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Happy 17-01 trekkies! (It's like May the 4th, but for real nerds). And this year's 17-01 brings us a new season of Star Trek Discovery!
Even if the movies have essentially stalled, Star Trek is alive and kicking on TV. Because you don't have CBS All Access and can't watch the new Star Trek but you desperately want to stay in the loop and read all about the latest episodes: That's right, Captain's Blog is back in full swing as Discovery Season 2 kicks off 2019 the only way we could ask: long and... prosperous? Okay, I don't know what that means, but it suddenly sounds dirty. Anyway, let's just dive in...
If you're white, you might remember that black, nerdy kid from the show Community who seemed funny named Donald Glover.
If you're a movie-buff you've seen him pop up in The Martian, Spider-Man Homecoming, or The Lazarus Effect. If you're a nerd you know he's playing Lando in the new Star Wars movie. If you're trendy this last week you just saw his music video "This is America" all over the news (and if you're really cool, you already knew about him under his musical stage-name Childish Gambino years ago). He also won awards as a writer on 30 Rock (yeah, that one, where Tina Fey hired him). He also has stand-up comedy on Netflix. But if you're black, you know him from Atlanta, his slick new indie-style TV show he stars in, writes, produces and sometimes even directs on FX about a couple guys in Atlanta coming up in the rap music scene and the real-life troubles and obstacles they encounter both staying around their neighborhood and trying to break out of it. But Atlanta is too good not to share with larger mainstream audiences, and as I discovered after binging both seasons in the last week, it may be about black people, but it's not just for them. Everyone should be watching it. In the 1950's Philip K Dick stumbled across the news that Eisenhower recommended people buy their own bomb shelters because they'd be more likely to take proper care of them. There were two problems with this for the paranoid, anti-establishment sci-fi author. It perpetuated a growing fear of Cold War catastrophe that no matter how nice your day was going, doom was hanging over your head. And it encouraged the consumer to buy his way out of every problem. These two ideas, consumerism and anxiety, formed the cornerstone of his short story, "Foster, You're Dead!" Which was recently adapted into a brilliant hour long episode of the anthology series, Electric Dreams available on Amazon Prime. Star Trek Discovery completes it's epic yet controversial first season with no shortage of last minute twists and thoughtful character developments that tie up the series' themes and plot lines quite nicely. But is it enough to satisfy the Trekkie fanboys? Let's take a look...
(14) "The War Without, The War Within" and (15) "Will You Take My Hand?" The last two episodes see our titular crew returned to their normal universe just as the Klingons close in on the Federation and Earth. They call it "nine months in the future" but they were in the Mirror Universe so long, this little so-called time displacement only serves as a distraction. Are they planning more timey-wimey stuff? No. Are they going to try to reverse the nine months they missed in order to save countless lives in an already lost war? Good idea, but nope, not that either. They're just gonna shrug and go with it, so again, I say, why bother with the time shift at all? |
Captain's Blog
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