My biggest plot gripe is Geordi's visit to Dr. Pulaski. That whole thing about replacing his VISOR with artificial eyes kind of comes out of nowhere. Later Trek shows like DS9 or even VOY would have dropped hints in a few episodes leading up to a moment like that, but this episode did follow the writers' strike pretty closely… That, combined with the episodic attitude toward television writing prevalent at the time, is probably why it wasn't foreshadowed. I still think it was pretty ham-fisted. Of course, the idea was also dropped completely until La Forge's sight regenerated in "All Good Things…" (and he got ocular implants sometime before Star Trek: First Contact).
Smaller nitpicks include Riva's clothing blowing in the wind while he is still materializing on Solais V the second time, and Data's sign-language interpretation—in both directions—getting ahead of the person he's interpreting for.
Riker's early line—"Our job is not to police the galaxy"—reads as a commentary on American involvement in world events, especially now that Team America: World Police has been out for a while. The sentiment, too, has been around for some time, and while I'm not sure it fits into the script as a whole I did find that scene in the turbolift amusing.
Despite the Lost In Space feel it lends this script,¹ I do think the decision to use real American Sign Language on screen was appropriate for the message. People who don't know ASL won't know that the signs used in the show weren't made-up, and viewers who do know ASL (or at least enough to recognize it) can cheer for a pretty true-to-life representation of deafness on prime-time television.
Well, there goes the only character I cared about on this show. We'll see if I pick it up again next week.
I wanted to like this episode. Between the guest stars (Robert Picardo and John Billingsley on screen together?!) and fact that it's a character-centered episode about my favorite Orville crew member, it should be a shoe-in for my short list of Best 'The Orville' Episodes. But it's not—and the reason is nothing to do with any character's departure from the regular cast.
It's because this script is full of missed opportunities. With the amount of work that went into fleshing out our protagonist's backstory, it's surprising that so little (seemingly) went into fleshing out the episode's main antagonist. John Billingsley worked with what he was given, but it wasn't much to go on. Besides irony stemming from the contrast between this role and his stint as the doctor on Star Trek: Enterprise, his character was pretty one-dimensional here. That was disappointing, to say the least.
Robert Picardo got slightly more to work with, built on his previous appearance in season one. The scenes in which it was just him and Halston Sage were the highlights of the episode, and even though I didn't think the family drama felt particularly genuine, it still managed to make me feel something. (That's why this episode got a 5/10 from me instead of something lower.)
This didn't affect my rating (much), but: I really could have done without the drawn-out hedge-trimmer bit with Alara's sister Solana. Maybe it's because I'd just finished eating lunch when that scene came up, but the whole scene was extremely uncomfortable. Such a horrific prospect as cutting off fingers felt like a poor fit for the usual tone of this series.
The plot holes, oh dear.
First of all, I want to stress that this episode has a good premise, even though it ultimately contradicts established canon with regard to genetic engineering (which has long been forbidden in the Federation since the Eugenics Wars). Where it falls short is the execution.
We have a deus ex Data: Because he "has a way with computers", something that should take "months" (sequencing a complex genome) is done in the space between two scenes. It serves to rush the story ahead, much too quickly.
We also have a deus ex transporter: While I believe that the filter O'Brien (and team) put together can reverse DNA changes, I don't believe for one second that reverting the DNA changes also undoes their effects on things that aren't DNA. Once you age, you're aged. There's no reversing that. (Well, there is… Star Trek is full of "magical" medical devices that could undo those effects, at least cosmetically, but the transporter process shown wouldn't do it.)
This episode's pacing is its worst attribute. The script spends too much time creating the problem, and has to skip over (or hand-wave, as above) a lot of the problem-solving. A technical solution that nobody has ever tried before (and is, of course, pulled out of some engineer's ass under pressure) is par for the course with this kind of Trek story—the franchise uses this formula over and over and over again—but it usually manages to feel much less forced.
While not as bad as I remembered (maybe I've just learned to live with Pulaski?), this isn't a good episode of TNG. It's just barely passable.
Seeing Thomas Haden Church in this episode made me wish that Wings wasn't butchered on streaming services. Neither Hulu nor CBS All Access (even if I was willing to subscribe to Yet Another Streaming Service) has all the episodes available. There are random gaps due to music licensing or other nonsense that I, as a viewer, don't give a crap about—I just want to watch the show, the whole show.
But guest stars aside, it sounds like the motivation for this episode was pretty petty. Allegedly, Eddie LeBec got killed off because Jay Thomas (the actor who portrayed him) made a public remark about Rhea Perlman (Carla) on some radio appearance? And because of that, Cheers' producers decided to "punish" him by having his character die? Given the actor switcheroo shenanigans they played with Gary, basically taking whichever of two actors was available to shoot any given episode, I don't see why they didn't just re-cast Eddie and call it a day. Maybe the real reason was that the writers didn't know how to get Carla and Eddie out of the "absentee husband" situation the writers put them in. (Even if so, that's also a poor excuse. They could have mined some more jokes from Eddie always being on the road, then had him quit the ice show to be home with his family more.)
Loved that MacGyver reference! :grin:
Watching this in its full two-hour format might have cheated me a bit on the "Time Spent" metrics here at Trakt, since at present the two parts have 44+41=85 minutes if watched separately but the full-length version on Netflix runs 97 minutes… Worth it, though. That's a big difference in runtime, even accounting for doubling up on the opening/ending credits. A quick comparison, just clicking around on Hulu, showed that the two-part rerun cut out some sizable chunks of footage—probably to make room for more commercials, though at least one scene was later removed because it went against the producers' original intent.*
In its original format, certainly, this is a fairly compelling first episode. I hear there's also a Director's Cut version of this episode floating around, which might be worth watching at some point for comparison purposes. While I do have some questions about little changes, the overall feel of this opener is at least as entertaining as the original film. Don't understand why the solution to Michael Shanks' incorrect pronunciation of Sha'uri's name was a retcon instead of helping him out with a dialogue coach, but whatever.
For episodes with no "uncut" version, I'll have to see if I prefer Netflix or Hulu in the long run. I found the image on Netflix to be better quality overall than Hulu (which had quite a bit of aliasing and pixelization), but NF seems to have set the image brightness very low. Details get completely lost in dark areas—crushed to black—on Netflix, whereas on Hulu I can see (for example) the texture of O'Neill's shirt early in part 2, when he walks into the infirmary and talks to Kawalsky.
* — When Apophis examines Sha're, the original intent was never to show her fully nude. Showtime allegedly requested those shots be added to draw more viewers, which answers my unasked question about how this show could have gotten away with those scenes on broadcast television in 1997. It didn't have to!
Oof, man. Like the original "Wormhole X-Treme!" episode this built on, a lot of the in-jokes and self-roasting worked really well.
Unlike that first installment, though, this one felt entirely too much like a bottle episode. The use of pre-existing sets was quite evident, and spending a majority of the runtime with the core cast sitting around the conference room table did nothing to counteract the "bottle" feeling. They were in fact bottled up in the conference room waiting for the gate to be fixed.
When the gate finally did work again, and everyone (even Walter) trooped through to what we were led to believe would be a surprise party for Mitchell's 200th gate trip, that turned out to be a bait and switch—the other end of the gate was the show-within-a-show cast finishing the final shot of their 200th episode, 10 years into the in-universe future. We, the audience, are denied the payoff. Instead, we get several minutes of not-very-funny fictional interviews (which I thought were the weakest part of "Wormhole X-Treme!").
That's all without even mentioning how different the chemistry of the cast is compared to 100 episode before, and ignoring those fantasy sequences of ideas for Marty's film-within-the-show that drag on much longer than is funny (especially the puppets).
Personally, I don't think the SG-1 crew should have tried to replicate the previous gag show, but plenty of fans seem to love this one just as much or more. For me, though, it did not work the second time.
Others have already said pieces of this in older comments, but I'm still going to stitch together the parts that hit me while watching.
First and foremost, this felt like a "we have to talk about it" episode, to the point of looking like virtue signaling on the network's part. Yes, I realize that ignoring the events of the preceding year would have upset (some) viewers. But ironically, It felt like the episode did what it portrayed Boyle as doing, making a big deal of showing how much it cares about the issues while the characters who should have had the most to say about the topic (Holt and Jeffords) were sidelined to "B" plots with no connection to them.
And underneath all of that, there was the implication of both Rosa and Hitchcock dropping off the main cast. Looking ahead to the credits for future episodes in the season, I can see that both of them appear to remain involved, but I have no idea how. If Hitchcock stays in Brazil and we only see him on Scully's tablet, that's a big change. If Rosa isn't working at the precinct any more and we only see her out in the world, that's a big change too. I'm not a fan of big changes like that near the end of a series… certainly not after what happened to Stargate SG-1.
I guess you could say this season opener disappointed me. Brooklyn Nine-Nine has shown in the past that it can tackle serious subject matter without losing its spark of humor, but it failed to hit that mark this time.
While it suffers from having to follow a stellar episode like "Passion", this episode isn't bad. We get some worldbuilding in the form of Buffy's cousin, plus a bit of badass Xander and a moment of Clever Cordy when she teases Xander about watching Buffy's butt.
Listening to David Boreanaz speak in vampire mode gives me a good idea just how much of Armin Shimerman's vocal affect (and all the other Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, really) must have come from the mouth prosthetics, rather than conscious choices to make the characters speak a certain way. Those fake teeth really change one's speech!
The doctor who tells the Scoobies they can't follow Buffy any further into the hospital (Juanita Jennings) has been in so many other one-off roles, from Sister, Sister and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Frasier and beyond.
Plus, seeing Willie Garson in anything these days is a bittersweet treat after his passing just three months ago. This episode of Buffy aired just a few months before his guest role on Star Trek: Voyager (5x09 "Thirty Days"), and I was just recovering from repeatedly seeing him in Stargate SG-1 too.
And speaking of Voyager, our friend Dr. Backer is played by none other than Admiral Owen Paris himself, Richard Herd. He and Garson were both on the show after this, so I'm sure it's just coincidence that the first demon Giles describes to Cordelia "extracts vital organs to replenish its own mutating cells" and not a reference to the Vidiians.
What holds this one back from a perfect 10 is the nebulous, unexplained re-disappearance of Chet and Virna Hunter after Shawn moved into the apartment with Jack and Eric.
I could never put the timeline together in reruns on Disney Channel, but it's obvious now why: The show sometimes made quiet changes to the established status quo, without showing the events on screen. Chet leaving again was one such case; he was on the way to becoming a better father with his job at John Adams High and a life reunited with Shawn and Virna, but shortly after convincing Shawn to move out, Chet simply vanished from the scripts except for a few vague mentions.
Given how important it was for the show to, well, show us when he came back, it's disappointing for multiple reasons that we were left out of further developments on that front. I'd argue that at least one or two of the weirder (somewhat out-of-character) stories with Jealous Cory could have been replaced by much better, more meaningful scripts involving Chet and Virna (and Shawn)—which in turn would have made this episode even more powerful.
It's not like this episode needed more dramatic punch, but I still wish the producers had planned ahead a bit more.
Eerie parallels between this fictional Flight 093 and the real-life UAL 93 seventeen years later:
While aircraft are pressurized, the cabin pressure aboard a Boeing 747 is generally equivalent to atmospheric pressure approximately one mile above sea level. Pressurization depends on a constant supply of air from outside the cabin, which obviously becomes unavailable if a plane is submerged (both because the intake vents will flood, and the engines can't power the pressurization system because they will also flood).
More importantly, aircraft door, hatch, and window seals are designed to hold pressure in, not out. Dialogue seems to put this aircraft at least 100 feet (30 meters) underwater, where the water would exert about 4 atmospheres of pressure on the plane. A three-atmosphere pressure differential is likely (based on my ten minutes of research, just now) would deform the fuselage pretty quickly. Hollywood likes to play this "underwater plane" game kind of a lot, but it's not based in real physics.
Even putting a 747 on this route (:airplane_departure: LAX, :airplane_arriving: DFW) is silly, even in the '80s. That model is suited for much longer, higher-volume routes. One wonders how a "small airline" (as described in dialogue at the airport, before boarding) even managed to buy one.
Less serious quibble: The jump from "String doing his taxes" to "String standing in air traffic control with Dom" made it feel like there was a scene missing. It was probably shot and then cut for time, but cutting the flight attendant's safety lecture before takeoff (which added nothing to the story) should have left enough slack for a quick "how did we get here" segment.
The thing is, I still liked the story thread of this episode. Caitlin needed some character building, and this gave it to her. I just wish the premise that enabled it could have been a little less laughable.
Maybe it's unfair to the cast and crew that I would say this, but: 8 Simple Rules was never better than it is in this series of episodes, right here, dealing with the loss of John Ritter. The whole team put together a perfect balance of sitcom humor and raw emotion—there's no way the remaining main cast members are "acting" grief-stricken.
Blessedly few shows ever have to deal with an unplanned main-character death, but 8 Simple Rules stands far above most of its peers in this department. Kudos to the writers for setting up the dominos, and bravo to the cast for harnessing everything they felt in the weeks following Ritter's sudden passing and pouring it into a series of heart-wrenching performances.
Today, both WGA (and SAG-AFTRA) members are on strike, in part, because TV and movie producers want to use more AI tools instead of relying on human creativity. Last-minute rewrites such as those needed at this point in the run of 8 Simple Rules clearly demonstrate what a team of humans can accomplish, under time pressure. Despite losing its headline star, the show was only off the air for a month while the production regrouped, which is pretty incredible. None of that could have happened without the WGA members responsible for creating a new storyline, and the SAG-AFTRA members who then brought it to life on-screen.
Support the human creators whose work you enjoy, people. I've seen ChatGPT's attempts to write a story, and they're not worth it.
Reviewing this season-ender as if it was one episode seems to make sense, because the story clearly flows right from one into the other and they originally aired the same night. So, here goes.
In "Part Un", I was frustrated by having the restaurant scene cut short. Rory and Missy calling back to the fact that they "at least" had lobster wasn't nearly enough of a button on the whole thing with Jim and C.J. figuring out who was going to pay for what turned out to be a very expensive dinner.
And in "Part Deux", the whole subplot with C.J. and Sissy just disappeared without a trace. I suppose all the humor had been wrung from such a simplistic setup already, but… come on. Closure, people. It's the end of a season; don't leave loose threads hanging.
Speaking of loose threads, it's going to sound silly if I now go on to excuse what was set up between Cate and Ed Gibb, but that's different because it wasn't a forgotten plot line; it was a setup for season 3. Hoping we at least get a reference to the final frog-herding scene in 3x01, though.
The weirdest part of this whole season was that, once they adjusted to losing John Ritter so suddenly, the show's tone markedly improved. I was never a big fan of the cheesy "front door" intro, which wouldn't have worked with Jim or C.J. at the door instead of Paul. Losing that intro and jumping right into the story is the best change that came of the casting change, forced though it was.
As of writing this, TMDB has both 2x23 "Final Parts Un & Deux" and 2x24 "Finalé Part Deux". The former is locked, which makes me wary that the latter—this episode—could be deleted. I'll therefore cross-post the thoughts above, plus my history & rating for this episode, to 2x23 just in case.
At time of writing, TMDB has set this to "Final [sic] Parts Un & Deux" (including the typo) and locked it. Streaming apps, TVDB, & IMDB call it just "Finale Part Un" (or with "Finalé" instead, if they're trying to be fancy). In case TMDB goes even further and deletes "Finale Part Deux", eventually leading to Trakt also deleting the next episode, I've duplicated my season-ending perspective from https://trakt.tv/comments/589829 here, too.
As further insurance against future deletions, my rating & history for 2x24: 7/10, played 2023-08-14 11:54 UTC.
Reviewing this season-ender as if it was one episode seems to make sense, because the story clearly flows right from one into the other and they originally aired the same night. So, here goes.
In "Part Un", I was frustrated by having the restaurant scene cut short. Rory and Missy calling back to the fact that they "at least" had lobster wasn't nearly enough of a button on the whole thing with Jim and C.J. figuring out who was going to pay for what turned out to be a very expensive dinner.
And in "Part Deux", the whole subplot with C.J. and Sissy just disappeared without a trace. I suppose all the humor had been wrung from such a simplistic setup already, but… come on. Closure, people. It's the end of a season; don't leave loose threads hanging.
Speaking of loose threads, it's going to sound silly if I now go on to excuse what was set up between Cate and Ed Gibb, but that's different because it wasn't a forgotten plot line; it was a setup for season 3. Hoping we at least get a reference to the final frog-herding scene in 3x01, though.
The weirdest part of this whole season was that, once they adjusted to losing John Ritter so suddenly, the show's tone markedly improved. I was never a big fan of the cheesy "front door" intro, which wouldn't have worked with Jim or C.J. at the door instead of Paul. Losing that intro and jumping right into the story is the best change that came of the casting change, forced though it was.
I definitely thought that Nyx somehow knew her brother killed himself, based on how she was crying, curled up in her quarters, at the end of the last episode. Guess the writers didn't realize what they implied. Or maybe, she's in denial.
Some very nice character development for Devon here. What we learn of his past turns out to be a bit on the cliché side, but that makes it no less valid as a motivator for his drug addiction. I look forward to finding out more about him, assuming that, because we don't see him die from the stab wound at the end of this episode, he'll be around for at least a while longer.
Those special transfer pod outfits are a neat dodge of a number of issues, on multiple fronts. They avoid: having to find a way for the characters to get clothes in the facility; depicting an underage female† in the nude; implying that said underage female is nude with grown men; and a generally awkward sequence that wouldn't add anything to the plot.
There is a small plot hole, though: Alicia Reynaud orders her techs to pick a transfer pod at random and send a charge to "fry [the occupant's] brain". But apparently it never happens, as in a subsequent scene her apparent lieutenant says they should "just send the charge and end this" but she says no. Interesting oversight on the writers' part.
Given Five's display of skill here, she'd make an absolutely fantastic pen-tester. If she was a real person on Earth in 2016, she could probably get a job at any tech or security firm she wanted. And I certainly wouldn't mind learning a thing or two about security from her. Even just running into her at a conference and chatting for a few minutes would probably lead to some important, useful lessons. Her grasp of space physics ain't too shabby, either. I've always liked Five as a character, and I really love that this show includes such a brilliant girl! Way to flip the script on the traditional male STEM whiz-kid archetype. Actually, now that I really think about it, she's a lot like a girl version of Wesley Crusher—whom I did not hate, unlike so much of the Star Trek fandom.
Speaking of Star Trek, it's neat that the description of how FTL drives work in Dark Matter nicely matches the theoretical physics of warp drives. None of that hyperspace bullshit that so many other sci-fi franchises try to throw around. It's refreshingly simple, as is the description of Blink Drive and its temporary wormhole–based operation.
And on a completely personal note, I've worked in at least two theaters that have identical (or nearly so) metal chairs as in Alicia Reynaud's detention room. Those square frames with three closely spaced vertical flat bars in the middle of the back are pretty distinctive.
† — Five is canonically a teenager, probably around 15-16 years old, from the sources I can find and recall from watching the show so far (though the actress portraying her is 21).
Make that three pickle jar jokes in as many episodes, this time with godawful CGI to go with it.
Interesting that the show is set farther in the future than any Star Trek series, but doesn't have teleportation technology available. An excuse for shuttle docking effects porn every week? (i.e. the exact opposite of the reason why Roddenberry gave the Enterprise a transporter.)
If asked for the most Star Trek–like thing about The Orville, it's that the captain regularly goes on away missions. Dangerous ones.
And he always almost gets killed.
The last scene is iffy on the effects.
Stars outside the captain's office window: moving.
Ship: stationary.
What.
Pria shouldn't have vanished. That creates all kinds of plot holes that wouldn't exist if she'd stuck around to be dropped off at a Union base or whatever they would do with her. Since she disappeared, that implies she never existed in this timeilne, so she couldn't have saved the Orville from the dark matter storm, which means Mercer couldn't have ordered the wormhole destroyed. But if the wormhole isn't destroyed, then Pria continues to exist in this timeline, which means the wormhole Mercer will order the wormhole destroyed, which means… Time travel is a bitch to write.
I really like this as a character episode for Alara, but I wouldn't call it a great episode outside of that.
Cmdr. Grayson: "We have crew members trying to murder each other."
Capt. Mercer, moments later: "From this point forward, I want everyone to carry weapons at all times."
What. LOGIC!
Speaking of logic, how much sense does it really make that something knocks the power out and kills the lights everywhere on the ship, but the automatic doors still work? Isaac even says, "Ship's power is completely offline."
And also speaking of logic (well, it's more of a continuity thing): Alara says the energy rifle is set on maximum, "and we both know that's enough to vaporize even you." But it doesn't vaporize shit when she fires.
Yes, I know the whole thing is a simulation, and it doesn't have to follow all the rules of reality. That was the point, even—making things happen that couldn't in real life. But there's a difference between breaking the rules because it's necessary for the simulation and breaking the rules because of lazy writing.
Robert Picardo in the insensitive-father role? Oy. I was actually really excited when I saw his name pop up in the opening guest-star credits, but now I just feel cheated out of a proper Picardo cameo. It's tempting to ask him (probably in vain) on Twitter what the producers did to get him in that role.
I'm confused… They can't beam down to the surface, but when an emergency beam-out becomes necessary suddenly the transporter works without causing an electrical storm? What. (Yes, I know the aliens are screwing with the weather. Still doesn't explain how they know which transporter beams are for beaming in and which are for beaming out.)
Was there a deleted scene where "the cloaking device" came up before? That line near the end came out of left field.
Actually, the writing in this episode was pretty weak. The Doctor's subplot was the only really solid thread. All the rest of the story—Voyager needing some resource to maintain the ship, Chakotay derailing the search to find aliens that his tribe believed were supernatural beings—didn't hang together. Aside from the obvious cop-outs and clichés regarding the whole "aliens influencing ancient Earth" angle, the script feels really hacked together. It's like they ran out of time for rewrites, after going through weeks or months of revisions already, and had to just go with whatever they had.
And let's make special mention of the disconnect between Chakotay's attitude toward his heritage at fifteen (shown in flashbacks) versus his attitude now. He's done a complete one-eighty, and the story doesn't give us enough of what happened in between to explain the drastic character shift. I dunno… meh.
Once again, we find an Enterprise crew member alone aboard an alien ship without any Universal Translator, but still able to perfectly understand every alien language spoken on board. Funny how language is only a barrier when the plot requires it to be.
I found the T'Pol/Phlox plot even more uncomfortable than "Tuvix", which I watched yesterday. To be quite honest, I have no idea what point it was meant to serve. At least the main plot with Archer being captured by a bounty hunter working to service the Klingons' price on his head had some relevance to continuity and a cliché moral point to make (good men can be driven to awful deeds under the right circumstances). T'Pol throwing herself at the doctor (and, once, Malcolm) seemed to be pure fanservice.
Anyone who's read my reviews or chatted with me about fanservice in anime knows the disdain I have for the practice. It applies equally to live-action and Western media, worry not. Briefly, I think sexualizing a character just for the hell of it (as this seemed to be) cheapens the entire series. Enterprise isn't alone in this. The same was done in Voyager, first with Kes, then with Seven when Kes failed to hold the target male viewership demographic. The Next Generation did it with Deanna Troi and her absurd non-uniform. I can still call it out when I see it, especially because other Trek series did the same thing. It's a pattern.
I thought this was a pretty great episode in spite of its numerous, shall we say, plot holes.
Troi is once again shown "reading" Ferengi in direct contradiction to later established canon that Betazoids cannot sense Ferengi emotions due to their unusual four-lobed brain structure. Bok also transports off the Stargazer while its shields are up—I suppose the Ferengi could have transporters that work through shields, but if so they'd be used in other episodes and this just smells like the writers forgot Bok had raised the Stargazer's shields earlier in that scene. (And at the end, Picard has the Enterprise beam him back without lowering the shields, too. We know Federation transporters don't work through shields.)
What really saves the episode is Riker's relationship with the Ferengi first officer, Kazago, whose actions begin the work of transforming the Ferengi from the underwhelming villain role originally assigned to them by the writers into the principled traders we come to know. He's reluctant at first, but comes around to demonstrate that the Ferengi do, in fact, have a sense of morality and ethics after all. Armin Shimerman might have been one of the Ferengi in their first appearance ever, but Douglas Warhit has the honor of kicking off their development as a proper Star Trek alien race with some kind of actual culture.
Big goof: The automated weapon pursuing the Enterprise should have disappeared at the end of the "demonstration", along with its counterpart on the surface.
Smaller goof: Geordi orders the shields lowered (to transport the away team back) while the Enterprise stardrive section is still in the atmosphere. The hull temperature had reached 3,300 degrees (presumably Celsius) with the deflector shields active; lowering the shields before exiting the planet's atmosphere would almost certainly lead to the hull overheating and thus some degree of structural failure.
Nitpick goof: The Echo Papa 607 has previously encountered (and presumably destroyed) another Starfleet ship, the Drake, and should therefore be familiar with Starfleet weaponry already. Even if its data banks are reset between demonstrations, it should have been able to learn about the Enterprise's capabilities from the ship's computers, while it was scanning for language data. (And really, the thing has so many sensors it should be able to just… scan the damn ship and figure it out.)
Bonus nitpick: Why does Beverly wait so long to tell Jean-Luc about her second (leg) injury? That seems out of character.
The "rogue weapons platform" side of the plot is an offshoot of the "rogue computer system" trope Star Trek (and sci-fi in general) trots out so often. There's nothing particularly surprising or special about that. We learn, we trick the system, we win.
What's good about this episode? Geordi's character development. That said, some of the mechanics were off. First Logan calls Geordi to protest the fact that the Enterprise is still in orbit despite heavy weapons fire. Then later, he's annoyed at Geordi for leaving the away team behind. The man can't make up his mind…
What's this bullshit about setting the warp core ratio at 25:1? There's only one intermix ratio: 1:1. We learned that in "Coming of Age".
The number of soundstage lights that the various Armus props and costumes reflect is amazing. Using such a reflective material was a big gamble—one I'm not sure paid off in the end.
I don't look forward to this episode when rewatching the series. It's kind of a disaster, from a writing perspective. Picard talking to an oil slick isn't nearly as ridiculous as several members of the production team have been quoted saying over the years, but it's not exactly the high-powered diplomacy we come to expect from Jean-Luc.
Mostly, though, it's the meaningless character death. It doesn't work. Unfortunately, the same thing happened at the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season six, again because the actor wished to move on from the show.
In this case, I think Denise Crosby gave up too soon. I agree with something Wil Wheaton wrote years ago in a review of "Hide and Q":
I have to give up some respect for Michael Dorn. I can't imagine what it must have been like to play Worf in the first season, when he was one-dimensional and so incredibly stupid. He didn't do much more than Denise did in these early episodes, and where she decided to quit the series out of frustration, Michael stuck it out, eventually developed a complex and beloved character, became a regular on DS9, and was in all the TNG movies.
—
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011201935/http://www.tvsquad.com/2007/02/19/star-trek-the-next-generation-hide-and-q/(the original site no longer exists)
When I originally went from watching later-season reruns of TNG on television to running through the series from start to finish, the most striking thing was how flat the writing was at the beginning for Worf. All of the characters needed time to grow depth, but it was especially surprising just how far Worf in particular had come. And yes, Michael Dorn really played the long game, where Denise Crosby seemed to rather impatiently throw in the towel. (Whether Worf would have developed as much as he did if Tasha Yar had remained on the show is another question altogether.)
The good points of this episode, though, are actually the scenes where Deanna gets into Armus' head. Didn't see that coming. Early Troi is really not a very good character, but her empathic abilities really work for me in this one.
Devlin Medical Technologies, huh? Cute little inside nod to one of the co-writers on Stargate's original film.
This episode contains one of the most conspicuous incorrect card swipes in the whole franchise. Rodney tries the card multiple times, and the fact that it doesn't work is a plot point. The obvious reason is that he's swiping it backwards.
Meanwhile, still trying to figure out why Amanda Tapping joined the main cast only to keep skipping episodes. So far this season, she's appeared in just 6 of the 9 episodes—and many of those featured her character in just a few short scenes. I would guess that the producers probably wanted to add a tie-in with SG-1 after its non-renewal to capture any audience that wasn't already watching Atlantis, but if that had been the reason I started watching this show after SG-1 ended then I'd be none too pleased with her repeated absences. It seems too early for her work on Sanctuary to be interfering with Tapping's appearances here (it didn't premiere until nearly a year later, in October 2008), but maybe the production lead time was greater than I'd expect.
Wallace was almost redeemable until he almost turned kidnapping into murder. I felt that the character crossed a line in that moment. If he hadn't injected Jeannie with the defective nanites, sacrificing himself so Todd the Wraith could finish reprogramming the nanites would have been a much more powerful gesture. As written, Wallace's death and Sheppard's "contribution" to it fell more than a little flat, like "of course that's the solution, duh".
Colonel Carter Count: 14/20 episodes this season. I guess 70% isn't bad, but it's still considerably lower than I'd expect for a star with main-cast billing like Amanda Tapping.
Despite the whole "ECH" shtick in one episode of Star Trek: Voyager, it's still weird to see Robert Picardo in a red uniform. :joy:
This might be the best "clip show" in Stargate history, and that's because the clips are new material. Structurally, though, it's pretty similar: Most of the episode is vignettes tied together with a few low-budget scenes on some redressed corridor sets. Probably the most expensive scene (other than the raid on Michael's compound in the last few minutes, setting up the season-ending cliffhanger) was Sheppard fighting through the sandstorm. I like this style of storytelling, really. I just don't like being fed old footage. :smirk:
Sheppard's quip about it not being his birthday got me thinking… Atlantis never addresses the issue of planetary rotational/orbital periods. Does the planet where Atlantis sits have exactly the same 24-hour day and 365-day year as Earth? Surely not? Surely it's also different from where the city rested at the beginning of the series. There must be some small variation on each world, so what do the Atlantis personnel do about date-keeping? (Probably quartz or atomic timekeeping devices for reference to Earth time, and the city's own systems for local time, or something like that. Still, odd that they never even mention it.)
I thought it was awfully early in the series to pull the "series regular might be leaving" card, and that was before I looked at some episode trivia and learned that this was filmed as the third in the season. Thank goodness it didn't air as such. Way too early!
A couple of goofs I noticed that weren't mentioned in the sources I found:
1. Wyatt's entrance onto the holodeck from off camera is not accompanied by the sound of the doors opening and closing, but Riker's subsequent exit does come with sound effects.
2. The Tarellians are allegedly trapped on their ship and unable to transport due to the Enterprise's tractor beam. But Wyatt is able to transport over with no issue. Either both ships' transporters should work regardless of the tractor beam being engaged, or neither should.
Lwaxana Troi is a divisive character, I think it's safe to say. Even with myself, I have arguments about whether or not she belongs on Star Trek in general (especially when she shows up on DS9… oy). At times, she's hilariously funny—Gene Roddenberry allegedly described her as "the Auntie Mame of the galaxy" (Star Trek: The Next Generation 365 p. 033)—but the writers seemed to misuse her at times. I'll leave further discussion of that for when I get to the relevant episodes, though. This appearance (her first) was mostly great.
What wasn't so great, though: This story. Unsurprising, then, that the script for this episode (as written by Lan O'Kun) was going to be cut from the series. Tracy Tormé rewrote it and "saved" the episode from getting cut, but he still wasn't very happy with how it turned out. I bet a lot of that came from feeling like a lot of the comedy failed to make it all the way to filming. Goodness knows the episode seems to make plays at seriousness here and there, only to fall flat.
The best parts really are the funny bits with Lwaxana, and Data trying to observe more of the human condition. The worst parts all involve Riker ducking out of the room because he's uncomfortable with the situation for some reason that isn't adequately addressed. Oh, and the central idea of Wyatt and this Tarellian girl connecting across the light-years through their dreams. Star Trek usually stays away from that "woo~" sort of thing…
Star Trek at its finest, quietly replacing a main character with a random crewmember they can kill off without repercussions. Quality. Extra realism points for making the redshirt who gets killed without provocation a black man, I guess?
The evolution of the Enterprise auto-destruct system is interesting. Not only has it gained a variable countdown duration (instead of the fixed five-minute timer it had in "11001001") and timer displays integrated with the LCARS screens (instead of the LED dot-matrix displays used in "11001001"), but the sequence can also be aborted without any physical contact with a console. Picard and Riker need only verbally order and confirm (respectively) the destruct sequence's cancellation, where a second palm scan was needed before.
Nagilum's animations visibly freeze-frame at several points. I don't remember noticing that in reruns on TV, but the high-definition version of the show makes the effects' age very obvious. From clips of the original footage, it looks like Nagilum was actually recreated with smaller mouth movements for the blu-rays—which ultimately looks worse than the original 1988 effects… Oh well.
"Where Silence Has Lease" lends itself poorly to nitpicking overall—especially since I'm watching the remastered version, which corrected one of the most glaring mistakes (that of the Yamato's bridge displaying a dedication plaque reading Enterprise).
Joking aside, there aren't really any plot holes here to complement the "hole in space". It's a standard noncorporeal-alien-toys-with-corporeal-Starfleet-people plot. We've seen them before, and we'll see more by the time we reach the end of Star Trek: Enterprise.
Most of this episode's strength lies in how it paints a character study of Picard. A bit of Worf's development happens here too. Data's doesn't really count, because the Data talking to Picard about the nature of death was actually Nagilum speaking through fake-Data.
It's interesting enough, though it's quite slow-moving. Q does much of the same stuff, but with more flair.
Odd that Data would speak of reusing wrapping paper, when it's likely that quite literally everything—the gifts and the paper enclosing them—was replicated, and the discarded bits destined to be recycled back into the raw matter storage.
Eight hundred quadrillion bits must have sounded like quite a lot in 1989, but these days it sounds like a hundred petabytes. To put that number in perspective, Backblaze (a cloud-backup service) ordered about 100 PB of hard drives for Q4 2017 alone.¹ One blogger's back-of-the-napkin estimate from 2012² placed YouTube's annual storage growth needs at about 75 PB/year. An undated answer published on BBC Science Focus Magazine's website claims that the "big four" (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook) together store roughly 1,200 PB between them.³ Basically, any way you slice it, Data's storage capacity is almost laughably small by today's standards, thirty years later. (It's no wonder later Trek shows switched to more ambiguous units, like Voyager's "teraquads".)
And I didn't even start on Data's supposed computational performance of 60 trillion operations per second. Presuming those are floating-point operations—to give us a comparable frame of reference to today's (super)computers—Data's woefully inferior there, too, by today's standards. The fastest supercomputer I could find information on, the U.S. Department of Energy's Summit, can allegedly perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or PFLOPS. It scored well over 100 PFLOPS on the Linpack benchmark test, and was the first supercomputer to reach the exaop range.⁴ But at least Data is about 1,000 times faster than a high-end desktop PC CPU, which today clocks in at around 60 GFLOPS vs. Data's presumed 60 TFLOPS.
Finally, there's a bit of contradiction in terms of Data's rights. If he didn't have the right to resign, because he was considered an object and property of Starfleet, how did he have the right to apply to Starfleet Academy in the first place? The right to apply (and graduate) kind of implies the right to later resign from service.
"The Measure of a Man" is one of the most widely acclaimed episodes of all Star Trek, period, let alone within The Next Generation. Mostly, I think it—unlike The Office (UK)—lives up to its praise.
Picard is on top of his game as a master debater, if not a litigator. Riker gets to have a bit of character development through being forced to defend a position with which he vehemently disagrees. Oh, and a conversation with Guinan the Wise gets shoehorned in, just to build that relationship (between her and Picard) a bit more. (Apparently that was a last-minute addition to the script…)
The episode is a bit in-your-face with the philosophy at times, and I didn't remember the plot turning on a dime the way it did, but it's still very powerful to watch. It's a credit to the actors involved, as much as to the scriptwriters. (Who, I might add, forgot that Data can't use contractions. "You've constructed a positronic brain?" is not a question Data should have been able to ask, as worded.)
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/400-petabytes-cloud-storage/https://sumanrs.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/youtube-yearly-costs-for-storagenetworking-estimate/https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/how-much-data-is-on-the-internet/Did SG-1 need to show some Jaffa women? Yes, definitely. The fact that we only ever see Jaffa men fighting for their respective system lords needed to be addressed somehow, and this story did cover it as far as Moloc is concerned.
However, I was deeply disappointed in the wardrobe choices made for this episode. Just like in every video game or action movie featuring women in fighting roles, the Hak'tyl warriors wore unrealistically skimpy outfits that would provide no real protection in battle. These costumes were no better than what Hathor wore* a few seasons ago—and in that case, "Hathor never expects to find herself in active combat" was a flimsy but valid excuse. Ishta and the others here go off to raid other Jaffa parties for symbiotes with no armor at all. It's no wonder they lose so many good warriors in trying to procure symbiotes for the children among them.
We also have to acknowledge that Teal'c's romance with Ishta makes no sense. Had Christopher Judge not written the script, I very much doubt that idea ever would have come up. Though I have no evidence to prove that it was indeed his idea, the lack of any co-writer credits for this script is about as damning as possible. To think that Jolene Blalock took a break from T'Pol's Bermanization on Star Trek: Enterprise to film this, where her character was arguably treated even worse… Sigh.
Honestly, I'm out of energy now to also complain about the huge gaping plot hole: there were at least three symbiotes available at the SGC for reimplantation into Neith, since their original Jaffa hosts had given them up in favor of Tretonin treatments.
In writing this down, I talked myself into revising my rating from 6/10 to 5/10. Whoops.
* — And at least Hathor's skimpy costume covered where her symbiote pouch should be; "Birthright" overlooked that detail a few times.
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…
This episode hits me every time, and I always forget just how meaningful the plot is until Captain Keogh shows up with his intimidating Galaxy-class starship and I remember what's about to happen.
Ultimately, the episode title could not possibly be more relevant. Everything that happens eventually serves to paint the Jem'Hadar and the Dominion in full color, and we know exactly who they are by the end. We don't know what they want, precisely—even if we can guess from the name, "Dominion"—but we do know that agents of the Dominion will stop at nothing to carry out whatever orders the Founders have given them.
I did forget about Eris being a Vorta until they all made it back to Deep Space Nine, but I have to agree with @LeftHandedGuitarist on at least these points: Her telekinetic power is never displayed by any other Vorta in the Star Trek canon; and it's extremely odd that she should fail to recognize Odo as a Founder. Eris was meant to return in at least two episodes ("The Search, Part II" and "The Ship"), but Molly Hagan was unavailable. In the process the writers seem to have forgotten about the Vorta's supposed telekinetic ability. As for Eris failing to recognize Odo as a Founder, all I can think of is that the writers hadn't yet thought far enough ahead. Later we find out that the Vorta consider themselves "those who serve the Founders", and that the hierarchy of the Dominion government is essentially Founders > Vorta > Jem'Hadar > everyone else. But this early on, that structure likely hadn't solidified in the writers' room yet.
Certainly there are other little things I could nitpick, like how Jake seems to think putting back the single piece of the autopilot subsystem he removed would be too difficult, but overall this is a good, gut-punching (on account of the Odyssey's fate), first real introduction to the Dominion's true colors.
Well, that commentary on the ozone layer wasn't pointed at all, was it? Downright in-your-face, that was.
I think my favorite part of this episode was Jerry Hardin. Having started watching The X-Files this past summer, I have really enjoyed his appearances as "Deep Throat" on that show. They are few (only 11 of 218 episodes), but welcome. I can also look forward to his return in "Time's Arrow" as Samuel Clemens, and recall his brief appearance on Voyager in the just-okay episode "Emanations".
Actually, "When The Bough Breaks" is pretty well-written. We have an alien race that has become complacent and arrogant, secure enough in their technological superiority that they feel comfortable simply taking what they want directly from the Federation flagship. We have Picard, studied in negotiations, well aware that care must be taken to avoid the Aldeans giving up and simply retreating behind their cloak once more. And we have Doctor Crusher, whose investigations (cheesy ozone-layer comments aside) dig right to the heart of the Aldeans' problems and provide a better solution than they had settled on.
My only real question concerns the number of children taken. Counselor Troi claims to sense "thousands of minds" as Enterprise approaches the planet's location, but we only ever see about half a dozen Aldeans. They take seven children, including Wesley, in a ploy to rejuvenate their entire society… off of a ship carrying roughly 1,000 people. Surely that figure includes more than seven children?
