petronia

S01 E18 The Squire Of Gothos: I am sort of over whimsical omnipotent alien beings dicking around the crew of the Enterprise for lulz, which... yeah. NOT LIKE THIS HAPPENS A LOT IN TREK OR ANYTHING. This ep is pretty explicit re this sort of... contemporary longing... for ~~mommy and daddy~~ some more advanced civilization to put an end to humanity's Playtime With Nuclear Holocaust, but in general the series resorts to deus ex machina to pull Kirk's nuts out of the fire pretty often; I guess because they keep setting up situations where if one were writing a standalone SF short story rocks would simply fall and everyone would die and it would be deeply meaningful and shit. XD; Possibly I think this because I'm reading The Martian Chronicles, which kicks off with no less than four, count'em, four White Man Bad Endings before American imperialism succeeds in making the red planet its own (via unintentional biological warfare, no less! If you really feel like writing an effed up Star Trek story one day, make it one where someone beams down from the Enterprise with a head cold and the virus wipes out an entire alien civilization). It's blackly hilarious, in a futuristic Edward Gorey sort of way.

S01 E19 Arena: speaking of "advanced civilizations", LMAO when the Metron dude was like "does my appearance surprise you" and Kirk is just like notoutloudnotoutloudthatrobeiskindagayshitwasthatoutloud. Anyway I started off thinking "Everyone makes fun of this episode but it's actually pretty good, there's a budget and explosions and action and stuff!" and then I got to the halfway mark ROTFL4EVR

(Something about the juxtaposition between the Looney Tunes nature of the battle and Shatner's "emotive" monologuing... actually I rather liked the narrative parallel between the "sophisticated" portable cannon they use at the beginning and the one Kirk cobbles together out of rocks and bamboo, but yeah there's no real way to take this shiz seriously. XD;)