There’s no way to ask this without it coming off as a roast, so I’m just going to lean into it: What the fuck do Canadian tourists do in Montana? Look at mountains? Why, did Canada run out?

Or Windex.

That’s kind of the point, that show ended 28 years ago. What have you seen him in since then? When he’s been mentioned in the years since, it’s generally either to make a joke about his career or just his general persona.

30 Rock in 2006: In this episode, Jenna Maroney goes on a sexual walkabout, engaging in a bunch of deviant sex acts. At ~3:45, we see the very end of her checklist:

• In an airplane wheel well
• Pull a general Tso’s Revenge
• Run a train with the cast of “Training Day” on a train
• Soon-Yi a marriage
• Supreme court Justice,Liberal
• Yoko a band
• Dean Cain

Once the band has been Yoko’d, she scrolls down to the final entry. “Ugh, Dean Cain,” she sighs, rolling her eyes.

Family Guy in 2007: Dean Cain is so desperate for attention that he’s taken to wearing old Superman merch and sidling up to random strangers then saying “Hey, is that Dean Cain?” in a fake voice.

Yeah, it’s literally true that he’s a former Superman actor, but he’s been a punchline for over 20 years, to the point where he’s probably better known as a joke than an actor.

This show was not even a year and a half old when it made the departure of a series regular genuinely hurt. Taking to school a certain well-known space opera that tries and fails to do the same thing literally months later, a franchise that The Orville was suppose to be a parody of.

It also put me in mind of the way a certain character fairly unceremoniously left early TNG. That was still season 1, but episode 23, so technically further into the show than we are here if you’re counting in minutes. And it was much worse. The Orville absolutely gave a masterclass here.

Oh funny. I just mentioned this in my comment as well. The lack of prosthetics in that scene were apparently scripted. It is supposed to represent Alara picturing herself as a human.

Without wanting to get into too much behind-the scenes drama, there may or may not have been some interpersonal stuff behind this episode. Halston Sage (Lt. Alara Kitan) and Seth MacFarlane (Capt. Mercer) were at one point in a romantic relationship, and then they weren’t any more, and then Alara left the series. Nobody has outwardly connected those things in a causative sense; in public, the explanation was simply that this was the right story for the show. I find that a little hard to justify, though, and promptly …

… smacks of allowing rewrites of future scripts which expected her to be available.

That said, this episode itself is very strong (even if Alara isn’t!); it doesn’t feel like a rush job in any way. Alara’s family (and old friend Robert Picardo again) initially seem a bit one-note with their “Military bad” attitudes, but are revealed to have more depth as we spend more time with them, in part through their almost complete helplessness when confronted with a stressful situation. It’s a shame it took this to get them to find respect for Alara, but that’s families for you.

Something I frankly never noticed before was that Halston Sage has no Xelayan prosthetics in the fantasy sequence where she rides an Eevek (Xelayan horse thing) on the beach, as seen in the thumbnail of this post. This was included in the script, confirming that it’s not a production mistake. Alara picturing herself as happily human gives her some additional depth. She’s an outsider in both Xelayan and human society, so this represents one of the paths she could take to finding a place.

It’s a fantastic farewell to a character who I wish we got more time with, an arc cut short by … something. The only problem I have with the episode–besides it including Alara’s exit-- is a minor one: the grieving-cum-vengeful parents appear comically villainous (e.g. when threatening to start lopping off Solana’s fingers: “Which one, sweetie?”). I think they could have been given a slightly less scene-chewing evil that didn’t take so much relish in violence. There’s no room left to sympathize with them, because they’re just awful. Maybe that’s to soften our feelings about the Kitans. They could be worse!

I remember buying this game off the back of how much I loved the Baldur’s Gate games (I and II, at the time), playing it for like 30 minutes and getting so frustrated I just went and replayed Baldur’s Gate II again. I’m sure I still have my physical disc somewhere. I probably should give it more of a chance.

Oh boo. New Who just got dropped by all major streaming services here without warning; I no longer have a place to watch legitimately. Simultaneously, a separate, free “service” for streaming shows that I may or may not have used has shut down. What a bad week for this to happen, I was very much looking forward to this one. I will try to figure something out so I can continue to join the rewatch.

Suffer like DC did?

deleted by creator

I kind of wish this headline just kept going.

Proton’s Lumo AI chatbot: not end-to-end encrypted, not open source, bad taste in music, murdered family of five

Uh, holy shit. Meta doesn’t even make Flo. This is worse: the developers were specifically selling their users’ menstrual data to Facebook.

Anybody have an open-source tracker they’d recommend?

I’m thinking about my eye floaters roughly 200% of the time and I still mistake them for bugs flying past my face at least once a week.

I checked, whoever CONEY is isn’t saying these things, it’s a reaction video making fun of the satanic panic around Pokémon. That’s why in the profile pic he looks like one of those dudes who would make an outrageous reaction face in the thumbnail, because he usually does. No shade, except for the obvious shade.

• Satanism in Pokémon and MTG (original video)
• The Disturbing Agenda Behind Pokémon (CONEY reaction video)

EDIT: I’m watching the OG video (35 damn minutes); favorite pull quote so far:

The danger of Dungeons & Dragons or any kind of role-playing game like this is that it’s played with the mind and–when played with the mind–the mind begins to lose that fine line with what’s real and what’s fantasy. And the more you get into the fantasy world, the more it seems real and all of a sudden now, you don’t know what’s real or what’s not.

Seems like.

EDIT2: Hold up though, is this guy working undercover for Prima Guides or something?

And now, parents, if you’re not up on Pokémon, you need to be. And one of the things you can do is go out and buy the official Pokémon Trading Card Game Player’s Guide. And you can get this at any store that sells any of the Pokémon stuff. I mean anything. You can get it like at Toys ‘R’ Us or any of those places that sell any of the Pokémon.

You might be thinking of Super Mario Bros. Crossover, although that only goes in one direction: you can choose from a bunch of characters, but you’re always playing Super Mario Bros.

From a behind-the-scenes perspective, the most important thing to note about this episode is that it’s actually from season 1. If you thought it was weird that the first season had 12 episodes and the second had 14, instead of the more common 13-episode season, here’s your answer. I don’t think we’ve had any formal explanation of what happened, but MacFarlane did say that 20th Century Fox’s corporate board raised a note about the network broadcast standards in relation to this episode. Maybe it was just too sexually arousing to air.

It was originally supposed to air as episode 12, so despite jumping seasons, it’s really only been shuffled down two episodes. They did have to reshoot the scenes with Topa in them, because there is supposed to have been a small time jump between seasons and season 2 Topa is older than the child they filmed with previously. It’s interesting to think that this episode was originally intended to air before “Ja’loja”, as you might have expected this episode to change that one. Then again, that episode showed deceptively little of the Bortus-Klyden relationship.

I think this episode is missing something as far as exploring the repercussions of Topa’s reassignment. We don’t seem to get any indication that that is at the root of Bortus’s porn addiction until the episode is about 2/3 complete. As a viewer, you might bring that context with you, but if the show was peppering in any foreshadowing about it, I didn’t catch it. The episode is kind of goofy and jokey for the first 29 minutes, then we get the reveal and finally have something to really bite into.

The conclusion, with most of the potential refugees forced to remain on the planet and die, reinforces the tonal shift in the last third of the episode. We get a touching farewell from First Minister Theece to her partner and child, a scene which deserves a better episode. Ultimately, I just don’t feel like the comedy is really integrated very well into this episode compared to some of the others we’ve seen. There’s so much here for the episode to dig into, but it’s all dumped into the final act instead of throughout.

Ultimately, this one feels like a missed opportunity. I don’t hate it or anything, it’s no “Cupid’s Dagger”, I just feel certain there’s a better episode buried inside this one.

At least we get this exchange:

Lt. Malloy: “Captain, we have another problem.” Capt. Mercer: “Oh, neat, what is it?”

I’m always on board for a (quasi-) Jackie Tyler episode; she’s one of my favorite parts of the Rose era. It is funny that Camille Coduri is playing a 20-year-old Jackie Tyler here with just an '80s perm to convince us. She’s entirely unconvincing as a 20-year-old, but it’s not really much worse than Billie Piper being 19. It’s the Dear Evan Hansen industrial complex over here.

I love any time there’s Back to the Future II (my favorite!) shenanigans in a time travel story, so the opening with multiple Doctors and Roses a few minutes apart immediately wins me over. They’re followed by some pretty naff effects throughout, with the red-cellophane vision and dodgy CGI monsters all over the place. I’m still on board.

It’s interesting to see the Doctor actively frightened about what he’s done to the timeline, since plot conceits usually dictate that whatever he does is fine. There’s some interesting moments like him watching that time-displaced death car with genuine concern. We also get his line, “An ordinary man, that’s the most important thing in creation.” I wonder if somebody overheard the Doctor saying this in 1987 and that’s why we’re dealing with the manosphere today.

The scene(s) where Pete starts to understand that he’s not in Rose’s future and in fact not in anybody’s future are well written and performed by Piper and Dingwall, who is unfalteringly believable as a deadbeat husband and dad who both knows and regrets it. Rose’s false monologue about the kind of father he becomes and his ultimate recognition that he can in some way be that father is genuinely affecting. Even though the music is doing its best to hammer the emotional beats home throughout, I don’t think it was necessary in that moment.

This isn’t an episode that I think should have won any awards, and don’t worry: it didn’t. Nothing ground-breaking for the show happens here, the music choices are incredibly un-subtle, and it’s ultimately very predictable stuff. But I find it enjoyable from start to finish. It’s the fun kind of silly. I like getting to meet a bunch of the recurring cast at a different point in their lives in a story that’s self-contained but with a satisfying payoff in the final Jackie and child-Rose scene. This isn’t Doctor Who at its best, but it’s supremely comfortable viewing and I’m happy with that.

Bonus points for the pre-Rickroll “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the scene with Rose and her father in the car on the way to the church. The meme didn’t exist when this episode was first broadcast, it was just a hit song from the '80s. Hearing it in the background just to set the scene without the 20 years of baggage is a fun time. It’s hard to remember what it was like to hear it without the modern context, but having nobody react strongly to it in-universe gives us a small taste.

/s != serious

Gamers said they wanted women out of games, I thought they’d be happy. /s