The Trouble With Edward

The second episode of season two of Short Treks was the quirky and fun "The Trouble With Edward": a tribbles episode.

Captain Lynne Lucero has taken her first command, of the science vessel Cabot. Right away, she has two tricky problems to solve: a planet facing a dangerous food shortage, and a difficult officer on her ship named Edward Larkin. Single-minded and antisocial, Larkin wants to genetically engineer a solution to the food crisis. But in doing so, he unleashes a far worse problem.

Going back to see reactions to this episode when it first arrived, it seems "The Trouble With Edward" was really polarizing. Some people really went with the broad, humorous tone, while many simply were not having it. Personally, I'm totally here for it. It's true that Star Trek isn't usually a comedy, but it has always made room for silly, from classics like "A Piece of the Action" to Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, from The Next Generation's "Rascals" to Deep Space Nine's "The Magnificent Ferengi" (which I haven't yet reached in my rewatch), and more. Every once in a while, Star Trek just gets goofy, and I find it a great spice in the soup. Episodes involving tribbles are perhaps the silliest of all.

Maybe it's that in the modern age of Star Trek -- the Kelvin timeline movies and Star Trek: Discovery -- it's never been this comedic. You might even argue that Star Trek has never taken such a pure shot at comedy. This episode is not the product of a Star Trek writers' room cutting loose for an episode. It's written by a actual comedy writer, Graham Wagner, who worked on shows like The Office, Portlandia, and Silicon Valley. It's directed by a comedy director, Daniel Gray Longino -- another Portlandia veteran (who also made Who Is America? with Sacha Baron Cohen). These are comedy people making a Star Trek episode, not Star Trek people trying to make comedy. The resulting tone is different, more dry than just tongue-in-cheek.

It's also great, I think. It has a fun story arc for newly-minted Captain Lucero, who goes from "can't wait to work with people smarter than me" to "he was an idiot." It has playful music, from the jaunty score by Sahil Jindal to the rare use of existing, real-world music in Bing Crosby's "Johnny Appleseed." The darker, Gremlins-like take on the reproducing tribbles lends a black comedy of its own. And of course, it's the perfect vehicle for the deadpan humor of H. Jon Benjamin as the troublesome Edward Larkin.

Alright... maybe the post-credits commercial for Tribbles cereal (played, apparently, from VHS tape) is pushing a little too far. But even that joke is well in keeping with the nature of this episode to try something really different. I feel like you can't get too bent out of shape about that unless you're struggling to figure out where it goes in "Star Trek continuity." (And if you are: first you'll need to reconcile why the tribbles' out-of-control reproduction seemed to be created here when Enterprise already talked about that characteristic in one of its episodes.)

I give "The Trouble With Edward" an A-. I found it an inspired use of the Short Treks format.

Summer Lovin?

This season's touring Broadway theater package at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts has some interesting shows in it, but could have been ordered a little better. Two "jukebox musicals" were programmed back to back; even though Jimmy Buffett's Escape to Margaritaville was here just a few weeks ago, it's now time for Summer: The Donna Summer Musical. Fortunately, in musical style, narrative tone, and other ways, the two could hardly be more different.

Unlike most jukebox musicals -- shows built around one performer's pre-existing song catalog -- Summer doesn't construct a wholly fictional narrative to contain the songs of Donna Summer. Instead, it presents itself as a chronicle of her actual life, from childhood to her final years. It uses a particularly theatrical storytelling device to do this, giving us three different versions of Donna: the young "Duckling," the golden era "Disco," and the reflective "Diva." The three speak to each other across time, and hand off parts of the story in a non-chronological order.

What sounds potentially confusing or arty on paper is actually one of the most effective aspects of the product. This show isn't really interested in making substantial characters out of anyone but Donna Summer, so rather than make it essentially a one-woman show, this technique of splitting the character among three performers gives more texture and variety to the musical. It's also a good way to convey inner monologue to the audience without having a character address it directly (though that also happens at points in the show).

All three of the main performers in this touring show are exceptional. Any one of them could carry a musical alone, but in this format, the audience is essentially treated to three stars. Each is as good as the next, in my view -- though for what it's worth, Dan'yelle Williamson (as Diva Donna) actually brought the crowd to a full, minute-long standing ovation in the middle of the show with her emotional rendition of "Friends Unknown."

For certain, Summer wouldn't be as entertaining a night without these three performers. There are other fun elements to the show, like a cast of mostly women playing both male and female supporting parts, and bright white sets that reflect whatever light is cast upon them. But the story is a bit superficial, for the most part. Truly profound aspects of Donna Summer's life, from abuse as a child to a divorce to a cancer diagnosis, don't get a lot of explanation in the dialogue. It's left to the performers to "sing it out" and make us feel something despite the slim context -- and time and again, they manage to do just that. (Williamson even sells a scene that overtly whitewashes some homophobic comments made by the real Donna Summer. The script manufacturers an excuse/apology for it that Summer herself never gave, but it works well enough within the show.)

And needless to say, this show might be a "must see" if you're into disco, because aside from a few quiet interludes, the musical is one rockin' dance number after another. All told, I'd say it's a solid B, more fun than I expected. The show is here in Denver for the next couple of weeks, if you're interested in checking it out.

DS9 Flashback: For the Uniform

Near the end of season four of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (in "For the Cause"), recurring characters Kasidy Yates and Michael Eddington were revealed to be working for the Maquis. Half a season later, Kasidy Yates had been brought back into the fold. But Eddington was still out there, a dangling plot thread that was picked up in "For the Uniform."

Starfleet traitor Michael Eddington is stirring up trouble with the Maquis, and Captain Sisko is determined to capture him. Sisko's fixation leads to the crippling of the Defiant, orders to stay out of the action (which he soon ignores), and ultimately to an embrace of the villainous role Eddington assigns him. Like Valjean in Les Misérables, Eddington sees himself a hero who has committed at worst a trivial crime... and he sees Sisko as the monstrous Javert, who won't just let it go.

Every time a Maquis story comes around, I remember that the entire concept of the Maquis was thrust upon them by the creation of Star Trek: Voyager. They might have just as easily chose to ignore it. But I'm glad they chose to follow up on the story of Eddington -- even if it takes a familiar, Wrath of Khan-like structure of vendetta via space battle, with a literature-quoting nemesis out-thinking our hero until he's inspired to think outside the box.

Eddington does come off marvelously deluded in this episode. Though he casts himself as the hero, he maroons Sisko's contact on a planet where he'll surely die a slow death, justifies mass slaughter because he's targeting a different race, and takes clear joy in taunting Sisko despite his protests that it "isn't personal." Of course, more interesting villains never see themselves as the villain, but Eddington is so far from the Valjean he imagines himself to be that it's actually rather hard to empathize with his point of view.

It actually undermines Sisko's "heel turn" in this episode a bit that Eddington is also so dark. I love Avery Brooks' intensity throughout; he's legitimately frightening in the scene where he unloads emotionally to Dax (and physically, on a heavy bag she holds), and he's cold as ice in the moment where he too elects to use weapons of mass destruction. But there's tonal dissonance to the way it's all sort of whomp-whomped at the end. He and Dax laugh that the plan was never run by Starfleet; roll credits. But wait a minute! Sisko destroyed a planet! That probably won't sit well with Starfleet, at least not until there's a long examination of whether the ends justified the means here. (But at least this episode did open the door to this sort of brash, Kirk-like action. That paved the way for a much stronger examination of these themes in season six's "In the Pale Moonlight.")

Another echo of the Wrath of Khan vibe is the way this episode feels more militaristic than most Star Trek. The damaging of the Defiant, and subsequently taking it out anyway in more analog fashion, creates a real submarine-type environment. There's more background dialogue than normal, orders are being repeated and relayed through Nog, and there's the sense that any action will take time to carry out. It's fun and effective for this story.

Also supporting this story is some strong visual effects work. After not liking the CG look of the Badlands in previous episodes, supervisor Gary Hutzel decided here to recreate them by pouring liquid nitrogen ("which boils furiously at room temperature") onto black velvet and filming it in slow motion. It looks much more dangerous; similarly impressive are the collapse of a planet's atmosphere after Sisko bombs it, and the sluggish movements of the damaged Defiant.

A visual effect of decidedly more mixed results, however, was the "holo-communicator" introduced here. You might imagine the concept was here to save money on viewscreen shots, or bridge sets for other starships. Or maybe you'd expect it for narrative reasons, to avoid the Wrath of Khan "problem" of the rivals never being in the same space during the story, using holograms to portray them in one room. But nope; the holo-communicator is here mainly because it had been bothering staff writer Ronald D. Moore: "it's so absurd that in the twenty-fourth century they have holodeck technology that allows them to recreate Ancient Rome, but everybody talks to each other on television monitors."

After trying and failing to get this technology added to the Enterprise-E in First Contact, Moore convinced DS9 show runner Ira Steven Behr to go for it here. But the effects department hated the idea. How were they to show this "amazing 3-D image" in the 2-D medium of television? How do you distinguish that it's a hologram and not someone beaming in? Are you supposed to move the camera constantly? That can be time-consuming and expensive. Is it a lighting effect, or is that just confusing? Is there some sort of visual element that winds up being far more expensive than a viewscreen shot would have been? No one really liked the results here, so the holo-communicator would appear in only one more Deep Space Nine. (Decades later, Star Trek: Discovery would have the time and budget -- and the benefit of advancing real-world technology -- to make holographic communications in Star Trek a regular thing.)

Other observation:

• I love the opportunity Odo takes to get in a dig: that Starfleet should be reminded that Eddington was only on the station in the first place because they didn't trust the shapeshifter.

"For the Uniform" has its rough patches, but it still looks good overall. I give it a B.

A Parasite to See

After winning at the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild, and the Producers Guild, 1917 looks to be the movie to beat for this year's Best Picture Oscar. But notably, the Screen Actors Guild awarded their top honor to a different film, Parasite.

Parasite is a tricky movie to discuss. It's been called everything from a black comedy to a drama to a satire to a thriller. It's mixing up a lot of genres in its own way. And no one wants to get too specific about its story; it's definitely packing some surprises best not spoiled.

What can safely be said: Parasite is a Korean film from writer-director Bong Joon-ho. He's made several films, many known in America, though perhaps the most relevant is his dystopian sci-fi movie Snowpiercer. Like that film, Parasite is a story about poverty and class... though it uses a very different type of story and genre to make its points. A family of four is struggling to make ends meet when an opportunity comes along to con a rich family. Bit by bit, the con game grows and the lies become more elaborate. There are secrets to be revealed that shock the story in a whole new direction.

It's easy to see how Parasite managed to break through enough to find an audience before awards season, and to vault it into award contention now. The movie effortlessly transcends any cultural differences between Korea and the west, with very real (if sometimes exaggerated) characters, familiar struggles, and a relatable tale of gradually sinking in too deep before you even know how you got there.

That said, you should not see Parasite because you've heard it packs some great plot twists -- it takes more than half its 130-minute run time to get to any of that. You must first enjoy it as the con artist story it is at the outset. It can be enjoyed on that level; the characters are more than interesting enough to draw you in. The wait for things to shift feels long not because the film is boring in Act One, but because you begin to feel tension in wondering just what's going to go wrong and how.

But it's also hard not to think of another 2019 movie that used an unconventional genre to depict class struggle. Many critics have compared Parasite to Us, and it's a fair comparison. They're certainly different enough that both are worth seeing. But they're also different enough that one is going to appeal more strongly to you than the other. Jordan Peele's movie felt forged in the mold of Rod Serling. Parasite feels more in the mold of Alfred Hitchcock. Both work. But my preference is for the supernatural elements at play in Us.

In fact, Us looms so large on my 2019 movie radar (it's still #2 on my Top 10 List) that good as Parasite is, it doesn't quite make the cut for me. Still, I give it a B+. If you like suspense thrillers, it's worth seeking out as it makes its way to streaming.

Remembrance

The series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "All Good Things..." was such a strong conclusion that it was almost a shame they kept going with four feature films. Case in point: Star Trek: Nemesis -- a movie so disappointing that it's definitely a shame that was the last we saw of those characters. (Mostly. The series finale of Enterprise, "There Are the Voyages" is a topic for another day.)

Yes, I'm going to watch any new Star Trek that comes along. But I was especially eager for Star Trek: Picard -- eager, but trying not to get my hopes too high -- if for no other reason than the fact that Nemesis would no longer be The End. Needless to say, I was practically giddy that not only was Picard's first episode, "Remembrance," actually good, it was in my view the strongest first episode of any Star Trek series.

In the proudest traditions of the franchise, Star Trek: Picard is an allegory built for our times. Its backdrop is the story of a society that suffered a galvanizing trauma... and responded in all the wrong ways. Putting Jean-Luc Picard, the most morally upright captain in all of Star Trek, at the center of that story is more than enough justification to bring back the character.

Crucially and correctly, though, this Jean-Luc Picard is not the character we last saw 18 years ago -- and I don't just mean that he's clearly become embittered and disillusioned for the reasons he expresses in the episode. Picard was always a character with warmth at his core, but it took many seasons of The Next Generation to truly see that. He was always a captain first, cloaking his warmth beneath authority and duty. In this new series, free of that burden, we actually see a more outwardly caring Picard than we've ever seen before. He's demonstrably, openly kind -- to his Romulan housekeepers, to the mysterious Dahj... and, of course, to his dog. The character development of the intervening years is not all for the worse, and it's great to see the show present that.

This compelling back story and compelling lead character are met with a compelling narrative. "Remembrance" does a great job of letting the audience be ahead in some ways (we know the secret of Dahj long before any of the characters do), while leaving us to speculate in others (why did the synths attack Mars?). The episode does a great job allowing moments for introspection while generally unfolding at a breakneck pace -- 44 minutes sails by before you know it.

If the new isn't why you're here, there's plenty of nostalgia too. I could only guess how it all plays to someone not steeped in the minutia of Star Trek, but I thought they did a great job of peppering in the past in fun ways. From the J.J. Abrams' film's cataclysm on Romulus, to the death of Data and thread of B-4, to all the way back to cybernetics expert Bruce Maddox, this story embraces elements of others that came before. Then there were all the visual references for those who could recognize them -- the Captain Picard Day banner, the Kurlan Naiskos, an ad for a business run by Kasidy Yates... and probably more I'll spot when I watch the episode again. (They weren't only playing the classics, though -- the species of Dahj's alien boyfriend, Xehean, was introduced on Star Trek: Discovery.)

Even though this first episode was largely Earthbound, there were plenty of great sci-fi visuals to feast your eyes upon. Earth on Star Trek has never looked as vital and lived in as it did here -- and we got to see many parts of it, from Boston to Paris, from San Francisco to the French countryside, and even to the much-talked-about-but-never-before-seen Daystrom Institute. Sure, modern visual effects allow you to do so much now that it's easy to be jaded; it's still great to see those techniques brought to bear on Star Trek.

There were perhaps a few moments like the rooftop fight that felt a bit more obligatory than organic. But even in that example, it was a great looking fight with lots of clever choreography (including tricky use of the transporter) and hits that looked painful. Overall, "Remembrance" set the table for a story I'm eager to see more of. I'm not much for binge TV, but if I could have started the next episode, I would have done so immediately.

I give "Remembrance" an A-. If Star Trek: Picard can keep up at anywhere near this level, it's going to be a great season of television.

The Bitter End

Enough of the "precursor awards" to the Oscars have now been handed out that the rough shape of what's likely to win at this year's ceremony has taken form. Although there are nine films competing for Best Picture, many of them can already be dismissed as having no real chance at the prize. And I just watched one of those, the divorce drama Marriage Story.

Nicole and Charlie are at the end of their marriage. They've been a team, Charlie the director of a New York theater company, Nicole the star actress. They've raised a son together. But they've realized it just isn't working. What begins as an amicable parting of ways slowly devolves as family and lawyers get involved. Soon, long gestating resentment is brought to the surface.

Marriage Story is written and directed by Noah Baumbach, but to me, it's neither the writing nor the directing of the movie that makes it shine. It does feel like a particularly realistic story, but there have been so many movies made about divorce that it could hardly be the first one. It's not the nature of these characters that makes the tale especially memorable; the fact that the couple are both in theater is very much periphery to the narrative.

It's not even that Marriage Story is particularly well balanced between the two sides of this separation. I think Baumbach might have intended it that way, but I do believe the story ends up tilting in favor of Charlie. It's the nature of the couple's grievances that Nicole's are very much rooted in the past, while Charlie's develop in the present. So while each has cause to want to leave the other, we see more of Charlie's side depicted on screen, in the here and now. The film eschews flashbacks, so we're left more to what Nicole tells us about her side of the story.

But if all of that sounds like I'm a bit down on this movie, I'm really not. It's a realistic portrait of a marriage in decay: one spouse coasting along oblivious, the other nursing a growing bitterness. The fact that the movie perhaps doesn't present it in a "50-50" kind of way doesn't take away from that core truth. Indeed, this will be painfully familiar for many people -- those who have been through that particular kind of divorce, or watched friends or family go through one. Yet the movie isn't two hours of pain, either. It's actually quite funny, with spikes of humor throughout.

That's thanks to a great cast. And it's in this that the movie achieves excellence. Scarlett Johansson earns her Oscar nomination as Nicole. I noted that her character's issues with the marriage are rooted more in the past; this means Johansson really has to make you sympathize through monologues more than action. (One in particular quite stands out.) Adam Driver is solid as Charlie, defending a practiced obliviousness to reality even as it slowly crumbles around him.

Most delicious of all are the three actors who play various lawyers the couple deals with over the course of their divorce. Ray Liotta is a calculating slimeball who oozes over every scene he's in. Alan Alda is a kindly old man, right as a friend, but wrong for the job. And Laura Dern is a force of nature ready to stick it to anyone and anything. (She's totally going to win Best Supporting Actress, by the way.) There are also great accents provided by Julie Hagerty and Merritt Wever as Nicole's mother and sister, and Wallace Shawn as an actor in Charlie and Nicole's theater company.

Marriage Story is not a flashy movie, nor even an uncommonly clever one. But what it does, it does very well, with one of the strongest casts of the year. I give it an A-, and the #5 slot (for now) on my Top 10 Movies of 2019 list.

DS9 Flashback: The Begotten

The first half of Deep Space Nine's fifth season contained two ongoing story threads: Odo's shapeshifting powers having been stripped away by his people, and Kira's pregnancy. Both stories were brought to a conclusion in "The Begotten."

When Odo receives a sick baby changeling from Quark, he must try to teach it about shapeshifting despite no longer being able to do it himself. And when the scientist who studied him, Doctor Mora, comes to the station, the two clash as a parent and child would over their own past and how best to "raise" this infant. Meanwhile, Kira gives birth to the O'Briens' son.

According to episode writer René Echevarria, the idea of a changeling child had been brewing for some time among the writing staff. But they didn't want to just retell "The Abandoned" with a young changeling instead of a young Jem'Hadar. Echevarria cracked it by suggesting an infant changeling, too young to even assume any shape. This presented actor Rene Auberjonois the difficult challenge of telling revealing stories to and connecting emotionally with a jar of goo -- but he was able to rise to the challenge.

To help him, though, the episode also brings back Odo's "father," Dr. Mora -- a human actor for Auberjonois to play off of. The relationship between Odo and Mora seems to have backslid a bit since "The Alternate," with this episode covering similar ground. This episode feels a bit stronger though, with more of Mora's pain at being resented by his "son," and Odo gradually coming to understand what it's like to be a parent. The two bicker a lot here about how to "raise a baby," but each comes to appreciate the other's experience. The place they finally end up feels earned and sweet.

Throughout the episode, we really see a new side of Odo. He is truly happy at times, as we've never seen -- being swept up in joy at the baby changeling's progress, goofily telling the replicator that "we're celebrating," plus getting drunk and baring his innermost thoughts to Quark. There's also a great throughline about flight; Odo has expressed before what a joy it is to fly, and a bird is the first form he assumes upon regaining his powers here. But that sensation may now always be bittersweet to him; Auberjonois is excellent in conveying the sorrow of knowing that what Odo regains comes at the loss of his "adopted son's" life. (And lest you ever forget, he's acting all this through a makeup mask that covers his entire face. It's extraordinary.)

The B plot of the episode is necessary, but it's quite lightweight and goofy compared to the rest. To break up the monotony of regular television childbirth scenes (and to spare Nana Visitor from having to scream in mock agony), we learn that Bajorans must be relaxed to give birth. This leads to the broad (and slightly icky) comedy of Miles O'Brien and Shakaar behaving like children and getting territorial over Kira's body. Miles at least is given reason: he missed the birth of his first child, and wants to be involved this time. Shakaar, however, just seems like a needy goofball. This would be his last appearance on the series before an unceremonious, off-screen breakup with Kira.

One very nice moment does come of this plot line, though -- and it was suggested by Nana Visitor herself. Apparently, in the first draft of the script, Kira basically handed over the baby to Miles and Keiko with a loving smile. Job done. Having just given birth herself, Visitor doubted that it could possibly be so simple for a surrogate mother to just do that without any sorrow. She lobbied show runner Ira Steven Behr to have the scene rewritten, and this led to the great exchange with Odo at the end, where the two bond over having almost been parents -- and the regrets both feel, despite neither having ever wanted a child.

Other observations:

• It's been well established that Captain Sisko loves babies. We get that here for a brief moment, even with the jar of goo.

• Again, spoilers for a few episodes from now... but as I noted recently, the Julian Bashir we're seeing in this stretch of episodes is actually a changeling imposter. Neither writers nor actor Alexander Siddig knew this at the time, but it works out to be fascinating in retrospect. Here, a Founder is sitting on the sidelines as the baby changeling dies. There must truly be nothing that could be done (or else that whole "no changeling ever harms another" thing is even more suspect). He's also taunting Odo about the physical pains that come with being a solid.

• Yes, it's a bit silly that Odo puts the infant in a drinking glass when taking it out in public. But it's all in service of Worf's great joke: "Why are you talking to your beverage?"

• Who is this midwife that just lays into the leader of her planet's government? She gives absolutely zero fucks, and it's subtly great.

The Odo storyline here is strong, even if it does replay some of the same beats of "The Alternate." The juvenile aspects surrounding Kira's childbirth bring the whole down a notch, though. I give "The Begotten" a B overall.

Making Time for Yourself

I feel like I'm getting a new recommendation for a streaming show I absolutely have to watch every week. The queue gets ever longer. And it seems like by the time I'm ready to talk about something, everyone has moved on to the next new hot thing. It's especially hard to keep up when I finish watching a show that none of my friends seemed to be watching in the first place. Well, then... time for me to lob one recommendation too many at you!

Living With Yourself was a show that arrived on Netflix in late 2019 to much fanfare, only to promptly be swallowed up in Baby Yoda and Witcher memes. It was so unbuzzed-about that I honestly expect to hear any day now that Netflix has cancelled it after its single season. Even if that happens, I think it's 8 half-hour episodes are worth the ride.

Paul Rudd stars as Miles Elliot. (And Miles Elliot!) Dissatisfied with his life, he takes a co-worker's advice to try an expensive but sketchy spa treatment from a strange strip mall location. Next thing he knows, he's waking up buried alive. The spa treatment is really a cloning procedure, where a better version of him was created to take over his life, and he was supposed to have been killed and discarded. Having survived, though, he and his clone must now figure out how they're going to share one life. They must also navigate their own unique crises of identity: Miles Prime must wrestle with someone capable of "being him" better than he can be, while the Miles Clone struggles with the knowledge that all his memories and experiences aren't truly his -- they happened to someone else.

What I found most satisfying about Living With Yourself is how many different things it offered in just 8 short episodes. It starts out as fairly broad comedy, and early episodes are heavily dependent on sophisticated visual effects to allow Paul Rudd to convincingly act opposite himself. But as more episodes unspool, the narrative shifts into deeper emotional territory, and often focuses on one Miles or the other to a degree that some episodes use few (if any) effects.

The performances are great. Paul Rudd is clearly working in the sort of space that Tatiana Maslany ruled in Orphan Black, creating two distinctly different performances as the two Miles. But equally impressive is Aisling Bea as Kate, Miles' wife. In the back half of the episodes, her character is brought increasingly to the fore, working through her own insecurities and desires just like her "two husbands."

I'd give the run of Living With Yourself a B+. In a super-crowded slate of top-notch shows, I could see where perhaps even that's not good enough to make the cut. But at less than four hours to watch the entire thing, I think it's well worth the time. If you're a fan of Paul Rudd, you're going to enjoy it. And is anybody not a fan of Paul Rudd?

Q&A

With Star Trek: Picard about to begin, it was time for me to once again fire up my subscription to CBS All Access. And that meant I could watch the new installments of Short Treks that have been trickling out over the past few months. My thoughts on them will also trickle out, over the next few weeks -- beginning with the first of the "second season," Q&A.

It's Ensign Spock's very first day serving aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Right out the gate, he gets to know one of his superior officers in a very personal way, when he and Number One become trapped together in a turbolift with nothing but questions and answers to pass their time.

More than anything, this episode of Short Treks utilizes the charisma of Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck to eagerly and desperately make you want the Star Trek series set on Pike's Enterprise that season two of Star Trek: Discovery suggested. Actors and characters alike are just fun with each other here, and fun to watch. The two of them and Anson Mount would make an excellent "core three" to build a new show around.

Their rapport is so great, in fact, that it makes it possible to ignore a lot about this episode that's actually not good when you stop to think about it. They're good enough to make you not care that "trapped in the turbolift" has been done at least twice before on Star Trek. (But hey, it's just one of the classic TV tropes; it's how you use it, right?) They're good enough to make you overlook that "Modern Major-General" was sung already (in one of those very same episodes: Geordi to Crusher in "Disaster"). They're good enough to make you set aside that the transporter would be an easy and obvious solution to get them out of the turbolift. They're even good enough to make you not realize until much later they "hey, isn't 'suppress your freaky' a pretty antithetical message to 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations?'"

I can get past all that, because the core story here is pretty fun. Essentially, this is a story that tries to explain why Spock acts so unlike himself in the original Star Trek pilot episode, "The Cage." To account for why so many of the traits Spock would display in the series proper felt like they were more Number One's personality in that first episode. It's a neat idea that one person would make such an impact on a young, impressionable Spock -- and that it was the sudden and prolonged intimacy of this experience that made that impression so strong.

Supporting the great work between the two actors is a fun-loving score from first time Trek composer Nami Malumad. It slyly quotes phrases from the classic Star Trek theme as it quietly lies back in the mix... until unleashing with full force to support the singing of Gilbert and Sullivan. There's also great camera work, managing to keep the tight, single set interesting for the duration of the episode.

Is it the strongest Short Trek? Nah... thought I would say it's probably as good as a B. But like I said, more than anything: it really, really makes me want to see more of this incarnation of Spock, Number One, and Pike. And, I mean, they must want you to want it, right?

DS9 Flashback: The Darkness and the Light

Although actress Nana Visitor gave birth to her baby rather early in season five of Deep Space Nine, her character of Kira Nerys would not do the same until mid-season. Visitor needed time to recover and return to work full time, and the writers still wanted to tell stories with the pregnant Kira while they had the chance -- stories like "The Darkness and the Light."

An unknown assassin is killing off members of Kira's former Resistance cell one by one, and taunting her with with cryptic messages. She's determined to find out who is responsible and exact revenge... even now, near the end of her surrogate pregnancy.

This episode actually began outside the writing staff, with writer Bryan Fuller. This was the beginning of his association with Star Trek, which would soon see him on the Voyager staff, and much later creating Discovery. This was well before he created Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, or American Gods. He was a fan with an agent, whose submission of an Agatha Christie-style "And Then There Were None" tale started the whole ball rolling. He sold his idea once he responded to the DS9 staff's big note: give us a reason why this Cardassian killer doesn't go after Kira herself. (Her pregnancy and the killer's moral code became that reason.)

Fuller didn't write the script itself; that fell to staff writer Ronald D. Moore. But in many ways, the episode feels like a predecessor of one part of Fuller's later career in particular: his TV series Hannibal. There's murder as a major plot element. A poetic villain with a cultivated moral code. And shocking violence, quite graphic for the time it was made (the transporter death being one of the most gruesome things ever depicted on the series).

There's also a fair amount of visual panache put on it by director Michael Vejar. This was the first time he'd worked on Star Trek since the first season of The Next Generation, but he would work for them a bunch after this, on more than two dozen episodes of Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. He earned that steady work here with a sweeping camera move that lifts up into an unusual overhead angle, long single takes of Nana Visitor delivering two powerful monologues, and stark use of lighting to underscore the themes of the episode title in Kira's confrontation with Silaran Prin.

It's those monologues that are the high points of the episode. Nana Visitor is exceptional in detailing her gratitude for the brave friend who fed information to her Resistance cell, helping the audience invest in a character we really never get to meet. She's better still when she recounts her first mission with the Resistance, and the fear and uncertainty of that experience. It's the counter to what Silaran Prin implies later, that she's a cold-blooded killer with no regard for what she did.

There's a nice emotional arc to the episode as Kira's friends are taken out. The first death is at a bit of a remove, a stylized scene set in the Star Trek caves. The second death shocks us, first with its gore and then with Kira's impassioned speech. Later come the deaths of Furel and Lupaza, and even though we've seen the characters only once before, their loss is really felt.

What's crazy, though, is that we never see Shakaar, the leader of Kira's cell. They barely even talk about him. He's the First Minister of Bajor, might plausibly be an assassination target in light of the pattern here, and no one informs him? Not even to secure the investigative resources he must have available? Ronald D. Moore says that once again, the character was excluded for budgetary reasons. But if you ask me, the fact that the writers didn't even feel it necessary to use him in this story makes it pretty plain that they weren't interested in using him any more, period.

I feel like the ending gets away just a bit. Prin goes through some rather elaborate mental gymnastics to explain why Shakaar is not responsible (and thus not in this episode). And while it's great that Kira rescues herself, not needing the Defiant to come to her rescue, it's a bit silly that some Macguffin about herbs she's been taking for her pregnancy is how she accomplishes it. It's great that Kira doesn't back down against Silaran Prin and apologize for her actions during the war; it was war, and she is not sorry for the things she did. But it's a bit silly that she ends up adopting Prin's poetic manner of speech when "explaining" what happened to her friends.

There's no "B story" to this episode, though other characters get nice little moments sprinkled throughout. Worf ribs Dax about how she got hustled at tongo, and even quotes one of the Rules of Acquisition. (He can learn other cultures!) Nog wields his Ferengi hearing like a superpower to help Kira crack the threatening messages sent by the killer. Odo tries to assure Kira he's on the case, though she's compelled to take matters into her own hands. Mostly, though, this episode is all Kira, all the time. And fortunately, Nana Visitor is good enough that they can do that.

Other observations:

• Early on, Kira talks about how violent one of her Resistance friends used to be, until he found the Prophets and became a Vedek. It does sound like an earnest change, to hear Kira tell it. Still, I feel a bit oogy at the suggestion of someone cloaking violence in religion. It's a grey area worth exploring, though not the focus of this episode.

• The final shot of the episode is a very unusual angle from underneath the Defiant. Effects producer Gary Hutzel didn't set out to make it that way: "I was planning on just doing a standard fly-by for that shot when we ran into some technical problems with the motion control rig. The pan/tilt wasn't operating properly; it was locked off at a downward angle as the camera drove past the ship. I looked at it and said, 'Fine. Sold. We'll shoot that.' It became the shot -- and it looked good. Thank goodness for technical problems."

I give "The Darkness and the Light" a B. The story is intriguing, and Nana Visitor is great -- but the more flowery elements of the final act leave me a bit cold.

DS9 Flashback: Rapture

Deep Space Nine episodes about Bajoran religion weren't usually popular with Star Trek fans, but one that was more well-received was season five's "Rapture."

A freak accident alters Captain Sisko's senses, leaving him with visions from the Prophets of Bajoran past and future. Guided by what he's shown, he locates a long lost ancient city, persuading Kai Winn in the process that he truly is the Emissary. But the visions pose an increasing risk to Sisko's own life, and he refuses any medical intervention to eliminate them. Plus, what he sees also threatens the treaty Bajor is finally about to sign to join the Federation.

Personally, I don't find "Rapture" vastly better (or worse) than most Emissary-themed episodes of the series, but many fans feel differently. One reason might be that this is a case where the writers actually planned ahead and knew where the story was going, which enables you to go back to watch this episode and see the connections. Sisko sees "locusts" swarming toward Cardassia, and then coming to destroy Bajor if it joins the Federation now -- a direct connection to the Dominion's actions later in this season.

Another reason might be the family drama at play in the episode, which is strong. Kasidy Yates returns from her prison sentence, and is immediately accepted back by Benjamin. You could ascribe many reasons for this: a better future understanding of what it means to have "paid your debt to society," Sisko himself being a forgiving and understanding man (who is in love), or the general dopamine high of the visions he's having. In any case, it's great that Kasidy is just right back in the mix... and forcefully arguing against Benjamin by the end of the hour, to abandon his visions and be with the son who needs him. It's not a huge episode for Jake Sisko, but Cirroc Lofton is once again great in father-son moments that count. Avery Brooks seems to really bring out his best as an actor.

As for Avery Brooks himself? Well, this script asks a lot of him. The distant and serene sort of haze he ambles about in for most of the episode isn't entirely convincing. When he walks the Promenade, spouting platitudes to anyone in arm's reach, it has the feeling of a huckster working a crowd -- even though we're meant to accept what Sisko says as absolute truth. Brooks is stronger in other moments, though: likening his emerging sense of the universe to looking into Jake's face as a baby, or his increasing fanaticism as he's determined to hang onto the visions at any cost. His best moment is the raw anguish Sisko feels when he awakens to find the visions gone.

This actually might be one of Kai Winn's best episodes in the series; it's certainly the one that gives her the most nuance as a character. She's always been a heel to this point, with Louise Fletcher expertly delivering insults with a smile like she's handing out chocolate-covered cobras. But when Kira tries this time to mount her high horse, Winn responds with a truly convincing monologue about what she did in the Occupation, which seems just as valid and noble and full of sacrifice as anything Kira did with the Resistance. Between this scene, and Winn's acceptance (at last) of Sisko as Emissary, this could be a turning point for her. Her ultimate tragedy is that it isn't, though, and we get a hint of that here: when she says she "doesn't know who her enemies are anymore," it's implicit in that statement that she's seen all our main characters as enemies up until this moment. You can't really walk away from an extreme like that all in one step.

Around the periphery, Kira gets several interesting moments. She and Worf both get to voice support in the power of faith. That faith initially makes Kira support Sisko's choice to die for his visions... but later she believes that Jake's intervention to save his father might also be the hand of the Prophets. Earlier in the episode, Kira also speaks to her own journey of five years, going from being very much against the Federation's presence on Bajor to supporting their Federation membership. She also comes close to a moment of pure horror when she realizes she interrupted Sisko during an actual vision from the Prophets.

But while the character drama throughout the story is pretty strong, the mechanics of the plot are rather weak. The "reflection in the waterfall" puzzle is cheesy in its transparency, a "mystery" that could not possibly have endured for centuries. The homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with Sisko sculpting his dinner, doesn't really work. There's also just not much tension in any of this unless you're watching it for the second time. You know for certain that Sisko isn't actually going to die this way. Plus, it takes the "aha!" moments of knowing about the coming Dominion war -- or Julian Bashir's secret at this point in the story -- to appreciate what's going on here.

About Julian Bashir. (Spoiler here in this paragraph, if you're watching Deep Space Nine for the first time.) A few episodes from now, we'll find that the real Bashir is in a Dominion prison, replaced by a changeling impersonator. When exactly this change happens is unclear, but as the uniforms switch in this episode to the First Contact style, and real Bashir is found in the previous style, it has to be the changeling from at least this point forward. This the writers did not plan ahead for, with actor Alexander Siddig not finding out about the swap until that episode was about to film. Still, it's interesting to imagine what the changeling could be playing at here: he's willing to let Sisko die for the potential tactical win, saving his life in the end perhaps in the hopes he'll sow more discord, rooting for the chaos his visions might sow between Bajor and the Federation, or just generally gathering intel on just how "real" Bajor's gods really are.

Other observations:

• After a good amount of filming on location in recent episodes, this one goes back to the good ol' "Star Trek caves" to portray the lost city of B'hala. It's not the most convincing environment, though the big obelisk the set department adds is a nice touch.

• Regarding that change to First Contact style uniforms: it happened here because this was the first episode scheduled to air after the premiere of that movie in theaters. Doctor Bashir gets a sly line calling attention to the change. No mention is made of any repairs needed on the Defiant resulting from the movie, though. Show runner Ira Steven Behr was a little miffed that First Contact included the Defiant -- the canonically anti-Borg ship -- just to beat the crap out of it, so he declined to acknowledge any of that on Deep Space Nine.

• Although this episode brought Kasidy Yates back to the show, this would be her only appearance in season five. Actress Penny Johnson played a recurring character on The Larry Sanders Show at this time, and not available to Star Trek as much as the writers had hoped for.

• Speaking of not appearing: it had been planned to have First Minister Shakaar present for the big treaty signing, as he logically would be. But when the writers realized there wasn't really anything interesting for Shakaar to do in this story, he was written out. It was one of a handful of episodes around this time in which the writers gradually learned they just weren't into that character much anymore.

• Odo appears only briefly in this episode, struggling with Worf to figure out where to house a bunch of visiting admirals and starship captains. Surely the starship captains could just stay aboard their own ships, right? It's not like the commute to the station for official events would be hard. And wouldn't they rather stay "at home" rather than "at a hotel" if it's practical?

• It's a quick moment, but I like that among all the ways Jake feels betrayed by his father throughout this episode, the one that seems to hurt most is that now he trusts Kai Winn.

"Rapture" is certainly an important episode in the overall story of Deep Space Nine, but I think that role itself is stronger than the drama within the episode. I give it a B.

A Planet Comes Together

Sometimes, a board game captures the imagination by gimmick alone. You hear what it's about, the one-sentence encapsulation of how it works, and you know you just have to try it. But those games don't always manage to deliver on their tantalizing promise. To me, Planet turned out to be such a game.

Each player receives a slightly-larger-than-fist-sized "planet" to become the creator of. (They're dodecahedrons, or 12-sided dice, if you want to get technical.) Players draft tiles of several different terrain types, and must place them on their planets. The components are all magnetic, so your planet actually comes together (and can be viewed) in all three dimensions. In each round, a selection of animal cards are each drawn to the one planet that best meets a particular condition -- largest ocean next to forest, largest tundra not next to mountains, and so forth. Final scoring at the end rewards you for a particular terrain type on your planet, and for the animals you've successfully attracted there.

It's an amazing idea that, sadly, does not work so smoothly when you actually sit down to play the game. In theory, it's a game of full public information. You know that, say, at the end of next round, you're going to want a big forest on your planet -- and not next to an ocean. But where do you stand in that particular race? Well, you can pick up your planet and count the tiles... but you can't easily see all your opponent's planets because they're all three dimensional.

You have two solutions, equally bad. You can examine (or the other players to pass you) opposing planets, but the magnets aren't that secure. Several times as we played, people dropped their planets, and even just a couple of inches was far enough and hard enough to knock multiple tiles off. Good luck putting it back together exactly the way it was supposed to be.

Alternatively, you can ask everyone else to count their own planets and tell you the numbers. This quickly becomes time-consuming and burdensome. You want to know where you stand this round. Another person, thinking ahead, is looking at the requirements for next round. Maybe someone else is even thinking multiple rounds ahead. So before each drafting phase, you have to go through a lengthy "Q&A" phase. "What's your largest forest?" "Next to water?" "No, mountain." "Five." "But since you brought it up, how about next to water?" "Well, what about your largest ocean?" And as the planets fill up, you can't even be sure you've counted particularly large regions correctly, as they stretch around to the opposite side of your planet.

The game would be much easier to play if this kind of information was simply kept secret. Yet it would also be profoundly unsatisfying, taking away much of the look-ahead, the jockeying for position, and any possibility of planning. The cool gimmick that makes you want to experience the game in the first place becomes the element that makes it so difficult to play -- if you could just glance over at a flattened map with tiles in front of each opponent, you could easily learn everything you want to... and without tipping off your opponents about what strategic consideration you're looking to next.

Planet really is a neat idea. But this particular rules set fell very short for me. I'd give the game a C-. Other tile placement games may be less flashy, but there are many that play much more smoothly.

Material Concerns

HBO, in its search to replace Game of Thrones (while it's waiting for the spinoff series to actually replace Game of Thrones) looked to another beloved fantasy book series, His Dark Materials. The eight episode first season wrapped up just before Christmas, and a second season is coming.

The three books comprising the original trilogy by Philip Pullman shine brightly in my memory as one of the best things I've ever read. I haven't gone back to re-read them since I first encountered them (now some 15 years ago), but I can still clearly remember being impressed by the cleverness of the setting and premise, engaged by the quality of the writing, and stunned by the ultimate conclusion and message. Any lover of fantasy owes it to themselves to read these books.

But I'd also be the first to admit, it seems to be a very hard sell in adaptation. The movie version of book one, made a while back with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, failed to take off. Fans of the books chalked that up mostly to the way the script abridged the source, postponing the most compelling and controversial material to later movies that would never come, attempting to make a "kids' movie" out of a tale with quite adult content.

HBO seemed to be the answer to that. A multi-part TV series would allow the time and space to capture all the book's twists and turns. And being on the prestigious pay channel would mean the harsh barbs of the story need not be sanded down.

But it hasn't seemed to me that His Dark Materials has taken off in this format either. Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian replaced Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow as the trendy topic at the internet's virtual water cooler. Few of my friends have mentioned watching the show at all. Among those who did, more than one said they tried the first episode and didn't get pulled in. And in the modern TV landscape, I get that -- there are so many things to watch that are good right out of the gate that who has time for something that doesn't grab you right away? (I just went through that myself with the first episode of The Witcher.)

Still, I have to jump in with the cliche and say: the show does get better. There's a lot of exposition needed to establish the world of His Dark Materials. Honestly, I don't remember quite how Philip Pullman did it all in his books... but that sort of thing is much harder in TV and movies anyway. As a result, the first episode of the HBO series (and much of the second) is a super-dense avalanche of world building that is admittedly short on action. I was willing to stick with the series because I knew from the books that there would be payoff.

If you hang in until episode three, I believe the hook will be set. The visuals are amazing throughout, from the steampunk qualities of the world at large, to the beauty of the Northern Lights and icy environments, to the convincing animation of the animal "daemons." Ruth Wilson gives a great performance as the doggedly driven Miss Coulter, young Dafne Keen grows more comfortable in her role as lead character Lyra, and the personalities of the many periphery characters begin to leave stronger impressions (including those played by James McAvoy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Clarke Peters, Anne-Marie Duff, and James Cosmo).

It's a largely faithful adaptation, by my memory. What changes there are seem to be to accelerate more demanding story elements rather than defer them. The moral ambiguities of certain characters are introduced sooner than in the books, an entire character not added until book two appears partway through season one, and stronger hints are dropped about the ultimate thematic direction of the tale. By the end of the season's eight episodes, you're left with some jaw-dropping developments and a compelling hook for where the story will go next. I also believe that most people would be glad they came along for the ride.

It's possible that there's really just no way to adapt the His Dark Materials books and do them justice. But I do believe this series has done it about as well as it could be. Acknowledging the slow start, I think I'd give the season a B+ overall. Maybe people have dropped their HBO subscriptions right now, following the conclusion of Game of Thrones. But if you spin it back up in the future (say, for Westworld), you might also want to make time for this thought-provoking fantasy tale.

DS9 Flashback: The Ascent

According to actor Rene Auberjonois, fans would regularly tell him and Armin Shimerman that one of their favorite parts of Deep Space Nine was the relationship between Odo and Quark. He thought that was a testament to the work his good friend had done with him, as Odo and Quark would only really snipe at each other in small doses of scattered episodes. The two together had never actually been the focus of an episode... until "The Ascent."

Odo and Quark are marooned on a barely habitable planet after their runabout is sabotaged by the Orion Syndicate. Fighting with each other and the elements, the two must lug a transmitter to the highest mountain peak in the area in hopes of calling for help. Meanwhile, Nog returns from Starfleet Academy for a field study at Deep Space Nine. He and Jake decide to be roommates... but quickly learn their lifestyles are far from compatible.

Show runner Ira Steven Behr has said that he'd always wanted to use Odo and Quark to do a version of Samuel Beckett's existential play "Waiting for Godot" -- just the two of them stuck somewhere for no articulated reason, waiting for Sisko to come pick them up in a runabout. Behr said he never actually found the courage to do something that devoid of narrative, but the concept dovetailed nicely when the writers decided they wanted to do an episode that involved Odo's new human frailty, a story where his inability to shapeshift imperiled him in a situation that would have been trivial before he became a "solid." They decided to have him and Quark climb a mountain.

The episode really does showcase the complexity of the relationship between Odo and Quark. On the one hand, it seems they truly do hate each other. When Odo thinks Quark is finally going down for a serious crime, he wants to be there personally to see it, volunteering to take his nemesis to a grand jury hearing. Once they're marooned and the going gets tough, they hurl truly biting insults at one another, calling each other a failure. It's hard to know what barb from Quark stings worse: telling Odo that he secretly wanted to become a solid, or that he's wasted his life by focusing so much on Quark himself.

Yet on the other hand, it seems the two truly do care for each other deeply. When Odo breaks his leg, Quark won't leave him behind. (He pretends he'll use Odo for food if he dies, but it's clearly bluster.) Odo knows exactly what sort of last rites Quark wants, and wants him to get them as much as he wants his own observed. The two share a hearty laugh at their ordeal when, in the end, they're finally out of danger.

Making the episode was almost as much an ordeal for actor Armin Shimerman as it was for his alter ego Quark. The production actually filmed for three days near Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the continental U.S. The altitude created unusual pressures inside the prosthetic Ferengi head piece he wore, and the exertions of this filming nearly made him pass out. Fortunately, the production had anticipated altitude sickness, and had remedies on hand to help him through. ("The medic's the hero of that episode," he declared.)

Looking at the results, the production hardships feel worth it. The real-life wilderness makes the survival tale feel truly dangerous. And even though they had sunny 65 degree days for the shoot, it really feels cold, thanks to the smart choices of camera lenses and film stock by director of photography Kris Krosskove. (Still, they added a line for Odo, complaining how it could be both sunny and freezing, to button up the discrepancy.) Real life shots serve where matte paintings usually fill in during most Star Trek episodes. And Quark's final ascent in wind and darkness makes for a great finale to the story.

As great as this Odo/Quark "A-story" is, though, the "B-story" of Jake and Nog is underwhelming. Certainly, it's good to have Nog and Aron Eisenberg back on the show. The writers loved both character and actor, and contrived a "sophomore field study" (that would go on for three years) as a reason to have him around again. But this story plays out very much like an earlier Jake/Nog plot, when cultural differences on their double date threatened their friendship. The only significant difference is that there, Nog's entrenched "Ferengi-ness" was the source of the conflict. Here, it's his full embrace of Starfleet habits that clashes with Jake's laid back ways.

I feel like both young men are supposed to be partially right here. And when it's Nog pushing Jake to clean the place up so they don't live in filth, it seems like he has a point. But when Nog goes into a writer's story and starts re-writing it without permission? That is way over the line!

But to me, what really doesn't work about this story is that it doesn't have a logical resolution. Their fathers, Sisko and Rom, decide they need each other. Sisko throws his weight around as Jake's Dad and Nog's commanding officer to force them to live together. But nothing has fundamentally changed about the situation that makes it seem like it'll work out if they try living together again. They don't articulate any compromise. They don't apologize to each other. So, how is this an ending?

Other observations:

• At one point, Quark says he's going to teach Odo to play Fizzbin. This is a reference to the classic Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action," in which Kirk invents the game on the fly as a diversion. Episode co-writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe reasoned that Fizzbin has become a real game a few decades later. "The people on Sigma Iotia II were clearly very smart, so they were able to extrapolate a game from the little bit Kirk told them. Now it's the national game of Iotia and Quark knows how to play it."

• The makeup is great in this episode. Bruises, sunburn, and dehydration are all visible on both Odo and Quark -- and mind you, both of them are already covered in makeup all the time.

• Quark comes through in the end. He truly is a survivor, under pretty much all circumstances. Don't bet against him.

"The Ascent" really is everything a Deep Space Nine fan could hope for from an Odo/Quark episode. And had it not been saddled with such a weak "feuding roommates" B-plot, it might have been a series best episode. Even as it is, I'd still call it an A-.

The War Movie to End All War Movies?

The new World War I movie 1917 seemed to be fairly well known before its release, thanks to the flashy trailer that's been running in front of almost everything for the last few months. Last week's Golden Globe win for Best Drama Motion Picture raised its profile even more. But in some recent conversations with various friends, I learned that apparently, the movie's big gimmick was not as widely known as I thought: the entire two-hour movie is crafted to appear as a single, unbroken camera shot.

This sort of camera trickery is, of course, not new. From Alfred Hitchcock's Rope to Alejandro González Iñárritu's Oscar-winning Birdman, many directors have used the one-take conceit for a lot of stated reasons. It's said to make you connect closer with the characters. It's said to put you more into the story, particularly when the camera moves around in full circles to capture the whole environment. Perhaps it's because I'm so interested in filmmaking itself, but I've found the technique to always have the opposite effect: I become engrossed in the meticulous planning, intense acting focus, and clever technical wizardry used to pull off such a thing.

From that standpoint, 1917 is masterful. Jaw-droppingly, gobsmackingly excellent. It's one thing to pull off a suspenseful character drama, confined to an apartment, in a single take. It's harder to present the tale of a pigeonholed actor trying to reboot his career mostly in the confines of a theater, but it's still not too difficult to wrap your head around how it was done. 1917 is like a career-best illusion from a master magician. You will not know how it's all done, and even the parts you do know (or can figure out) still leave you impressed.

Director Sam Mendes has choreographed an intricate dance of impossible scale for this movie. It may look like a single take, but it is not a static movie. We move indoors and out, down into trenches, across bombed-out battlefields, through raging firefights, onto a vehicle, and so much more. Mendes' partner in crime, Director of Photography Roger Deakins, leads a team that makes the camera move fluidly through all of it, maintaining perfect focus and crisp lighting.

The strain the actors must have gone through to make this movie is hard to imagine. For the two leads, Dean-Charles Chapman and (especially) George MacKay, I can't imagine they'll ever be part of another movie that's harder to make -- even if they go on to the top of the A list from here. (They're both lesser-known for now, Chapman's most recognizable role being Tommen Baratheon on Game of Thrones, while MacKay is best known for 11.22.63.) Both actors are committed to going along with any slight hiccups along the way to make the single take work; you will see things in the movie that were clearly not planned, but their reactions manage to incorporate these surprises wonderfully.

But here's the thing: the craft of the movie, the technical achievement, is so off-the-charts high that it surpasses the quality of the story itself. Assembled from real war remembrances told to Mendes by his grandfather (and with, I suspect, a lot of helpful punch-up from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns), 1917 does have some strong vignettes scattered throughout -- moments of hardship and loss, a meaningful encounter with a civilian, and harrowing scenes of action and danger. But I found that any emotion they stirred was far outweighed by my sense of wonder at the technique of it all.

I feel like I may need to see the movie again and try to let go of following "the magic trick." But I also suspect that were the movie presented in a more conventional manner, it wouldn't have left a strong enough impression on me to truly want to see it again. It's good, but it's the grand vision of it all that makes it great. And yet... so damn great!

I'm not usually one to go for style over substance when it comes to movies. Even though I'm typically more enthralled by character and story than visuals, 1917 is something different -- something very special. And so I find myself thinking of it as an A-. Unless you simply don't like war movies as a genre, it's definitely worth seeing, and probably while it's on a big screen at your local theater. It's sliding into the #3 slot of my 2019 Top 10 list, and for the moment at least -- with many more nominees still to see -- is the movie I'll be rooting for in this year's awards hunt (especially for the people behind the scenes who pulled it off).

DS9 Flashback: Things Past

"Necessary Evil" was one of the strongest early episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Its flashbacks of the station under Cardassian control scored big with fans, as did its examination of how Kira and Odo got by in a time of war. For years, the writers had wanted to do "another Terok Nor" episode. Three seasons later, they did it with "Things Past."

Returning to Deep Space Nine, Sisko, Dax, Garak, and Odo encounter a strange phenomenon... and awaken on the station, years in the past, before the end of the Cardassian Occupation. The four are locked inside some sort of shared dream or hallucination: perceived as Bajoran laborers, and arrested by security chief Thrax as suspects in an assassination attempt on Gul Dukat. If they're executed as scheduled, they'll perish in the real world. But perhaps they can survive if Odo, who clearly knows more than he's revealing, can admit the truth.

"Things Past" is a decent episode. There's certainly intriguing character insight about Odo at the core of it. But the episode also feels more convoluted than it needs to be. The past success of "Necessary Evil" boxed the writers in a bit. That episode had involved flashbacks, and they didn't want to do that again. They certainly didn't want to do a time travel story. Eventually, freelancer Michael Taylor (who'd pitched the exceptional "The Visitor") came up with an angle they liked: a nested dream structure in which different characters would keep waking up from a dream only to find themselves inside another dream. (Hmm. He'd invented Inception about two decades too early.) Eventually, they characters would learn that it was all a part of Odo's "master dream" about his own past.

The idea was streamlined a lot before filming, condensed into a single shared dream. But the story is still a bit at odds with itself. Those inside the dream are looking for an explanation (time travel, holodeck scenario, parallel universe?), but the audience is shown right away what's really going on. And because this obvious robs the scenario of necessary tension, the idea is then introduced that dying in the dream means you die in real life. (Director LeVar Burton even called this episode "The Nightmare on Odo Street.) This should expediently set things up so we can just focus on Odo's feelings, but there's so much technobabble explaining how this telepathic link came to be and what the rules of the dream are that it almost should have been more of a mystery than it is.

The true identity of Thrax doesn't make for all that great a surprise, either. Odo began the episode expressing regrets about his role during the Occupation. He's antsy and cagey the entire time, betraying clear knowledge of exactly when and where they've all been transported, and just as clearly withholding other information. Garak spells out for us that Odo should have been the security chief in this time frame. Thrax is not costumed like any other Cardassian. Guest star Kurtwood Smith (who's generally great) even shades his performance to mimic Rene Auberjonois' mannerisms. (Listen for the way he says "Quarrrk!")

Let go of the sci-fi trappings, though, and the story here is a strong one. According to staff writer Ronald D. Moore, they'd never really believed Odo could have kept his hands clean during the Occupation. The resulting story is sort of an echo of "Necessary Evil," which showed Kira in a darker light during that time; this story shows Odo that way. There are any number of stories in the pop culture about miscarriages of justice -- the Central Park Five, the West Memphis Three, Making a Murderer. This episode shows similar sloppy investigation: ignoring certain evidence that's been gathered, settling on "your man" and discarding anything that doesn't fit, pressure to rush to judgment from on high. In hindsight, Odo knows where he went wrong, and tries to argue with himself to be better. But this isn't an actual chance to relive history, it's only a chance to confront and accept it.

The story winds up having some interesting moments for other characters too. Garak gets a little ugly, spouting a few openly racist comments about Bajorans ("servile work is in their nature"), and getting a bit more into his feud with Dukat. Dukat, meanwhile, is very on brand: as ruthless as he is needy. He needs to be loved even as he oppresses, putting similar moves on Dax that he normally uses on Kira, desperate to win someone over so they'll recognize his "good qualities." Dax has strong moments too, actually driving the prison break -- one that would have worked had they not actually been trapped in a dream with only one escape: Odo's confession.

There's lots of fun work with lighting and cameras. All the dark and dingy work redressing the station sets that worked so great in "Necessary Evil" returns here. There are fun camera moves to disguise actor movements, a great "Vertigo zoom" on Odo's face when Thrax calls him by his real name, great smash cuts to emphasize the dreamlike logic, and more. It all looks great.

Other observations:

• To test the theory they might be on a holodeck, Sisko simply calls "computer, end program." There are times I feel like I want to try that out in real life.

• The way this delusion is shaped around Odo's thoughts right before it begins is rather similar to what happened to Beverly Crusher in "Remember Me."

• The episode ends in the same way as "Necessary Evil," with Kira and Odo standing apart from each other in the constable's office, their friendship rocked by what has been revealed.

• In an interview about this episode, Rene Auberjonois made this poignant observation about Odo: "...in the pilot he says to Dukat, 'There's one thing that you know about me – I never lie.' We've tried to be consistent with that. But that doesn't mean he doesn't lie to himself. He is this wonderfully contradictory character, in that he's made of liquid, but he's very rigid."

"Things Past" gets tangled up a bit in sci-fi trappings that don't work too well, but I think the core dramatic story does. I give it a B.

A Clever Endeavor

Dice can be a tricky thing to use in a strategy game. Different gamers are more open to random chance than others, and finding a design in which tactical decisions can outpace luck (without totally overwhelming it) is a tough needle to thread. You have to be pretty clever to create such a game, and not particularly humble to title it That's Pretty Clever. But I'm not here to talk about that game today; I'm here to discuss the even less humbly named sequel, Twice As Clever.

I've never played the original game from which Twice As Clever sprang, but I'd be willing to guess it's "twice as complicated." It's not easy to explain what's going on in the game. At its core, its "roll and write," a cousin of Yahtzee in which you get to roll dice up to three times, making marks on a personal score sheet.

The dice you roll are a spectrum of colors, each one tied to a different area of your score sheet. On each roll, you get to choose one die to mark in its corresponding area, but then you have to exclude from your next roll any other dice with a value lower than the one you took. You have to try to squeeze out three valuable rolls/choices with an ever dwindling number of dice. Once a player has had three rolls (or finished in just one or two), each of their opponents gets to take one of their unused (set aside) dice and mark that on their own score sheets -- so there's another angle to what you're passing up as you take your three rolls.

The sections of the score sheet are so intertwined, so loaded up with special things you can "unlock," the game just has a zany atmosphere. One area is a 4 x 6 grid where, when picking a die of one color, you mark off each of the other dice it forced you to set aside. Another area is a peculiarly arrayed set of uneven rows in columns where marking enough squares once will unlock bonuses powers... but you have to mark each space twice to score points. Another area scores two particular dice in tandem, and the total each time you write there must be equal to or less than your previous total. All the while, there are numerous ways to unlock the option to reroll your dice, pull back a die you had to set aside earlier, or claim an extra die from a roll (yours or an opponents).

It's all quite difficult to explain clearly even when the components are all in front of you; I doubt I'm making much sense at all here, without visual aids. Suffice it to say that, in the way of so many games, it gets much easier after you've done it a few turns. And it does hit the target in terms of giving you some measure of control over the chaos of the dice. Yes, anyone can run hot and win the game, but you are making important choices every step of the way. Each decision point tends to be meaningful, and you can definitely look back at the end and tell where you might have gone wrong or right.

Once everyone playing has all the rules down, it's a brisk game that plays in 30 minutes or less with up to four players. And surprisingly, it's had a little more staying power in my group than many new games have had in a while. More than I'd have ever guessed a "random dice game" could have.

That said, the fact we've played it a few times has highlighted for us that not all areas of the score sheet are created equal -- one in particular seems vital to go in on heavily if you're going to have a winning score. I'm not sure what we make of that. If everyone knows that one area of the strategy is crucial, and everyone has equal access (which they do), then it's hard to say the game isn't "fair" or "balanced." On the other hand, if the strategy is limited -- if you must always pursue X even as your secondary focus could be A, B, or C -- then does the game have enough variety in it? It's hard to say. Plus, of course, we could just be "those gamers" right now, certain that a particular strategy is the best for a game when the designer, who has surely played dozens if not hundreds of times more than us, is quite sure it's all even. (That designer, by the way, is Wolfgang Warsch -- who has strong hits not only with this, but with The Taverns of Tiefenthal and The Quacks of Quedlinburg as well. The man knows his stuff.)

I can at least say this: I expect Twice As Clever to stay in the mix a while longer. I'd call it a solid B. Maybe we'll find out just what the balance is like. Or at least figure out if it can be explained more coherently to a first-time player.

A Little From Coloma A, A Little From Coloma B

I love a good worker placement game. And fortunately for me, there have now been so many board games involving worker placement mechanics that A) there are a ton of really good ones; and B) any new ones generally have something clever going on it them (because they have to in order to break through). One of the newer games in the genre that I've enjoyed is Coloma, from designer "Jonny Pac" Cantin.

Set in the Old West, Coloma has players engaging in a variety of activities: building up their western infrastructure, driving their covered wagon around to nearby towns to establish connections, fighting off lawless bandits that storm in, and building bridges over newly discovered rivers. It sounds like a lot, but it's actually not too hard to process because of the clever action system at the heart of the game.

There are five different possible actions you can take each turn, arrayed on a wheel at the center of the board. Adding a wrinkle to the mix, a sixth action is shown on a dial that spins around the wheel each turn, covering up one of the five actions and replacing it with something else. All players plan their turn simultaneously, making a secret selection from the five available actions, then revealing and placing their workers simultaneously.

The core strategy in the game revolves around anticipating what the other players will do. That's because each of the five possible choices actually allows two actions, and "A" and a "B." And for whichever action is chosen by the most players, the "B" is canceled out -- a big red X covers that up, and all the players there only get to do the "A." So each turn, you have interesting considerations to account for in choosing which of the five things you will do. Is there something so important for you to do right now that you're willing to risk losing "half your turn" (while dragging down some opponents with you)? Can you wait for a turn, maybe doing something else this turn and getting two actions where most of your opponents will only get one? Ah... but is that rotating sixth action going cover up what you really need and make it impossible to take next turn?

There are additional nuances to all this: buildings you can construct to give you bonus actions when you choose a specific part of the wheel (including "insurance" for when you get X'd out), an intriguing "arrow" symbol on the wheel that can cause you to do the "A" from one part of the wheel and the "B" from a different part of the wheel, and more. But the core is simple: make plans, and try as much as you can not to make the same plan most other players are making.

It's a fun gimmick, and its presented in a fun way. The action wheel is right there on the board for all to see. Past games with similar "spinning wheels on the board" have been attached to the game board with a plastic brad, but Coloma uses magnets to affix the two layers of the dial in place. It's a simple pleasure, but it feels quite nice. Other fun components include a 3D mine cart in which to put the gold tokens players spend, and fun meeple shapes for the bandits. (There's also a deluxe version of the game, which the early Kickstarter backers received, with additional components that are quite beautiful.)

I've played Coloma several times now, and continue to enjoy it. I have only a couple of reservations about the game. The first is more of an unresolved question for me: I'm unsure of how the game works at higher player counts. Coloma takes up to 6 players, which is a true rarity for a worker placement game. It still moves briskly even with more players; because planning is simultaneous, the game doesn't take that much longer for more players, and you stay involved in it for more of that run time. But more players means more people to stay out of the way of. (Plus, ties for "which action was chosen by most players?" can have its own interesting effects.) You get X'd out more often with more players, which gives a big edge to a player clever or lucky enough to avoid that fate, say, two or three times more than anyone else. It's a good thing, I suppose, that the game's central mechanic matters even more with more players. But if it feels too much like luck and not enough like strategy, it undermines the reason you play a game like this. I haven't played it enough to say it's too luck driven for my tastes with six players, but I can say I do prefer the game with fewer players either way. (Though the option for six players is definitely nice.)

There's also the scoring of the game, which isn't quite as smooth as I wish it were. There are a handful of things that score for points during play. In the end, they probably amount to 20% of your score or less. That's enough that it's important to track, but not enough that it feels important compared to the massive scoring that happens at the end of the game. It just feels awkward to me to score some points during the game but not others, especially when some things you're not supposed to score until the end happen during play, can't be changed, yet aren't supposed to be tallied until the end. Perhaps I've played so many games with "a bit of endgame scoring" that I've become unreasonably accustomed to 80-20 splits the other way.

In any case, there are a lot of elements to Coloma that I'm taken with. It's been one of the few new games to make it to my group's game table multiple times, and it probably still has more life in it. I give it a B+.