And then tonight as I took out the trash I saw where it's evidently been burrowing, a big hole directly under the retaining wall to our yard.

Now what?

Betrayed

To despise your government
To distrust your government
To be unable to respect your government
To know the leader of your country has contempt
for the people of your country
To be angered
not because it’s “Not in my name”
but because it IS in my name

First we've got Bride of Chaotica!, in which Kate Mulgrew enthusiastically chews the scenery. Mmm! Part of a balanced breakfast!

Also, she's pretty judgey about Tom's extracurriculars. E remarked that her daily coinflip must've landed on "Mom", and I can't say she's wrong.

It's a fun breather episode so long as you forget the fact that dozens of photonic aliens died before anybody on Voyager even realized they were at war. Whoops! Also, they spend almost the entire episode mere inches away from a shipwide epidemic of some sort of gross gastrointestinal illness, but nobody seems to care about that either, it's all played for laughs.

Then this episode I completely forgot where Tuvok and Tom are crash-landed on a time displaced planet for several months or a year with a woman who is deeply crushing on Tuvok. Tom, for whatever weird reason of his own, is adamant that the correct course of action is for Tuvok to get in touch with his emotions and just go to bang city with this woman. E and I agreed that the actually correct and logical course of action was for Tuvok to give Tom that punch in the face that he is just begging for, but for some reason Tuvok refrained. Seriously, I have no idea what bug flew up Tom's butt this episode, but he was so fucking obnoxious for no reason at all. Maybe, Tom, you should get in touch with your emotions before you start lecturing the Vulcan about his. I genuinely have no idea what his deal was or was supposed to be.

On a very different note, I don't know if anybody can make it to London who cares, but Camlann is doing a live prequel episode in September. If you know a bit more about Arthuriana than I do you probably would like the audiodrama a lot. Or even if you only know as much as I do or a little less. The music is amazing.

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How're you gonna send your "thoughts-and-prayers" email on Friday? At this point, silence would've been better. (I have no idea how I got on the mayor's email list.)

Speaking of the shooting, my aunt texted me to check in. She, uh, she called me by the name I tried out for like five minutes in middle school. I have no idea how she remembered that. I barely remember that. But at least she didn't ask after Mommy's health this time.

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This should drop the temperature to something livable.

E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.

First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.

I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.

Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.

The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.

At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)

One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.

And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.

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Really? You really don't see it at all?



(The comment is a few years old and gave a few more details in the thread that read to me like they were a teen or young adult when they wrote it, so to protect their identity I'm linking to a different lyrics video of the same song. But seriously, there's a level of stupidity that can't be entirely excused by youth.)

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So, there was the one where Naomi Wildman's mother doesn't die but we never see her again, which is kinda weak as episodes go but which does set up Naomi becoming Seven's little duckling.

We skipped the ice episode - I mean, it's a great episode, I just wasn't feeling it - and went on to Seven's multiple personality episode, or as I call it, "Jeri Ryan is an amazing actress". Like, wow.

This is another episode in which the crew has seemingly forgotten the concept of diplomacy. Okay, you have a Borg device with a computer virus that kills lots of Borg. The people who invented the thing obviously want it put back in space, intact, so it can kill even more Borg. You don't want to do that until you've cured Seven - great, wonderful. Have you considered asking them if there is anything they might accept in trade? Like, I don't know, information about the Borg? They only met the menace four years ago! Sure, they've made remarkable strides in killing them since them, but they'd surely like to know more about your novel approach of deborgifying the drones? They could get some of their own people back if they tried that approach, and that'd surely be better than killing them all? More information so they could pursue multiple goals can only be a good thing, especially as the Borg are bound to adapt to any one approach sooner or later.

But no, nobody even suggests it. Geez, these people. (And also? Maybe information on this virus would've been a good thing to trade for. You don't need people to sacrifice themselves. If the virus is nonfatal but persistent you can just infect people prophylacticly and hope for the... uh, best? Worst? You can hope that if the worst ever happens, at least you'll take some Borg out with you.)

And we wrapped up with the episode in which the Doctor creates a holographic Cardassian war criminal as a medical expert with whom to confer. So-so writing, honestly - the themes deserved better, and it's only saved by the acting.

while denying that it was in any way wrong to act like that.

But now I'm not sure where I read that. Does anybody have a link?