Voyager Re-Watch: Cold Fire

So basically Cold Fire the one where I always feel like the bad guy Ocampan is Hugo Weaving even though I'm fully aware that he's not. Also a little girl has a scary voice. Here's how it goes:

Voyager is be-bopping along the Delta Quadrant and Kes and Tuvok are working on honing her magic Ocampan powers of telepathy. There's some scolding, obviously, and then the Caretaker's remains start going all wibbly wobbly and everyone has to check it out. Pretty soon they find a whole other Ocampa colony who accompany a female caretaker with a very clear bad guy name--Suspiria. Tuvok is rightly suspicious and runs off to find a way to kill Suspiria, you know, just in case.

Anyway, during all this Elrond shows up and tells Kes that she's being way underutilized and kind of gives her the ole' Come To The Dark Side (of Middle Earth/The Delta Quadrant) speech and Kes is just kind of like, "Wanna see my garden?" Because she's Kes. They go down to the Airponics Bay to check it out and Agent Smith shows her how to burn up all her flowers for not really any good reason at all. Seems like alarm bells should be ringing all over the place but Kes is definitely considering leaving Voyager to hang with these jerkbags. Eventually all of it comes crashing down when she pretty much sets Tuvok on fire (per V's instructions) and then Voyager is attacked by an all powerful Little Girl Monster version of Suspiria. Finally, Kes gets her business together and attacks The Red Skull while Janeway takes out Suspiria--the evil pair take off and Kes is left to sit in the corner and think about what she's done.

Really disappointed I didn't get a Megatron reference in there...

I've always felt a little mixed about this one. There's something about it that just never completely jived with me. Maybe it's that it all feels just a little bit too easy. It's Kes' sudden huge burst of power and her willingness to give into it then her willingness to give it up--I don't know. It's hard to fit all of that into forty-five minutes. But, maybe I'm also kind of torn because I always wanted a Hugo Weaving-esque bad guy to show up and explain to me, after all these years, how to finally use my super powers. Isn't that a dream everyone has? No? Just me? Ok. Anyway, in spite of whatever it is about this one that bugs me, I think the cast did a really solid job--especially Jennifer Lien and Tim Russ. Oh... and Ambassador Soval. Him too.

Bonus Points:
-I think this is the first time they mention that Voyager is becoming known as a "Ship of Death."
-Seriously though, Jennifer Lien does a great job here. It's one of the first times we get to see her actually have a real role in things and not just spending her time being some jealous guy's girlfriend.

Many Happy Returns

In my last post I mentioned how I'd been rather depressed and that I'd gone off and done some writing and could tell I was on the mend. Well, as it turns out, I suppose I sort of opened the flood gates. After I finished my mini-journal/essay project, I resumed work on a novel I had started a month before--one that had been completely derailed by the events in my life. Once I started, I really just couldn't stop. I wrote a thousand words a day at first. Then two-thousand. Then three. I only barely took the weekends off (sometimes starting back at work on Sunday night) and picking it up again on Monday mornings. I wrote in a near-fever, unwilling to stop. And then suddenly, on Wednesday of this week, I typed The End. It was a perfect storm of inspiration, long-term planning, and thirty years (including a couple very important ones) that ended up happening to make this happen and now, suddenly, I have a working draft. So, this is all sort of a long way of telling you what I've been up to lately.

Yesterday, still recovering from a sinus infection, I mostly laid on the couch and watched baseball and ate crackers because my antibiotic twisted up my stomach.

Today I'm back.

Well, sort of. I'm back to tell you that I'm coming back.

And, until then, I'm back to tell you how excited and happy I am about the Marriage Equality ruling handed down today. A couple years ago I did a little piece for marriage equality:

And today I returned to it, dressing everyone up for their big day:

Today is a day of celebration! Congratulations to anyone out there who's been waiting to get hitched, to anyone who hopes to get hitched, to anyone and everyone and all their family and friends. This ruling only brings us ever closer to the sort of peace and universal equality envisioned in Trek. 

PS- I made both of these the right size for a Facebook cover photo so, if you want to pull it and use it on your cover page, you're welcome to.