Recent content by jian

It’s a common joke at our table that as soon as Sisko gets to go to the Mirror Universe he immediately has sex with his coworkers with no consequences. Says a lot about him. Cardassia is indeed a fantastic setting (so much more so than Bajor, sorry not sorry Bajor) because it’s such a rigid...

Yes, profession often means "something you pay someone to do", like lawyer, doctor, accountant, soldier, or sex worker. We probably didn't pay each other to do hunting and farming initially because we didn't have money. Profession can also mean "group of people whom you pay to do something, who...

One interesting comparison is DS9 not to other ST series (or even B5) but to concurrent urban fantasy series such as Buffy. Buffy and its ilk (and all its various descendants) are of course much more dramatic - the writers throw in random deaths, traumas, body changes, resurrections...

Yes, it’s true - he gets some general maturity and moral/emotional flexibility/range, not least from his friendship with Garak. The S31 stuff is just the natural offshoot for that development. I stand by my rating but agree there’s plenty there. A lot of the rating is based on how recognisable...

Part of it is that he's a regular cast member so he keeps on having to be around (unlike Keiko or even Nog, Martok, or Garak) but they're really not sure what to do with him for all of that time. DS9 isn't a family sitcom where there's a beaten path for characters growing up along with their...

Going back and watching a few earlier episodes before plunging back into the latter half of season 7. So yesterday we watched The Visitor and Second Skin. The Visitor held up very well and, as noted above, highlights Jake’s core character issues and deftly turns them into an excellent science...

I think that’s definitely the character concept and the team (especially Lofton) delivers it very well, but it becomes a significant contrast to everyone else on the show (who are various shades of player character, living through and doing extraordinary things). And it seems clear that the...

I really think Jake doesn’t get a fair shake in DS9, and that’s basically because he’s always defined as a child, an adjunct to his protagonist dad. He’s never allowed to develop his own agenda and maturity. Part of that is the actor’s age and therefore range - Lofton was 13-20 years old during...

The dramatic beats felt very dated, quite like war films from the 50s and 60s, which were mostly about WW2. The angry complaining, the thousand yard stares, the ungrateful civilian (Quark), and so on. Heck, it goes even further back - a lot of those tropes are from Westerns. The other thing is...

So, we're still on Netflix so we can finish DS9. The last two nights were the Nog-focused two-parter (not actually a two-parter since there's an episode in between, but you know what I mean): The Siege of AR-558 and It's Only A Paper Moon. The Siege of AR-558 is a weird one because it's...

“A small regional station with an audience about eight times the size of my country, nothing to write home about.”

Man of Steel had a lot of good points - especially Henry Cavill - but it really was short on the heroism that’s central to Superman, and so I’d have to agree with all that. It did feel like Age of Ultron, which came out a few years later, was a take that to MoS in some ways, not least in the...

It’s not a bad match at all, since they’re based on this Ainu myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korpokkur They’re probably not dwarves.

Yes, that’s fair, and as such I’ve got no problems with that. Spirit folk aren’t elves, though, I just have no idea what they are. If the writers don’t know either, they probably shouldn’t be included.

Hmm, I’d have to strongly disagree. Elves and dwarves are very distinctly Western, the D&D versions of Tolkien archetypes and European myths, and there shouldn’t really be Japanese elves or Chinese dwarves. There are of course Asian myths which resemble those archetypes - orang bunian are...