone care for you when you’re home sick from school.

Jettison the emotional baggage you’re still carrying around Also I have to give my girl some props later in “The Icarus Factor” when she’s flirting with Kyle Riker right in front of Will. We find it a nice character inclusion that she and Kyle used to be down to clown, and even that she would have married him in a heartbeat, and she tells his son off in the most “oh no she didn’t!” way and then proceeds to drop like fifty mics all over Ten Forward.

Take your Prime Directive and shove it up your hatch! We on this podcast (who am I kidding; it’s mostly Chris) have a certain skepticism about the Prime Directive sometimes, and it’s usually the CMOs of their respective shows that get to question it most blatantly. Pulaski sure does in “Pen Pals” because screw the prime directive in this case! When a whole planet is on the line, Pulaski is the conscience that we all need!

Forget me, forget me not This is one that could have gone in either the Top Moments or the Worst Moments list because, face it, mind wipes are horrifying. But I’m gonna give Pulaski the win for erasing Sarjenka’s memories in “Pen Pals” because it’s impressive as hell. And she uses it to kinda-sorta stay within the Prime Directive that we just shat on. Plus she let Sarjenka keep the singing rock!

You’re still the Captain. Invincible. I’m still not certain what Chris was getting at about Pulaski’s letting Picard avoid the heart treatment he’s been neglecting out of sheer vanity in “Samaritan Snare,” but I’ll do you one better: she winds up fixing his stupid ticker for him in the end anyway! And is the grouchy little man thankful afterwards? Not even a little bit! Pulaski gets no respect, I tells ya!

Quote me a little of that poetry While you’ll see in just a moment that Pulaski’s views on Klingons were initially unkind, by “Up the Long Ladder,” she’d bonded with Worf enough that she was willing to engage in some Klingon rituals. She goes out of her way to concoct an antidote so she can take part in a poisonous tea ceremony with him, which is above and beyond (and also fuels some shipping), and she also keeps Worf’s measles a secret!

Bust him up, Data! In “Peak Performance,” it’s Pulaski who sets up the Strategema match between Data and Sirna Kolrami, and she ends up feeling really bad for goading him when he loses to that smug Zakdorn prick. So it’s that much sweeter that she’s there cheering him on when Data thinks outside the box causes the stalemate, telling him that in that way, he did indeed beat him!

Feelings of warmth and friendship What a shame that the last episode we got with this amazing character was one of the most infamously bad. But none of that is on Pulaski because she’s actually on full display in “Shades of Grey,” partly because she’s one of few characters in the non-clipshow scenes. But she (and Troi, as I brought up last week) pulled out all the stops to save Riker’s brain from certain doom.

Pull your head out of your ass! Okay, this last one’s not canon, but I just couldn’t help including this plug to go read Caitlin’s fanfic “The Pulaski Maneuver”!!! Or listen to it on the podcast back when we wrapped TNG with our episode “Tales from the Holodeck.” Pulaski finally telling Geordi everything that he’s deserved to hear might be my favorite moment, and it’s so in her character that I say it counts!

—

Worst moments

The cold hand of technology Most of Pulaski’s negative personality traits are going to circle around her treatment of Data as a piece of equipment and not an individual. In her introduction episode, “The Child,” one of her early interactions with Data is to tell him he’s not wanted in the delivery room because he lacks the human touch. Lucky for us, Troi sticks up for him and he gets to watch her whelp an alien baby.

One is my name; the other is not Shortly afterwards, still in “The Child,” we get one of the fandom’s most hated moments from Pulaski when she not only mispronounces Data’s name, but doesn’t seem to understand that doing so is rude and problematic, instead deciding to put the onus on him for being capable of offense. It’s a tough moment for fans to accept, and if that were the level of bigotry her character stayed at, I’d understand why so many Trekkies dislike the character.

I’m not accustomed to working with non-living devices More growing pains come from Pulaski in “Where Silence Has Lease,” in which she refers to Data as “it” and Picard has to gently correct her. We’re two episodes into the season at this point, and Pulaski is still finding it difficult to accept the personhood of this fan-favorite character, something viewers pretty much got on board with in episode one. At least she apologized.

The mystery of the lack of any mystery Here we are, three episodes in when we reach “Elementary, Dear Data” and we see more of Pulaski judging Data for being incapable of thinking creatively when he solves Holmesian riddles. We may have blamed Geordi for accidentally creating Moriarty when we covered his character spotlight, but it was definitely Pulaski who goaded them on in the first place.

Medical research is sometimes a risky business While we may have praised her above for not putting everyone else at risk when she released the augmented child from his wrapper in “Unnatural Selection,” Pulaski was still dead wrong about the experiment being at all safe. She still got contaminated by the fast-aging disease and was resigned to her fate until Picard and O’Brien were able to transport her back. Speaking of which…

I’m a doctor, not an original character One rather understandable complaint we can see in the Pulaski character is that she’s just Dr. McCoy in a skirt. Which may not be a bad thing, per se, but when we see her racism against the outsider character, her Bones-like irascibility, and even her specific fear of transporters in “Unnatural Selection,” we start to wonder if the writers couldn’t have been a little more original.

I’m just glad that humans have progressed beyond the need for barbaric display We get a couple glimpses that Pulaski is a little repulsed by Klingon culture throughout the show. First, in “A Matter of Honor,” she’s grossed out by Klingon cuisine and calls Klingons barbaric, and not in the way Klingons would probably like. And she also gets a little smug after watching Worf’s Age of Ascension ceremony in “The Icarus Factor,” which she seemed pretty judgey about (but hey, at least she went!).

Quit cloning around! We gave Riker some guff for this as well in his character spotlight, and there’s enough guff to go around to give to Pulaski as well for their actions in “Up the Long Ladder.” Sure, the clones were made of them without their consent, but to take matters into their own hands and murder these people without discussion is not the Starfleet way.

Never to be heard from again… Obviously the worst character moment for us is Pulaski leaving the show after just one season. Notice how most of the bad moments come from earlier and the good moments are mostly from the latter half of the season. That shows how much the character was getting better, even in the rough first couple seasons of the show (you’ve heard our coverage of Chaos on the Bridge, right?). And while many celebrate the return of Crusher, we still have to wonder what the show would be like with more Dr. Pulaski.

—

And just like that, she’s gone and so is this blogpost. Keep following along because we’ve got another doctor of the Enterprise-D to discuss next week, and it’s not Selar! We also hope you’re making the schlep through Enterprise with us as we cover the whole thing over on SoundCloud or your podcast platform of choice. Wave your medical tricorders over our Facebook and Twitter pages, and get the pronunciation right: It’s Data, not Data!

[mothershewrote]

It's MOTHER Monday! There's a new town to discover & a new friend to meet! Lloyd joins Ninten in his battle against the alien menace while Cat and Jess ponder puzzling evidence of further pop culture connections.

Listen & subscribe to "MOTHER," She Wrote!

[bookgeekgrrl]

My media this week (6-12 Oct 2024)

clyde you were the mvp of this entire series

📚 STUFF I READ 📚

🥰 Every Door Opens (notoska) - Part 1 of We Made Ourselves - 74K, post WS angsty slow burn getting together fic - very delicious

🥰 Melt Into, Melt Until (notoska) - Part 2 of We Made Ourselves - 79K, stucky, post-getting together, lots & lots of slooooooow sex (positive) (very positive)

🥰 The Blood Contract (ikft) - 75K, Suits vampire AU - author's description: "What if we did Suits but half the characters were vampires for no discernible reason? What if that ended up changing very little … Because nothing screams satire like a bunch of lawyers who are also vampires." - great worldbuilding. first in a series but does stand alone

😍 A Man Takes His Sadness Down to the River (The Consolation of Philosophy) series - parts 1-3 (dorian_burberrycanary) - first 3 fics in a series of 4 works (40K out of 151K total) - a marvelous stucky post-EG/TFATWS fix it (knowledge of TFATWS canon not required)

💖💖 +136K of shorter fic so shout out to these I really loved 💖💖

Unorthodox (LearnedFoot) - Suits: Mike/Harvey, 6K - enjoyable alt-meeting AU

Something Else When I See You (emchant3d) - MCU: shrunkyclunks, 5K - 🔥🔥🔥

Normal (LearnedFoot) - Suits: Mike/Harvey, 9K - amnesia fic just never gets old!

Bon Voyage (spqr) - Doctor Odyssey: Max/Avery/Tristan, 11K - been fervently hoping someone would write this OT3 since ep 1 aired. Truly blessed this writer (one of my faves) took it on.

📺 STUFF I WATCHED 📺

In Deep: Life at the Bottom of the Ocean With Dr. Sarah McAnulty - Session 4

Dr. Odyssey - s1, e3

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - s1, e1-2

The Sam Sanders Show - Sasheer Zamata on Queerness, Witches, and Disney

Handsome - Drew Barrymore asks about bats in caves

Handsome - Pretty Little Episode #8

The Sam Sanders Show - Monét X Change: Drag, Politics, and Opera

Dirty Laundry - s4, e5

Gastronauts - s1, e1

Elementary - s2, e9-19

🎧 PODCASTS 🎧

Pop Culture Happy Hour - A Different Man

Code Switch - Ask Code Switch: Is it a preference or fetish?

Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me! - Dear Wait Wait: How do I keep my kid from biting people?

Vibe Check - The Vibe Coven

The Sporkful - How Cascatelli Ended Up In A German Museum

Pop Culture Happy Hour - SNL, Late Night, And The Election

⭐ Pop Culture Happy Hour - Pop Culture Pumpkin Spice Lattes: Basic But We Love It

Death, Sex & Money - Bonus: Two Sex Columnists on Tapping into Turn-Ons

Pop Culture Happy Hour - Saturday Night And What's Making Us Happy

Dear Prudence - I Spread A Rumor That Alienated My Friends and Mentor. Help!

Dear Prudence - Prudie Plus: My Partner is Kind, Generous…and a Trump Voter. Help!

It's Been a Minute - Is the free speech debate dead? Plus, the devil! Smart Podcast, Trashy Books - 636. Swordcrossed Cozy Romantasy with Freya Marske

⭐ Today, Explained - Pennies don’t make cents

99% Invisible - Christiania

Ologies - Momiology (MUMMIFICATION) with Kara Cooney & Salima Ikram

Re: Dracula - October 11: Freedom of Soul

Sibling Rivalry - The One About Diddy

It's Been a Minute - The SMACKDOWN: Techno vs. Aaliyah vs. Motown

🎶 MUSIC 🎶

Juliana Hatfield covers

[fromalicetobella]

I’ll be having The stone cold canon fact that Ava from Abbott elementary has a below deck podcast called “small deck energy” PLEASE

[notwhelmedyet]

thing's i've been rotating around in my head like a microwave lately: the way native english speakers learn to speak and write english without ever being taught its history

i listen to a podcast on the history of the english language and there were a few episodes rencently-ish on pronunciation (159-161). He explained how voiced vs unvoiced consonants work, how semivowels and approximates work.

SO MANY SPELLING MYSTERIES can be explained by "we froze the spellings after the invention of the printing press, but because pronouncing X is difficult, we shifted to the voiced/unvoiced counterpart of that latter/dropped a syllable". it's like 3rd eye open on how we spell and say things

some consonant sounds are formed by movements of the tongue/mouth to constrict the sound coming out. some are formed by doing that and activating the voicebox. those are unvoiced sounds (no voicebox) and voiced sound (voicebox activated).

f is unvoiced. v is voiced.

why is it wives but a singular wife? well, originally it was wife and wifas (or various other suffixes back when english had a conjugation system like spanish/french/etc). When the suffix became a single s sound it was really hard to say. wifes. try it. it's hard. that's cause all the sounds in that word are voiced except the f and swapping to the unvoiced version for a single sound is hard. so we started saying wives. v is the voiced version of f so the motion of your mouth is exactly the same.

rotating like a microwave y'all

(most of the remaining 75% of spelling mysteries can be explained by:

some pretentious jerk decided to make the spelling look more like its greek/latin roots in the 1500s but we kept pronouncing it the way it's spelled

nobody knew how to pronounce the word so they guessed off the spelling and guessed wrong

gothic script made it hard to read things with lots of u, i, m, n etc next to each other so the scribes fucked with it so they could read the goofy handwriting style

The Great Vowel Shift Strikes Again

this word got adopted after a bunch of spelling shenanigans from a country that doesn't have X rule and we kept the original spelling

someone tried to standardize the spelling system to make things easier and people were like "yeah! great idea" and followed the rule about half the time leading to an even less standardized system)

[otterandterrier]

there are hundreds of shows I could potentially be watching but

I might have just started another TLBD rewatch

[qpr-competition]

WELCOME BACK TO THE QPR COMPETITION

in round two, the matches will be:

Aziraphale and Crowley from Good Omens vs Joan Watson and Sherlock Holmes from Elementary

Riza Hawkeye and Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist vs John Watson and Sherlock Holmes from ACD's collection of stories

Arthur Lester and John Doe from Malevolent podcast vs Abed Nadir and Troy Barnes from Community

Team Rocket from Pokemon vs Timothy Stoker and Sasha James from The Magnus Archives

Jesse Cosay and Lake from Infinity Train vs Kris and Susie from Deltarune

Mollymauk Tealeaf and Yasha Nydoorin from Critical Role vs Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee from Lord Of The Rings

Hunter and Willow Park from The Owl House vs Sakuko Kodama and Satoru Takahashi from Koisenu Futari | Two People Who Can't Fall In Love

Lapis Lazuli and Peridot from Steven Universe vs The Scooby Gang from Scooby-Doo

i will be starting the next round tomorrow, on 9 am GMT!

[icklewolfiekins]

hey do u guys feel a new hyperfixation coming on and are just like powerless to stop it or are you normal

[awardswatcherik]

AwardsWatch Podcast Ep. 226: 2024 Emmys Preview and Predictions

Although the Emmy Awards were just earlier this year in January due to the SAG-AFTRA strike in summer and fall of 2023, we’re back into the Emmy season once again as April and May find networks and streamers cramming content under the wire to hit the May 31 deadline. On episode 226 of The AwardsWatch Podcast, Editor-In-Chief Erik Anderson and TV Editor Tyler Doster break down the top categories…

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Geordi La Forge

By Ames

Our tour through the Enterprise-D wouldn’t be complete without a dive under the door to engineering, so join A Star to Steer Her By for this week’s character spotlight as we take a look through Geordi La Forge’s schematics. There’s a lot to love about The Next Generation’s chief engineer, probably the greatest being the portrayal by film and television legend LeVar Burton. In any other actor’s hands, Geordi just wouldn’t be Geordi.

But sometimes, Geordi can really just be way too Geordi, as you’ll see as you read on below for our best and worst La Forge moments! Let’s just say, he’s a character who makes remarkable friendships throughout the show, and he really should leave all his relationships at that. You can also adjust your VISOR frequency to our corresponding banter over on this week’s podcast episode (discussion at 1:17:39). Now get ready to tuck and roll!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Prepare to initiate separation sequence When La Forge is left briefly in charge of the ship in “The Arsenal of Freedom,” he is almost immediately put to the test by the planet’s defense system, and he keeps his cool even while receiving constant backtalk from Logan. It’s one of few instances we see the saucer separate as well, allowing Geordi to make use of the battle bridge to save the day!

Elementary, my dear La Forge One of the highlights of all of Next Gen is watching the friendship between Data and Geordi take shape and grow, and early on we get some great moments of them playing Holmes and Watson together on the holodeck in “Elementary, Dear Data,” which is undoubtedly sweet. Extra kudos to La Forge for putting up with Data’s shenanigans when he’s got all the stories memorized too.

Have you tried turning it off and on again? It’s always a joy getting to watch the engineers do their whiz kid stuff, and we get a good taste of that in “Contagion” when Geordi is inspired by Data randomly restarting himself and uses that as a launching point for wiping the Yamato’s records out of the Enterprise as well. It’s Information Technology 101, and he does it so well!

The best piece of engineering we’ll ever need Speaking of great engineering feats, La Forge does it again in “Booby Trap” when he concocts the purely manual solution to get out of the literal booby trap. Because the issue is with the computer, he opts to turn the whole thing off and have Picard pilot through the debris field himself. All you gotta do is ignore some of the weird holo-Leah stuff and it’s quite brilliant!

I will be your eyes Somehow, all of La Forge’s platonic relationships hit some really high marks, and he forms enough of a trust with Bochra in “The Enemy” that the two are able to survive on Galorndon Core. You’d never think humans and Romulans could find common ground before, but when these two find that they need each other, you think there might be hope yet.

Computer, identify the source of this shadow Geordi has another very nice friendship with his old crewmate Susanna Leijton in “Identity Crisis,” but the most impressive part of this episode is the great sleuthing that he does with some video tapes and the holodeck to determine that there was more on planet Tarchannen III than met the eye. In fact, there were otherwise invisible transfigured rave apes!

A blind man who never would have existed in your society Appropriately, we saw Hannah Bates’s actress in our podcast coverage this week in “Two Days and Two Nights,” and that makes it a good time to bring up that Geordi totally schools her biologically engineered ass in “The Masterpiece Society.” He uses his VISOR to save the day, something no one in their colony would ever have because of their ableist views.

BBFF: Best Borg Friends Forever As with his bromance with Bochra, Geordi connects with another unexpected being in “I, Borg.” Indeed, it’s the engineer’s ability to humanize even the least human, most frightening enemies that proves to be one of his best qualities throughout the show. Watching Geordi remind Hugh of his individuality, give him his name, and save him from Picard is the best of La Forge.

Are you saying I'm some blind ghost with clothes? Speaking of forging friendships, La Forge shared a very clever plot with Ro Laren in “The Next Phase,” and it turns out the two of them work together splendidly! Not only do they confront what could easily be interpreted as their deaths, AND find an ingenious way back to the correct phase, but they also foil a nefarious Romulan plot. Oh dear, what would Bochra think?

The Titan’s Turn Boys We picked on Riker the other week for how he acted when Jellico had command of the Enterprise in “Chain of Command.” But you know who took it like a champ and did his damn job? Freakin’ Geordi! He helped Jellico with the solution to their Cardassian problem and even used his friendliness and good nature to get him to involve that whiny Riker to pilot the shuttle.

They see me rollin’, they hatin’ Whenever a chief engineer gets to roll under a slowly closing garage door, you know you’re in for a good time. It happened in “The Best of Both Worlds,” critically one of the best episodes of all of Trek. But an even better roll is in Generations in which Geordi gets a perfect score for the pirouettes and for sticking the landing in a great pose, all while saving his whole engineering crew!

I’ve never seen a sunrise Finally, let’s close out the Best Moments with just a small detail from Insurrection. While we must admit that the rejuvenation storyline on Ba’ku wasn’t terribly well fleshed out, the character who really gets something out of it is Geordi. When his optic nerves have regenerated, he gets to enjoy a sunrise the natural way for the first time, and it’s tragic because he knows it won’t last.

—

Worst moments

This is why you wear PPE Who’s keeping count of how many times “The Naked Now” or “The Naked Time” has come up in these character spotlights? Well, in the case of the TNG spinoff, you can thank La Forge for catching the Psi 2000 virus in the first place by handling a corpse with no protective equipment. And am I the only one it rubs wrong that he spent the episode complaining about being blind?

An adversary capable of defeating Data Here’s another shipwide problem that was basically Geordi’s fault. With his imprecise wording, he effectively made the computer create Moriarty in the holodeck in “Elementary, Dear Data” and we see the repercussions of his mistake throughout both that episode and “Ship in a Bottle,” which I’ve already given Picard some guff about.

Their rubber band broke, right? La Forge starts the abysmal “Samaritan Snare” off on the wrong foot from the word go. He makes fun of the Pakleds pretty much to their faces, which is uncomfortable on its own. But he simultaneously underestimates them, assuming them to just be dopey but affable instead of dopey and malicious. Getting kidnapped by caricatures makes for a pretty rough day.

That’s a Coco No-No! It begins. Why the show decided Geordi had to be weird with women is beyond us, but it starts with his weird date with Christy in “Booby Trap.” He takes it way too personally that she’s not that into him on their date and gripes about it to Guinan afterwards. And that’s not even mentioning the rest of this squicky episode that sets Geordi up as the incel of the franchise.

Hold the Broccoli Despite La Forge generally being a friendly guy and a good boss, the way he treats Barclay when we first meet him in “Hollow Pursuits” is downright shameful. Throwing around the disparaging nickname. Complaining to Picard whenever he has to be in the same room with him. Overall treating him like a leper. Not great boss behavior.

I’m guilty of a terrible crime, Doctor. I offered you friendship. There’s good reason for “Galaxy’s Child” making our Worst Episodes of TNG list, and that’s that it entirely besmirches the character of Geordi La Forge. It��s one thing to get a little action with holo-Leah, but it’s another to expect the real Leah to treat you the same way. And then to turn it around so it’s all her fault? Nothing on our Best Moments list makes up for this railroading of an otherwise good character.

Even in a La Forge post, O’Brien must suffer Geordi just plain wasn’t having a good day in “The Mind’s Eye” and it’s full of bad behavior that can easily be blamed on the brainwashing, but blame we will! Manchurian Candidate’d or not, Geordi La Forge was capable of killing the simulation O’Brien at the command of some Romulans, and later dumping his drink on him in real life… but that’s nothing new to the chief.

A century out of date Okay, so it’s plain and true that Montgomery Scott was entirely underfoot and a bit of a hindrance for the engineering crew in “Relics.” But it’s also so sad to watch our resident miracle worker from The Original Series get treated like an obsolete dunsel. Geordi is prepared to ignore the old engineer until the captain takes him aside with another of his patented Picard pep talks.

I'm starting to feel like I know her If falling for a holodeck version of Leah Brahms wasn’t creepy enough for you, don’t worry, Geordi can go lower. In “Aquiel” he falls for the eponymous character by watching her personal logs, ostensibly for an investigation, but then when he hooks up with the murder suspect when she turns out to still be alive, no one can doubt that he’s taken it too far. Like freakin’ always.

How do you feel? We already saw in our spotlight on Lt. Commander Data that installing the emotion chip in Generations was a bad move. Geordi does promise to his android friend that he’ll remove the thing at the first sign of trouble… which happens at the most inopportune time right as Geordi is busy getting kidnapped by Klingons. This guy. Always getting kidnapped and reprogrammed, he is.

This is the exact spot where your statue’s gonna be One more from the movies, and that’s that Geordi gets to meet one of his heroes in First Contact… and immediately creeps Zefram Cochrane out by fanboying all over him. Word of advice, Gordo: if you’re already messing with the Temporal Prime Directive, maybe don’t start talking about going to Zephram Cochrane High School to the guy.

The Butterfly-in-the-sky Effect We get even more temporal shenanigans when Geordi gets a brief cameo in Voyager’s “Timeless.” Sure, LeVar was also busy directing this one so it’s a no-brainer to pop up on a viewscreen while he’s on set, but it also just feels weird for one of our past heroes to be the one browbeating our current heroes to stop their super cool time adventure. What a Herbert.

—

Well, our beach violinist has absconded and our Coco-no-nos have run dry, so we’ll wrap things up here. We’re wrapping season one of Enterprise over on the watchthrough on SoundCloud next week, so get ready for us to tear our hair out trying to think of highlights from that before we’re back on course with more TNG character profiles. So keep your VISOR pointed here, stay in the friendzone with us over on Facebook and Twitter, and watch the sunset with us over the bay.

[timikaschambers]

Healing from the Inside Out Series #6: Tradition

Hi there! It’s common to continue traditional beliefs and behaviors because others have done it before us. We may feel obligated to fill someone else’s shoes and guilty if we don’t measure up. But, my mother often told us (and still does) that “Just because someone else did it, doesn’t mean you have to.” She also encouraged us to “Create the family you want.”  Our earthly journey is one of…