The finale to season 1 may be low key, but it's a very strong episode. The religious aspects that the show will come to be known for are fully introduced here, and they're handled maturely. I've always found the Bajoran faith to be fascinating and one of my favourite parts of this show, even though I consider myself agnostic and have a low opinion of organised religion. DS9 manages to successfully intertwine the beliefs of science and faith, and figure out how its characters can learn to keep those two points of view while still respecting each other. It's not an easy journey, as this episode demonstrates.
It's worth noting that this is the first time since the pilot that Sisko's role as the Emissary has been referred to in any significant way. The episode introduces a couple of major recurring characters in Vedek Bareil and Vedek Winn - the latter being played wonderfully by Louise Fletcher and managing to inspire an incredible amount of hate in the viewer! If you despise her, as most do, that only means that she did her job extremely well. And it's going to get much, much more intense from here on!
I like the O'Brien subplot, it's just a shame that Neela hadn't had more of a presence throughout the season up to this point. That would have made her reveal much more powerful. It's also great to see Odo being the excellent investigator that he is. Dax is still relegated to not much more than a background science person at this point, I hadn't realised just how little the first season had used her.
An overall great episode and powerful end to the first season, really showing that Sisko and Kira have worked through things to find common ground and respect for each other. The only real weak point for me was the slow motion "noooooooo!" at the end which was a bit cheesy. It is redeemed somewhat by - for once - a gorgeous accompanying musical score.
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@lefthandedguitarist That whole slow-motion sequence was so un-Trek, ugh.
One of the things I enjoy about this episode is how it shows the main characters isolated and working together, each of them playing to their own strengths. Terry Farrel has been given very little to do as Dax throughout the first seasons, and I would say that this is the first episode where she's actually been given the chance to act. She does a great job, too, especially once her symbiont is removed and the calm, confident personality allowed to her by Dax disappears and we see how scared and young Jadzia is. We are given a great look into how the Trill work, too.
The guest cast are excellent, too. Tim Russ is barely recognisable as a Klingon. John Glover gets to change from a timid character into a different person. It's remarkable to see how different he plays it once he's joined, laughing with Sisko about their past adventures. The commander himself works against Verad and his crew brilliantly, playing on their emotions and never backing down. Meanwhile, Bashir shows that he isn't easily intimidated and O'Brien... well, O'Brien gets shot and rolls around in pain.
I like this as a display of friendship between the characters, they've reached a point where they trust each other. The problem I have, though, is Quark. He does something absolutely despicable and is told several times through the episode that he's finished. None of these people will ever trust him again. And yet, the episode ends with zero repercussions for him and all is forgotten. That doesn't ring true at all.
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I guess someone had to leave room for the others to act, so Colm got the short straw this time around.
This stage of DS9 is still mostly following the episodic formula of the Trek shows that preceded it, so the lack of any consequences for Quark is hardly surprising. It's not until later—a season or two, as I recall—that the show really gets into cross-episode persistence. I remember interviews with the creative staff on my DVDs saying that the push for longer and more involved story arcs was something of an ongoing battle. Given the "reset button" basis of its predecessors, it's not surprising that it took DS9 some time to break out of that mold and evolve the franchise (only for Voyager to keep treading the old path, generally).
Shout by Kathleen Reed Bright
VIP4What makes me happy is to live in a world where I can have my Dutch & eat my Pawter too - Johnny
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Quote of the season right there.
Main theme: LOTS OF EXPLOSIONS
Love the interaction between oliver and Feliity.. Not much went down in this episode. The end kinda saved it for me because the plot around Sebastian thickens.
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Including explosions of things that shouldn't explode. What was up with those falling lights? Pure Hollywood.
It was good, but after seeing the expanse, it's like comparing water and wine
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Yeah, The Expanse has nuance. Killjoys doesn't even know the meaning of the word.
Arrow maybe a superhero but he is not that smart. At least not in this episode... And Yes, Roy was right.
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Laurel's not too bright either, opening that door without even looking through the peephole first.
Quit after the 2nd season. What was barely tolerable in season 1 got really on my nerve (models instead of actresses, silly costumes to hide the identities of the superheroes, mediocre storylines) as well as the partly boring flashbacks were to much for me to enjoy the show. Going to give Mr. Robot a try now.
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I hope you liked Mr. Robot. I found this show considerably more watchable.
Say it with me: SMALL BUSINESS IS THE BACKBONE OF AMERICA.
You know, John, you say you're not so immature as to replace the sound effects on Jim Cramer's button panel with fart noises, but then you spent the rest of the episode calling back to that. I call bullshit.
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@eric2203 Actually, I think you missed my sarcasm completely.
An episode that sets up an interesting philosophical discussion about what death is, or could be, from the point of view of different beings - and indeed their practice of euthanasia, but then doesn't really do a thing with it. It's slow paced and nothing ever really gets explored. There are no tough choices to make, and it ends with "okay, you believe that, but we don't really know. See ya." Harry's captivity among the aliens feels especially cheap and rushed.
I didn't hate it, though, and actually found Harry's naivety quite a good fit for his part in the story. Kes gets some stuff to do, too, which for once doesn't feel like an attempt to give her character busy work. It's just such a sedate and lifeless (ha) episode. I also got very annoyed at the camera angles being all off-kilter.
The actor playing the alien patient alongside Harry had a similar off-putting vibe to Vedek Bareil.
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I find it interesting that you thought Chandler (as Hatil) off-putting. To me, Philip Anglim's portrayal of Bareil was much more off-putting—his early behavior around Kira, especially, was downright creepy.
I have to say, this season has been more like Trump's Week Tonight than Last Week Tonight. If you're running Trump-related segments every week, it gets a little old. There's enough politics in the mainstream news, isn't there? I know the show's writers could find other things for John to talk about. How do I know? They consistently did so before Trump announced his presidential campaign. The other stuff that happens every week hasn't stopped happening—they've just stopped putting it in the scripts.
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@andyesco "fail to realize that hes [sic] the president"? I live in the U.S., I am well aware. In fact, I'm tired of him "constantly doing controversial scandalous shit" too, and I avoid pretty much all television news outlets because of the constant barrage of coverage. LWT can choose to cover a wider variety of topics; they just don't. It seems you're not the only one who thinks LWT is a political news outlet (it wasn't meant to be).
Genuinely funny moments balanced by spot-on drama and, unfortunately, jokes that fall flat. Maybe I'm just not British enough to enjoy the potty humor?
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Returning to this with episode 2, I wonder at my past self: How could you not mention Colin Salmon?!
@donxy Netflix has since dropped the streaming availability. It's DVD-only now. :/
. . . and that "jar of pickles" was an incredibly bad special effects.
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Well, they can't all be amazing… :/
Can someone explain how come Pria disappeared?
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@misnomer Something like that.
Making her disappear is actually more problematic from a temporal mechanics perspective, since implying that Pria no longer exists in that timeline also implies that she never existed, which means she couldn't have saved the Orville from the dark matter storm, and therefore they couldn't have destroyed the wormhole, and so she actually should exist in this timeline after all.
In short, it's a most ingenious paradox. It didn't have to be. They could have had her not disappear, but dropped her off at a Union base as originally planned, before they knew she was from the future.
Shout by Sultan Nur KORKUSUZ GÜÇÜK
The moment Elliot hugged the guy whose heart had been broken by Elliot was too sweet ^-^
Have you tried writing 192.251.68.249 which Elliot wrote on Putty to connect Darlene on URL bar of your browser? :)
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@sultan-n Actually I tried dig -x first, and when that didn't work I did curl --head. :D
Shout by Sean RudfordDirector
This show had big shoes to fill replacing breaking bad in it's time slot. So far, it's doing well. Very, very character driven, yet in a way that isn't so slow that it bores me.
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@redouaaane @youngasiangod As of right now, he has 103 "10" ratings out of 236 total. Seems legit…
(Yes, that is sarcasm. Also, 40 "9"s and 40 "8"s. Hmm. No bell curve here!)
More old-school fun featuring my old flame, Lizzie McGuire. The one thing I object to is Kate's wardrobe during gym class.
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She's wearing the same gym uniform as all the other girls…?
An interesting look at the Jewish tradition of a bat mitzvah.
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Crucial distinction: Gordo has a bar mitzvah. A bat mitzvah is the same thing, but recognizes a girl's coming of age rather than a boy's. (In particular, there are still some Jewish communities that will not allow a girl to perform the same ceremony as a boy on her bat mitzvah for various religious reasons, so the two terms really aren't equivalent in many cases even if one discounts the gender of the participant.)
When I See Review About The Whole Series, I See So Many Negative Reviews & Some Pos. I Think I Must Giving It A Shut. But.... Hmmm. I Can't Get Anything From It. Romance? Not Really! Adventure? Not Really! Love? Not Really! Good Plot? Not Really!
This Series Have So Many Think But Not In a whole package. In Season 1 U Get 4 Good Episode And The Other Just Waste Of Time. In Season 2 U Get The Same 4 Good Episode! In General, I Feel choosing this, just another bad idea!loading replies
Reading This Shout Hurts My Brain.
@LuckyNumber78, I'm pretty sure the dishes in the first scene of this are the same as yours. Kind of like how I grew up using the same plastic picnicware cups as were used in Quark's on DS9…
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@luckynumber78 Of which dish set? Lol
Average episode rating: 5.923
That feels about right. I could be talked into
Math.floor()ing that, too. Oops, I just did.The season got off to a pretty underwhelming and off-putting start, then got pretty good for a couple episodes before dropping back into the trap of overly sexualizing every situation possible.
Hollywood writers—especially any who work for Syfy—say it with me: Not everything is about sex.
Again.
Say it again.
Repeat until you actually understand the words.
I call out Syfy writers specifically because one need only look at the other shows on their slate recently to find examples of characters being put in bed with each other for no particular reason other than "sex sells". It happens in Killjoys a lot, too—another Syfy Original. Based on just the two, I'm not inclined to give any other Syfy original shows a chance. (I haven't watched enough of Wynonna Earp to know if it also falls into this trap, but the likelihood that I will ever watch another episode of that show has just dropped even further.)
Between characters screwing each other at every possible opportunity and the sheer amount of gratuitous blood & gore, I'm downright resentful that I still want to know what happens next. This show wasn't fun to watch, and it's not even using the sex and violence to make a worthwhile point. The real surprise for me, at this point, is that I managed to get through the whole season in just under 9 months.
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@annismckenzie It's so much clearer to express the idea of rounding something down that way, haha. I'm not involved with trakt, just a slightly "younger" VIP member, but I do agree that the commenting functionality could use some building-out. Could be useful to index comments, too, and add them to the search feature. (Speaking of search, the VIP forum is kind of useless because you can't search for threads.) At least that duplicate comment's sorted—thanks for helping me learn about the block on deleting comments with replies, by the way!
As far as second-screening specifically goes, I already do usually keep the episode page open on a second monitor while I watch something on the primary. Were you looking for more of a live-chat kind of thing?
Average episode rating: 5.923
That feels about right. I could be talked into
Math.floor()ing that, too. Oops, I just did.The season got off to a pretty underwhelming and off-putting start, then got pretty good for a couple episodes before dropping back into the trap of overly sexualizing every situation possible.
Hollywood writers—especially any who work for Syfy—say it with me: Not everything is about sex.
Again.
Say it again.
Repeat until you actually understand the words.
I call out Syfy writers specifically because one need only look at the other shows on their slate recently to find examples of characters being put in bed with each other for no particular reason other than "sex sells". It happens in Killjoys a lot, too—another Syfy Original. Based on just the two, I'm not inclined to give any other Syfy original shows a chance. (I haven't watched enough of Wynonna Earp to know if it also falls into this trap, but the likelihood that I will ever watch another episode of that show has just dropped even further.)
Between characters screwing each other at every possible opportunity and the sheer amount of gratuitous blood & gore, I'm downright resentful that I still want to know what happens next. This show wasn't fun to watch, and it's not even using the sex and violence to make a worthwhile point. The real surprise for me, at this point, is that I managed to get through the whole season in just under 9 months.
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@annismckenzie Oooh, yeah the network activity feature only shows plays for now, but I believe there are long-term plans to put more stuff in the activity feed. Comments would be good to include, as would ratings. Those could be stacked on the "Play" entries if added soon after a play, rather than taking up multiple feed slots… Sometimes I wish I was part of trakt somehow so I could get more directly involved with this stuff, but afaik they're not hiring (small team of friends).
An alternative idea would be imitating Last.fm's "Now Playing" page, which displays info about whatever track your player is currently playing (if NP notifications are supported) or the last track played (if not supported). Trakt's version could be a live dashboard of sorts that shows the basic item info (poster, title, episode/season/number if applicable) and also presents relevant comments. Shouts and reviews for the currently playing episode, pulling in season-level and series-level comments near their respective ends, stuff like that. (For movies, just that film's comments, of course.)
@justin, is this kind of thing worth an idea thread on UserVoice? I wasn't able to find anything relevant in a quick search.
haha there's a little Android and iOS fanboy/fangirl battle here; yet none of these guys ever heard of Maemo, MeeGo or Symbian.
I'm still waiting to see whether we even get to see a Nokia device appear in the show. All you ever see are your typical Apple products and Android s%*t, some Amazon... We needa see some retro 90s-00s hacking! (looking @ young Elliot)loading replies
Hmm, WebOS, Firefox OS… the failed Ubuntu Edge would be a killer device type for this show, I think. Too bad it fell so far short of its funding goal, I wanted one.
Voyager can land! That's pretty cool, and something I only vaguely had in the back of my memory. I thought that the sequence was done pretty effectively here.
While this riffs on similar ideas done in the TNG episode 'The Neutral Zone', it makes it more about the Voyager's crew than the people they find, which was a good decision. It does feel like quite a big moment when Janeway and Chakotay walk into the cargo bay to see how many people want to leave. Honestly, I was a bit surprised that everyone wanted to stay because the show hasn't really managed to sell the idea that everyone there is working towards the same goal at all.
It's also nice for them to encounter something that isn't a spacial anomaly. I quite like that the people they find include Amelia Earhart (dodgy wig aside) and how Janeway bonds with her. The rest of the 37's are a bit flat, though - at least, the ones who are actually allowed to talk. It's particularly annoying the way Fred goes all-American and immediately becomes hostile. Nice to see Tackleberry from Police Academy, though!
Overall, this is a fun episode. A few things bugged me: finding the car floating in space and it works - wouldn't all liquids inside be extremely frozen? Also, having Paris be a geek for 1930s automobiles certainly detracts (again) from his bad boy image, but in this case it does serve the character better because he needs to move away from that. On the flip side, I thought that the way the rest of the crew talk about the car was quite realistic, and kind of charming. Once we meet the humans living on the planet, it feels like a massive cop out that we don't see these incredible cities they are talking about; yeah, I get that it would have been a huge and expensive undertaking to put them on screen, but the dialogue around them feels so awkward and could have been handled so much better: "I'd love to see your amazing cities!" "Oh wow, weren't those cities amazing!" just doesn't cut it.
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@lefthandedguitarist When they "came back" from the settlement tour, without showing anything at all, all I could think was, "Something something budget," haha.
All the moral complexity and historical sensitivity of a Disney sequel.
At least Judi Dench is brilliant. As usual.
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@luckynumber78 And to think that last week, my mom wanted to go see a movie and tried to talk me into this one…
It seems like all of the iconic episodes--such as this one--are in the second season.
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@ithinkdifferent With 31 episodes in season one and 34 episodes in season two (and no third season)… It's better than a 50/50 chance that any random episode will be from the second season.
Frankie Muniz? Malcolm in the Middle? I'm just trying to figure out what the connection is, here. Why is a Disney show referencing a rival network's series and bringing on its star as a guest? (FOX is a rival of ABC, which Disney acquired in 1995.)
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Oh, @luckynumber78, your dishes are in this one too.
The very first line of the episode is a Family Guy reference? Please, Stewie's "mom" gag has no place here.
Nice to hear that TCAS survived into the 25th century and is equipped on spacefaring shuttlecraft.
Actually, I cracked up a bit when the shuttle's computer started chanting, "Too low, terrain."I wonder if Dr. Finn is a distant descendant of Kevin (of Kevin (Probably) Saves the World)…
The character concept for Isaac is fine enough, but every time they show him walking around his costume messes with it. An artificial life form of Isaac's type just doesn't look right with a fabric outer garment, especially because his garment is clearly designed to look like a metal exterior.
Also, continuity issue: When the Orville detects the aliens approaching the shuttle, Bortus reports "two dozen" unidentified life forms. From when Isaac begins stunning the approaching attackers to when Marcus joins him, Isaac has already fired at least 22 shots (yes, I went back and counted them). Yet, there is still a large number of aliens for them to deter. So many that they are nearly overwhelmed before the shuttle from the Orville bombards the aliens with weapons fire from the air. Something's not right there…
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@snydez What do you mean? The TCAS in a modern-day aircraft will say "Too low, terrain" repeatedly if the plane is too low and in danger of hitting terrain—they inserted the same behavior into the Orville shuttlecraft used in this episode, probably as a gag/nod.
