Broken Bow: Four Words

Jelik, Sarin, Rigel, Tholia. The four words Hoshi could not translate from Klaang's delirious ravings in Phlox's sickbay. Lovely bit of foreshadowing there with the use of Tholia. I wish though that we had heard the word Jelik again. Not as something epic revealed but said in passing, perhaps by Daniels (though thinking about it I don't think he ever said anything "in passing".) The kind of reference that rewards the faithful viewer.

Jelik, Jelik, Jelik.. probably calling after his favorite Klingon dessert.

Weird Trek things I'd like to do part 1

Watch Enterprise all the way through with the peppy theme music for the first two seasons and the slower theme music for the last two. I don't dislike the peppy theme music of seasons 3 and 4 the way many folk do but I do think it is dissonant considering the darkness the crew is plunged into. With Archer resorting to piracy, the ship and crew in terrible disrepair, deaths every other episode.. the peppy "faith in my heart" deal is weirdly jarring. How much better to have had the slower theme for those seasons. Start off the series with the wildly optimistic peppy theme and switch to the more reflective one.

I've just starting re-watching Enterprise through from the beginning. I've only seen Broken Bow, it's not too late for this musical experiment. Of course I will miss all the credits, Guest Star this and Guest Star that but I can live without it. It will be a pain and I will probably give up after a while but I think I should try it.

I have abandoned Six Feet Under for the moment as I have failed to buy the dvd set at the bargain price. Because the sets are so inexpensive, especially when on sale, they fall into Mr. Teacake's ethics zone in which they must be purchased rather than downloaded. Mr. Teacake has these sudden ethical spasms and far be it from me to dissuade a man from his ethics especially if it means actual purchase of dvd sets. It goes like this: if you would buy it you should buy it. I would NOT buy Enterprise at its current price of AU188.00 a season so it is okay to download it. I will buy it when it is released in the affordable cardboard slipcovers, as I am currently buying DS9 (I've acquired seasons 1-4 so far). Just because I'm a collector doesn't mean I'm an idiot.

All of this is good news for this blog and it's thousands of readers because it means I won't be overly distracted by non-Trek.

In other news The Good That Men Do is so far a fabulous book.

"refulgent"

I consider myself to have a good vocabulary. The last book I read that required recourse to the dictionary was "Father and Son" by Edmund Gosse, a fabulous book I couldn't put down except when recording in a notebook the words I needed to look up while reading it. There was at least one a page. I must find that notebook, I am sure "refulgent" is in there somewhere.

Trek books are not great literature. Often they are not particularly well written. A great Trek book may well be quite embarrassing if held up to other great fiction in terms of the actual writing. A Trek book is great if it captures the voice of the known characters, if it creates sympathetic and interesting new characters and if it carries the Trek story forward in a believable and wonderful way. There are many books that do all this and not much more is asked of them in the area of literary craft.

Therefore it is particularly annoying to me to come across obscure and/or archaic words in the middle of maudlin run on Treklit sentences. It conjures up the image of the author with thesaurus.com at the top of his bookmarks, hoping to add some weightiness to his work. One Trek book was peppered with such words like truffles embedded in Velveeta. It was quite hilarious; I looked up every one of them and they were all lovely but wow, were they out of place. I can't remember which book that one was now but as I recall it was an excellent Trek tale and I will probably reread it again. Next time I'll have a little notebook at hand, for my amusement and edification.

"Shenar responded in the same manner that Theras had; he gently took Theras's hand, his blind face refulgent with a look of almost religious ecstasy."

The Good That Men Do by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin, page 51



Painting is "Refulgent Reflux" by Jonas Gerard.

Limbo

Unfortunately a person can only watch so much television. I fully intended to immediately begin watching Enterprise again after finishing it but I got sucked into a completely different show, Six Feet Under. Sometimes I think 6'U is riveting tv and other times I think it's a morass of sticky emotional slop. Kind of like E2.. (j/k!!) During the last few episodes my mind has been wandering and I've been thinking of the clean, sexless, idealistic Enterprise crew as I knew them in Season 1.

I find it even harder to read novels than to watch a decent amount of television. I think I am on chapter 2 of The Good That Men Do. Some days I manage only a few sentences before putting it down. So far it is nicely written. I was a bit worried as I was never able to get into the first book in the Titan series as the writing was long winded and dull but this seems much tighter. I am hoping I can actually keep up with Enterprise Relaunch as I am for once starting at the beginning. I love the cover of TGTMD.

I have been missing the Enterprise theme music, my nightly companion for 5 months. I always watched the whole thing. With 6'U I skip ahead, I don't think I've ever seen it through.

I think I'm pining for Enterprise..

A Phlox Question

Phlox's very weird grin: why do we only see this in BB and TATV? It does make a nice bookend. I imagine it was dropped after BB for who knows what reason and revived for TATV out of sentiment.

Stupid Escheresque Dilemmas!

The problem with studying TATV for clues as to Trip's being Not.Dead is that it just doesn't work if you see it as a holoprogram. Unless of course this is almost an easter egg the meticulous historian can discover when running this program (which assumes Trip's lack of actual death is known in Riker's time). These historical holoprograms would only have any real accuracy if there were constant cams recording folk allowing future holoprogrammers reconstruction opportunity.

If it were really that accurate I imagine it would be a terrible temptation to spend your life on a holodeck with someone you loved who had died. I think if you did spend time with a program of them it would seem stilted and odd and not really connect to you the way the real person did.

Even though I think that the future holoprogram aspect of TATV was a nice and interesting touch (I suspect I'm the only fan who feels this way) I would much rather be working with the real source material and not have the nagging "this is just a program" feel to the final episode of such a fine series.

TATV: Thoughts as the final theme music played

I jotted down these ideas just after watching TATV for the first time last night. Probably as a result of reading forums I was preoccupied with working out how Trip could manage to not be dead.

~~~

How Trip is Not.Dead

Shran disguised his own death and he is now ready to disguise the death of Trip. He needs Trip for.. something as yet unrevealed and he needs him DEAD in the eyes of the pinkskins to achieve this. The kidnapping is a fake and the kidnappers either his compatriots in his scheme or his hired hands. Their mission: seize Trip after making him appear killed. Heck, perhaps they even allow him to die knowing they can revive him once they get their hands on his body. Perhaps they substitute a fake body and take Trip’s real body away, revive him and use him for their plans.

“He’d never make it back”: Riker. Sure never make it back in time for the ceremony but perhaps he does make it back from the dead a decade in the future. (Good thing Vulcans have long lives.)

~~~

Since then I've been thinking about how un-sad the rest of the crew seemed to be in the days following Trip's death. I will be rewatching those scenes but I don't recall Archer or Reed making any definitive statements about him being dead and how tragic this was on the eve of their retiring the NX-01. So I'm starting to think this could actually be a ruse on the part of the crew, with or without Shran being a factor. Section 31? Starfleet intelligence? Both recently had their fingers in the warp coils.

And perhaps that might explain T'Pol's rather lame talk with Trip in the shuttle "do you miss me?" "I will miss you".. I don't buy that this all came about after a little chat with Chef. Maybe T'Pol knew Trip would be away for a long time, perhaps forever, on this mission that required him dead.


Chef serving Pyrithian bat droppings to galley visitors:

5 good things about almost being done with Enterprise

1. Mirror Universe eps finally coming up!

2. I will get to read "The Good That Men Do".

3. Can stop reading forums through my fingers.

4. Can read 1,000,000 shipper posts I have carefully avoided for the duration of watching Enterprise.

5. Already looking forward to starting ENT all over again.

I console myself with these little bonuses but really I am very sad.

Borderland: The Orions

Okay maybe this is just me but.. I could not get past how similar the big beefy male Orions looked to Shrek. They were supposed to be so menacing but all I saw was Shrek, Shrek, Shrek. This was very unfortunate.

Babel One

So what, was Journey to Babel supposed to be Babel Two? Tellarites, Andorrians, mystery ship, southeast Asian fruits pretending to be alien delicacies.. so far no daddy issues though.

Replicating

Many of my blog posts here will be replicated from forum posts elsewhere. This blog will be a kind of scrapbook of my Enterprise thoughts and most likely will be unread by anyone.