Day Two Hundred and Fifty-two - Star Trek Voyager: Season 7, Episode 19, "Wait... this seems a bit familiar."

I've been very sporadic with my Voyager watching.

Having seen the complete series several times thanks to syndication and reruns on UPN (back when there was a UPN) and other networks for well over a decade, I pretty much just limit myself to my favorites... and, usually, those favorites revolve around The Doctor (Robert Picardo). Today's Couchbound entry is no exception, featuring the Season 7 episode, "Author, Author."

Recently MacGuffin-ing a way to regularly communicate with Starfleet back in the Alpha Quadrant (thanks to Dwight Schultz's recurring Barclay character), the crew of Voyager are finally able to speak face to face with colleagues and loved ones for the first time in years. Not having any family to speak of himself (or, perhaps, the writers not wanting to retread ground so quickly after Life Line), The Doctor decides to speak with a publisher for his new Holo-Novel.

The novel, itself, is a farcical reinterpretation of the Voyager crew from an oppressed Emergency Medical Hologram's perspective... and basically serves to drive a wedge between The Doctor and the crew as all of their fictional analogs act like they're from the Mirror Universe, but that's the throwaway comedic part of the episode. The real meat of the story is a replay of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode with The Doctor standing in for Data in The Measure of a Man.

It really is extremely derivative of the legal proceedings from over a decade previous, where a Starfleet scientist wanted to disassemble Data against his will, claiming he had no rights because he was just a machine and Starfleet property. In Author, Author, it's the same, just swapping out the scientist with a greedy, overzealous publisher looking for a quick strip of gold-pressed latium and Data for the put upon AI, The Doctor.

The episode is a bit disappointing on the whole.

The novel is far too cheesy and melodramatic, the few glimpses of it we are given, and the crew's reactions to it, while understandable, are far too conveniently shocked/appalled, with only Neelix giving a favorable review. The only highlight for me was when Tom Paris reprogrammed the novel to give a creepy, perverted slant to The Doctor that gave Picardo a few gems to chew on.

Then there's the side story that features several bridge crew and their calls home with loved ones. While it was nice to see B'elanna and Seven reconnect with their families, the scene with Ensign Kim's stereotypical overbearing Asian mother felt as if it set back race relations a couple of years with a few broad strokes of the pen.... so, kudos there, writers.

Still, if you can get past all the cheese and hammy dialogue, it's nice to see "Measure of a Man"-lite, the Diet Soda of Data Episode Ripoffs. It pales in comparison to the original (what with Riker running the prosecution and much more time spent philosophizing instead of just the crew testimonials here), but it ain't terrible.

Plus, it's always good to see Broccoli, even if he's a tool in real life.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

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 One Hundred and Fifty-two - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, "I love you, Benedict, but you're no Ricardo Montalban"

Despite the tremendous job that JJ Abrams is doing rebooting the Star Trek franchise into summer movie blockbusters, I'm personally of the opinion that that classics remain so for a good reason.

While young Kirk and Spock are gallivanting around the galaxy, taking on klingons, gene warriors, and deus ex'd uber-cruisers in Abrams' version, the original crew were taking small, personal journeys with cosmic consequences that didn't have to rely on glitz and glamour, but were instead morality plays on duty, honor, revenge, and friendship.

Abrams tries, but it's mostly lost in the dramatic action set-pieces and grand CGI crashes. While the vistas are amazing, I still think the models and matte effects were better. Though arguments could be made either way concerning the acting.

Take The Wrath of Khan for example.

Yes, there are obvious plot holes and it's a slow starter, but the sheer charisma that Ricardo Montalban exudes makes up for his plastic supporting crew (only one of whom actually speaks), and his singular quest for vengence that ties back to his and Kirk's encounters back in The Original Series, makes for much more entertaining and satisfying resolutions than Into Darkness' denouement.

Still, I shouldn't compare them, really. They are two separate movies, after all... it's just that Abrams makes it so we have to.

Really, I'm not here blogging about 2013's Wrath, so I'll stop and return to the original.

I so very much love both the first and the third acts of this film. I have nothing against the second, where Kirk and the Enterprise tussle with Khan and the Reliant for the first time, but that Kobayashi Maru sequence of Kirstie Alley's and the post test scenes where Kirk ruminates on getting old and useless are just great... and that final speech of Khan's to the viewscreen, quoting Moby Dick? It's both iconic and delicious. The way Montalban chews on that scene, and every scene with pretty much no help from his supporting crew, makes me so happy.

Yes, the solutions are simple and obvious, with rational folks wondering why the heck Scotty didn't just go in and sacrifice himself earlier (considering he knew what the stakes where), but "the needs of the many" speech rings so much more true than Chris Pine's in 2013.

Gah! I'm doing it again.

I've waited forever to watch Wrath on Netflix. Not because Into Darkness was coming up and I needed to prepare for the eventuality of Cumberbatch's character... and, also, not because I wanted to compare both second entries of the respective series. No, the true reason I've delayed so long in watching Wrath is that I wanted the original Star Trek:The Motion Picture to make it on the stream so I could watch them in order.

It's been so long since I watched V'Ger assimilate Illia... and Decker commit the ultimate sacrifice.

So, I waited.

Until I couldn't wait any longer.

Wrath is still the best Star Trek movie for me, in any reality, though I do not have the disdain for the TNG Trek films that most do. Montalban makes the film and Spock's parting words always ring so much more true than any other platitude the many films have tried the bring across.

I truly wish Abrams films were smaller, more personal stories instead of the grand, sweeping epics of adventure that he has created... but I understand the necessity. No executives would fund them, I think, thanks to the need for franchises to be bloated money-grabbers for studios and their investors. All we can hope for are the non-franchise films to take up the slack. Films like Moon, Gravity, and the like.

Here's hoping.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~