The Schizoid Man

Hello Grandfather.	Dying man looking a bit camp.	Vulcan Doctor, American accent.	Winner of the Norks Award.
(more images below)

Overview: A brilliant scientist, Dr. Ira Graves, attempts to cheat death by uploading his memories and personality into Data.
Writer: Tracy Torme
Director: Les Landau

Anon²: Yeah. Card-count: you got 2 - oh, hang on - that may be a small mark. Pie got 2 definitely. You got 1, plus a small mark. I got fuck all. Possibly I wasn't paying attention enough. Anyway, it was an obvious plot. Data gets told to shut the fuck up twice. And there was a guest star appearance from fucking Monty Python. Ni! Ni!

Anon: Absolutely. The body of Ira Graves that's going to be blasted off into space is wearing the chain-mail hat of one of the Knights of the Round Table in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's quite impressive. Ira Graves is played by W Morgan Sheppard of David Lynch fame. He is British, for the record. There's also an appearance by the woman who went on to play K'Ehleyr later this season - Suzie Plakson, who isn't British.

Pie: There you go.

Anon: She had a bit of a manky American accent in this.

Anon²: One of the things we started to comment on during this episode was the quality of the tits amongst the female cast. I think we rated them...

Pie: I've got Rhiannon greater than Troi greater than Dr. Selar greater than Beverly (who wasn't in the episode but I included her for the sake of comparison) greater than Pulaski.

Anon²: How about Tasha Yar? Did you include her?

Pie: Oh, no I didn't.

Anon: Tasha was briefly in the episode, as well.

Pie: Oh yeah. In the flashbacks.

Anon: As was Lt. Cmdr. Ilya Kuryukin.

Pie: She didn't have much of a pair of tits, did she - Yar?

Anon²: She had a pair of norks that you could squeeze and make a "Ork-ur" sound.

Anon: She had lezza norks.

Pie: Yeah, A-cup lezza norks.

Anon²: I appreciate lesbians.

Anon: Lesbian x1. Fisting x2.

Pie: I'm going to add her to the rankings alongside Pulaski with same size tits, but less droopy.

Anon²: I bet Pulaski's look like a pair of ironing boards.

Anon: They managed to re-use the Code of Honor set. The previous episode also had The Last Outpost's set. So, in terms of "set-watch" which we'll probably never do again, we missed out on some opportunities.

Pie: Yeah. I think that episode does win the award for the most obvious plot twist. All of the characters in the episode completely failed to spot it, despite it being totally obvious.

Anon²: I drew a big arrow with "obvious plot" next to it, just to remind me how obvious it was.

Pie: Overall, I thought this was an alright episode. I know you didn't think much of it, but I thought it showed a bit of imagination. They started to spot the scope of what they could do in the series.

Anon: It had a lot of Wizard of Oz references in this as well.

Anon²: It was a Data episode as well.

Anon: I think at this stage they're beginning to realise that Data is the star of the show.

Anon²: They begin to give him this dual-personality thing. It's popped up before with Datalore.

Anon: They did something similar there.

Anon²: Yeah, it was similar. It's the same thing - "is it Data or not?"

Anon: (burps loudly)

Anon²: Yeah, not sure how you spell that, but impressive.

Pie: They do seem to do their best to give the actor - Brent Spiner, is it? - a good role.

Anon²: Spiner, is it? Or Spinner? (pause) How are you going to transcribe that so people can tell the difference between Spiner and Spinner?

Anon: Well, one would have 2 N's.

Pie: Which one?

Anon: Well, Spinner would have 2 N's. Spiner has 1.

Anon²: So, is it Spiner?

Anon: Yeah. I've met him.

Anon²: Really? Did you ask him then?

Anon: I didn't need to. Like, when I met Ian McShane, I didn't have to ask him if it was Ian McShane or Ian McShanny!

Pie: (laughs) When did you meet Ian McShane?

Anon: He walked into my old pub in Essex.

Pie: Pretty random.

Anon: Yeah, he bought me a pint. Many years ago now.

Anon²: Top man.

Anon: It was before Deadwood, but after Lovejoy. Lovejoy was filmed in my neck of the woods, as it goes.

Anon²: What was Lovejoy about?

Anon: He was an antiques dealer. Something like that.

Anon²: Like in The Antiques Roadshow?

Anon: No, not The Antiques Fucking Roadshow. It wasn't that bad!

Anon²: I liked the bit where they go, "Here's your fucking picture. It's worth fuck all."

Pie: Whenever I hear Lovejoy, all I can think of is Soccer A.M.

Anon: (laughs) Tim Lovejoy!

Anon²: And now he's on some cooking show called Something for the Weekend. I don't mind that.

Pie: I'm now old enough I've started to enjoy cookery programs.

Anon²: Dude! Saturday Kitchen! Fucking great!

Pie: Good program, that.

Anon²: I get up on a Saturday, have a piss, get back into bed, turn the TV on, watch that for a bit then think "Bacon!" So I go downstairs and make a bacon sandwich. Then I come back up, have a wank over some porn then go to bed again to think what I'm going to do in the rest of the day. That's my usual Saturday morning.

Anon: I now own a copy of Levi Roots' Reggae Reggae Cookbook.

Anon²: Hooray!

Pie: Have you been watching his TV series?

Anon: Levi Roots has a TV series?

Pie: Yeah, Carribean Food Made Easy. Something like that.

Anon: What channel's that on?

Pie: I dunno. We Sky Plus-ed it.

Anon²: He was on a Dragon's Den: Where Are They Now? thing a few weeks ago.

Pie: I met Levi Roots at the Good Food Show last year.

Anon²: Really? Fantastic.

Pie: I didn't buy any of his sauces though.

Anon: Did he sing a song to you?

Pie: He's a bit of a... y'know in the Dragon's Den episode, Levi Roots seemed a bit of a fucking idiot? That's kinda like how he is in real life.

Anon²: It's probably not his sauce. It's probably his mum's.

Anon: I think it may have been. It was a family secret recipe or something.

Pie: Something like that.

Anon²: Anyway, Star Trek Cookbook... I mean Star Trek!

Anon: There probably has been a Star Trek Cookbook, in fairness.

Anon²: Yeah, gagh and blood eels!

Pie: There have been many tangents in this commentary.

Anon: Oh, you noticed?

Anon²: We're not doing it on purpose.

Anon: We saw the return of the really slow lift in Engineering in this episode.

Anon²: Oh my word! Why bother?

Anon: There's a bit in Engineering, near the Warp Core where Data basically beats the shit out of the entire cast. Then they decided to go up and challenge him, using the really slow lift.

Pie: This raises an interesting point about Star Trek, particularly these older episodes - Next Gen was on in the 80's and we're now in 2009, so this is a long time ago now - a lot of the time, they're making predictions about what's going to happen in the future, but they've already been superceded within 25 years of the broadcast. Like, they've created a futuristic-looking lift that's now worse than the ones you'd find around Lakeside Shopping Centre. Or, when they say that Fermat's Last Theorem has never been proved, but I think it was proved a few years back. That's one of the flaws of futuristic TV.

Anon: Ah, okay. Speaking of lifts, when I went up the CN Tower in Toronto, that was the first time I'd been up a lift so high that my ears had popped.

Anon²: My ears popped when I went up the Empire State Building.

Anon: The CN Tower's even higher.

Anon²: Unfortunately, the Two Towers weren't there, so I didn't go up them. Well, I did, but it was ground-level.

Anon: You mean the Twin Towers?

Anon²: Yeah, Twin Towers. That's what I said.

Anon: You said Two Towers.

Anon²: Ah, Two Towers. Lord of the Rings. Okay. I was going to go up those as well, but I'm not an Elf anymore. I stopped playing that particular game. I got to level 60 with an Orc called Beardsley.

Pie: I remember him.

Anon²: Yeah, he was alright. He was good. He had big tusks. (pause) Well, we've spent 90% of this commentary talking about things other than Star Trek, but it wasn't a bad episode. It wasn't tragic.

Anon: It was just a bit... meh.

Anon²: 6 out of 10.

Anon: 6 out of 10's a bit generous really, if you look at Next Gen as a whole.

Anon²: Okay, I might downgrade it to a 5. You've got to grade some episodes below this, and there were some that were truly tragic and don't get any points. There's a few that fit inbetween. You've got to judge it season-by-season, and overall as well. Obviously, it gets better over time.

Pie: Where are we at, 31 episodes?

Anon: 32.

Pie: I'd have to say that's got to be in the top 6 or 7 from what we've seen so far.

Anon²: It's not bad.

Anon: I'd put it in the top 6 or 7 of the 6 that we've all watched together.

Pie: (laughs)

Anon: It was better than Angel One, actually.

Anon²: Let's put it this way... how many really outstanding episodes have we seen so far? 3 or 4?

Pie: I'd say none.

Anon: Outstanding? Probably none. You've got 2 really good episodes this season. The Measure of a Man and Q Who.

Anon²: Actually, all of the Q episodes except for the first one are quite good.

Anon: And Hide & Q. That was fairly pants as well.

Anon²: Yeah.

Anon: So, the next episode, when we get around to it, is called Unnatural Selection.

Anon²: Yeah, and we might have a new guest star.

Anon: We might do. We'll see. We'll keep that one a secret.

Anon²: You'll never guess who! Blame Canada! Blame Canada!

Pie: Which one's Unnatural Selection again?

Anon: I haven't got a fucking clue, mate.

Pie: Ah okay. It'll be a surprise then.

Anon: I don't think it's the one where they let all of those Irish people camp in the shuttle bay. That's Up the Long Ladder or something like that.

Pie: Oh, is it the cloning episode?

Anon: I don't know. I don't remember that one. I don't remember Samaritan Snare either.

Pie: Oh, I remember Samaritan Snare. That's the one with the Pakloids.

Anon: Pakleds.

Pie: "Things that make us go!"

Anon: I don't remember anything in Pen Pals except for Sarjenka.

Pie: You get to score 5 points.

Anon: I don't think that storyline was enough to fill an entire episode.

Pie: I think I've only seen that episode once. Picard says he isn't going to break the Prime Directive, then at the end of the episode he says, "Alright then. Go on; break it!"

Anon: That's happened a few times.

Pie: I think that's how that episode went. So are these episodes we've been talking about all in series 2 then?

Anon: Yeah, all season 2. Season; not series, by the way. Okay. Anyways, thanks for coming, Pieman.

Pie: No worries.

Anon²: Oh, my absence for the last 2 minutes was because I was having a piss.

Anon: Okay. You didn't have one of your Saturday morning wanks in there, did you?

Anon²: No.

Anon: Good. See you later.

- Anon, Anon² & Pie, 05-Oct-2009