Voyager: 11:59

[Mickey_Rat15]

I was amused by this, as for once, it seems that Neelix was even dumber than SF gave him credit for. Or the writers.

Unfortunately, it does not prove Neelix is dumb, just credulous. Neelix has no knowledge of Earth except what he gets from the crew and the ship's archives. Their records on the Great Wall must include that old chestnut about the Wall being visible from space without correction.

[proporRocket]

I have mixed feelings about this episode. The story is interesting and could have been fleshed-out in to an all right indie film, and it was nice to see Kate Mulgrew do some acting with out the limitations of Janeway.

On the other hand, it did feel like the writers were just bored with their own show. The tie-ins to the crew were flimsy at best.

Also, at the back of my head, all I could think about was how Barns&Nobel were going to put this guy out of business anyway.

[AlucardNoir]

I dunno Chuck. I'm 29 and I have strands of white hair, had them since I was 14. My hair still looks chestnut but since I wear it long the dozen or so white hairs I have tend to be fairly visible. Patrick Stewart famously lost his hair by 19 and I had a college friend that was gray in his mid 20's and had gone grey when he was 16.

We know Kevin Tighe is a full decade older then Mulgrew, but still, I don't know if I agree with you.

EDIT: and just to set things straight. 11:59 aired in 1999, Mulgrew was born in 1955, Tighe in 1944. Mulgrew was 44, and Tighe was 55 - neither of them were what you might call a spring chicken when the episode was made or aired.

[Beastro]

I don't understand the fascination people have with old buildings and I never will. Give me something modern, bright, clean and multi-functional over a run-down dirty old bookshop in a dirty run-down street any day. And BTW i'm not talking about landmarks or truly historic buildings here, i'm talking about this strange attachment people have to things past their use-by date just because they're old.

Because many people don't have an outlook on life that sees things simply being of use, that once that ends, are to be thrown away.

I bet a century from now people with the mindset you express will curl their noses at our time and all the things we lack or didn't know that they now have. To me it's a mindset that's off putting and reeks of hubris.

In much a similar way, I've always found myself more comfortable around the elderly than anyone else, even as a little kid, and I wonder how much of that is due to my love of history and how much they embody it.

And on the topic of rose-tinted spectacles, 99% of the past was, for the most part, absolutely God-awful for anyone that wasn't rich and powerful. If you were poor, it didn't matter what race or sex you were despite what people seem to think today; you were living in freezing cramped buildings, with mouldy food on the table that could not be refrigerated, horrible medical conditions because painkillers and antibiotics had yet to be invented, little to no education, and almost no prospects for getting out of your situation. These people would have traded their left arms to live inside a modern mall. So, yeah; the present and future is better in every way that counts to the past and the sooner we leave it all behind the better.

And yet people found meaning, fulfillment and enjoyment in life despite our sneering at their lives back then, paradoxically, because they suffered so much in that way the human conditions finds fond memories from terrible parts of our past.

That isn't say you're wrong, but it's simply one exaggerated look on things like the rose-tinted one you criticize that is a shit-tinted one that only sees what's terrible and awful about the past and nothing else.

Past their use-by date? There's nothing wrong with most of them, they're still perfectly functional usually. I don't undestand the fascination anyone has with modern ones, they just scream dull, impersonal soulessness. I've seen precious little built in the last century that isn't utterly uninspiring.

See, right there is part of my problem. Define ''soul'' or ''soulessness'' in this context. Define ''impersonal.'' Define ''dull.''
Like the old man in the episode, I always hear these words thrown around when people debate why old buildings are better than new ones but they are meaningless because no context is given as to why they are these things. I see no reason why a new build is/isn't any of the things.
[/quote]

Much of it the character things like architecture had that is now lacking. Look back to old things and they have the quality to them that is now lacking even when it comes things deliberately meant to be made with some sense of "soul".

A good example I've run across is 9/11 memorials around the US and how many lack a life to them, like the Octacube, Postcards, Empty Sky, The Pentagon Memorial and the one in Arizona while others are just brutally disgusting and ugly, made as if children had designed them, like Homo Homini and To Struggle Against World Terrorism.

Amusingly, the ones that do have "soul" are the ones that simply have wreckage from the Twin Towers on display, like the 9/11 Cross, the Survivor's Staircase and the various pieces on display around the world, like the section of an I-beam outside our main fire station in my town here in Canada.

[Shuboy07]

I dunno Chuck. I'm 29 and I have strands of white hair, had them since I was 14. My hair still looks chestnut but since I wear it long the dozen or so white hairs I have tend to be fairly visible. Patrick Stewart famously lost his hair by 19 and I had a college friend that was gray in his mid 20's and had gone grey when he was 16.

We know Kevin Tighe is a full decade older then Mulgrew, but still, I don't know if I agree with.

EDIT: and just to set things straight. 11:59 aired in 1999, Mulgrew was born in 1955, Tighe in 1944. Mulgrew was 44, and Tighe was 55 - neither of them were what you might call a spring chicken when the episode was made or aired.

I brought this up when Chuck reviewed the last Discovery episode, Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, that Stella Mudd was portrayed by the very lovely Katherine Barrell who is 28! Rainn Wilson is 52. The age difference there was probably even more glaring than this one.

Joe Menosky, who penned this episode with Braga, has revealed that the original story had NO scenes on Voyager which have certainly made the episode stand out even more.

[christoff522]

Kevin Tighe is 73
Kate Mulgrew 63

my God the age difference, quick get Chris Hansen to expose this perverted relationship!!

Chuck I've been watching your reviews for almost a decade now, and I have to say, sometimes you come out with the stupidest comments. "Why get someone with a comb over to be Shannon's love interest".

I do however agree with the Janeway armor, and Neelix being one of the creepiest characters ever written - but that might be you tainting him for me.

[CrypticMirror]

The Millennium Gate? I can only assume from the name that it is some sort of media scandal involving the Millennium. I think this story would have worked far better as a Chakotay episode. When you think about it, Chakotay's ancestors being Native American and all the stuff they would have had to live through in that era -the ravages of the war on drugs (which essentially drugs have won) and the racism and the economic refugees, etc- that would have been a great chance for Star Trek to strut its social conscience and really give people something to think about.

How that "Great Wall of China is visible from space" canard can still persist when people routinely go to work in space, and I think there are also mention of orbital habitats although we never saw them, where it can be busted by simply looking out a window is a mystery to me. Not to mention that East Asia was supposed to be the part of the Earth which bore the brunt of the Eugenics wars and WW3 which makes the survival of the Great Wall all the more doubtful. Unless they rebuilt it in glowing neon bricks, of course. Which they might have.

I dunno Chuck. I'm 29 and I have strands of white hair, had them since I was 14. My hair still looks chestnut but since I wear it long the dozen or so white hairs I have tend to be fairly visible. Patrick Stewart famously lost his hair by 19 and I had a college friend that was gray in his mid 20's and had gone grey when he was 16.

Yeah, I've always had a proper Mallen Streak all my life, even as a little girl, which was handy in my teen years as hair streaks were in style at the time so I never had to mess around with styling sets like my peers; sad to say that in the last few years it has started to spread a bit though.

[Zoinksberg]

I brought this up when Chuck reviewed the last Discovery episode, Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad, that Stella Mudd was portrayed by the very lovely Katherine Barrell who is 28! Rainn Wilson is 52. The age difference there was probably even more glaring than this one.

Huh, I was set to make a comment about the age difference between Stella in Discovery and in TOS being an even more glaring age difference, but I was wrong. Kay Elliot was 38 when she filmed her scenes in I, Mudd. So I owe the Discovery casting team a credit, they managed to find someone exactly 10 years younger to play someone 10 years earlier. Best continuity on the show!

And to Trinary's comment about Tighe, I remember when I saw this episode replayed on SpikeTV and I recognized him as Locke's father from Lost. A conman who found his long lost son only so he could get close to him, get him to donate a kidney, and then disappears from him again. And that was the least bad thing he did to him. Janeways, am I right?

[FaxModem1]

Rewatched the episode, because I enjoyed it. I rather enjoy Janeway's speech after her image of her family hero is smashed.

JANEWAY: Let me guess. The holographic engineer is having problems with her programme. Neelix, the Cardassian cook, is low on supplies. Seven of Twelve is regenerating and Captain Chakotay is doing just fine. Just wondering how they'll piece together our lives a few hundred years from now.
CHAKOTAY: Depends on how big the pieces are.
JANEWAY: A PADD here, a Captain's log there, maybe a couple of holodeck programmes. It won't be as much to go on as we might think. I've gone through dozens of histories written about twenty first century Earth, all of them biased in one way or another. The Vulcans describe First Contact with a savagely illogical race. Ferengi talk about Wall Street as if it were holy ground. The Bolians express dismay at the low quality of human plumbing. And human historians? Exact same story. Every culture saw it a different way. So I go back to the raw material. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates, census surveys, voter registration forms, housing records, medical, employment, court records. It's all fragmented and incomplete.

It's a fascinating look at our own personal bias when it comes to history, how we judge past civilizations, such as in this very thread with arguments about architecture. We all come from different places, and view history differently.

Someone views it as an affront to how awful the past was, and how they're forgetting all the pain they went through, while another person believes that the buildings from the past hold up due to the artistic beauty from such designs, and show soul. While yet another person in this thread has an utterly utilitarian perspective, and only wants something that has value, and wants to replace something if something more efficient comes along.

Within the episode, we see that history is important, because of what we learn from it, or how it can inspire us. While at the same time, one must have an eye towards the future, and opening up new doors, and not being trapped, like Henry Janeway was, while not continually running, like Shannon was. Keeping a balance.

Potentially, Henry's bookstore in the Millennium Gate was a nice little slice of yesterday, with books on every level subject, and wifi available for those who want to hang out and enjoy the area. That balance of new and classic that compliments each other.

[Texanhick20]

I'm just glad to see that an american midwestern town in late 2000 is doing so well just a year after the Eugenics Wars!