R.CAllen

I cough all the time and never noticed it up until now. I cough! I'm a cougher! I'm, uh, Father Coughlin!!!!11!!

Who was it here who said Vincent Price for Doctor Strange the last time we did this? That would have been fun to see.

From a few weeks ago in my, uh, plague diary :

There's a bit in that dumb Nick Kroll / John Mulaney stageplay where John Mulaney's nefarious evil alter ego is shattering the world of Nick Kroll's delightful baby alter ego by listing all the actors of NYC stage & screen who are better than him. Each and every one of the guys on that list (Bobby Cannavale, Stanley Tucci, Oliver Platt, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nathan Lane, Griffin Dunne) are probably around old enough to be at semi-serious risk of dropping dead from all this. I'm betting we go seven for seven, I'm betting maybe both Kroll and Mulaney bite it too, I'm guessing Pete Davidson caves in Mulaney's head with a clawhammer while in a drug-induced rage and I think Nick Kroll just mysteriously vanishes off the face of the Earth once all that family money gets suspiciously tucked away into a Swiss bank account. Is it healthy for me to be sitting here speculating about the imminent deaths of nearly a minyan's worth of people, good people, creative people, craftsmen? No!? What is healthy then? I can't touch my face!!!!11!

I agree that it's all a touch too morbid but those are my ten guys, yeah, I'll feel real bad in a v. specific way if there's a news story about any among the aforementioned persons catching the virus, different from how I'd feel about all other slebs individually.

Contemporary:

yer John Wicks (2014, 2017, 2019)

The two sequels to Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), but not that movie in and of itself, are the absolute pinnacle of the modern movie business' particular melange of blockbuster action & nerd-franchise worship. Those'd be Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017). In fact, that latter one is kind of a proper filuhm, it's, I don't know, it's the Wrath of Khan (1982) of the monkey movies.

Stone cold classics:

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three (1973)

[Edit : I thought I'd be able to list, like, a dozen unnamed movies for each of these two categories without hesitation but my mind is blanking. Do I not actually like action movies? Am I just frazzled because I checked the updated Ontario covid-19 list and yesterday we had 150 new cases and by today we have 209 new cases and it doesn't take, like, a prophetic genius to see that's a bad sign? I don't know.]

Good for you! I, naturally, hope it all works out for the best!

Terrible! Fumbling towards profundity and failing at it miserably (sole possible exception : The Tempest quotation) in nearly every instance.

• Why introduce a magic fix-it machine and have scenes elaborating upon how the magic fix-it machine works and not bother to include a single line about how the one thing we all REALLY need to fix can't be fixed with the magic fix-it machine? Either have Raffi & ... Rios (?) (I literally forgot the character's name for a minute there, I can remember that Doctor Julian Bashir scuttled his number one spot at graduating from Starfleet Medical School because he deliberately confused a preganglionic fibre for a postganglionic nerve but I can't remember the name of a guy I've spent the last seven weeks watching) talk about it in the scene where they're repairing the ship or have Alison Pill's character mention it in the Picard Manoeuvre scene!

• What happened to Narek? Did they leave him on the planet? Wait, is the version of Isa Briones who is eeeeevil now dead or just knocked unconscious? Are all the remaining Borg still on that planet? Did they leave Doctor Soong's pervert son in control of this nascent civilization that has just experienced its first intracommunity act of murder? Is Narissa still on that planet or are we expected to believe she's dead for real dead even though we didn't see her dead body? Wait, how did Narissa know Seven of Nine's backstory?

• The whole thing hinges on whether or not Isa Briones' character, Soji (Sohji?), chooses to trust humanity or not. She eventually decides to do it. Why? What makes her stop moving holograms around on the planet's surface? Because ... Picard moved some holograms around on the ship? This is the sort of thing TNG inter alia used to spend its final moments of each episode wrapping up in a nice neat li'l bow and this show just decides to outright ignore instead. It's not enough to have Picard talking about the rights & responsibilities of being alive, it's not enough to have him deliver a few lines to her over Zoom, this is what everything's been building towards and it can't be given short shrift.

• Why is everyone so inexplicably chummy at the end? Is Raffi bisexual? I'm perfectly fine with a major new character of this here Star Trek being a paranoid drug addict conspiracy theorist bisexual grandma who is now girlfriends with Seven of Nine but I'd like to have had that particular element established prior to the final moments of the season, y'know. Why are Rios and Alison Pill's character making out? She murdered her ex while brainwashed, buddy, you gotta give her some space!!!

• omigosh the thing with the order of nuns who have taken the exact opposite of a vow of silence being secretly tied into an evil ancient conspiracy (which is what the Qowat Milat are, we see in the opening flashback of episode 8 that everyone who goes to Secret Planet With Eight Suns are women!) is just a rip-off of a gag from Pratchett & Gaiman's Good Omens. You gotta get better things to rip off if you're doing a Star Trek! TOS is classic movies & the stage, TNG is anime and, yeah, still classic movies, DS9 is probably the most original Trek per volume, VOY & ENT have a lot of horror in 'em, DSC, uh, I guess gets kind of anime in its second season. PIC is just ripping off nerd stuff, really prominent nerd stuff the audience is probably familiar with already, and that combined w/its approach to self-reference within the franchise itself is part of what keeps it all stultified and lifeless and boring.

What was the moral of the story? I can't decide what the moral of this Star Trek story is! I've narrowed it down to maybe four choices!
a) don't summon a giant metal octopus. If you're ever tempted to summon a giant metal octopus, then, DON'T.
b) you can not trust refugees. Or, uh, halfbreeds!?
c) it's good to die.
e) all of the above?

[Edit: Wait, the climax of this whole story was just an identical fleet of ships helmed by a character we barely saw up until now facing off with, sequentially:

* an identical bunch of flowers
* an identical bunch of mirage'd spaceships
* an identical bunch of real starships

until she and they gave up and went home! Just some goddamn StarCraft level plotting, spawning zergs, Command & Conquer type BS, Picard & Co. mined enough tiberium to field just the right amount of troops to force the baddies into a draw! Dumb!]

Predictions:
- there's an obvious unattempted fix to the Doctor Agnes Jurati, Murderer problem that they could have gone with and is still available for the future. But in order to do it from now on they'd have to continue the plot of Season 1 into future seasons and I get the feeling it'll be a real Armin Tanzarian situation for nearly everything they covered so far. (More generously : every season as a whole will be kind of like an individual episode of Star Trek, one single story in a string of stories; so next season will be a new plot, this gang of adventurers dealing with something new, and they'll try to avoid any focus on the details of who killed whom for what reasons years ago.)

- That being said, well, Season 2 of Picard is maybe gonna star Angus Imrie (the guy who played a Young Patrick Stewart in Joe Cornish's The Kid Who Would Be King), open with a shot of Sir Patrick Stewart sitting at home on his couch saying the words, "I remember when I was a young captain on the Stargazer" (his wife will hold the phone), and the rest of it will be filmed entirely in Iceland with a crew wearing hazmat suits.

- Look, the very real prospect of me and mine spending our final days on this here earth empty-eyed, febrile, and coughing our lungs out is somewhat diminishing my ability to speculate and/or hope for what comes next on Star Trek : Picard. Maybe some Klingon stuff!? I'd love an episode that was just Picard trying and failing repeatedly to return to his long abandoned habit of doing a captain's log, sort of a Secret Honor (1984) deal, a one-hander where Patrick Stewart really got to show his stuff for an hour. But, far more than that, I'd love for everyone I love to. not. die. just. yet.

Gonna be tough to do Season 2 of this thing when, what, probably Patrick Stewart, Michelle Hurd, Santiago Cabrera, Jeri Ryan, Brent Spiner, Orla Brady, Tamlyn Tomita, and Kurtzman himself are all, like, dead or hooked up to a makeshift ventilator. And even if they all make it through alive and in good health (an outcome that I naturally want and wish for) good luck squeezing in pre-production, shooting, and post into one of the few six week periods of intermittent relaxation of suppressive measures over the next year'and'a'half!

What do you miss?

TOUCHING MY FACE.

Same.

Brent Spiner returning to the franchise's narrative twice over mostly just to play relatives of Data's creator is kind of a neat choice. Assuming there isn't a twist coming and he's going to be shown next episode to be literally and not merely figuratively Data then this is actually one of those rare times the show managed to upend my expectations in a way that I also found really fitting, apropos. Put him in a wig and heels next time ^[1] and have him be Mrs. Soong!

LOL @ them establishing Narissa as the threat for the last episode and now having the Romulan commodore be there instead for the end of this one. LOL @ them ending two episodes in a row in quasi-identical fashion, with the sight of a Romulan snakehead going after our heroes last week and now with the sight of a fleet of Romulan warbirds going after our heroes this week!!!!!

I liked Raffi and Picard's conversation. I do think that Jean-Luc Picard genuinely does feel something akin to love for his second in commands, for his Number 1s (Numbers 1???). Jack Crusher, Will Riker, the kid in the episode where he gets stuck in an elevator and treats 'em all like his crew, her, I think they all matter to him.

Predictions :
- I don't know who the unfinished golem is going to be. Maddox, undoing the murder and alleviating the pain of what Agnes has done? Data/Soong? Picard? Is Picard going to go from being a living man with a machine heart to being a machine man with a living heart? I'd naturally lay my odds on Maddox, I assume everyone else would to (certainly makes sense if they want to keep Alison Pill a part of the main cast) but I think the other two possibilities are more enriching.

I wonder if adding a laugh track to STP would help with watch-ability?

I actually really like the sound design / scoring for this show! The music is really nice, the theme is good (the opening credits are, uh, garbage otherwise), even the ambient noises and little boops & bleeps by devices have the right feel to 'em. Much better than Discovery, at least, which fails on this level while succeeding at others Picard hasn't managed so far.

If I were suitably aphasic and had no ability whatsoever to comprehend spoken language and thus couldn't parse the dialogue's meaning, and if I shut my eyes while watching the show, I bet I'd really enjoy it. Kind of like those mental patients in an asylum who'd watch Reagan give press conferences on TV and laugh at his punchlines (wait, did that really happen? Or was that just in a novel I read?). Patrick Stewart's calming tones!!!

[1] Like there's going to be a next time. Well, one can always hope. Still, Brent Spiner is 71 years old! Stay safe! Avoid the Crystalline Entity!

--- SPECIAL CONTENT UNLOCKED ---

I started going to gym. From around Wednesday December 18th to Monday March 16th I went to gym a grand total of 108 times! I went to gym so much, so often, and for so long that gym quit on me. Gym quit before I did! Gym just sent me a little e-mail; said it had to shut down, said it had to be properly sanitized, said it was not available for use under any circumstances.

I think we all know why gym did this. I choose to consider it my first victory against gym. [Correction : no, it is my ONE HUNDRED AND NINTH victory against gym.]

In recognition of my historic triumph over gym

&

in the hope of providing just a little more in these particularly trying times of whatever merest minute-st scintilla of comfort or insight or cautionary example or quote unquote value my words have ever had to you

I now present my treadmill movie/tv diary, hitherto unavailable to all but ultra-premium subscribers. Below (but placed behind a spoiler box for your convenience and lightly redacted for reasons of privacy & redundancy) are its one hundred and twelve entries! Every movie, every television show, every ... YouTube (?), every podcast, is listed along with the year of its initial release. Roughly seventy percent of the entries even have brief commentary attached! (No letter grades, tho, I went a little Montessori-style for my time on the treadmill and the elliptical and the stationary bike.) (Also, for much of the serialized entertainment I neglected to mark down which episode it was. Sorry!) Free to all.

I hold out hope for Worf nonetheless. Not you, not your promises, not the nerd Internet, not CBS All Access itself can take the hope of Worf away from me. (... I guess if we don't get him this year then they have to dole out him and Geordi for one of each of the upcoming seasons, respectively, in order to dovetail w/the abbreviated list of the TNG cast offered by Picard's houseguest/lifepartner in the 2nd episode.) (... Then again, of course, there's probably not going to be another season of this show. Or of any TV show. Well, maybe it's best to just optimistically assume a healthy delay of at least a year for any imminent expensive popcultural products not already mostly completed.)

I don't think it's a coincidence! I accept it as a given that the characters are being manipulated by some sort of emergent AI system. This is textual within the show itself because something is clearly communicating with Robot Girl disguised as Her Human Mother and it prompted her to go back to Picard in the pilot and that same something deepfaked a 'Picard' to Rafi to get her to realize Maddox was on Freecloud. And it's extratextual because they need to string together the show's implausible plotting and overly laboured connections in a way that satisfices so it's going to be Robot God Of Her Robot Planet Is Responsible For Bringing Them All Together.

What I found more coincidental/implausible than this guy being involved in this thing from the very beginning is that this guy and this guy's five extant holographic semi-sentient consciousnesses, what, they all never saw a picture of the Robot Girl they've been going after for this entire season in any way, shape, or form!? The show makes a point of having the ship scan the Borg Cube with such a degree of fine detail that Rafi (the actress plays every one of her scenes like she's a completely different person in each; could probably be chalked up to the fact the character's a recovering junkie but even accounting for that, still, no consistent performance) spots the Stupid Clue Symbols scrawled on a piece of paper but it doesn't see ... like all those photographs Robot Girl had of herself in her room that were so important to a previous episode!? The ship makes a holo-replica of Picard's château which includes his records from thirty years ago but doesn't include the painting hanging on the wall w/her face on it (no, wait, there was a whole thing in the first episode over there being two paintings - one w/her face that was only in San Francisco, one w/it hidden that Picard kept in his château; okay they might have actually given this more thought than I assumed, sorry, sorry for doubting the creative prowess of one highbrow novelist and one work-for-hire jobber and two guys w/a string of bad nerd projects between them)!?

- This time the TNG ep I watched before the new one was 'Aquiel', from Season 6. It's generally regarded as something of a clunker, by fans of the series and even by the team who made it, and little more than yet another among a string of episodes focusing on Geordi's lovelife that ends unhappily for all involved. I don't think I've ever seen it before. It's solid stuff! It could easily have been nothing but a dismissible rip-off of an old movie (the wiki told me it was Laura from 1944, and even still, I mean, it's not like that's too bad of a thing for a Star Trek to be; half of TOS was just dismissible rip-offs of old movies) but it's actually pretty good. It's a murder mystery but what's been murdered here isn't really a person, per se, it's a concept. That concept is what the Enterprise kind of stands for, open and honest communication among a community of equals, and so probably the crux of the episode is the scene where Picard effortlessly manipulates the Klingon governor into co-operating with the investigation. The coalescing organism that did the murder is an exploitative and imitative model of this mode of communication, one that destroys memories, destroys trust, and so when Riker tries to pressure Geordi into disbelieving in Aquiel's innocence, when the Klingons bluster and threaten, and, yes, when Picard uses his status as Arbiter of the Rite of Succession to make the Klingon governor do what he wants, they're acting more like the shapeshifting tomato sauce thingmabob than themselves. Geordi's choices in this episode are seen as aberrant, by both the audience and his fellow crewmembers, but he's openly and enthusiastically trying to right a wrong, uncover the truth, and care for the abandoned. The worst thing he does is towards the end, when he offers to put in a good word for Aquiel so she can transfer aboard, thus potentially elevating her above other worthy candidates for the post. She rightfully says she wants to get there on her own merits, which is both correct on the face of it and maintains the status quo to boot. In fact, I think she makes a way better candidate for a hypothetical long-term future relationship for Geordi than Doctor Leah Brahms, who can be inferred as his wife in the possible future shown in "All Good Things".

- This week was just terrible. An unceasing explainasaurus, just characters discovering things and explaining them to each other over and over again. What actually happened in this episode? Most of the main characters are on the ship, on their way to Place #1, they change their mind and head towards Place #2, then eventually decide to give in and go back on their way to Place #1 instead. The two main characters who aren't on the ship spend the episode in a dark room looking at and manipulating holograms. The remainder of the episode is taken up by the villain whose flashback opens the episode and who spends the majority of her time just shooting people again and again. I found it all less compelling than an episode of TNG whose highlight were the two times Jonathan Frakes pets a dog! Nobody pets a dog in this episode! Reg E. Cathey doesn't guest-star in this episode (it'd be a miracle, too, considering he's been dead for a year or two by now! I didn't recognize him in 'Aquiel' under all that Klingon make-up but that was him. Tommy Carcetti's politico from The Wire did a Star Trek!)!

Predictions :

- I've been trying to figure out how the show would interrelate its seemingly unending supply of male-female Romulan pairs and I guess it's clear by now that Narek (absent from this week!) & Narissa are going to end up being the kids of the two Romulans who Picard has been playing house with for all these years. It's exactly dumb and obvious enough for this dumb and obvious show to do!

- Captain Worf of the Enterprise to the rescue in the season finale, please, thank you. I don't want it to be Worf in control of a Klingon fleet or anything like that. I want to see the Enterprise again and I want it to be with Worf as her captain.

- I was watching (well, technically, re-watching : I did see it sometime ago in reruns and may even have caught it on first airing as a toddler, who knows) the Season 2 TNG opener "The Child" just before putting the latest episode up. Remarkable how the shakiest rendition of a dusted-off script by a show still finding its feet managed to just completely trounce what came after it, seriously, it was way better than what came out thirty-one years later. It's even kind of the same story, no matter the overlapping characters, both episodes are about people dealing with death, the sudden and unexpected insertion of a supranormal being into a settled status quo, and the making of conscious and deliberate choice as to what one's future will be! But "The Child" managed to do it in forty-five minutes while ALSO introducing two new characters (Guinan and Doctor Pulaski) and setting up so much else for the remaining series (Geordi as Chief Engineer, Wesley's ongoing character arc) and, crucially, didn't chose to cut away from the main narrative to indulge in thematically unrelated and incoherently shot martial arts 'action'! Oh boy, the Zhat Vash and the Qowat Milat are really throwing down! How 'exciting' is that? Literally less exciting than watching some ancient pal of Gene Roddenberry glancing at a repurposed prop and woodenly reciting a few lines about radiation threatening the entire ship, that's how exciting it was.

- I never really bought the idea of Troi & Riker getting shacked up and settling down (they're both such grown-ups on TNG about how, sure, they might have loved each other once but now they're different people who want different things and have this really sweet friendship instead - the marriage in Nemesis is so dumb, Worf being there for that wedding is so dumb, they didn't come to HIS wedding, actually if memory serves the plan was to bring in some of the crew for that specific DS9 episode but they couldn't get everyone to agree to show up, only Frakes & Burton & Spiner, so they scrapped it but as far as I'm concerned that's pretty much who'd pop by, Picard is too stuffy for any social event not mandated by his duties, Beverly is too work focused to take time off, Deanna wouldn't want to possibly cause offense by being the glamorous ex (she'd send a sweet gift, though, and her and Jadzia would probably have got along together great), but Riker would absolutely want to go to show there are no hard feelings and because he loves to party, he probably goes to every one he gets invited to, and Data would just not have the good sense to say no and Geordi would attend because he's a needy needy man who craves any excuse for human contact) but the idea that their first go at domestic bliss after so long apart really did not work out for the best, that they suffered this tremendous loss instead that just has reshaped their lives from that point forward, well, I liked that! I think that works.

- Okay, so I thought Riker explained away his home's advanced self-defense features to Picard by referencing their planet's trouble with the Xindi and for once I was going to praise this show for correctly deploying its deepcut references to unloved areas of the franchise (because the last time we've seen Troi and Riker was the ENT finale, and that was awful in all kinds of ways this particular episode just was not, so it serves as an acknowledgment of the damage repaired from that particular misstep) but a brief turn around the wiki shows he was talking about the Kzinti instead. It was just more of the same!

Predictions :

- I think it's obvious at this point we're going to see Brent Spiner again as a human version of Data and/or the resurrection of B-4. I mean, we might not see it this season but that's where the show is going.

- Still holding out hope for Michael Dorn! Even kind of want to see LeVar Burton in command of the Endeavour, just like in that one dumb episode of VOY!

- Human heart for Picard question mark

Yeah, that's more the kind of thing Fozzie Bear might say.

The Gentlemen (2019)
C

Ordinary Love (2019)
A+

Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (2019)
B+

You're welcome!

The bit that first popped into my head when I was trying to force my dumb brains to scrounge up something for them to be watching was a v. similar one that I couldn't find online (because I couldn't quite remember who it was, either the Muppet or the guest host) but which I realized today was the other semi-famous Rita Moreno bit, not her singing "Fever" w/Animal, but this'n which opens her episode.

Makes sense to me, man. Good taste, smarts, the works!

After all, what could anyone possibly NOT enjoy about, say, seeing Narek do the Zhal Makh on Soji while Narissa watches but during the Zhal Makh (which, of course, consists of Yut Makh, Lu Shiar, Qlam Wath, Vri Glam, and Rok Khan) Narek takes out his tan zekhran to kill Soji with but before he does so breaks his Zhat Vash training first and tells Soji his name is actually Chaya!?

Yeah, generally speaking I tend to associate the popcultural avatars of any given user of any online platform w/the statements tied to them (not necessarily the names themselves, tho, if @DarthVader420 tweets 'wait are you telling me a CAT made this ketchup!? #smdh ' I just think that some guy, some shmo who four hundred and nineteen other people got the idea to be Darth Vader before him, he's the one who tweeted it but if there's a picture of Darth Vader there I'm all like 'Omigosh! I guess Luke & Leia's pops has a half-developed opinion/joke about a condiment which he has chosen to share with us!') but in this case I found it really really jarring.

Why would Fozzie make this joke? Piggy and Kermit are his co-workers, his friends, he's known them for over FIFTY YEARS, since they were babies ^[1], it's really inappropriate for him to speculate about their sex life! Even in jest! And it doesn't even make sense! Muppets don't have genitals! Doctor Honeydew doesn't even have eyes (neither do Janice or the Swedish Chef) you're telling me any of them have a doinkus or a vereen or some sort of hermaphroditic doinkus / vereen combination? You're telling me Beaker is shlurping Bunsen Honeydew's nonexistent doinkus ("Meep meep meep!") while the entire Electric Mayhem band watches? You're telling me Statler is topping Waldorf up in the stage left balcony box while Sweetums & Ruth Buzzi manhandle each other to music? Can't happen! Impossible!

[1] Yes, I am well aware that Muppet Babies (1984-1991) is an apocryphal text which merely adumbrates in cartoon form the vivid fantasy had by Piggy in The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) of her and Kermit and the assorted company growing up together. I know it's non-canonical, little more than a reticulated polyfoam Infancy Gospel! I know!

FOZZIE NO

- Goddamn, deep cut to Season 1 of Star Trek : Voyager right there @ the end. You'd think what with the long established idea of, like, subspace transporter platforms (I think that's what the evil Ferengi used in the final season of TNG to hop on board the ship and spook Picard when he was doing his evil son plan thing, hold on, is that guy Jason Whatshisname gonna come back and be on this show too? Calling it now, that guy or his mom is gonna get referenced sometime before the finale, you betcha) and the way that technology was used in two of the Abrams films for v. similar purposes that'd just be what they'd go for to establish how these two get away from the Romulans at the end but, nope, it's the stuff from the "how would YOU like to be Prime Directive-d, huh, guys? Not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot is it now!! This is an important lesson!" episode.

- is Picard sundowning? Is the thing that whatshername, Rafi, said about his unchecked id or whatever actually how Patrick Stewart is choosing to play him? He's clapping in praise, he's dishing out hugs for Hugh, wait isn't this kinda what David Paymer was talking about in the second episode? Yeah, I think it fits actually.

- Lots of dumb dumb secret ritual stuff and spooky dream nonsense and hidden true name (Chaya? Come on, Ayelet & Michael & Kirsten & Akiva! Chaya is a girl's name for girls!) stuff this week. I guess we were saved from having to see that happen last week. I didn't think I'd miss it and I guess I don't. Go back to cutting Robot Girl & Romulan Spy & Romulan Spy's Sister Who Was Roger Sterling's New Wife On Mad Men back out of the show!

- The thing about not letting the perfect be the enemy of good (which Picard was also mea culpa-ing to the Romulans a few weeks ago about) is a little bit extratextual, I think. They know they're making a badly structured show strung together with baling wire and missing bits and pieces (was there a scene with Agnes & Romulan Ninja Guy before where they established his idiosyncratic use of the phrase "in butting" and they just didn't air it? Wait, what happened to her? Was she completely missing from the second half of the episode?) but it's the best they can manage, they're trying their hardest, come on, have some sympathy for them! What else are you gonna watch? The other Star Trek show, or the new Star Trek show, or the other new Star Trek show, or the five other Star Treks they're planning on doing too?

- okay, the guy saying "Locutus!?", that was funny; I'll give them that. I think I'm actually liking the show more and more the longer it goes on and the faster I run on the treadmill while watching it.

I don't remember the Reman Viceroy ever being mentioned in Enterprise. At least the Ron Pearlman character. If it was mentioned, it might be "a" Viceroy, as in the Reman Head of State, who is subservient to the Romulan Praetor?


BTW, I am skipping over Picard plot points, so if I misunderstood, sorry.

Yeah, you're right! I checked the wiki and my wires got a little crossed there. There is a character I was thinking of who is a reference to that movie (played by Brian Thompson! The Alien Bounty Hunter on The X-Files!) but, yes, it's not the Ron Perlman-in-a-monster-mask dude.

I think part of what I dislike about this show is just how goofy the structure feels (this week especially so because Robot Girl & Romulan Spy's B-plot was nearly completely absent; the characters didn't even appear) and the awful sense of mismatch generated because every other televised Picard story is basically over-and-done-with inside of 45 minutes but this one just keeps going and going and going. It's like what Chuck Jones thought of Space Jam (1996), Bugs Bunny shouldn't have needed any help and should have had the whole thing wrapped up inside of seven minutes. Why can't Picard just solve this problem in a single episode with plenty of time allotted for a secondary character to experience and solve a somewhat related but more personal problem of their own? Come on, Picard! You're better than this! Just aim your ship at a sun and go back in time to save the dead robot girl! Or, better yet, go further back in time and save the Romulan civilization itself! Or, y'know what, screw it, go back far enough in time to stop the many many wars the Federation has been in and keep Beverly from becoming a widow besides! I can conceive of no problems w/this approach on any level, either within the text itself or as effective storytelling! Do not correct me!

And yet this episode was still fairly neat, possibly even the best one of the series so far, a relatively straightforward action adventure story wherein the conflicts and pains of the past of our series' regulars are illuminated by the conflict and pain of the past of the episode's special guest star! Fun! I think that heightening and twisting and détourning the Seven / Janeway relationship so now she's locked into a cycle of sexy revenge w/this new crime boss figure (as opposed to her previous cycle of sexy give'and'take w/an alternately pleasing and alternately withholding mother figure) is a great endpoint for Seven of Nine's character! I was kind of worried the show would feel such a slavish devotion to continuity that it'd bother to address the Chakotay situation that the final episodes of Voyager's final season unnaturally slotted her into but it seems like it's only Nemesis (2002) and Star Trek (2009) which exerted an unnatural pull on the showrunners' collective psyche(s).

If memory serves there's a nigh-incomprehensible action sequence and Jonathan Frakes just ... kicks him down a Jefferies tube? I know they mentioned the character again a few years later on Star Trek : Enterprise (2001-2005) which of course took place chronologically earlier so is no proof either way yet considering how this show seems to love its relatively deep continuity pulls (Icheb! Tranya! Mot! Quark!) nothing can really be ruled out and so any recurring (or even stand-alone) element of the Star Trek mythos could arguably be playing a role in the ongoing plot. (Also, uh, I was kidding!?) ((But, no, yeah, if it turns out to be that guy then YEAH I CALLED IT ALL ALONG I WAS SERIOUS THE WHOLE TIME NO JOKE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT REAL.))

I had a lot more to say back when the finale aired but in order to say it I typed it out in Microsoft Word, and copying'n'pasting it in here doesn't maintain the formatting, so I would have had to go through the three pages and manually italicize everything again. I was too lazy to do that then so you were all spared. UP UNTIL NOW! Don't blame me for the following; blame Darth Krawlie, blame Tank, blame yourselves!

I guess on the whole I really liked the first three episodes, the Tim Blake Nelson one, the black'n'white flashback one, and that's kind of it. 5 outta 9. Not half bad! Literally.

- I think the pilot (... is Lady Trieu even mentioned or alluded to in any way during this'n?) can be compared'n'contrasted w/the Season 2 premiere of The Leftovers and I think both of these show's final moments are equally in dialogue with each other.

- I haven't really been paying much attention to how this show's been received out there in the wider world (I mean, unless N6's review write'em'up counts - it's certainly a well articulated understanding of what's to be seen, as is so typical and consistent of his work that to make note of it here and now feels less like praise than condescension on my behalf, regardless, I sincerely enjoyed reading it) but it's difficult to imagine anyone who really really liked the comic, appreciated it for what it was, really really liking this show (well, not so difficult, it takes all kinds). Watchmen (1986-7) is arguably the best comic book ever because of the very particular way it puts words and images together; ultimately, that's what makes it special, a capital-M Mature attitude towards superheroes is supplementary to the way it's being told, it reinforces the how of it rather than being what it's actually about. It could've been about granary suppliers! Moore tried to do a Watchmen about regular people in regular world, yeah, it was called Big Numbers and he did it with Bill Sienkiewicz (sp?) and they gave up a few issues in but it could have arguably been the better work. Decades later, I am like three-fifths certain there's a flex on that particular comicbook in this show's pilot! Anyway, Watchmen (2019) is not as good at being a television show as Watchmen (1986-7) is at being a comic book. That's probably true of every adaptation of justly celebrated material, but, wait, no! Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is just as good as a TV show, as a movie, and as a novel! It can be done. It just probably can't be done w/Watchmen and maybe can't be done with the v. specific creative and commercial talent involved in adapting it today, in the Year Of Your Lord 2019. Or maybe I'm wrong, talking out of my butt as usual, there are certainly ways in which the show takes advantage of being in a TV show landscape in the same way the comic takes advantage of being a part of comics culture (is the extratextual associations of an actor playing other characters in a one-to-one correspondence with how the 'cast' of the comic are based on the Charlton characters or maybe how the Laurie-Jon Mars sequence is ripped off of Baron/Rude Nexus? Could be!), maybe there's way more to this show than I gave it credit for? Nope!

- Trying to put the above paragraph in a single sentence, well, the show's not as gifted at being a show as the comic is at being a comic so all that remains is to praise it for the mere mechanisms of its plot and that's a tougher sell. Watchmen (1986-7) is a superhero murder mystery in a world on the verge of apocalypse. This show is ... what? The exact same thing, maybe? I don't buy that it's about race, any more than Quentin Tarantino's movies are about race just because he uses the n-word a lot in his films (obvious exception aside) and I don't buy that it's about Our Times Now any more than Shane Black's films are about Christmas just because that's when they take place (again, obvious exception(s) aside). It sort of gestures at those things, but not in any way that feels coherent or with any kind of understandable summarizable thesis statement. As the kids say in their essays, what is Shakespeare trying to say? Is this show's finale just the love story of a torture-happy cop and her brainwashed, caged, suicidal husband and how they defeated a well-intentioned supervillain with the aid of some co-workers and a mentally unstable mass murderer? Is this show as a whole just a kind of game of keep'away involving three varieties of painted figures : a gold one, a blue one, and a silver one : show you the gold one first, keep the blue one away from your eyes for a while, throw the silver one into the sewer, and explain away the gold one last?

- Have read a few interviews, though, and I saw that dumb letter he wrote to the fans around when he got the job (as dumb letters to the fans go, though, it's a distant second to Zach Snyder exhorting the fanbase to go see the movie a second time just as Sally Jupiter fell in love w/Blake). I kinda liked how, for a while there a few years back, Lost's particularly appealing elements were sort of messily fractionated off by the shows made by each of the co-creators. Carlton Cuse's Colony had the sci-fi premises and conspiracy theory worldbuilding and action/adventure elements and Damon Lindelof's Leftovers had the all-timer performances and active preoccupation w/the numinous and great needle-drop after great needle-drop. What am I saying? I don't know. I hope Carlton Cuse's next show after he was done with his show is better than Lindelof's next show after he was done with his show (this one! Watchmen! (2019)!), I hope Cuse goes from strength to strength. I kinda hope Lindelof chucks himself in a lake. Knowing how bad you are at making a Watchmen TV show (and seeding that same show w/little digs at yourself) doesn't excuse making the show bad! It makes it worse. It'd be way better if he thought he was great, fired on all cylinders (what was it Snyder said in false modesty? Something like 'I guess if at the end of it Alan Moore watches it on his DVD player in London and is like 'Well, they didn't %*#~ it up too bad' we'll have succeeded' - if that was the idiotic attitude he'd taken to being an accessory to theft on a massive scale and, as he acknowledges in the show and especially and explicitly in the finale, the hubris of trying to step to this material, well, then I'd what? Who knows?), as it is now I'm probably not going to watch his next one. Gonna have to rope me in by adapting beloved nerd properties from here until the end of all things, Lindelof, if you'd just let anyone else out there bite the bullet on this'n I'd have been eager to see what your next thingum was but now that you've done this show it'll be a nope from me unless it's, like, a Star Trek.

- I was watching the sequel to Zombieland (spoilers(?) for the sequel to Zombie's Land! quit reading this post if you want to enjoy a piece of entertainment free of me talking about it, actually, that has v. general applications as well) and there's a bit in it where they meet a new person, named Madison, played by Zooey Deutsch, and she's been hiding out in the freezer of a Pinkberry in the mall for the past ten years, her and Jesse Eisenberg bone while him and the Emma Stone character (they're all named after locales, even the minor one-off characters from ten years ago in the first movie) were on a break, later on they're all driving in the car on their way to do something or other and she starts to sweat and vomit and so they think she's been bit and is turning into a zombie so they dump her in the woods and we hear (but don't see) Jesse Eisenberg shoot her. Oh, the movie opens w/three little pieces of explanatory info-dump delineating that there are new kinds of zombies in the world, in the, uh, Zombieland. So I automatically assume that, either

1) no, she's not actually been bitten by a zombie (we haven't been shown that happen as an audience) and that she's either had an allergic reaction to the food she's eating (because her character was established as vegan, the make-up on her zombie face looks more like it's trying to convey that sort of thing than zombieness)

or

2) yeah, Madison was bitten by a zombie years and years ago and that she's some new kind of zombieness we've never seen before and she was staving off the disease by keeping her body cool in the freezer and now that she's spent a day or so outside of that environment the base-level zombieness has returned, but will eventually recede as ... I don't know, it gets dark and cold enough outside, and she'll make her way back to the main group in the clown-themed ice cream truck that was shown in that same area right before the whole inciting incident kicked off.

Now (2) didn't happen, natch, but something about the length of time in between when this character left the narrative and then re-entered the narrative made me certain, like dead certain, that's what we were seeing. I think if I'd been forced to put a probability on it at the earliest point it would have been 50/50 but the longer this character was out of the movie it became like 10/90 for me. (And when she does come back into play, yeah, she's driving the clown-themed ice cream truck! Why is it a ice cream related vehicle if she's merely had an allergic reaction to the trail mix? I don't know!)

My point is that the way I process stories, especially goofy make'em'ups involving the make-believe with a lot of moving supranormal parts, seems to be one in which the greater the delay in offering me an expected answer the more and more likely my brain is to reject an immediate and understandable set of resolved premises and settle on something needlessly ornate & bizarre in its stead. If it was something simple then the question would already be answered and we'd be moving on to new questions, no? If a character says Professor Plum did the murder, and we haven't seen Professor Plum in handcuffs yet, then, uh, it must be ... forgive me, I've forgotten who the characters in the Clue board game are.

Anyway, that's my 'defence' about why I was wrong about lots and lots of thing. Except I'm not wrong all the way, yet, because if they can rope Trent Reznor and some of the cast into coming back they've got a real shot at further and future seasons of the show, ones that fulfill some of my Predictions, and then there'll be an opportunity for me to make more Predictions (f'rinstance : pretty sure Angela's foot just goes splat into the water, pretty sure that what Jon/Cal meant by giving her that egg was now if she goes through an Intrinsic Field she'll come out like him, NOT automatically giving her the full suite of Doctor Manhattan abilities instantaneously but prepping her for that as an outcome later on - this allows for ongoing ambiguity in the story about whether she just ate a raw egg comme ça Rorschach, if there's maybe some other bit of food in the house that has Doctor Manhattan powers, if she's just making meaning out of nothing and Jon was just speaking about a hypothetical possibility that he never realized --- this is all assuming there's a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, season; if that's the last episode of this particular iteration of the Watchmen franchise then of course what we saw is what we saw and no more, again, Leftovers finale is rather helpful here) and be wrong about those. Exciting!

ME FOR THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS, OVER & OVER IN MY MIND: The popular appellation of 'Mary Sue' to any character appearing in any canonical mass-market source-authentic media is a category error on multiple levels and, honestly, arises more out of an inability to correctly separate audience & artefact than from any genuine attempt to understand fiction itself!

ROMULAN NINJA WARRIOR RAISED AS THE SOLE BOY IN A CONVENT WITH MAD LEET SKILLZ, FOLLOWER OF AN ANCIENT CODE, THE ONLY CHILD CAPTAIN PICARD HAS EVER LIKED AND WHO USED TO SNUGGLE UP W/HIM AND READ HIM BEDTIME STORIES TOO: Hey, wazzup! Jolan true! *opens palms*
ME: Hah hah great! Uh, weird that everyone associated w/creating you wasn't remotely the age you were around the time TNG first aired so I suppose TECHNICALLY you don't count as authorial insertion but, I mean, still ...
ROMULAN NINJA WARRIOR RAISED AS THE SOLE BOY IN A CONVENT WITH MAD LEET SKILLZ, FOLLOWER OF AN ANCIENT CODE, THE ONLY CHILD CAPTAIN PICARD HAS EVER LIKED AND WHO USED TO SNUGGLE UP W/HIM AND READ HIM BEDTIME STORIES TOO: *flicks sword around all cool and stuff*

Festschrift! Paradigmatic! Our boy Michael Chabon sure wrote this week's episode, yessir.

Look, if Seven of Nine is going to show up as the surprise stinger for the end of an episode there needs to be a scant little something setting that up during the episode! No, talking about Fenris Rangers twice doesn't count! Marketing (or the credit sequence) doesn't count! Naming the planet Vashti almost counts, for reasons somewhat too esoteric to get into! Literally all that was needed would be to change, like, maybe only a noun or two in that Former Senator's little speech (from Wahlburger-class or whatever he said to Intrepid-class) or a mention of Admiral Janeway during the flashback sequence or literally anything, anything at all, to give the tiniest set-up to that pay-off! This is kind of my same problem as the Borg Cube reveal for the pilot, yeah, and it's all probably due to these folks thinking they're making a ten-hour-long movie rather than episodes of television. (Or, like, a lack of forethought & money too : that's what probably explains the dumb scenes of Robot Girl & Romulan Spy sitting in a sparsely populated room having a drink together and then sliding down a hallway together laughing joyously rather than having those scenes be them in a proper nightclub dancing; and that's what probably explains the absence of communication or attempted communication between Our Ship and the Old Romulan Warbird during the space battle sequence, there was juuuust a scene before it w/Picard & Romulan Ninja Boy where he emphasized the need to not kill people and suddenly they're firing on that ship w/o at least trying to negotiate something first!? I mean, Worf'd be pleased but it kinda goes against everything Picard is as a person and what was literally just made clear to the audience.)

Longshot predictions on who the main bad guy(s) manipulating events is gonna turn out to be :

- Professor Moriarty

- I think I already said Lore and Sela, but, yeah, I think it could v. well be either of them

- the Ron Perlman villain from Nemesis (2002)

- someone from the Mirror Universe

- KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN

- some of the older pre-Soong androids from TOS

- the "we seeeeeeeek peeeeeeacefulllllllll co-existence" worm aliens from that great Season 1 episode of TNG

- Vash

- the Bynars

- Spock Two, the giant clone of Spock from the planet Phylos