Interface

Description intentionally left blank. Find out why when we put Interface in the Mission Log. Not as terrible an episode as the past few have been, but more stuff I simply did not care about. It would have been better if we had ever meet Geordi’s parents along the way, but I simply don’t care about them. And once again, it is good that Star Fleet’s penalties for such massive violations of direct orders are so lenient. If this was a real fleet, every one of the command staff would have been court marshaled several times throughout the series and removed from positions of authority. Even Riker – remember that whole thing in The Outcast. Even Wesley – he took over the ship in week two. Week. two. This is a complaint I have in many TV shows, movies, and books. Very typical in police / detective stories. Employee deliberately violates a rule and/or order but because things turned out “OK,” the supervisor gives the employee a good tongue lashing and then basically tossels the employee’s hair with a “warning” (don’t ever let me see you do that again) and all but chuckles to him/herself afterwards musing “that crazy kid.” It would be nice to see some real consequences – Jeordi having to peel potatoes for a month? Closest I ever saw was the end of Season 1 of The Wire when McNaulty gets put on boat duty. I could imagine Worf walking around with a clipboard ticking off the names of the crew who were shifty that morning. Ensign Gomes…tick. Lieutenant Junior J… tick. Lieutenant Barkley… double tick. When late TOS choked, Kirk boinked a priestess and/or talked a computer to death. When TNG choked, the crew wandered around confused for 40 minutes before discovering ‘it was whacky aliens all along!’ Interface is one of those eps. It would have been nice if we ever heard of Geordi’s parents outside this ep. Ah well… Total geekery-outery: the probe was inspired at least in part by an aborted NASA project called the Teleoperator Retrieval System, a remote-controlled platform that would, at least on paper, be used by early space shuttle crews to latch onto Skylab and push it back into a higher orbit so the shuttle program would have an already-available space station as a port-of-call when flights began. (Problem: this idea was predicated on shuttle flights starting in a window during 1977-79, rather than 1981; Skylab fell out of the sky and ceased being a lab in July ’79.) No cool VR rigs, just cameras and remote controls…but otherwise, kind of the same idea. The VR element of it may put on immediately in mind of virtual reality, but strip that away, and it’s kind of a hopped-up descendant of the TRS with all sorts of environmental sensors attached…and apparently a mean of communicating with fire critters who look like your mom . By the way, if you string a bunch of silent pauses together and wrap them around each other, would that be some kind of lacuna coil? Yeah, like last week’s episode it’s largely forgettable. Not bad, not good, just an episode. Anyone bothered by the fact that when Barkley saw worms in the transporter everyone tried to figure out what it was, but when Geordi sees his missing mother everyone assumes he’s imagining it? Geordi’s “propose a theory to fit what you think the facts are” scene was a great specimen of the logical fallacy of confirmation bias. He was not about to let anyone talk him out of the idea that he’d seen his mother aboard the Hera, so he devised a really convoluted theory using “I saw my mom aboard the Hera” as its basis. Result: faulty theory. And that bothers me – that our supposedly idealized humans of the future can snap back to the 21st century reality of people who refuse to take on board information conflicting with what they’ve decided their worldview it. Sigh. It’s clearly because he’s in the denial stage regarding his mother. But the ep. shows how his method of theorising is faulty. to me w all the CRAAAAAZZZZYYYY stuff they have been through, I am surprised they are not a bit more a