It wasn't just the "sexy is rubbing gel under black lights"— it was more the juvenile attitude that they had to lampshade it.  That they couldn't just be sexy for sexy's sake, they had to make an excuse.  Same thing with "Vulcan neuropressure".  "Oh, no, we're not being SEXY.  Heaven forbid!  No, this is a medical…

I think part of the problem with the Essentialists boils down to the tamed-down presentation of Risa.  They had to file off any sort of edge on Risa— give it safe-for-all-ages sexiness— and as a consequence, it forces the Essentialists to have no teeth to them.

This is a show that opens with A. Doctor Bashir getting high, followed by B. Lord Grantham walking around naked.

Oz and Dawn: Together Again For The First Time.

Right, it's not like Art is going to go, "You screwed up the radio codes… WAIT, ARE YOU A CLONE OF MY PARTNER?"

Or that, since they all were placed into the adoption system, it's possible that Allison had a very good result in her adoption, and wanted to pay that forward.

I was totally considering saying that, but I wanted to see if anyone would take the bait on it.

The other good part is when Picard just starts cracking up and says, "Screw it, this is what's happening, whatever."  It was the perfect meta-commentary for the episode.

TMP: All the wrong lessons from 2001.

Also, if memory serves, Levar directed that episode.  So part of having the Captain be Geordi was in part, "Eh, I'm already here."

All right, you got me.  Because I'm easy.

SPOILERS

Heh.  My "sell" episode was "The Long, Twilight Struggle".  I actually carried a VHS tape around in my bag of it, and would tell people, "Let me just show you this space battle…"  In about two weeks, I had made about 2 dozen converts…

Out of curiosity, I fired up this episode on Voyager.  The real, deep underlying flaw is how little it really cares about being an look back at the past.  It takes more than a third of the episode— minute 17 of 45— before it actually gets to the Excelsior.  They're far more interested in the…

@avclub-d7f43e1fb2d4977c86163d9b0cb07814:disqus : "They're repeatedly depicted as war-mongering, superstitious, rapists who
have a rape culture that they know is a rape culture but don't care,
and other various negative things."

@avclub-d7f43e1fb2d4977c86163d9b0cb07814:disqus That theory was more or less the target-quality goal for 80s and 90s TV.  I think it was Straczynski on the old B5 board that admitted to that: that at the end of the season, if you've done a good job, then about 1/3 of the episodes you'll be pretty proud of, 1/3 you…

@Automocar:disqus Oh, there are some gloriously messed up people over there.  I'll admit I would get into it a bit, especially the folks who insisted that Enterprise would have to be "decanonized" for Trek to come back.  I was really curious what the decanonization process would entail.  Some expository dialogue about…

I disagree: some things are very bad, and thus deserve to be scoured.  Don't let them hide in the dark.

I figured Darvin had been playing Human so long he didn't know how to break character anymore.

"So he says to me, 'Today is a good day to die', and I thought, 'Yes, but perhaps tomorrow would be a better one.  Why risk it?'"