The Most Disliked Episode of TNG, Season 6: 2021 Edition...

[Qonundrum]

That is a total win on your part!

Thanks!

I honestly tried with that one. And I was wrong - Geordi didn't have a beard in that one, and the CGI snotball o' doom was the doggie -- I should have seen that one coming... oh well.

The Crusher scene where the other bit of goo transforms into her hand was suitably chilling (and well-done)... and I got the vibe they were trying to do something more and other with Geordi (but, once again, is looking into personnel files and falls in love with a perceptive reaction than the real deal, though thankfully he's liking that too - and with a little more refined dialogue this time around) but the whole thing is like wading in quicksand while juggling helium-filled balloons. Picard trying to chessify the Klingon commander feels like a pale imitation of the times he did it with more panache in season 3...

If anything, the last scene in the story had some great sartorial taste applied to Aquiel and Geordi's outfits and there's finally some decent on-screen chemistry in the episode... Oh crap, I'm remembering more of it now... At least it's still 97.47% awful...

 

[Farscape One]

This is off topic, sorry, but....
As Bruce Willis said in his Roast: Die Hard is not a Christmas movie.
But maybe you knew that already?
Very much Crichton style thing you did there. =)

I am aware of what Bruce Willis said. It just illustrates that actors can be wrong, too.


Think about this a second. A Christmas movie is one where Christmas, or a big element of it, is a focal or key point to the story. DIE HARD is most certainly a Christmas movie for multiple reasons.

1. The entire plot starts because John McClane is going to a Christmas party.

2. The setting of the entire movie is at a Christmas party.

3. The time frame within the movie is Christmas time.

4. There is Christmas dialogue all over the movie. Christmas catch phrases everywhere, like "Now I have a machine gun. Ho, ho, ho."

5. Christmas decor EVERYWHERE, including outside Nakatomi.

6. There is Christmas music throughout the movie. Even the end credits use a Christmas song. This cannot be seen as anything but a deliberate choice by the producers and director.

7. Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza, the writers of the movie, calls it a Christmas movie.


I will not dispute that DIE HARD is not a typical Christmas movie. But it most certainly is a Christmas movie.

 

[Oddish]

will not dispute that DIE HARD is not a typical Christmas movie. But it most certainly is a Christmas movie.

Agreed. So is "Lethal Weapon".

Here's a bit of trivia... Al Leong is seen in both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, playing a baddie both times. The question is... how many times does Mr. Leong's character die in those two movies?
A. He survives both of them.
B. Once.
C. Twice.
D. Three or more times.

Answer...

Spoiler

D. He dies three times.

In Lethal Weapon, he plays Endo the torturer, and is killed when Riggs gets him in a deadly head-scissors. In "Die Hard", he is seen on the bottom floor when McClane drops the bomb down the elevator shaft, and we clearly see that the explosion is on the bottom floor. Despite this, he mysteriously is seen alive near the end, when McClane shoots him dead while rescuing the hostages from the roof.

 

[Qonundrum]

I am saving Rascals. I think for a "kids" episode it's well done and well-acted.

^^this

It is a kid-friendly version of Trek, which doesn't patronize, condescend, or ham up stupid clown acts for the kids*, while keeping it family-friendly by adding enough to keep adults entertained. Plus an adult-themed situation that the kids wouldn't understand and some adults would rightly find creepy, but it's handled rather well.

The kid actors were good-to-great. Little Guinan and Picard were treated the best, and having Number One by "my number one dad!" still has me rolling...


* thank goodness...


The Ferengi almost feel tacked on, and the shooed-in dialogue of "Oh, we're rogues" feels even more convenient, and I wish Ethan Philips had played the main baddie because he could sell that sense of threat that was desperately needed for the Ferengi subplot.

The story is almost too high-concept, which skirts around immortality thanks to the transporter (and in season 6's "let's let the transporter be the gimmick this week" for how many weeks in a row...), but the dialogue accorded the situations was crisp for the most part. If you watch the kid actors and pretend the main actors are doing the roles, all but one line feels germane -- would Picard really not know the difference between the school computer terminals and the master mainframe? (Substituting collegiate-level language for elementary school-level language wouldn't cut it either, never mind the way-too-specific response - unless the computer is loading the map relevant to the area immediately surrounding their classroom by default, which is fair as each terminal would have a node that matches up to the section they're in, and other factors... )

As always, the Guinan/Ro pairing is marvelous. Whoopi's involvement in the show sadly dwindles after this, and part of me wonders if this episode was the impetus behind her slowly disappearing...

 

[Farscape One]

Agreed. So is "Lethal Weapon".

Here's a bit of trivia... Al Leong is seen in both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, playing a baddie both times. The question is... how many times does Mr. Leong's character die in those two movies?
A. He survives both of them.
B. Once.
C. Twice.
D. Three or more times.

Answer...

Spoiler

D. He dies three times.

In Lethal Weapon, he plays Endo the torturer, and is killed when Riggs gets him in a deadly head-scissors. In "Die Hard", he is seen on the bottom floor when McClane drops the bomb down the elevator shaft, and we clearly see that the explosion is on the bottom floor. Despite this, he mysteriously is seen alive near the end, when McClane shoots him dead while rescuing the hostages from the roof.

Regarding your answer...

Spoiler

Actually, if you are talking about the Asian guy with long hair, he was not killed in the explosion on the lower floor when John dropped the bomb in the shaft. It was another long haired guy that got blown up.

By the way, it wasn't the ground floor. It was a lower floor, but not the bottom. Remember, the missile those guys used was aiming downward at the armored car... at least a few floors up.

 

[Oddish]

Regarding your answer...

Spoiler

Actually, if you are talking about the Asian guy with long hair, he was not killed in the explosion on the lower floor when John dropped the bomb in the shaft. It was another long haired guy that got blown up.

By the way, it wasn't the ground floor. It was a lower floor, but not the bottom. Remember, the missile those guys used was aiming downward at the armored car... at least a few floors up.

Regarding your response...

Spoiler

The fact that the guys with the rocket launcher are silhouetted against the explosion suggests that you are right, and at least one of the rocket guys was killed (we don't see them again). However, I rewatched the scene on YouTube. The explosion is definitely emanating from the bottom floor; you can see the police armored car also silhouetted against it outside. So it's a safe bet that chocolate-munching Al was also vaporized.

 

[Farscape One]

Except...

Spoiler

You might be right about the explosion, but look at when they firing the missile. It was a downward angle.

Perhaps the explosion blew up multiple floors... there was enough material to make that happen. But they were definitely not situated om the ground floor.

But look at the two guys as they were setting up the missile launcher.

One had kind of curly hair, and the other was a long haired white guy with a tan and a ponytail. I think he had a leather jacket. It definitely was not the Asian dude, especially since said long haired guy was carrying another missile walking back to the launcher when the bomb John dropped went off.

 

[Oddish]

My point...

Spoiler

Though the "official" casualties of John's computer bomb were the two guys with the rocket launcher, what we see on the screen suggests that the explosion was centered on the ground floor, where Al Leong was shooting SWAT cops and going on a candy binge.

Proof that even the best Christmas movie ever has a minor continuity error.

 

[JesterFace]

I'm not sure if I have noticed this before but Al Leong from Die Hard and Lethal Weapon also appears as a baddie in 1st season of 24.
Right now 1st season of 24 is the only TV series that can challenge STNG as the best series ever. However, STNG seems to always return to its position as the best.