Author: tederick
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Absolute Candor”
“A promise is a prison, Elnor. Do not make yourself another’s jailer.” Look: I like Elnor. I like him a lot! Giving Picard his own personal bodyguard Elf is nuts, but the Qowat Milat (Romulan ninja-Elves who only speak the bluntest version of the truth) are my kind of loony. Inventing a whole second sub-sect…
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What if I just wrote it?
Here’s the thing: as soon as the phrase “machine learning” was on the table, any human being with a brain should have been so freaked out that they smashed all of their electronic devices with a hammer. We weren’t, and we didn’t, and now here we are: the beginning of the actual era where, to…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “The End is the Beginning”
“You are Starfleet. To the core.” Patrick Stewart does a better job of convincing me of the emotional contours of Picard’s departure from Starfleet in this episode; in the prologue flashback, we see him emerging from the immediately-post-Mars, let’s-still-save-Romulus meeting, having staked his career on their saying yes — and Starfleet having called his bluff…
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THELMA & LOUISE Blu-ray Review: Soaring Into the Criterion Collection
A gregarious polyglot as a filmmaker, Ridley Scott has tried a bit of everything. By the time Thelma & Louise hits screens in 1991, he has already made two of the most important science fiction films of all time, and has tried his hand at historical drama, fantasy, and neo-noir. (In the thirty years since,…
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Best of a bad batch
Are we there yet? Are we at the point where we, as a citizenry, can acknowledge that The Mandalorian is pretty bad now… and that it wasn’t ever, actually, particularly good? My own stance on the series has been: it was good, not great, weekly Star Wars. It was amiable enough to begin with, and…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Maps and Legends”
“The sheer. Fucking. Hubris.” “Maps and Legends” opens with a banger flashback sequence where the androids (here called “synths”) commit their act of… terrorism? Sabotage?… on Mars. If you’ve ever played Alien: Isolation, you’ll recognize the vibe: ghost-eyed indestructible beings with the strength of dozens of people apiece, snapping necks, blowing brains out with industrial…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — “Remembrance”
“I don’t want the game to end.” The first episode of Star Trek: Picard is a huge episode of television. Premieres were never this show’s problem. Each season begins formidably, with intent writ large across entertaining hours, which see us reconnecting with old friends who find themselves in new surroundings. That’s an elaborate way of…
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An open letter in support of independent cinemas in Canada
Dear MP Marci Ien, MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam, Minister Pablo Rodriguez, and Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, Do you support The Revue Cinema, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Imagine Cinemas Market Square, and the Ontario Place Cinesphere? I’ve been enjoying great movies at great cinemas since, literally, as far back as I can remember. My first memory is of my…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — NEMESIS rewatch
“It seems as though we are truly sailing into the unknown.” What, then, of Data? The reason I needed to hit both First Contact and Nemesis on my way into Star Trek: Picard‘s first season was that while the modern incarnation of the captain began in the former, everything else about the Picard series, for…
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Blogging the Next Generation: Picard — FIRST CONTACT rewatch
We’ve been here before. Quite literally in this case — I covered Star Trek: First Contact, the second Next Generation feature film, as part of Blogging the Next Generation. More broadly, I started, and finished, that project a decade ago: a three-year tour through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, then on Tumblr,…