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The series suffers badly from the defenestration of creator Robert Hewitt Wolfe in this episode. The Reverend Bug-Eyed Monster's theology was the most intellectually interesting creation in the original version of the series; among other things, it was one of the few religions, fictional or real, to tackle The Problem of Evil seriously.

To get actor Brent Stait back on the series, a Trivia item informs us, it was necessary to de-fur Rev Bem. (Future season spoiler: He only makes one more appearance, next season, also episode 15.) But those left after Wolfe's departure ruined the intellectual relevance of The Way by providing a miracle; this has been recognized as a mistake since at least classical Greek drama: "deus ex machina" is not a term of praise. It also reduces non-believers to cardboard characters, wilfully failing to believe merely to advance the plot. (Cp. Star Wars, medieval hagiographies, and Stranger in a Strange Land. Contrast The Bishop's Wife and Almost an Angel.)

There was no need for the heavy-handedness. If the actor could no longer wear yak hair, the character could have become bald for any number of reasons, ranging from hair-related religious inspiration (cp. More medieval hagiographies) to the mundane (cp. Sir Patrick). (Apologies for the miscapitalization; IMDb refuses to let me correct it.)

Even ignoring the Thunderbirds affiliation, this episode was good solid classic hard science fiction -- with an engineering troubleshooting plot more Hugo Gernsback than John W. Campbell Jr.. One valuable technical lesson of which Gernsback would have approved was the importance of Reading The Fine Manual. I didn't catch any howlers in the science and astrogation, though presumably one of the scene transitions covered a lot more time than it suggested. The drama and characterization were well-handled for this genre, and Richard Ridings does a good Jeremy Clarkson version of a chief engineer, especially when giving driving instructions.

After too many episodes where Sir Roger portrays some sort of private detective and/or pure-hearted busybody, The Saint is finally [correction: for the second time] in a real story written by Leslie Charteris behaving in a way which (as one critic noted) should land him in jail but (spoiler warning) doesn't.

We also finally meet Chief Inspector Claude Eustace Teal, and some fine secondary characters. There's excellent, albeit low-budget, shady London life and some patented Charteris wit in the plot and writing - which I strongly urge readers of this review to follow up on in the _early_ Saint novels and short stories. (Charteris did have trouble keeping up the standard once he got stale.)

The present-day main part of this episode, credited jointly to Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore, is uninspiring. The mystery of Jim remains a mystery. The heavenly subplot, of angels' being preposterously ill-informed about the humans they are in charge of, is amusing but wearing thin. The obligatory human romance subplot is heavy-handed and unappealing.

The minisode "A Companion to Owls," however, though credited solely to Finnemore, shows signs of serious thought, and deserves it in turn. I have to suspect that Gaiman, and perhaps even the late Sir Terry Pratchett's posthumous notes, had a hand in it. Gaiman is troubled about his theological background, certainly read Robert A. Heinlein in his youth, and was no doubt aware of his _Job: Comedy of Justice_, which was not actually about Job, but has a theme similar to this minisode. Trading Places (1983) also seems to have been a strong influence, as was Fierce Creatures (1997), and perhaps George Bernard Shaw's _The Devil's Disciple._ I suspect that one famous line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) influenced Crowley's morally crucial choice.

Yet another plot founded on someone forgetting to include an Off Switch in an allegedly brilliant design. The involvement of several Thunderbirds in, initially, merely delivering tools to a ground-based mass transit vehicle was equally senseless. The ensuing (spoiler alert) rescue almost made sense, given the preceding setup. It did, admittedly, make for some good (artificial) special effects in the last moments, though I would have expected more loud whooshing sounds when the vacuum seal was broken.

The voice acting was quite good; David Tennant managed to be the character rather than himself; I did not recognize him until Amazon X-Ray pointed him out.

As noted here by those whose German is better than mine, this episode's location filming (except for some beautiful tracking shots which might have been purchased from Shutterstock) suffered conspicuously from budget constraints; the Omega Group's headquarters have also gone notably down-market. The casting of the Taskers' bosses suffered from ideology as well as thrift; both of them together do not add up to the original film's Charlton Heston as Spencer Trilby.

But at least the show spent its budget for writers unusually well. The now-mandatory denigration of straight males is handled with wit and charm. And (perhaps because of Executive Producer James Cameron's clout), the series is allowed to take marriage seriously. While maintaining a high stylistic tone, it injects an interesting (at least to those of us married to professors and living with imperfect plumbing) note of realism (at least compared to, say, the James Bond films), into a genre which normally economises on nothing except intelligent writing.

The series' creator, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, was fired after episode 12 of season 2, Ouroboros (2002), for refusing to dumb the show down enough to suit Kevin Sorbo, but "his influence was felt until the completion of the second season; at that point, Bob Engels was brought on to be an executive producer." At the time, I boycotted the show after Wolfe's departure, but there were actually some good episodes under Wolfe's departed influence, e.g. The Knight, Death and the Devil (2002) and Immaculate Perception (2002).

This episode, however, feels like Wolfe left an intelligent sketch for a season finalé, along the lines of "the first fifty delegates to the restored Commonwealth gather on the Andromeda and Bad Things Happen." The blanks were filled in cluelessly, with the mysterious and inexplicable Alien(s), who at the beginning of the episode, has no problem partially materializing to snatch or kill Commonwealth delegates. It later changes strategy, fully materializing in tactically weak locations to engage in pointless losing hand-to-hand combat.

Then it is reinforced by few enough ships to be defeated by the Commonwealth, followed by a roughly infinite number. Don't expect the idiocy to get an intelligible explanation at the start of season 3; I wasn't able to endure the whole episode, but the reviews here suggest that the new producer didn't even pretend to provide an explanation.

This episode was a heavy-handed intervention in a twenty-first century election campaign, with a denouement even less realistic than customary for TV courtroom dramas about overwhelmingly guilty defendants - if the rabbit pulled out of a law book had actually existed, all the other lawyers would have known about it too. It also requires retroactively rewriting much of the previous season, without apparent use of time travel, and the lawyer's keeping her plan secret from her client made it even less likely to succeed. And the heavy-handed political analogy doesn't work (though to be fair, the reason for the Federation's outlawing of genetic modification has less to do with saving tens of millions of lives than avoiding doubling Paramount's makeup budget.) The one twinge of honesty is that Star Fleet has finally admitted to the rule of (wo)men, not of law.

But I am forced to admit that somehow (unlike the political manifesto in Picard season 2) the old Star Trek magic worked. It was beautifully written and orchestrated, and well-directed and acted.

This is not so much a film version of Gregory McDonald's Edgar-winning novel (no Flynns, for instance) as licensed plagiarism of it, but done by writers good enough to appreciate the writing and imitate its spirit. (The less said about the alleged connection between the novels and Chevy Chase, at least in polite company, the better. I like both the writer and the actor, but one can like whiskey and like tonic without wanting to drink whiskey and tonic.) The film does actually take some aspects of the novel's complicated plot, which may be why fans of Chase's slapstick mode had intellectual difficulty with it.

This show was of course doomed to be just fan fiction when the producers failed to buy the rights to the Silmarillion, and was further doomed by cut-rate writers, even if the special effects cost a gigabuck and look worth every penny. And of course the writers were obliged to deconstruct Tolkien from a timeless twentieth-century author with nineteenth-century sensibilities, into a twenty-first century feminist. I am reminded of those lower-paid fan fiction auteurs who do away with Kirk and Spock's inconvenient heterosexuality, or with Doc Smith's gender distinctions.

But the low- though over-paid writers are genuinely pretending to try to imitate Tolkien, and Tolkienesque atmosphere and prosodic echoes slip through often enough, and with a big enough budget, to make the show worth watching with judicious and extensive use of the Fast Forward button.

Read the comics, or put on a blindfold and listen to the audiobook dramatization, which is true to Gaiman's spirit. Like most recent Goyer, this replaces intellect with pointless but big-budget violence.

Both side of the flame war here are missing a crucial point. Those down-voting this episode because of its overweening Wokeism ignore Bormanis' æsthetic triumph in making even the most Braga-esque clichés work artistically to produce remarkably compelling TV.

Those ritually denouncing as Haters the critics of the episode's logic are engaging in the worst sort of Western twenty-first century anti-TERF feminist human chauvinism, and missing one of the main points to science fiction: Alien cultures are not good only in so far as they are not actually alien. The Moclan delegate was quite right about their prejudice against his species.

They're also commanding their enemies to overlook even the stalest of plot holes: A mismatched duo equipped only with light arms and the heaviest of plot armor defeating an entire Black Site. An unnecessary car chase in the sky in which a shuttle with damaged thrusters out-manouvres an uncountable number of expendable attackers. Split-second coincidences in the timing both of the resolutions. (And how did the three get past Planetary Union assembly security onto the debating floor without their informing the President?) The complete failure to motivate the Evil Moclans-as more than one reviewer noted, they cannot have overheard the conversation to learn that Topa knew the quantum frequencies and the name of the traitor without also overhearing what they were. The complete abrogation of Klyden's character at the end, in which she abandons her principles and her patriotism. That's not how successful cultures like that work; cp. The Roman story of Camilla and Publius.

Provides deep insight into the intellectual determination and emotional shortcomings needed to succeed as a researcher in experimental science. Follows primarily Robert Townley's work in Lawrence Shapiro's lab at Columbia University.

I'm glad the reviewers complaining here that they wanted a happy ending are not Planetary Union officers. Admittedly time travel makes no sense, but allowing for its existence and supposed rules, following them was the only moral choice.

Who knew that the most important skill for a Starfleet captain was cooking? And we finally have it confirmed that Vulcan women are voracious Cosmopolitan Magazine subscribers, rather than the actual Vulcans from The Original Series. With all the embarrassing talking about feelings, it is no wonder that (as other readers have noted) 90% of the Enterprise's grew went missing.

Akiva Goldsman seems to have gotten the memo about being derivative and competent (and only moderately preachy) rather than original and annoying. But, while '60s network sexual censorship was strict (David Gerrold makes fun of it in his book on the making of The Trouble with Tribbles), in this millennium it was apparently required to expunge the Vulcan mating habit of Pon Farr from "Amok Time," and replace it with network-mandated female-aggressive XXI-century human customs.

"Or, Starship Troopers redux"

Mr Goyer was supposedly filming a classic science fiction trilogy. (We do not speak of the sequels, especially the ill-advised attempt to cover up the manifest inconsistency between the Foundation universe and positronic robotics.) Its essence was an Asimovian attitude of rationality about science, and an attitude towards politics summed up by the quintessential Brooklyn politician Salvor Hardin as "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Mr Goyer had a lot of leeway to update the trilogy. Asimov's characterizations (unlike, say, Shakespeare's or Sondheim's) are weak enough to allow mandatory gender- and race-swapping. (Indeed, in novelizing the original stories from Campbell's Astounding, the order was altered and hence a character name was swapped for one installment.)

But Mr Goyer seems to find cinematic violence as his first refuge, and his second is a conversion of mathematics to magic, knowable only to a chosen few, or two. He has also abandoned the one part of characterization that Dr A actually did well: the portrayal of his villains, not as villains in their own eyes, but as playing an inevitable role in the broad sweep of history.

Ah, the joys of time travel, back to a (surprise, surprise) spatio-temporal location near the production studio, in a bygone millennium when an attractive woman could safely walk on a Los Angeles beach protected by only a Vulcan security chief and two high-T human males. Some things never change, however: The chief threat is from technology belonging to a vagrant vandal, and (spoiler) the supervillain turns out to be a capitalist. Despite the clichés, however, it's good fun; thanks to Voyager for People who Hate Voyager for the recommendation.

This was the first show after Wolfe's termination, and it shows: bad guys pursuing good guys for no detectable reason; sequential martial arts when both sides have energy weapons; no actual plot beyond the preceding. Mr Sorbo got what he wanted.

My wife has read the 1927 science fiction novel on which this film is based, and assures me that it mostly makes sense. The film is far too short to handle all its plots and subplots, but can be enjoyed if you view it as incomprehensible but entertaining excerpts from a larger whole.

Unlike the previous episode, which was mainly consumed by my non-Apple remote's skip button, this one is not entirely soap opera, and actually has some cool stuff in it.

For a show categorized as science fiction, this has far too much resemblance to daytime network TV. I couldn't have endured it without buying a non-Apple remote, which has a Skip button. The closest things to excitement were two disciplinary hearings, only one of which I could bear not to skip, and the summarization of a bureaucratic document (a good use for the pause button). A low point was an unsuccessful attempt to quit smoking; one of the two attempts to cut down on alcohol wasn't too bad, accompanied as it was by an attempt to practice for claustrophobia.

Just what we need, another show about a capitalist with an American southern accent who is suicidally stupid and in charge of deadly apparatus without an off switch and with its reset button inaccessible.

The "Let's Put on a Show" show always requires a substantial suspension of disbelief to enjoy; I even stomached the fake plot complications in Gold Diggers of 1933. But, although the ten writers here started with a good cast, excellent songs, and apparently (I foolishly lived on the wrong coast during the 1999 Encores revival) a good play with something to say, they threw it all away except for a couple of Rodgers and Hart's weaker songs. Every event in the screenplay happens just to instantiate the next scheduled cliché, including the weather; nothing makes any sense on its own terms. The blackface, unforgivable though it is for modern audiences, at least steals at second hand from a genuine tradition; the rest of the writing is just going through the scheduled motions.

An aging filmmaker with a wife and five kids wants to explore, alone, the deepest depth of the ocean. Predictably (at least for those familiar with lazy writing), everything goes wrong and he breaks rules he himself set, so even more things break. Somehow he survives to tell the tale and discovers a preposterous number of new species.