Star Trek: Discovery?

My new rule is never to put more effort into reviews of things than the creators did creating it. So here are some notes on Star Trek: Discovery.

* Decent effects and acting. Not as politically correct as I thought but still problems.

* The lead is a human Black woman who was raised on Vulcan by–wait for it–Spock’s parents.

* Vulblack is sent out alone in a spacesuit, copying Spock in the first Star Trek movie. They send the show’s lead–second in command–when they have a ROBOT crewmember wearing a Daft Punk helmet on the bridge.

* The Chinese Womancaptain failed to heed Vulblack’s valuable tactical advice for defeating Klingons, advice which should have been readily available to anyone in Starfleet.

* Chinese Womancaptain is killed for being an idiot. Vulblack gets the blame.

* The #1 in Command of the Federation Fleet shows up at the disastrous battle. An arrogant White Guy, his ship is rammed and destroyed.

* In the latest episode, another woman is killed for making a rash decision to bully a massive alien lifeform. Women are bad luck on ships.

* The show’s creators explained the Klingons are “Trump supporters.” For that to be true, the Klingon government would have open orders and be flooding Klingon territory with foreigners.

* The Klingons who yell, “REMAIN KLINGON!” are written by writers who IRL yell,”REMAIN JEWISH!” In other words, only Jews and Asians are allowed to preserve their unique cultures. Everyone else must suffer DIVERSITY, including Klingons.

* Klingons are warriors who find meaning in battle. They don’t need a PC excuse to do anything.

* The writers boasted Discovery would have a Gay in the regular cast. In the first episode they killed of The Gay’s partner. In other words, Gay & Switch.

* For The Record: I am against any non-Vulcan being able to deliver the Vulcan nerve pinch, so Data and Vulblack can cram it. I always assumed the Pinch works like a Taser and only Vulcans could do it due to telepathy.

* There’s so much shit out there it’s not worth getting mad over a single TV show.

* I love this song.  Beautiful for lovers and serial killers alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robot with Red Arm, A One-Act Play

A.A. Jabrams, director of the new Space Wars, sits with his creative team made up of three toy sellers.

Jabrams: So what the hell do we do with 3-CPO? Lorge Gucas made him “naked” in The Spectral Harasser, he was black and soot-coated in Advance of the Duplicates and finally shiny in Avengement of the Dark Robes. What’s left?

Toy 1: Well, let’s see, he’s introduced in Space Wars, Episode 4, taken apart for scrap in Payback of the Authority and treated as a “funny god” in Revisit of the Sword-Knights.

Toy 2: A.A., your new Space Wars:  The Potential Wakes Up has the same sand planet just with a different name. 3-CPO is WORTHLESS on desert planets, the sand is coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere in his circuits; he’s shiny like a signal mirror, the evil Authority can see him from space!–and his translation skills are next-to-worthless. Hell, if San Holo can understand the Warkees without a droid translator, and Suke Lywalker knows what 2D-2R is beeping, what good is P-3-OH anyway?

Jabrams: The fucking soccer ball has made a MINT aleady! Fans snatched his ass up; didn’t even wait to see if he’s an annoying, scene-ruining asshole like Bar Bar Jinks. FIFA-1 was a stroke of my genius!

Toy 1:  But boss…that still leaves the problem of 3-CPO.

Toy 3: Well…we could…make one of his arms red?

Jabrams: … That’s bucking frilliant!

Toy 1: But how do we explain the arm?

Toy 2: Who gives a shit? We’ll pay some monkey with a laptop to make something up.

Jabrams: Fuckin’ NERDS are going to LOVE this!

Toy 3: AND buy it. Even if they paint their old reaction figure’s arm red, they wouldn’t get the cool new packaging!

Jabrams: I love the movies! HAIL SATAN!

Toy people: (in unison) HAIL SATAN!

Almost Human—the cloning one

The challenge of making a good sci-fi show is taking thoughtful risks. That doesn’t mean the story has to be so complicated it leaves the dumb masses behind, but without a future where technology has changed morality, you’ve got another generic cop show with electric cars and quieter guns.

The drugs-are-bad episode, terrorism episode, heist episode and fuckbots episode were decent but not nearly as interesting as they could’ve been.

And now the cloning episode.

The plot we got was a literal genius who was faking being good in the eyes of the world but was really a villain, because he killed the doctor who helped clone him a few times. The story involves him and his clone family trying to kill a witness to the crime, a ditzy broad who looks like a 1980s Madonna and who is psychic from a brain-boosting process (a story in itself). The tight-(hair)-bunned cop-boss character is explored a little more but that’s really the only thing new.

A better plot would have had the good guy be likable while an unseen killer picked off the clones, causing the good guy to expose him-selves to the cops. Why was cloning conveniently made illegal 20 years earlier? Why did this guy clone himself, was it to beat an incurable disease? Do clones have legal rights? Is killing a clone considered murder?

This is the first episode where we really see Dorian’s awesome robopower as he catches up to a speeding electro-van and flips it like a cheese omelette (causing it to explode, even though it has no gas engine).

We the audience were kind-of prepped for this when earlier an MX-43 bragged about being able to lift a metric ton. I didn’t like this new information because it made Kennex look ignorant. If you didn’t know your robot buddy could lift a car, you might call in human first responders, needlessly putting them in the line of fire.

The MXs are as useless as stormtroopers. They’re supposed to provide a cold, glaring contrast to “crazy” warm Dorian, but their design is not well thought-out.

If an MX-43 can effortlessly carry a metric ton, they should all be walking around with 200 extra pounds of body armor, especially since every episode the bad guys get the jump on them. MX headwear is clearly not bulletproof, as their heads always get blown apart like rock candy.

It’s not necessary to build humanoid robots so that their recording devices are fragile chips of glass in their rock candy skulls…the head should have sensors-only while recording modules used as evidence should be heavily shielded in the robots’ torsos.  Sorry for the nerd shit, but it has to be said.

I don’t care about the hot girl cop, do you? We’ve seen McCoy break into a cold sweat in a showroom of fuckbots, why would he care about a human woman? (Prediction:  later in the season, when he’s ready to close the deal, the evil Insyndicate girlfriend will come along to ruin everything).

We also learned this week that Dorian has a giant robocock. The patrol car cop-buddy banter gets amusingly gayer every week.

Almost Human Episodes — the drugs one and the Die Hard one

I am a fan of Almost Human.  Like I said before (but it’s new to you) since I have no future, shows about the future are always amusing/entertaining.

No sooner had I written about the fuckbots episode when another appeared! While not quite a Die Hard ripoff, the episode where terrorists take over a building ripped-off Die Hard, though done well enough.  Halfway through the terrorists thew some poor Asian (Lou?) out the window before (mercifully?) shooting him in the face.  Pretty hardcore for regular TV.

Dorian proves his metal mettle at the end by taking out those bastards.

 

The drugs episode was OK, kind of a letdown after the hostage tension of last week.  The British nerd tech gets an increased role.  He looks awfully like a living model of the mascot of this comic strip. 

For the libertarian-minded, allow me to answer the question why 35 years in the future drugs are STILL not legalized, taxed and regulated:  because our esteemed government–among others–would come down on the show for not parroting the Party Line, which is Drug Prohibition and driving tanks through people’s front doors is the only way we’ll stop drugs.

Dorian’s fight with the Russianbot was OK.  The bots seem to be stronger than humans but not by much.  

I thought it was cool when McCoy put a round through that evil cop’s head.  That should ALWAYS happen to shit-talking villains in custody.

That’s it.  I’m not going to start writing about The Blacklist, though I watch that one and Person of Interest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost Human’s fuckbot episode

Almost Human aka The McCoy Show didn’t screw up the fuckbot episode too badly. I enjoyed it but am not ready to start calling the Obamabot 5000 by his RoboChristian name, even with his testicle scanners at maximum.

The ep did a nice fakeout at the beginning, when the expected lone loser soliciting a fuckbot proved not a client but an investigating inventor taking the law into his own hands and resulting in his doom. (Later the ep implied both the obnoxious cop and the genius limey tech both indulged in fuckbottery, the latter just for “conversation.”)

Most of the hour I thought the women were being kidnapped by the Future Albanians and fitted with some kind of brain transplant which made them servile fuckbots like the meat puppets in the novel Neuromancer but non-consensually, a far more horrifying (and interesting) idea. But alas, the mob was just using the kidnapped broads to siphon off their lovely skin.

But I just didn’t buy that the fuckbot industry was not able to create realistic human skin. In less than 10 years medicine will be 3-D printing replaceable human organs; can’t see how creating skin would be a problem fifty years from now.

Other random nouns:

* Why don’t any of the androids have superpowers?

* In the show’s world there are two major manufacturers of fuckbots. The idea that either could go bankrupt is ridiculous, but a story was required.

* I liked the concept of the DNA bomb. I’ve exploded a few of those myself.

* Thank you writers (so far) for not implying (future) global warming has destroyed earth.

* The McCoy Show takes place in the Fringe universe, or at least one where Massive Dynamic exists. Oh, J.J. Numbnuts, you’re a crafty one! Will you be using whales in the next Star Trek movie or mix it up and put them in Star Wars 7?

* A commenter elsewhere suggested that the fuckbot episode was really the fourth or fifth along in the season, obviously shown to lure viewers with its saucy subject matter.

* Since we’ve learned our esteemed “freedom-loving” government is spying on all of us all the time in 2013, what kind of tyrannical monster must the federal mafia be in 2048?

* I was mistaken about one thing from my initial post about the show. The criminal gang is not called ‘The Syndicate’ but
Insyndicate (why doesn’t anyone calls them “In-Syn” for short, or better yet, IN-SYNC)?

* Yeah, McCoy Kennex was upset about his GF being a member of In-syn, but he shouldn’t have erased his vmail.

* Calling a deadly gas in the first ep “Myklon Red” sure was creative. Sounds ominous for some reason.

* Expect to see an evil Dorian later in the season, perhaps running In-Syn. Just a guess.

Here’s the official website and a wiki for Almost Human. I do like the show and if anyone’s listening, this is no time to play it safe with the storyline.