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“Oh, MAN!” After a furious week or so of writing and scheduling posts for this rebooted Blogging the Next Generation, I took about a month off between “The Impossible Box” and today’s entry. I recall something similar happening when the…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “The Impossible Box”
“That’s not my name.” In “The Impossible Box,” we arrive at what I’ve elsewhere described as ur-text of any modern Picard story: the now-seemingly-inevitable narrative debt to Locutus of Borg. “The Best of Both Worlds” gets trotted out for the…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Stardust City Rag”
“What the hell are you doing out here, Picard?” Since Seven of Nine pops up at the end of the previous episode and now joins the cast of Star Trek: Picard (first irregularly, then permanently), some background context on my…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Absolute Candor”
“A promise is a prison, Elnor. Do not make yourself another’s jailer.” Look: I like Elnor. I like him a lot! Giving Picard his own personal bodyguard Elf is nuts, but the Qowat Milat (Romulan ninja-Elves who only speak the…
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What if I just wrote it?
Here’s the thing: as soon as the phrase “machine learning” was on the table, any human being with a brain should have been so freaked out that they smashed all of their electronic devices with a hammer. We weren’t, and…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “The End is the Beginning”
“You are Starfleet. To the core.” Patrick Stewart does a better job of convincing me of the emotional contours of Picard’s departure from Starfleet in this episode; in the prologue flashback, we see him emerging from the immediately-post-Mars, let’s-still-save-Romulus meeting,…
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THELMA & LOUISE Blu-ray Review: Soaring Into the Criterion Collection
A gregarious polyglot as a filmmaker, Ridley Scott has tried a bit of everything. By the time Thelma & Louise hits screens in 1991, he has already made two of the most important science fiction films of all time, and…
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Best of a bad batch
Are we there yet? Are we at the point where we, as a citizenry, can acknowledge that The Mandalorian is pretty bad now… and that it wasn’t ever, actually, particularly good? My own stance on the series has been: it…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Maps and Legends”
“The sheer. Fucking. Hubris.” “Maps and Legends” opens with a banger flashback sequence where the androids (here called “synths”) commit their act of… terrorism? Sabotage?… on Mars. If you’ve ever played Alien: Isolation, you’ll recognize the vibe: ghost-eyed indestructible beings…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Remembrance”
“I don’t want the game to end.” The first episode of Star Trek: Picard is a huge episode of television. Premieres were never this show’s problem. Each season begins formidably, with intent writ large across entertaining hours, which see us…
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