Petronia

Star Trek TOS: 1/3 of the way through the first season. I've been finding this mentally taxing - I keep losing track of the first few minutes of each episode gawking at the "tech", the outfits and the general decor, and the acting is hard to parse. One assumes TV acting was more theatrical back then but sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be getting, and I can't tell if it's the actors or the scripts at issue (particularly in these early eps where everyone involved was sounding things out, incl. q. obv. the costume dept XD;), or the intervening 40(!) years of shifts in mores and convention. Or, why not, the editing: come to think of it one of the things that's throwing me off is that by 21st-century standards reaction shots are too long. And the things they do with dramatic lighting. XD

Anyhow I think all of it is starting to come together slowly, Charlie X was the first ep where I felt I was rolling with the punches the way I was meant to at any given moment. It's a good story, too.

The decor comes across as less cheesy now than when my friend made fun of it during the 90s. Everything was sleek molded black plastic then, remember? But Apple singlehandedly brought candy colours back, then a sort of retro analog cool mentality took hold, 60s classics became the new antique furniture, and faux-budget-brand functional minimalism is now cutting-edge design thanks to the economic crisis (the generic solution seems to be colour blocks + explanatory text in big font - if you can get a number series in there so much the better). One of the things I find hard to tell is if the conference and recreation rooms and such are supposed to look futuristic too, because they look like normal (and slightly depressing) office spaces on earth today. SF FULFILLS ITS OWN PROPHECY?!

Meanwhile the new movie is all soft white floor lighting and transparent freestanding screens that I suspect will look dated in a decade because they're too now!cool, like the pics I took of that marketing agency in São Paulo - I think it's even got the same flooring. XD; The yellow is very Jeffries tube as well. Love the yellow. That was the first time I saw a rug like that and now they're in all the Urban Outfitters.

The navigator is like the DADD professor of the Enterprise bridge. XD;