We picked a heck of a week to make jokes about war crimes.

In that we allow our cast to be flawed, we have to make them into 20th Century people, which includes a set of 20th Century social assumptions. Could we have this series without flawed characters? Could our main cast just be a Greek chorus to frame the adventures of other, flawed people from other planets?

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.

As a capstone for The Original Series and its crew--

RAND IS BACK! This is her biggest role post-TOS and it's good to see her again.

Also, a movie happens.

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.

Derek and I talk about redstone missiles, predestination paradoxes, and global warming a bit (It's real! We caused it! It's bad!). We get to see a Picard speech that doesn't get enough acclaim, either because the story almost immediately undercuts it or because it just doesn't work.

Between the hair and the coat and the pocket-sized spaceship that can travel in time, the Rick Sanchez parallels jumped out at me on this one and I can't put them to bed. So I put out into the universe: "Berlinghoff and Wesley," written by Dan Harmon and Wil Wheaton.

But seriously, how smart is "Rasmussen"? Is he faking it all or has he done some research?

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.

I know it's "Grammaton Cleric," but I can' t just stop an episode to make pedantic corrections about 2002 cult films. There are TV shows from 1991 that require our full attention.

What *does* happen here doesn't happen to any great effect and even Leonard Nimoy can' t save it from just being "meh."

But Data did the Vulcan thing. That's cool.

Hypothetically.

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.

Honestly, I'd feel more comfortable sending kids to Romulus. Spy kids.

For an episode with Spock, there's not a lot of Spock. And speaking of Star Trek episodes without a lot of Star Trek, I also feel like we haven't gotten a strong idea or moral principle lately. Derek and I are just crackin' jokes instead of engaging in some elevated discourse because...we're just not seeing any. Is that fair for the first stretch of Season 5 or are we just getting complacent? I'm sorry if we are; we're stretching for the meatier content.

I refuse to apologize for my Brooks and Dunn references.

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.

The big irony of this episode is how quick people are to chalk this one up as another story where Wesley saves the ship but it's actually another episode where the writers press the "Data" button and the goal is to summon the android who can do anything so he can solve everything. 

Saying this is another episode where Wesley saves the ship is like saying any silver-age Superman story is one where Jimmy saves the day because he has the supersonic watch.

Anyway, is this episode prescient about World of Warcraft just because its writers were poking at a Nintendo like it was the danged Monolith? The episode about technology giving us stimulation without any benefit--or worse, harm--seems incredibly broad and yet it's very specifically applicable to the world we live in 30 years later. The applicability of its lesson requires us to perceive these things as dangers before its message about their dangers are applicable so I still feel like it's irrelevant. Am I overthinking this tepid, tepid story?

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.

Riker: Can save Earth.

Riker's legs: Can save the Enterprise.

Does it work though? Does Troi's throughline work? Are her stakes real?

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.

*Turns number under the sign that says "Days since android racism" to 0*

We reintroduce the Crystalline Entity, then shatter it quite expertly this week.

I'm amazed that Picard's stupid jacket didn't immediately torpedo this sensitive diplomatic mission. But I'm glad we got Ro out of all of this.

And Deep Space Nine.

I didn't realize how the Iran/Iraq War and the Soviet/Afghan war ran almost contemporaneously for almost the entirety of the 80's. Lockerbie was in '88 and I was way off with the Beirut barracks bombing happening in '83, almost eight years before this episode. 

Still though, what could this series could have done with its main characters to make them more interesting, even if they were a bit more flawed? And I don't mean flawed as in 'poorly written.' I mean flawed in a way that made them more nuanced characters. Give Doctor Crusher a hat?

I don't know why Picard has this stupid jacket because it's stupid. 

The Tamarians are pretty cool guys and it's implied that they're comparable in technological ability to The Federation. Are the Children of Tama another large, star-spanning polity which influences and is influenced by its neighbors? My personal model of Star Trek has been that these types of heterogeneous entities are the only type which can achieve a certain level of stellar progress before they collapse. 

It was off-camera, but does our chanting for Riker to put Picard into danger because it supports the value Picard puts on peace resemble the principle I often put forward that Picard putting the Enterprise in danger is acceptable because he does so for the moral principles his crew--civilian and Starfleet alike--believe in?

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.