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List Only! Last Star Trek Episode You Watched

TOS: Is There in Truth No Beauty?

was the latest I rewatched and reviewed it in the TOS forum some time ago. Most of my opinion has not changed. The direction had a couple minor misfires, but a couple fantastic (one with a fisheye lens to really sell the emotional off-kilter feel) scenes as well. The script is still a bit myopic in some moments (Kirk is always hyperfocused about all the men in Starfleet and thinking it's always about sex...) and a little freewheeling with safely whizzing out of the galaxy and slightly forcing the dialogue of the need for Spock to mind-meld in order to do the necessary and quick navigational changes, but by no means does it come across as a shining example of season 3 being complete and utter tosh per that fan consensus.
 
TNG: Encounter at Farpoint (part 1), streamed on Netflix.

I was inspired to watch this after my recent viewing of All Good Things... Parts of it are really good, better than I remember, and others not so much.

I think that most of us here are quite fond of Jean-Luc Picard, but I also think we forget how cranky and short tempered he was in the first two seasons of TNG. Referring to Q’s Marine Corps uniform as a “costume” probably didn’t win him many points with a lot of viewers in 1987, and it still makes me cringe when I hear it now. Get over yourself, Jean-Luc.

137-year old Admiral McCoy walking the corridors of Enterprise-D is still a joy to see, something that almost makes up for Deanna being on the verge of tears for most of the episode.

Its long past my bedtime, so part 2 will have to wait.

I still wish Data spouted months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, and so on, which would validate McCoy's cranky line about "so precisely" with a lot more authenticity. It's a lovely tribute scene in of itself but it could have been a homer with just one slight augment to Data's line involving the relative passage of time...

As for the admittedly cringefest on another issue: In the self-contained and detached universe of sci-fi, is it out of place for a character to made commentary over a long distant empire's uniforms?

Looking back a few hundred years, here's one example:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/467318898814126389/

A lot of people would call it a costume as well.

Having said that and thanks for still reading, having a person ostensibly from the future (sandboxed sci-fi setting or not) rag on near-contemporary uniforms is a bit of a different context, isn't it? It would be closer to relate to thus feel a bit sledgehammery and thus cringe-inducing. Even then, wasn't the figure with the "costume" from the 1950s and Picard thusly mocking McCarthyism when pointing to the outfit?

Assuming the goal wasn't to deliberately make the audience squirm. Being season 1, people were squirming for all sorts of unintentional reasons so it is admittedly hard to tell...
 
Without that bad decision, Starfleet has nothing to base its weapons research on. Remember, the Borg were already encroaching on Federation and Romulan territory a year earlier in "The Neutral Zone".

Seconded. It would have been a bigger mistake to turn around per Guinan's advice. That's the same Guinan that Picard otherwise listened to, advocated for, and freely set orders in agreement with her in numerous other episodes. :D Even the apocryphal "I Borg" that makes Chekov's "change the personality to fit the plot" trope trick into inconsequential zilcharama by comparison...

And I prefer Picard's big mistake being in "I Borg" where they don't return Hugh with the good ol' "Send them what amounts to compelling them to calculate to the last digit the value 'Pi'" trick, though the Borg's main operating system would surely prevent any single process and input queues from hogging and overriding the mesh, SMP CPU network to the point they paralyze themselves into deactivation (or collectively go nuts and explode in unison, if it had been Kirk ordering the collective to do it.)

On edit: Typo, whoops...
 
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I still wish Data spouted months, weeks, days, hours, seconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, and so on, which would validate McCoy's cranky line about "so precisely" with a lot more authenticity. It's a lovely tribute scene in of itself but it could have been a homer with just one slight augment to Data's line involving the relative passage of time...

As for the admittedly cringefest on another issue: In the self-contained and detached universe of sci-fi, is it out of place for a character to made commentary over a long distant empire's uniforms?

Looking back a few hundred years, here's one example:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/467318898814126389/

A lot of people would call it a costume as well.

Having said that and thanks for still reading, having a person ostensibly from the future (sandboxed sci-fi setting or not) rag on near-contemporary uniforms is a bit of a different context, isn't it? It would be closer to relate to thus feel a bit sledgehammery and thus cringe-inducing. Even then, wasn't the figure with the "costume" from the 1950s and Picard thusly mocking McCarthyism when pointing to the outfit?

Assuming the goal wasn't to deliberately make the audience squirm. Being season 1, people were squirming for all sorts of unintentional reasons so it is admittedly hard to tell...
The “costume” line bothers me because my father served in the Marine Corps from 1949 to 1959, and wore that same uniform (or one very similar at least). Picard’s dismissal of it as a mere prop worn by barbaric people that he views as inferior to his enlightened self is an insult to everyone that served, past or present, and sacrificed so much to keep the rest of us safe and free.

John Glenn, first American to orbit the earth, served in the Marine Corps, and also wore that same uniform. Glenn sure wasn’t drinking any Earl Grey in his Mercury capsule.
 
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TNG The Inner Light. It's been years since I last watched this episode because of its emotional impact, and it hasn't lost any of its effectiveness now. A classic, absolute timeless classic.
 
TNG Sub Rosa and Lower Decks are now the latest full episode entries. I did see a couple clips from one of the prequel shows as a reminder but those can't and don't count.



Agreed, I was never a big fan of the animated series, but D.C Fontana gave us some wonderful backstory about Spock’s childhood in this episode.

Built upon her own "Journey to Babel" that got the ball rolling :)
 
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