George Takei, especially, just looks ridiculously young. To the point that, while Shatner made me think "Hey, Shatner's so young he doesn't even look like the Priceline guy," Takei/Sulu made me think of a guy who came up to my table at the gun show I worked last weekend. This random guy of some-kind-of-non-cracker-descent in his early 20s at best asked me if the QuickClot I was selling was the powder, or the bandage. I don't work gun-shows on the regular, I was just filling in for my dad who actually knows about the shit, so I looked at the package, and pointed out that the instructions on the back of the packaging indicated you used it like a bandage. He was all, "Yeah, you're right; when I was in Afghanistan we were using the powder, but they outlawed the powder and switched it to the bandage stuff."
And that was really weird cuz' this kid was ten years younger than me and talking about practical shit he'd experienced in a war-zone and it creeped me out, a bit. In that it made me feel SUPER ignorant, instead of just the regular ignorant I feel when I'm visiting dad at a gun show. Which is totally irrelevant to Star Trek, except Sulu being so young had the same "Jesus, they really are just kids, all the WWII crap I've read is way dead-on," sort of vibe to it.
Yeah, I'm a little drunk. Seven shots again, but this time with the 2oz shot-glass instead of the 1.5oz shot glass? Anyways...
... the episode! Outside of the weirdly jarring "Children at war" moment, the biggest thing to strike me was that this episode was ALSO all about the sexy. I joked in the last entry about how the Captain was all about some green bitches, in the pilot. At least, I thought I was joking. This episode was called "The Man Trap" and was about a creature that could become your wildest dreams, suck you in, and suck all of the salt out of you.
I had no idea how based in reality the stereotype of Captain Kirk as a sexy-man living the sexy-dream in sexy-space was. It's kind of hilarious. Are all of these episodes going to rock it like that? I'm looking forward to finding out. I started this thinking it'd be a bunch of hard sci-fi with the occasional Shatner-bangs-an-alien moment that created the stereotype; so far we're 2 for 2 on episodes revolving around male/female interaction. Word.
The 'husband' of the 'creature' did a really great job with his part. He gets the kudos for 'best actor in the episode.' Also, the 'husband' and the 'creature' were totally in the right, in the round-table discussion that happens towards the end. This episode ends in a tragedy that didn't have to happen, and oddly considers it a triumph. Solid plot, though. Bunch of familiar tropes used as well as one would expect from a low-budget network TV show.
Random tally: 7 big shots of Aristocrat Vodka, 2 episodes that are all about the sexy, 1 good actor, and one Nubian Prince that seemed 10 years ahead of his time. That guy was so 70s sex-symbol.
For the record, another guy came to my table and conversationally mentioned that if you use QuickClot, you have to be on blood thinners for a year and a half. After the show was over, I asked my dad what the deal was, and it turns out that the latter guy was almost right: The reason the military switched from the powder to the bandage was that whole blood-thinner thing. The bandage version of QuickClot doesn't fuck you up like the powder version did, or something. The More You Know(TM).
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