Watching every episode of Star Trek The Next Generation for the first time Part Three by C T Thorbens

Posted onLeave a comment

Part Three of mocking a thirty-year-old scifi series for being hokey and rubbish. In this installment, we learn about Data’s backstory, Riker’s sexual fantasies (SPOILER ALERT: they involve trombones) and how to fix the ozone layer. 12. Datalore: Data, we learn, was found 26 years ago, the sole survivor of some catastrophic tragedy, like a waxen-skinned Harry Potter. The Enterprise returns to his planet and finds a SECOND Data – called Lore – who seems really nice and eager to be friends with everyone. OR IS HE? This episode is a tricky one — bits of it are good, and yet the whole is so irretrievably stupid. On the plus side, Data does a cracking performance as Evil Twin Lore, Read More

Theatre Review: New Atlantis – Both Waving and Drowning by Lydia Nicholas

Posted onLeave a comment

Sieman’s Crystal, the fractured, urgent glass polygon where Last Theatre’s New Atlantis sets its immersive stage, is an ill-fated location to explore the public’s place in humanity’s struggle to face the oncoming climate catastrophe. Above us oil-monarchy sponsored empty glass baubles run from the gargantuan ExCel centre to the O2 along the Emerites Airline. Massive 19th century cranes are dwarfed by even more massive business hotels, monuments to one withered stream of capital become sculpture to entertain the acolytes of the next. To the south the evening sky is alive with the light of a thousand Canary Wharf executive’s windows. Turning East along Victoria Dock, we stare right up the business end of London City Airport’s runway where for £10,000 Read More

Thoughts on Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004) by William Eddingtackle

Posted onLeave a comment

“They took from their surroundings what was needed and made of it something more,” says the narrator of Shane Carruth’s fiendishly knotty debut, pairing words that mythologise the film’s accidental (time) tourists Aaron (Carruth himself) and Abe (David Sullivan) with a deadened electronic tone that flatpacks their experience into drudge. It’s a fair summary of Carruth’s extraordinary achievement – having written, directed, designed, shot, scored and starred in this $4,000 Sundance winner, he has as good a claim as any towards legitimate auteurship. As underlined by an anecdote about NASA’s failed attempts to create a pen that writes in zero gravity (the Soviets used pencils), this is the science, and the cinema, of found things, awesome ideas stumbled upon by Read More

Watching every episode of Star Trek The Next Generation for the first time Part Two by C T Thorbens

Posted onLeave a comment

Part Two of what happens if you wait twenty years to finally watch a beloved scifi series and find yourself baffled by it. 8. The Battle: The Ferengi are back to offer a ship ‘as a gift’ and since none of the crew have ever heard the phrase ‘Trojan horse’, they accept. It contains a Picard-specific magic box, the effects of which are too silly to go into here. Despite their obvious shiftiness (including significant pauses and actually rubbing their hands together) no one, including Troi, picks up on their hidden agenda. Her empathic abilities are limited to saying quickly ‘ooh, I felt something too,’ when Picard lurches out of his chair, clutching his forehead in agony. I’m going to Read More

Watching Every Episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation for the First time, Part One by C T Thorbens

Posted onLeave a comment

With the launch of the latest Start Trek big-screen adventure, could there be a better time to finally get round to watching Star Trek: TNG? Well, pretty much any time in the past 20 years would have made more sense. During my preteens and adolescence, the show seemed to be on every week, requiring dogged persistence and ingenuity on my part to avoid watching even a single episode. And remember, this was 1990, a time when my house had access to only four TV channels and no internet. I didn’t avoid it out of a lack of interest in the genre (I was entering peak sci-fi interest years, and by the end of ST:TNG’s run on British TV, would have Read More