To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise: Season 1) [1.2]

(Continued from 1.1)


Shadows Of P'Jem: Well, I thought I was going to like it more than I did. What we have here is a follow-up to The Andorian Incident, with fallout from that whole monastery plot leading to T'Pol getting recalled because Vulcan High Command think she was the one at fault there (and they can't shitcan Archer). Some neat stuff is teased but what we get is just... Archer and T'Pol kidnapped for most of the episode. There's some funny physical comedy moments between the two as they try to get out, and the Andorians do show up again to help bust them out to repay their debt from The Andorian Incident, but then a Vulcan strike team busts in and complicates their rescue attempt. I found that interesting because, from our point of view, the Vulcans came in and ruined what would have gone off without a hitch... but in-universe if you asked the Vulcans, they'd say everything would have been fine if the humans and Andorians hadn't blustered their way in. You know, kind of like what happened with P'Jem! T'Pol takes a shot for a Vulcan captain and that convinces them to let her stay on the ship. It's an episode with good ramifications and things to think about, but otherwise it's not the greatest in the world. That's okay though. It's a step up from the messes that the last two episodes were...

Actual post-watch experience of "Fusion".

Shuttlepod One: A more low-key episode that I kind of misinterpreted as I watched it, but still enjoyed. Armory Officer Malcolm Reed and Engineer Tucker are in a shuttlepod doing tests when they find wreckage from the Enterprise, assume it's been destroyed, and slowly drift through space with only a few days of air left and little hope of rescue. The majority of the episode is just them adrift with little hope, Tucker as an optimist and Reed as a pessimist regarding any chance of rescue. Now, the story has little mentions of miniature black holes called micro-singularities, and I thought maybe this would be an alternate timeline deal or something involving them. No, it turns out the debris was just from a rescue attempt the Enterprise made that gets talked about after the opening credits. So, I made this one out to be more interesting than it was, but it's still pretty good. Reed's mournful bit late in the episode about how he's only recording logs for his family and all his old girlfriends to find, because the real family he cared for was the crew of the Enterprise who are now seemingly dead, is a great little moment. Not so great is Reed's dream of being rescued and then T'Pol making out with him. Or his drunken declaration that she has a nice ass. Yeah. That happened. Eyebrow-raising, but this was still an interesting one that I got to write a big paragraph about so it must have done something right.

To Boldly Step Forward (Enterprise: Season 1) [1.1]

Part One: No, They're Not Gonna Hold Me Down No More

(Since this ended up being something in the realm of 7000 words once I wrote about every episode of Season 1, you get it split in half so your eyes don't glaze over. I can be kind with my walls of text sometime. The other half of the season will go up tomorrow.)

Okay, so Season 1 of Enterprise. As I write this I am maybe... halfway through it. If I had seen all of it, I'd give you a brief summary of what it was like. (INTRUSION FROM THE FUTURE: Good to great, with some missteps.) Right now, all I can do is set the scene for you. A little Star Trek lore: In the mid-22nd century humanity developed faster-than-light warp engines for travelling into space, and attracted the attention of the Vulcans. You know 'em, those logical people with the pointed ears and the eyebrows. Enterprise is set about 100 years afterward, with rapid technological progress thanks to our alliance with the Vulcans. The story of humanity making first contact with the Vulcans was told in the TNG movie, Star Trek First Contact, and the ending of that made it seem like humanity was about to enter a golden age. It's somewhat golden, but there's a sense of progess being held back. The Vulcans, ever logical and without emotion, simply do not trust the overly emotional and irrational human race, and have been holding back technological advances. Many resent this, but now we have a fancy new spaceship, the NX-01 Enterprise, launching off into the vast unknown as humanity is ready to take its first steps forward into space and explore and learn (and encounter a bunch of tricky shit on the way, as per Star Trek convention). So, then. Here's Season 1 of Enterprise, episode by episode.

To Boldly Step Forward (Introduction)

Introduction: Gettin' From There To Here


Star Trek was never really my scene as a kid. I was 2 years old when The Next Generation premiered, and was in no state to be watching it. I remembered seeing part of a rerun of the old 60's Star Trek show once, when I was very young. An alien shot a laser beam at two people and turned them into tiny cubes, then crushed one of them in his hand and said "THIS MAN IS NOW DEAD". It terrified me. Later, when I was about 10 years old, I saw the Star Wars trilogy thanks to an older cousin of mine with a large VHS collection. He eventually moved just next door to us for a time, and after I saw Star Wars I was intrigued by his Star Trek VHS collection. That got me to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I know a lot of people rag on this movie nowadays for being an ultra slow, agonizing borefest of a film that just fucking drags itself across the screen, but you know what? This shit was fascinating to me as a kid. It had another horrific moment there with the transporter accident scene, but after all the bombast of Star Wars I had never seen anything like this. So it was that I went through those other movies, and fell in a sort of love with the original crew in my own way. The TNG movies were concurrent at this time, and I saw them... but they didn't click with me. In hindsight, I get why. They're far less of a general audience thing. I didn't need to watch a Star Trek episode from 1967 to know that Khan was this larger-than-life space Ahab who wanted to get revenge at any cost against Captain Kirk, but these TNG movies? They just sort of fell flat because I had no investment in this crew. That was my Star Trek limit, and for many years I didn't bother.


Then I picked up TNG around... god, I don't even know how long ago it was now. Late 2016? Let's say that. Here's where I have to give credit where it's due. At well over a hundred episodes, maybe even something like 180 (I've not looked it up), TNG would have taken me ages to blast through. I needed a roadmap. No, more than that. A tour guide. I found my guide to the stars in the author of Eruditorum Press's critical analysis/personal life experience journal of Star Trek. I'd known about them already due to the anime Dirty Pair and their analysis of that series as it related to Star Trek, so I reached out. I asked for a curation of TNG on a season by season basis as I worked my way through, to avoid the bad episodes, the ones with unfortunate implications. I mostly followed my guide's advice, though I did dip into episodes featuring Q and a bunch of the ones that were described as "this is a fan favorite episode but I disagree with it because of ____". It was important for me to get a sense of why Star Trek fandom at large went to bat for those episodes, and I saw the strengths and weaknesses of them. I understood why general consensus would love them, and I found my own love for this show growing. This, more than those movies I saw when I was 10, became my ideal Star Trek. A space utopia spreading across the stars, growing and learning and changing across the vast expanse. Peak Star Trek, in Doctor Who terms for me, is a fusion of the weird (See: The Underwater Menace or, to give a more recent example, It Takes You Away) and the sheer potential of the human race (See: Tom Baker's "indomitable species" speech from The Ark In Space). I don't really have to sum up TNG because the show made itself a narrative bridge between its beginning and ending. The first episode shows our new crew having to prove humanity's worth to Q, the omnipotent alien trickster god who demands the human race retreat from the stars because they're too aggressive and morally bankrupt for it, and puts them on trial to answer for their crimes as a species. The final episode reveals that the trial never ended. The entire show has been about humanity proving itself, showing its best and worst tendencies through good and bad. Utopia wins out. Humanity has bettered itself in its exploration, and so too did I better myself by experiencing it. What a wonderful show.


I could go on. I could write about TNG and sing its praises for thousands of words, but... Well, my guide made an entire book series about that. I don't feel like I could do better than them, and even my personal affirmations would be a hollow duplicate. What I can do, however, is share in my newest adventure. One my guide hasn't quite made it up to yet with their massive project, and one I'm still exploring. I dabbled in Deep Space Nine after TNG, and managed to go back to those TNG movies and find... well, not too much of an opinion change, more of an understanding. I could go on about those, but here's the new voyage I decided to take. Star Trek Enterprise, the prequel Star Trek series that aired from 2001 to 2005. I spent a ludicrous amount of money on the Blu-Ray set of the complete series, and I have been working through it slowly but surely. Here and now, in the middle of season 1, I decided to make a thing out of it. Why not chronicle my journey? I did it with Sailor Moon, and made an entire nine-month journey out of it. Six months to watch it, and then three to write it down. Things will be different this time. For one, I'm not going to write it out like I did with Sailor Moon. Instead, I'll take more of a capsule review approach, going through episode by episode and giving a paragraph or so of thoughts. Roughly. More to the point, I'll actually write things down concurrent with my watching of the episodes. None of this waiting to watch it all and then spending months sitting on my thoughts. You'll get it all when I finish a season, and they'll probably be split up to two posts per season. Maybe three. I don't know how much I'll talk. Well then. Take my hand, won't you? The guided has now become the guide. Let me take you on a journey through the stars, a journey of a utopia not yet fully formed. We cannot boldly go where no one has gone before, as we've gone so far back that even this assertiveness is new to us. These are simple moves that will echo across into the future. Not a Discovery, or a Short Trip.


Come with me. We will boldly step forward, where others will go afterward.


TO BE CONTINUED...

Do Androids Have Nightmares Of Electric Ouroboroi? (Mega Man X6)

Well. Well well well. Here we are. Dear God in heaven, here we are. I debated whether or not I was going to write this. As I played the game in question, I really wanted to rip it to shreds in a proper exorcism. Then I beat it, watched some speedrun stuff, realized some other stuff, and now I'm faced with a dilemma on just who is to blame for the experience I had. It was only digging up my old writings on Mega Man X5 and seeing the teaser for this game I inadvertently put at the end that made me pull the trigger on it. So, here it is. Mega Man X6. A screed I have yet to commit to the page, but which will be partly a rage-induced exorcism and partly a treatise on the nature of culpability in a difficult video game experience. Let me set the scene for you. It's 6:30 PM on Monday night (January 24th for those of you coming to this well after the fact) and my Internet connection just went out. Well, shit. Now what do I do? At least I have a myriad of video games to choose from. Against all odds, I decided to fire up the Switch and see what Mega Man X6 had to offer. The online connection didn't come back until 9:30 on the 25th, so that was a good 27 hours or so of being cut off. Nothing but me, and Mega Man X6. This is not a review in the traditional sense. This is a travel journal, of my survival in the depths of hard video game hell. Here then, is my experience with Mega Man X6, and what I've been mulling over for the past week.

From The SMPS Vaults: Mega Man X5 (A Review)

(Hello! Future intrusion here. What you're about to read was posted to the former forums of Socksmakepeoplesexy.net in late March of 2015. It's an interesting piece on Mega Man X5 that I wrote when I finished that game at the time, and it's going up here both as a "better late than never" archival of writing I did that's no longer online, and a companion piece/prelude to something I have yet to write. I don't have too many screenshots to include this time, so we'll just let the words sing and use what I did write to paint an imagination picture for you. One final note: In 2015 I played this game on the PS Vita, but nowadays it's available for multiple platforms as part of Mega Man X Legacy Collection 2. I got the screenshots and stuff included here from the Switch version, but it also changes all the Guns N Roses boss reference names back to their original Japanese ones, so bear that in mind. Well then. On with what I had to waffle about almost four years ago.)

Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: New Year's Day 2019 Special (Resolution)

Destroying humanity with a kettle and some string.

So this is how we end the story of Doctor Who in the 2010s, huh? Okay. It's also the only Doctor Who we get all year, and god knows when Series 12 will be in 2020? Like it could be another October air date of ten episodes for all we know? ...Okay. As one last adventure before the inevitable cold dark of the series resting? It's okay. It's another Chris Chibnall joint and he manages to make something that's not offensively boring like... oh, the Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos. Mind you, it's still not going to crack my top three for Series 11 or anything. This presents us with a problem. Series 11, in comparison to what came before, had some episodes that resonated well with me, some others that were well-executed adventures but faltered in places, and then a bunch of somewhat mediocre stories. Unfortunately, all of those were written by our current showrunner. (Okay, on a rewatch in the marathon leading up to Resolution, Woman Who Fell To Earth still worked for me and that entire climax with the crane and Segun Akinola's score for that bit were rad as hell.) Anyway, let's send Series 11 off and talk about this slim island of Who that we got. The news of the hiatus gave this episode some unfair expectations. If it was shitty we'd all be down because it was our only Who for 16+ months. If it was spectacularly good we'd be pissed off that Chibnall blew his quality wad on the ending and put out all that mediocrity in 2018, and that he was finally getting good before the show went off the air for 16+ months. With all that in mind, how was Resolution?

See ya, 2018.

Not much to say, really. There wasn't much activity on the blog because I was too busy watching magical girl cartoons and dealing with other shit to play video games and make many other super-meaningful and esoteric connections. Still, I do adore these little celebrations and looks back at things I wrote. It's about 45 minutes until the year ends for me, so I've still got time. One last walk down memory lane.


An Early Spring Fling (Fire Emblem Echoes)

I said it near the end of the Game Of The Year post, but I really wish I beat this one. Still, it was neat that I got to dig into Fire Emblem like this and get inspired by a game that may be a rare one of a kind treat. Or maybe they really will make more like it. Either way, we'll see if I can clear it in 2019. This is notable for being, if nothing else, one of the two things I wrote on the blog before the big one. The other?

I Attack Your Accurate Adaptation Of The Rules Directly! (Yu-Gi-Oh: The Sacred Cards)

I didn't put it on the GOTY post but this was... cute. Cute enough that parts of it inspired me. Enough to write this. It's far from the greatest game I played this year, but as one of the few that were interesting enough to get a post out of me? It deserves a spot. (Maybe Trails In The Sky will get one in 2019. Second Chapter, don't let me down.)

Moonlight Shines Eternal (The Sailor Moon Post): 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

The headliner. The defining bit of media from 2018 for me. I spent six months watching it, and another three agonizing over what to say about it. This show changed me, became a metaphor for my own personal confusions and discoveries over the year, and became an essential part of me. It's got its flaws and all, but in the end it's the symbolism of it all. It wasn't about the quality of the show. It was about the person it helped awaken inside me. For that, I can't thank it enough.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 10 (The Dark Tower)

Had to put a rep from the Halloween marathon on here. I like this entry the best even though it's, by some measure, the worst. I barely talk about the book, but it's more about the influence it had on me. A perfect pairing with all that Sailor Moon exorcism, as this is a novel which made me in 2003 just as much as Sailor Moon did.

Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 9 (It Takes You Away)

Series 11 was kind of a letdown, huh? I'd love to believe that tomorrow's Resolution will redeem it, but I have my doubts. Still, there were highs. Pity none of them were by the fucker in charge, but this is the highest high for me, I think. Inventive, twisty, and full of lots of gonzo symbolism and occult power. And A SENTIENT FUCKING FROG UNIVERSE HOLY SHIT I STILL LOVE IT.

Frezno's Games Of The 2018 Thing

In case you missed it. Very good games were played and I talked about them. Like two days ago. You probably caught it, but it's here for posterity. You know. I could have added more but I felt the list was getting bloated, so. There we are.

That'll do it for 2018. I have nothing else to say except an expression of my love and gratitude to all of you, the ones who do read this nonsense I sporadically spout out of my brain. You make me feel like I actually know what the hell I'm doing here sometimes, and for that I can't thank you enough. I hope you enjoy your end of year festivities, and let's cross our fingers for some really cool and life-changing positive experiences to be had in 2019. See you on the other side of the year.