Howard Bryant on baseball and the Fourth of July.
Stuart Schrader on counter insurgency policing.
Kurt Schiller on The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.
Patrick Stewart on the wonderful legacy of David Warner. I will always be so fond of two Warner roles from my childhood: As a torturous Cardassian on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as Ra’s al Ghul on Batman The Animated Series. Oh, and Quest of the Delta Knights.
Ana Cecilia Alvarez on the films of Satoshi Kon.
Worth Reading Recently
- Chelsea Manning on media freedom.
- Ian Bogost on my favorite Star Trek episode Darmok.
- The Nation's interview with Edward Snowden.
- Leigh Alexander on Twin Peaks and the recent Law & Order SVU episode about Gamergate.
- The Challenge of Teaching At A Community College.
- Soccer Gods on the fall of Nottingham Forest.
- Guardian on Stevie Smith.
- The Geek Agenda on Sansa Stark.
- Jill Walker Rettberg on teaching BASIC in 2015.
- The Intercept on encrypting your laptop.
Lonely Among Us
As I have mentioned before, growing up I really hated Wesley Crusher. Wil Wheaton, on the other hand, I am a big fan of. Recently Wil has been reviewing old episodes of The Next Generation over at TV Squad. His review of Lonely Among Us hits on something that makes me hate Wesley a lot less, and turn my anger towards the people who created him:
Behind the Scenes Memory: I don’t recall much about working on this particular episode, but I can clearly and painfully recall something that happened right around the time we filmed it: D.C. Fontana, who wrote this episode and is presumably responsible for all the lame dialogue I had to deliver in it, was part of a panel at a convention in 1987 called “Solving the Wesley Problem.” The whole thing was focused on attacking me and my character, and lamenting the fact that there was a damn kid on the Enterprise. Patrick Stewart called me from the show and encouraged me to come to the convention and speak on my own behalf, which I did with some success. That panel and the audience’s comments really hurt me when I was a 15 year-old kid, but while I watched this episode as a 34 year-old man, I had this crazy idea: Maybe instead of sitting on this panel and trashing me, D.C Fontana could have written intelligent dialogue for me and helped solve the “Wesley problem” herself. I don’t know, maybe she tried to do that and didn’t get a lot of support from the rest of the producers and writing staff, but even I know of Dr. Channing’s theory of not writing cliched dialogue for kids in science fiction, and then blaming the actor who is forced to deliver it.
Right on! By the way, Wil’s reviews of these episodes on TV Squad have been hilarious and really spot on with his critiques, praises, and other remembrances.
These Are The Voyages...
Never before has a Star Trek finale personally offended me, but the finale of Enterprise, which aired last week, was one of the worst hours of television I have ever witnessed. I have not really paid that much attention to Enterprise in the past few years, the craptacular first few years really turned me off, but it was incredibly insulting to have the finale of the show be essentially an amendment to a god-awful season seven Next Generation episode. Plus, it stars Troi and Riker, my two least favorite characters on Trek ever.
So, as I stated above, this episode takes place during TNG episode The Pegasus. Why? That is another awful season seven episode when the show was spiralling down the tubes of suck.
They could not even get the sets right for the Enterprise-D scenes either. As some smart fans noted on tvtome, the turbo lift used for the Enterprise-D is actually the one from the Enterprise-E. The scenes from Ten-Forward were mostly stock footage from the season three The Price…which is from four years before this episode!
I will not even go into the semi-emotional Vulcan and how pointless it was to SPOILER ALERT and such. If this is the end of Trek for a while, I say good riddance! Maybe I should check out another Trek alum’s new show.
Mysterious Square-Jawed man stares at Dr. Bev long enough to make her think she's getting her bodice ripped on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel in a supermarket checkout line, and walks off.
As we all know, season seven of Star Trek The Next Generation isn't really that great. One of the lower points is the episode Sub Rosa, which is so hilariously bad that it has spawned not just one spoof, but a second one on TWOP.
What is funny about this episode is that the next week TNG would put up one of the best hours of Star Trek ever.