Spoilers DS9: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack Review Thread

Indeed. What we have known as the medium of Television is moving on, in the next decade or two, traditional Television will be dead as a Dodo, everything will be through streaming and ondemand services.

 

$5.99 per month, plus the need for a broadband connection, and the need for a home computer with enough iron to watch a streaming service (or a mobile device and a WiFi server), and (unless you're content to watch it in a little window on your computer screen, or on your mobile device) a hookup to your TV.

When you buy a movie ticket, you're paying for the whole theatrical experience: the experience of watching a movie on a screen that, even in a modest, third-run neighborhood theatre (are there any of those left) or the smallest hall of a megaplex, is still enormous by living room standards, and the communal shared experience.

When you buy a DVD, or a DVD season set, you're paying for the privilege of watching the movie whenever you want, wherever (given a portable DVD player or a notebook computer with a DVD drive) you want, as often as you want, for as long as you want (and yes, that's an intentional allusion to Roddenberry's comments about Questor).

Why do I spend hundreds of dollars a year attending live concerts at Hollywood Bowl and Walt Disney Concert Hall, when I could simply buy DVDs of every opus I don't already have on DVD, or (for selected concerts) listen to KUSC's broadcasts? Why do I endeavor to catch concerts and/or live theatre during my vacations? Why do I have friendly, ongoing relationships with two Northern California theatrical companies whose productions I see on my Spring vacations? Because there's something ineffable about personally attending a live performance, something that transcends even the movie theatre experience (or the live-performance-broadcast-to-movie-theatres experience), let alone the television experience.

And about the only television I watch on any kind of regular basis is Jeopardy!, and if it went off the air, my dad would be the only one left in the house watching television at all. Other than Jeopardy!, all I bother watching are DVDs and the occasional VHS tape.

 

Isn't that most computers these days? Heck, my cheap 5-year-old refurbished laptop can handle Netflix and other streaming services.

A little window?? Just about every online video format lets you watch in full-screen mode. It's that icon at the bottom that looks like a rectangle, or four arrows pointing to the corners of a rectangle. I routinely watch Netflix and other streaming shows and movies on my 20" desktop monitor, which is smaller than my TV but closer to where I sit when I watch it, and also has HD, which my TV doesn't.

Ha. These days, the "communal shared experience" is hoping that the people around you don't use their phones during the movie. And these days, theaters are installing recliner-style seats to try to make the theater experience more like the living-room experience, which can be annoying when the noise of the recliner motors distracts you from the movie. Also, I usually get better sound on my home system. I often find the dialogue hard to hear in theatrical movies.

The same goes for paying for a streaming service. You can watch the available programming whenever and wherever you want, and a small fee per month gives you access to the entire current catalog rather than a single film.

Then I really don't understand what your point is. I'm sure Discovery will be out on DVD within a few months after the season ends.

 

^lol, whatever the heck video you chose makes this so much funnier.

 

That's all really rather grand, although you don't need a TV to watch web content and things change, they progress, they move on. In the industrial revolution, individuals who fought against progress then were called Ludites. In my household (well me and the wife) we watch very little "live" TV and get pretty much 95% of our content either through a streaming site (Netflix, Amazon etc) or timeshifted or ondemand through our Sky subscription.

 

Not everybody is willing to ride "upgrade treadmills." Especially when one has to pay "The Bill" for those rides.

At the International Printing Museum, where I spend my Saturdays docenting, we sell a poster, printed by letterpress, from a forme set in wood display type: "Luddites Unite." We routinely not only demonstrate printing equipment that is older than most of the people running it (sometimes over a century older), but produce much of the Museum's printed materials using it. If despising planned obsolescence and upgrade treadmills makes me a Luddite, then so I am, and I'm damn proud of it.

How did my offhand remark in what was already a tangent to this thread turn into a full-scale derailment of it, anyway?

 

Yeah. I don't see this as a technology thing, but a market thing. TV providers are experimenting with new ways to deliver content, as they did in the past with their own broadcast networks, cable networks, first-run syndication, etc. Heck, streaming TV is hardly a novelty; Netflix and Hulu and Amazon have been doing it for years. This is just more studios/networks trying to get their own piece of that pie.

 

No, despising new technology because it makes things marginally more difficult for you even though it makes things better for society is what a Luddite is

Like those original Luddites that destroyed looms that could let cloth be made cheaper and with greater availability because they didn't want to lose their jobs as fancy handweavers instead of any actual moral reason

They probably would have torn apart your printing machines because they meant calligraphers couldn't sell pretty writing to rich people and make a ton of money anymore

 

And... back to Enigma Tales please.

 

I just finished yesterday, and I don't understand why people are complaining about Pulaski, I think she's a great character. I love the voice Una gives her and had several laugh-out-loud moments. Such delightful turns of phrase. I didn't take her as being ignorant of political matters, just that she saw them as getting in the way of what was important and so deliberately didn't pay attention. And she knows she has flaws, but equally doesn't care. She is who she is, you can either accept her as she is or not, she won't mind either way. I would have thought she must be in her 80s or 90s by now though, getting on a bit for some of these action scenes.

Two stand-out scenes were Parmak coming in tears to Garak, admitting that he doesn't trust him anymore. When Pulaski and Alden first suggested going to Parmak, I was like, "Are you serious? Trying to get to Garak through his boyfriend? HE WILL KILL YOU." But I suppose it shows just how much Garak has grown that he cared more about upsetting Parmak than about Alden's faux pas. And he did already admit that he regretted the way he treated Alden earlier, as delicious as that was to see.

And the other stand-out scene is of course, as many have rightly pointed out, Pulaski bringing Kukalaka to Bashir. Perfect - what better way to comfort him that to bring his stuffed toy, the thing that reminds of simpler times, when all he wanted to do was help people. That and Garak's soothing voice seem to be doing the trick, however slowly.

I also agree with the slight criticism that the reveal of the ultimate bad guy was strangely handled, in an exposition dump over a comm screen rather than seeing the story happen.

Never cared for Natima Lang in the series, but she was only in one episode and has now been in several books so I like her better there. Interesting that Una is kind of creating her own little company of characters and moving them around - this book combines scenarios and makes references all the way back to Una's earliest works, although now I want to know whatever happened to Corazame and Macet and Ferric and Naithe...

 

I do it almost every time

 

I think to some extent, the antipathy towards Pulaski is rooted in resentment over Crusher being written out of the second season of TNG.

I never disliked her in the series, and I don't dislike her here.

 

Halfway through the audiobook, liking the story so far, but must say the narrator Robert Petkoff's rendition of Elim Garak is so good! The nuances, the inflections, whatever it is that made Andrew Robinson's delivery so unique is right there. It was like hearing the original character again. Worth a listen for that alone, if you get the chance.

 

The ending was very emotional and very well written. One of the best endings in a Star Trek book.

I would like to know who voted poor and why. I thought it was outstanding.

 

Given that the first episode is being broadcast on network TV, then you'll have to regard DSC as canon. You said that it has to be be on conventional broadcast TV and it will be. You never said every episode had to be on broadcast TV.

http://deadline.com/2017/06/star-tr...-cbs-all-access-rollout-to-follow-1202115723/

 

I didn't care for Pulaski in the series, but I do like her in the books. The Missing and this one are the only ones I've read with her in them though. Is Ms McCormack the only one who has written her post-Nemesis?

 

David Mack wrote Pulaski in A Ceremony of Losses (third book in The Fall miniseries).

 

I gave it a below average. I only read 40% of it, but man this was a struggle to read. I have absolutely no interest in reading anymore of this.