There are nights when it would be smarter to go to bed or more productive to read, but TV appeals. On those nights, there’s no guarantee that anything good will be on. We tend toward Food Channel and Adult Swim, but there’s another category of programming we enjoy. Some shows were just made to mock.
CSI: Miami is a favorite in this category, between David Caruso chewing up the scenery and preposterometer levels in the danger zone, an episode of CSI: Miami is good for 44 minutes of snarky comments and laughter.
The other night as we were looking for an excuse to not be productive, my sweetie saw Star Trek: The Next Generation in the listing. “We can mock that!” she said with enthusiasm. Immediately I saw the potential and we selected that channel. We were not disappointed.
Take the scene in the bar with Whoopi Goldberg and the kid crew member. “Do you want some Blagaturian Tea?” Whoopi asked (or something like that). “How about some Hoobajoobian cocoa?” Just about every object on the show has a polysyllabic adjective to improve its exoticness. They settled on “Gogorotarian soufflé.” Or whatever. And even after the first time, does Whoopi take the easy way out and just say “soufflé”? No. Time after time she says, “Gogorotarian soufflé.”
You know what she’s really saying? “Space soufflé.” “You want some Space Tea? How about some Space Cocoa? No? Ok, I know you won’t say no to some Space Soufflé.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation becomes much more watchable if you simply replace all those silly adjectives with “space”.
This particular episode hinged on a Really Freakin’ Huge Coincidence. The Mysterious Visitor and the Deadly Cargo were incompatible, so the Mysterious Visitor left. That’s the whole story right there. No cleverness or ingenuity on the part of the crew of the Enterprise required at all. The thing is, it would have been easy to create a causal relationship between the the Mysterious Stranger being there at the same time as the Deadly Cargo. It would have been relatively simple to have one of the main characters actually accomplish something, rather than just watch events unfold.
Lazy writing.
Yep, there’s a new show on our WatchenMocken list.
