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 Five - Cosmos: The Persistence of Memory, "Yeah, where's a Bird of Prey when you need one?"

To be honest, I've watched this episode twice in the last twenty-four hours. 

The first time was last night while I was arranging perler beads for a crafting project with friends. There was much in the way of half-listening and little in the way of actual watching. 

The second time, however, hours later, I was able to give Carl the full-attention that he deserves and felt almost the same amount of awe that I've recalled from previous episodes.

I say "almost" because, well, I wasn't too impressed with his "Dandelions" monologue on the complexity of life. 

He does have a nice bit on whales, their songs, and the effect that man has had both on isolating our mammalian cousins from each other thanks to muddying the oceans with noise pollution and hunting them so close to extinction. So much so that I think one of the writers of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home started writing the treatment for their script the moment they finished watching the segment.

Also, I was particularly enthralled with his comparisons between the sheer amount of information it takes to begin to understand life, our brains, and our need as a species to compile additional information in large memory banks outside our brains... in libraries.

He also goes into a little bit about the Voyager space program and the golden discs that are aboard both soon to be extra-solar vehicles. I find this additionally amusing due to the fact that a Voyager spacecraft was the main villain of the original Star Trek movie.

I think it's pretty fair to say that this wasn't the most thrilling of the Cosmos episodes, but it's still a certainty that I always learn something (or am reminded of a fact that I've long since forgotten since the first time I saw Cosmos is Debbie Prell's Physics classes). I wasn't exactly overwhelmed with delight when he spent a good ten minutes equating the knowledge of the human race in its various forms with stacks of books, but it was interesting how quickly he introduced the viewer to the concept of the bit... a simple yes or no that matters immensely to computer programers and logicians, but very little to the laymen.

Heck I still don't know the specific reason video game system generations operated using the bit as a measure of processing power. It was just something I always accepted with more meaning better, but hearing Carl talk about the bit as a logic gate, it makes me want to research it on my own.

And that's something I dearly love about Cosmos... even in its weaker episodes, it manages to pique my curiosity in some manner and goad me into learning something new outside the show. Sure, it's a silly little thing like what 8-bit versus 16-bit really means, but still.

As ever, I think Cosmos should be on everyone's queue and I look forward to hearing its soothing new age soundtrack and the sonorous lilt of Carl's voice again in the near future.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~