vaguerant

It's all right. I fell off it after one too many comedy "animal accidentally gets killed" scenes for me, which hurt what was otherwise a fun, feel-good sitcom. Tudyk is excellent as always and the supporting cast of small-town weirdos are mostly likeable. It's not for me but I can understand people loving it.

For those who didn't follow the link:

But what was the reason for Henry’s condemnation by the University to five and a half centuries of infamy? It was a murder. In 1242 he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result, forced to stay away (and allowed no closer than Northampton) at least until the King returned from abroad.

Further research is needed to discover the exact details of what happened here but it seems that Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order of 25 March 1264, resuming its hostility to Henry Symeonis. In fact, it felt so strongly about it, that it gave Henry Symeonis the unique honour of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.

There's even a few that made it big and sometimes bigger than their parent shows.

• All in the Family --> Maude --> Good Times
• Love, American Style --> Happy Days --> Laverne & Shirley / Mork & Mindy
• Jag --> NCIS --> 50 more NCIS spinoffs
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Voyager --> Star Trek: Prodigy (mostly a Voyager spinoff, but Trek is incestuous)
• Star Trek --> Star Trek: Discovery --> Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

I can't help meaningfully, but it is interesting to note that that community is visible from kbin.earth:

https://kbin.earth/m/self@0d.gs

This might indicate that there's some configuration difference between Mbin running on Fedia and kbin.earth.

Pascal's family left Chile when he was nine months old, so it would be a lot weirder if he did have a Chilean accent.

Wait, is this why Emma Watson was speeding?

I would kind of argue it's Fox News that lied on this one. They edited down his full response which was a lot more sketchy about whether he would release the files.

In the interview, co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked whether Trump would declassify “9/11 files” and “JFK files.” He said yes without hesitation. Then she asked, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?”

His answer, as it initially aired: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”

But in the full version that only aired later, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”

Campos-Duffy interjected and said, “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”

Trump hedged again: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff, I would.”

His actual answer hedges on how much or whether he'd release any of the Epstein files and especially the actually damaging stuff, preferring to release only the stuff about how he died while casting aspersions about the reliability of the whole ... pedo jet and island part. Fox edited him down to a more agreeable position than the one he actually held.

While there's obviously a big joke at the core of this episode, I love what a contemplative story we get for this one. Opening on Mercer commiserating with the incomparable Jason Alexander as bartender Olix is a delightfully understated way to pick up. The general tone of The Orville allows for a captain who is more open about the unexciting side of the job than we usually see in sci-fi generally or Star Trek specifically.

We get a lot of great interpersonal character moments besides that: Mercer and Kitan identifying their similarities, Grayson and Mercer debating the objectivity of a captain in a relationship with a member of the crew, Isaac standing up for Claire and Marcus. Plus, we get that memorable zipper scene between Malloy and LaMarr. Of course, there's also the introduction of the alluring Janel.

There are some slightly less-great moments, mainly around Mercer being a petty, jealous creep. It's unbecoming behavior for a captain and only sort of works because The Orville (the show, and I guess Cassius the character) treat it as a quirky foible rather than basically disqualifying. If you take these scenes seriously, they do hurt his likeability, so it's kind of necessary to accept that it's only as big a deal as the episode tells us. Even writing this much about it, I'm taking it too seriously relative to what the show intends.

I was surprised to read that Jason Alexander was cast very late. After filming had already begun, the actor who played season 1 bartender Kanoot had to drop out due to his claustrophobia under the heavy prosthetics. This episode is perhaps as close to Seinfeld as the show ever gets: it's essentially about nothing. We mostly see characters sitting around having conversations and/or farcical relationship struggles. It feels like if you were going to plan ahead of time to introduce Jason Alexander in an episode, it would be this one. And yet, that was just good fortune.

Overall, this makes for an excellent return and has me excited to continue the rewatch.

"OK, have fun. Enjoy your right to free speech. The armed forces welcomes your dissent."

I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week's preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he's not used well here. Simon's only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We're really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You'd probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I'm getting way off-track at this point.

Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father's suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn't really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.

The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian's quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn't you imagine this guy as the Editor?

That's really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I've watched a couple of Christian's films, but only because they're bad. I'm not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that's a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.

The cast really is stacked for this one, so it's such a shame that this episode isn't more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg's Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig's Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams's Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I'd be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.

And yet, there's just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren't any. I'm a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.

If you don't mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there's a lot of options these days. There's the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we've got two new methods:

The PC port of the source code decompilation:

• https://github.com/HarbourMasters/SpaghettiKart

And the recompilation of the binary:

• https://github.com/sonicdcer/MarioKart64Recomp

For anybody who's unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.

Using the old "source code == recipe" analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.

Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let's say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64's MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can't feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn't eat the Klingon meal.

As an end-user, the result doesn't change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible "recipe" you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.