Star Trek Next Gen: Up The Long Ladder

So I'm slowly working my way through Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I'm almost done the second season.  I just finished the eighteenth episode, "Up The Long Ladder," and...wow.  Just wow.

STAR TREK, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT.  THAT SHIT IS MESSED UP.

So the episode starts off with some dinky little subplot where Worf gets Klingon measles and has tea with the doctor.  If that counts as a subplot, because that's pretty much all that happens.  It's also the most tolerable part of the episode, so...yeah.

The rest of the episode is about the forgotten human colony they find and rescue from a bad case of splody planet or soemthing, a colony of the most cliche stereotypes of Irish people you can imagine.  Complete with Irish accents, despite being isolated from Earth and other humans for three hundred years.  They're a bunch of redheaded farmers who don't know anything about computers or science and the men are all portrayed as lazy drunks and the women are sharp-tongued and complain about how they have to do all the work and they've got sheep and pigs and goats and assorted barnyard animals and use equipment like looms and wear homemade peasant-type clothing, and it's basically just a really offensive Irish stereotype and what the hell Star Trek, I thought you were supposed to be progressive.  The sharp-tongued redhead daughter who's dad keeps trying to marry her off to random dudes wears a petticoat.  A petticoat, for crying out loud.

Then it turns out there's ANOTHER forgotten colony!  So they go check that out and it's from the same group who went up, but they're not Irish because they're scientifically advanced!  So they speak with normal American accents and have basically the same lifestyle as the crew on the Enterprise.  Except they reproduce by cloning!  You see, all but five of the original settlers died in a crash or something and the survivors were scientific peoples, so they just started cloning and at first they stopped people from inbreeding through drugs and punitive laws, and "now, after three hundred years the entire concept of sexual reproduction is a little repugnant."  Because that's how people work, right? Just put up a bunch of laws and stuff and eventually nobody ever wants sex ever.  But blah blah reproductive fading copy of a copy blah blah, and they need new blood!  So they're all "Hey you, want to give some dna?" and Riker is all "Oh fuck no, I'm too special!" and Picard is all "Yeah probably everyone's gonna feel like that so I won't ask around or anything."  So they steal some DNA from Dr. Crusher and Riker in a really ridiculous, needlessly dramatic scene.  And when Crusher and Riker find out they go kill their clones and the clone dude is all "What choice did we have, you wouldn't help!  We have a right to survive!" and the show is all "huh maybe they have a weird point here" and I'm like THE FUCK THEY DO.  They have a right to exist, they have a right to reproduce themselves, but they do not in any way have a right to impose on other people.  Some random dude who wants to make sure his bloodline survives doesn't have the right to force a woman to carry his baby against her will, that's just a more extreme version of what the clone people are trying to pull here.

So the crew goes back to the ship or something and have a meeting and go "What these dudes need is breeding stock....oh!  We've got those homeless Irish assholes in the hold!  Let's shotgun wedding this shit."  Not "Let's present the option to both cultures while informing the rest of the Federation that there's a Class M planet that could use some settlers."  Just straight up "bully these homeless people who've just had everything torn away from them into living with these assholes who have no sense of respect for other people and who clearly look down on them, but need them because their society is collapsing due to a lack of a genetically diverse population."  Then they go into a private meeting, just the two male leaders and Picard's group, and after a bit of disagreeing they finally settle on WHAT THE FUCK STAR TREK THIS BULLSHIT IS CREEPY AS HELL.

Ahem.  Sorry.  They settle on a plan where the Irish group settle the clone planet and monogamy is illegal now because we need lots of babies, so every woman, both the poor Irish women who have just had their entire lives ripped up and are thrown into chaos and the clone women who have a culture of finding sexual reproduction absolutely repugnant, have to have at least three kids by three different men.  None of these women, who's reproductive future is being decided on by a group of men and one doctor, are present for this meeting or have any say about what's going on.  We don't see the reaction of the clone women (who are probably gonna end up rape victims, because none of them actually want sex but they will be pressured into becoming broodmares by the (male) leader of their society), but we see one Irish woman's reaction.  She's the one who's had her father try to marry her off to every man he sees.  She's understandably furious that her father and Picard went around making all these grand plans without ever asking if the women would be willing to play along, and Picard is all "wtf you said you wanted a new home, here it is!"  She goes "Yeah, but I never said I wanted to be Eve!"  Because seriously who would willingly sign up for that bullshit.  Picard is all "Fine, I'll just take you to the nearest star base so you'll have lost not only your home, but your family and friends and entire culture as well."  Because that's not coercive at all.  Suddenly she has a complete 180 on her opinion and goes "Wait, that dude looks important.  He's rich, isn't he?  And I can have three husbands?  Ok, that makes up for everything," and wanders off to hit on people.

What the ever-loving fuck is going on here?!  Granted, a lot of Star Trek episodes are pretty doofy, but this is the first time I've been literally repulsed by the events of an episode.  It's like they tried to think of every possible way to make this episode as creepy as they could, or something.  And they put a cheerful comic-relief/happy-ending gloss over it just so you could tell that they gave zero shits about what a bullshit society they just created.  I thought Star Trek was supposed to represent some futuristic utopia, but here they throw this super-dark, seriously fucked up situation in our face and pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows.  Fuck, show.  Don't do that.

Castle

I've been catching up on Castle.  I'm on the first episode of the fifth season now.  About ten or fifteen minutes in, actually.  It's a good start to the episode, it had me cracking up.  But there's one thing that I just can't get over, that I've been thinking for pretty much this whole series.  This huge glaring flaw that stops me from really, thoroughly being able to enjoy this show in its entirety.

Beckett's season one hair was so nice, why did they have to change it!?

See?  So nice!  And it changed styles, but it was still pretty every time.  It was a really distinctive hairstyle that suited her really well, but it was still versatile so she wasn't stuck in the same look all the time.  And now she's just got...long hair. And sometimes it's curly.  It's so boring.  And it seems a little unprofessional -- I've never seen a policewoman with long loose hair, it's always tidied up so it's not in her face or flying all around her head.  I've got long hair, I know how inconvenient it can be.  In the first season, Beckett's hair was pretty, it was unique, and it suited her character's lifestyle.  Then it grew out and it looked more generic and it didn't make a lot of sense for her character to have it in the styles she wore.

Other than that though, I guess the show's good.  The banter's always great, and Nathan Fillion is an absolute darling.  The crimes have gotten better, too.  I remember in the first season I would be able to guess who the killer was in every episode, way before the characters figured it out.  I can't really do that any more, it's a surprise more often.  I choose to believe it's because the crime-writing has improved and not because I've become stupider in the past four seasons.  I really hope the crime-writing improved.

Why I Won't Rant About The Big Bang Theory

I wrote a ridiculously long post complaining about the most recent episode of The Big Bang Theory.  I had a big long multi-paragraph rant on how irritating the characters have become and how the romantic pairings are awful and filled with misery and how the jokes are old and un-funny (Howard's mom is fat!  Ha!  Sheldon is a sexist douche!  Ha! Ha!  Leonard is clingy and smothering and his relationship with Penny will destroy them both!  HA!).  Then I realized that obsessing about the show that I watch when I want to turn my brain off is doing it wrong.  Also, this show has really gone on for too long, it needs to end already.  TV shows are not meant to go on indefinitely.  Half of the problems I had with the most recent episode wouldn't have been a problem in the first season before the show had so much history and character development to trip over.

Anyway, I deleted that ridiculously long post, because I realized that it's stupid to try to analyze the characters on a sitcom.  No sitcom character can ever be anything less than awful, because early in the show's run awful characters are more fun to watch, and late in the show's run everyone has been Flandarized to hell and they're tripping over so much history and backstory nearly everything they do means they're being a dick.  Like Leonard, pulling exactly the same thing on Penny as Stephanie pulled on him in season two, and he doesn't seem to remember at all how uncomfortable that made him -- even saying something along the lines of "If you don't want her to move in why don't you just tell her that" to Sheldon, completely forgetting what a useless wad he was in that episode and how he even tried to beg Penny into telling Stephanie to back off for him.  Without that history, Leonard's behaviour is naive and clingy, but not that bad.  With that history, he is a complete tool.

Oh jeez, here I go ranting again.  This is a hard habit to break, let me tell you.  But I really should, because seriously, I'm watching this crap because I want something stupid and funny to make me laugh and to stop me thinking for twenty minutes.  If I then spend forty minutes writing a rant, and then another fifteen minutes on a half-rant about not ranting after that?  It is clearly not doing it's job.  Maybe I should just watch The Walking Dead instead, at least that show is fun to hate.

Oh my god Andrea, can you get any more awful.

Happy October 19th!

Well okay, happy a few days after October 19th, because the fourth season of Community started a few days ago.  But I started this blog post that day, and then forgot about it.  So it kind of counts!

Who caught the season premier of Community?  What did you all think?  Seems like they're definitely playing up the goofiness of Greendale this season.  It wasn't really the strongest episode (not that season premiers ever are) but it was still fun and there were some good laughs in there.  My brother walked past while I was watching it and had a minor freakout when he thought they added a laugh track, until he realized that it was just Abed's imagination spot.  Also, I would watch Greendale Babies. FOREVER.

I didn't get the gag at the end, though.  What the heck was that all about?  Shirly singing "Oh Lord no!" in a deep voice.  Was it implying she's a dude?  Was it just a joke about how often she says "Oh Lord no"?  I am confused.  And a little disappointed, because usually the ending gag is the funniest part of the show.  Oh well, maybe they'll do better next episode.

The Mob Doctor was cancelled? It can't be!

I simply cannot believe that The Mob Doctor has been cancelled.  What the hell, Fox?  It's impossible.  It's inconceivable!  Why on Earth did it take them so long?

To recap: The Mob Doctor is (was) a new medical(ish) drama(ish) that Fox trotted out this year.  When I first heard about it, I really, really, really wanted it to be good.  And on paper it has so much going for it!  It's about a woman who's a resident at a prestigious hospital, but by night moonlights as a Mob Doctor to pay off her debt to the mafia.  How rad is that!?

Unfortunately, it was not good.  At all.  It was kind of terrible, actually, and it was pretty obvious from the first episode that it wouldn't make it to a second season.  And it made me  so sad.  Not only did this show that sounded like it could be awesome turn out to be not-awesome, it wasn't even entertainingly terrible.  It was just really bland and boring.  When I realized that it was not the cool show I wanted it to be, I decided to watch it anyway, hoping that it would be bad enough to be fun ranting about on my blog and to friends.  But it didn't even have the decency to do that!  It was just....boring.  And bland.  And everybody was stupid.  And so even though I wanted to watch it despite not liking it (I had not realized how ridiculous that sounds until just now) I couldn't even do that.  I don't think I managed to get past the fourth episode.

So in short, The Mob Doctor was a vaguely terrible TV show that was impossible to enjoy no matter how hard you tried and I am kind of impressed that Fox let it go on for a full thirteen episodes.   The pilot made it clear that it was barely watchable.

In short: bad TV show is cancelled to the surprise of no one ever and I still need to find a good show to watch. Or just a bunch of good movies.  Whatever.  Maybe I'll finally get around to watching Reservoir Dogs, I've been meaning to check it out ever since I finally saw Pulp Fiction a month ago.

Jem and the Holograms

I fucking love Jem and the Holograms.  The series is just fantastically bad in every way.  I'm going to buy the series box set off a friend who, in a moment of insanity, bought it at HMV and has never stopped regretting the purchase, at least not that I've seen.  I don't know why.  It's such an amazing show, it's like this perfect explosion of mediocre 80's trash that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.  It is so bad it has become fantastic.

I mean, just look at the opening!  The animation is admittedly six to eight times better than you will ever see in the actual show, but the rest of it is a fairly good demonstration of the show in general.  The wet troll-doll hairstyle, the inane lyrics, the freeze-frame-spinning-star-title-card at the end.  It's absolutely glorious.

So according to the lyrics, when Jem is not being Excitement or Adventure (ie. most of the time) she is Outrageous.  I could make a crack like "I disagree!  I find she is not outrageous at all, but is in fact a boring character on a terrible children's cartoon from the Eighties!"  But the actual definition for outrageous, according to Google and therefore Right and True, is this:

And honestly if I were asked to describe this show to somebody who had never heard of it, I would use all those words in the definition to describe it.  So clearly, this show knew exactly what it was talking about when it wrote the theme song.  And when it was describing the title character.  And when it was describing the music.  Jem, the music's contageous - outrageous!!  It's true, all the songs in this are shockingly bad and to call them contageous is wildly exaggerated and improbable.  Not that I'm a music critic, I leave that to Wyatt.

Though I can't figure out the eye-sparkle when Jem winks.  I get it when it pops up when she kisses Dudeface, because clearly they are into the sloppy droolfest makeouts.  Did he spit in her eye? Is that why she closed it?  And if that's what happened, was it a kink thing or is he just an ass who randomly spits in people's eyes?  Because honestly, I'd believe either.