The Voyager to Hell is Laden with Disappointment

Last night's tweets;

A tired avocado stretches out.
When liquefied, an agent buries it.
Oblivion's in many holes en route.
So it's better to follow the rabbit.

I'm tried already to-day after a lot of pencilling. I got totally caught up last night in spite of jury duty early in the week, and for this chapter and probably a lot more after it, I definitely need to not get behind. I've given up trying to watch any television show with dinner--now I need that time for colouring.

With breakfast a few days ago, I watched "Barge of the Dead", an episode of Star Trek: Voyager written by Bryan Fuller and Ronald D. Moore. I hadn't seen it before--I'd stopped watching Voyager at some point in the fourth or fifth season. I was given to notice again Voyager is one of the weakest Star Trek series, second only to Enterprise, but it has by far the best theme segment--an original composition by Jerry Goldsmith, instead of the recycled Star Trek The Motion Picture theme for Next Generation, and it has the Voyager flying through a lot of space chachkis like nebulae, ice rings, and solar flares of the sort that were only later conspicuously tacked on to Deep Space Nine's awkward revised theme segment.

But Voyager suffered from a kind of odd carelessness, as was evident in "Barge of the Dead" where I kept finding my self asking, "Wait--why are they doing that?" Like, "How did B'Elanna Torres and Harry Kim stay up 'til 3am scanning a piece of metal?" "Why is Neelix up at 3am?" "Why wasn't Torres beamed out of her crashing shuttle?" and so on. But the episode had, for around 80% of its runtime, an actually pretty exciting story about B'Elanna dying and ending up on a barge on its way to Klingon hell. This story's pretty thoroughly ruined, though, by B'Elanna managing to get back there with a simulated death--because the afterlife wouldn't know the difference, right?--and then by the fact that it all ends up being a hallucination. I don't mind stories about people's dreams, but in this case, an actual encounter with Klingon hell would've been a lot cooler, since, as usual for Star Trek dream stuff, it's filled with ham-handed symbols and the dreamer interpreting them to win the episode.

I did go to Tim's last night and played some Oblivion. A while ago, Tim told me about an upcoming video game I'm extremely excited about; Fallout: New Vegas, the latest in the Fallout series. This one's to be published by Bethesda but developed by Obsidian, a company comprised of members of the team who made the first two Fallout games. Which means this game could be the best of two worlds--Bethesda's beautiful engine with the superior writing and character systems of the first two games. Now I really want to upgrade my computer.