The Doena Journal

Deutsche Version | February

January, 1st

The Dark Knight

Christian Bale … Bruce Wayne / Batman
Heath Ledger … The Joker
Aaron Eckhart … Harvey Dent / Two-Face
Michael Caine … Alfred Pennyworth
Maggie Gyllenhaal … Rachel Dawes
Gary Oldman … James Gordon
Morgan Freeman … Lucius Fox

Synopsis: Batman, Lt. Gordon and DA Harvey Dent have become a very efficient team and they dealt some major blows to Gotham’s underworld. But now Batman gets a new class of enemy: The Joker. The Joker has no plan, he has no goal beside causing havoc and creating chaos. And he’s very good at what he does. But can he force Batman to cross the line?

My Opinion: A great continuation to the great first movie. I always liked the first two Batman movies and I never really liked the cheesy third and especially fourth movie. Although I’ve never read any Batman comic I’ve always felt that it had to be dark and dirty and sometimes morally grey. Batman is no bright character for me. And although it had many comic elements in it Batman Begins felt very realistic. And The Dark Knight is the perfect sequel. It continues where the first movie left off - and I love the Joker. When he first told the story about how he got the scars I thought they were going to blew it and then was relieved when he then told yet another - totally different - story and thus remained his mysteriousness. But to be perfectly honest, I had expected that the “good people” on the ferry would pull the trigger. And then have themselves blown up. That would be totally in the line of Joker’s thinking IMHO. If I were to give stars, what I rarely do, I’d give 9.5 out of 10.
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Deutsche Version

Season 1

Disc 1

Pilot

Synopsis: It’s the year 1999 and Judgement Day hasn’t happened - yet. Sarah and John are constantly switching aliases and living placaes. But one day two cyborgs have still found them: One comes in the form of a young girl called Cameron and she was sent to protect John. And the other is a classical terminator. They try to escape him but in the end there’s no place they can hide, just another time.

My Opinion: To fully enjoy the show one has to put it in a parallel universe to the movies. It’s similar to the Highlander movie (There can be only one!) and the series. While I liked the general general idea of the show I had a problem with some story elements. For example: Cameron took the other cyborg out with a power surge. In my unprofessional opinion two minutes should have been enough to somehow destroy him or at least to damage him severely - he can’t resist after all. And some of the stuff in the vault seemed unlikely, too. Even if I knew how to build a microchip in 1965 there wouldn’t be the the technology (wafers etc.) to actually do it. But they had to find a way to push the series forward to today and it was fairly ok.
So I like the story but one mustn’t think to much about the logic.

Gnothi Seauton

Synopsis: They jumped eight years into the future, into 2007. And now all three of them need new identities to blend in. Cameron leads Sarah to a group of resistance fighters who were send back by John to destroy Skynet before it goes operational. But when that fails they have to visit an old friend. Meanwhile John explores the technological differences between 1999 and 2007.

My Opinion: The writers are obviously not very burdened with the complex issues that go with time-travel. It seems that whenever they need it they will send people back and forth through time as if nothing could disrupt the timeline. But if that were so then we would be back on the concept of a time-loop as the movie Terminator had present it (It has always happened that way and always will be, there’s nothing we can do about it). But Terminator 2 had thrown that overboard and declared that the timeline can be changed and (as Doc Brown explained it in Back to the Future 2) that will result in another timeline. I also had a problem with that “Zombie Terminator” who can obviously walk without its head attached - I thought the “eyes” were its optical sensors?
Another thing I noticed: I don’t know how far ahead the pilot was shot and what they thought would happen after it, but I didn’t have the feeling to see a Mrs. Dyson or a detective who was eight years older than in the pilot. They should have used a better mask to make them look younger in the pilot (Look at Bruce Boxleitner in Babylon 5: In the Beginning!)
Too bad Enrique had to die, I would have liked it to see Tony Amendola (Master Bra’tac in Stargate SG-1) more often.

The Turk

Synopsis: Sarah is looking for former employees of Cyberdyne Systems to check whether they are continuing the Skynet project or doing something else dangerous. Connor and Cameron pose as siblings in their new school and try to blend in.

My Opinion: Is it my imagination or did the metall skeleton of that terminator look a bit too shiny? He had been blasted to peaces and has lain in the garbage. Which brings up another question: How did he get there in the first place? He wasn’t within the time bubble and thus hasn’t travelled with the others. What happend to that bank building in the last eight years and why has no one ever found the skeleton or the head - which lay quite open on the side of the street?
And when Sarah burned down Andy’s house the fires looked digital - and fake. Don’t they have the money anymore to burn down a real, wooden facade?

Disc 1 - My Opinion: The show is enjoyable, the characters are fine. But as you can see the show opens a can of questions for me and they bother me because that makes me thinking that either the writers didn’t see this problems or they thought the viewers wouldn’t notice or that the viewers wouldn’t care. None of which is really an acceptable answer in my opinion. But I will continue to watch and see how it unfolds.
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Pon Farr

Here’s a clip of how Star Trek I could have been.

Warning: When you watch this in the office, use earphones.

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Deutsche Version | Season 3 | Season 5

Disc 1

The Way of the Warrior

Synopsis: A rather large fleet of klingon ships under the command of General Martok arrives at the station and their true intentions remain unclear. But then they start to search ships that try to leave the bajoran sector to look for changelings. Sisko needs a Klingon to shed some light into this: Lt. Cmdr. Worf, son of Mogh. But when the fleet departs for an attack on Cardassia (that is infiltrated by Founders - or so do the Klingons believe), Worf has to make a choice: To stay with Starfleet or to rejoin his people.

My Opinion: Hawk is back! This was a great start to the season. Worf and Martok are great additions to the show and I like how fluent the concept of good and bad guys is. Except for Babylon 5 in other shows of that time the good guys remain good and the bad guys remain the bad guys. There’s rarely a grey area. Yes, the Klingons have been the bad guys once, but since the start of TNG they basically belonged to the good guys and that didn’t change - until now. It also often happened that a race was portrayed in a certain way and there were only a few exceptions to that general portrayal. Only Humans had been shown in all variations of grey. That is also due to the fact that TNG has shown a certain race rarely twice (except for the Klingons). DS9 with it’s “port of call” concept has broken with that and has shown all kinds of Bajorans, Klingons, Cardassians and will continue to do so.

The Visitor

Synopsis: An accident happens aboard the Defiant and Sisko gets vaporized and his son is shocked. But a few months later Ben Sisko reappears in Jake’s quarters and disappears again. Then a year later it happens again. Ben is caught in some kind of subspace bubble and Jake (who was involved in the original accident) is his anchor to this world. While his life goes on, he spends his time either with writing or studying subspace mechanics and after fifty years, Jake has figured out how to save his father.

My Opinion: In general, I liked this episode and (again) the relationship between Jake and his father. The story is very emotional and very well told. What bugs me is the fact that the Dominion war didn’t seem to have happened in that timeline. Firstly this contradicts the things we have learned so far about the Dominion infiltration of the AQ (e.g. in The Adversary) and secondly because that would mean that Sisko’s survival would lead to the greatest war in the history of the AQ with its millions of deaths.

Hippocratic Oath

Synopsis: O’Brien and Bashir detect a crash-landed ship along a trading route in the GQ. But when they approach the planet they get shot down and have to face a group of Jem’Hadar. But these are not regular Jem’Hadar, these one want to be free and for this they need to free themselves from the Ketracel-white drug. Bashir doesn’t believe this is possible due to his experiences with the Jem’Hadar infant in the previous year.

My Opinion: For the first time since the start of their friendship a rift has been created between Miles and Julian. Although it was sad to see, their behaviour was very fitting to each character. Miles has fought in the cardassian border wars and seen what an ruthless enemy is capable of and Julian is still a very enthusiastic doctor who values life above all else. But I am glad that their friendship will survive things like that.
And now we’ve seen Jem’Hadar who can think and act outside their genetically programmed pattern. Again a race has been shown more than one-dimensional and it will happen again.
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At some point I got the glorious idea to update from Wordpress 2.3.2 to version 2.6.5. I was punished instantly because the WYSIWYG editor didn’t work anymore.

Luckily a few days later version 2.7 came out and I updated again. Looked nice but was terribly slow. And suddenly I got a mail from my provider that my scripts would drive the server insane and that I had to do something. So I checked all my projects and did some optimizations and whatnot because I thought the error would be somewhere in my “bricolage code” .

But then he said: It’s your Wordpress. So I deacticated all my plugins but it didn’t help. So what did I do, I exported all my posts, killed Wordpress 2.7, did a clean install of 2.3.3 and here we are again.

And what have we learned again what we’ve never should have forgotten? Never change a running system!

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