This episode was cursed. We had to record it twice and we still had recording issues. Ironic that it’s one of–if not the–best episode of Season One. Thanks for bearing with us, y’all.  

It’s Antares, not Ares. Antares is butts. I apologize for forgetting that, crew of the Ares.  

When I was a kid the Klingon death yell was cringey has heck. As I grew up and it was revisited over time, it faded into the background of Klingon culture. Is it the open, bare showing of emotion that makes it cringey? The whole-hearted dedication to something weird? 

I dunno. 

This one is really great about the strong ingroup/outgroup perspective of television and how it feeds an action/methodical work paradigm that eventually makes the main characters the infallible, victory-through-action doers of things that are morally flawless and beset by inferiors.  

But certainly, there’s no cultural consequence of that being pumped over the airwaves for decades.  Certainly.  

Apparently, Denise Crosby is Bing Crosby’s granddaughter, but that’s a whole capital-“T” Thing. 

Night Court did not have a spin-off, though it shared two characters–Bailiff “Bull” Shannon and Judge Margaret W. Wilbur (played by Florence Stanley)–with “My Two Dads.” 

This week we talk about actors and accents, the lost plot of Data’s sapience, and how Jean-Luc Picard would totally kill a guy.  Is Picard a good leader right now? 

We make fun of his standing orders and how well the crew is trained, but are we being too hard on him? Was it just that they couldn’t write these episodes to improve the crew’s abilities or do the folks on the Enterprise have to be poorly trained for these stories to work? 

I said “Univac” instead of “Multivac” here. Univac is a real computer, but Multivac was a famous supercomputer from a series of short stories by Issac Asimov. Specifically, I was referencing “All the Troubles of the World.” I don’t know if I have to say this, but they’re good reads.  

The lack of Aldean culture is an unspoken assumption of this episode, but then The Federation doesn’t have much culture either. Is culture a reflection of cultural strife? Do broken hearts, historically fictitious murderers, and creeping social capgras delusion define the biggest sources of conflict for folks in the US?  

Imagination has to play a part in culture, but people in Star Trek can’t be sci-fi nerds imagining their future because they are the future, but if a people don’t have a need to imagine a better future, what do they imagine? 

 PROFESSOR X IS NOT TELEKINETIC. I AM STRUGGLING ALONGSIDE YOU, LISTENER.  

Slavoj Žižek is Slovenian political commentator. And I was serious about June Shannon; you don’t see people from the Honey Boo Boo clan on television because television prefers to show them as figures to be laughed at. Women who are every bit as talented as Marina Sirtis are turned down for roles because they don’t look like Marina Sirtis did in 1987. I don’t know if that’s June Shannon individually, but Derek’s quick dismissal underscores my point, doesn’t it? 

I kinda missed that we never got the “whole crew goes on downtime and we see what they do as people” episode in the original series. Maybe in a lot of ways, that’s how “11001001” really separates itself from its predecessor. We constantly complain about the support cast not getting enough attention in TNG, but this is still light years ahead of where they started.  

I don’t know when the easy-on-the-eyes set dressing for entertainment crosses into erotica or something harder, but I know it does and am interested in any related information, articles, perspectives you all may have. 

The real struggle of the men in “Angel One” is that they’re not in power. That’s worth a whole discussion, but there’s too much happening in this episode to really dwell on that.  

The awkward sex things you can blame on Derek and me (as opposed to early TNG being early TNG) is strictly the result of me trying to “yes and” Derek. Developing new skills is never easy. 

 What is Lore’s motivation? Is he in love with The Crystalline Entity? Did he initially admire it from afar before being convinced to start serially selling out humans? Also, who disassembled Lore in that tiny window between when he sold the colony out to The Crystalline Entity and when everyone was killed? Where was Data during all of this if we assume Data spent time active with the colonists?  

So many questions.  

Also Marc Okrand is the guy who wrote the Klingon Dictionary. Not Michael Okuda. 

 In terms of enjoyment, “The Big Goodbye” is one of the most uneven episodes of the first season. Sure, “Code of Honor” is consistently bad and there are better episodes, but "The Big Goodbye" is just all over the place.

 Man, we messed up badly on this one. Auntie Mame was a novel before it was a movie, not a play. Gene Roddenberry’s right-hand man was Maurice Hurley, who hadn’t even joined the series at this point. Troi is empathic, not telepathic.  

I think Derek even called Picard “Riker” somewhere in there.  

Nailed that “Take On Me” reference though.  This is a fun episode that–new agey stuff aside–doesn’t let go of serious themes like social pressure, the adult/parent relationship, and ladies with cheese-grater abs. 

I hope you forgive us of the shortcomings of this episode. As always, complaints can be directed to @vanvelding on Twitter.