“[T]he command bridge of the Enterprise? Give me a break. Does it have to look like the control room of low-wattage Midwestern TV station? All those little blinking lights? What, is there a fly-into-space knob that has to be set to ON to get the thing to move? Then the fly-into-space light lights up, so we know we’re in space. And there must be a cool-sounds knob, too, and a what-Third-World-airport-did-they-loot-to-get-all-those-freakin’-plastic-lounge-chairs knob, too, and that one’s set all the way up to 10. Then there’s that ersatz techno-yammer. ‘Sir, aft shield down to 40 percent efficiency. And we’ve fired all our photon torpedoes!’ Damn the photon torpedoes, I say, full rant ahead. The waxworks sense of it is cloying. It’s like visiting an old folks’ home when none of the old folks have any connection to you. Demographically, the whole ‘Star Trek’ shebang must skew toward the Alzheimer’s generation. We ain’t in a country of young men. The movie is almost utterly devoid of youth; the two babes (Marina Sirtis as Counselor Deanna Troi and Dina Meyer as Commander Donatra) could be your grandma, and most of the guys look like they need oatmeal twice a day because their teeth and gums hurt and they want to stay regular. I kept waiting for Norma Desmond to walk in as Miss Space Station, Stardate 10002. And the sparks….” Stephen Hunter
—Hilarious Washington Post Anti-Star-Trek RantWashPost [resgistration; will expire])
I don’t normally link to the Washington Post anymore, since the site now requires registration and the pages all expire after a few weeks. But this rant is priceless.
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the…
As a grad student at the University of Toronto, I picked up a bit about…