Picard: Watcher

The newest episode of Star Trek: Picard was released today, but here I will "catch up" by talking about last week's installment, "Watcher."

Picard follows a strong lead on the location of the mysterious Watcher. Rios lands in an ICE holding center, and Seven and Raffi try to rescue him before he's transferred to a Sanctuary District. And Jurati trades verbal jabs with the Borg Queen in the aftermath of their link.

This was the second episode in a row directed by Lea Thompson, and she was just as strong here as she was the week before. The material, though, was just a touch weaker. Just a touch.

The Picard storyline of the episode was perhaps the weakest element to me this week, but only in that it took a lot of time and a lot of dialogue to get to where it was going. We were served multiple scenes of Picard trying to convince Guinan to trust him, which stalled completely until Picard finally dropped his name (which apparently he should have done in the first place). I also stumbled a bit at first on reconciling the continuity of it all; why didn't Guinan remember the events of "Time's Arrow?" (Ah! Because the correct future from which Picard traveled back in time doesn't exist right now.)

But setting aside the slow burn of that subplot, there was a lot of interesting material in those conversations. Casting a new Guinan was absolutely the right move, even if the show had had the budget for extensive (and not entirely convincing) de-aging visual effects on Whoopi Goldberg. Ito Aghayere did a remarkable job of capturing some indescribable essence of Guinan, and her very presence in the role made the point of all the dialogue hit harder: here's an old white man telling a young black woman to just hang on a bit longer and keep waiting for the change that is going to come, I promise. Very effective Star Trek social commentary. No, not subtle, but still well integrated into the episode.

More of the same came in the Rios subplot. There weren't any soapbox speeches asking how "primitive humans could allow such a thing to happen?" Still, pointed lines of dialogue like "they make you swear allegiance?" could not help but get the message across. The way that real world ICE was blended with the Trek back story of the Sanctuary Districts worked all too well. (A linguistic inversion of the term "sanctuary cities" feels absolutely plausible, doesn't it?)

Seven and Raffi were the release valve on all the serious talk about morality, and served that role well. I'm very much enjoying their dynamic, especially the fact that Raffi's impulse control is even worse than Seven's, and that Seven therefore has to be the level head in the pairing. (Four years of Voyager taught us well that this doesn't come naturally.) Was the car chase a bit silly, a bit manufactured just to inject some action into a talk-heavy episode? You bet. But how often do you get to have a car chase in Star Trek? You gotta just let them have this moment.

The handful of exchanges between Jurati and the Borg Queen were once again a highlight of an episode. Annie Wersching really does seem to be the perfect performer for this different way of writing the Queen. We've had flirtatious (Alice Krige's original) and menacing (Susanna Thompson's version on Voyager), but this queen is oddly sarcastic and quippy. If you'd described it to me, I wouldn't have believed it would work, but Annie Wersching really sells it, and the dynamic between her and Alison Pill has quickly become one of the best elements of the season. And you know it's still going somewhere.

Q continues to be a spice used very sparingly, and that continues to serve the season well. He appears here in a brief final scene (that would have been mid-credits, were this a Marvel movie), after showing up for literally only seconds the week before. It seems as though "just what is up with Q?" is a concern that will rise higher on the list very soon. For now, his scene was fun for more shoutouts to Star Trek continuity (that this season has shoveled on for the fans) -- we got a newspaper referencing Chris Brynner and a Dixon Hill novel written by Tracy Torme (who wrote the first Next Gen episode to feature Hill).

Of course, the big fan shoutout was the return appearance of "the punk on the bus" from Star Trek IV, who had an updated new song ("I Still Hate You") and a healthy fear of what happened the last time someone asked him to turn down his music. Meanwhile, the fan "deep cut" was the revelation that the Watcher was also called a Supervisor, which makes them a possible "co-worker" of Gary Seven from the classic episode "Assignment: Earth." Though of course, the bigger revelation there was that the Watcher somehow looks like Laris. (I knew it couldn't be Guinan; she's famously a Listener, not a Watcher. Nonetheless, I didn't see this twist coming.)

Like I said, this was perhaps a small step down from the week before, but there was still plenty of exciting stuff to keep me very high on this season so far. I give "Watcher" a B+.

Passing Grade

I've been listening to the podcast Filmspotting for a number of years -- long enough for them to repeatedly highlight a particular movie, convince me to put it on my watch list, and for me to then lose track of that movie before actually getting around to it. One such movie was 2018's Eighth Grade, which fell off my radar and then came back onto it thanks to the "life in COVID" Netflix special Inside; Bo Burnham was the writer and director of both.

Eighth Grade is a comedy/drama/coming-of-age story about Kayla, a young girl in the titular year of school. She's navigating all the pressures of that difficult age, struggling with anxiety, and trying to cope by cultivating a social media persona. 94 minutes of heart and humor ensue.

This movie is a particular subgenre of movie I don't generally go for -- a "slice of life" story that isn't particularly driven by plot, serving more as a character study. I didn't exactly love this particular take on the genre either... though I could feel that it was a very well-made version of the formula.

What's key here is the accuracy in this slice of life story. For adults in the audience, this movie serves as a powerful reminder of what an awkward age your early teens are -- that period of time where few have found connections with people like themselves, in large part because they have little or no idea who they are as individuals. Yet familiar as all that is, Eighth Grade also serves as powerful notice that what you remember of school at that age is nothing like today's experience. Modern issues like social media and shooting drills pepper the movie, keenly pointing out that the current generation has basically all the problems of the last generation, plus new ones.

The young lead actor of the movie is really very good. Elsie Fisher gives a very natural, honest performance. She has seemingly no vanity, which is truly remarkable given that she's obviously very close to the age she's portraying here. With such a game partner in the creative process, writer-director Bo Burnham is essentially able to do what he'd wind up doing himself when he made Inside a few years later in the pandemic: peel away any masks to expose some very sensitive emotions beneath.

But, as I said, there kind of isn't much of a plot here. And the other characters outside of Kayla aren't that compelling. (The cluelessness of her father is especially difficult. He gets a nice inspirational speech near the end, but it feels like he's exceptionally lucky that his daughter is doing as well as she is, given how little he actually knows about her.)

I would give Eighth Grade a B-, which is right on the cusp of a "broad recommendation." Specifically, if you're a person who doesn't mind a meandering story (yes, a 90 minute movie can meander) and is satisfied to watch one fully-formed character, then this will probably hit the mark for you.

Assuming You Haven't Had Enough Pandemic Already....

It's common for a successful board game to spawn many expansions, new editions, and spin-offs. (I've certainly helped make my share of those in my career.) But few games have been re-mixed as much as Pandemic. I've played a fair number of the versions, but one that I hadn't tried until recently was the highly regarded (by the BoardGameGeek community) Pandemic: Iberia.

In many ways, Iberia sticks closely to the core Pandemic formula -- there are four types of diseases spreading across the game board. Players must work cooperatively to keep outbreaks in check through clever movement, trading of cards, and usage of special player-specific powers. I actually found it a bit refreshing to be back playing something so close to "regular Pandemic" after playing through the very different Legacy versions.

But Iberia does have a few twists from "good old-fashioned Pandemic" -- fairly small but incredibly meaningful twists that make this a notably different experience. First, this game is set in a specific time and place (Spain, 1848) that predates any understanding of how to cure or eradicate the diseases spreading around the country. You're only mitigating and researching these diseases in the hopes that a cure will one day be found (beyond the scope of the actual gameplay). In mechanics, this means that you can never make it impossible for the four diseases to appear on the board; your goal is to "research" all four diseases before they overwhelm you.

You have some new tools at your disposal to aid in this. In Pandemic: Iberia, you can construct a railway network over the course of the game. Player spend early actions to create connections between cities; later in the game, you can "fast travel" to anywhere on that rail network for a single move, making it much easier to get players to the location they need to be.

You can also distribute purified water into small regions on the board, tokens you can discard to prevent a disease marker from being added to any city touching the region. The system for this cleverly makes it easier to distribute water using cards of colors you've successfully "researched"; so just when a card stops being useful for one purpose, it becomes very useful for another purpose.

I think these changes collectively give Iberia a better sense of tension than its regular Pandemic cousin. I've only played a couple of times, but in those plays, it seems like Pandemic: Iberia never really lets you off the hook. In the classic game, lucky draws and/or smart plays can make it so that victory is assured. You can get out ahead of the rate at which problems arise, and coast to an easy victory. (Not always, but sometimes.) Iberia feels like a more breathless sprint to the finish, where you can't be sure if you'll win or lose until everyone around the table is taking their very last turn.

Then, assuming you do master this version and it ceases to challenge your group, there are options to ramp up the difficulty. One of the more intriguing is to assign abilities to each of the diseases that reflect the time-period-accurate diseases of malaria, typhus, yellow fever, and cholera. I don't know that my group will ever need such a challenge, but it's nice to know that it's there.

I certainly think that Pandemic: Iberia feels like the most replayable non-Legacy version of the game that I've experienced. I'd give it a B+. If you once loved Pandemic but don't find yourself playing it as much anymore, you might want to check out this version.

Picard: Assimilation

Coming up to just one episode behind in blogging about Star Trek: Picard season 2, here are my thoughts on the third episode, "Assimilation."

Picard's team is able to take La Sirena back in time, but at a very high cost. There, the search for the mysterious Watcher begins... but an accident befalls Rios before he can even get started, and he soon is in a delicate situation. Meanwhile, Dr. Jurati must take a dangerous trip into the mind of the Borg Queen to extract information that might help them all.

Let me start with the interesting name on the back of the director's chair for this episode: Lea Thompson. On the one hand, I had no idea that she had taken up directing... though on the other, it's an all-too-common career path for actresses that Hollywood lamentably discards once they reach a certain age. Thompson's directorial resume seems to be a mix of sitcoms and sci-fi shows, though Picard certainly seems like the biggest production she's yet tackled. She did it expertly in every way, getting fantastic performances from the actors, serving up loads of intriguing images, making many dynamic camera moves. If there's any justice, she'll be getting more calls to direct with this work added to her reel.

The episode opened by resolving the cliffhanger from episode 2, of course, and I was pulled in different directions by how things unfolded. On the one hand, I'm sorry to see Elnor dispatched so suddenly (even if the time travel conceit of the season provides an easy way to undo that before season 3). On the other hand, I'm glad the show honored the truth of the situation they'd set up: Elnor was shot by a weapon that should have been lethal, and there really needed to be stakes-setting for this opening act of the season-long story.

That took us to the time travel, which paid homage to Star Trek IV in just the right way. Without indulging fully in the pretentiousness of how time travel looked in that movie, we got some intriguing manipulation of the photography (forwards and backwards, dropping frames). And though this is jumping around the episode a bit, it was not the only homage here: signs for the "Sanctuary Disticts" of LA connected us with Deep Space Nine's "Past Tense" two-parter. More indirectly, the episode story was an homage to great Star Trek naturally including social commentary.

The Rios subplot was, of course, the key vehicle for that, and was a compelling element of the episode. I like that the team's clearly suspect plan to trust in compromised technology led to immediate consequences. (Damn, what a hell of a stunt for Rios' arrival!) Most times that Star Trek takes a trip back in time, they pick up an ally among the contemporary locals. Teresa joins a long tradition including Rain Robinson, Gillian Taylor, and more, and I hope that the character has a longer role in the season ahead.

The Seven/Raffi banter was the comic relief of the episode, and a great use of both characters, as neither is really in their element -- not within character using subterfuge, and not as a story device being the lightness of an episode. Both were a lot of fun. (Way more fun than Kevin the unseen guard. Screw that guy.)

But the best scenes of the episode, far and away, were Dr. Jurati's infiltration of the Borg Queen's mind. Annie Wersching continued to give us a chilling and creepy take on the Queen. ("You've impressed me" was one of the most menacing thing the character has ever said.) Meanwhile, Alison Pill more than rose to the challenge of her difficult moments -- flipping back and forth between Jurati and the Queen, switching between different high-pitched emotions in an instant, and generally making the encounter seem truly dangerous. It's interesting to me that the first season of Picard cast Jurati as the "traitor in our midst," and now this interaction with the Borg Queen positions her to potentially be that again in season two. Yet it doesn't feel at all like a "rehash" to me, and I'm truly interested to see where things go next.

I thought this episode continued all the momentum of the one before, and kept me highly engaged in this new season. I give "Assimilation" an A-.

Picard: Penance

Now that I've caught up with season four of Star Trek: Discovery, it's time for me to start catching up on Star Trek: Picard. So I'm picking back up with the second episode of the new season, "Penance."

Q, in typically circumspect fashion, explains to Picard that he now finds himself in another reality because he has to atone for something. Picard must navigate a xenophobic, authoritarian world to gather the friends who are aware that this timeline isn't the real one... and must reach out to an unlikely ally to learn what specifically went wrong in the past to create this present.

I was completely caught up in this episode and loving every minute of it as I watched it. And in retrospect, after it was over, that's a pretty remarkable thing. The "mirror universe" is a long-running Trek concept that has allowed the franchise to explore the evils of authoritarianism and xenophobia... and if that wasn't already starting to get a little stale after Deep Space Nine's multiple mirror episodes, it was certainly mined to exhaustion by Discovery.

But of course, this isn't exactly the mirror universe. And somehow, there were just enough subtle distinctions in here to get that across. From the original Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror," the mirror universe has always been at least as much about camp as it was a "cautionary tale" -- certainly that's what Deep Space Nine and Enterprise did with it. And even as serious as Discovery strives to be, you can't tell me Michelle Yeoh's delicious performance of Mirror Georgiou wasn't fun. But this alternate timeline of Picard, like the xenophobic reality of season one, clearly had a message in mind. Every aspect of the production paid attention to this, from the photography to the sets to the costumes. (My favorite detail: the ridiculously large communicator badges. A perfect encapsulation about how authoritarianism is performative.)

Serious though the message was, this episode was still a lot of fun. The writers did a superb job of nailing each character's specific voice. Different people navigated the alternate reality with varying degrees of ease, and each character was given moments perfectly suited to the actors portraying them: Patrick Stewart was given the "moral compass" moments, Jeri Ryan got to be the most stoic and unflappable, Evan Evagora was given an outstanding fight scene, Alison Pill was given great comic relief, and so on.

The guest stars were excellent in this episode too. Annie Wersching becomes the third actress to portray the Borg Queen, and in just one episode, her incarnation stands out as possibly the most creepy of all. Her unsettling and meaningful glances at Jurati portend something yet to be revealed, and it feels ominous. John de Lancie gave one of his best performances yet as Q. I was actually shocked at the restraint here, at how little he appeared in the episode. Q set this scenario in motion (or did he?), but did not just pop in every few minutes for a few bon mots. Instead, we got a solid 10-minute stretch of him being subtly unhinged, threatening (and threatened?) as we've rarely seen the character. I've been coming around to the belief that Q is a spice best used carefully in the Star Trek dish, and this episode embraced that. (Plus, a fun Patton Oswalt voice-over cameo. He continues to collect geek franchises. Love it.)

Speaking of geeks -- there were all the fun shoutouts here that longtime Trekkers could ever hope for. The "skull gallery" gave us a raft of Deep Space Nine references (among others). We heard about "General Sisko." We were briefly introduced to yet another Soong family member (who looks and sounds like Brent Spiner). Q name-checked the titles of at least two other Star Trek episodes. If I watch "Penance" again, I'll bet I'd pick up on still more Trek franchise "sly winks."

Yeah, I loved it. Perhaps I'd wish for even more differentiation from the mirror universe, but aside from that minor quibble, I thoroughly enjoyed the episode. I give it an A-. I'm very much looking forward to what happens next. (And I guess lucky me for falling a little behind: I now have a couple more episodes to watch!)

Discovery: Coming Home

The finale of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season was a one-hour distillation and continuation of all that had been true of the rest of the season: it was a bit cluttered, it made several disappointing plot moves... and it also absolutely hit the bullseye on some key emotional moments.

Discovery must stop Book's ship (under the control of Tarka) from destroying the 10-C power source, but doing so may sacrifice their ability to get home. And even if successful, the aliens must still be convinced to stop their system-annihilating anomaly. Meanwhile, an evacuation effort is underway at Earth, but it's too late to do much for a seemingly doomed planet.

Over the course of the season, I think the writers had dug themselves an awfully deep hole with Tarka and Book. The weren't going to make me come around on understanding either character's behavior any better, but of course... they were going to try. I thought that effort fell flat; Tarka had been so single-minded all season long, so beyond seeing reason, that him doing anything short of fighting tooth-and-nail up until the bitter end wasn't going to feel honest to me. So his sacrifice for Book did not feel redemptive -- it just felt false. But good riddance; it's not like I was invested in him anyway.

They didn't make any effort at justifying why Book was such a dupe this season, but I suppose that's alright since that ship left the spacedock a long time ago. I did like his apparent death and subsequent "resurrection," though. I personally wasn't moved by the potential loss of the character (not even enough to actively even question whether the writers were "tricking me" or not). Sonequa Martin-Green, however, got another chance to showcase that she might be the strongest actor Star Trek has ever had. Her long, wordless reaction to Book's death went through half a dozen micro-emotions in a single shot, so tight on her face that you could see every one. Her euphoria when Book was later restored was equally powerful. I may have been past caring too deeply about Book, but wow, did I care about what Michael Burnham thought about Book.

The rest of that "return" sequence, though? Ugh. I was stunned at how completely the writers threw away the very thing that was so compelling about the previous episode. We were served up literally an entire season about how unknowable these aliens would be, culminating in a fantastic hour showcasing the difficulties of communicating with them. But then Saru just downloaded Duolingo 10-C and suddenly three different characters are all taking turns with their own long, complicated monologues. Give me more of "how do we express this complex idea in a simple way!" What have you done?!

I found the rest of the episode to be a similar mix of good and bad, though not to the startling extremes of "Sonequa Martin-Green doing what she does best" and "the 10-C being reduced to the lowest alien denominator." There was a very enjoyable rapport between Tilly and Admiral Vance, featuring stoicism under pressure, a real "end point" for a long growth arc for Tilly, and some pleasant gallows humor... yet I'm also not entirely sure any of that wasn't a distraction from what was most interesting in the episode. (What if that screen time had instead been used to keep communication with the 10-C difficult?) I liked that, for a change, Discovery didn't have any characters (that we care about) actually have to give their lives to save the apocalyptic day... yet I'm also fairly sure that made the jeopardy seem toothless, when even a secondary character like Ndoye survived.

I felt not at all mixed about the relationship between T'Rina and Saru. That may have been the one plot thread I thought was perfectly handled at every moment throughout the season. Am I a "shipper" now? How am I a shipper now?!

I can't close without acknowledging the cameo at the end that made Republican politicians performatively lose their goddamn minds: the appearance of Stacey Abrams as the President of Earth. You might think this was typical politics, one side ranting against the other. I think it cannot be stated often and forcefully enough: that reaction was racist. It. Was. Racist. No doubt, if I had the chance to say that directly to the sorts of people who whined about Abrams' appearance, they would scream about cancel culture and how they're tired of being called racist. OK, stop being racist.

Here's why it feels to me that this is about race. I have no idea how many people actually subscribe to Paramount Plus, but I feel pretty confident in declaring that it's got to be a smaller number than were watching a typical network television sitcom about 10 years ago. A particular sitcom: Parks and Recreation. I could point out that there was no whining when John McCain made a cameo appearance on that show -- but that would simply point out the hypocrisy that it's fine with Republicans when one of their own does something. But then, Joe Biden also appeared on Parks and Recreation. No big social media reaction to that -- even though all the same social media was around then, even though the political environment at the time had already grown pretty toxic, even though certainly more people saw that than saw the season four finale of Star Trek: Discovery. The difference? Stacey Abrams, a black woman, was portrayed as a person in a position of respect and power. As having a place of importance in a hopeful future. That brought a backlash. Gross.

This was simply the latest in a long line of Star Trek fans getting to fulfill a dream by appearing on the show -- people like Stephen Hawking, Mae Jemison, Prince (now King) Abdullah of Jordan, Tom Morello, Seth MacFarlane, and more. It was fun. Maybe Stacey Abrams was a little stilted in her line delivery, but hey, I'll bet she was nervous and freaking out about actually getting to be on Star Trek! I'd much rather have her holding public office than acting in television shows anyway. (She's still working on that.)

(deep breath)

Right, the season finale of Star Trek: Discovery. A few very strong, emotional moments. A lot of frustrating decisions. I could see giving it a wide range of mediocre grades, depending on what I choose to give the most weight to. I think I'm going to come down on the more positive side of "I'm here to buy absolutely anything Sonequa Martin-Green wants to sell me" and give the episode a B-. But I certainly hope that before season 5, the writers' room regroups and charts a better course for the next episodes.

Caged Pig

Some movies are real crowd-pleasers that appeal to a broad audience (and, typically, are specifically crafted to do so). Then there are movies that are real barometers of a person's personal taste in film -- the kind of thing that one person thinks are Oscar worthy and another finds unwatchable. Pig is one of those movies.

Nicolas Cage stars as Robin Feld, a reclusive truffle hunter who lives in the Oregon forest. When his beloved foraging pig is abducted, he recruits the help of the restaurant supplier who buys from him. Together, the two try to find who took the pig.

Pig was nominated for absolutely no Academy Awards, even though a great many critics put it on their Top 10 Lists for 2021. I know at least one person who has called Pig their favorite movie of last year. So for the right audience, this movie definitely works. I'm simply not in that audience.

To some extent, I can blame the way I bounced off this movie on the way that some people tried to summarize it: "it's John Wick with a pig." That flippant description does a disservice to people who like either movie. This is not an action-adventure, nor a revenge flick; it's a largely internal meditation on loss.

But it being so internalized is the bigger part of why I think it didn't work well for me. I like emotions to ride closer to the surface in a movie. Being at a remove feels very much the point here to me; the protagonist himself has withdrawn from society, so the storytelling chooses to withdraw from direct emotion. Instead, feelings will be evoked through the secondary medium of food. (That makes sense in context, believe it or not.) You'll be invited to pity a character, but not to actually feel what the character is feeling.

It's beyond wild to me that Nicolas Cage is the star of this movie. His career is littered with over-the-top, larger-than-life performances. Casting him to be a character who's staid and restrained feels like some bizarre sort of dare. His very presence does even more disservice to proper expectation setting, I think, than the people who called this "John Wick with a pig." You spend the entire movie waiting for Nicolas Cage to start... you know... Caging. But he never does. This is like some darker, grittier, more "realistic" version of a bright and colorful superhero who we've never actually seen on screen before: The Dark Chef Rises.

My instincts told me this movie wasn't going to be for me, but I let enough high praise convince me to try it anyway. I really should have trusted my instincts on this one. For me, Pig was a D- at best, with perhaps the kindest thing I could say about it being that it took only 92 minutes of my time. I don't doubt the sincerity of those who put it among the best of 2021. I just don't get it.

Discovery: Species Ten-C

The second-to-last episode of Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season felt to me like two episodes in one. One of them, I truly loved. The other? Well, it basically kept falling short in the same ways that the last several Discovery episodes have fallen short for me.

The Discovery crew attempts to make contact with the mysterious 10-C aliens, but are at a loss to find any basis for communication. Meanwhile, Tarka is taking genocidal steps to destroy the 10-C power source; only Book is in a position to stop him, and only a captive Jett Reno may be able to convince Book to do so.

The whole "first contact" part of this episode? Truly excellent. Yes, it was a little bit Arrival, a little bit Contact, a little bit The Abyss... but it felt to me like a good take on those ideas rather than a straight-up copy of any. I thought it actually captured the sense of grandeur and wonder that the original Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture was clearly trying for, but couldn't reach through some combination of bad writing and the limitations of 1979 visual effects.

Trying to make sense of alien thoughts, trying to render human thoughts in a mathematical and truly universal way... this is great stuff, and frankly, Star Trek doesn't explore it often enough when clearly it could. (I can't think of an example nearly as effective as this since "Darmok.") It made me wish that Star Trek would try this more often, even as I realized that this probably wouldn't feel as special if it were more frequent.

But alas, this was only half of the episode -- and the other half wasn't nearly as compelling. Book continued to be as dumb as can be, falling for Tarka's lies yet again. General Ndoye's unjustified impatience paved the way for cheap jeopardy. A slow burn effort to figure out "what's wrong with Zora" turned out to be fruitless, as Culber and Stamets figured out the answer about 20 seconds too late to actually do anything about it.

The thing is, I feel like there are ways to have improved at least some of this. It's just that the Discovery writers' room may just be failing to "show their work." Setting aside the fact that Booker could just be blinded by simple, relatable grief, there might be a sci-fi explanation here: his empathic abilities could be overloaded by Tarka's feelings of loss, or his own loss mirroring back on itself inside his mind, to a degree that he just can't tell that Tarka's deciving him. Elsewhere, we viewers may have been conditioned by decades of film and television teaching us that you run a doomsday countdown to 0:01, but General Ndoye hasn't been. With stakes this high, it's not unreasonable for someone to be impatient and act drastically -- we just don't always get that character in our fiction. If only the audience had been given a little help understanding these justifications, maybe character behavior wouldn't seem so strange.

But then, justifying why people behave the way they do during a crisis is not Discovery's strong suit -- not this season, at least. Take as an example: I actually enjoyed the scenes between Burhman and Saru, where she gave him advice on relating to a Vulcan, and he shared some "primal scream" therapy with her. And I know that in theory, they did have time for those conversations, as other people were preparing things for their mission. Yet are we sure that there was absolutely nothing Burnham or Saru could be doing to help in those moments? If true, best to make that overwhelmingly and explicitly clear to the audience, lest it look like they're behaving wildly inappropriately with extremely limited time.

Another scene that I liked from the B plot (even if it too felt a bit tonally jarring amid the action) were the stories exchanged between Jett Reno and Cleveland Booker. Reno has usually been the prickly, comic relief character. In having her speak about her late wife, she had to both relate to another person and be very serious -- big gear changes for her character (which Tig Notaro delivered very well). Book's side of the exchange did help explain why an alien is named Cleveland Booker... which I didn't really need to know as much as "why is he being so dumb right now?"... but it was an interesting tidbit (and also delivered very well by David Ajala).

The "warts" in this episode were rough to look at. But "warts and all," there was a lot I did like about this episode. I think I'm going to call it a B.

A Total Clone Show

The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have lit up the internet in a number of ways. But while the masses have been focused mainly on "Baby Yoda," Star Wars fans who have been watching all the TV shows have been thrilled at how characters originally introduced in the cartoon series have been appearing in live action Star Wars for the first time.

I finally finished watching all of the Clone Wars series. This was the first weekly Star Wars TV show, set in between Episodes II and III and taking an anthology approach to filling in that gap. Different episodes would feature different characters. Some plots would exist for one-off episodes, while others would develop over time.

There are 7 seasons of Clone Wars, and more than 130 episodes, so it wasn't internet buzz that made me seek it out -- I actually started many months ago. Technically, I started many years ago. As seasons one and two of Clone Wars were first airing on television, I was involved in making a game based on the series, and wound up watching every episode that then existed as a result. That didn't really translate to an enjoyment of the show that kept me watching after I was no longer "required" to, and so I drifted away from it. As many fans would tell you, I left before Clone Wars actually got good.

That's sort of accurate. But I think it would be more accurate to say that I left before Clone Wars grew up. The first two seasons of the show feel very much aimed at kids. The plots were often shallow. Too many episodes focused on Jar Jar Binks or C-3PO, or were stretched to fit a teachable moral (explicitly spelled out at the start of every episode). And since the trappings of the prequel movies weren't exactly a favorite of mine to begin with, any obstacle to sticking with the show felt like too big an obstacle.

But enough people whose opinions I trust told me that Clone Wars was worth going back to and finishing. And indeed, they were right. I'm not sure there's a clear break point where the show improves; I just know that by the end of season three, it almost felt like a different show. A deep serialized arc with multiple concurrent subplots had crept in. Stand-alone episodes fell away almost entirely, with nearly every episode now part of an explicit two- or three- (or four!) part story. And it really stopped feinting at being a show "for kids," spending some whole episodes on political scheming, philosophical disagreements, or romance.

By season four, Clone Wars had become good enough to convince me that the entire folly of the prequel trilogy was actually worth it, as stage setting for this. And there were still three more seasons to go after that, each one a marked improvement over the last! I had the pleasure of just watching them all at my own pace, not having to wait a year or more between seasons (or much more, in the case of the six-year gap between seasons six and seven). And a pleasure it was.

Overall, I'd give Clone Wars a B grade. But that's truly an average, a result of me not really reflecting on each season as a whole as I went along. Loosely, I'd say the early seasons rate a C at best, while later seasons were at least an A-. The good news, if you've never watched Clone Wars yourself, is that I really don't think it's necessary to be a completionist here. The background you need on the series is provided by prequel movies, so if you want to just skip the early "bad" seasons and start around season three, you could do that. You can even skip all the way the real cream of the crop and watch just the last season or two, if you really wanted. The farther in you jump, the more chance you'll miss the introduction of a cool new character created for the show, or the first chapters of an important ongoing storyline... but I think it will all still probably be coherent compared to the average hyper-serialized television series.

Wherever you decide to start, the point is: I think you should start.

Discovery: Rosetta

Catching up with last week's (not yesterday's) episode of Star Trek: Discovery...

Hoping to gather sociological information on Species 10-C to help in their coming first contact, Burnham leads a small away team to a planet that may have been the aliens' former home world. Meanwhile, aboard Discovery, Booker and Tarka conduct a stealth operation that will allow Book's ship to travel with Discovery undetected.

There are two distinct aspects to Star Trek: Discovery that I think are diametrically opposed to one another: the show wants to engage deeply with the personal problems and feelings of its major characters, and it wants every season-long story to feature a massive, galaxy-threatening problem. I do find the show is often able to keep these two elements in balance with each other... but as each season approaches its conclusion, this becomes harder to do: even though human emotion is always, rightfully, the heart of the show, when the stakes become so high, it increasingly strains credibility to stop and talk about feelings.

The episode "Rosetta" is the most literal illustration of this unfortunate tension that the show has ever presented. With less than a day before the civilizations of Earth, Titan, and Ni'Var will be annihilated, the Discovery crew paused to literally bask in feelings. In other words, I found it hard to disagree with the characters at the start of the episode who were saying, "why again are we doing this side quest right now?"

The flip side, at least, is that the mission to the 10-C's former homeworld was tantalizing in what it suggested about this species. Discovery sure seems to be teeing us up for the incredibly rare Star Trek alien that won't be a human actor in prosthetic makeup. The implications are that they're huge, live in a gas environment, and communicate through a method that's neither linguistic nor telepathic. If even one of those things actually turns out to be true, Discovery will have done a good job using modern television technology and storytelling to give us something we truly haven't seen before in the franchise. I'm all for that.

But the "stop for a side quest" main plot was not the only element of the episode that strained logic. As Book and Tarka's infiltration mission transitioned into "appeal to General Ndoye," the why of it all confounded me. What exactly is Book going to ask Ndoye to do? Even he didn't know, as all his cloak-and-dagger culminated in a vague warning to basically "be ready for when we think of something for you to actually do." Plus, Book hasn't even finished cleaning the egg off his face from the last several times that Tarka double-crossed him, so he forfeits any place to be surprised when Tarka shows up with a captive Jet Reno at the end of the episode. And yet, I continue to enjoy the emotional journey Book has been on this season. (Again, emotions are something Discovery does very well.) But does he have to be so dumb?

There was also interesting emotional content in Adira's small subplot -- some sort of hero worship (or budding crush?) involving Detmer. But this too depended on Adira not being very "smart" -- that is, not as emotionally mature as I feel we've seen her in the past. Par for the course in this episode: the writers had a compelling emotional arc mapped out for the characters, but didn't really build an episode that comfortably held or justified it.

Always great to have Tig Notaro back, though. And the end of the episode certainly confirms that she'll be in at least one of the remaining two episodes of the season.

I really wanted to like this episode more, but it was unfortunately doing a lot to trigger my "unsuspension of disbelief." And yet, even as parts of it seemed so dumb, others were so effectively tugging on the heartstrings that I couldn't hate it that much. Average that all out to something like a C+? I certainly hope that the last two episodes pull out of what's been feeling like a bit of a spiral to me, to deliver a solid conclusion to the season.

Conversation Starter

The Conversation is a movie that gets discussed quite a bit in film buff circles -- the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola movie that's so good it deserved the Best Picture Oscar... had Francis Ford Coppola not also made the winning The Godfather Part II in the same year. It's the story of Henry Caul, paranoid surveillance expert who is drawn into compromising his principles when he records a young couple, seemingly in fear for their lives from the client who contracted him to make the recording.

Perhaps I shouldn't have even bothered watching the film. I've never "met a film" from Coppola that I've truly liked, and I'm especially down on the Godfather films that most of the world holds in high esteem. Yet The Conversation increasingly felt like something of a "blind spot" in my film credentials. And I've always enjoyed star Gene Hackman in pretty much everything (and some have said this is his greatest performance).

So I gave The Conversation a chance... and found it pretty "meh." Which, in terms adjusted for me might well mean that some of my readers would love it.

I did truly enjoy the "frozen in time" state of surveillance in the mid-1970s. Not only is it fun to think of how the main character would react in utter horror to our modern age of cell phones and social media, it's also fun to watch modern CSI-style tropes ("enhance") play out using half-century-old technology. The opening act of the film is surprisingly strong and fast-moving for a movie of the time (in my experience), throwing you right into the heart of the story.

But there is a distinct and deliberate pacing to 70s thrillers, and "slow burn" is a generous way of describing it. The Conversation is more interested in the psychological hang-ups of its protagonist than the specifics of his case. While on paper, that sounds the right emphasis to me, the fact is that in this story, I found the case far more interesting than the character. The movie strongly tells us who he is, but does almost nothing to justify why he compromises so much about who he is, right now, in this situation. The movie is sort of "too plotty" for the character study, but too languid to be truly suspenseful.

I don't know that I would have called this an all-time great Gene Hackman performance. But, paradoxically, it certainly showcases why Gene Hackman is great. He's one of the most soft-spoken and naturalistic film actors of all time, and that's especially remarkable when you consider the era he worked in most, the 1970s and 1980s. He was working steadily in a time when grandstanding actors with outsized egos, "Method" excesses, and booming voices were on a rapid rise. There is nothing standout to me about Hackman in this movie... and that's kind of the point. He's doing his best to give us a real person, not a performance.

Many people have more affection for movies of the 1970s (and earlier) than I do, so factor that in when I say I'd give The Conversation a C. Also, because I also dissed The Godfather movies here, factor that in when I say would much sooner have awarded Best Picture to this over The Godfather Part II (or Chinatown, the other lauded nominee from 1974). I can't personally endorse The Conversation, but I'm quite sure that one or two people reading this have never seen it and would probably love it. I hope I've given enough clues here for you to know if that's you.

Voyager Flashback: Coda

Some of Star Trek's best episodes have featured characters grappling with the prospect of an afterlife. Another strong link in that chain comes with Voyager's "Coda."

Captain Janeway finds herself in a repeating loop of time that always seems to end with her death. Soon, a manifestation of her father appears to help her face the truth: she has died, and now she must let go and move on to what comes next.

There's a fun origin story to this episode. According to show runner Jeri Taylor (who also wrote this script), there had been several pieces of story ideas kicking around the writers' room, but not quite working out. Then the inspiration came to pull them all into one episode, with the "time loop" conceit to contain them all. I think the result is smoother than "five or six episodes mashed together." But I do think there are two episodes here.

First, you have a compelling little sci-fi problem: Janeway is stuck inside Happy Death Day (over two decades before that movie would actually be made). This tees up a number of great vignettes, including an unusually fast space battle, a creepy "Remember Me"-adjacent scenario where only Janeway perceives that space/time is changing, and a fantastically unsettling scene in which the Doctor decides to euthanize the captain against her will. I can imagine a version of this episode where the back half continued to feed us more increasingly bizarre deaths, fluctuating tone wildly between mystery and horror and science, and ultimately maybe having Janeway question whether "fate" can be beaten.

Meanwhile, the back half of this episode serves up some of the most emotionally affecting scenes of the series to date. Chakotay's failed attempts to revive Janeway with CPR yield some of Robert Beltran's best work. (He even makes the cliché line "don't you die on me!" sound credible in the moment.) Watching characters grieve Janeway really lands, from Tuvok's stoic log entry to B'Elanna's eulogy to the words from Harry Kim that move Janeway to tears. Without all the mysterious time loop stuff of the first half, you could almost believe Janeway's death was real. (At least, as much as you could ever believe that the #1 star on the call sheet was being written off their show.)

I can imagine a version of this episode that skips the first 15-20 minutes, starts with the failed attempt to revive Janeway, and is simply an extended meditation on "letting go," with more time allowing for even more characters to express their feelings. You could even keep the twist involving Janeway's "father" in that version of that episode. Guest star Len Cariou (most famous for originating Sweeney Todd on Broadway) is great as the understanding and welcoming father... and equally great as the insistent and sinister alien trying to coax Janeway "toward the light" (his light). And offering an explanation of near-death experiences is just the sort of "what if?" premise that Star Trek does well.

The thing is, it's not like the two halves of this episode don't work together. The throughline of "not accepting death" runs from beginning to end. Look at the whole critically, and you can conclude that the evil alien tried first to pose as a Vidiian, then The Doctor, and perhaps even Chakotay all in sequence -- attempting to invoke fear, helplessness, and hopelessness -- before finally trying Janeway's father as a messenger for embracing death.

Other observations:

• There are a lot of details about Janeway's background in this episode: how her father died, that she has a sister. Jeri Taylor took most of these details from the novel Mosaic, which she'd already written, bringing quasi-canon Star Trek officially inside the tent.
  

• At the funeral, the declaration that "the captain wouldn't want us to be sad" is immediately followed with the news that "Neelix has prepared some food." So much for that.

• It's pretty frustrating that during Tuvok and Kes' attempt to contact Janeway, she remains mostly silent. Nor does she try the one thing we've seen work for awakening Kes' perceptions, physical contact (or the attempt at it).

I think "Coda" is actually a pretty good episode, and I'd give it a B+. I just can't shake the feeling that either half, broken out onto its own and fully developed into an hour, might have been among the very best of the series.

Furnace Up Your Sleeve

There aren't many board games that come along with a revolutionary new mechanic unlike anything I've seen before in another game. But fortunately, there's plenty of room to achieve a game that feels novel and different even just making small tweaks to existing ideas. Furnace is a recent example.

Furnace pits up to four players against each other in a four-round competition to build the best industrial empire. In each round, things start with an auction phase. Players bid against each other over a series of cards that either produce one of the game's resources or convert resources (to points, or to some other resource). After the auctioning, there's a phase where each player runs the engine they've built, using the cards they've acquired one time each to generate the most "stuff" they can.

It's such a fast game to play and so simple to explain that a natural gut reaction would be to say "there's really not much here." But how the auctions are conducted makes all the difference, generating a lot of brinksmanship with your opponents and creating fun tension and competition.

Each player has 4 bidding chips, valued 1 through 4. On your turn, you place one of your bidding chips on one of the cards up for sale. There are a lot of cards available (equal to the number of players, plus four more), but things fill up fast. That's because you're not allowed to put more than one of your chips on the same card, and you're not allowed to put the same chip value on a card that an opponent has already placed there.

What's more, once the chips are all placed, you go through each card one by one, and it's not exactly "winner take all." While the highest bidder on each card takes it to add to their engine, every other player who bid on it gets a smaller reward specified by the card -- and takes that reward as many times as the value on the chip they bid for it.

These two tweaks together create a surprisingly broad strategic landscape. Sometimes you're bidding to win and sometimes you're actually bidding to lose. Losing with a high number can pay handsome rewards... but bidding high-ish can mean you win something you didn't actually want to win. Bidding a number that boxes out an opponent is another important nuance (when you can leave them unable to play the numbers they have remaining on a card you know they want). Cards are also auctioned in order, and rewards can sometimes be conversions rather than resources -- so that order can matter a great deal.

Yes, when you get to the "production" phase of a round, the game silos the players off from one another, everyone running their own engine independently. But this less interactive phase takes far less time than the rest. And even it has some optional wrinkles you can choose to play with: the default rules for the game let you use your collected cards in any order, while a variant forces you to build everything in a specific order as you acquire cards and then to always run your engine from left to right.

Designer Ivan Lashin has not only managed to generate welcome nuance in a game with a slimmer rules set, he's managed to do it in a game that only takes around 10-15 minutes per player to play. I don't know about you, but I'm always in the market for a game that fills the gaming niche of "let's play one more that's quick, but not brainless."

I'd give Furnace a B+. There are a fair number of games somewhat close to it, but in my limited plays so far, I've enjoyed it more than the competition.

Picard: The Star Gazer

It's not clear to me why the modern "Star Trek industrial complex" decided there should be three weeks of overlap where both Discovery and Picard were dropping new episodes, but that's exactly what they've done. And, of course, a longtime Trek fan like me is going to jump straight to the new Star Trek: Picard episode, "The Star Gazer."

A year and a half has passed since the events of season one, and much has changed with where all of our heroes find themselves. Jean-Luc Picard is increasingly preoccupied with the roads it now seems too late for him to travel, and with memories of his mother who put him on the road he did travel. Soon, a crisis comes for Picard, calling him by name. When he visits an unusual anomaly in space, he quickly encounters two important specters from his past.

Overall, I was really picking up what this first episode of season two was putting down. It was full of wonderful one-on-one character interactions: Picard and Laris, Rios and Jurati, Seven and Picard, Picard and Guinan. The theme of emotional avoidance was made strongly again and again, clearly setting the table for the story to be told this season. The scene between Guinan and Picard (her bar is at 10 Forward Avenue, get it?!) was especially nice, really demonstrating their friendship as they talked intimiately over "hooch." (Even if Guinan's "why I'm aging" explanation felt a bit forced and undermined a similar beat coming for Q later in the epsiode.)

It was great to have a more menacing version of the Borg back on the scene; I for one have felt like they've been defanged significantly in pretty much every appearance since First Contact. There was great action, with some of the most impressive and painful looking stunts Star Trek has ever served up. And the production values were off the charts; "new Trek" has always looked expensive, but this episode looked as impressive to me as any Star Trek feature film ever has.

Part of getting Patrick Stewart to return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard was letting him contribute more story elements to the scripts than he ever got to before. I'm willing to bet that one of those contributions was the revelation that Picard's father was abusive to his mother -- an aspect of Stewart's own life that he's spoken of publicly and powerfully on many occasions. On the one hand, it feels like background we really ought to have known about Picard before now, with as much time as we've spent with the character. On the other hand, it truly does feel internally consistent with pretty much everything we have learned about him over the years. It explains why he was so reluctant to ever return home, informs the rift he had with the "brother who stayed behind," and quietly reinforces all we know of his moral code. (Also, his wistful regrets about being "the last Picard" echo nicely with his anguish at losing his family in the movie Generations.)

All that said, though... there was a good deal of "inelegance" to the script that served up all these great elements. The "48 hours earlier" trope was used in the most cynical way here: "nothing happens" in the first three-quarters of this story, so we're going to manufacture some action by teasing the end just to grab your attention. The theme of "regret" was hit so hard that I can't help but be nervous how this season will tackle it in a way that feels meaningfully different from one of The Next Generation's all-time great episodes, "Tapestry" (which, notably, also used Q to get at the issue). Then there's the convenience of it all. I understand they want to bring back all their actors from season one (and I'm happy to have them), but moving almost all of them into formal Starfleet roles felt like quite the expedient cheat -- and hard to reconcile for most of them, as we saw them in season one.

Clearly this episode is the opening chapter of the novel that will be season two. Once the whole shape is revealed, my take on this first hour might change dramatically. But as an island unto itself, I give "The Star Gazer" a B+.

Voyager Flashback: Alter Ego

If you've watched any of the modern Star Trek series, you'll know that they've (understandably) embraced more modern television sensibilities. Besides the huge strides in visuals, the way the stories are told feels very different from past Star Trek series. Of course, the "Berman era" series also had a feel distinct from the original series -- which is more apparent when a kind of "throwback" episode comes along, like Voyager's "Alter Ego."

Voyager investigates an "inversion nebula," a phenomenon that shouldn't exist. Meanwhile, Kim goes to Tuvok for advice on suppressing his emotions when he falls in love with a holodeck character. Slowly, it becomes apparent that there might be a surprising link between the two stories.

The trappings of this episode are very much of the "Next Generation and company" era of Star Trek -- holodecks (both the complicated relationships they can foster, and the way their characters can become sentient and dangerous), traces of ongoing character development (in the budding romance between Tom and B'Elanna), and gentle setup for a future episode (Vorik's attentiveness to B'Elanna). Still, this really feels like a classic Star Trek episode to me in its focus on Tuvok -- specifically, in the complexity and contradictions of Vulcan emotions.

The episode opens with banter that could have been lifted straight from Kirk, Spock, and McCoy; everyone is giving Tuvok a good-natured (?) ribbing about Vulcan stoicism. There's plenty of deadpan Vulcan humor. ("Are you two friends?" "Yes."/"No.") Tuvok spends a lot of the episode declaring what "Vulcans do not" do, which is exposed as a screen for what he personally does not want to do. (This is exposed both by the mysteriously perceptive Marayna and by the actions of another Vulcan, Vorik.) The pacing is rather slow, with the episode more than half over before any real sense of danger manifests. There's a classic Star Trek sense of financial restraint to the episode. (We paid for this resort set, and dammit, we are going to get our money's worth!) And everything builds to a climax that feels pretty "old school Trek" too; Tuvok helps the real Marayna face her own issues of loneliness, as she delivers a parting shot that Tuvok himself is also quite lonely.

At the same time, though, the episode doesn't feel "dated" -- at least, not to the 1960s. There's plenty about it that feels modern (for then) as well. The story feels somewhat inspired by Fatal Attraction, with Marayna interested in a man who does not reciprocate. (The main difference: infidelity is not in the mix here. Though it sure does take a long time for Tuvok to remind everyone that he has a wife.) The sort of "story handoff" here is also rather sophisticated for its time; before the episode really focuses on Tuvok, it looks like it's going to be about Harry Kim falling in love with a holodeck character (which might actually have made an interesting full episode of its own, had there been no "twist" about Marayna).

I also enjoy the interplay between main characters here. Kim and Tuvok have a "jealous argument" that's perfectly calibrated for Star Trek in general and a Vulcan in particular -- feelings are clearly hurt, even though no one is shouting. (It's nice for the episode to pair these two. It was reportedly conceived of as another Paris/Kim episode, but I think it was good to mix things up.) A scene in engineering is the latest in the long line featuring the enduring friendship of B'Elanna and Harry; for the dozenth time, I found myself thinking they should have been made a couple (rather than B'Elanna and Tom).

Other observations:

• I applaud the actors' very careful pronunciation of the Vulcan game of kal-toh. Long ago (in the days when I was working on Star Trek CCG), I pronounced it lazily, was misheard as saying "cow toe," and and that's what we ended up calling it from then on.

• This episode was directed by Robert Picardo. He's the second Voyager actor to helm an episode, but it didn't really grab him like it did some of the others who would do so; he directed only one other. "Alter Ego" was specifically chosen for him, as he would appear in just one short vignette at the holodeck resort. Reportedly, the writers asked him what he'd like that venue to be. So when you see two holo-babes hanging on and kissing The Doctor, know that Robert Picardo "wrote" that for himself. In an interview, he quipped (not really so humorously): "I got to shoot as many takes of that as I wanted."

• Could anyone really be strangled by a lei? 

• The nebula turns out to be either an "art installation" or a "national park," depending on your point of view.

I do find myself wishing that "Alter Ego" had either stuck with the first suggested plot (holodeck love), or had transitioned to the more menacing plot (alien Fatal Attraction) a little bit faster. But there are still moments to like here. I give the episode a B-.

A Cowboy Rides Off Into the Sunset

I've been aware of Cowboy Bebop for literally decades. A friend of mine -- who always hoped I'd grow to share his love of anime -- was regularly trying to sell me on Cowboy Bebop being the one series that might guide me into the genre. It didn't have the shrill, piercing voice acting of other anime. It didn't traffic in the cliches of so many other anime series. It was pretty clearly an inspiration for He-Who-Must-No-Longer-Be-Named when he created Firefly. None of those appeals worked; I never gave the show a chance.

Finally, along came a live action adaptation of the show. But before a non-binger like me could even get through the 10 episodes, Netflix cancelled it. Not enough people watched it fast enough, it seems, for how expensive it surely was to make. And if it had at least been "on the bubble" in viewership? Well, the critics -- and many of Cowboy Bebop's original fans -- seemed staunchly aligned against it. So... easy come, easy go, I guess.

For what it's worth, I thought the live Cowboy Bebop was "not bad." But far too much time has passed since the original for this new version to hew so closely to it. Is it unfair that 20 years of pop culture has cribbed from the anime, and now the live version feels like IT is the copy -- of Firefly, Veronica Mars, The Mandalorian, and more? Sure. But nobody forced the live action version to essentially remake the old scripts and retain its now-predictable plot twists.

If the scripts sometimes felt like they weren't trying hard enough, the visuals felt to me like they were usually trying too hard. In 10 episodes of Cowboy Bebop, I think there might be something like 5 "normal" shots total. Most of the time, the camera is reveling in heavily-tilted Dutch angles, conspicuous fisheye lenses, and more. Every shot is special, and so no shot is special. It's just distracting.

On the other hand, Cowboy Bebop had perfectly cast actors portraying very enjoyable characters. John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, and Daniella Pineda made a delicious, sarcastic, unflappable trio. The banter was smart and sharp. They had a sense of style that went far beyond the costumes and hairstyling. They were good at the action too. And the remaining cast and guest stars were often just as fun. The chemistry always had me looking forward to the next episode -- even when I was halfway through the current episode and had already guessed the ending.

I think overall, I would only give Cowboy Bebop a B-. But I totally would have been there for another season, had there been one. And I suppose my takeaway is to be on the lookout for those three main stars I liked so much, hoping for them to wind up on some other TV series in the future that makes as good use of them. (Another takeaway: a fantastic theme song that's going straight into my ski mix. Yes, I know it's exactly the same banger that the anime featured too. Better late than never.)

Voyager Flashback: Fair Trade

I've made no secret of the fact that Neelix was my least favorite character on Star Trek: Voyager. I think this was the same for many viewers. The third season episode "Fair Trade" was not going to change any of those opinions.

Voyager arrives at the Nekrit Expanse, a vast region of space about which little is known. Neelix is secretly concerned, as it marks the edge of space he knows personally, and thus the end of his utility as a guide to the Delta Quadrant. Concerned about his place on the ship, he works with an old partner to find a map of the Expanse... and is drawn back into a criminal past.

The story of Neelix's "dark past" had reportedly been kicking around with the writing staff since season one. But only in season three did they contrive a reason why he might embrace that past: fear of outliving his usefulness on Voyager and being put off the ship. On the one hand, that fear makes sense: this is not a Galaxy-class starship with non-Starfleet families "not contributing" to the workings of the ship. On the other hand, Neelix has been living with these people for two years now, yet hasn't learned that the Federation is non-transactional and generous to a fault?

But then, Neelix's failure to "read the room" has always been one of the character's most obnoxious traits. And this story kicks that into high gear. In the opening minutes of the episode, he's trying to force his way into the security department and engineering. Only minutes after that, he's admitting to his old friend Wixiban that he's actually never really been useful on the ship -- they don't need a cook, and he's not much of an ambassador. Indeed, Wixiban seems to actually be everything Neelix always pretended at: more street smart, more knowledgeable, more clever and resourceful.

That's the real problem with this episode: it's "threatening me with a good time." For Neelix to actually get put off the ship would be a dream come true. (All apologies to actor Ethan Phillips here. He's doing exactly what the writing asks of him in this role... and the writers repeatedly throw him under the bus.) Neelix doesn't even have the connection with the far more interesting character of Kes anymore; their breakup from a few episodes ago was apparently real, as he doesn't even go to her for advice in this situation. (Apparently, a scene dealt with this, but was cut for time. I have to believe other material left in the episode was less essential.)

What saves the episode from being a total bust is its relatable theme: the more you lie, the harder it becomes to tell the truth. I imagine for everyone, that lesson relates to some very different and very personal past, but the general sentiment feels absolutely universal. Paris voices this theme in an awfully on-the-nose scene, but it doesn't make it any less true. And everything builds to a conclusion in which Janeway echoes one of Jean-Luc Picard's all-time best speeches from The Next Generation, about how the first duty of any Starfleet officer is to the truth.

Other observations:

• Ensign Vorik makes his first appearance in this episode, a character being seeded now for a future story line. It's the second time that actor Alexander Enberg played a Vulcan, and show runner Jeri Taylor once opined that the two characters might be twin brothers. (Taylor had a vested interest in fleshing out Vorik; Alexander Enberg is her son!)
  

• Garrett Wang does not appear in this episode. Years later, he explained that he was experiencing depression at the time and showing up late to work. He was given time off to see a counselor. Though lest you think that producer Rick Berman was actually doing a nice thing here, he believed Wang was simply out "partying too hard" and blowing off his responsibilities. So he probably saw his actions here as something more akin to meting out punishment.
  

• Speaking of punishment, "cryostatic imprisonment" sounds like an interesting one, worthy of its own Star Trek episode. We've seen stasis used as a sort of one-way time travel before, and the people who do it always seem pretty miserable for everything they've missed. Inflicting it as punishment doesn't sound entirely far-fetched.

• And still speaking of punishment, at the end of this episode, Janeway orders Neelix to scrub the ship's exhaust manifolds for two weeks. It's a task so unpleasant it can double as a punishment. But it's somebody's regular daily job on Voyager.
  

Relatable as the theme of this episode might be, it still centers around Neelix. And the writers remain as determined as ever to make him the most unlikable character on the show. I give "Fair Trade" a C-.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

One of the surprise hits of 2018 was the horror movie A Quiet Place. I had generally enjoyed it, but was not necessarily convinced that there needed to be a sequel. So I made no rush to see A Quiet Place Part II. But I did at last get around to that... and found that I'd really been missing out.

This sequel (with a short "prequel" prologue) picks up in the immediate aftermath of the first movie, following the Abbott family as they try to survive a high-concept apocalypse of creatures who hunt you down if you make the slightest sound. This chapter revolves around efforts to locate other survivors who may have formed a stable community.

The movie landscape is now stuffed with films running two hours at least. A Quiet Place Part II is a refreshing and tight 97 minutes. Part of it being lean and mean is that it's meticulously crafted; every moment in the movie is setting something up or paying something off. Which is not to say that it's shallow; it includes major arcs for each of the characters, and some of the payoffs relate to things from the first movie (which I found myself wishing I'd rewatched before jumping into Part II).

That script is written by John Krasinski, working without the co-writers who contributed to the first movie. This solo effort is nonetheless as clever as the first film, and maybe more so. You have to forgive a few leaps in logic here and there (basically, splitting characters up when they'd be smarter not to do so). But get past those and you're rewarded with very clever set pieces, intriguing new contributions to the world, and an especially wonderful character arc for the character of Regan. (This movie is essentially hers, as much as the first belonged to Emily Blunt's Evelyn. Young actress Millicent Simmonds rises to the occasion.)

Kraskinski is an even stronger director than a writer, delivering multiple great sequences full of suspense and excitement. The technical challenges are greater here too; having "shown the monster" at the end of the first movie, CG becomes a more necessary component this time around. But things speed along briskly, the movie says what it wants to say, then abruptly rolls credits to leave you wanting more.

While I was reluctant at the idea of a Part II, I now find myself eager at the prospect of a Part III... which has been announced. So long as the same people are all involved again, in front of and behind the camera, count me in. Because I actually liked Part II better than the original, and I'd give it a B+. I actually respect the movie even more than that; rare is the sequel that can pick up the threads of a movie an intriguing way, and it's virtually unheard of in the horror genre.

In fact, I'd slot A Quiet Place Part II onto my Top 10 Movie List for the year. But which year? Back in March of 2020, the movie was actually the next major studio release scheduled when theaters began closing for COVID-19... and it was ultimately delayed all the way into 2021. Yet it is nonetheless listed as a 2020 film, because it had already had its red carpet premiere just a week before the delay. I suppose since my 2020 movie list still feels anemic (it only just reached 10 movies I'd consider decent), I'll file A Quiet Place Part II "officially" in 2020. (And pretty high on the list, at that.) In any case, I certainly recommend it.