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GRAY MAN ART

@graymanart / graymanart.tumblr.com

Celebrating/creating black and white art of all shapes and sizes.
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discotreque

“As real as a hopped-up Q on Captain Picard Day”

We’re halfway through Season 1, and while I haven’t felt moved to write an episode-by-episode breakdown, I do have a small handful of thoughts about Lower Decks so far.

I don’t even know if these are hot takes—I’ve mostly been avoiding what other people are saying, because it turns out I don’t really care. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ So maybe it’s slightly hypocritical of me to expect anyone to care about my opinions, but that’s never stopped me from sharing them.

  • On the visuals: Possibly prettier than Disco, and that’s saying something. The “special effects” are just fucking gorgeous, and are absolutely living up to the high-concept potential that animated Star Trek has always had. (TAS was goofy and not especially well-made, but you can’t say they didn’t swing for the fences conceptually!)
  • As a sitcom: If it were the exact same show, but set in an original, non–Star Trek setting (i.e. entirely nostalgia-free), I’d probably still watch it. If it were more or less the same show, but not sci-fi at all? Before Episode 5, I would have said “maybe, maybe not,” but I think I’m finally and fully hooked on the characters, so yeah, I think I actually would.
  • As a Star Trek series: What a whole-hearted vindication of the Greatest Generation podcast’s ongoing “Star Trek is a place” thesis. There’s room for so many different kinds of stories in this universe, and they’re not all going to be to my tastes—e.g. I’m still hoping Section 31 is a fake cover for a different series entirely, which it’s almost certainly not, but I’m still hoping. Lower Decks, though, has so much of EXACTLY what I want from Star Trek, and after three grim seasons of Picard and Discovery (which I liked! but also, ooooof), if they’re hyper-correcting into joke-a-minute territory, it’s actually a breath of fresh goddamned air.
  • On the storytelling (large-scale): The only thing even close to a season-spanning arc seems to be Mariner’s relationship with Captain Freeman, and that’s been simmering along pretty quietly in the background, except for Episode 4. A season of TV that actually develops its characters and their relationships instead of an infuriatingly sloppy puzzle-box plot? Fucking finally.
  • On the storytelling (small-scale): So far the format of the show has been fairly standard (but fairly well-executed) 22-minute sitcom premises as foreground stories—with what would have been entire 45-minute episodes of TNG as background stories? The density and the economy of the writing are just unreal.
  • On being TV-14-L: It’s almost certainly an inevitability of commerce that the rating is so low, because you can tell if the writers had their way it would be TV-MA all day; and as a grown goddamned adult, I happen to find bleeped fuck-words infinitely more distracting than unbleeped ones—even, gasp, in Star Trek!—so I had mixed feelings about the swearing-but-not-swearing at first. But I think I’m starting to appreciate it: they’re writing what works for the characters, and if CBS wants to bleep it, that’s on CBS. I respect that.
  • On being TV-14-V: The over-the-top slapstick gore is a surprisingly natural comedic fit for the established medical technology of the setting—"You’ll be fine, they’ll just wave a light over it!“ is one of my favourite lines so far—but I think Angie, Beckett’s friend in that flashback to the Quito, is the first person we’ve seen actually die on Lower Decks. And that makes perfect sense too: when your entire show revolves around the lives of the redshirts, it’s an entirely different vibe to kill off three of them in a cold open.
  • On friendship: Mariner & Boimler, and Rutherford & Tendi, are shaping up to be the main narrative pairings, and you can easily see either or both of those becoming romantic pairings—but what if they don’t? Like, holy SHIT did I love Tendi and Rutherford on the Vancouver. They’re both huge Starfleet nerds, but they’re not goody-goodies in the slightest: their first loyalty is to SCIENCE!, and the results are chaotic as fuck, and I love them together so much… as bros. Likewise, I’m starting to really dig Mariner and Boimler’s odd-couple dynamic—but I don’t want any of them to hook up with each other, and so far the show’s intentions in that area seem… indeterminate. So we’ll see.
  • On the captain being a Black woman: Doesn’t look so fucking difficult, does it, Discovery?

tl;dr: I kind of love this show. I will happily watch the next 15 episodes, and I would watch 50 more after that, and then I would watch seven seasons of the spinoff with Captain Mariner, First Officer Boimler, Chief Engineer Rutherford, and Science Officer Tendi. MAKE IT SO.

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Scrooge : “Back during The Gold Rush, when i was prospecting for my fortune in klondike-”

Huey & the rest of the Fandom :

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graymanart

Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey.

#ducktales#doctor who
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unicornempire
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I never could decide if it would be worse being eaten by the raptor or that spitinyourface dinosaur… . . . . . #handlettering #handmade #merch #smallbusiness #wearitloveit #nerdart #nerdartist #geekart #movieart #etsyfinds #etsy #nerdgirl #creativeuprising #supportart #comiccon #washington #womenofillustration #geekstyle #nerdstyle #nerdyart #byhand #nostalgia #unicornempiretees #screenprinting #screenprinted #screenprintedshirt #jurassicpark #jurassicworld

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graymanart

More great work from Amber and company! 

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Came home to find the hallway of my apartment completely covered in #glitter. Not gonna lie, this is a new one. Did someone murder a pixie and drag it’s corpse outside to get rid of the evidence? (at Portland, Oregon)

#glitter
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