Did the first officer have a sleeveless uniform to give us yet another clue that there was "something very odd about her", as Sheppard said? Or maybe it was to make it more realistic for McKay to comment on how "hot" she was. :joy_cat:
Not just a Cheers episode guest-starring Kate Mulgrew. Not just a two-part Cheers episode guest-starring Kate Mulgrew. A three-part Cheers episode starring Kate Mulgrew!
Don't mind me. I'll be over here trying to pretend I don't see Captain Janeway (Star Trek: Voyager) on Sam's arm.
"It's funny, the day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do. It's all the days they stay dead."
Azbantium plot hole aside, this is very well acted. A lot of the Capaldi-era episodes have been lackluster on the writing front, the acting front, or both—but this one is a masterful performance. If I have only one major question about "How?!", that's a massive improvement.
I, for one, really appreciated the "Oh, snap!" moment when I realized that my suspicions had been right: the whole "cycle" premise had been foreshadowed at the very beginning.
(The "plot hole" is the azbantium room not resetting, when all the other rooms in the entire castle reset to their original state after some time. Why should that one not reset? Obviously because the Doctor would never be able to escape if it did.)
Alton Benes drove me crazy until I finally looked up the actor's name. Lawrence Tierney also played "Cyrus Redblock" in that one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which of course is why I remember his voice so well.
Really strange to have that very same opening bit, word-for-word, as "Coach's Daughter". For a hot minute, I thought Amazon had actually started playing the wrong episode somehow!
Captures the mood of the game very well. No doubt the game developer being on the writing team had something to do with it.
Of all the bits of set dressing they could have used for a cable sticking out of a downed aircraft, why a bright blue D-sub connector? It strains my suspension of disbelief just that little bit too much to believe that there was a VGA monitor in that plane.
Next season is going to feel slightly empty without Meera. She didn't have that big of a role, but I still liked having her character around.
WTF, that class period was like 90 seconds long… Every class in this episode seems to end right after the important dialogue ends, as if the writers simply couldn't fathom that the classes might continue off-screen with more mundane material.
And is Finch really incapable of silencing the shutter sound on his phone? The man can hack into financial and government servers in seconds!
9.5/10 (if only trakt supported that)
By rights, I should give this season an 8 (my per-episode ratings average out to 8.41). But I enjoyed it a lot more than that. I don't feel like a 10 is completely justified, since I did have a few bones to pick with the narrative, but a 9 is a bit shy of what the show deserves.
The blanket makes a delightful brick joke.
Morgan's return in this and subsequent episodes filled a void in the show I hadn't even realized was there.
Boyle doesn't have an earpiece in either ear when Jake is feeding him interrogation lines, Cyrano style.
I'm disappointed in NBC for putting in the effort to register cloud9usa.com, but stopping short of putting a tie-in site there. The domain doesn't actually resolve to a server; being registered just makes it safe to use on screen. :disappointed: (Also of note: Before NBC registered the domain in 2015, cloud9usa.com redirected to the site for Cloud9 All-Natural Aphrodisiac Drink, according to Wayback Machine captures from 2011–2014. Prior to that, archived captures only show error pages or "Under Construction" notices.)
Colonel Carter Count: 8/13 episodes this season. Big role in this one, though. We're moving up!
IMDB trivia told me this was Katie Brown's last appearance on the show, and wiki notes pointed me to a future reveal (in 4x16 "Trio") that she misinterpreted McKay's actions as a breakup and left Atlantis shortly after this story. That's too bad… That relationship really grounded Rodney's character, and gave him a lot of growth.
I recommend checking out the GateWorld transcript of this episode if you want to know what Radek says in Czech:https://www.gateworld.net/atlantis/s4/quarantine/transcript/
Before the DNA test was even started, there was all this talk about how the woman they found could know so much about them, and yet none of the Atlantis expedition team seem to recall the very previous episode ("Sanctuary") in which an Ancient proved able to sense many things from the humans around her—including names and intentions.
Not only did Charles Shaughnessy guest star, but the writers made a huge (yet subtle) hat-tip to his work on The Nanny via introducing his character, Alex Colson, to a Captain Mike Shefield.
John Billingsley holding an early 2000s Dell laptop, standing next to a ring transporter, is somehow very amusing, and I don't know why.
Of course I'm absolutely here for the Star Trek gags. I choose to believe that Felger's daydream was only about the medal ceremony, and not the entire episode, because I just couldn't take the overused "it was just a dream" trope again.
I love that this show is getting serious about its characters, and forcing them to grow instead of playing for cheap laughs every week.
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'll probably never be on board with how the writers handled Jane Leeves' pregnancy by creating Daphne's eating disorder out of thin air, but I sincerely hope that it's addressed later. Sending Daphne off to a health spa and then pretending that nothing ever happened once she returns would be almost worse than the ending of Star Trek: Enterprise…
All that said, the "A" story in this episode is :fire:
Average episode rating for this season: 7.66…
I'll assign my true rating based on rounding the score of 8.5 I'd give if Trakt supported it. In my opinion, Frasier really hit its stride in this season, knocking out more "great" or better episodes in one year than its predecessor Cheers ever did.
"Made-up language"? Troy was pretty clearly speaking Spanish, or close enough to it with a bit of French thrown in. Hulu subtitles lie.
At time of writing, this was 9x08 "Bad Neighbor Sam", aka "I Hate Leases to Pieces" on some streaming services. Some episode orderings have a 50-minute (TVDB DVD order, though its runtime is incorrectly marked as "25") or two-part (TMDB) 200th episode anniversary special here. Since I'm not sure how well Trakt handles episode orders getting shuffled around, it seemed prudent to leave a note for myself and anyone else who cares about the long-term accuracy of their stats, on the off chance that the metadata changes but plays & other Trakt data remain attached to the episode number.
Oh man, the translator scene. :joy:
Oh, hi Will Bowman… I mean, Josh Holloway. (Too bad Colony got canceled. He was even better in that.)
Captures the atmosphere and overall "feel" of the book quite well. I'm gonna keep going.
Definitely reminded me why I liked this show so much, after taking some time away to watch other series.
Reddington is still one of my favorite characters ever.
That Doctor Who reference… Bow ties are a Matt Smith thing—and he's not my favorite Doctor—but it'll do.
Bit over the top in places with all the sex and blood, but usually all of those favored elements serve a plot purpose. I can't give the season any less than a 9 for sheer scale—the story of these 10 episodes is absolutely huge—and ambition. It delivers.
Slow at points, enough that I took a break from watching for some time, despite starting while the season was yet unfinished. But the last few episodes are very much worth the journey.
"…I'm glad we had this conversation." I feel you, Holden.
Also, how is there no indication on any of the control screens when they're in simulation mode? I feel like that would be kind of important to have on a fighter.
