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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Tags:Star Trek, Star Trek: Picard, CBS, all access, science fiction, Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart, Lieutenant Commander Data, Brent Spiner, USS Enterprise, Starfleet, Romulans, Romulus, refugees, android, civil rights, Borg, Number One, pit bull, dog
This week, I came across a video from Fox Sports outlining some of the "innovative" new rules being employed in the XFL for its [second] inaugural season. The rules are intended to make the game more exciting and streamlined. Some of them sound like generally good ideas. Others seem like poorly thought-out attempts to make the offenses' jobs easier, at the expense of defense and special teams.
The XFL released a video detailing its new rules.
Overtime shootout sounds dumber than college overtime
I am not surprised that the XFL is experimenting with a new overtime design. I am, however, surprised that they managed to come up with an overtime that is somehow even more divorced from football than college's overtime rules. Now, I've made my distaste for college overtime clear in the past. In summary, college overtime changes the rules of the game such that the teams' relative strengths or weaknesses may shift dramatically, in such a way that the outcome of the game may not be representative of the game as a whole. For one thing, special teams is almost completely removed from the game.
The XFL is going even further. Overtime games will be decided by what is essentially a two-point conversion shoot-out. Basically, the teams will take turns trying two-point conversions until one team scores and the other doesn't.
Special teams stars like Devin Hester will be
completely irrelevant in XFL overtime.
So now, not only are kick and punt returns eliminated from the game in overtime, but the field goal kicker has to sit on the bench knowing that he can't contribute either. Does your team have an elite kicker? Too bad! He doesn't get to see the field. How about an explosive kick returner? He also has to sit on the bench and watch without being able to use his talents to help his team win the game.
Heck, unless your team specializes in converting short-yardage situations, your team is going to be handicapped. Have a trio of speedy receivers who stretch the field, and a QB with a rocket arm? Sorry, they only have about 12 yards to work with. Have a dominating pass rush that leaves rival QBs with little time to make a five or seven-step drop before being buried into the ground? Well, they probably won't have time to get to the QB, since the rules are basically mandating a three-step drop or less.
Put simply, this overtime is not football.
My other complaint with college rules has also been carried over to the XFL: games can't tie. The rapid nature of the shootout should hopefully mean that overtimes don't drag on for as long as college overtimes often do, and the scores won't be as wildly inflated. So those are improvements. But sometimes, a tie might be representative of a hard-fought game against two closely-matched opponents. But the XFL rules prohibit this.
No, I do not like these overtime rules at all.
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Snowboarding is a dangerous sport. A couple years ago, I almost broke my neck in a fall. I fell face-first so hard that my goggles were crushed. I was lucky to have escaped that fall with only a bloody nose, broken goggles, and maybe a very mild concussion. That incident inspired me to buy a helmet -- something my partner had been telling me to do for years.
I once face-planted so hard, I crushed my goggles.
My luck ran out a week ago, and I finally suffered a serious injury. Thankfully, it wasn't a broken neck. I dislocated my right shoulder.
I wish that I could say that I dislocated it while trying to do a jump flip or grinding a rail. I'm not nearly that good of a snowboarder. Despite having been doing this for years, I still struggle with simple things like turning and carving. But that wasn't even how I fell. Nope. I fell and dislocated my shoulder while getting off the lift. Worse yet, it was the lift on the bunny hill.
Now, in my defense, that lift chair is really low to the ground, and it isn't easy to stand up off of it. We were riding with our kid, who was skiing on her own, without an instructor, for the first time. I was using my arm to push myself off the chair. I slipped, and the board started to slide out from under me. Instead of falling back onto the chair, I fell on the ground in front of the chair. But my arm was still on the chair.
My partner had to drive me down the mountain to the hospital, where the doctor had me "re-introduce" my shoulder on my own -- no pain-killers.
I dislocated my shoulder while snowboarding. It was quite painful.
So now my arm is in a sling. It doesn't hurt (other than a little soreness and swelling), but I'm not supposed to move the arm much because of the risk that it might fall back out of socket. I'll be seeing an orthopedic specialist in a few days to determine how bad the damage is, if it's healing correctly, and what the recovery will entail. I'm expecting at least several weeks of healing in this sling, and probably some physical therapy to restore strength and range of motion. I really hope that I don't end up needing surgery.
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One of my biggest complaints with Disney's Star Wars movies has been their complete lack of original ideas, and their complete unwillingness to move the Star Wars narrative forward. That's actually why I didn't think The Last Jedi was as bad as most people said it was. I mean, it wasn't "good" by any stretch of the imagination. The script was messy, the tone was uneven, and a lot of the movie's logic was fundamentally flawed. But I appreciated much of the bold thematic elements. The Last Jedi wanted desperately to move the franchise in new directions, and it actively mocked the previous film(s) (and the fanbase) for being too trapped in the past.
The rest of Disney's Star Wars movies haven't been so bold. The Force Awakens was a rehash of the original movie. Rogue One and Solo were both prequels that nobody asked for that both attempted to explain minutia that never needed explaining to begin with. I haven't seen Rise of Skywalker yet, but I'm hearing that it's an exceedingly dumb rehash of Return of the Jedi, and possibly the worst Star Wars movie since The Pantom Menace. And that's the "gentle" criticism that I'm hearing from people who were generally favorable towards Disney's treatment of Star Wars!
Suffice it to say, outside of the X-Wing and Armada tabletop games (which I love and still regularly play), I have become so jaded and sick of Star Wars that I didn't bat an eye at Disney's announcement of The Mandalorian. I just assumed that it was a prequel series about young Boba Fett that would continue the Star Wars trend of fixating on its past. I had no interest in watching the series, and I sure as hell was not going to pay a monthly subscription to Disney to watch it.
But I guess a free subscription to Disney Plus came with our Verizon phone plan, and my girlfriend was hearing some good word-of-mouth in the week after the first episode premiered, so we've been having stay-in date nights to watch it. I want to say, by the way, that I like this approach of releasing episodes of a streaming series on a fixed schedule, rather than dumping a whole season all at once. It facilitates water-cooler talk because everybody else is at the same point in the narrative that you are. You have time to digest the events of each episode and talk about them, and you are able to speculate with friends over what's going to happen next, because your friends don't know either! You'd think that streaming services like Netflix and Hulu would have figured this out with the success of HBO's Game of Thrones weekly release schedule, but they didn't. Disney learned. (and so did CBS).
The Mandalorian feels like it's actually pushing the Star Wars narrative forward.
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Tags:The Mandalorian, Disney, Disney Plus, streaming television, Lucasfilm, Star Wars, Mandalorian, bounty hunter, Yoda, baby Yoda, child, the Force, Galactic Empire, New Republic, Christmas, toy
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