ST:TNG Treadmill Review #46: The Loss

The Loss
Season 4 Episode 10
Original airdate: December 29, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

While the Enterprise struggles to contend with a mysterious life-form, Troi inexplicably loses her empathetic powers.

My Brief Review

“Empathetic”? Well, whatever. This is not a great episode. I have never really enjoyed episodes that explore Troi’s empathic powers. I’ve never found the idea of the empathic powers compelling, and the way Troi is written as a character is often not great. I do not blame Marina Sirtis for this. It’s the writers and producers. She was not given a lot to work with.

The idea of the two-dimensional beings drawn to the cosmic string fragment like moths to a flame is kind of interesting, and was very timely with the ongoing development of string theory at the time of the episode. I guess the past couple of decades’ failure of string theory to prove at all viable kind of sours me on this. (I was a big reader of popular writing about theoretical physics by the likes of Brian Greene and Michio Kaku in the ’90s.)

On top of what was already a bit of a throwaway episode (aired between Christmas and New Year’s when people were probably less likely to be watching anyway), this also proves to be the first episode in the entire season that isn’t about family in some way.

Memorable Moment

Honestly… not much? Troi comparing the beings to moths being drawn to a flame, I guess. This episode’s details are especially unmemorable, considering that I had actually just seen this one randomly on TV within the last year or so. I remembered that I had seen it, but very few of the details came back to me until moments before they were going to happen.

Crew Rando

OK, we get a serious crew rando this time around. Yes, Ensign Allenby is still at the helm, but we are treated to several scenes featuring Ensign Brooks, whose presence on the ship seems only to be relevant when we need to see Deanna Troi doing her job as ship’s counselor. (Which, strangely, she never normally has to make time for. She’s always on the bridge, and now suddenly she’s seeing patients?)

Distance Rating: 2K

IMDb score: 6.0/10

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #45: Final Mission (or Not)

Final Mission
Season 4 Episode 9
Original airdate: November 17, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

Before leaving for Starfleet Academy, Wesley Crusher accompanies Capt. Picard at the negotiation proceedings of a mining dispute.

My Brief Review

Of course this is not actually anyone’s final mission… except Dirgo, the shuttlecraft captain who meets his untimely yet well-deserved demise in this episode.

Wes is on his way to Starfleet Academy, so another scenario is contrived to allow him to be alone with Captain Picard, while the Enterprise races off to deal with a distant emergency… which only exists, on a practical level, to justify the situation where Picard and Wesley are forced to be together because the ship isn’t there to save them.

We never find out what the weird sentry is that’s guarding the fountain in the cave, or how Wesley destroyed it, or how it passes through his body like Voldemort in the first Harry Potter movie without harming him in any way. But does any of it really matter? We get affirmation that Captain Picard is proud of Wesley, which is pretty much the whole reason for this episode to exist.

Still, I actually did enjoy it. The scenes with Wesley and Picard are much more compelling than the side story about dragging a radiation-leaking garbage scow through an asteroid belt. Seriously. That’s the side story.

Does this episode carry on my observation that every episode of season 4 is about family? I would say yes. Obviously there’s Dr. Crusher’s interactions with Wesley after the rescue, but I’ve always felt that there was almost a father-son dynamic to Wesley and Picard’s relationship, and that definitely gets played up here.

Memorable Moment

The shuttle crashed in the middle of a desert, baking at 55ºC, Picard fashions a large arrow out of debris, pointing at the mountains where they’re heading for shelter, then proceeds to immediately walk off at a 10º angle from where the arrow is pointing. Oops. Also there are big looping tire tracks in the sand all around the shuttle craft. Maybe they just didn’t show up on a standard definition TV.

I have several other complaints about these types of details in this sloppy episode, but this IMDb review covers them all better (and more sarcastically) than I even could.

Crew Rando

A real crew rando! She has her name spoken several times and even has a few lines herself! With Wesley gone, we now have Ensign Allenby at the helm. (She appears in two other episodes, one of them uncredited.)

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 6.9/10

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #44: Future Imperfect

Future Imperfect
Season 4 Episode 8
Original airdate: November 10, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

Riker has to leave his birthday party early to head an away team after a Romulan secret base is found on a planet which was believed to be uninhabited.

My Brief Review

I thought from the synopsis that this would be the first episode of the season not to be about family in some way, but then, bam! Captain Riker wakes up 16 years in the future, with no memory of his son, Jean-Luc Riker. This is also another Twilight Zone-esque story, where nothing is as it seems.

I hate to spoil it, because I love this kind of episode, and even though it’s not the greatest execution, there are some fun “ah-ha” moments that are best left as surprises.

Memorable Moment

I won’t go into detail, but there’s a great moment where Riker realizes that all is not as it appears to be, which leads him to yell “SHUT UP!” at Admiral Picard.

Crew Rando

16 years is a lot of time to accumulate a new crop of randos, including a few who have lines. I’ll go with Ensign Gates, who’s operating the transporter.

Distance Rating: 3K

IMDb score: 7.9/10

ST:TNG Treadmill Review #43: Reunion

Reunion
Season 4 Episode 7
Original airdate: November 3, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

When the head of the Klingon high council passes on, Capt. Picard finds himself in the middle of the struggle for the now-vacant position.

My Brief Review

Wow, season 4 really is all about family, isn’t it? I actually skipped the previous episode, Legacy, because its synopsis — “The crew of the Enterprise enters into orbit around the home planet of their former crewmate, Tasha Yar, where they encounter her sister” — because it just didn’t appeal to me, but it was about family too!

In this one, though the synopsis doesn’t reveal it, we meet Worf’s son Alexander, whose mother K’Ehleyr, makes a return appearance (sadly her last, for reasons that… well, will become obvious during the episode… no spoilers!) as the ambassador facilitating the typically complex Klingon ritual to determine a successor to the leader of the high council, K’mpec, who dies by poisoning early in the episode.

This episode is really a sequel to the story of Worf’s discommendation from last season. It’s a pretty strong episode, lots of Klingon business, and it features my absolute favorite Klingon… Ol’ Crazy Eyes Gowron.


Ol’ Crazy Eyes Gowron (not from this episode, but a good example of his crazy eyes)

Memorable Moment

Gowron flashing his crazy eyes, of course! Actually, the moment I probably remember most is not that. It’s when Alexander is in the — what is it? school? playroom? — with the other kids and he knocks over their blocks.

Crew Rando

Honorable mention here to the rando from Duras’s ship who — spoiler! — sacrifices himself, via a Romulan bomb implanted in his forearm, in an attempt to disrupt the proceedings. There’s also a good rando/dumbass “security officer” on the Enterprise, who is fooled, ridiculously easily, by another of Duras’s henchmen.

Distance Rating: 4K

IMDb score: 8.4/10

Some thoughts on the unintuitiveness of the Mac’s Menu Bar

(This post is adapted from a rambling Twitter thread I just posted.)

I was just reading Nick Heer’s post on transparency in macOS Big Sur and it got me thinking about a related issue I recently dealt with. This is not a new and questionable UI design choice Apple foisted upon us in 2020. It’s a fundamental UI element that dates back to the original 1984 Macintosh.

The Menu Bar.

Although the Mac (and, technically, the Lisa before it) was a ripoff of the original experimental graphical user interface (GUI) developed at Xerox PARC, there is one thing about the Mac that is distinctly different from every other GUI that exists, be it any iteration of Windows, Linux GUIs like GNOME or KDE, the old Sun workstations, even the NeXT OS that Steve Jobs led the creation of after his original ouster from Apple, which formed the basis for Mac OS X and everything Apple has created in this century.

The Menu Bar.

Every other GUI puts a row of menus into the window for each app. On the Mac, the Menu Bar is affixed to the top of the screen, and changes context based on which app is in the foreground. There is a conceptual detachment between apps and their windows on the Mac that does not exist in any other modern operating system, and if you don’t fully grasp that concept, it makes the Mac considerably more confusing to use.

I was reminded of this recently when I had to provide a bit of “tech support” for my parents. My parents are in their 70s. But they’ve had Macs since I first convinced them to buy a candy-colored original iMac over 20 years ago. They’ve only had Macs, although now they do most of their “computer” activities on their iPhones or iPad. But they still use the Mac for banking, printing documents, and a few other tasks that are still a bit obscure to them on the iPad.

And even though they’ve been using Macs for over a quarter of their lives, they still don’t “get” the Menu Bar.

We were on a FaceTime call and they asked me to help them figure out a problem they were having with their Mac. They were describing a weird problem they were having with Safari, and I just could not understand what the issue was. They were describing a sidebar with all of their email in it, and that they couldn’t make it go away.

Since we were doing FaceTime on their iPad, I eventually asked them to turn the iPad so I could see their Mac screen.

I know that their email is through Gmail (because I set it up), so I was expecting to see the Gmail web interface. But what I was actually seeing was the Mac Mail app’s interface. What? How did they manage to get Safari to display that? Then I realized what the problem was.

The Menu Bar.

They had Safari open, as the foreground app, but they didn’t have any Safari windows open. They also had the Mail app open; in fact, it was the only window open on their desktop. But because Safari was the foreground app, the Menu Bar, was saying “Safari” and had the Safari menus.

Why wouldn’t they have just clicked on the Mail window which would make it the foreground app? Seems obvious, but they are nervous novices, and they’re reluctant to click anything, ever, if they’re not sure what will happen. (I know they are not alone in this.)

I told them how to quit Safari, and then how to quit Mail, and they thanked me for fixing their problem. (Did I really though?) But it left me frustrated with the Mac.

Damn it, the Menu Bar is confusing. As loyal as I am to the Mac, putting menus within an app — making it so that the window is the app — is a lot more intuitive and logical than the way the Mac does it. How can an app be open if all of its windows are closed? It doesn’t make sense. Once you conceptually understand foreground and background apps, and have some technical understanding of how the computer works, it’s easy enough to take it all for granted. But at the surface level — which is all the average non-technical user grasps — it makes no damn sense to have the Menu Bar detached from the app it affects.

If there weren’t a thousand other reasons I prefer the Mac, I would be inclined to say that this detail alone makes Windows a superior OS. But it’s not.