Comment Stream

Re: DS9 S6: Waltz

It's interesting that Dukat's chorus are the people he has the most issues with: Weyoun for being his puppet master in matters of the Dominion-Cardassian "alliance"; Damar for killing Ziyal; and Kira for not only not succumbing to his charms (as the Bajorans didn't as a people), but also for rejecting him in what he undoubtedly saw as a cruel way (down to his bad breath). In his not-quite-recovered mind, Weyoun still tells him what to do; Damar is still an obsequious toady; and Kira is still callous and cruel to him (like Bajor with its refusal to cave to his/Cardassia's superiority).

Re: VOY S5: Think Tank

Two things improve this episode:

1) make it a two-parter to properly flesh out the themes established at the episode's beginning, most notably the cat-and-mouse game b/w Voyager and the Think Tank and Seven's struggle with her purpose on Voyager, and

2) cast Jason Alexander as a super-smart George Costanza, neuroses and all.

Re: TAS S1: The Magicks of Megas-Tu

@ PCP,

Wow, you made you realize that I really did watch this episode and that it wasn't a fever dream. Apparently you saw what I saw, it was a real thing on a screen for all to see. Good to know, as least *I* hadn't eaten the moldy bread.

Re: VOY S5: Think Tank

@ Jammer - "plot that once again makes the human sensibility the benchmark of morality while absolute intelligence merely corrupts absolutely."

That human sensibility is all over Trek like a bloody virus and it often irritates me. Like Picard and his little "morality speech" to Q in TNG's "True Q". I literally collapsed on the couch laughing at that speech, and of course I loved Q's comeback.

Humanity in ST act so smugly superior yet if I think of all the immoral things all our favourite captains and co. gave done, their attitude is mind-boggling.

A 3 star episode for me, I was entertained and it was a bit more imaginative than ST usual, with great alien designs. I just wish it was done without the bounty hunters, instead the Think Tank offering Voyager a fast way home in exchange for Seven, then when she refuses, they refuse to let her leave. And Seven herself being a bit more conflicted about her choice.

But otherwise a really good episode for me.

Re: TAS S1: The Magicks of Megas-Tu

Star Trek has solved the mystery! It turns out that The Moment of Creation--The Big Bang--was essentially a Big Fart from an alternate universe where magic itself is the rule of the day. Well, shit, that’s a good enough explanation as any.

Jammer, your reviews are always sublime. They’re better than my rants, by far. But now, I must respectfully disagree with you. This episode was way too much fun and acid-crazed to receive anything less than a passing score. “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” is *alive* in a fever-dreamily audacious way. One star? For shame!

I too got a kick out of NBC apparently objecting to showing the conception of God but greenlighting The Devil in one of its shows. I also got a kick out of how both Star Trek and South Park conceive the Dark Prince as just a jovial, chill fellow who only wants to rollick and frolic with lots of friends, drinks beer, reads books, holds luaus and Sweet Sixteen parties, and sticks up for humanity on one or two occasions. South Park even takes this a step further, taking pains to show that the main humans who come within Satan’s orbit--Saddam Hussein, Donald Trump and “those spoiled rich girls on MTV”--are actually far worse than he is. Remember, in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu,” not only does Kirk pricelessly defend Lucifer, but Lucifer defends us as well. What a nice old chap.

That brings me to the Salem Witch Trials scene, and the second time that Kirk is accused of being a witch (see: “All Our Yesterdays”). This is quite the jarring tone shift in this episode, but considering what came before it, I’ll chalk it up to its usual crazy business (McCoy: “What in the name of sanity is going on?!” Me: “You are in a cartoon show, Doctor. Just run with it.”) As everyone hopefully knows, the Salem Witch Trials had nothing to do with witchcraft. A couple of girls ate some moldy bread and got ergot poisoning, causing them to hallucinate, and then a phalanx of other girls joined in because they wanted attention. Then the typical townsperson realized that he could say his neighbor was guilty of witchcraft against his family so that he’d then be free to seize some land. Essentially, this had nothing to do with supernatural influence and arguably nothing to do with the influence of Satan. But here comes Star Trek to set the record straight! These aliens all came along on the Mayflower and settled in Massachusetts, you see, but just couldn’t help themselves--they just *had* to show that they had special powers. Then, all of us members of “the vilest species in all the universe” (okay, no argument here) burned them at the stake. Some did because they were simply afraid, and some because the aliens wouldn’t play ball and use their powers to fund the colonists’ personal gains. Star Trek’s point here is that we don’t need no stinking Devil. We’re doing just fine being ugly on our own. But I kid.

Oh my God, where Star Trek: TAS really shows its ridiculously cheesy side here is through anything and everything to do with showing “the magic” of the Megans’ alternate universe on screen. The Spock schlock is one thing (“Power of this universe, enter my being.” / “I know I can”), but I lost it when Kirk was psychokinetically dueling with Asmodeus. First, he gamely *leans away* when Asmodeus shoots a fireball at him. (“Submit, Captain! You haven’t the power to fight us.” Maybe not, but it appears he does have the power to dodge you.) Then they use their fingers to shoot LSD-conceived bullshit at each other, complete with Kirk shown cringing and shielding himself from a fierce wind in front of a matte painting of the rainbow flag (but I kid). The *only* thing that was missing here was Eric Cartman’s vocalizations when he was engaging in a similar “psychic battle” on South Park: “Neh neh neh neh neh! Neh neh neh neh neh neh neh!” Oh TAS, how could we hate you?

I gave a grade of B to “Spock’s Brain.” I would die on a hill defending that episode’s worth. I had lots of fun laughing along with that show. As for “The Magicks of Megas-Tu,” I had lots of fun laughing *at* it. Sadly, there’s a difference. I’ll tell you what, though. This episode had me thinking big thoughts and appreciating what it tried to do a lot more than “The Survivor” or “The Infinite Vulcan” did. For sheer value as a silly diversion, “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” definitely passes. As Lucien himself said, “A toast to a new friendship!”


Speak Freely:
Spock -- “I find this scientifically fascinating.”
McCoy -- “At least I have the good sense to be scared, Jim.”


P.S. What the *hell* was that shot of Little Child Satan next to a spinning dreidel? Asking for a friend.

P.P.S. Lucien was a fair infomercial salesman: “Never settle for anything less. Do you need a room, a stable, a castle? Stop in at your friendly sorcerer-contractor.”

P.P.P.S. In the finest tradition of 70’s exploitation films, Sulu imagines himself up a beautiful charmer--but whoops! It’s really SATAN! (Uhura: “Good luck.”)

P.P.P.P.S. That “love philter” vial was clearly shaped like a penis. Clearly.


My Grade: C

Re: TOS S3: For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

Natira looks like she's wearing a skirt, but it's actually the belliest of all bell bottoms.

The next time someone's sun blows up, they should just send a probe with some memories and a flute.

Re: ENT S4: Terra Prime

The ending with the death was the most heart-wrenching scene in any ST series - save the death of Edith Keeler. Pity that this series was canceled as it was starting to figure itself out. 3 1/2 stars with 1/2 star taken off for the ridiculousness of Archer not shooting Paxson to secure the facility.

Re: Star Trek: Insurrection

"I love TNG, despite its many flaws. These movies, though, I just can't get into. None of them. They all feel off, wrong and surface-level, overlaid with a vibe of "let's get the gang back together". Honestly, I don't know if a TNG movie could ever feel otherwise. If instead of movies they, every two years, made a new two-parter episode for TV, I expect it would be the same. Although maybe not quite so, because then they wouldn't necessarily be trying to target a broader audience.

No, for me TNG ended at All Good Things, which was a good ending. Everything that came after is fan-fiction. Especially "Picard", which was just awful."

Agreed 100%. The TNG movies never worked for me. Even the good one (First Contact) had that feel like a pop version of a Disney movie ballad - same words, same tune, but devoid of that all important connection to story, character and context. The TNG movies were like the TNG cast having fun together in a very fourth wall breaking way. The essence of TNG was just gone. Generations probably felt the most authentic since at least they had the Enterprise D but ya, none of the films really worked.

And don't get me started on Picard - *shudder*. I've spilled more than enough digital ink on that wretched thing.

Re: DS9 S2: Rivals

I like it when Trek tries a slice-of-life, semi-frothy story. This hit the target but wasn't anywhere close to the bull's-eye. They couldn't quite pull the fun moments together.

Re: ENT S1: Shadows of P'Jem

Second time i have watched in last 6 months. 4th time overall. Every time I watch I enjoy even more.

Love the episode. Archer saying how the Vulcans took away something special from his dad andnot gonna let them do that to him, together with T’Pol’s reaction is one of the sweetest moments in all of Trek.

Jammer, rewatch. Worthy of a rating revision.

Re: Star Trek: Insurrection

I've seen this a few times over the years and still have zero recollection of half the plot points Jammer mentions.

I love TNG, despite its many flaws. These movies, though, I just can't get into. None of them. They all feel off, wrong and surface-level, overlaid with a vibe of "let's get the gang back together". Honestly, I don't know if a TNG movie could ever feel otherwise. If instead of movies they, every two years, made a new two-parter episode for TV, I expect it would be the same. Although maybe not quite so, because then they wouldn't necessarily be trying to target a broader audience.

No, for me TNG ended at All Good Things, which was a good ending. Everything that came after is fan-fiction. Especially "Picard", which was just awful.

Re: VOY S1: State of Flux

Really good episode. And Seska is a great villain deserving of more screen time.

Re: TAS S1: The Infinite Vulcan

@ Peter G: "In the absence of problems, he'll come up with one."

To quote my wife, when she was epically ranting about her mother / my mother-in-law: "She always has a problem for every solution!" That one has stuck with me.

No criticism from me to you about watching a video on Tony Stark. For sure, Stark and Keniclius have a lot in common with each other. These types of people are never happy unless there's a crisis to manage. Admittedly that's what science and engineering is--solving problems. Innovation happens when they identify and solve problems the rest of us never even realized we had, but every so often we really get the short straw when even more problems are created because of them. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" often comes to mind!

Re: DS9 S4: The Visitor

I can't really get past the question of why Jake's death would "cut the cord" between him and his father. His body's still there. Benjamin should continue appearing beside it. The question of what happens to Melanie's future is also a problem, which I see people have wrestled with above. Both problems arise because the writers haven't actually thought about / cared about the technical implications of their story.

Fair enough; they wanted to write a story about coping with loss and the emotional link between Jake and his father. It's clear this worked (see Jammer's review and most of the comments in this thread that aren't about time travel dynamics). The message of this is a little hard to figure out. Clearly, things go badly when Jake can't move on from the loss of his father, well when he moves on with his life, and wrong again when he remodels his entire life around trying to recover his father (although it is unclear *why* his marriage collapses; plenty of couples survive one of the partners going to graduate school and Jake is shown to be obsessive as a writer too, so maybe his wife was always going to get sick of him and leave him).

I'm not sure how we're meant to read the final meeting. Jake kills himself, which seems bad. On the other hand, he has written more stories, largely so that he can present them to his father, which suggests that he's found a way to get something constructive out of "the cord." But completely cutting the cord doesn't allow him to move on, it terminates his existence and sends both of them back to the moment before the loss... This allows the series to continue, but I have no idea if it can be made to mean anything.

I guess Melanie, as an ersatz child to Jake, who is a result of his interrupted writing career, is a symbol of everything that he could have accomplished had he been able to escape the cord together.

Re: TAS S1: The Infinite Vulcan

@ PCP,

"See, this right here is the problem with megalomaniacal scientists. They just can't stop *messing* with everything, even when they don't have to do so anymore. "

Funny enough, I was watching a video last night about Tony Stark (don't criticize me, I was tired) which was just about this topic, how he's the sort of person who consistently creates problems and comes up with brilliant ways to solve them, but not before creating new problems. And in the absence of problems he'll come up with one.

Re: VOY S4: Demon

As a vanilla SF episode it wasn't THAT bad (some high concept stuff, although the development was lacking). And the planet sets were great! (I enjoyed the close-ups of the landed Voyager too). An expensive episode to produce, no doubt.

I'd give it 2 and a half stars.

Re: VOY S5: 11:59

I really liked this episode since I saw it way back. It’s low key but I like that. It’s different but the tone and story always stuck with me. This and Counterpoint this season were standout Janeway episodes, among the best of the series.

Re: TAS S1: The Infinite Vulcan

Keniclius 5: "What of my work?! If all I have lived for is already done, if the times I feared are gone, what is to become of me? There appears to be no reason why I should continue to exist."

First of all, your mouth to God's ear, Keniclius. Second, Jesus H. F. Christ, how about just kicking back with a few beers and chilling out, not bothering anyone? Why can't that be what becomes of you? See, this right here is the problem with megalomaniacal scientists. They just can't stop *messing* with everything, even when they don't have to do so anymore. Dude, just kick back, enjoy your retirement and shut up. Essentially, one plus of the episode is showing how well-intentioned ideas and scientific breakthroughs can rage out of control and become too giant (literally in this case, with giant humans and giant Vulcans).

I had to laugh that the plants turned out to catch some disease because of visiting humanoid tourists on their planet. Star Trek took over three years to *finally* suggest that explorers landing on all these alien planets might not be so good for the natives' immune systems? But I kid. There is an eerie visual (even for animation, which impressed me) where we see the old dead plants lined up against the wall as museum pieces in a dank old cave. That was well done.

But even with one or two things to take seriously within it, "The Infinite Vulcan" is pretty much primed to be laughed at and absorbed without any serious reflection. Talking plants, "primitive and aggressive," no less? Whatever, they're aliens. I too found the pterodactyl plants to be a complete hoot, especially when they carted Spock off into the sky and Kirk nonchalantly asks where they've taken him as if he couldn't care less. (Yeah, Shatner is back to phoning it in again, sad to say). The noisy screeching was a little much--I was with McCoy: "I can't take much more of this."

Giant Spock was a perfectly hokey gag just *made* for TAS. Had they never done something like this, in hindsight I would probably have objected to the fact that they didn't do anything over-the-top in a cartoon show that leant itself to it--so points for that, I guess. Sulu was priceless, by the way: "The Vulcan mind touch!" For the kids, apparently. I cracked up.


Speak Freely:
Kirk -- "Sulu, you're the most scrutable man I know."


My Grade: D+

Re: ENT S4: Observer Effect

Hoshi being a top linguistic expert out of any human and secretly an expert gambler beforehand probably makes her the most powerful ferengi in all of star trek.

Re: TNG S4: Night Terrors

Luckily for Worf his knife needed to be just a smidgen sharper before using it, allowing Troi to arrive in the nick of time. I assume that she used security override to get in, although she must have gone to that immediately upon arrival. She didn't try the door bell.

Door bell. Picard's trouble with them was funny. Especially his reaction when Troi and Crusher were there after all. "What...?!"

How many times has Worf needed to replace those tall thin glasses of oil? Every other week the bridge crew are being jolted and jostled by enemy ship fire or whatnot, yet crew quarters are always shown to have breakable things sitting out in the open like this.

Troi's contribution in the first scene was so classically Troi in its vagueness and uselessness. Even better than usual because here she couldn't even speak in full sentences. I was still chuckling away about that by the time they were on the other ship, "and she's only *half* Betazed" I was thinking. And then they found a full one: brain dead zombie. Comedy gold.

Gillespie's a trouble maker. Bars only lead to bar fights. They should rethink the inclusion of bars on ships. Guinan's gun had a cool design but one ugly paint job.

Keiko comes home from work, takes two steps into their room, stands there and launches into a full-on whine about her day. Was she under the influence yet, like O'Brian was? Her later lines gave the impression that maybe she wasn't.

Re: TNG S7: Parallels

I like this episode a lot, but it's kind of a mind **ck when you stop and think about it. Billions if not trillions of universes.

Re: TNG S3: Menage a Troi

I'm ambivalent about Lwaxana Troi. Like most eeryone, I thought of her early episodes as some of the worst in TNG, though in an odd case, she seemed to get less irritating and get a little more depth each appearance. Here is, I think, where she really started to turn the script and become more than just a punchline, but it's still not one of my favorite stories by a long shot. The Ferengi were always a joke of a threat, but here, the writing seems indecisive between taking them seriously as potential sex criminals or treating their stripping Deanna and Lwaxana as just a joke. It's meant to highluight how ridiculous and horrible they are, but at the same time, it's so disturbing that they're making sex crimes here, and it's meant to be, funny? Besides, it's yet another occasion where Deanna Troi falls victim of a sexually charged threat. When she's not forcefully impregnanted by an entity, she's mind-raped and then literally nearly raped in a tone-deaf episode that tries to handle the subject, and now, she's stripped by the joke characters. At this point, we start to view a tendency from the writers to humiliate her in ways reminiscent of sexual assault, which of course is meant to be see as *bad* within the story, but, I dunno, no wonder some fans are so frustrated by how women are written in TNG.
Still, it's nice that Lwaxan can finally show that she can do more than just annoy everyone in the Enterprise and in the audience, and her part shows how they were gradually growing the character. She may not be my favorite character, but she gets better.

Re: TAS S1: Introduction

@Black_Oat:
Your link is dead. Perhaps I should rephrase my opinion about Star Trek TAS as being okay for its intended audience back when it first aired but horribly animated and barely adding anything new to the orignal series by today's standards. And I believe that if you think those other series you mentioned are bad you are guilty of the same mistake as me when I initialy said TAS was garbage because while I would probably hate them today I remember being amused by them back in the day. I probably should have been more aware of the fact that I was judging something from the 70's for a relatively young audience as an adult used to 2020's standards.

I still stand by my opinion that to me TAS was a boring and disappointing snorefest and that I am not particularly willing to debate this as discussing differing opinions usually doesn't go well unless *both* parties are really willing and able to do it properly. It also has to be worth the trouble actually debating which I don't believe to be the case.

I believe this addition to my earlier comments will do, for now.

Re: TOS S2: Wolf in the Fold

@Peter G
==
"I'll take Spock's Brain anyday."

Someone already did.
==

And it was a woman! Now Spock is going to hate women too.

Re: A 30th anniversary amid life's fast-moving middle stage

God, this hits home. I feel the same emotions now looking over my own debris and "body of work" on the internet for the last 30ish years. The diminishing returns of Trek. The feeling of loss. The acute painful sickening sweetness of nostalgia. The yearning for more, for a new phase, for new discoveries.

Whatever we end up doing, let's just do our best. Thanks for the great ride, thoughtful comments, and enjoyment over the years. You're a mensch.