anyone… please god…
9 Likes
It’s got Quark in drag what more could you ask for
Never follow an episode guide they hate all the camp episodes and they love all the boring space war action ones because they don’t know what star trek is about.
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There’s only two episodes in all of the 90-00s Treks I refuse to watch on my regular Trek rewatches. The first is the Season 2 finale of TNG (I’ve never watched this one) and the second is Profit & Lace (watched a few times before swearing off it forever).
I agree that people who focus on the overarching story episodes are missing the forest for the trees. I love the campy and throwaway episodes - I will defend Move Along Home to anyone in earshot - and that’s part of why I don’t really gel with nuTrek. I tell people never to skip episodes because even the “filler” is important to the tone and variety of Trek.
But P&L is just SO bad. It can’t decide what tone it wants to go for, and as a result veers between a Some Like It Hot cross-dresser comedy and a serious evaluation of Quark’s relationship with his mother and ingrained Ferengi sexism.
Good concept, bad episode.
5 Likes
This was my beef with Farscape
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farscape is kind of wild because it starts out at “melodramatic, almost to the point of parody” and then somehow still escalates from there?
there’s a sort of slapdash energy to it where it simultaneously doesn’t take itself seriously but also takes itself deadly seriously and i appreciate them trying to ride that line even if it doesn’t always land for me.
i am not finished with the series though so idk if this completely falls apart at some point. my buddy and i have been watching it at the glacial pace of an episode every week or two or four.
6 Likes
I started rewatching Voyager since I finished my DS9 one a month or two ago. A lot of duds, but it was my first trek so I’ll always love it. I always forget just how insufferable Neelix is in the beginning with the whole love triangle thing.
4 Likes
No the characters in farscape get profoundly screwed up by their misadventures
My second favorite thing about the show, after the muppets, is how every character is a hollowed out ptsd wreck failing to keep it together with every new space wizard or ancient alien or planet sized whale carcass they have to deal with, not to mention all the horny torture scenarios
And how the show will confidently let the mess of a “filler” episode persist through the rest of the show.
4 Likes
Also Voyager has the best theme song
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Everyone was so damn inconsistent that trying to casually watch when it was airing was impossible. I wasn’t sure if I missed an episode or this was a really early rerun or what.
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Season 4 gets Obnoxiously Heterosexual™ but other than that it maintains that energy throughout the whole show.
Love Farscape. Part of my canonical “big three sci-fi shows” i tell everyone to watch, alongside Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine. It bums me out we’ll never get a show that manic and deranged ever again. And it manages to make a protagonist who does pop culture quips not annoying! How! Oh yeah, by nobody getting it and him constantly being tormented by the Reasonable Businessman Voice Kinky Sex Demon.
Voyager is full of duds for sure but there’s very few I’d rate below, like, 5/10. The dud episodes still feel like Star Trek, and Janeway’s constant suicidal attitude towards her ship and the lives of her command always makes me laugh. Unfortunately there’s also very few I’d rate like, 9 or above, where DS9 is basically nonstop bangers and TNG has a decent number. It’s definitely the weakest of the 90s treks, but it’s still watchably good television that hasn’t been ruined by the prestige TV Alex Kurtzmann brainrot that has since consumed the franchise.
6 Likes
I have only ever seen random eps of Farscape on tv all out of order sans any context and I’d hate to ruin those utterly insane experiences by watching more of it. Best rock-paper-scissors scene ever.
5 Likes
i randomly saw that discovery was on today and as someone who has watched all of star trek this is definitely the first time i’ve been so checked out i didn’t even realize it was currently airing on television
5 Likes
Well, Mirrors wasn’t too bad. This reminds how promising the reboot was back in S3 before the Discovery showed back up. When it’s just Brooke and Michael as couriers, it’s a passable Star Wars adventure show.
I like Moll and L’ak’s actors quite a bit. The flashbacks super duper sucked but it is cool seeing modern Breen, even if they are exactly the same as the Emerald Chain, and every other bad guy they’ve encountered in the future. I could not possibly be less interested in the subplot about Brooke’s mentor.
The Breen story is so weird. So like, they have a fluid jelly face and then a regular solid Star Trek alien face, and the civil war they’re in is over whether or not they should go into their second form? Why does that matter? Why is it a thing?
Sad to see Moll and L’ak ship blow up, that thing was cool.
It is so incredibly strange that they shoehorned in the mirror-universe Enterprise here. Maybe they’re gonna have goatee’d Spock show up later or something?
At least that shot of the Enterprise pulling out of the stellar bunghole looked awesome. And Caulder and Tilly’s conversation in the bar was very good.
1 Like
Oh my god I just realized, the entire reason this episode happened was to set up some dumbass backstory for the Section 31 movie. The crew of the ISS Enterprise crossed over, were made Federation citizens, and the leader became an admiral before “all records of her mysteriously vanish.”
1 Like
The latest Disco, “Whistlespeak”, blew chunks and was only plodded along by some rock solid Tilly-isms. Felt like one of the many, many Stargate SG-1 episodes nobody remembers.
ST Discovery super duper does not like the Prime Directive as a thing, so all Starfleet involved just roll their eyes at it and break it as fast as not doing so becomes inconvenient. This and the ep where they reveal the secret of Saru’s planet are some real TOS-style “let’s fix the planet’s culture” biz that’s feel-good but really hollow when you’re craving some kind of substantial sci-fi. Does Starfleet just go around interfering like this now?
2 Likes
Gene Roddenberry’s Family Jewels
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Erigah is another ep that is 1/10 of a meandering straight-to-DVD Stargate SG-1 movie, here to move the season arc forward another 55 minutes. On its own, it has no dramatic weight, no story to speak of, and most egregiously, nothing that sticks with you once it’s over.
Moll and L’ak as a romance is still kind of working for me. It’s making me realize that whenever Michael and the Discovery crew are not the focus, I’m interested again, and what I’m actually enjoying is the original premise of this show: A Star Trek anthology series with new characters, new locations, new dynamics each episode or season.
Imagine if last season was a Federation ambassador vessel trying to reach and talk to Species 10C, all diplomats and shit. I would’ve eaten that up. Imagine if this season was just Moll and La’k as treasure-hunting scavs trying to get the big score so they can retire to a beach.
The cast and crew of Discovery seem completely superfluous, just happy to be here for this adventure or that, none of it connected, just thwarting end-of-the-galaxy threat after end-of-the-galaxy threat to maintain the status quo.
Thoughts on Erigah
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It is incredibly, unintentionally funny how Booke has absolutely no reason to be here in this season and the show insists on calling attention to this every episode, to the level of having each character say “You have to accept that you don’t have anything to do right now”, having characters struggle to think of a useful task for him, etc etc. It’s my favorite thing this season right now.
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Very good T’Rina ep, I loved her in this. Wouldn’t have minded this entire this just being about her and, again, almost no Disco present.
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Impossible challenge to give a flying fuck about the Breen now that they’ve been revealed to be exactly the same as the Discovery Klingons. This mysterious race has now been shown to be a warrior race of different houses that has fractured without a single leader, and needs another monarch to unify them again.
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Na’an returning for this episode was some stellar comedy as she does nothing but bungle the security of the entire Federation over and over and over for 55 minutes straight. Stellar stuff.
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Lighting and sets are looking a lot better than they did in season 1. It’s amazing how SNW got something so basic so right, right out the gate.
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Love seeing more Jet Reno, but, being told how cool Jet Reno is is way less entertaining and effective than seeing how cool Jet Reno is. They need to stop trying to impress us and just let her do shit. You have an amazing character, give her something with even a little dramatic weight. Put her on an entire mission! Give her a few episodes!
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Gray’s one and only thing continues to be “they have Impostor Syndrome, they need to learn confidence” and their story in every. Single. Episode is about this. Please god show us something else about this, anything.
3 Likes
Thinking back on this season so far, and the past few seasons, this show wants to be Star Wars and should just embrace that, rather than having all of this grate against the idea of an orderly, professional, responsible Federation. Just have Michael and Booke be smugglers and do a Star Wars.
The most memorable things are in fact two special FX shots that I loved:
Moll & L’ak’s warp countermeasures
And
The ISS Enterprise being pulled out of a space bullhole
Both shots look amazing.
Lastly, in looking for these scenes I found this Moll & L’ak AMV that is so, so much more enjoyable than watching the show itself:
Truly don’t know what to say about this series at this point. I don’t know what this is supposed to be. It’s become like Johnny Quest and fuck, fuck it sucks.
Labyrinths is about Michael Burnham going to a secret library to find “the clue”. She looks for it for 20 minutes, then a mustache-twirling cartoonishly-evil Breen villain shows up and starts shooting. He seemingly intentionally pisses off every ally he has, because he’s evil and “wants the clue.” Everyone on the show calls it “the clue” and it sounds so incredibly dumb hearing a raspy General Grievous motherfucker demanding the Discovery crew hand over all the clues.
To get the clue, Michael find a hidden book that beams her into her mind palace. There she has to realize that she has a fear of not being perfect, but is reassured that she is, indeed, perfect at everything she does and succeeds at everything she tries, and nothing is ever her fault.
The supervillain is defeated when his own men turn on him because he’s too evil, and that’s the ep. This shit is so, so, so dumb.
Important: I love love love the little fire-shooters they installed onto the set of the bridge back on the S4 premiere. When they’re getting hit with bangers, these pipes shoot bursts of fire, sort of like how sparks shoot out of the panels, except there’s no possible reason as to why fire is coming out of the walls. It is the worst idea and I cannot believe they’re still using it.
Notes on Labyrinths
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Them making Stamets hold up the 3D-printed logo of Betazed and emphatically say “THIS is the logo of Betazed. THIS CLUE is the most important thing in the Federation right now. THIS will lead us to the next hint.” and hold this up for like two full minutes is an absolutely deranged use of two minutes of air time.
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In this episode, the bridge crew needed to very precisely navigate “the biggest ion storm in the quadrant”, probably the biggest “fly the ship good” moment in the show, aside for that bit last season where they went through the galactic barrier bubbles. There is no possible story reason as to why Dettmer isn’t here doing this, so I have to guess the actor had to leave the show for some reason. It just doesn’t make any sense otherwise that their pilot character isn’t here.
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The Eternal Gallery is “protected” by being inside of an incredibly dangerous ion storm that very nearly destroys the Discovery. I have to ask: Who actually survives this harrowing journey into the cloud? Do only the strongest battleships and the best pilots make it? Is that who their target audience is for this ancient book archive?
Absolutely obsessed with how the Archive is fully nothing but paper books and being impossible to get to. Anyone that survives the journey can touch the books, flip through them, take stuff out of them, etc, constantly damaging them. The archivists don’t digitize the books and share them with the galaxy or anything, they just, hoard them in a museum at the center of a fire tornado.
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THE FIRST-EDITION BOOK HAD A BIG METAL TOUCHPAD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BOOK THAT IF YOU TOUCH IT YOU GO INTO A MIND PALACE AND CLEARLY NOBODY EVER TOOK OUT OR INVESTIGATED OR TOUCHED IT OR ANYTHING DID NOBODY EVER READ THIS BOOK EVEN ONE TIME
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Some A+ stuff from Booke’s actor in the scene with the root.
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The Breen “tracked a Starfleet jump signature to this location.” That’s a thing people can do?? They can track spore jumps and go there???
8 Likes
