A good article from the Boston Globe. The plays I saw with my dad handed us a script on every uncomfortable topic parents and children both painstakingly avoid and desperately need to discuss. If YouTube’s current teenage audience is anything like my teenage self, they won’t take kindly to their parents telling them to get offline. At that age, my dad disparaging a website I genuinely loved felt like proof…
Another of the many, many reflections on the big story of the weekend. In 1984, George Orwell famously described a totalitarian political order in which people were kept as docile subjects in part by a daily ritual called “Two Minutes Hate” in which the population directs all of its pent up fury at “Goldstein,” a possibly fictional enemy of the state. Thanks to Twitter, we now know that the same dynamic…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The powerful, unpredictable Q conjures a Napoleonic scenario from Picard’s mind and takes the rest of the bridge crew there, leaving Picard on the Enterprise. Memorable not for the fuzzy-faced toy soldiers that get way too much screen time, but for a Shakespeare quote battle between Q and Picard, and Riker’s misplaced magnanimity when given the powers of Q. We’re…
Conflict between two species who petition for membership in the Federation turns out to be the B-plot. On its way past a mysterious optical special effect, the Enterprise picks up a strange glowing spark via the sensor array, and as such entities tend to do in Star Trek, it starts wreaking havoc. We get a lot of exterior shots of the ship, some alien character designs that would have worked better in background shots, a glimpse at a sensor relay room we’ve never seen before (though it’s pretty obviously a redress of Engineering), and some glimpses of the Crushers at home.
In a final reflection video for a freshman writing class, a student gave a personal shout-out to me and to every classmate over a moody guitar soundtrack, and now apparently I have something in my eye.
While I wouldn’t say this was a strong episode, of the first season episodes I’ve rewatched, it’s the first that really felt like the Star Trek: The Next Generation I grew to love. The young director Rob Bowman went on to direct about 12 more episodes. The arrogant Starfleet propulsion expert Kosinski makes neither friends nor sense as he smirks and bullies his way through his scenes of techno-magical warp…