This episode had some very beautiful moments. First the flashback to Michael's mother cooking. The atmosphere, the composition, the aspect ratio change - it was very warm. I could really tell that it was his good memory, with the sharp contrast of his father that inhibited him so much and caused him to grow up as a stone cold man. I love that the scene of him cooking replicated his mother's so well. Truly touching.
And Eric's story with his mother, I love to see good parenting in action. I loved that the show didn't try to say "no" to Eric and his identity but instead acknowledged his mother's weakness and therefore Eric's strength as a gay man. This show is really, uniquely, good and this episode had some very hard hitting feel good scenes.
Meanwhile, the main story with Maeve and Otis is really getting gummed up. No one is clear with what they want and so everyone is just a toss up - I understand that they are all kids but damn...they really tossed Ruby aside.
Come on, Eric cheating on Adam was so unnecessary.
They're still trying to make their relationship work and this whole season just showed all the effort Adam puts into it (improving his grades, writing poetry, having open conversations, managing his anger issues). Meanwhile Eric gets upset when Adam doesn't want sex or when he's worried about Eric in Nigeria? And now Eric cheats on him? I'm all for multi-dimensional characters, but would be great to see some effort or good side of Eric in this season.
"I don't think I feel that emotion"
"Very often, Michael, when children are bullied by a parent, they falsely learn that emotions are a sign of vulnerability, and so they shut them off"
that hits hard..
- Ah, the first time a son/daughter is mature enough to call their parents out on their flaws, well done Otis
- That Nigerian accent is really testing my English comprehension tonight, as a foreigner as well lol
- Mmm that photographer is not saying it all, careful Eric...
- Here he is - Michael/Anton Ego
- Phew
- No Eric, come on, poor Adam
What is up with teen dramas and cheating? First Maeve, now Eric. Also the fact that a 17 year old went gallivanting around a strange city with an adult he just met is messed up. I know they didn't hook up, but the fact that the show made us think for a minute there that they did is gross. Like, sir, that is a literal minor, please go to jail.
The headmistress is evil evil. What she did to Adam, Lily and Cal was horrible. The students need to riot right now and get her removed.
Loved the simple moment of Adam's dad recreating the joy he felt cooking with his mom as a child. Very touching scene.
Oh, man! Matt really loves playing martyr huh! Like he was already back in, and he got his bracelet back and the people on the inside had no clue about his little adventure and he is kinda known so even if he didn’t wear his bracelet he would be accepted back in, but he loves to suffer!!!!
And I’m glad they aren’t using a mini departure to explain what happened to the girls, cause it would be easy to blame it on Nora Durst but I’m glad there’s so much else to it!! Can’t wait to see what mess Meg has planned!
WOW! Like I don’t know how someone can come up with this representation of the afterlife, but it was brilliant!!! I’m not sure it was just afterlife or hell but the way he got in out of the bathtub like a fish out of water and then out the depths of earth as if he just escaped hell, it was just ridiculously great! It was a little too much for my average mind and I don’t think I was in the right mindset to fully appreciate this but still I can see it was a masterpiece.
What a fantastic hour of television. The latter half of this season is really something special thus far.
The reverend is easily the best character in the show. His episodes are always great.
[8.2/10] Sometimes I worry that my own original thoughts have all been subsumed by pop culture ephemera. I grew up with the television as a persistent comfort. I love stories in all forms. It’s hard for me to make it through a whole conversation without at least thinking about how some moment or exchange or phrase connects to something I know and love from fiction. These are my fables, my myths, my examples for how people interact and work through problems, that help grease the wheels of real life, and at times, threaten to squeeze it out.
I don’t know if I could build a whole language around that, but I bet I could come pretty close. Nowadays, I watch pretty much everything with my wife. More than one person has commented that at times it’s like we’re speaking in a different tongue, given how likely we are to use some character name or quote as shorthand for a broader idea, or just make each other laugh with one reference or another.
“Darmok” takes that basic idea -- the way we communicate and connect through stories -- and magnifies it to a fantastic scale, in the proud Star Trek tradition. The Enterprise encounters a ship from The Children of Tama, a race reputed to be unintelligible. Sure enough, when they open a channel, communication is all but impossible. Without any warning our heroes can comprehend, the Tamarians beam Picard and their own captain down to a nearby planet, deploying a scattering field that prevents Riker from simply beaming his commanding officer right back. The move forces Picard to measure his Tamarian equivalent, and Riker to try to rescue his captain.
Revisiting this episode after so many years, it struck me how much “Darmok” follows the rhythms of The Original Series. Seeing the captain of the Enterprise beamed down to a mysterious planet in a one-on-one confrontation with an opposing leader is bound to give fans “Arena” flashbacks. Likewise, the episode uses the standard TOS A-story/B-story split, with a major character stranded or captured and trying to survive, and the rest of the crew working feverishly to find and save their comrade.
Yet, the episode isn’t about confrontation or even one of Star Trek’s trademark “we’re not so different, you and I” epiphanies. It’s about how we bridge the gaps between peoples, and how the stories we tell can bring those peoples together and teach us about one another. The former is true to the spirit of The Next Generation’s ethos, fitting with the series’s bent toward cultural and political understanding and peace. The latter is true to the show in a meta sense, as a series of tales meant to display the human condition across cultures and hopefully bring people together through them.
Granted, to achieve either of those things here, the audience has to stop themselves from thinking too hard about how Tamarian society would actually work. Don’t get me wrong, speaking entirely in call-outs to famous myths and other tales of renown might be enough to get you through a lot of simple social situations. It might even be enough to get you through day-to-day life in a fairly simple society. But the Children of Tama are a space-faring species with technology that surpasses the Federation. It’s hard to envision how they could translate concepts like “We need to shift the absorption rate of the dilithium crystals approximately thirty-two percent and shift the result power through the starboard nacelle in order to aim it at the apogee of the wormhole and dilute its gravitational field enough for us to escape at Warp 3” into metaphor.
But this wouldn’t be the first Star Trek episode to take a concept that itself works better as metaphor or something heightened than as something real, and it wouldn’t be the last. That’s the elegance of it. “Darmok” is itself a fable, a fantastical story of a species with a peculiar syntax nevertheless finding a bond of understanding with their galactic neighbors through two men being stranded together in an outlandish situation. Like the myths Picard reads in the episode’s closing scene, it requires some willing suspension of disbelief, but the story works on a thematic and emotional level, which makes it easy to forgive the allowances it takes.
The emotion rests on the budding friendship between Captain Picard and Dathon, the alien captain who deliberately strands himself with Picard to forge a bond between the two of them. I’ll confess, it’s hard to put myself in the shoes of a first-time viewer for this one: not knowing whether the Tamarians have ill-intent, not knowing how their language works, not knowing what they’re trying to communicate.
But I’d like to think that the viewer’s experience mirror’s Picard’s. At first we’re inclined to be suspicious of Dathon. He’s kidnapped Picard from his ship. He’s bearing a pair of knives and seems to be trying to initiate ritual combat. He speaks in a flurry of proper nouns that make his intent less than clear in situations that bear on his and Jean-Luc’s survival. And yet, as Picard begins to understand his meaning, appreciate his good intentions, and grow attached to his counterpart, so do we.
Much of that comes from the boffo performance of Paul Winfield as Dathon. His is a difficult and, frankly, thankless role for an actor. He has to speak veritable nonsense, and yet communicate character, emotion, determination, friendship, and most importantly conviction through it. When the episode begins, we don’t know what Dathon is trying to say, and even as it progresses, some of his phrases remain opaque, But through Winfield’s intensity, his warmth, his pain, we understand who he is. We countenance him as a well-rounded person with internal thoughts and feelings. Winfield achieves all of this without the benefit of dialogue the audience can comprehend, and it’s a tremendous achievement.
The one downside to the episode’s construction is that, given the high concept premise, it requires a fair bit of exposition. Maybe I’m being unfair to the episode. Seeing Troi, Data, and Riker figure out the Tamarian method of communication through multiple scenes, and having an entire separate event where Picard does the same might not seem as tedious if you’re not already in the know from having seen the episode before. The central idea is still a strong one, but ironically, the mechanics of conveying it to the audience can grow a little tiresome.
Still, it’s worth it to watch the bond between Picard and Dathon blossom. Through the need to survive, mutual generosity, a shared threat that requires cooperation, understanding slowly emerges. That was Dathon’s plan all along, to put he and Jean-Luc the same position the figures from his story were in, in the hopes that it would bring the two of them together the same way it did those men of myth.
Suffice it to say, it works. Through the situation comes comprehension, enough for Picard to communicate to Dathon’s second-in-command and avoid a confrontation. But through the telling of the story comes camaraderie. Dathon doesn’t fully understand Picard’s tale of Gilgamesh, but the telling of it is a form of bonding, a type of comfort and exchange. It soothes Dathon as he convalesces, and brings the two of them together.
In an ideal world, the same is true for Star Trek itself. There’s a (likely apocryphal) story of two Trekkies who spoke different languages falling in love at a con when they found they could nevertheless converse together in Klingon. Most of the time, the unifying communication isn’t that literal, but for many of us, Star Trek is common ground, creating its own set of fables and touchpoints that unite people, help clarify their views of the world, and make human beings a little more comprehensible to each other. As much as phrases like “Live long and prosper” have entered the popular consciousness, there’s ways big and small that Trek has made communicating certain ideas easier. There’s a common well of concepts and characters to draw from that help us to understand one another.
But at the same time, in a much bigger way, Star Trek has bonded folks, brought them together in spaces real and virtual, for their shared love of hearing and telling these stories. One of the few silver linings of a dark, pandemic-filled year for me was finding a group of like-minded Trek fans who gush and bash and love all the same Starfleet stories I do. I’ve never met the vast majority of these people. Many of them come from other countries with different native tongues. And yet, we’re all able to forge those bonds of friendship and even community from the ways we’ve been shaped by those stories, and continue to be shaped by them today.
I hope there’s still room in my brain for original thought with so many pieces of pop culture floating around up there. It’s important to be able to distinguish between the comforts of fiction and the needs and complexities of real life, and it’s important to have an identity apart from the art you consume. But if I were to craft a form of communication founded only on metaphor and storytelling -- if I were to pick a set of tales to be the founding ideas for what we aspire to and how we related to one another -- I can hardly think of a better starting point than Star Trek: The Next Generation, and bold outings like “Darmok” demonstrate why.
I just loved Laurens answer to privilege (And they actually used it correctly for once - although I'm asking myself how someone who was able to afford medical school in the US and got a spot which you seemingly can only get if someone bribes a person for you can't afford an iPad - I don't know about US universities, but you can't get through the german ones if you don't have your own computer these days, so having to share digital books seems weird).
But in general:
Isn't it weird, that if you help family (in the figurative not the literal sense) you are giving them "an unfair advantage" but if you don't you're considered a stone-cold bitch/ass?
Regarding Max and Helen:
Can the Show be renamed and follow them?
Seems actually more interesting than the non-characters we'd be left with.
Lauren is interesting but the character can't hold the show on her own, I've skipped over most of Iggy's scenes from the start since they are boring, Floyd was unlikeable since he told Lauren that he couldn't be with her because she is white (which is just as disgusting as telling someone you can't be with them because they are black and your family will only accept white spouses).
They will need some really good stories for the new medical director if they want to keep the show relevant.
Boooring!!
I agree with most of what Marc's already said. But: Helen and Max are just boring. Sorry, but their appeal was the will they/won't they routine. Now that they're together, there isn't much left to tell about these characters.
What's missing is interesting medical riddles, handling patients which was once a strength of this show. But it all gets bogged down by Iggy's issues (which are the most boring of all), by Floyd's love triangle, by Lauren's relationship issues. And let's not mention all those manager-decisions... o no, we can't close down the ICU, we'll rather staff it with people who haven't worked in an ICU for a long time or not at all etc. That's negligent at best (especially since it doesn't solve the underlying issue of a lack of competent doctors for the ICU).
I still like this show, but some kind of upheavel is needed to make it interesting again.
Well, get rid of Max and Helen and their endless romantic problems, bring in new interesting characters - and pick up more interesting medical problems. NA is focusing too much on the personal issues right now which seem contrived and repetitive. It was a great show, but it's meandering in lower mediocrity right now, which is a shame.
I liked the scene of cooking eggs, it felt so oddly satisfying, in a way. Homage to the movie Big Night. Awesome! Wthout any dialogue spoken. What a brilliant scene!
I thought Chuck wanted at least try to be better.
Instead his dillusions of grandeur got even worse.
Also, in a final scene Taylor showed their own hypocritical self. Making grand talks about the markets and logical decisions while DECIDING FOR her subordinate that she stays put and then firing her out of spite basically telling her that they will make Axe not rehire her also. (Oh my what a pronoun-salad...).
The only people actually even remotely likeable in this show are Axe and Wendy - both not good people but people who at least don't pretend to be something they are not or to fight for one thing while they are fighting for another.
Unrelated: "Banks are Evil" - really?!? You work for a corporation which makes a living out of buying and selling peoples livelyhood (their places of work) - putting people out of work indirectly by expectation of better margins from the people in charge and you don't even use your own money for it.
Banks on the other hand usually lend and administrate money for other people without much risk or gain (yes, mostly!).
If you want to label one of the two things evil (and I maintain, that good and evil are just constructs usable in the context of the predominent culture of the time) - I would say that in general Capital Investment firms fit the bill way better than Banks.
The double date was so fun. It started off super awkward, but Adam unexpectedly giving Otis great advice regarding Ola and finding common ground with Ruby over the Kardashians of all things was really heartwarming to watch.
The headmistress offering to help fund Maeve's trip to America has earned her a tiny bit of good will. Maeve deserves so much after all that she's been through. The show really wants me to get on the Erin forgiveness train, but it's not happening. The way she's treated Maeve is too awful to get past IMO. You don't owe people second chances just because you're related to them.
The last scene was heartbreaking. It must've been so hard for Ruby to open up to Otis and let him see past the facade and when he didn't say I love you back you could see her heart shatter. I know he shouldn't say it if he's not sure or not ready, but still, I felt so bad for her.
You know what…. Fuck maeve…… I want ruby to be happy and with Otis ….. it’s probably not gonna happen tho
Loved this episode, loved the characters development and the writing. Also, what other show could feature Doris Day, Duran Duran and KRS-One all in one episode.
I'm glad Isaac came clean early in the season. Maeve was never going to be okay with that he did, so best to be done with it now.
And I'm getting strong Delores Umbridge vibes from the new headmistress. I'm guessing there will eventually be a student revolt and Groff will somehow get his job back, possible with less fervor than before?
Well, looks like this show subverted my expectations yet again. I was sure the Isaac thing was gonna be dragged out till the last possible moment. I'm pleasantly surprised.
In other news, Maeve's mom is still the worst, the headmistress has made the fastest change from hero to villain I've ever seen, Maeve and Aimee's friendship is everything to me, Adam's character development is great (I love that he's finding ways to change his harmful patterns of behavior, we stan) and Otis and Ruby might just be the first time I actually ship the couple that's in the way of another couple I'm rooting for.
Nothing like a sex montage to start off the new season.
Whoever gave Maeve that haircut needs to be shot. Someone really looked at the gorgeous Emma Mackey and thought it would be a good idea to give her these bangs. Disgraceful.
Even though I ship Maeve and Otis, he and Ruby are cute. Maeve and Isaac on the other hand are a big nope for me. I hope he stays firmly in the friend zone, but this show is a teen drama, so it could go either way at this point.
Ah, that's the Good Fight I remember! Superb episode, hilarious at times. And Abernathy's back!!
Another intoxicatingly rich episode.
Marissa getting kicked out i was like :cold_sweat::cold_sweat::cold_sweat:
Politics was brilliant
The Wackner court plot line is getting very old, very fast. This is by far the worst season of this show. I get what they're trying to say, but it's too surreal, and the writing is just not that good.
Easily one of the worst episodes this season. The show/mock courts take over, but I'd really like to see some real court action. And the whole firm-situation with racism, power-play, misogynism doesn't resonate at all with me, it just feels too contrived. And let's add the drug king pin trying to make some pot-ice cream... WTF? It feels as if this show runs out of (serious) ideas. Unfortunately, as I still love the setting and the characters.
For some reason, this episode really stuck out in my memory. Being in the small town while this intense storm is raging around them is a striking visual.
Why would the biology lab have access to the school's PA system?
The thing about this whole "no one knows Peter but he knows everything!!" arc is that it's frustrating as a viewer. We know that they're all supposed to know him, so all this running around being suspicious of him is just aggravating. This would've been a better plot arc had Peter been a completely new character. Or, if it looked like Peter but they claimed they were someone else, or if it was some unknown dude saying they're Peter. Then the fact that he knows all this stuff would be mysterious. But as it is, you're just waiting for the inevitable reset or whatever trigger allows them to move past this.
I don't get what exactly Olivia thought she was going to be able to do. She'd only ever managed a minute or two on the other side. Why did she think it would be different now? It was complete luck that she managed to find someone to talk to, and more luck that they actually listened to her. Pretty dumb.
We saw the other side's medicine capable of completely, 100% healing severe body-covering burns in a matter of weeks. But they can't do anything about blindness?
People are allowed to change up their appearance every now and then, but so many changes for Olivia happening right after they came back from the alternate universe? And no one finds that suspicious? It's so dumb.
Lol at the random zoom-in on the Ford Taurus text, and the lingering shot on the Sprint logo. There hadn't been such blatant product placement before now.
So shooting the deaf guy left no kind of mess in the kitchen whatsoever? Surrrrre.
Leonard Nimoy was great, but I wonder if William Bell would've factored into the show more had he been cast differently. With how much of both Walter and Bell's past factor into the show, I feel like Bell should've been a more prominent character.
(Future spoilers) I know this is not the true end of Bell's appearances, but he still doesn't show up very much.
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z2021-12-31T23:59:59Z