Day Two Hundred and Four - Star Trek Voyager: Season 5, Episode 11, "Robert Picardo, you wonderful ham, you."

Voyager gets a lot of grief from geek folk across the spectrum, despite it returning to the roots of Star Trek and focusing more on human exploration of the galaxy and less on Alpha Quadrant politics.

A closer hybrid of TOS and TNG than should've been expected, but shipped off to the far reaches of the Milky Way on a near impossible journey home, Voyager played quite a bit of havoc with its crew, but unfortunately relied on cheesy gimmicks like the Borg and sexy add-on characters when ratings flagged (a trap that carried over into Enterprise).

I can't exactly say that I'm a fan of the series as a whole, but I certainly enjoy any episode which revolves around the "Outsider Exploring Humanity" character, The Doctor. Like Data before him, The Doctor (played by scifi character actor Robert Picardo), is an AI who dreams of being human and fully integrating into a crew which sometimes regards him more as a tool than an individual.

Having Seven of Nine join the crew was an annoyance to me, at first, in spite of her skintight catsuit's effect on my lizard brain, but I eventually grew to enjoy her presence strictly from the perspective of The Doctor mentoring her. In this particular episode, both play a major role as The Doctor discovers a conspiracy to violate the sanctity of his memory banks and erase moments of his past.

I like Latent Images (this episode's title) mostly due to the fact that the key dilemma, that The Doctor's decision to choose one life over another causes him an extreme ethical crisis is layered both as a programming paradox issue and an overall ethical quandary. Any rational being with empathy would have the same problem and perhaps react the same way and that's what makes the episode so special. With any other character, the writers could just handwave away the decision with a "and I'll have to live with it the rest of my life" line, but by forcing the dilemma to have more permanent consequences, it's easier to swallow as relevant and poignant.

I am more than a bit disappointed that the writers got lazy and didn't dream up a new argument for sentience (or lack thereof) for Janeway to counter Seven with, as we've pretty much already covered the same ground with Data in TNG long before Voyager was zapped to the Delta Quadrant, but she doesn't hold it for long, so it's a bit forgivable.

I also kind of wish that they had taken this opportunity to off a main cast member (or even a recurring guest crewer) instead of a generic extra. It would've made that much more of a punch, but oh well.

As I implied above, I pretty much just skip around the series for Doctor-centric episodes now, but... if you've never watched it (or, it's just been that long)... I could easily affirm that it's worth going through in its entirety at least once, the same I would say for any Trek series (even Enterprise).

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Sixty - TEDTalks: Space Trek, Episode 2, or "65 Million Years Ago... the Dinosaurs had a Bad Day."

Wow... two months done already.

In many ways, it feels longer than that, but it also feels like the briefest time ever. In that conceptual haze of my memory of time, I remember watching Wild Target and Hardware just a few days ago as opposed to a few dozen days ago... or several dozen.

I wonder if March will go just as fast?

Anyway, on to today's entry.

Yesterday and today have been very busy days, so I needed small bites of Netflix to nosh on. Luckily, there are plenty of TEDTalks in my queue, so I decided to swing over to the Space Trek compilation (which holds 20 or so lectures on, you guessed it, SPACE) and watched Phil Plait's entry on the dangers of asteroids/meteors hitting the earth and wrecking our millenium.

If you didn't already know this about me, one of my major fears is that we'll never get off this Pale Blue Dot, instead becoming just an afterthought in the life cycle of the universe because either we will manage to kill ourselves off by war or pollution... or we'll face some natural catastrophe like a planet killer asteroid.

I'm glad I watched Phil's talk as it actually does mention the asteroid Apophis and, even though it was recorded a few years ago and most of the bleak reports I hear about Apophis nowadays don't go into much detail (like Michio Kaku's recent appearance on The Colbert Report), Phil Plait's quantifying of the odds that Apophis will fall through the keyhole that will guarantee an eventual hit gave me a bit more peace of mind.

I also like that he goes over several historical asteroid events, like Tunguska and the Meteor Crater in Arizona in addition to the Yucatan event that killed the dinosaurs.

No one ever really gives any scale or context to those impacts and explosions beyond the barest of facts and impressive CGI recreations meant to frighten us, but Phil does. He even goes so far as to tell what scientists think the composition of the meteors were and how that affected their impacts, craters, and overall damage to the surrounding areas.

My favorite part, though, had to be his solutions section. I really love the idea that, with a enough time and the tiniest of tugs, a two-ton satellite that we could send out to these asteroids could nudge them just far enough so that they'd miss us. He even mentions the possibility of using the gravity tether method to put asteroids that might have been on course to destroy us into a parking orbit so that we could mine them hollow and get so rich doing so!

Dangerous, but funny.

It's a short lecture, only clocking in at fifteen minutes, but, like most TEDTalks, it was both entertaining and informative. Always good to watch and enjoy!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~