The Road to DS9 continues and I think it's one of those roads where it gets longer every time you take a step on it.
There's this yin and yang to The Beige and The Bold. A balance. A comme ci, and a comme ça, if you get what I'm saying. What I'm saying is...enjoy this solo episode.
Also, when I say "crazy" here, I mean it in a way that we accept Barclay has a host of problems but we still accept him. The problem in his first appearance wasn't really his problems, but everyone else on the ship being unable to work around them. And now, despite everything I say about "Realm of Fear," Barclay isn't any less anxious, really; the crew of the Enterprise--and I hope the viewer at home--has learned to accept that about him.
But I say a lot of stuff in here, so maybe forget me?
The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.
source https://anchor.fm/tbntb/episodes/Realm-of-Fear-edsvef
4 comments:
Rolling the season 5 summary ep into the series endcap?
Fun to see Barclay again, I don't really sympathize with his anxieties but I'm glad the other characters haven't backslid from his last appearance. I do feel him walking laps - I don't know what I'd do if I were somewhere I couldn't stretch my legs.
If I were to rewrite this, I wouldn't take it as a phobia + mystery episode, but as a more generalizable story of someone with sub-par credibility noticing and building confidence and credibility in a problem everyone else is brushing off.
Good point about Barclay's expendability raising the stakes, and him being the only recurring support character who could have this anxiety. We could maybe replace him with Geordi if we mucked with visor software updates or something, except even then Geordi's got too much credibility; could try Troi, but I don't know how we'd make her fear the transporter; Data becoming afraid of the transporter would be a completely different episode; weirdly, Worf's confidence and brave face could make for a pretty clean substitution. I guess Kiko's always an option too.
With all of the underdefined high-powered physics - transporters especially - there's got to be room to construct a framework where plasma conduits and plasma life forms make sense.
"There's a disabled ship, let's do exactly what they did" - hah, you doubled back to the binary system in "Night Terrors" too, eh?
Interesting that both this episode and the next feature transporters as emergency pocket dimensions.
I just don't know if the supplementals were adding value. I feel like we talked a big game in each one, then forgot them in the upcoming season. They felt like a set of awkward minigames as opposed to core gameplay.
If you like them though, that changes the calculus.
Worf would be a great substitution.
"Night Terrors," "Hero Worship," and I think, "Imaginary Friend," are all examples of the 'let's do what those dead folks did and not die' method of investigation. "Clues," too with the twist that the ship that 'died' was them.
I think the examination of transporters and pocket dimensions comes with Trek being a little more preoccupied with Trek as time goes on. We become more interested in The Star Trek universe than in making general, open-ended stories expressed through the series' logic and characters.
But hey, I've got half a season to complain about that.
"Where No Man Has Gone Before" could fit the mold too, and I'm sure DS9 and VOY aren't immune either... Easy to picture department heads gathered in the conference room, each proposing a plan of action distilled from these episodes, and the last person calling the trope out.
I like the supplementals. I think there's value in reviewing what developments you (dis)liked from a season, and hope for / would enact next season, and any notes lingering from individual episodes. To some extent (perhaps an increasing extent) you guys cover this long-view stuff in individual episodes as you go, and Derek's skipping half the episodes anyways now, so I won't miss supplemental five and six. However, in supplemental three you had Derek compare the three TNG seasons to the three TOS seasons, so when you finish season seven I am looking forward to your comparison of second-half TNG to first-half TNG. Also curious about where you would see seasons eight through ten (fall 94 to spring 97) going.
I've got the season 8 book, so I feel pretty confident about where those seasons would go. ;)
But I'll make sure to do a season 7/series supplemental.
Post a Comment