Oh thank goodness, it's storming
Aug. 2nd, 2025 10:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyThis should drop the temperature to something livable.
E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.
First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.
I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.
Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.
The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.
At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)
One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.
And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.
*****************
Peacock feathers can emit laser beams (OMGWTF)
'Flummadiddle,' 'Slumgullion,' and More Silly Words from the 19th Century
Why did Russian mega earthquake not cause more tsunami damage?
The Monster at the Dinner Table
I Watched 20 Arrests In Trump’s America. Here’s What They Looked Like.
“We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out”
A Trip Through Hell
How heat threatens lives in America’s prisons
Earth is being slowly dehydrated by unmitigated mining of groundwater
Respiratory viral infections awaken metastatic breast cancer cells in lungs
E and I watched three more Voyager episodes.
First, we watched the one where Tom Paris gets put in solitary for 30 days due to an environmental crime of conscience. Janeway flipped her morning coin and landed on "martinet / asshole", I guess. Tom tries pointing out that a month of solitary is cruel and unusual punishment, but nobody, least of all the writers, takes it seriously.
I take it seriously. This is literally torture. The worst thing that happens to Tom is he's bored and has a few nightmares about his astonishingly abusive father. (I thought the man was astonishingly abusive. I'll bet the writers thought he was just ordinary bad.) What happens to real people includes but is not limited to hallucinations, obsessive thoughts, a heightened risk of suicide, and lasting psychosis.
Anyway, the episode was surprisingly still topical, 30-ish years after the fact. The one moderately amusing part of this episode is where Tom tells the turbolift to bring him to the brig because nobody wanted to pay the security guard extras to speak. Great episode, but, to reiterate, solitary confinement is literally torture.
The next episode was Counterpoint, in which a fascist thug thinks he has culture, but actually he does not. They never do. Voyager is smuggling telepathic refugees. The fascists have some inane argument about how you can't trust telepaths and they're a real and present threat to society, but it's a weaksauce argument and nobody buys it. Outside the ship children are getting smuggled around in crates and incarcerated in concentration camps everywhere you look. This is another surprisingly, and dismayingly, topical episode.
At the end, Janeway is sad that the thug betrayed them instead of defecting for real, but that's because she thinks he's hot. I think she could've just kidnapped him. It worked with Seven, after all. (To be honest, there's a long list of one-episode characters that I think Janeway should've outright kidnapped. And also Seska and her baby.)
One of those refugee children shows up again on Prodigy as a Starfleet security guard and... honestly, I have so many questions about the way they apparently jaunt back and forth to the Delta Quadrant on a whim nowadays. Is this something they explain in Picard? Because I'm not watching Picard, not now that I've heard they kill off Icheb.
And today was a Robert Picardo Showcase Episode wherein the Doctor has a psychological crisis after finding out his memory was modified to make him forget his previous psychological crisis, when he chose to save his friend Harry over some random extra. It's a good episode. Don't ask me what Voyager planned to do if he never overcame his trauma and they had to go the rest of the trip with no doctor, though.
Peacock feathers can emit laser beams (OMGWTF)
'Flummadiddle,' 'Slumgullion,' and More Silly Words from the 19th Century
Why did Russian mega earthquake not cause more tsunami damage?
The Monster at the Dinner Table
I Watched 20 Arrests In Trump’s America. Here’s What They Looked Like.
“We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out”
A Trip Through Hell
How heat threatens lives in America’s prisons
Earth is being slowly dehydrated by unmitigated mining of groundwater
Respiratory viral infections awaken metastatic breast cancer cells in lungs
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 11:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 12:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 02:49 pm (UTC)As long as I've got my mind, I'm never truly captive.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:09 pm (UTC)Though I'm not sure that's not a result of your *own* lasting psychological trauma from that boarding school.
As for the time at university, the difference may be that you were the one who chose to stay in your room, and you had the ability to change your mind and leave at any time.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:26 pm (UTC)And yeah, choice is important. The most gilded cage is still a cage.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-02 06:16 am (UTC)Keep in mind the lasting psychological damage from covid lockdowns, especially for those living alone. Humans on average are very bad at 'alone'.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:30 pm (UTC)I remember 100% being on his side and so surprised she did that and then demoted him.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:39 pm (UTC)I live in a state where solitary is still allowed. My colleague teaches math in prison and sometimes his students will just end up in solitary and it’s just so sad.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 07:49 pm (UTC)Security does go in the turbo lift with him and takes him to the brig though.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 08:45 pm (UTC)They couldn't get rid of extras entirely.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:32 pm (UTC)Wait! really? I can’t stop laughing.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-01 10:29 pm (UTC)