Subj : [SPOILERS] [Threshold] Can't See the "Trees Made of Glass" For the Forest To : alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise,alt.fan.tom-servo,rec.arts.sf.tv,rec.arts.tv From : Bozo the Evil Klown Date : Tue Sep 20 2005 12:38:27 From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.enterprise Short version: Much better than I expected. S P O I L E R S P A C E Imitation is the sincerest form of Hollywood. No doubt a lot of suits were expecting Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" to be the big Summer blockbuster, which is why all Big Three have alien invasion shows out this Fall. I'm a bit behind, so I've only just caught the first to premiere. Signals from the CBS network caused the following patterns to form in my theta waves: - The Navy spent a lot of tax dollars installing those monitors on the Bridge (to say nothing of the R & D and manufacturing of the sensor tech feeding them). You could at least glance at them once in a while. - They can round up anyone at a moment's notice, whisk them to Washington via chopper, but it's not until The Most Important Person goes down to Control HQ to brief the Cabinet that they think to find someone to hand Fido over to? - They need the best work from the A-Team, so the ghost tries his best to make the linguist feel put upon and undervalued- doubly strange , since later on we see the ghost does have rudimentary skills. - OTOH, nice to show a brainy character with some good old-fashioned vices. Hollywood loves the stereotype of intelligent people as cold, aloof and emotionally retarded. Seeing him gambling with a drink in one hand and a stripper in the other was one of the highlights of the pilot. - Part of it is Spiner not trying to hide his age (as in "Nemesis"), but he's shown for years the range to play very different characters. Here he's entirely credible as a non-Data scientist. Dutton is also every bit as good as expected. In fact, the entire cast came across as believable. I hope future scripts will live up to their potential. - "And on the eighth day God created Klingons." Point for getting the obligatory Trek reference out of the way early on, two bonus points for it being in character and appropriate to the scene. - I'm not quite clear where the ship was attacked. It *seemed* in many scenes to be 80 miles off of U.S. shores, but the North Koreans were the first to get a ship there, and nobody even suggested towing it in instead of splashing all that alien contamination all over the water. - The linguist guy is also supposed to be a hot-shot mathematician, but it took him quite a while to recognize the tie-dye pattern was a fractal design. - Once the rocket scientist realized the Xmas ornament was multidimensional, he should have realized there *could* be infinite space deeper inside than the outer leaves that were unfolding and retracting. - BTW, did it remind anyone else of the animations for the growing polyhedrons in "Andromeda Strain?" - These guys do not watch enough movies. When the corpse started moving their very first response should have been to put all the bodies in restraints. - I can buy a multidimensional doohickey manipulating us from the inside out (much like us three-D critters can reach inside a two-D drawing on a piece of paper) but for recordings of the "signal" to have similar powers is *really* pushing the credibility envelope, even by skiffy standards. I had the same reaction to this as when the "CSI" folk take a digital picture of someone's eye two or three pixels across and "enhance" a picture of the picture-taker reflected in the eye. - And then knowing the power of the signal they later start broadcasting part of it, through loudspeakers, for hours. - A gun is a ***LOT*** more effective when you're not standing close enough to the intended target for him to grab it. Granted it wasn't too effective in any case, but the ghost should have seen that coming. - BTW, when you put three or four bullets into someone's chest and they're still moving, either A) Find a better weapon or B) Find some means of increasing the distance between you and it. Something that's merely annoyed by bullets + pissing it off = *not* your best day ever. - When dealing with alien, multi-dimensional tech you really shouldn't be surprised by people appearing and disappearing at will. - These are the brains that are supposed to be our very only chance to save the planet, so when planning to lure the bad guys to one location you put the Most Important Bait On The Planet in an unarmed, unguarded, unobserved van. And then no one is even looking outside the plant, so the appearance of all the townsfolk is such a big surprise... Look, Braga, Trek is dead for now. It's too late to try to make Starfleet Security look competent by comparison. - At least they had a semblance of a plan, though given the target instead of moving the troops within grabbing range with the cattle prods, standing off and machine-gunning trank darts into him until a minute or so after he goes down would have been my preferred plan. - Once the camera zoomed way up from their car who could doubt we'd see another fractal spiral? Surely someone is going to take notice of the pattern of the blackout. They really need a canny spin doctor on the team. The pilot was much better than expected (much credit to the cast). Of course given the production team's track record I was expecting such a sucktacular shitfest that my "Mystery Science Theater" tapes would be physically repelled from the TV. They had some genuinely good ideas, like sending information to change us into them instead of the stereotypical invasion fleet, but too many lapses that would have been caught if they'd just proofread the script once. A sci fi show on Friday night on one of the Big Three nets already has too many strikes against it; with just a little care and thought a decent show could have been great. NEXT WEEK: Update your firewalls, folks, 'cause the aliens figured out the obvious *really* fast!!! ***** The Joker in the Eeeeeeevil Cabal Deck of Cards. OZ: So... do you guys steal weapons from the Army a lot? WILLOW: Well, we don't get cable, so we have to make our own fun. .