It's a good Troi episode, listeners. The premise is insane, but who gives a crap because it serves a good story. And honestly, anyone who can't get over that has decided not to get over it.

Like a lot of TNG's best episodes, there isn't much more to add. 

It does lack a 'moral core' because it's all driven by Troi's desire to survive, but if we were to add a moral choice to it, what would that look like?

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

This starts a period of The Beige and The Bold where some episodes include Derek and me, and others include a special guest co-host instead of Derek. This week's special guest co-host is Brady Hendricks of The City Within the Walls Podcast. We talk about Moriarty, holodeck programming, and Inception.

Brady raises a good question: After everything we've been through with Barclay, do we trust him with the holodeck? He's familiar with it, but is he too familiar with it?

You can check out The City Within the Walls Podcast on itunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-city-within-the-walls-podcast/id1446805578

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most  podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at  10:00 PM CST.

Chain of Command, Pt II is one of the best episodes of the series. We get payoff on our construction of Jellico and the Cardassians in that we see the almost self-destructive need for control that runs through both.

And I'm done with my defense of Jellico. Obviously, the narrative is against him, but I don't think that's reason enough to scuttle him. I'm a "death of the author" guy. A story can make a character that's a laudable person even while it's trying to undermine them morally. "Paradise Lost" is the example that's easiest to call up. 

But Jellico brings nothing to the table. If you're a person who is pleased by the exercise of power on behalf of your ingroup, you might admire his hard line on the Cardassians, but Picard is just as capable of doing that and he didn't put all of his skill points into "raging as--jerkhole."

Am I too down on US culture here? Can I flog my own culture over Guantanamo Bay, then flog them slightly harder because they didn't listen to Star Trek? Except, instead of flogging, it's whipping the brickwork of the wall around their estate with a wet noodle. 

More clearly: is Star Trek any good if it makes people excited over starship aesthetics, camp plots, and the finer points of the history of the Star Trek Universe instead of making them outraged over their country's immoral behavior?

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

Like many of my opinions on Star Trek: The Next Generation, my opinion of Captain Jellico, specifically, has come full circle. I wish there was some nuance in his character, but he's just gratuitously aggro. No conflict with the Cardassians was so imminent that he couldn't just let Riker finish a sentence. Granted, our leads burrow into their roles as planets orbiting Captain Picard instead of breaking out as their own independent characters, so both of our bike tires are flat this time.

It turns out the nerd fraternity is Lambda Lambda Lambda, which was actually a fraternity for black students that within the fictional "Revenge of the Nerds" universe allowed the nerds to use it.

Really, the harping I do about Star Trek losing its ideological way reaches its climax here. I know other people (and me. Actually, most me) gripe a lot about Star Trek: Picard, but STP is really a natural extension of the changes in Star Trek most clearly seen in "Chain of Command." I mean, is there any context in which "Starfleet does covert ops and does them badly" doesn't leave us pretty far from the space where we started? And are there any merits to that deeper space?

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

I was pleasantly surprised by this episode. I don't think I'd seen it since it originally aired. There are flaws in it, especially how they test for sentience, but I don't remember the story being this compelling. There are so few instances of Riker having good leadership moments in later seasons that this one where he knuckles down ends up being one of the better ones?

Should the exocomps have come back? What if they're sentient, but non-sapient? With neither a drive to reproduce nor aspirational intelligence? Is it moral to create beings strictly for labor, even if it's labor they enjoy? What happens when the particle fountain is completed? Do you ship them across known space for another project despite the fact that it's less efficient than creating new exocomps locally and painlessly switching the old ones off? 

How mentally undeveloped do your synthetic slaves have to be before it's moral to create and use them for your own ends? It's a deep question that's worth asking if your Star Trek series is almost entirely premised on it.

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most  podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at  10:00 PM CST.

It continues the proud tradition of TNG episodes using the holodeck and an improbable technical issue to fully commit themselves to genre episodes.

I mean, maybe not "proud."

It's got a ton great ideas: Data being a bunch of different dudes, Worf spending quality time with Alexander, Troi being cool and into Westerns. It just doesn't really get there with the plot and the Trek-ness of it.

I mean, if we're not going to let Troi light some dudes up, then let Worf replace all the guns with bat'leths, y'know?

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

We're back on track and it's just Derek and me all the way through the halfway point of the season and the start of the Deep Space Nine series.

We talk about Amanda Rogers' bland taste in men, the yikes factor of turning Doctor Crusher into a dog, and what is the deal with the Q even? It's an episode that's all over the place and the last thing we care about the fate of some character we just met and will never see again.

Sorry, I guess that's a spoiler for Voyager when Amanda Rogers and all of the questions she raises are ignored. Honestly, that's to Voyager's credit because it did all of this better.

"Voyager did all of this better" is a red flag in terms of episode quality, but welcome to season six! *Evil madman laughter*

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes usually go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

The Road to Deep Space Nine ends in a place we didn't expect at a time we never considered. It's like Agincourt, Appomattox, or AR-558.

I don't really know what else to say. Here's the link to trekmovie.com, which has a little more about the various Trek organizations which are donating: https://trekmovie.com/2020/06/03/star-trek-websites-and-podcasts-unite-ask-trekkies-to-support-organizations-fighting-injustice/ and the original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/gva3en/the_mod_team_of_rstartrek_would_like_to_invite/

The Beige and The Bold is a podcast that talks about Star Trek. You can reach out to me on twitter @vanvelding or on blogspot at vanvelding.blogspot.com.

The Road to Deep Space Nine continues as I struggle through the bewildering house which Unsolved Mysteries made. I am legitimately struggling to understand how this episode came out before both "Fire in the Sky" and "The X-Files." Nimoy hosted "In Search of..." in 1977, so that's not a proximate cause.

Am I too mean here? About stories where there's always *some* way to win? Obviously, you can't have a series where ALL of our heroes' actions are doomed to fail, but certainly, there's something to be said for acknowledging when bold action just won't work. When resistance is--oh wait.

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.

It's important in crossovers that we make sure that the characters from different worlds don't automatically know each other are protagonists. I think a lot of fans would accept that, but it wouldn't be earned. What is cool is throwing characters together in a situation that's so dire that folks are willing to throw in with anyone who isn't trying to kill them right now.

I am interested in seeing the Picard throughline replaced with a Worf throughline. Worf being, I dunno, a nerd for weapons systems of this era, as these are the guys who the Klingons considered formidable foes. And Scotty's all, "you couldn't tell that by talking to them" and Worf gives that smirk he gives sometimes. That'd be great, right?

Any older character could really fill those roles though. Maybe the issue is that Geordi isn't defined by being an engineer or an aspiring officer so Scotty can't interact satisfyingly interact with him on those levels. Again, we get an (ostensible) Geordi episode that doesn't tell us about Geordi. Could we have had Scotty have a different A-plot with another, non-Picard, non-Data character?

The Beige and The Bold is hosted on Anchor and is available on most podcasting platforms. New episodes go live on Sunday nights at 10:00 PM CST.