Set phasers to maximum dweeb

"Ready, sir."

Thank you, Mr. Lileks. Fire at will.

I mean, I knew I was going to love the column the instant the picture popped up. That brightens a geek's lunch hour, eh wot? I loved Deep Sleep Nine, especially once they woke up Avery Brooks and told him that he was on the clock. Couldn't get into Voyager the same way as DS9 and Next Generation, especially Captain Lameway, who surely should have been court martialed for all the times she ditched the Prime Directive. (More specifically, ditched it without Kirk's brio and style.) Therefore, I'll take Lileks' word for it on Enterprise, a show I disliked. Terminal "Prequelitis" - no matter what you see, you know how it turns out. It severely hampers your creative efforts, which is probably why it could only squeeze out four years. (And for hockey fans, Scott Bakula looks too much like Flyers forward John LeClair, and he's not even captain of his own team.)

Allow me one concession: the finale is in fact cribbed directly from what I think was Voyager's best episode. Good on them for borrowing from the best, especially if it's the only way they could reasonably close the series.

On a related note (HA - I do have original content today!) TNT played "Insurrection" yesterday on the telly, and it was kind of fun to see; it hits all of the high notes for a Trek movie: Obvious Moral, the ship and crew nearly buy it, and F Murray Abraham's turn to hold the prestigious Serious Thespian Slumming fellowship. (They should have thrown in Data giggling like Tom Hulce in Amadeus, just for the hell of it.) No, it wasn't the best of them. Any fan fictioners who wish to indulge can write the "Enterprise" Finale-style story of how history shows that this was the lowest point in Captain Picard's otherwise stellar career: risking it all on the society that modelled itself on M Night Shyamalan's "The Village." (I love the one guy who tells Picard that the minute they pick up a gun to defend themselves, they become no different than the guys who want to kidnap the whole lot of them and destroy their planet and their precious way of life. My instant response, in the theater [bad habit of mine] was, "So, you want us to do it for you since you don't like us anyway?" I'd be a bad Federation Captain.) I won't be that guy, though. I enjoyed it for what it was, screened out the preachle*, and watched the pretty boom-booms. It's probably good training for Episode III, now that I think about it...

*preachle (n.) - a sickly combination of preaching and treachle; it sticks in the throat and may cause the dreaded disease cringivitis.