Fashion It So

We’ll Always Have Paris - 1.24

White after Labor Day? Tsk

This episode begins with a fencing match. Picard and his opponent, Officer Some Dude, are wearing the traditional white fencing outfits (so colored because in the olden days there would be soot or colored dye placed on the tip of the sword to help judges determine where the touches had gone). Pretty basic, it seems. They get a little more glamorous, though, upon closer inspection:

Michael Jackson only wishes his single glove were this fabulous

It’s the fanciest dishwashing glove ever! j/k, I know it’s for protection. But look at that material! It’s almost as shiny as Picard’s head! And then we get to see a little more of the suit itself on the bridge:

Repurposed from Liz Taylor’s White Diamonds ad

SO SPARKLY!! SO SHINY!! Except it really doesn’t look like it breathes too well, though I suppose in the future, every fabric has been designed to wick away moisture and self-clean and give you a full-body massage whenever you want. In the future, even satin breathes well.

The thing is that this fencing has nothing at all to do with the rest of the episode. The rest of the episode is dealt with dealing with some sort of “time blip” in which everyone on the ship experiences sort of a skip in time, where a few seconds repeat themselves for no apparent reason. Then they get a pre-recorded distress call from some scientist who was studying time travel, a fact that Picard knows because said scientist married his old girlfriend! Oh, this is gonna be rich.

So Troi is like “Captain, I am sensing strong emotions from you,” because this is a first-season episode and literally every line ever said by Troi starts with “I am sensing…” So she recommends he go to the Holodeck to deal with his shit before they go rescue this fool that stole his girl.

Picard tells the Holodeck to recreate the cafe in which he was supposed to have met up with said girl 22 years ago. This is where the real fashions in this episode start:

Putting the gay in Gay Paree

First we’ve got the maitre d’. I can’t tell if that outfit is a jumpsuit or separates, but either way, it makes him look like a third-rate futuristic Erik Estrada impersonator. Something about that khaki, plus his hair, is reading really CHiPs to me.

Then we’ve got Puffy Mauve Shirt back there playing what appears to be a Bong Organ. Yes, that is a musical instrument. If I knew how to make gifs, I could show you that this instrument is basically a handjob practice device, though somehow I’m pretty sure that guy does not need any more practice on that front.

Are you ready for some FASHIONNNNN

This lady has a one-sleeved dress on, a currently waning trend I happen to despise, and has apparently deflated a Detroit Lions commemorative football and stuck it to the side of her head.

Seriously guys what season is it

What I like to imagine here is that Blondie was like “Hey, Brunette, meet me for an important Liz Claiborne-related business meeting later,” and Brunette was like “I better put on my best backless Business Outfit,” but then Blondie realized how many hot guys hang out at this cafe, and decided to go with Disheveled Laura Ashley Milkmaid instead, because nothing says “do me” like a ruffle on your bicep.

On the real though, I would wear both of these outfits. Except for the fact that the pink thing is TWO PIECES (well, four if you count the bicep ruffles as separate pieces):

The fabric shortage is having long-lasting effects on how much of my breasts are showing

See that? That is a crop top. It’s barely a crop top, even; it’s more like a couple of napkins from a wedding at the Sheraton in Oshkosh.

Okay, so all of this happens before the second commercial break. We haven’t even met the scientist or his wife, Picard’s ex, yet. But here they come, transported directly to sick bay:

If you get injured time traveling, can’t you just go back and fix it?

I had one thought when I saw this, the first shot of Dr. and Mrs. Time Travel: what is that thing she is wearing?! And where can I get one?! (Note: I changed my tune pretty quick, but my initial reaction was one of covetous…ness.) This episode doesn’t have a whole lot in the way of fashion - this pretty much wraps it up, right here, but this silver jumpsuit is SO GLORIOUS that it is worth at least 4 Romulan Square Jackets and a Guinan’s hat. Let’s break it down:

Stop: phaser time

First of all, this shit has Hammer pants, another currently-waning (I hope) trend that I despise. But these are first-gen Hammer pants, which somehow makes them slightly more palatable than the ones I see on girls on the street. Back in 1988, they just didn’t know any better.

Don’t have a cowl, man

Second, this voluminous front, complete with cowl neck. Now, I have no problem with a nice cowl, but I consider the point of cowls to be to show more cleavage than you could with another neckline. This cowl does no such thing, AND gives her lopsided-looking boobs. No good.

Oh shit, we forgot to make the back - quick, staple this on

Third, this is not the back of a shirt. This is a mini-cape.

Side boob is still boob, just be happy you got to see anything

And lastly, there is some serious side boob happening, mostly due to the lack of back of this jumpsuit. I would really like to see a pattern of this outfit, but I suspect it is just a bunch of drawings of unicorns jumping over rainbows and the words “cowl” and “2 legit” and “shiny shiny shiny” written all over them. It’s just a mercy that Michelle Phillips (yes, that Michelle Phillips) is so pretty, because the jumpsuit is really not her friend here.

The rest of the episode is mostly the crew trying to figure out what’s going on with the time blips, which make it possible for this shot to happen:

DOUBLE HANDSOME (and Data) (sorry Data)

If all we got out of this episode was this shot and Bong Organ, I would have been happy.

Justice - 1.08

Mostly, when I revisit an episode of TNG, I’m like “I must have seen this at some point…how could I have forgotten [crazy thing that happens to the crew]?” This episode, “Justice,” I most definitely remembered a key plot point of - Wesley falling into a bed of flowers and consequently being sentenced to death - but there is far more I didn’t remember:

• that the planet they are on is similar in its mores to the planet Picard visits when he is on holiday (meaning…they have a lot of sex, all the time)
• that there is a weird spaceship messing with the Enterprise
• that the people on this planet consider the weird spaceship to be God
• that the people on this planet dress like they are currently in, or about to be in, a sauna and/or sexy cult ritual

This is one of the very first shots of the episode:

“We run everywhere so we always have paper-towel-bikini-ready bodies”

The people on this planet are all pretty foxy, in an 80s way, and don’t mind showing it off, but what little they do wear is creepily uniform, like they are all backup dancers in the Bounty® Paper Towel Burlesque Extravaganza, which then actually turns out to be a brainwashing seminar. Also, their main mode of transport is running. I can’t really find too much fault with this. I mean, look at them. Running makes you sexy, I guess.

Some of the crew has already been on the planet, and the Edo (which is the race of people that live here) are all too happy to welcome them back:

“Our identical haircuts are giving me a huge boner”

They don’t French as a greeting or anything, but they do give the kind of lingering hug you get from the guy in your improv class whom you suspect works at the natural foods store, or the weird dude in youth group who insists he “wants to be friends…in the Lord” but then later turns out to be either a serial killer or an infomercial pitchman. You know the type. Yar is into it, but Worf is skeptical:

“Hugging makes me more nervous than battling”

Later on, this exchange happens:

Worf: I am not concerned with pleasure, Commander, I am a warrior.

Riker: Even Klingons need love now and then.

Worf: For what we would consider love, sir, I would need a Klingon woman.

Riker: What about plain old basic sex? You must have some need for that.

Worf: Of course, but with the females available to me, sir - Earth females - I must restrain myself too much. They are quite fragile, sir.

Riker: Worf, if anyone else had said that I’d suspect he was bragging.

Worf: Bragging, sir?

Worf cannot be held responsible for the AWESOME POWER of his Klingon manhood. I’ll just say this: I’d hit it.

Okay, so we have these two ambassadors to the sexy paper towel race, Rivan (the lady) and Liator (the man). They are both very blond and very bland and very…fit, as Troi puts it earlier in the episode:

“Do you even need to ask if the carpets match the drapes? You can probably just see for yourself when there’s a gust of wind”

She is giving me some serious young Charlize Theron, if Charlize had worked exclusively on Lifetime Original Movies and worn terrible wigs. He has almost certainly played Rolf in a community theater production of The Sound of Music. And both of them have RAD outfits:

“We can’t play shirts and skins, just straps and skins”

Those shorts are DANGEROUS, y’all! Especially when you’re running everywhere! I don’t know if you know this, Edo people, but you have wobbly bits that cannot be restrained by a twist of muslin and a flap. I mean, check out Liator here:

“Edo sandwich on Starfleet bread what whaaaaaaaaat”

Look, Liator, I know that the sheer sensuality of just standing between Yar and Troi is almost too much for anyone to handle, but tend to your shorts, man.

And it’s like that with everyone: their outfits defy the laws of time and space:

What is that side strap even doing?

Seriously, guys, why even bother with pants at this point?

What kind of space-age polymer is holding up your tops? HOW IS THAT EVEN WORKING??

Even the children on this planet are subjected to the same Ibiza dance party clothing standards:

“Let’s be friends, Wesley…maybe you can lose your v-card before we threaten you with execution!”

I don’t know what’s worse, the adult women’s physically impossible scraps of fabric cover-ups, or this poor little girl’s severely unflattering bermuda shorts onesie. It looks like something I would have sold for $5 at the Lands’ End Not Quite Perfect Store when I worked there in college.* And what possible reason could there be for Kid on the Right to have such a deep V in his shorts? Though you know Dov Charney probably saw this picture and was like “YES. INSPIRATION.” And then he put those shorts on a dude with a handlebar mustache and called it a day by partying with some underage-looking Asian girls.

Also, I just really like that this is occurring:

“I used Crisco on your legs and also in my bangs”

You can see his whole flank! What part is flanks, on a human?

But I think the best demonstration of the ridiculousness of these outfits is when Rivan goes up to the Enterprise (ummmm violation of the Prime Directive, anyone? ANYONE?) to sort out what is going on with the “God” spaceship:

She looks like a Swedish bikini team girl who wandered into a futuristic office park. You know Troi is pissed she’s not the eye candy for once, though.

In the end, Picard decides to save Wesley from getting executed, even though it’s in violation of the Prime Directive, even though this whole episode seems like it might be a violation of the Prime Directive. (Nerd debate time!) But I think what we really got out of this ep was that running makes you sexy, and Klingon sex is really intense. And that with enough space-age polymers, any scrap of fabric you have laying around can be an entire outfit.

*yes, that was my real job
 

The Arsenal of Freedom - 1.21

So I have a day job and my darling roommate (for whose ST:TNG obsession I am pretty much single-handedly responsible for) does not. So fairly frequently, I will receive any number of electronic messages from her, usually in the form of Facebook wall posts, alerting me to the episode she is watching. This is how I found the delightful episode Captain’s Holiday. So the other day, I see this on my wall:

dude: tell me about your ship, riker. it’s the Enterprise, isn’t it?
riker: no, it’s the…Lollipop.
dude: i have no knowledge of that ship.
riker: it’s just been commissioned. it’s a good ship.
I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.

I was MOROSE that I was not at home watching with her, but let’s be real, mama needs a job so she can buy more shoes that look like Worf.

At my earliest convenience, I skedaddled over to my laptop and pulled up the episode in question. It’s a first season episode, which usually means it’s going to be not as good, but it did involve some non-primary-crew-member characters, so I hoped there would at least be some outfits. Sadly, they were mostly Federation folk, so it was pretty much all burgundy and mustard pajamas for the most part. There was this guy, though, who you probably know as “hey, we need sort of a weird-looking guy,” but I know as Subway Ghost from Ghost. The late Vincent Schiavelli, ladies and gentlemen! The link between Jack Nicholson and Fran Drescher! He taught Swayze how to kick a can!

Now, while Vincent’s character here is sort of a recorded pitchman for a planet that was once a major purveyor of weapons (sort of like a Crazy Eddie’s Phaser Emporium Planet, if you will), he is dressed like Hugh Hefner, if Hef was a fan of those duct tape prom dresses you see every year, or maybe of Red Green. With a neck that long, Vincent can get away with the mock duct-tape turtleneck look, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. Or anyone.

But really, that’s all the non-Federation garb we see in this episode. So I’d like to take a minute to talk about hair. First, we have Ensign T’Su.

She’s only in this one episode, and I think it’s because Picard was like “Onscreen! Is it onscreen yet? T’Su, move your head, it’s like an orange on a toothpick.” Girl is WORKING. THAT. PERM. And with a middle part? That is hardcore. I would not be surprised if she stood up from that console and had some Starfleet-issue legwarmers on with some 24th-century LA Gear.

So the crew is orbiting this uninhabited planet that used to be a weapons warehouse, and Riker is like “my friend’s ship crashed here, let me go check it out,” so he and Yar and Data kick it on down to the surface to investigate, where they find Captain Paul Rice, friend of Riker:

This guy has been on, like, every TV show, ever (including a second episode of TNG, in which he plays a different character), but I recognized him as the dad of the one Mexican-American kid in Hamlet 2. Which means he probably touched Steve Coogan once, which means he’s awesome. What I don’t understand about his hair here is that it’s at once perfect and imperfect. It’s Schrodinger’s Hair. It’s like a Ken doll’s hair, but then, just to the right of his part, there’s a weird cowlick or something, like the hairstylist just looked at him and said “anything I do to your lustrous raven locks will only make it worse. This imperfection is part of your beauty” and then went to braid Troi’s hair for like 3 hours.

But it turns out this isn’t Paul Rice at all! It’s only a hologram of him, created by the weapon planet to try to trick Riker into giving him information. This is also the aforementioned “dude” in my roommate’s wall post.

Meanwhile, Picard and Crusher are also on the planet, and they’re trapped in a cave of sexual tension, so guess who’s running the ship? Data. But guess who doesn’t like that? Chief Engineer Logan. (Geordi wasn’t promoted until Season 2.) This is Logan:

From the Orson Welles/Vincent D’Onofrio school of Latent Jowlyface comes Vito Ruginis! He plays Logan as douchey as possible, a character choice that I can’t help but think was inspired by the vast amount of gel that must be in his hair. Look at that sheen! Look at that structure! You can almost feel the crunch beneath your fingers.

Also on the bridge, since basically everyone is down on the crazy weapons planet, is Lt. Solis, who I really hope is a descendant of the character Eva Longoria plays on Desperate Housewives. I watched one season of that show and I still know that that was her last name. I don’t know why. What information did I lose to make room for that tidbit? Anyway, here’s Solis:

My research indicates that Solis was played by George de la Pena, who was a soloist at American Ballet Theater in the 70s and 80s. He even played Nijinsky in a movie called Nijinsky, so he must be great. But even great dancers must retire eventually. And what do dancers do when they retire from dancing? Single episodes of TV shows. His hair is sort of dancer-y, don’t you think? A tiny bit of elegant movement, but with each hair perfectly in place, as if by magic. DANCE MAGIC.

The episode has a fair amount of delightfully cheesy action and also taught me that the saucer section (which they refer to as “the saucer section”) can SEPARATE from the rest of the ship! What!? But the real lesson here, I think, is that even in the 24th century, people still have bad hair days.

Symbiosis - 1.22

So in this episode, Picard and the gang are tootling around some star because some crazy magnetic shit is going on with it, and they want to check it out. They get a distress call from a freighter near the star from a guy named T’Jon who claims to be the captain of the ship, but when they ask him what’s wrong, and then explain to him how to fix it, he sounds basically retarded. Everyone is like “who is this guy and how did he get his own ship?” but they decide to beam them up anyway. But T’Jon and the other passengers send their cargo, a big space barrel, instead of themselves, and the crew of the Enterprise is super confused because HELLO people are totally more important than space barrels. Finally, the four passengers, two from each of two nearby planets, get beamed aboard, right as their freighter is blowing up, and both pairs tell Picard that they own the space barrel full of medicine. Apparently, the one planet produces the medicine that the other planet needs to survive (because they have a terrible plague).

This is T’Jon, the “captain” (right) and his buddy Romas, from a planet that apparently prizes looking like an old prospector. They claim that they paid, fair and square, for the space barrel, and they should get the medicine because they need it for the plague on their planet. Now, personally, I never trust anyone in overalls, but they seem like they need some kind of medicine, because they’re like FREAKING OUT for a lot of the episode. I blame the freakouts on the fact that they’re clad entirely in Mining Town Linen Blend.

Here we have Sobi and Langor, from the planet that produces the medicine, also known as Sweet Hair Disco Planet. I want to live in her hair, and have a summer home in his. Their lives are awesome because all they do on their planet is make this medicine needed by the prospector people, so they can wear shiny, shiny jackets and dresses and look at each other smugly all day long.

But it gets better when you get the full-length:

What is that dress!? If those cutouts are supposed to be Space Sexy, it is not working. And whatever it’s doing to her boobs is not nice. AND there is some sort of valance around her midsection. I couldn’t get a good shot of the hemline, but it is a handkerchief hem. There’s a LOT going on. I just thank god his pants are flat-front, even if his jacket looks like it was made for little people.

So it turns out that the “plague” on the Prospector Planet is actually the WHOLE FUCKING PLANET being addicted to the “medicine” that the Disco Planet is producing, and Dr. Crusher is like PISSED about it, and they figure out a way to help the addict prospector planet without violating the Prime Directive. They do not figure out how T’Jon got his own ship dressed like he was panning for gold, though.