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For All Mankind: And Here's to You (2021)
Gross, gross, gross, gross
I don't know why they chose to have Karen sleep with Danny, but what a massive, disgusting mistake from both a character and writing perspective. I was so uncomfortable during that scene. She's twice his age, known him for his whole short life, he's still barely a child, and she's his boss. Karen crossed a major line that she can never get back from, and if her friends and family find out what she did, she should be rightfully shunned from polite society and divorced. She's a sexual predator now, not someone to sympathize with.
I don't know if the writers think they can come back from this, because based on the title of the episode, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: The Serene Squall (2022)
Another great episide!
Don't listen to all the bigots who let their petty and worthless prejudices ruin their own enjoyment of this episode. They've given this episode bad reviews because they can't keep their hateful politics out of Star Trek. If these jerks had their way, the wonderful Nichelle Nichols would never have been hired to play the beloved Uhura. These people spread misery, hatred, and depression wherever they go, and the world would be a much better place without these joy-sucking fun-haters.
This is another great episode with lots of delightful moments. New character Dr. Aspen shines as an intelligent, delightful, and earnest addition to the supporting cast, and I sincerely hope we'll be seeing much more of her in the future. Have I mentioned that she's also knock-out gorgeous? I'm normally not one for tall, willowy women, but she took my breath away!
This episode's themes were of deception and misdirection, and I have to say that the writers hit another one out of the park. I really enjoy how they've written many episodes this season around a thematic element so that the A-plot and B-plot (and sometimes the C-plot and D-plot) feel coherent and whole. This episode has an A-plot and B-plot that work together to tell the whole story, and it's just delightful to watch.
For those at home keeping track of classic Trek references, we get to see a great rendition of the Star Trek classic, the venerable Jefferies Tube, which is depicted in a super familiar, but really well updated to fit a more modern aesthetic. Also, an unexpected character makes an appearance, and it is just so neat.
Another great episode bolstered by excellent writing, a great new character, spot-on casting, and fun call-backs to the original series.
P. S. I added an extra star to my own assessment to counter-balance the negative reviews by the joy-killing bigots who just want to make the world a worse place. Ignore those people, they aren't worth the time of day.
Babylon 5: The Wheel of Fire (1998)
This is a fine episide . . .
This is a fine episode, easily an 8 or 8.5 out of 10. However, JMS wrote Londo out of the show for this episode and the rest of the season, and that I CANNOT abide!
Babylon 5: Confessions and Lamentations (1995)
Since we've gone through a global pandemic, this episide rings hollow
If we set aside the fact that a disease that's 100% fatal and 100% contagious and kills its victims within 48 hours of infection would kill itself off before killing a significant number of the population, nobody at all acts with any sense due to an airborne virus.
This show would have us believe that Babylon 5's air circulation system doesn't filter viruses and pathogens from the air. Dr. Franklin makes it perfectly clear, on multiple occasions, that because Babylon 5's air is recycled, that everyone is being exposed to the virus and no Markab is safe. If the virus jumps species, then nobody is safe. Why was Babylon 5 not built with air filtration systems? We can remove viruses from the air with UV light and HEPA filters TODAY.
If I was Sheridan, I'd be getting the maintenance crew to duct tape HEPA filters to the air intake and outtakes and setting up UV lights in all the ducts. I would hate to be on Babylon 5 during cold/flu season since apparently they believe in just infecting everybody with everyone else's germs.
What was the point of this episode? Was it another heavy-handed "people who put their religious beliefs above science are going to have a bad time" episode? We already saw that in season 1.
Rurôni Kenshin: Sai shûshô - The Beginning (2021)
Great movie, a must watch for any Kenshin fans
Just to warn those who enjoyed the anime: get ready for some major blue balls. Kenshin and Saito never fight in this movie!
The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
One of the most horrifying sequences put to film
The scene where Nell ties the noose around her neck and hangs herself, thus discovering she's the "Bent-Necked Lady" that's been haunting her her whole life was one of the most creepy and horrific things I've ever seen.
Gordon Behind Bars (2012)
The premise of this show is purely disgusting.
Prisons should be abolished, prisoners shouldn't be used as slave labour. It's sick and disturbing that Gordon Ramsay thought this was ever a good idea. I've lost a huge amount of respect for him.
The Feed (2019)
Skip it, maybe get the book instead
"The Feed" is a 2019 Amazon Prime Video TV series supposedly based on the above book, but really comes across more like a middling episode of Netflix's "Black Mirror." I would argue that the episodes of Black Mirror that deal with the exact same subject matter as Amazon's The Feed, such as "Arkangel," "Nosedive," and "The Entire History of You," are far better quality, ask far more interesting questions, have better scripts and better acting, and even better production quality.
If you want a vision of the future Amazon's The Feed brings us, imagine a Charlie Bit My Finger YouTube video playing inside a human brain - forever.
The Thrill of It All (1963)
The only way to really enjoy this movie is to see it as a horror movie in the vein of Gaslight
A husband is jealous of his formerly homemaker housewife leaving the home and pursuing a successful advertising career where she is paid over half a million dollars, in today's money, per year ($80,000 in 1963 would be $668,099.35 in 2019), so he contrives to psychologically manipulate his wife into quitter her lucrative and rewarding job.
Seen through modern eyes, Gerald Boyer's (James Garner) psychological manipulation of his wife Beverly (Doris Day) is sick and twisted. I couldn't help but be disgusted by his actions throughout the second act of the film. Gerald pretends he's having an string of affairs, going so far as to invite his nurse out, taking a picture with her and hiding it so Beverly can find it, placing lipstick on his own collar, and pretending to come home drunk and calling her by another woman's name.
What kind of monster would cause his wife such pain and suffering like that?
What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (2018)
An excellent documentary tribute to Deep Space Nine, the very best Star Trek series
Full disclosure: I backed "What We Left Behind" as an IndieGoGo project.
"What We Left Behind" starts in an interesting and revealing way for a documentary. It's a beginning you wouldn't see in any other documentary: the cast of the show takes turns reading letters from viewers about how horrible and sucky the show is.
The effect is to remind you, the viewer, that there's something special and unique about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the TV show this film is documenting. I say "remind," because if you're a fan of DS9, then you probably already know in your heart, in your very bones, that DS9 was not like other Star Trek series, and indeed was not like most other TV series of the time.
"What We Left Behind" does an excellent job of doing what it sets out to do: chronicling what made DS9 so unique and enduring, exploring the creation and run of DS9 from 1993-1999, a love letter from those who worked on DS9 to the fans, a love letter from everyone who worked on DS9 and the fans to the show itself, a "what could have been" with the season 8 episode pitch (more on that later), a nostalgia trip, and last, but not least, a showcase of what DS9 would look like if remastered into full glorious HD.
That's a lot of tasks for one 2 hour documentary, but it accomplishes all of this with flying colours. This documentary was crowdfunded via IndieGoGo, and it initially raised far more money than the producers asked for or expected. One of the "stretch goals" for the project was extra HD footage. In fact, the producers did an extra round of crowdfunding to include as much HD footage as they could. In the end, there's over 20 minutes of the remastered footage, and every minute is more stunning and glorious than the last.
It looked to me like the producers did include one scene of standard format, non-remastered footage, and the difference between the two were like night and day. As Herman Zimmerman, the production designer for DS9 points out, DS9 was filmed with almost all on-set lighting, like a film noir in space, which explains the often dark and moody lighting. This type of lighting was unusual for television at the time as tiny CRT TVs couldn't show much detail so TV producers favoured high-key lighting. But it means that DS9 is absolutely gorgeous remastered in HD. You really get the feeling that the HD footage is the realization of their true vision for DS9, unlike, say, The Wire, where creator David Simon is on record saying that HD The Wire was not the original creative vision and they always intended it to be a low-res, CRT-TV type show.
It would be a crime against art, a crime against television, a crime against science fiction, and a crime against Star Trek for CBS to not lovingly remaster Deep Space Nine in full HD.
The set design and lighting aren't the only forward-looking things DS9 accomplished when it aired in the 90s. Back in the 1990s, before the advent of streaming TV shows, we had to rely on either watching the show when it aired or setting the timer on your VHS tape, bingeing TV shows wasn't yet a thing. While prime-time arc-based TV shows were not unheard of (David Lynch's Twin Peaks comes to mind as a notable example), they weren't common. DS9 was one of a crop of TV shows beginning to air arc-based, "bingeable" TV shows, its contemporaries "The X-Files," "Babylon 5," and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" are a few I can think of who also helped start the trend. "What We Left Behind" documents how Paramount, the studio that produced DS9 for syndication, didn't do arc-based TV shows, and the producers of DS9 had to fight tooth and nail to allow DS9 to become more arc-based.
The studio felt they had good reason to resist arc-based shows: the audience didn't like it. When someone tunes into a syndicated TV show, they had to be able to jump right in and enjoy a stand-alone episode of the show without reading a history book on previous events or watch the rest of the show to get caught up. You can see this attitude with DS9's much worse, but much more heavily promoted, younger-sibling show "Star Trek: Voyager," which eschewed story-arcs and was defiantly stand-alone throughout its seven year run. However, modern TV has shown that DS9, and its contemporary arc-based shows, were right: arc-based has won the day. If it wasn't for DS9 and these other aforementioned shows, "Game of Thrones" wouldn't have been possible. I'd argue that even "The Wire," the "Hamlet" of American television, wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for DS9 and its contemporaries.
"What We Left Behind" does an excellent job of documenting these facts, and more, and this alone would have been enough for me to appreciate DS9's legacy and what this documentary set out to highlight, but that's not all. One of the central concepts of "What We Left Behind" is (most of) the original show's writers, Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler, René Echevarria, Ronald D. Moore, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe, pitching a theoretical season 8 episode 1, breaking it down, and cool storyboarded semi-animated sequences to go along with it. I won't spoil the plot, but needless to say, seeing this is quite a treat. Not only do we get to see titans of television science-fiction lay down what could have been the next episode in a favourite, long ago ended, science-fiction show, but you get a glimpse into what being in the writer's room during the show's heyday must have been like (Pete Allan Fields was off sick that particular day).
The season 8 pitch is a joy to watch, and adds another layer of awesomeness to the already full "What We Left Behind." I highly recommend checking this doc out. If you're a DS9 fan, you'll get misty eyed and appreciate this doc for what it is, if you're not a DS9 fan, check it out and you might understand why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine inspires such love and devotion from its fan base.
The Good Fight: Day 408 (2018)
"The Good Fight" season 2 starts strong and never lets up
"The Good Fight" is amazing. I loved its prequel show, "The Good Wife," but this one is even better, which I wouldn't have thought possible.
During this episode, Dianne (Christine Baranski) is stuck in court, and I had to pause the show because I laughed for about five minutes straight when the bailiff announced "the honorable Judge Lyman presiding" and Howard Lyman (Jerry Adler) showed up. I bet he wasn't wearing any pants under that robe.
Supergirl: Homecoming (2017)
Sloppy writing that requires the characters to act like morons in what could have been a good episode
In this episode of Supergirl the spy comes in from the cold. After the obviously way too easy rescue of Jeremiah Danvers, the adopted father of Supergirl and father of Agent Alex Danvers, the characters proceed to act like total morons.
You have a former agent, Jeremiah Danvers, who was presumed dead, but actually captured by your deadly enemy for 14 years, so what does your top secret governmental organization do? Debrief him so you can learn all you can about your enemy? No. Do a full body medical scan since you know this deadly organization loves their cybernetic body mods? No. Surely you get your telepathic Martian to read his mind to see if he's been brainwashed or turned, right? "Not." as Harry Wells would say. At least you relieve him of duty so he can recover from being captured, undoubtedly a traumatic experience? Nope. Maybe you put him on observation because he's been gone for 14 years and things are going to be new and strange for him? No way.
What do you do instead? You have all your main characters, the smart-as-a-whip government agent, the superhuman from another planet, the incredibly powerful telepathic Martian, all decide to suddenly become very credulous and accept the return of the 14 year captive at face value. They become so hostile to even the idea they should be careful that they exile the only rational one in the room, playboy Mon-el.
This episode could have built up the tension of whether or not Jeremiah Danvers was a double agent. The writers could have flipped some of the tropes, but instead choose to make their main characters look like useful idiots. At this rate, Cadmus deserves to win because they're up against the secret government version of the three stooges.
Battlefield Earth (2000)
I love this terrible movie.
This movie is terrible in pretty much every way, but it is one of those movies that's so bad it's good, like the filmmakers were really fighting hard to earn that 2.3 out of 10 rating.
I have to say, despite the laughable plot, the hammy acting, the terrible directing, the cheesy lines and so forth, I love this horrible, horrible movie.
You can tell that everyone involved just didn't actually care at all, it really shows how half-done it all really is.
I have to give a well-earned 1/10 for Battlefield Earth, one of my favourite crappy movies.
Star Trek: Voyager (1995)
Very Well the Worst Trek Has to Offer
Some people say that "Star Trek: Voyager" started out strong. The pilot was good they say, the first few seasons had great potential. However, in any objective view this is not the case. "Star Trek: Voyager" failed from the moment of conception.
Before "Voyager" was ever released, some of the crew discussed a little about what the show would be like. This quote by the great Ron D. Moore, of Battlestar Galactica fame, illustrates it best: "The premise has a lot of possibilities. Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and Sternbach and Okuda were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn't going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn't going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want. That didn't happen. It doesn't happen at all, and it's a lie to the audience. I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn't act like this." Ron D. Moore's problems with Voyager aside, this quote shows the intelligent viewing audience several problems that existed throughout the series run.
a) Voyager never changed in it's entire seven year voyage. The ship's hull never was damaged, there were no burn marks from weapons fire, no marks from nebulae, no burn marks from entering planetary atmospheres (they did that a few times,) the ship was even largely assimilated by the Borg at one point, and no visible effect, on the interior or exterior of the ship, was ever shown. The ship was "spic-and-span" as Ron D. Moore says.
b) The original premise of a crew-at-odds was dropped very early in the run of the series. I wouldn't be surprised if anyone forgot, but there were originally supposed to be two separate crews on the starship Voyager. A Federation crew, and a Maquis crew. A casual examination of the Maquis (as depicted on other Star Trek shows) shows that they have surrendered their Federation citizenship, they oppose the Federation for giving away their homes to a hostile race, they think the Federation is worse than the Borg. After the pilot episode the Maquis were wearing Starfleet uniforms! A little while after that, it seems like even the Marquis forgot they were labelled as terrorists by the Federation!
c) 7 of 9. Or, as I like to call her "canonical Mary Sue." She's a drop dead gorgeous, former Borg drone, she's a genius, her nano-probes can do nearly anything! All the male characters want to be with her (and most of the female ones if you follow the latest "slash" fan fiction,) she's such an amazing character that after her debut most of the episodes became about her. Truth is, she's too good, too powerful, she's (for lack of a better term) a Mary Sue! Jeri Ryan isn't even a good actor. She tries for "Borg" but all the gets is "yawn."
d) The writing for Voyager is atrocious. About half of it is technobable (such gems as "interfereometric wave," whatever that's supposed to be,) throw in a few clichés, long thoughtful pauses and bad attempts at lighthearted joking, and you have the average Voyager script. As time went on, the scripts got more and more outlandish, often showing alternate time lines just so the audience could see cool special effects (i.e. Voyager blowing up, Voyager crashing on ice planet, etc.) And someone please tell me how the ship can keep the holodecks on 24 hours a day while the ship is starving for power?
Voyager had promise, it really did, and I tried to like it. But it ultimately falls short of what good Star Trek, and good TV can be. Don't invest your time into this show, just look for something better...