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anikadamg
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Star Trek: Lower Decks: Temporal Edict (2020)
An introspective depth with an extroverted expression
This is a commentary on modern times when CEOs can get so hung up on productivity that they kill it.
This is Trek at its greatest, it's just that older fans like myself are less likely to appreciate it since we loved all the pomp and ceremony and that's kinda being taken for a ride right now.
Here's some amazing observations they allude to in the episode which should be familiar to nearly all working adults and will be awesome
Command discovers buffer time and believing that this is a waste of time, orders tasks to be done according to a schedule they set.
They never realised buffer time existed because they truly have no idea how long anything takes yet they decide to set the time table for those actually doing the work.
Sometimes they get the times wrong
Mostly the times don't even include walking to the place where the work is done, so everyone is running all the time.
This also mentally exhausts people so they end up making exponentially more mistakes, to the extent that the ship is disabled at a crucial moment.
Then when an externality crops up, they're expected to take care of that while still maintaining time on their already insufficient time table.
This not only makes them totally ineffective at dealing with emergencies but also degrades even further their regular activities.
The degradation of their regular activities directly causes things that normally would pass without incident, to turn into massive amounts of effort and injury. Tremendously increasing the actual work that it requires to do their operations.
The mental exhaustion causes them to continue to escalate their own trouble by attacking each other instead of easily dealing with the situation at hand themselves.
Meanwhile, the captain is absolutely overwhelmed and takes on tremendous work that their reports should be doing, she has to do it because now the others are incapacitated.
"I need us working harder and faster and stricter" the captain says as she collapses into a chair.
"You're a great captain, let them be a great crew"
"Let people do whatever they need to do to get the job done"
Just define goals and let them come up with approaches********
Gerald's Game (2017)
A brutal tale for brutal reality. This, like all of Stephen King's books, is deeper than it seems.
The tale uses ordinary circumstances about a horribly common life, to show the brutal, manipulative nature of human beings. Small lines about the incident isolated her for nearly her entire life, and each line her abuser says "maybe it was the eclipse" - disavowing responsibility, "you can't tell anyone next week or 10 years from now" securing her silence for short and long term. Beautifully and brutally made to show the violence that abuse survivors endure. The fact that she didn't feel like family anymore, that her job was no longer to be a kid but to be a guardian. And finally, that the people who are supposed to protect you from the monsters, can be monsters themselves. Magnificent and terrifying, for real and imaginary villains. Geralds Game might just frighten you a tenth of a percent that real abuse survivors endure.