30th Annivesary of 1994!

[Tallguy]

DS9 Tribunal. (Finally! And Happy Star Trek Day!)

As a rule I do not enjoy the "let's kick the crap out of Miles episodes". But I have to admit this one is pretty good.

I'm sure I'll expound on this over in the Controversial Opinions thread where we happen to be talking about The Maquis. Short version is that any treaty with the Cardasians is not worth the electrons that it is stored on and the Federation frankly invites this sort of behavior.

One of the biggest struggles that this episode has is that the Cardassian legal system is almost played as farce. I'm not saying there aren't societies and systems that have this kind of rigged outcome. But a) they aren't planetary governments (this is kind of a sci-fi problem of course) and b) the real ones at least feel they have to pay lip service to more liberal systems which the Carassians obviously don't have to. The lawyer character is the prime example of this tension between terror and absurdity. At the end he says "They'll kill me!" and it's a laugh line. Except I expect he's serious. It's only because this is a TV show that this isn't a horrifying statement.

It's arguable that Colm Meaney is the best actor on the show. He doesn't have the presence of Avery Brooks, sure. But he's the realest person to ever exist in Star Trek. He's got a new movie coming out with Paul Reiser. I'm excited.

ODO IS SOOOOO GOOD IN THIS EPISODE! I could probably dismiss it without him. And again, he's never showy. He doesn't make the indignant speech. (Not much.) He knows the rules and he plays the game. I love it when Odo is competent.

Pretty good overall.

 

[Commander Troi]

Happy Star Trek Day!

Happy Star Trek Day!

It's arguable that Colm Meaney is the best actor on the show. He doesn't have the presence of Avery Brooks, sure. But he's the realest person to ever exist in Star Trek. He's got a new movie coming out with Paul Reiser. I'm excited.

Yeah, Colm is amazing and O'Brien is The Most Important Person in the History of Starfleet. I'll have to look up the movie.

I love it when Odo is competent.

Odo is always competent!

 

[Commander Troi]

I'll have to look up the movie.

OK, that looks hysterical!

 

[Commander Troi]

It's arguable that Colm Meaney is the best actor on the show.

Have you seen Hell on Wheels with him and Anson Mount? Terrific show.

 

[tomalak301]

It's arguable that Colm Meaney is the best actor on the show

I thought Rene Auberjonois was the best actor on the show, but Meaney really did some great work expanding O'Brian from a side character to a fully fledged out main character.

 

[Qonundrum]

TNG: Genesis

"Are we not men? No, we are Devo!"

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Gotta luv Mark and Gerry! Wish the video had a different deinterlace method applied, though...

What a weird-ass episode!

Very! But it's also (and/or oddly) one of my favorites of post-season-4 TNG

It starts off fine - Spot and Alyssa are pregnant, Barclay is being a hypochondriac (anticipating those who search the web for symptoms now), and Worf is frustrated by a weapons test malfunction. Picard and Data go off to pick up a misfired torpedo. People start gradually changing. Picard and Data come back and find everyone devolved. Some of the makeup is better than others. The whole thing is a bit off the rails. Enjoyable, definitely creepy, but not a top tier ep. Note: Gates McFadden directed this.

McFadden's directing and tone-setting (and acting, especially in one key scene) are absolutely brilliant.

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(Still creepy to this day, even though she mentions the venom sac beforehand... so it's an easy guess and yet remains so utterly effective - that's just how great the scene is. I'm also still amazed they allowed the composer to make real incidental music - a rarity in post-season-4 TNG...)

There's one briefing room scene where Barclay, despite having shown to be increasingly antsy before, remains fairly calm in the background in a scene doing a close-up of another character, but it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. Took me over 30 years to spot it..

Yeah, chasing wild torpedoes - which must be encrusted with diamonds and latinum, too - is a very goofy scripted reason to get Mon Capitan and Mister Robot out of the ship instead of Ensigns Fido and Rover, a reason that works far better for Voyager, but I'll roll with it... and speaking of rolling:

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(you spin me round, like a record.)

Cool scene and effect. Definitely worth the budget on this, instead of the scanner equipment used in "Gambit" to determine which artifacts were not mere pottery but bits of an advanced technological weapon that has instructions engraved on it that tells one with 20/20 vision (and zoom mode) how to overcome it.

And speaking of spinning right round with goofy scripted reasons:

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(it's not unlike every time I go to a restaurant, though the action is not always indicative of a bad meal. Quite the contrary, many societies have people making "the noise" as a genuine compliment -- I might even try that one day and scribble down the reactions... But what's this season one-ism that Troi belched out doing in season seven?! Piffle!! Also, note all that moiré on Worf's baldric. That clip definitely did not come from the blu-ray release...)


The high-concept nature of their transmogrifications is cool, even if the reason being DNA infused with Treknobabble was pointed out as being erroneous, even in 1994 people nitpicked -- unless they (and me) took the use of "devolved" too literally and it's just some an anomaly created on the fly by Crusher* causing their DNA to be altered by accident and turned into an airborne contagion as a result, with Picard using "devolve" too literally to sell the allusion. And to think this is the same Crusher that got a hammer, some planks of wood, built a 20-foot soapbox, just to be all meany upnose to the eeeeeeeeevil guest doc of the week:

* something about a slight K3 imbalance, and in turn creating and implementing a shiny new type of T cell to activate some dormant bit of DNA in order to cure Barclay's contagious case of hypochondria (oops). Given how quickly Barclay responds, she could have just given him a saline solution in the hypospray and viola - no episode and, quite frankly,seeing the result of the crew mutating into various critters was used to great effect, even if the cause of it needed another draft (not unlike Crusher's flippantly creating synthetic T-cells to activate dormant DNA without any testing or research, which reminds me.

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But given how contentious "Ethics" was, it's easy to forget that story beyond Worf's ritual subplot where Riker steps in...

 

[Qonundrum]

TNG: Masks

Even when LD made fun of it, I didn't really remember this episode. I'm not sure what you have against Brent these days, but I thought he did a pretty good job here. I did laugh when Data fell at Deanna's feet. I think they could've done more with that. I was glad they used Picard's interest in archaeology, but frustrated he didn't catch the sun/moon iconography until late in the episode. I *think* I know what the writer was going for, but he couldn't quite pull it off. It might've been the pacing; I'm not sure. But it definitely felt slow.

I just rewatched this. I don't see the hate it's cultivated - but then again, I do dig archaeology-driven episodes...

True, it's definitely more relaxed in pacing and, yeah, the ending is surprisingly weak (it's almost like metaphor and allegory for day vs night, recurring), but I wonder if the pacing and tone was part of the point - relying on mysticism, a return to mystery and weirdness of a differently form of exploration, and Brent to carry it all, and he easily does.

Geordi saying he can access the program to stop it is like using a menu ordering kiosk at a fast food joint. One can use it, but there's no way they can connect to and tinker with the compiled code. It was a bit cookie cutter, unlike Picard and Data in "The Best of Both Worlds" who find Unix's sleep mode to be the metaphor for the Borg's Achilles' heel. A shame later episodes didn't find more heels than Al Bundy at his shoe store, instead of rewriting the Borg to deprive them of all the Borgiful things that made them the Borg to make them easier to defeat. "Cap'n, only one or two phaser blasts before they adapt!" (two dozen perfect aims are delivered) "Only this long? Dang, they're finally adapting, shall we throw our phasers at them?" "Permissions granted" (phaser flung, Borg knocked out, but another one bends over and picks up the phaser and figures out the range of randomly generated frequencies, which is still nuttier than an oak tree preserve because your shield would automatically be set to counter anything from within the complete range of frequencies the beam could be emitted from, for which it's amazing that there were no phasers in storage in the bit of Enterprise that was carved up and taken during the first encounter... or computers hosting enough of the database to give the Borg an advantage, which also reminds as Picard knew of the phan for phasers to change frequencies before being abducted and knowledge taken from him so how come any of the landing party could fire even a single bolt, never mind the nine or so before they adapted -- true, Geordi did not specify the bandwidth level, but the Borg would surely have a base level set and, for any drone killed, a log of the frequencies used so the frequency could not be used again and, as with all things pesky physics, the range of frequencies is bound to be finite... but I digress within a digression's digression of a digressed digression, or something as I didn't keep count this time due to all the digressing...)

I wish that we saw the ship exterior having been changed to the blocky shape or the probe city thing in later scenes - the "enemy of the week" remains a little too vague, unless that's part of the reason for the story... combined with "we spent the budget on a bunch of sculpted styrofoam blocks and bits of tumbleweeds nicked from "Tombstone" (1993). But I like the fact that this goofy alien space city thing may have traversed the galaxy, adding to its structure by transmogrifying others it encounters. Somewhere, somehow, it's encased in a comet-like substance - which weakens it and, thankfully for it, the Enterprise and Data are right there who then open Pandora's box of blocks. But if it's really an enemy and just out to grow and expand for its own sake, like an electronic version of the space amoeba from "The Immunity Syndrome" or a different take on what The Inner Light did, or others. It's a weird episode where some possible influences are spotted and yet the whole thing feels eminently original.

But, in the art room, why is there a big Okudagram of a Ferengi ship/blueprint?

But given "Gambit", "Force of Nature" after a few minutes, and a handful of others lowball episodes, "Masks" is very refreshing to experience. Even the music continues to elevate above the norm set during 5 and 6 (and some of 7), even if little from seasons 5-7 compares to 1-4 due to the flat nature overall...