UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

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

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

(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.

Remember Me
Season 4 Episode 5
Original airdate: October 20, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

Dr. Crusher’s anxiety over losing loved ones is magnified when she becomes trapped in an alternate reality.

My Brief Review

I’m not sure I’d say this is my favorite episode of the show, but it’s definitely the one that’s stuck with me most vividly. I love these Twilight Zone-type episodes, and this one is a classic.

Wesley is conducting a warp field experiment in engineering, and shortly thereafter, Dr. Crusher starts to notice a strange phenomenon: people are vanishing from onboard the Enterprise, and no one but her seems to remember them ever existing.

Eventually, it comes to this… Beverly is alone on the bridge (and, in fact, alone on the ship), when she poses the question to the computer: “What is the nature of the universe?”

Computer: “The universe is a spheroid region 704 meters in diameter.”

Eventually the ship starts to break down due to what the computer calls a “design flaw”… namely, that parts of the ship’s design now fall outside the universe. But Beverly is smart, almost as smart as her son Wesley, who gets into serious Jedi mode with The Traveler, who comes back and works his metaphysical magic.

Of course everything works out fine in the end. But it’s quite a trip along the way.

Memorable Moment

When Dr. Crusher asks the computer to display a model of the universe and she recognizes the shape as Wesley’s warp field, that’s an image that’s burned into my brain. But I think the most memorable moment is when it’s down to just her and Picard left on board, and she’s sitting next to him. She has the computer giving a continual audible readout of Picard’s life functions. For a moment she glances away from him, the computer falls silent, and… he’s gone.

Crew Rando

Uh, I mean, come on. There’s like nobody in this episode. So let’s go with Dr. Dalen Quaice, Beverly’s old (and I mean old) friend, who’s the first to disappear. He’s played by Bill Erwin, who according to IMDb is “known for” the unforgettable roles “Man on Plane,” “Man in Airport,” and “70-Year-Old Man.”

Distane Rating: 6K

IMDb score: 7.9/10

Suddenly Human
Season 4 Episode 4
Original airdate: October 13, 1990

Netflix Synopsis

On a rescue mission to a Talarian shipwreck, the Enterprise team discovers that one of the alien crew is a young human.

My Brief Review

Wow, season four is all about family, isn’t it? In this case, Picard spends a few days as a surrogate father to an angsty teenager. Fighting over loud music, even.

The boy was captured by the Talarians, a patriarchal, warrior race, and raised as one of their own. But when he comes aboard Enterprise, it’s discovered that he’s actually the son of a Starfleet commander, who had been killed in a battle with the Talarians. His grandmother is a Starfleet admiral. Which place is his home? Is his Talarian father a serial abuser? Will Captain Picard survive young Jono stabbing him while he sleeps? (Yeah, that happens.)

In the end, Jono makes his choice, but he learns a lot about being human along the way.

Memorable Moment

Jono creeping up on a sleeping Picard and thrusting a dagger into his chest is certainly memorable, but the moment from this episode I immediately remembered from years ago is him sitting in Ten-Forward with Wesley Crusher, jabbing a spoon violently into a banana split, and splattering blue (?) ice cream all over Wesley’s face. Wherein Data gets a lesson in slapstick humor.

Crew Rando

Crewman Martinez (a.k.a “backflip master”) appears here, but I think we only see the back of his head. But in a more general “rando” sense, let’s talk about Jono’s Talarian father, Captain Endar. He’s played by Sherman Howard, who has appeared in a million small roles, including a bunch of Star Trek stuff as well as tons of video game and cartoon voice work. But his most memorable moment may be as playing Roy, Elaine’s ex-boyfriend in the Seinfeld episode The Junior Mint. Yes, he’s the patient who’s being operated on when Kramer drops a Junior Mint from the viewing gallery.

Distance Rating: 4K

IMDb score: 6.5/10