Nov 17 | Originally hired as co-executive producer to help with the second half of the show's first season, Kevin Murphy has now taken the reins of Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel on Syfy, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He now serves as an executive producer along with Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane Espenson and oversees the day-to-day functions of the show.
Nov 12 | Star Trek star Zachary Quinto is loosely attached to star in the romantic dramedy Whirligig, reports Risky Business.Quinto would play the lead role in the independent Canadian film, which is aiming to shoot early next year. The movie centers on a man who, in a misguided attempt to woo an older woman, befriends the woman's adopted son.Chaz Thorne is directing the pic, based on a screenplay by Michael Amo, creator of the Canadian supernatural series "The Listener."
Nov 11 | The CNS Foundation, is hosting an on-line charity auction at www.charitybuzz.com. One of the items they are auctioning is a signed movie poster of the new Star Trek movie which has all the cast members and writers. The president of our organization is Carol Abrams, JJ's mother, and she arranged for the donation from Bad Robot Production Company. J.J. Abrams is also a major donor to their organization. The funds raised will go to help find a cure to neurological disorders in children. The auction link is here.
Nov 10 | Candice Bergen, Charles Lisanby, Don Pardo, Gene Roddenberry, Tom and Dick Smothers and Bob Stewart have been selected as the next inductees into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame. They will be honored at a Jan. 20 ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "This year's inductees have challenged and shaped popular culture, changed television for the better and entertained us royally while doing so," TV Academy Chairman-CEO John Shaffner said. More info at the Hollywood Reporter
Nov 08 | Unreality-SF.net has interviewed Star Trerk author James Swallow about some of his upcoming projects. He talks about Titan: Synthesis and Seven Deadly Sins: The Slow Knife, as well as some forthcoming Doctor Who and Stargate stories.
Overall episode score: 8.0
Performances: 8.0
Writing: 6.0
Direction: 7.0
FX and Production Values: 8.0
Summary: ENTERPRISE does Beauty and the Beast with a lonely old alien telepath.
"Exile" may remind some viewers of the second season ENTERPRISE episode
"Vanishing Point." "Exile" features Hoshi experiencing
strange hallucinatory images that cause her to doubt reality and become
isolated and cut off from the crew. However, where "Vanishing Point" was a 43
minute waste of time that all turned out to be a dream, "Exile" features what
may be ENTERPRISE's best guest star of the entire series. Indeed 'Tarquin' is
in many ways reminiscent of an Original Series tragic character like
Methuselah or Kodos the Executioner; driven and brooding and doomed by his
destiny. Those types of characters and indeed complex characters of any kind
have become increasingly rare on STAR TREK and vanishingly rare on
this show, so Tarquin is a breath of fresh air in an all too often stale
enclosed room.
Season three has so far been in danger of neglecting the development of the
ensemble cast in favor of focusing excessively on Archer, Trip and T'Pol. "Exile"
helps balance that out not only with character development for Hoshi that in
part helps explain her linguistic abilities, but also a nice scene for Phlox
that serves to develop his character specifically, and Denobulans in general.
The general track of Hoshi's development has involved her learning to
overcome her fears as in "Fight or Flight" or" Sleeping Dogs" or "Vanishing
Point." "Exile" is less about Hoshi dealing with a narrowly targeted phobia
like claustrophobia or fear of transporters than dealing with an opportunity
to retreat into an isolated life.
Meanwhile "Exile" also follows up on "Anomaly"'s mysterious sphere that turns
out to be part of a network of such spheres radiating gravitational
anomalies thus causing the Expanse to exist. The artificial nature of the
Expanse may then help explain why we never heard about it in any other STAR TREK series. The exploration of the sphere manages to weave together what
the ENTERPRISE crew has learned about the Expanse from Trellium-D and the
Vulcan reaction to it, to the Xindi charts and the spheres themselves. The
spacewalk also offers the opportunity for comedy, which for once
isn't broadly overacted by Trinneer. The scenes of Archer and Trip trying to
shoot down the shuttle also make for some nice visuals, particularly as they
shoot up at the shuttle. The actual shuttle crashing back down to the
surface of the sphere has the unrealistic feel of a 3D object with no
actual mass moved around in Lightwave rather than the real world. however. A problem
the colliding asteroids in last week's Impulse also suffered from.
Overall, though, it's the interaction between Hoshi and Tarquin and the
performances of the two actors that make the episode. Phyllis Strong's
script by contrast is rather weak and leans on classic cliches from bad
novels right down to the echoing manor and the host who warns his guest not
to go outside and the graves right outside the door. Even Roxann Dawson's
usually strong direction is muddled and having Hoshi constantly changing
into new outfits to indicate the passage of time was clearly a bad idea.
Still, she and the actors got the character scenes right. It would have been
all too easy for Park to fall into a victim mode but instead she remains
strong and defiant. It would have also been all too easy to write off
Tarquin as a cliche, a lonely telepathic voyeur-kidnapper but instead he
retains a tragic dignity as he appeals for an understanding that he knows
will never come, and even if it comes, will never last. To the end Tarquin is
neither evil nor good, he's simply an exile who like Hoshi is isolated by
his own uniqueness and abilities.
The crystal ball falls a bit on the absurd side along with Strong's
other cliches. It is rather odd that Hoshi would use the crystal ball to
see scenes of space battles the Enterprise fought years ago instead of
seeing what is happening now. The idea of objects retaining psychic
impressions from their owners is also pretty silly. Heavily influenced by
some questionable research about human psychic abilities, science fiction
widely adopted psychic abilities as being scientifically legitimate; though
in fact they're extremely questionable to say the least. While BABYLON 5 had
a backstory explaining its human psychic abilities, STAR TREK has generally
portrayed psychic abilities as an alien ability. This conveniently avoids
questions of credibility raised by belief in psychic phenomena and the
general fraudulence of those phenomena.
Still, it's one thing when those powers are portrayed as being able to make
telepathic contact which could at least be somewhat plausible given an alien
biology. On the other hand, psychic resonance is definitely on the kookier side of
the spectrum and pretty difficult to justify without resorting to Theosophy
or some other lunatic philosophy of that kind. Furthermore, Hoshi's ability
to use the crystal combined with Tarquin's repeated references to her
uniqueness would almost seem to suggest that the writers are setting her up
for some sort of psychic ability. Of course actual mind reading skills would
probably be the only thing that could explain her ability to learn a
completely alien language in days or even hours. Though it still wouldn't
explain how she learned to read an entire alien book in an entirely unknown
alien language a short time after she first laid eyes on it without help or
a Rosetta Stone of any kind. That's pretty difficult to justify even with
psychic powers, let alone without them. The producers have been giving Hoshi
superhuman abilities for some time now and while "Exile" does at least begin
to try and justify those abilities, what's being portrayed is still far in
excess of what is possible or plausible.
Tarquin's final appearance is almost unexpected and despite the rather
different tones of the episode's two storylines, Archer and Trip's outer space
adventure and Hoshi's quiet battle of wills in Tarquin's manor, the episode
manages to come together again as Archer and T'Pol finally get a lead on the
weapon even as they begin to realize the extent of what they are facing
here.
Odie, you can be forgiven for not recognizing the difference, since we can hardly expect a guy to be versed in the intricacies of a chick genre like Gothic romances. This plot went a couple centuries further back, to classic fairy tales. The very weaknesses you see in the story are the tip offs, though. For example, the crystal ball becomes the Beast's magic mirror. Its visions of tragedy and destruction parallel the visions of death that drove the Beauty to leave the Beast. In the classic tale, the Father asked the Beauty to remain with the Beast, although not demanding she do so. This matches the attitude of Archer, who is willing to leave a member of the family in possible danger in order to protect the whole. The motivation to sacrifice ones self for the "family" are identical for Hoshi and the Beauty. I suspect that most of the female audience, at least the ones who remember the non-Disneyfied version of the tale, picked up on it.
On an entirely differnt note, I wonder how wise it is for the writers to focus on the second tier of characters, no matter how many advocates they might have. Personally, I think that all the series since TOS have suffered from the need to showcase too many cast members. To use political science terminology, it's never wise to sacrifice the core for the periphery.
I agree, but it seems like few of the (vocal) fans on this site are interested in characters exhibiting normal human fears. Fight or Flight was disliked, for example, because Hoshi screamed when she saw corpses of dead aliens hanging from hooks in a derelict space - I guess the people who visit this site are generally quite heroic and aren't phased by dangling dead bodies in dark, unknown, foreign environments.
I have enjoyed almost every ep that put the spot light on Hoshi, although, as with the rest of season three so far, this one was one of the weakest IMHO. I found it artificially cliche, and I think Linda Park did too. The outstandingly ridiculous highlights were:
- Hoshi changing twice into moderately sexy outfits (high heels, plunging necklines) when she clearly was not showing any interest in her alien stalker.
- Had Hoshi seemed conflicted in her response to the guy then I might have been sold on her choice of garments
- She also looked ridiculously posed in one scene lying on her bed in her sensually red, luxuriously silk negligee. Contrived maybe?
(Aside: The people on this site who rail about T'Pol's sexy scenes
never commented on this - I guess Hoshi is less threateningly beautiful?)
- The crystal ball and the castle were just absurdly cliche
- Couldn't Phyllis Strong have been imaginative enough to think of some other object that would magnify his power?
- The motion of the bouncing shuttle pod looked cartoon-like
- I can just hear the dudes who developed that CGI sequence giggling to themselves as they took another toke.
One last observation, this ep needed a lot more time. Tarquin's (I think that was his name) brooding character needed to come across as more attractive and complex for this sort of a story to work. It's hard to pull this off in less than an hour, but better writing, directing, and acting could have achieved it. This may sound silly, Richard Burton's brooding gravitas is exactly the quality that would be right for this character and would have helped the production a lot - I guess they'll never make another Richard Burton though...
--------
'It was beautiful, we were selling rich women their fat asses back to them' - Tylor Durden
(1)
| 
