Why does the new security officer go after the nerd when she could (indeed, should) take out the two armed guards?
She seems kind of dumb and doesn’t know when to keep quiet. I dislike her.
But that’s what I’ve been saying. Season one was a comedy with sci-fi elements. Season two is almost straight sci fi - much less time and effort spent on jokes.
Holy crap, Birthday Cake was awful. Not even worth writing out the full title.
I think you may have that backwards, at least according to Seth Macfarlane. Apparently he was shooting for SciFi a la the Next Generation with some comedy thrown in. It was the network that wanted to market it as a comedy.
It looks to me like the network is driving the train. Nothing about the crew is remotely professional. Patrick Warburton’s character was a hoot but walking onto to the ops deck out of uniform in a sweaty outfit holding a bowl of food was pure comedy. Same with the blue guy blowing his load all over Kelly. I was waiting for the punchline: once you go blue, it’s all over you.
Good line! That blue guy was Rob Lowe, by the way.
I completely missed it was Rob Lowe. I was just impressed the network managed a a galactic money-shot in prime time.
I enjoyed the episode and do think most of the questions were answered. I think they didn’t the bluff with force because that’s what the Krill would do and they want to think of themselves as better than that. Further, they are contacting them just to contact them, not because there are huge reserves of dilithium (or whatever) on the planet. I do agree that the escape attempt was brutal and should have been handled differently. Showing that none of the guards died due to armor or that they were using rubber bullets of some kind, would have been nice.
I can’t check this easily but I thought part of the premise of the show was that the Union lost a bunch of captains but had ships and needed them manned. So they went to the dregs? That’s how Mercer ended up captain and was able to bring his friend, the screw up? To me, that explains a lot of the antics and bad decisions. Or maybe it’s that Mercer and Kelly are good but the crew is sub standard? I’m probably wrong but that’s in my head.
Good discussion! Thanks!
You miss the point.
Suppose Kelly is 35 Earth years old, on the day of her birthday. That means that (adjusting for leap years) she was born exactly 35 Earth revolutions ago.
But suppose that that day happened to be during the “Gelliac” astronomical sign on Regul. Unless the two planets have essentially identical revolutionary periods, her Earth “birthday” isn’t going to be falling on her Regul “birthday”. That is, it won’t happen during Gelliac.
As for the episode, it is in keeping with the show as a whole. They have some really good set-ups to explore, but they do so in a very pedestrian way. I’ve said before that this show is just very, very average. It never seems to manage to do anything noteworthy with the issues it explores.
Kelly and Bortus essentially murdered several Regulians. So they are going to be executed on the spot? No trial? Seriously? Then they don’t even show the extensive negotiations that would have had to be engaged in to get them back after the “star” shows up in the sky?
But I do like the fact that the lack of transporters makes it so much more dangerous when they are on alien planets. Not able to just beam them up and skedaddle.
Right, but they don’t care. As soon as Kelly said she and Bortus had birthdays coming up, they were Giliacs in the Prefect’s mind, and nothing was going to change that, and they didn’t bother testing their teeth. It was just luck that Ed, Claire, & Talla’s birthdates didn’t line up with a Giliac period in the past, even though their next birthday wasn’t going to fall in the current Giliac period.
One of the themes of the episode after all was that the Regorans use science in defiance of logic, not in support of it. If they weren’t so utterly revulsed by Giliacs, they would have just released Kelly & Bortus back to Mercer, with instructions to leave and never come back.
P.S., it’s “Giliac” and “Regor”, as seen in the episode close captioning. And Ed, Claire and Talla were a Panaji, a Corobahn, and a Valeigh.
Oh, it looks like you’re right. They weren’t shown testing Grayson and Bortus. So that particular complaint isn’t a plot hole necessarily.
Of course someone on the crew - maybe not the humans, but you’d think Isaac would figure it out - should’ve then said “wait, test the teeth on Grayson and Bortus then. That’ll prove they’re not Giliacs” for the reasons explained.
I’m comfortable believing that the Giliac hatred was so irrational, once you’ve been branded as one, there’s no way to remove the stigma. Heck, the Regorans may not even believe other planets have different length years.
Depicting the negotiations would have probably been boring, but just hand-waving it, as they did, with no further explanation, was probably worse. “Hey, we have them back, and we’re having their birthday party!”
I was reminded of a lot of ST:TNG episodes at that point. They’d get into an interesting situation, which didn’t look like it had a simple resolution, and then it was close to the top of the hour, so it was “Wesley/Data/Geordi comes up with something > problem resolved > ahead warp factor 5, engage” in three minutes. 
IIRC it wasn’t that the Fleet lost a bunch of captains, it was that just they went through a poorly planned expansion and now that so many ships they were having trouble crewing.
Scotty, execute [del]Order 66[/del] General Order 24 in 24 hours!
And then there was the time the Union government shut down for six weeks, causing a lot of people to reconsider their career paths…oh, wait, I’m confusing that with some other event.
I was so hoping that when the Regorians wanted to see a demonstration of Talla’s “special” abilities, that she’d ask them to give her some hideously complex math problem and she’d just do it in her head on the spot.
I thought the Billy Joel episode was in the running for “best episode of the series” along with a couple others; then this astrology one came along and made the point moot. I consider it to be the best episode of a serialized* science fiction series since the first couple seasons of nu-BSG well over a decade ago.
So I’m shocked by how much negativity I’m seeing online, about this latest episode in particular.
*Without that caveat, it would have to get in line behind a bunch of “Black Mirror” episodes.