Though at times it seems like this episode tries to occupy too many places at once, and could have dropped a subplot or two to really focus on Isaac and the Kaylon again, there is still enough character work and humor to make this an enjoyable watch. Even toward the end, my thinking was closer to "How is this all going to wrap up? Isn't the episode almost over?!" than "Geez, how much more of this is there?" That's a good thing.
I also understand that the producers probably didn't want to focus another episode solely on Isaac and the Kaylon, considering that the season premiere already did that. The C and D stories were therefore useful to take breaks from what could have felt like retread territory to some viewers.
And finally, I kept hoping that there would be some opportunity for K-1 to spoof The Good Place's Janet and say something like, "Not a robot." It didn't happen, but it would have been hilarious.
Pete's out there making a bad name for men everywhere. It's none of your business, bud.
I only wish we'd seen more of what happened after Jake fixed it. Two phrases wasn't enough!
Weird that Dr. Weir is already played by someone else. Surely the production team knew at the end of season 7 that they'd need her back, and held Jessica Steen's availability for when filming resumed for season 8? Jarring that they didn't even match hair colors.
Average episode rating this season: 7.416666… (comfortably rounded up to 8/10 because I so look forward to the show coming around in my rotation again)
I'd counter @drnkmnky's assessment ("mediocre") with this point: The humor of Frasier is much more, shall we say, cerebral than many other popular sitcoms. I find Friends in particular to be a very marked contrast. Personally, I laugh much more at the wittiness of the Crane brothers and the people around them than I do at the often inane antics of Ross et al.
First episode of this season that got me to start giving a shit.
Actually, I think Minister Zhang will be the most interesting character to watch this season.
I can see @LeftHandedGuitarist's points regarding the tropes used, but I have a soft spot for this episode despite that. Paris might not be a particularly believable "bad boy", and Lidell isn't terribly convincing either (it's so obvious that she's involved, this comment can't possibly qualify as a spolier). But it's all worth it for Tuvok.
Is the story predictable? Probably. I've seen the series too many times at this point to be surprised by anything, so I can't trust my own judgment on that front. But it's just so satisfying to watch Tuvok tease all the threads together. Call me sentimental, whatever. This is a Tuvok focus episode. Poor Tom's just a prop.
David Hewlett's performance is absolutely phenomenal in this one. I have no words.
No words, that is, except to nitpick that this "dangerous" mission to a Wraith-occupied planet is a little too easy—especially the part about getting back to Atlantis, which is neither shown nor even referenced.
Patrick Stewart flubbed a line in the Sickbay scene, saying "Terellian" instead of "Talarian", and that made it into the final print. It also survived into the syndicated TV broadcasts, DVD release, and Blu-ray remaster.
It's odd that a message to Starfleet would take 48 hours to arrive on subspace frequencies, according to Riker, when the whole episode started with a communiqué from Starfleet asking the Enterprise to investigate a disturbance in the area. They wouldn't ask unless the request would arrive quickly enough for the ship to actually arrive in time to see what happened. Picard says to inform Starfleet the Enterprise will enter the Neutral Zone, which presumably won't take 48 hours to get back to Earth. You can't run a fleet of starships on four-day turnaround between order and acknowledgement… Riker's line had to be a mistake.
Speaking of communication issues… When Tasha reports a hostage situation on deck 17, which she later tells the Bridge to disregard, it's extremely fishy that no one acknowledged it, asked for more details, said they were sending another team… anything.
Worf's reference to the "Age of Inclusion" in this episode is the only time that term appears in Star Trek. In all future episodes that reference this point in a young Klingon's life, it is called the "Age of Ascension" instead.
And more Klingon-related writing flubs: Klingons use disruptors, not phasers, but everyone in this episode calls the weapon Korris and Kon'mel assembled in the security detention cell a "phaser". Oops?
I like this episode as a character study of Worf, though it's not that great overall. The important bits are acted well, and we get a nice bit where Data explains the Klingons' howling at the ceiling to Captain Picard. I do have a soft spot for Data being a smarty-pants.
Watching Brent Spiner take on two roles was an absolute treat, as was seeing the Crystalline Entity effects shots fully redone in HD. Even this far into the season, I'm still constantly blown away by what a difference the blu-ray remaster makes as compared with my last journey through the series on DVD. (Sadly, Deep Space Nine and Voyager are equally unlikely ever to get remastered releases.)
How Spiner is able to be in two places at once seems pretty obvious in every shot. There are a lot of convenient framings that isolate either Data or Lore and show no one else (not even a sliver of uniform at the edge of the screen), or shots that have a conspicuously wide margin between the two to allow for combining two separate takes later.
I suppose what I'm saying is, it's no Orphan Black… but comparing the photographic effects of two shows filmed three decades apart wouldn't be fair. The techniques for doing split-screen shots with a moving camera hadn't been developed yet. Industrial Light & Magic debuted the first-of-its-kind VistaGlide computer-controlled camera system a year later in 1989's Back to the Future Part II. If it was even ready for use while "Datalore" was filming, I doubt ILM would have made it available for TNG's use, as using it in earlier productions would have spoiled the "wow factor" of BttF2's well-known dinner scene. (That said, I just don't think it was ready yet. BttF2 didn't begin filming until February 1989.)
Oh… and this episode also gave us the wonderful phrase, "Shut up, Wesley," for which I've never had much use except to tease one of my college roommates. I consider that line far out of character for Picard.
There was so much slack in this script. Of course I've seen reviews on previous episodes this season accusing Hulu of ballooning the runtimes just because they can (no need to stay within a strict airtime budget), but in my opinion the previous episodes were pretty mild on that front. The first was the worst, and it just reminded me of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with all the sweeping ship shots.
But this week, I would agree they spent entirely too much time on background elements of the story. It should have been a great story—another continuity callback to the series' past. Instead it was just okay, full of shots and even whole scenes that neither advanced the plot nor provided a window into any of the characters' minds.
I still maintain that Cloud 9 IT (or Zephra IT, whatever) wouldn't be able to see search queries. But they don't have to be able to for this plot to work. It was all Jonah, so it's all still plausible.
What I hope now is for the "Employee App" to persist through the rest of the series, or go away as part of a story. If they just pretend it never happened in the next episode, that will be disappointing.
Colonel Carter Count: 13/19 episodes this season. (You'd think I would have stopped doing this after Tapping stopped skipping weeks, but here we are one episode before the end of the season, still counting.)
It's too quick to add to IMDB trivia (they don't like "blink and you'll miss it" goofs), but one of the fast-scrolling data screens that Beckett & Keller look at has the typographical error "CHEMCIAL" in it.
Colonel Carter Count: 10/16 episodes this season—and this appearance's a doozy. Good to see that Joe Flanigan got some time off of his own this week after carrying almost all of last week's episode by himself (with help from several guest stars).
Despite the holes one could poke in the physics (the added occupants don't actually add that much weight to the room vs. the room's own empty weight—and they could just ditch the smashed crates and other useless junk out the red door if the extra weight really was such a problem) and the obvious "TV suspense" elements (literally every plan going wrong somehow, except for the one last-ditch effort that succeeds by the narrowest possible margin), this is still a really great episode for the three characters who occupy most of its screen time. Dr. Keller perhaps shows her interest in McKay too soon, before the relevant discussion happens, but still: nice character work.
Some follow-up with those silly kids would have been great, but I get why it didn't happen. It's not actually important.
Aren't those "bugs" the same visual effect as the "small energy beings" on M4C-862 (SG-1 4x19 "Prodigy")?
And this Wraith seems super familiar, since the same actor as "Steve" from a few episodes ago came back to play another one.
Didn't they already develop an accelerated dialing procedure during the last "siege" of the stargate? Why did Carter have to do it again?
I realized in this episode that the coffee delivery man is played by Jamie Farr (Cpl. Klinger, M*A*S*H). Cool!
No Quidditch for years, and suddenly we get tryouts and snippets of a match because it's plot-relevant again. I know there's only so much that can be packed into a movie series, even one with such long installments as this, but a little backstory on how Harry got to be team captain and what happened to Wood would have been nice.
"I analyzed the typing speed and patterns on the hard drive." You WHAT? I so hate meaningless technobabble.
Two major components to this review: structure and impact. I will use inline spoiler tags, but note that I do not consider facts about the true events to be spoilers. It's a biopic—we know what happened. But if you don't, be warned that I will "spoil the ending", as it were, and stop reading now.
Now, then.
This is an important story. We all know what happened to the plane, and we all know what usually happens to aircraft whose pilots attempt to do what Sully pulled off. The story of the cra— I mean, forced water landing, itself is amazing. The whole process is so incredible, and this movie captures everything from the initial bird strike through the last boats carrying passengers to shore. I thought the story of the landing itself was done very, very well. This movie is worth watching on the strength of that portrayal alone.
I did have some major objections to the structure, though. They're probably not unlike @LuckyNumber78's complaints…though I'm not coming at this from the perspective of a screenwriter, just as a viewer.
Specifically, the most insulting sequence in the entire film to me was the beginning, which seems like it's throwing us right into the narrative, but turns out to be a just a dream (if it wasn't given away already by the aircraft trying to fly through Manhattan, grazing skyscrapers on its way to a fiery crash). That put me in a pretty skeptical mood for the rest of the film, and for good reason—lots of sequences turn out to be Sully's daydreams/hallucinations/imagination. They were not managed well, in my opinion. That's not to say I object to their use; just that they weren't done well in this film.
The whole temporal flow of the film is pretty unhinged, actually. Though it technically follows a single event from start to finish (the NTSB investigation), even that continuity is disrupted in places. The film retreads certain events, and includes a few others, for no discernible dramatic purpose. And even when it does buckle down and get on with settling the NTSB investigation once and for all, the climax reeks of half-assed attempts to make it "Hollywood suspenseful" that just fall flat. (I mean most of the final NTSB hearing, if you're wondering, where evidence like the report on the left engine shows up at the last minute.)
To be quite honest, I waffled between a 5 and a 6 on this one, not because I didn't find the film compelling, but because it doesn't work structurally. I get that there's an element of metaphor in how the film is laid out, and I appreciate it, but for a film like this it's really not in the story's best interest to keep the audience guessing at what's real. I finally decided on a 6, but only because the true story deserves more than a 5.
Skimming other reviews of this film elsewhere, I've seen accusations of slow pacing, bad writing, unrealistic characters… For every reviewer who found the movie amazing, it's almost like that had to be balanced out by someone else who couldn't stand it.
Someone will have to balance out my review, then, because I need more films like Leave No Trace in my life.
Sometimes, if a movie leaves me wondering what actually happened, it's a sign of incoherent writing, or editing. Other times—as with Leave No Trace—it means I wasn't paying close enough attention to the details. And no, I'm definitely not in the segment of moviegoers who would argue that it's the filmmaker's job to make sure I know what's happening. Nothing smacks of "inexperienced director" like hitting me, the viewer, over the head with a plot point several times to make sure I got it.
Fortunately there's none of that in Leave No Trace. I've been meaning to watch Winter's Bone for some time, but I'll have to bump it up a few slots on the ol' watchlist after seeing this. If the two films share any of the same DNA (and they do, in the form of writer and director Debra Granik), I'll love that one too.¹ I can't get enough of this storytelling technique, where the characters just…exist, and don't stand there explaining what's happening (or what happened before now) for the audience's benefit.
Not everyone appreciates this style of "expositionless" storytelling, to be sure. One IMDB reviewer said "it seemed this [movie] had a beginning, beginning and beginning."² But those of us who relish poking fun at the "exposition dumps" traditional screenplays often throw out really love being left to our own interpretations of characters' words and actions. Or at least… I do.
This isn't an easy movie to watch, really. I wouldn't throw it up to relax after a hard day. The subject matter gets too deep for that, I think. But it is very much worth the journey. Along with those critical accusations I mentioned earlier, numerous reviewers also called this film insightful, thought-provoking, and uncomfortable. I agree with all of those, at least on some level. Scenes that might seem kind of throwaway at first (the church service, say) always turned out to be plot-relevant in the end.
Leave No Trace is slow and quiet at times, but it's never boring.
https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4250151/Garrett is the damn best character.
"Sorry, it was an accident."
"So was the Y chromosome, but you don't see us throwing stuff at it."
I refuse to let the last minute ruin the preceding 42, but what the hell was that?
Google were right to feature this film on Chrome's "New Tab" page when it came out. It's breathtaking. Lion deserves a 10/10 for cinematography.
I wish I could agree with the choice to cast Dev Patel in the lead role, though. Apart from the difference in skin tone, Patel's Saroo spent a lot of the film playing something of a sex icon. As amazing as the story is, I found the execution disappointing in the area of character development. Saroo himself didn't really get fleshed out, and as a result he remains kind of a cardboard cutout, a place for the viewer to self-insert and imagine how it would feel to be in his place.
One other big issue: Saroo's adopted brother. We find out almost nothing about him over the course of the film. His obvious mental illness/disability is sidelined to just a couple of scenes—sidelined to the point of being irrelevant. As the viewer, we know it exists, but that's all. We don't know what it is, or if he's undergoing treatment, or if he tried treatment and it failed to help, or how it's really affecting his life. Its effect on Sue is alluded to in a few places, but nothing about Mantosh himself.
It irks me a bit that the film devoted so much screen time to Saroo flicking the Google Earth map around. Some of that time could have been spent further developing characters, perhaps showing some of Saroo's life growing up. Skipping ahead 20 years deprived the audience of opportunities to watch Saroo adapt to life in Australia.
All that said, I realize that this film is essentially a pseudo-biography of living people, and as such there must have been limitations on what the film was able to show. So I can't lop off a mess of rating points for the perceived holes in the screenplay. And besides, it was still a damn enjoyable film.
I like this episode not because the writing is particularly strong, or because the characters feel particularly well developed, but because of the (perhaps not-so-)subtle political points it makes along the way. One of Quinn's arguments sticks out as remarkably salient:
"I was the greatest threat the Continuum had ever known. They feared me so much they had to lock me away for eternity. And when they did that, they were saying that the individual's rights will be protected only so long as they don't conflict with the state. Nothing is so dangerous to a society." (emphasis mine)
The slippery slope that decision represents could be taken as the first step toward a totalitarian government, and Quinn's status as a renowned philosopher among the Q rings true in that moment. For all intents and purposes, the Q Continuum already is a form of totalitarian democracy, wherein the citizens govern each other by means of consensus and any dissenters are suppressed.
On top of that, it was a master stroke to have had Jonathan Frakes direct this episode—if only because he was already well-versed in telling this kind of ethical dilemma from his years on TNG. And Q stories always seem to work better when there are multiple Q involved, likely because they give the writers an excuse to give John de Lancie more than just comic prankster material.
Anyone care to explain to me why Bashir couldn't simply replicate another dress uniform when he realized he'd misplaced his? It's not like they're forced to ration replicator usage like the crew of a certain ship lost in the Delta Quadrant…
It's a first effort at adapting Star Trek to the feature film format, and it shows. Pacing is very slow for most of the film, only picking up near the climax. The slowness is not helped by long, drawn-out shots of the ship—leaving spacedock, exploring new environments, etc. At the time, I suppose, the audiences probably loved getting to see such views of the ship they'd known up until then only on small television screens, but that's the only purpose these…let's call them "ship porn" shots…serve. Dramatically, they belong on the cutting room floor (or, more accurately, should never have been shot, given how much of the $43 million budget effects shots consumed).
There just isn't enough plot to fill the runtime of this film. It feels like a standard one-hour TV episode script stretched to fill 2+ hours with eye candy. Presented as an episode of the original TV series that ran from 1966-1969, the film's plot would likely have been quite at home. As a full-length feature film, though, it felt like a slog. For the first 90 minutes or so I found myself often checking the playback position, the movie-watcher's version of constantly asking Mom, "Are we there yet?"
That's not what you want your viewers to do when they watch your film.
Update from the future: In summer 2019, TrekMovie interviewed Douglas Trumbull about his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as a lead-up to the film's 40th anniversary and Trumbull's first appearance at a Trek convention. Read it here: https://trekmovie.com/2019/07/26/interview-vfx-pioneer-douglas-trumbull-on-how-it-took-a-miracle-to-complete-star-trek-the-motion-picture/
Yep, Community rediscovered its roots and returned to what it does best: genre parody.
Awesome.
Riker calls for emergency attention from security, so who shows up? Worf, with Geordi. Neither has a phaser. La Forge isn't even part of the security division—at this point in the series, he's the helmsman. But Dr. Crusher happens to bring along a phaser when called to a medical emergency onboard the ship… because that makes sense. (We'll try to ignore how Worf and Geordi play along with Admiral Quinn's lies about what happened to Riker. That's also bad.)
That chair Remmick is sitting in looks an awful lot like the one used for Admiral Jameson in "Too Short a Season". That's because it was the same prop, redressed.
Not a nitpick, but doesn't fit into the review proper, either: I had no idea Captain Rixx was a Bolian. This is the first appearance of the species in Star Trek, and I guess I'm used to the later makeup design—which uses a much more saturated blue. Bonus trivia: The Bolians were named after Cliff Bole, who went on to direct a total of 42 Star Trek episodes across TNG, DS9, & VOY. He also directed on numerous other well-known shows like MacGyver, The X-Files, Baywatch, and Charlie's Angels.
Some background information on what was happening in the television world at the time explains why this episode wasn't as good as you might think it should be. After all, it's clearly meant to be a taut thriller about the possibility of Starfleet being seized by aliens. It's obviously meant to be part of a larger story arc—that started several episodes back, when Quinn gave Picard that warning.
The writers' strike of 1988 was ultimately responsible for this letdown. This "Conspiracy" plotline was meant to be intertwined with the Borg, who were to be introduced at the start of season two. But the writers' strike delayed the rest of the Borg storyline several months, and this piece of it was dropped. That's why nothing ever comes of the "homing beacon" Data reports.
It's too bad. Aside from it being entirely too easy for Picard and Riker to win against the "mother creature" (in Remmick's body), I enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, but "Conspiracy" as part of something bigger would have been better than what ultimately happened: treating this like any other incident-of-the-week—essentially, pressing the "big reset button" and pretending like these events never occurred.
