Monthly Archives: August 2025

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode — A Space Adventure Hour

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.

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Cartoonishly Incompetent, but Still Dangerous

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So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its report on employment and job growth, reducing the number of jobs created in the reported period (May 2025) from about 129,000 to a mere 19,000. The correction was quite large, but it is not unprecedented. However, since this is well within the chaotic, on-again, off-again tariff merry-go-round of Trump economic activity, a weakening of job growth is bad news for the current administration and the allies that have slavishly lashed themselves to it. I’m given to recall a scene from The Godfather.

Tom Hagen had been sent to Hollywood to bend a studio mogul to Vito Corleone’s will. Acting out of personal pride and stubbornness, the mogul refuses Hagen to his face. Hagen thanks the man for a pleasant evening and meal and excuses himself because Vito Corleone insists on hearing bad news immediately.

This is competent, intelligent leadership. Crises cannot be handled well and the best possible outcomes cannot be obtained if full and accurate information is not at hand for the decision makers. Every two-bit serial villain that kills an underling for delivering bad news is sabotaging their own operation with such shortsighted and idiotic measures.

Trump is idiotic and shortsighted.

He fired the head of the BLS, made wild and unsupported accusations that the bad report was an orchestrated conspiracy to make him look bad, and insisted that the news was, of course, “fake.”

This nation is facing its most critical crisis since the Civil War, and it is only by our actions today and tomorrow that we can save it.

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Movie Review: Siberian Lady Macbeth

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A Polish film from 1962, Siberian Lady Macbeth is an adaptation of the 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which has been adapted into an opera and films since 1962.

Kino Video

Katarina is an unhappy wife living on a large estate with many serfs, ruled by an overbearing “master” Boris, to whose son she is married. Childless and joyless, with her husband away dealing with some far-flung emergency, Katarina begins an affair with a recently hired serf, Sergei. Katarina and Sergei conspire and murder Boris when he returns so Sergei may become the “master” of the estate. Their idyllic future is threatened by the arrival of distant relatives with a claim on the estate. Burdened by guilt and with suspicion against the couple growing, their relationship frays, leading to the story’s inevitable tragic conclusion.

 

 

Siberian Lady Macbeth is not an adaptation of the classic play but rather takes its title from the central conceit of a woman manipulating the men around her into murder. The story is presented more as a film noir, with characters driven by their base desires and greed into inescapable situations. While this film was produced in Poland, it in many ways adheres to America’s Production Code, both in the depiction of onscreen sexuality and violence and the compelled moralistic ending.

The copy streaming on Kanopy is not restored and displays many scratches and blemishes due to its age but is still quite watchable.

Overall, I am glad to have seen this film, but I can’t say that it ranks very highly among my favorite noirs nor my favored adaptations of Macbeth. There are several shots, particularly of the windswept and foggy estate that serves as the story’s central location, that were reminiscent of 1957’s Throne of Blood, my favorite non-Macbeth adaptation of the tragedy.

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