I remember one of the main goals of that one was to square how stoic and formal Picard was with the fact that every third episode, we met some old friend who was like a brother to him, or an ex-girlfriend who he nearly married, or some other incredibly close personal relationship from before he was on the Enterprise.…

Oh, don't get me started. Aside from the biannual threats to the galaxy and universe that keep popping up in the ongoing storyline, the way the books have started playing musical chairs with the dead characters is the most irritating trend in the novel line after the editorial shake-up a couple years ago (honorable…

Oh, everything sounds shitty when it's summed up. For instance, Odo plays with a mug of goo for an hour that then undoes the last half-season of his character development.

CONTINUING SPOILERS FOR THE TREK NOVEL-VERSE AND THE REMAINDER OF DS9'S TV EPISODES

Yeah. It's not a Cylon-style instant download at death, but apparently the Vorta make regular backups of themselves. So each Weyoun is a distinct copy, if only because he can't remember the last hours/days/weeks of his predecessor's life. They also tended to have somewhat different personalities.

http://www.youtube.com/watc…

@avclub-b327ac90601ec5904ca8e539cba62638:disqus It's not pretentious (well, it is pretentious, but that wasn't the point). It was written and directed by less (in)famous people, so they were downplayed in favor of Shyamalan's producer and story credits, same as what happens with every movie Spielberg produces but…

@avclub-7cbaf9384cf3835106bf2f444c0bcf65:disqus @avclub-2b32df9b2c5dd4da49b2bcd7b8975d49:disqus It also has to do with the conventions of apocalyptic literature, which as a genre is basically "Oppressed people, have hope: those who do evil will be brought to justice." While a surface reading has a very unchrist-like…

I was a little disappointed when I finally saw the episode and realized the much-vaunted "Shadow ships can merge/split into two" scene was just the one that had an arm sliced off getting a tow from another one (though that ship must have been a bit of a wuss compared to the others. Other times a Shadow ship lost a…

The amazing part is that it's a 42x scale duplicate of the X-Wing they sell, so those Legos are built into other, larger Legos, which were built into an X-Wing.

Yep. ET is still there. It's off in the ass-end of the park, way offset from the main drag, so you kind of have to be looking for it. Probably no one wants to put a new ride there since it's such a bad spot.

Well, they've still got the one. There's a little nook just past the Terminator show.

If I were going to do a real-world Simpsons house (and, who knows, I've thought about it as a 3D modeling exercise), the last thing I would try to do is make it look like a cartoon. I don't know who could possibly have thought that was a good idea. It'd be like if the production team for Star Wars had tried to…

The whole thing does have a weird sort of Noah's Ark/Christ metaphor to it. Mankind's flawed nature leads to a catastrophe that decimates the world, but is redeemed through the example of the superior beings who descend from the heavens (and/or united in fear and wonder of the same).

It might be that it's easy for a Changeling to duplicate a model precisely, but inventing a new person just ends up with the smooth, generic face. Odo can turn into a working hawk, but he's probably turning into a specific hawk he was once close enough to examine using whatever crazy senses Changelings have. It would…

SPOILERS

@avclub-383d3906a81567a4790639391dc4ecd7:disqus I wonder if there are debated in the 24th century about how easy/legal it is to jailbreak your holodeck to run unauthorized programs.

@avclub-3be42d8a3412057f79af152555e39bd4:disqus Nope, it was just the first dead or dying thing he had handy to try transfusing things into. Apparently, they weren't bullshitting around with the close coordination between the comics and the movies, and the comics already did their version of "The Trouble With…

This was the first episode I watched live (and, thus, didn't smash through the commercials). I was surprised at the ad-synergy with the two commercials set in the Defiance-verse. There was a Dodge ad with a car being used from the present day all the way through the show's setting fifty-odd years from now, and an Axe…

Well, Khan did steal the transporter from a classified research lab in the heart of the Federation, and it was apparently the only one. If you need a device that costs as much as ten starships to beam one person over, or a super-genius from a hundred years in the future to do the math in his head, it doesn't matter if…