#rewatch s1e4

[skitskatdacat63]

"Fernando" S1E4 - Fernando Alonso & Carlos Sainz Sr.

[canonically47]

their first official break-up

sniffles.. nowen save me nowen

[obviouslyphosphorus]

“I can’t stand by and watch him die!” “Then don’t look.”

[kirjavas]

i remember watching episode 4 with my parents for the first time and when lyra took out the alethiometer to tell iorek where his armour was my dad said "bear with her" and couldn't stop laughing at his own joke

[c0ffeeb1ack]

kind of interesting how we never really see the events of the hargreeves' "missions" as kids other than that first episode, but we do see the aftermath of them with both luther's unconsensual monkeyfication and ben being dead. someone better at media analysis pick this up please 🙏

[overheard-at-easing-the-badger]

Thom: *explaining the effects of the madness and gentling the Power had on his nephew*

Rand:

[yellowjacketslesbian]

van protecting nat from travis in S1E4 and then having to watch nat date him anyway like a week later is literally every lesbian having to watch their bi bestie date an awful man when they know their friend could do so much better (lottie)

[goldenhourfishbowl]

It always gets me the way Ben tries to guide Klaus in his life, partially because that is the only way for him to exert any control over the world. It's not like he has a life of his own. While the other siblings are exasperated by Klaus and simply choose to ignore him, for Ben Klaus is everything. No other way

[elevenstork]

S1E4 "the poisoned chalice" commentar

That throne room is fucking huge

"I'm going to be at the banquet?" Baby thinking Arthur is inviting him ;(

They really went and had Merlin simping over every woman he ever encountered for reasons

I understand that Nimueh is trying to get Merlin killed, but she could've just get Arthur (or even better Uther killed) and deal with Merlin later

Now I'm questioning the water-poisoning too. Was that really necesary (accidentaly revealing that it was her) when she could've just walked into the castle and poison them??

Arthur is so fed up by the old men's bullshit

If they don't let him finally drink his wine then God help everyone in that room xD

Arthur tries to get Merlin out of trouble yet again :3

"But if it poisoned he'll die"

"Then we will know he was telling the truth"

Bitch

Man, that plan was really hanging on pure hope and luck

So many people could have drink it instead of him...

Yeah but why is the crown prince tge first knneing beside himnon the floor?

Gaius and Gwen were there a minute later..

Aand why is he the one to carry his body, why not one of the guards or servants?

Arthur?? ;°

I'm so done guys

Arthur wouldn't have stood up from Merlin's bedside to pass Gaius the goblet, Gwen had to go and fetch it >D

Uther, yet again, has some truth in what he says, but he is also so so wrong

"Sometimes you have got to do what you think is right and damn the concequences"

It's a good thing Gaius sent Gwen away because the moment she leaves Merlin starts whispering Arthur's name :>

Aand now he is doing it again with everyone present :v

Gwen just thinks he is dreaming of Arthur in his feaver

Also Merlin literally on the verge of death, unconscious and still trying to channel his magic and the last fragment of his power to save Arthur :(

Merlin, begging for Arthur to just leave him to die, and save himself..

Uther is such an arsehole i can't believe it

And now they think he died 😢

"Someone knew I was in trouble and sent a light to guide the way" that sounds romantic as hell

I love these soft moments between them :*

[infinity2020corner]

Still think Bates slamming Thomas into a wall and threatening him with more bodily harm is a disproportionate, not to mention alarming reaction to Thomas acting like a little shit

[biblioflyer]

The Trouble with Tardigrade Trolleys (Discovery rewatch)

And apologia and a rant. It's a BOGO post!

Discovery’s use and abuse of the tardigrade is a feature not a bug. Let’s try to set aside questions of whether or not this is immersion breaking for the Star Trek setting for a moment, and look at it as a thought experiment.

This is one of the better “trolley problem” style moral dilemmas that I’ve seen in Star Trek. Usually Star Trek writers are a bit self righteous or maybe squeamish. They can’t help themselves, a lot of them approach Trek as a series of moral teachings wrapped in the aesthetics of science fiction. 

A lot of the time these moral teachings are only moderately more subtle than a special episode of a children’s TV show: “Oh no, the Mauve Ranger is bullying people to fit in!”

Simple and easy stories where the correct answer is written in eleventeen foot tall neon letters and there’s very little or no ambiguity or attempt to steelman the other choice.

In edgy adult dramas, sometimes you get the guy from “24” torturing someone to reveal the location of a dirty bomb. That “someone” is a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer or from a culture we’re socially programmed to feel less empathy for. At least I assume that’s what happened. I never actually watched “24” because even though I’m writing about Discovery’s use and abuse of the tardigrade as a trolley problem and pretending this can be dissected as a sterile intellectual discussion, I detest nihilistic storytelling that dehumanizes outgroups and constructs a permission structure to do evil because maybe the worst case scenario could actually happen. 

The point being that apologia for human rights violations usually depicts the victim as unsympathetic. Even Star Trek Picard manages to sneak in a trolley problem wherein, from a consequentialist standpoint, Seven is almost entirely in the right to execute a gangster who had dealt in ex-Borg implants extracted via torture and murder. (Spoiler: I was not happy about this scenario.)

Discovery’s tardigrade problem is remarkably willing to confront moral ambiguity and thus, to my mind, is a much better and thus more interesting trolley problem because the deck hasn’t been stacked to allow an easy and obvious exception to most well adjusted people’s moral hangups around torture and murder.

It's not trying to hide the ball here. It’s very easy to cry animal abuse or torture. It's easy because that is exactly what is happening.

Yet on the other tracks are hundreds of innocent lives.

What makes this a well constructed trolley problem is that “Ripper” the tardigrade has blood on its claws. It's also, by most standards, terrifying and hideous. It may as well be a xenomorph from Alien in how sympathetic it is. Except….. We are shown that it has a gentle side. It's surprisingly willing to trust unarmed humans considering how many humanoids have tried to kill or imprison it up to this point.

And let's face it, the show gave us every conceivable signal possible to tee us up to not feel sorry for Landry. So much so that I was completely convinced that she was from the Mirror Universe, like Lorca, until she died trying to hack off one of Ripper’s limbs. Memory Alpha informs me that Star Trek Online gave her a tragic backstory, I don’t consider STO canon and I don’t even consider it “canon until disproved by onscreen events” but I will give them credit for trying to clean up the continuity such that it doesn’t seem as much like Landry is supposed to be representative of Starfleet security for this era.

The first time the spikes that link it to the Spore drive are inserted into it, you don’t need a close up of Burnham’s face to recognize Ripper’s agony. By that point most people capable of empathy for a nonhuman, non-fuzzy creature are already starting to see it more like a manatee or a weird bear than a monster. Bringing Star Trek back into the room, in my mind this is VERY good Star Trek.

What makes it good Star Trek is that we’re being asked to empathize with a monstrous creature, to reexamine its motives and behavior in a fresh light with new context, and to appreciate its pain. If we set aside our desire to view Star Trek as a documentary of an enlightened society that has figured out how to instill perfect morality into its citizens, then I think we also see another thing that Trek is good at: showing people doing the work of realizing they’ve made a terrible decision that flies in the face of their values and trying to fix it.

It’s critical to recall that the Tardigrade isn’t suffering because our heroes are bad people. Okay Landry and Lorca are bad people (weird that the two human monsters have L names.) It’s suffering because 1. Nobody has quite realized its sentient yet. 2. Their conception of what if anything causes it physical discomfort is not very well developed (at least the first time it’s used) and 3. Hundreds of people will die if Discovery doesn’t use the Tardigrade to initiate a spore jump to the dilithium mine currently under attack by Klingons.

The original scenario in s1e4 “The Butcher’s Knife Cares Not for the Lamb’s Cry” (which is such a metal title) is very much a ticking clock that takes place in conditions of ambiguous knowledge with not a certain amount of pressure to look away from the moral hazard staring the characters in the face. It bears repeating, several hundred miners and their families are at risk, as well as a key resource keeping Starfleet able to hold the line against the Klingons.

The additional usages of the Spore Drive are harder to justify. Not impossible, but more difficult. By s1e5 “Choose Your Pain” it’s abundantly clear that Ripper is being harmed by the jumps, jumping too frequently is causing Ripper harm faster than it can recover, and some of the crew are definitely getting squeamish. Lorca rattles off a list of achievements as a result of the Spore Drive representing lives saved, the Klingon capacity to make war reduced etc. 

So the bleakness of it all is that there is inarguably blood on the crew’s hands for inflicting pain on a creature that the crew no longer is blinded to but one could also argue there would be blood on their hands if they had the capacity to intervene and failed to. (To what degree if any you have culpability for failing to prevent something profoundly awful from happening if you must violate an important moral precept to do it is what makes the trolley problem so interesting and debates around, say, Batman killing the Joker incredibly interesting, but often VERY heated.)

It's also uncomfortable but not hard to understand why, with its back to the wall, Starfleet is interested in capturing more Tardigrades and using them for propulsion, despite the mounting evidence that this is profoundly cruel.

At this point, I will once again throw open the doors to the clean room and “contaminate” it with spores of classic Trek morality.

As the secular humanist, cruelty averse do gooders; I find it shocking, offensive even as a fan, that when presented with a trolley problem that I personally think would be an example of an easy slam dunk, Starfleet balks at the much easier, much more moral path.

That trolley problem being permit the use of genetic engineering to adapt humans to act as Spore Drive navigators in place of the Tardigrades….

OR

Keep inflicting suffering upon a being that can feel pain.

And Starfleet shouts down the genetic engineering solution, because the legacy of the Eugenics War and the prohibition on genetic alterations is somehow more important than winning a war in which everything about the society in which Federation citizens currently live in will undoubtedly get A LOT worse, and the body count tremendous. Also remember at this point we don’t know that for whatever reason Stamets is the only viable candidate. 

As much as I’m enjoying rewatching this show much more than I ever expected, this is infuriating!

Who thought it was at all logically defensible for Starfleet to turn down the ability to mass produce Spore Drive navigators instead of trying to capture a lifeform that is VERY dangerous when provoked? 

Who thought it was consistent with the characterization of Starfleet to decide Eugenics was worse than torture?

To make matters worse, this isn’t an example of a Badmiral gaslighting HQ like Dougherty in Insurrection, this is Starfleet’s equivalent of the joint chiefs! What the hell?!

Clearly someone just pulled the prohibition on genetic engineering out because it was an already established piece of Star Trek canon as a way to rationalize why the obvious solution of just letting a volunteer pilot the darn ship couldn’t have been done immediately after the Tardigrade curls up and goes on strike. And critically this rationalization was conjured without any real consideration as to how silly, if not downright evil it makes Starfleet Command look.

[state-of-being]

When Prudence brings Stolas to Blackwood's office because she caught him spying in the girls showers...

Lilith, girl, there are better ways to see Sabrina naked.

[stemroses]

Tell me how I forgot this man was out here muttering/moaning (but in a sick way) Arthur’s name while on his deathbed

Babe in episode fucking 4

[honeysucklepink]

Moonlighting Rewatch, S1E4: "The Next Murder You Hear"

Synopsis from Wikipedia: "Maddie and David investigate the on-air shooting of a radio talk-show host. Although David thinks the case will be great publicity for the agency, Maddie is unsure whether to take it when she learns that the host was having an affair with a married woman. The host soon turns up alive, having faked his own death to keep the affair from his boss, but is then accused of the murder of his lover's husband, who was also his boss. Both the host and his mistress hire Blue Moon to prove their innocence, and Maddie and David disagree over who they believe actually did it."

Original Airdate: March 19, 1985

Fun Fact (esp. for Gleeks): Guest star Quinn Fabray's dad!

Rewatch window is from 8 pm eastern Tuesday, November 7th to 8 pm eastern Wednesday, November 8th!

[free-to-be-no-one-but-mee]

Realizing how many different things they dealt with and how long it takes for actual religion to show up

Like there are demons, but they're just demons lol

jensen's ass curve shot!

Bed head

FLIP PHONE

The brother's have so fucking good looks between them. Just a slow turn and everyone knows what they are saying to each other

boy MADE and emf and sam's the smart one? Pfff

Agile motherfuckers

"whY Do yUO thINk i DriVE eVeRYwhErE SaM?"

Jensen has such large eyes, ofc no one says no to him