Look, Star Trek: Voyager sucked. But the way it sucked are fascinating, because they reflect the ways the TV landscape has changed since the show’s original conception. Voyager came onto the scene once Star Trek: The Next Generation finished up, and famously, one of the many, many, many issues this created in its production was creative differences between the cast, crew, and executives; the executives in charge wanted a show replicating the success of TNG, which to them meant replicating that show’s episodic storytelling in stark defiance of the increasing popularity of serialized storytelling pioneered by Voyager’s predecessors Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
It was also in stark defiance of both the wishes of the cast, crew, and fans – all of whom expected the show to have the ambitions of the franchise – as well as, you know, the basic premise of the show. The plot basis of the show is that the title ship is investigating a Maquis ship – that is to say, a group rebelling against the Federation, who frequently came up in DS9 – only for both groups to be flung across the galaxy deep into unexplored space known as the Delta Quadrant. Being 75 years from home and losing much of both crews, they agree to merge and work together to get home.
It’s a compelling idea that sparks the imagination, wondering how the two crews will evolve alongside each other, how the ship will change (physically and otherwise) in response to the needs of being so far away from home, and what sacrifices will be made to achieve a big, nearly impossible goal. Any illusions that the show will explore these ideas will fall away for any viewer within five episodes; even by the standards set by decades of reputation, the show is aggressively mediocre at best.
But it does end up watchable in ways specific to its era of television, and is even kind of revealing about storytelling. I have complained in the past about the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica having too much vision, and here we have a show with the exact opposite problem*. There is no unifying reason this show has to exist beyond that there must always be a Star Trek. Now, I’ve brought up this kind of complaint before, and there are always people who say “But Tristan, does art need a specific reason to exist? Can’t something just be?” To which I would answer no, and I would point to Voyager as a reason why.
(*How amusing that each show has the exact same premise and the exact opposite problem.)
Almost everything wrong with Voyager can be traced back to the fact that it didn’t pick a star to follow. Captain Janeway is famously inconsistent in her characterisation, something even actress Kate Mulgrew joked made her seem mentally ill at points; plot points are picked up and dropped essentially at random; tonal and structural inconsistencies; even main characters cast aside for long times (there’s about a season and a half where every episode is about either the Doctor (Robert Picardo) or Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan)).
One strength of visionary writing I pointed to in my BSG essay was that knowing where you’re going means knowing where you’re not going. Voyager shows why this is a good thing because of how often one wonders why the hell we’re watching what we’re watching; this show actually has fewer holodeck episodes than its fellow entries in the franchise, but they’ve gained notoriety specifically because it’s harder to justify them being here at all.
On the other hand, any strengths the show has can also be tied into its preoccupation with keeping the Star Trek tradition alive – specifically, it relies on the old systems of writing a Star Trek episode. I notice the show’s defenders tend to point to the fact that, unlike many modern shows, individual episodes have stories that begin, develop, and end in forty-five minutes (ninety in a two-parter). Even in the context of restoring the status quo, the sense of closure that comes with an episode is energizing.
Further, any time it actually engages with Star Trek ideas, it tends to work a lot better. This show has me fully believing that Vulcans, not Klingons, are the true coolest Star Trek race because they’re fundamentally the most dramatic, which makes them so easy to write that any idiot can do it. Any time that Tuvok (Tim Russ) takes our attention, the show improves enormously – he’s driven by logic, which means he only does things he wants to and he deduces the most effective way to achieve them (apparently, helped enormously by Russ being a huge Trek nerd who would advocate for his character when he felt Tuvok was written incorrectly).
One also sees this with the Borg; with this, the writers have the advantages of a) the Borg being deeply developed by this point whilst still having enough mystery to play with and more importantly b) the Borg being really cool, allowing them to seize a gap in the franchise and create a sympathetic Borg character in Seven of Nine, pulling out not just the ways Borg technology can create stories but Borg philosophy, as Seven consistently argues for efficiency over humanity.
Although this points to the show’s premise being an albatross around its neck; protagonists being stranded in the unexplored cracks of the galaxy demands the creation of new and interesting aliens, and they never quite manage to find something as compelling as the Klingons, Cardassians, Bajorans, Ferengi, or even Changelings. In fact, it’s quite satisfying to learn that even most of the writers thought the Kazon were lousy Klingon knockoffs. One could imagine an alternate universe where the creative teams of DS9 and Voyager were swapped, and the latter would have functioned much better.
It also points to an element where the badness and goodness collide into something genuinely compelling, even troubling me to the point of forcing me to assess my own behaviour. Janeway has something of a reputation in the fandom that’s split in half; both halves see her as a bloodthirsty tyrant, and one half celebrates her for it while the other thinks she’s insane. Both are oversimplifying somewhat, but they’re responding to something real, to wit: Janeway professes the values of Starfleet and the Federation, but will often default back onto violence and anger.
This (probably unintentionally) (definitely unintentionally) hits onto a fundamental aspect of human nature, and in fact one more relevant than ever. When left to her own devices, Janeway happily extolls the necessity and virtue of empathy and compassion, but when she’s hit with even a single obstacle, she’ll become viciously violent and seek revenge and punishment. For Janeway, this is mainly a result of lazy writing (the Doctor is one of the show’s golden children and not only never falls into this, he angrily sticks to his principles even at their most personally inconvenient); for most people, it’s because it’s easy to voice our principles and even easier to hit and berate people.
I know this because I’ve both been on the receiving end of it, and, embarrassingly, done it myself; more than once, I’ve seen people who know fully well what it’s like to be a neurodivergent person in [waves hands] all this, to have symptoms and breaking points, to know how exasperating it is to be told by a healthier person that maybe you should just not have symptoms, only for that same person to say the exact same things to a less healthy person than they, or to get mad when they, you know, show symptoms of a mental illness.
And at the same time, I’ve advocated for empathy and compassion with as much enthusiasm as Janeway and, just as often, ended up yelling at people. Watching Janeway break her values so often made me wonder how often I’d been doing the exact same thing; the people it’s most tough to extend empathy to aren’t people suffering, but people who refuse to extend empathy to others; it took some thought to recognise how often this comes from suffering itself. The thing about berating people is that it makes you feel tough and in control, even when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Watching Voyager forced me to ask myself – what’s more important? My values or feeling tough? The consequences to my actions or vindication? Granted, that says more about me than Voyager, but it did spark the thoughts. All franchises are essentially a core idea explored from different angles, and Star Trek, more than any other popular franchise, has a core set of philosophical ideas – Western liberal politics and aspirations to post-scarcity and mutual improvement – that any entry must engage with, even if they reject it. Voyager shows that even when you write one without something to say, you’ll end up saying something.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Live Music – played a gig supporting a couple of excellent synth-emo-pop (?) acts, the headliner (Me Rex) I’ve seen before in a couple of different iterations, this gig was solo with electronics which worked really well. The other touring act was a trio from Nashville who had an inflatable castle onstage (!) and set up a tent in the middle of the audience during one song, which I can honestly say is not stagecraft I have previously encountered before. They won the whole crowd over pretty hard, haha. And their songs were good too! My set also went well, there were a lot of unfamiliar faces in the crowd and I got a few nice comments from strangers, which is always welcome.
Halt & Catch Fire, first two episodes – wanted to try something new and felt like it should probably NOT be another cosy crime thing. This popped up, and as a middle-age nerd I find early personal-computing stories interesting so it has vaguely been on my radar for a while. After a couple of episodes I’m… somewhat engaged? The character played by Lee Pace seems a bit too much of an obvious “mystery man” for viewers to become fascinated by, and it feels a little clunky to me thus far. But I like Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis a lot, I’ll probably keep watching.
Woooooo live music! Woooo comments from strangers!
Wooo, live music and a bouncy castle!
Wooooooo supporting live music!!
Live music — went to the basement bar and caught Abbie Barrett again after a killer set earlier this year, she once again rocked (road testing some new members, the bassist joked he was “getting doged” after messing up the bridge). One of those nights where you sort of drag yourself out and it pays off in spades, great stuff.
Panic Room — not as solid as I remembered, the show-stopping ghost camera through the building came off as goofy in its gimmicky (through a coffee pot handle! WOW) and the structure in general was solid but undistinguished, David Koepp writing a mid-tier melody without much feeling. This is in the Jodie Foster collection on Criterion and she is fine but there is not much to her character, she only really comes alive toward the end when she has to perform/lie to cops at her door with the burglars watching her on video — lots of complicated reaction that is there for the viewer but not for the people she’s in front of, a really good scene. Whitaker is the man and Dwight Yoakam is fucking great, both as menacing goon and as owned piece of shit by the end.
Looney Tunes — dipping into Tubi’s enormous stash and there are some weird ones here. The Hen-pecked Duck has Daffy in … divorce court? (With a very raunchy throwaway from a hen at one point.) The Ghost Mouse is entirely one-offs, a weirdo high-talking mouse and an extremely stupid proto-Sylvester cat, both of these are from 1941 and black and white with odd rich and sometimes impressionistic backgrounds, very different than the stripped-down material of the Chuck Jones years. And sadly a Pepe Le Pew was in the mix, what an annoying fucking character. But they have Draftee Daffy, one of Bob Clampett’s finest 7 minutes, and there is lots more to go through.
How Tubi has the cartoons is weird. Makes me think that these are the cartoons as packaged for syndication in lumps of three. Which makes sense and saved local stations from having to pick which three they show each day. I never even thought about this before. This would explain why I had all those awful ones without Bugs or Daffy foisted on me when I was a kid. Want Bugs Bunny? You also have to show that hideous Jazz Singer pastiche.
Got it one, these are the three-for-one syndication deals.
There will be no Owl Jolson libel on this website as long as I’m around!
I love Bugs and I love Daffy but if you’ve seen one you’ve pretty much seen ‘em all. I was always happy to get one with characters I’d never seen. (Just as long as it wasn’t one of those with the kangaroo that beat up Sylvester. Those sucked.)
Wooo, live music!
And booo, Pepe Le Pew. I guess someone must have liked him, but I can’t imagine it.
Pepe Le Pew has gotten a lot of heat for being problematic and weirdly little heat for just being kind of shit even outside that.
He just sucks as a character! The French goofery is dumb but that is personal taste, maybe people love Blanc’s work here; what is hard to argue is his repetitive blandness. He does the same shit over and over with no variation, the same pursuit without the rhythmic comedy of a good counterpart (Elmer Fudd is doing the same thing over and over but is the pasty for Bugs’ imaginative ass-kicking) or more to the point the futile comedy of Wile E. Coyote’s backfiring schemes. Just a total turd. But I think the “problematic” stuff carries weight too, Elmer and Wile E. and Sylvester are all out for blood and that is fine; Le Pew is not exactly horny but his end goal is his pleasure at the expense of his object’s comfort, to actively make them uncomfortable –it’s not fun to watch.
The first Pepe cartoon has the twist ending that he is in fact not Charles Boyer but a married American coded skunk who is caught by his wife. We basically hear the accent vanish and it’s just Mel Blanc. All the jokes of “skunk chases cat” are there already, and really there is nothing left to be said even without that ending, but once we see what sort of fake he is, all the years of the same gags over and over are just dull.
And also problematic.
That’s the one we watched! I was wondering if it was the first, I’d never seen American Pepe before.
The premise, I figure, is what if a “wolf” (woman-chaser) character were a skunk instead? And, in the time period in which it was made, it would go over now just as well as you’d expect.
The other part of this is the mistaken identity engine that powers all of these. Something like Red Hot Riding Hood is great for a lot of reasons, but it has a ton of fun with the “wolf” premise taken to extremes — our boy is gonzo for Red and he is right to be, look at those gams! But Le Pew is always chasing a phony skunk due to some paint nonsense, this is another “unnatural” aspect that the other food-based chase dynamics don’t have — he’s an asshole and he’s bothering a person who is unsuspecting. “Wrong man” is also a strong comedy engine but it needs more complication than Le Pew brings (and a more active protagonist than his victim).
IIRC, in that first cartoon, the cat is also a man. Granted, that too has not aged entirely well,. but in the context of the era, and given the really odd levels of crossdressing – never mind Bugs in a dress, how about Elmer in a dress and with what seem to be actual breasts – there is some strange modicum of cleverness to “male cat because mistaken for a female skunk.” Though what if we reimagined things and male cat likes being pursued by another man? Opens up fanfic possibilities.
Wooo new bassists!
I felt the same about Panic Room when I revisited it – I remembered it being very solid but when I revisited it alongside some other Fincher stuff it felt a little hollow.
Wooooooo live music in a basement!!
Breakheart Pass – Things are never what they seemed in this very 70s western based on an Alistair McLean novel (which he adapted for the movie). The train full of soldiers and medical supplies is not going to deal with a diphtheria outbreak, Ben Johnson is not an upstanding US marshal and Richard Crenna is not an upstanding governor of Nevada looking to save dying troops, and Charles Bronson is not a murderous desperado. Only Jill Ireland (Bronson’s wife but just barely a love interest), the governor’s fiancee, and Ed Lauter, a stalwart major, are who they seem to be. The plot never entirely holds together and there is a level of bloodthirstiness that you might have seen in earlier westerns. But the camera work (filming snowy vistas in Idaho), a solid Jerry Goldsmith score, and a stalwart cast of familiar faces (we also have David Huddleston, Charles Durning, and oddly boxing legend Archie Moore) help Bronson make this entertaining enough for 90 minutes.
Slow Horses, “Strange Games” – Just enough time to watch one more season before pulling the plug on Apple Plus. We start with the same cast, with River having pushed himself even deeper into purgatory after pretty much everyone failed to stop the Russians, and with yet another secret from Jackson’s past posing a threat. Leading to Standish being kidnapped. Well done – with an opening sequence filmed in Istanbul – but no one where it’s going.
The Practice, “Trees in a Forest” – Lindsay asks for equity in the firm, and creates a mess, and then also confesses she is in love with Bobby. This is interesting but only up to a point. And “there’s a rat in the office and the three women leap on their desks” is really painfully sexist (even if Rebecca kills the rat). The cases are much more interesting: Helen prosecuting a rich guy for a hit and run that killed a homeless man – she loses – and Eugene defending a kid who accidentally killed his best friend in a gang initiation. Helen’s realization that a case she didn’t want to cover matter is effective, and it’s always timely to be reminded that our humanity must extend to all. The show ends with Helen and Eugene just taking a walk, neither happy with our screwed up world.
MASH, “Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?” – A bombadier thinks he’s Jesus. Frank and Margaret take offense and call in Col. Flagg. Hawkeye calls in Dr. Freedman. There are some very touching scenes here as no one sure how to deal with a man who thinks he’s Jesus, and Sidney standing up to Flagg is great. But it never entirely feels fleshed out. And Radar asking the man who would be God to bless his teddy bear (and not one of his animals) completes the infantilization of Radar (who at least finally gets a real first name).
Frasier, “Shut Out in Seattle,” part two – And now the breakups. Though of the four relationships that end, the only one our cast doesn’t make the choice to end is Frasier’s. What stops this from being either insufferable or too familiar is the coda, with the Crane men in a new bar, Martin telling his sons that there is nothing wrong with any of them, stuff just happens and you learn from it. Followed, bizarrely, by the three of them singing the theme from Goldfinger. Thus ends the sixth season, which started badly and got a lot better but out of necessity kind of leaves most of the cast where they started. Well, except Daphne. Oh, and this is the end of Dan Butler’s run as a regular. No idea why, though even as a credited regular, Bulldog was kind of in the background.
Brakeheart Pass easily laps Red Sun in “star-studded Charles Bronson period Westerns” for me, it moves so much better (woo trains!) and Bronson is actually a rather fun detective.
I was remiss about the guests on The Practice: Richard Schiff as a homeless man who’s the one witness to the hit and run, Joseph Campanella as our special guest judge, John Pleshette as the rich guy’s lawyer; Ray Abruzzo as a cop (and soon to be a semi-regular).
Conclave
The meek shall inherit the Earth.
MST3k, “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die”
Showed this to my boyfriend. They almost immediately became an MST3k fan on the basis of Night Of The Blood Beast and watched like a dozen episodes of it, helped by the fact that it’s really good to have on while crafting. This particular one has a lot of great runners, like the “ahh help I’m in another dimension” one, and it has a lot of needlessly long shots that give the guys time to riff.
Stagecoach
I am a sucker for anything with an ensemble cast where almost everyone gets some small, revealing moment or something to contribute.
Noticed this time around that the film subtly emphasizes that Hatfield’s genteel Southern charm is partly defined by who it excludes; obviously Stagecoach isn’t even the most progressive movie of all time–it’s not even the most progressive Western of 1939, though it’s far from the worst the genre has to offer–but that’s still a nice touch. (Great Carradine performance in general: his wolfish grin during the iconic chase sequence goes past the intrinsic satisfaction of a good action scene into something more chilling. This is a guy who likes killing people–who maybe especially likes killing people he thinks are inferior to him–and who has missed it.)
The Plot Against Harry
For Movie Club. Fascinatingly offbeat movie that’s very specifically grounded not only in 1969 Jewish New York but also in Michael Roemer’s particular vision; there are scenes here no one else would have thought of creating. Someone mentioned in the discussion that this is the kind of environment you usually have a fish-out-of-water character exploring, and that made me realize that Harry is a fish who was temporarily out of the water–for a nine-month prison sentence–and has now been dropped back into it, but the film abandons the assumption that the story is about the fish; this is really a story about the water. You lose any real sense of structure, but what you get in return is a free-floating portrait of a time and place that it would be hard to capture in this kind of detail any other way.
Zodiac
Like Stagecoach, I’ve seen this movie any number of times, so I’ll just pick out a particular detail that struck me this time around, and that’s how we end with Mike Mageau. We’ve spent almost three hours following characters who see this case as a puzzle to be solved (and obsessed over), and while that has its own costs and causes its own wear and tear on the soul, there’s something powerful about bringing it all back to a man whose life was devastated by the Zodiac in a much more visceral and immediate way. (Fantastic bit of makeup in giving Jimmi Simpson such dirty fingernails.) This has never been engaging or interesting to Mageau; it’s been harrowing, and Simpson’s performance gives that real weight.
The Nice Guys
* “Look on the bright side. Nobody got hurt.” / “People got hurt.” / “I’m saying I think they died quickly, though, so I don’t think they got hurt.”
* “Amelia, Misty, Dean, Shattuck, all dead. The rest of us just get to choke.”
Incredible movie. Funny, entertainingly violent, resonant (that last quote sticks with me), and even poignant (the way Gosling plays March’s reaction to seeing that the inked-on YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY blackout message on his has gotten smeared into YOU WILL BE HAPPY is transcendent; it actually reminds me a little of the end of Bubba Ho-Tep, which I feel like Shane Black has certainly seen). Also, hot damn, Russell Crowe in this movie can get it.
It was my wife’s birthday this weekend, so she got to choose all the movies except The Plot Against Harry, and she has great taste, which is why I have such a great lineup of rewatched favorites here.
Where can I find The Plot Against Harry?
I watched it on the Criterion Channel, which seems to be the only place it’s streaming at the moment.
https://archive.org/details/the-plot-against-harry-1970
Stagecoach absolutely rules, apart from all the “I wonder how they made those horse stunts look so convincing? Oh no” stuff. Such a great ensemble of weirdos.
Also hell yeah The Nice Guys. One of the most rewatchable movies and Shane Black’s best work, for me.
I’m torn between The Nice Guys and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang on my favorite Black, and talk about a case of being spoiled for choice.
And yeah, the terrific ensemble of (mostly) character actors in Stagecoach rules. So glad Thomas Mitchell got the Oscar for this.
It is dark as hell but I enjoy how the beginning of The Nice Guys plays like the “I shall become a bat!” origin story for a young Shane Black himself. Great movie and great buddy work, rewatching The Last Boy Scout a few weeks back really showed how much Black loves this dynamic and how much he can vary within it — LBS is not bad but it is certainly crasser and cheaper than what Crowe and Gosling have here.
I’d define STAGECOACH as a revisionist Western by the degree to which it bestows a particular form of honor and grace to those who are not granted that measure of respect by the people and institutions that hold the power to decide who is deemed respectable and who is not (at least among the non Native Americans). I think it did a lot to lend dramatic form to the more Turnerian/ de Toqueville interpretation of American exceptionalism that had been pushed aside by the more aristocratic paternalism embodied by Owen Wister, of which Hatfield is kind of a caricature (and a tradition that was perpetuated in Errol Flynn’s Westerns, as well as in DeMille’s epics of the period). Ford’s film is part of a new tradition of populist “adult” Westerns beginning in 1939, alongside William Wyler’s THE WESTERNER and Henry King’s JESSE JAMES.
Jumping ahead to 1951, I’d check out Anthony Mann’s DEVIL’S DOORWAY as a politically progressive response to populism’s embrace of American Exceptionalism, emphasizing how racism poisoned the well of Western individualism and initiative, casting the collective heroes of, let’s say, SHANE, as the villains.
Yes, it’s really notable in Stagecoach how poisonous respectability is–that line at the end about Dallas and Ringo being “spared the blessing of civilizations” is, in fact, pretty sincere. (It’s also striking, in that regard, that Gatewood, the embezzling banker, is quick to accuse the outpost operator’s Apache wife of being a thief, projecting his own crimes onto her without any self-awareness about it whatsoever.)
I need to see more Anthony Mann ASAP.
“I’m fucking your dad.” “WHAT?!”
“He accepted her betrayal with equanimity.”
What Did We Play?
Our voyage through Yesterhill continues in Curse of Strahd. Apparently DMs have a choice of whether what goes on there is just a series of visions or if the players can interact with the “ghosts.” Seeing as we are all big on the RP and not just lore dumps, our DM went with the latter. It’s been fun and a nice change from all the combat of late.
Hollow Knight: Silksong – ah yes. I had forgotten how difficult the first Hollow Knight was, but as I get stuck in yet another “one more go, I’ll win the boss fight thi- OH fuck off” cycle it’s all flooding back to me. This is a good mix of “more of the same” and “clever new stuff” so far, I’m having a great time BUT also feel like I’m at serious risk of breaking a controller / window / anything that happens to be nearby.
Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective, “The Murderer Lives at 221” – another case of this cooperative detective game with friends, as the name of the case indicates Holmes is a suspect in this one and we were working to clear his name. Bit of a frustrating one to be honest, we never really cracked a few of the key leads and the game’s main flaw (it was all initially written in French and the translation is, how do you say… “merde”?) was very much in evidence a few times. Still good fun though, I think next time we’re going to try a case from the Lovecraftian spin-off game which I like the sound of…
I am abysmal at Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, so it’s good to know I’m not the only one. I feel like if someone did an Agatha Christie version, I’d be much better.
I’m not sure if it’s even POSSIBLE to “win” it (as in, outdo Sherlock’s score at the end) but we’ve done…. OK sometimes. This one felt like a pretty terrible effort, haha.
Would definitely like to see the formula applied to Poirot and co.! Also PROOFREAD BY SOMEBODY WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH
Got back on the Don’t Starve horse again now that I have my new laptop, but since I hadn’t gotten very far into my new world, I restarted it again and this time rigged it so I’d kick things off in autumn instead of spring. (It’s a coin-flip between the two, so this isn’t even as much cheating as me adding more resurrection points to save myself the frustration of losing the entire save file after one bad fight. I stand by this choice.) An autumn start is much smoother, since it lacks spring’s oppressive rain (which lowers your sanity) and occasional rain of frogs (which are just awful to deal with), and it doesn’t immediately lead into a summer where you’re at risk of eating dying of heatstroke or having your camp catch on fire before you’ve developed the technology to handily put it out.
However, I have not found any beefalo in this world yet, which concerns me.
Hollow Knight: Silksong – Look, even as someone who just recently 112ed HK in ~25 hours after not picking it up in about four years… Silksong is tough. There are so many enemies and obstacles that do double damage or can hit you twice, and it’s a lot easier in some of these fights to become trapped.
Still, though, even through the frustrations I’m having fun. I’ve managed almost 20 hours since it came out, which is easy when you don’t have a job. I finally made it to Act 2 last night. And I’m realizing the game is a lot bigger than I suspected, which makes sense now that I think about it. And there’s a ton to explore, and that’s fun. Obviously, we will continue onward.
I like that it’s Big, I MOSTLY like that it’s Tough, although I currently find myself with a choice of three incredibly tough fights that I’m not sure I’m ready for and two of them are an annoyingly long walk from a safe bench, so I’m cursing the developers even as I continue to think it’s pretty fantastic.
Ha, there was one point I had like four fights to choose from and I don’t remember what I ended up deciding. One of them I still haven’t done, although I’ve made a lot of progress elsewhere.
The toughest boss I’ve faced so far was at the end of Act 1, and that might have taken me at least two dozen tries (not counting that it’s difficult enough just to get back to the boss).
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
Unlocked the F1 car and its upgraded, gaudier version early in the week. Haven’t driven it as much as I wanted to, but it’s sleek and fast and controls super well. It’s a bit slower and less dizzying than the F1 car in Burnout 3: Takedown but that might be an improvement because that one drove like rocket down a slide and crashed on every corner. Also, I got the car way earlier than I expected, so I’m curious what else is there to do in the game. Might be time to give the motorcycles and Big Surf Island a more serious effort.
I am much more of a Voyager fan that most, so even if I agree with most of this, I will do my best Worf voice and declare “I must protest! Voyager does not suck!” My recent watch-through actually had me falling in love with the show, possibly for the first time. Yes, a lot of individual elements are a mess, and a lot of episodes amount to nothing. But overall I think we get a lot of good Trek. Better than Discovery and Picard, for sure. Better than Enterprise. At worst, it’s fun and scratches a Trek itch.
“Watching Janeway break her values so often made me wonder how often I’d been doing the exact same thing; the people it’s most tough to extend empathy to aren’t people suffering, but people who refuse to extend empathy to others; it took some thought to recognise how often this comes from suffering itself. ”
Hrm. I dunno about this, I think a lot of it comes from the perception of suffering. Inconvenience reconfigured as suffering. It’s something I struggle with too but that doesn’t mean it is real or something viable. Perhaps it’s the active verb of “extending” empathy that is bugging me, I think a lot of people are dicks and not bothering with them or walking away seems like a fine response — I’m not going to give them my time or understanding.
See, I disagree with multiple points there – as always, I don’t think ’empathy’ means compassion, and in this case, I don’t think ‘limited life experience’ or ‘refusal to be uncomfortable’ are necessarily bad enough sins to deny empathy. In fact, a lot of people who refuse to be uncomfortable are people who had a shit go of it in some way and lacked the tools to work through their discomfort. And I usually find extending people like that even the slightest empathy and assumption of autonomy is usually what allows them to have the space to reflect on their behaviours. Most people just want to feel heard first. It helps that I was reminded this weekend of how brash and self-righteous I could be when I was younger – extending empathy to people who don’t ‘deserve it’ was a skill learned through harsh reality, being on the other end of it, and preferring things to be better rather than worse.
Following the philosophy of William Munny, I try not to think in terms of “deserve.” I don’t necessarily believe someone doesn’t deserve empathy, but I do not have time for them. What empathy I grant is a personal and I suppose selfish matter, it’s the understanding the person I find annoying or worse has a life that I am not privy to, and that my irritation is not their problem so why am I making it one for me. But that’s the small stuff, and big stuff I am very comfortable writing off.
What I meant to add earlier — more power to you on this, sincerely. I’m not saying my philosophy should be how everyone acts. I don’t think it’s a wrong way to act, though.
When Janeway is chewing out a crewmember it feels like when I was a kid and got in real bad trouble from my mom. Janeway is a mass of inconsistencies. That’s on the writers. I think Voy holds the Star Trek record for having the most episodes rewritten which can cause a lot of consistency problems in tone, pacing, characterization and on and on. She’s not at the center of the show like other Captains either. There is at least a season and a half of episodes focusing on the Doctor and Seven Of Nine. That’s time away from developing her character. So, Janeway does come across as a crazy lady. She killed Tuvix just because she wanted Tuvok back. She decided they should explore an unknown, potentially dangerous nebula just because she wanted coffee. There has been some revisionism with her and how the tragedy of Voy’s situation tests Janeway over the years. Making desperate deals with one devil or another again and again and again to get her crew home safely can make for some hard choices. In the end I like Janeway for Kate Mulgrew. She could have been one of the greats. Still, give me this show over any current Trek.
BTW, it happens to be “Star Trek Day,” to mark the day in 1966 when TOS debuted.
Aww, I’ve got some Star Trek: TOS stickers I never put on anything, and I’m going to stick one on the new laptop in honor of the day.