UNCUT REACTION - Star Trek TNG S2E22 - Shades of Gray
Added 2024-04-04 13:02:43 +0000 UTCFrom our live stream last night. Available to ALL Patrons!
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Well, I can think of only 1 finale between this point any the end of the Berman era in 2005 that inspires as much, or perhaps more vitriol. Thankfully, no more clips shows. TNG finales are somewhere between solid and legendary from here on out. Most DS9/Voyager/Enterprise finales are as well. I completely forgot about Riker's little joke, but I guess it explains why he's such a badass. His great grandfather is Chuck Norris. Tricordrazine is new to TNG. Apparently it's a more potent and perhaps safer version of cordrazine from TOS, most prominently featured as the drug that drove McCoy insane briefly in City on the Edge of Forever. I'm going to make an argument now that this episode could have gone the clip show route and not been totally ass. The Stargate franchise did 7 clip shows between SG1 and SGA(late 90s and 2000s), and some of them are actually extremely well received because they actually use them to advance the ongoing arcs of the show. Picture this. Admiral Quinn returns with a new aide, not to interrogate the crew like in Coming of Age, but to try and gauge the threat to the federation from the various encounters the Enterprise has had over the past 2 years and get the opinions of the crew. Basically all the new footage would just be the main cast along with Quinn and his aide in the briefing room. No new medical props, no planet set needing to be dressed up, or wound makeup for Riker. Just straight up dialogue, cheap and easy. First they might touch on the Conspiracy story, Quinn briefing them on new security procedures to prevent future infiltration, theories as to their motives and origins, but still more questions than answers. Perhaps then asks about their assessment of the threat posed by the T'kon and Iconians, to which Riker and Picard/Data respectively might give their thoughts on the threat posed, their dialogue playing over near muted scenes from those episodes. That discussion segues into talking about the Romulans, that being the second encounter since they re-emerged and it almost ended in battle. Quinn seeing their assessment of whether they need to worry about the Romulans starting a new conflict. At this point he starts asking about their encounters with Q, with Picard and Riker talking about the evolution of his interest in humanity over their various encounters. That of course leads into discussing the Borg and the threat they pose, and discussing how one of their ships must have already visited the edge of federation and Romulan space given the colonies lost along the neutral zone. Finally Quinn may express some concern about the reliability of the klingons as allies, given their appearances in Heart of Glory, A Matter of Honor, and The Emissary all ended up with some form of conflict. At this point Worf and Riker step in to defend the klingons, dismissing these events as exceptions to the rule. Quinn will express concerns about the strategic position of the federation, with recent losses of ships and crews such as the Tsiolkovsky, Drake, Horatio, Lantree, and Yamato, as well as their outposts along the neutral zone, and with the uncertain motives of the Romulans and Ferengi, and the potential coming conflict with the Borg. He'll tell Picard to keep on his toes and that starfleet will be depending on them now more than ever. Perhaps he tells Picard that a fleetwide technical update/modernization is underway and the Enterprise will be getting new equipment soon(hinting at the new uniforms and props in S3). Yeah, nothing really happens, but it's a proper clip show recap of the major events of the first 2 seasons(as opposed to 1 character's POV), laying out a lot of connections between them. If you're gonna have a clip show, it would be better than what we got.
Timothy Nikiforovs
2024-07-22 07:21:55 +0000 UTCGuys, I had so many plans to watch this live and I came down super sick. Today is the first day I have been able to function. Looking forward to watching now
Fossilizer
2024-04-06 14:17:09 +0000 UTCOkay, it's not a good episode, but it's not QUITE as bad as it's been made out to be. Waste of time? Sure. But boy, Jonathan Frakes does some heavy lifting in the first 20-25 minutes or so. He's in full charming-Riker mode. I actually enjoyed his performance here. That was a really fancy jungle set on the planet, for a bottle episode that was supposed to be cheap. I wonder if that set was leftover from some other production.
Ian Westcott
2024-04-05 17:30:00 +0000 UTCThis comment is "The Stand" of comments. Or maybe the "Atlas Shrugged" of comments. Really good and really long lol
Prof Moff
2024-04-04 20:24:49 +0000 UTCShowrunner Maurice Hurley wrote the first draft of the Season 2 finale on his way out the door before leaving TNG, but production assistant Eric A. Stillwell, who selected the clips in “Shades of Gray,” also devised its title. His initial suggestion was “Riker’s Brain,” which he nearly persuaded the rest of the production staff to use. For my essay about “Shades of Gray” (an episode I unironically love), I have decided to shamelessly rip off the format of two other Internet essays about the episode, those by Zack Handlen of "The A.V. Club" and L. I. Underhill on the Eruditorum Press website. However, I will have to do a little more work on my version than they did, since I never posted essays about most of TNG Season 1, although I did make isolated comments about it. Here, then, is my commentary on “Shades of Gray”: Gene Roddenberry initially planned to keep the use of the Klingons and Romulans in TNG to a minimum, allowing the new show to develop its own mythos. To that end, he created the Ferengi as the main antagonists for the new series. As ruthless capitalists, the Ferengi presented an effective contrast to the post-scarcity, moneyless and implicitly socialistic society of the Federation. However, there were allegations that the Ferengi represented anti-Semitic stereotypes. More importantly, “The Last Outpost” made clear that the Ferengi were simply not going to work as serious villains on an ongoing basis. Stewart’s research for the role of Picard consisted of repeatedly reading the “Farpoint” script. Despite having appeared in the BBC Shakespeare, the David Lynch version of "Dune" and various other films and TV shows, Stewart felt that he had limited experience with screen as opposed to stage acting. For this reason, he attended the first day of shooting on “Farpoint” (the location scene on the Holodeck), even though he did not appear in the scene, to observe the production process. Jonathan Frakes and Whoopi Goldberg’s chemistry in the mock flirting scene is amazing. I suspect the reason Dr. Pulaski’s ex-husbands have all remained on good terms with her is in the hope of making love with her for old times’ sake if they meet up again. I also think Kyle must have deduced that Will and Troi had been lovers from Troi’s statement just after meeting him that “I’ve felt certain things”: there was probably a family resemblance between the father and son’s emotional responses on seeing an attractive woman like Troi, and Kyle realized that Troi picked up on this. The Edo costumes take the so-called “Theiss Titillation Theory” to its utmost extreme in what would prove to be TOS veteran William Ware Theiss’ final season with Star Trek. Theiss, who served as costume designer for all three seasons of TOS and the first season of TNG and won an Emmy Award for his work on a later episode this season, left TNG at the end of Season One, partly due to illness. Theiss would die of AIDS in 1992 at the age of 61. Minuet’s comment to Riker that she is “As real as you need me to be” echoes Vina’s answer when Pike asks if she is real in “The Cage.” Unlike Pike, Riker does not object that the statement is meaningless – but, unlike Minuet, Vina is in fact real, albeit not what she appears to be. I presume that Riker and Beata made love after the fade to Ramsey’s campfire. Brenna’s question to Riker, “Do you not like girls?,” is TNG’s first acknowledgement that non-heterosexual people exist. Rick Berman was always reluctant to feature gay and lesbian characters in Star Trek, ostensibly because TV stations might refuse to air episodes featuring such characters in family-oriented timeslots, but really because he was a homophobe. TOS, with its storylines and character relationships into which viewers could read queer subtexts, was more queer-friendly than TNG, which debuted over 20 years later. This will seem off-topic, but it isn’t: there’s a British sci-fi show about time travel called "Primeval" in which one of the regular characters is badly affected toward the end of Season 1 by history being changed. At one point she sees herself in a bathroom mirror as a mass of shining, whirling, reflective facets, which is what the temporal anomalies on the show look like. This is what came to mind when I saw the photo of Alex with Denise Crosby: Crosby is a living, walking spoiler, and I felt uncomfortable seeing Alex with her. Fortunately, no harm seems to have been done. The biggest single difference between the two versions is that Ilia gives birth to a little girl, whom she names Irska, not to a little boy. The story, while inherently problematic, is far cuter and more heartwarming with a girl in the title role. (It also makes more sense scientifically; Ian is genetically identical to Troi, which is impossible given that he is male.) There is a scene with Ilia and Irska performing a Deltan dance together in Ilia’s quarters which could have been one of the best scenes in Star Trek history or one of the worst, depending on how it came out; Irska also develops an extremely cute friendship with Scotty. This episode was one of only five Star Trek stories to be adapted into View-Master reels, following “The Omega Glory,” “Yesteryear” (retitled “Mr. Spock’s Time Trek”), and the first two movies. Kids Alex and Josh’s age may not know what a View-Master is: a modernized stereoscope, resembling a pair of binoculars, into which one inserts cardboard discs containing pairs of miniature color images printed on film, with the image pairs depicting the same scene from slightly different viewpoints. When you look through the eyepieces, you see one of each image pair through each eye, and therefore see the images in 3D. A lever turns the disc to move from one image to the next. Media critic L.I. Underhill’s essay about “A Matter of Honor” on the Eruditorum Press website extensively discusses their fond memories of the View-Master reels, saying little about the episode itself. Working title: “Assassins” (or “The Assassins”). Fans have frequently mocked the scene on the bridge in which Tasha and Wesley discuss drug use, saying that it sounds like something out of an “afterschool special” from the 1980s “Just Say No” era. However, Denise Crosby appreciated the scene because it gave her something interesting to play for once. She has since expressed agreement with fans who theorize that the scene implies Tasha herself used drugs before leaving her dystopian home planet. There is a scene in this episode in which Geordi makes a report to the bridge from Engineering. [SPOILER REDACTED] Denise Crosby asked to leave TNG due to the lack of development of Tasha’s character. Since Tasha was the Enterprise security chief, Gene Roddenberry decided that the most dramatically effective way to write her out would be to kill her off in a sudden and unexpected fashion –like the typical “redshirt death” on TOS but far more shocking because it happened to a main character. Tasha’s death proved divisive: while there were fans who agreed with Roddenberry’s reasoning, the pointlessness of the death angered others. Working title: “10101001.” (Yes, really.) “11001001” is the number two-hundred-and-one in binary notation, but in the context of this episode simply refers to the names of the four Bynars working aboard the Enterprise: One One, Zero Zero, One Zero, and Zero One. Maurice Hurley wrote the script of “Heart of Glory” in only two days, developing it from “Once a Klingon,” an earlier script by Herbert J. Wright from a story by Wright and D. C. Fontana (who was a woman, by the way). Nothing is now known about this earlier version of the story. Captain Rixx of the USS Thomas Paine, one of the captains who meet with Picard and Walker Keel on Dytallix B, is a member of an alien species known as the Bolians, named after this episode’s director, Cliff Bole. “Merde” is the French word for “shit.” As such, Picard’s use of it is the strongest profanity in a Star Trek TV episode up to this point, surpassing “Let’s get the hell out of here.” The show got away with it because most Americans did not know what the word means. At the end of this rewatch, when T’Jon and the others beamed off the Enterprise, I said aloud, “Goodbye, David” (quoting Kirk in Search for Spock). Merritt Buttrick died of AIDS on March 17, 1989, between the broadcasts of Episodes 10 and 11 of TNG Season Two. The moment when the Enterprise computer interrupts Data, saying, “Thank you, sir. I comprehend,” is intriguing. Is the computer secretly sentient and keeping it to her(?)self? The 2nd Revised Final Draft Script simply comments, “Even the computer has learned to interrupt when he is rambling.” As with the Talosians in “The Cage/The Menagerie,” female actors played the Bynars. However, rather than dubbing them with men’s voices, post-production work lowered the performers’ own voices in pitch. The production team considered casting children in the roles, but decided against it due to the limited hours they could work and the requirement to provide teachers on set. Working title: “Revelations.” John D. F. Black, the writer of “The Naked Time,” was still living in 1987 (he died in 2018) but did not work on this episode; his co-writing credit for the episode’s story acknowledges that the episode is a direct sequel to and reworking of “The Naked Time,” allowing Black to receive credit and payment for his indirect contribution. “J. Michael Bingham,” credited with co-writing the story and writing the teleplay, was a pseudonym for D. C. Fontana (who was a woman, by the way). Even this early in the series, TNG was already encountering behind-the-scenes problems like those which affected TOS Season 3. Fontana took her name off this episode to protest Gene Roddenberry’s rewrite of her script, which she felt sexualized and diminished the female characters. When Riker’s face rises from the depths of Armus in a silent scream without breaking the surface, what we see is a mold of Jonathan Frakes’ face, not Frakes himself. Troi and Geordi are absent from this episode (although, bizarrely, Troi appears in the View-Master version). This is the first episode of the entire series in which LeVar Burton does not appear as Geordi. Gene Dynarski (Commander Quinteros) previously appeared twice on TOS: as Ben Childress, the ultra-macho miner who ends up living happily ever after with Eve in “Mudd’s Women,” and as Krodak in “The Mark of Gideon.” The three members of Riva’s Chorus correspond to Sigmund Freud's concept of the Id, Ego, and Superego. The episode’s script had Riva learn to speak overnight after the deaths of the Chorus, but Howie Seago objected that this would perpetuate the practice of forcing Deaf children to speak in real life. Seago suggested the ending in the aired episode only the day before it was filmed. Fans have commented on the irony that this episode provides our first detailed look at Klingon culture and yet centers on Riker rather than Worf. Ever since I first saw the episode as a kid, however, I have felt that, although Riker is the protagonist, the story is really about Worf. Although Worf spent his childhood in the company of humans, his deepest instincts and emotions are still Klingon. Therefore, what Riker experiences in this episode is what Worf’s life is like every day: navigating through an alien world which does not work the way his instincts tell him it should. It seems to me that life is also like that for Data; it certainly was for Spock; and, in the real world, those of us who are neurodiverse share the same experience. This was Majel Barrett's first performance as the computer voice on TNG (it was played by other actresses in the earlier episodes). Fans have suggested that the Bynars installed her voice as part of their upgrades (and, unlike Minuet, she sticks around). One of my favorite episodes of Season 2, and even more of a favorite of my late mother, “Unnatural Selection” has one positive quality more important than all others: it is a retread of “The Deadly Years” so vastly superior to the original that we can now at last forget that episode exists. We can also forget “Too Short a Season,” since this episode’s superb old-age makeup effaces memories of the abomination perpetrated upon Clayton Rohner as Admiral Jameson. Jonathan Frakes plays the trombone in real life, so the script took advantage of this ability, although another player dubbed Riker’s performance on the soundtrack. Alex and Josh made no comment on the wonderful moment when Picard asks whether Geordi always sees an aura around Data, and Geordi replies, “You mean you don’t?” It emphasizes the beauty of Geordi and Data’s friendship in that Geordi is comfortable befriending Data even though Data looks more different from humans to Geordi than to everyone else. As it happens, there is another reason Data looks different than usual in this scene: Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner’s photo doubles, rather than Frakes and Spiner themselves, played Riker and Data in the footage from Geordi’s VISOR. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Project Genesis proposal video to the technological history of motion pictures. This was not the first CGI sequence in a feature film; even the “original original” Star Wars included such a sequence in 1977 (the Death Star plans), as did the 1979 version of TMP (the wormhole). However, in 1982 the Genesis video was by far the most elaborate and spectacular CGI sequence movie audiences had ever seen. It was made by artists at a division of Lucasfilm which would later become Pixar. (Of course, Disney would eventually acquire both Pixar and Lucasfilm as separate companies.) It is no exaggeration to say that Buzz Lightyear, Jar Jar Binks, Gollum, and Moana were all born on the Genesis Planet. Fun fact: To test whether this episode was suitable for children, visual effects supervisor Dan Curry screened it for his 6-year-old son. The child liked it so much that he suggested the creation of a Remmick action figure whose head would explode at the press of a button. As a result, the episode was broadcast unedited in the United States (but was first banned and then edited in the UK and was preceded by a content warning in Canada). [SPOILER REDACTED] I mentioned in my comments on “Encounter at Farpoint” that TNG passes the Bechdel Test often enough for it not to be necessary to point it out every time it happens. I do think it is worth mentioning, however, that “Farpoint” and “The Naked Now” are the first consecutive Star Trek episodes to pass the test (as it happens, with exchanges between the same two characters: Tasha and Troi). Working title: “The Shroud.” This title referred to Armus; the script states that Riker still has “signs of the shroud” on his face at Tasha’s funeral.
Anthony Bernacchi
2024-04-04 17:31:53 +0000 UTCthis episode wasn't even that good tbh ^^ 15 minutes of more or less just showing old scenes
overdev
2024-04-04 16:24:31 +0000 UTCAnd I just checked my Amazon order history and found I got that particular drive 4 years ago. It might be wearing out, so I just ordered a new one that will be delivered tomorrow. We'll see if that makes a difference. When I sync up a disc for the reactions I always minimize both the Patreon site and the playing software and have the windows side by side on the screen. When it works it works fine. Much easier than playing the disc on the TV and the reaction on the laptop.
KatWithAttitude
2024-04-04 16:03:19 +0000 UTCIt took me a little while to get the Blu-ray drive working again, but I finally succeeded in watching the whole reaction from beginning to end. Not that it improved the episode, but it is what it is. If they still put optical drives in laptops I probably wouldn't keep having this trouble.
KatWithAttitude
2024-04-04 15:00:36 +0000 UTC“Data, something's got me!”
Geordie Joe
2024-04-04 14:57:37 +0000 UTCIt was the most screentime she got all season
StonyD
2024-04-04 14:24:38 +0000 UTCI forgot just how much heavy lifting Sirtis had to do in this episode. A hell of an actor
Colin Fair Wells
2024-04-04 14:14:37 +0000 UTCI made the unfortunate choice to watch this before i finished my morning coffee. Now I will never wake up.
Ca$hWednesday
2024-04-04 14:13:03 +0000 UTCBut some episodes are worth it...
KatWithAttitude
2024-04-04 13:53:58 +0000 UTCTechnology can be the worst
Josh (Target Audience)
2024-04-04 13:51:06 +0000 UTCSo much work for such little payoff LOL!
StonyD
2024-04-04 13:48:28 +0000 UTCLast night I had everything all ready to go with the external Blu-ray drive that I plug into my laptop. But as soon as you got started and I pressed "Play", the drive suddenly decided it wasn't going to recognize the disc. It was almost 10 minutes after you got started before I finally got it going and synced it up again. I'll watch it again in a few minutes so I can experience the whole thing again. Whee.
KatWithAttitude
2024-04-04 13:42:45 +0000 UTCThe twists! The turns! The heels! How will Billy Riker get out of this one? Stay Tuned!
StonyD
2024-04-04 13:15:12 +0000 UTCIt was a blast
Captain Proton
2024-04-04 13:14:06 +0000 UTC
