stillshimpy

I can't tell if this is just a current issue, or if there has been a change. Has TDS been pulled from Hulu and now the only way for people who exclusively stream is to watch it on Youtube? Edited: okay, found the answer. The Viacom deal expired so it's either the website, the app with ads or youtube if you don't have Sling? It will be interesting to see how that works out for them.

Oooo Canada, thank you. Trudeau handily defeats the weird bullying thing that is the Trump handshake. You know that's got to show up next week, right?

And then he took kind of a pasting about wasting all those raisins. The raisins were meant to represent faults, areas for concern, ethical violations and Hillary had a cookies' worth of concern. Then John dumped roughly six thousand raisins from the stage lights as representative of Trump's flaws.

That combination of clips legitimately made me laugh until I cried but that's because it rounded the bend into actually crying. This is the man who will have to meet heads of state and foreign dignitaries. He can't even do something as simple as shake hands without being a giant, creepy weirdo. Awesome. That's just...so great. I'm already fucking tired of winning. Please, make the winning stop. Last Week Tonight faces such a tough challenge: How to fit all the horror that is 45 into a 30 min segment. You know by the time they've got their show in the can on Sundays, they'll have a week's worth of "Oh shit, really? God gawd. Maybe space aliens will take mercy on us and colonize Earth soon" by the time the show actually airs that evening. Keeping that in mind -- and quite possibly because they had to acknowledge at least some of the "What the fuck? Really?" of the three months that LWT has been off the air, I didn't actually find this one of John's stronger episodes but I didn't care because I was so glad that he was back.

Wait, who turned 43 over the weekend? Edited: that apoplectic freak, Alex Jones is only 43? Holy shit. I actually have a friend named Alex Jones and he's an incredibly funny man and a gifted writer. So my husband will see me liking his posts on FB and my friend Alex leans incredibly far to the left. I guess one day my husband took it into his head to follow AJ on Twitter because he finds my friend really funny. I literally heard about it when my husband let loose with a horrified scream. We got the "that's a different Alex Jones" straightened out very quickly but last night was the first time he's ever seen that Alex Jones (my husband had never heard of him before the friend mix-up) and to say he was horrified anew would be putting it really mildly. I swear I thought he was going to die in the clip they were showing. A human being shouldn't routinely turn brick red like that. Dude's turning the color of the clay pot from which he will soon push up daisies because ....that's not healthy.

I'm with you on that. That was not one of the stronger moments in the show. It was unworthy of John and I'm really surprised he did that. Admittedly, I'm a little surprised John didn't spend the first twenty minutes of the show, sprinting back and forth across the stage yelling, "Fuuuuccckkkkk! What the fuuuucccccckkk!" pausing to look at yet another alarming headline and just continuing with the sprinting and swearing because this is brain breaking material. I guess I'll put that regrettable humor choice down to some evidence of completely understandable brain breakage. Also, I had to explain to my husband what the rumor pertained to and...so that was a form of fun. If fun is "and then he looked at me like my brain had broken long ago but as it seemingly fit with what John was implying, we moved on." I'm still entirely tripped out by the Empire Flooring jingle being played. I wanted to laugh at the cowboy ads, they're brilliant and truly, what is with the paucity of books on the shelves in the original? Are books themselves now threatening? I had a hard time laughing though because ...yeah...hi, reality. How grim you are.

Oh wow, something good happened. What a strange, largely unfamiliar sensation that is at this juncture. Glad to hear it, though, if nothing else I love watching Ted Danson have the time of his life but I'm also super fond of the whole cast, so I'm glad that there will be a second season.

Yikes. Shockwave Part II is not an auspicious start to the second season. The name of the Suliban always makes me wince a bit, what with the seemingly purposeful two-letters-from-the-Taliban thing but that's kind of to be expected for the time in which this was written. It just has all the subtlety of an eighth-graders creative writing choice. Still, not even close to the biggest problem with the resolution. They brought back Daniel's sealed quarters which was a nice piece of continuity but it was just an odd note to hit: everyone is relieved that they were proven innocent in the death of 3600 people but...it's not actually a good resolution. "We were used to murder 3600 people by nefarious forces, trying to get us sent home!" is actually more troubling as a problem for Starfleet to contend with than "we had a leaking plasma vent and blew up an entire colony in a completely accidental manner". Also, that they're all far more troubled that they have to go home than "Holy shit, we killed 3600 people!" all along is a very strange choice to make. Incidentally, on FB a friend was mentioning something about meowing Star Trek themes to her cat (just...go with that...okay? It can't really be that much of a surprise that most of my friends are slightly goofy) and I mentioned that Enterprise would be the easiest to meow but was also entirely mortifying. That's how I was kind of spoiled to why this series is referred to as "polarizing" ...I knew that having read it on the series description page of memory alpha but I thought it would have to do with the retcon fails already witnessed. Then someone cheerfully informed me that the federation will cosign sexual enslavement at some point in this season. I literally found that out yesterday and now I'm really leery of this season. I guess we'll see but man, between the self-involved reactions of ...oh...everyone... about the colony massacre and the rumor of terrible sexual treatment of another species, I'm going to have to gird my courage here. On the colony: they're still dead so keep the glee to a minimum or have some regret that you were just used as a tool to murder. The writing of this series seems to struggle with tempering and layering.

Well, season one finishes up with three incredibly odd episodes. The relentless march of HoYay that was Trip and Archer in the desert, clinging to each other, frequently shirtless and sweaty, I was in stitches. I guess they intentionally did that as an homage to the fact that Trek launched slash fiction and I admit to getting a kick out of how much they just leaned into, "Here you go!! Back before gay people had any kind of representation on TV, Kirk and Spock launched the tradition (unwittingly on the part of TOS) of the bromance that would be a stand-in for gay representation. Here's an updated version where we lean so far in, you'll expect Archer and Trip to confess their true feelings by episode's end!" Aside from Brother Justin of Carnivale fame being present with a face tattoo that seemed to scream, "Hmmm. The actor is actually kind of an appealing dude, so let's draw a devil beard on his chin to give the audience a clue not to fully trust him!" that was an oddly fun episode even if it did seem to be swinging from the heels in acknowledging TOS's "we launched Slash, here, you're welcome!" I enjoyed it for how fully the actors just committed to "Yeah, we know...it's purposeful...and we're now going to lean in!" of it all. Then Risa is just an episode that...wow. Uh. Huh. So the gender politics there are interesting and once again, Reed is the anyway-the-plot-blows characterization. Trip and Reed just glorying in their piggishness when it came to ogling women and be the grossest guys who weigh the worth of women out superficially without qualm was clearly purposeful because they end up with the just desserts for that one. It's just the gender-politics are dated for now so it really stuck out there. That's an argument I'm always having with a friend of mine, though. If a feminist endeavor has done its job it will not date well because society will have moved past it. I loved that the person to actually have an enjoyable leave was Hoshi. I was so afraid they would damsel-in-distress her with the weird, non-blinking guy with whom she ended up having a no-ties good time. That said, the Archer, Reed, and Tucker apparently are either too gullible to be allowed out without adult supervision or as gross as high school football players and completely deserve what they got. How the hell did Archer think the Chinese Crested dog got onto his freaking balcony?? Did it teleport?? Clue number one that she wasn't to be trusted. It was a mainly odd episode but it had decent intent, I think....? I laughed aloud at Phlox's interrupted hibernation and T'Pol gives good "straightman" for the comedy. But shit, that finale is problematic. There doesn't seem to be a season two thread so I'll just discuss the first part: How could the writers not have spotted that it was incredibly weird that pretty much everyone was more concerned with "Wah!! We won't get to keep going on our trip! It's not fair!!" than "Shit, we just killed 3600 people?!? Entirely innocent people just waiting to greet us?? FUCK!!" Aside from an early flinch or two, the plot swerves away from "they feel guilty and grief-stricken" and directly into them all being self-absorbed to an alarming degree about an entire colony being obliterated. Season one really has three episodes in a row that have writing that is far from nuanced and the fixation on the end of the mission vs. "we are all really weirded out that we just visited a 911-without-animosity on another culture" was....well...it was not what I was expecting, really.

I cry just thinking about the ending of A Prayer for Owen Meany. That remains one of the most ultimately moving books I have ever read. Wow, did that ever click when you mentioned it, ghoulina and I started crying all over again. I cried at the end of The OA also. It wasn't perfect but it still gained emotional access to me. I similarly haven't shed a tear watching this is us. I haven't even gotten choked up because nothing that has happened on This is Us has surprised me and to me, the most powerful stories are the ones that gain emotional access without permission, without being predictable. This story was not predictable and to this day, part of the reason I love Irving's Owen Meany is I never saw the end coming and I remember crying so hard when I read it, my chest hurt from crying. Do you all remember the movie Dad? It was terrible, so emotionally manipulative, so emotions-by-the-numbers and it practically stood on top of you and screamed "CRY!! THIS IS MOVING!! CRY!!! SO SAD!! We're playing you like an emotional violin!" and that always just leaves me cold, worse still, can amuse me, or actively ticks me off. I'm mentioning that because this was the opposite of that. I don't what the true parts of Prairie's story are but she left blind and she came back with her sight. She knew something was happening at that school or else she had amazing timing on a guess. That final movement reminded me of closing the eyes on a corpse, by the way. I think that's what she understood when she woke up, told her dad she understood what it meant and then ran away. The only way for her to get to where she was going was to die. I don't think she was in that subway for 7 years, though. A man just recently put a go-pro on his guide dog to show the world how much abuse guide dogs are subjected to because their owners can't see the perpetrators. She was blind when she left, it's never suggested that she had hysterical blindness. She regained her sight at some point. If had just been an attack in the subway, the hospital would have been trying to figure out who she was. She'd have to live somewhere because those transit cops weren't just going to pretend she wasn't there and not to put too fine a point on it, but a beautiful blind woman in the subways for 7 years would not fare well at all, you know? I don't know what was true there and what wasn't but I do think someone had her. The FBI ...uh...whatever he was, just popping up in Prairie's house when French was in there indicates they were watching the house. So they seemed to think she'd been taken captive. To add to the overall surreal feeling of it all, I nearly fell over when that was supposed to be Michigan. Does any part of Michigan look like that? I felt like that was a purposefully strange thing too. A lot of the story seemed designed to keep the audience off-balance throughout. I really liked that, also.

I agree, but unfortunately Stargate, in a very rare move (as they were always rip-offing the Treks) beat them to that depiction with an incredibly similar story. I mean, incredibly similar. Pretty much sans water polo. Turn about is fair play and all that so I don't fault them, I'd just seen the story before too.

See, that was part of what was bothering me. Sure, Tucker made a good Bruce Willis stand-in and the actor is a great sport about running around with the majority of his kit off (the UPN's idea of gender equality, I guess) and I did note that they cutesy-poo'd it up by making sure no one saw them but it was a case of "Wha....What are they even doing that close to Earth???" Dude, they have them meet the Borg??? Yeah, I'll wait and see how that pans out but that sounds like a truly terrible idea. The writing here is frequently quite odd. The webbed critter that encases people in its glop for no real reason (why did something that was part of a whole wander far enough away to latch onto the "eating? Yeah, that's like fucking!" aliens' ship....never creep into it and....plot contrivance overload there. Also, everyone getting into each other's minds is seventy -five thousand different kinds of wrong. I guess we can assume that the two crewmen encased in there so that it wouldn't just be Archer and Tucker romping around in each other's heads, had nothing going on in there that was even of the slightest interest. Also, shame on the show for having the female crew member be the second to be captured but out like a light for a ridiculous amount of time....as well as unable to flee. Seriously, chica got webbed because she was displaying one of the Scifi Tropes: Survival instincts of a lemming. "It has him, sir, he's trapped, I have time to narrate all this but am daft enough not to have done so from a safe remove! Also, as I am a girl person, I'll pass out for the bulk of this." I'd have handed out gold stars if they'd had the guts to knock out crewmen Movie Obsession and have her captured solely because she was of the "Never leave a man behind!! I fight and narrate!!" And Reed might just be the most unevenly written character I've ever seen. But at least the makeup on the "we demand an apology before we'll help you save your crew members" was super cool. Space, the final frontier, where we apparently will encounter a race even more sexually repressed than Earthlings. No small feat. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be thrilled if strangers started doing the do in front of me but it wouldn't present a barrier to trying to save their lives....and I'm descended from the literal Puritans, for the love of god, gods, and the wizard Ted.

Oh dear, I just watched the Dean Stockwell episode. I am deeply uncertain about a temporal war being in play this early in the game. I don't understand why the freaking Ferengi just wandered by when I swear to dog I remember the rather offensive TNG that introduced them as being their introduction (and man, was it ever a mortifying one). This series is very odd. I like it because of the cast. I like it because right now, I really need to see a series that basically is about decent human beings, going forth and trying to do the right thing. It has its missteps, it has the earmarkings of "This was on UPN, wasn't it? I can tell by all the busty female aliens, for starter" ....and it suffers from doing things that don't make a metric ton of sense. Klingons that look like TNG Klingons. Uh...oooookay? I'll roll with that. Ferengi! Uh....what? And then Dean Stockwell's "I wish we had met under better circumstances" was fairly hilarious because only if everyone had stopped action and turned to the camera with a giant stage-wink could that have line have been a little less organic. Yeah, so far it's the cast that I like and I like Scott Bakula because he's Scott Bakula, but Archer's driving me up a tree. I love Tucker (Trip) and I've really warmed up to Reed, Hoshi and T'Pol too. Phlox hasn't really gotten me one way or another. Archer, thy name is inconsistency. Cut it out, Beagle Guardian, cut it out.

Thank you, hincandenza, that's kind of you to take the time to say and I appreciate it. Also, I personally think Brit Marling is so beautiful, she looks as if she tumbled off of Mt. Olympus but I was particularly impressed by how she could almost look like an entirely different person from different angles. I agree, it could be very frustrating at points. One of those areas was that whereas it was made obvious that Alice Krige's character really wanted someone to be dependent on her -- because that's what she associated with being loved, that only those that need you for everything, can truly love you in her worldview -- the very undefined nature of what her adoptive father understood about her dreams, his belief in her, went largely unaddressed. When he nodded to her, allowing her to run to her death basically, it made me wonder if her mother wasn't the person responsible for that tracking bracelet vs. any kind of authority. There were a couple of rather sloppy parallels between Prairie's adoptive mother (Borg Queen, ahoy! Never a good sign) and Hap. French touched on that a bit, that she came back because there was something about her home there and what it meant to her. Her mother was controlling in a way that is not good for anyone. Someone in the very beginning of the thread wondered why Prairie jumped off the bridge: she was trying to drown, I think, to get back to Kahtoun. I think she believed that if she had the five doing the ....whatever we're calling that....Jazzercize for Angels, or Tai Chi most likely to rupture a disk...then she would be able to get back to Homer and the other captives but initially, I think she was simply trying to find a way to drown (as that had been her path to the other side). I agree, it was a sometimes needlessly murky narrative but I liked it despite its flaws.

Well, I enjoyed it but I think the ending was purposefully bizarre because what the five end up doing is committing a tremendous act of faith in Prairie and each other. I don't know if we're meant to believe that their dancing stopped anyone else from being hurt or killed (one of the movements is for healing) but the point was even with all of those questions and it seems just as likely that she bought the books not to invent her reality -- because most of those stories didn't have a lot to do with the stories of the captors -- but because she was searching for parts of the strange reality she'd lived. We do know she was missing though, the mother hiding her note was to make sure that they'd consider her a missing person. So she wasn't just hanging out in a subway, playing violin for 7 years. The police were able to identify her and get in touch with her parents, she had been a missing person. I think the point was simply that they all did this, despite it not making any sense, despite having questions. As to the whole "Why wouldn't she just tell people where the captives were"...because they aren't there any longer. Not because Hap said he'd move them but because he was doing to take all of them to the alternate dimension. When he told her she'd never been essential to the process, that she was disposable, it was because Hap had the movements he wanted, needed. He could kill all the captives, or use them to get out of that dimension. Does it make sense? Well hell no, it does not. I'm okay with that. I'm okay with having watched a very odd fairytale that was seemingly more about how people can save each other. I don't know what the full truth of Prairie's story was but in Homer's "I swallowed a sea creature" NDE he was running through what looked like a medical facility with tile on the walls. I think that's where Prairie was meant to be in the scene where she says, "Homer?" I personally liked this series a lot more than Stranger Things and it truly was weirder than hell. I have to give it up for the actors who were just all in on those purposefully bizarre dance moves. They had to be stranger than hell because actual faith is....for those who have it...it's senseless stuff but it is very real to those that have it. No matter how bizarre it sounds to those of us on the outside of it and I think that's what the ultimate point of the story was. They didn't know whether or not Prairie was telling the truth. They didn't know what to believe but she'd helped each of them find their way out of their own darkness and in the end, they had faith....and it did do something. Whether or not it was connected to anything in other dimensions or a god source or what....it either distracted the shooter or it stopped the harm or....something. But the point doesn't seem to be whether or not we can take the dance seriously, I mean, only if it had been performed by John Cleese clones in a row could that have been stranger and sillier. It's just that they still did, they still connected, they still all took that plunge together and acted on the important part of what Prairie told Winchell: they survived because they weren't alone, they had each other. I'm not making a big stand for the quality of this series, it wore a bit thin in places but the performances were great and I dig adult Narnia type of things. That's what this felt like to me. I can completely understand why it wasn't for everyone and I think the complaints are valid. It just worked for me because I don't think it was ever meant to be anything other than a fairytale. Hell, those five characters coming together to do anything was a parallel to the five captors, who similarly had nothing in common coming together. Also, the FBI guy actually does tell Prairie that her Vitamin D deficiency, the tooth decay, and several other things prove that she was held captive somewhere without access to sunlight. He clearly believed she made up the other captors as a coping device and maybe she did. The ending suggests that maybe she didn't but it seems up to the individual viewer to decide what to do with that.

Boy, I hope there's still a world left by the time John Oliver returns from hiatus. In the meantime, Trevor has really hit his stride. I remember a piece last fall that talked about how Trevor's Daily Show wasn't quite filling the TDS role of old in the election cycle because Trevor is a genial sort of fellow. I agreed with that but only to an extent. I used to think his outrage showed a few signs of strain and artifice because he doesn't have a volatile personality. I loved Jon Stewart dearly but the man really was able to bring forth true outrage on occasion. Trevor Noah has not only caught up, I think he's leading the way in conveying that honestly freaked out "What is even happening now? Holy carp and all the little fishes, this is seas-aflame-up-is-down-down-is-up madness" and I have no question about his emotional authenticity when it comes to being almost fully freaked out. Oh, what I wouldn't give for a boring news cycle and a resulting dud of a a show. Bring on the duds for a bit, please. Also, Brexiters even if you bail now, the world you help push over a cliff is still pretty much falling over it anyway. Brexit, don't Brexit, roast cocktails weenies over the flames of dying democracy. I'm totally with Trevor on this one, "Oh no you don't!! Come back here and smolder with the rest of us!" bloody hell. Superimposing the Joker's face over Trump's was so accurate it was impossible to laugh at. It was a case, "Ha....wah! Pass the tequila, someone, anyone. Holy shit."

That was odd timing on my part but I guess it turned out to be a good thing, from my perspective. I commented before watching episode 16 vs. after it and that gave me a chance to really think about how I felt about the series prior this one. The characterizations, plot, writing, etc. Good grief, episode 16 is kind of a problematic one. Points to the writers, I guess, for actually trying to address issues of rape using a mind-melding parallel. The episode is likely 15 years old at this point so there's a good reason it seems like a blunt-force fictional treatment of an issue that is still incredibly present in our world. I appreciate that they were trying to be very forward thinking, for that time, but like a lot of early attempts at addressing serious problems, it's clunky in the rearview mirror. Kind of like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is now the most ham-fisted, preachy thing around but at the time was ground breaking. Points to the show for just boldly going there and for knowing what they wanted to say. Unfortunately, that episode was kind of a hot mess in all other capacities. The Merry Band of Feeling Vulcans were, starting with the superficial, as distracting as hell to look at because good lord, the wigs set new standards for "stolen from a knockoff Barbie" so it was an act of will not to laugh the entire time. The story lacked anything resembling nuance. They kind of unintentionally had Trip not understanding what the fuck a boundary actually is. Jeez, did that ever not sit well with me. "I have nothing to say to my father" "But you'll regret it when he's dead" put that sucker on repeat for about five exchanges ...and then it maddeningly ends with the guy whose boundaries Trip was shitting all over thanking Trip for having done so. Way to mix your messages, show. Then T'Pol's rape -- it was so clearly a parallel for rape -- was disturbing as hell partially because that creeper was giving off the "ditch that guy and call an Uber home" vibe from jump. So whereas I appreciate the attempt to address consent very early on in our cultural awareness of the concept of a cultural mindset contributing to rape, it ultimately fell flat on its face when, for reasons that I am not getting to this moment, they had Archer practically have to ride in on a white charger to save T'Pol from the increasingly bad man. Jeez, show. In terms of character progression, I do have to give them credit for arcing that really well. They'd very carefully built in T'Pol's more humanizing aspects (going along with Hoshi and Trip in the decontamination shower happening just prior to this) as well as her growing attachment to the crew, so the episode hurt plenty. It just -- probably because it is a 15 year old episode -- reverted to some kind of patriarchal structure wherein the lead dude in charge ends up intervening to protect her. It really isn't often that Star Trek touches on a very current societal problem because they do work primarily with metaphors and symbolism. This one both benefitted and suffered from cutting a little too close to the bone. It is the first episode that really had me emotionally responding. It also really distracted me from the atrocious Vulcan wigs, so there was that!

Oh lord, that sounds like it might be harrowing but I'll let you know what I thought of it. I'm 16 episodes in on Star Trek: Enterprise and it's kind of a mixed bag. I can understand Scott Bakula's choices as Archer even if they aren't really fitting for a Starfleet commander. Hell, they're already pretty freaking dated and overly reactionary by today's standards and that's one area I'm just going to continue to handwave. The Treks always struggle the most at trying to depict any technology that is presently in use. So when Archer stops and has everyone pose for a picture, there's suddenly an amusing "Welp, that technology is already outdated" ...kind of like how people on TNG would sneakernet reports around the ship. So that kind of stuff I just try to ignore. I get why Bakula and the actor playing Trip (I'm sorry, I don't have his name handy) went for a kind of space cowboy vibe. They were really stuck with William Shatner's "he's supposed to come much later in the timeline" choices as indicating things about Star Fleet. Those kind of broad choices are really interfering with my ability to just go with it but I'm trying. I wasn't expecting quite so much Klingon action in this series and I'm not sure what to make of it. TOS Klingons didn't look anything like TNG Klingons so to have something predating TOS where the Klingons look like Klingons from TNG forward is really weirdly jarring. Again, I understand the choice, they wanted the audience from the recent Treks and were going with what they had established. It's just in my head, it all feels very AU-worthy. But I like the characters, for the most part. Even if Reed's dramatic letter recordings were worthy of fucking Camille in the over-the-top hand-wringing and fear category. That was both funny and eventually irritating as hell. Shut up and die like an aviator, dude. T'Pol has grown on me too and I actually enjoyed the most recent Klingon story except, I swear, what the fuck was with the "Oh, here's a hold full of live animals, kept in the dark, waiting for slaughter" ...Klingons: still in need of anger management -- wasn't on display. Klingons: I want someone to kick their asses on general principles handily nipped in to fill the "what will I dislike about them today?" slot. I'm currently a little nonplussed by the overly coy time-travelers with an agenda. Another character that belonged in a film from the 1930s. As near as I can tell, the greatest value of this series is in enjoying the cast. By the way, they stuck Scott Bakula with one of the most awkward lines I've ever witnessed and heaven help him, the poor man tried. "Until the day that someone produces that (pause for emphasis, make sure to weirdly weight the next word)...directive...." about not playing God. Uh, well, I liked the story choices there but I'd love to see the line reads they rejected because that was clunkier than hell. It's just not Bakula's fault, the line was a fucking nightmare. So I seem to do best with this series when I kind of divorce it from known Treks and then I like it just fine. When they go too far out of their way to achieve tie-ins there are lines like that, that show the strain. Seriously, did they have to have him use the word directive? "I'm hinting at the establishment of the famed in song and story Prime Directive!! Also, someone removed the words subtlety and nuance form my personal lexicon!" One thing I love is that they are bumping into worlds and people that seem more diverse which is fun. It seems like they tried to do as much retroactive world-building as possible and some of it is more successful than others.

He's also in the meeting where Michael proposes changing the eternal damnation thing into something more entertaining for the architects and questions some things there also. So I don't that he made Michael changed anything about the yogurt shops at Shawn's insistence, as much as they all may have had another meeting to discuss how this would be done and it was always a joint effort. I think Shawn's another architect and that the only reason Michael seemed subordinate to him was that Michael was still a new architect. It's hard to say though because they left several things very open-ended probably to help provide room for another season. But Shawn isn't a judge (or at least, most of what he said as the judge was not true), he was in the pitch meeting when Michael outlines his "make it more interesting for us" plan and I thought that Michael's neighborhood was more a collaborative effort for all of them. That they are all using those four people as playthings for their amusement. Or not as that's another thing open to interpretation.

I guess Mindy St. Clair (neutral zone lady in the aqua power-suit) was one and then whoever the guy from Calgary was who guessed everything right? Although, I'm not sure why he would have had a trial. Also, it turned out the Sean/Shawn was actually just one of Michael's coworkers in what appeared to be hell's workshop, he hadn't been asleep in goo for 50 years, or however long he said, they were just faking his role as the judge. So I'm not sure we're supposed to believe there were other cases. I can see I've got company in the "liked it but it also makes me sad that Michael's evil". Jason is meant to have stopped learning at the age of 7, Eleanor wasn't properly raised and didn't bother to grow as an adult, Tahani was also just trying to get the love and attention of her parents as much as anything. I don't think we know anything about Chidi's parents, do we? I'm just wondering if rather than being a straight-up bad place this area isn't the second-chance place? If 3/4s of the official residents are mostly just comprised of people trying to meet their childhood emotional needs via behaviors that are wrong but will step up and do the right thing if given the right circumstances and prompting, they're basically just kind of parenting each other. It's just in the nature vs. nurture, none of them are inherently bad. It still doesn't make sense that they would warrant eternal torture. Eleanor lashed out at anyone who was trying to get close to her on any level but she's so capable of affection that she kept trying to damn herself to actual hell to save Chidi, who she isn't even romantically in love with so that's just sacrifice for a fairly pure love. I guess I'm just trying to figure out a way for Michael to still have decent intent, or to be part of the gang vs. the architect because whereas Ted Danson can play it, it's just much more fun to see him playing that weirdly earnest thing.

Thank you for this, JudyObscure, it was my first ever, honest to goodness spit-take at "it's all, "HATE! NO BOUNDARIES!" I like Milo V. enough and sure, he's ludicrously buff at this point but mostly I want to throw Jack down and shampoo him and then return him, no worse for wear, but decidedly less likely to trigger my "that's kind of icky, right?" reflex when it comes to his hair. Yikes. I don't usually comment but I swear I'm starting to think the Ken Olin twist will be that Randall is actually the second-coming of Christ. I'm barely freaking joking. A newborn who is passed from one storyline to the next, into yet another within one episode and isn't featured howling his tiny lungs out in screaming protest? It's either Jesus or the Devil. Those are kind of your only choices because that was the least believable thing outside of Mandy Moore's tummy pillow (that I found entirely endearing because she really swung from the heels and made me believe anyway). Plus, he sort of went around resurrecting lives. I don't think we know anything about his mother and we know his father is, at least, bisexual. Tell me he's only described Randall's mother as an angel and I'll almost lay money down on that one. I am actually kidding, it's just that between Jack's saintliness, Randall's awesome power of being perfect in every darned way and the entire "Big Three!" thing over and over, it's been difficult to escape it as a tongue-in-cheek theory. This is an entirely pleasant show. It has just the right amount of heart, normally. In this episode, I think they went a little bit long on the sentimental and spared any kind of edge. I found it a little one note, although I enjoy Dr. K. (and loved the revelation that he's actually suicidal with grief when giving Jack the lemons speech...that was a bit of an edge), love the actor....it was the fireman's story that was just the killer of all things related to momentum. Better to have followed Miguel home to find out what the hell his over-investment in all things Jack and Rebecca are about. Instead, we got a story of a fireman bringing a human being home like surprise takeout he's hoping his wife will find appealing.

Ha, well I'm not surprised you don't recall it, as I'm sure it was just kind of a routine "explaining Trek to the non-watcher" thing for you but for me it was a case of "Huh, okay, that does sound interesting, I'll try again. Oh, okay, so it gets better after the first season on TNG? Good to know...good to know..." I'm sure it was nothing out of the ordinary for you but I appreciate it nonetheless, and thank you! Yes, that's my big dog, Oscar :-) He's our 'found abandoned on a highway' dog and he's Great Pyrenees/Plott Hound mix (had a DNA text run) so he's kind of a gigantic fellow. He's bonded with our smaller dog, Pud, so while you're petting him, she'll walk under him like he's a bridge and pop out on the other side. It's super amusing. "This is an unwelcome development!!!! Bipedal food-giver, quit trying to drown yourself and help me!!!" So I'm just going to ask up front: Is the dog going to be okay throughout the series? TNG was good about Spot (of the fluid gender identity) so I'm not living in too much fear but yes, "Floating beagles in spppppaaaacccccceeee" (Lost in Space theme plays) was what came to mind there :-)

Hi, John Potts :-) Great to see your screenname. I don't think I've ever gotten around to telling you that you are the reason I ended up finally -- successfully -- watching all the Treks. I kept trying and failing, kind of spectacularly. I'd wander into the worst episodes ever, apparently well known as howlers, pretty much without fail. Except for one DS9 that just stuck with me. Over on BSG's TWoP forum, when I outlined the plot of that episode, you told me the title of it, some of the background (about why Kira seemed to have so much antipathy towards the Cardassians) and several other things. So we kept going back and forth on it. You had the patience of a saint and I tried watching from the start of TNG -- people told me the specific parts that would lag -- and after a lot of false starts, I finally got there with your help. Thank you for that, I ended up finding them all worthwhile for different reasons. Telling people their gods are false is the same thing as attempting to one-up their belief system, I think. I'd always watch in horror as Picard did that but it was also humanizing to a character who otherwise had next to no flaws. After getting my feet under me here with a few more episodes, it's clear that I'm actually going to enjoy Enterprise but I think I sort of need to view it as a Star Trek AU because it feels like it's already fucking pretty hardcore with some established canon. The Klingons showing up, looking like Klingons startled me. Also, in my long, long list of times I complain about the Klingons, this won't be one of them. In the "Trip gets accidentally knocked up by eye-banging a lizard person" episode, I actually really enjoyed the quieter intensity of the "no really, we'll fuck you up if we ever meet again" Klingons. They were menacing without seeming like rage addicts. Good work by those actors. My husband keeps laughing at Archer because he's so emo. "What do you think this is, a slave ship?!?" I get that playing a ST captain is always fraught with peril. An actor has to make the role his or her own and not just blend with the background. However, both Archer and Trip's tendency towards being overly emotive is -- again while a good establishing "they didn't know what they were doing here yet" trait -- is still a little puzzling. New frontiers, so let's choose not one but two of the most reactionary types but having accepted that trait about them both, I'm starting to like the cast chemistry. T'Pol is supposed to be the same T'Pol from TOS fame or no? In the "I'm pregnant and am sprouting nipples where there are no mammary glands, try not to think about it too much" episode I think, as absurd as the setup was, that's where the show just gelled for me. They started exploring how freaking dangerous space exploration would be. We met up with Klingons giving what I thought were rock solid performances and the personalities of the cast started to work rather than seem "Uh...whoa...this is a departure in tone" .... The thing I couldn't stop thinking about? When the artificial gravity was off, I couldn't help think about Archer's dog floating around in his quarters.

Thank you for the answer, ottoDbusdriver. At least I know I'm not the only one to have had a "....?" moment or eight from the choice. I've certainly gotten that impression, Maverick, seeing as almost every Trek fan I've talked to about it told me some version of, "It's not really necessary to watch it and it might actually negatively impact how much you like the other shows" but I thought that had to do with -- even I know this just from legend -- the whole series ends with some kind of "we just fucked with the entire timeline of the canon, for fun! Enjoy the illogical choices! Bye!" The song is just drippy and belongs to a different genre entirely. It's a thematically dissonant choice. Although, it did make me laugh a little because was Roddenberry dead by the time this series was under way? I had a bunch of false starts trying to watch the Treks but when I finally did plunge into TNG about 6 years ago, I was genuinely surprised by how friggin' obnoxious Captain Picard could be about other people having any kind of faith. It was just strange, "We must not interfere because of the prime directive, we can't risk changing your society before you are ready to advance, you understand. By the way? Poo. Poo on the gods you worship. Invisible sky bullies, you're like a bunch of children. Sorry about attacking one of the cornerstones of your society, peace out" which while frequently at least amusing was really pretty far into the "Interfering. Well, what is interfering, really? I can't give you this technology, you're not ready for it, so instead let me just try to disassemble one of the foundations of your lives" territory. So the first time I heard the song I felt as if it was the kind of choice that would have made Gene Roddenberry choke on a sandwich. It just so strongly implies religion when the word faith is brought up even though they are not interchangeable words. I kind of envisioned a writers' room worth of writers dancing around the "because we finally can! Wooooo! Freedom, sweet freedom!!" bonfire. I know, DS9 actually already broke that seal by having the Bajorans practicing a religion and Worf had a sort of belief system, I just thought having the theme song yell "faith of the...." multiple times was funny in the first episode. Then, by the third episode, it's just so...wrong. Not because of the lyrics but because there's zero space-exploration-is-our-jam type of vibe to it. Also, thus far, Archer really sucks and I want Laura Roslin to pop up in a tiny cameo and throw him in a BSG-style airlock. I know the Federation is not a gig yet, in this premise, but my god, command structure was a known and practiced thing. I guess they just wanted a wild-wild-west type of feeling and one way to get there was to pretend that ....gosh, pretty much anything he's done so far when it comes to interacting with his crew....Archer was just earning his command wings or something. Kind of a weird series, so far, to be honest. The extended scene of T'Pol and Connor in their undies practically yelling, "As close as we could get to gratuitous nudity, enjoy, folks! Seven-of-Nine isn't the only one with a smokin' bod!" although I was in stitches laughing over the "I will spread this anti-contaminant all-over-person sanitizer exactly one finger joint length down into my underwear because that somehow makes sense! Also, let's pretend that Vulcan's are so inflexible that they can't reach their own lower backs. " Thus far the series has been primarily comedic. "Oh, you have claustrophobia and panic attacks? We used OSHA guidelines to test the transporter. They didn't survive, sad to say for you, haul your panic attack ass over into the deadville alien ship and if you start wiggin'? I'll scream helpfully at you. I'm your captain! " Unless I'm just reading this all wrong and the next episode is all about how Archer has to see the ship's doctor for a mood stabilizer.

Okay, I've only seen two episodes of this series so far and I really only have one thing I can say with conviction: who thought that theme song was a good idea because that person was pretty much the definition of wrong on every conceivable level. It's sounds like something that ought to be the theme song for a family drama, set on a ranch, headlining CMT's schedule. Holy shit, I've got faith...of the heart....? I've never been mortified on behalf of a show about their credit song before. Is that what it really was in the original run? I'm so hoping someone will say they had something better, lost the rights, or something because there has to be a reason they chose something that awful.