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…
A Ferengi set on revenge tricks Picard into lowering the Enterprise’s shields and unceremoniously beams him into space.
Uh, no, actually the Ferengi plan involves finding a derelict starship Picard abandoned nine years ago and slipping a beach-ball sized “thought maker” into his personal effects, so that when he stops by his old cabin and gets a headache he can’t finish packing, so his uninspected trunk is brought to his quarters on the Enterprise, where opening the lid tips over a bucket, causing a marble to flip a little man into a tub, in which Picard re-enacts the Battle of Maxia and triggers the jittery vengeful descent of a little plastic cage.
In which Wesley commits a crime on the Legalistic Planet of Blond Joggers. (Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break.) We get right into the story by having an away team return to the bridge and briefly report on their first contact with the Edo, a peaceful people who seem to spend…
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.
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. 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…
Rewatching ST:TNG after about a 20-year break. This odd episode introduced the Ferengi, a parody of the capitalist patriarchy. I only remember bits and pieces of this episode, possibly because the pieces really don’t fit together very well. The long opening sequence gives us a good look at how the bridge crew deals with an…
Rewatching TNG after almost 20 years. (Yes, I know the show is older than that.) When the show first aired in 1987, I was living in an apartment-style dorm. When this episode first aired, the guy who owned the TV in our common room was flipping back and forth between it and a sporting event.…
With a large ensemble, we saw many scenes of one person infecting another, which got predictable after a while. Even after they learned the intoxication spreads through perspiration, nobody thinks to put on rubber gloves.
I admit, Data’s interrupted “There was a young lady from Venus” limerick made me laugh, but what sold the scene for me was Data asking Worf, “Did I say something wrong?” and Worf huffing, “I don’t understand their humor either.”
Because this show has so many short two-person scenes, I like to think of this episode as TNG’s versions of the ballroom sketches on the old Muppet Show. (Closeup on chandelier; medium shot of couples dancing; cut to a nondescript couple of muppets; there’s a setup and a cheesy punchline; cut to another couple, repeat.)
Rewatching ST:TNG after almost 20 years. The series pilot Encounter at Farpoint reads as obviously padded. Yes, the ship was new to us and we wanted a good look at it inside and out, but the slow pan across the engineering set was a waste of time, since no plot events happen there. And while I…
The cliffhanger for Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds,” June, 1990. I was a freshly-graduated English BA with good summer editing and PR gigs already lined up, admission to an MA program in hand, and a big group of friends who often gathered at midnight Sunday. That was when the local…
More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…
I am not particularly into anime, though when I was about 12 I was entranced to run across episodes of Star Blazers that aired on my local TV station one summer at about 7am. Having said that, I found this trailer for a (theoretical) anime reworking of Star Wars very appealing.
Transcript: Me: (Starts writing a routine email for textbook adoption committee.) Me: (Accidentally paraphrases part of Roy Batty’s “Tears in rain” monologue.) Me: (Checks IMDB to refresh my memory of the full quote.) Me: (Checks Blade Runner Wiki to confirm umlaut in Tannhäuser Gate.) Me: (Looks up Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.) Me: What, what was…
I spent about 30 seconds eyeballing the hexcode colors for Starfleet uniforms so that, from now on, when I’m marking papers, my Canvas interface will remind me just a little bit of Star Trek. Where do you create joy? Captain’s log… supplemental entry. It’s not a perfect match, but the blue and gold are hard…
He could have built, you know, a junkyard mechanic droid, or a general manual labor droid, or a Bitcoin-mining droid, or a freedom-fighter droid? No, he builds a fussy butler. The silliness of this just hit me.
Posting this mostly to prove that I can remain rational even when I encounter criticism of classic Star Trek, which certainly had its silly moments, but which offered many, many serious adult treatments of social issues. If you like your science fiction overlong and overserious, may I recommend Star Trek: The Motion Picture? 2001 is…
Putting speaker notes on an iPad is always more fun when using a typeface that invokes TNG Okudagrams.
I learned a lot while watching this video. I didn’t realize how much of this movie was driven by off-screen narration. The whole “The Death Star will be in range in five minutes” sequence was added in post.
I recently noticed that a blog post I created in 2003 has been getting a spike in traffic. Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife’s old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots…
