Betty white died today at 99.

PNQ: favorite White role?

My parents were huge Golden Girls fan, so I probably saw more of her in that than anyone else.

A commenter on a YouTube NextGen clip dismissed the first two seasons as "boring"...


PNQ: Opinions?


I don't think the two seasons were "boring", I think that they were poorly written and directed. That's not the same thing.

Inspired by Facebook...


PNQ: What Star Trek characters do you think would be worthy of holding Mjolnir?


Needlemouse uses the nine virtues of Odinism as a guideline: Courage, Truth, Honor, Fidelity (not just to a romantic partner, but to an ideal or mission), Discipline, Hospitality, Self-Reliance, Industriousness, and Perseverence.


In a general sense I think most Starfleet officers would qualify, but if you increase the level of virtue required you get some interesting thought experiments.



Obvious people who wouldn't qualify:


Any Ferengi. Duh.
A lot of Vulcans, they'd have trouble with Fidelity and Hospitality. And Courage in its truest sense.
Most Romulans and Cardassians. They put too much faith in the state, I think Truth and Honor would be big problems.

I'm pondering the use of "fidelity" as a quality of a hero or noble warrior.



It derives from the Latin "fidelis", which indicates faithfulness or loyalty.


The Wikipedia page also introduces an approach that I hadn't considered, epitomized by the music industries use of "fidelity": "how close does the recording match the original?" That is, "how much do my actions match the intents of the institutions that I believe in?"



It's here that I think we run into a big problem with the concept of Batman handing Mjolnir. His actions may be in the name of the rule of law, but in his heart he acts in the name of what he thinks should be legal or not.



This is something mirrored by Thor at the start of his movie: might makes right, and he has might, so he must be right. A fallacy. This is one of the reasons Captain America can wield the hammer and Iron Man never had a chance.



So Starfleet officers would have to believe in the "gospel" of Starfleet to be worthy of the hammer.

Why won't IKEA ship me the blahaj shark? :confused:

So I'm watching a review of "The Pegasus" again and the following occurs to me...


PNQ: Even if the Federation doesn't believe in cloaking devices, what about all the other galactic powers?


I mean, surely the Ferengi could've bought or stole cloaking tech by now. The Obsidian Order could've stolen cloaking tech by now (they had an embassy on Romulus, after all). The Breen, the Orion Syndicate, the list goes on and on.


Gene's admonition that Starfleet doesn't sneak around is idealistic but not realistic.



I wish that they had introduced more restrictions on cloaking devices than just "no shields or weapons". The most obvious one that I can think of is "no cloaks while at warp."



Second is "cloaks are so energy-intensive that you can only use it for X minutes." Or to follow up on STVI, say that ships under cloak must be specifically modified to contain all impulse and thruster exhaust until the ship drops cloak. After X minutes the tanks are full and you need to decloak to vent before you can cloak again.


Third is some sort of technobabble to say that cloaking devices put out some form of radiation that Klingons and Romulans can handle just fine, but is cumulatively toxic for all other races. Perhaps when the Romulans gave the tech to the Klingons in the first place they also shared the needed genetic modifications. This would be a good place to explain the Romulan forehead ridges.

PNQ: What TV show have you seen all (or at least the vast majority of), but now regret wasting your time with?

Every so often I regret watching Love Hina. There are only like three jokes in that show that are repeated over and over.

I know that a lot of early dubbed anime have that problem, but still…

I don’t know how many of you have heard of Kimagure Orange Road. It also had a rather limited premise, but at least it had heart and made you feel for the characters.

A comment on a YouTube video of Janeway's cameo in Nemesis...


"I don't want her as guest character-I WANTED A VOYAGER MOVIE."


PNQ: What could've been the plot of a Voyager movie?


Or a DS9 movie, while we're talking about it. Obviously an ENT movie would be our heroes preventing the Klingons or Romulans from interfering with the creation of the Federation, but what about the other two?


I mean, you couldn't have saved arriving home for a Voyager movie, it would've short-changed the TV viewers. And a key problem with Voyager is that there really isn't a reason for the crew to remain together after they get back.



An interesting TV movie would be Voyager returning to the Delta Quadrant ten years later with some sort of Federation-built equivalent to the Borg transwarp conduits and revisit some old friends like Neelix, but you couldn't put that in theaters.



Obviously a DS9 movie would be Sisko returning in time for Bajor to join the Federation. The enemy wouldn't be the Cardassians, it would be the Maquis (I refuse to believe that the Maquis could ever be completely eradicated, they have enough sense to remain decentralized enough to allow for a comeback). But again, TV movie, not theaters.

Aside from sitting through Disney Afternoon day after day despite not being too fond of several of its cartoons? Nothing really. Slayers was mostly a disappointment, but even it had three or four good episodes in that first season and, like, I get the references in fanworks better now.

A Reddit post brings up an interesting question: Is it really okay to superglue your LEGO sets together, especially if they're fragile?


I'm conflicted. LEGO is a construction toy, not a model set. The idea of paying that much money only to build a very specific thing and then putting it on a shelf seems...unnatural to me. That's what plastic models are for.



Then again, maybe I'm just an old fogey. I remember when LEGO was the following and nothing else: Castle, Town, Pirate, Space, DUPLO, Technic. That was it. No licensed nonsense, no set-specific pieces. You build, you take it apart, you build again.



Then again, the Reddit post was about LEGO flowers, which are more fragile than the usual creation. As long as you're not filling whole shelves, is it okay to superglue once in awhile?

We're now two years away from the Bell Riots, and it's sad how close we are to Sanctuary Districts actually happening.


PNQ: What near-future event in Trek are you most scared of and most looking forward to?


Not counting World War III and the first warp flight, of course. I want to stay away from that stuff.



The cure for cancer will be found in this century according to "Fury."
According to "Where No Man..." the genetic potential for ESP will first be quantified.


The ozone layer is said to fail in this century, luckily this seems to have been averted.


"The Slaver Weapons" indicate that the Kzinti wars will also occur in this century, but one has to wonder how a planet that has just invented warp drive can effectively wage an interplanetary war.

It's been a long-standing question, and today I saw that another YouTube video had been made on the subject:


PNQ: Why didn't Voyager set course for the Gamma Quadrant end of the Bajoran Wormhole? Wouldn't it be a shorter trip?


Well, I have another question...


PNQ: How did they know that they were in the Delta Quadrant in the first place?


Okay, let's handwave that one away, even if it implies that the locations and movements of all major stars in the galaxy have been charted (a dubious claim if you ask me). Voyager disappeared Stardate 48317. While the DS9 crew had heard rumblings of the Dominion, First Contact wasn't really had until "The Jem'Hadar", Stardate 48212. It had only been a month or so! The full picture of the Dominion couldn't have been known, especially the extents of "Dominion Space".



On the other hand, Janeway seemed to know that Borg space was on their present course at one point or another. Did she pick the lesser of two evils? Did she think that it would be easier for Voyager to slip past the Borg unnoticed than to go through the Dominion?

Courtesy of Facebook...


PNQ: Which actor did the best portrayal of Sherlock Holmes?


I'm not the best judge, as I've never seen a traditional Holmes portrayal. I did enjoy the Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century cartoon and Great Mouse Detective.



I did watch the pilot of the Benedict Cumberbatch version. It was okay, but I wasn't hooked enough to watch any more.


So what do you guys think? I daresay John Barrymore and Basil Rathbone did okay, they're good actors. Did Ian McKellan do a good job in Mr. Holmes?

Could happen at the rate we're going.

I bet the Ferengi could collapse your economy at a distance and win the war that way.


He did a very good job.

I want to keep the Trek retrospectives on the 30th anniversary cycle, but I want to do another show during the summer.


PNQ: Opinions?


I know that I'll have to do Babylon 5 eventually, but I'm not ready for a project of that depth yet. Maybe next year I'll do the pilot movie for the 30th anniversary.


I also plan to eventually do all of Stargate, but that's a big project. Like, REALLY big.



So by process of elimination I'm down to Andromeda, Farscape, and Battlestar Galactica. Of the three I'm most familiar with Andromeda, I watched the first few seasons. I've seen bits and pieces of Farscape, but none of Battlestar Galactica. Which is weird, as my mother enjoyed them a lot (she was the one that introduced me to Trek in the first place).

I haven't watched any of those shows beyond a few minutes here and there, so I don't have any opinions.

(I've been very slowly covering nu Doctor Who on my blog, but with so little time and with other creative projects sucking up what little time I have, and having misplaced the current DVD, I'm treading water in S2.)

I vote BSG. Your threads come from a perspective of knowing a lot about the show in question -- it would be interesting to see how the exact opposite scenario turns out.

Oo, how'd I miss this one? I never shut up on this subject. The answer is Jeremy Brett in the Granada TV series. He was <i>born</i> to play Holmes, and he put himself into the role so completely it basically killed him. Amazingly, the whole series is on YouTube, so check it out!

(I do like Cumberbatch, and Downey Jr. for that matter, but they're not really playing the Conan Doyle character.)

On notalwaysright.com someone mentioned that Bones had almost as many relationships as Kirk...


PNQ: Am I forgetting a lot of his girlfriends?


I can remember Nancy Crater, the one played by Julie Newmar, he tried hitting on Shaw, the one from the amusement park planet, the one from the asteroid ship, that's about it.

PNQ: Do you think that the Progenitors are the same as the Preservers?


Quick recap. The Progenitors are the aliens from "The Chase", the first sentient race to evolve in the galaxy (or at least the Alpha Quadrant). The Preservers are the aliens from "The Paradise Syndrome", the ones that transplant populations of primitive cultures to other planets to give them a chance to evolve.



A few sources consider them to be the same thing, but I have doubts. The Progenitors were active billions of years ago, and the Preservers were active thousands of years ago.



A few expanded universe sources make them the same thing. My biggest problem is that the Progenitor message clearly indicated that they thought that their race was dying out, hence the need to plant DNA in primordial worlds.



A few people also connect them to the changelings, basically based on the same actress playing the Progenitor hologram and the Female Changeling. What idiots. Trek recycles actors all the time, it doesn't mean anything. Do we have to assume that Pulaski is a descendant of Miranda Jones solely because they share an actress?

I gave the Jeremy Brett series two episodes to suck me in, and it didn't. Good acting all round, of course, but the problem is that I just don't find Sherlock Holmes particularly interesting. He's stiff, he's smug, he's cold, he's arrogant. And you just can't alter that personality all that much without ceasing to be an authentic Sherlock Holmes.

So I'm running through a playlist of TNG clips, and I get to the one where Picard owns the Sheliak. I had to wonder...


PNQ: We know the ship is self-cleaning, but how does it actually work?


It's one thing to say that overnight a swarm of robots pop out of a console and clean everything, but there is no "overnight" on a starship. Someone is always on the Bridge, in Engineering, in Ten Forward, etc. Robots would become safety hazards.


Do the transporters routinely sweep these areas and beam away everything that isn't supposed to be there? That seems like a very resource-intensive process, both in terms of energy and computing power.

A Not Always Right story leads to comments regarding ways to call someone stupid or crazy...


PNQ: What's your favorite version of "a few X short of a Y"?


I'll always remember Stargate's "three fries short of a Happy Meal."

Musical Hell reviews the Rex Harrison Doctor Dolittle movie


I agree that objectively this is a horrible movie. Pacing problems, structural problems, not very PC, Rex Harrison's limited singing range, all that. However, I'm still fond of this film.



PNQ: What's a movie that you like that is objectively awful?


Of A-movies please. Plenty of brainless horror and action flicks exist, that's the whole point. They're meant to be mental junk food and nothing else. Movies like Doctor Doolittle are trying to be deeper than that.



YouTube playlist of covers of songs from the movie.

Steve Shives tackles the biggest plot hole in Trek


It's a long video, and he covers the relevant portion at the end. You can skip the video anyway, I'll tell you:


How come Kirk and crew wanted to take McCoy (with Spock's katra) to the Genesis Planet? They didn't know that Spock had been rejuvenated. They didn't even know if the body was intact. In fact, given the available information at the time, the logical course of action would be to take McCoy to Vulcan to have the katra extracted and placed in one of the receptacles in Mount Seleya.



Steve theorizes that Kirk is interpreting the words of Spock's katra in McCoy to mean that the Genesis planet is no place to leave the body, it should be buried on Vulcan. I'm dubious at this, why would the Vulcans be more sentimental about bodies than Klingons, who accept that the body is just a shell for the soul which has left to go to Sto'vo'kor or Gre'thor?



Then again, I would expect Starfleet officers to have some sort of request on record regarding cremation, burial location, etc. And Spock would've had a request for disposal on Vulcan on record.


Then again, Spock should've had katra-specific requests on file. Vulcans on their planet, or colonies, or Vulcan-only ships can leave this stuff unsaid because they know what to do, but chances are Spock was always going to die among non-Vulcans.



As for the "biggest plot hole in Star Trek", this one ain't even in the top ten. I'd put "women can't be captains" or "transporters keep working through shields" or "shutting down a frozen holodeck vaporizes everyone inside" way above the Genesis planet conundrum.

Wait, what's that last one about shutting down a frozen holodeck?

In "The Big Goodbye" it's clearly stated that a forced shutdown of the holodeck vaporizes everything inside. I covered this in the retrospective.


WESLEY: I don't know if I should. If this isn't done correctly, the programme could abort and everyone inside could vanish.



Of course this didn't carry on into later appearances of the holodeck, but it DID happen and it's a pretty big plothole. It only exists as a handwave to extend the length of the episode.

PNQ: What's a BIG fanproject that you'd love to do but know you never will?


I've had bits and pieces of ideas for an Ocarina of Time novelization in my head for years, but I'll never get them put down. There are so many characters that deserve backstories and plot points that I think I could explain, but the project is just too massive.

PNQ: Where did Yeoman go after TOS?


The Yeoman is a sort of personal assistant/office manager for the captain, so where'd they go? In the TNG era (especially DS9) we've seen assistants to flag officers, but captains would have just as much need for them.


For that matter, all of the department heads among the senior staff should have yeomen in addition to the round-the-clock assistants.



In the novel "The Lost Years" Kevin Riley serves as aide to newly-minted Admiral Kirk, but he was a Lieutenant Commander at the time. Is that a difference between line and flag officers-the former get enlisted assistants and the latter get commissioned assistants?

There are many SF shows coming up that I want to do retrospectives on. The big question when scheduling is how many I can do in a single season. Each entry is half an hour or an hour when I'm operating off a transcript on a familiar show, but as soon as we move past Trek and Stargate I know I'm going to have to actually watch the episodes, that's a lot more time.



In addition to Trek, Babylon 5, Stargate, and Battlestar Galactica, I've also realized that I want to do Andromeda, Seaquest, Farscape, and Quantum Leap.



PNQ: Opinions on proposed schedule before?


22/23-TNG S6, DS9 S1, B5 Pilot Movie
23/24-TNG S7, DS9 S2, TAS S1, DSV S1, B5 Pilot

24/25-DS9 S3, VOY S1, TAS S2, DSV S2, B5 S1
Start Sliders in Fall 2026, Stargate SG-1 in Fall 2027, Quantum Leap and Farscape in Fall 2029, Andromeda in Fall 2030, Enterprise in Fall 2031, Battlestar Galactica in Fall 2033, etc.


(All of these are 30th anniversary except for Quantum Leap which is the 40th anniversary and TAS which is the 50th)



Will we even be here in ten years? Moving BSG up to 2023 for the 20th anniversary instead of the 30th anniversary seems weird.


Four shows at once seems like a lot, even if I can work off scripts for two of them.



Perhaps I should limit the "school year" retrospectives to the space shows and use the summers for the Earth-based shows (ditching the whole anniversary concept in the process and working at my own pace). In that case SG-1 would be next summer, Quantum Leap the summer after, etc.


I'd also like to know what shows you just plain aren't interested in. Why should I go through all this work if nobody's going to read it? Do you only care about Trek and B5? I don't know.

Star Trek is honestly the only show I really care about, but I still have a mild interest in Farscape and KJ likes Quantum Leap.

So I'm in the middle of a SF Debris binge, and the following occurs to me during "Firstborn"...


PNQ: What else could they have done with Alexander?


Far too often Alexander's role is disappointing Worf and refusing to do Klingon stuff. It got old fast. He needed more episodes like "Fistful of Datas".



One thing that comes to mind immediately is how he felt about the Worf/Troi relationship (which I never liked). Or how about him being a role model/mentor for Molly? Did the Roshenkos teach him any Earth sports that he could play with Worf? Baseball doesn't seem like a good fit, but how about rugby or motorcycle racing?


Or what about preparing for Starfleet? Alexander could show that while he doesn't respect Worf's culture, he respects his profession and accomplishments. This would also be a good use for Wesley, turning him into a teacher.

In watching Obscurus Lupa's review of "Threshold" it occurs to me...


PNQ: Is it really the worst episode of Voyager?


Don't get me wrong, it's bad. Really bad. But the badness is in the premise and complete disregard for logic, not the direction or performances. I'd watch "Threshold" over "Equinox" or "Scorpion" any day.

The TV Tropes page for "Balance of Terror" says that Kirk's wedding speech is reused for all future weddings in Trek...


PNQ: Is it used anywhere else other than in "Data's Day"?


Was it snuck into Discovery or something?

The MemAlpha page for weddings has some similar-but-not-identical ones. The only one in nuTrek, not yet mentioned there, is the SNW Season 1 finale -- which was literally an alternate version of "Balance of Terror", a well-intended homage with divisive results (for instance, I loved it, Wowbagger hated it).

[ED: A very similar speech was used in the S3 finale of The Orville, too.]

Now that the original film snippet of "When Love is Gone" from the Muppet Christmas Carol has been found and restored to the master print...


PNQ: "When Love is Gone"-essential or sappy tripe worth discarding?


I think it's essential for Scrooge's character arc, how about you?

So I'm watching an SF Debris review and I'm reminded of the fact that they were going to kill Kim and not Kes during "Scorpion."


PNQ: What future plot possibilities do you see if Kes had stayed?


I mean, she would've had to have a kid this time around, but she wasn't with Neelix anymore and Tom was with Torres by now. So who? The odds of finding another lost Ocampan colony out here a la "Homestead" seem remote. My mind wanders to Chakotay, that would be an interesting development. I wonder if someone has written that fanfic yet. There's drama to be milked from Janeway losing a man that she cared for to her "daughter."



How would her relationship with Seven go? It stands to reason that she'd be empathetic to Seven's journey to discover her humanity.



Another possibility is how her new dynamic with Neelix would lead to her trying to smooth out some of Neelix's rough edges. You know, at the start she could see no wrong in him, she was so starstruck that she was blind to his faults. But now that she's matured and they're no longer together, she's able to see all of what he is. And relationship or not, there are few people who could make Neelix change as fast as she could.

Could someone verify the following TOS example for a TVTropes draft?


"A Running Gag Star Trek, where Bones sneaks Kirk onto the Enterprise by injecting him with an vaccine for a disease, to give him the symptoms. Kirk suffers a reaction to the vaccine, resulting in Bones chasing him around, injecting him with unknown drugs as Kirk tries to save the ship."


Bones would never make anyone sick. The only time I recall Kirk being in command while injured is "Journey to Babel", and Bones was busy with Spock and Sarek at the time, not tending to Kirk.


I'm on thin ice with a few tropers at the moment, and I don't want to make a unilateral edit right now.

That's a reference to the 2009 movie. I would consider it less a running gag than an ongoing comic relief thing that happened once and was done.

Interesting ideas, that would be one way to change Neelix's character if the showrunners understood how much people hated him.

I think Chakotay is out of the question. The power and maturity differences are too much. I also can't see him attracted to her that much honestly. Kim would be a match on both counts, but probably a blander relationship to write for.

They could find another Ocampan colony, but the father coming along would mean more money and scenes for yet another character, and a one-and-done romance would be pretty blatantly just to give her a child because they thought she needed one.

Oh. The link in the example goes straight to the page for the film. This is what we call Failed a Spot Check.



I'm still not comfortable calling it just "Star Trek". It has to be Trek '09 or Trek 11 or Abrams Trek or whatever. When's the last time we even used "Star Trek" for the series and not TOS?