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Reviews
Star Trek: Picard: Farewell (2022)
It Won't Stop
When you hope the pain might finally alleviate, the agony of Agnes, the Elrond of Eleanor, the teary hugs and contrived mushiness, and the celebration of Borg as the purest form of communism, which is ultimately the agenda this show tries to push, stabs every every square inch of your body and douses it with salt.
Star Trek: Picard: Hide and Seek (2022)
Space Jesus
5.4 rating is too kind. No sane person could rate this higher than a 1. I'm assuming friends and family of the makers tried to help. There is not one single redeeming quality of this episode or this season. The Kurtzman crew are obsessed with having some space Jesus in all their shows - Mikey BurntHam in Discovery and Alison swallowed too many Pills in Picard. Enough. Please eliminate this entire generation of filmmakers and bestow Star Trek to the rightful heirs.
Star Trek: Picard: Mercy (2022)
Cringe Flow
The cringe flows through me as Picard easily convinces law enforcement he's a 25th century time traveler here to save the galaxy.
I'm convinced there's a Hollywood conspiracy against black women. Three different current scifi shows feature the most humiliating roles for them, horribly written, directed to intentionally be inconsistent, and as a result, seemingly badly acted. This is the most egregious example, a perfectly non-Guinan character falsely posing as Guinan. There was a perfectly capable actress named Whoopi Goldberg who was primed for the role - kinda weird she was reduced to a cameo. Are we being baited? That's a big muscular YES!
Star Trek: Picard: Monsters (2022)
Unwarranted
Everything about this season is unwarranted. Why do we need another story that goes back in time in an attempt to undo the future? Why do we need all this dark side of Picard psychological profiling? What are all these questions trying to get to the heart of Picard and why does anyone think they're necessary or interesting? This is not anything anyone cares about relating to our beloved captain. Everything is pointless and boring.
Star Trek: Picard: Two of One (2022)
Trekless
Star Trek fans deserved the memo that there'd be no star trekking this season. And that we'd be forced to overdose on Alison's Pills. The girl who was the focus of last season has the same arc this season; I guess they just wanted to keep her on the show. It is great to see more Brent Spiner, who would be welcomed in every single scene of the entire series. This episode clocks in at a mere 38 minutes to stretch the show thin with a serious lack of episode structure or resolution. We used to get stories like this in one or two episodes before moving on to something new.
Star Trek: Picard: Fly Me to the Moon (2022)
Improvement
Vast improvement from some previous episodes, which were outright cringe. Great to Brent Spiner in a strong role, wish he were in every scene of the series. Still don't know why Q has no power over Reynee Palpacard.
Star Trek: Picard: Assimilation (2022)
Just Keeps Getting Worse
An embarassing, laughable mess. The writers of this show have lots of stupid emotion with no heart and certainly no logic. Their biases are clear, they're writing political propaganda with a passionate predisposition. This is not cool headed, intelligent science fiction. It's loud and stupid.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Strange New Worlds (2022)
ZZZZZZzzzzzzz...
You need more than a likeable leading man. This is pure nostalgia bait for old school suckers who've been deprived on anything new that's worth watching.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Children of the Comet (2022)
Zzzzzzz
The Uhura backstory we never needed. Plus one for the Kirk lineage - we got Jim, David, George, and now Sam. Don't get it don't care. This show is incredibly boring.
Star Trek: Picard: Penance (2022)
Borg are Good, People are Bad... because, of course
So, this is supposed to be a 'statement' about confederacy, depicted as organized, militant, Nazi-like - everything a federation or union would be, nothing like a rag-wearing rebellion. And they're such bad guys for wanting to eradicate a species that has destroyed half the galaxy, that it's justified for our 'heroes' to kill them in a show trying to promote peace. So, we show sympathy for the Borg, and justify capital punishment to their eradicators - yep, the future is scary.
Public Enemies (2009)
Horrible camera
The decision to shoot this on the Sony PMW-EX1 is the worst photographic choice in movie history. All kinds of digital noise makes it look like a time traveller went back to the early 20th century and used a crappy video camcorder to document this. No amount of attention was paid to the effect this texture would have on telling this era of history. Horrible. Shows Michael Mann is film illiterate.
Impractical Jokers (2011)
This is what's wrong with America
Whoever likes this show is the reason humankind will perish. Thank you for destroying society with this trash.
Star Trek: Discovery: Such Sweet Sorrow (2019)
No Tears
Wants to be a tear jerker by trying to make every single awfully written moment full of solmen melodrama. It's really bad, and unbearable to watch.
Star Trek: Discovery (2017)
Ruthless Melodrama
Season 1 starts off fun, adventurous. But season 2 dwindles down into the Michael Burnham crying show as she has bad emotional dialogue with each of her three mothers constantly. It's painful, and it's really bad. I'll always treasure the good time I had in season 1, but after that, it's unbearable.
Star Trek: Discovery: The Red Angel (2019)
Melodrama
They give a Spock-size funeral to a background character who had no context to be weeped for. I guess I can make it as the wold's most important extra afterall - there's hope for us at Central Casting!
Star Trek: Picard: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2 (2020)
To Boldly Go...
I was absolutely moved by this finale; gripping, emotional, exciting. I watched it on my birthday and it was the single best treat I could've given myself. Trek has evolved visually, thank goodness, but never lost it's soul; if anything, it's grown. Story continuity is beautifully intact, seamlessly weaving the old with the new. Though some may confuse it as such, there's no nostalgia bait here, this is evolved. Old characters exist with a new purpose, because that's life. We live, we get old, and we have new missions. I've loved seeing Jeri Ryan added to the mix and look forward to her future on the show. This season deals with the death of Data, something I'm sure impacted Trek fans at the end of Nemesis. How it concludes that story is so touching, I shed a few tears myself. It can be said now that this story and Nemesis are so perfectly interconnected, that one could not exist without the other. And that's how it should be.
I look FORWARD to the future of this show.
Star Trek: Picard (2020)
Emotional Spaceflight
This is a Trekkie's dream. Truly, a dream in the sense that when you dream of a movie or TV show franchise you love, it's different, yet resonates with emotional familiarity. This is not a show that retreads the same ground or tries to be a nostalgia-fest, this is evolved, transcendent, exactly where things should be after several decades have passed. It's been the best television experience I've had since Twin Peaks: The Return. Bringing Michael Chabon on board, in addition to the other fabulous creative team, was a key move in the playbook to crafting an unforgettable, masterpiece of a season. Thank you to all those involved.
Star Trek: Picard: Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1 (2020)
Letdown
If I have to watch Allison Pill quiver her lip one more time, I'm going to throw something through my TV. I've loved this series, but Agnes has gotten to be overkill. Her character is painfully melodramatic. Also, do they understand how much beauty is in the absence of music? Way too much music when we should be hearing natural sound. And the synth glitter makeup looks straight out of the 60s, an intentional homage when you include the wardrobe, but I don't see that it serves a show that's otherwise been evolutionary. Akiva Goldsman had done a good job previously, but makes many poor directing choices in this episode? And did anyone notice Picard drop an octave in his voice?
Star Trek: Discovery: Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad (2017)
THIS IS STAR TREK
This is the first to act like a Star Trek episode, less obsessed with serializing and more interested in legit sci-fi writing. It's excellent, mind-bending work, and I hope we see more of it.
Star Trek: Picard: Nepenthe (2020)
Riker's Island
Marina Sirtis stole the show. What a beautifully emotional performance. Jonathan Frakes was right there too, he hasn't lost a step in that character. They've both beautifully evolved. And how often are we annoyed by some offspring that's brought between characters we love? (I'm looking at you Mutt Williams). The young girl was fantastic, dynamic and charismatic. This was a perfect episode with the Riker family.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Bad Batch (2020)
Zzzzzz
An absolute bore fest, totally devoid of character or anything interesting at all. You can feel just how lifeless creative is at this point in a terribly stretched thin series.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Inner Light (1992)
Trancendence
The single most emotionally charged episode of Star Trek there ever was.
Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
My Log is Turning to Gold
Twin Peaks exists in a shared dream between the murdered Laura Palmer, the FBI investigator, Agent Dale Cooper, the director of the show (and FBI), David Lynch (as Gordon Cole), and the audience. Cooper represents the ultimate good, a young agent who earnestly strives to rid the world of evil and live comfortably in the blissful backwoods of small-town USA. Laura's death is at the hands of an entity called Bob, "the evil men do," according to Agent Albert Rosenfield. But Bob inhabited a vehicle, Laura's father Leland Palmer, who sexually abused her through adolescence, then murdered her in her coming of age. Cooper invested himself so deeply solving her murder, he became a permanent resident inside the Black Lodge, a dimension of metaphors, doppelgangers, and backwards action played forward. His evil doppelganger, Mr. C, escaped the Lodge and returned to Peaks in the guise of Cooper, inhabited by Bob. Laura tells Cooper she will see him again in 25 years. Meanwhile...
The Return means so many things. Cooper is returning to the world from the Black Lodge. He is also on a journey to return to Twin Peaks, as are Lynch and the audience. It's the return of the series to television, and in several ways it's a return to the past, which may drive home the ultimate point of the series. Mr. C is a powerful underworld criminal, but his time is running out, and he has to return to the Black Lodge to exchange places with the real Cooper. But there's a plan to prevent this from happening, and Cooper has to go out another portal, arriving in Las Vegas where he takes the place of his tulpa, Dougie Jones, who is married with a son. But his return renders him catatonic, making his interactions limited to mere infancy. He learns simple words all over again, mimicking other people's gestures, and has to have his wife, Janey-E, make most decisions for him. Cooper is followed by shoten zenjin; whether it's bending over to avoid a bullet, the intuition to play winning slot machines, or getting help with his homework, he shines in a ray of fortune. Meanwhile, Mr. C is on the hunt for coordinates that will lead him to another mystery, but he gets picked up by police and held in prison for possessing incriminating articles. FBI agents Cole and Albert, accompanied by new blood Tammy Preston, know there is something minatory about this version of Cooper. They begin investigating who exactly he is and where he comes from. But at the same time, in Buckhorn, South Dakota, they're investigating another puzzling mystery: the resurgence of Major Garland Briggs' corpse, who died 25 years ago in a fire.
And in local Twin Peaks news, the 25 year-old case of Laura Palmer is opening up again after the Log Lady prophesizes to Deputy Hawk that something's missing regarding Agent Cooper, and the way he'll find it has to do with his Native American heritage. Twin Peaks is exactly where any lumber town nestled in the woods might be a quarter of a century later: much of it the same, but with a new generation walking over remnants of its past. A new drug has come into town, threatening the sanity of a society that's lost in the comfort of isolation. The new generation is troubled, whether it's Shelly's daughter Becky, strapped for cash with a deadbeat abusive husband, or Ben Horne's grandson Richard, selling drugs and causing trouble, there's an overall feeling that we are looking at the fallout of the American Dream, an empty promise that has reached the end of its cycle, coddled too long by overprotective elders. The darkness in those woods has spread out across the nation, and it's coming back inwards. David Lynch says the original series is about wood, those ancient witness trees containing spirits and information of the past. Fire Walk With Me is about electricity, the transmission of spiritual entities across a vast network. And The Return is about the fusion of wood & electricity, as expressed when the Log Lady says, "my log is turning to gold," an electrical conductor merging with an organic prophet - everything out there is coming back in here.
There's always a sad but funny feeling in Twin Peaks, Lynch's insight to the duality in all things. Dougie/Cooper's infancy is pathetic, it makes you want to cry, but each helpless beat makes us laugh. His best form of communication is picking up words at the end of other peoples' sentences, which others ignorantly take to be an honest reply. And that's the point, ignorance. In Buddhist philosophy, which Cooper champions, ignorance tops of a 12-linked chain of causation, the most fundamental darkness. It's everywhere: a mother blind to her daughter's abuse; a society built upon the blood of Natives; builders of an atomic bomb; a town asleep to Bob entering the world; a girl screaming on the floor of the Roadhouse, ignored by entranced concertgoers; even Cooper's naive belief that he can change the past, proportionate to a TV audience that tries to relive nostalgia through revived shows. It's my belief that ignorance is the answer to one of the show's key questions: who is Judy? It's likely Judy is the female counterpart of Bob. Many have suggested that if Bob is the father, Leland, Judy must be the mother, Sarah Palmer. "The horse is the white of the eyes," says the Woodsman - white eyes representing blindness, and a white horse is what Sarah hallucinates before any of Leland's atrocities. Bob/Leland may be the aggressor, but Sarah lives in denial, allowing his crimes to occur. Judy may be a more subtle, less obvious form of evil than Bob, but it is she who lets Bob into the world, which we literally see when the Experiment (maybe Judy's spiritual form) spews out an egg containing Bob, following the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
An even greater mystery may be: who is Laura Palmer? Like the Buddha, she is an expedient means, a source for society to abuse and then reflect upon. In the Lodge, she says "I am dead, yet I live." Her spirit is very alive in the world, consequences of her death apparent in the pursuit of Bob. Laura is planted after creation of the bomb, the result of all man's lust for power. Her coming of age is during the Reagan-Bush years when America is at the height of profiting on its dominion over the world. Her prophecy of reawakening the story 25 years later is in perfect accord with the country's trajectory, right at the onset of Trump's presidency, when man's darkest ambitions will come to fruition as they attempt to rescue a failing economy, not unlike the rise of Hitler. Like German expressionists tapping the collective unconscious, prophesizing the direction of their country, Lynch delves deep into this subconscious ocean through Transcendental Meditation, catching ideas and following them to conclusion. Such artists function as vessels, granting spiritual understanding of ourselves in this time and place. Sheryl Lee is credited as Laura Palmer for every single episode, because Frost & Lynch have never lost sight of the fact that this show is about her. When the opening credits roll, her eyes loom over Blue Pine Mountain, and everything subsequently is related to the fallout of her murder, which has left a ghostly stain in Twin Peaks. Three missing pages of her diary have been recovered, and there may still be a fourth - who carries this page? Carrie Paige?
Peaks is the only series on television where each story beat is a microcosm of a larger brushstroke, and a macrocosm of endless phenomena. There are seemingly loose ends, unanswered questions - "is it about the bunny?" - that you can make whole stories of - there are bunnies in front of Sarah Palmer's TV, and this is a show about the viewer's relationship with TV (interesting if Sarah/Judy does represent ignorance). Each manifold moment is deeply interwoven with every other, but you can watch it like you're meditating. Peaks is not afraid to settle down, breathe, making it's complexities nuanced, balanced, and engaging. Sheriff Frank Truman represents no country for old men, a hero who realizes the plot is less important than life, such as we see when refraining from telling his brother Harry, who is sick with cancer, about reigniting Laura's case. Frank will stop and have a chat with 90 year-old Doc Hayward. Carl Rodd (90s) is less worried about receiving rent money and more concerned that his tenant not hurt himself making it. Ben Horne is continuing to be a humanitarian, though not without the temptation of an office affair, something he'd never pass up before. Dr. Jacoby, who may have corrupted his young patients more than help them, is pointlessly painting golden shovels for people to dig themselves out of the crap. The elderly are all racing to redeem sins of the past, aware that they've left a broken world for the youth.
Lynch pokes at the American nuclear family ideal, depicting a loveless marriage that exists for the sake of existing. Through Cooper, they experience material gain, an ominous joy overtaking them; having things creates 'happiness.' Again, the American Dream is having that share of pie where they'd always been short changed. The pie is a trap, even if it's innocuous as heavenly cherry pie. Sweet treats and fancy toys keep them distracted as evil escapes through the night. This is how America was built, keep citizens happily ignorant of its dark dealings. Contrast this with Philip Gerard and Man From Another Place saying, "I want all my garmonbozia" - pain & sorrow are something to live with, not escape from, or there can be no enlightenment. Creamed corn is processed food, manufactured and distributed for convenience, as one might find in a convenience store. The room above the Convenience Store is where Lodge entities and Woodsmen gather. Convenience is another illusion of the American Dream, that we've imperialized and bombed our way through this world to have quicker access to resources that are more easily distributed.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Yesterday's Enterprise (1990)
Best Star Trek
The best episode of Star Trek there ever was. It's no wonder Tarantino was inspired by it for his own Trei film, which probably won't happen.