Oh, mother, tell your children not to do what I have done
I do not think of myself as more of a Trekkie than your average second-generation reader of science fiction who grew up on Leonard Nimoy introducing the Omni films at the Musem of Science, but last night I sat down to rewatch the two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94) of which which I had carried the most vivid memories since childhood and then somehow it was seven in the morning and I was telling ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch about that one time Barclay became so obsessed with Voyager he never unpacked his apartment and I had to go to bed before the metatext ate me alive. I may still have to write about at least a couple of the rewatches. It was interesting to me how well I had remembered one and how selectively—although not inaccurately—the other.
I deeply resent finding out about the existence of Jean-Pierre Bacri from the fact that he doesn't exist anymore. I resent the loss of Cloris Leachman and Cicely Tyson on principle. For Hilton Valentine, there is nothing to do but listen to "The House of the Rising Sun."
This time last year I was discovering and documenting the Kendall Cogeneration Station and Broad Canal and all the rest of East Cambridge that went into "Tea with the Earl of Twilight." I miss it desperately. At least there is still industrial steam and winter sunshine in my life.
spatch about that one time Barclay became so obsessed with Voyager he never unpacked his apartment and I had to go to bed before the metatext ate me alive. I may still have to write about at least a couple of the rewatches. It was interesting to me how well I had remembered one and how selectively—although not inaccurately—the other. I deeply resent finding out about the existence of Jean-Pierre Bacri from the fact that he doesn't exist anymore. I resent the loss of Cloris Leachman and Cicely Tyson on principle. For Hilton Valentine, there is nothing to do but listen to "The House of the Rising Sun."
This time last year I was discovering and documenting the Kendall Cogeneration Station and Broad Canal and all the rest of East Cambridge that went into "Tea with the Earl of Twilight." I miss it desperately. At least there is still industrial steam and winter sunshine in my life.
no subject
no subject
"The Defector" (3.10) and "Tin Man" (3.20). I didn't watch a lot of television as a child, but somehow I caught both of these episodes—I caught a reasonable handful of TNG because my parents watched it, although I still had to be shown some of the famous ones by friends in college—and they just embedded themselves in me. In the case of "The Defector," I had retained the story almost beat-for-beat; I didn't have a complete recall of scenes or conversations, but individual lines, gestures, or expressions were right there in memory as they came up and I had not forgotten how it ended. The one thing that had meant nothing to me at the time was the interweave of Henry V, for the obvious reason that I hadn't yet read it. For "Tin Man," I had remembered almost everything about the guest character down to his body language and completely jettisoned any of the plot that wasn't focused directly on him and his relationship with the alien of the week; I had confabulated or extrapolated one detail about which I feel slightly bad because I included it in a description of the episode in an LJ-conversation some years ago and I don't like telling stories wrong. I still can't see how it wasn't influenced by Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires and More Slow," which I would have been reading around the same time. I was eight years old when both episodes aired in 1990. One of the reasons I want to write about them is not just that I was afraid that they wouldn't hold up to my memories and instead one of them was even better than I had been able to evaluate as a child, but that I have such an interesting double vision of them now, like the stamp of the Cold War all over "The Defector" or the fact that I didn't mistrust for a moment a character who is presented with obvious ambivalence in "Tin Man" because he made so much sense to me. I tend to have difficulty writing about things that I saw for the first time before I knew how to think about film/TV, but in the case of Star Trek I think the distance might actually give me something to work with. I also watched "Hollow Pursuits" (3.21) because it was right there on Netflix's otherwise aggravating autoplay, but I had actually managed to rewatch that one in 2007 and stand by my opinion that it's a wonderful concept executed with much more nuance than technically necessary that just shoots itself in the foot at the climax, thematically speaking. Then I detoured to Voyager's "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" (6.4), since it is a much more broadly comic take on similar material but carries off its ending more proportionally. In terms of other TNG, I have strong affectionate memories of "Masks" (7.17) as well, but I do not expect that episode to hold up on anything other than the myth-level. The myth-level caused me to write some terrible middle-school file-off, though.
[edit] This entire chain started because I realized that James Sloyan, whom I had just seen in "Jetrel," had been the guest star of "The Defector." So if I was going to rewatch "The Defector," I might as well rewatch "Tin Man," and then suddenly time had passed.
no subject
no subject
They're on Netflix!
I was living in England when season 3 aired, and a friend sent videotapes.
That's really nice. I had some friends burn me shows to DVD like that. (My videotapes were of Babylon 5 and most of them drowned in the flood in my parents' basement, which was minimal as floods went, but remarkably targeted.)
(I hadn't cared for the first two seasons when they first aired, but I loved seasons 3 and 4.)
I remember very little about what happened when in TNG except for the inimitable temporal marker of Riker's beard. Based on the episodes I rewatched last night, though, I am willing to declare in favor of Season Three.
no subject
no subject
For what it's worth, I remember liking Dr. Pulaski. I was surprised she was not a recurring character after her starring season.
no subject
Oh, wow, that is gorgeous.
no subject
Thank you. It was the one story I got out of last year and it means a lot to me.
no subject
no subject
*hugs*
I was saying over at
You wrote "The Fire and the Place in the Forest" in 2020. And quite a lot of novel. Don't forget that.
no subject
*AUGH*
no subject
no subject
I had some of that even with the third-season episodes I was watching. I was braced for cultural differences, but totally failed to realize how much like the '80's even the cinematography would look to me. That was definitely not a thing I could evaluate at the time.