Human Spaceflight: 16 Apr 1972. Once more a Saturn V roars off the pad, carrying astronauts John Young (Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10), Charlie Duke (first flight) and Ken Mattingly (who had just missed out on Apollo 13) aloft on the Apollo 16 mission to the Descartes region of the lunar highlands.
You truly believed that I would be deceived by that schlock plan from ‘Revenge of the Surfboarding Killer Bikini Vampire Girls’?
And the first step to being good at anything is being bad at it! Hobbies are for your own enjoyment. Anything else is a bonus.
I can only assume that every else on Ligon II called bullshit on the whole thing and got rid of all three of them, as this major power transfer took place out of sight of anyone else with the aid of aliens who had a vested interest in getting rid of the guy who blocked their access to the vaccine.
Probably would have added more to Yareena's 'death' so that at least one Ligonian actually verified it before she was revived. As it is they see her struck, then immediately beamed away, then she shows up alive on the Enterprise and basically Lutan just accepts Crusher's 'yeah, she died, honest'.
Oh lord, really? Maybe I need to revise my earlier comment. Still, it could have as easily been saved by casting and costume as it was sunk by it.
But it also has the 'man impaled by poison spike doesn't actually feel any effect of the poison until he notices he's bleeding, then promptly keels over' trope. Didn't think that poor bastard was worth applying their great medical tech to, did they?
I believe this is also the first use of the 'we can actually kill someone just long enough to convince the aliens and then revive them because we have superior medical technology' gambit. Which makes no sense really, especially the way it's used here.
The worst bit is that it's not even written that way. If the Ligonians hadn't all been cast and costumed as they were this would just be a rather sub-par (it's still not a great story by any means) episode of the series, but those production choices have just sunk its credibility forever.
All I know is my gut says maybe…
Ah, well we just did earlier today at Riverside so all is well. 🥰 I shall pass on your hugs to Zoe and Ellie as well.
Human Spaceflight: 11 Oct 1971. The world's first space station, Salyut 1, re-entered the atmosphere and was destroyed. After the deaths of the Soyuz 11 crew, it was hoped the station could survive until the Soyuz could be redesigned to improve safety. Delays meant the station was lost.
Cue something else going wrong… 🤦♂️
Oh I do love when a nicely planned journey gets all messed up. Gone from having plenty of time to grab lunch before the event to will probably arrive just in time for it if nothing else goes wrong. 😖
I still have two tickets going spare for today's Riverside screening if anyone is interested. Drop me a DM here or find me there.
riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/Sw-...
I have had to edit nala out of several podcasts, largely because she has a habit of unexpectedly jumping up my back and biting my ankles. Occasional shrieks of pain would otherwise punctuate many episodes.
I once had to edit the line, "Gah, get your tail out of my ear!" from a podcast.
Human Spaceflight: 12 Aug 1971. Kosmos 434 is launched. As with many other launches, it was not until some time later it was revealed to be another test of the Soviet lunar lander. At this point they still had plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon.
They haven't even bothered piling up any debris around the base to show how the ground ruptured. You can even see the inward curve at the bottom in many shots! Even TV Trek did better than that with their sets!
Those rock pillars in the scenes with the false god are a horrendous example of how compromised this film got. After a not bad sequence showing them bursting out of the ground, we then get loads of shots that clearly show they are just sitting on a studio floor!
You know, I'd never even thought of that! TNG has only just started showing us Romulans with rubber forehead features, and of course the one Romulan we see in this movie doesn't have them, so yeah, why does he assume the pointy ears make him a Vulcan rather than a Romulan?
Especially when you have to forget a facility used many times in the series to explain how the enemy got the advantage. Shield frequencies are adjustable! A fully crewed Galaxy class ship should have rained fire down on that Bird of Prey, not run away and taken every hit.
It's sad that even by the last TNG movie the makers were thinking they could just take bits of previous ones that had gone over well and just put them in the movies, without understanding at all why they worked so well before.
I'm not sure how deliberate it was but I do find it unfortunate, if fitting, that the USS Grissom explodes and the last word spoken before its destruction and the death of its crew is 'fire' (albeit in Klingon). It rather disturbingly echoes the fate of the astronaut it was named after...
Oh yes! If I see one more reel about making a delicious, sugar-free dessert where the first ingredient is honey I may scream!
If anyone is interested I have two tickets going spare for this event on Sunday.
Along with the notion there is somehow a difference between natural and synthetic chemicals. Aspirin is aspirin, guys, whether synthesised in a lab or extracted from tree bark....
And in the reverse sense, sodium explodes in water, chlorine was used in gas attacks in WWI to kill huge numbers of people. Both those things will kill or maim you in their raw form, but you try surviving without sodium chloride....
No new episodes today, I'm afraid, but the final episode of the podcast will be availabe soon.
Not 14F?
