Tuesday, December 16, 2008
"Where No One Has Gone Before"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before
Finally getting back to watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, this is the one with the Traveller in it. Awesome. I actually don't remember seeing this one more than one or two times on TV, so it always had a weirdly etherial quality to it.
Love the shots of the old-school computer graphics and how they integrated simple graphics on top of lights to make it look complicaed. Amazingly it still stands up and doesn't look out of place. Very nice job.
Having Geordi as a lowly pilot and some random beardo as the chief engineer is all kinds of wrong. The actor is phoning it in pretty hard, too. I wonder if he knew his gig wasn't going to last.
Best effects of the early TNG run, for sure. Though the story behind the Traveller still doesn't make any sense, at least we get eye candy. I wonder what ever happened to the matt painting.
Haha, oh Data, you still haven't learned not to quote time spans to the millisecond. One of the more charming old tropes.
Silly Wesley quote: "you mean space and time and thought aren't as what they appear to be?" This Wesley as universe-travelling wunderkind thing could really have gotten out of hand had they persued this Traveller storyline any further.
Had to throw in some video of the sweet "let's pretend we're 2001: A Space Odyssey" moment for a while. I do so love the original-series-ish tension-building music.
The mentions of "rape gangs" on Tasha Yarr's home colony are totally out-of-place attempts at grittiness. Feels very tacky.
The crazy hallucinations the whole crew is experiencing are pretty awesome, mostly for the bad French-Russian accent from Picard's mother offering him tea and teasing him about the nature of space.
*sigh* the climax of this episode is for everyone on the ship to think happy thoughts so the Traveller can get the energy to bring them home. Endings were always the worst part of this series, this one is even worse than "reverse the shield phase arrays" bullshit, but they didn't really have much more room to do much else.
Oh Christ, this is where Wesley gets promoted to Ensign and gets that goofy rainbow stripey uniform. Great episode, horrible consequences.
By al -
12:04 a.m. |
Be grateful, however, because that universe-travelling wunderkind thing is what eventually got him off the show, right?
(As an aside, a few weeks ago I was playing, uh... Star Trek 20 Questions on http://www.20q.net/ , and I picked the Traveller to see how long it would take to win.)
(Also... I had a crush on Wesley when I was a little girl. EMBARRASSING.)
