Does this show still make money?

I get that it has funny bits every so often that go viral (most of which seem to be cartoons or Samberg songs) but WOW, what a bunch of dreck you have to sit through to get to those gems, eh?

Note: According to Gabe, of videogum netfame, Hulu cut out many of the sketches.  This makes sense, as I wondered where the hell the host of the show (Ed Helms) was during most of the sketches that ran.  He was barely there!  So, maybe there was a bunch of funny hidden from internet viewers.   Also, Gabe apparently liked this episode, while I wanted to stab my eyes.  And he evidently found the Garth & Kat stuff funny !?!?!?!? EXCLAMATIONPOINT!?

Is this actually funny?  Is there something wrong with me for finding it so obnoxious?  I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if there was just something horribly wrong with me….

Aside:  Evidently Hulu feels teerrrrrrrible that their commercials do not play on my systems.  I do not feel terrible about this at all Hulu.  In fact, I am quiet pleased. I would have stopped watching at the first commercial if they had been working.  WAIT.  That would have saved me from sitting through this crap.  I take it back – please fix your commercials so I can be dissuaded from ever watching anything on Hula again!

ALSO: There are a lot of commercials (like 2 60 second pauses where a commercial would have been every 5-10 mins for me).  Like. More than on real TV, maybe?

Of course, there are also commercials on youtube (!) now, so hey, we knew it couldn’t last.  On to the next thing….

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yevav-RcUfQ

I like how the enemy goes from catapults directly to giant robot warmech things.  Now that, my friends, is how to win an arms race.   I haven’t listened to the audio yet, so who knows, maybe it’s explained.

The animations look solid and crisp and very reminiscent of certain flavors of anime from the 80s & 90s.  Which is a good thing.

But man, no Pumyra or Bengali :(.  They were my favorites.  WHAT?  Of course there had to be someone who liked the “new” Thundercats, right?  That someone was me.

[UPDATE:   Additional info from a panel at Wondercon on Sunday.  Evidently Bengali & Lynxo will show up eventually.]

• Morn mills around in the background
• The crew member that suddenly had a name and was talking last episode?  Yeah, you guessed it, they have a role in this episode and won’t be seen again.
• Kira and Sisko exchange knowing smiles to close us out

This was a strange “season finale” in the sense that I’m used to them kind of leaving something hanging, or being a two-parter, or both, but this was a done-in-one no cliffhanger.  So odd by today’s standards.  Maybe they didn’t know if they were coming back the following season?

In any case, the DS9 crew made a serious enemy and a serious ally… hopefully at least one of them will be back in the future.

So wow, a whole season down… I can’t remember the last time I watched a whole season of something – the second season of Heroes maybe?  So what do I think?  I think it had a bit of a rocky start – not a horrible one, but just not an awesome one – but seems to be picking up nicely towards the end.  I’ll probably take a month or so break before starting season 2.  Onward.

More on Kira’s background in the resistance, and more of the “how to live in the aftermath” stuff, both political and personal.  Stuff that tends to give this show a bit more weight than I felt that TNG had (at least in an overarching sense, as there were definitely “serious” episodes of TNG).

• No Morn
• All the regulars get a few lines, but this is Kira & the Cardassian captive’s show.
• NO KNOWING SMILE.

• Morn stared on aghast as Kira threw Quark into a wall.  Dude.  She’s pretty strong.  I mean, his head alone must way 20lbs.
• Having a complete non-humanoid around is incredibly handy.
• Cisco makes a clock while he’s possessed – I want to say I remember this turning up in later episodes. I hope it does, I love little things like that.
• Quark’s “clue” about Klingon weaponry had nothing to do with anything and was completely pointless -  considering the Klingon crew members journals were about looking for a colony site and then finding the telepathic matrix on accident…. what?
• Dolemite!
• Is there anything that doesn’t kill people in the gamma quadrant?  I’m just waiting for some good news to come through that stupid wormhole.
• Kira & Cisco tag-teamed the knowing smiles.  His was a little creepy.

• We meet another Gamma quadrant lifeform – this one a digital “puppy” that now lives in the computer system.  I wonder if they’ll ever come back to that?  I hope so.  Lots of possibilities there.
• Diana Troy’s mom pops up, and hits on Odo and they bond and stuff over hair.  The bonding part came entirely too quickly after all of her vapid droning, but the sentiment was nice.  And they get stuck in an elevator for hours and Odo has to turn back into goo that a) occupies much less surface area/volume than his human form so b) should probably be pretty damn dense but is c) easily caught by Ms. Troy in her skirt and looks like it weighs basically nothing.  To quote some commercial from the 80s: WHERE’S THE MASS?
• You make us sit through those people annoying the hell out of Julian for that long and then you SKIP the part where he does something right?  WTF.  Seriously.
• I did not notice Morn in the opening bar scene – was he there?
• Oh, and some random Bajoran officer on deck (“Anara”) gets like 10 lines throughout the course of the episode.  What the hell?  I suspect she’s going to be like that Starfleet security guy that turned up in two episodes (109 and 110) and then vanished.  Except she probably won’t even make it to two episodes.
• Everyone got a decent amount of face time this episode – I was kind of surprised how well they worked that.
• Anytime there is a computer sequence or any computer jargon it’s hard not to sharpen a couch cushion and gouge  my eye out because they are usually just talking in circles or pulling archaic looking plug things out of one slot and putting them into another.
• Chief O’Brien got the closing smile.  It wasn’t so much knowing as it was really amused with itself.

B-plot: Nog & Sisko junior doing something like an old-school RPG trade-up quest:  “Go get me some blabba beans”,  “Thank you for the blabba beans, here is a broken briefcase?”  (WTF do I do with a broken briefcase?)  “Ahh, thank you for that broken briefcase, here I will give you a used condom for that.” WTF!??   Eventually they get rich because duh, they are PCs*.

Annnnnnnd.  Onto the  notes:

• Off-camera, Morn asked Dax out on a date.  She, of course, said no… but admits that she may find him kinda cute.
• Morn… sits at the bar.
• Is it just me or is it odd that Ferengi pull on each others’ ears when they are angry BUT those same ears can also get them off?  Soo… it’s like if humans jerked on each others’ genitals.  Bad racial mash-up (old school human ear-pulling vs. earsturbation).
• The lisp Nog gets from his fake teeth is rather gross.  Especially when he’s excited.
• Kira’s got some big shoulders.  OK that outfit under her uniform is really strange.  Also, since this is a Kira-centric episode… I can’t hear her name without thinking of Death Note.  Which I never did finish watching.  Hmm…
• Doctor & Engineer get some random throw away lines.  Oh and Dax too.  Odo barely slips one in there at the end.
• Sisko continues to show why he’s the man for the job.
• I’m continually amazed at the way they find to write low-budget settings into Star Trek plots.  “Hey, let’s visit an old man in a shack with no technology!”
• Also, Ferengi “education” continues to disappoint in that they don’t realize that land = value.
• Houses in the future are flammable.  But I guess that’s because they are still building them out of mud bricks.  Wait… mud bricks are flammable?
• Also, Kira is never gonna see this old man again.  Stop making it like she cares.  I will eat something only moderately tasty if she does!!

I had to find something else to do while watching this.  While not bad, it’s just not enough to demand my full attention.  Hoping for some plot related episodes soooooon.  That being said, it was a decent stock episode continuing the examination of Kira’s character and her struggle with the shift from rebel to military.

In closing, what have we learned today?

That it’s incredibly easy to set up a corporate entity on DS9.

*: Player characters.

The A-plot involved a young Bajoran girl thrust into a leadership position via the death of her parents, and now she’s stuck trying to negotiate with her group’s Hatfield & McCoy type enemy, and doesn’t want to back down and appear weak.  Yada yada missed childhood yada yada enter Nog & Jake that teach her how to compromise and stuff and there is oatmeal thrown that almost makes Jake cry.

Both A & B plots could have been separate episodes, and bore absolutely no relation to each other, so I’m a little confused as to why they did this (then again, I would have had a really hard time sitting through a whole episode of the B plot… BUT… they could have actually made it interesting via having people act..oh wait, I wasn’t going to talk about it).  I think this was the first time that happened, but maybe it’s their formula and will continue to be used?

The rundown:

• The Doctor evidently annoys the Chief as much as he should.  We get to see a bunch of O’Brien annoyance expressions, which are understandable.  I thought they were gonna bond here, or something, and I’m kinda pleased that they didn’t.  Plenty of time for that.
• The B-plot was really dumb.
• Kira makes like lawn furniture, as does Odo, and gets to toss out a random line or two and ensure that they get paid.  Wait, Quark does too.
• Morn laughs at a joke and wanders around.
• Sisko kind of came off like a dick or a bully in the way he treated the young Bajoran girl (Did she have a name?  Eh, who cares?)
• O’Brien got the knowing smile, and the knowing was about knowing how annoying Julian is.

So, Kai Opaka, the Bajoran (why do I always want to spell it “Bjoran”?) Pope type deal (but female, and they apparently only have 1 major religion) wants to visit DS9.  Cool.  Then she wants to take a drive through the wormhole.  Cool.  But less cool, you know?  Like, kind of creepy cool like why would the Pope want to take a private drive with you into the backwaters of the Brazilian jungle with no magic Papal escort?  OK, there was one dude, but he stayed on  DS9 for no reason at all.  Also, note that while all this is happening, Kai has this wide eyed stare like she knows she is going to die, or something.  Because she obviously knows she is going to die, or something.

Turns out, she was just going to stay behind in the gamma quadrant on a prison world where two warring factions are imprisoned and everyone is condemned to be resurrected every time they die.  And of course Kai dies on the crash so she gets resurrected by the crazy alien microbes and can’t leave the planet without actually dying forever.

Oh, right, this marks the introduction of

gamma quadrant species #4 – the ones that refuse to sign a cease fire when it could break their eternal curse and instead continue fighting forever.

I didn’t notice who got the closing knowing facial expression.  I’ll double check and update (because you care, I know you do) when I watch the next one tomorrow.

Also, as Jen said: “Awesome, an episode without Quark!”

Another funny bit… the doctor was included basically because “it’s a slow day” – so he got stuck on the planet with them.  Otherwise he could have skipped a paycheck for this ep.   OHHH but it was SUPER convenient that he was there – because otherwise they wouldn’t have known how the resurrection thing works, or that Kai (or anyone else) would die if they took her off planet.

ANOTHER funny bit was with O’Brien and Dax in orbit throwing out gibberish engineering terms.  I mean, they weren’t gibberish… but they way the solution was only 2 seconds away WAS total gibberish.  But, he does that every time.  I’m starting to think this O’Brien dude is like, a mega fucking genius or something.  Like, mega.

[EDIT: Kai Opaka got the knowing smile, but it wasn't a knowing smile so much as it was a trepidation-filled gaze into the potential of infinite deaths.  Or something.]

A brief recap:

species 1: hunts sentients

species 2: plays total dick-ass holosuite games that are a) more powerful tech than anything the Federation has and b) totally stupid.  Also has the most annoying laugh ever.  And are total dicks.

species 3: kills the family of one who is declared an “enemy of the state” (or something like that), but not the person himself.  And also doesn’t have to prove anything before said execution.

So, I get what they’re going for with all the gamma quadrant species being “inhuman” in addition to “unhuman”… but the fact that they all speak English kinda screws with that.

Also, wow but this episode may have set some records for stupidest Star Trek extras/species yet.  The main alien dude had a really weird man-woman body (which I think was,unfortunately 70% just the actors body and 30% weird prop clothes)… worse than a Cardassian’s, and the backup alien dudes trying to kill him just looked kinda silly.  Not like that is anything new.

• Odo quotes Morn, kinda.  Morn waves his arms around and again, says nothing.
• Odo centric episode in general, with the first hints about his species.
• Random dumb things:  Sisko is totally cool with taking himself (THE SENIOR OFFICER) and one other in a tiny ship to a possibly alien planet to tell them that one of theirs just murdered someone on the station?  How is that in any way following a protocol.  Delegate man, delegate!
• Speaking of delegating, in either this episode or the last one, Sisko tells Kira about some problem and she says “I’ll have Odo blah blah blah.”  Dude.  Lady.  If he wanted Odo to do something he would have just tapped that stupid little triangle thing and said “Hey Odo, do some shit with this shit.”  But no, he told YOU.  In PERSON.  Not the time to delegate.  *Knows who’s not getting an xmas bonus!*
• Odo gets the closing… “unknowing” smile I guess you’d call it.