Sliders.tv → Posts by ireactions
I cannot stress enough in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit that Informant's views do not represent the views of Sliders.tv and our current moment of agreement is clearly an abberation.
I don't think Allison Mack started evil. I think she just learned really fast.
Now here's the question I'm interested in - did he abandon the FBI storyline or was he never really planning on using it? Did he stop it because Bennish was instrumental and FOX didn't like Bennish? I'm not sure I remember reading anything about that, honestly.
Disclaimer: everything below is based on memories and impressions of chatting with Torme via AOL almost two decades ago and may be coloured by personal bias and filling in blank areas with guesses and it was written hurriedly during a lunchbreak.
I asked Torme back in 2000 about his plans for the FBI plot and his answer was appropriately SLIDERS-esque. He explained to me: his approach to a story is not to lay out precisely what happens when and to whom. Instead, he creates a concept and a beginning that will allow him multiple options for additional stories and conclusions. Due to the improvisational nature of television, it's important to have lots of different paths available rather than a strict plan from which any deviation means losing direction.
In the case of the FBI, Torme and Weiss wanted to create an alternate group of interdimensional travellers who would be professional and authoritarian. These federal agents would stand in stark contrast to the awkward ragamuffins that are the sliders. When the sliders encountered them, they would be in opposition.
Extrapolating from what Torme said: where the sliders blunder into situations, the FBI would be coolly mission-oriented, seeking to acquire intelligence, weapons and technology. Where the sliders are unwitting forces of anarchy who bring down governments, the FBI consider it appropriate to uphold existing power structures.
To me, Torme's view opens the door to many potential conflicts: the FBI want to reproduce biological weapons, but the sliders want to destroy them. The FBI want to help the fascist regime put down the resistance that the sliders have joined. The FBI want to curtail the interdimensional interference that the sliders regularly cause. The FBI consider the sliders to be domestic terrorists while the sliders view them as authoritarian pawns.
According to Torme: Bennish's presence on the federal agents' team makes the agents seem more professional in contrast and also showcases Bennish's hypocracy: he sides with whichever side he thinks will benefit him most.
Also according to Torme: to wrap up the FBI plot, if needed, numerous options existed. The FBI and the sliders could come to a truce where the FBI can't take the sliders home but can take messages for their families. The FBI catch up to the sliders and, because John Rhys-Davies wants to leave the show, the FBI manage take Arturo and only Arturo home (but, if John changes his mind, the FBI accidentally take the wrong Arturo home and the right one returns to the group).
One idea that Torme was keen on but chose not to pursue: the FBI weren't actually investigating Quinn's disappearance in "Summer of Love." They were investigating Michael Mallory's disappearance, had been for years, believing he faked his death to join a foreign power to help them make weapons. The FBI believed the vortex to be some unknown armament. Quinn's disappearance made them suspect that Quinn had been recruited by his father.
This would lead to a story where the FBI, investigating on a parallel Earth, could clear Michael's name and find that Michael had gone into hiding to protect his family and country. Alternatively, Michael could've been a traitor (like in "Gillian of the Spirits") and Quinn would embrace the Professor as his true father figure. The FBI plot could end with Quinn having hope that his father was still alive back home. Or it could end with Quinn knowing that a confrontation with his father was lying in wait should he ever get back. But when Torme wrote "The Guardian," he no longer saw Michael Mallory as secretly alive; he now saw Michael's value as the ghost of Quinn's childhood.
... this is what it was like to talk to Torme. In fact, I think this is why, nine years later, Transmodiar talked to Torme and Torme couldn't remember what his plans were. He hadn't planned. He'd imagined multiple paths of potential development.
None of the above is the secrets SLIDERS was building to reveal. This isn't the uncovered mythology of the series. They're just things Torme thought about doing but may not have done and probably wouldn't have done because other possibilities would have presented themselves over time. Quinn was supposed to be an awkward geek; that wasn't what was onscreen, so Torme changed his approach. Also, Torme was working with Robert K. Weiss and Weiss would've had his own ideas for what might come.
During our talk, the only certainty Torme was absolutely sure of for the FBI was this: if SLIDERS had been more successful, it'd occasionally be necessary to do an episode where the regular cast would have limited onscreen roles to get ahead on another episode. This happened with THE X-FILES where supporting cast members would take center-stage for a week. In that event, there might have been an episode devoted to the FBI and Bennish having an adventure.
Torme's philosophy of writing is neatly summarized in Quinn's speech about stardust in "The Guardian." Torme didn't make plans; he made possibilities. And as time passed, those possibilities would be dismantled and reconfigured to form new paths. That's what we should expect from the co-creator of SLIDERS.
So while the Kromaggs might've been his way to reinvent the show after the Peckinpah stuff, there's a chance he would've never mentioned the tracking device again if he'd stayed on the show indefinitely.
I agree and disagree. With "Invasion," the tracking device means that if the sliders get home, the Kromaggs will invade. The natural endpoint of the series -- getting home -- is now irrevocably entangled with "Invasion" and the Kromaggs cannot be ignored.
But, I admit, Torme could have had a storyline where the sliders are caught in an electromagnetic pulse and the implant, whoever it's in, is presumably destroyed. Kind of a waste, though.
No need for kromaggs to make sense when sliders never did from the start
1) Quinn's dad died when he was 12 but in the picture in the pilot there they are the same height as they are at the end of the pilot when he comes home from work.
2) After skipping a grade in school Quinn said he was smaller then his classmates (the picture in the pilot makes him ruffly 6" at 12 did he go to Giant dude high school?)but still managed to be QB on the football team.
Also why did the mags drive Hummers instead of some antigravity mini manta idk
Maybe the felt demasculinized and need to overcompensate
Well, this is a discussion forum and as fans, we'll naturally discuss the absurdities of the series. We may not find sense, but we do search for meaning. And I do find meaning in SLIDERS' absurdities, especially in how the more ridiculous aspects of the first 22 episodes feed the depth and mythic nature of the characters.
In the first two seasons, the sliders never carry luggage, yet the characters alternate between outfits and maintain the same styles: Quinn's flannel and jeans, Wade's casual dressiness, Rembrandt and Arturo's fitted, tailored suits.
And money! In Season 1, the sliders find jobs despite having no verifiable identification; in Season 2, they always have money for food and hotels without explanation. These plot points were set aside because dealing with it every episode was repetitive and distracting.
You could see that as a plothole. Or you could see it as an indication that the sliders are innately gifted as interdimensional nomads. They are just that good. The rationalization (if there is one) is not as important as the meaning behind it.
That said, if I *had* to explain it -- I'd go by the DOCTOR WHO story that every supposed mistake is just a missing story away from explaining it. I imagine a lost Season 1 episode: the sliders land on a world where the Cold War never ended and the world lives in terror of impending nuclear war. The sliders are caught up in an espionage plot, mistaken for enemy spies and seek refuge in the Dominion Hotel (instead of the Motel 12).
There, they find a secret storage space left by two Communist agents who died in the 70s and never recovered their cache. In the storage space is a suitcase full of cash and a variety of outfits for different identities to pass for Americans -- which allow the sliders to maintain their styles and even alternate between the same outfits.
Subsequently, any time there's a Dominion Hotel in a parallel Earth, the sliders visit the storage space and 30 per cent of the time, the cash and the clothes are there -- which is why they always stay at the Dominion Hotel starting in Season 2.
As for the inconsistency between the Pilot and "The Guardian" regarding Quinn's childhood:
Quinn being smaller than his classmates because he's younger and Quinn being athletic as he grew are not mutually exclusive concepts. The former serves as a solid explanation for Quinn's awkwardness when he's Jerry O'Connell. The latter is reinforced by Quinn's love for sports as indicated by all the gear in his bedroom. There's nothing in the Pilot to contradict this backstory.
However, there is indeed a contradiction: the Pilot puts Michael's death in Quinn's teens via the family photograph. "The Guardian" declares that the death of Quinn's father at age 10 caused Quinn to become socially isolated and racked with guilt over how his final words to his dad were spoken in anger.
I don't think it's an error; I think Tracy Torme, who wrote both episodes, deliberately altered Quinn's backstory.
You could conceivably rationalize the continuity here. If I had to explain it, I'd say that Quinn had a growth spurt on his home Earth that his "Guardian" double would experience later. I might suggest that in the family photo of Jerry O'Connell and Tom Butler, Jerry isn't playing Quinn; he is one of Quinn's cousins and Quinn keeps the photo to think of how it might be had his father lived.
You could even go so far to say that there were two timelines; the original timeline in which Quinn's dad died when Quinn was a teen and then an altered timeline resulting from the Season 5 Combine experiment retroactively reaching into the past and warping reality causing a corrupted version of history that now had Quinn further traumatized by this new version of his formative years...
But to me, rationalizations obscure the purpose of the "Guardian" retcon -- which was to reconcile Quinn Mallory being an awkward, isolated nerd who is played by the attractive and charismatic Jerry O'Connell.
Torme's solution: he changed his plan for Quinn's father. Originally, Torme's idea was that Michael Mallory had faked his death and gone into hiding (possibly because foreign powers sought to use him to develop weapons for their ends?). This could have led to a storyline where (a) Quinn discovers a double of his father staged the car accident and wonders if back home, his father is still alive or (b) the sliders make it home, but due to Michael Mallory being alive, they cannot be sure if this is home or not.
But, because of how Quinn was cast and how Jerry played him, Torme decided to revise Michael Mallory's role in Quinn's life. With "The Guardian," Michael isn't a future plot point to pay off. Instead, he became a life-defining trauma for Quinn.
The inconsistency between the Pilot and "The Guardian" is really the creator noting the inconsistency between the actor and the character. The retcon merges them into a unified whole. But the discrepancy speaks to the contradictions within Quinn Mallory. He's both an adventurer and a withdrawn scientist. He's both athletic and physically vulnerable. He's both glowingly charismatic and traumatized into isolation. These conflicts make the character rich and multifaceted.
Anyway. The sliders never earning money and Quinn having two conflicting backstories is, of course, ridiculous. But that's why SLIDERS is such a special show. Like the very best superhero concepts, SLIDERS tapped into mythic absurdity where myths are always ridiculous.
A godlike being lives as a mild-mannered reporter? A billionaire playboy fights street crime? Four homeless people never struggle financially? It's absurd, but the absurdities speak to deeper truths of human nature. Like the sliders, we can solve anything by working together with ingenuity, inventiveness and ideas. And like Quinn Mallory, we all have multiple sides to ourselves.
So, I'm pretty happy with how the Tab A 10.1 is working out as an instantly on bedside computer. It's superior to my iPad Mini 2 by performing smoothly and having a bigger screen to justify picking it up over a phone. But. Occasionally, as I grip it to type or rotate it in my hands, there's a click or a creak, like the casing seal isn't entirely rigid. Even though Samsung did a great job of making the plastic have a faintly metallic feel, plastic just doesn't feel as solid as the aluminium of the iPad. But... tablets just don't do enough to justify spending more (or any) money on them.
It'll probably feel fine once a case comes in the mail and I grip the outer frame of the case instead of the tablet.
As I recall (although I could be mistaken), it was Marc Scott Zicree who wanted to bring the Kromaggs back in an effort to do an epic storyline for SLIDERS and in an attempt to compensate for SLIDERS having lost the Professor and Wade, but Peckinpah executed the opening installment of this arc with "Genesis" his way and it only got worse.
However, it raises an interesting question. What did Tormé want out of the Kromaggs?
The thing about "Invasion" is that Tormé deliberately wrote it so that it was impossible to ignore the Kromaggs. The tracking device meant the sliders would doom their world by going home, requiring that any finale involving home would involve the Kromaggs.
Tormé said in an interview that he wanted to do a sequel to "Invasion" where it would be extremely surreal and it would not begin with the sliders landing in another Kromagg invasion. In fact, the sliders wouldn't even realize they were in a Kromagg story until they were in the middle of one.
He would reveal that this story was "Slide Effects," a Season 4 premiere in which Quinn wakes up to discover he is home and time has been rewound to the Pilot. It's 1994, Wade's at Doppler's, Rembrandt's working on his career, the Professor's teaching and only Quinn remembers sliding. More interestingly, Tormé's plot had Quinn encountering doubles of familiar characters: Ryan, Gillian, Sid -- and Logan St. Clair.
Logan's presence in Tormé's storyline is peculiar because in no variant on Earth Prime with Quinn Mallory could have Logan St. Clair. They're the same person. All the other characters would indicate to Quinn that sliding wasn't a dream; he recognizes them all from his adventures.
I wonder if Logan's presence would be a hint leading to the eventual revelation: the entire scenario is a telepathic simulation created by the Kromaggs.
Also intriguing: "Slide Effects" was devised this way because Tormé was trying to get past FOX's resistance to any Kromagg sequels. His solution was a story that, as pitched, wouldn't be a Kromagg show. It'd be the story of Quinn waking up to find that he's back at the beginning.
It's strange how Tormé conceived "Opportunity Cost" four years before Matt Hutaff submitted it to Slide It Yourself...
As a Season 4 premiere, "Slide Effects" would re-establish the show's premise for a new audience. But with any subsequent Kromagg stories being fraught with difficulty -- network distaste, losing the mystery -- maybe it'd have been necessary to deal with the Kromagg tracking device in this episode.
I wonder if maybe Tormé would have had "Slide Effects" end on a bittersweet note: the sliders realize -- due to the inoperable, unremovable tracking device, they can never go home. Maybe, the Kromaggs aren't meant to be the central villain, the primary antagonist. Maybe they're simply a plot device that ends the ongoing arc of the sliders searching for home. That was their goal for Seasons 1 - 3. With Season 4, they're forced to accept that they can't go back and they mustn't keep trying.
And maybe the Kromaggs, having cut the sliders off from home, open a new path for the sliders. These are Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, after all. So they are not crushed or broken by home being permanently denied them. Instead, they are heartwarmed by having had the chance to revisit home one last time, even in an illusion.
They are strengthened by the knowledge that even within a comforting dreamworld of home, they found their way back to each other and gave each other the will to break free. And they step into the vortex once again, no longer searching for home but instead giving themselves to adventure and infinity with the knowledge that so long as they're together, they are home.
And maybe that's what the Kromaggs were meant to do. They were supposed to make the sliders more commited to sliding than ever before.
It's just a theory...
Still getting to grips with using a 10 inch tablet again. Given how phones have gotten bigger, it made no sense to buy a device that wasn't much larger. The main problem was input. The Samsung Tab A 10.1's capacitive buttons were too easily triggered by holding the tablet and some had to be disabled with a third party app. Also, the screen is too big for typing with Google Keyboard which required my thumbs to stretch farther than possible. And for some reason, Google Keyboard's one handed mode is disabled on tablets, so I had to install Swype for a right sided keyboard.
Most apps are just stretched phone apps, but given that this device is for video and the web browser, it's fine. Once again, I would not have bought this if not for it being priced as a discounted open box item that cost exactly what I got for selling the iPad Mini 2.
No. That's Temporal Flux's stuff. The EP.COM policy is that we leave his material to him.
We honestly have no idea where he acquired his amazing finds and anecdotes. We speculate endlessly. Many of EP.COM's current and future items came from Transmodiar befriending former SLIDERS producers.
Always good to see tom2point0 here, he doesn't show up often enough. I have been listening to REWATCH PODCAST cover THE FLASH (90s series) with pleasure, but I didn't have time to watch the actual show, so I can say nothing other than noting that I continue to enjoy Tom and Cory's banter during my commutes and hikes.
DISCOVERY, however, most definitely does not present the secret origin of Section 31. Their name, Section 31, comes from the original 22nd century Starfleet charter: Article 13, Section 31 allows extraordinary measures against extreme threat. Starfleet and Section 31 pre-date the Federation and DISCOVERY.
Section 31 appeared on ENTERPRISE in the year 2155 as a secret cabal within the United Earth government and Starfleet with Enterprise-armsmaster Malcolm Reed a former member. Given that DISCOVERY takes place in 2256, it's clearly not Section 31's starting point. But this does give me an excuse to talk about Section 31.
The reason the DS9 creators came up with Section 31: they were telling war stories and needed to show that the Federation, like any government, would engage in bloody and covert black-ops missions. But Gene Roddenberry's TNG-era declaration that the future was a perfect world had become so entrenched in the franchise that the writers couldn't overturn it. So they introduced Section 31.
From their debut in "Inquisition":
BASHIR
So, are you going to tell me who
you are? Who you work for?
SLOAN
I would think it's obvious -- the
same people you work for. The
Federation. Starfleet.
BASHIR
You don't expect me to believe
you're with Internal Affairs, do
you?
SLOAN
Of course not. Internal Affairs
is a competent department, but...
limited.
BASHIR
Then what department are you with?
SLOAN
Let's just say I belong to another
branch of Starfleet
Intelligence... our official
designation is Section 31.
BASHIR
Never heard of it.
SLOAN
We keep a low profile. It works
out better that way... for all
concerned.
BASHIR
And what does "Section 31"
do -- aside from kidnapping
Starfleet officers?
SLOAN
We search out and identify
potential dangers to the
Federation.
BASHIR
And once identified?
SLOAN
We deal with them.
BASHIR
How?
SLOAN
Quietly.
BASHIR
So if I had turned out to be a
Dominion agent -- what would've
happened to me?
SLOAN
We wouldn't be standing here
having this conversation.
BASHIR
And Starfleet sanctions what
you're doing?
SLOAN
We don't submit reports or ask for
approval for specific operations,
if that's what you mean. We're an
autonomous department.
BASHIR
Authorized by whom?
SLOAN
Section 31 was part of the
original Starfleet charter.
BASHIR
That was two hundred years ago.
Are you telling me you've been
operating on your own ever since?
Without specific orders?
Accountable to nobody, but
yourselves?
SLOAN
You make it sound so... ominous.
BASHIR
Isn't it? If what you say is
true, you function as judge, jury
and executioner. I'd say that's
too much power for anyone.
SLOAN
I admit it takes exceptional
people to do what we do -- people
who can sublimate their own
ambitions to the best interests of
the Federation.
(a beat)
People like you.
BASHIR
Me?
SLOAN
(nods)
We're on the same team. We
believe in the same principles
that every other Federation
citizen holds dear.
BASHIR
But you violate those principles
as a matter of course.
SLOAN
In order to protect them.
BASHIR
I'm sorry. But the ends don't
always justify the means.
SLOAN
(calmly)
Really? How many lives do you
suppose you've saved in your
medical career?
BASHIR
I don't see what that has to do
with anything.
SLOAN
Hundreds... thousands? Do you
suppose that those people give a
damn that you lied to get into
Starfleet Medical? I doubt it.
Bashir is momentarily thrown by Sloan's argument --
SLOAN
We deal with threats to the
Federation that jeopardize its
very survival. If you knew how
many lives we've saved, I think
you'd agree that the ends do
justify the means.I'm not afraid
of bending the rules every once
in a while -- if the situation warrants
it. And I don't think you are either.
BASHIR
You've got the wrong man, Sloan.
SLOAN
(confident)
I don't think so. In time, you'll
come to agree with me.
With Section 31, DS9 could show the Federation engaging in assassination, fraud, genocide, false flag operations, propaganda, facism, torture, psychological manipulation, violation of civil liberties and sheer ruthlessness -- but because Section 31 was a disavowed branch of Starfleet with no official sanction or existence, the writers left themselves an out. They could say the Federation's hands were clean by putting all the responsibility on Section 31. As seen in "Inquisition":
SISKO
There's no record of a Deputy
Director Sloan anywhere in
Starfleet. As for Section 31...
that's a little more complicated.
Starfleet Command didn't
acknowledge its existence. But
they didn't deny it either.
They simply said they'd look into
it and get back to me.
BASHIR
When?
SISKO
They didn't say.
KIRA
Sounds like a cover-up to me.
BASHIR
Is it possible that the Federation
would condone this kind of
activity?
ODO
Personally, I find it hard to
believe that they wouldn't. Every
other great power has a unit like
Section 31... the Romulans
have the Tal Shiar, the
Cardassians had the Obsidian
Order...
BASHIR
But what would that say about us?
That we're no different than our
enemies? That when push comes to
shove, we're willing to throw away
our principles in order to
survive?
SISKO
I wish I had an answer for you,
Doctor.
Perhaps the greatest Section 31 story (there were only three) is "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" where Section 31 manipulates Dr. Bashir into staging an assassination and framing an ambassador to maneuver a more controllable ally onto the political chessboard.
Dr. Bashir figures out the plan and needs Admiral Ross to stop it. Admiral Ross has always been an ally: he's allowed our heroes to skirt rules; he's tacitly encouraged the cast's crazier ideas; he's been the most pleasant and supportive admiral ever seen in STAR TREK.
Ross is Professor Arturo. Ross is Dr. Harry Wells. Ross is Dr. Martin Stein. Ross is Temporal Flux. Ross is Dad. Ross is suddenly debilitated by an illness and unable to help, and Section 31 wins. Later, Bashir confronts Ross, having realized: Ross faked his illness to allow Section 31 to proceed with its plans.
BASHIR
And how long have you worked for
Section 31?
ROSS
I don't.
BASHIR
Just a temporary alliance?
ROSS
Something like that.
BASHIR
And you don't see anything wrong
with what happened?
ROSS
I don't like it. But I've spent
the last year and a half of my
life ordering young men and women
to die. I like that even less.
BASHIR
That's a glib answer. And it's a
cheap way of avoiding the fact
that you've trampled on the very
thing those men and women are out
there dying to protect. Doesn't
that mean anything to you?
ROSS
Inter arma enim silent leges.
BASHIR
"In time of war, the law falls
silent." Cicero. So is that
what we've become -- a twenty-
fourth century Rome? Driven by
nothing more than the certainty
that Caesar can do no wrong?
ROSS
This conversation never happened.
You're dismissed.
Ross didn't kill anyone, didn't frame anyone; he simply chose to do nothing to prevent it and is therefore complicit. That's what makes 31 terrifying.
Despite the writers having left themselves a backdoor to say Section 31 is a rogue agency, it would be reasonable to take the view that Section 31 is the Federation and always has been.
Captain Lorca represents their values rather well. I think Lorca is one of them although there's the possibility that he doesn't know he's one of them. Section 31 has often maneuvered unwitting Starfleet officers into acting on their behalf.
Anyway. DS9's first two Section 31 episodes were great and can be read here:
http://www.st-minutiae.com/resources/scripts/542.txt
http://scifijaz.com/t/565.txt
I do feel Samsung's Android is now good, based on this Tab A 10.1. They've left Google Material design alone or kept close to it in modifying the toggles. It's so close that by installing Google's launcher and keyboard, the only hints of Samsung skinning are in the lockscreen, settings, toggles and status bar. I don't think I'll install a custom ROM on this. I just found an app to remap all the buttons, too. I set the buttons to take action only on double tap, so I can rest my fingers on them without triggering the back or recent apps functions. And I've found a bluelight filter that doesn't need root, so I might never root the tablet.
This open box tablet was about 1/5 the price of an iPad Pro and considered a budget model, but it was a good trade fot the sluggish iPad Mini 2.
Nice to hear you're happy with your hardware. How's the Samsung version of Android compared to the S4?
I was very reluctant to buy a tablet. The truth is that while I liked the iPad Mini 2 (until iOS 11 was forced on it), I was using it less and less. I had a tablet because web browsing on a phone used to be unworkable with fonts too small and data too costly, meaning it was best to read all my news feeds at home on wifi and do all my research and planning on my tablet. But data's gotten cheaper. Websites are built for mobile phones and smaller screens. So, while I might have preferred the tablet aesthetically, it was faster to do look things up and read news and messages on my phone.
Eventually, I found myself removing all my social media and email apps from the tablet because I wasn't using them enough and the tablet became a Netflix and PDF machine and a second screen for my online courses. I would play the tutorial videos on the tablet and execute the assignments and take notes on my laptop. If I were at home and were looking something up, I'd use the tablet.
But after the update, iOS just couldn't function. Udemy kept freezing up on me. Netflix would crash. I couldn't type. Websites wouldn't load. But because tablets have become so limited in their purpose, I couldn't justify buying another one. I couldn't justify buying an iPad Pro or Mini that I couldn't stop Apple from upgrading to an eventually unusable OS.
I switched to using my laptop for all my webwork, films and TV and used my phone for the online video courses. But I just couldn't maintain workflow with videos playing on a smaller size; I needed them on a larger screen so I could make out the details. I decided to get by with the phone and laptop combo, but if a new tablet could be purchased for the same money earned from selling the old one, that was acceptable.
There's this place in my town that sells open box tech. Recently, they got a bunch of Samsung Tab A 10.1's. I'm quite impressed with the polycarbonate casing and 1080p screen. Samsung's build of Android on this tablet is very restrained; it looks almost like the Google version once I replaced the launcher. The hardware is powerful.
It's a little cumbersome in that on the iPad, you could rest your fingers on the edge of the screen and the OS would know you weren't doing a long-press. Android isn't so clever and there are also capacitive buttons that mean you can't hold the tablet from the bottom frame. But I've figured out how to hold it on the buttonless edge with one hand and at the edge with another.
Android apps are almost all all 5.5 inch phone apps stretched out to 10 inches and some look downright silly -- but I don't really need it to do much more than run Chrome, Netflix and Udemy. I'm going to wait until the 14 day return period has ended before I root it, but I only need to do that to install a bluelight filter.
I can't exactly recommend any tablet given how it's a limited, luxury item and you can't do anything this 10-inch slab that you couldn't on a more compact phone. I just need one for my peculiar workflow.
I'm with Informant regarding iPhones. And for awhile, I was against expensive smartphones anyway. They are too expensive and too easily broken or misplaced, so I buy decent budget models like the Moto G4 and have a tablet like an iPad Mini for luxury mobility. Except my service provider is now offering a replacement plan. For a monthly fee, they'll give you two replacements a year for accidental damage, loss or theft. I still don't know if I'd spend iPhone money, but I might be willing to get a mid range phone instead of sticking to budget models.
That said, the Moto G4 is mostly of flagship standard. I have no trouble reading the screen on direct sunlight. The camera is excellent in the day and good with flash at night. It never freezes or labs and all games play great. It lacks a good low light camera, it's splashproof rather than waterproof and it doesn't support mobile payments or have a fingerprint sensor, but it's a very good phone. Best unlocked model on sale at brick and mortar retailers at the time I bought it.
**
About a year ago, I updated my iPad Mini 2 to a new version of iOS because the new version was needed to run Google Keyboard and I wanted the swipe typing. I figured that when a jailbreak was developed, I'd use it to prevent any subsequent upgrades and dodge having my iPad getting a new OS that wouldn't run well on older hardware. Except the jailbreak never came. And then Apple started forcing iPads to update while in sleep mode and despite my efforts at round the clock monitoring, I passed out one night and awakened to find my iPad running iOS 11 and so slow that it couldn't fully load webpages -- they'd cut off to blank whiteness when scrolling -- and the screen can't seem to maintain the finger tracking needed for swipe typing. The keyboard loses the gesture trail halfway into words and often crashes.
I sold it for $200 today and bought a Samsung Tab A 10.1 for that same $200. *sigh*
This was the photo.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrY99ojUMAAGJZe.jpg
Wally has been handled terribly and I don't know why every decision for him was so misjudged. The first thing was the casting: they wrote Wally to be a reckless street racer. But then they hired Keiynan Lonsdale whose screen presence is deliberate, thoughtful, gentle and in no way suited to the Wally that's been scripted. The second thing was keeping him on the show: once Joe's ex-wife died, Wally simply wasn't needed and should have been sent off to college offscreen.
Instead, they kept him around to fill a seat at the family dinners and be Joe's son, a role already filled by Barry that made Wally superfluous. Then they turned Wally into Kid Flash except we already have a character with superspeed in Barry, meaning Wally was again completely extraneous. There was simply no role for Wally on the show and he hung around pointlessly. He has no voice. He has no meaningful contribution. He has no reason to be there.
The Wally West of the comics was interesting because where the previous Flash had been a scientist, Wally was a blue collar guy who had to struggle to find clever solutions against villains who were smarter and more scientifically minded and knowledgeable. Wally's defining trait was his impatience, a character element that was perfect for a speedster. He could not stand to wait for anything and it was both an asset and a liability.
The most prominent Wally writer, Mark Waid, wrote the comic for nine years and then quit, hilariously explaining that when he first started, he was just like Wally; he was ridiculously impatient and wrote the character like himself. But after nine years, Waid had learned how to be patient and couldn't connect to Wally anymore.
The TV Wally hasn't captured any of that and his only real personality trait is that he's in love with Jesse Quick. But it is interesting that Wally West's inessential situation is very much like the comic book counterpart -- when REBIRTH resurrected Barry, the writers erased Wally from reality because they couldn't figure out what to do with him, then brought him back because they felt bad about deleting a character who had been THE Flash for the 90s and 2000s -- but put him out of the way in TITANS.
I'd suggest putting Wally on LEGENDS except I seriously doubt anyone is all that desperate to see more of him and Lonsdale's a decent actor who deserves a better role.
You mean you agreed with me agreeing with you?
I get the sense that the prequel-to-TOS situation is an awkward artifact of the creative troubles behind the series.
Bryan Fuller pitched DISCOVERY as an anthology show with each season to be set in a different time period. As it was an anthology, it makes sense that Fuller wanted the first season to be set close to the most iconic, culturally defining era of the franchise by making it 10 years before the original series. Later seasons would move forward.
The original intention was to render the 60s era STAR TREK with modern materials and technology the way the rebootquel movies have done it. The uniforms were to resemble those in "The Cage." Fuller posted photos of gold, scarlet and blue turtlenecks on Twitter.
But Fuller left, the people who took over have stuck with Fuller's plot and time period but are executing it with their own production aesthetic instead and they changed the uniforms to look more like ENTERPRISE.
The new producers have decided to render the 23rd century as they see fit and then sort out the discrepancies later. The current producers have said in interviews that the contradictions will be explained. http://www.cbr.com/star-trek-discovery- … y-changes/ It does leave me wondering why they would create supposed errors in the first place.
Anyway. I'll finish Season 1 before I give an opinion. I don't think there's anything wrong with one season as a TOS-prequel, but doing an entire show like this astounds me for all the reasons Slider_Quinn21 expresses.
But then why is Quinn played by Jerry in the family photo if the Pilot meant for Quinn to be 10 when his father died?
I haven't seen this week's episode yet. So this is just rambling about continuity:
Most fans, I find, think of STAR TREK continuity the way they see the continuity of a cop drama or a teen soap. ELEMENTARY, DAWSON'S CREEK, EVERWOOD and such. But because of the huge timespan of STAR TREK, I think it's probably better to see it like the Marvel Universe where all events are in a broad continuity subject to the interpretation of the individual author and re-interpreted in terms of the present day. Both STAR TREK and the Marvel Universe function as representations of present day concerns and anxieties, after all.
The most interesting Marvel characters, to me, from a continuity standpoint are Iron Man and Captain America. Iron Man's origin story is continually updated in flashbacks: the Vietnam era incident that caused Tony Stark's heart to be lodged with shrapnel and necessitate an Iron Man suit has been continually updated to the Gulf War, to Afghanistan -- and the surroundings and soldiers and technology are also altered with each new version. It's a floating timeline and it's necessary to move Tony Stark into the present so that Iron Man's technology can represent the future.
Captain America also has an interesting continuity oddity: the year in which he reawakened from decades-long cryogenic suspension moves forward. He originally defrosted in the 60s; today, it's the 2000s. With each year, Cap emerges into a world farther and farther from World War II. Naturally, the stories in which he engaged with current events -- Nixon, the War on Drugs, Bill Clinton being at his funeral, the inauguration of George W. Bush and 9/11 -- have to quietly fade away from reference. A hilarious continuity issue: Cap's long-time girlfriend, Sharon, was written to be the younger sister of his WWII girlfriend, Peggy. As WWII grows distant, Sharon has been altered into Peggy's grand-niece. I think, at some point, Sharon will become Peggy's great-grand niece.
I think STAR TREK has to be treated the same way -- a floating timeline perpetually drifting ahead of our present rather than a locked, strictly defined set of stories.
**
When writing SLIDERS REBORN, I had the opportunity to explain a lot of the show's peculiar continuity: the Season 1 episodes being aired in the wrong order, the Season 2 guest-stars who vanished between episodes, Season 3 monsters, the Season 4 backstory, the Season 5 production being isolated to backlots.
I was using the idea that there were two timelines in SLIDERS: an original timeline in which the original sliders had four years of wonderful adventures, and a corrupted timeline created by Dr. Geiger's Combine experiment that ripped all Quinns out of all realities and created a warped, damaged timeline that aired on TV. This blanket explanation served as a catch-all rationale for every continuity error and the Season 3 monsters and I singled out each one in the explanation.
But there was one continuity oddity I decided to leave alone -- Quinn Mallory's childhood.
The SLIDERS pilot shows Jerry O'Connell in a photograph with his father, Michael. "The Guardian," however, shows Quinn as a 10-year-old mourning the death of his father. The Pilot puts Michael's death in Quinn's teens and it's not a source of trauma as Quinn and Amanda joke about Amanda conversing with Michael's photograph. "The Guardian" declares that the death of Quinn's father at a young age caused Quinn to become socially isolated and racked with guilt over how his final words to his dad were spoken in anger.
I think you could conceivably find a way to rationalize the continuity here. You could say that Quinn has, over time, found ways to obscure his grief. You could say that Quinn had a growth spurt on his home Earth that his "Guardian" double would experience later in life. You could say that Jerry isn't playing Quinn in the photograph; he is playing one of Quinn's cousins and Quinn keeps the photo as an indication of how it might have looked had his father lived longer.
But the rationalizations obscure the purpose of the "Guardian" retcon -- which was to find some way to explore the strange contradiction in Quinn Mallory being an awkward, socially isolated nerd played by the athletic, attractive and charismatic Jerry O'Connell.
Tracy Torme, who wrote both episodes, clearly made the decision to revise the Pilot backstory for Quinn. I think: he didn't expect Quinn to be as attractive as Jerry made him and he wanted to reconcile the discrepancy between character and actor. His solution was to repurpose the death of Quinn's father from being one point of Quinn's backstory to a life-defining trauma that left Quinn fundamentally broken.
And as someone who was moving SLIDERS continuity around to get everything in order, this is something I decided I wouldn't touch because the retcon was part of Tracy Torme getting to grips with Quinn Mallory. It was part of the process of merging what was intended and what was onscreen into a unified whole, and if I tugged at the improvised and spontaneously formed threads that make Quinn who he is, I would unravel him.
To quote TREK novelist Christopher Bennett:
Fans have always had to squint and gloss over the differences of interpretation in order to pretend that these works of fiction created by different people with different ideas could represent a consistent reality. If you want to be that obsessively nitpicky, then you'll have to admit that 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' is set in an alternate universe where Kirk has a different middle name, 'Mudd's Women' is set an alternate universe where they use lithium instead of dilithium, most of TNG's first season is set in an alternate universe where Data used contractions and showed emotion, etc.
STAR TREK has never, ever, EVER been an actually consistent reality. We only choose to pretend it is by ignoring or rationalizing the hundreds and hundreds of contradictions it already contains. So either you're willing to suspend disbelief and play along with the pretense that there's a single universe, or you're not and you have to admit that there are countless mutually contradictory versions of Trek already.
To claim that previous TREK is completely reconcilable but the newest thing is completely irreconcilable is a self-contradiction.
Roddenberry's take: TOS was an imperfect dramatization of the crew's adventures and that later TREK productions were able to come closer to getting it right. It wasn't the TREK universe that was changing, just the way in which it was dramatically recreated for 20th-century television viewers.
Some of my favourite inconsistencies:
The original series took almost half a season to pin down the 23rd century era, with the time period referred to as the 21st or 28th century. Kirk at one point says he works for the United Earth Space Probe Agency before it became Starfleet and Earth became the Federation. Spock is emotional in the early episodes and made a rape joke. Kirk's initial in the first episode produced is "R." Spock refers to his parents in the past tense, but they guest-star later on. McCoy says that the "Vulcanians" were conquered by Earth.
From a production standpoint, the Starfleet arrowhead was meant to be for all starship crews, but for a number of TOS episodes, costumers misunderstood "Charlie X" in which the crew of the Antares had their own insignia (as merchant marines) and took that to mean each ship had its own individual badge when designing costumes. DISCOVERY uses the triangular symbol as intended rather than as it was onscreen.
With TNG's early seasons, Picard was a cruel leader prone to putting his people in difficult situations just to screw with them, Data was emotional, Troi experienced other people's emotions rather than being aware of them, Worf was animalistically feral, Starfleet regularly vacationed on pre-warp planets, holodeck matter existed outside the simulator, the Borg ignored organic life -- none of which was retained as Picard became gentle to the point of babying Barclay, Data became emotionless, Troi's powers dialed down, Worf became smart, the Prime Directive became much stricter and the Borg started assimilating people.
The mannered and bizarre Ferengi of TNG's Season 1 are not the capitalist caricatures of DS9, the makeup for Trills in TNG was ignored in DS9, Voyager travelled back to the 1990s where the Eugenics Wars, established in TOS, are not present or mentioned.
FIRST CONTACT and ENTERPRISE have warp drive in the 22nd century, but TOS' "Balance of Terror" established that the Earth-Romulan War unfolded at sublight speeds. TNG had Wesley depart Starfleet to ascend to higher planes of existence with the Traveler; DS9 had Worf become a Klingon ambassador by the finale "Nemesis" has him -- yet NEMESIS shows both back in Starfleet.
In "Operation: Annihilate!," Kirk's brother, Sam, is killed. Yet, in STAR TREK V, Kirk remarks, "I once lost a brother. I was lucky to get him back," referring to Spock and suggesting that Kirk has forgotten he had a sibling who died with his wife and left behind an orphaned nephew.
STAR TREK has never been a documentary. But if you must have an in-universe blanket explanation, the simplest route is that Data's trip to 19th century Earth in "Time's Arrow" and the time travel of FIRST CONTACT along with the Temporal Cold War of ENTERPRISE have caused some details of TOS to shift and some of the contradictions are due to the time travel ripples taking effect.
The novels and comic books, however, tend to offer rationalizations via new stories that weren't aired on TV or shown in theatres. The comic book adaptation for STAR TREK V amended Kirk's line about his brother to say that Kirk lost "two brothers" and was lucky to get "one back." My personal explanation for the error: Sam Kirk was probably, in an untelevised story, resurrected due to some VOYAGER-esque time travel rewind that retroactively erased his death.
And maybe there are many variants of Ferengi and Trills, we were seeing Picard during periods of indigestion during Season 1, Troi mastered her psi-powers, Data was experimenting with simulated emotion, the Earth-Romulan War unfolded in areas of space where warp drive couldn't be used, Worf got counselling, etc..
There's some stuff that's best ignored, however. It's grossly out of character for Spock as he took shape to joke that a woman who was sexually assaulted by an evil double of Captain Kirk enjoyed the experience. It is outrageous to claim, as TOS did, that no woman has ever captained a starship.
I prefer to simply think that these events didn't happen, much like Quinn shrugging off Wade being in a rape camp or spending a season finding coordinates to Kromagg Prime and a way to bypass the Slidecage only to blow both off in "Revelations."
And I don't think we need to restrict STAR TREK to technology that was feasible to render on TV in the 1960s; the show should reflect a future based on the world we have today. And on the level of TV production, there is really insufficient time to worry about it at all.
In a podcast, "Desperate Hours" author David Mack said that he read the TV scripts, passed along any contradictions he didn't think could be reconciled and some were amended and some weren't. He added that he offered the TV producers three paths for "Desperate Hours": he could describe the 60s Enterprise as being visually in line with 2017 DISCOVERY ships with holograms and jacketed uniforms and metallic surfaces. He could describe the 2017 DISCOVERY ships as being visually in line with the 60s STAR TREK with switches and dials and pastel colours.
Or he could describe both the 60s and 2017 ships exactly as they appeared onscreen -- and declare with a straight face that the 60s ships are in fact more advanced than the 2017 ships and have the characters consider the 60s style to be more futuristic than the DISCOVERY ships.
They asked him to take the third option. That said, a lot of this could be side-stepped if DISCOVERY were set in the 25th century and DISCOVERY has, for now, given no real reason why it's set in the 23rd aside from Michael Burnham being Sarek's adopted daughter.
I think Slider_Quinn21's probably right about the end of the spore network.
**
The DISCOVERY novel "Desperate Hours" explains that the holographic communications seen on the Shenzhou were older technology that the newer Constitution-class ships, like the Enterprise, didn't incorporate because holograms were bandwidth hogs and had, over time, become insecure and easily hacked and hijacked.
That said -- the truth is that no STAR TREK series can ever be fully reconciled with its sibling productions. STAR TREK was filmed in the 60s; even the 80s-era MOTION PICTURE is near-impossible to reconcile on a technological level with the TV show from which it came. The perfect humans of TNG are not the flawed heroes of DS9; the goofy Zefram Cochrane of FIRST CONTACT is not the troubled relic of the 60s "Metamorphosis" and even within the individual shows, they're not consistent. That's just the nature of ongoing continuity and TV production.
I agree with Slider_Quinn21 that "The Flash Reborn" (hmm) didn't make much sense, but it was effective as a means of stepping away from some of Season 3's excesses (hmm). I didn't feel Caitlin was well-served by Season 3 which gave her an evil alternate personality for no real reason and this episode has made it a more interesting conflict while restoring Caitlin to our helpful, lively scientist. It was also a relief to see Barry more lighthearted after his angsty misery of Season 3 that seemed better suited to Oliver Queen than Barry Allen. It was a fun episode.
**
LEGENDS was also a lot of fun for me. On one level, I think it's strange to criticize LEGENDS time travel adventures with the view that you're bored with time travel. On another, it's fair to note that LEGENDS has an extremely repetitive formula for time travel: they enter an unfamiliar time period, get attacked by the locals and so it goes. The character arcs have been extremely shallow and when characters actually change, it's abrupt and jarring. Rip Hunter went from respecting the Legends to dismissing them between the Season 2 finale and the Season 3 premiere, for example.
I don't expect a lot from LEGENDS. It's a dumping ground for characters from ARROW and FLASH who have nowhere else to go; it's much more humour oriented. Sara working at Bed, Bath and Beyond was hilarious; Ray being a glorified intern because Felicity destroyed PalmerTech was very funny. It's a low bar. I really enjoy the running joke of Sara's absurd sex life.
Well, that's just great. We've lost our Professor Arturo, our Dr. Wells, our Temporal Flux. We've lost Dad.
... good thing LEGENDS is a very silly ensemble show that doesn't really depend on dramatics to be entertaining?
**
One thing that made no sense to me in THE FLASH's third season -- why in God's name did they replace Harry with the fairly useless HR? I understand that there was no narrative reason to justify Harry staying on Earth 1, but it would have been better to shift Tom Cavanagh over to LEGENDS or ARROW for a season rather than keep him on THE FLASH but give him no meaningful role to play.
Recently, I was listening to Tom Cavanagh's podcast, MIKE AND TOM EAT SNACKS -- and Tom's podcast persona, his real life personality -- it's basically the HR character: a ridiculously gregarious exaggerator of absurd passion for the most mundane and minute elements of life (in the podcast, it's junk food) to the point of spending 30 - 40 minutes discussing a single potato chip product in needless detail and applying human characteristics to a snack.
So, I guess Season 3 was the show letting Tom Cavanagh play himself for a year.
Now I'm going to argue against myself.
Within the individual shows, STAR TREK is not clear on whether humanity has really achieved utopia or if they merely present themselves as one. The classic series during the Gene L. Coon episodes (Season 1, first half of Season 2) routinely criticizes Starfleet and the Federation. "Errand of Mercy" presents Kirk and Starfleet as warmongers gunning for conflict with Klingons. "Arena" showed the Federation (accidentally) encroaching on another species' territory and thought of as invaders. "Amok Time" has Starfleet wanting the Enterprise to put on a show of force for a recently brokered truce between two warring worlds.
There's the especially troubling episode, "A Taste of Armageddon," in which Starfleet is established to have General Order 24 where a starship captain can order that the population of an entire planet be extinguished if given sufficient cause.
Throughout the show, Kirk is routinely shown to be more humane and moral than the organization that employs him and the Federation is shown to be humanitarian in posture and PR, but no less imperialist as than the Klingons.
However, after Coon left the series in the middle of Season 2, latter writers took a more simplistic route, presenting Starfleet as interplanetary do-gooders and anyone against the Federation is simply evil. TNG took this latter approach. DS9 took the view that while within the Federation, it's easy to be a saint, it's not so easy in the Gamma Quadrant or on Bajor or for the Maquis and then had Section 31 bring back the original skepticism of the old show.
"Errand of Mercy" is a standout in its skepticism: Kirk meets what he perceives to be an underdeveloped world and offers them the Federation's help in turning their world into a paradise, to show them how to feed millions where they once fed hundreds, to give them scientific and engineering knowledge that will allow them to remake their planet, to educate every child and give health and knowledge to every inhabitant. But the script underscores how the offer is made because the Federation wants this world as a key strategic point against the Klingons, and Kirk is shown to be, in many ways, just as flawed as his enemies in this episode.
And yet, ENTERPRISE took the view that the Federation is benign, particularly with the Andorian/Tellarite three-parter in which both races set aside their differences thanks to Captain Archer's diplomacy and respect for both cultures. It's one of those cases where latter writers adopted the original writers' words but may have missed the meaning behind them. There's also, of course, the fact that the individual writers within STAR TREK's 60s run weren't on the same page either.
Home sick today, so I saw the third episode earlier than expected. I can sort of see why they might have gone the prequel route: the Discovery is captained by Gabriel Lorca who seems more like a Section 31 agent than a Federation starship captain. Seth MacFarlane remarked once that NEXT GEN seemed staffed by the most professional people ever; rarely was anyone bad-tempered, irritable, holding a grudge -- to the point where Captain Picard was shocked when Barclay received a poor performance, he had a senior staff meeting as though it was a galactic crisis and ordered Geordi to become Barclay's "best friend."
Captain Lorca is out to destroy the enemy and he barely seems to have any concern for the people who are presumably on his side. An entire starship crew is killed due to an experiment he's leading; his response is to destroy the evidence and the corpses. He bullies his staff into taking Michael into their ranks, he houses homicidal monsters on his ship in secret -- even Captain Kirk at his most aggressive when fighting Klingons or the Gorn, made it clear that he was out to protect people whereas Lorca's goal is victory through destruction. When he describes a new means of interstellar travel, he conveys no joy or wonder -- only interest in how he might use the new tech to fight a war.
And while Michael might step for the moral high ground, as a convicted felon of no official rank and living out a life imprisonment sentence, she finds herself forced to stand next to him.
So, in that sense, I can see why they wanted a prequel to explore how the Federation faced a wartime situation that brought out the worst of them -- because by the time we get to the Original Series, few Starfleet officers are anything like that, to the point where the writers had to create a dark conspiracy to find Lorca's type in the STAR TREK universe. To do DISCOVERY as a sequel would be saying that humanity's best didn't persevere in the end.
I'll wait until the season's over to have an opinion on the time period. But for now, I do wonder why they went the prequel route too. Maybe there's a reason.
I'm about 2/3 through STAR TREK: DISCOVERY - "Desperate Hours." The story has the Shenzou and the Enterprise (captained by Christopher Pike) teaming up to fight an alien menace. At one point, Spock beams over to the Shenzou to meet Michael, his adoptive sister, and notes that because they weren't raised together at the same time, they barely know each other. He also observes that the Shenzou was built before the Enterprise. The explanation for why DISCOVERY doesn't look like "The Cage" and why the uniforms and ships and tech look different: the Enterprise was the first of a new generation of starships built primarily for diplomacy with all the uniforms and design elements meant to encourage peaceful discourse.
The Shenzou (and most of Starfleet's ships right now) have a more militaristic edge because they were built for battle as the Federation is still haunted by the Romulan War. The Enterprise is essentially a pilot project for a new vision of Starfleet dedicated to peacekeeping rather than military force, hence the different look and uniforms and technology. At this point in the timeline, no one's sure how that's going to turn out.
Personally, I always liked this video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCPdmOuzYrM -- which suggests what the original STAR TREK might've looked like had they used modern design materials.
I thought DISCOVERY was good, but the show is still a work in progress because the first two episodes are more about establishing the lead character's conflicts rather than establishing what the show will be.
DISCOVERY really captured the two sides of STAR TREK: the militaristic situations of threat and danger and the exploratory sense of adventure. The image of the Starfleet logo written in sand through a series of footprints is beautiful. Michael Burnham's delight at flying through space in an EVA suit to see what's out there is magnificently presented and it's right alongside situations of threat and danger where Starfleet's ideals of peace and discourse come up against a culture that sees strength through dominance and destruction.
Visually, the show's costuming and ship designs find an interesting middle ground between ENTERPRISE and STAR TREK: the uniforms are reminiscent of the NX-01 flight suits but with some of the decorations found in STAR TREK's tunics.
From a technological standpoint, however, DISCOVERY's tech seems far more advanced than all the shows taking place after DISCOVERY. Holographic communications were presented as startlingly new in DS9, so to see it here is jarring. The transporter works faster on DISCOVERY than in the original series. The force field technology holding back the vacuum of space when the ship's structure is smashed open was absent in the other shows.
The rebootquels had an in-universe explanation for why the 23rd century looked different from the 1960s show: the attack on the Kelvin caused Starfleet to amp up its military research and development to be able to fight off any such future attacks. The only real explanation DISCOVERY can offer, given that the producers say it's set in the original timeline, is that STAR TREK is a fictional creation and each series is an interpretation of a conjectural mythology rather than a documentary of an actual reality.
That's the only reason I can find for the Klingons being redesigned, an aesthetic move that dismisses ENTERPRISE's Augment virus explanation for why the Original Series Klingons looked human.
For the technology, there are any number of in-universe explanations. Holographic tech may have proven to be insecure, the slower transporter may have included more safety measures, the force field tech became obsolete with advancements in artificial gravity. The average viewer who may not have seen the 60s show won't be troubled. I wondered if newcomers might be confused at how Michael putting her hand between her captain's neck and shoulder somehow knocked her unconscious, but I think it's fair to say that Spock's iconic status means the Vulcan nerve pinch is known by all.
It's interesting -- for the longest time, I couldn't really accept ENTERPRISE as a prequel to the original series. In terms of writing and design, it was really a prequel to TNG. DISCOVERY feels like a prequel to the 2009 rebootquel.
There is a novel, STAR TREK: DESPERATE HOURS which has the DISCOVERY characters meeting the characters of "The Cage" and the writer, David Mack, will have to find some way to reconcile two very disparate visions of the twenty-third century.
Just finished the first episode. It's good. Basically the FRINGE (Season 1) creative team doing STAR TREK, not worrying too much about continuity and bringing the TV concept into 2017.
DEFENDERS was really disappointing, but I also wasn't surprised because it continues IRON FIST's bizarre obsession with the Hand, a vaguely defined collection of mysterious personalities speaking in vagaries about a mythology that is more nonsensically incoherent than the X-FILES myth-arc. It's completely unclear what their goals are, why those goals are reached through criminality, why Elektra is so critical to those goals and the answers we do get are even more confusing than the questions.
IRON FIST established that there were multiple factions to the Hand with Bakuto being an enemy of Madame Gao; DEFENDERS has them teaming up. IRON FIST declared that there were warring segments of the organization; DEFENDERS has all the players sitting together. DAREDEVIL's second season had the organization supposedly dealt a blow yet they continue to have infinite numbers of disposable ninjas to throw at our heroes. The Hand is an amorphous collection of contradictory incoherence and DEFENDERS has endless scenes of the Hand villains engaging in tedious discussions of nothing.
Elektra is a pathetic villain with the writers consistently having the villains highlight how she hasn't been at all successful against the Defenders to the point of bringing in anonymous henchmen for her to kill to try to establish her sense of threat. Then there's the big reveal -- that the island of Manhattan (which weighs approximately 3 billion tonnes) is built on exactly one dragon skeleton and extracting some vaguely defined substance will cause the island to collapse.
I'm not sure what's more ridiculous, the idea that an entire city is built on such a comparatively tiny structure and no one ever noticed -- or the idea that Elektra is supposed to be dangerous.
There's also the fact that DEFENDERS can't even figure out if the Hand destroyed K'un Lun or not, at times saying they did so, at others saying it was someone else, and later saying they hope to return to the city that was destroyed by either them or others. What!?
The DEFENDERS writers also seem deeply aggravated with the Iron Fist character: Stick calls him the stupidest Iron Fist in history and the series repeatedly ties Danny Rand to a chair or a stretcher and swaps him out with Colleen Young.
For a superhero show, DEFENDERS seemed to consist largely of people sitting around having slow, boring conversations about nothing whatsoever with the action rarely ever capitalizing on Daredevil, Iron Fist, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage somehow combining their abilities or working together at all. The series, despite the writers' obvious disdain for IRON FIST, focuses its attention on the Hand and the Hand is terrible. I wasn't the biggest fan of AVENGERS, but I did think it was a good call to give minimal attention to the villains and focus largely on the heroes interacting. DEFENDERS has one big episode of interaction and the other seven don't go to much effort to put them together.
DEFENDERS is generic, dull, slow, deeply uninteresting and for me, a real disappointment.
There are no two people more opposed to each other than Informant and ireactions. So, when we both agree that Allison Mack has been swept up in a creepy cult run by a con man, we're probably onto something.
The important thing to hang onto in moments like these, I think, is to remember that Allison Mack merely played Chloe. We should separate the art from the artist. I confess, there is a bitter irony in this for me in that Chloe Sullivan taught me how to be suspicious, to demand that assertions be accompanied with evidence and specifics.
On five occasions, people have tried to rope me into multi-level marketing scams. On three occasions, cultists have attempted to recruit me. While I was innocent, guileless and lonely, Chloe Sullivan's influence helped me see right through these people every single time.
It's unfortunate that Chloe couldn't give Allison the same thing.
Mack and Chloe are different. Chloe Sullivan, despite some truly terrible writing , was a practical-minded character (although to say that, I have to ignore her SEVEN YEARS of crushing on Clark and those healing powers I'd prefer to forget). Chloe was fixated on building her career in journalism and then shifted into the Watchtower initiative. Mack subsumed her life into Chloe's existence.
When SMALLVILLE ended, Mack felt at a loss without writers to script snarky one-liners for her and felt like Chloe was a fully defined person while Mack was a blank template. And, because SMALLVILLE had made her rich, Mack went a different route from Chloe, focusing on intangibles like self-actualization, identity, emotional authenticity -- and this search for ephemeral (and therefore extremely vague) meaning led her into what looks to me and Informant to be a cult.
I would define a cult in this sense as an organization that promises insubstantial, non-material validation in exchange for vast sums of money and the notoriety of their members. Mack, who was desperate for validation, seems to have fallen head-first into this scam.
Cults like these tend to work best with people who are insecure but don't worry about where their next meal is coming from. They target rich but troubled people with emotional needs that cult leaders can salve in the way you saw in that video. Mack expresses her need and this Keith Raniere fellow parrots back her question in paraphrased terms but with no actual specificity.
There's a lot of gossip around Raniere, some of which has been substantiated and some of which hasn't. We can be sure that he ran multilevel marketing schemes and executive coaching workshops that charged people $25,000 a day.
You say that Mack isn't engaging with him, but she seems completely swept up professionally and personally. Mack blogged about how Raniere is her mentor, how he encouraged her to take a step back from acting and figure out who she'd be if she weren't being Chloe, and how she was getting involved in his (high priced) workshops and programs which have been described by cult investigators as flattering people's egos while brainwashing them into Raniere's control.
She now runs some sort of vaguely defined acting school with him that charges $10,000 a year to young performers.
The part where unsubstantiated rumours come in: former followers have claimed that the end goal was to acquire a large pool of young girls -- including Hollywood actresses -- to engage in sexual relationships with Raniere.
The story going around (which may or may not be true) is that Allison Mack is hopelessly in love with him and is now recruiting young actresses into Raniere's harem -- of which Kristin Kreuk was briefly a member but left after breaking up with a cultist boyfriend and after a threeway with Mack and Raniere -- and that Mack's been brainwashed into believing that all this scamming and seduction is some process of self-realization.
I cannot emphasize enough, however, how everything in the above two paragraphs is unproven hearsay. I would be sorry to think any of it true. It is entirely possible that Raniere's former business partners (victims?) have sought to smear him and used Allison Mack's public standing to attack him (with exaggerated claims?). There isn't anything resembling a verifiable source in these claims.
But Informant and I both agree (!!!!!!!!!) that Raniere is a con-artist.
And I just think it indicates that Chloe and Allison aren't the same person; Chloe's bullshit meter is a highly tuned radar for nonsense whereas Allison is deeply susceptible. Cult leaders are bottomless wells of charisma who target people's innate longings and weaknesses; the only reason I'm not a victim myself is because, um, I already had an all-consuming obsession that required absurd amounts of time and investment (SLIDERS, it was SLIDERS).
That said, we are assuming innocence on Mack's part and thinking of her as a victim -- because we love Chloe Sullivan and we don't want to think that this woman who represented everything we'd like to be and like to date could be a willing accomplice to a con-artist and predator.
**
I confess to a certain level of, shall we say, professional admiration for Raniere. I run a book club and one challenge is to keep the conversation going. One technique is to paraphrase what somebody else said in the form of a question to get participants to question, explore and debate what's been said and them transition into something new, while making everyone feel like what they've said was heard and is being considered. It's a terrific conversational approach for a book club.
When Raniere talks with Mack about authenticity -- I've actually used that topic in some of my friendships with actresses. Acting is the art of being natural in highly unnatural circumstances in counterfeit realities. I consider my actress friends to be experts in the art of naturalism and the subjective nature of reality and it's a subject most performers could talk about forever and it's a great resource for conversations in a book club.
And I can (grimly) appreciate the social skills to engineer a position of trust with Allison Mack. I imagine Raniere presented himself as someone who was beyond the rat race, pursuing higher goals of personal definition and Mack latched onto that, thinking this already wealthy man of high ideals couldn't be after her money or her body. I'm kind of like that with women too. I try to communicate that I'm interested in their opinions and unique perspectives formed by their specific life experiences and professions and skillsets -- largely in terms of what it can bring to discussions in my book club.
I am somewhat interested in how my book club could benefit from brainwashing, domination over submissives, psychedelics to induce suggestibility and inducing wealthy members to hand over all their possessions and funds -- or I would be except that seems like a lot of time, effort and energy and I don't need such complications for my book club.
I guess the upshot of all this is that we can respect people's skills and talents (Allison's acting, Raniere's leadership) while being appalled by how they choose to use them... ?
In the comments, Rosenbaum says he’s interviewing Kreuk and Mack in future instalments. The last I heard of Mack, she’d fallen in with this creepy cult leader and his weird harem.
In the movie about the making of SLIDERS REBORN, which would feature me and Transmodiar sitting in a room talking, Tom Welling would play me and Michael Rosenbaum would play Transmodiar and we sound just like them except Tom swears a lot and I don't.
ME: "I'm stuck on this part of the 'Net Worth' Redux script. I've finished everything else, I've fixed all the other plot problems in the story, except -- I can't figure out how Quinn is supposed to survive getting shot at with a bazooka that brings the hotel crashing down around him. I'm really starting to lose hope that I can come up with a solution."
MATT: "Why do they have to fire a bazooka? Is that set in stone? Couldn't the Rovers or whatever the fuck they are called have pirated a piece of tech from the Onliners? Some pulse technology that knocks everyone out without damaging the building?"
ME: "But the bazooka!"
MATT: "I mean, you're trying to reverse engineer a solution to a problem that is fundamentally stupid. So just change the problem to something less stupid. That whole scene is tard-level dumb, you should come up with a completely different scenario. Barring that, change the nature of the weapon and be done with it."
ME: "I didn't want to see it that way, I guess. I wanted to see it as an impossible situation, which Quinn tends to thrive on."
MATT: "Quinn doesn't thrive on that stuff."
ME: "What!?"
MATT: "He is adaptable at BEST. Quinn is not MacGyver. He is not going to engineer a solution out of getting hit by a bazooka."
ME: "MacGyver?"
MATT: "Have you never seen MACGYVER?"
ME: "Is that a TV show?"
MATT: "Are... are you fucking with me right now?"
ME: "I've heard it used as a verb."
MATT: "I am gobsmacked."
ME: "I'm reading the Wikipedia entry on MACGYVER now. But I always thought the best way to handle Quinn was to put the character in insane, impossible, no-win situations. And then come up with some absurd, implausible, nonsensical contrivance that allows him to succeed while using his genius to dismiss any plot problems that may result."
MATT: "See, and that's a problem that was perpetuated by the writers. Each member of the team had a particular skillset. Quinn was the enthusiastic genius. Arturo was the realist, the skeptic. Rembrandt was the street-smart voice. Literally, the voice. And Wade was the devil-may-care element of playful chaos. As time went on more and more things were subsumed by Quinn because he was easiest to write for -- he was the lead, after all. So he became the hacker, the sweet-talker, the fucking lockpick master. But if you are looking at a basics approach, Quinn should be totally out of his element when staring down a bazooka."
ME: "This Wikpedia page on MACGYVER is really inspiring. This reads like the greatest TV show ever made, Matt. 'The clever solutions MacGyver implemented to seemingly unsolvable problems – often in life-or-death situations requiring him to improvise complex devices in a matter of minutes – were a major attraction of the show, which was praised for generating interest in the applied sciences, particularly engineering, and for providing entertaining storylines.' This is totally what Quinn should be!"
MATT: "I'm telling you -- Rembrandt needs to take center stage for a moment. Arturo needs to be a disbelieving boob."
ME: "Matt, MacGyver is the perfect model for Quinn Mallory! Quinn is going to beat that bazooka even if it kills me. MacGyver will lead the way!"
MATT: "God help us."
Michael Rosenbaum is fascinating, a bundle of self-aware neuroticism and bombastic lunacy with a strangely insincere demeanor that is in stark contradiction to a deep sensitivity and compassion. His goofy hipster routine is curiously at odds with Tom Welling being a low-key construction worker who staggered backwards into modeling and acting who had a year or so of partying before deciding to settle down and get married with a steady job in construction -- well, television.
Basically, Tom Welling became, at age 22, what Jerry O'Connell became at age 32. Can you imagine Jerry deciding to get married and settle down during the first season of SLIDERS? Jerry was like Jeff Winger without the smarts.
It's strange to compare Tom and Jerry. They were both athletic, attractive actors playing socially awkward young men. Their characters had exactly the same dress sense in flannel and jeans and moppy hair. The only difference between their clothes is that Clark wore workboots while Quinn wore sneakers.
I once remarked that Tom Welling would have made a god-awful Quinn Mallory because Jerry was, despite his flaws, a very well-trained actor whereas Tom was a cluelessly one-note actor with zero imagination and no ability to play a scientific mind. Now I'm not so sure.
The thing is that Jerry O'Connell was an extroverted being of hypercaffeinated sexual appetites while Tom Welling was and remains introverted and withdrawn and while he partied, he didn't much like it. Jerry was only playing an awkward geek. Tom actually is one, albeit in the body of a football player. Jerry O'Connell saw SLIDERS as his ticket to an open bar at all the good nightclubs. Tom saw SMALLVILLE as his job. But unlike SLIDERS, SMALLVILLE was so well-marketed that Tom knew -- if he did a good job on SMALLVILLE, he'd never have to work again for the rest of his life.
And so, to live up to his responsibilities, Tom blocked out anything that wasn't related to his work on SMALLVILLE (including his marriage). From age 22 to 32, he simply had no personal life. He barely even saw his wife and his marriage failed. Michael notes how Tom started out in Season 5 having put on weight because he had spent the summer eating heavily and realized he could never do that again. Even when he wasn't working, he had to think about work.
Tom Welling committed to SMALLVILLE and engaged with it fully as a creator, producer and director; Jerry may have had those same credits, but he never understood his character in the way Tom got Clark Kent. Could Tom have played a scientist? Jerry O'Connell thinks it absurd that he himself played a scientist. Tom would have given it his best.
It was interesting to hear how Tom regarded modeling and acting: it was simply a job much like construction was simply a job. But he assessed the requirements and impact and handed his whole life over to his character because he knew people were counting on him.
I thought it was hilarious how Michael Rosenbaum described his resentment and irritation with Tom; it aggravated Michael deeply that Michael had spent years honing his craft and paying his dues with one lousy independent film after another. Meanwhile, Tom did some male modeling and became the lead of a hit TV show based on nothing but his chiseled facial features.
Michael then explains that this resentment vanished when Tom was downright apologetic about his lucky breaks and dismissive of his own talents and eager to learn from Michael's acting ability.
Michael describes an absurd event during the filming of the SMALLVILLE pilot: Michael approached Kristin Kreuk and apologized in advance were he to sprout an erection while working with her. Kreuk protested, "But we don't even have any scenes together." Michael responded, "Yeah. I know!"
It's the sort of joke where -- if you're not the most socially skillful individual, it will come off very badly. You have to have off-the-charts charisma to make remarks like that and come off as amusing and endearing as opposed to creepy and harassing and Michael has it.
Roddenberry had no creative input into STAR TREK VI whatsoever beyond raging about how much he hated it. That's it. That's all. (He was annoyed at Starfleet's conspiracy, the Enterprise crew's racism and the militaristic tone. Not a frame was altered to suit him and he died shortly after seeing the film. It seems he hated VI so much it killed him.)
THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY's dialogue says that the Klingon homeworld has been severely damaged and that in order to repair it, the Empire will have to divert their resources away from the military and towards environmental repair -- which is why they initiated peace talks with the Federation. As those talks were successful, we can take it from TNG that the repair to their planet was successful.
STAR TREK VI was made between Seasons 4 - 5 of TNG and most of the film was shot on redressed TNG sets, so they knew full well that the Klingon homeworld had been shown to be a fixture of TNG and that the Federation and the Empire had made peace. The film established the origins of that peace and Colonel Worf, Worf's grandfather, was a little nod to TNG as well as the transition of "where no man has gone before" to "where no one has gone before" at the end of the film.
That said, much of VI makes more sense as an allegory for US/Russia relations than it does in the literal reality of STAR TREK, but I love it anyway.
I dunno what Apple thinks they're getting away with in claiming that this thick-framed phone has no bezel.
I continue to be happy with my Moto G4 on Nougat, which stood in for my DSLR camera last week due to a crisis and acquitted itself rather well. That said, if the Samsung A5 ever drops to a much lower price...
Here are the notes I sent Rewatch Podcast about SLIDERS REBORN which Tom alludes to vaguely in the podcast. http://freepdfhosting.com/f9f41f037b.pdf
I usually keep the GPS and Bluetooth disengaged on my phone. It saves battery. But I've locked the CPU base speed now. As a result, the battery drain doesn't seem terribly severe at all. Three hours on data with full GPS and the Bluetooth connected to both my smartwatch and earbuds and the battery only went down 10 per cent.
If I had to buy a new phone today, I would get the Moto E4. It's a budget device with a 5-inch, 720p screen, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, microSD and it would be sufficient for my ebook reading and social media and total lack of gaming. The 8-megapixel camera is adequate; decent in daylight, needs a flash in low light. It's about $130 USD and I just wouldn't recommend buying a superphone because phones are too fragile and easily lost in my experience.
In your case, I'd probably recommend the Samsung S7. It's about $340 USD and you'd get about the same user-experience as on an S8 except you wouldn't have the bezel-less look.
I upgraded my Moto G4 from Android 6.0.1 (Motorola's Marshmallow build) to Nougat (7.1.2, a custom Lineage OS ROM). Some very interesting results.
Apparently, all this time, my phone has had a notification light that the Motorola Marshmallow software ignored. Why install a light and not write software to use it? Lineage OS uses the light. A flashing notification light uses much less energy. Previously, the phone used Ambient Display which would flash notifications across the screen and every time you picked the device up. But this was a huge power drain because it meant keeping the light and motion sensors permanently engaged to detect unpocketing, flipping and picking up.
The phone can now read the battery life of my Bluetooth earpiece and headphones where it couldn't before. Bluetooth performance on the whole seems to be greatly improved with devices pairing instantly and automatically when they previously had to be connected individually, manually and repeatedly.
There are a lot of effective little tweaks, too. Messaging apps now hyphenate words. Security features will allow the phone to stay unlocked in sleep if you keep it on your person and stay in motion. Snapchat didn't load before; it does now.
And everything is responsive: apps load faster, all the animations have been additionally smoothed. The camera app used to take 4 - 5 seconds to load up, now it takes 1 second, if that.
The phone was now so fast that it began to overheat regularly. That's right! All eight CPU cores were perpetually at maximum clockspeed. The phone got so hot that I had to put it in the freezer while I tried to think out what to do.
The phone's battery drained from 100 to 0 in five hours of mixed use and in sleep mode. Even when idling, the phone was extremely heated. I set the phone to Power Saver mode and its longevity stretched to six hours.
Eventually, I decided to lock the CPU to the lowest clockspeeds. The Moto G4's processor contains two quad-core arrangements, the first at 0.84 GHz to 1.2 GHz, the second from 0.96 GHz to 1.5 GHz. I've set the processors permanently at the base speed and this put the phone back to the icy cool it had on Marshmallow. I'm hoping the multi-core setup will negate any performance loss for me. It seems good enough for Facebook and Twitter and ebooks and Chrome.
I haven't noticed any loss of speed beyond a slightly longer pause to wake the phone from sleep mode (which is better than the phone going dead inside six hours). But I suspect that if I were a gamer (and I'm not), the processor being locked to lowest speed would lead to slow load-times and poor framerates.
I don't have any more information or opinions about Joss except that I believe Kai Cole's allegations to be true because Joss has failed to refute them.
... honestly, it makes me think about ME, because I am a ridiculously self-involved person. There's a lot of bad behaviour in my past, and while I was equally terrible to all people, some of them were women and every time I see someone taken down publicly, I wonder how long it is before my own misdeeds come back to bring me crashing down.
And every time the Joss Whedons and Devin Faracis and Brian Woods of the world come crashing down, I wonder if and when the consequences of my poor choices from the person I used to be will blow apart the person I've become. That said, I never assaulted anybody and my misdeeds are more spoken than acted.
Which may be why I always liked how Dan Harmon presents himself as a defective, malfunctioning wreck. “I am not a good person; that's why I want to make a good show for good people,” he declared once. “A fan of COMMUNITY doesn't have to be a fan of Dan Harmon. I am a creepy jerk.” Well, so was I. I think I’m better now, but changing myself never seems to change what I did.
If I were Warner Bros., I would fire Whedon off BATGIRL immediately and hire Joe Wright (HANNA) to direct and Doris Egan (HOUSE) to write the script -- not because I believe the stories about Whedon, but because the optics are too bad to ignore.
I don't have much behind the scenes knowledge of Whedon's behaviour. I've heard two versions of the Charisma Carpenter firing; the first is that she was fired for getting pregnant. The second is that she became difficult to work with following a miscarriage due to her depression and grief, resulting in highly acidic behaviour towards the other cast and crew that led to her removal from the series.
I have always found it strange to accuse Whedon of celebrating abuse and rape in his writing when fictional characters are designed to suffer for dramatic purposes. Being a feminist and having sex with lots of different women are not mutually exclusive values.
But having sex outside of the committed marriage to which you've agreed is unacceptable. If you want to be a player, don't marry someone as your one and only. It is also unacceptable to engage in romantic or sexual relationships with women whom you employ and whose careers you control; there are inherent power imbalances that are destructive.
I hope that Kai Cole's account isn't true. Whedon's non-denial denial, however, was so empty that it made Cole's account of being gaslit and traumatized to be all the more credible. As far as the world is concerned, Whedon cheated on his wife constantly and he had affairs with people with whom he was in a position of authority and control. He allowed his wife to think they were monogamous, meaning she had no knowledge of what STDs she might be exposed to, and he knowingly and indifferently traumatized her with his infidelities.
If you have any details, please share them. However, if this is going to be another Wil Wheaton situation where you allude vaguely and never offer specifics, please don't.
In the Bryan Singer case, Singer was unequivocal in declaring his innocence and was able to prove that he had been in Toronto when his accuser claimed Singer had raped him in Hawaii. The plaintiff in that case was later exposed as a serial liar and conman. In this instance, Whedon has refused to comment, allowing these accusations to stand unchallenged.
From a public relations standpoint, it looks true. If Whedon isn't going to defend himself, then he needs to wrap up his work on JUSTICE LEAGUE, then leave film, TV and comics. His reputation as it stands will now damage every female-forward project he touches.
I'm sorry to hear this. It is an unavoidable yet painful consequence of pet ownership that we outlive our companions. Please hang onto your 15 years of memories as best you can.
Hmm. I ran into something similar on Reddit back in 2015; when sharing SLIDERS REBORN, my posts were blocked as spam and I had to contact the moderator who made me a pre-approved poster. It happens. Still...
Craig Byrne, the creator of KSiteTV is a very interesting figure in fandom. Full disclosure: there is bad blood between us. Fuller disclosure: I was entirely in the wrong in our dispute as I was an impulsive teenager who had yet to learn that my crazy rage should be put into fiction as opposed to interaction on Byrne's SMALLVILLE message board. It would drive me crazy that Clark/Lana fans would mock Chloe and I was vitriolic and insulting. It would drive me crazy that fans would ship Clark and Lex when I saw them as brothers.
Today, I realize that people enjoy art on their own terms and see no need to demand that anyone appreciate content with my views, but at the time, I considered anyone who disagreed with me on highly subjective matters to be deficient and malicious. I must confess that I am deeply ashamed of my behaviour, particularly for how my remarks came off as homophobic. Byrne banned me. He was right to do it.
Anyway. We sometimes run afoul of the specific culture in different fandoms. The culture of KSiteTV is, I find, decidedly corporate; Byrne didn't actually enjoy SMALLVILLE despite creating the premier SMALLVILLE site, KryptonSite. In his personal blog, he was very critical and mocking of the show and on the boards themselves, he was indifferent.
But because he ran KryptonSite, he opened the door to networking with the show's staff and this led to Byrne writing the official guides and companion books for SMALLVILLE as well as creating KSiteTV, a sci-fi fantasy TV news site. While Byrne made fan interaction available, it was all to build an audience for his empire and he served fans in order to monetize fandom (and feed some of that money back into serving fans).
We should all admire how he took his hobby, writing about TV, and turned it into a career. However, the KSiteTV empire is ultimately to serve Craig Byrne, to fuel his books, to develop his audience and to increase his ad revenue. That is perfectly fair; it's his website. Why shouldn't he find a way to earn money from doing what he loves?
But as a result, the corporate culture of KSiteTV is at odds with promoting other people's tie-in materials because it was designed to promote KSiteTV's materials.
With the LOIS & CLARK fandom, Tom and I encountered a set of fans who saw LOIS & CLARK as a cult show with a specific narrative around the behind the scenes story. That narrative was entirely about blaming the Season 2 - 4 producers for any story directions the fans didn't like, much like we do in SLIDERS fandom.
However, in my research, I found that the Season 2 - 4 producers were actually working under severe duress from network directives. I pointed this out, Tom pointed this out, and the L&C fans got upset because our information did not reinforce the cult TV culture of blaming the names that appeared in the L&C credits as opposed to finding fault with the ABC network administration.
And with SLIDERS, Tom and Cory fit right in because SLIDERS' fan culture is that of a Do-It-Yourself group. SLIDERS was so badly mistreated and neglected that we fans had to do everything short of making the show by ourselves.
We couldn't trust the actual producers on the show to be honest with fans; Temporal Flux and the Expert had to offer their services and when Season 5 story editor Keith Damron portrayed TF and the Expert as delusional liars, fandom considered TF and the Expert to be far more credulous and reliable than an official staff member and history proved this view to be correct.
We had to make our own DVDs because Universal's box set put them out in the wrong order. We had to make our own DVD cases because of the ridiculous foam cases. We had to make our own episode guides because the one written and published for a price was based on scripts rather than episode viewings.
We had to make our own tie-in novels because Universal couldn't be bothered. We had to make our own twentieth anniversary special.
I've been informed that it was insane to write a six-part screenplay series for a third-tier 90s show that collapsed upon itself after 22 episodes and that it was even crazier to rope the two premier podcasters for the show into recording an installment that mocks my plotholes and pokes fun at my misjudgements and lapses of logic.
But that's the DIY nature of SLIDERS -- which is why Rewatch Podcast fit right into our multiverse.
I think that the Darkness plotline worked fine in Season 10 -- in terms of how it began in Season 10, episode 1 and ended with episode 13. Once the Darkness had been rebuffed and rejected by the Vigilante Registration Act repeal, the plotline was effectively over, although it continued to linger awkwardly afterwards.
I've gotten slightly more behind the scenes information on the show since the finale and there were some serious production problems throughout Season 10.
Allison Mack's departure came as a huge shock; the producers knew she was tired out and bored with Chloe Sullivan, but they had expected to get her to stand on her marks and say her lines for one more year -- perhaps by signing her to a 13 episode contract so that she'd have nine episodes off.
Instead, Allison signed for the premiere and then a few weeks of work that would amount to about four episodes in the middle of the season. Production was shocked that, due to the state of their contract, they couldn't even be sure if Allison would be in the finale. In fact, all bets were off for the finale.
Because of Season 10's low budget, they could not book actors well in advance. Fans would expect Allison Mack, Michael Rosenbaum, John Schneider and Annette O'Toole in the finale, but without the money to secure them, all production could do was hope to God these actors hadn't booked other jobs by the time the last filming block arrived.
So they planned what they could -- which is to say they planned the first 13 episodes of Season 10. That's why "Beacon," in which the Darkness is defeated and Lionel is ousted from LuthorCorp, feels like a season finale.
The hope was that by the time episode 13 came, they could figure out what the hell to do for 14 - 22. Maybe Allison Mack's contractual situation could be ironed out. Maybe Rosenbaum would commit to return for one episode.
But by the time they got there, the situation had shown only modest improvement. Allison Mack, John Schneider and Annette O'Toole had agreed to keep their schedules free for the finale. They felt they owed it to the fans.
Michael Rosenbaum, however, continued to refuse to return and at this point, production had devised an alternate plan. Having had different actors play Lex as children and an aged clone, they decided could use Lucas Grabeel, the actor playing the young clone of Lex, to stand in for Rosenbaum. They'd established that clones age fast.
The idea being thrown around in the writers' room: Grabeel, who'd played teenaged Lex in Season 6, would be the restored Lex (original brain, cloned body that would quickly age to adulthood and stop there). Lex would revive the remannts of the Darkness to fight Clark. Clark would defeat both (but Lex would survive). At the end of his final scene, Grabeel would age into Rosenbaum (Lex's face would be lifted from a Season 7 shot and grafted onto a body double's head in a dimly lit shot).
If Rosenbaum changed his mind at the last minute, Grabeel's later scenes could be refilmed with Rosenbaum instead of Lex; the clone would age earlier and faster.
Production planned several episodes with Lucas Grabeel, filmed "Beacon," filmed "Scion," -- but then they lost Grabeel; he signed to play a lead character in SWITCHED AT BIRTH. Production had only been able to hire him as a guest-star; they had no contractual hold on him if he found a regular role on another series. They couldn't even get Grabeel for a cameo in the finale.
It was too late to establish another Lex. Both the preferred plan (Rosenbaum returning) and the backup plan (Grabeel standing in) had failed. And so, the Darkness became the major villain of finale. Rosenbaum agreed to return only in time to film two scenes and some second unit footage.
There is a sad irony in how SMALLVILLE could get Rosenbaum but not Grabeel for the finale.
Cast availability was a constant problem in Season 10. There had been scheduling miracles in Seasons 8 - 9. In Season 10, SMALLVILLE's luck ran out. Kyle Gallner and Lee Thompson Young were unavailable all year, hence the body doubles in "Icarus." Alan Ritchson was able to do "Patriot," but unable to do "Icarus" or "Collateral." The producers reached out to Serinda Swan to reprise her role as Zatanna and the idea of her magic creating Clark's glasses-wearing identity retroactively was thrown around as well, but Swan was a regular on BREAKOUT KINGS. In an interview, Swan expressed her deep regret at being unable to take part in Season 10.
With all this confusion and disarray and uncertainty, many things during Season 10 got lost in the shuffle. The writers, struggling to account for a constantly unclear situation, lost track of whether or not Clark was wearing glasses or if Oliver was a fugitive or if he was avoiding Watchtower or not.
They lost their grip on whether Clark selling the farm was a good thing (it was presented as embracing adulthood) or a bad thing (Martha returned to protest). They failed to come up with a convincing explanation for how Clark's glasses would make his coworkers and friends forget what he looked like without them. They wrote cliffhangers the next episode would ignore.
This situation also made the writers blind to how badly the finale would misfire if they told the story of Clark putting on the costume but avoided any shots of him wearing it -- they were simply dealing with too many impossible circumstances at this point to see straight.
The other massive problem -- the writers worked in Los Angeles but filming was in Vancouver -- so the people scripting the show were often detached from the actual on-set production situation, not realizing that Grabeel could go at any moment or that Allison was totally burnt out. As a result, the team was unable to prepare for impending crisis or take advantage of opportunity.
This is not a SLIDERS in Season 5 situation; the SMALLVILLE team on Season 10 were hard-working and talented and they loved their show. They were simply defeated by budget restrictions, unavailable actors and geography that made it impossible for them to plan, prepare or function.
The takeaway from this, I think, is that networks should never cut budgets so deeply that writers aren't in the same city where the show is being filmed and producers can't lock actors down for filming commitments.
The other takeaway I have is that Season 10's failures don't feel like a really big deal to me because the Season 11 comic books were so good. Sometimes, sticking the landing erases any bad feeling caused by a bumpy flight.
I think it was a huge mistake to attempt to tell the story of Clark putting on the suit for the first time while avoiding any shots where he was actually wearing it. It'd probably have been best if the Darkness plotline had been wrapped up as the second-to-last episode season finale with the actual finale being a flash forward set 5 - 10 years later with Superman only ever seen at a distance as a blur of special effects. But maybe they felt they'd used that idea already with the flash forward in the homecoming episode.
Regardless of whether it fit the themes of the show or not, SMALLVILLE was one long build to seeing Tom Welling in the costume -- and they didn't deliver. On a visual level, it was awkward and clumsy to, after Clark suits up, film Tom only from the neck up and to use a CG Tom for long distance shots because the lead character of the show is suddenly subject to awkward angles and editing.
But, because I read the Season 11 comics, it didn't bother me too much.
Tom and Cory: nice work on the FLASH intro! I really liked Cory's comments about the costume and Tom's observations about John Wesley Shipp's musculature. My favourite parts were the remarks about the unaired JUSTICE LEAGUE pilot and the proposed WB FLASH series. I'd never even heard of the latter!
I actually haven't seen THE FLASH (1990) outside of the pilot episode. It looked like a show that was groundbreaking and special in the time in which it was made, but a bit too slow for me to watch when new episodes of the CW's FLASH were airing. However, I will be taking this journey back to the 90s with the Rewatch Podcast and I'm eager to react to both the show and their reactions.
My feelings about THE FLASH (1990) are exactly the same as my feelings about QUANTUM LEAP, so there's another show that I probably wouldn't watch on my own but will for Tom and for Cory.
The initial intro is up!!!
So, we're coming up on the end of THE X-FILES comics where Mulder and Scully take on the Trump administration. Trump doesn't ever appear on the page -- he's heard in a phone call with a hilarious pastiche of his incoherent repetition of key words. The plot is that due to the White House's overall ineptitude, they've failed to notice that their staffers have been infiltrated and replaced by aliens plotting to bring the planet to nuclear war.
I only started following DOCTOR WHO in 2000 (with novels and audioplays) and I was against gender-swapping the Doctor from 2000 to 2014. In the last three years, however, the show has introduced the concept that Time Lords could change gender and successfully sold me on it.
First, DW introduced a mysterious new character named Missy, a manipulative woman who was collecting the consciousnesses of various deceased characters. Missy is revealed to be the Doctor's old enemy, the Master, renamed Missy after the last regeneration resulted in a female body. And the show demonstrated that Missy was still the Master, the core character was the same, just expressed differently in a new form, which is what regeneration's all about anyway.
Originally, I felt that the Doctor, regardless of being an alien, was conceived as a Victorian era scientist and all the Doctors, when written well, have been written as this original character albeit in a different body. As Steven Moffat says, there's only one Doctor but with multiple faces and you feel different when you've changed your clothes or even just your shoes, so imagine how you feel in a whole new body. But that body, and that personality, was that of a man; a man who liked to show off for young girls and be the older brother and father while occasionally being flirty. The Doctor's relationships with women always made me think of him as someone who would always self-identify as a man.
But then came the Master becoming Missy and the Master as a woman was simply the Master with a different body. There was also the first Capaldi episode where the Doctor's old friend, Vastra, remarked that the Doctor, as Matt Smith, would flirt with women, but it was a facade affected to be understood and accepted as something humans could comprehend, and the idea that flirting with women is essential to the Doctor is set aside when Capaldi tells Clara that he is not her boyfriend.
And then, "Hell Bent" had the recurring Time Lord, the General, regenerate into a woman at which point she remarked that her last incarnation was the only time she'd ever been a man and she was relieved to be free of the male ego. At this point, it became clear to me that the Doctor didn't necessarily have to be a man, that Time Lord characteristics even in male-female relationships could shift without being totally revised in a regeneration; the flirting with women was only a technique seen with Doctors 9 - 11 that Capaldi's Doctor had cast off.
So, at this point, DOCTOR WHO has set up the concept of Time Lord males becoming women, shown how Time Lord characterizations can adjust to female bodies, indicated that it's in no way unusual among them, and also had Capaldi declare that he can't actually remember if the First Doctor was a woman or not and that Gallifreyan civilization is beyond concern for gender differentiation. DOCTOR WHO has done all the work to earn this change for the Doctor and done it carefully, thoughtfully and had the process take place over the course of three seasons and anyone complaining that the show is just doing this randomly out of desperation for ratings has not been watching the show very closely.
The other option could be that Durance is playing a younger Alura and Astra and they'll use makeup to take a decade off her face.
I don't see the problem. Erica Durance and Laura Benanti have very similar builds and if they match Erica's hair to the Season 1 Alura look, it'll work. Erica's aged visibly since SMALLVILLE which should make her look more mother than the teen idol she was as Lois. I think they need Alura or Astra in flashbacks to explain the backstory of the new Kryptonian villain.
My concern is that Erica seems incapable of playing characters who aren't sardonic, self-aware goofballs like herself. When she tried playing the regal and elegant Isis, it was embarrassing. Her attempt to do an Allison Mack impression in a body switch episode was an insult to Allison. Erica is a wonderful performer of her natural persona, but I don't feel she can disappear into a character.
Thoughts on why Shatner acted as he did:
Shatner at the time was a bundle of neurotic insecurity prone to eruptions of hostility to keep people at bay. The reason, I think: he couldn't live up to the physical image of Captain Kirk. Kirk is youthful, athletic and tall. To play this character, the balding Shatner wore a two piece wig with makeup carefully blending the seam of the hairpiece with the forehead of his skin. He had lifts in his shoes. While in shape at the start of each season of TREK, filming schedules left him no time to exercise and he had to wear a girdle.
None of this was a big deal until the success of STAR TREK meant Shatner had to maintain this appearance in his public life, not just on set. Joan Collins describes how she ran into Shatner off set and didn't recognize this short, portly, balding old man as the young starship captain. Shatner resented this image he couldn't maintain in real life, resented his co-workers knowing he couldn't maintain it and the sight of a young teenager looking at him adoringly made Shatner feel like a fraud under threat.
It's easier for actors these days because nutrition and exercise methods and technology have advanced. Shatner, desperate to get back in shape, would live on lemon juice for weeks, lose weight, then he couldn't sustain his deprivation and binge. Today, a guy like Stephen Amell knows to keep stable blood sugar levels to avoid cravings, sate himself on protein and fat and we now know that starving doesn't work. Also, no one cared that Picard was bald and all the TNG cast wore muscle suits.
Oh. Sorry. Wheaton has finally divulged the true Shatner/Wheaton meeting and it's more the second version than the first version.
I am so angry right now I am about to explode. Informant and Slider_Quinn21 have officially made an enemy for life today by still refusing to share what they've heard about Wil Wheaton that makes Rick Berman not want him onstage at TREK events.
I have some hope left for Grizzlor.
**
Awhile ago, I heard this (alleged) incident on the set of STAR TREK: THE FINAL FRONTIER where a 17-year-old Wheaton went to the set to meet William Shatner. Wheaton greeted Shatner, said he was a big fan and that perhaps they could have a cup of coffee sometime. Shatner snapped that he had better things to do than hang out with some loser who pressed buttons on the bridge of the Enterprise while the real actors worked. A humiliated Wheaton fled the set. Shatner chased him outside and apologized. Wheaton unleashed a torrent of profanities and insults about Shatner's 70s career of appearances at children's birthday parties, Shatner responded with an onslaught of swear words, James Doohan broke up the fight and dragged Shatner into a trailer to tell him off for how he treated young fans, Wheaton stormed off to the TNG set. Shatner later sent Wheaton a number of gifts in apology, Wheaton coldly ignored them and up to 2002 referred to Shatner as "Old Toupee Head" until they made amends in the green room for THE WEAKEST LINK.
The other version of this story that I've heard is that a busy Shatner barely noticed Wheaton on set except to inquire what his job was on TNG and then remark, "In my day, I'd never let a kid on my bridge," and Wheaton ran away in tears. Shatner has a sense of humour where he likes to insult people and see if they can fling his barbs back at him in which case he'll consider them an equal which gained an acidic edge due to his own humiliation in which, post STAR TREK, he lost all his money in a nasty divorce and spent the 70s as a world famous actor living in the back of his truck, scraping together a living from, as I said, children's birthday parties and the like. It wasn't until Kirk was killed off that Shatner developed the ability to laugh at himself and Shatner and Wheaton, today, have exactly the same sense of self-mocking humour.
Shatner laughing at himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hnBp7x2QAE
I am shocked, outraged and very hurt by how Informant, Slider_Quinn21 and Grizzlor would speak of Wil's reportedly bad behaviour at conventions -- without sharing any of these stories! I demand you spill all of them! So that I can perform armchair psychoanalysis upon them.
Wheaton repeatedly says in his book that he's ashamed of his age 16 - 21 behaviour both on the TNG set and at cons and that a lot of it was because he was really unhappy over how people conflated him with Wesley Crusher. At cons, fans expressed their hatred towards him, and he describes a panel where the screenwriters were actively bashing Wheaton as being annoying even though they were the ones scripting his dialogue. He was constantly on edge at cons. Also, as a kid, he saw the TOS cast doing photo-ops while in a drunken stupor and he had this terror that he was looking at his own future.
I think it's fair for Informant to say Wheaton didn't earn the regard that the other actors won because Wheaton gave up on Wesley, leaving after Season 4's ninth episode whereas the other actors never gave up on their characters.
After his time on the show, Wheaton went to cons as an autograph signer who wasn't there for a speaking engagement and was there to sell autographed photos, and this made him both depressed over his career and increasingly desperate over his finances, so that could also be a factor in his con behaviour back then as he was constantly in denial over his career path, describing it as being in "Prove to Everyone that Leaving STAR TREK Wasn't A Mistake" mode.
Wheaton's written a number of Season 1 TNG reviews where he notes that his performance on TNG was well before he'd received five years' worth of professional training. He says that while he likes the sincerity of his Wesley performance and how he delivers his often terrible dialogue well, he dislikes how he "telegraphs" everything he's about to do; he doesn't play off the other actors, he's visibly waiting for his next line, and he talks about how Patrick Stewart adds so much beyond the page and blows young Wheaton off the screen. He notes a specific moment in the first TNG episode where Stewart looks at Wheaton and Stewart plays it as Picard grappling with how Wesley reminds Picard of Wesley's father, Picard's dead friend. Wheaton says looking back, he wishes he could have done something with this moment -- but he just stood there.
Jerry O'Connell also played a whiz-kid on SLIDERS and did a lot better. Jerry had John Rhys-Davies there to read all the scripts and identify all the subtext and opportunities within each scene, so Jerry's performances have a specificity and weight that vanishes once John's not around. Wheaton notes that the Season 1 - 2 writers, in trying to make Wesley unusually intelligent, would write all the other characters as unusually stupid. In contrast, Tracy Tormé wrote Quinn's intelligence as improvisational brilliance whereas Roddenberry wrote Wesley with average ability that the script declared extraordinary or gave Wesley skills like commandeering the Enterprise that the character hadn't earned with any credibility. There's also the fact that Wesley was constantly excused from fault or frailty whereas Quinn is regularly shown to be incompetent and over his head.
Had Wheaton done PRIMAL FEAR, he would have played it with a lot more experience and craft than he showed on TNG.
Anyway. I quite enjoy Wheaton's self-mocking, self-flagellating persona. He's become a less drunk Dan Harmon and Dan Harmon is basically a drunker and more ridiculous Tracy Tormé and Tracy Tormé is essentially a Gene Roddenberry who can actually write dialogue. There was a point to this, but it has temporarily escaped my mind.
That's another reason why I'm a little disappointed that Discovery isn't an anthology series. I think there's so many cool stories that they could tell in the Star Trek universe, up to and including "What's Wesley up to?" I think a "different era each season" story (like American Horror Story* for Star Trek) would work, or I think a complete anthology series could be really cool (like Twilight Zone* or Black Mirror*)
* Talking strictly about format.
You probably wouldn't get Avery Brooks to return as Sisko for a whole season of something, but you could get him for an episode. Same with virtually any of the other actors (Patrick Stewart might be the only guy too big for something this small, but even he might do a cameo or something). Let's check in on the TNG crew. Or the people at Deep Space Nine. How's Riker's first big command going? What's Jake Sisko doing? How'd the Voyager crew end up? What was the adjustment to the first years of the Federation like for the Enterprise crew?
Or go further. What's life like in the 26th century? 29th? 32nd?
That is why God invented all those comic books and novels that you're too good for. ;-)
**
The situation Wil Wheaton described in his autobiography was circa 2001 or so. He's doing fine now.
Wheaton, in his biography, explains that Rick Berman prevented Wheaton from exercising his option to be absent from THE NEXT GENERATION in order to do a film, telling Wheaton the film's shooting days overlapped with a Wesley-centered episode. Then the shooting days for the Wesley episode came and Wheaton had no scenes whatsoever.
Wheaton was outraged and quit. In the rush of freedom from STAR TREK, he decided to focus on acting lessons, hone his craft, refine his skills and turned down the lead role of PRIMAL FEAR which took Edward Norton to stardom while Wheaton finished his education andwent to work for a computer startup firm that collapsed.
In returning to Hollywood, he couldn't land any roles. He'd been a very cute little boy, but now he was an extremely average looking adult man and the roles he competed for went to more conventionally attractive actors. He used up his money from STAR TREK on his wedding, his stepsons and a series of legal problems caused by his wife's ex-husband. With his savings gone and not much work, Wheaton was under a mountain of debt, borrowing money from his parents and constantly terrified to lose his house. He describes an evening at Hooters where his server asked him, "Didn't you used to be an actor when you were a kid?" and the horrifying realization that he couldn't claim to be an actor now.
In his autobiography, Wheaton describes how leaving STAR TREK was the right move in that moment: a chance to grow up, move forward and not be ruled by Rick Berman's ego. He studied acting more thoroughly. He met his wife. But years later, he was out of work, financially shattered, and he fully grasped the bitter irony that STAR TREK had been driving him to depression and misery, but he was depressed and miserable now and if he'd done his seven years on the show, he could be depressed and miserable and not nearly bankrupt. In shameful desperation, he was auditioning to game shows and trying to trade in on his D-list celebrity standing to support his wife and children, barely winning a spot on THE WEAKEST LINK.
He was called to appear in NEMESIS in a single scene that would take two days to film that was cut from the movie and not even invited to the premiere. Wheaton notes that this was a long line of behaviour from Rick Berman at events where Berman would call up every TNG regular to go onstage and take a bow and be recognized -- but Wheaton would be excluded, left sitting alone in the actors' section, the only person left in that section, seated while his co-workers were onstage.
Wheaton also said, however, that he didn't handle his exit from STAR TREK well. He doesn't go into detail beyond saying he was immature, that it was hard being a child surrounded by adults, he later describes an apology he gave to Patrick Stewart without conveying precisely what it was for which he had to apologize. Wheaton says that Stewart responded simply by saying that Wheaton had been a teenager and that everyone understood. So, I assume that Wheaton was not exactly innocent, although youth excuses many misdeeds.
I'm not clear on Berman's reason for disliking Wheaton, but at one point, Wheaton exclaims that he is sorry and that he was a kid and that it hurt that the DVD set doesn't use any photos of Wesley on the box or the discs. Then, Wheaton relates how he hit a period where conventions were no longer offering him a decent speaking fee, considering him on the same level as performers who played Transporter Chief #7 and sell signed headshots. "I went there expecting to sell hundreds of autographed pictures... hardly anyone was interested. I sat in a cavernous and undecorated area. 'This is what my life has come to,' I thought. 'I am a has-been.'"
A convention organizer for a 15-year anniversary convention flat out told him that while they paid top dollar for STAR TREK captains and good money for the likes of Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden, Wheaton was worthless.
Wheaton blogged about this conversation and the organizer was beset by a deluge of emails, phone calls and faxes by angry TREK fans who were furious at a TNG-actor being treated in this fashion and the convention apologized and booked Wheaton and his comedy troupe.
Wheaton describes the tipping point of his career -- an infomercial where he would peddle 3D glasses for computer games, an infomercial Wheaton describes as the final nail in the coffin holding his aspirations to be a serious actor. Weighing it, he felt that the product was good, that his career was dead anyway, and he might as well take the money, pay off his debts, support his family and transition into writing.
This led to his career renaissance on THE GUILD, THE BIG BANG THEORY and his involvement in the GEEK AND SUNDRY media platform and eventually, Wheaton was able to step into a new career as a geek-personality and web media producer and then a voice acting career. I think, financially, Wheaton is doing fine now. However, I think his career trajectory, during the downward spiral, spoke to a failure to recognize opportunity and a lack of creativity.
I can't judge him for quitting STAR TREK (although I'm sure his accountant does and Wheaton clearly credits this decision with destroying his career), but turning down PRIMAL FEAR was really, really stupid and he says so himself. "I foolishly thought Hollywood would wait for me," he writes. After that, he spent too much time doing only auditions when what he needed to do was start making his own work.
I'm friends with lots of actors (okay, two actresses) and they are perpetually auditioning for roles they don't get. Their attitude is to write their own dream roles and make sure that even if they're tending bar and working shifts in group homes to pay their bills, they have lived out their creative ambitions in the venue of independent stage theatre. Then there's actors like Tom Welling who spent their time as actors treating the set of their show as film school so that afterwards, Tom wasn't just an actor but also a producer and director. Allison Mack was in the same position as Wheaton on SMALLVILLE and stuck it out for nine years before having a mid-life crisis that resulted in her reduced role for Season 10. Why'd she stay? She did it for the money.
In an interview with Robert Floyd, whom I still like even though he voted for Trump, Floyd spoke how of actors should save their money. "You got paid as a guest star," he recalls saying to a bartender. "Don't spend that money, don't live off that money or you will be broke, you will have nothing," advising his employee to instead treat his bar wages as his spending money and his acting wages as savings.
Wheaton says after TREK, he fell in love with the woman who became his wife, fell in love with her children, now his stepsons, and he spent everything he had from TREK and STAND BY ME to set up his new life with his new family. Getting married so young and with kids to support without a stable income was foolhardy, but while Wheaton regrets leaving TREK and rejecting PRIMAL FEAR, his marriage and stepsons are not regrets and never were, not even when he was on the verge of homelessness.
As Wheaton himself confesses, he would've been better off doing Seasons 5- 7 of STAR TREK. But he doesn't need it to help him anymore; he makes his own work now and he's not selling signed action figures to make a minimum payment and hoping DISCOVERY will cast him in order to save him from his creditors.
With regards to CNN, I completely agree with Informant and it's a lengthy pattern of what alternates between journalistic malpractice and journalistic bullying that cannot be allowed to stand. The Intercept has a fairly good overview of recent media recklessness at https://theintercept.com/2017/06/27/cnn … ia-threat/ and their outrage over CNN threatening citizens at https://theintercept.com/2017/07/05/cnn … ddit-user/ is how I feel about it too.
I was reading Wil Wheaton's autobiography, JUST A GEEK, where he described the terrible shame of running into Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart and their assorted successes while he'd had one disastrous audition after another, and how he was embarrassed to park anywhere near them because they all had luxury cars while he had a Volkswagen and how he came to realize that despite his youthful bravado, quitting STAR TREK had been a complete and total financial disaster and career suicide and I felt this tremendous sense of relief and comfort to know that even someone as cool as Wil Wheaton has often felt pathetic.
Informant wrote:Can someone explain to me why people hate the Amazing Spider-Man movies so much?
The first Amazing Spider-man is probably my favorite film with the character. They hit all the right notes for me (it even somehow felt like the 80's comics I grew up with); and it provided the best explanation I've seen of why decent people in the world would fear and hate Spider-man (because of his initial focus on the almost ruthless hunt for Uncle Ben's killer).
Amazing Spider-man 2 was a huge drop of the ball and the worst of the franchise in my opinion. The Spider-man costume was perfect, but everything else was like something Joel Schumacher made. And as if my disappointment in the movie wasn't enough, the mid credits scene was some left field promo for X-men.
This is exactly how I feel.
I can't agree with that. You are free to watch it in production order, of course, but I feel that "As Time Goes By" is, as Ian McDuffie put it, the unplanned series finale of SLIDERS.
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