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I was kind of torn on that one, which sort of struck me as the one trying hardest to look and feel like a TOS episode, but it still leaves us with three out of the first four with an identifiable “gimmick,” and the muppet epsiode to come. In fact, it seems like they’ve intentionally leaned into it:

“There’s a cadence between kind of classic ‘TOS’ sci-fi thriller and then the thing that actually makes us ‘Strange New Worlds’…which is our worlds are genres,” Goldsman said. “Those are our strange new worlds. It’s the lens that allows us to tell stories in a way that typically, or at least consistently, hasn’t been done in ‘Star Trek’ before.”

I’m not even entirely sure I hate it, but it’s not adding a fun factor on its own anymore, so if an episode is weak, like the last one, there is nothing particularly refreshing about the fact that they cast Dave Foley and tried to make it funny.

Also, there’s too much Kirk.

When every episode is a “special” genre homage, none of them are special.

I appreciate that there’s an almost palpable march towards TOS camp, and TOS had its share of backlot-leveraging genre scripts, but TOS also had its share of episodes done as straighter sci-fi, sometimes building off really solid and thought-provoking story ideas (leaving Shatner and the production designers to add the camp factor on their own).

The arrow travels half the distance from your bow to the throat of your unworthy enemy. Then half again, and again, and so on, yet always half the distance remains. How does it ever penetrate to spill his lifeblood upon the ground?

While the reality of the scenario is a lesson for another day, buried within the paradox we lay a foundation for comprehending the limit function…

It’s probably related to this possibly apocryphal story:

One shell, however, wasn’t quite empty.

Inside the casing was “a carefully rolled piece of paper” written in Czech, he noted. “This is all we can do for you now,” the message read.

Columbus was indeed a bastard by contemporary standards:

One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was… stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.

It got bad enough that he was sent back in chains (though he was released) and stripped of all his titles (permanently). There’s some thought that the report was a bit of a hit piece by his political enemies, but it seems like he, with his equally shitty brother, opened himself up by being such an asshole.

You don’t have to be an apologist for the Spanish regime or think they were enlightened somehow to understand that he was particularly shitty. As the historian in the article says, “The monarchs wanted someone who did not give them problems. Columbus did not solve problems, he created them.”

“Peaceful ancient Mediterranean state” is an oxymoron

The Minoans would like a word…

Though more recent scholarship seems to imply that the word would most likely be, “Agreed!”

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Anecdote time: My mom grew up in the Atlanta suburbs in the 50s and 60s, and while she converted to Mormonism (I got better!) for my dad, she was very much a white woman of her place and time. Growing up, she made it clear that she knew of exactly three “sons of perdition,” a biblical term the LDS used to describe “those who were permitted to be born to this world with physical bodies but then served Satan and turned utterly against God [and who] will not be redeemed from the second (spiritual) death and cannot dwell in a kingdom of glory.”

They were Adolph Hitler (fair enough), Napoleon Bonaparte (I’m guessing a personal bugaboo of whatever armchair historian and armchair-ier theologian introduced her to this concept, but okay he started a lot of very large wars), and William Tecumseh Sherman.

LOL, that’s rough. I should have clarified what I was thinking of the (Western) Roman Empire.

I believe that’s as high as it ever got, but it was definitely a thing.

Patrick Stewart was also deeply involved in the creative decisions on Picard seasons 1 and 2. He got to the point where he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and since he is Jean-Luc Picard, what he wants is ipso facto the right choice:

“What I’d like to see at the end of the show,” I told them, “is a content Jean-Luc. I want to see Picard perfectly at ease with his situation. Not anxious, not in a frenzy, not depressed. And I think this means that there is a wife in the picture.” You see, the line between Jean-Luc and me has grown ever more blurred. If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?

Sometimes you do not want your actor actually in charge of their iconic character, and genuine embrace of it can manage to make it worse if they’re not writers. I will do my occasional hornet’s-nest kicking and say that Mark Hamill’s take on Luke Skywalker after filming The Last Jedi was similarly myopic, but in a direction that more fans at least think they wanted, and since we’ll never see his choices play out he still gets the benefit of the doubt.

That’s all correct, and the new movie also has the Colosseum flooded deeply enough that there are large sharks eating combatants in the naumachia. Then there’s the infamous cafe and newspaper scene, and of course, the one gladiator riding a rhinoceros with full tack as a war horse.

All of which could be somewhat forgiven if it was a decent movie, but it’s also predictable and overly derivative of the first one, utterly anticlimactic, and Paul Mescal joins Sam Worthington in being a “star” who has all the action-movie charisma of a floppy skin tag. I’ll withhold overall judgment until I see Hamnet.

And yet, somehow it’s a more sophisticated ahistorical argument than whatever the fuck they were getting at in the sequel.

What about the papers where he expounded upon how he wanted to return to a fully-functioning Republic, but not for the benefit of the senatorial class? Release the Maximus files!!!