u/OWSpaceClown

Yeah, they didn't tell you?

Who? Oh they were humanoid, upright walking. They looked a lot like you but with some kind of forehead thing. We wrote down the name they gave us but I doubt it'll mean anything to you, translations and all, am I right?

Yeah we know all about the greater intergalactic community, blah blah blah. Frankly we suspected there was something out there for a while. When you live this close to the, hold on let me check my notes, 'United Federation of Planets', you'll notice a lot of moving objects in the sky. Oh and regarding that whole federation thing, it sounds interesting but I think we'd prefer to just be our own planet. Those aliens who visited us seem like they got a real good thing going so we might just hook up with them if that's all right. Yeah I know this Federation of Planets is closer and all, but hey, they got to us first.

Sorry to ruin your moment. I can see you put a lot of time in how to present yourself to our society. Surprised it never came up in your research that we've already been contacted. Did you think that was our first FTL launch? No that was us pushing it to warp 7 and, wait what's the fastest your first warp ship went? Not warp 7? Oh sorry, looks like we might be progressing at a faster rate than you are. Yeah we're already projecting warp 12 in about 3 to 6 months. What? No that appears to be faster than your warp 9. Look it just seems that we have nothing to benefit from each other.

But hey, thanks for stopping by. Your greetings of peace and prosperity were well, really nice! Yeah you seem like a nice federation! I'm sure you guys will do great moving forward! Maybe just ease up the condescending next time. Don't need to act like we don't know what an alien is or a universal translator or pretend your smooth forehead is some scary monstrous sighting we can't handle. Come to think of it, we kind of found the whole experience just a tiny bit patronizing, if you don't mind us saying.

Oh and regarding those spies you've had walking about our planet, taking notes, wearing prosthetics, it's cute that you wanted to make believe as one of us. Regardless, you have five days to get them the fuck off our planet. We are not kidding.

Chow!

Lots of talk on the pod and here about the idea of key jangling. As in, tantalizing the audience with something they know we want, and the promise to deliver more of it.

I was commenting earlier today about The Force Awakens, and how much key jangling it does, often at the expense of plot. And it got me to thinking about Star Trek Into Darkness, which grossly overrated how much us Star Trek fans wanted to see the movie constantly wink and nod at us with constant references to past Trek, which really only consisted of references to Wrath of Khan, plus a few scattered references to Mudd and Tribbles.

But I also deeply remember seeing it in theatres, and my packed IMAX audience buzzing over Spock's utterly tacky "KHAAAAN" bellow. It wasn't the entire audience, but it was certainly the contingent of viewers who highest level of reference with Trek was Star Trek II. For the more dedicated fanbase, it felt like pandering. Or patronizing. The movie's most serious scene was completely undercut by a line by line callback to the iconic scene from Wrath of Khan. It felt like them saying, "This is what you guys like right? You like Wrath of Khan? Here's ALL the Wrath of Khan! Here's Carol Marcus naked!" And we already knew Abrams was not a Star Trek fan!

Like I say, it seemed to work for some people. But fans when polled at a convention not long after placed Into Darkness dead last! (They also adopted Galaxy Quest and placed it 7th!) I don't think Into Darkness worked to build the fanbase the way they wanted. People were amused, but not overly committed.

I don't want to tell you how many times we in security have had to investigate missing persons, search all over the ship for the one that we were told quietely slipped out in the middle of the night only to suddenly discover... well you can put it together right?

Oh and just like that, I’ve been called on an away mission! How bout we do Canada Day drinks on me afterwards?

I know know, when they say leave nothing behind they mean it. But this was just a harmless bathroom break in the trees that may or may not have been seen by a local, may have left trace amounts of urine behind. How worried should I be?

Why am I going to follow the carefully constructed plot of the holo novel when I could just shoot random stuff, cause chaos and see how the holodeck NPCs react? Are Starfleet officers just that joyless?

It’s like the show writers have never even played Grand Theft Auto.

"I'm not a cat person number one, but Starfleet has insisted on putting me on a starship with house cats."

"I didn't know we had a podcast!"

"Computer, define 'podcasting'."

Griff has really been pushing himself to be creative with these, and this one especially is bound to be a challenge he'd relish! I doubt he's just going to roll with the obvious jingle of "POD n CAST!"

It’s no big deal if you haven’t seen it.

Oh and if you do come across it, just don’t touch it. Just DM me or somebody in engineering. And maybe put a containment field around it. If you don’t know how to do that, no biggy.

I'm in a motel in Sandusky Ohio watching TNT. They are showing The Two Towers. I'm near the end, Eowyn and Gandalf just showed up to save the day.

"Theoden King stands alone."

"Not alone... ROHIRRHIM, CHARGE!"

Quick cut to commercial.

I'm just, it's only one of the most spectacular moments of the trilogy! And you ad break there? You could have given just one more minute?

This is why I don't usually watch movies off TV. I really need to find the wifi password here...

I've chaffed a fair bit at the way modern fans overly obsess over the edit, often at the expense of everything else. But in Samoa, right at very start, I get it. Because you simply cannot talk about Samoa and it's winner's story without talking about the edit.

Because in that premiere Natalie does not exist. There's no title sequence and so she exists only as "dumbass blonde with long hair". I've been following along with the Evolution of Strategy and I'm curious how they are going to cover Samoa. Till now they've been able to take a reasonably balanced approach to tracking every major player's game. But this feels impossible with Samoa.

And that premiere was NOT edited well. I've tried in this rewatch to give the editors the benefit of the doubt, but there's such a huge shift here. We've jumped from a 16 person cast to 20 and so it's not unusual for them to struggle to track everyone, but that first boot was not explained at all, except in terms of showing that Rusell just told people what to do, and so they did it. There's GOT to be more to that story.

Is it possible that Samoa is just a really dreadful cast? And is it possible that Samoa was in a way, the real start of the dark ages of Survivor that finally started to end around Cagayan? Heroes vs Villians kind of disguises when those dark ages start. Looking back it really feels like the Phillipines is the only well cast season of mostly newbies with a lot of balance and some genuinely likeable people.

And I do just wonder if Natalie is someone they struggled to get usable content from. I noticed watching the finale yesterday that she forgot to show her vote to the camera. She gets the old over the shoulder shot during the final words. In my defence here, I haven't watched Samoa in a long time and I'm struggling to remember Natalie. And looking at the confessional chart, I may not hear her talk at all until episode 4.

TLDR : This is the true moment when 'the edit' started to reign supreme in Survivor discussion, I think to it's detriment.

Addendum : Scrolling this post and wow, I did just make it through this entire post without naming you know who! A personal accomplishment!

Nothing I hate more than having the EMH reload during a critical procedure and having to resume from an earlier save state with no idea what's happened during the treatment.

They are both reasonably entertaining movies but they leave you with nothing to think about. They both try to be standalone adventures while at the same time there appears to be all this exciting stuff happening or about to happen on the ongoing shows. But the movies can't really comment on any of that. And so if you're a viewer of the shows, you just get the sense that none of this is consequential. If you aren't regularly watching the shows or caught up, there's nothing here that really screams "Wow, I need to get back into this!"

In both cases you get the sense that it's nice to see your beloved characters on the big screen for a short bit but you also feel dissapointed that this dull adventure is likely all you're going to get from them for the next 2 to 3 years.

I knew I know how these sequels work. They’ll explain the entire plot in the first minute right?

I’m just worried that the recap will spoil part 1 should I ever choose to watch it.