Gambit

It’s been brought up a few times, why the hell is the Enterprise crew doing deep under cover, (that is not very good undercover work), investigations? They should have emphasized that it could kill specific people from a distance like Cerebro a la X-Men…killing the captains of starships during battle would be a pretty nifty weapon…mind control too, but yeah, they sure rushed/crammed this episode. See my above comment please. Pretty sure Jaglom Shrek (from Birthright Pt. 1) found some 24th century rogaine and changed his name to Yranac. The mask is identical to the one James Cromwell wore. And speaking of recycled… see also, the bit about Riker lamenting Picard’s death, chasing around like in Reunification Pts 1 & 2, the battle bridge, etc.. This ep feels very recycled. Also, the music is horrible. It becomes noticeable how lacking in melody later TNG music gets when it’s used to add fake drama to stretched out parts. Gambit feels like a one parter stuffed with pointless plot points to make it a two parter. Ah well, at least next week we can look forward to… oh… sigh Why? The video with Alice in Wonderland? Oh. Yeah. Never a big Tom Petty Fan. I got Redemption and Unification confused there for a bit…but yup, I see the recycled aspect….sigh…S7. The alien actor…an Yridian? He seemed to be imitating James Cromwell !! Check screenshots of the ‘two’ Yridian faces. Every brow wrinkle is identicle. They just added hair. I guess in 1993, Trek failed to anticipate fan obsession and the internet’s love of puctures. Ha! They were hoping that the internet’s nascent love of pictures of cats would distract us! Star Trek: The Lost Years which is an Vulcan adventure after the last TOS episode but before Star Trek TMP is a key piece of this story. It is about the last battle of the Vulcan Civil War thousands of years ago and how Vulcans were fighting telekinetic/pyrokinetic/telephathic battles with each other and finally ended with the exodus of some Vulcans to the Romulus system, while most remained on Vulcan w Surak to study logic/ c’thia the mastery of emotion. The psychic energies or “katras” were stored in containers called “vrekatras” or something like that and could be transferred decades or centuries later….. Also key to read is “Spock’s World” which was about a Vulcan First 🙂 ,movement of isolationists who felt too much non Vulcan influence was ruining Vulcan. It also had my first exposure to “social media comment boards” like FaceBook, because the USS Enterprise has a BBS Bulletin Board System for crewmates to sell stuff, discuss politics or argue anonymously…so interesting to think of that book now…I think it came out in 1987? Anyway, just some context on some non-canon Vulcan lore…. Read this one years ago when it first hit the shelves. It was a great take on the history of Vulcan. So exciting was Gambit that my major memory of it has little to do with TNG itself, but with Jonathan Frakes appearing on The Chevy Chase Show on Fox at around the same time; even had a clip from Gambit Part I with him. Of course, if you were anywhere near a TV in late ’93 and watched it, you know that The Chevy Chase Show was a glorious slo-mo disaster as Fox tried to carve out its own slice of the late night talk show pie. Chevy Chase was not the man to lead that fight, however, and his interview with Frakes was particularly painful to watch – he’d done no prep work whatsoever, and either had or feigned having absolutely no Star Trek knowledge (or at least TNG knowledge) whatsoever. Not long into the interview, Frakes himself started cracking up at how badly it was going and stopped taking it seriously. I remember this vividly (partly because I was the late shift board op at a Fox station when The Chevy Chase Show was on)…and of course that means I can’t find it anywhere on Youtube. It was just awful, and was pulled in just a few weeks, replaced by reruns of In Living Color and a Rescue 911 ripoff hosted by Gil “Buck Rogers” Gerard, obviously