From an episode that wanted to be taken seriously but kinda failed to make the grade, we shift to an episode that was always intended to be silly, one of Star Trek‘s few deliberate stabs at comedy: David Gerrold’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”.
A couple of times a week, not really often enough, I walk a three-mile course on the treadmill. This is not very exciting by itself, so I generally use the time to watch or rewatch something.
Tonight, it was the last significant Klingon episode of Classic Trek, Jerome Bixby’s “Day of the Dove”.
This is a story that actually starts out somewhat promising. Indeed, for most of the first 20 minutes or so, I thought perhaps the rather low opinion my memory held for it must have been mistaken. There’s a real mystery, coupled with the longstanding distrust between humans and Klingons to build tension. Michael Ansara’s Kang shows hints of the kind of Klingon we’re more used to from TNG and after. We even get a glimpse of the Klingon’s rather tangled gender relations, with the appearance of Kang’s wife and science officer, Mara.
Unfortunately, that’s right about when someone–the director, I presume–started telling Shatner he wasn’t chewing the scenery enough. Continue Reading »
Since my friend Richard was kind enough to refer people my way before writing his well-thought out refutation of my iPad/Star Trek article, it’s only fair that I refer you back to said refutation.
Several of you have pointed out to me that I’m not the only one who has noticed the resemblance between Apple’s impending device and Star Trek‘s ubiquitous portable data thingummies. Gizmodo points out there will be an app for that…
Star Trek is, of course, a world full of ubiquitous computing, although it’s rarely portrayed in those terms exactly. We see communicators, tricorders, flat-panel displays everywhere…and, for portable information access and messaging, the PADD.
Of course, these are really all just non-functional props. But the ideas behind them have long-since fired the imagination of real-world engineers. Communicators have already completely infiltrated our real-world lives–we call them cellphones. Flat panel displays are now so common it’s getting hard to remember when televisions took up significant cubic volume and not just rectangular area. Tricorders…well, we’ve got a way to go on that one, because we’re nowhere near the necessary technology for that kind of magical scanning. But they’re working on it.
PADDs, however, are in reach of our real-world technology, and the iPad seems to be consciously trying to make them a reality. The way PADDs have been portrayed, even as far back as Classic Trek1 gives us some insight, I believe, into how Apple envisions the iPad being used.
Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure were impossible, and in a way that appears to be sustainable without him 1
Given how savage I’ve been about RTD’s writing in some of my recent reviews, you might find this praise surprising, but it’s nothing but the documentable truth. Doctor Who had collapsed in the late 80s, and languished as a television property for nearly 15 years. Lots of people wanted to see it revived, but nobody was quite sure how to do successfully accomplish it.
Until RTD found a way.
[This was begun before the release; hence the now slightly outdated time reference]
With the release of Star Trek Online due tomorrow, we’re currently working through the Head Start period. This is the second phase of “bonus” time for pre-order cusotmers, the first being the Open Beta period that ended on 26 January.
The good news is that I’ve found a great deal about the general user experience has improved significantly. Controls work more smoothly, and rarely fail to work when expected. The GUI has been cleaned up and streamlined a bit, to good effect. I haven’t once materialized on a planet as a starship, or in space as a person, since toward the end of the Beta. I’ve seen far less rubber-banding and other such network and server lag effects.
The bad news is that the game is still not as polished as it really should be with general release less than 24 hours away. The other bad news is that there’s still whole areas of potential Star Trek content that are either missing or just not done in a convincing way.
That said, I plan to keep on playing, as much to see how it evolves as anything else. Read on for more details after the jump.
From the day I first heard they were going to do a Star Trek-based MMO, I knew two things: firstly, that whoever dared attempt such a thing was extremely brave; and secondly, that I would almost certainly be plunking down my cash to see how it came out. Because, let’s face it: while I’ve gone through periods of denial, debunking, and disenchantment, I am, at heart, still a Trekkie1.
What I did not know was whether it would actually be good, meaning both a fun MMO to play, and decent Star Trek lore.
And now? I’m afraid I still don’t know. Not for sure. There’s a lot of potential here. I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I’m definitely still rooting for it. I’m subscribing when the release comes up in a couple of weeks.
But the game shows signs of not having quite enough resources spent on its development, which means that I don’t think it will truly be release-quality on release day. Of course, these days, nothing is. It doesn’t bother me, personally, but I know it will turn off a lot of people, which could affect the long-term viability of the game.
I would love to be able to tell you that “The End of Time, Part 2″ redeemed the flaws of Part 1, not only pulling all the right rabbits out of the right hats but giving us a perfect send-off for an extremely popular and successful Doctor. Sadly, I can’t. On the other hand, I don’t have to say it was a steaming pile, either, because it wasn’t.
It was, in the end, the same sort of mixed bag Part 1 was. It was a little more solid, which continues RTD’s pattern of having shaky setups followed by better (but not always spectacular) pay-offs. But really, it was more of the same, for good and for ill, and overall, I think I’m disappointed.
RTD did succeed in handling two key parts in ways that completely surprised me. I’m still trying to decide if I like the surprises, but I like the fact that I was surprised.
The good news is that “The End of Time, Part 1″ is noticeably better than the first half of the Series 4 finale, “The Stolen Earth”. Of course, the problem is that “The Stolen Earth” was a steaming pile of cat feces, so improving on that standard is simply not very difficult.
The bad news is that, as fun as “The End of Time, Part 1″, it isn’t as good as it ought to be. Russel T. Davies has proven time and again (most recently, I’m told, with Torchwood: “Children of Earth”, which everybody seems to rave about), that he actually knows how to write in a non-clunky, non-fanwanky way. And yet, when it comes to Doctor Who finales, he continues to fall back on clunky, contrived, fanwanky writing.
That said, RTD does make good on something he was quoted as saying about this story. In an interview, RTD had said that this story was going to be “huge and epic, but also intimate.” When I first read that, I twitched, because it sounded like a salesman trying to convince us that his product is all things to all people, which never works out.
So I was pleased to discover that he actually succeeded at crafting a story that manages to be both things at the same time.
