I've never completely understood that.  I mean, did they have to pay royalties to Maurice Hurley (writer of "Q Who") every time the Borg appeared?  Do recurring characters always mean royalties for the writer of the first episode in which they appeared?  I guess I always assumed that when the producers bought a story…

I have mixed feelings about "Endgame".  I enjoyed it quite a bit when it first aired and I still enjoyed it when I did a rewatch of the whole series a couple of years ago.  I am sympathetic to the criticism that it ends without actually dealing with the homecoming of the crew (and things like how Starfleet will deal…

"Basil the Rat" is not just my favorite episode of Fawlty Towers; it's my favorite thirty minutes of television ever.  "The Germans" and "Communication Problems" are close contenders though.

Because I like making lists, and am a huge, huge nerd, here are the Voyager episodes I would consider most worth seeing:

I'm rather fond of Rich and Strange, but I can certainly see how one could loathe it.

Yes!  It started out as a perfectly good, if somewhat low-key, science fiction story.  Then it became a sermon about how great cults are, or something like that.  And the level of misogyny makes other classic-era science fiction authors look like radical feminists in comparison.

I'll bet Tolkien secretly regretted ever  having converted Lewis from atheism.

Yeah, "His Dark Materials" is certainly not atheistic (even if Pullman himself is an atheist).  "His Dark Materials" doesn't say that the Judeo-Christian God doesn't exist; it says that the Judeo-Christian God is evil, and that the true entity we should be worshiping (the Dust) is more of an eastern-style impersonal…

The first things that came to my mind were Psycho and The Birds.  The moment when the first bird attacks is brilliantly unexpected.  What I love about it is that it's played so straight and not filmed in some overwrought way.  We don't get foreboding shots of the bird about to attack, or of Tippie Hedren seeing the…

I didn't mind the Doctor's singing in general, but "Virtuoso" was a terrible, terrible, terrible episode.  On the other hand, some of the Doctor-centric episodes where the writers were clearly having fun and putting him in non-medical situations are quite excellent; for example, "Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy", or…

Phlox is every bit as annoying as Neelix, if not more.  Go watch "A Night in Sickbay".

@avclub-1df8797177fc3b52be6784aacca7358c:disqus  Having superior mental capabilities would not necessarily make him any wiser.  He was still young, inexperienced, and arrogant; I see no reason to think he would have been otherwise.  I'm actually rather glad that Siddig didn't know about this secret from the beginning,…

@mem359 I've always suspected that Spock was just making all those numbers up and having a good chuckle beneath his Vulcan exterior.

@avclub-43f6ba1dfda6b8106dc7cf1155f37fdb:disqus  Tell us more about you and your wife!

Yeah, there's no reason for Khan and Kirk to appear in a scene together (other than to comply with Hollywood convention, which is a pretty bad reason).  The Wrath of Khan was definitely better for not having forced such a scene to happen.

I too hated Trek '09 and will probably not even see this new one in the theater.

I seem to remember reading that Siddig el Fadil made a conscious decision to play him unlikeably when the show started, taking the risk that this would bother some viewers but hoping that it would give the character room to develop.  I can't remember whether that was in the DS9 Companion or somewhere else, though.  Or…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus  I must say, I'm glad they didn't go that way.  Not that Auberjonois  couldn't have pulled it off, but I think the Odo-Mora scenes work better with two actors physically together in the scene than they would with him playing alone against himself.

@avclub-bbb04f2a70775131fa0397bbdb4c03de:disqus  The Q thing at least makes a little sense in that the American civil war is just a representation created so that Janeway's human mind can comprehend what's going on; since Q brought her there, it makes sense that he'd cast his own side as the 'good guys', i.e. the…

Yeah, it's always bothered me that any time an animal is referred to in a throwaway reference, its name is 'X-ian Y' where X is a planet.  Not particularly because it's implausible that animals would be named that way, but because that specificity almost always seems out of place in that sort of off-hand comment.  I…