2x01 “brother”
now this is more like it!
seriously, i remembered season 2 being a whole lot better, but i didn’t remember how hard it hit the ground running on cleaning up the mess that season 1 left. pike is such a breath of fresh air, and immediately enters the conversation as one of the best star trek captains. i love his extremely picard-adjacent collaborative decision-making process.
my thirst for morebius led to us marathoning all the animated episodes with him in them prior to seeing the movie, and i also picked up the two morbius: epic collection graphic novels, which are super long and full of great content, so it took me until quite a while after seeing the movie to finish them.
yeah, i was unironically excited for the morbius movie. no, i’m not sorry. bite me! (especially if you’re a vampire.)
i have an appalling admission that is tantamount to a betrayal of my entire generation: prior to recently starting reading the whole series on a whim, i had never read a single main-line goosebumps book.
i mean, i did read and love the first two of their choose your own adventure knockoffs, give yourself goosebumps. so technically technically this isn’t my first venture into the series. and like every other nerdy kid from my generation the scholastic book fair was easily one of my favorite days of the school year in grade school, but i tended to leave loaded up with nonfiction books and (shamefully) garfield comics.
in spite of my relative inexperience i feel incredibly nostalgic for goosebumps because it had such a powerful presence in the popular culture of my childhood and is so up my alley that it’s actually kind of weird i didn’t get around to reading them until now? if i had i’m pretty sure i would’ve gotten hooked. but it was honestly kind of enough just having it around, seeing those iconic tim jacobus covers everywhere.
this series is so strongly associated with kids of my generation that it still feels like it’s mine, like it’s part of my childhood. so, yeah, there’s… a surprising amount of emotional investment and what i would go so far as to describe as a sense of ownership despite the mere technicality of me not having ever actually read any of these until now. so in spite of the rather mixed results (you’ll see), i’m super glad i’m finally making a point to read these.
1x10 “despite yourself”
the bulk of the episode is the crew figuring out that they’re in the mirror universe and taking steps to blend in until they can figure out a way to escape. that stuff’s all aces. also a lot of it takes the form of a breezy montage, and you know i’m a sucker for those. this is also where we start figuring out what’s going on with tyler (though it’s possible to make it through most of the next episode without realizing it, which is what i did when i first watched through the series), and the shocking, unceremonious death of dr. culber.
even though that last mistake gets taken back next season, and even though this episode is the start of an arc that’s much better than the bulk of the season, i can’t get over the extremely straightforward employment of the bury your gays trope, nor the fact the this is a pretty awkward transition episode. i kinda hate how often this season feels like it’s just very loudly moving pieces around instead of telling a story. fortunately this is the last time this particular arc feels like that, but it really is a microcosm for the season as a whole. c-rank
1x11 “the wolf inside”
there are two wolves inside you. one of them is incredible character writing, one of them is really frustrating big picture plot issues and extremely un-star trekky texture. (this obligatory “there are two wolves inside you” joke is about the season as a whole, not this episode or this arc.)
i’m actually kind of terrified by how much these movies parallel the genesis games?
like, the first one feels all kinds of lonely. in the game, it’s because it’s just sonic all alone against the world. in the movie, it’s because sonic is the only mobian in a world full of humans and the other most prominent character (besides eggman) is literally a cop, and no matter how much i appreciate him taking care of sonic when he really needed it, i can’t get over the whole cop thing. but both the game and movie are greater than the sum of their parts because sonic’s incredible… sonicness just shines through.
but then in the next couple games (and second movie) the world opens up and suddenly he has all these mobian friends and soulmates. there’s a subtle but important shift in the tone of the games that’s especially noticeable in sonic 3 & knuckles, and it really feels like the second movie mirrors this shift in tone.
the human characters are in this drastically less, the objectively correct amount. it’s like, with the arrival of tails and knuckles and new conflicts, there are less empty spaces to fill up with the human characters. and the parts the human characters are in are actually pretty amazing instead of me being like “okay, that’s fine, get them off the screen now please.” like, for the first movie i would genuinely prefer a supercut of all the times sonic or eggman is on screen over the full movie.
i have impossibly high standards for how sonic, knuckles, and especially tails are characteristized, and for the dynamic between them. this movie met and exceeded my wildest hopes for how well any movie could meet those standards.
KNUCKLES IS THE BEST BOY, OMG.
the harder you complain about the dancefight scene, THE HARDER I STAN IT TO CANCEL YOU OUT.
jim carey’s eggman is still a bit different than how i view eggman, but he’s a lot closer in this one than he was in the first one, and i actually like this version better because he grosses me out less and hits in a more “fun villain” kind of place. the aesthetic of his robots and other tech is also much, much more him than it was in the first movie.
the settings were also much, much more mobian even though most of the movie still took place on earth!! the place the master emerald is hidden is a dead ringer for labyrinth zone from sonic 1, which is kind of a weird choice, but still leads to a lot of game-accurate peril. the one real disappointment on that score is that when the master emerald starts shooting that huge beam of light into the sky i kinda more than half-expected a floating island to rise from beneath the waves, but oh well.
in short, this is exactly what i wanted. i wanted to watch this again immediately after seeing it. i’m so unbelievably happy that it exists and we’re getting more of them.
we’re rewatching discovery because my boyfriend hasn’t seen any of it, and we need to at least get through season 2 before strange new worlds comes out! also i’d also like to show him the actually-good season 3, and i haven’t seen season 4 myself yet.
so, yeah! here we (boldly) go.
1x01 “the vulcan hello”
it’s been five years and i’m still mad.
they teased us with an episode of the perfect star trek series, y’all.