Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
So I'm just going to come out and say it: My favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is "Conundrum." It's episode fourteen of season five, and I just deeply love it.
I don't know if it's because I literally just assumed Erich Anderson's Commander McDuff was a random Enterprise officer of the week (which we saw quite often during the show) when I watched it as a kid during the original run, so the twist actually worked on eleven year old me. I don't know if it's because I just like a good "everyone has amnesia" story. I don't even know if it's just because it's a good Ro Laren episode. I don't know if it's just because we learn that Starfleet doesn't give a crap about lasers.
I just like it. It's neat.
And I rewatched it last night, and feel that it holds up -- which is why I found it deeply weird that the folks who wrote the episode actually think it's not that good. My favorite episode of the entire seven season run of the show was a failure according to the folks who wrote it.
And maybe, as a writer and creator, I should remember that.
Like the hardest part of releasing creative works to the public is that often, after a while, I'll start to judge those things far more harshly than when I first made them. Or I'll compare it to the potential I thought an idea had in my head. And if I don't reach that potential, I'll think of it as "bad" -- when it might just be slightly different than that idea. I have one hundred percent published stories that I thought were just sort of okay and later had someone tell me how much it meant to them to read it.
*cough*I Hate November*cough*
So I should make sure I remember Conundrum. That one of my favorite things to rewatch is considered one of those failures by its creators. That the things I make might have value, just not in the way I originally thought they should.
It's just sort of how things work out.
Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches' Collective's April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!
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Damn Lynn is so awesome!
I didn’t know she was Hispanic until now.
Lynn Guadalupe Baxter is the daughter of an Irish immigrant father and a Mexican-American Mother.
I’m not sure how much I’ve inserted into the last seven years of canon, but I know I mentioned her Mexican heritage for the first time back at the tail end of I Hate November in Chapter Two.
(Lynn was originally created for another comic I was working on in 2003 that I never finished or released. It was called Re-entry and was meant to be a much more serious comic about a couple of characters putting their lives back together after hitting rock bottom. For that project, I did an indepth timeline and bible for each character.
Re-entry stuff isn’t canon, but I updated her timeline in 2006 when I recycled Lynn for a project called “Full Circle.” When I started UnCONventional I used the 2006 character bible for Lynn, and have stuck to it pretty closely)
Little vicious to pull on a lowly desk clerk, on the other hand, he should have been looking for alternative solutions the moment he knew there was a problem.
Yeah, vicious and probably overkill. On the other hand, this problem should never have happened in the first place, so I can’t blame her for going with the nuclear option to fix it.
nice when you can play that many cards from your hand on one turn and just WRECK your opponent
I can just see what’s going through the front desk clerk’s mind….”uh….uh….oh, FELGERCARB!!!!!!”
I work as a front desk clerk and I’ve had this happen…the ones that I REALLY love are the ones that reserve a room online only a half-hour before arriving at the hotel…
Grin. And then just being Lynn seems to be sufficient.