Turning the page

The last couple of weeks haven't been great here in the confines of my chemistry-addled brain, but it's a new week now and the world keeps on turning.

Last night I had an umpiring shift, one of the final ones of the year as things wind down (I may get two or three more at most) and the final one that will involve some of my favorite players in the league. Bonus, I got to chat a little bit with Stephen, a guy that had been one of my favorite players to ump until he moved away last year, but who has now returned. Welcome back, dude! Hope to see you on the field next year. Also good to see Megan, Joel, Pat, Wyatt, Ray, and the rest of those folks yesterday for one final time until we convene again after New Year's. And Megan, thank you as always for the baked good samples. (Hey, I heard that, and they're not "special" baked goods. C'mon.)

I'm going to miss umping in the fall, but there'll be plenty of chaos to keep me occupied. Which is good, because the continual meltdown of the nation will undoubtedly pummel my psyche some more.

Meanwhile, there's three weeks of baseball left before the postseason and I've got tickets for three more Seattle Mariner games with the ever-present possibility of an extra or two. Despite their crappy last three weeks or so in which the M's went 6-15, they've decided to put some effort into it here at the end and have won their last three with 18 games to go. They're somehow only two games worse off in the standings since starting that 6-15 would-be collapse, going from tied for first place to, well, two behind, and two games is plenty surmountable with 18 left, especially since three of those 18 are against the team they're chasing. I say that, but I've also been a fan of Your Seattle Mariners for long enough to know that the most likely outcome is yet another missed-it-by-that-much end to the season.

This week also will see the season finale of Strange New Worlds, which has been really uneven in this third season of the series. After I have a chance to process Wednesday night's episode, I think a season recap/analysis post will be necessary since this show has been so frustrating to me—it has been so good in prior years, has the potential to be really great, and has shortchanged itself this season in some annoying ways.

Also, I watched Thunderbolts* the other night, having skipped it in the theaters. You know what? Pretty good. Certainly by the standard of recent efforts from Marvel Studios. I'd been forewarned by Erik's review that I probably ought to be in a decent headspace when I saw it, and I was. It is an interesting way to go, making depression the actual Big Bad of the film. Wielded by The Sentry, a character I was aware of in comicdom (a would-be Superman type created on purpose by nefarious experiments but that ends up being unstable) but never paid much attention to, I appreciate the way the depression was depicted, with Sentry's victims just poofing away leaving an ashy shadow behind; later we see what happens to them post-poof, they're trapped in a mindspace of sorts, reliving their traumatic or hurtful memories over and over. It's not a perfect representation, but damned if it isn't at least in the ballpark. The solution is for our reluctant (except for gung-ho Red Star, played to perfection by David Harbour) would-be heroes to coax Sentry out of his depressive episode and then after that restores everyone to normal keep working with him to manage his moods. There's also some absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely messaging here, which is good, but it is entirely unsatisfying to have the film end with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss' character Allegra de Fontaine slither out of trouble and manipulate things to her advantage again. Maybe that's appropriate given the real world we're living in, but that's also the main reason it's so irritating. Can't these criminal asshats even face justice in our comic-book movies??

Anyway, new week, new turn of the page, life goes on.

Tagged Umping, Baseball, Seattle Mariners, Star Trek, Movies, Posted on September 9, 2025 at 7:13PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Strange New Worldview

Anson Mount as Captain Pike as a Vulcan/Conehead

WARNING: This post delves into extreme geek territory and may ironically support conscious or unconscious biases regarding the intellectual and social priorities of the so-called "Sci-fi or Star Trek Nerd." Proceed at your own risk.

For the most part, I have been pleased and impressed with the efforts by the writers and production staff of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. The prequel series hasn't been perfect by any stretch, but its first season came pretty close and its second was also solid. The current third season, though, has been ... iffy.

After viewing each of the nine episodes to have dropped thus far in season three, my opinions have all been tinged with at least some level of "there's something here that bothers me." Usually not something I can immediately put my finger on, more of a sense that if I were to really dig in I would find a troubling bit of sloppy writing or hack shortcut or character misrepresentation or canon violation or whatever. It's been disappointing; ever since J.J. Abrams made his two alleged Star Trek films—Star Trek (2009), which was meh, and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), which was awful, and neither respected the core of the Trek concept—I've been leery of people taking on this franchise that I hold so dear and fucking it up. But by and large the recent streaming series—Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, and now SNW—have honored their ancestry relatively well (despite some issues with lazy writing in each season of Disco and the first two seasons of Picard).

SNW season three, while not as good as seasons one and two, still hadn't crossed into fuckup territory until last week's episode eight.

On first viewing, 308 struck me like the rest of season three has: Something I can't quite put my finger on bothers me about this. Additionally, there were things I identified immediately that bothered me, but they were to the "get over it, nerd" side of the I-have-issues spectrum—sci-fi plot elements that didn't hold up to in-universe scientific scrutiny. (I mean, fairly major ones, to be sure, but still things that, if you really wanted to make the episode work, you could manage to solve with some more creative thinking.) On subsequent viewing, though, I realized why this one annoyed me so much.

Titled "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans," the episode opens with an intriguing setup: An alien planetary culture has reached out to the Vulcans for help, but as they are still primitive by Federation standards—and have never encountered aliens other than Vulcans, who encountered them many decades before the Federation existed and who gave the society the nuclear infrastructure that is now failing—only Vulcans can help them, otherwise our heroes will run afoul of the Prime Directive of noninterference by revealing themselves to a pre-warp society. No Vulcan-only ship is able to render assistance in time to avert disaster, to it's up to the Enterprise crew to find a solution. The solution is to (somehow) transform a few of the crew into Vulcans—merely disguising them on a surface level would not fool the native technology—to aid the natives and keep their equipment from melting down while still upholding the Prime Directive. As Chief Engineer Pelia (Carol Kane) put it, "a prime loophole!"

Then we arrive at the first of the "get over it, nerd" problems: Deriving a serum from an elaborate solution to a prior episode's plot—wherein an injectable was concocted by exotic aliens and that far exceeded known Federation science to remedy their own mistake that stripped Spock of his Vulcan DNA—Nurse Chapel doses five of the crew with it and within seconds four of them—it has no effect on Pelia, who is not human—are physiologically transformed into Vulcans. This happens quickly and, aside from some sort-of convulsions and evident momentary pain, easily; we soon see the surface-level change to their ears, eyebrows, and, for some reason, hairstyles. What we don't see, and what is the plot's entire reason for doing this, is the massive internal restructuring that raises the suspension-of-disbelief level unattainably high. But OK, the story needs to move along, so get over it, nerd.

Almost immediately, though, we get the second of the "get over it, nerd" problems: In addition to their physiology, their attitudes and behavior also shift into what appears to be the current cultural and philosophical norm for Vulcans. That is, they somehow adopt learned behaviors that they have no experience learning. There is a voiceover log entry to handwave this problem away, but it's so nonsensical as to be worthless (and I am fairly convinced that it was added after-the-fact when, too late, someone brought up this problem and demanded something fix it).

But that's what's needed for the story—the whole point is for us to see Captain Pike, La'an, Chapel, and Uhura go against character and behave as Vulcans in order for silliness and comic mayhem to commence.

So for the rest of the episode we get silly confrontational behavior from our transformed characters, all played for laughs. One of the principal elements of the "humor" (reflected in the title) is that the transformed Captain Pike continually references the fact that Spock is only half-Vulcan and thus, by implication, inferior. The dilemma with the aliens in need of help is resolved almost immediately, mere minutes after the party beams down to the surface at Pike's order to transport "four and a half Vulcans," the implication being that as Vulcans they were smart enough and efficient enough to conduct a repair thought to take many hours in a small fraction of the time. Upon return, the "un-Vulcanizing" version of the serum fails. With the excuse to get to the point of things disposed of—and perhaps wasted, it had potential to be interesting—let more hilarity ensue.

Here's the real problem: the behavior of our transformed characters is offensive by design, that's the reason we get the allegedly comic scenes. (To be fair, in isolation some of them are funny.) But it's just accepted that they were just being Vulcan. Vulcan does as Vulcan is, or something. Which is more than simply offensive to a character in a scene played for laughs, it's offensive to the audience, it's offensive to the in-universe culture, it's offensive to the core of what makes Trek Trek. When watching this one again it occurred to me exactly why I was having trouble beyond the pseudo-science—this episode is essentially a minstrel show.

What really, truly bugs me about this episode is that (apparently) at no point during preproduction or production itself did anyone say, "whoa, what are we doing here, let's think this through." No one objected to doing this script as is, it occurred to (apparently) nobody in the writers room or on set that they were offending a large chunk of their audience with this episode. Nobody sat back and said, "wait a second, are we basically putting Anson and Christine and Jess and Celia into metaphorical blackface and having them parade around like Jim Crow?" Because that's what they did.

Beyond that, the studio seemed to think so highly of "Four and a Half Vulcans" that when they put together promotional material for the season they led with clips and teases from this installment above all the others. I really think they expected this one to be the fan-favorite of the season. (Also, there were visuals that served no purpose other than for use as promotional images; why the hell would Pike—or anyone—beam down to repair nuclear infrastructure carrying a lirpa? That's only for the photo of Vulcan-Pike carrying the ancient Vulcan weapon, it served no other purpose. They knew before production that this was the one they'd hype up most.)

How did this get made? How obtusely anti-Star Trek can you get in a Star Trek writers' room, J.J. Abrams notwithstanding?

When Discovery was first announced, I noted that one of the top execs in charge was Alex Kurtzman, who was a credited co-writer and highly involved with the making of both Abrams films. That screamed "red alert" to me, those films were so antithetical to what Star Trek really is that I wanted no one from those productions anywhere near any new series. He remains a big cheese in the production of all of the newer series including SNW, but until now the sort of ignorant cluelessness of those films has been minimal at most. Now I'm back to blaming Kurtzman, rightly or wrongly, for bastardizing this thing that has been so much a part of my identity since I was single-digits years old. (More accurately, in this case I blame him for aiding and abetting as the credited writers were Dana Horgan and Henry Alonso Myers, not Kurtzman himself.)

The thing is, this still could have been an exceptionally good episode.

I mean, the serum thing would still be a problem, but with a little more thought and care, we could eliminate the instant-logic problem and we could turn the whole thing into something special.

There is a scene in the middle of the episode wherein Number One, Spock, Dr. M'Benga, Pelia, Batel, and Lt. Ortegas convene and discuss what to do about the Vulcanized officers. The return-to-human serum has been fixed, but the four new Vulcans are refusing to change back. As is, it's not a bad scene, we get some good Spock stuff in particular, but it could have been expanded to include something meatier. It's a streaming show, so if they went over time it's not a problem; length shouldn't matter so much, so we could add something like this:

Now we have changed the tone of the episode away form pure comic farce to thoughtful examination of unconscious and institutional racism.

This also gives more weight to the ultimate solution to the problem. Instead of what we actually get in the episode—a wonderful appearance by Patton Oswalt as the delightful Vulcan katra expert named Doug simply convincing all but La'an to go back to being human, all offscreen and with no explanation, while Spock unconscionably invades La'an's mindspace to bring her back to humanity through their emotional connection (and dance)—we would instead know, whether shown onscreen or not, that Doug's ministrations reveal their behavior to themselves as being distastefully bigoted; there would be a far more believable rationale for the until-then intransigent Vulcanized crew to change their minds and realize that (a) they preferred their old selves, and (b) they were making a mockery of a species they claimed they wished to emulate. The shame would be more than enough to make them demand the re-humaning serum. This, of course, would also demand a different coda scene showing Pike, at least, if not all of them, acknowledging their subconscious prejudicial attitudes. And Spock, along with every biracial member of the audience, deserved an apology.

Oswalt, by the way, is easily a highlight of the season. I loved Doug. I even appreciated the farcical scene with Una and Spock trying to convince Doug that Una was off the market, as it were. I would like to see, if not future appearances from Oswalt/Doug, then future references to him. Perhaps Una receives a message that we hear start to play for her in the background that begins "Heeey, it's Doug," ala Kamala Harris' infamous first voicemail form her husband. I only wish Oswalt appeared in support of a better and less offensive script. Same goes for Anson Mount's brilliant face-acting and comic timing. (My imagined added scene above would also give some credence to Mount's choice to play Vulcan-Pike as a Conehead from Saturday Night Live instead of an actual Vulcan.)

There's been much discussion of this episode elsewhere on the Internet, but I've refrained from looking at most of it and I haven't heard any of the review podcasts about it yet. But I have gleaned that the trans community is particularly upset about it; I can't claim to fully understand that, as I don't see the parallels as being, well, really parallel, but I do get the underlying gist. Frankly, I would expect any minority group to be, if not offended, then disappointed by the obtuseness of the writers and producers in a more visceral way than I'm articulating here.

I can't help but imagine the script as produced being proposed with previous Trek showrunners in place. Neither Gene—Roddenberry or Coon—would permit it, even though Gene Coon would appreciate going for silliness if there was more substance. Ira Steven Behr would have stopped it at an early stage and demanded rewrite after rewrite until it was suitably focused on something about racism. Even the two-headed beast I came to think of as Bermaga—the team of Rick Berman and Brannon Braga that was responsible for the first three years of the series Enterprise and whom I've been highly critical of for juvenile and nonsensical elements in their scripts—might well have recognized this as too flawed to produce.

In the end, this is a similar problem to several scripts in Discovery and Picard—it went into production before it was ready; writing issues were overlooked, unrecognized, or simply ignored. This time, though, the issues were more than just sloppy execution or a dumb lack of coherence with the rest of the story. This time it was really upsetting.

Tagged Star Trek, Culture, Society, Racism, Posted on September 5, 2025 at 10:45PM   |   Permalink   |     |  

Ghosts appear and fade away

Sigh. The state of the world (see previous post) hasn't been good for my state of mind.

I haven't found myself in the clutches of a particularly bad episode in the Black Hole for a long time now; still haven't, and I thank modern medicine for that and hope RFK Jr. isn't able to somehow outlaw Zoloft so that can continue. But I do get into milder ones with what seems like increasing frequency.

Again, state of the world.

I've been gloomy for a week or so. Forgetful, slow to act, listless and prone the intrusions of sad memories.

Time of year has something to do with it, too. Time was, the approach of fall was a fun time of year—pennant races in full swing, shortening of the days (night owls of the world rejoice!), crisp evenings among the shed leaves—but these days I think of (a) my grandfather, who would be 104 years old today if he were still around and whom I miss a lot, especially around his birthday for whatever reason; and (b) my mom, who died ten years ago(!) this week. My mom would be apoplectic at the state of the US government right now. As a career public health professional she would be aghast and possibly in tears over what RFK has done to HHS. I think about her a lot even when I read the damn news because of that.

My distractions have been somewhat effective. Friends are good to have. Nerd TV is an excellent diversion (though I have a whole post's worth of thoughts on the good and less good of the current season of Strange New Worlds which may yet get put into actual words). Baseball—well, with the recent performance of Your Seattle Mariners, baseball hasn't really helped much. Books and other reading material. Enterprise fanfiction, comics, baseball histories.

The Ministry of Time was a good read, recommended to those who like character studies and fish-out-of-water scenarios and mysterious intrigue. And that can handle convolutions of time travelers, of course.

And, oddly for me, music.

I'm not a big music buff like so many of my contemporaries. I like the stuff I like, my musical tastes haven't really changed since the late 1970s, and live shows tend to be more annoying than enjoyable thanks to the deafening volume. But I did recently run across a new(ish) album from the great band Semisonic that has a title track, "Little Bit of Sun," that speaks to me. It immediately goes up there with Men at Work's "Overkill" as a go-to depression song. They're good companion pieces, really, with "Overkill" describing the experience of being in the grip of a depressive episode and "Little Bit of Sun" describing the first glimmer of climbing out of one.

Here's to finding a little bit of sun, a little bit of sky. I think I see it from the corner of my eye.

Tagged The Black Hole, Music, Posted on September 3, 2025 at 1:54AM   |   Permalink   |     |  

The pro-death party

The news has been awful lately.

I know, that seems like an evergreen statement in the year 2025. It kind of is. Every day there's more nightmare fuel.

Since I last posted anything we've had another school shooting, more decimation at the CDC, concrete orders from RFK Jr.'s HHS to stop vaccinating people, the U.S. regime assassinated 11 Venezuelans in the Caribbean on suspicion of drug-running (prior administrations would have impounded and searched the boat, these guys just blew it up), the Russian regime assassinated a Ukrainian official in the midst of continued Russian attacks in their war, and our wannabe despot added Baltimore to the list of cities he wants to deploy troops to in violation of posse comitatus. And that's just off the top of my head.

Remember when Republicans branded themselves the "pro-life party"? Yes, yes, we knew it was bullshit then too, but even Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, the GOP's propaganda masters and spiritual disciples of Joseph Goebbels, would have a hard time spinning today's Republicans as "pro-life" when they are so clearly, actively, and zealously pro-death.

Pro-gun massacres. Pro-disease. Pro-pandemics. Pro-war, so long as it's the tyrant's pals Vlad and Bibi doing the warring and/or it's a convenient excuse to shoot at Spanish-speaking brown folks.

The modern Republican party is the Death Party.

The latest school shooting will not move a single Republican lawmaker to support any curtailment of the availability of assault weapons to the general public. They have accepted—with enthusiasm!—that the occasional massacre of children is an acceptable price to pay for the gun lobby's political support.

The illegal deployment of military to American cities to combat "crime" is, of course, an attempt to intimidate political opposition and an to incite violence; the longer it goes on, the more likely there will be people killed on the streets by government thugs.

We're not three years past a global pandemic that was only (mostly) overcome because of the herculean feat of creating and mass-distributing vaccines, so naturally the guy who mismanaged the start of the COVID-19 fiasco put a guy in charge of public health that opposes not just vaccines but public health measures in general. Because of this moronic regime's first go-round, COVID-19 is still a thing, and now you can't get the vaccine unless you're over 65 or have compounding risk factors. And we have to worry about diseases we thought were behind us again. Measles, anyone? HPV? Tetanus? Fucking polio, perhaps?

And if you do get sick, well, your health insurance is going to get worse and more expensive next year thanks to the one and only piece of legislation this traitorous excuse for a Congressional majority passed so far. Medicaid is basically going away, Medicare is next on the chopping block. For most of us this would be a problem, but Republicans, in the words of Senator Joni Ernst, think "we're all going to die [anyway]" so why fight it when we could instead give more money to rich people?

And this doesn't even touch on the destruction of USAID and the environmental damage being done by deregulation and callous incentives to polluters.

Death Party would be consistent with, you know, how words work. Which is antithetical to how this group handles things like names and labels. This year's HR1 was literally named the "Big Beautiful Bill" when it was the ugliest legislation to see a vote in ages. Back in the George W. Bush Administration there was legislation the Republicans named the "Clear Skies Act"; Al Franken rightly noted that the only way that would be an accurate label is if you added a couple of words and made the the "Clear the Skies of Birds Act." Atwater and Rove pioneered this for Republicans—call the worst things you can think of something positive and you can fool enough suckers into supporting it.

Even the name of their party.

Republican: Supporting a form of government known as a Republic, a governing body made up of Representatives of the Public. Modern Republican officeholders do not represent the public in any way, shape, or form.

The GOP: The "Grand Old Party" is not grand—at its outset it was a regional party, continued to be so in the aftermath of the Civil War, and despite some spans of electoral domination has never been comprised of a majority of the electorate by registration or identification—nor is it old in comparison to the Democratic party, which had already existed for 25 years when the Republican party was formed. If they want to maintain the monicker "GOP," perhaps it should stand for, oh, "Greedy Obnoxious Pedophiles" or "Getting Oligarchs Paid" or "Grotesquely Onerous Policies."

So call them the Death Party. Death by gunfire. Death by disease. Death by environmental cataclysm. Death by starvation. Death by negligence.

Death by a feckless Congressional caucus of neo-Nazi toadies. Death by tyrannical narcissism in the White House. Death by Republicans.

Tagged Politics, Republicans, President VonClownstick, Posted on September 3, 2025 at 12:00AM   |   Permalink   |     |