My main complaint with Barclay is that he’s overrated. But that only comes because he’s vulnerable in a way that no main character could be. My main complaint isn’t with the fandom, but with the cultural limitations of the 1990’s. I guess that’s a recurring theme.  

“Look behind you,” stretches back at least to Cu Chulainn, the mythical hero of Ireland. It’s an old, old trick.  

It’s really frustrating to see the main cast be so bad at basic leadership. It’s not just about them, but about the setting and the philosophy behind it. What could they have changed to keep this episode essentially intact but to still functional?

Y’know, when I say an episode is boring, I don’t mean “it’s so boring, I’d edit it and then totally forget to post it,” but that’s what happened.  

I’d apologize for our weird digression into class structure but honestly, what else is happening in this episode? What’s your favorite class, listener? The humble proletariat? The reactionary bourgeoisie? The redoubtable bürger?

We compare Riker vacations to Picard vacations, gush about Vash, and also there some time travel there…just because?  

Vash seems like such an outside-of-the box perfect fit for Picard. I’d be curious about other such fits for members of the crew. I would not put K’Ehylar in that place for Worf. They have dynamite chemistry, but she borders on whatever a Klingon version of a manic pixie dream girl is. I’d be interested in seeing the “Vash” for the rest of the crew.

This one’s got Libertarian jokes and pacifist jokes in it because we are both fair and balanced and neither Libertarians nor pacifists. “Allegiance” isn’t bad; it just fails to be inspiring and is another in a long line of episodes that are about Picard, but don’t need to be.  

I also have to apologize because it was only during editing that I realized I missed a long line of “you might be a Libertarian if…” jokes. I’m sure we’ll get to them.  

Finally, I want to introduce everyone to my son, Applied Research VanVelding, and my daughter, Doctoral Thesis VanVelding. They’re great kids and my hopes for them in the future are modest. Really, naming your kid ‘fighter’ in a martial society works, but it would be hilarious to see a more modern/post-modern culture do it. Maybe the diversification of labor keeps us from doing it, but we could still go for D&D classes, right?

Weeeeeeeaaaaaabbbbb.  

It’s good to see Worf successfully engaging with his heritage in a way that his progenitor character, Spock, never did. It’s weird that, in retrospect, Worf is the number three or number four character for development and storylines in this series. I approve.  

Also, Riker should have been the cha’DIch.

That Andorian looks like The Great friggin’ Gazoo. Data is a great dad. Beverly in grade school was whatever Mean Girls look like in the 24th Century.  

Where are we on Worf needing a permission slip to give birth to Klingon Jesus?  

Also, I swear we recorded this over a month before any actual famous people blamed prescription drugs on saying racist things.

In the "Skin of Evil" versus "Yesterday's Enterprise" war, I am firmly in the "Skin of Evil" camp. "Yesterday's Enterprise" is a fun little romp through continuity with the giant 'Member Portal, but let's save it for a really big episode.

He's also the dad from SLC Punk.

So we’re a bit offended here and maybe just bored enough to make up a B-plot where Worf and Geordi are trying to complete space’s most insane scavenger hunt.  

Roshamon was directed by Kurosawa, but I was only correct because I am too much an unwashed pleb to know a second Japanese director. It’s a classic example of answer by accident, I assure you I am a buffoon.  

We understand how the Tanugans’ legal system is a bit unfair, but it still feels like Starfleet closed ranks around Riker and his alleged murder with an unsettling quickness. Why couldn’t Picard have just been, y’know, in the right here for extradition? Why didn’t we examine Federation Law and space law in more depth? Why couldn’t we even work a mention in edgewise about state v federal power, or at least one where federal officials aren’t inherently personally involved in the conflict? 

I'd like to add that you guys are lucky we didn’t record this episode with the same commentary repeated three times, but with different attitudes.  But don't worry; I'd stake my honor on us never doing one episode multiple times for its own sake.

The flaw with Star Trek (and maybe television of its era) is that it can’t give its protagonists real, intentional flaws. What happens is that we search for humanizing flaws from less-than-perfect writing and sorta crack open this implicit pretense of characters. Modern demands for high-resolution characters take the old 4:3 characters and stretch them into 16:9 frames. That’s part of why we’re so hard on Commander Riker, I think.  

Also, these four episodes–“A Matter of Perspective,” “The Offspring,” “Sins of the Father,” and–not so much but it’s in the sequence–“Yesterday’s Enterprise” seem to mark a turning point where the staff of The Next Generation gave up on Riker as a protagonist and started focusing on Picard.  

Riker’s flaws had always been easily redeemable with a bit of maturity and seasoning. All they would have had to have done was to execute the most basic–and I can’t emphasize that enough *BASIC*–character arc to make Riker likable. Instead, he gets thrown on the pile with Geordi and Troi where he’s occasionally trotted out for episodes where we’re reminded of exactly which wheelhouse he’s confined to.

I can’t believe this episode has a moral after all.

Unspoken emotions in a relationship we don’t ship, a stock villain with one quirk and a paper-thin idea behind him, relevant technology we’ll never see again, and a sociopolitical conflict that gets The Federation’s fingers slick with blood just by touching it that we never see or hear from again. This episode has everything.  

I don’t think I completed my thought on the IRA. I have a layperson’s knowledge of The Troubles and despite being acquainted with Britain’s history of imperialism and oppression, a sympathetic view of the IRA is far enough outside of my scope that I’m skeptical of it. It’s something I’m not educated on and which is far beyond the scope of the research I do for The Beige and The Bold.  

Derek’s second guessing of tactics towards the gun-wielding kid at the end seems like criticism for criticism’s sake? It feels like it’d be easy if we followed his advice–if the cops jumped a child from behind to wrestle a gun away from him–to argue with equal fervor that it was foolish because the kid might have gotten a shot off. Am I being sensitive about the critical light Derek is here to shine on this series? Or this a gratuitous reach for a ‘well actually’?