Category: Movies That Are Actually TV Shows

The internet has always had a tendency to sort things into exactly two categories: Best thing ever and worst thing ever. Having seen the Mandalorian Season Three, it’s a good-not-great season of the show, and I’m confident it got punted into “worst thing ever” because it was clearly not up to the standard of the first two seasons, and if your scale of quality has exactly two points on it, then anything worse than the best thing ever must be the worst thing ever.

I’ll go one further: The Mandalorian Season Three is much better for the Mandalorian than Season Two was. Season Two was really focused on fan service, which is great, but Luke showing up again isn’t going to hit the way his first appearance did. Plus, they didn’t actually time travel to 1983 to get young Mark Hamill, they’re making do with lookalikes touched up with a bit of CGI. Minimizing Luke’s presence is important because the seams are gonna be very noticeable if you ask that character to carry entire episodes or especially an entire season of the show.

Season Three of the Mandalorian has almost no fanservice. The closest thing is that Bo Katan features heavily, but even if you want a Clone Wars/Rebels reunion, Satine Kryze’s absence is very much felt (there’s reasons for that, it’s a whole thing). But what Season Three of the Mandalorian does a good job with is being about Mandalorians. Defining their place in the galaxy in the New Republic era, addressing the contradiction between the Mandalorians we saw in Clone Wars and Rebels and the way they operated in Season One of the Mandalorian.

Season Two laid the groundwork for this by introducing Bo Katan and establishing that Din Djarin’s faction was a rogue sect, but it was a Band-Aid, wiki patching. People on Wookieepedia had some outstanding questions about how the Mandalorians we see in Season One could coexist with the Mandalorians we see in Clone Wars and Rebels, and Season Two provided straightforwardly factual answers while exploring the implications very little. Season Three doesn’t just tell us that Din Djarin grew up in a secluded, more fundamentalist Mandalorian sect, it explains what that was like and how the society he came from and the cousin society of mainstream Mandalorians felt about one another. It’s still kind of ridiculous that Din Djarin didn’t know that most Mandalorians did not adhere strictly to the oldest traditions of the creed, but at least the place that Mandalorians are in now makes sense: The Children of the Watch, the Night Owls, and every other remnant faction of the Mandalorians have been reunited around Bo Katan. They have a defined relationship with one another and with the galaxy at large. The contradictions haven’t just been explained, they’ve been explored, used as the basis for a story.

Also, extreme nitpick, but Mandalore is in the north end of the Outer Rim and Nevarro is on the south, so if Moff Gideon is supposed to be conquering a specific sector of space (even granting that the Shadow Council’s sectors probably don’t match Republic/Imperial sectors at all, in the same way that an evil James Bond sort of organization might slice the world up into “provinces” that don’t match the actual existing provinces of existing nations at all), then is his sector, like, the entire Outer Rim? Or does he have a corridor that cuts straight through the Inner Rim to link two vastly different locations? Would’ve made more sense if the Shadow Council were all mobile fleets and secret bases, so Gideon’s got a few planetary strongholds but the real locus of his power is his cruiser (which is how it seems to work in the show as it is anyway) and he can take it around anywhere he wants outside of New Republic space. Other moffs might be trying to take and hold specific chunks of the Outer Rim, but Moff Gideon is a pillaging nomad.

3-dimensional Chess is supposed to be some kind of futuristic turbo-Chess in Star Trek, but every time it comes up, it’s a fantasy where writers pretend that intuition and gumption can possibly defeat logic and analysis in a game of perfect information with mathematically exact moves. They do this in the Original Series with Spock’s perfect logic being defeated by Kirk’s…well, exactly what quality Kirk has isn’t clear, but some kind of creativity and human gumption. That isn’t a thing in Chess. If an opponent surprises you with a sudden checkmate, it’s not because they invented a new way to move their pieces, it’s because they saw one of the very large but finite number of perfectly mathematically defined moves that you missed.

The Next Generation usually has Poker games, not Chess, which is a better choice for many reasons: It allows a larger number of players at once, Poker-playing strategies straightforwardly reveal a lot about someone’s personality, especially concerning appetite for risk, while Chess-playing strategies require a lot of knowledge of the game to reveal anything besides the fact that these two characters play Chess, and if you want to do the “pure logic gets outmaneuvered by intuition” thing, then it makes perfect sense in Poker. Data, taking up Spock’s role as the flawless logician with poor intuition, can instantly calculate the exact odds that any other player has any other hand based on the cards in his own hand and the river, but this means he has a very predictable strategy and no ability to guess when someone is bluffing even in a weekly Poker game where players can get to know each other’s tells. Paradoxically, Data would be very good at high-tier professional Poker where everyone has figured out how to mask their tells so the math is all that’s left, but because it’s a multiplayer game, Data can lose because of an inability to take advantage of other players’ weaknesses.

But also, when 3D Chess does show up in TNG, it’s Deanna Troi checkmating Data and saying that Chess isn’t just a game of logic, it’s also about intuition. No it isn’t! Games of intuition exist, Chess is not one of them!

Here’s another TNG bit of lore that bugged me as filler, although this one feels like less of a nitpick. An entire episode’s premise turns on it and it suggests that the Federation will literally sell its people into slavery if they happen to be in a jurisdiction where that’s legal. In S4E13, “The Devil’s Due,” space Satan comes to collect on a thousand-year-old contract to enslave a planet while the Enterprise happens to be in orbit to check up on some Federation scientists. According to the contract’s legal terms, space Satan gets the Enterprise as well because they were in orbit around the planet and thus within the bounds of the contract when it came due.

Okay, so the terms of the contract include everything in the planet, including its orbit, and under the existing legal system, people can promise the property of their distant descendants as part of a contract. Sure, whatever. But the Enterprise isn’t governed by that legal system. It’s governed by Federation law and whatever international law exists in the Star Trek galaxy (it’s not clear if there’s any at all). Surely, in both cases, they would not permit a starship and its crew to fall under the legal ownership of space Satan just because they happened to be in orbit around a planet when their debt came due. The people who made the contract do not own the Enterprise, so they can’t give it away. It doesn’t matter if their own local laws claim otherwise – Federation law, surely, does not allow slavery regardless of what contracts are signed, surely does not allow its citizens’ personal property to be signed away against their will just because some foreign law proclaims they forfeited it merely by entering another planet’s orbit at the wrong time, and very certainly will not give away one of the most advanced starships in their fleet because of a technicality in some other planet’s legal code.

If space Satan is a being of laws and contracts at all, then she has no claim to the Enterprise, which operates under Federation law, and Federation law would have to be braindead to consider itself subject to local laws to the point of giving away a starship and its crew.

Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E6, “The Game,” is an episode that was presumably written by a recent college grad whose entire dorm nearly had their academic careers ended by an addiction to…this seems like a WoW thing, but it’s a 1991 episode, so we’re not even to Diablo yet. Maybe Tetris? The simple “put thing into thing” gameplay of the game depicted in the episode does resemble Tetris more than anything with even an excuse plot like the standout games of 1990 and 1991 (Link to the Past, Final Fantasy III, Super Mario Wrold) all had. Anyway, I’m giving them a ton of credit with the assumption that it was based on some kind of actual experience, when it draws its themes at least as much from video game alarmism that used to be so common before the children of the 80s became culturally dominant.

I don’t feel a ton of need to go over why that was dumb, feels like anyone reading this blog is probably already on board with that, at this point most of the people who knew little enough about video games to be taken in by that kind of bullshit are dead, probably from old age, but maybe there was a gamer uprising that I missed while I was working on a D&D sourcebook. No, what I want to talk about is that near the climax, Wesley Crusher, the last holdout against the mind controlling game, is hunted down by the rest of the Enterprise crew and forced to play it and become addicted. They force his eyes open so that he’ll be forced to interact with it, and then…he blinks. Clearly non-diegetically. Humans blink a lot and unthinkingly, and of course they didn’t actually pry the actor’s eyes open for the shot, they just pressed their fingers nearby and then he shot his own eyes open wide (movie magic!). The human blink reflex is really hard to control so I’m guessing they did lots of takes and all of them had this problem, and sometimes you just have to ask the audience to suspend their disbelief over a literal blink-and-you’ll-miss-it error. Still kind of funny, though.

This is Wesley Crusher’s last significant episode (he’s actually visiting the ship after having left for Starfleet Academy), and I find it interesting how completely rehabilitated the character is. This episode is even doing “Wesley holds out against a threat that’s overtaken the adults” like they did incessantly in season 1 and it was miserable, but they pull it off just fine here in the post-beard growth season 5. Wesley avoids the game because he’s got a crush distracting him long enough to be one of the last holdouts, by which time the way the game has overtaken the entire crew is immediately obviously creepy, not because he’s a speshul wunderkind. His flight from the older officers of the Enterprise involves a lot of resourcefulness on both sides, which makes him seem genuinely clever, not like the adults have all had their teeth beaten out by the Idiot Ball so Wesley can save the day. Ultimately he succeeds not by single-handedly overcoming the crew of the Enterprise, but by repairing damage done to Data, who is immune to the game and was taken out early on to prevent him from counteracting it, and then leading the crew on a chase long enough to distract them that Data is able to whip up a solution.

Apparently it was too late, though. Wesley’s writing in season 1 was abysmal, and apparently his season 2-4 writing (he appears only sporadically in season 5) wasn’t enough to save him. The main solution to Wesley’s writing problem in seasons 2-4 was to de-emphasize his role – he’s mainly there to be Geordi’s sidekick in Engineering, and he works fine in that role, but it does mean there’s not really a chance to rescue the character so much as just to overlook him. Clearly by season 5, if not by season 2, “Wesley sucks” was too much of a meme to dislodge.

One carried forward eternally by Wil Wheaton’s refusal to get over it. People love Kate Mulgrew, all Wil Wheaton has to do is say “I was fifteen years old, they gave me a terrible script, and I did the best I could with it” and most people would be sympathetic to him.

This is a really tiny nitpick but I’ve slipped from 3/week to 1/week blog posts, so whatever. In Star Trek: The Next Generation S4E12, “The Wounded,” the opening captain’s log states that it has been slightly more than a year since the Federation signed a peace treaty with the Cardassians, putting an end to a long war. But we know from comments about Wesley Crusher’s service on the ship a few episodes earlier that each season of the show maps to one year in-universe, so this war would’ve ended at some point in sesaon 2-3. And yet it doesn’t come up at all in any of the first three seasons. The Ferengi are the main antagonists of the first season, which didn’t really work out because they just aren’t that intimidating and they tend to come across more like plucky-but-ruthless small business owners rather than rapacious industrialists. They focused more on the Romulans for seasons 2 and 3, though the series’ ultimate primary antagonist in the Borg also made some pretty impactful appearances.

Obviously they needed Cardassia to have recently-ish signed a treaty with the Federation to make that episode work and they didn’t want to have an entire Cardassian War arc to justify that one episode, and that was the right call. Still bugged me, though.

This is a really tiny nitpick, but I wanted to do something for 1024 (2^10) and this is the first thing that popped into my head. There’s an episode of Star Trek TNG about the binars, aliens who have merged with computers to the point where their primary language is binary. They hijack the Enterprise to upload their consciousness into its databanks and then download it somewhere else safe. When asked why they didn’t just ask for help from the Federation, they say that there was a chance they would say no and their mission was too important to accept no for an answer. Riker says, with enough confidence that the show pretty clearly intends this to be taken as fact, that this is a result of their binary computer thinking, they can’t deal with probabilities.

So, I guess they dedicated exactly one bit of memory to storing the probability of success for asking the Federation for help, and rounded down. Rather than, for example, setting aside ten bits so they can store 1,024 different points on a spectrum of probabilty.

Tasha Yar’s death near the end of the first season of TNG was the first step of the show growing the beard. Tasha Yar was an okay character and Worf makes much more sense as Chief of Security than as helmsman or whatever he was doing in the first season. So I’m sympathetic to the plight the writers had landed themselves in at the end of that first season: Tasha Yar had to go to make room for Worf’s character to grow, and that had to be some kind of plot point. Having her die was a good idea to make it clear that being on an away team wasn’t necessarily safe, particularly since, at her rank, it wouldn’t make much sense to transfer away from the Enterprise unless she had some kind of strong personal reason to prefer a different mission, which slams us into the problem that Tasha Yar’s backstory is dumb and offensive. It was close to being cool – a refugee from a wartorn failed state who joined Starfleet after they evacuated her.

Unfortunately they decided that the defining feature of the failed state was going to be “rape gangs.” Which are gangs assembled for an indefinite period of time primarily for the purpose of rape? Or is this the only planet in the galaxy whose gangs commit rape at all? Both are dumb and just the words “rape gang” are so overly edgy that I feel second-hand embarrassment on behalf of the writers just repeating them. Like, rape gangs exist in places with extreme violent crime problems, but they’re not a career path the way gangs that focus on smuggling and extortion are. They’re more like a fucked up hobby club.

Refocusing away from “rape gangs” and onto general violent chaos could’ve salvaged her character the same way Riker got salvaged further down the road. That would take time, though, time during which Worf is left on helm, so given we need to get rid of Tasha in one episode and the less said about her backstory the better, easiest thing to do is to kill her.

The problem is the monster of the week selected for the killing is a pile of black goo who’s having a real rough time in tenth grade. Plus they lean a lot on Tasha’s pre-recorded funeral speech at the end to see the character off. Data’s moment with Picard where he asks if he missed the point of the funeral because it seemed to be more about the living than the dead was pretty good, but Tasha’s recorded speech itself was mediocre. General pattern of the first season, really, Data, Geordi, Picard, and Dr. Crusher are already firing more-or-less on all cylinders, but Riker, Worf, Tasha, Troi, and Wesley are all dragging things down. Some of these characters would be salvaged, others would be cut. Cutting Tasha was the first step along that path (bafflingly, this was soon followed by cutting Dr. Crusher, who was a perfectly good character even in season one – I’m guessing this was something to do with the actor’s career, but I like to imagine Crusher got hit by splash damage when they nuked Wesley who, narrative cockroach that the character is, survived the explosion). Shame about the execution, though, because she was one of the more salvageable of the dud characters. Presumably that’s why they killed her again in an alternate timeline episode. Tasha practically turned to camera and declared she was determined to have a cooler death than the one she got in the Alpha Timeline.

Multiverse: Hunter is getting close to complete, so I’m looking at the next Multiverse book in the polls on my Patreon. The winner is Shonen Martial Arts. The main foundation of the book has to be Dragon Ball, of course, and I’m already familiar with that one because I was an eight-year old boy in the 90s. In order to make the book thorough, I’ve also been trying to watch at least one season of other major shows in the genre, though, and double check how many of them can be stirred in with off-brand Dragon Ball to help cover more bases: Boruto’s Dad, One Piece, Bleach, Demon Slayer, JoJo, Hunter x Hunter, maybe some others depending on how long this takes me. Shonen anime is long so even getting through one season of these might be too much.

Which means I’ve been watching Boruto’s Dad. I appreciate how the show sells its basic concepts in the first episode even though it’s only 23 minutes long: Boruto’s Dad is a reincarnated demon fox monster thing, everyone is super mean to him about it because that’s the level of intelligence that fourteen year olds operate on, he lashes out with a lot of dumb pranks which make him unpopular with the adults in the room, he’s bad at ninja magic but has ambitions of one day being ninja president, and by the end of the episode he’s shown he’s really good at ninja magic when he puts in the effort and also there is a ninja battle with an evil traitor ninja. It’s a lot to cover and it does have the problem of lurching from one plot point to another with minimal transition, but the speed of the delivery means there’s not a whole lot of time to dwell on it and it lets the show set up its protagonist’s main goal, major obstacles to that goal, and general personality, while also finding room to squeeze in learning ninja magic and a ninja fight.

And also one of Boruto’s Dad’s most consistently used prank techniques, at least in the early show, is when he turns into a hot lady to try and make older men uncomfortable, which I’ve decided makes this whole series a trans allegory. I will not be accepting questions at this time.