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Peace 47

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Everything posted by Peace 47

  1. Hallelujah, they found an actual light switch on one of these ships. The Enterprise-D never lets me down. I won’t think too hard about how the 7 of them are supposed to run a ship that was meant for over a thousand crew members. (Flashes of Beverly’s disappearing universe episode!) The pacing and tone was absolutely bonkers in this ep. We go from: classic TNG surrealist dream/ mind sequence, to them being ready to institutionalize Jack without much further thought about a plan, to Jack escaping without much further thought about a plan, to complete Borg takeover of the entire fleet (that escalated quickly!), to major character death, to weird nostalgia trip for the OG 7 when everyone around them is literally dying, possibly even their own children. I mean, I love the Enterprise-D (favorite ship), but they should have put visiting the old bridge and full cast reunion earlier in the season so it wouldn’t feel like they literally had to step over Shaw’s dead body to mainline nostalgia feels. I really can’t get over how these goobers continually have no plan. They went into Frontier Day intending to … do what exactly?
  2. Plus, we only saw Elia as one singular “Spy” in this episode, and the episode title implies multiples, so we are probably still looking for more. And I had the same uneasy feeling as you when she was so uncharacteristically quick to want to get back to the fleet in orbit (whereas before, she was willing to make a last stand at the Covert in S1 or bean some space pirates in the head in S3), and the episode lingered on her return through the atmosphere. It’s just so hard to think that she could be that sus, though. She has seemed like a woman of honor, even if I have never really liked her character due to the fanatical shunning and cultish behavior. But she is the one who had the idea to retake Mandalore (so she is the one who could spring the trap), although that thought to retake the planet only seemed to gel when Bo said she saw the Mythosaur. I don’t know, but kudos to the show for making me question everything. Everything felt dangerous and full of dread in this episode.
  3. I really hope that it is Bo who can finally take this dude down after the massive amount of crap he has pulled, and after all the ways he has screwed her over specifically, but I’m a little apprehensive that after Din once again reiterated in this episode that the Dark Saber means nothing to him, that Gideon will get it from Bo, and Din will have to get it from him again, putting Din right back where he doesn’t want to be with it. Did anyone notice that one of Gideon’s troops in the final fight grabbed his throat, choked and flew backwards? They didn’t show Grogu right after that, but I guess Grogu was in the mix of defending the Mandalorians. I just feel so bad for this little PTSD sufferer that he has to be put in the middle of more “lost cause” battles. Din showed remarkable restraint as they were walking down the Navarro street and Grogu just kept hitting “yes” over and over. He’s definitely mastered the “ignore it so as not to encourage it” parenting technique. I just saw a post on Tumblr that made me sad: Gideon said at the end to take Din to interrogation, and the “previously on” referenced the mind flayer, so maybe this means Din will get scrambled brains. ☹️ But on the upside, I guess that is a way to get our annual helmet off scene.
  4. Where has this episode been all my life? That was really exciting. Grogu having a little temper tantrum while operating heavy machinery was a very funny beginning that belied how genuinely tragic this episode was about to get. When you stop to think about it, it’s kind of unsettling to have Grogu walking around in the husk of a previously sentient being, and it’s a little sad that what Grogu really seems to need is an AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) device like non-speaking children use in our world, so that he can fully communicate with Din to his full capacity. But if you don’t stop to think, that scene was hilarious. A few other thoughts: Moff Gideon is the Star Wars version of the Borg: assimilating the tech of other cultures and wiping them out while doing it. Mandalore makes Murder Beach Desert Planet from early this season look like a 5-star Bahamian resort. And while Paz was dying, all I could think of was poor Ragnar’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day(s): attacked by the sea monster, swallowed by the scary bird dragon and now his dad dies? Yikes. Din taking Grogu to Mandalore was some highly, highly questionable parenting, unless Grogu saves him next week, and then it will be a stroke of genius. By far the best episode of the season. Bo was great; Din talked about some feelings with her. Just great stuff.
  5. One trope that I’ve noticed that many fans really respond to is the Character Death (that cannot be undone by magic/ sci-fi etc.). I’m feeling some ambivalence about how the trope is becoming to be viewed as the last frontier of brave storytelling and that the death is needed for the story/ episode/ movie to be seminal, serious or awards-worthy. Like, there is obviously tremendous variation among shows and how they deploy this (a couple of old examples where I don’t think the deaths were for plaudits but to tell a viscerally violent story were something like Hank’s death on Breaking Bad or Lucy’s death on ER). It’s just that these days, it’s as if the audience is forever hungering for the “death” episode and ready to call a show a cop-out if they don’t deliver, and the showrunners know this and deliver on it as a matter of course in every show. I feel as though the shows (again, using older examples so people don’t come after me for spoilers) Lucifer and Alias delivered on a death in the last season simply because it is expected that someone important has to die. I don’t know, maybe it’s that people want the catharsis that processing a fictional death can bring and that’s why it’s so popular. But sometimes I feel like people (myself included) may be responding to the adrenaline rush of the shock and not the story. I don’t know if I’m making sense. I’m obviously thinking about it in the context of this super-recent example:
  6. I actually thought Tom was surprisingly and unexpectedly compassionate. Tom told them Logan was very sick, said that they were doing chest compressions and gave the kids a chance to say some final words for whatever peace of mind that could bring them before Logan was declared dead. He conveyed how dire it was without jumping the gun, given that they were still doing CPR.
  7. I really didn’t take anything negative from Riker and Troi dissing Nepenthe, but since so many of you all (and others on the Internet) did, I guess I misinterpreted the intentions of the scene. I would just say that Riker and Troi have often had a semi-teasing relationship with one another and have used humor to relate to one another. And here, they were just finding some common ground about how that place doesn’t suit them anymore. They both got serious at the end when Riker asked why they were still there, and Troi basically said that they had to be ready to leave their ties to that place behind and move on from the acute grief phase. On the flip side, everyone seems to be praising Riker’s reaction to Worf, and as I said above, that didn’t sit right with me because Worf was sharing an earnest reflection on how Deanna inspired his personal growth, and Riker is basically like, “Don’t talk to my wife like that,” and it seems weird because Worf moved on from Deanna decades ago, married someone else, hasn’t seen her recently, apparently, and Riker and Worf were very close friends, so why the weird jealousy played for laughs? It seemed like the characters were in service of the joke, not the joke being in service of the characters. 🤷‍♀️
  8. But Data said this season that the diagnosis was most likely incorrect. And Picard was only diagnosed with the disease post-assimilation.
  9. Lol! You put Pedro Pascal with Grogu behind that door and I’ll give this season an A+.
  10. @FloatOn’s post above says that Terry Matalas stated that he felt that he didn’t have time to address Kestra, so just assume that she is off at Starfleet Academy. One story beat of the episode that I kind of responded to was Jack’s temptation to go the bridge to turn himself in, and Picard chimed in as the veteran captain (admiral, whatever) he is and told Jack that if he did that, Vadic would just kill the rest of the crew all the sooner and leave with Jack anyway. Jack was under enormous emotional pressure at that point, and I liked that Jean-Luc was applying Starfleet rationale to the situation: it was a flash of the old Picard I remembered from TNG. So on this whole Jack situation: Picard’s body was altered in some way by his Borg assimilation, in a way that mimics Irumodic Syndrome, and this is genetically passed along to Jack, but Jack was also further modified in some way before birth to give him powers to control others (Borg-like without the need for assimilation). And the Changelings, who have already infiltrated (most of?) Starfleet and can control people anyway by replacing them, want Jack to exert further control over the Federation, and something from Picard’s brain will help them do that? It all seems so complicated, so maybe all that is just overthinking the answer. Like that one Simpsons episode where Milhouse presents the kids’ collective synthesized theory for where their parents are going at night: “The Rand Corporation—in conjunction with the saucer people—under the supervision of the reverse vampires—are forcing our parents to go to bed early in a fiendish plot to eliminate the meal of dinner!” My only takeaway from what we know so far is that Bev is coming across as a piss-poor doctor: not being able to eliminate all the Borg-iness from Jean-Luc, misdiagnosing his Irumodic syndrome, not checking her kid out when he couldn’t sleep as a kid, misdiagnosing him. Yikes, Bev. My hot take is that I’m pro-leather jacket. They look cool.
  11. Hilarious that Geordi also hates Chateau Picard wines. That stuff must be swill. I see a red door, and I want to paint it black—hey, maybe it’s The Rolling Stones behind there. Troi did say it was an ancient, weak voice. Things I liked: - Riker and Troi had good chemistry in their scenes together. I’m still a little bothered about how their daughter seems like kind of an afterthought to both of them (but I get how that can happen in the middle of grief over another child). But on the lighter side, them dunking on Nepenthe was funny. Whatever she said about it being a hipster paradise was funny. - Geordi and Data’s two sentence exchange before the conference room scene was sweet. Things I didn’t like: - I have found Shaw to be an amusing asshole, with the thought/ hope that he was going to display some growth (especially after he kind of apologized for his Borg rant and seemed to realize how out of line he was). But his refusal to call Seven by her name is really getting ridiculous. Starfleet HR should be all up in that “hostile workplace” violation. - Riker being so jealous of Worf greeting Deanna. That was a scene played for laughs that was not true to the characters. They’re all too good of friends for Riker to act like that. - The plot and pacing of this show.
  12. Nice job on the part of the posters who noted from episode 2 that Bo defeated that thing that captured Din on Mandalore and should therefore possess the Dark Saber. Bo and Din having some interesting back-and-forth in this episode (joking, disagreeing a little bit, and ultimately displaying complete loyalty to one another) was really enjoyable. Sure was some campy fun. Not just the insane cameos with the arch line delivery, but also the single, big red button to convert all the droids into attack droids at once, or Bo cutting to the chase and just zapping Christopher Lloyd a la Indiana Jones in the middle of Lloyd’s villain speech. The only thing missing was Duchess Lizzo playing a space flute. My favorite part was when the Mandalorians were Saturday tailgating outside their ships and Bo had to get down to business. Her using her shield to block Axe’s flamethrower was dope. Din should tell Bo that droids killed his entire family and community, and then she might stop ribbing him about his issues with them. Was it Axe and the crew who broke Moff Gideon out of custody? They don’t seem very trustworthy. Bo is going to have to find a way to decouple authority to rule from possession of the Dark Saber, or she will just have people forever challenging her to death battles. Strange people distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. 😁
  13. It must suck for her. I wonder how she is going to feel when whatever Vadic alluded to in the interrogation scene is fully revealed (about how Jack was never “for Beverly”). Implying … what? She may have been impregnated with a genetically modified embryo with the express purpose that the child would eventually, inevitably be tracked down for his next purpose? That she and Jack have been stalked all this time, and telling Jean-Luc about his son would have had no bearing on ending up in the mortal danger she was trying to avoid? I’d have a nervous breakdown at that point. They have put such emphasis on Beverly being so traumatized from losing her first son that this is the unfortunate result—that she is willing to do war crimes and hide secret children for 20 years. But I’m confused why Wesley can’t see or speak to her anymore, or ever again. The Traveler from TNG was traveling on this plane of existence with a Federation scientist when we met him. He lived on a planet within traveling distance of a Federation starship (from Beverly’s collapsing universe TNG episode). Why can’t Wesley exist in the here and now every once and awhile? Oh really, Wesley? You’re exploring the unlimited possibilities of existence? That’s great, now squeeze in a call to your momma every Sunday you little ingrate.
  14. “Tupac” … lololol. That was hilarious. Yeah, I think his big hit was “Delta Quadrant Love.” As a minor Trekkie who isn’t going to be familiar with all of the deep cuts, I still like the cameos of, and references to, historical Trek characters, ships, plots, etc., even if I don’t fully get everything until I come here and read about it or go on YouTube and watch my Emergency Awesome or Screen Crush subscriptions. None of that is what annoys me about this season. This is in contrast to my reaction to the currently airing season of The Mandalorian, where Star Wars fans on this site are, for example, super excited to see a cameo of a character from a Star Wars animated show I have never watched or super enthused to see the show start to weave in larger Star Wars politics. Whereas I (who am only a fan of that one show) just want to spend 30 minutes each week with the two credited leads I care about and the cute baby. Similarly, in this show, in this season, all I wanted was to spend as much time as possible with the TNG cast + Seven + Sidney (whom I really like) + Shaw (who can be entertaining) and for the TNG folks to be recognizably who I knew them to be. Gates McFadden is crushing it on the acting, but in this ep, when she and Picard decided to commit some war crimes together right before the force fields fell, I was like, who is this lady? This lady who was anti-Borg genocide. It’s like how I felt put off last week when Geordi came in all patriarchal and hostile, and why I was so excited this week when he was just as I remembered him with 30 years of extra life tacked on. I don’t even really care if the plot is one of convenience (like leaving Data-Lore networked with the ship) or if it doesn’t make sense. I just want my promised OG 7 cast members to sit around a conference table and solve a few problems together, stat … and for Beverly not to commit any war crimes. That would be nice, too.
  15. I should clarify that I meant that I liked the score that played in-episode towards the end of it (rather than me commenting on the TNG theme that plays at the actual end during the credits). I liked the score so much, in fact, that I went back to the 34-ish minute mark of the episode tonight and watched through to the end just to hear it again. I like driving, escalating, minor-key string/ piano music like that. The TNG theme itself is very John Williams Superman theme-reminiscent to me, which makes sense since they were originally composed in the same era (the TNG theme is from the original motion picture, right?)
  16. I really did like the Data-Geordi scene as I posted above, just because it was the only time this season that I have been moved like that, and I didn’t think that Geordi (my co-favorite TNG character, and maybe my only favorite character left, now that Beverly’s morality has been so thoroughly crapped upon, which I stand by is her defining trait) ever got his due in the movies or a truly emotional acknowledgment of how Data’s death affected him (as it was all about Picard). So I stand by my enthusiasm for that. But I don’t disagree with all the posts that follow, taking issue with the writing/plotting/pacing. And I get that Amanda Plummer is making “Choices” in her acting here, but while she was chewing the scenery like there was no tomorrow at the end, I was like, can’t we go spend time with Will, Deanna and Worf, and Picard can just fill us in later with 2 sentences on what it took Vadik about 10 minutes to get out? I did like the score at the end. It’s been a little bombastic at times, but I liked the motif there.
  17. That Geordi-(Lore)-Data scene where Geordi was pouring his heart out, trying to reach Data, made me actually tear up. How moving that he got a second chance to say the things he never got to say before. I have always loved their friendship. But knowing Data’s wish to be let go from S1, it added an extra layer of sadness that some version of his consciousness is having to endure this torture. I hope Tuvok isn’t dead, but for all the Starfleet officers that have been replaced by Changelings to date, doesn’t that seem to be the outcome for them, based on what we’ve seen? I guess we will be seeing Janeway soon since they mention her every other episode.
  18. I think that is a good thing. I don’t want to be a hater of such a charming show, and I was having fun with the season, until this week, my patience wore a little thin. It’s just that S1 was about Din, a closed off, traumatized survivor of a childhood horror, getting more and more attached to a special, traumatized child. S2 set up a crisis where every task Din accomplished (for his creed, for his sense of obligation to Grogu) in each individual episode got him one step closer to the most painful thing to him: separating from this kid that he really had grown to love. And I think S3 is kind of missing the personal arc that fits within the larger story. I’m fine if it’s Bo’s arc this season, but episode 2 had some really promising conversations about how she sees herself and her culture, and not a lot since.
  19. Din to Carson Teva: The entire covert will have to relocate. Me: Oh no, not relocation from the murder beach-desert where nothing grows and the only fun is paintball fights. How sad. I finally have to conclude that the pacing of this season is atrocious. I think I noticed that the time stamp said over 14 minutes into a 38-ish minute episode before Din (or Bo, as second lead) even appeared onscreen. Din needs some kind of arc or character development or something. Like, the Armorer reasonably concludes that after the battle at Navarro, the Mandalorians have some hope, and she reasonably goes to Bo about it (although I had a very hard time believing she just relented on the helmet rule after ostracizing Din so thoroughly), But even with her approaching Bo, Din is the one with the impressive friend network, leadership potential and dark saber that has gotten them to where they are now, so shouldn’t he be in the mix? The season also seems weirdly … campy? cheap? Like the space pirates in appearance and dialogue remind me of some kind of 90s Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers villains, and Greef takes “the townspeople” out into the flats when it looks like there are just a couple dozen of them, and the battle in town wasn’t very suspenseful, and … I don’t know. I feel like the season is really losing me.
  20. According to my recollection of what said superfans had mentioned around the time of the Boba Fett show, Din has to complete a simple, personal Mandalorian adoption ceremony, where he acknowledges Grogu as his child, before they are officially father-son in the culture (and presumably Din could then remove the helmet with him). I just Googled Mandalorian adoption (you know, instead of finishing my real-life paperwork for the day like a normal person), and Wookiepedia seems to confirm. That all kind of goes along with the discussion in this thread about how it’s becoming noticeable that Din is not referring to Grogu as his own kid yet. Pffft, is that all? 😁 Oh no, it wasn’t: Cara was there, too. When Din transgresses, there are no half-measures.
  21. She is using the actual correct French pronunciation of the name. You don’t pronounce the “d”.
  22. Even our MVP Worf had to say some clunkers, such as that Data wasn’t “guarding the manifest, he is the manifest!” (so hackneyed) and “I will find him, Admiral. I will bring William Riker home.” (Who talks like that?) I’m definitely not saying that all the dialogue is bad (Shaw and Worf get some entertaining stuff and Will has had some entertaining stuff), but there are stretches when I think it really should have gone through another edit or 10. TNG is easily one of my top 10 favorite shows of all time, maybe top 5. In that context, I am grading this season so far as “watchable, but disappointing.” I like that they are giving characters not named Picard or Data something meaningful to do (unlike the movies), but I’m also often getting disappointed on what they are doing with them (Geordi being all grouchy and maybe not having been the greatest parent to Sidney? Beverly being a weird liar?). We’ll see, I guess. 🤷‍♀️
  23. Facts. I thought that Picard buried Kirk under some rocks on a hilltop in Generations, but I guess that burial was just for the picturesque Instagram “RIP” shot, since I guess Kirk’s remains are with JLP’s now. I’m not sure that both Jean-Luc and Raffi had to point out that Data has already died twice. We all get that we have to overlook the repetition of that point for purposes of the full cast reunion we all want. Probably best to move on. Why does Geordi only call JLP “Jean-Luc” and never use his title? I did find Seven’s moment with Voyager quite touching, and I liked Shaw geeking out as an engineer being excited to meet Geordi.
  24. Geordi seemed a little out of character to me at the beginning, but I can’t put my finger on exactly why. It’s not that Geordi in TNG could not be prickly when stressed, it’s just that the writing seemed to take it to an 11 until he cooled off and was forced by circumstance to join the team. He did give me some real Joel in The Last of Us vibes when he was talking about not being able to help Jean-Luc and protect his family. When he was flirting with Sidney, I was thinking that they’re supposed to be, at most, the same age, and Jack is more likely a couple years younger, but when I saw them together, I was like, nah, this dude is divorced with one kid in elementary school, a mortgage payment and is checking his 401(k) to calculate if he’s saving enough for retirement.
  25. The raptors seem to need fuel in the form of Mandalorian children, though, so you know, pros and cons. There is no clean energy in Star Wars, I guess. 🤷‍♀️
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