For me, since Vincent Cassel is pretty much Hollywood’s go-to “French Guy” I always misremember him as also playing the merovingian in the 2nd matrix (even though it was a completely different french guy).

So the drunk guy at the party at the beginning, talking about how everyone was in The Matrix?

Pretty disappointed that Dolores was only 1-gunning things.

Some very big Person of Interest energy tonight.

If Rios is a synth, that’s not actually good writing.

I think part of it is also that the actress/directing isn’t very good?

I just don’t think the show earns it.

...last week I was saying that it wouldn’t surprise me if Riker and Troi ended up with a brandnew posotronic son by the end of this story.

Completely unrelated, but if Admiral Clancy were actually Admiral Marta Clancy (née Batanides) that would be something I could totally get behind.

The beginning-middle-end thing was something I thought about in the Seven/Icheb/pimpsuit episode. It was pretty self-contained, in that it introduced the idea of borg-harvesting, sortof discussed why it was bad, and then sortof addressed the issue by having Seven act as an executioner. (although it still didn’t have…

That’s terrible writing. It’s useless terrible writing. The whole season has been hinting at some dark secret in Rios’s past, but this is a reveal that stretches credibility...

There’s a nicely allegorical story that could be told about a Starfleet that is corrupt to its core: captains recieve kill orders following first contact, admirals tell octagenarians to shut the fuck up, etc.

I’m waiting for serialization to swing back a bit more to the ~2005ish writing style. In something like bsg (or ds9, or Buffy, or...) there were season long arcs, but each episode also stood on its own, and had a beginning, middle, and end.

In season 1 I thought it was reasonably justified: a western videogame is going to have lots gunfights, and plus whatever Maeve was up to.

The show makes her life seem kindof miserable, too. Her parents are cool and all (if also a little bit doomsday-prepper), and she gets to play dressup in the woods. But is that it? She latches onto Soji because she must be bored out of her mind.

There’s some abrupt exposition: the family had a son who died of a disease which could’ve been cured with a culture grown in a positronic matrix, which is a forced, clumsy way to both tug on the heartstrings and provide a connection with the main plot.

Hanging over all of this is that Disco season 2 just did their terrible borg-origin-story-that-wasnt.

What I noticed about ToD recently was that the ropebridge scene is a very meh setpiece to end with. I hadn’t seen the movie in years, and honestly thought there was more to come...but nope.

They’ve said that he has a neurological disease, and I’m curious how that’s going to factor into things. Because if your title character is dying / has dementia, that means it shouldn’t be possible to just shoe-horn them into any ol’ story.

I actually wonder if some of this might be on Chabon, and that it’s actually more of a novel-problem than a movie-problem.