selenak

Paradise 2.05: In which we finally do meet a survivor who did not become his better self in adversity, though Garythe mailman isn't presented as a muhaahaing supervillain, either. (Or a sociopath like Jane.) Again, as with Annie, we're introduced to him via a montage of his pre-Apocalypse existence, his loneliness shared only with one long distance friend. We see him saving Bean and Teri on the day of the catastrophe on (good) impulse in the flashbacks, and if there is anything in the presence to indicate Gary might not be entirely the good guy he seems, it's only that his claim that "they" have taken Teri and the entire rest of the group is contradicted when we meet some of the rest of the group in the grand survivor bazar, and that his pass at Teri in the flashbacks contradicts his "a sister to me" to Xavier in the present, but then again a rejected pass is hardly the kind of thing you tell the woman's husband who has a gun in his hand on first sight. What did make me distrustful was that Ennis was presented as so hostile to Teri from the get go that him acting against her would not have been a dramatic climax to the flashbacks, whereas the reveal that Ennis might have behaved like an ass, but he also respected Teri's autonomy, whereas Gary had become so attached to her and the idea of her and Bean as his family in the last three years that faced with the prospect of losing her, he shot his best friend instead. It's a development that builds up to this moment - murder not out of greed or sexual jealousy or hate, but out of fear for the desperate loneliness he lived in pre Apocalypse to return.

Admittedly I have no idea where we're going with this. I mean, Gary - who strikes me as a very John Steinbeck type of character - is hardly the stuff antagonists are build off, and Xavier distrusts him already, so I doubt we'll spend the remaining season with him fighting with our hero. The episode did introduce yet another part of the group Link has just led to the bunker's front door, and also continued to flesh out Teri some more, and propably there was some more exposition I don't yet recognize as such but will later, but for now, I'm a bit baffled. (For comparison, 1.05, also ending with a surprise character death, was focused on Billy, i.e. someone who was already a regular, and moved the main story forward.)

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1.10 : In which we get a finale that surprisingly enough isn't a big action-heavy extravaganda, but a Trekian court room drama plus ensemble to the rescue tale. I was utterly wrong with the Anisha-Mir-as-secret-leader (or next leader post Nus) speculation, as it turns out, and the emphasis on her tech savy is not connected to the problem of the wall at all. Given that the Discovery finale I loved the most was the one where Michael and friends had to find a way to communicate with an alien species, not stop them militarily, while the ones (and not just of Disco) where multiple ships shoot at each other usually don't do it for me, I liked that. (Speaking of Discovery, I think if you've watched Disco you go into the premise of the court room trial in a different way than if you haven't, because the last three seasons of ST: Discovery which are all set in this very era and in fact introduce it to the Trekverse put a great emphasis on Starfleet really doing its utmost to help in what initially are really dire circumstances (because the Burn is sitll in place when Michael arrives in the 31st century) and being in fact the most sympathetic incarnation of Starfleet ever. Which I welcomed, because while illn the 1990s DS9 pointing out the darker side of Starfleet was fresh and new, by the time Disco started it really wasn't anymore and by contrast we needed a reason why we should want our heroes be a part of this organisation to begin with. Now, if you haven't watched Discovery, then your last few versions of Starfleet were the bureacracy-heavy ones from Picard which left the Romulan refugees fend for themselves after the android catastrophe (which, again, is the exact opposite of what the Starfleet of the 31st century does post Burn as shown, not told, in Discovery), or the ones from Strange New Worlds which in its third season did a really bad and unconvincing episode which reminded me B5's "A View from the Gallery" (not my favourite B5 episode, if you can't tell) in how self congratulatory it was. So if that's your emotional basis, I could understand a "wanting to see Starfleet/the Federation face their inadequacies and injustices" emotional background. Me, I was fretting that we'd retcon what we saw on Disco when Nus Bracca did his big speech, and more than glad when the episode did not go this way.

(Mind you, I also appreciated that the initial wrong of the pilot - the separation of Anisha Mir and Caleb - remained a wrong. Not Anisha's arrest itself, the separation of mother and child. There is a difference.) The "courtroom" scenes were three great acting showcases, with each character getting a spotlight, and both the speeches and the interactions/dialogue shining. Though while all three were excellent, I've got to hand it to Holly Hunter, who really did wonders with silent reaction shots and with that sense of watchfulness Nahla Ake excuded when either Nus or Anisha were speaking, and a fascinating mixture of empathy and calculation. (I.e. I think she did feel sorry for the child Nus had been, but every word she said was carefully chosen for the double audience of the galaxy at large and Anisha right in front of her, and she was like an expert verbal fencer, not bothering with the "we didn't want" and instead immediately going for the weak spots, the omissions in the rethoric, like the Federation pilot whom Nus killed, making him in lack of a better turm human to the audience. And reserving the finan coup de grace, the conclusion about the Frontium, for the last as if she was Perry Mason.

Conversely, I liked that while Anisha Mir clearly (and as opposed to Nus) could not wave the death of the Pilot away and presumably also believed Nahla that the Burn era Federation was in a state of constant Triage type decisions, she still said - and thought - that Nahla herself was guilty, because neither of those things negated the wrong done to her personally. Nor did it make her accusation untrue that Nahla resigned after and not before the fact and had a good existence to fall back onto while Anisha was in prison. Etc.. I'm still going to and thro about Anisha accepting in the tag scene that Caleb will divide his life between being with her and being at Starfleet Accademy, but for now I'm good with it. (And of course, it makes for a far less angsty finale than if he had to choose between them for good.)

Meanwhile on Athena: we did get the bit of technobabble explaining why the Discovery can't use the mushroom space travel, thank you, show, and I'm proud to have guessed what Nahla meant with her sentence to the Doctor before he did it. This was certainly the episode with the most Jett Reno this entire season, mentoring the cadets (especially but not solely Caleb) through a situation she herself was in when we originally met her - alone on a broken ship. Sam in her concern for the Doctor doing a Caleb (i.e. lashing out at her friend) only for Genesis to handle it and manage to get through to her made for the most character drama that had nothing to do with Caleb, and I was glad we got all the previous episodes with their varoius spotlights on the non-Caleb cadets, because the finale did not give them much non-background stuff to do otherwise. That everyone would be able to work as a team to solve the issue of the "mines" was predictable, though I didn't mind, I like "the team comes together" scenes with they go with other stuff.

Lastly: the credits showing the entire cast only via pics of theim as children or even babies were a touch both hilarious and cute. All in all not a perfect but a very enjoyable first season with room for improvement (as most first seasons of good shows have); I'm glad I watched it.