23 February

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #57: The Host

The Host
Season 4 Episode 23
Original airdate: May 11, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

Dr. Crusher falls for a visiting ambassador, only to discover that he’s not quite what she thought.

My Brief Review

Spoiler: He’s a parasite living inside a symbiont host. The host body dies, he gets transplanted into Riker’s body so he can continue mediating a dispute between two moons, everything works out in the end, and his permanent replacement host is… a woman! Gasp!

Beverly is totally fine falling in love with an alien with forehead ridges… as long as it’s a straight relationship. eyeroll Sometimes Star Trek’s efforts to be socially progressive are a bit ham-fisted, and often they don’t age well, much like their tech. In some ways, we’ve come farther both socially and technologically in 30 years than the writers anticipated in 300.

And in other ways… not so much.

P.S. Yes I skipped another Lwaxana Troi episode. Ugh.

Memorable Moment

That rose Odan gives Beverly is pretty sad, I have to say. At least they show it later in full bloom, and that’s what makes Beverly decide she can… uh… handle a night of passion with Riker.

But I think the most memorable moment for me is when we first see the planetary system where this negotiation is taking place. It’s a planet with two large moons, and all three are class M. The humanoids originated on the central planet but colonized the two moons centuries earlier. It’s a very interesting concept I would like to see more done with, as opposed to the main focus of the episode. Once again.

Crew Rando

Nurse Ogawa makes another appearance in this episode. I think she’s the only non-regular we even see in this episode.

Distance Rating: 2.23 miles

IMDb score: 6.5/10
#irunwithmaud #finishtherun

ST:TNG Treadmill Reviews #55 and #56: Wherein I am beginning to lose steam for this project

Over the weekend I ran on the treadmill twice and watched ST:TNG as usual, both times. In this case I watched Qpid (S4E20, 4/20/91, IMDb 7.3/10) and The Drumhead (S4E21, 4/27/91, IMDb 8.4/10).

Both were good episodes that I enjoyed, but my timing was bad, and I did not have a chance to write my blog entries immediately after watching them.

“Qpid” (featuring Q, of course), was the kind of episode I might typically hate, but I actually found it exceedingly entertaining, with Picard as Robin Hood, leading his band of Merry Men to rescue Maid Marian (Vash, from the episode where Picard punches a Ferengi in the face). The episode even pays homage to one of the funniest moments in Animal House.

And then we had “The Drumhead,” featuring Jean Simmons (who I recognized best from having just seen her in an old episode of Miss Marple that I watched a week or so ago) as a witch hunt-leading admiral. The episode, once again, felt very timely with what’s been happening in the U.S. politically in recent months. When episodes like this originally aired, I saw them as symbolically representing tyrannical governments of the 20th century, but I foolishly maintained an “it would never happen here” mentality. Now I know better. So I didn’t exactly enjoy this episode, but I found it compelling.

Sorry for breaking the formula with this review; I’m just trying to get caught up!

Private Eyes are watching you!

I don’t normally post links to music videos on this blog… that’s typically reserved for one of my other blogs. But… well… any way you slice it, Hall and Oates are not prog rock, so it just didn’t fit.

But I got this video in my head (yes, I can get a video in my head) and I felt compelled to share it. It’s a cool song, and a humorously low-budget video, but the main reason I remember this video so well and love it so much is that it’s intricately woven into the fabric of my early childhood memories. This song was huge right when we first got MTV in 1982, and it was on heavy rotation. I was at a critical age—8 years old—where a lot of things seem to start to gel in your mind. You understand the world in new ways… your horizons expand… and those things you enjoy most at that time seem to leave a permanent impression on who you are.

For me, in 1982, it was MTV and Atari. So hearing this song—and, even more, seeing its video—triggers a flood of memories. Maybe it does for you too. Maybe not. Anyway, enjoy…

There are so many things I remember vividly about this video. Daryl Hall’s green jacket. The trench coats. John Oates and his bug eyes. The white flashes when the hand claps come in. The list of minute details permanently stored in my brain goes on.

But there is no way I can let this pass without commenting on the one thing that drives me mad: that the video of the drummer’s hands at the beginning is “off.” He’s shown hitting the snare drum when you hear the bass drum. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate joke or if the director of the video was just too clueless and/or lazy and/or in a big damn hurry to get the video finished before they burned through the $200 budget.

Anyway, this was something I was acutely aware of and bothered by as an 8 year old, watching this video. At the time I had a tendency to point out any minuscule error anyone around me made, as if the universe assigned me the job of trying to fix all of the small faults within it. So, yes… oh yes.. I noticed this.