Been watching tng from the beginning, skipping episodes my much more trek literate spouse either hates or finds insignificant… This show is so fuckin great lmao. The opening scene of the ep with Troi’s mom where Riker is just watching a hologram of two ladies playing harp is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen
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the whole first ep of the new season is temporarily up (in the states?) if you wanna watch
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yeah just in the states
First two eps were fine but didn’t do a ton for me, felt more like setting stuff up for the season than episodes good on their own
Not blown away by these two either. You sorta hope these new Trek series get cut down in their prime rather than when then they’ve already started phoning it in.
I can’t stop thinking about that final Discovery season.
Does anyone know if any musicians have ever put Denise Crosby’s speech about how drugs make you feel good in a song, that would go hard
The episode is called symbiosis
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Everyone ITT who likes Lower Decks (or any of the TNG timeloop episodes) should check this one out. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure comic that has a very neat trick it does very well. I won’t say any more than that!! I guess $25 is kinda expensive buuut it’s like 200 glossy full color pages so it’s worth it, imo.
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Haven’t thought about Ryan North in a while but his stuff is usually fun
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“Conspiracy” is wild because it’s one of those episodes that’s emblematic of the weirdness of the first season, but the plot itself feels like exactly the kind of thing they’d do for a like entire season subplot of Discovery or something like that. Cramming it all into a single episode does make it feel a bit rushed, but there are still plot things in it that are executed well and seem like exactly how it would work in the modern era of heavily serialized fauxtege streaming shows, like Data confirming the conspiracy by doing high speed statistical analysis of years worth of Starfleet records. But there is no way a 2020s show would ever dare to have a reveal as campy and weird as a table full of dudes all scooping handfuls of mealworms into their mouths. There are actually so many moments of weird gross pulpy nonsense in this show, way more than I would have predicted based on my recollection of later seasons. I actually kind of love it? They also have tons of grizzled old TV character actors which creates a fun sense of continuity with TOS even though in universe they’re meant to be many decades apart. Like having guys who probably played in tons of old TV westerns play all the high ranking star fleet admirals makes the show feel much more like a sequel to a 60s show, it’s great. In my mind there was such a huge gap between the two, but at this point early TNG feels closer to TOS than it does to the present most of the time
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That episode is one of the best they ever did
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I give the concept an A, the worm eating scenes an A+, but the overall execution a B
this is more or less my opinion of all the good episodes so far, very few pure stinkers , but like 5 or 6 eps in this season have solid concepts and mid execution, save for 1 or 2 really great scenes
it just feels like a lot of the writing is half-baked. Like the episode of the old guy taking reverse aging drugs so he can go back and try to correct the civil war he accidentally started when he was younger is 3/4 of the way to being this like genuinely profound rumination on trauma and remorse and survivor’s guilt… the scene where he goes down to the planet and insists with increasing madness that he knows his way around even though they’ve changed the layout a bunch in the intervening years is so good… i’m like this is the type of shit viet thanh nguyen was on when he wrote “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” but then they don’t really follow through on any of that, and then in the last scene where picard is telling everyone what lesson they learned today he’s just like ‘ahh. the quest for youth is futile indeed’… like… is that really what this episode was about? guess i was wrong
in conspiracy, i love the mysterious meeting on the lifeless planet, esp the suspicious blue alien guy, and a lot of the other stuff in the first half of the episode. but all that mystery and suspense just sort of goes to shit when the parasite aliens plan seems to just be ‘immediately reveal who you are to your victims and just physically overpower them’ like i’m sorry how would that be an effective technique. i just think cramming all of that into one episode that had to be resolved by the end forced them to make overly goofy decisions about how to move the plot forward, i feel like there’s a way you could make them slightly more cunning without having to get rid of the worm banquet, which owns
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The Best Exotic Nanite Hotel was the most mid ep if Lower Decks to date, I can’t quite believe how phoned-in it was considering the grey-goo premise. The deckers chase around a Rick & Morty monster, they bicker, and then in the last 5 minutes of the episode, they cram in the kinda interesting micro-universe idea in a rush to set up more of the dimensional-overlap crisis for the finale.
My prediction, which I’m making here at ep 3, is that Alternate Universe Boimz will be the villain of the season, and the dimensional issues they keep seeing is caused by him. Gonna guess the micro-USS Endeavour will play some part in the solution, because otherwise, it is incredibly bizarre to introduce that in the 11th hour here.
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oh, that reminds me, another thing that doesn’t happen in at least the first season of tng, is the thing where every episode has an ‘a plot’ and a ‘b plot’ that are basically unrelated. this seems to have become the norm in almost all episodic tv these days, and i really don’t like it. it is probably the only thing that i didn’t care for about lower decks. its like a 30 minute show, and half the fun of the show is the core group of like 4 main characters. having them split into random pairs with each doing something totally different every episode just gets kind of boring… it’s way more fun when all the characters get to interact and talk about the same situation
if they can’t think of some way to involve all of the characters in a single story for every episode, i would prefer it if they just did like old school cartoons and have every episode divided into two unrelated segments with their own titles and stuff
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It’s so much better to stick to the one plotline, I definitely agree. One of my big gripes about LD is that they never give the time they need to let either the characters or the premise breathe, they’re in too much of a rush.
Just do the one good plotline that ep! Do full scenes with your characters! Let them do more than parrot references and quip! You absolutely do not need to spend 15 minutes of a 30 min show having Boimler fuck up at skiing!
I remember that Peanut Hamper ep last season, with the bird-people being particularly good for this reason, it just had the one focus.
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A Farewell to Farms was alright, it’s nice seeing Ma’ah again. I got a lil’ chuckle out of Mariner’s face up there and the scene where the two klingons yell at each other to experience bij, and that’s about it. Beyond that, a sort of numbly entertaining 30 minutes.
Not looking promising for this final season…
The other thing about early TNG is that it is frequently menacing if not just scary like TOS is, and later Treks rarely are.
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So I’ve seen enough of “Trials and Tribble-ations” on Tumblr that I’ve finally decided to give Deep Space Nine a shot, but wanted to try a random episode first to see what the series was like. Thanks to effective Paramount+ thumbnail use, I decided to for episode 4.06, “Rejoined”, where Jadzia is ex-spouses with Moira Queen from Arrow (I only learned this bit later, and it only improves the ep), and they’re still in love and pining, and the episode is entirely about that and they actually kiss, and it’s 1995 and I love it, and I’m afraid it’s set too high a bar.
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