Hell, I’m a married dude with a child, and I wear a rainbow flag. Ain’t nobody that straight.

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

1 moa (minute of audio in 128000 bps mp3)

Give me 320000 bps or give me death!

If you’ve got an Asian grocery store near you they’ll most likely have loose leaf. I got into pu’er tea this way and it’s fantastic!

futuramacrushedpelvises.gif

New person, same stomach worm.

Ro’s first appearance comes well before the Federation knew the Prophets, let alone the Pah Wraiths, to be literally real.

Riker calling out Ro for her earring isn’t great, when compared against his acceptance of Worf’s baldric. If I were trying to find a defensible reason, I might go with the idea that Bajor used to have a rigidly enforced caste system, and the earrings indicated one’s caste, so it is possible that Riker assumed that Ro was trying to adhere to the old system which would fly in the face of Federation egalitarianism, and that he was less familiar with how Bajor’s treatment of the caste system had changed during the occupation.

I like to imagine that a mirror universe / mind swap / space madness episode is always fun for the actors. After playing the same character for years they get to try out something different. Must be a nice change of pace.

I’ve been out of the loop on most of the recent series, but there still isn’t really cursing like this in Star Trek, is there? I remember thinking it felt really natural to have the BSG reboot characters yelling “Frak!” all the time. Even though it was technically a PG cuss, the way they made every use of it come out so Anglo Saxon-sounding. It just makes sense that every once in a while someone’s got to get some swears out, even in space.

My SO and I say that all the chips they’re exchanging during the Enterprise-D poker games are exchangeable for sexual favors.

Looks nice. Non-reactive. Quark talks about gold-pressed latinum having a distinctive clink, so the gold would be a part of that.

Bajor isn’t part of the Federation, so they don’t have immediate access to all Federation tech. Also, even when they join, I’m not convinced that the Federation just hands new members everything. The Prime Directive is all about not interfering in a society’s natural growth, and although achieving warp travel is the major barrier to initiating First Contact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional steps along the way once a planet has joined the Federation.

Having seen Avery Brooks give panels at cons, I can confidently say that all the times when Sisko got space madness or was holosuite transformed into a Bond villain or was otherwise acting like a madman… all of those performances are the real Avery Brooks, and the stolid, restrained, level-headed Sisko is the character that Avery Brooks uses his formidable acting skills to pretend to be.

Boy you Starfleet officers sure are a contentious lot!

Navigational shields deflect bits of dust and micrometeors away from the ship so that the hull isn’t constantly being bombarded by interstellar debris so small that it doesn’t merit navigating around or pushing out of the way with a tractor beam. Essentially, they are the absolute weakest form of ship defense, and the laser weapons described don’t even pose a threat to them, let alone the actual defensive shields intended for use in combat.

Leave them all in. Remasters are for restoring a work to as close as possible to the way it was meant to look when it was released, and nothing more. You wouldn’t look at a painting by da Vinci or Vermeer and say “Hey the perspective is off there,” or “That kind of bird doesn’t belong in that time and place,” and then “fix” the painting in the process of restoring it.

The creator(s) made a series of decisions during the original process of creation. Maybe some of them were mistakes, but they were their mistakes to make, and not anyone else’s to try and second guess after the fact. Once you start down that path, there’s nothing preventing George Lucas style special edition madness.

Remake of Three’s Company with Garak, Julian, and Dax sharing an apartment, and Quark as the landlord.

Any time I see “Directed by LeVar Burton” I know I’m in for a good time. He was fantastic at directing episodes with heavy interpersonal stories.

Tough little ship!

Seems a little bit over-greebled. Normalize those dark areas of the hull and the whole thing would look a lot cleaner.