I think this may be the one where I bow out.

Of commenting, anyway. I've been ruminating over whether I want to contribute to the excellent comments here (I mean, I'll still chime in on the DS9 stuff) but I think it's getting too frustrating.

Spoilers for the rest of the series:

Vg'f abg gung V qba'g ybir Iblntre'f punenpgref naq pbaprcg. V guvax vg naq gurl ner nznmvat. Gur npgvat'f svefg-engr gbb -- rira Eboreg Qhapna ZnpArvy qbrf gur orfg ur pna jvgu Gbz Cnevf, jub'f cneg bs gung Xvex-Evxre-Cnevf Znayl Ureb gevavgl. (V'z zhpu sbaqre bs Trrxl Gbz, jub ernef uvf urnq yngre va gur frevrf, jvgu uvf ybir bs ybat-tbar nagvdhr pnef naq fvyyl byq FS frevnyf.)

Ohg fb zhpu bs gur gvzr, gur fubjehaaref whfg tnir hf gur fnzr fghss jr'q tbggra ba GBF naq GAT, bire naq bire ntnva. Gurl arire rkcyberq -- ng yrnfg, nf sne nf V'z pbaprearq; lbhe zvyrntr znl inel! -- gur pbaprcg'f cbgragvny, naq gurl jnfgrq gurve terng pnfg -- Eboreg Orygena rfcrpvnyyl, ohg Tneerg Jnat gbb, naq Wraavsre Yrva jura fur jnf fgvyy ba gur fubj. Vg'f fb sehfgengvat; vg znxrf zr fb natel, orpnhfr vg jnf n tbbq fubj naq unq gur cbgragvny gb or n terng fubj, ohg V pbhyq arire ybir vg gur jnl V ybirq QF9. Gung znxrf zr fnq nf jryy nf natel, ubarfgyl.

I wish you guys the best, though, and I'll still be reading along. It's going to be very interesting.

Since I didn't say it yesterday, I wanted to just pause a second and say thank you. I've really enjoyed this feature, and I wanted to say I appreciate all the work you put into it. Thanks! You're awesome!

That last thing you said could not be more true. Also, I'm going to be thinking "V, Obet" the rest of the day; that's right up there with "Abool Aboof" as an appropriate-sounding rot-13ing.

Well.

I haven't watched this episode since it first aired. 1992 me, who had turned fourteen two days before it aired, thought it was tremendously brave of TNG to air an episode like that. I thought it probably had something to do with gay rights (fourteen year old me had a vague idea that there were people who weren't comfortable with their assigned gender somewhere in the world, but like a lot of straight boys -- at least at the time; I don't know about now, but I hope like hell it's different -- that idea freaked him out profoundly and he didn't like thinking about it) and, years later when I learned that Jonathan Frakes had fought hard for a man to play Soren (I wonder if he actually tried for a transwoman? Frakes, who went to Julliard and had been part of the New York and L.A. theater scenes before heading to Hollywood, certainly had to be more enlightened, or at least more knowledgeable, than I was at the time) , I was proud of him, but didn't give a lot of thought to the episode. It was only later that I got over my anti-trans* prejudices enough to understand why someone might be offended by this episode, and... yikes.

Wanting to end on a happier note, I will mention that Geordi's Beard was not something the producers particularly liked -- they really wanted him to be clean-shaven -- but LeVar Burton, who was getting married around this time, had insisted that he wasn't going to have the wedding (and thus the wedding pictures) without the beard he regrew every time they stopped shooting. Eventually they gave in.

I remember when this came out, Oregon was just starting the debate over physician-assisted suicide that led to us being the first U.S. state to legalize it. Like many people have noted, it still feels topical today. I'm not sure it's explored as well as it could have been, but I do love that early scene between Riker and Worf. Frakes and Dorn just -- well, I was going to say they "just kill the scene," but that ends up sounding grotesque. They're both very good.

I think I can see what they were going for with that scene. It's supposed to be a contrast between the Federation's all-encompassing hope and the Klingon warrior mentality, I suppose.

V'z tbvat gb ebg13 guvf whfg va pnfr, orpnhfr n ybg bs gur cybg cbvagf trg qrnyg jvgu ntnva va Trarengvbaf, rira gubhtu V *guvax* gurl jrer bevtvanyyl qrnyg jvgu ba GBF naq va gur GAT cvybg. V ernyyl pna'g erzrzore, fb V svtherq orggre fnsr guna fbeel.

V thrff jr pna unaqjnir Evxre'f irel, irel fgebat artngvir ernpgvba gb nffvfgrq fhvpvqr nf orvat n zragnyvgl gung terj bhg bs JJVVV naq gur Cbfg-Ngbzvp Ubeebe. Uhznavgl univat fheivirq nyy gung, evfra bhg bs gur nfurf (yvxr n Cubravk, ub ub) vg'f cresrpgyl cynhfvoyr gung jr nf n fcrpvrf jbhyq nyzbfg srgvfuvmr fheiviny. Bs pbhefr, jung'f ernyyl tbvat ba urer, V guvax, vf gung gur jevgref qvqa'g unir n irel fbcuvfgvpngrq ivrj (be whfg pbhyqa'g cbegenl bar, tvira ubj bireshyy gur rcvfbqr nyernql vf) bs gur vffhrf vaibyirq, rfcrpvnyyl Jbes'f orpbzvat unaqvpnccrq.

Oh, well. The cast does their usual yeoman's work, even Sir Patrick, who is given some fairly clunky stuff to deliver. I think Gates McFadden's especially good, although Michael Dorn is (I mean, who's surprised?) the standout here.

One other thing. (I feel like talking about this every time I see TNG Klingons, but the comment about Brian Bonsall upthread reminded me this time.) For the longest time I just assumed that TNG -- I knew that TOS didn't do this, but I assumed that TNG was just casting black actors, or at least dark-skinned actors, as Klingons. It honestly never occurred to me that the show was putting them in brownface, and... I mean, obviously now I know, and now I can't unsee it; more to the point, I can't stop thinking about how disgusting it is. (Of course, I'm the same dude who watched the show for *thirty years* before realizing that Shatner was wearing a toupée during TOS, so I guess I'm pretty oblivious.)

This is kind of a hard episode for me to comment on.

It's actually my all-time favorite Next Generation episode. The iffiness of the Riker/Ro interludes didn't occur to me at all -- I was pretty young and very naive when I watched this episode the first time. Even now, my privilege -- I'm happy to admit it -- means I have a hard time really understanding why people identify those scenes with lack of consent. (I mean, I understand, but I don't UNDERSTAND, if that makes any sense.) Scarlettmi puts it well in the first comment, I think: I don't feel that their lack of memories about their lives to date impairs their ability to make decisions for themselves about anything else, so....

Still, mine is a minority (and very privileged) viewpoint, and one that I'm happy not to... I don't know, impose on anyone?

Goodness knows, I'm used to having opinions like that, relating to TNG. I mean, I like Riker, for heaven's sake. (My poor wife, also a big Trek fan, has had to put up with me trying to figure out why it is that I don't find Riker at all skeevy or smarmy, usually by asking her questions about why she does. In the end, I should probably just put it down to being an Aspie and let it rest there.)

But yeah, I love this episode. I love the mystery, I love they way MacDuff just pops up there (it's a little like an AU fanfic, right there in a real episode!) and you're trying to figure out exactly what his deal is at the same time the other characters are trying to figure out who they even are. I love the insights we get into people's characters. Honestly, I could sit around and watch TNG (or, well, just about any other media) do character development all day. Worf and Picard particularly shine in this, I think, but I also really like what happens to Ro. With her traumatic past shorn away, she's so much more relaxed, and... I don't know, it seems like it'd be a really freeing experience, even if only on a subconscious level. (It certainly didn't hurt that Michelle Forbes and Jonathan Frakes have buckets of chemistry.)

So... yeah. I love this one, although now I feel sort of defensive about that, and that makes me sad.

As I was reading along here, I had a notion.

I wonder why Jack Crusher never recorded any more messages for Wesley. He died when the boy was young, but not when Wes was a baby.

What if he did record more, but never got around to sending them -- and they went down with the Stargazer? It's possible that they're still in the computer core, wherever it went after the confrontation with Gos.

1. Yep.
2. Yep. I'm a practicing Quaker. (Although the official Quaker doctrine is that we don't have a doctrine, so it's complicated.)
3. Sort of. That is to say, I'm a member of my city's Quaker meeting, but it takes place on the other side of the city and we don't have a car, so we only rarely attend; maybe when my daughter's a bit older, we'll make more of an effort.
4. Yep, very much so. My dad's a cultural Lutheran; my mom's a fairly devout Methodist, and we all attended a Methodist church. I was raised in a very liberal mainline congregation and that shapes my values to this day.

I think this may actually be the worst episode of the third season... which is saying a lot.

Dammit. I really hate this episode -- even I, who was not the most enlightened kid in the world, thought the sexism was weird and obvious when I saw it way back when. I would really love to go back and swap the creative teams for The Twilight Zone and Star Trek and see what difference that would've made. (TTZ was very, very progressive in terms of casting actors of color and taking on civil rights and mental health issues, at least for a show of its time. Also, for the most part, excellent writing.)

I also hate to see TOS go out this way. This was the original, what so many of us who love episodic SF grew up thinking of as the gold standard (a prize that now, for my money, is jointly shared by ST: DS9, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and Farscape) and it's just incredibly frustrating to see characters that I'm so fond of reduced to such shoddy episodes with such awful treatment of women, minorities, and just... I mean, some really, really awful writing.

And then there's Kirk. Dammit, I want to like him. I want to like him really badly, and I do, most of the time; thinking of the way he was in most of the first and second season (especially the first half of season one), when Shatner kept the hammier aspects of his acting a little more tightly under wraps....

My wife, an enormous Trek fan who grew up in the Australian outback (her parents were hippies; they pretty much lived alone, sometimes working as farmhands, sometimes living in various communes, etc; so my wife is that rare fan of the Trek franchise who became a fan through the books, and didn't see any of the shows until she was in her teens and they moved to a city), once said something that I thought was very insightful: that Kirk is much more appealing when you take away the cheesy attempts at comedy and most of the romance aspects... the way it's done in many of the books. (I particularly like Diane Carey, Diane Duane's and John M. Ford's takes on Kirk; your mileage may vary, of course, but they're all easily available as e-books or paperbacks.)

Last thing: I cannot wait... I CANNOT WAIT... for TNG to begin. I mean, I know I'm going to get a massive kick out of watching Mark watch the movies (Nygubhtu V'yy or ubarfg, V'z xvaq bs jbeelvat nobhg uvz guebjvat uvf GI guebhtu n jvaqbj juvyr jngpuvat gur svefg bar. Gnyx nobhg n zbivr gung unfa'g ntrq jryy!), but even though vg'f jvqryl nterrq gung frireny -- pregnvayl abg nyy, gurer ner ybgf bs trzf, ohg gur fubj gbbx n pbhcyr frnfbaf gb svaq vgf srrg -- bs gur rcvfbqrf va gur svefg gjb, gjb-naq-n-unys frnfbaf bs GAT ner cerggl fcbggl, just knowing that Mark is going to be watching the cast he'll be watching and seeing some of the things I know he'll be seeing in just a few short days and over the coming months makes me really happy.

And then comes DS9. Which I believe will be spent with me doing a lot of dancing if Mark likes it, and a lot of nervous lip-chewing if he doesn't. Onward!

If you do, you might want to read them in chronological order, not order of publication -- Forester's first book about Hornblower was set when Hornblower's the captain of a battleship, and didn't write about his youth until much later. I'm not sure if it would make much of a difference where you begin, but there it is. (My favorite Hornblower novels, incidentally, are "Hornblower and the Hotspur," about his first command, and especially "Hornblower and the Atropos," about the next one. They're not as action-packed, but you get a lot of fun characterization.)