I think that the nuBSG sequence was a coincidence. The story from behind the scenes was that they'd gotten a network note to include a little levity, maybe a birthday party scene or something. That teaser was basically, "We got your frakkin' birthday party right here, assholes."

I've heard that lighting in a closed environment like that is pretty important for psychological and physiological reasons. If everyone on a ship or station is from a planet with some sort of day/night cycle, it makes sense to simulate that from a comfort perspective. On the other hand, if they're all from…

I missed the episode first-run, so my first exposure to the concept of mirror-Vic was in a Trek magazine, which stated-as-fact the theory that mirror-Vic was an android, so that interpretation has always been burned into my head. I guess the evidence was that there were more sparks than usual when he was shot.

And he was definitely boning his way up and down the human race. Weren't we introduced to him planning some extracurricular activities with one of his students?

good bye Night-Night guns. Sounds like they were addressing the complaints with that one.

The short and the special were probably shot months apart. It would've been a waste of his time and their money to bring him in for a single shot with no dialogue that's already filled with stand-ins and VFX face-replacements.

I think it was more of a pleasant side-effect that they could wrap that up all at once without a whole lot of fuss than a driving reason to add in another Doctor. There were references as late as the penultimate episode of the season that the Doctor still had another regeneration left in him, and though it's easy…

Season 2 is a big improvement. The kind of the show it is and the kind of show it wants to be finally meet half way.

Nope. She tells a story about a friend of her in college who was totally devoted to this guy who wouldn't give her the time of day, and then says she's now telling herself what she told her friend then: DTMFA.

The Master was definitely racist (or not above using racism to insult people). "Oh, look, the girlie and the freak. Though I'm not sure which one's which."

"Smith and Jones" was definitely the best introductory episode of the Davies era (I'm not counting "Partners in Crime" because it had too much of an advantage). "The Eleventh Hour" blows it out of the water, though, much more than the difference between an A- and an A.

I thought the dazed, happy look on her face right after the Doctor does some of the ol' mouth-to-mouth transfer of genetic material (somebody's watched "Gattaca!") told us everything we needed to know about Martha's infatuation right there.

They call it a Valentine to the students.

Watching this time, I felt so bad for the puppeteer watching the actress's face like a hawk and clicking the button so her extra eyes blinked a split-second after her real eyes blinked.

My favorite thing about the car chase is that, up until "The Snowman,"* it was really the only time they used modern special effects to sell that the TARDIS was bigger on the inside, when we can see the mismatched perspective of the console room swinging around inside that tiny little box through the doors. If I was…

When the show first brought her in, there was definitely a divide in my circles between, "Lauren Cooper as a companion, this'll suck so hard!" and "Who? What? She seems all right. Less annoying than Jackie or early-Mickey, anyway." Most everybody seemed to come around during her season, though.

Roddenberry was pretty much ejected from the movies creatively after (or partway through) TMP, so those aren't examples of Roddenberry's thoughts. The memorial for Yar could be argued as being pretty perfunctory, but you can make the case that that's TV convention as much as Roddenberry's rules.

That's a very good point.

I don't remember the exact line, but I think in Farpoint Riker said something about having been on a holodeck before, but the one on the Enterprise was much newer and nicer.

Personally, my dream TV series would be a short-run (like, Sherlock-style seasons), cable JJ-Verse adaptation of the "Vanguard" novel series, which is basically TOS-era DS9 by way of HBO. It leaves the Prime Universe safely in the hands of the die-hards with their radically divergent novel, comic, and MMO…