"Moist Vessel" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E04
Navigating interpersonal relationships is no simple task; even if you live on a technological marvel in the distant future, it’s not the stuff in deep space that will really get on your nerves, it’s the people on that technological marvel…
"Temporal Edict" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E03
One of the things I love about Lower Decks is how it shows us stuff we always knew had to be happening aboard Starfleet vessels, but had just never been shown on screen before. In episode 1, we saw the…
"Envoys" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E02
Encouragement is in short supply in 2020—make that the 21st century thus far. That’s a tough statement to argue with, even if you don’t find it a laughable understatement. In a world that feels like it’s falling apart, the worst…
"Second Contact" – Star Trek: Lower Decks S1E01
It’s not hard to make jokes at the expense of the Final Frontier. Saturday Night Live has done it. Futurama extended the idea to seven seasons and four movies. In 2013, Star Trek convention attendees ranked Galaxy Quest the seventh…
Aliens Just Like Us: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) & Under the Skin (2013)
“Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come…
A Deluge of Dark Water(s): The Dark Waters of Dark Waters (1944), Dark Waters (1993), Dark Water (2002), and Dark Waters (2019)
When I was a child, I thought I was surrounded by bad guys. This is not a metaphor. I had the creeping suspicion that everyone I knew—my grandma, the dentist, the children’s pastor at my church, my pre-school teachers, everybody—was…
The Complicated Vengeance of Hunters
Nazis! Groovy Assassins! Al Pacino! What happens when you take the motives and violence of Taranitino’s Inglourious Basterds and mix it with the revelry and twisted humor of The Boondock Saints? You get Hunters. And it’s glorious. I will keep…
"Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2" – Star Trek: Picard S1E10
I struggled with how to start this review. I’m not only an enormous fan of The Next Generation, but I am particularly fond of Data and his relationship with Picard. Their bond was at the heart of TNG. It was…
"Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1" – Star Trek: Picard S1E09
Look at them. They’ve never met anyone like you before, that granite face, wisdom and integrity etched into every line. The eloquence, the conviction…they don’t know what hit them. —Dr. Altan Inigo Soong Soong’s criticizadmiration of Picard might as well…
Make Happy: Bo Burnham Gets Real
The world is not funny. We are all dying. Thus opens Make Happy, Bo Burnham’s comedy special from 2016. Though it is four years old, and the world seems to have massively changed since then, some things stay the same.…