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Star Trek: Lower Decks: Reflections (2022)
Best Lower Decks episode so far!
This episode does everything right!
- 90s TNG-era Star Trek nostalgia, but only as a backdrop, not as integral part of the plot. Trekkies will recognize many details, but it's never a nostalgia bait.
- Characters get some development and one of them even finds out things about his past. And these things make even sense and offer room for further developments! In this episode character drives plot and plot drives character - with the prospect of even getting more down the line.
- Boimler ultimately got his guts together and Mariner has finally been put in her place.
- The show scaled back on the humor, especially on the absurd kind of humor. Do not get me wrong: They did not drop it entirely, but it has been set to 50%.
- When we see the Cerritos go to warp, we can see that the creators actually watch The Orville, as they copied the "go to warp speed but make anaft view shot out of it" from The Orville's season 2 finale.
If they could just stop using the f-word 20 times per episode...
The Orville: Domino (2022)
Better Star Trek than Star Trek, better Star Wars than Star Wars, better Mass Effect than Mass Effect
This is an ultra-high quality sci fi movie that could have run in cinemas. 80 minutes full of plot development, character development, thrill, action and amazing effects. Roughly 20 minutes into this episode the writers already turned the universe as we knew it from the previous seasons upside down. And boy was the finale satisfying! The only sad thing is that Seth MacFarlane is clearly building for a possible series finale next week by wrapping up most plots and subplots while only foreshadowing instead of starting new ones. He seem to be unsure about a possible renewal for season 4, despite today's installmant making The Orville the best sci fi show in recent years.
The Orville: Gently Falling Rain (2022)
Unconventional, unpredictable, intense
This was definitely the best episode this season so far. Gripping, intense and with many surprises - but it never felt contrived or constructed. It is also astonishing how the production values haven been upped for season 3. Seriously, this episode feels like it had a $10m budget.
The Orville: Mortality Paradox (2022)
Mystery Box storytelling done right!
At first I thought this would become something like TNG S2E12 "The Royal". But it soon become apparent that it might turn out more like TNG S2E2 "Where Silence Has Lease", but with The Orville's Nagilum not willed to sacrifice its laboratory rats. And in the end we got a touch of VOY S2E18 "Death Wish". And it did not feel artificial or forced. Plus it was very well-paced for the full 60 minutes. That is how you do full hour episodes!
An amazing episode and a return to form for the show!
Star Trek: Picard: The Star Gazer (2022)
I hope this is not a nostalgia bait...
There are some definite highlights in here:
(+) The Sovereign class has her first appearance on the small screen.
(+) We see many other well-established TNG-era starships, and they even have ships from Star Trek: Online as well as sensible refits (e.g. The Excelsior's warp nacelles) present. Like it!
(+) We finally got the LCARS screens back. Lovely! They provide a visual like to established Star Trek and are a paradigm of good, clean, interesting and especially timeless design.
(+) Many little easter eggs: The reckoning tablet from DS9 S06E21, the painting from Picard's ready room, the Mintakan tapestry from TNG and many more.
(+) Pacing seems to be better than in season 1.
(+) Unlike Star Trek: Discovery, this show does not appear to be a constant therapy session.
(+) The actors seem to have been cast for talent and not for diversity and representation.
(+) Excellent digital de-aging job on John de Lancie's Q scene! And also a good decision to let Q adjust his physical appearance to Picard's age after he realized how much Picard has aged over time. This suits his previous behavior to adjust to Picard's age, like in the series finale of TNG. Of course this was also a cost-saving measure, but it was a well chosen one.
(+) They did not cut Whoopi Goldberg's appearance as Guinan despite the actresses' recent inexcuseable comments on social issues.
But there are also problems:
(-) I wish they had digitally de-aged Guinan. Explaining the slowly-aging El-Aurians' aged appearance with her desire to blend in with the humans surrounding her is lazy and absurd. They were too eager to save a buck here. Disappointing.
(-) While pacing improves over season 1, the writers still procrastinate plot development.
(-) They forgot to turn the lights on: Federation starships always had bright, clean but still cozy bridges. But the bridge of the Stargazer is dark, cold and full of unnecessary greebles. The same is true for the corridors.
(-) Too many CGI sets. E.g. The Stargazer's shuttlebay is an obvious CGI set and also looks way to similar to Discovery's terrible shuttlebay.
(-) There are way too many lens flares.
(-) The Borg queen was terrible! Didn't look like a Borg and the Swiss clockwork in hear head was laughable and cringe.
(-) Why is Rios' ship's name "Stargazer"? Shouldn't it be "Stargazer-A"? Disregarding Starfleet's naming conventions is a clear canon violation!
(-) The cigar Rios holds is ludicrous: He never lights it up despite trying at least once as well as holding the thing in his hand for prolonged periods of time. Also in Voyager S01E08 Tom Paris says that humanity gave up smoking a long time ago. So I consider Rios' cigar a canon violation.
(-) My biggest problem is how the Picard family and the Picard family home is treated. (1) Picard's father seems to be some sort of rapist who beat his wife. (You can clearly see that Patrick Stewart wrote this. He told on multiple conventions that he witnessed his father abusing his mother.) While technically not being a canon violation, it clashes with the impression of a strict but loving family head we got in TNG S04E02. (2) The woman presented as Picard's mother is incompatible with established canon. She is way to young to become the elderly woman shown in TNG S01E06 set in 2364, especially considering she is already dead by then and only represented as a vision from the past. Also their eye colors mismatch (gray like Jean-Luc Picard in TNG S01E06, but clearly blue in PIC S02E01). (3) The Picard family home is shown in TNG S04E02. It then burn down in ST7. In PIC S01E01 it shows up again, but this time completely(!) different than in TNG S04E02, which is fine, as it had to be rebuilt after the fire and not necessarily needed to be rebuilt faithful to the original. But now in PIC S02E01 flashbacks reveal that young Jean-Luc already lived in the new home when he was a kid. A crisp-clear canon and timeline violation, done for dramatic presentation.
My fear is that this season's first episode was a nostalgia bait, just like the first episode of the first season. Seriously, I think they did fan service to lure the senior Trekkers into the show and then let them down.
Conclusion: Rated M for Mediocre. But it's the best live-action Star Trek contend since 2005.
Tom and Jerry (2021)
Surprisingly funny and entertaining
Seriously, it is much better than the ciritics say. Good pacing and the slapstick humor works out much better than anticipated. The animation style takes a few minutes to get used to, but you will definitely get into it. An most important: This movie does NOT "ruin" previous iterations of Tom & Jerry or your childhood memories about them.
The Expanse: Nemesis Games (2021)
Terrible season finally wraps up
- The Expanse is an ensemble show. It doesn't work when separating the crew members.
- The "Crying Naomi Show" was hard to bear. (When did "The Expanse" become "Star Trek: Discovery"?)
- There is no excuse for what happened to Alex. This is unacceptable.
- Avasarala's story arc is absurd. Politics doesn't work that way.
Star Trek: Discovery: The Sanctuary (2020)
Usually Trek shows get better with each season. This show doesn't.
"The Sanctuary" replaces "Point of Light" as the weakest episode of STD.
The dull, uninspired story arc is served slower and slower with each episode. It's like every episode is a filler. Moreover, everything is artificial, plastic and feels "injected".
Not to mention all the plot holes, inconsistencies and canon violations. And the visual style sucks as well: The lens flares. The blurry special effects. The chromatic aberration. The lighting. The camerawork.
Star Trek: Picard (2020)
Constant retcons destroy what made things interesting in the first place --- but there are also many pleasing aspects about this show
First of all: This is very emotional for me. I'm born in the very late 1980s and grew up with the 1987-2002 TNG-era Star Trek, as TNG+DS9+VOY had constant reruns on mainstream German TV stations until the late 2000s. So there is nostalgia in play, and nostalgia usually isn't a good reviewer. But a fan's lore knowledge can also help to sort things out.
So straight to every fan's most important question: Does the show respect and uphold established Star Trek canon? The answer to this question is: Sort of. Considering the state of Star Trek since 2009, this is a success. And a cornerstone of this success is that a contemporary Trek show made with modern movie tech and a big budget has much less trouble integrating into the Star Trek timeline when it is set 20 years after ST10 like STP rather than 10 years before TOS like STD. That's simply because in a sequel the advancements in production standards can be explained away as in-universe advancements, while a prequel completely destroys suspension of disbelief.
And they really tried to link STP to TNG/DS9/VOY visually while still appealing to "the next generation" of consumers! Let's take LCARS for example: The OS evolved since we last saw it on the small screen in Voyager's Endgame, but you can clearly see it is still LCARS - just after the installation of some updates over the two decades. It's like the evolution of Windows during the last two decades: It changed, but the basic layout and iconography stayed the same. The producers also made sure to provide visual links to established TNG-era elements, like with the items in Picard's exhibition room at the Starfleet Museum, er the esthetics of the replicator or by making the Galaxy class USS Enterprise-D and it 10 forward bar appear.
So far there aren't many significant canon contradictions. Okay, in TNG S01E26 Data said that TV didn't last much beyond the year 2040, yet we see TV newscasts and Picard doing a TV interview. But admittedly we already saw a TV newscast in Voyager's series finale "Endgame", and I personally can live with such small and infrequent canon offenses quite well. But I can't live with the big ones! Big ones like shuttles from Discovery flying around everywhere while the beautiful TNG-era shuttles were nowhere to be seen! This is a bad artistic decision and it makes no sense canon-wise, as Discovery is set over a century before Picard while Voyager with its beautiful shuttlecrafts is set only 25 years before Picard. Such inconsistencies suck!
On the other hand we get much nostalgic balm that will please every fan's soul. We can spot a dermal regenerator in action. We see both TNG-era uniforms - and they look good. We see the communicator that was used in Voyager and the latter half of DS9. We see many recreations of props used in TNG like the Kurlan naiskos, a Klingon bat'leth or the banner from Captain Picard Day. (The original props had been sold as part of the "It's a Wrap!" auction, but the recreations look very, very convincing.) We see established alien species like the Trill.
A thing that can be noticed quite negatively however is the surprisingly cheap looking VFX. Enterprise-D's ten forward can easily be recognized as digital set, the shot of San Francisco's bay area looks like from a 2000s Syfy channel movie and the CGI model of the Enterprise-D looks inferior to his physical counterpart(s) from the 80s/90s where real light was hitting real surfaces. (TNG aged very well and it is hard to live up to its standards!)
But the worst thing is the horrible writing. The first episode has a clear jumping the shark moment where massive hack writing is setting in. You will immediately realize what I mean when watching the show. The first 40 minutes of the series are making it quite clear that we can expect an unrealistic as well as contradicting storyline full of plot holes. And yes, I'm positive about this after the first episode.
Game of Thrones: The Last of the Starks (2019)
Lackluster
I'm speechless and shocked. The season already started a bit weaker than the previous ones, but I wasn't overly concerned - until now.
With this episode GoT is just like all the average high-budget fantasy show out there: You can watch it, but you don't have to.
Star Trek: Discovery: Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2 (2019)
The Universe is under an obligation to make sense for me. And it deeply violated my trust with this episode.
(1) The storyline is hyper-convoluted and largely grotesque. Just make a sanity check: Can you always tell why something is happening? Can you always give the motivation a character has for doing the things he does in any given scene? Seriously, I can't. Maybe I'm stupid and the ingenious work of Alex Kurtzman is beyond my comprehension. In this case I likely should stick with simplistic shows I understand, like "Game of Thrones", "Dark" or "True Detective".
(2) The pacing is obnoxious. Like in many previous STD episodes, we have important chunks of information presented to the audience in rushed conversations shot from way too many different angels. Sometimes you have to rewind in order to be able to catch up with the newest plot hole. But then, just one scene later, a way too lengthy sobbing-conversation makes us fast forward for minutes.
(3) The true identity of the Red Angel is finally revealed. And it turns out to be no surprise for the critics of the show, who correctly predicted this "twist" months ago. And you can predict it, too! Just think like a pre-puberty child whose homework is to write a fanfic. Mary Sue incoming!
(4) A toxic visual style prevails throughout the whole series, including this episode: Lens flares, shaky camera work, unwarranted close-ups, swish pans, unnatural and too dark illumination, hyper-polished sets, etc. It seems the show is designed to primarily cater towards ADHD millennials instead of loyal fans.
(5) Part and parcel of an STD episode are tons of plot holes, inconsistencies and canon violations, so it's no surprise to find many of them in this episode as well. The authors evidently wrote the action scenes first and then constructed a lousy plot around them. (A spoiler review for season 2 will follow, detailing some of the plot holes.)
(6) This episode "borrowed" elements from Ender's Game, the MCU (especially Iron Man) and Star Wars - but not from Star Trek.
(7) You hoped for this episode to fix the timeline? Or do a Borg origin story? Well, get used to the bitter taste of disappointment.
(8) What else did I notice? Well, we see the Golden Gate Bridge's roadway covered with solar panels. But why? Doesn't the Federation make use of energy sources like fusion reactors or warp cores? And if everyone has a flying car or or uses teleporters, wouldn't it be cool to open up the bridge for tourists to stroll about? There is only one plausible reason why the writers did this solar panels thing: To show that their vision of the future as being car-free and super-eco-green. How generic. But at least someone handed Hipster-Spock a Gilette razor. That's an improvement.
BTW: This felt like a series finale, not a season finale. I'm really looking forward to see season 3 after this. My assumption is that S03 will entirely consist of Short Treks.
Captain Marvel (2019)
Better than feared, worse than hoped --- Or: Why is everyone giving this movie either 10/10 or 1/10?
I just watched the movie's midnight premiere here in Germany. So here are my first impressions:
(+) The "woke" advertising campaign has little to do with the final film. I found Brie Larson offending, but I don't find Captain Marvel offending.
(-) Generic plot. There are much better alien invasion flicks out there.
(+) VFX + SFX are splendid. But that's a basic requirement for a Marvel movie.
(-) The concept of a female Superman is as absurd as the concept of a male Superman. Did you dislike the scene in DC's "Justice League" where Superman flew around carrying a row house? If so, you will find Captain Marvel to be a camp culture screwball comedy that will make every Superman movie every produced look sane+sober. (I see that superheros per se are an absurd concept, but there has to be a limit!)
(+) Good pacing. I never had the feelings of "oh, I'm sick of that scene because it is so slow and adds nothing to the plot" or "oh, this was to fast for me to follow the plot". (Edit: After having read many other reviews I'm surprised so many people seem to disagree on this point. Have they really seen the movie? Pacing was really good!)
(-) As a 90s kid I can just say: What I saw, heard and felt was not like the 1990s, but more like the work of a screenwriter who did a serendipity trip through Wikipedia's 90s portal.
(+) Solid camera work. It's good to see there are still people left in mainstream Hollywood who can do their job without inducing nausea in their audience.
(-) Too many CGI sets. And yes, you can spot them quite easily. (This does not contradict the fact that this movie's VFX is splendid.)
(+) I really like the props and costumes. Can't wait to see my gf in the Captain Marvel cosplay she's working on for the upcoming Leipzig Book Fair. ;-)
(-) The MCU in general is increasingly suffering from franchise wear. In hindsight many fans might actually want to consider this movie as the genre's "jumping the shark" moment, but I personally think "Thor: Ragnarok" already did that job back in 2017.
Conclusion: 5/10 + one extra star for the cat = 6/10. But that's the absolute maximum rating you can give this movie without having an agenda. 7/10 or more is fanboy palavering, 3/10 or less is hater rage.
Because seriously, think of it: If you rate this movie 10/10, then what verdict would you give to the Avengers films? Or the Dark Knight Trilogy? Or the Godfather movies? 25/10? And if you rate this movie 1/10, what's your verdict on movies like "Sharknado"? -25/10?
Btw: I'm really looking forward to see Captain Marvel's review section in a few months. Because by then the "honeymoon period", in which everything is great and the weaknesses are widely ignored by joyful fans, will have worn off; and the haters will have shifted their attention to Hollywood's next SJW project. And yes, of course Captain Marvel is an SJW product. But it's still an ok movie that's far from being unwatchable like the all-female "Ghostbusters" from 2016 was. And it doesn't break the MCU's canon like the hyper-diverse "Star Trek: Discovery" broke Star Trek's 50-year-old canon. So, if you are a Marvel fan, there is no reason not to have fun with Captain Marvel. However, if Marvel stuff isn't your cup of tea, you might want to consider watching "Alita: Battle Angel" instead, as Cameron's movie is better made and features a female superhero, too. And if you don't like superhero movies at all, you might want to stay at home.
The Orville: Identity, Part II (2019)
Seth MacFarlane fused Star Trek and Star Wars by taking "the best of both worlds"
With this episode of "The Orville" Seth MacFarlane fused TNG-era "Star Trek" and pre-Disney "Star Wars" into the second-most amazing TV show currently on air, right after "Game of Thrones". And should the show get renewed for a third season, it is going to be the number one after GoT wraps up in summer.
This was the conclusion of the most amazing two parter I've seen in a long time. It has become rare for bombastic special effects to mix up with an ingenious plot, amazing storytelling, sublime presentation, perfect pacing, great acting, astonishing music, nice sound effects, immersive camerawork and a pleasing cutting rate.
It's also terrific to see how little plot holes there were in this episode, especially when considering how difficult this is to achieve in a worldbuilding format like this. (Some of the show's earlier episodes had a few medium-level problems in that regard.)
I rarely give a straight 10/10, but I had to do it this time.
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
In Japan her name is "Gally", but the US publisher considered that name to be too stuffy, and came up with the more sexy "Alita" instead...
...and he did so for a good reason! But first things first: "Alita: Battle Angel" offers pitch-perfect pacing, fantastic mocap, outstanding VFX and SFX, nicely choreographed action, fitting music, great camerawork, solid story and good acting. Actors have clearly been cast for talent and not for diversity. Also nice to see a movie with a strong female lead who doesn't rise herself by demeaning men. But the most amazing plus here is Cameron and Rodriguez left Alita at least somewhat sexualized. Not as sexualized as she was in the 1991 Manga (where she was renamed from Gally to Alita by Kodansha USA for reasons I stated in the headline), but as much as it is possible in late-2010s "woke" Hollywood. Love it!
Star Trek: Discovery: Saints of Imperfection (2019)
Hyper-convoluted
Sadly the writers doubled down on the crazy mycelium network thing by giving it powers that make the show appear to be more science fantasy than science fiction. And even this fantasy plot is hard to follow, as it is extremely convoluted and features opaque storytelling and presentation in order to mask its bad writing.
And again this episode does not drive the plot, but is the third interlude in a row.
The Orville: Firestorm (2017)
Feels like a flashback to a first season episode of a TNG-era Star Trek show
This episode is 100% predictable and 0% thrilling.
To make a long story short: Strange things happen on the Orville. A plot line that was already rotten in the 1980s. But it becomes worse: Everyone will immediately suspected these strange things to take place on the ship's holodeck. Why? Because they happen right after Alara loses her confidence due to finding out she's afraid of fire + they all happen to Alara or in her close presence + they all are about common fears like arachnophobia or nihilophobia. (Oh, btw: Robert Picardo, who once diagnosed nihilophobia on Mr. Neelix in his role as EMH back on Star Trek Voyager, makes a guest appearance. That was nice!)
So my first thought was that Alara got sedated and transported into the holodeck by her crewmates in order to run a program specifically designed to bring back her confidence. A program confronting her with many common fears and ultimately some sort of holographic exposure therapy against pyrophobia. And in the end it turned out that I was quite close, but not close enough to the constructed absurdity of this episode's conclusion: In fact Alara did this to herself! And she forced her crewmates to assist her by abusing a strange security regulation that says an Union starship's chief security officer can take command when he thinks the captain is unfit for duty, e.g. because of insanity or drunkenness - which is basically hyper-nonsense, as the chief security officer could become drunk or insane himself and hence abuse this regulation ... what eventually happened in this really bad episode.
You can now dislike this.
The Orville: Cupid's Dagger (2017)
Reminds me of DS9 S03E10 "Fascination"
I can't help. I have to rate this 10 out of 10 stars. Surely, way too many people rate way too high on IMDb due to their emotions. But I don't care, because this episode of The Orville was so much fun!
"Cupid's Dagger" is predictable and it has strong similarities with the Star Trek DS9 episode S03E10 "Fascination", which itself was a variation of the age-old "people-on-a-starship-start-to-act-strangely-theme". But know what? It doesn't matter! This episode still was great and it made me happy. Hopefully there is more of this stuff upcoming!
The Orville: Majority Rule (2017)
At first I liked this - but after some thought I changed my mind
At first every Trek-savvy viewer will like "Majority Rule". They see the dangers of a society that has been perverted by social media, where the anonymous mob reigns and everyone if forced to please. And yes, at first I thought "What a great message!" and was amazed.
However, after giving it some thought, I changed my mind.
To make a long story short: "Majority Rule" tries to make you believe there could be a society in which a shitstorm caused by a frivolity will make the police transform you into a featherbrained zombie. It's like a Family Guy episode, but this time Seth MacFarlane sells it to us as serious, important and prudent social criticism - and too many are buying it.
But let's begin at the beginning: Starship visits unknown planet. -> Planet is inhabited by aliens of the week. -> Aliens of the week look like humans due to Hodgkin's law of parallel planetary development (a homage to Star Trek TOS S02E25 "Bread an Circuses", and a nice way to veil budget constraints in both 1967 and 2017). -> Aliens of the week have a strange politically system where everything is based on a per-person voting system.
The show calls this political system an "absolute democracy". And while I agree that an absolute democracy is based on the tyranny of the majority, an absolute democracy still means voting about *issues*, not about *people*.
But in this episode every individual wears a physical two-button like/dislike badge on his chest that everyone else can operate by simply pressing either the up (like) or down (dislike) button. Moreover, even non-physical (and likely anonymous) online-voting is possible, as soon as you know someone's badge ID.
So people are voting on other people, not on issues. It's a rating system. And everyone with too many downvotes will face something even worse than death: a neural castration that turns you into a some sort of zombie (it's like the "psychotectic treatment" from Star Trek TNG S05E17 "The Outrcast", just worse).
The problem is: A society as the one shown in this episode would never work. More than 1 million downvotes will make you a criminal and what you did a "crime against the state". To give an example from the episode: It declares two people who didn't give their bus seats to a pregnant woman criminals facing a worse-than-death punishment, just because the online mob saw an video of the scene that has been uploaded on the so-called "master feed" TV station. This is ridiculous! Even for a comedy show! It puts rude people on one level with murders. This is neither funny nor can it be taken seriously. And no, there is no dictatorship in earth's history that ever did something comparable to this nonsense.
To make things worse, this system is totally illogical. Just think of a situation like that: A person gets 999,999 downvotes from a serious crime A, than gets an additional single downvote for not smiling at someone - and bang! Not smiling has become a "crime against the state"! And the worst of all: All this downsides could have been avoided! They should have made this episode about a social credit system as it is currently envisioned in China. A system where people with a low score will have problems finding a partner or getting a job. Where a low score will speak against you in a trial or will make it impossible for you to get a permit to travel abroad. And where everyone does "like-whoring", where everyone is a conformist an where everyone is exercising preemptive obedience. A social surveillance terror regime, but nonetheless a place were codified law exists and flame wars don't end up with real causalities. That would have worked. But not that pile of garbage.
Another annoying fact is that this episode makes it clear "The Orville" not only took things like the holodeck or the warp drive from "Star Trek", but that annoying prime directive, too. I loathe it! It's the thing that turns civilized starship captains into cold-blooded monsters willed to rather sacrifice whole cultures on the altar of non-interference than helping them (as seen on Star Trek TNG S07E13 "Homeward").
I'm also afraid "Majority Rule" could damage the reputation of direct democracy, a system known to work well in Switzerland. Don't get me wrong: Everyone with an IQ above the room temperature will be able to differentiate direct and absolute democracy. But the proponents of pure representative democracy might still use this plot as a ploy.
On the upside this episode still is a great parody of social media activity. The scene were Isaac is used as social bot was especially enjoyable. And it still is The Orville, what means decent acting, nice CGI, good music and working humor.