Reviews

I honestly don't understand the appeal of episodes centered around Klingon politics. I find them obtuse, boring, and predictable, filled with saying "honor" a hundred times with only some actually adhering to that virtue at all. Also, I still don't understand why Picard or Starfleet are involved in appointing anyone in the Klingon high council.

The biggest glaring issue with this episode for me is how ridiculous Picard's plan was. How the hell are 20 starships supposed to cover the entirety of the Klingon-Romulan border with an effective blockade of interconnecting beams as a detection grid? Space is fricken huge and seemed like the ships were all pretty close together. Surely the Romulans could have just gone around it. Wouldn't it have made more sense for the blockade to be made around a smaller target, like Qo'noS itself? Granted, that would have probably been taken as a hostile act by the Klingons, but surely there could have been another way.

The Duras sisters and Toral didn't seem very convincingly threatening. B'Etor was more horny than anything else.

Data's first officer, Hobson, was so rude and obnoxious, and they didn't even give him a chance to change his mind about Data. Also, was THAT the bridge of the Sutherland? Pretty sure my bathroom might be bigger.

Sela's revelation seemed kind of random, and the characters trying to explain it to each other seemed clunky as well since none of them were able to really understand the events that transpired in Yesterday's Enterprise, except Tasha Yar herself who could have passed that on to Sela to explain here. But instead, we have some kind of strange, half-understood and hunch-filled explanation by Guinan to a doubtful Picard. This felt like it could have been it's own episode, but instead it is hastily covered to get back to some drunk, rough-housing Klingons apparently taking a break from the war to just have some jolly time with their enemies.

I did overall like Worf in this episode and its predecessor, and I wish that they had focused more on him. There could have been much profound and dramatic moments.

Honestly, Neelix grew on me as the show progressed, but these last couple of episodes, his character really irritated me. This episode is a classic example of finding a new form of life as the A plot, but it also has multiple other plots going on at the same time, none of which I found particularly compelling. Tom and Harry hang out in Sandrine's for the first time... and it's kinda boring, not to mention an energy drain. Chakotay has one of his first big "generic Native American" moments with Janeway, which just feels culturally insensitive. Then there's Neelix just being suddenly super negative about the crew and Janeway, all of whom I thought he seemed to respect before. Just kind of weak in my opinion and kind of forgettable to me.

I can't really understand all the positive reviews here, though a few others have noted what I did about this episode that makes it subpar. Another episode that has a professional woman (Commissioner Hedford) who doesn't end up playing that role. Instead, she first serves the men coffee and, as sure as it happens in almost every episode, someone (in this case, Zefram Cochrane) focuses entirely on her beauty and talks about her as if she wasn't standing right there. I guess after being kept alive on a planet for 150 years, I guess I could understand his interest in suddenly seeing a human woman again. The problem is, the woman is dying and is a bit preoccupied and annoyed that all the men are standing around kicking their feet about what to do. The gaseous entity that brought them there in the first place (The Companion) doesn't really know what love is, but eventually determines that its behavior was guided by something like love to preserve Zefram Cochrane's life. It keeps Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Hedford on the planet in order to provide Cochrane some companionship, but really doesn't seem to care whether the others live or die. It says that it can't heal Hedford, but was capable of returning Cochrane from an old man in his 80s back to a young, healthy man in his 30s. Eventually when pressed for information using the universal translator, the Companion's voice comes out of the device as female, because apparently the concept of male and female beings is a universal constant, even among gaseous life forms. How is the universal translator even supposed to determine that? Is that how people in the future will be able to check on someone's gender? By telling them to speak into a device that will somehow determine which type of voice to use for them? Very odd.

Finally, once the Companion realizes that it wants to understand love and other human sensations, it takes over the body of Commissioner Hedford, who apparently was just about to die, and then "they" express their affection for Cochrane. I'm pretty sure that if Hedford's consciousness is alive somewhere in that body, that she is an unwilling participant in this gaseous entity's plans. Also, by taking over Hedford's body, she is returned to perfect health. So what was that about it not being able to heal her? Or did it just refuse to do so and then later just use her body to experience what it is like to be human?

The Companion and Cochrane decide to stay behind on the planet and live together until they both die of old age, because apparently by taking over a human body, the entity is no long able to do the anti-aging trick it had done before. Cochrane asks that Kirk not tell anybody about him or what happened there and when McCoy reminds Kirk that the whole point of their mission earlier was to save Hedford's life so that she could help stop a war on another planet, Kirk doesn't even seem fazed at all and just shrugs it off saying, "Well I'm sure that the Federation can find another woman somewhere who will stop that war." Happily ever after? Are you kidding me? This lack of responsibility for the lives of everyone on that planet and direct orders from Starfleet is uncharacteristic of Captain Kirk. Nobody seemed to be bothered about how the Companion just assumed Hedford's life and was likely keeping her consciousness trapped within the body that was now being preserved. It seems that the Companion never did understand how it was wrong to force someone to stay on that planet against their will because all it seemed to understand was that the preservation of life in any form was what was right.

A somewhat interesting episode with the premise being that a life form could be duplicated with two slightly different variations. It brings up ideas about how neurologically speaking, we all possess different personalities and capabilities if certain pathways in the brain were rewired or missing.

I found Shatner's acting totally insane and unrealistic as the aggressive Kirk, though I thought the good, indecisive Kirk was well portrayed. I'm not really sure why the good Kirk was so confident that the bad one wouldn't kill him though.

The huge plot hole is why transporting the away team from the planet was the only option. The Enterprise should have at least one operational shuttlecraft at any given time. It's bizarre to me that the away team faced likely death yet nobody even suggested using a shuttlecraft. If the writers wanted this to be more realistic, they could have provided some made-up explanation for why the shuttlecraft couldn't be used. Hell, perhaps the aggressive Kirk could have disabled them for some reason.

In the end, a decently interesting concept, some wild acting from Shatner, and a big, annoying plot hole.

WARNING! This review contains spoilers!

Well, going into this movie I had been warned that it was a bit... odd, but I wanted to view it myself to draw my own conclusions.

The first half of the film was fairly well done. I was a bit unsure about their portrayal of the Watchers but afterward I realized it was actually somewhat interesting and creative. The scenes were beautifully filmed with some breathtaking scenery and very lifelike costumes and sets that made you really feel you were there. The warm glow of the central fire in the ark that showed off the immense expanse of its interior was a very nice touch.

However, it started getting weird just before they were set to depart on the ark... I had dismissed some of the earlier deviations from the story as reasonably-acceptable artistic liberty in order to add some level of interest. This included the before-mentioned Watchers (both their strange appearance and their siding with and helping of Noah), the murder of Lamech, the snake-skin artifact, and the fact that God didn't ever actually communicate with Noah beyond a couple vague dreams with bizarre imagery. But about halfway through the movie, suddenly Ham is considering rebelling against his father, a bad guy gets on the ark, Ila receives magical healing from Methuselah and pregnant on the ark, it's made to seem like God never intended on letting Noah and his family repopulate the earth, and then Noah seems like an absolute crazy man for believing that God (whom still never says a WORD in the movie to clearly define anything of his will) desires them to all perish as punishment for sharing in the sin of Adam and Eve. He thinks God intended to only save the animals and that he and his family would just live out their lives and die without having children. He believes this so much that he promises he will murder his grandchild if it is a girl. I mean I know that maybe they were trying to include a bit of the sacrifices other people in the Bible were asked to make in devotion to God, but it all felt very much like Noah was literally insane.

Finally, when the ark reaches land and Noah has opted to disobey God just a second before killing two newborn granddaughters, he kinda becomes a weird hermit from his family on the top of Mt. Ararat and drinks himself until he's naked (which seems to happen a lot in the Bible...). There's no joy in finding land or receiving the promise of God that he will never cause another flood to wipe out mankind... the ending is depressing and the whole thing just fizzles out.

So, in conclusion, I feel that a movie that had a lot of potential became the victim of its director's desire to make every story into an unbearable tragedy with a collection of deep concepts that make you keep trudging through it for more. It does definitely feel like Aronofsky wanted to first tell the story of how the human race deserves to be extinct for its sinful corruption that is inherent even in the best of us, but it could have been done a bit more subtly. It's very sad, some level of action that gets pointless by the end, with a rather skewed version of the story that I believe most Christians would frown upon. The pluses are beautiful cinematography, costume design, and set design, as well as some decent acting and creative concepts.