Well I'll be damned. This winter, I was pleasantly surprised by The Mandalorian seeming to pull the Star Wars franchise back from the brink of the abyss. And now I'm also pleasantly surprised to see that perhaps Star Trek might be pulled out from circling the toilet bowl as well. The first episode of CBS All Access' new Picard series was surprisingly "not bad".

Now, I do still have some serious reservations about the directions that I think the show might be going later in the season. And I'll get to that later. But first, I want to sit and bask in the delight of having just watched a new piece of Star Trek media that I didn't hate. After slogging through the first season of Discovery (I have yet to watch the second season), I was left with zero faith in CBS's ability to re-capture the spirit and soul of Star Trek.

Picard shows some good faith right from the start by opening with a clip of the Enterprise-D. Not some re-designed Franken-ship monstrosity like the "original" Enterprise in the 2009 Trek reboot, or as seen in Discovery. But the honest-to-goodness Galaxy-class Enterprise-D, pretty much exactly as we remember and love her -- and looking mighty gorgeous, might I add! We then zoom into Ten Forward, where Picard is playing a hand of poker with an unconvincingly digitally de-aged Brent Spiner reprising the role of Data. This scene pays homage to the beautiful final scene of the Next Generation finale "All Good Things...", and Picard laments that he's stalling going all-in against Data's hand because he "doesn't want the game to end".

Picard is a return (and continuation) of Star Trek as fans knew it almost 20 years ago.

We didn't want the game to end either...

The first few scenes of the episode then go on to show Picard giving brief (but impassioned) speeches about the decline of Starfleet ideals, the civil rights of sentient androids, and the moral imperative to provide aid and relief to the Romulan refugees whose home planet was destroyed by the [somehow unexpected?] supernova of the Romulan sun. And he's also trying to do some social justice for pit bull dogs, which (as my choice of pets should suggest) is something that I approve very strongly of. It's respectful and faithful (and reverent) to what came before. "Holy shit", I thought, "this is actually looking and feeling like the Star Trek that I know and love."

For a moment, I thought the soul of Star Trek is there, in those early scenes, even though it is shallow and lacks the idealism that has always underpinned Trek.

...

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Logan movie poster

You've probably already heard this, but Logan is not a typical comic book movie. In fact, this movie feels less like a comic book movie, and more like a western combined with Terminator 2: Judgement Day and The Last of Us. This last analogy is particularly apt, considering that Logan deals with the extinction of mutants from the X-Men film universe.

The X-Men comics and movies have always been known for being topical, with their themes of racism, bigotry, and so forth, and Logan manages to to also be surprisingly topical regarding its storyline of a child fleeing [what amounts to] a violent drug cartel in Mexico, being unwelcome in the United States, and having to flee even further to Canada.

And this movie is laden with so much more possible metaphor. Logan's rejection of the comics' fallacious telling of events may symbolize our own need to let go of our childhood nostalgia regarding these fictional universes and characters and accept new and different interpretations. The final scene, with the child clutching the action figure, just so perfectly captures this bittersweet sentiment. And thank goodness that there isn't an end-credits scene, because I would have been pissed if anything had come up to ruin that perfect final shot. Or maybe it symbolizes the gradual and steady loss of our own real-world heroes. The last astronaut to walk on the moon died this year. We've lost civil rights leaders, WWII veterans are becoming increasingly rare, our 20th century pop culture icons are slowly kicking the bucket. What kinds of heroes will replace them? There's a lot to unpack here.

Logan - X-Men comics
The X-Men are revered, mythical figures within the film's universe.

And by avoiding any strong, direct connections to other X-Men movies, Logan not only allows non X-Men fans to get into the movie without all the extra baggage, but it also kind of implies that maybe the previous movies aren't to be taken seriously either...

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Uncanny X-Men #141: Days of Future Past
Cover of Uncanny X-Men #141:
Days of Future Past
.

So, what's the deal with the "Days of Future Past" X-Men story, anyway? Sure, it's a great storyline, but other comics also have similarly great storylines. Yet, I can't think of any other comic story that is treated with as much reverence as this particular one. No other comic book story that I can think of has been directly adapted as often as this one. Not "The Night Gwen Stacy Died", not "The Death of Superman". These comic stories have been reference in numerous media, particularly Gwen Stacy's death, but rarely are they adapted. But I've yet to see an incarnation of X-Men that does not include a version of the "Days of Future Past" storyline. It's been featured in multiple animated series, video games, and novelizations.

Of course, all of the various retellings of this story take their own creative liberties, and the new movie from 20th Century Fox is no exception.

This film is designed to be a sequel to both the First Class and Last Stand movies in the X-Men franchise. I was kind of surprised that the studio took this particular approach, since there were some nagging inconsistencies and continuity issues with the two timelines. But I guess Hollywood never cares as much about continuity as the nerdy fanboys do... Fortunately, these continuity issues don't come up or interfere with this film.

In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The creative liberties were generally positive, and the combination of the two timelines actually works surprisingly well. I wasn't terribly thrilled with the depressed, brooding depiction of the younger Xavier, but I don't know enough about the character's comic book history to know whether this is anachronistic, and it definitely wasn't to the movie's detriment.

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Star Trek First Contact poster

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of participating in a podcast called Geek Fights, and the topic was "Worst episode of Star Trek". During that debate, I railed pretty heavily against a particular episode of Star Trek Voyager called "Dark Frontier", and alleged that that episode (and Voyager in general) ruined the Borg - one of Star Trek's most compelling villains. Although, I don't think I was as hard on "Dark Frontier" as Allen was on Republicans...

But, due to time constraints, I tried to restrain myself, and I mentioned that I would go into more detail on my blog.


Well, Geek Fights fans, the podcast was recently released, and so here is that blog!

First of all, the podcast itself is included in the embedded player below, or you can listen to it from its original source at Geek Fights.

The story arc from "Dark Frontier" is a representation of the 2 things that I most hate about the last few seasons of Voyager. The first being that they were too heavily focused on Seven of Nine and the Doctor. Yeah, she looked great in that skin-tight unitard. Yeah, sure, she and the Doctor are probably the best and most interesting characters in the entire series. And I will defend Jeri Ryan's acting performance to the last -- she totally nailed the part! And yeah the Doctor is Voyager's equivalent of TNG's Data (arguably that show's most popular character). And Robert Picardo probably provides the second-best acting performance on the series. But there are like 7 other major characters on the show, make an episode about one of them for a change...

The other problem I had with Voyager was the Borg. The Borg were probably the best, most perfect villain for Roddenberry's Star Trek because Star Trek was supposed to be a "human voyage". The Borg were antithetical to everything that the show was about: the human spirit, the spirit of discovery, self-betterment, compassion, friendship, loyalty, and so on.

Star Trek The Next Generation - Best of Both Worlds part II

The Borg had none of that. They were mindless, infallible automatons with a collective will, who single-mindedly sought out technology and mercilessly destroyed anything and anyone that got in their way. They were a representation of technology gone amok.

They had NO humanity.

But that's not even the worst of it!

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A gamer's thoughts

Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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