Some Comments About “Star Trek: Picard” @ The Halfway Point Of Season 3, The Final Season

If the last five episodes are as incredible as these first five, this one season of this one streaming show will have made up for:

  • Every bad episode of TOS;
  • Every bad episode of ST:TAS;
  • Every bad episode of TNG (yes, even the race/ethnic stereotyping and overt racism of Seasons 1 and 2);
  • Every bad episode of DS9 (were there bad episodes of that? 🙂 );
  • Every bad episode of Voyager (and I love the fact that there are not many of those 🙂 ),
  • Every bad Trek movie (maybe even including the new ones, depending on how powerful this particular story and series ends!) and 
  • Every misstep of streaming Nu Trek, animated and live-action (including Picard Season Two)

This is an amazing time to love this franchise! Today is a good day to live đꙂ

[UPDATE AFTER SEEING FINALE ON 4/20/23: The finale might have been the weakest. With the amount of time spent, the showrunners are determined to set up Star Trek: Legacy–something that technically doesn’t exist (yet)! I can’t believe the Trek people allowed the showrunners so much setup for nothing. There was less setup for a new movie the Trek folks have already announced! The story as a whole is almost the GOAT, but perhaps time will push this to an A+.]

*****

A Related Aside: Between this and what’s going on with Star Wars streaming shows, it’s beginning to be understood that good writing fixes everything–even bad movie sequels and prequels. The Star Wars streaming showrunners are creating world-building that’s so well done [LINK ADDED 4/20/23] it’s actually showing the greatness of the content of the prequels and sequels. An example of re-evaluating and changing your long-held view of something based on something else new that puts the old in a new context, a la the maxim, “If you change the way you look at things, what you look at changes.” 

“Bearing Witness In The Case Of Mumia Abu-Jamal” Forum

140-Word Review Of The First Two Episodes Of Hulu’s (And Nikole Hannah-Jones’) “The 1619 Project”

Easily the most militant, near-radical Oprah product yet. 🙂 Episode One is the usual (corporate) skewered portrait of Black people (only) wanting as-is American identity through American liberal democracy and capitalism instead of freedom, which is a much more complicated socio-political discussion that American documentarians wish to ignore. (Docs like this conveniently 🙂 forget that the American Civil Rights Movement was a McCarthyite compromise to what Blacks really wanted and had to politically dismantle–a Freedom Movement.) But admittedly, having a Black woman on-camera asking other Black women about the state of American democracy, regardless of the lack of imagination of the answers, feels new. Episode Two’s Black womanist-centered approach to the discussion of the concept of race, again, felt quite innovative. Overall, the personal-is-political approach works for Hannah-Jones since it creates tensions not normally “scene” in Black American docs.

FEBRUARY 16TH UPDATE: I finished the whole series. Nikole Hannah-Jones deserves her own family-centered, elite-access-influenced worldview, but I think future explorations of Black America should be divided into sections of multiple commentators/producers/narrators, etc. I believe that this historical doc should establish a new tradition.

Belated 78-Word Review Of The TV Adaption Of “Kindred”

Mallori Johnson is a star but she has to burn through an unnecessary mess. A uniquely powerful story about the pain and irony of slavery in America–a short but stout book that slams the reader in the face–is so packed with television characters and thinned out and stretched as to lose its original meaning. Sad for non-readers who will think any of this has to do with a product produced by our amazing ancestor Octavia Butler.

UPDATE: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/kindred-canceled-fx-1235313309/

And so now I feel I just wasted eight hours of a Sunday. But I’m glad to be introduced to Mallori Johnson, who deserves better projects.

Philadelphia’s 6th Annual Martin Luther King Symposium, Featuring Marc Lamont Hill, Jared Ball, Charisse Burden Stelly, And Others

“Green screen…” “Black history Starter Pack…” Good hate…. 🙂

Congrats, Golden Globe Winners!

Zendaya, “Euphoria”

I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to be there tonight, but I just wanted to say thank you to @goldenglobes for this incredible honor. To my fellow nominees, it is a privilege to be named beside you, I admire you all deeply. Thank you to my Euphoria family, without you, none of this is possible. Lastly, thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has allowed Rue into theirs. I think everyone knows how much she means to me, but the fact that she can mean something to someone else is a gift. I’m honestly at a loss for words as I type this, all I can say is thank you thank you thank you. Goodnight♥️