Fearsome Pirate writes:
I for one praise the EU for passing common-sense regulations against assault olive oil.
The Prime Directive got a lot dumber once they turned it into a regular thing in TNG. TNG was, in general, dumber than TOS in every conceivable way. If I could change three things about history, they’d be the Treaty of Versailles, the existence of Rousseau’s philosophy, and the cancellation of Star Trek: Phase II.
Jason Blair writes:
The prime directive is the stupidest, most often broken rule in the ST universe.
Jaredd writes:
For your monday morning amusement
Food news!
Monsanto wins! (I love how the ruling is unanimous, but somehow NPR tries to write an article that makes you sad for the farmer.)
No olive oil for you! (at least not any tasty, local olive oil.)
Jeremiah Lawson writes:
The opening ten minutes highlight the essential problem of the Prime Directive. An old friend of mine said that any honest Trek fan has to consider that many of the best stories in the Trek franchise happened when people ignored the prime directive. Maybe it’s like the Geneva Convention of Star Trek. People know what it says and they say the follow it but it doesn’t mean they really do.
Jason Blair writes:
Laugh of the Day
Apparently, this is real.
(HT: Justin Lee over at the blue social media site)
Fearsome Pirate writes:
Into Darkness
I mentioned it on Facebook, but the new Star Trek is arguably the best Trek film of all of them. I spoiled nothing about the film for myself. I saw only the trailer and avoided reviews or any other discussion, so I will avoid any spoilers whatsoever.
First of all, the movie is better than the previous one. I enjoyed ST very much, but it did indeed get heavy with the deus ex machina plot devices and “this makes no sense if you stop noticing the explosions” plot holes. This was actually a signature move of the Next Generation (unsolvable problem is solved in the last five minutes of the episode by Laforge saying “techity tech tech technobabble,” but it’s also why TNG could fall really flat now and then. This script is way better, and they took more than ten minutes thinking about whether it would all make sense the next day (I saw it last night; it still mostly makes sense).
A lot of praise for the previous film still holds. What I really love about this series is that the actors are playing the classic characters, not playing the classic actors playing the classic characters. In other words, Chris Pine is a great James Kirk without doing a William Shatner impersonation. To me, this makes the characters larger than their original portrayals in the classic series and opens up Star Trek to a lot more creativity and new directions.
The exception is Karl Urban as Dr McCoy. That’s not a criticism—the McCoy character as we know it was practically invented by DeForest Kelley and suffused with his background in Western films. A good McCoy necessarily needs to borrow quite a bit from Kelley.
There is quite a bit of fanservice in the movies. For example, the admiral uniforms are inspired by the first movie. You may view this as annoying or not, depending on your disposition. Personally, I liked it. What I think Abrams was trying to do was establish his take on Star Trek as indeed being the same characters and the same universe as the classic show and films without being chained to the cyclopediae and “bibles” the series had been encumbered by. This is indeed a re-imagining, not totally dumping everything in the garbage and making “Generic Action Movie #8435″ with a Star Trek skin. But Abrams also managed to do this without making the movie incomprehensible to newbies of the series. With the exception of a reference to the Prime Directive, my wife had no trouble following what was going on. She simply didn’t know that this or that was a nod to a classic episode or movie.
A lot of Trekkies hate the new films because they aren’t classic Trek. Well, I was a kid who had plastic Spock ears and various incarnations of the Enterprise hanging from my ceiling, so I don’t think my credentials are in question. My take on the whole thing is that it’s all pretend. I don’t get worked up about someone pretending different things about a pretend universe. The reality is that the Star Trek IP had been completely run into the ground, its fictional universe turned into a tangled mess of garbage that no one could work with. And, by the way, most of the Star Trek movies sucked, not just the odd-numbered ones. With Abrams at the helm, we’ve got a producer who is concentrating on making good movies and actors who are concentrating on playing good characters, with little care given toward constructing a geeky fictional universe for nerds to nerd out over, and that’s precisely what Star Trek needs. To me, that has more in common with the spirit of the original series than anything we’ve seen in a long, long time.
John H writes:
Who else is planning to catch the new Trek?
Saw it last Friday. Is good fun. Could do without the utterly pointless underwear shot of Alice Eve (who is easy enough on the eye already without the director having to resort to such tedious high jinks), the deliberate nods to the Canon got a little wearing, and it lacks the narrative ingenuity of the last film, but go in with the right expectations and you’ll have an enjoyable evening.
Jeremiah Lawson writes:
per MacArthur
He impressed me, negatively, decades ago with Charismatic Chaos. Just go with the Benny Hinns and kinda skim over Gordon Fee’s work in textual scholarship why don’t you? Where I grew up Pentecostal it was okay to read Solzhenitsyn, Fee, Schaeffer, and even bits of Kierkegaard. You could admit you sometimes listened to Dave Brubeck. The kind of Pentecostalism I experienced growing up didn’t fit MacArthur’s straw-man variation. I’m not Pentecostal now but MacArthur seems like he’s pissy about some stuff where he paved the way for some of it. As I see things MacArthur’s cranky broadsides at everyone was a beta version of Driscoll. We don’t really get to decide what elements of our work or persona or activity really becomes our legacy. we can do our best but time and chance happen to us all.
I would say, even as a Calvinist, that a bunch of the new Calvinist types may discover in some terrible ways that they’ve bet on the wrong horses. Every movement has some kind of crisis like that at some point but the crisis we could be looking at could be real ugly. I don’t take neo-Calvinists seriously at any point in which they say Catholics have a Pope and cover up sex abuse, I’ll put it that way. Or on the subject of courtship but I’m guessing J.S. wouldn’t want me to rehash all that already.
Looks like a new nephew could be arriving here soon. :)
Who else is planning to catch the new Trek?
Jeremiah Lawson writes:
I was chronically underemployed for the years when the book first came out so I haven’t read any of it. Just begun catching up to things in the last seven months on books and culture stuff. I’ll admit that picking up a box set of the complete Haydn piano sonatas has trumped books.
Though those two door-stoppers by N. T. Wright on Paul look mighty intriguing … .
But Michael’s book is part of a to-get-to list.
Matthew Johnson writes:
I can’t imagine living out faith with the thought “am I getting too Arminian?” popping up everywhere I turn.
What is, “Something I never worry about”, Alex?
