In the armed services? Wouldn't surprise me. Call it a team building exercise. It's probably the most inoffensive term I guess since therapy is verboten.
Spoilers Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1x08 – “The Life of the Stars”
Same wrong use of the letters, nothing here is Klingon, just typing English and changing the font
Jörg Hillebrand (@gaghyogi49.bsky.social)
Thanks to three pages from the Klingon translation of Hamlet, seen ever so briefly in #StarfleetAcademy's "The Life of the Stars"➡️↙️↘️, we can now finally experience Shakespeare in the original Klingon ("Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country"⬆️⬅️). Or we can just buy the book. 😜bsky.app
Some enlightened future!
Also isn't Starfleet supposed to be different from the dudebros in the War College?
No.Some enlightened future!
Also isn't Starfleet supposed to be different from the dudebros in the War College?
Ahke finally with some wisdom befitting a Lathanite. The Doctor has has hiss issues fixed, hopefully for the better. SAM (favorite!) is back and OK. And the cadets figured out there were stupid and bratty and not OK aftercall the trauma.
And Tilly was fantastic. I like her so much better being insightful, caring, and witty rather than as pure comic relief.
My 9 might be stingy.
And Tilly was fantastic. I like her so much better being insightful, caring, and witty rather than as pure comic relief.
My 9 might be stingy.
Read it. Our Town is a classic. You won't regret it, I do not think. I didn't.
I wasn't too familiar with it either. Has heard if it, but if I ever read it, I forgot the details. It is beautiful.
SFA gets points for bringing it up. Bravo
Tilly isn't a drama teacher.
She trains caders and helps them. The theatre class was just a front to get them therapy without actually sending them to therapy.
This was alluded to in the scene with Ake, Reno, & Tilly.
I see this criticism a,bit already in this thread and an surprised at the confusion.
So, I like SA (though I have found some bits cringe-worthy, OVERALL I like it) - but, I am MOSTLY liking it, and find a lot of the complaints LAME and demonstrating a failure of imagination on the complainers part!? ("Waaah! How can you have a Female Jem'Hadad!?" Dude, I am old enough to remember "How can you have a BALD man in the 24th century!?" "How can you have a Black Vulcan!?")
And I even liked THIS episode...overall. And K like SAM as a character.
That being said...um...well..."Voyager" was the first "Star Trek" I *stopped* watching. NOT because it had a female captain (I *LIKED* that idea, was a bit disappointed at first that Janeway wasn't played by Lindsay Wagner as rumored for a while!) I just found is overly heavy with technobabble - even moreso than TNG - most stories were "We got in a TECHNOBABBLE situation, what is the TECHNIBABBLE SOLUTION!? And some stuff was REALLY silly like "Let's *punch through* that event horizon!" and "Holographic wine has no calories!" and "The atom on the DNA strand has *writing* on it!" and "These people are born old and age into children" - uh, so how does CHILDBIRTH WORK!? Does a toddler give birth to a full grown old man!? And the Ocampa only having ONE child should shrink the species! And then there are flying viruses and "hair pasta made from hair" and the FINAL STRAW was...the holographic daughter dying.
So how can his *holographic daughter* DIE!? Her death is part of a PROGRAM SENARIO!! Just REPROGRAM THE SIMULATION SO SHE *RECOVERS*!? Bit she DIES because she *bumped her head*!
I GET how SAM can die, because SHE has a damaged emitter and her program was corrupted and of you just re-write it, maybe it won't BE her anymore, but a COPY.
But the daughter on the holodeck - that B'lanna MURDERED - was part of a *senario* that could be re-written.
"But if we did, it would be cheating! The Doctor wouldn't learn his lesson!" SO WHAT!? If this is a self-aware life form (and B'lanna just MURDERED IT) why let her DIE!? As a FATHER I save SAVE THE CHILD AT ALL COSTS!?
And 50 years later (it's been that long, right!?) I STILL don't understand that episodes.
Can someone CONVINCE ME that I am wrong and that Voyager episode all made sense!!! PLEASE
And I even liked THIS episode...overall. And K like SAM as a character.
That being said...um...well..."Voyager" was the first "Star Trek" I *stopped* watching. NOT because it had a female captain (I *LIKED* that idea, was a bit disappointed at first that Janeway wasn't played by Lindsay Wagner as rumored for a while!) I just found is overly heavy with technobabble - even moreso than TNG - most stories were "We got in a TECHNOBABBLE situation, what is the TECHNIBABBLE SOLUTION!? And some stuff was REALLY silly like "Let's *punch through* that event horizon!" and "Holographic wine has no calories!" and "The atom on the DNA strand has *writing* on it!" and "These people are born old and age into children" - uh, so how does CHILDBIRTH WORK!? Does a toddler give birth to a full grown old man!? And the Ocampa only having ONE child should shrink the species! And then there are flying viruses and "hair pasta made from hair" and the FINAL STRAW was...the holographic daughter dying.
So how can his *holographic daughter* DIE!? Her death is part of a PROGRAM SENARIO!! Just REPROGRAM THE SIMULATION SO SHE *RECOVERS*!? Bit she DIES because she *bumped her head*!
I GET how SAM can die, because SHE has a damaged emitter and her program was corrupted and of you just re-write it, maybe it won't BE her anymore, but a COPY.
But the daughter on the holodeck - that B'lanna MURDERED - was part of a *senario* that could be re-written.
"But if we did, it would be cheating! The Doctor wouldn't learn his lesson!" SO WHAT!? If this is a self-aware life form (and B'lanna just MURDERED IT) why let her DIE!? As a FATHER I save SAVE THE CHILD AT ALL COSTS!?
And 50 years later (it's been that long, right!?) I STILL don't understand that episodes.
Can someone CONVINCE ME that I am wrong and that Voyager episode all made sense!!! PLEASE
The point is they were trending in the right direction before and now they are in reverse. Not that they weren't ever a mess in the first place.
I believe.
I feel like I keep saying the same thing over and over again, but this episode is like good idea, somewhat flawed presentation.
Our Town is an okay framing, especially with what they wanted to show with the Doctor, but it's really used in a way that doesn't feel like it's perfectly there. It's like taking the Cliff Notes (or I guess ChatGPT summary) of the play and shoehorning in the themes of being invested in the moments of life onto the idea of the episode rather than it feeling organic.
I get that SAM is the full of life character, but I don't get why she would connect with Our Town specifically. Even if we stuck to English language plays in the American canon that I guess are in the public domain so CBS didn't have to buy any rights, there so many options. It's like the writers made her pick the play because they wanted to write around it.
Earlier in the season I had questions about SAM and hoped they'd explain her weird background and I'm glad they did see my questions coming in their season planning. I'm mostly satisfied, but I don't get why they'd choose this specific age and time of life for her either. Maybe the Kasqians don't have a concept of childhood so they didn't bother... fine. But why arbitrarily pick 17? Why have her join the Academy other than the show is called Starfleet Academy and not Starfleet Diplomacy or whatever. Or why not have her live as an actual child and grow up among organics to see if organics would mistreat her?
Like at least the gap in her knowledge was so they could do a Doctor episode, so I get that... but I'm still not really satisfied with why they chose to send her off into the world like this in the first place. They said they spend 200 years designing her... but I would have liked to see what came out of that time.
The Academy side of things was... just fine I guess. There isn't enough time for any of this to be traumatic, especially since I as an audience member don't care about a random character dying so I'm not sure why the students care other than that's what is expected to happen to the characters. You would have thought that first episode with being invaded and almost dying would have been more traumatic, but they gloss over all that like nothing happened.
And that just makes it worse in terms of Tarima and her trauma which I really don't understand. Perhaps I'm dense but it's not like Picard being assimilated or Nog losing her leg, at least not to me as a simple audience member, so it's hard to connect with her going through her prescribed drunken rebellious phase before she "gets over it" and learns her lesson from reading Our Town. I don't even know why she couldn't just visit her War College friends because they literally share the same campus. Is this Harry Potter rules where schools are not allowed to ever mix on penalty of death? (I've never watched Harry Potter but I assume that's how it works).
What makes it worse is that the episode is an hour long, so it's not even a matter of not having enough time to flesh things out. It's just that the characters just feel like going through the motions, so it really does feel like I'm watching a table read of a script rather than being immersed in a TV show.
Like most of the episodes, I don't necessarily dislike this one but it's hard to like it as well. Even the revelation about the Doctor is fine, but then they just montage away meet of the story with lines from Our Town... while we spend 5 minutes watching drunk Tarima deal with Caleb. I dunno... I feel like if they just made it a one hour SAM episode with Tarima as the b story, maybe it would have been better. But we'll never know.
Some pointless thoughts:
I still don't understand how students can just show up for a class and have no idea what it is. Apparently the class also just ends arbitrarily and I guess Tilly will give them an A? Yes I know the class isn't the point and this was to trick them into therapy or whatever, but how does that actually work within the context of running a school?
Like I said before, sometimes this feels like a college, other times it feels like a high school where everyone takes the same class and can have Breakfast Club-like adventures together. Yes, I should just stop trying to figure out how the school actually works.
Oh during one of the "classes" there was an extra no-name student sitting in the back. Why was she there at all? Did she get roped into trauma class because no one would talk to her or remember her name?
I know this Doctor episode is probably one of the more famous ones, but I won't forget the time that the Doctor took over Seven's body and started drinking and getting horny.
I'm assuming no one will do a follow up on that any time soon.
I'm going to assume that the people who are wearing uniforms without the red/gold/blue are undeclared majors, but I still don't know what that means... but also it doesn't seem important.
Anyway, I feel like the show is just on the cusp of being enjoyable for me but it can't quite get there. It's just missing something that would elevate it for me.
Their pads told them to report there and they did. Ake out it on their schedules. They said that in the episode.
If I recall correctly, the Doctor was playing The Sims and one of his Sims died. It was a traumatic experience because he hadn't made any save games.
I suppose anyone would be a little messed up after seeing a hologram of a realistic little girl suffer and die, especially if they were a (completely different sapient) hologram themselves. The fact that she was a video game character reprogrammed by B'Elanna to troll him only softened the blow so much.
Also my review of The Life of the Stars is: I'm clearly not the right person to review this episode. It's apparently working for a lot of people, so it can't be bad, but I don't really understand the appeal.
Again, the Our Town stuff was fantastic. And I was not intimately familiar with the details going in. And here Ake is the Stage Manager, and being inside & outside of time. But the Doc is now in.
Think it's an age thing. Those of us in our 50's are sufficiently old enough to remember the contemporary outrage at "New Star Trek" (TNG), "Boldly Go Nowhere" (DS9) or "Black Vulcan" (VOY).
If you are, say, 42, then you would have been 10 when Voyager came out, and you won't remember even that, and there is very little about it in our historical record. That being said, there were no channels for that or other outrage in the mainstream anyway. My hypothetical 42-and-under-year-old would have seen the Berman series in later syndication, maybe for the first time, without the accompanying initial reaction. UNless you read "the 50 year history" you might be forgiven for thinking there was no issue.
Then along comes Secret Hideout and nu-Trek, and everyone's suddenly an expert and also outraged by everything and you could be forgiven for forming the impression that nu-Trek was loathed but Berman Trek was chocolate cake.
I remember it fine.
Sure. It's just that sometimes Starfleet Academy is a high school and sometimes it's a college. I can't imagine a college where you're pulled out of your normal classes by the Dean and then told to take another class that you don't know anything about. That could make sense in a high school where kids basically have no power or agency I suppose.
Literally when 9/11 happened, my college didn't stop. I imagine in high school they took time off to have assemblies or whatever, but in college it was like we got more stuff to teach.
Starfleet Academy is closer to a service academy not just straight college.
Rewatching Real Life, it was actually harder on him because it was his lack of medical power that led to her death. He couldn't stop it, couldn't cure her from a simple accident injury. That's why this death weighs heavier.
And in Distant Origin, he didn't appear much, only in scenes treating and investigating Mr. Jurassic Park, so it's quite possible he still grieved while doing his job as well.
And in Distant Origin, he didn't appear much, only in scenes treating and investigating Mr. Jurassic Park, so it's quite possible he still grieved while doing his job as well.
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What good is a scenario to learn and experience real life if it doesn't play by the rules of real life?
The Doctor was learning what it means to be a person outside of just a doctor, B'Elanna added depth to his program and a randomness generator so that behaviours and events would take an unpredictable course so that it would be a real experience and not the 1950s tv advert he made. The real world is messy and tragic and the Doctor was ultimately unprepared for it.
It was probably too much too soon for him and the level of shock put him off the idea of raising his own child again. SAM presented this scenario again and it brought this unresolved issue back up. Yes he was a foster or stepdad on the tachyon planet but that wasn't his child so there is a difference.
The theater class was mandated therapy. I’m reminded of company team building retreats and courses that are often comedy fodder in TV shows.
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