{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri","title":"Chandri MacLeod","subtitle":"Chandri MacLeod","author":{"name":"Chandri MacLeod"},"link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"service.feed","type":"application\/x.atom+xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom","title":"Chandri MacLeod"}}],"updated":"2017-04-04T22:30:27Z","entry":[{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:895717","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/895717.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=895717"}}],"title":"I think it's finally time to go","published":"2017-04-04T22:30:27Z","updated":"2017-04-04T22:30:27Z","content":"So... I think I'll be shutting down this LJ soon. I mostly post to Tumblr initially, that might soon change to some other platform (Pillowfort is trying so hard) but in the meantime, Dreamwidth is somewhat less Russian and rather less likely to do intensely shady things like making you sign a TOS without letting you in to delete your account first. So.
Probably won't be immediate. I've wiped out a couple of old comms and my existing LJ entries will be on Dreamwidth<\/a>, as will anything else that would once have been crossposted to LJ. I've got to go through all my posts and see if there's anything actually still hosted here (pictures, docs, etc.) but from there I'm going to go through and actually delete older stuff.
It's a shame. But we all knew it was heading in this direction."},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:895275","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/895275.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=895275"}}],"title":"So it\u2019s definitely spring now","published":"2017-04-03T20:17:24Z","updated":"2017-04-03T20:17:24Z","content":"We\u2019ve been sitting here in our office sneezing and sniffling and being all like\u00a0\u201cgod WHAT is in the air today that all our allergies are so bad?\u201d And then I actually looked up the pollen report and
\u2026oh. So basically. All the things I\u2019m allergic to. Okay.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2nC5phu<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:895115","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/895115.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=895115"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: In this episode, in a roundabout treatise on bodily...","published":"2017-03-23T01:54:28Z","updated":"2017-03-23T01:54:28Z","content":"nsmtnz:
In this episode, in a roundabout treatise on bodily autonomy and how you shouldn\u2019t fuck with it, some jerkface glowy space lights impersonate The Patriarchy.
(Poor, poor) Mira Romaine, Space Archivist, is on board the Enterprise to install new equipment on Memory Alpha, the Federation\u2019s cultural repository. So, space library\/archive, basically. We love this idea, even though its practicality is highly limited due to having been conceived of in an age before network connectivity or automatic quadruple backups and therefore about as vulnerable as the Library of Alexandria. Spoiler: things end about as well for Memory Alpha.\u00a0
Like, I love this idea, but the execution infuriates me???
The Enterprise runs into the Patriarchy Lights (aka: the titular Lights of Zetar) on their way there and a bunch of people get weird headaches, but Lieutenant Mira Romaine gets first-stage possessed by the Lights and starts having visions.
So, this sounds interesting. Right? Except the show completely drops the ball.
Mostly Romaine is unnecessary to this episode, because despite being written by a woman (though we\u2019re inclined to blame dude-rewrites) - Shari Lewis, to be specific! - this episode, that is nominally about a woman\u2019s bodily autonomy, consists mainly of a bunch of men, including male-voiced incorporeal-douchebag space-lights (oh look, it\u2019s another exciting episode of You Literally Cannot Trust Ascended Beings) standing around arguing about the woman\u2019s rights while the woman in question writhes, incapacitated in one way or another, in a corner.
Or\u2026 floats, as the case may be.
The Lights want to take over Romaine\u2019s body, and keep it until it dies. Romaine, obviously, is seriously fucking opposed to this (we think - she doesn\u2019t get many lines). The dudes in her life (including an inexplicably-besotted Scotty who takes their unconvincingly-portrayed budding relationship as license to speak for Mira, condescend to Mira over things that turn out to be very fucking real and important after all, and make decisions for her) are like, philosophically opposed to and argue against this and are even willing to straight-up kill in order to prevent it, but at no point actually ask Mira what she wants.
Worse, nearly the entire episode is actually told not from Mira\u2019s point of view, but from Scotty\u2019s. And Scotty spends the first half of the episode trying to reverse-gaslight Romaine out of reporting her weird visions, or believing anything is seriously wrong with her.
Don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s probably just your uterus! Those cause precognitive visions, right?
Basically with a few tweaks here and there - completely excise the weird romance sideplot, give Mira 75% more dialogue and a refocusing of the story on Mira\u2019s POV - this could have been a great episode. As it is, the NSMTNZ crew can award it no better than a \u201cmeh.\u201d
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
So close, and yet so full of shit.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2o6SyU9<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:894908","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/894908.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=894908"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: Buckle up, nerds, because this week\u2019s","published":"2017-03-15T19:46:40Z","updated":"2017-03-15T19:46:40Z","content":"nsmtnz:
Buckle up, nerds, because this week\u2019s episode brings together two of our favourite things: 1. Star Trek and 2. a cozy murder mystery! We\u2019re so excited.
(Okay, 2\/3 of us are excited. But Kim was loudly overruled because DEMOCRACY.)
There\u2019s no contrived excuse for tossing our crew into the mystery this time: it\u2019s a straight-up scientific investigation of a weird planet that shouldn\u2019t exist in nature. Hallucination? Artificial planet? Sensor ghosts? Actual ghosts? But Kirk decides the most sensible method of investigation is to actually beam down.
Go away, we don\u2019t want any!
That\u2019s maybe his moment of most questionable judgement in the episode (as evidenced by the Ghost of Purple Space Christmas Past popping on board to scream a too-late warning), but we want to give points from then on. A TOS episode in which nearly everyone, nearly all of the time, thinks things through before acting? In which we not only make verbal callbacks to previous episodes, but learn the lessons of previous failures? Impossible!
\u201cRemember that thing that time?\u201d \u201cOh, shit, you\u2019re right.\u201d
There\u2019s a weird through-running series of out-of-place \u201coh, she\u2019s killing us one by one but she\u2019s soooooo beeeeeeoooooootifulllll\u201d comments by the male characters, but\u2026 it actually turns out to make relevant sense, in a kind of subversive, roundabout kind of way. It took us most of the ep to work this out, and we\u2019re really really mad about it.
This is actually a really enjoyable episode, given that not all that much happens? There\u2019s a murder mystery; there\u2019s a cultural puzzle to be solved; there\u2019s a lot of problem-solving that requires extensive use of logic and deduction; there\u2019s a plethora of crisis-reaction shots which are mainly women; there\u2019s Lee Merriweather aka Catwoman as our female guest star! There\u2019s a character clearly intended to be Indian who was played by a Jewish-American actress which really threw our POC count into a tizzy but we decided to come down on the side of who does a hell of a lot of out-loud problem-solving in a command position on the bridge of the Enterprise. Like, there are some weird, potentially-problematic bits of the type and in roughly the proportions we have come to expect them from TOS, but for the most part, it is good?
It\u2019s like a space pants suit. For murder.
Strange. Confusing. Surprising. Especially given the magnificent insanity of this outfit.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
I feel like I didn\u2019t really do the Purple Space Pants Suit justice but honestly, who could have?
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2mtO75l<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:894529","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/894529.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=894529"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: So, chances are, you have a hazy memory of a Star Trek...","published":"2017-02-16T20:56:23Z","updated":"2017-02-16T20:56:23Z","content":"nsmtnz:
So, chances are, you have a hazy memory of a Star Trek episode that takes place in a mental hospital of some kind. Like us, you probably made it to Dagger of the Mind and went \u201cwait, what? why is this way worse than I remember, and not just because it\u2019s been twenty years since I last saw it?\u201d Well, I\u2019m about to put your mind at ease, because it turns out that there are, in fact, two Original Series episodes that a) take place in a mental health facility and b) talk about mental illness in a surprisingly sympathetic and progressive way, e.g. It Is An Illness, and this is the second one. The do-over, if you will, given that their actual plots are really, really similar. And spoiler: this one\u2019s a lot better.
I mean, on costumes ALONE.
The Enterprise visits the Elba 2 asylum (a facility for the \u201cincorrigibly criminally insane\u201d deemed incurable by other medical means) to deliver a new wonder drug that Federation scientists hope will provide the cure to all mental illness\u2026 or at least, that\u2019s the idea, broadly speaking. Kirk and Spock beam down to deliver the vials and learn that one of Kirk\u2019s heroes, Captain Garth, aka: Garth of Izar, is now an inmate at the hospital. Because apparently no one\u2019s ever told him that you should never meet your heroes (seriously, specifically in Kirk\u2019s case - it never goes well), he asks the Governor if he can see Garth.
Naturally, it\u2019s about two minutes later that we learn that Garth has replaced Governor Corey, taken over the asylum, developed an ultra-explosive capable of destroying planets, and has grand plans to take over the galaxy because the extinction of war as a way of life has made humans weak and robbed them of purpose. Oh, and by the way, Garth has developed shapeshifting powers that allow him to look like anyone he wants. Guess who his new favourite shape turns out to be.
There are\u2026 literally too many double-blank jokes.
Kirk is absolutely opposed to this entire way of thinking, and he says so, a lot. Peace, Kirk says, gave him purpose. Peace brought prosperity to the galaxy. Peace made Kirk and Spock brothers. Peace - and compassion, and friendship - are the way forward, into the future.
If this refrain sounds familiar to those of you who\u2019ve seen and liked the thesis statement of Star Trek: Beyond, you\u2019re not alone. And this episode deals with similar themes, enough that we saw direct connections between Whom Gods Destroy and the reboot film. Garth, despite his clear Napoleonic roots, is a sympathetic character. Kirk, while trying to argue him out of the whole galactic domination thing, repeatedly tells Garth that what he\u2019s doing is wrong, but that it\u2019s not his fault: that he\u2019s sick, and that what\u2019s happening isn\u2019t his fault. You could brush this off as coming from Kirk\u2019s clear affection for the man\u2019s legacy, but it\u2019s also obviously rooted in a culture that has gone a long way in destigmatizing mental illness. Garth, we\u2019re told over and over again, is not his mental illness. Garth\u2019s not crazy, he\u2019s sick, and Kirk wants to help him.
The most stylish mental hospital in the galaxy.
These are all attitudes we rarely see convincingly portrayed in twenty-first century television, and moreover, it\u2019s strongly implied that a life of war and its associated trauma may have caused Garth\u2019s mental illness in the first place, long before an accident maimed him and led to his developing superpowers. In the end, the message of this episode is larger than our oft-repeated \u201csafe words save lives.\u201d It\u2019s about compassion, and about how friendship is, really, kinda magic.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Two Kirks, and some surprisingly good decision-making. Who could have foreseen this.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2lQv2Oh<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:894290","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/894290.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=894290"}}],"title":"Anybody on the Pillowfort.io beta?","published":"2017-02-07T17:57:21Z","updated":"2017-02-07T17:57:21Z","category":{"@attributes":{"term":"pillowfort"}},"content":"It occurred to me that many of the people I most want to link up with again on Pillowfort are people who may well still be using LJ on a semi-regular basis.
Where are you, my fellow Fandom Olds?"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:894141","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/894141.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=894141"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: This week, Kirk gets kidnapped by an alien queen to...","published":"2017-01-25T18:12:22Z","updated":"2017-01-25T18:12:22Z","content":"nsmtnz:
This week, Kirk gets kidnapped by an alien queen to become part of her man-harem.
No, literally.
And we love her.
It starts as all bad days for the Enterprise start: with them answering a distress call. Only when they arrive, there\u2019s nobody home; just an entire abandoned city and a lot of annoying buzzing noises. Are they all dead? Is the distress call merely on repeat from long ago? Maybe we should just go?
Our favourite part of the male aliens\u2019 outfits is the ultra-low-cut shirts. V. snazzy.
But they lose their first redshirt maybe two minutes in, realize five minutes later they\u2019ve brought something dangerous back aboard the ship with them, and then we\u2019re off and running. Mostly the crisis amounts to irritating mosquito-sounds until Kirk, himself, disappears - or rather, is accelerated far beyond everyone else - and finds himself in a bizarro-world where his crew is frozen in place and he\u2019s alone, at normal speed, with Deelah.
We have no idea how this outfit works, but it\u2019s a marvel and so is Deelah.
We love Deelah. She knows what she wants, knows what she has to do, and she\u2019s not going to let any insignificant considerations like the objectively unethical shading of abducting people to be your unwilling sperm factories stop her from getting any of it.
Deelah was immediately nominated to our top 10 of female TOS characters. She\u2019s smart, witty, unimpressed by Kirk but also unafraid to say what she wants, and then, uh, take it. She\u2019s in a shitty situation, with her culture and her species on the edge of extinction, but she\u2019s dealing, and did we mention this is the second or third lady in a few episodes to be the undisputed ruler of an entire civilization? I mean, that civilization is down to maybe five people, but still. Plus it seems to be a matriarchy.
Did we mention she outsmarts Kirk about 79 times before the episode is more than fifteen minutes in?
Honestly, this is a pretty solid episode. We get a puzzle, characters whose motivations are clear, and a conflict where you understand why the bad guys are doing what they\u2019re doing, even while you acknowledge that it\u2019s ethically\u2026 uh, grey.
We do have some issues with the parting shot\/decision on the part of Kirk & Co where he basically dooms the Scalosians to extinction despite having the cure, but up until the last three minutes, it\u2019s a thing of beauty.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
NGL, we are all about the episodes that flip the gender dynamic and objectify men.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2jRY3Fn<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:893939","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/893939.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=893939"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: So fair warning on two counts: this episode contains...","published":"2017-01-18T19:38:42Z","updated":"2017-01-18T19:38:42Z","content":"nsmtnz:
So fair warning on two counts:
this episode contains multiple instances of various kinds of assault, humiliation, and other hella disturbing violations of people\u2019s rights, and
you will have to listen to both William Shatner and Corene make this noise, multiple times:
Plato\u2019s Stepchildren is another of those classic Star Trek stories that everyone has heard of, and in a lot of ways it\u2019s based on a theme that\u2019s often repeated throughout the franchise: intrepid crew meets omniscient aliens who use their ineffable power to fuck with people, omniscient aliens must be taken down a peg and justice is restored. It\u2019s a well-worn and dependable formula.
On the other hand, though, this episode also includes a variety of some of TOS\u2019s most explicit statements about both the perceived backwardness of its contemporary audience, and broader thesis statements about the underlying messages of Trek.
So the trouble starts when the Enterprise answers a distress call from Platonia, peopled by a race (if you can call 38 eugenically-chosen people a \u201crace\u201d) of functionally-immortal aliens who have based their society on the teachings of Plato, absorbed during a millennia-ago trip to Earth. Unfortunately, the Platonians don\u2019t seem to have absorbed the full range of Platonic ideas, specifically hand-waving the parts about peace and justice in favour of living lives so contemplative and \u201csimple\u201d (for a certain value of \u201csimple\u201d that means \u201cextreme luxury and every whim satisfied\u201d) that they\u2019ve gotten too lazy to maintain immune systems. This is what brings Kirk, Spock, and Bones to them in the first place: their self-styled philosopher-king has gotten a tiny cut and developed a deadly bacterial infection. Bones easily fixes this with basic medical science, and the Platonians reward them by turning them into their newest telekinetic playthings.
Must give credit to the balls-to-the-wall physical acting in this episode.
Did I mention that the Platonians also have telekinetic powers, which they mostly use to play games and torture people?
So, \u201cplaythings\u201d is too mild. In fact, the lone exception to the Platonians\u2019 superpowers is a little person named Alexander (played by Michael Dunn, who we awarded Performance of the Episode about three minutes in), who seems to be kept around to mock, torture, and push around.
Again, there are a lot of really disturbing moments in this episode. There are a number of scenes that amount to straight-up torture, which are absolutely carried out for the amusement of the Platonians. But here`s the thing: the whole thing is a set of super-unsubtle metaphors. The Platonians\u2019 powers are the disproportionate influence granted by wealth and privilege, and the way that when one part of the population has an obscenely disproportionate level of either, they will use it to oppress and harm those who don\u2019t. When offered the power he\u2019s been so long denied, at the point where our heroes figure out how to out-brain their oppressors, Alexander turns it down: \u201cI don\u2019t want to be like them,\u201d he tells Kirk, after Kirk has laid out as explicit an endorsement of Trek\u2019s futuristic socialism and extreme inclusiveness as I\u2019ve ever seen in Original Trek. \u201cWhere we come from,\u201d he tells an incredulous Alexander, \u201csize, shape, or colour makes no difference, and no one has the power.\u201d \u201cThe power,\u201d here, being literally their tormentors\u2019 superpowers, but they may as well be handing a printed indictment of rich white supremacist elite right through the fourth wall and directly into the viewers\u2019 living rooms.
It\u2019s not you. They really are just giant bags of dicks.
Add to this the fact that this episode contains the famous First Interracial Kiss (though it\u2019s under undeniably disturbing circumstances and may or may not be the \u201cfirst,\u201d historically), we can\u2019t exactly call this episode subtle. But we can appreciate it for both its timeliness and how ahead of its time it managed to be.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Both subtle and oh god, the air-dancing.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2jxZfA5<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:893453","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/893453.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=893453"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: This week\u2019s episode really, really","published":"2017-01-11T19:55:34Z","updated":"2017-01-11T19:55:34Z","content":"nsmtnz:
This week\u2019s episode really, really wanted to be a ghost story.
It almost manages it - Kirk, rather than saving the day, spends most of the episode floating at low-opacity in the background, waving his arms - but mostly this episode is about getting along.
And also how you never, ever fucking board a ghost ship.
I\u2019m just saying, \u201clet\u2019s go visit\u201d would not be my first impulse.
The Enterprise is in search of yet another missing ship, this time the Defiant (you might recognize the name from a successor\u2019s major appearance on DS9), which is missing and adrift in a section of uncharted territory where space is literally falling apart around it. Into this comes charging the Enterprise, whereupon they immediately become ensnared in the region\u2019s weird physics and harmful side-effects. Specifically: this part of space does a particular kind of brain damage that makes humans go slowly insane.
This is a pretty well-worn plot for TOS, a Man vs. Environment tale where they have to brain their way out of a seemingly impossible situation. What\u2019s unexpected is that after beaming aboard the ghost ship and finding the Defiant\u2019s entire crew not only dead, but murdered by each other, they beam back to the Enterprise and leave Kirk behind\u2026 and then he\u2019s lost.
I mean\u2026 sort of. Physically.
You read that right: for most of this episode, the crew is not only without the guidance of their captain, but they\u2019re pretty sure he\u2019s dead. They even hold a mini-memorial, is-this-really-the-time memorial service midway through the episode, which mostly serves to highlight the tensions between the surviving senior officers, namely Spock and Bones who, absent the social lubricant usually provided by Kirk, are having what we will call \u201cissues\u201d with their grief, the dangerous situation, and each other.
Fortunately, the triumph of this story is basically what Kirk leaves in his Final Message addressed to Bones and Spock: we need to get along with each other in order to survive.
Also: social drinking solves everything.
As for the titular Tholians? Well, they\u2019re there, for maybe the last 25% of the episode, and they mostly serve to crank up the ticking-clock pressure and build a space-net. I mean, it\u2019s a nice space-net. I guess.
Overall this is a pretty good bottle-episode, even if the Tholians themselves could have been replaced by, like, the ship\u2019s rapidly dwindling power supply. Or a black hole. Or a really big space rock.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Orange Tang: the cure for space dementia! This explains so much.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2jwsrUt<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:893277","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/893277.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=893277"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: So just to get this out of the way before we start: oh...","published":"2016-12-28T19:47:05Z","updated":"2016-12-28T19:47:05Z","content":"nsmtnz:
So just to get this out of the way before we start: oh god, later Klingons are so much better than TOS-era Klingons. Not just in terms of, you know, a vastly more fleshed-out and consistent culture and general coolness factor, but also because of the wow, really terrible (both in terms of, you know, just being brownface and also because of the impossibly bad quality) brownface makeup. It is somehow most noticeable on Kang\u2019s science officer, wife and one of only two Klingon ladies in the original series, Mara.
It\u2019s fine, just melt a Hershey bar and smear it all over their faces. No one will notice.
(A heads-up at this point that this episode does include a scene with a sexual assault.)
We\u2019re not sure what the goal here was, since earlier TOS Klingons didn\u2019t\u2026 really\u2026 have this? So we\u2019re not sure what makeup and wardrobe were smoking that day, but.
This week\u2019s episode also purports to deliver a subtle message of not letting yourself be riled up by bullshit, hate-mongering propaganda to hate and fight things that actually have nothing to do with your own life (we try, guys; we try) that could conceivably be relevant to today\u2019s mediasphere, but actually just brings us a torturously drawn-out metaphor for how we should all just hug it out.
We genuinely did not need the other 50 minutes.
Here\u2019s the rundown: the Enterprise and a Klingon ship under the command of one of our favourite Klingons, Kang, are tricked into a rendezvous. The planet supposedly had a Federation colony on it, but it`s mysteriously gone, with no sign on their instruments that it ever existed. The Klingon ship, on the other hand, suffers a catastrophic malfunction that (possibly) kills 400 of their crew. Tragedy on both sides! How terrible! And then the Enterprise beams the survivors aboard, leaving them with equal numbers of Klingons and Federation crew, and suddenly shit gets weird.\u00a0
By which I mean: a bunch of swords appear from thin air.
The takeway is that the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by a glowy disco-ball alien that feeds on negative emotions like hatred, specifically \u201crace hatred,\u201d because while Star Trek has never been a subtle beast when it comes to its messaging, TOS is somehow even less subtle than its descendants. The disco ball wanted to keep them fighting so it could suck up all those delicious, delicious bigotry feelings, even going so far as to revive fallen fighters when they\u2019ve been killed by the other side.
\u2026yeah.
Like I said, Trek is not subtle. On the other hand, we mostly don\u2019t mind.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Oh god, so bad.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2htTm55<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:892992","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/892992.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=892992"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: Do you enjoy bizarre sci-fi-esque westerns like Wild...","published":"2016-12-22T00:28:05Z","updated":"2016-12-22T00:28:05Z","content":"nsmtnz:
Do you enjoy bizarre sci-fi-esque westerns like Wild Wild West and Westworld? Alternately, have you been doing a lot of drugs? Then this episode is for you!
Seriously. First of all, the reason given for the Enterprise visiting this planet either makes no sense at all or makes them look like assholes, which always gets us off to a glowing start. Second of all, this episode takes place in a 19th-century Wild West town that apparently did not feel the need to put walls or ceilings on any of its buildings, something that is never, at any point in the episode, commented upon by anyone.
They do, however, have this fabulous floating sky clock. Trade-offs.
Basically, Kirk, following orders from higher-up, approaches a planet that has done them the damned courtesy of sending a probe telling the Enterprise in no uncertain terms that they are not at home to visitors, thanks. Naturally, this means that when the away party beams down, they find themselves quickly lectured by an almost unbelievably shoddily-constructed Guest Alien who informs them that because they can\u2019t follow simple instructions or respect sovereign space, they must now be executed\u2026 in the weirdest fucking way I have ever heard of, even in Star Trek.
Death by toxic exposure to your own shitty past? I mean, it\u2019s novel.
Basically, they\u2019re zipped to Pretend Tombstone Arizona, the away team is cast as the Clantons, and the Earps are going to kill them if they don\u2019t skip town by 5pm. Yes, Death by O.K. Corral. Supposedly this was chosen from Kirk\u2019s mind because he (and his crew) must die by the \u201cviolence of [his] own past.\u201d The fact that Kirk\u2019s ancestors are from Iowa, not the Wild Wild West, is apparently immaterial to the moment, but\u2026 whatever.
Obviously the away team does not perish at the hands of the Earps and Doc Holliday (weirdly cast as Snidely Whiplash-level black hats in this story). But neither do they, really, escape via application of their smarts, as usual. They work out that the whole Wild West set is an illusion, but that the bullets can still kill them if they believe in them. But do we get to see the power of human imagination being wielded as the ultimate weapon against violence and death? No. It turns out that humans? Just too emotional to logically believe that an illusion is unreal.
Fortunately Spock is around to give them the psychic equivalent of an anti-anxiety pill.
Like, there are parts of this episode that definitely come out the other side of Bad and all the way back around to This Is Amazing, but the ten minutes of our lives we gave up to Spock doing the most awkward series of mind-melds ever really didn\u2019t help.
Floating sky clocks can only make up for so much.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
I mean, it\u2019s a lot less dark than Westworld. Somehow manages to make less sense. Sorry, I\u2019m still hung up on the total lack of walls.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2hejaDF<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:892783","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/892783.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=892783"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: This week\u2019s episode is widely considered","published":"2016-12-07T19:40:18Z","updated":"2016-12-07T19:40:18Z","content":"nsmtnz:
This week\u2019s episode is widely considered to be the worst of the Original Series, and while we beg to differ on \u201cworst,\u201d it\u2019s still pretty damn bad. From inconsistent characterization to random dialogue to one of the most random stunt-casts in our shared experience, this ep goes from \u201cuhh\u201d to \u201cwhat?\u201d to \u201cumm, no\u201d with great speed and all the agility of a drunken wildebeest.
This week\u2019s Sailor Moon Says? Don\u2019t Trust Orphans.
The ship\u2019s first mistake is answering a distress call. Seriously, when does that ever go well? They arrive at Triacus to find that all the adult members of the archaeological expedition have committed suicide, leaving only their children alive. Children who are\u2026 shall we say disturbingly unaffected? Creepily cheerful? by the horrible deaths of their parents, apparently right in front of them.
Now you know, and I know, that creepy orphans are not to be trusted, especially in sci-fi, but the crew takes the kids aboard without even a biohazard scan (yet another checkmark in the fail column for the Enterprise crew!) and they promptly take over the ship.
You can\u2019t stop the darkness with ice cream. At least, not for long.
What follows doesn\u2019t make a whole lot more sense than what comes before, nor does the tone get any less inconsistent. We discover that the children are being manipulated by some kind of immortal demon, Gorgan, a translucent holographic dude who most closely resembles an inverted lampshade, but the villain\u2019s motivations - beyond \u201cconquest!\u201d - and the children\u2019s reasons for going along are never really explained or, when they are explained, even remotely plausible. Not to mention that for an episode centred around children, the children themselves are so bizarrely written that we have to wonder if the people writing them had ever met a genuine human child.
Unless the human child was the kid from The Exorcist. In which case, fair.
Verdict: baffling, off-key, and left us cold. Even Shatner\u2019s famous, oft-mocked performance in the Homoerotic Turbolift Scene couldn\u2019t save this one.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
So many jumpsuits. So little writing.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2hk8Wxn<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:892512","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/892512.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=892512"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: So we\u2019ve been looking forward with - not","published":"2016-11-30T19:35:26Z","updated":"2016-11-30T19:35:26Z","content":"nsmtnz:
So we\u2019ve been looking forward with - not anticipation? More like trepidation? Dread? knowing this episode was coming up pretty soon, and here we are: The One Where Kirk Gets Amnesia and Cosplays A Hollywood Native American. To give you an idea of the level of cultural sensitivity on display for this episode, the alternate episode title was \u201cThe Paleface.\u201d
Is this episode, super, super-racist? Why, yes! How did you guess?
Just to give you an idea: this happens.
So to summarize, briefly: there\u2019s an asteroid headed for a planet that is home to a pre-warp culture. The Enterprise is going to divert the asteroid and keep it from killing everyone, which is apparently nbd in the 23rd century. Cool. Fine. I\u2019m with you.
Except then for no reason at all, even though they are on an extremely tight schedule (this is mentioned at least three times in the first five minutes of the episode), Kirk, Spock and Bones beam down to gawk at a) the weird alien monolith that seems strangely out of place on a world with no industrial development and b) the natives, who look curiously like pre-European-contact Native Americans of the These-Are-What-We-Had-In-Wardrobe tribe, and write an ode to how \u201cidyllic\u201d and \u201cuncomplicated\u201d their lives seem. (This is the first mention of The Preservers, aka: the omnipotent aliens who went around plucking up \u201cprimitive\u201d cultures and preserving them in situ on other worlds, who we can only assume were invented to retroactively explain away all the highly questionable Alternate Earth writing decisions so far.)
Should we, white men, feel funny about this framing? \u2026nah.
They\u2019re in a hurry, so naturally Kirk has to trip through a hole and get lost, forcing Spock and Bones to leave him behind in order to keep their appointment with the planet-killing asteroid,
Kirk gets himself electrocuted, gets amnesia, and emerges from the monolith to be greeted by the tribe\u2019s priestesses, one of whom promptly falls in love with him. Kirk - or rather, Kirok, as he comes to be called - gets adopted by the tribe as their new, uh, wizard? And worshiped as a god? and it only gets worse from there.
Naturally, the one canonically white dude gets immediately worshiped as a god. Nothing uncomfortable about this at ALL.
For what should be pretty obvious reasons, we were not huge fans. In addition to being ultra-terrible and full of holes big enough for a starship captain to fall through - the conflict makes very little sense, when it turns out that the planet had an asteroid deflection machine all along, and Spock comes to the solution mainly via inspirational lute-playing - but rife with the kind of infantilizing characterization of Native Americans\/First Nations people that should give any decent human contact humiliation. Kirk\u2019s whole character arc in this episode is a desire for a condescendingly-idealized \u201csimpler life\u201d that\u2019s handily delivered to him by amnesia and being slotted into a position of power and basically worshiped as a god. Not to mention the rampant brownface and the fact that the sole female guest star exists only to\u2026
\u2026no. I could go on. But honestly, you can probably guess, and if we had to watch this, so do you.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
I would kind of prefer to never think of this episode again but honestly, I also want you all to suffer with me.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2gLbDYf<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:892246","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/892246.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=892246"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: So mostly we loved this episode because it contains a...","published":"2016-11-30T17:35:15Z","updated":"2016-11-30T17:35:15Z","content":"nsmtnz:
So mostly we loved this episode because it contains a novelty for TOS: a take-no-shit female leader in the form of a Romulan Commander whose authority is so unimpeachable that we don\u2019t even get to learn her name.\u00a0
Witness the birth of the traditional Romulan Power Lounge. Her legacy, it is grand.
I mean, there are downsides. We encounter RomCom (we tend to come up with abbreviated nicknames for guest characters and this one was too good not to share) in the course of the Enterprise 100% participating in cross-Neutral-Zone espionage, and she ends up losing the day at least partly due to her having the hots for the tall drink of pointy-eared water that is Commander Spock. There are, of course, counter-arguments to the interpretations of both of those things, and as a bonus, the episode was written by our girl, D.C. Fontana, which lends at least two-thirds of us some confidence that our ultra-progressive headcanoning of this episode are at least a little right.
Come home with me and be my kept man. It\u2019ll be awesome.
I do have to question the wisdom of Starfleet\u2019s plan here, though, at least at the outset. The plan itself is relatively sound: manufacture a situation in which Starfleet personnel can get onboard a Romunal ship? Fine. Probably you do need to cross into Romulan space to do that. Suggest a possible explanation for this highly illegal action that does not represent a breach of the Federation-Romulan treaty (e.g. Kirk Has Gone Mad Again, something that happens often enough that you\u2019d think people would start to get suspicious)? Cool. I\u2019m with you so far. I\u2019m even with you as far as part C of this plan, i.e. While You\u2019re On Board, See If You Can Get Your Hands On Some Cloaking Tech, which I look on as a sort of value-added bonus-level option.\u00a0
Tech which, evidently, is much more modular than the level of tech onscreen so far might have led you to believe.
My objection arises in the initial planning stages, in that surely there were easier ways to go about acquiring this intelligence. Doesn\u2019t the Federation have spies? I\u2019m confident that Romulus does. Later on, I know that the Federation does. What is diplomacy for if not to serve as a flimsy cover for international espionage?
Learn from your neighbours, Federation. After all, isn\u2019t that what you\u2019re all about?
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Oh, look, it\u2019s one of my favourite episodes!
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2g7jRdj<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:891970","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/891970.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=891970"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: Welcome to season 3 of both TOS and Not So Much The...","published":"2016-11-16T19:37:43Z","updated":"2016-11-16T19:37:43Z","content":"nsmtnz:
Welcome to season 3 of both TOS and Not So Much The Neutral Zone! Can you believe we\u2019ve been doing this for this long?? Neither can we!
In less cheerful news: we are so. Sorry. America. The existential dread we feel on your behalf actually came in handy this week, though, because this episode is basically what it says on the tin. That is: repetitions of the title also comprise roughly 25% of the episode dialogue.
In what feels very much like a great big middle finger to the network, this week\u2019s adventure begins with a purple-booted alien lady booping onto the bridge with little warning (in fairness, Kirk did call security, they just didn\u2019t get there in time), knocking everyone unconscious, and then stealing Spock\u2019s brain and making off into the night. The crew wakes up, finds a newly-brain-free Spock on the floor of Sickbay, and then vow to track down the thief and return Spock\u2019s brain to him. Never mind the fact that the medical technology to do that doesn\u2019t actually exist in the Federation: Kirk knows his heroic role and that ultimately, the universe will bend itself to his whims.
I really don\u2019t need this shit, Jim.
Ultimately it turns out that the brain-thieves live on an ice-age planet where the men and women are segregated into surface-dwelling cavemen and bunker-dwelling lam\u00e9-clad cave-ladies who live underground, control all the technology, and enslave the men through the use of pain belt devices. They apparently stole Spock\u2019s brain to replace their previous Controller, another brain that finally kicked it after ten thousand years of running their underground complex.
They\u2019re also really, really stupid. The episode really, really wants you to know that the bunker-women are stupid. Or at least I assume it does, given how many times and ways the male Starfleet officers repeat it. Apparently their mental faculties have \u201catrophied\u201d after generations of having their lives run by the Controller. Setting aside that that\u2019s not how brains fucking work, let\u2019s focus on the relevant questions, like: if they have such tiny, atrophied lady-brains, how did their leader sneak onto the Enterprise, perform cutting-edge neurosurgery, escape, and install Spock\u2019s brain into its new home?
I\u2019m so glad you asked, because the answer is Space-Age Hair Curler.
Apparently the answer is \u201cthe computer gave her a temporary upgrade,\u201d but the knowledge only lasts for three hours.
No, that\u2019s not how brains work either, I know. But on the upside, this episode solves the question of \u201chow are we going to get a major cast member into every scene of this episode if his brain has been literally removed from his head?\u201d
I AM SO GLAD YOU ASKED.
Better than the remote-control BB-8 we use to taunt the dog? \u2026still no.
This episode is fundamentally bananas, but let\u2019s all sit back and appreciate the solid brass balls of the writer who first had this idea, then spoke it aloud in front of other professional adults, and then managed to convince them to use it. Hats off, unknown writer.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Please allow me to assure you that this episode is at least\u00a0200% more bananas than it seems to be.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2f5a6P4<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:891806","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/891806.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=891806"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: Now, I\u2019m sure this will come as no","published":"2016-10-26T19:53:53Z","updated":"2016-10-26T19:53:53Z","content":"nsmtnz:
Now, I\u2019m sure this will come as no surprise to you, the habitual sci-fi consumer, but here\u2019s a pro tip: when you give a New, Amazing, Cutting Edge Computer the sole charge of a starship\/town\/space station, Shit Goes Down.
In this episode, Dr. Richard Daystrom (who later gave his name to The Daystrom Institute, one of the Federation\u2019s premiere scientific institutes of research and learning) is here to field-test his shiny new M5 computer, a device designed to take over the running of a starship in order to make a human crew redundant. Dr. Daystrom, as it happens, is, uh, a liiiiittle too emotionally involved with his Ultimate Computer.
As a rule, excessive fondling of the technology is not an encouraging sign.
Now, a nearly infinite number of questions might immediately spring to mind, but we think the principle ones are:
why?
wouldn\u2019t that make the entire mission of Starfleet redundant?
haven\u2019t any of the top brass who approved this field test ever seen a sci-fi movie?
moreover, why??
Also, naturally, the moment Daystrom comes on board he just can\u2019t shut up about how pointless human crews and, more importantly, human Captains are, and how the future is all about super-genius computers doing the work of all these folks who have dedicated their lives to, uh, you know, running a starship, and making them obsolete. He\u2019s getting a mystifying amount of support from Starfleet brass, even from Kirk\u2019s so-called \u201cold friend\u201d Commodore Wesley, who after the M5\u2019s first successful outing goes so far as to address Kirk as \u201cCaptain Dunsel,\u201d which is Starfleet Academy-ese for \u201cyou serve no purpose.\u201d
Your best man speech was great and everything, but now you\u2019re obsolete.
Burrrrrrn.
Obviously, obviously, the M5 goes a little spare, takes over the entire ship, and - oops! - murders upwards of three dozen crew on the other ships involved in the field test. Even in tech support we couldn\u2019t label that as \u201cexpected behaviour.\u201d It comes out that the M5 isn\u2019t actually a pure AI, but an \u201cimprint\u201d of Daystrom\u2019s own brain, and it would appear that the hybridization isn\u2019t exactly\u2026 what\u2019s the word? Oh yes: stable.
Pro tip #2: hit the kill switch before the computer kills the first redshirt, not after.
Honestly, we think, as always, that the #1 qualification for admittance to Starfleet Academy is genre savvy, e.g. maybe a quick skim of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On the plus side, it appears that \u201conce built a pseudo-computer that went rogue and murdered dozens of Starfleet personnel\u201d is not a disqualifying CV item when it comes to getting vast, prestigious research facilities named after you, so there\u2019s that. In the Federation, anyone really can be anything.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Just basic genre-savvy. That\u2019s all I\u2019m asking.
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2dLsXdY<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:891559","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/891559.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=891559"}}],"title":"nsmtnz: You know it\u2019s a bad week when","published":"2016-10-20T01:59:34Z","updated":"2016-10-20T01:59:34Z","content":"nsmtnz:
You know it\u2019s a bad week when \u201cstarship crew reduced to little piles of salt\u201d is the high point of the episode.
Okay, here\u2019s a partial list of acceptable scenarios under which you may portray generally Earth, or specifically the United States of America, as existing on an alien planet or anywhere that is not our universe:
alternate timelines
alternate universes
cultures that deliberately imitate Earth
cultures that have been plucked from Earth\/America and plonked down on another planet and directed to develop that way
cultures that have been plucked from Earth\/America and deliberately preserved, in situ, by omnipotent alien museum curators
alien training programs that mimic and live as humans for the purposes of infiltration\/invasion
Scenarios where this just pisses us off:
alien planets thousands of light-years from Earth spontaneously developing parallel China and America, right down to the Stars & Stripes, the Christian Bible and the Declaration of Independence for the purposes of making a sloppy point about how The Cold War Is Bad And We Should Stop, with bonus White Indians, yes you read that right
Guess which one happens in this episode.
What the ACTUAL FUCK, Gene Roddenberry.
The frustrating thing is that this episode contains at least three barely-connected episodes, and 1.75 of them could be good stories. Unfortunately, they\u2019re made retroactively irrelevant by the general shittiness of the final, out-of-the-blue, America, Fuck Yeah! minutes of the episode are, especially since the entire debacle could have been avoided by a refresher course on Biohazard Protocols (yes, we\u2019re back here, again) and Keeping In Touch With Starfleet.
This makes me so? irrationally?? angry???
Mystifyingly, this was one of Gene Roddenberry\u2019s submissions for the original pilot, but NBC - rightly - made him shelve it until late in the second season when, presumably, they could no longer stop him.
Possibly this episode would seem less wretched to an actual American, but we seriously doubt it.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
I\u2019m still just, so angry? And even more angry about the parts of this episode that are too real\u00a0up against the current state of Americaland.
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So with guest-host Trisha joining us this week, the NSMTNZ crew is 50\/50 on loving this episode and finding the Kelvins some of most genuinely scary villains of TOS so far.
The story begins rather generically, with the Enterprise responding to a distress call\u2026 and then being immediately taken prisoner. \u201cThanks for picking up the phone,\u201d says Chief Villain Rojan. \u201cYou, your ship, and your crew are now ours to command.\u201d
\u201c\u2026huh,\u201d says Captain Kirk.
-50 points for attempted galactic domination. +100 points for alien conqueror gender parity.
The thing about this story is that you expect it to go down just like every other episode: our brave crew, taken prisoner by seemingly all-powerful aliens, notices a flaw at the outset, makes a plan to exploit that flaw, and ultimately defeats said all-powerful aliens. And ultimately, that\u2019s what happens. Intellectually, as viewers, we know that ultimately, the Enterprise crew will triumph. But the difference in this episode is, chiefly, two-fold.
First: the episode defies your assumption that the crew will progressively one-up the aggressors by having the Kelvins repeatedly, ruthlessly, foil our protagonists\u2019 attempts at rebellion, starting with a calculated, cold-blooded murder in the first five minutes of the episode. This murder is not only utterly cold-blooded, but deliberately calculated for the purposes of breaking Kirk, and making him less likely to take risks later on in the episode.
It\u2019s like a really, really dark version of Follow the Lady. Like, LAYERS of dark.
And the crazy thing? It works. Former-space-squid Rojan reads Kirk like a book in the first forty seconds of their acquaintance and works out exactly what will keep Kirk in line when faced with the deaths of more of his crew, to the point of making Kirk decide against initiating a self-destruct that will protect the Federation and the entire Milky Way Galaxy.
Second: the crew gives up. Not for long, admittedly; the time between \u201coh, we\u2019re fucked\u201d and \u201coh hey, a plan!\u201d is a matter of seconds, in-episode. But it happens, and the Eureka moment that gives them the idea for their plan is essentially an accident: their enemy makes a mistake. But if that hadn\u2019t happened? Damn. Who knows?
Because we wouldn\u2019t want to go an entire episode without cultural stereotypes, Scotty\u2019s solution is get everyone super-drunk.
It\u2019s a rare episode of Trek that can convince us, even for a fraction of a second, that maybe this time, just maybe, the good guys might not win the day. And even though the solution to the problem descends into Wacky Hijinks - tricking the Kelvins into giving in to the unexpected barrage of inconvenient urges that come hand-in-hand with stuffing an ultra-rational space-squid into a tiny human body via booze, makeouts and fisticuffs - that qualifies it, IMHO, for entry into the Surprisingly Good Episodes Hall of Fame.
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Despite the bananas parts at the end there were parts of this one that were genuinely scary??
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My question is: have the people who write these stories ever, ever owned a dog?
from Tumblr http:\/\/ift.tt\/2dAsNIQ<\/a> (click to see full post including images)"},{"id":"urn:lj:livejournal.com:atom1:chandri:890557","link":[{"@attributes":{"rel":"alternate","type":"text\/html","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/890557.html"}},{"@attributes":{"rel":"self","type":"text\/xml","href":"https:\/\/chandri.livejournal.com\/data\/atom\/?itemid=890557"}}],"title":"To the dickface who was my first phonecall this lovely Friday morning:","published":"2016-09-16T17:08:42Z","updated":"2016-09-16T17:08:42Z","content":"Wow, yes, when you submit a request, half an hour after we close, for us to do something that we are not allowed to do without confirmation from a separate department - information which is included in the automatically-generated email you got in response to the request, which I know you read because you bitched about it for two straight minutes (\u201cI don\u2019t need an automatic email telling me things, I need to talk to a person to get this done immediately\u201d, ACTUAL QUOTE) - and get no answer overnight or within the first twenty minutes that we\u2019re open the next day, and when I pick up the phone and re-iterate that no, Thing has not been done because\u00a0
you only submitted the request yesterday, after we were all gone, and\u00a0
as spelled out in the email you admitted reading, we can do nothing until HR tells us to\u00a0
\u2026the appropriate thing is ABSOLUTELY to berate me for a further two minutes and then hang up in a snit and call the one of our advisors who is also the chair of your department (academia is weird).
(Who will tell you the exact same thing.)
(And then, after he notices my frantic waving from his office doorway and has been informed that you only submitted the request last night, will call you back and sternly inform you that, and I\u2019m paraphrasing here, a lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on ours.)
(SUCK IT.)
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Me, expecting an explosion of entitlement and whining, as per usual from this department: Ooh, yeah, that's due to an issue with the native WordPress media player that we don't have a fix for, yet.
Instructor: Ohhhhh okay, no problem, I'll just change the way I'm teaching the class.
Me: ...so you're my new favourite.
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This episode is called \u201cThe Immunity Syndrome,\u201d but frankly this is a missed opportunity to title an episode \u201cAttack of the Giant Space Amoeba,\u201d or to gleefully over-use the word \u201centropy.\u201d
Attack of the Giant Space Amoeba. HOW COOL DOES THAT SOUND.
Because that\u2019s what this episode wants to be about, folks: entropy, and why it\u2019s the enemy.
This is another one of those times when you can just about see the episode that the episode wanted to be, but it never quite made it out into the world.
What this episode wants to be about:
how fatalism solves nothing except for making extremely orderly log entries
how just because something has worked for a long time doesn\u2019t mean it will always work and how that mindset might indeed get you killed when faced with something totally outside of your experience
how what sets humans apart is our ability to go \u201cwait, WAIT, fuck YOU,\u201d and completely re-invent ourselves in order to survive (the latter being a central thesis statement of Star Trek)
What this episode is actually about:
an up-front death-count on par with a Garth Nix novel
a pseudo-B-plot of inexplicable Spock\/Bones dick-swinging over martyring themselves for science
a literal trek into the Space Heart of Darkness whose symptomatic effects on humans include irritability, depression, confusion, and a loss of motivation, all of which translated through the screen to us, your reviewers
Keptin, I need a nap.
As so often happens with TOS, the episode you will inevitably write in your head while watching is far superior to what\u2019s on the screen. And maybe sugar up before sitting down to watch, lest the entropy get you, too.\u00a0
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Just reading the description for this episode makes me feel tired.
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There are two main settings: sitting at a desk in her home, and walking through woods where these experiences took place as she tries to surface her memories (the woods have a set of background sounds to differentiate them from the house).\u00a0
Each episode will switch back and forth, but I\u2019m trying to come up with a clear audible way of transitioning between these two settings, like a cut-beep but not a cut-beep, and something that sounds like it fits with the premise and the context. Right now I\u2019m thinking a burst of radio static, but it\u2019s just a placeholder, and I\u2019m open to suggestions. Any ideas?
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So this episode is nominally a murder mystery, which honestly, made us give it a whole lot of bonus points right at the outset. Our crew is visiting Argelius, a port world where, well, to give you an idea, the law of the land is literally love. A couple of hundred years ago Argelians decided that work was stupid, fighting was boring, and conflict was the worst, and decided to devote their lives to seeking happiness and pleasure. Honestly, this sounds like a pretty sensible set of ideals on which to base a culture. The shocking thing is how generally gross the representatives of the Enterprise are acting in the first five minutes, sprawled out on cushions around a table leering dramatically at the nice lady dancer who is just trying to do her job, guys.\u00a0
Foreground: young woman, dancing. Background: Scotty, Bones & Kirk being gross foreigners.
There\u2019s arguably a plot reason for this, but it\u2019s a stupid one: to manufacture a totally unnecessary motive for Scotty to be cast immediately as the suspect when the unfortunate young lady (Tara) is murdered about ten minutes later: Scotty recently suffered a concussion, which apparently, by insane 1960s space logic, has given him a \u201ctotal resentment of all women\u201d (yes, what the actual fuck is an excellent question to have here, though it did cross our minds that, if we\u2019d believed it was deliberate, this is in some ways an incredibly modern way of viewing the relationship between brain injury and culpability in violent crime\u2026 though we pretty much came down on refusing to award credit on the basis of how stupid it sounds). Fortunately, Ship Pimp James Kirk is here to set him up with Tara, hoping they can bone that nonsensical resentment right out of him.
It\u2019s almost funny how many more times Scotty ends up awkwardly positioned with blood on his hands over yet another murdered woman (three in total, RIP Tara, Lieutenant Karen Tracy, and Sybo), or it would be if this episode didn\u2019t centre on a murderer whose motive is that it simply hates women.
Walks in the fog: NOT SO ROMANTIC AFTER ALL, HUH.
Yes, seriously, this is the explicit motive, for real.
By the virtue of Space Google, they discover that the culprit is, in fact, a deathless, millennia-old misogyny cloud possessing a series of man-shaped shells which was probably the truth behind the legend of Jack the Ripper, but still: this is so bananas that if a woman had written this episode, I would be tempted to think it was trying to be subversive.
They would have caught the murderer a lot sooner if Space Google could fuzzy search, I\u2019m just saying.
As it is, we just have to sit back and admire the skillful use of Agatha Christie red flags in pointing loudly at the murderer in the first ten minutes of the story: out-of-towner, loner, obstructionist, and portrayed jarringly by John Fiedler, voice of Piglet.
Some stuff happened to Piglet in the Hundred Acre Wood, apparently.
Yeah. Let that one settle.\u00a0
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[From The Not So Much The Neutral Zone Podcast]
Piglet. Piglet why.
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