Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Well by now it's on its sixth or seventh episode, but when Star Trek: Discovery 's premiere came out I did review it like I did with The Orville because hey, I'm a huge Star Trek fan and I had to at least give it a shot despite my poor first impressions from trailers and such. Like with The Orville , I did my level best to give it a chance to prove me wrong.  Despite the tone, the weird look with the Klingons, the SJW nonsense with the casting decisions, and the political commentary by the cast and crew, I went into it hoping for a good show because I wanted to see good Star Trek again. Sadly,  Discovery  is not good  Star Trek.  Frankly this show isn't Star Trek at all.  It doesn't even fit in with the JJ Abrams reboot, which itself already turned Star Trek 's corpse into a mindless zombie searching for brains, and unlike the reboot which could at least claim to be paced well enough to make you forget how stupid it is, Discovery fails on just...

Well I've been pretty lax lately about putting up posts for the reviews on the blog.  Blogger makes it somewhat of a pain in the ass so it tends to dissuade me, but in any case I have two TV shows to talk about with you all for this one. First up is Marvel's new Netflix show, The Defenders , which teams up all the heroes from all their other Netflix shows.  Of those, the only one I genuinely enjoyed from start to finish was Jessica Jones , but Daredevil wasn't too bad.  Iron Fist had a few good secondary characters, but otherwise just kind of sucked.  As for Luke Cage , well, I had plenty to say about that one already. So how does putting them all together stack up? Not well, I'm afraid: And then there was The Orville , Seth MacFarlane's personal Star Trek fan fiction/parody/homage.  The trailers for this thing made me cringe, but as a huge Star Trek fan myself, I had to at least give this one a shot.  Sadly it too made me very cranky:

It's no secret I'm not a fan of J.J. Abram's reboot of Star Trek .  Not only did it turn the franchise into incredibly generic and brain-dead action movies, but as movies go they're pretty terrible once you see through the extremely fast pace that keeps people from realizing how stupid everything is. Of course they're also written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, who are the total and complete hacks behind such other well-written movies like... Transformers . Beyond, however, has been written mostly by Simon Pegg, and Justin Lin from the Fast and Furious franchise has come on board to direct, probably because Paramount didn't want to spend any more money on Lasik for the editing/CGI teams going blind adding JJ's trademark lens flare all over the place. The question is, did that improve things or not?  Here's what I thought:  

Star Trek has had a profound effect on my life. I grew up watching the original series in reruns and seeing the movies in theaters. As Star Trek: The Next Generation matured into a great show, so did I mature through my teenage years. The ethical debates we had in college classrooms had nothing on heated arguments I had about Captain Janeway’s decisions in Star Trek: Voyager . Even when I finally developed an interest in politics, I was more concerned about the reboot of Star Trek than I was about Obama’s attempt to reboot America. Such is the world for people who don’t have time to follow the minute by minute machinations of Washington. It’s why politically savvy people my age spend so much time trying to impress upon conservatives just how important it is they engage in the culture. Not only does it inform our politics, it reflects what we value as a nation. In fact, the difference between the original Star Trek and the rebooted version demonstrates how drastically A...

There's a classic episode of Star Trek: The Next Generati on in which Captain Picard is captured by the Cardassians in an attempt to glean information about Federation defense plans. Picard is given over to Gul Madred, played by David Warner, who proceeds to torture the good captain in every way imaginable (waterboarding is curiously left out) including inserting a device into Picard that can instantly cause pain and continue to do so for prolonged periods of time. The hallmark of the repeated tortures is the test Gul Madred uses to determine if Picard has finally submitted. Madred has placed above and behind him, four spotlights. He turns them on, and then he asks Picard the simple question of "how many lights do you see?" Picard naturally counts four, only to be rebuked by Gul Madred that there are, in fact, five lights. This exchange is repeated a number of times over several days, and when Picard disagrees, Madred inflicts pain on Picard, even leaving the pain device ...