vaguerant

This episode finally answers the question raised by Futurama: "Is the Space Pope reptilian?" Apparently not, but he's pretty cold-blooded.

And we come to our--First? Second?--major breach of the unofficial Planetary Union Prime Directive. As I mentioned when we watched "If the Stars Should Appear", Seth MacFarlane said early on that there wasn't any formal equivalent to the United Federation of Planets' Prime Directive from Star Trek:

There's no Prime Directive per se, more of a case-by-case analysis among the Admiralty when those situations arise in the show.

However, Commander Grayson gets in Big Trouble™ for causing cultural contamination in this episode. There's clearly some sort of formalized rule against this kind of interference. This episode aired some three months after MacFarlane made that comment. In addition to being the final episode of the season to air, this was also the final one produced, not being completed until two weeks before broadcast. However, the episode had already been both written and filmed by the time MacFarlane made the comment above, which somewhat confuses the timeline.

Getting back to the episode's plot, Captain Mercer takes an oddly cavalier approach to finding clothes, casually causing a second contamination. It's not at all clear how seriously the not-quite-Prime Directive is taken by the Planetary Union and crew of the Orville. Maybe it was just necessary to move the plot forward, but it feels a little bit confused. I think the way to reconcile MacFarlane's explanation is that they have a hard rule against contamination but no precise statutes for how to deliberately manage first contact, and the Orville crew are just a bit lax.

One more thing: It's nice to know that Perd Hapley's reporting career continues all the way into our spacefaring future.

While I'm mostly nitpicking the point of what exactly the rules are, I do very much like this episode and its exploration of how religion impacts a developing human-ish culture over the course of 2,100 years. The episode takes a fairly dim view, with it being something which some take comfort in while others use it to oppress them and eventually everybody grows out of it. But you know ... yeah, that's pretty much it. All human cultures seem to develop a religious belief system at some point, so maybe Kelly's contamination didn't actually change much in the scheme of things beyond the specific subject and terminology of worship.

It's great that the season doesn't end on a big bombastic space battle or anything. It doesn't even really feel like an ending of any kind, just another solid episode. It leaves a nice aftertaste that I think does a better job of getting across what The Orville is about than an action sequence would. It leaves us wanting more just because the show is very fucking good, not because we're left worrying about a dramatic cliffhanger. I really like that.

Agree with everything here, this is a great episode that hums along on the strength of its writing and performances. Eccleston's Doctor has a darkness that really suits where he sits in the timeline. Getting that first explanation of the Time War retroactively explains why he's such a dick in this incarnation: he's still deeply wounded by it but close enough to the man who did it that it very much informs who he is as a person, essentially still externalising that pain.

Something else that's interesting is that I feel this episode gives the impression that it was Nine/Eccleston who in fact took part in the Time War, while leaving things open-ended enough that that could change. Jumping ahead a bit, Moffat's earliest plan for "The Day of the Doctor" was to have Eccleston return. However, given his treatment at the hands of the BBC the first time around, Eccleston was unwilling to appear and we got the War Doctor instead. I'm not sure if RTD has ever commented on what it was he envisioned.

I've noted in previous rewatch discussions that I basically arrived fresh at New Who, but this episode reminds me that I did know Daleks couldn't go up stairs. The "ELEVATE!" reveal was a major shock to the audience and canon at the time. In addition to its general invulnerability throughout the episode, this was a scene that really hammered home the Daleks as scary. For people completely new to the series like children, it doesn't really mean anything, but anybody with a passing awareness of the show gets something in that moment to show them that Daleks are still able to do the unexpected. For adult fans, I could see this at least giving them a reminder of why they were afraid of them as kids.

The final confrontation is just amazing. That this episode manages to reintroduce Daleks, convince us they're a worthy threat, show us their true face and make us feel bad for them across 45 minutes is just excellent work from top to bottom. I'm a broken record on this, but that it's done in such a low-key and probably low-budget episode and not via an episode full of explosions and CGI is a testament to what the show can do at its best.

One thing I'll say is that it might have been interesting to call the episode "Metaltron" instead of "Dalek" to keep the surprise hidden, but I imagine that would have hurt it in terms of viewership. People definitely would have been excited to see the latest take on the Doctor Who enemy in a way that they probably wouldn't have been to see "Metaltron".

Sorry to be a downer, but I was curious why Bruno Langley, who plays Adam Mitchell ("Little Lord Fauntleroy"), seemed to drop off the face of the Earth a few years ago. If you don't want to open it, you can probably guess from the spoiler heading:

At least he's not around for long!

I AM THE PARK!

Thank you for loving her.

I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.

Poker Face is simply the best time I've had watching TV in recent memory. It's currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It's not "premium TV" in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it's very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it's mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson's Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.

The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people's involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, "I'm not exactly sure, but that's not really the point." She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week's guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they're able to cast big in every episode. There's at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.

I'm always impressed that they're consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn't just walk into a scene and say "I did not commit any murders recently" and set off Cale's ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.

Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don't necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don't really want to give the impression that they're not, either. It's kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of "premium TV", but I can't fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.

No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it's Peacock's biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.

Murderbot was also pretty fun. It's a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It's a pretty different take on the "android learns how to be human" trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn't adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it's mostly just accepted as part of his nature.

My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren't enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don't have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don't know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.

Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I'm thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don't think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.

Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I'm 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I'll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.

I loved this show! Watched it a month ago or so. Another reference point I'd give is an underwater version of Firefly or Farscape: a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold on the run in a ship that's not quite qualified for what they're up against. For more Farscape-ism, it was shot in Australia and the cast are mostly from there and pretending not to be.

The production was kind of a mess: the show was ordered by Disney+ but dropped again before it became available to stream, so where it's available to watch in any given country is a crapshoot. AMC+ in the US and Canada, Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Stan in Australia. Given the awkward production history, I suspect it will remain a single-season show (hello again, Firefly).

For people who don't like a series that ends abruptly, I'll give some very generic "vibe" spoilers: I thought it was a perfectly satisfying ending, especially given the show is a prequel to the original novel, so we know or can find out where the story is going. There are absolutely some plot threads left untied which would be followed up in a hypothetical season 2, but personally I didn't leave the series frustrated by them.

It's only a 10-episode show, so it's a very easy watch. I'd love it if they got the opportunity to make more, but I had a ton of fun either way.

In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody's ever been.

I feel a thousand years old. People are mixing up George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the TV series Avatar.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Earth has been split into three large superstates: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. These three states are in perpetual war with one another, with Oceania's alliances frequently shifting so that the current enemy and ally could change at any given moment and history is rewritten to affirm that the enemy and ally had always been in their present alignment.

Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs—all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere.

"There is no war in Ba Sing Se" is the Avatar line, while "Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia" is generally the line that gets quoted from Ninteen Eighty-Four in similar contexts.

These seem like arbitrary rules. Most random accidents don't reliably kill people and are also painful. You're comparing a tiny subset of random accidents to all intentional suicide methods as if they are or should be somehow similar.

♫ I still dream of QAnon ♫

(To the tune of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting".)

Sorry if I'm misreading, but I wonder if you're mixing up Steve Bannon (71) and Barron Trump (19). The Tweet says "Bannon" and is probably meant to imply the former. Steve Bannon is probably too old to have ever been victimized by Jeffrey Epstein; they are/were the same age.