#the ep the Star Trek wiki is named after!!

[glompcat]

I am in shock that Lamb Chop is currently in last in the best 90s PBS kids show poll. Truly in shock.

As a result I am sharing this song that has been stuck in my head since I was a child. A song that truly does not end.

[aemiron-main]

Creelarke Analysis: Star Trek and Clarke’s Disease

So! What the hell is “Clarke’s disease”? Where did it come from, and how does it tie to Creelarke and Scott Clarke, besides the name?

Clarke’s Disease is from the Star Trek comics, and it’s also mentioned in two of the Star Trek episodes (“Borderland,” and “Cold Station 12”).

But it gets even better regarding Creelarke, as it goes beyond Scott's last name also being Clarke- the guy initially infected with Clarke’s Disease was named Henry Archer.

Staring at Henry being called “sick,” staring at him very very very likely being gay, staring at Creelarke and the “sickness”, being homosexuality/his gay little friendship with Scott- hence, Clarke’s disease.

And taking a deeper look at Henry Archer, the parallels between Henry Archer and Henry Creel go deeper than just names: "Henry Archer, the father of Jonathan Archer, died of this illness in 2124. Dr. Arik Soong, attempting to sell the benefits of genetic engineering to Archer, suggested that the science might have led to a cure, sparing the elder Archer years of misery." A doctor attempted to cure Henry Archer of his illness- it reminds me a lot of Brenner trying to "fix"/cure Henry. Arik Soong also reminds me quite a lot of Brenner, as he's described as "Arik Soong was a brilliant doctor of genetics in the 22nd century. He believed that Humanity's abandonment of genetic engineering after the Eugenics Wars was a mistake and hoped to show that genetically engineered Humans would not necessarily become tyrants like Khan Noonien Singh. He argued that the source of the problem wasn't, in fact, the technology, but Humanity's own inability to use it wisely." Brenner, much like Arik, also experimented with genetic engineering, as we know that he was attempting to "recreate," Henry in the lab. Arik, just like Brenner, also stole children:

And looking at the wiki for the Borderlands ep, one of the episodes that includes Clarke's disease, yet again, Arik and Brenner are very similar, raising children as if they were they own as experiments in a secret location.

In fact, the other episode involving Clarke's disease, Cold Station 12, also involves this Brenner-coded doctor and his stolen lab children:

I'm going to need to do a deep dive on all of the parallels one of these days, especially since my Star Trek knowledge isn't particularly deep, but it's VERY interesting to me that a guy named Henry was involved with a very Brenner-coded doctor and diagnosed with Clarke's disease.

[qwertyfingers]

hi it's watch order anon again i sent the time travel ep ask before you answered the tng watch order one (after i saw your post about it taking a while) and i was actually thanking you for recommending spn eps to me (because i'm also the spn watch order anon) and talking about spn time travel episodes (which i am going to look up you don't have to rec any to me if you don't want to). thank you VERY much however for the tng time travel rec list i'm adding them to... the list

OH IM STUPIT KLSGJCHGFG

well, here we have: FITZ’S FUN-RANKED LIST OF SUPERNATURAL TIME TRAVEL EPS (TAKING A ROUNDABOUT DEFINITION OF TIME TRAVEL TO INCLUDE ALTERNATE UNIVERSES BECAUSE THEYRE FUN IN THE SAME WAY OKAY)

IMPORTNANT DISCLAIMER: S5E4 The End is theeeeee iconic Supernatural time travel/au ep but do NOT be led astray you HAVE to watch this one with context. do the full deancas lazarus rising to the end speedrun you will NOT regret it I PROMISE

S6E15 The French Mistake THEEEEEEEEE episode of all time amongst thee show of all time. they KILL eric kripke ONSCREEN

S3E11 Mystery Spot - LITERALLY a timeloop fanfic. EXTREMELY good. fave pre-Cas episode for me.

S5E8 Changing Channels - brings back mystery spots MOTW and makes him even more powerful. iconic behaviour, great episode.

S6E17 My Heart Will Go On is fun hijinks-y but admittedly has very little on-screen time travel. Balthazar is in it though and I like him

S6E18 Frontierland - Dean and Sam send themselves back in time AND it’s a cowboy episode. VERY star trek

S13E16 Scoobynatural - IT COUNTS I THINK. Semi-related, S8E8 Hunteri Heroici involves a guy who make cartoons come to life with his mind. It’s a very fun and very pretty episode and Cas and Dean r gay, well worth watching <3

S4E17 It’s A Terrible Life - Zachariah traps Sam and Dean in alternate reality where Dean is a (heavily implied out queer) businessman of some sort and wears fruity suits. Sam is there I guess. One of its finest Gay Homophobia episodes and genuinely very fun to watch.

S11E14 The Vessel - Dean wears a fruity little sailor outfit and Casifer (Lucifer who is possessing Castiel and the Winchesters don’t know yet - it’s a whole story arc) fists Sam’s soul just for funsies. The ONLY reason Casifer couldn’t get on that boat is because if Cas saw Dean’s fruity sailor outfit for more than a minute he would have lost his MIND and Lucifer woulda had to leave his vessel sharpish.

S8E11 LARP and the Real Girl - I think the title speaks for itself really, I think this counts! Charlie Bradbury (Felicia Day’s character) is in it and she’s cool and gay and Dean wears chainmail <3

S7E12 Time After Time I can’t remember that much about this ep but Dean does wear a very good 40s suit including a shoulder holster <3

I really want to tell you to watch the Belphegor episodes (S15E1-S15E3) but none of it would actually make sense I’m just obsessed with them bringing a messy gay bitch demon into Jack’s body literally top 10 Supernatural Gay Homophobia Moments in my onion.

S8E12 As Time Goes By - Sam and Dean’s grandfather jumps forward in time to find them, and introduces them to the history of the Men Of Letters, whose house they will steal in the next episode

S4E3 In The Beginning - This and the next episode are only ranked so low because I don’t care about Mary and John drama. HOWEVER. Zachariah sends Dean back in time to meet his mum before she married John and Zachariah very possibly fucked her. There are a LOT of memes about this now.

S5E13 The Song Remains The Same - Anna tries to stop Sam from being born. This entire concept is VERY funny to me. As is Sam and Dean showing up on the doorstep of their mum and dad, who do not have children yet, telling them their real names and saying ‘it’s a family name’ when John points out that Mary has relatives with the same name. Comedic genius I don’t care about the rest of the episode but from what I remember it’s pretty good.

S14E13 Lebanon - this episode is bad because it tries to redemption arc John BUT. it gave us  [spoilers] 1) lesbian steve jobs ted talk sam 2) Dean trying to placate alt-Cas who never got to know him by doing the ‘Cas....’ and gentle touch thing and alt-Cas just going ham and obliterating his ass 3) Dean choosing to go back to their world (with Cas <3) over staying in this universe with his Dad because he’s not worth it <3

There are several flashback eps to Dean and Sam’s childhoods, but as you can imagine these are all pretty sad and not the kind of thing you wanna watch For Funsies. The wiki has a list of those here.

The longest alt-universe arc is the Apocalypse World - a world where the Angels and Demons successfully orchestrated their plan to cause the apocalypse and are steadily wiping out the last of the human population. This isn’t overall a “fun” arc, but is v interesting and pique your attention if you like time travel and AU content. The wiki lists all the episodes here.

[simonjadis]

Anon I’m ASSUMING that these are from the same person; apologies if they are not

I would say that my feelings are similar to yours, but not quite identical ...

Disney’s handling has been imperfect, and some of the mistakes have been made the highest level (I know that people give Kathleen Kennedy a hard time, but if rumor is to be believed, some of the interference that made IX kind of weird came from higher than that)

for example, Kennedy said in an interview that she tries to find people who just make big, successful movies to make sure that these are also big, successful movies. I can understand that as being a safe bet from a business stand point, but that’s not the same thing as finding someone passionate about very specifically telling good, new Star Wars stories, which we did not really get in the Sequel Trilogy

(one of the most common theories that I saw from TLJ apologists was that people didn’t like that it was new/different than what they were expecting, which was really not the issue for me or my friends. Also it was just a speedrun of parts of Episodes V and VI)

I think that I’m “too close” to Star Wars to see it as a financial asset rather than a beloved universe full of characters and stories that I adore, but I don’t think that “literally just rehash the Original Trilogy for two movies and barely acknowledge any other part of Star Wars until IX” was a good idea

Rey deserved her own story. and Luke deserved to not be retroactively robbed of his

as for George Lucas, I do think that years of backlash over the Prequels sucked the fun out of it for him. Also, who doesn’t want four billion dollars? it was a sweetheart deal for Disney, of course

the sad thing is that this meant the end of Clone Wars, because Disney took one look at Lucasfilm’s budget and was like “OH NO YOU CANNOT SPEND THAT KIND OF MONEY ON A CARTOON” which is why Season 6 was paid for by Netflix and why Maul: Son of Dathomir was a comic

I love Star Wars Rebels and I’m not trying to knock the show at all, but the budgetary difference was palpable. Clone Wars did have it a little easier because of the Clone Troopers (all having the same face), but on Rebels, you notice that 90% of the Imperials are the same guy wearing a hat with his visor obscuring most of his face. market scenes show just a few people (but plenty of Storm Troopers)

the designs of the main characters -- Ezra, Hera, Sabine, Zeb, Kallus, Thrawn, Kanan, etc -- are great and loving and detailed and most of those change a little over time, but there’s a reason that we only see so many planets on Rebels. look at the huge armies and crowds in Rebels. my friend @drunkkenobi​ is the first who pointed out to me that in Clone Wars, you sometimes see lines of ships (Space Traffic) and each ship in line will be unique, distinct from the others

it’s not Rebels’ fault that they didn’t have that kind of budget. that’s also why their space battles (and space ships) never quite look right. meanwhile, for Clone Wars, if they wanted a particular scene or ship that went over their planned budget, all that they had to do was ask Uncle George

eccentric billionaires funding expensive media isn’t necessarily the most sustainable model for storytelling, but it sure worked out well for Clone Wars and for The Expanse

(Jeff Bezos personally called up the head of Amazon Prime programming, who had already been considering acquiring the extremely good but expensive show, and was like “hey the cast from this show is at a thing where I am, I’d love to just tell them that their show is saved, give me it?” and we saw as many new locations in Season 4 as we did in the first three seasons)

but streaming -- where you actually get money directly from customers who then, through their activity on your platform, show you exactly what they want to see aka what is keeping them on your platform -- offers a new opportunity for high quality genre media. remember, scifi and fantasy were EVERYWHERE in the ‘90s and the early aughts, and then because too expensive for regular TV unless they had huge audiences. only through streaming do we have these new Star Treks, The Witcher, and the real possibility of a new Stargate series

why do I bring up streaming? because

The Mandalorian goes to show that Disney can 100% do good Star Wars. Rebels was good, despite its budget, but can you imagine how much better it would have been if it had aired on Disney+

as with the DC movies (three of which are good and I’m also excited for Birds of Prey), the solution to the our-movies-made-a-lot-of-money-but-aren’t-strictly-speaking-good is literally just “let the people who do the cartoons make the movies”

and now we’re getting a final, seventh (half) season of Clone Wars! twelve episodes looking better than the show has ever looked!!

if you’re like me, you probably thought to yourself “gee, only 12?” and, cynically, you figured that it’s a trick -- announced at ComicCon in 2018 to build up the first wave of hype for Disney+

and it is ... but it 100% worked on me, I signed up for Disney+ and will pay anything for Clone War

my HOPE is that this is a test run to see if people really like high-quality animated Star Wars stories enough to continue with it. there’s only so much clone wars that one can cover (my suspicion is that we will see Ahsoka fake her death during Order 66 in these eps, so yep, that’s the end of the Clone Wars right there)

imagine a well-written series with everything that Clone Wars had in terms of content and visual quality, but it’s set after Episode IX. to my frustration, IX ends with effectively the same worldstate as VI which essentially means that nothing much happened in the Sequel Trilogy. but imagine a series set after IX. we could see a new set of (Force-wielding) characters. we could see Rey, Finn, Poe, and Rose during some episodes. Rose could finally get to do something that’s not an insulting fool’s errand (she deserves so much better!!!!!)

we don’t need a new Big Scary Empire/First Order thing, just organized crime and pirates and Hutts and bounty hunters and individual planet systems going to war as the characters try to assemble a NEW New Republic (gods I hate the unchanged worldstate)

now, I know that Star Wars Resistance is not ... reassuring. this is the only screencap that I have from it because I couldn’t get into it. it’s not the animation (I enjoyed Tron Uprising and Iron Man: Armored Adventures and this is the same kind of deal), but three things:

-I watch Star Wars for the Force primarily; other stuff can be cool but I need the Force

-I will never care about ships racing and really I don’t care about an individual ship flying; I’m a Command Ship kind of space nerd

-apparently the writing doesn’t improve much during the first season. people tell the main character to not do something, then he does it, and disaster ensues. that’s ... it’s fine, it’s fine to exist as a show, it’s just not for me

obviously, not all Star Wars media is for me, but when something -- like TLJ or the Sequel Series as a whole (even though VII and IX are enjoyable) or Resistance -- disappoints me, I would never accuse it of “ruining Star Wars”

Star Wars is a whole franchise. the breadth of canon isn’t all wiped away by some disappointments. was the MCU ruined by Age of Ultron? no. it was a bad movie but from the same franchise that gave us The Winter Soldier and Thor Ragnarok. hell, Dawn of Justice doesn’t “ruin” Wonder Woman or Aquaman or Shazam. bad movies aren’t contagious

for the past several years, the Entitled Dude crowd has felt empowered. they were radicalized in the altright/redpill/MGTOW/meninist/nazi/gamergate/comicsgate/etc spheres of the internet and now they just have a reflex where they see any sort of representation and decry it as “SJW,” which they also seem to think is a bad thing

in the same way that well-meaning people on tumblr can get radicalized into being antis/puriteens, people with certain vulnerabilities on reddit or youtube can get sucked into a world that tells them that they are the default and that other people existing is “political” in media and in real life, and that people being upset by outright cruelty towards them is both funny and means that the cruel person is the victor. they need therapy and studios need to not listen to them

unfortunately, sometimes there are movies that are bad despite having things like solid representation. Ghostbusters 2016 was a delight, but my friends and I with whom I saw TLJ (all of us queer feminists) left the theater angry. we’ve bitten our tongues a lot (even if it seems otherwise) because publicly criticizing the film too often leads some incel monster to chime in with agreement, and we’re just like

the redpillgate crowed et all is a natural ally of conservative white evangelicals, even though the former group is generally made up of New Atheists (the short version is atheists who hold socially conservative views because racism/misogyny/transphobia benefit them without using christianity as an excuse). it’s kind of like how terfs will side with conservative hate groups because, though they’re natural enemies, they both despite trans people just for existing

unfortunately, when you’re looking at who went to see a movie or who hated it, not everyone posts with an ID card saying exactly their demographic. which is only going to make studios like Disney even more nervous about including queer content in Star Wars and in the MCU (I mean real queer content with characters whose names don’t have to be searched on a wiki)

that was a bit of a tangent, but yeah. sorry if I missed anything