Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

Myriad Universes: The Lesson

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“The Lesson” is a story that could never have been made on the TV series. This is highly unusual to say, because, with the exception of a particularly lavish holodeck environment, the entire story takes place on the Enterprise and there’s not a single “effects shot” apart from the exterior view of the ship in the first panel. Normally, one would expect the comic book to tell stories that were too complex or expensive to film, but this is an extraordinarily intimate and low-stakes story the existence of which reveals some odd truths about how curiously inverted the roles of the two main series have become by now.

“The Lesson” is also perfect Star Trek: The Next Generation, standing shoulder to shoulder with “The Wounded” as something utterly and incomparably definitive.

It’s not so much a story as it is an interlocking series of vignettes all centred around the concept of learning and growth. Beverly confesses to Deanna that it’s her birthday today and she’s depressed not because anybody forgot, but because she thinks shes getting older and feels past her prime. Commander Riker is giving a guest lecture to the Enterprise school about the American Revolution and how it could have been prevented (a subject he did his master’s thesis on) and caution’s Wesley (who’s still aboard at this point in time and attending the school) that he won’t let personal feelings get in the way in an academic environment. Worf reads a letter from Jeremy Aster, who confides in him his uncertainty about pursuing his crush because there’s another boy who he thinks he doesn’t stand a chance against. Geordi and Miles O’Brien are sitting in ten forward talking about unique celebrities from around the galaxy who live outrageous lives they’d like to emulate, and they rope Data in to get a third perspective.

As a present to Beverly, Deanna prescribes her a “special” unorthodox treatment on the holodeck where they traverse a rugged and breathtakingly beautiful amalgam alien landscape as they hike through dense forests, cross waterfalls and scale mountains. Though she complains all the way, at the top Beverly is taken aback by the view and remembers that age is just a state of mind. Wesley catches Will in a factual slip-up and corrects him in front of the class, which embarrasses him, but Will thanks him afterwards saying that if he wasn’t going to give Wes any special treatment, he shouldn’t have expected any in return and confesses he should have prepared better. Meanwhile, as he observes Geordi and Miles’ conversation and, after he’s prompted for his opinion on which celebrity he’d most like to be, Data says he wouldn’t like to be anyone other than who he is and wouldn’t want to live anywhere apart from the Enterprise.

It is deeply, deeply ironic that this story exists here in May 1991, directly contemporaneous with garbage like “The Host” and “In Theory”. For all the writing staff may whine about wanting to do smaller, more intimate stories that just focus on the drama and the characters without having to worry about the allegedly extraneous and superficial science fiction elements, the show itself is *extremely* reticent about doing an episode that doesn’t have an action story as at least a B-plot.…

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Hardhome

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State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:]

Lions of Mereen: Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
Paws of the Wall: Tormund Giantsbane
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandei
Coins of Braavos: No one
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear of Mereen, Jorah Mormont

Dorne is abandoned.

The episode is in eight parts. The first is five minutes long and is set in Mereen. The opening image is an overhead shot of Daenerys’s throne room.

The second is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Tyrion to Cersei Lannister.

The third is five minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by very hard cut, from Cersei screaming to Arya’s impassive face, accented by a sharply dissonant chord.

The fourth is three minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the unnamed girl in the House of Black and White to Cersei’s cell door.

The fifth is four minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by theme, from Cersei to Sansa, both prisoners. The second is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Theon talking about Ramsey to Ramsey.

The sixth part is six minutes long and is in two sections; it is set in Mereen. The first section is five minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Ramsey to Theon and Daenerys sitting and drinking. The other is one minute long; the transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a rack of weapons.

The seventh part is one minute long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Jorah to a spoon.

The last is thirty-one minutes long is in two sections; it is set at and north of the Wall. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by image, from Cersei licking water from a small puddle on the floor to a bowl. The other is twenty-eight minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Sam saying that Jon always comes back to Jon. The final image is an establishing shot of Hardhome fallen to the dead.

Review

The telling moment actually comes in the little “Inside Game of Thrones” thing they do at the end of the episode, where Benioff and Weiss pat themselves on the back for how Hardhome isn’t in the books. That’s true, and the episode is built to milk it, with the looming realization that there’s a big action sequence coming played as an almost decadently long moment of dread.

There’s a real structural cleverness to this. It’s the first “big moment” episode we’ve had; a half-episode one, in the tradition of “The Lion and the Rose” or “The Laws of Gods and Men,” as opposed to a “Blackwater” or a “The Watchers on the Wall,” but nevertheless an episode that is primarily about one thing.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 30th, 2015)

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First of all, the Perdido Street Station post is going to be in June. I foolishly didn’t look at the length of the book before planning my reading for the month, and am only halfway through. Will go back to reading after I schedule this though.

Hoping to clear time to look at the Hugo Packet a bit, if only to get a broader sense of the Puppies. My interview with Day/Beale isn’t quite nailed down yet, but it’s getting close. (He’s still rereading Wasp Factory, which is the main delay. I, in what was in hindsight the wrong call, reread it prior to Seveneves, putting Perdido Street Station after that.)

But for those who have read the Hugo packet, how are things in it? What are your ballots, if you’re not voting No Award in all categories (or if you’re ranking things below No Award, as I am planning to do with the non-Puppy choices, after perusing the Puppy choices to see if there are any surprises there.

Other than that, I’ve wrapped up the Davison revisions and started in on Colin Baker. Friday’s Last War in Albion is a big one. And there’s my first stab at original fiction in years up for people backing the Patreon at $5 or more. See you tomorrow night for Hardhome.…

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Furiosa and Furiosa

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Well, it’s basically a two-hour chase sequence with a few pauses… but yes, it’s amazingly well done.  Old hand George Miller takes advantage of all the modern techniques – hyper-fast editing, CGI, etc – but he uses these things for storytelling purposes, not to show us how fast he can edit or how good his CGI is.  He never sacrifices the clarity of the visual storytelling.  The production and costume design has a gnarly, knotty detail and complexity.  The brazenly ironic and stylised salvagepunk visual world of the movie makes it like an 80s auteur film made on a vast budget and with modern techniques.  The result is jaw-droppingly good.  It instantly makes just about every other blockbuster movie of recent years look quaint and windy.  Mad Max: Fury Road makes Avengers: Age of Ultron look like a Cameron Crowe movie in which the assembled twee, privileged assholes play with action figures and make “boom” noises.

I’m not going to go into much political detail.  I’ve junked most of what I’ve been trying to write about this movie, largely because of this article at Jacobin, which says everything I was groping for, and lots more of interest.  It’s really good… though there are bits where I think the writer, Stephen Maher, goes too far.  (There are also a few snafus which suggest he didn’t quite pay enough attention to the plot.)

Read it?  Okay, then here are some caveats:

I don’t think Maher gets it exactly right.  The film certainly does buy into an orientalist narrative about the supposed sins of pre-modern and/or anti-modern civilisation, and yes this is inevitably tinged with Huntingdonism and Islamophobia.  In the film, patriarchy comes complete with a built-in death-cult, tribal masks, and a harem of the type sheiks always have in racist, orientalist Western fantasies.  But I think the film is less a defence of ‘our’ modernity in the face of such things and more an attempt to implicate modernity in the same supposed sins.  The death cult of the suicide bombers uses Northern European religious ideas (Valhalla), urges itself on with thrash metal music, and Joe decorates himself with Western-style military medals, etc.  Plus the Mad Max movies’ usual anxious appropriation of the camp and performative hyper-masculinity of biker culture.  It’s like the film is saying “see how awful we’d become if we degenerated in the face of a civilisational crisis… it’s buried inside our civilisation, waiting to creep back out… the seeds are already there, around us”.  This is all problematic in itself, but maybe not quite as bad as the review above makes it sound.

It’s still an awesomely entertaining movie (reason enough to see it and enjoy it) with reasonably good gender politics.

Much of a meal has been made of the gender politics of the film, usually through the medium of stories about assorted reactionary bumwipes crying about how it’s a feminist lecture instead of a manly movie filled with manly masculine manliness.  Firstly, this is crap.  Max gets to be incredibly masculine in all those stereotypical ways. …

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“If you believe in peace, act peacefully. If you believe in love, act lovingly.” Redemption

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We always knew it was coming.

The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed.

This is the cliffhanger season finale that looms the largest in my memory. Not my favourite…I think “Time’s Arrow” and “Descent” are probably better, and I have fonder and more vivid memories of them both. I was told, of course, that I was supposed to like “The Best of Both Worlds”, and “The Best of Both Worlds” is certainly very good at what it does. But this is the one that exerts the greatest gravity over the mental landscape of mine Star Trek: The Next Generation belongs to.

The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It’s the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser. To me, this is simply one of the most iconic designs of the series, occupies a primal, fundamental spot in my memories and is one of those images that defines what Star Trek means to me. The Attack Cruiser was designed by Rick Sternbach, and while it’s far from his first or last design for the series, it’s one of his signatures. It showcases a lineage from the old Klingon Battlecruisers of yore as well as taking some cues from Federation aesthetics (intentionally, according to Sternbach, to demonstrate the sharing and exchange of ideas brought about by the alliance).

But the Klingon Attack Cruiser also demonstrates a fastidiousness that’s uniquely Sternbach’s: While Andy Probert’s starship work tended to be defined by clean, organic elegance, Sternbach’s is absolutely loaded up with meticulously thought-out little details-There’s every manner of nook, cranny and panel all over the ship, each of which look like they’re there for a purpose and are doing something important. Indeed, there’s probably a technical manual somewhere that tells you precisely what they all do. It’s a dedication to go above and beyond and a pride in getting all of those details right that’s as much a hallmark of Star Trek creative and fan spaces as it is of anime communities, and it’s here that Rick Sternbach’s real heritage starts to shine through. The Klingon Attack Cruiser is actually far more reminiscent of 1980s sci-fi anime mecha designs than it is of the US Navy- and Golden Age Hard SF-inspired designs that characterized Star Trek’s earlier years, or even of Andy Probert’s unique flavour of artistry. One could very easily imagine it fitting in just as well in Macross or in Dirty Pair as it does here.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else: Marcelo Camargo

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This post exists because my Patreon crossed the $310 mark. It’s currently at $318.50, exactly $6.50 away from another bonus post like this on “Night of the Doctor,” which will otherwise wait until the McGann/Eccleston book to be written. You can pledge to help make that happen here.

To recap, in early July 2014 it emerged that a server at a BBC Worldwide had been improperly secured, and that scripts for the first five episodes of Season Eight had leaked. A few days later it became clear that the leak was worse than it had initially appeared as a workprint of Deep Breath also appeared on torrent sites, followed, over the course of the next month and a half, by workprints of Into the Dalek, Robot of Sherwood, Listen, and Time Heist. The files had been prepared for a Brazil-based subtitling company called Drei Marc, and specifically for a gentleman named Marcelo Camargo who, despite having absolutely nothing to do with the leak itself, became the name most associated with it.
 
The first thing to say is both obvious and controversial: it was fine. For all the talk of the leak being “embarrassing” for both Doctor Who and the BBC, there were no meaningful negative consequences. All five leaked episodes performed just fine, both critically and in the ratings. Just like the leak of Rose didn’t hurt anything (and indeed probably helped the series, as the diehard fans hashed out all their arguments over it in advance). Indeed, the truth is that it’s tough to think of any instance where a pre-release leak to torrent sites actually caused any damage. It’s to the point where it’s widely believed that the recent leak of the Supergirl pilot was deliberate on CBS’s part. 
 
No, that’s not the same as saying that leaks can’t hurt shows. Certainly it helps that the five leaked episodes were actually good. It’s hard to hurt good material by letting people see it. Had Capaldi completely bombed in the part such that the buzz around the screener copies was negative it would have been a very different situation. But these were five episodes of television that ranged from the quite good to the excellent, and even with unfinished effects and dodgy musical cues their basic quality was evident.
 
And yes, I suppose at this point I may as well admit that I watched them at the time, especially as Moffat has admitted that he would have watched them. I don’t mean this revelation to indicate some larger ethical principle, to be clear. I just couldn’t resist. My wife and I were nearly a year into a running joke of saying “guess what” with the answer being a very emphatic and happy “Peter Capaldi,” with every syllable emphasized. I was dying to see the new Doctor. So I caved. Lasted a solid week or two after Deep Breath leaked, and avoided the scripts entirely, as what I was interested in was the performance, not the plot, but I caved eventually.
…

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Comics Reviews (May 26th, 2015)

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Uncanny Avengers: Ultron Forever #1

Not a week where being at the bottom of the list is a commentary on much beyond how good the list is. Ewing is going for raw silliness here, and the pleasure of this book is unabashedly in using the deep history of Marvel Comics to put together a plot that is at once a riff on Age of Ultron and firmly a celebration of the greater weirdness of Marvel comics. It’s fluffy, and I suspect $15 was a bit high for the entirety of this story, but it’s terribly fun.

The Infinity Gauntlet #1

Interesting, and a comic that introduces some characters you really hope will stick around past the crossover. I liked Duggan’s issue of The Black Vortex more than most of that arc, and was enthused to check him out on a riff on the first big Marvel story I ever read, but this doesn’t quite scratch that itch, and what’s introduced instead – a very nice riff on the idea of child heroes and responsibility – isn’t quite defined enough to grab me. Still, I’m apparently pulling this, and I may well forget to drop it. Worth checking out, but a book that has the misfortune of coming while I’m trying to pare my pulls.

Where Monsters Dwell #1

Garth Ennis being silly. He’s very good at this sort of comedy, but it’s a slender thing, and I kind of suspect I should drop it and add War Stories from Avatar.

Chew #49

A good issue, which is a good sign as we move into the last year of this book. The boil has long since gone off this for me, but I remain vaguely optimistic that it will stick the landing and not make me feel bad for pulling it for the last two years of its run. Quite liked Olive and Tony’s reunion. Olive is by some margin the best thing going in this book.

Old Man Logan #1

A Frank Miller riff, but in a nice, technical sense of playing with his sense of craft rather than his more overbearing aspects. I was kind of expecting the worst out of this book, as I find Sorrentino’s art, though moody, tough to follow, but it kept things going well, with a nice Western noir feel and a surprising level of Secret Wars meatiness. The final image is terribly promising.

Uber #25

A side trip that depends on a better memory of the overall state of play than I have, and thus something of a slender thing for me, but also the sort of worldbuilding whose existence is part of the point of Uber, a comic that’s obviously going to reward a reread when it’s done. Or possibly in two months when it takes a mid-run break prior to a big 2016 relaunch.

Providence #1

This is marketed as the Watchmen of H.P. Lovecraft, but to any Moore connoisseur it’s clearly intended to be the From Hell of Lovecraft, and like From Hell, it opens with a slow burn, with pieces put on the board according to a logic that is as of yet far from clear.…

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“Men Who Hate Women”: In Theory

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Oh no, not again.

I have to filet another Star Trek: The Next Generation sacred cow tonight. I hate doing this. But this one’s time is long, long overdue, ’cause “In Theory” is bad. Really bad. How bad? Well, in terms of gender, this is right down there in the same league as “Reunion”.

I’ll let writer Ronald D. Moore explain himself in his own words.

“I loved the notion of Data involved with a woman who fell in love with him because it was sort of a callback to when The Original Series was on. There were so many women who were in love with Spock. So much of Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail was from women, women who were falling in love with this remote, inaccessible character with the idea that ‘I could touch his heart-I could get to Spock like no one else.’ I was fascinated by that aspect of fandom. So I thought, well, what if we did that with Data and there was a woman who fell in love with a man who literally doesn’t have a heart, who could not give her something emotional. I wanted to see that relationship crash on the rocks. I wanted to see the moment when she realizes that he really can’t give back to her what she wants.”

The mean-spirited cynicism is self-evident. It always is with Moore. Like his compatriot Ira Steven Behr, that’s a signature of his. But the sheer, stupefying extent to which Moore is off the mark here is so galling I don’t even have the words to properly convey it, and what it reveals about how much Star Trek creators truly understand their fanbase and the history of their own damn show is absolutely frightening. Moore has essentially penned a 45-minute up-yours to the heart and soul of Star Trek and science fiction fandom and delivered one of the most inexcusably and hurtfully misogynistic sentiments this side of his precious Original Series. Jenna D’Sora is every single bro-ish stereotype of “clingy bitches” rolled into one: She’s vapid, shallow, air-headed and programatically dedicated to a man who doesn’t care about her in the face of all sense and reason. She’s even “on the rebound”. And she, and by extension this entire fucking episode, exists for no other reason than to bully and ostracize Star Trek’s original and most loyal fans.

That Moore’s conception of Star Trek fandom (I refuse to use the phrase “female fandom” because in the 1960s and 1970s women were the only fans of any consequence Star Trek fucking had) is blindingly ahistorical goes without saying. Those women who Moore would be so quick to belittle and infantilize were the young people of the 1960s that Star Trek inspired and who worked hard to make sure it had enough episodes to become syndicated, thus guaranteeing it a legacy and a life beyond its pathetic initial network run on NBC.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.01: The North Remembers

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lannister 
The Direwolves, Catelyn Stark, Robb Stark
Dragons of the Dothraki Sea: Daenerys Targaryen,
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of the Dothraki Sea: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Ships of Dragonstone: Davos Seaworth
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
The Direwolf, Arya Stark
The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Dogs of King’s Landing: Sandor Clegane
Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre
Bears of the Wall: Jeor Mormont
Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The episode is in ten parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The opening image is of the Hound fighting another armored man. 
The second runs four minutes and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion and Cersei talking about the Starks to Bran. 
The third runs four minutes and is set in the Red Waste, east of the Dothraki Sea. The transition is by dialogue, from Bran and Osha talking about dragons to Daenerys and her dragons, and by red comet. 
The fourth runs six minutes and is set at Craster’s Keep, north of the Wall. The transition is by family, from Daenerys Targaryen to Jon Snow, and by red comet.
The fifth runs seven minutes and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by red comet. At the episode’s halfway point, Stannis is being crowned the Prince that Was Promised as he is reborn amidst salt and smoke in the creation of Lightbringer.
The sixth runs three minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by image, from the flickering fire behind Melisandre to the fires in the Stark camp, and by dialogue, with both Robb Stark and Jaime Lannister being discussed at Stannis Baratheon’s small council meeting.
The seventh runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Jaime Lannister to Tyrion. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion Lannister to Cersei. 
The eighth part runs five minutes and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands; the transition is by family, from Cersei to Alton Lannister.
The ninth runs five minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Catelyn Stark to Cersei walking into the throne room. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Cersei to prostitutes having sex, and by consequence, from Joffrey ordering the death of Robert Baratheon’s bastards to one being killed in the brothel.
…

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“I’ve never seen a rainbow”: Galaxy’s Child, Identity Crisis, The Mind’s Eye

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Poor Geordi La Forge.

I have no idea what it is about the Starship Enterprise‘s chief engineer, but absolutely nobody seems comfortable with writing for him or even has any real idea who he is. Michael Piller’s big contribution to fleshing out Geordi’s character was turning him into an insecure mechanophile who didn’t know how to act around women, Ira Steven Behr thinks he should be eaten by Klingons and even René Echevarria mentioned he had no idea what Geordi and Beverly Crusher would have to talk about to each other as an example of how hard he found it to write for the Star Trek: The Next Generation characters. Only Deanna Troi elicits a comparable level of writer’s block and despair amongst Star Trek creator types, and even she’s had “Night Terrors” and bits of “Half a Life” by this point.

So it really is fitting one member of this trio is entitled “Identity Crisis”, because that’s what it feels like Geordi is going through. And not just him, but Star Trek: The Next Generation too-Recall that while we’ve seen some strong stuff in the past few weeks, we’re still very early on in the show’s Mark II phase and it’s still finding its footing to some extent. That process won’t be complete until we enter the summer hiatus. But as for poor Geordi, it really does feel like the creative team has absolutely no idea what to do with him here: Instead of looking at the role he plays on the Enterprise and his relationships with the other members of the crew, the episode invents backstory for him, is primarily interested in creating the person he used to be instead of who he is now and tries to tell a story in the past tense (unlike what the show did with Captain Picard in “The Battle” where the Stargazer backstory was firmly in the past, here the Victory stuff has real material bearing on the plot). Also, it turns Geordi into a 1980s version of the aliens from Raumpatrouille Orion.

The other episodes in this set aren’t especially better. “The Mind’s Eye” is the most obviously offensive, being a rote, boring “Shocking Betrayal!” Manchurian Candidate ripoff. It’s an unimaginative and stock “Let’s Do” plot well beyond the point at which we should have learned that these don’t work, and the treatment of Geordi is absolutely horrific: Let’s take his visor, which was designed to facilitate an empowering portrayal of blind people, and turn it into a security risk by treating it like a computer in a thriller movie you can hack and make it do whatever you want. On top of that, it renders Geordi subservient to the by this point entirely and unnecessarily overblown Worf/Mogh/Duras discommendation story arc. The one bit of partial credit I suppose I could give this episode is that Commander Sela is in it, but she really doesn’t need to be in this episode.…

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