My thinking was he was almost dead. What's a kid's last words going to be if he's almost dead? "I want my mummy". If that was the last thing coursing through his neurons, the nanogenes would pick that up and might think it "normal".
SpaceScotsman
joined 2 years ago
The banana gag was great, and I think it starts to signal the doctors ongoing hatred of guns. He was quite quick to grab one at the end of Dalek, but now he's more critical of them.
As for the cliffhanger resolution, I would struggle to answer if you asked me to name one episode where a cliffhanger was resolved well.
This is a really good episode and pairs nicely with the previous one.
It's got really nice character work - Nancy being street smart enough to turn tables on the home owner, and a touching twist of her being a single teen mother (and everything else that implies). Jack is a lot more tolerable on this one now he's stopped his fake persona, even if the sonic pissing match is a bit much for me.
The direction in this one is really nice - multiple times there is a sequence where the characters are chatting away and not realising something critical has happened around them. For that I absolutely love the scenes in the doctors room, with the typewriter, and the teleport during the dance.
The explanation of how the child is able to control radios and all the hints leading to the final answer to the puzzle of what's happening are well written. It's a story straight out of black mirror with an all powerful AI gone wrong - a story still very of our times. My only gripe there is his on earth does the child remote control the typewriter, but given how well that scene was done I don't mind it.
The set design of the bomb site is great and really gets the vibe of a hastily erected military encampment. Music wise I again feel that it was a bit much, especially when it interrupts the sweet but creepy lullaby.
Random other remarks :
- why on earth was Jack riding the bomb? It's so ridiculous but it works for his character
- the doctor says he's done a software patch and will email the upgrade - even in 2005 those words in that order are a bit dated
- doctors final words to doctor Constantine made me wonder if this was meant to be a real historical person, but I did a quick search and apparently that's not the case. Maybe a missed opportunity there?
I like this as a replacement for the Winnie the Pooh tuxedo image macro
Given it's been established the only person who can really help control Batel is Spock, and he is incommunicado for the whole episode, both Batel and Gamble should have been in confinement as soon as possible.
The auto-red alerts did stick out a bit, but it kind of makes sense. The computer knows where everyone is and what they usually do, and behaviour-based intrusion detection systems are starting to become normal cybersecurity concepts even today.
The story is reminiscent of more classic trek - away mission, something goes wrong, and the crew have to fix it. There was a lot of classic science fantasy tropes in here - right from the start with the blood magic to open the prison up. When immortality was first mentioned, my immediate thought was that immortality would involve consciousness transfer into another being, and we kind of got that, but not from the immortal beings themselves and instead from others that snuck in through the gaps in between dimensions. I guess these creatures are some sort of lovecraftian indescribable horrors. Seeing how Pelia and Batel both reacted to them suggests there is some shared history amongst many of the species that now exist, and that they all know instinctively to fear them.
They killed off a named character (F for Gamble), which is surprising, but definitely raises the stakes for the rest of the show. I was really not expecting that, and getting such in your face gore (pardon the expression) was quite a lot to take in. The evil doesn't really seem quite well contained in the pattern buffer, and I hope the crew notice this pretty quickly. If it's messing with the computer system, if it can quantum phase itself around any barriers, it should be obvious fairly quickly something isn't right. And the pattern buffer has shown that it can't keep stuff stable forever without continually re-materialising it, which seems like a really bad idea, so that needs dealing with.
Amongst the characters, Spock really shines out here as the voice of reason. If they had listened to him in the first place this whole thing could have been avoided. While I get where the archaeologists amongst the team were coming from, they should have been overruled, and Spock's only flaw here was not putting his foot down. As security, La'an should have pushed behind him on this, and chapel shouldn't have let her desire to explore cloud her judgement.
On sets: Nothing beats a good quarry, love to see that. I really like the exterior and background visuals within the prison - reminds me of the videogame manifold garden (highly recommended if you like first person puzzlers). However, I did feel that the physicality of the room (or just floor) they were on made it very obvious it was a set. The background visuals felt detached from the area where the away team were standing and, backgrounds aside, was too bland for my liking. I think it is a pity we didn't get to explore more because some parts, especially the exterior and the life form they found, had a really cool design.
The directing was good. It was tense, it captured the confusion in the prison well. The chaos on the ship was exciting and felt like there was a risk of real damage. My only major nitpick was it made it very obvious when the evil was first making it's presence known. I don't know if this was an attempt to capture the fact that the evil was there all along and it could choose when to appear, or if it was just trying to signal to the audience "hey, right now something's not right", but I would have preferred if it had been more subtle and let us try to figure out what was going on.
Great episode. With an episode like that I can see why they wanted to add some extra comedy ones around it, but I hope there are more like this. Though I could do without the eye gore, in future.
bottom can't drop out if they never had a bottom
You know what? Do it. I want one of these guys to actually built one of these mega data centres. If we're going to ruin the environment anyway, we might as well encourage the billionaires to bankrupt themselves at the same time.
I'm in the UK, and I don't see it expiring on the iplayer any time soon, so I'm up for continuing them. But if there's not any critical mass of others watching along, it might make sense to put it on break, at least until someone else picks the rights up.
The blitz setting was very well done. Sci-fi spaceships aside, this story feels like the kind of ghost story people might have told each other during that era.
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I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.
I was convinced up until the reveal that the "alien" was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I'm not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they're all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn't go down well for me. It's a generational ship, none of the original "good guys" were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they've killed.
The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn't need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They're all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk's captain literally is not a human.
The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut's perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.
Random other thoughts: