Star Trek: Voyager S06E13 Virtuoso

The holographic doctor becomes a famous musician on an advanced alien planet. He resigns from Star Fleet in order to pursue his new career as a rock star (except that he sings opera and not rock ‘n’ roll). But then the aliens on the planet program their own hologram who’s an even better singer, making the doctor obsolete.

The ridiculousness of this accurate synopsis of the episode belies the fact that it was pretty entertaining.

Everyone on Voyager is really pissed at the doctor for wanting to leave them in order to pursue his dream job. But why shouldn’t he? Voyager is on a pointless impossible mission to return to the alpha quadrant that it will never complete, and it’s pretty likely that they will be killed along the way because Janeway is incapable of not sticking her nose in business where it doesn’t belong. If they don’t die investigating some space anomaly, then the Borg will surely get them. Anyone with any common sense would take the opportunity to leave and settle down on a nice planet rather than inevitably die under a Janeway dictatorship.

Anyone, that is, who’s sentient. If the doctor is just a computer program simulating a sentient being, then no, he can’t do that. I know that I would be pretty pissed if, one day, my MacBook Pro which I paid two thousand dollars for suddenly announced that it’s leaving me to go self-actualize. I’d have to go back to watching Netflix on a crappy older Windows computer, which is the equivalent of having Tom Paris take over sickbay.

Star Trek TOS S02E20 “Return to Tomorrow”

The Enterprise discovers three disembodied intelligences on a planet that has been dead for half a million years. You’d think that, by now, they’d know that whenever they encounter a disembodied intelligence, it’s really bad news. But nope, they never learn the lessons of the previous episodes. So, after Captain Kirk gives a speech about the importance of taking risks, a speech which William Shatner massively overacts, they decide to let the disembodied intelligences borrow their human bodies so they can build themselves robot bodies.

The three disembodied intelligences:

(1) Sargon: He’s the guy in the charge and he’s the good guy. He genuinely believes that he will use his robot body to go around the galaxy helping the lesser species, teaching them new technologies and the wisdom to avoid destroying themselves like his race did.

(2) Thalassa: She’s Sargon’s wife. She doesn’t have a strong moral compass one way or the other because she’s a woman. She’s generally good because she’s married to Sargon and Sargon is good. But we know that if somehow, things had been different and she had been married to Henoch, then she’d be evil like him.

(3) Henoch: He’s the bad guy who has no intention of ever giving back his borrowed body (which belongs to Spock). Thus, it’s not surprising that he’s single. One of the lessons of this episode is that if a man doesn’t have a wife, he turns evil. Or maybe the lesson is that evil men can’t get a woman in the first place.

Henoch knows that Sargon is a lost cause because he’s too goody two shoes, so he hatches a plot to kill him while he inhabits Kirk’s body. But Henoch knows how to manipulate Thalassa into going along with his scheme. He purposely builds for her a robot body that looks like an old man instead of a hot young babe, because even though she’s an intelligence far beyond humankind, she’s also just a vain woman who is horrified by a robot body that looks like an old man. She wants to keep the hot babelicious body of the random female officer that we’ve never seen before and will never see again.

But luckily for the Enterprise, Sargon survives the murder attempt and thwarts Henoch and returns everyone’s bodies.

Star Trek: Picard S01E06

Still the best Star Trek series ever.

Star Trek: Picard S01E05

My weekly review of Star Trek: Picard.

Still the best Star Trek series ever.

But I’m confused about the alleged lack of money in the future. People talk about getting paid and stuff like that.

Yes, the answer is that people writing the scripts really have no clue how a moneyless future would work, plus they’re not the same people who wrote the scripts from previous movies and TV episodes where they talked about there not being any money, so they just ignore the issue.

And a spoiler comment about the ending:

Picard S01E04

I forgot my weekly review.

Still the best Star Trek TV series ever. Even though it became a little borderline silly this episode.

Is there money in the Star Trek future?

In the movie Star Trek: First Contact, Captain Picard smugly explains to the 21st century woman that they beamed up to the ship (in gross violation of the Temporal Prime Directive) that there’s no money in the future.

In episode 3 of Star Trek: Picard, when Picard visits Raffi, Raffi is pissed that Picard lives in a fancy chateau in France while she lives in a crappy mobile home type of residence in the desert.

So there may not be “money” in the future, but there must be something very much like money that allows some people to have much fancier lives than other people. Social credits?

Star Trek: Picard S01E03

Still the best Star Trek series ever.

Star Trek: Picard S01E02

I still think this is the best Star Trek ever, or at least the best it could possibly be without William Shatner.

Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Way overrated movie.

It’s more movie-like and has better pacing, better spaceship sets and special effects than the first TNG movie. And I also like the new uniforms. But the plot is stupid. I say that the worst movie with the original cast is better than the best TNG movie.

I’m not a fan of adding time travel to series that aren’t specifically about time travel. So the TV series Travelers, specifically about time travel, was great, but time travel is bad when it’s in Star Trek. If the Borg can travel back in time, then why not just travel back in time in Borg space, then send a Borg cube to Earth which is back in time before they have any defenses, and they can just easily assimilate the planet, and Picard would have totally been unable to do anything about it.

The supposedly great accomplishment of man’s first warp flight becomes pretty meaningless if time travelers from the future are helping out.

This is a more minor point, but I don’t understand why Picard allowed Doctor Crusher to bring the injured black woman back to the Enterprise. It’s a mistake that Captain Kirk would have made, but Picard is supposed to be a real stickler for following the rules, even if following the rules sucks. With several people from the past knowing about the future, including Zefram Cochrane, I don’t see how the timeline hasn’t been screwed up.

Vulcans discover Cochrane’s tiny little spaceship, but are oblivious to the huge-in-comparison Enterprise from the future orbiting Earth.

Nothing in this movie makes sense if you spend more than a few seconds thinking about it.

A horny grotesque Borg “queen” who wants to have sex with Data, this is just so stupid I don’t know what more to say about it.

Star Trek Generations (1994)

With the new Picard series on the air, I thought I should catch up on these post-TNG movies that I missed.

While it was cool to see William Shatner play Captain Kirk one last time (when he was still young enough to do it), it was totally crappy that they just killed him off in such a dumb meaningless manner. If only they had the foresight back then to realize that they could have a TV series about Captain Kirk as an older retired man. It surely would have been way better than Voyager.

Otherwise, this feels like a regular TNG episode with slightly better-looking spaceship interiors, stretched out unnecessarily to two hours. With far too much technobabble and MacGuffins.

Other than William Shatner, the high point of the movie is Brett Spiner playing Data who had Geordi install an “emotion chip” into his brain. After some initial difficulty adjusting to the “chip,” Data starts acting like the only normal human on the ship, and the humans act like emotionless Starfleet drones.