OK, I've never seen the show, but briefly looking at the clips, it looks like there's never two whammies in a row.  That means that it would be pretty easy to "beat the game": just push the button right after you see it land on a whammy.  
But I haven't studied it closely so correct me if I'm wrong.

@avclub-3c9b5f1cd6a030bcb7bed9eac80589fb:disqus 
Oh, I definitely agree that he wasn't conning the game show.  As I said below, he just won a poorly designed game.  
I've never seen the documentary so I just assumed that the doc brought up the rest of his kinda shady life.

Wikipedia makes it sound like he was a tad bit of a con artist-opening up checking accounts under assumed names to take advantage of a deal that would give new customers at the bank $500, and he had a lifelong get rich quick addiction.
Besides the defrauding the bank, though, he seems more like a Cramden-esque schemer.

I definitely wouldn't say the game was "rigged," as Todd does.   If the game was rigged, the producers would send you a whammy whenever they felt like it.  Instead, the game was just poorly designed.  
It's like one of those '90s video games where the boss will punch you twice and then jump around three times.  The…

Obviously it's the same issue as before.
The Dax comment was mostly a bad joke.  I do not attribute Dax's abilities to the symbiont.
I think we're taking this way too seriously, but then, we wouldn't be here otherwise.

@LurkyMcLurkerson:disqus 
OK, this is probably my error of terminology.  Does glass ceiling apply only if no women make it to the top?  Because sure there are women COs in Starfleet, but they're very underrepresented and except for Janeway, they're usually villains (see two out of the three admirals cited…

@LurkyMcLurkerson:disqus I think this may be why I was confused at how strongly you felt about this.  Besides the person who said that pregnancy would explain the gender imbalance and the person who said that women naturally would choose to avoid combat situations, most of us weren't grasping at *external* reasons for…

@avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus 
Yes, your point was clear.  I guess I was too concerned with making my own point to listen to yours and that's why I added the bit in the edited version about "I see y'all made the same point."
I imagine if we have a disagreement it would be the degree to which espousing…

@LurkyMcLurkerson:disqus , @avclub-0ae7484a9f3bbd2a21df420050c032ae:disqus , & @avclub-b31df16a88ce00fed951f24b46e08649:disqus :
There is no Federation.  There is no Starfleet.  They only exist as depicted.  They are products of their time.   
TOS has women dressed in skimpy uniforms and low on the command structure…

@LurkyMcLurkerson:disqus , I was mostly explaining why the other people were assuming the Defiant/Starfleet had imbalanced gender ratios rather than my own view. But in response to your points, for one thing DS9 is built around the idea that the Federation in general and Starfleet in particular are less utopian than…

"There's never been any reason to think that gender ratios in Starfleet aren't balanced."
Except the on-screen gender ratios are something like 3:1 for TOS and 2:1 for all the later series. They talk a big game about egalitarianism, but there's still a visible gender disparity. Kinda like today.

Haven't Trek people been established as living to around 150 anyway?  Bones made it onto TNG and that would have been about that long, right?  I mean, yeah, in the middle of nowhere they won't live quite that long, but they're not starting from scratch.  Bashir knows a lot about medicine and presumably he's got a…

"Première," with an accent grave?  Well la-di-da Mr. Adams

This episode reminds me that Paul McCartney really, really needed John to balance out his tendency to sappiness.

@Prankster36:disqus , I meant making them sexist is a cheap way of making them more unlikeable.  A culture that exalts egocentric profit-seeking as the only good is inherently loathesome- you don't need to also make them sexist.  At the same time, Ferengi profiteering and individualism occasionally points to the holes…

I enjoy the Ferengi more than most apparently.  I do think they're a lost opportunity for an interesting social criticism that could have been less one sided. (For example, I think making them sexist was a mistake.  It makes it too easy for them to be the bad guys.  I think you could have much more interesting stories…

I'd say TNG is clearly better than Voyager as a whole.  Number one, as you say, is Patrick Stewart. He goes a long way to making bad episodes good and good episodes great.  Maybe if you had a lesser actor Picard would be as annoying as Janeway.  (I don't think so, because Janeway was a very inconsistent character.…

I think Crystal Skull tries too hard and fails in a lot of places and I absolutely hate Shia LaBoeuf, so that really drags it down in my eyes.  C-, if that.
Temple of Doom to me is dumb fun.  B-, maybe a B.
(Last Crusade: A-, Raiders: A, although I do love Sean Connery as Indy's dad.)

Gotcha.  Haven't watched the series all the way through since the '90s and I don't remember the founders being curious about sex.

Yeah, today was a great skimming failure on my part.  Thanks for the info.