In honor of Valentine’s Day, check out this bizarre sight we found at (of all places) Borders a while back:
Yes, it’s Star Trek perfume inspired by the Vulcan mating urge.
But, wait, there’s more!
Apparently, they want you to believe that Starfleet Medical has isolated the factor that made Captain James T. Kirk a 23rd century Casanova (in SPAAACE!) and have bottled it to sell.
We are South Coast Plaza of Borg. You will be overstimulated!
Seriously, after only 20 minutes at the mall on Saturday, I was already feeling overwhelmed. The children’s choir singing “Holly Jolly Christmas” right outside the first store did not help!
I miss the Ghirardelli shop. It was my favorite way to just retreat from the madness that is South Coast Plaza during the Christmas shopping season and prepare myself for the next hour or two.
Oh, yeah…here’s a better photo of the bridge and the mall segment formerly known as Crystal Court.
Standing in the movie theater lobby, listening to competing CLANKing from Star Trek and Terminator: Salvation.
Finally got out to see Terminator: Salvation at the second-run theater. It was a passable action flick, though a bit overblown and tedious at times. I thought it was better than T3: Rise of the Machines, at least. T3 was too caught up in repeating the first two movies (a Terminator is sent back in time to kill John Connor, a guardian is sent back in time to protect him, they spend the whole time running from the Terminator, and they repeat the same stunts with bigger vehicles and explosions) and showing the origins of what we’d seen before.
While Terminator: Salvation also has the unenviable task of being both a sequel and a prequel at the same time, it manages to at least distinguish itself by going off in a new direction in terms of story. Yes, it’s the story of a prototype Terminator, how John Connor met Kyle Reese, and how John Connor became leader of the resistance, but it takes those elements as starting points and tells a story, rather than following a connect-the-dots path. (Though they did repeat a few stunts, and there are plot holes you could fly an H-K through.)
That, and T3 really annoyed me because it rejected the core theme of T2: “The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” Whether that theme is actually supportable in the first two movies is debatable (especially considering that the first film appears to present a stable time loop), but this complete reversal is a bit of a slap in the face.*
I actually don’t know much about Surrogates other than the fact that it’s based on a comic book, but I saw this poster the other day and was instantly reminded of the original posters advertising Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
It’s not a direct reference, of course, simply a similar concept — and the image of a partially-assembled Cameron (Summer Glau) was clearly inspired by the first appearance of the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) in Star Trek: First Contact.
Of course, as I was reminded while looking for pictures, the Borg Queen had her own antecedents as well.
Back to the Surrogates poster, it turns out that Bleeding Cool spotted a much closer reference in the form of an entry in a Celebrity Cyborgs photo alteration contest, featuring model Kate Moss.
Appropriately enough, the entry was apparently inspired by an article that mentioned an upcoming movie adaptation of Surrogates…
*Regarding the “slap in the face” — that’s not really the phrase I want to use, since it implies deliberate offense and is really overused in entitled fandom. What I’m getting at is that it’s sudden and shocking, like preparing to wade out slowly into a very cold pool, then getting pushed in and doing a belly flop.
The original Star Trek TV series was famously pitched to the network as “Wagon Train to the stars” (Wagon Train being a then-well-known Western). Star Trek: The Next Generation was in the same mold, with Deep Space Nine described as Gunsmoke (in space!). Babylon 5, while not a Trek series, appeared around the same time and was described as Casablanca (in space). “Sooner or later, everyone comes to Babylon 5.”
So it was kind of odd tonight to watch an episode of DS9 that basically was Casablanca in space.
In “Profit and Loss”, the owner of a local bar encounters the love of his life who disappeared years ago. But she’s here with the leader(s) of a foreign nation’s underground resistance against a powerful military regime — and that regime wants to capture her companion(s). There’s also the matter of obtaining an object so that they can leave safely. She could stay here with the bar owner, but in the end has to leave. Meanwhile, there are shifting alliances as the bar owner has to deal with the local chief of police and other citizens with their own agendas.
According to the writeup at Memory Alpha, the episode was originally going to be more like Casablanca, even titled “Here’s Lookin’ at You…,” but they had to change it due to legal pressure.
