Omelets for Pepper

Discovery was already very eager to turn the Federation into some grim, depressing future space government and I don’t need another series deciding that that’s precisely what we need to make it ~interesting~ because post-scarcity utopias are boring somehow.

Giving the Federation a bit of a dark side is fine; it’s run by people and people are flawed. But ultimately the Federation, from TNG onwards, is in fact supposed to be a space utopia. It’s sins, when they happen, are meant to be ones of ignorance, of omission and individual bad actors, rather than of commission, of deliberate and vicious malice.

I know people are already rearing up to go “But what about Section 31!” And Section 31 is precisely my point. Section 31 is a rogue, illegal conspiracy of baddies with no sanction that, when 99% of Federation citizens find out they exist, are appalled by and immediately spring into action to try and get rid of.

Or look at Admiral Leyton. (The coup guy from Season 4 of DS9.) Leyton is trying to turn the Federation into a police state… and he understands that Federation society is so utterly and completely repelled by this notion that he is going to have to lie to EVERYONE, even his co-conspirators, to make it happen, and his entire thing collapses when a simple, basic appeal to Federation values is made to his literal right-hand woman and even SHE rejects him. Which was the point.

Only now in Picard we’ve got Space Fox News going “no migrant caravans!” and the Federation council going “gosh, some members of this race did a crime, better ban that race.” And I’m just. I’m so tired. Can they please let us have Star Trek? Can we have ONE setting where things aren’t shitty? Can we have one thing that says “hey, if we all pull together, we CAN overcome our worse natures and build this great utopian project?”

My real question is what the purpose of this all is.  If it’s just a way of making Picard look like a hero (as in Insurrection, or what the Abrams movies do with Kirk), or an awkward 9/11 allegory (as in Star Trek Into Darkness), or just, as you say, the belief that there’s nothing interesting to be said about a utopian society (as in Discovery), then yeah, I agree that it’s hardly worth doing.  But if it’s actually a story about living in a society that has lost its way and not knowing what to do about that - or if you can even do anything - then that feels like a story we could use in this moment.  And as I said, Picard feels like the perfect character to give that story to.  One of the things I wrote about when I rewatched The Next Generation in 2011 was how, coming to the show as an adult, it was hard to escape the impression that Picard believed in the Federation more than it believed in itself.  Insurrection may have been an over the top exploration of that concept, but it carried forward ideas already established in the show itself, in which Picard frequently clashed with admirals or the Starfleet brass over whether to uphold the Federation’s core values, and the proteges he tried to mold into Starfleet officers took one look at what Starfleet was outside the limits of Picard’s control and ran for the hills.  An old Picard who has been forgotten and dismissed by society trying to make one last stand for the values he believes in strikes me as entirely appropriate to the character.

(I’m more bothered by the use of the Romulans, who really shouldn’t be refugees - the Romulan Empire would have had colonies outside its home system on which to resettle the millions displaced by the supernova, and Starfleet’s only contribution to that effort should have been in evacuating and transporting these people.  Also, if you’re going to treat Nemesis as canon for the purposes of establishing Data’s death, you should probably also acknowledge that Romulus had a sister planet whose inhabitants were enslaved by the Romulans.  Did Picard’s Dunkirk plan also include relocating the Remans, and if so, were they going to remain slaves?)

I’m also pretty sure it’s inaccurate to call “synths” an alien race rather than a technology, though obviously the fact that this is a new term that everyone is acting like we should recognize is a bit problematic.  I’m a bit concerned about this throughline, because Star Trek has always struggled with the concept of artificial life.  The Next Generation had Data and treated him as completely unique, even as holodeck characters routinely achieved consciousness.  Voyager went a little further with the concept of holographic people, even suggesting that they were being used to perform menial or difficult labor (without dialing back their intelligence or self-awareness, for some reason), but treated the Doctor’s outcries against this situation with disdain, often chiding him for making his human crewmates feel bad with his [check notes] agitation against slavery.  Even Picard assumes that holographic beings who are at least semi-intelligent can be used to perform certain types of labor without the ability to stop or refuse, as in the Index who greets visitors to Starfleet Archives.  I’m not sure the show is equipped to handle an SFnal concept as thorny and complicated as this one.

If it’s noodles, pour them on your sister instead of on her computer, or if the noodles are quite hot, pour them on her pillow or in a great spattering arc around her room.

If you have a supervillain at gunpoint and *they* say you’re “too good” and “won’t do it,” shoot them in the leg/foot or the shoulder. The former allows them to think they’re right while you lower the gun only to be confronted with sudden understanding and regret when you blow their metatarsals to kingdom come, while the latter is instant and avoids giving them even a moment’s satisfaction or any time to charge you while you’re lowering the gun to shoot them in the leg.

For a would-be screenwriter I weirdly don’t have too many formative movies (maybe because I’m not much of a re-watcher in general) but Guest Reactor Justin tagged me in the “10 posters from movies that matter to you” thing that’s been going around Facebook, so here is at least one:

I grew up more or less familiar with Lois & Clark and the 90s animated series, but Superman Returns is the first Superman thing I loved. It was my gateway proper to picking up some Superman comics, two of which made their own significant impact on me (Birthright, of which there is a fair amount in the first half or so of Man of Steel, and which made me get why Clark falls for Lois Lane; and the acclaimed All-Star Superman, which MoS’s Jor-El quotes). There’s stuff in Returns that I don’t much care for, like Lex Luthor (I’ve never been that interested in any incarnation of him); and there’s a case to be made that Brandon Routh and Kate Bosworth were a handful of years too young. But unlike its detractors, I never thought of this movie as boring.

Least controversially, the airplane rescue is very possibly my favorite superhero set piece ever. Part of the reason it works so well is that we’re in Lois’s point of view for a lot of it; we first see Superman as a blur outside her window, and we’re tossed around the cabin with her as Superman has trouble solving the problem. Superman’s struggle, less of strength and speed than of precision and even, surprisingly, delicacy, sets the sequence apart from most large-scale superhero action, in a way that in the last 12 years has only really been answered by the Air Force One rescue in Iron Man 3, which added the great flourish of having the crew participate in their own salvation. (Maybe this should go without saying, but the fact that these scenes are about saving people and not Kicking All of the Ass is a large part of why they stand out.)

Though Routh may have been too young (for continuity’s sake if nothing else), he still gave what might be my favorite onscreen interpretation of the Kal-El persona. He’s the rare deeply introverted superhero who (crucially) isn’t characterized as therefore brooding or broken. Routh’s Superman is alienated (no pun intended) but serene, distant but warm, an observer (to an admittedly creepy fault) as much as a doer, both apart from mortals and empathetic toward them nonetheless. He comes across as enlightened beyond his apparent years (a way in which Routh’s youth was perhaps a bonus), truly a superior man.

I think this commitment to Kal-El as not-of-humanity, in a moral and psychological sense as well as a physical one, is why some people reject this movie even if they don’t in general reject the concept of Superman as a Better Guy Than All of Us. I think people find this Superman on some level condescending, and some purists might say that even if condescension isn’t unwarranted, Superman wouldn’t feel it. But this is a Superman who explicitly hears everything all the time, and spends a lot of time as a stratospheric sentinel. He’s intimately familiar with all of the ways that people suck. If he didn’t find the species disappointing it wouldn’t be saintly but stupid. That he doesn’t give up on humanity anyway is what makes him something adjacent to divine. So is the fact that – as Christopher Orr pointed out in his reviews of both Superman Returns and Man of Steel – Singer and Routh’s Superman never throws a punch.

This is a superhero movie that can be described not only as “visually stunning” but as, specifically, beautiful. Unlike Batman v Superman (a movie I actually don’t hate, but that’s beside the point), which describes Superman as day to Batman’s night but never demonstrates this visually, Superman Returns is drenched in light. The visual effects really hold up, the music both honors John Williams’s themes and contributes some soaring new melodies that feel right at home, the flight sequences have a sense of spaciousness and therefore freedom that the (excellent) flight in Man of Steel doesn’t, and the choice to have Superman move like a swimmer – gracefully and in some ways oddly slowly – reinforces his characterization as a removed higher being.

Shockingly (for those who know me), I never had a problem with the kid.

★ Important questions ★

I’m just one Army brat, but having spent a lot of time around both soldiers and airmen, I read this ribbing as perfectly in line with the time-honored tradition of interservice rivalry, even if the interservice part isn’t textually explicit. Of course Rhodey respects what Steve did. He also knows Steve can take worse than a little irreverence. (There is almost no way the Howling Commandos, who may not have been mixed-service but did have an international composition, didn’t say “worse” to each other during the war – not as belittlement, but as a coping mechanism for their daily trauma.)

Whether or not you like it per se (and some of what’s in the “Hater’s Guide” articles linked above is indeed in poor taste), if you really think that a combat pilot giving an infantryman shit about literally any call the latter made in an airplane is out of character, I have to wonder how many actual service-members you’ve met.

And of course, there’s comics precedent between Steve and Carol:

- from Avengers: Endless Wartime, by Warren Ellis and Mike McKone

“seriously judging everyone who doesn’t reblog this post”

“if you don’t reblog this post you have no soul”

“you reblogged something from an OP who is bad”

“i don’t care what your blog is about, spread this like wildfire!”

60y/o man presents for adult well-visit. Me: All right, cover your right eye for me. Can you read the bottom row of letters? Patient: [reads them perfectly] Me: Awesome! Now cover the other eye, and let’s do the same thing. Patient: [covers other eye] I can’t see anything. Me: How about the top row? Patient: Nope. Me: Even the big E? Patient: What E?

Me: [worried but hiding it] All right. Let’s try something else then. [holds up index finger] Cover your right eye and follow my finger with your left eye. Patient: [follows instructions perfectly] Me: Excellent. Now let’s try the other one. Patient: [right eye does not move]

Me: [worrying even more but still trying to hide it] Okay. [picks up ophthalmoscope] I’m going to check your left eye first, okay? Patient: Okay. Me: [performs fundoscopic exam on left eye] All right. Everything looks good here! Let’s try the other one. Patient: Okay. Me: [attempts fundoscopic exam, but light bounces back at me] 

Me: I- [working hard to conceal panic] Your right eye is interesting. Patient: Yeah, it’s a glass eye. Me: …what? Patient: [clearly trying not to laugh] It’s a glass eye. Me: Were you planning on telling me at some point? Patient: [bursts into fit of giggles] I wanted to see you freak out first!

Had you met each other before “Booksmart”?

DEVER We were always ships in the night.

FELDSTEIN I saw Kaitlyn at the Toronto Film Festival. She was in pink, and she walked out, and I was like, [gasps]. “Wait — oh — but ——. ” When Olivia told me she wanted me to be Molly, I was like, is Kaitlyn still playing Amy? I couldn’t believe it. Because Kaitlyn’s performance in “Short Term 12” will go down —

DEVER [mortified] Oh my God.

FELDSTEIN — as one of the best cinematic performances —

DEVER She brings this up all the time.

FELDSTEIN — of all time. I was such a fan of hers.

DEVER We met for the first time at a lunch with Olivia, at the Chateau [Marmont] in Los Angeles, as you do. And we agreed to living together within the first 15 minutes of knowing each other.

Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever interviewed by Dave Itzkoff

Act 1 Scene 1

When she looked back on these projects, Wilde was upbeat rather than heartbroken. “I somehow developed a solid core of confidence that has allowed me to weather the storms of almost everything not working out,” she said. She likened the experiences to dating, adding: “None of this is commitment. This is me learning, and then realizing, I know what I want to do with it.”

Yet, without quite pointing to specific instances or past collaborators, Wilde said she had faced enough examples of being categorized for her looks — and the expectation that she can play only certain types of sexualized or available characters because of them — that it had caused her to question her talents and accomplishments.

“Have I ever felt exploited?” she said, a tone of resignation slipping into her voice for the first time in the conversation. “Yeah. Do I realize that I’d become numb to that? Yes. I had become numb to the fact that every meeting I went on — with men and women, by the way — I was going to be judged on my physical appearance. Because that’s what actors deal with, and man, it’s exhausting.”

Olivia Wilde profiled by Dave Itzkoff

If you want to see Rosamund Pike and Chris O'Dowd argue for 10 minutes at a time, for 10 episodes, you should get a free trial to Sundance Now and watch all of State of the Union in a week.

At 100 total minutes you could watch it all in one sitting, obviously, but I think Alan Sepinwall is right that it seems intended to stretch out; I watched two a day, and not back-to-back.