[Movies] The A-Team (2010)

One of the main drawbacks of the global economic recession was the truly inspired idea that the thing we most want to watch in movie theaters are rehashed ideas based on old TV shows or even movies from many, many years ago. Seriously, it's practically a curse of some kind and I'd like to think that part of the reasons the US continues to suffer ecnomic hardship (beyond how ridiculous partisan politics gets or how insane the Tea Party is) is the fact that the lack of truly creative forces driving new thought in the country is stagnating.

Yes, let's use Hollywood's pathetic movie turn-out as some sort of a barometer for the lack of true innovation in the US outside of tech companies like Google and Facebook or something.

So we get this weird movie based on a TV show that had a decent cult following but never really went anywhere. And the big plan was to take bits and pieces of the original show, throw in some cheap references and special effects and out them all in a blender.

Of course when you put such diverse elements into a blender long enough, you're going to end up with unrecognizable mush.

[Theater] In The Heights (Atlantis Productions)

When you live outside the US (or even just outside of New York), getting access to top Broadway shows is pretty challenging. It's not like I have the financial capability (or even just the visa) to hop onto a plane to New York to catch a show over the weekend and then fly right on back. It sucks, but what can you do right?

At times I've tried getting bootleg copies of some major plays and musicals and while you'll generally get a good idea of what the show is like and how it runs, it's never the same thing. My fellow Broadway fans can surely relate to this little conundrum.

So I'm very, very thankful for theater companies like Atlantis Productions that put a lot of effort into getting the rights for the major plays and doing this best to stage them well. While you can argue to the high heavens that a local production will never be like Broadway, it doesn't mean they can't come pretty darned close. And this was definitely one of those stand-out plays that really, really impressed me with how well it was done.

[Social Networks] Problems With Facebook's Cookies

I've had an odd love-hate relationship with Facebook's social plugins over the years, mainly because of the many changes that have been made to the site and the resulting impact this has on Facebook's perceived privacy approach. I'm not talking about their official privacy policy or anything like that - this is more about how the rest of the world receives such changes and determines the impact on everyone's life.

A great example of this is probably Facebook's Like button. At first, I was pretty wary about it given it was designed to report back your browsing activity on different sites to Facebook for the purposes of showing you which of your friends have liked the same article and so on. At first I would only browse Facebook using Chrome's Incognito mode, in order to keep my browsing secure from the Facebook cookie reporting. And then eventually I weaned off this as adoption became greater and I decided to gamble on Facebook to see where these plugins might lead to.

Then I took the next step and actually created a Facebook Like page for the Geeky Guide to "promote the brand" and also try to foster a community between Geeky Guide readers. It's been a fun experiment for sure and I now have about 150+ fans who publicly support the site, which is cool.

But then increased scrutiny of Facebook's privacy practices have been the talk of the talk recently starting with their big revamp of the News Feed to include the Ticker and the option for site owners to push content to people's Ticker streams without explicitly consent and of course the more recent Facebook cookie tracking snafu where Facebook's cookies continue to report on your site usage even when logged out of Facebook.

[Books] Star Wars: Force Heretic I: Remnant (The New Jedi Order Book 15)

I'm fairly certain that I've discussed the challenge of trilogies in the past. With this being a format very popular among Star Wars novels, the trilogy story format is an inevitable topic, I suppose. It has its fair share of good points and bad points like any other story format, although I do feel it has significant limitations.

A trilogy is never easy to balance regardless of your writing skill. After all, how does one map the proper flow of a narrative in a manner that it can be divided into three main chunks and yet still provide the classic elements of build-up, climax and resolution, along with all the rest of that sort of thing.

At this point in the New Jedi Order story arc, it was clear that the story really had to wrap up. There are a total of 19 full novels in the series and this is well into the tail end of things. And with this being the last multi-book arc in the entire book series, it's clear that the authors were given a laundry list of plot points that they needed to hit as part of this particular journey. Thus in many ways, I felt the book was determined to achieve these goals and not necessarily just tell a story of its own.

[Movies] Fright Night (2011)

I can't remember the last time that I had seen the original version of this movie in its entirety. The best that I can come up with are vague snippets during one of those instances when the movie was playing on HBO or something. And this is considering it's been a few years since I last had a cable subscription active. Go figure.

Remakes are a dime a dozen these days as Hollywood continues to play it safe by sticking to older movies instead of investing more in original stories and concepts. And while I generally shun remakes since they almost always manage to disappoint me, there are always those instances when the remakes aren't as bad as feared.

Admittedly I only saw this new version because of David Tennant. As a major Doctor Who fan, I've certainly missed the tenth incarnation of our time-traveling friend and the prospects of seeing him in a major feature seemed a bit too hard to resist. And thankfully, my shallow reasoning for watching this movie was rewarded by a pretty solid piece of entertainment that certainly made things worthwhile.

[Technicolor Musings] Young Love Can Be Tragic

S&W Model 18-3 (.22LR) - England via Flickr.

Local news is ablaze with reports of a 13 year old boy who shot his 16 year old lover in Pampanga last September 20. The incident happened at SM Pampanga where the younger boy managed to get a gun past security in order to shoot his slightly older alleged lover and then himself. There are various Facebook pages discussing the identities of the two individuals in question, but I felt it best not to venture into such details at this time.

Both eventually died after they were taken off life support.

The shooting naturally raises many questions, but of course the local media can only really focus on the "safe" issues. Thus the discussions regarding the prevalence of loose firearms in the country and the calls to mall owners to tighten security in order to prevent such shootings from happening again. While these remain valid concerns, I doubt this one incident will trigger a wave of reform in terms of gun laws or anything of that nature.

What is naturally absent from the news discussions is the fact that the two young men were romantically entangled. There's news that a "third party" may have been involved, thus triggering the anger of the younger boy and I suppose that does provide motive for the shooting.

[Movies] Outsourced (2006)

I've been working in the Philippine call center industry for over 8 years now, so I'd like to think that I have a pretty decent grasp of the culture by now. I'm not claiming to be a total expert just yet, but for the most part I've come to realize a few tendencies when it comes to our agents and all that jazz. Anyone would given enough time immersed in a particular working environment.

When this movie came out, I avoided it outright. I mean come on, how can watching a movie related to my job be entertaining to me? Was it really a good way to spend my free time to watch a movie that would obviously remind me of the work place? It's probably why my interest in The Sims was so limited - the "fun" of simulating real life at the expense of your actual time for other fun activities seemed pretty weird to me.

But then the movie managed to trigger a short-lived TV show last year, and that eventually got me curious. My brother had shared the first half of the season with me and I decided to do my best to finish what had been started.

Ironically, I watched the TV show before this one, and folks pointed out that one didn't make sense without the other. So I got around to watching this to see what the fuss was all about.

[Theater] The Lion King (Base Entertainment Singapore)

Many years ago when my partner was in New York, he had wanted to catch a screening of this particular play. However things didn't work out for him, and so to some extent it was a bit of a hang-up for him - yet another of life's unresolved bucket list items that we tend to carry around with us all through our lives.

Last month, we found out that the run of this play over at the Marina Bay Sands theater in Singapore had been extended yet again. Now given our schedules had finally freed up enough to make planning an out of the country trip like this possible, we decided to take the gamble and started making the travel arrangements to head over to Singapore.

So this play helped mark our first overseas vacation together, and I can't think of a better way to commemorate things. It's a stellar play no matter how you look at it and Base Entertainment made sure to put up a production worthy of the brand. And with luck, this review will help break down why it was such an amazing show and worth flying out of the country for.

[Metro] It All Starts With Discipline

On our trip to Singapore last month. I snapped this quick photo at the train station. Notice anything different?

At first glance, it doesn't seem like anything fancy. It's just people on an escalator, right?

But notice how they're all standing on one side? That's the ticket right there.

They are deliberately queuing on the left-hand side of the escalator, leaving the ride side free. Free for what you ask? Well, in public transit hubs like train stations and even the walkalators at the airport, the practice is to queue left for most folks, but if you're in a hurry you can take the right side and briskly dash by. And it's not like Singapore is alone in this practice. I've heard that Japan does the same thing.

There are a few signs here and there that remind people to do this, but for the most part people just automatically follow. It's all just conditioned into everyone's psyche or something - a lovely display of discipline that certainly inspires one to hope for a better tomorrow even here in the Philippines.

What prevents us from being similarly disciplined? Where have we gone wrong as a culture that people repeatedly choose to disobey laws and not follow rules. It's all over the place - people who smoke where they're not supposed to. People who jay walk and not wait for the street lights to change. People who stay in the bus lane in order to get along faster than scramble back into the main lanes of EDSA before the cops catch them. People who litter left and right. The list goes on and on.

The biggest cause of our woes is not the government or the lack of education. At its core it's the level of self-discipline that people choose to practice day in and day out, I feel. By remaining selfish and undisciplined and unwilling to give up individual advantage in favor of others, well, it leads to a lot of madness and crazier things when allowed to take their natural course of progression.

[Books] Children of the Mind

Getting to this final book in the Ender Quartet (or whatever we're supposed to call this series) was quite the struggle. The religious rhetoric had really started to get to me and the lack of truly interesting or innovative character development had been weighing heavily on me in previous books. Then there was the added fun of dealing with the insanity what was the world of Path and the effort to keep the misguided Path citizens relevant to the story.

It was a bit of a stretch, but they sort of managed this in the end. Of course we're not plagued with the continued involvement of Path in the story, or at least one of its citizens.

The ending of the last book left me feeling that Card wasn't quite ready to leave his primary characters behind. As much as I didn't quite like a lot of the new people he had introduced as this series has progressed, I don't think rebooting things and returning to a prior state was a good solution either. And yet there it was and we as readers just had to grin and bear it as the story meandered on with its additional baggage.

So this book left an odd taste in my mouth given the diverse players thrown into the mix.

[Movies] Limitless (2011)

My partner and I had opted not to catch this movie in the theater for one reason or another. Maybe the concept just didn't draw us in. Maybe the trailer didn't represent the movie well. Maybe we were still traumatized by that horrible remake of The A-Team. Thus despite the reasonably attractive Bradley Cooper, this movie was relegated to the "will catch on home video" category of movies for this year.

Thus the timing of this review, given we only recently got around to watching it.

Now Bradley Cooper's core charm, I feel, is when he's truly charming. In his earlier years on Alias, he managed to present that cute, awkward nerdy kind of charming which was pretty cute. In other movies they've had him be all dashing and debonair charming. And now that he has the muscles to augment his charms, Hollywood has been doing its best to make him romantic comedy leading man material of the extra charming variety.

This movie had us going back to him being in a more cerebral role. But he wasn't charming. And maybe that helped kill this movie for me.

[Movies] Shock to the System (2006)

My continuing efforts to address a long overdue blog review has turned into quite an enjoyable movie watching spree. I suppose that's a testament to the original books that brought the character of gay detective Donald Strachey that has really helped things along for me. And after watching the first movie, Third Man Out, I was more than eager to dive into the next one.

Beyond the writing, actor Chad Allen has also proven himself to be quite the decent actor - or even more than that. His portrayal of Donald Strachey really helps stress how the fact that the character is gay isn't necessarily central to the plot. Instead, he's just another detective who just happens to have a loving husband / partner to come home to and who is more open to handling queer-related crimes.

I enjoyed this movie and the fact that they decided to maintain some semblance of continuity between the sequels. That really helps with longer-term character development and it's the sort of thing that really makes a series of movies feel like a more coherent franchise.

[Movies] The God of Cookery (1996)

Back in the day, SkyCable had Star Mandarin as one of its standard cable channels - one of those tricks that cable companies do to inflate their channel counts. Surprisingly, my brother and I ended up watching the various movies on the channel during those lull hours when HBO seemed determined to play every single movie 2-3 times in a day while all the other channels seemed to lack anything worth watching. It's a weird world that way.

Recently I was struck by a wave of nostalgia about movies that I wanted to share with my partner. This was one of the movies that really stood out for one reason or another. Maybe it's because of the fact that we had also finished watching the entire Cooking Master Boy anime series at the time. Or maybe it's because Stephen Chow's career was already reaching new heights and this old gem had been dug up to capitalize on his popularity at the time.

It kind of pains me how movies in other countries in the region look so much better than local movies. And I'm not even comparing to movies of the past - it's a very real problem that continues to plague the local film industry.

But I suppose that sort of a rant can wait for another post entirely.

[TV] Glee: Season 2

There's a fairly thin line between an amazing new concept and a cheap novelty. It's easy for one to become the other, but of course it's pain to see the transition of the former into the latter.

As harsh as it sounds, this is my perception when it comes to the television series Glee. At first it seemed like quite the novel idea for a series - following the adventures of a group of misfits and outcasts who end up in the school glee club and try to make their way to the national choir competition. Who cares if most of them are already past college age, right? The important thing here is how much fun the show was and how the musical sequences were definitely something to be enjoyed.

However the show started to meander as guest stars would come and go with their own irrelevant story arcs that vanished into limbo. They had a large cast of characters that they couldn't effectively manage continued development of. And the show remained confused as to whether it wanted to push the surreal and fantastical elements involved or make things more real. And in the end it felt like a big mess.

And yet for one reason or another I watched the second season in the hopes that it would somehow redeem itself and figure out where it needed to apply focus. Instead we got this.

[Books] I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

When I started the Geeky Guide five years ago, a large part of my initial focus was Google-watching. And could you blame me? Google is THE company to follow for geeks such as myself, and is pretty much the place that any geek would kill to work for. Well, now there's Facebook too, but Google still represents a particular idea of tech-geekdom that is hard to match.

There's a large segment of the blogging world that's dedicated to following the comings and goings of Google as a company and in time I realized the Geeky Guide would have more of an identity if I branched out into other avenue. However my core love for Google remains just as strong and I've continued to act as a sort of Google advocate to my friends including trying to get people on Google Apps and things like that.

So when this book came out, I knew I had to get it. As much as fellow Google fanboys know most of the company history as based on what had been previously published on various websites, this is the first time an insider has published his observations of the tech giant during its early start-up days.

[Books] Star Wars: Destiny's Way (The New Jedi Order Book 14)

As my reading progress works it way through the vast series of novels that is The New Jedi Order series of Star Wars books, the thought has crossesd my mind more than once about how our heroes could possibly win in the end. Let's face it, this is still Star Wars so it means that good has to triumph over evil at the end of all this - it's just a question of how. And for most of this series, it has been one depressing defeat after another as the intergalactic invaders known as the Yuuzhan Vong continue their conquest of the New Republic and nearby territories.

In any narrative, even one of this scale, there has to be that turning point when the almost invincible enemy begins to falter. As much as there have been isolated victories against the Yuuzhan Vong across the books, you have to admit that the overall tone has been one of slowly giving ground to these invaders culminating with the fall of Coruscant, the home of the New Republic's government.

In many ways, this book certainly felt like that potential turning point. While the book does not end with the New Republic being safe and restored to its former glory, it does present how the beleaguered forces finally find their angle of opportunity and start to exploit it. It's far from the final conclusion of the entire series, but it's definitely a key moment in the whole story arc that is a must-read if you want to fully appreciate the progression of this narrative.

[Movies] Bridesmaids (2011)

Movies are not often universal in appeal. What is appealing to one can be totally boring for another. It just goes on and on and on. And thus the goal of each reviewer is to try and figure out some relatively objective criteria upon one can base his or her reviews to have some sort of consistency.

I find this most true in comedies. After all, comedy is highly relative to one's experiences and interests, one's tastes and quirks. Thus comedies hit people in different ways. Sometimes the humor is almost immediate for a large group of people. Sometimes it just leaves people scratching their heads and blinking repeatedly in the gloom of the theater.

This movie has gotten a lot of good buzz and a significant degree of appeal among many people around the web. And yet as I watched the movie, I didn't quite get the same reaction as a lot of other people seemed to have as based on other reviews. In this regard it seems that I'm really not necessarily the same as most others, but a a geek I've often felt this in a variety of situations.

[Technicolor Musings] No Complaints For AJ (1982 - 2011)

Venus Raj and AJ Matela by AJ Matela via Flickr.

AJ Matela, the man behind Bakla Ako, May Reklamo? and many other blogs, died this week. In another day, September 10, he would have been 29 years old. It still feels almost surreal to consider that such a distinct voice in the local LGBT blogging community is gone, but it is indeed true. I still seem to be surprising contacts with this news as waves of grief and support explore out across the social web. It was only the other week when Migs sent out a call for support given his on-going health concerns and despite a stellar fight on AJ's part, he finally passed on to that better place we're all meant to go to some time.

It goes without saying that it feels like his passing had come far too soon. But then these things happen, of course, and there's no real way around things. This is not to say that things have been wasted in any way - those who knew AJ would acknowledge how he had always lived life to the fullest. And beyond living such a fantastic life, he has also had the opportunity to touch so many lives.

I had already written a short tribute for AJ over on my LiveJournal blog, but I thought it appropriate to write a bit more at length about him for this week's Technicolor Musings post. After wall, what better way to remember such a well-known blogger than with a modest photo blog post as well, right? And we all know how much AJ loved photos.

[Movies] Buying The Cow (2002)

Every now and then I start watching movies in a manner that may seem like I'm doing circuit training for an international Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon tournament. This usually involves watching a series of movies that follow a singular them such as a common director, actor or even concept. It's not that I play a lot of Six Degree of Kevin Bacon, but a geek needs to be prepared for any eventuality.

This can be a lot of fun since it means you get to discover a bunch of different movies that you had never heard of before you started searching IMDb or Wikipedia for work related to a particular artist or whatever. It can also be pretty painful since there's also a good reason that certain movies never escape the direct-to-video market. No matter how you look at it though, the whole activity is bound to be educational and it'll give you greater insight into what your person of focus has had to go through to become the major celebrity he or she may be today.

In this case, this is part of a series of movies favoring one of my favorite actors, Ryan Reynolds. I know, he's not exactly in the running to win an Oscar or participate in a life-changing movie anytime soon. But allow me this moment of shallowness as I admit that I just find him really hot and thus I've decided to suffer through a number of his lesser known movies just to see how they went. And whether or not he was shirtless.

And this movie had a lot of that.

[TV] Community: Season 2

It's interesting to watch a show come into its own, even if it figures out that the direction that it needs to take may not necessarily be close to its original concept. Community is a pretty good example of this sort of a transition, at least in my opinion. For anyone who has come to love the show, you probably don't like it solely for how the first few episodes went.

In the early days of Community, the story was centered around Jeff Winger and his quest to finally get through college in order to reclaim his status as a lawyer. All the other characters, mainly the members of his Spanish study group, were pretty much just supporting roles. They either provided assistance to him in order to get him to pass this subject or that requirement while others provided modest romantic interests or strange friendships.

But as the first season progressed, it grew less and less about Jeff and more and more about the study group as a whole. Not only that, but the writers seemed to embrace the positive reactions they got from geekier segments of the community, thus upping the shows number of pop culture references and montages in a manner that celebrated geek culture. While shows like The Big Bang Theory are deliberately intellectual and geeky in presentation, Community ended up feeling more like the sleeper geek show - the one that makes you realize you share geek traits no matter how "cool" you think you are.

And this second season was all about diving headlong into geek culture and never turning back.

[Google] What's Going On?

Image by masahiko via FlickrI'm still in the middle of reading I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, the amazing narrative of a segment of Google's early history from the perspective of Douglas Edwards, the proverbial "voice of Google" for many years. The book is proving to be an amazing read and I'll probably take a blog post (or three) to discuss my insights once I've finally finished reading it.

One of my biggest takeaways from the book thus far is how differently the approach customer support and feedback. The rest of the world scrambles to put out PR fires and manage their image as best as they can in this social media age. But for Google (or at least the early Google), getting too bogged down in customer support means taking time away from actually solving the problem or getting more done. It's not the most laudable of beliefs, but it does make a lot of sense and it helps explains a lot of Google's actions.

But recent changes in how Google has been running things has me a little confused as of late. Despite my new realizations about the company because of Edwards' book, there's a lot of be puzzled over in terms of recent announcement and product closures that have been making the rounds of the news sites and the tech blogosphere at large.

[Books] Xenocide

As I continued to make my way through the original Ender books written by Orson Scott Card, I finally reached a point where my interests and those of the author started to diverge. While he won me over with the brilliance of Ender's Game and the complexity of Speaker for the Dead, this book left me feeling a little weird, among other things. Perhaps his being a Morman had truly begun to creep into his writing or at least presented itself in a way that rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe his focus on Brazil was weirding me out. Maybe the story was just going into a place I didn't entirely like. It's hard to say really.

It might have more to do with how Bean was perhaps one of the more interesting characters, at least in terms of how he was originally presented in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. And while Ender was interesting to begin with, over the course of these books in particular, he's become less and less appealing a character to me given how lofty a lot of the subject matter has become. Or at least has tried to become.

To be fair, this story arc has included some pretty interesting themes and concepts. We've had to deal with the question of sentience, the value of one species over another and even a little religious argumentation to boot. But then it has meandered around a lot as well and I suppose that's really begun to eat away at my personal interest in this story. But still, I already started the series and I remain determined to finish it no matter what.

[Star Wars] Messing With The Classics

Image via WikipediaThere's been a lot of press buzz going around related to the additional changes made to the Star Wars films in line with the debut of the Blu-ray collection of these iconic movies. One could argue that this is nothing more than the kind of backlash George Lucas first received when he created the "Special Edition" of the original trilogy, which consisted of updates made to the first three movies mainly related to the inferior special effects technology available at the time.

However this is a lot more than just tweaking the excessive black edges where different sets of footage were spliced together or the lack of CGI alien creatures in a busy starport. These have included some strange thematic changes that have altered the narrative to some extent or tried to present additional insight into certain sections of the movie.

So I figured today was as good a day as any to try and discuss some of the changes and weigh in on the modifications as best as can be expected.

[Movies] Third Man Out (2005)

Over two years ago, I received a review copy of On the Other Hand, Death: A Donald Strachey Mystery as part of the marketing efforts around the DVD release of the movie. However, early 2009 was a rather turbulent time for me personally and I never got around to watching the movie nor writing anything about it.

Recently I came across the DVD and decided to finally get around to watching it. However the movie is a part of a series of movies, and thus it only seemed proper to watch all of them and not just the DVD that had been sent to me. Thus this is the first of series of review posts dedicated to the Donald Strachey mystery movies and I do hope you enjoy the little adventure of watching all four movies, even if only through these reviews.

And what is it with gay mysteries as a book and movie genre? Does this tape the same area of our cultural awareness that make home brew gumshoe stories such a hit with the ladies as well? Or is a love for mysteries a universal concept that transcends gender definitions if only because people generally appreciate the investigative process and how it eventually unfolds to reveal the culprit at the heart of things?

It's certainly something to ponder.

[Geeky Guide] Celebrating 5 Years of Geekery With The Mind Museum

September 1 marked the first anniversary of this little blog, The Geeky Guide to Nearly Everything. Since the blog began in 2006, we've published over 1,900 blog post and managed to attain over 100,000 page views. I know it doesn't seem like much when compared to the bigger name blogs, but given I still juggle a full-time job and other activities (i.e. having a social life), I'm still really happy with how far the blog has come. And as always, I'll continue in my efforts to provide meaningful geeky insights into various books, movies and whatever else I come across.

I was supposed to put something together on the anniversary date itself, however my partner Tobie and I were pretty busy that day exploring some of the planned exhibits for the soon-to-be-completed Mind Museum in Taguig. We were some of the lucky few who were invited to try out the exhibits and provide feedback to the Mind Museum team and needless to say Tobie and I had a LOT of fun. We had only planned to be there an hour and yet before we realized it we had been there for about two.

When you think about it, this was a great way to celebrate the anniversary of the Geeky Guide. What could be geekier than testing out different exhibits meant to demonstrate various scientific principles, right?

[Movies] Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982 / 2007)

It's a little weird how so many "must-see" movies end up sitting around our virtual "to-watch" lists for an extended period of time no matter how closely the movie fits into our core interests. Maybe it's because we feel secure in the fact that it's just waiting for us to get around to liberating them from storage while newer movies generate a false sense of urgency.

So ultimately, I have no good reason for not having watching Blade Runner before this year. It was just one of those movies that had managed to slip away for one reason or another. I knew little factoids about the movie as part of my general pop culture appreciation spin but that was about it. And yet time and time again I'd forgot about the movie and only remember it when it would get mentioned on some top ten list or some other movie review. The fact that I still hadn't seen it started to gnaw at me.

Thankfully my partner was game to watch it with me. He had already seen it but of course it had been some time since that last time he had done so. And thus the movie was still a welcome experience for both of us. And man, I'm more than glad that I finally got around to watching it in earnest. The movie is hard to compare to anything else that came out at the time or perhaps even any movie that has come out since.

[TV] Star Trek Voyager: Season 7

Well, this review marks the last of my Voyager reviews. After seven full seasons with a total of 172 episodes, the show finally came to an end in 2001. It was a pretty good run by Star Trek standards and it's still better than what the succeeding series, this being Enterprise, managed to accomplish. Despite all the criticism, you have to admit that it takes a lot of effort to get to the end of seven years for a science fiction TV series on US network television.

Reviewing the final season for any show inevitably becomes a review of the entire series, thus it's not often I get to publish something like this. On the one hand I want to make sure that I fairly represent this individual season and what it accomplished. On the other hand, one can't deny the fact that the final season's functional purpose and sort of goal even is the effective end of the overall narrative that began with the show's pilot.

In the case of Voyager, it had always been pretty clear what the show's narrative goal was. They were stranded in the Delta Quadrant and they had to get back home. We all knew it was going to happen - ending the show with them still stranded just wouldn't have made for an effective ending. So it was really a question of how and when they'd finally get home. Would it take the full 70 years projected at the start of the show? Will only a skeleton crew make it back to Earth?

And for the most part, they did manage to answer those questions, at the very least.