#isn't that a premise of a tng episode actually??

[thegeminisage]

tng update time, brief because i am BUSY. two nights ago we caught "contagion" together, yesterday i watched "the royale" on my own, and just now i finished "time squared."

contagion: don't know why this one was recced by so amny people because it was VERY boring. because it had romulans in it? it's not even unwatchably bad or anything, i just...didn't care

did like that the romulan commander was a woman though. just like the enterprise incident. where's spock when you need him

the archaeology angle was stupid. "oooh i have to go i've been studying them since i was a lad" you literally do not have to go "well china was thought to be only a myth until marco polo traveled there" bitch, not to the fucking chinese. get a grip.

the fakeout data death...girl we know he's going to be fine! i did like him throwing geordi around though he made the little faces <3 and i was very proud of him for continuing to work when he had a little computer virus. aw. maybe less glad that picard didn't give him any extra priase for doing so but whatever we can't have high expectations for this ep

anyway it was all just very overly contrived. and i was bored.

the royale: this had a great setup because i love when star trek talks about nasa. that made me really excited for what turned out to ultimately be a holodeck episode

played this one on 2x speed genuinely (my deepest dishonor - bad ones get 1.25x, really bad ones get 1.5x, and horrible ones alone get 2x speed)

like, if you changed it a little, you could say the holodeck is broken and won't let you out until you pretend to be investors and win big in the casino! it's the same thing. i guess they didn't want people thinking the holodeck was dangerous and unreliable, which it is

anyway, i liked data blowing on the dice. that was all though

time squared: this one blew my tits clean off. amazing. 10/10. it's like the immunity syndrome, enemy within, and doomsday machine had a time traveling baby

there is like a little bit of time travel technobabble that makes no sense whatsoever. and i did get the final twist spoiled for me. but it doesn't MATTER. neither of those things mattered because i was still sitting there with my jaw on the ground after the end

like, one website called this one confusing. sure yeah a little bit. they were playing very fast and loose with both their own rules established in the episode and the greater rules of the franchise as a whole. but the point is the character arc

like. picard sees himself make a decision that will destroy his ship. he sees himself fail utterly to do everything he holds sacred - he did not even GO DOWN with his ship. he is facing a matt decker doomsday machine of a situation. remember when kirk pitied matt decker because he saw his whole crew die and was helpless to stop it but was also a little put off by him because he couldn't possibly imagine himself in that situation? but with picard IT IS himself. it's green shirt john crichton and black shirt john crichton. they're BOTH the real picard but one of them has been through something unimaginably horrible

AND WHEN THAT PICARD. ENDANGERS THE SHIP. like. IN COLD BLOOD our picard chooses to kill him. and in my personal interpretation he thinks of it as mercy. but like he still shot him while looking directly at him and NO ONE knows what he did because he DIDNT TELL THEM except he called the fucking doctor for some reason

like at the end he's just staring out of a window. and riker is like hi im here to let you talk about it! and picard doesn't talk about it and riker goes away and in the end he is just staring out of the fucking window and they just ROLL CREDITS a real "anyway! these are the voyages of the starship enterprise" of a situation aka what i always loved about tos episodes (honorific)

i THINK this is a cross-section of drag me to hell and there was no laugh track but further contemplation required. straight banger i fucking loved it

i still have to do "the icaurs factor" and "pen pals" alone, but then we get to do "q who" together WHICH IS THE BORG EPISODE i cannot wait. nobody tell me ANYTHING.

[cantsayidont]

The thing I find most perplexing about the PICARD show — and I am going to say upfront here that I have not made any attempt to investigate any of the behind-the-scenes stuff or even paid any particular attention to the writing credits — is that judging by the end product, it really looks like there were significant differences between what was pitched, what was originally written, and what actually ended up on the screen. In fact, it seems like there were at least two, possibly three big changes in direction along the way.

@procrastinatorproject remarked (and I'm going to quote rather than reblog the reblog, to avoid making an unreadably long chain):

They spend a lot of time in the early episodes deconstructing Picard, the Great Captain. They make it abundantly clear that his typical MO of Giving A Great Speech and centering himself and his morality and his worth and self-sacrifice isn't a sustainable, useful way to solve problems. (See: threatening to resign in protest, tearing down the "No Humans" sign on Vashti and acting like he knows how to combat entranched racial divisions in a place he hasn't been to in almost 20 years, etc.) This is made clear repeatedly and I thought it was a really interesting and brave deconstruction of this Great Captain Narrative that we got especially in TNG (with the occasional nuance, yes, but still this at its core). And then they drop the ball on that when in the final episode, Picard saves the day by Making A Great Speech and cerntering himself by offering to sacrifice his life.

I'll go a step further than this: The strong impression I got from the first seven or eight episodes of PICARD S1 is that the first season was likely intended as a miniseries, and that it was originally pitched not simply as a deconstruction of the character, but as "The Death of Jean-Luc Picard." PICARD-era Picard is not a particularly young man even for the 24th century (he's 94 years old), and we're told early on that he's dying of a rare degenerative disease for which there is no cure. His choices have had serious consequences: He's burned bridges with most of his friends and colleagues, his last Grand Gesture was a disaster that cost him the last of his credibility with Starfleet (and destroyed Raffi's career, something the show never really has Picard even acknowledge), and he's isolated himself in bitter disillusionment. His former shipmates are no longer around to help him, and the people he recruits are not nearly so tolerant of his bullshit. The entire premise of the show suggests that this is Picard's last chance and his last ride — and I think probably the final curtain for the TNG cast as well. (The fact that the first season is set in the last year of the 24th century also seems significant in this respect.)

I also suspect that this was what lured Patrick Stewart back to the role; I think they probably told him, "Look, this is going to be Picard's King Lear — it's not going to be just another sci-fi action potboiler, it'll be a big Shakespearean tragedy that will really let you go out with some gravitas." (What actor would say no to that?)

The problem, of course, is that while this is interesting, it makes for a pretty bitter pill for the audience. I've never particularly liked TNG, and my emotional attachment to the characters is limited, but I can't see that this is what most fans would have hoped to see for Picard: He's all alone, sulking on his family estate with his Romulan servants (another pseudo-Shakespearean gesture, I thought, though incongruous for STAR TREK's alleged post-scarcity socialist utopia); Beverly is ominously MIA; he hasn't talked to Will and Deanna in so long he doesn't know they have a 12-year-old daughter (and when he finally goes to see them in Ep. 7, by far the best of the series, Deanna very justifiably reads him for filth); and his relationship with Geordi and Worf is apparently cordial but distant. He's a sour, unhappy old man whom Starfleet Command sees as a self-righteous crank who's outlived any usefulness or relevance. Even without getting into the other ways the story takes Picard apart, that's pretty grim, and when he sets out with the other new characters on what's clearly suggested as his final quest, it's plain that he's probably not going home again.

The way the final episodes of S1 try to dial this back is SO jarring and so unsatisfying that it really doesn't seem like it was the way it was intended to end at all. What it feels like is like someone higher up at CBS came in after the show was already well along in production and said, "Wait, what are you doing? You can't kill off Picard! How are we supposed to have a Season 2? And where are all the other iconic STAR TREK characters?" There's every indication that the finale was hastily rewritten very late in the game, after much of the shooting was either underway or already completed.

So, rather than bringing the tragedy to an organic conclusion, we get an incredibly stupid cop-out finale that's still a downer without even offering a satisfying resolution. It's hard to say which part is more frustrating: Picard's big death scene surrounded by people who barely know him (and who up to that point didn't even like him that much); the incongruous arrival of the Starfleet "cavalry," riding to the rescue in a way we were previously shown (repeatedly!) wasn't going to happen; immediately undoing Picard's death in a very uneasy way (making him a synth, something the rest of the series then has to tiptoe around); or attempting to contrive an emotional climax with Data arguing for his right to die — despite the fact that the character had in fact been dead for 20 years. While we're keeping score, I was also irritated by the way the finale vilified the Romulans; the Romulans' response to the situation was a little heavy-handed, but the thing they were afraid of was very real, and the only reason it was averted was that the synths at least temporarily decided to table the impending "intergalactic robot genocide" they were preparing to kick off.

How the season — and, perhaps, the show — was originally supposed to end, or whether whatever was originally planned would have been any better, I don't claim to know, but I really suspect it was supposed to be different. (To @procrastinatorproject's other point, I don't know that the critiques the earlier episodes made of Starfleet and the Federation necessarily had any resolution or direction in mind; if PICARD was really intended to bring down the curtain on the TNG era, a lot of it might well have been left unresolved with the expectation that subsequent projects were going to move on to later eras, like the "post-Burn" future of DISCOVERY, where what happened with the late 24th century Federation could either be shrugged off as no longer relevant or used to set up other plot developments, as seemed most useful.)

I actually liked S2 much better overall: The stuff with Picard's mother is extremely clunky and never lands emotionally, the attempt to suggest a Picard-Laris romance is just uncomfortable (poor Orla Brady!), and there are aspects of the plot that aren't very satisfying, but there's also a lot that's fun. It has some nice moments for Jeri Ryan ("I am NOT the worst driver here!"), the scenes with Seven and Raffi are great, Agnes' ill-fated hookup with the Borg Queen actually breaks some new ground with STAR TREK's dullest villains (which S3 then walked back), tying up Picard's friendship with Guinan was nice, and I didn't even mind the unexpected Wesley Crusher cameo. Its biggest problems are that it doesn't really fit: The tonal shifts from S1 are jarring; it doesn't bother to resolve any of the critiques or dangling story threads from the first season; and for all its attempts to tie in more STAR TREK lore, the obvious question, from viewers as well as probably CBS, remains, "Why is Picard still hanging around with these (mostly) new characters he barely knows rather than the other beloved TNG characters?"

So, S3 changes course again, finally doing the "getting the gang back together" nostalgia plot that the network and a lot of fans expected in the first place. That by itself might have been fine, but it has to go out of its way to reverse a lot of the major developments of the first two seasons (resurrecting Data to kill him off and then having to contrive a way to resurrect him again really beggars the word "clumsy"), and the plot rambles and wanders in the middle in incoherent ways that left me unsure if it's just badly written or there was ANOTHER word-from-on-high change in direction during production. The hilariously stupid Big Rock Finish isn't even much of a finale, since they obviously decided they didn't want to completely close the door on Picard and company after all.

There's evidence of this kind of thing in the other shows as well. LOWER DECKS, for instance, sets up several new characters at the end of S2, but then basically abandons all of its ongoing character threads for the entirety of the very weak S3, which is full of pointless guest appearances and cameos that don't amount to anything even on a sitcom level, before trying to pick up the abandoned story threads in S4. DISCOVERY, of course, then does its big and rather jarring era shift after setting up STRANGE NEW WORLDS as a spinoff. The idea of establishing a new era chronologically later than TNG makes sense, and would have been a natural step if PICARD had really been the finale of the TNG era, but going from "It's a TOS prequel!" to "It's set 900 years after TNG!" in midstream is weird, and I have to wonder if that's what they originally intended.

Obviously, one doesn't have to strain too hard to see why CBS has decided that it's safer to lean on nostalgia, but the disjointed progression of it makes me think that there were more creatively ambitious (not to say necessarily better) plans that have repeatedly changed, and how each of these shows has wrapped up seems to be materially different from how they began, in ways that are often very odd as well as unsatisfying.

[atopfourthwall]

Watching thru Star Trek Voyager for the first time. Do you like this series if so, favorite episode?

Posting my full thoughts below a read more because spoilers. But it's a mixed bag at best, favorite episode the two-parter Scorpion.

It's biggest issue is that it refuses to abide by its central concept: a Starfleet vessel lost 70,000 lightyears from home with few resources and in a place the Federation have never been to, made up of a mixed crew of both Starfleet and the Maquis - a rogue terrorist organization set on freedom from Cardassian oppression due to shitty treaties the Federation made in the name of peace.

Voyager goes for seven years and you would think with a premise like this, the ship should be a WRECK by the time it gets home - barely held together with duct tape, flickering lights and debris in spots because there just isn't time or necessity to deal with minor stuff like that when there are bigger concerns to deal with. You'd think the crew has gotten more lax, dirtier or with more rolled up sleeves and casualwear as the situation has made them less of a formal structure like a regular Starfleet vessel and more like a found family, maybe with a ton of alien crewmembers from the Delta Quadrant who have decided to join Voyager along the way because they (and the Federation by proxy) have offered something that wasn't present in their corner of the galaxy, something better and they want to join the mission back home. You'd think the ship itself would have changed in appearance as they've had to patch it with technology and because they don't have regular drydocks to replace lost/damaged systems and bulkheads. Sure, Star Trek has replicator technology, but I can't imagine Voyager has MASSIVE replication technology capable of creating HUGE swaths of the hull. At the very least, you'd think you'd see cracks in the hull hastily sealed up - maybe a kind of Kintsugi thing where the cracks are a different color because of special alien material used to keep it strong. You'd think those Maquis crewmembers, despite being former Starfleet, wouldn't be wearing Starfleet uniforms because why would they? They're here because they're stuck and what's Starfleet going to do if they haven't shined their boots? Throw them all in the brig for however long it takes to get home? More interpersonal conflicts between crewmen as they have to find a way to live together, have different approaches to solving problems, maybe deal with the crippling loneliness and despair that comes with thinking you may never make it home (either because of the dangers of space travel or just because it'll be 70 years on our current technology to get there).

But no. Nothing like that ever happens in Voyager.

Because it followed the pattern that had made Star Trek TNG so successful (despite it having a premise that DEMANDS more serialization), every episode the reset button is pressed. The ship is restored to normal, character development is rare or confined to a single episode. The few attempts at serialization are just… badly written (or just met with a shrug), which probably explains why they mostly dropped it in later seasons. You'd be forgiven for watching the first episode and then the last while thinking "Wow, not much changed except for Janeway's hairstyle."

Oh, but there WAS change… just not very much. A new cast member to replace one leaving… and a character brought on to be the breakout character - one of the few times we brought on new crew from this part of the galaxy - was shuffled away the episode beforehand because inexplicably some of his people were farther out than they ever should have been and he decided to stay with them because he met them for a few days. A romance between cast members that… was okay, but not great. Another romance introduced at the last second because they needed one of their characters to actually DO something because they had spent 7 years inventing boring hobbies and interests for him separate from his identity as fake-90s-Native American-whose-entire-culture-was-thought-up-by-a-fraud-who-tricked-Hollywood-into-thinking-he-knew-what-he-was-talking-about.

A lot of plots could have happened on any other Trek show. A lot of plots dealt with "Hey, maybe we'll get home THIS time!" and they of course would not. They invented a whole new way of propulsion that allowed you to be in every spot in the universe at once (and easily reversed the negative side effects by the end of the episode)… aaand then just pretended it never happened. The recurring villain enemies ranged from godawful to okay, but not fully realized.

Behind the scenes it was often full of office politics before actual quality. Whenever an episode needed some padding? Add technobabble. Have an ambitious idea for an episode? Nope, we're not interested in anything challenging. Do anything that might make the characters look bad or have more shades to them? Noooope. There were plans and ideas, things thrown out like, for instance, a year-long storyline where the ship would get as battered as I suggested… and it was shot down, turned into a two-parter with the reset button pushed hard at the end of it.

There's plenty to like about Voyager. Some really do love the characters and I like a lot of them, too. And there are plenty of episodes that I recommend and really enjoy and rewatch… but it's mostly wasted potential. It's telling that Ron Moore, who joined Voyager's writing staff after Deep Space 9 ended because he wanted to keep doing Star Trek, left after only 3 episodes… and went on to make the Battlestar Galactica remake, which for all its flaws did the Voyager concept considerably better and with all of those ideas I mentioned up top concerning the crew, the damage to the ship, the shades of grey, the hopelesness at times but still hope, etc.

[eponymous-rose]

So I've been rewatching Star Trek: TNG as comfort TV during/post-move and just got to Yesterday's Enterprise, which I remember liking well enough, but man, it's really unusual in the context of the rest of these early episodes. For one thing, the violence shown is a lot more stark than we've seen in the show thus far - Riker with his throat cut, Captain Garrett with the metal shrapnel in her head, lingering close-ups on dead faces. It's dark and moody and the "happy ending" resolution (as far as we know at this point, anyway) is saving the few survivors of a brutal battle, patching them up, and then shipping them straight back into that battle to be killed.

Given the show's not-so-great track record with its female characters, it's weirdly refreshing that we get a re-do for Tasha Yar. And yeah, she falls in love with a dude and goes off with him on his ship, but she was ready to say goodbye to him and that would've been that - what finally prompts her to step willingly into the meat-grinder is the realization that she had an "empty death" (Guinan had some really raw lines in this one) in the other timeline, and that now her death can have some meaning. It's nicely done, if a bit of a self-flagellating "mea culpa" on the writers' parts.

The alternate timeline isn't the gleeful, campy evil of the Mirrorverse, it's just an exhausted grind through the final days of a losing war. Lots of little touches show how desperate things have become - Wesley's been fast-tracked to a full ensign, Picard is a tactician first and foremost (he takes officers' opinions under advisement, yes, but he's also keeping from them the inevitable, imminent surrender), the bridge is laid out so the captain is front and center with everyone else in the background. As a contrast with the actual Enterprise's chill 90s living room lounge vibe, it's pretty striking. It's like a sneak preview into the bleak and war-heavy sci-fi that would start saturating pop culture a decade or so later, and then it's a firm rejection of that premise - "This isn't a ship of war. It's a ship of peace."

I have a long, long history with TNG - DS9 is my favorite Trek on balance, but TNG is encoded in my DNA. From around ages 3 and 5, my brother and I were watching and rewatching TNG constantly. (My parents would laugh over the fact that my brother didn't know how to read yet but had memorized the episode titles of the first couple seasons.) We had pajamas. We scoured every garage sale and had a giant metal can full of action figures and phasers and tricorders and ships and even, shockingly, that transporter toy that made things disappear using mirrors.

The tactile experience of those toys is burned in my brain - the loose nacelles on the Enterprise model, the click of the left phaser button, the little hole at the bottom of the Borg cube that we once stuck a pencil in and had the tip of the graphite snap off and rattle around forevermore. My brother and I played incessantly with our action figures, to the point where most of them had the paint at least partially rubbed off - we created hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new episodes over the years. The first time I ever used a touchscreen was at some sort of Star Trek exhibition in Canada in the early 90s that we stumbled across on our way to visit my grandparents.

I'm always fascinated by how kids interact with fictional media - my brother and I were so young, but we obviously knew Star Trek wasn't real. Except... I just always assumed that important people watched it, realized "well, that seems nice", and were actively working to make that future happen. I was (perhaps a little embarrassingly) older when I realized that no, we weren't gonna be out there on science missions to the stars during my lifetime. At least, not in an Enterprise kind of way.

At any given time, there's just this Star Trek filter over how I experience the world - when I got to go to college thanks to scholarships, I had that weighty feeling of responsibility and awe that came with daydreaming about Starfleet Academy. I saw my career shift from the gold of engineering to the blue of science to the red of command. And the older I get, the more I appreciate a show that, for all its flaws, managed to make a utopia interesting and complex.

Because TNG was such a phenomenon when I was a little kid in the early 90s, a lot of my family relationships also have TNG tied up in them. I remember going to my grandparents' apartment and my uncle showing us a fan magazine about the show. I remember another uncle who didn't really "get it" but gifted me and my brother astronaut ice cream because he knew we liked that space stuff. I remember watching most episodes curled up on the couch or my parents' bed with my brother and my mom and dad. When Mom got sick and we talked about death, I remember the way she wistfully brought up the Nexus from Generations or how she hoped she could see the next season of Picard (she didn't, sadly, but she really enjoyed that first season). Hell, one of the first real bonding moments I had with my otherwise hyper-professional and businesslike PhD advisor was when she made a TNG joke, I laughed at it, and she said, "I just love that show, everyone's so nice to each other."

It's just been a lot of fun coming back to this show, is all. I think I periodically forget how much it's affected me and the extent to which it was a fundamental, formative influence. While a lot of it either hasn't aged well or fails to hold up to modern media analysis, so much of it is still lovely, and occasionally there are these moments of shockingly good storytelling.

Star Trek good.

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

My best friend and I have been watching Star Trek: The Original Series for months, mostly because we're both sometimes busy and can't coordinate, but he does adore Star Trek (it is hard to overstate how much, except with regard to Picard) and even though I'm a TNG kid, I am almost always having a great time with it.

Overall: I love the stage-y Pepto-Bismol meets bisexual flag aesthetic of so much of the show, the actual bisexual vibes of so many characters (unintentionally? allegedly? I guess?), the effects that have aged remarkably well almost as much as the ones that have aged terribly, but are part of its charm, and of course, many of the characters. And I definitely have enjoyed the mixture of cheesy silliness with deeply earnest aspirations towards transcending its own era, even though it falls short (I'm an early modernist; I have a high tolerance for works that are ultimately of their times, but visibly trying to cut through the miasma of their eras' norms).

Anyway, some thoughts on each episode I've seen thus far!

[It's every episode up to "Metamorphosis", so there are a lot.]

1— "Where No Man Has Gone Before" - a pretty solid way to start the experience for me, and I see the religious skepticism has been baked in from very early, even though it's obviously still finding its footing at this point. I actually enjoyed seeing the wobbly character dynamics and world-building as it's figuring itself out.

2— "The Man Trap" - I really enjoyed this one! Despite some fundamental silliness, there's an interesting mix of horror and pathos (I support the salt vampire!).

3— "Charlie X" - a mixture of "oh God, poor Janice" (an impression that will repeat often) and an interesting take on the interaction of power and youthful masculinity. Charlie's outrage at his desires being stymied by literally anything or anyone at any time feels unfortunately timely, as does his petty vindictiveness against ... um, every woman ever, and Kirk's entirely correct lecture about it. I also found something particularly intriguing in the contrast between Charlie's admiration of Kirk's form of masculinity and how viscerally threatened he is by Spock.

4— "The Naked Time" - I adored this episode with zero irony. I particularly loved the revelation that Spock is ashamed of his feelings for Kirk (......) and the guilt he feels over his emotional distance from his mother combined with his understanding of how isolated she must feel in Vulcan culture. But I also laughed through the entire rest of the episode. Just a great time.

5— "The Enemy Within" - oh, hella yikes take on, uh, the inherent need for a good leader to have an anxious, violent, rapist side to his personality kept under control by a fearless, but vacillating and cerebral other side. (The premise seems even more egregious after "The Galileo Seven" makes a whole episode out of the idea that Spock's intellectual discipline and reserve undermine his leadership capabilities unless he behaves in a way that can be seen as fitting into human emotional norms.) I did cackle over the space dog fluffy alien creature and its evil twin, but poor Janice x100 :(

6— "Mudd's Women" - easily the worst episode to date, good God. Quite apart from "I guess sometimes you just have to be complicit in sex trafficking carried out by a lovable scamp who definitely hasn't gotten the post-capitalism newsletter" and the godawful ending, I am baffled by everyone on the Enterprise acting like they've never seen a beautiful woman. None of Mudd's women can hold a candle to Uhura (who I think isn't even in this episode?) and women getting obsessed by eternal beauty and devoting themselves to unappealing men is a tiresome aspect of ST that I wish had stopped here. Or never shown up at all.

7— "What Are Little Girls Made Of" - ah, the iconic phallic stalagmite! Nice to have context. I appreciate how smart and resourceful Kirk ends up being here. I liked Shatner's performance as the Kirk clone (he's actually been good in all the various Evil Kirk performances I've seen thus far), too. But I also really liked Spock's entirely justified annoyance at Kirk using racial slurs to communicate IT'S NOT ME.

8— "Miri" - this one is unfortunately dragged down by Kirk using his femme fatale allure with a girl framed as barely pubescent even if the actress was technically an adult. He's clearly not remotely attracted to her and working to save his crew, but it's still really unpleasant to watch, especially with a very young-looking actress. That said, the disease is creepy as hell, and it's a great McCoy episode. I was pretty fascinated as well by the concept of a drastically protracted childhood where the horror is not being trapped in the body of a child, but of actually remaining a child for enormous lengths of time.

9— "Dagger of the Mind" - this one would have been pretty mediocre, in all honesty, if not for the existence of Helen Noel. Helen is staggeringly beautiful, yes, but she is also better than everyone else in this episode, even my usual fave Spock. I like Kirk a lot and I still don't know what she sees in him.

10— "The Corbomite Maneuver" - it's a fun episode with some very good lines, but a bit like cotton candy.

11— "The Menagerie" - I had heard about this one, but didn't know all the details! The show-within-the-show only slightly strains credulity, and the plot is certainly more compelling than SNW (sorry to SNW fans; I watched a few episodes and it was fine, but too polished and heterosexual to feel like a true prequel to the boundary-pushing Candyland of TOS).

12— "The Conscience of the King" - this one was a bit over-theatrical in the most literal way, but I still really enjoyed it. The episode provides a genuinely fascinating backstory for Kirk, revealing that in his youth, he was a survivor of a terrible atrocity (and from what else we've heard, it seems he was moved elsewhere and became a bullied nerd for awhile before finding his true calling in space). The "real" villain of the episode doesn't really work for me, but doesn't need to, because her villainy is vastly and rightly overshadowed by the atrocity.

13— "Balance of Terror" - I can't describe this episode any other way: it fucking rules. This is maybe my favorite Star Trek episode that I can remember ever seeing. The revelation of the Vulcan-Romulan kinship is super compelling, and the intensity to this episode's take on the frequent Spock vs the Microaggressions subplot feels entirely organic and believable.

14— "Shore Leave" - fine, but rather a letdown after the glory of the previous one. The back rub early in the episode is as hilariously unsubtle as reported, and Spock's emphatic indifference to the sexbot ladies is, hmm, interesting. Otherwise, it is silly, entertaining-enough ST ephemera for me. I like these episodes existing as part of ST as a whole, but also don't feel especially invested in most individual cases of it. And God, Kirk's youthful nemesis Finnegan is so incredibly obnoxious and his little jig motif is so awful that (given "The Naked Time") I'm starting to wonder what gripe Star Trek has with Irish people.

15— "The Galileo Seven" - you know how I said that Spock vs the Microaggressions is a frequent subplot in these episodes? This one is "what if that was just the whole episode?" It's not terrible, but it's not terribly interesting, either, and the implications are pretty gross if you think about them.

16— "The Squire of Gothos" - I guessed the reveal a bit early in this one, but not in a way that made me feel like it was super obvious. The hints were there if you were paying attention, so it was rewarding to figure it out, but not obvious. Spock's speech about intellectual discipline and power really speaks to me right now, by the way.

17— "Arena" - the Gorn finally appear! Or a Gorn, anyway, and it's kind of wild that the 1967 episode's twist is that the real villain is colonialism, not the Gorn at all. Yet in 2020s Star Trek ... well, anyway, it's a good episode despite the incredibly dated monster effects.

18— "Tomorrow is Yesterday" - time travelllllll hell yeah, and it's quite a decent plot.

19— "Court Martial" - this one was tense and interesting, though I don't have much to say about it apart from really liking the lawyers.

20— "The Return of the Archons" - this was actually very effective, quiet terror for me (maybe extra for me as a queer person raised Mormon, lol). I think it also has one of the better instances of Kirk Fries A Machine With Logic.

21— "Space Seed" - an absolutely fascinating villain alongside absolutely dire gender politics. I did like seeing Khan for the first time.

22— "A Taste of Armageddon" - this had a very interesting war game concept, but I don't remember much about the episode beyond the concept tbh. It was fine.

23— "This Side of Paradise" - this one was interesting, especially given the allure of the "paradise" for Spock specifically (also for everyone else, but there's something especially bitter about whatshername's total indifference to his consent, and yet how complicated his feelings end up being about the whole thing). Kirk's fixation on his authority!!!!! in this episode feels unappealing and rather strange, but I didn't think it was really all about authority and The Human Need For Struggle(TM) that ST will keep returning to (don't like that aspect, though!).

24— "The Devil in the Dark" - an excellent episode IMO, including the incredibly dated rock alien special effects. Wouldn't have it any other way! I honestly appreciate how often the reveal in TOS has been that a scary "monster" is just some innocent person from another species getting screwed over by human ignorance and colonizing.

25— "Errand of Mercy" - Kirk is a patronizing asshole in this episode, can't lie, but given that he's being very obviously paralleled with the Klingon officer, it serves a function that's at least interesting. I'd like if that aspect of his personality went somewhere a bit more cohesively, but I'd rather have the episodic yet forwards propulsion of TOS as a whole, so it's okay.

26— "The Alternative Factor" - this has an interesting concept, but I remember thinking that it was forcing a bunch of usually competent people to make some very stupid decisions (though, tangentially, the fact that this is a change from the norm is at least something: I really enjoy that TOS in general avoids my beloathèd "our protagonists are the protagonists of the entire setting and every other character is an NPC who lacks moral vision and competence independent of the protagonists' influence"). I will say that the repetition of the alternate-universe effect is honestly pretty bad even when I'm grading on a 60s curve.

27— "The City on the Edge of Forever" - this is a very compelling, tightly-written episode that does good character work for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, even if its underlying premise is a bit challenging to buy at points. I always enjoy getting to see McCoy's medical ethos at play, as we do here. Spock's jealousy is also amusingly transparent against all the high drama.

28— "Operation -- Annihilate!" - this is a hilarious title for a pretty good episode, actually. I enjoyed it and especially enjoyed Leonard Nimoy's performance as Spock here. It's not like I ever don't, but it did some substantial heavy lifting.

29— "Amok Time" - so it turns out, the Spock/Kirk fans have not been exaggerating all these years. I didn't think it was likely they had, just given what I've seen this far, but damn. This is a fantastic episode, it's got interesting world-building for Vulcan, it's incredibly homoerotic even by TOS standards, and despite my fondness for Spock and Kirk, goodforher.jpeg with respect to T'Pring. If Vulcan men don't want their childhood brides plotting their deaths, maybe they should legalize divorce! Just a thought.

30— "Who Mourns for Adonais" - so this episode relies on "actually, every broadly appropriated cultural detail from an exotic distant land was just given to its people by ancient aliens," only this time, it's targeting Greeks! It does get details about ancient Greek culture and religion very wrong, if anyone was wondering. In any case, I guess Star Trek's weird issues with "ethnic whites" is not only with the Irish, though given that my father's background is specifically Greco-Irish, it feels like a weird personal attack. That aside, while "ancient aliens did it all!!!" was not as much of a thing at the time as now, Greek people were definitely more racialized in the USA then, so the use of the trope here was not as trivial as I think it can "read" to modern audiences, esp in the USA.

Apollo's actor does a good job with some hard dialogue, I will say, but I really wish Carolyn had just been playing along and biding her time rather than obviously being a silly female swayed by flattery of her beauty and delusions of vicarious power. Kirk's speech to her is good, but really dragged down by how bad the writing for her is. I did like Kirk's "actually, I'm a strict monotheist" retort to Apollo, though. I know Kirk's characterization eventually goes down a different route, but given the heavy involvement of Jewish people including Shatner in Star Trek (despite Roddenberry's antisemitism), and the historical use of the Greek and Roman pantheons in the oppression of Jewish communities, Kirk's indignation at the idea of worshipping any other god feels apropos.

31— "The Changeling" - Jim Kirk DESTROYS another implacable machine foe with LOGIC!!!! I can just imagine the YouTube series now. Seriously, though, it's fine and a drastic improvement from the previous episode, and I always enjoy a solid ST:TOS episode while I'm watching it. But it was not exceptional IMO.

32— "Mirror, Mirror" - YESSSSS I TOO GET TO EXPERIENCE THE MIRROR UNIVERSE. I loved this episode, honestly. The Mirror Universe is terrible, but super fun both in concept and execution. I love the competence of the prime universe team in the brief cut to them immediately clocking Mirror Kirk's group as imposters (though I did want more from Mirror Uhura who is just kind of there, though...). I love Mirror Spock being this warped but recognizable version of the character. I love the concept of Mirror Kirk being the perpetrator of war crimes exactly like Kirk's formative trauma back in "The Conscience of the King." I love the evil cutthroat BDSM space Byzantines vibes of the Terran Empire (is there an unimaginably decadent and deadly Byzantine Empire in the history of the Mirror Universe? I hope so. We deserve it after "Who Mourns for Adonais" tbh).

33— "The Apple" - this is a pretty fun one. The protagonists as the sort of serpent of this "Edenic" garden, coupled with the awful god creature is super entertaining, and it works well enough despite the show's erratic approach to religion.

34— "The Doomsday Machine" - damn, the commander in this episode is such an asshole. He's clearly meant to be, though, and his Ahab campaign turning out to not be entirely in vain at least makes it seem like there's a point to spending so much time on him being the worst.

35— "The Catspaw" - by coincidence, my best friend and I ended up watching this not far into November, just a few days after Halloween. About five minutes in, I said to him, "Is it just me, or is that castle clearly just Spirit Halloween?" He delightedly said, "This planet is Spirit Halloween!"

There's a bit of racial essentialism about ALL HUMANS that would be uncomfortable if it were not so patently ridiculous. The idea is that human beings have a basic racial fear of cats that the tiny aliens exploit—yes, "cats" in this episode refers mainly to the human fear of the house cat, aka the most successful and beloved domestic species on Earth, not lions or even cougars. The alien terrorizes the cast by taking the shape of a fluffy black house cat of varying sizes, but never any other kind of cat. This concept is hilarious, just to be clear. I enjoyed every moment. Even a super-large house cat is just even more friend-shaped floof to your basic human, let's be real, so the deadly threat is impossible to take seriously even before the giant house cat is revealed to be an incredibly horny alien lady with illusion powers (this persona is also an illusion, but the horniness is real). But are not all cats at some level horny alien ladies with illusion powers? I feel pretty sure that Star Trek thinks so.

36— "I, Mudd" - and the award for Most Improved Character has got to go to Harry Mudd. My bff and I actually had a great time with this episode, in part because the entire cast seem to be having a great time with it. I especially loved the twist with Uhura seeming to fall to the womanly weakness of desiring eternal beauty and the easy life only for it to be a trick. Mudd is still a sleaze, but a much funner one to watch this time, and we've just started quoting Spock's "He didn't pay the royalties" at random moments. The stereotypical nagging wife is what it is, but I'm grading Mudd episodes on an extra curve.

37— "Metamorphosis" - and at least, we've reached the most recent episode I've seen, so my impressions of this one are much more fresh. Somehow, I had no idea we first met Zefram Cochrane in TOS and not in First Contact. Also, wow, the actors for him and for the Commissioner are really attractive—not quirky 60s attractive, either. Cochrane reminds me vaguely of Henry Cavill and the Commissioner is simply gorgeous despite the blinding color scheme of her costume.

The gender essentialism sure is something at this point, I've got to say, when the characters are blandly agreeing that of course a sentient electric cloud must have a fundamental gender that you can kind of tell by the color scheme. Uh huh, but it is genuinely interesting that Cochrane clearly cares about the cloud and tries to protect her from our heroes until he realizes she loves him, but is so affronted at the idea of the cloud being in love with him and his (very obviously sexualized) communion and companionship with her being part of that.

He projects his revulsion primarily onto Spock (Spock vs the Microaggressions strikes again!), but literally everyone finds his attitude narrow-minded and weird. The feeling is kind of like if you met an idolized long-dead relative only for them to use a homophobic slur you've never even heard of.

The resolution of this little drama comes from the cloud bodysnatching the dying Commissioner, a young woman who longs to be loved by anyone at all after a life of being a loveless career woman. She is, to be clear, a career woman whose job is all about preventing warfare and who is deeply stressed about it, which seems a kind of love to me. But she is mostly framed just as this super abrasive, loveless career woman because it's TOS (and they eventually conclude that any woman could do her job and they'll just find a different one to stop the war).

Anyway, all this results in the somehow-female cloud fusing with what remains of the Commissioner's consciousness, curing her body of some fatal disease. Now that the cloud is fused with an actual (hot) human woman, Cochrane is totally chill with her love for him, and decides he can have a very strange threesome love her after all, and they'll live out these bodies' natural lives together until they both die (since she lost her electric cloud powers of healing and immortality when she bodysnatched the Commissioner, I gather). It feels weird and low-grade shitty on his part, although I like his actor's performance, because it makes it so clear that his aversion was only about appearances.

I think the cloud should have moved onto someone who would appreciate her devotion and restorative powers, like, say, the dying Commissioner lady who actually has this whole speech about how badly she longs to be loved and how she doesn't get why Cochrane is being such a baby about the adoration of a cloud. Look, I'm just saying the cloud could be bi and deserves someone who would appreciate her.

I know this was never going to happen on a nationally syndicated show in 1967, but I think it would make more narrative sense and be much more satisfying! Cochrane would love space adventures 150 years in the future—he was thrilled and excited about the idea of seeing the reality of the Federation and alliances with other species! And the Commissioner would appreciate a cloud girlfriend and immortality so much more than him. Hire me, Paramount.

[delta-queerdrant]

pedagogy of the repressed (Learning Curve, s1 e16)

The kindest thing I can say about "Learning Curve" is that it wasn't meant to be a season finale. For better or worse, that honor was intended for "The 37s," with additional Season 2 episodes aired between. I find this episode so incoherent as a climax to the first season that I considered reviewing them in filming order, before rejecting the idea as deranged.

On the whole I really like Tuvok as a character. As the oldest officer on board, he brings experience and depth of memory to his interactions, and while his Vulcan persona is familiar and by-the-book, Tim Russ's performance makes it feel fully realized (with perhaps an edge of charm).

I guess making Tuvok a piece of shit authoritarian is part of the specificity of his character, even if flexing your power over your students isn't terribly logical. But by making his bad teaching methods representative of the Starfleet ethos, there's only one possible conclusion, and it's nothing the show wants to face: Starfleet sucks.

The episode begins with a brief Janeway holonovel scene. It is inane. Why would anyone want to LARP being a governess? The obnoxious children make their appearance, but soon the whole exercise is happily interrupted.

A cohort of underperforming former Maquis is assigned to "field training." Let's remember, these folks never consented to work on this ship; their only obligation is to Chakotay as their former captain. After they walk out of training (a labor action if I ever saw one), Tuvok's next move is the enforcement of the Starfleet dress code. I was MAD when Gerron has to remove his Bajoran earring - so much is made of Ro Laren's earring in TNG, but here it's a passing moment of forced cultural assimilation that goes unchecked.

The episode wholly accepts that the view that these Maquis crew are undisciplined, lazy, and just can't cope with the rigors of Starfleet service. That their lives are anarchic-in-a-bad-way is underscored by Chakotay throwing a punch to put Dalby in his place - that's "the Maquis way," apparently! To which I say, really? Listen, I don't know the first thing about guerrilla fighters, I'm sure things get colorful between weapons drills and political philosophy debates, but wouldn't a large, sustained insurgency have methods for self-organization that don't involve frequent acts of violence?

Tuvok's training devolves into an episode of "The Biggest Loser," characterized by tough love and long-distance jogging. When his approach fails, an apt metaphor from Neelix makes him realize that he needs to build a relationship with his students, but it's too late. Only a crisis in the last act, in which Tuvok bend the rules, causes the Maquis to realize that they're willing to change as well(??)

It's just the stupidest ending - Tuvok and his students never demonstrate an ability to work well together, and Starfleet methods are never vindicated. In fact, nothing has changed by the end of this episode, as Tuvok has already showcased an ability to break rules in "Prime Factors." The episode's failure, in my mind, speaks to the failure of the show as a whole to tackle the Maquis/Starfleet conflict. After all, to deliver on its own premise would mean to complicate its belief in Starfleet heroism, and this show is too damn conservative to attempt it.

The only saving grace of this one is the cheese subplot, which is actually a hoot. There is no scientific mystery too ridiculous for this show, and I think that's wonderful.

I laughed out loud: "To discuss the patient's condition in front of the patient would be a serious breach of professional etiquette. It's been suggested that I cultivate a greater sensitivity to my patient's needs. Don't worry, my little friend."

Like a fermentation gone wrong, this one stunk. 1.5/5 infected alien cheeses.

[walkingstackofbooks]

TNG 6x20 The Chase and 7x15 Lower Decks thoughts (rewatching, so possible future spoilers for DS9 too)

I’ve temporarily paused my DS9 re-watch after 2x20 Maquis Part 1 to go through all the Cardassian episodes in TNG to get a better picture of the build up: 4x12, 5x03, 6x10, 6x11, 6x20 and 7x15.

6x20 The Chase

Admittedly, I skipped the first half of this because as I skimmed through the plot on Memory Alpha, there was no mention of Cardassians until later on XD

Lady Captain Cardassian! I feel like they're pretty rare, it's sas I'm so excited by this

Tfw there's a looong pause... and you're watching it on 1.5x speed. Just how long was that pause in normal time?!

Living for the Klingon-Cardassian banter

Data just THRASHING that Klingon. I love him so much

The Klingon is so INTO Data - this is flirting, right?

"You are attempting to bribe me." "Not at all." "You suggested a plan that would work to your advantage, one that I would be capable of executing. You then implied a reward. Clearly you were."

I think Nu'Daq might be my new favourite one-off character

Cardassian treachery! Gotta love it

Federation smarts! Gotta love it XD

"I will go with you" but imma be salty about it

Just wondering why I hadn't seen Miles about since season 4, then realised that, of course, he's on DS9 XD Doh!

Romulans from nowhere :o

I do like the plan to answer the long-standing why-is-everyone-humanoid question

>> Thinking about the word humanoid the other day, do you think the other species hear their own word through the UT? Kingonoid and Romuloid or so forth.

Haha they disagree, so much for coming together in fellowship and companionship

Romulan ending <3 "Perhaps, one day." "One day."

7x15 Lower Decks

Deanna and Riker are just nice

Love the Vulcan

Bajor mention!

Very professional, waiter, to spill the beans lilke that!

I do love this episode, and seeing the command from the outside

I hope their friendship isn't ruined by promotion. They seem very sweet

Having said that, I suddenly have a horrible feeling Sita dies in this episode

Beverly is so lovely

Lost. Puppy. What?

Awwwwwkward. "They both get a lot of snow." Love how Riker just seems amused.

Yeah, this episode is great, only getting to see what one of the lower decks see

Did he also think Wesley should have been expelled?

I love this Vulcan. And I love Geordie, but his frustration with Taurik is pretty amusing

I'm a fan of this poker juxtaposition scene - interesting that they've broken away from just the lower decks characters.

Hah, okay, Lavelle does annoy Riker

Lol "You and Lavelle are a lot alike." "What? We're not at all alike." "You're bluffing."

I really love this Ben guy. Inclusion of a civilian just being friends with whoever is super cute

Okay, Worf is actually being pretty good here? I find myself liking him in this episode.

Ohhhh "I wanted to make sure that you got a fair chance to redeem yourself", that makes far more sense - no wonder I felt he was a little out of character in the first scene with her, he was acting.

"I didn't realise she would be so young."

The feels. She's so excited and proud and knowing what happens... it hurts.

Oh, the promotion. I'm tearing up. This episode is making me FEEL

Ben, you are great. Nice job moving Worf.

Amazing how this episode is so moving when you barely know the characters. I loved the premise, and I love the execution of it. (Though damn you for killing off Sito.)

Again, we see a helpful Cardassian, but get the overall impression Cardassia is still a threat.

[pussyhoundspock]

snw anon (last one): idk. there's just such a pattern of small weird moments that i'm like.... what is the theme here? every time i try to watch thinking i'll like the premise (silly spock stuff! a fantasy ep!) it just feels so boring and i can't understand what the message was. everyone's dialogue is very like 'uhhh THAT was weird! [hold for laughter]' and there's nothing substantial. i really try to like it and i just can't. and st8 spock isn't bad bc he's str8 its because its boring. thanks!

yeah i agree! i think fundamentally they dont actually have that much to say with strange new worlds which is why it's been very surface level and also why season 1 was predominantly rips for TOS or TNG episodes or actual scifi stories, all done slightly worse, because they sort of made this show because they thought 'oh a spock prequel would probably make money' and not because they had anything interesting to say about spock's time on the enterprise with pike or any of the characters involved. and you know they have come up with plot arcs and sort of things to say but they're very tentative because, again, it's a money making concept and they can't alientate people. anyway. anyway. thanks for the asks sorry work is fully so insane where i'm working 5am to 10pm on a daily basis but yeah!

[everythingismadeofchaos]

I 100% thought this was about disco music until like 75% of the way in.

Yeah, it got more Star Trek as it went on. You're absolutely right about the tardigrade and the mycelial network and stuff. Sure. It felt really dark to me at first, though, too tryhard. It felt like somebody was trying to make Star Trek into Event Horizon. And I'm not just talking about the lighting.

I think a lot of the reaction originally was about the crew makeup and how it was very different from previous shows in terms of demographics, but my dad was one of these people and as I pointed out to him at the time "So on TOS, where it's a ship full of middle-aged white guys that talk like they're from Schenectady, you think that makes more sense?" The whole idea is that the Earth is United and everybody is equally able to do everything. They weren't able to show this on the original show because of network executives, and that's kind of what I'm talking about.

Honestly the thing that I don't like about "woke" television isn't the "wokeness," it's the feeling that cynical corporate interests are pushing it. It feels phony. When I was a kid we used to say "poser." Just because I agree with the basic premise of being "woke" doesn't help me to override this constant questioning of the narrative. It really is telling to compare the cast of the original show, which was basically like I said 400 white guys, a black woman telephone switchboard operator, a nurse, and a secretary. (And of course everybody is heterosexual. That goes without saying.) And I feel like this was a completely cynical business decision, meddling in the writing of the show.

Then if you look at Discovery, they're doing the same thing, but the other way around. After the first couple seasons of TNG I felt like they were getting out of that, like they were leaving the writing to the writers in the big '90s shows.

Then when Discovery came out, it's not that I objected to there being all these women and so forth; It's more that I felt like the episode wanted me to object to it, like they were intentionally trying to get me to react like what they used to call a "male chauvinist pig." Like they were calling me an asshole. "Check us out! We're really cool! There's all these female and gay characters! That's what people like now!"

This feeling really crystallized the more I thought about the first episode and the "sitcom misunderstanding" that results in the war that dominates the entire show. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that if it was Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, or hell, if it was Riker talking to Picard, they would have understood each other. The idea that the Klingons understand violence and you have to punch them in the nose to be friends with them is a very elementary school boy understanding of interactions between people. It used to be a lot more common.

Maybe people don't understand this now but there used to be this trope where men would get in a fist fight and then after that they would become friends. If you want to watch the best example of this I can think of, it's the hilariously politically incorrect John Wayne movie The Quiet Man. I'm not going to tell you the whole plot, but that's the important part.

Of course it's stupid, and it's probably a stupid way to go about living your life, and it's destructive and harmful and shouldn't be encouraged, but there's a visceral quality to it that actually works. Like, if you have a good cry, after that you feel better. If you're a 10-year-old boy and you can't stand another 10-year-old boy, and then at some point you have a dust up and you give him a fat lip and he gives you a black eye, the odds are pretty decent that this time next year you guys are going to be best friends. I can't explain this and I'm not sure what to think of it now but it's definitely a trope in literature. I can't say I recognize it from personal experience, so I don't know if it's actually part of human behavior or not. I'd like to ask a psychologist actually.

But my point is that if you're over a certain age you're going to recognize this idea, and the way it's inverted in this episode. If the Federation had shown the Klingons that they were tough customers, they could have been allies. In fact, we know the Klingons are sexist ("Women may not serve on the council!"), so maybe in order to have conflict they could have just had a ship led by a couple of women encounter the Klingons and then the Klingons think they're easy pickings.

Anyway, I wound up liking Discovery quite a lot and I'm glad it lasted as long as it did. It's just that I like the way the show talks about humanity, what it should be versus what it is, and it bothers me when what corporate interests are trying to do feels like it intrudes on the writing, if that makes sense.

idk why some trekkies say that disco “doesn’t feel like Star Trek” because i’m like three episodes in and they’re like “but it would be exploitation to use the giant tardigrade to navigate our mushroom spore engine across the galactic mycellial network!!” which is quintessential star trek ethics technobabble if i’ve ever heard it

[quasi-normalcy]

Worst Episodes of Star Trek by season (Revised and Expanded).

TOS:

"The Alternative Factor" - I've tried to watch this episode many times, but I don't think I've ever managed to sit all of the way through it. It's just a bunch of boring, nonsensical bullshit for an hour.

"The Omega Glory" - This is the reason why I object to framing Gene Roddenberry as some kind of visionary auteur, because this one, beyond simply having a ridiculous premise, is also really racist.

"Turnabout Intruder" - Turns out body-swaps aren't always good. Like the above, but sexist rather than racist.

"The Lorelei Signal" - An episode where Uhura finally takes command should be good, but again, more sexism (and a pointless rapid aging plot)

TNG:

"Justice" - The first season is mostly just kind of generically weak, but...ugh, those costumes.

"Shades of Gray" - Clipshow.

"The Price" - None of this season's episodes are actually bad, but I really don't like Troi's boytoy

"The Host" - Odan isn't interesting, and the bit where Beverly has sex with Riker's body is just gross.

"Violations" - Lots of bad episodes about rape on this list.

"Man of the People" - See number 5.

"Sub Rosa" - See number 6. Also, ludicrous premise.

DS9:

"The Passenger" - Did Siddig-el-Fadil just kind of forget how to act this week?

"The Alternate" - Probably the worst instance of Trek demanding reconciliation with shitty, abusive parents.

"Meridian" - Brigadoon in Space. Also featuring yet another chemistry-devoid romance for a female crew member.

"Sons of Mogh" - So the 'solution' is just to surgically alter him and delete his memory without his consent? And Julian went along with this?

"Let He Who Is Without Sin..." - Jadzia seems like a complete doormat for not dumping Worf's ass after this one.

"Profit and Lace" - I can't even be offended by the transphobia or the misogyny because of how stupid this one is. I love it.

"The Emperor's New Cloak" - The mirror universe had already been kinda run into the ground by this point.

VOY:

"Time and Again" - So boring. So pointless.

"Tattoo" - White Man's Burden. In Space!

"Favourite Son" - I don't even want to get into it, it's just bad.

"Demon" - This one could have been good if it actually paid attention to its own plot points. And the silly "needing to go to a hell planet to get deuterium" thing.

"The Disease" - Alas, Harry Kim's love life

"Fury" - Character assassination wrapped in the series' worst time travel plot.

"Endgame" - What a lousy way to end the series. No payoffs; no follow up; and the time travel thing wipes out trillions of people's lives for no compellingly good reason, and it's never discussed. The Borg are also presented as completely unthreatening villains, but this had been the way for several seasons. And it's even worse when you compare the deleted version of the early 25th century with the canonical version we see on "Picard."

ENT:

"Dear Doctor" - The 'moral' obligation to commit genocide. Fuck off.

"Cogenitor" - The 'moral' obligation to give a sex slave back to their masters. Fuck off.

"Rajiin" - Some pointless T&A; a little bad acting; and it becomes clear that there is no plan to the Xindi arc.

"These Are the Voyages..." - What a terrible insult to the series that it's supposedly the finale of.

DIS:

"Vaulting Ambition" - There's thos one scene where Emperor Georgiou murders all of her aristocratic in slo-mo cinematic detail and it just never comes up again. I hate this sort of pornographic, cavalier treatment of violence. It offends me to see human life treated in this manner.

"Point of Light" - Brings back Ash Tyler and Emperor Georgiou for an utterly un-thought-out 'intrigue' plot.

"Die Trying" - The idea that Starfleet has been using the same seed vault for a thousand years, that this seed vault is in Space, where it's vastly more vulnerable than it would be on (or inside) a planet, and that it contains seeds from *every plant in the galaxy* is so ridiculous that it undermines everything else in the episode for me.

"The Galactic Barrier" - Where it becomes most apparent that they're trying to fit ten episodes of plot into thirteen episodes.

PIC:

"Broken Pieces" - This one gets points off for completely wasting the XB plot, but it's still good because I like the bits with Rios's holograms and the character work for Jurati.

"Monsters" - There's a lot wrong with the second season, but two things that worked were Q and the Jurati/Borg Queen arc. Both of them were largely absent from this episode, and the stuff with Picard's expansion pack Victorian childhood trauma is just dreadful.

"The Last Generation" - Themes? Weight? Meaning? Non-violent solutions? Continuity? Nah. Let's just bash TNG action figures together for an hour. Also featuring the hit single 'Found Family Ain't Shit, You Need a Biological Son'

LWD:

"Temporal Edict" - This one has a generic workplace sitcom plot that doesn't really work in the Star Trek universe and also makes Freeman look like a complete idiot right out the gate.

"Mugato Gumato" - I don't think that Shaxs tasting Mugato dung was as funny as the episode seemed to think it was, and I really didn't like seeing Mariner beat the shit out of Boimler and Rutherford in the before-credits scene.

"Room for Growth" - Not bad, just kind of...meh.

"Twovix" - Again, not bad, just weakest of the season.

SNW:

"All Those Who Wander" - Ruining the Gorn and wasting Hemmer, all in one episode.

"The Broken Circle" - We really, badly needed to have this ten minute sequence of our medical personnel getting fucked-up on Green Goblin juice and beating up a hundred Klingons, eh?

PRO:

"Kobayashi" - Again, this one isn't actually bad, but it's just nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia; and I think that Dal's character growth should be earned through interaction with his friends, rather than with stock audio of Leonard Nimoy.

[startrekexplained]

The potential Spock two parter we could have gotten on Enterprise

Star Trek: Enterprise (or just Enterprise, as it was originally called) is an interesting series. A prequel set 100 years before TOS and 200 years before the TNG era of series, it had a very mixed at best reception when it first aired, and of course was cancelled due to low ratings during its fourth season, making it the first series since TOS to not end voluntarily. But it's been re-evaluated by a lot of fans in recent years and while it usually doesn't rank near the top of peoples lists, there's a general consensus now that the series wasn't "that bad" and even had some pretty good episodes, at least near the end. I'm personally a fan of the series, warts and all. But as good as I think the fourth season is, when it finally embraced the prequel concept it ran away from in its three previous seasons, it could have been even better if certain episode ideas had come to fruition, and I'm going to talk about one such episode(s).

A lot of fans know there was a shakeup in the fourth season, with co-creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga effectively standing aside for a new showrunner, Manny Coto, who turned the direction of the show around from its weird half prequel/half sequel premise into a genuine prequel to all the series that came before it, but particularly TOS. While this did change reception somewhat with fans and critics at the time of its airing, it wasn't enough to change its ratings decline, so we never got even one more season with this new direction, which is a real shame.

There was an attempt to grab ratings though, by getting William Shatner himself to guest star in a two parter about Mirror Kirk and the creation of the Mirror Universe. Shatner pitched the story himself (written by Judith and Garfield Reeves Stevens, who worked with him on the Shatnerverse novels) and it was well received by Coto, Braga and Berman but apparently Paramount was not willing to pay the modest fee Shatner was asking for the appearance and thus the plans were cancelled. The story pitch, IMO, was quite good so it's a real shame we didn't get to see this two parter but I actually don't want to talk about that today, I'll leave that for another post. Instead I want to talk about another two parter suggestion, that almost no one talks about but would have made for, potentially anyway, an excellent two parter and perhaps even a far superior series finale than what we actually ended up getting.

Mike Sussman, one of the lead writers of ENT, pitched a possible two parter in the event Shatner couldn't be convinced to guest star on ENT involving Leonard Nimoy guest starring instead as Spock. The pitch was inspired by an episode (Mystery of the Blues) from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles where Harrison Ford guest starred in a framing story about adventures in his youth. Leonard Nimoy would guest star in a similar capacity.

In this episode, Spock would be a distinguished and retired ambassador in the 24th Century, and he would be visited by a young Human/Vulcan hybrid in Starfleet who's seeking guidance for balancing his two alien halves. Spock would then retell a story about how, in the early 23rd Century he met T'Pol, who's a legend by the 24th Century and how he assisted her on a vitally important mission involving the retired NX-01 crew stealing the old NX Enterprise from the fleet museum for one last mission. During this mission, Spock would learn important lessons with the audience learning a lot of new information on Spock. Most importantly, Spock would learn during the course of the episodes to reconcile his desire to be a diplomat like his father and his desire for a career in Starfleet. Overall it would be something of a passing of the torch from ENT to TOS.

I don't know about you, but while this pitch isn't that detailed, and the story would have obviously needed a lot of ironing out from pitch to script, the idea is very strong and it could have potentially been one of the best Spock stories and definitely one of the best ENT episodes. It really is a missed opportunity, and what comes to mind is the Spock two parter in TNG "Unification" which served as a tie-in to Star Trek VI, which is one of my personal favorite TNG episodes and Spock stories. This potentially could have been ENT's version of that. While not pitched as a series finale, it also would have easily been far more suitable as that than "These Are The Voyages".

So what happened to this pitch? Obviously it was rejected, but I couldn't find any reason why. Presumably Leonard Nimoy either wasn't interested or wasn't even approached about it after Paramount rejected Shatner's modest pay demands to appear on ENT, and the only reason we even know about this is because Mike Sussman posted the memo pitching this to his twitter in 2016. I couldn't even find mentions of this pitch outside Memory Alpha. One wonders how many other great ideas were pitched and haven't been revealed.

[thegeminisage]

now that we're almost halfway through tng (we're at the start of s4, so...close enough) i feel like it's time to do an updated ranking of tng characters favorite to least favorite. here is the previous ranking. this time it will be much harder.

data - this will never change, ever. he gets the most interesting episodes. he is the most interesting premise. he is the the man the myth the legend the moment. he is autistic. he is not less perfect than lore

wesley - i don't want to talk about it

tasha - GIRL I MISS YOU SO BAD COME BACK FOR MORE THAN ONE EPISODE. don't kiss any boys

worf and riker tie - this is going to sound crazy but worf reminds me so much of spock sometimes. because they both struggle to find their place in the world but they do find it on board the enterprise. i like howmad he gets and his strict code of ethics. also, i think what he did on the klingon planet is fucking crazy. i hope they come back to it someday

as for riker: poker king. down to clown. cool with deanna's hookups. how can u not love him. i wish he did more outrageous stuff it's like the best thing about him and they never utilize it. he and worf (e deanna) should kiss

guinan - we like basically never see her and know nothing about her but it's always really exciting when she's there. it's like oh we got guinan this ep! always something to look forward to.

beverly - in a shocking twist i've decided that beverly is currently my favorite alive woman cast regular. this was a contentious decision which may have been influenced by having very recently watched a beverly ep but here's the thing. when they give her a half-decent script she's fucking amazing. when they let her do stuff besides Be A Mom. like she's so brave at times, in a different way than bones was brave - she's afraid of dying in a way that he isn't, but she'll still put herself in danger to help others anyway. actually i've finally mostly stopped mentally comparing her to bones, an honor which pulaski never got. unfortunately we almost never get the Great version of beverly

deanna and geordi tie - i'm sorry women. deanna dropped several rankings because what made her so special to me (yelling at her horrible mother) was immediately backtracked like it didn't matter in the following episodes with her horrible mother. i still feel deep sympathy and solidarity, and also deep gayness, but most of the time when we get Deanna Episodes(tm) they're about her shitty mom being shitty or about some guy sexually harassing her and it's very sad. like i love deanna. this bums me out. please treat her eally niceys

as for geordi, they simply have given him no screentime to do anything cool. i think there's been a total of three really good geordi moments since my last post like this. he's cool but they just never do anything with him. also, i don't like whatever he had going on with that holodeck girlfriend

picard - well SOMEBODY had to be last. i definitely don't actively dislike him anymore, and in fact he has quite a few good moments, he just doesn't make me insane in the brain the way (for example) data or spock does.

look forward to another ranking in like season 7 probably.

[thegreaterlink]

Reviewing Star Trek TNG - S4E2 "Family"

Finally, an episode title which can fit on one line.

Yes, I know I posted this too late for both Star Trek day and the death of the Queen. I guess I missed the starship landing. I tend to prioritise not feeling like shit over putting up a review on my silly little side blog.

Just to make it absolutely clear, the Queen’s death had nothing to do with this review being late. And if this is how you found out, then that’s quite frankly hilarious.

THE PREMISE

With the Enterprise docked at Earth for repairs following its skirmish with the Borg, Captain Picard takes shore leave to visit his family's vineyard in France and come to terms with the aftermath of his assimilation. Meanwhile, Worf's adoptive parents come aboard to visit him following his discommendation.

MY REVIEW

That's right. With its direct continuation of the Best of Both Worlds storyline, this could be viewed as a third part to that story's arc, only y'all didn't have to wait over a week for me to review it. It's nice to see a bit more continuity between episodes.

It’s also nice to have a bit of a breather episode after a rather intense two-parter. Having it be actually good is just a bonus.

The majority of the episode revolves around Picard with his family: his brother Robert (Jeremy Kemp) and Robert's wife Marie (Samantha Eggar) and son René (David Birkin).

It's always weird to remember that the Picards are supposed to be French when none of the actors make any sort of attempt at a French accent.

While Marie and René are serviceable characters, the main conflict is between Jean-Luc (there's not much point in calling him Picard when there are three other Picards in this episode) and Robert. Jean-Luc spends a lot of time questioning the future of his career in Starfleet, even considering joining his old friend Louis on the Atlantis Project, whatever that is.

But things properly kick off when Robert asks what really happened to him.

Suddenly long-standing tensions boil over. Jean-Luc has a long-standing grudge against Robert for treating him like shit when they were younger, while Robert in turn resents Jean-Luc for being the more successful sibling. This devolves into a full-on wrassle session in the mud, which ends with the two of them laughing together. We get the sense that they've been needing to let off some steam for a while, and it's a nice moment between the two.

Until it isn't.

"You don't know, Robert, you don't know. They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy, and I couldn't stop them! I should have been able to stop them! I tried. I tried so hard. But I wasn't strong enough! I wasn't good enough! I should have been able to stop them. I should, I should!"

Here we see the ever-stoic captain fully breaking down for the first time, completely overwhelmed by his guilt and loss of control. Since the series' inception it was clear that his compulsion to remain stoic and dignified in front of his crew has probably affected his ability to express his emotions and be properly vulnerable, making scenes like this all the more compelling.

While this scene is very powerful, my one complaint is that it feels a bit rushed from a writing perspective. It really could’ve used more room to breathe.

The idea of Picard facing realistic trauma came from Ronald D. Moore, who wrote the script even with Gene Roddenberry hating the concept, claiming that it couldn't be Star Trek without any action or jeopardy. His main issue was that animosity between siblings would just... stop existing by the 24th century. Sometimes this guy's thought process is just baffling, especially since it gets resolved in a pretty satisfactory manner.

"So… my brother is a Human being after all. This is going to be with you a long time, Jean-Luc. A long time. You have to learn to live with it. You have a simple choice now – live with it below the sea with Louis, or above the clouds with the Enterprise."

It's like that old saying goes: you either run from things or you face them, Mr White.

We next see Robert and Jean-Luc sitting and singing together, and they part on good terms.

But while Picard is definitely the primary focus of the episode, it still makes time for other family dynamics. This isn't the first time we've seen it in this series, but nearly all of those episodes have been about Lwaxana Troi and I've yet to see one of those that I actually like, so...

Anyway, Worf's parents are here! And they all actually like each other! Yay!

After seeing other characters like Riker and Troi having difficult relationships with their parents, it's refreshing to see how much Sergey (Theodore Bikel) and Helena Rozhenko (Georgia Brown) care about their son.

Thankfully, Worf never comes across as annoyed by his parents. At worst he’s slightly embarrassed, like when they’re telling the rest of the crew about him or his father is fanboying over the ship's architecture, but that’s about it. He genuinely cares about them, while they raised him like he was their own. It’s certainly a breath of fresh air, especially when it would’ve been easy to take the simple way out and write them as disapproving of Worf’s Klingon heritage.

With that being said, it's not perfect. While they never discuss it in front of him, when Worf is called away, we realise that they have no idea how to address the issue of Worf's discommendation. Like they say, Worf had no other Klingons to relate to growing up, so he often had to be left to his own devices.

It's important to bear in mind that honour is a MASSIVE deal to the Klingons (in case it wasn't already obvious), to the point where Kurn even had to disguise his identity when Worf's honour was called into question. It would be easy for him to assume that his parents would have the same reaction, since Klingon culture is technically all he's ever known.

Then Guinan comes over.

Helena: I'm afraid that Worf feels that… we do not understand him.

Worf: Well, part of him may feel that way... but there's another part that I've seen. The part that comes in and drinks prune juice. The part that looks out the window towards home. He's not looking towards the Klingon Empire, he's looking towards you.

This may be the third episode in a row where we've gotten a Guinan therapy speech, but they've been so well-written that I can't really complain. Plus it results in Worf talking things through with his parents, re-affirming that they'll always love and support him.

And last but not least, we have Wesley Crusher being gifted a holographic message from his late father, who wanted Wesley to have it when he turned 18.

We finally get a look at Jack Crusher, and I have to give props to the casting department for choosing Doug Wert, someone who could actually conceivably be related to Wesley.

It's a genuinely touching scene with some tragic dramatic irony, as the hologram tells Wesley that the person in front of him will be gone by the time he receives the message, and it ends with Wesley even about to embrace the image of his father before it disappears. After all, it may be an incredibly realistic recreation, but it's not the same as the genuine article.

I'm really glad we got episodes like this, especially since Gene Roddenberry was so opposed to them. They really go a long way to convincing us that the crew are real people and help us to care about them.

7.5/10 - One of the series’ most emotionally rich episodes so far.

Previous Episode | TNG Masterpost | Next Episode

[staringdownabarrel]

My other unpopular Star Trek opinion that nobody asked for is that I think Insurrection is a good movie, and the moral premise is pretty good.

I feel like a lot of people write it off because the Ba'ku planet "only" had 600 people on it, but that's the entire point. You're supposed to think about how many people it takes before it becomes wrong. Picard says it outright.

I don't really agree with the approach a lot of people have towards that issue, which seems to be that it only becomes wrong once you can no longer heard all those people onto a single starship. If you apply that logic, you're talking about an upper limit of something like 15,000-30,000 people at this point--Memory Alpha cites the upper evacuation limit for a Galaxy-class to be around 15,000, and no doubt a dedicated transport could carry more. I think it's an absolute thing. I think it'd be wrong to force even a single person to be moved from that planet if they didn't want to leave.

This is also the approach Picard takes in the movie, and it's actually pretty consistent with how he acted in TNG, too. One of Picard's defining attributes throughout TNG was that he tended to side with the individual over the state where possible. It's why he sided with Data over Starfleet in episodes like The Measure of a Man and The Offspring, for example, and why he eventually argued to allow the Native American colonists to remain in their village in Journey's End. Broadly speaking, his position is that people need protection from the state just as much as they need to be protected by the state.

I guess the obvious counter to this would be something like how Picard was initially going to follow orders and evacuate the Native American colony. And yes, this is true, albeit reluctantly. However, I feel like this experience in Journey's End may have informed his decision in Insurrection: that forcible relocations became a red line for him after that.

The other counter would be something like, "Sure, but the Prime Directive doesn't apply to the Ba'ku". After all, this is the point Admiral Dougherty brings up. I don't agree with this, either. The actual wording of the Prime Directive goes, "No starship may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society."

During the TNG era, this tended to be interpreted as an absolute thing. This is why Picard was able to basically tap out at the end of The Hunted with apparently no consequences to him: how the Angosian government handled its dispute with its veterans was part of the normal development of that society. It's also one of the reasons why the admiralty was hesitant to give Picard a fleet to blockade the Klingon-Romulan border in Redemption, Pt. II: a civil war over the succession of the Chancellor could have been a normal development in Klingon society, if it weren't for the Romulan interference.

Really, the only part of this where the waters get murky is that the Ba'ku aren't native to that particular planet. The thing is that after living there for 300 years, while they as a species might not be native to that planet, their culture effectively is. Even assuming there's a bit of leeway in that 300 years line--that it's based on a year for Ba'ku, which probably isn't exactly one Earth year, and that it's about 300 years and not exactly 300 years--that still means that the Ba'ku have been there for longer than the Federation has existed. Depending on the specifics of the maths involved, they may have even been there for longer than humans had warp drive.

The other thing to note here from a Prime Directive standpoint is that it's never actually stated what the Ba'ku's standing with their original home planet's government is. It's implied that there's no contact there and there hadn't been for a long, long time, but it's never stated what it was before that. It could be a general "not good", or it could be that the original species would be willing to reintegrate them into their culture--it's a blank spot.

Because of that, this is also a culture that had diverged from its host culture quite a while ago. While it might not have the long, several millennia old historical ties to a planet that the Federation is used to dealing with, there's still that deep cultural connection with that village.

I'm not really sure if I'd be completely willing to discount this as a Prime Directive issue on those grounds just due to how long they'd been there. Plus, given that the Son'a and the Ba'ku were the same species, this could be read as an internal conflict of the species, which would broadly fit with how the Prime Directive had been applied in other circumstances.

There is one other defense for removing the Ba'ku that I've traditionally seen, and that this was all happening during the Dominion War, therefore it's justified.

I don't really agree with this, either. This is a little too "the ends justify the means, especially in times of war" for my liking. I don't think it's right for the Federation to sacrifice the population of one planet that's neutral in the war, and more than likely hadn't even heard about it up until this point, just so a few thousand others might live.

I think it also assumes good faith on the part of the Son'a. This can't be assumed at that point, both due to how they'd concealed how they were the same species as the Ba'ku and how they saw the Dominion War as a sign of the Federation's growing weakness. It could be that once they'd developed the medicine, the Son'a would have turned around and said, "Thanks for that, see ya never", and then disappeared.

The other question about removing the Ba'ku in my mind is whether or not this counts as genocide. The current definition of genocide that the United Nations uses includes a provision about how deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. This tends to be an aspect that nobody really talks about, both due to how small the Ba'ku population is and how inflammatory the suggestion seems to be.

Given how the rings of Ba'ku increased the lifespan of those in the village by huge magnitudes, removing of them from the planet really would be doing that. While there were only 600 of them so it was only a very small cultural/ethnic group, that's still large enough for me to consider that this could actually count as a form of genocide in this context.

This is something that most likely occurred to Picard as well. Maybe there was a legal precedent for a culture so small in the Federation and maybe there wasn't, but if it were me, I don't know if I'd care if there was. It'd be something I'd want to stop.

Even putting aside the genocide question specifically and the moral dilemma more broadly, there's still a lot of things I like about this movie. I like how it's basically a two-part TNG episode with a much bigger budget. I like the designs of the new starships they introduce. I feel like there's a lot of stuff here that generally gets overlooked.

[morlock-holmes]

"Who gets to colonize what in the Federation" is what the Maquis are all about. "Internal dissension" is what they're all about. They're in TNG, DS9 and Voyager.

Were those themes handled well? I can't remember but they were certainly handled.

I really have two responses to this whole thread; one is to just reference the plots and characters that directly touch on points raised above, the other is that this just seems like fundamentally a complaint about the structure of some of the shows.

Particularly with the original series, the conceit is that the Enterprise largely operates outside the borders of known space. It's a show about an exploration vessel, just inherently from the premise the internal workings of the Federation are just not going to be immediately relevant.

I don't know, saying that TOS or TNG don't focus on the life of civilians outside of Starfleet feels kind of like saying Law & Order doesn't focus enough on Congress or ballot initiatives. Democratic input is not a particularly visible part of that show, either, but it's kind of hard for me to envision how you put more of that in without just completely chucking the focus of the show.

And yes, Star Trek does have a very patriotic undertone, because it's fundamentally utopian. One of the conceits of the show is that the Federation...

I don't quite have the word for it, but it functions. It is an organization whose actions largely are in concert with its stated values, where, e.g. the military largely is used for self-defense, people are able to sustain a high standard of living and the government can and does respect certain fundamental rights.

Within the show, the Federation is not criticized as being fundamentally ill-intentioned because the conceit is that it, in fact, isn't.

I kind of feel like complaining that the details are left vague is a bit like criticizing the show for not having a compelling explanation for faster than light travel; if you could actually build it in real life, you wouldn't be writing scifi TV.

To a certain extent the internal workings Federation is just "Whatever social technology it would take to instill certain values in the characters we are following" in the same way that the internal workings of a warp engine are "whatever physical technology it would take to have faster than light travel without weird relativistic effects."

And then... Like... There's tons of episodes where external actors criticize the Federation and aren't portrayed as evil or even wrong.

Please elaborate on the star trek/west wing thing? I was too young when the latter was airing and later Sorkin work poisoned me against watching it.

i will confess that i mostly know the west wing by reputation? like, uh, roughly this sort of thing. I’ve watched a few episodes myself out of curiosity, and i was shown one other one in high school, but, like. i’m not going to claim to have been a sort of superfan or w/e.

my knowledge of star trek is also fairly superficial. I’ve seen… probably a few seasons’ worth of various bits of star trek. but I, well, idk, I ended up with this weird sense of like. the long and short of it is, star trek feels like an expression of patriotism to a thing that doesn’t exist in the same way that the west wing feels patriotic to the real united states.

idk, maybe it’s just the whole adulation of captaincy or just, this vague sense that the federation may be criticized as making various errors but can never be criticized as not being fundamentally well-intentioned, or the impression that there is no power structure in the federation besides the military hierarchy (idk, i never heard much about anyone voting about anything in the federation) which is almost invariably portrayed as needing unquestioning respect, but like.

you’re left with the feeling that star trek is something built as patriotic fiction made in a different universe in the same way that starship troopers is.

this is an impression i had before i had much occasion to think about the west wing, before all these takes appeared on the internet, and everything. maybe this is unfair, and maybe a more thorough examination of both shows would reveal me to be completely wrong in some obvious way.

anyways. someone else write this post, i don’t know what i’m talking about.

[thegeminisage]

time for. SSSIGH. a star trek update. last night we watched tng's "starship mine" and "lessons."

starship mine (tng):

i actually didn't hate this one as much as my beloved cowatcher did...i think if the details of this had made more sense it could have been a really fun and sexy episode for picard to FINALLY serve some fucking cunt in. uuunfortunately

firstly we have...the welders, which have a range of like two inches. why picard dropped his weapon when one of those was trained on him i'll never know

then we have the entire premise of the baryon sweep itself...surely such a dangerous maneuver would be locked behind some kind of. like those cars that don't start if the driver's seatbelt isn't buckled. the computer won't start the sweep is there are life forms aboard. ik all the people working at this station were ""terrorists"" or whatever but they had to beam like a thousand people off the ship surely they're fucking outnumbered. if he called for help someone would hear him?? bnot even getting into the fact that an operation of this size would have more than like half a dozen people working on it

furthermore, this woman's escape plan was to get beamed off back to her own ship...so what was picard's escape plan? like, yes, sure, go to ten forward to buy yourself some time, but how are YOU getting OUT?

we saw him use a communicator at the end and realized he'd had it for like half the episode. again, WHY DIDN'T HE CALL SOMEONE?

the fact that this sludge, which they invented for this episode, can be used for NOTHING except weapons. i know why they said that. they wanted a quick way for picard to figure out the thieves were dangerous and make him look smart in the process. but it's fucking lazy, like the rest of this episode, and it has horrific ramifications for the worldbuilding at large. all of that waste has to go SOMEWHERE. even radioactive waste in real life gets reused as much as it can and in star trek they apparently solved the problem of nuclear waste so making up this spaceship waste is like. you realize you're implying that it gets dumped somewhere, right? right???

this episode wasn't a total loss to me though. for one thing, the running gag with the saddle actually was very funny and it got funnier every time it got brought up. deanna also got to cuddle with riker at one point and later tenderly wipe the blood off his face. i have mixed feelings about Smalltalk Guy (smalltalk isn't bad and talkative people aren't evil, the problem was that guy was talking At people instead of with them, but when engaged with data he waited his turn to speak), but watching him and data go was also really good

and the CONCEPT of this episode - that picard knows his ship so well he can play cat and mouse with five other people when the ship is powered off and in the dark and put the fear of god into them and then JUST when you think they finally got him he stone cold kills them on the way out - that's hot. that's not what this episode actually did, but it's what it thought it was doing, and i guess i can understand if you want to view it that way in your mind palace.

oh yeah i also recognized that guy from voyager. and i was like no way is that the guy from voyager, faceblindness strikes again! but i googled him and it was.

lessons (tng):

this one i did fucking hate, though having two picard-centric episodes in a row has done him no favors. i feel like we've had a lot of single-characters eps lately...one deanna one, one worf one, two picard ones, etc. i know the watching order has contributed to this plus the natla/bad batch break but i feel like we haven't had a genuine ensemble episode in 100 years

the big thing with this episode is of course ZERO regulations for a captain fucking around with his subordinate officer. this is a bad idea for many reasons presented in the episode itself - from picard's flirty like joke (???) about firing her to the way her requests of other crew members made them uncomfortable to the way she would go over someone's head if she wanted. again, in fics, they at least have to file paperwork. someone has to be assigned to step in if relationship problems interfere with work. i don't think it's reasonable to expect any person on the ship not to date when they're all stuck on that thing together for quite literally 5 and 10 years at a time but you have to at least have SOME regulations about it. starfleet has regulations about every stupid god damn thing in the universe, but not this?? when the episode itself showed it was demonstrably a bad idea??

apparently people praised the performances of these actors. i liked the girl, but i think for the first half of the episode sir patrick stewart was phoning it in. i don't understand why you'd have sir patrick stewart on your show and then give him such a shitty guy to be but whatever, man. like, he amped it up near the end, but by that time i was already so exhausted watching him awkwardly flirt in the exact same tone he uses to converse with his coworkers on the bridge that i didn't care.

the mention of the episode where he got his flute/learned his music WAS interesting. i wish they allowed character development and references to past episodes more often. but picard sharing his music with this lady and then being worried after she died that he would never enjoy music again just felt...selfish? especially because of:

BEVERLY. i feel like this is two or three times now picard's gotten interested in a lady and beverly has heard about it secondhand and made little jealous faces and then disappeared for the rest of the fucking episode. meanwhile when beverly was datign that trill picard got be like hey whatever else happens we're still buds ok? not only is beverly finding out like this insulting considering her and picard's situationship, picard LYING about where he got the tea recipe to her makes it perfectly clear he KNOWS what he's doing isn't fair to her. like, you see them share meals ALL THE TIME...i bet that dried up quick when he was dating this lady. did he even bother to tell her they weren't doing breakfast anymore?? my guess would be no.

i want to like picard SO MUCH but the truth is between the wooden flirting the general selfishness and the fact that he never does anything...blegh. i used to be a little unimpressed by his righteous speeches because while they were great in isolation (especially the one in data's trial...mwah) there were so many it felt like a one-trick pony situation. but we haven't had a good righteous speech in AGES and i KNOW this man can act. i actually really miss them. aside from the scotty episode, there are 4 lights, and schisms season 6 has sucked pretty bad i think

also, how are people out here saying THIS GUY is more mature than KIRK? kirk would torture himself over every one of those deaths from the firestorm whether he was dating those guys or not. he also wouldn't mess around with a fucking crew member to begin with - in dagger of the mind he was so mortified to have accidentally done so he could barely look that woman in the eye AND THEY DIDN'T EVEN FUCK. half of spirk fic angst comes from "oh no it's bad to fuck while you're captain!" and PICARD is the mature one??? kirk had fucking principles!!!!!

anyway, for half the episode we kept waiting for this lady to be evil or something and in a way that might have been less sexist and it definitely would have been more fun. picard roulette let's GO. but alas.

also, sorry, logistics again. number one in that little firestorm why didn't they send them down with GEAR. i know star trek is guilty of this across the board - nobody wears masks gloves or goggles in tos - but at least in tos they did have fucking space suits. number two why the fuck is some random employee allowed to SHUT DOWN the things that make FOOD on a whim. sigh. ok.

geez. tonight, in a well-earned break, we have 2 ds9 episodes: "vortex" and "battle lines." thank GOD it's not more tng