"Ethics" Is A Good Episode: A Reassurance
I'm writing this as a sort of sequel to my recent post about Spider-Man comics. Basically, I spent the last three months reading old comic books and had a really lousy time, and it's been bugging me for a while. It's not just that the experience was unsatisfying; I was beginning to wonder if any experience could be satisfying.
I mean, I've been a comic book dork for over 30 years. Three months of classic Spider-Man comics sounds like a great time, and I couldn't help but wonder if the comics weren't the problem. What if I had "outgrown" the whole thing? What if I had lost my passions? What if I could never find new passions to replace them? What if I'm doomed to be a bitter old man, incapable of enjoying his own hobbies?
But the other night I got takeout and decided to watch an old TNG episode over dinner, and it blew me away. Like an empty plastic drum falling on a stuntman.
I've always liked Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I always thought "Ethics" was a great episode, but it's not really one of my "go-to" episodes when I'm bored and picking one out to watch. I think that just changed, because the writing is just so good on this thing. It's the perfect antidote for three months of lackluster comic books. Let's discuss.
I’m gonna be honest with you, I have seen all five seasons of Strangers Things but I cannot for the life of me tell Mike and Will apart
Which one is Wheeler and which one is Byers? Fuck if I know, I gotta look at the character tags for that. Which one got kidnapped? Jonathon’s brother, can’t tell you more. Which one is dating El? The one that doesn’t know he’s gay pining for the other, next question.
A snippet of the Grimm x Criminal Minds fic that's been rotating in my brain like a potato in a microwave for the last while
Nick didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He settled for closing his eyes and pressing his head into the damp, mossy bark of the tree behind him.
“The FBI,” Hank repeated, his voice tinny through the phone’s speakers. “I can’t remember the last time they came to Portland, no matter how weird the murders got around here.”
“Why are they coming now?” Nick asked. He opened his eyes, grimaced at the sight in front of him, and closed them again like the knowledge of what was there would disappear if he no longer saw it. “We haven’t had any cases that have crossed state lines, not that I’ve heard about.”
“Well, rumor is that there’s a missing agent involved,” Hank answered, “But officially, it’s because of the situation at PSU. The president of the university is very keen to have the case closed as soon as possible.”
“I thought those were ruled accidental deaths?” Nick said.
“Apparently Harper found poison in the last girl’s system that the other MEs overlooked,” Hank answered. “Where are you anyway? The FBI will be here in a few hours and we need to go over the evidence before then. Do you want the Feds to show us up?”
Nick chuckled, a surprisingly honest sound. “I went for a run after our last case to clear my head. I’ll be there in thirty.”
“You better be,” Hank threatened jokingly before hanging up.
Nick finally opened his eyes again. He accidentally met the glazed-over gaze of the corpse in front of him. A corpse with an FBI badge hanging conspicuously from his belt.
“Shit,” he groaned as he scrubbed a hand over his face. “Monroe is going to have an aneurysm.”
Headcanon that Luke and Obi Wan got the money to pay Han Solo by selling the moisture farm at bargain-basement prices in Anchorhead without telling anyone that it was totally torched, and by the time anyone find out they were well off planet. Luke now has a reputation as one of Tattooine’s most famous con men despite the fact that it was Obi Wan who ran the con.
#I don’t know if you meant it this way but I totally interpreted this as them selling the farm multiple times to different people#luke: *wrestling over selling the wreck of the farm to someone he knows is a complete scumbag*#obi-wan: hello are you interested in buying a farm#complete scumbucket: *interested noises*#luke: wait didn’t we already-? *gets zapped by R2* ow!#luke: oh#luke: ohhhh#luke: >:)
i haven’t cared about star wars ‘canon’ since i was 3 years old- I LOVE the idea that the reason Luke had to dramatically speeder in and out of Jabba’s without hitting up any of his local connections is he is like, wanted by a bunch of scum in Mos Eisley. Can you- can you imagine Vader or whoever doing a recon in town on ‘the last son of the Jedi who blew up the death star.’ His close friends and family have all a) died b) moved off planet or c) both.
So the only reputation he has is ‘that bastard con artist who banked 19 years of aw-shucks-wormie-ness and used it to outrageously fleece everyone who’s almost anybody.’ Vader reading the report like…damn you Kenobi did you get HONDO to raise my son??
Jabba’s reaction to Luke’s message is INFINITELY funnier if we consider the idea that ‘Skywalker’ amongst the wretched local villainy (who mostly ignore imperial and rebel propaganda) is actually synonymous with TWO things - that brat who totally messed up the podrace bookies 25 years ago, and the infamous Anchorhead Con. Jabba gets this message about ‘Jedi’ and is like LOL i think the other Skywalker tried to pull some hotshit with that too before wimping out.
Everyone openly laughs like sure you’re a Jedi and I’ve got a bargain vaporator farm I want to sell you.
AND THEN HE WRECKS THE JOINT WITH A DEBT-RIDDEN HALF-BLIND SMUGGLER A RANDOM SLAVE GIRL ONE GUARD AND TWO BEAT UP DROIDS WHAAAT
I’m imagining some random palace guard telling Vader this, afterwards.
“So this fucking—SKYWALKER, dude, have you ever heard the name Skywalker? You know what it means? A FUCKING ASSHOLE, that’s what it means. Like. The first one was bad enough, this little shit named Anakin who was fuckin’ NINE YEARS OLD and he just WON THE FUCKING BOONTA EVE PODRACE and set SIXTEEN bookies out of business and if I ever meet him I’m gonna set him on fire for it—
“And then this new one, Luke? Fuckin’ nobody, raised by his aunt and uncle out in the Wastes, little aw-shucks hick farm kid, the kind you could give him a five-credit piece and a ten-credit piece and he keeps taking the fiver because it’s BIGGER, that kind of simple, and then he comes into Mos Eisley one afternoon and sells his aunt and uncle’s moisture farm, right, I’ve been out there a few times, several of us have, and it’s a nice place as far as moisture farms go, mildly profitable, and the kid is fucking happy to get like two-thirds its value, so he sells the farm, right? TO NINETEEN DIFFERENT PEOPLE! Do you have any idea how much Jabba’s finance people had to do to get that sorted out? Nineteen fucking mortgages on ONE fucking property, puts every real estate con Jabba the Hutt’s entire CLAN ever pulled and we were on the WRONG SIDE OF IT! We had every pirate and smuggler from here to Corellia laughing at us! And THEN! And THEN—!
“So he pops up via hologram message acting like a DIPLOMAT from the REPUBLIC, claiming a title and rank from an extinct, defunct, ILLEGAL order and wanting to bargain with Jabba—are you fucking kidding me, BARGAIN WITH JABBA for a smuggler who’s up to his ass in debt when he’s responsible for that farm scheme, acting like he doesn’t even fucking REMEMBER it and expects that Jabba’s forgotten it too. Like. Absolute fucking idiot, and anticipating that Jabba’s just as stupid. And he offers a pair of droids as a gift. Like, built-in-the-Republic-era, random-ass droids that he probably picked up from the Jawas that morning for a few hundred credits and a junked ‘vaporator.
“I mean, Jabba’s seething here, but hey, free droids is free droids. Whatever. He takes the droids, throws things, orders a fight to the death between two gamblers who owed him money, killed one of his dancers at some point … and then Boushh shows up with fucking Chewbacca in chains—he’s Solo’s first mate, so Jabba was all happy about that, but not happy enough to pay the full bounty—and what’s Boushh do? Pull some gonads out from somewhere after all these years, and also pull out a fucking THERMAL DETONATOR! Going to blow us all to fuck if he doesn’t get his measley fifty thousand, and, well, there’s no arguing with crazy like that.
“So now, if you’re keeping score, Jabba’s lost an absolute SHITLOAD of money and had his bookmaking industry fucked all to hell for like three years after the stunt from Skywalker the First, got screwed out of ANOTHER shitload of money in the farm scam by Skywalker the Sequel, got all but called an idiot to his face and insulted six times over by the same dude who’s apparently scammed so many people he’s forgotten who he has and hasn’t scammed, and got threatened out of fifty thousand credits by a second-tier bounty hunter IN FRONT OF HIS ENTIRE COURT.
“And then the next morning, what the fuck? Jabba’s favorite sculpture is gone, the one with Solo as its main ingredient that Boba Fett brought him. And Boushh is gone. And Jabba’s got a brand-new dancer chained up next to him. Night duty guy tells me Boushh unfroze Solo, and the new dancer girl IS Boushh, which, okay, you’re dealing with people like that and you look like that? You definitely need a helmet, but I feel like pretending she didn’t breathe oxygen was overkill. Anyway, then Skywalker shows up. All alone, no weapons, nothing, like he really believes in this Jedi shit. Arrogant little bastard, and we’re all laying bets on how Jabba’s going to kill him.
“So he talks a little, and fwoop! goes the trapdoor, and okay, everybody who bet on “Rancor” is doing a little happy dance, but then! BUT THEN! He fucking KILLS THE RANCOR! Drops its own cage door on its head and punches right through its skull! And—fucking NOBODY bet on that, which is a damn shame because everybody else would’ve just torn the winner apart out of sheer rage at that point and we coulda used some good bloodshed then, y’know? I mean, I dunno if you’ve ever met Jabba the Hutt, but he’s the kind of boss that’ll just go off and kill you for failing him or just because he’s angry at something. Just complete fucking asshole. I mean, he was pissed enough that everybody was worried for their safety, and so somebody dying messily right then would’ve calmed him down a bit.
“So Jabba’s big mad, and he gathers Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca all together and says he’s gonna feed them to the Sarlacc, which is a nasty tentacled carnivorous plant out in the desert, so we all board the sail barge and have a nice little pleasure cruise—have you ever been to Tattoine? I’m fuckin’ kidding, it’s brutal. But hey, we get to see Skywalker executed, right? Wrong.
“Jabba offers them the chance to beg for their lives, and Solo calls him a slimy piece of worm-ridden filth, which, I mean, I could do better, y’know? If I’m about to die? Anyway, Skywalker goes up first, gets prodded to the edge, flips a salute off to who-knows-where, and does this little twist in midair, catches the fucking plank, and fucking SPRINGBOARDS himself back onboard, CATCHES HIS LIGHTSABER FROM MIDAIR where the one DROID shot it to him, and starts sending guards over the side, usually in pieces.
“So more guards rush forward to help, and there’s this huge fight, and fuckin’ BOBA FETT falls in, and while that’s going on? The fucking dancing girl has grabbed her chain and is FUCKING STRANGLING JABBA WITH IT! Like, I look over and he’s bucking and struggling and she’s pulling on that chain like anything, and then somebody hits me over the head with a bottle of Corellian brandy, and by the time I look again he’s pitched over dead! And nobody freaking bet on that!
“And then? Off they fucking go, Skywalker and Solo and Chewbacca and the dancing girl and the droids and one of the guards who I played sabacc with the other night and he owes me twenty credits! And that fucking Skywalker just cost me my job, and if I see him again I’m going to burn him to cinders myself!”
The man subsides, eyeing the gigantic ebony figure in front of him who, except for a couple of momentary starts as though he might say something, has been silently listening to him all this time.
Size-wise, Darth Vader has nothing on Jabba the Hutt, but somehow, he is scarier.
Finally, the dark form speaks. “You said you could do better.” A moment’s silence, and he clarifies. “If you were about to die.” He gets the impression that whatever monster lurks behind the helmet is smiling. “You are about to die now. Because you are a criminal, and because of what you have said about my son, Luke Skywalker. You have an opportunity to do better. Use it.”
The so-condemned criminal, late of Jabba’s palace guard, lets his jaw hang open unflatteringly for a moment while his brain catches up with events. HIS SON, which means …
“YOU’RE Anakin Skywalker’s HUSBAND?”
The steady, hissing rhythm of Darth Vader’s rebreather actually stops dead as the Dark Lord straightens up as if stabbed with an electroprod.
In the instant before the man’s brains, blood, and spinal fluid coat the far wall, he has the momentary satisfaction of having, indeed, done much better than Solo.
i feel like i boarded a ride thinking it was one of those ‘boat slowly past the animatronic characters’ deals but it was actually space mountain
What I’m getting from this, is that if Luke ever goes back to Tatooine, they’ll make him their king.
How the hell do we count the age gap between Han and Leia? Because Han is like ten years older, right? But then he’s frozen in carbonate for years. Idk how many, but Luke is 19 in ANH and 23 in ROTJ so at most he’s in there for four years, so he’s six years older than Leia. Anyway I’ve just never seen anyone talk about Han losing literal years as a wall hanging and that sucks because it’d be great angst potential.
List of Quotes About Revan (before capture) in KotOR 1 (using the Strategy Wiki as a reference, quotes from after Revan's identity reveal but before going to the Star Forge System are listed on the Leviathan - Hangar page):
List of Quotes About Revan in KotOR 2 from party support conversations (using the Strategy Wiki as a reference):
List of Quotes About Revan in KotOR 2 from story walkthrough (using the Strategy Wiki as a reference):
of course the heating goes out the one day it actually is snowing and of course it’s new years so none of the companies we called can send anyone (except the gas company, who checked if we have a gas leak (we do but it’s outside so it’s not harmful) and then fucked off).
I’m freezing my toes off but at least my cats have their heated beds.
Since I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, I’m going to do what I’ve always dreamed of — staying up all night so I can watch the first sunrise of the year
(yes I know I can just wake up really early, but as someone who occasionally has to wake up at five am, I’m not going to do that to myself just for fun)
I did it! Unfortunately it wasn’t a very spactacular sunrise, just kinda gray and cloudy
Since I don’t have to go to work tomorrow, I’m going to do what I’ve always dreamed of — staying up all night so I can watch the first sunrise of the year
(yes I know I can just wake up really early, but as someone who occasionally has to wake up at five am, I’m not going to do that to myself just for fun)