Last month I did an experiment in which I listed TV shows I’d watched and lectures/podcasts I’d listened to. I’m continuing in that experiment this month, but it may be….too much.

Moviewatch September 2026

SEPTEMBER

Coyote vs Acme, 2026.  Wile E. Coyote enlists the help of a lawyer to help him fight against the ACME Corporation, which has taken over the market in phones, consumer explosives, remote-controlled punching fists, etc, and ruined his plans to capture the Roadrunner by their inferior products. Being a Super Genius, Wile E. tricks the lawyer into filing a larger case than he’d anticipated, and said lawyer has to overcome his laziness and fear of failure to man up and fight – inspired by Wile E.’s sheer doggedness.   While I did not approve of Foghorn Leghorn being turned into the villain (I say I say that’s LIBEL, son, a downright prevarication!),  I thought the movie made good use of its premise – there’s lots of subtle  music and references for those of us who grew up watching Looney Tunes –   and that the story was generally sweet and fun to watch.  The ladyfriend and I both enjoyed it. 

Mean Girls, 2004.  After leaving the theater for Coyote, I saw an SUV whose windows read “GET IN, LOSERS, WE’RE GRADUATING!”.   This led, rather naturally, to me watching Mean Girls for the nth time.   I don’t really know why I love watching this movie so much, but swapping out of context quotes from it is my niece and me’s love language.  I probably watched it for the first time for Lindsay Lohan, but now it’s a serious nostalgia piece, like Scream.  It’s also ridiculously quotable. So fetch. (Also, on October 3rd, he asked me what day it was. It’s October 3rd.)

McVeigh, 2023.   A dismal dramatization of Timothy McVeigh’s descent into infamy, resulting in him perpetuating the OKC bombing.  They take a lot of liberties – inventing a girlfriend for McVeigh,  presenting him as a dead-eyed drone who somehow attracts hot blondes despite his lack of personality and chain-smoking habit,  changing other characters’ backstories, etc. There’s no attempt at all to explore or explain who McVeigh was as a person, beyond “anti-government racist”: the one time Waco is mentioned, it’s Bill Clinton describing how terrible Koresh was and how he was training everyone for suicide.  Zero stars. 

Absolutely Anything, 2015.  My old movie-watching buddy was in town for a funeral, so we got together and watched….three SEC football games and two movies. (He doesn’t even LIKE football, we were just indulging our host who offered food.)   Anyway, this one has Simon Pegg as some British chap who can wave his hand and make anything happen, and also Robin Williams is his dog.  John Cleese also voices an alien. 

The Harder They Come, 1972.  I don’t know what this movie was about. I think it was about a young musician who gets involved in crime? The ending has a lot of armed men on white sand beaches. Anyway, there was a lot of reggae and completely irrelevant side-talk about everything from Gilda Radner to whether a prominent Wendys franchisee’s bankruptcy would affect our ability to get potato wedges. (…we used to eat breakfast on Saturdays together by the river, and were especially fond of Wendy’s potato wedges.)

Me, to movie-watching buddy: You know, since you moved to Georgia my movie-watching has gotten a lot less…..random.

Unabomber, 2026.  A dramatization of the making of Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski.  The movie follows two tracts: in the first, we see a young Ted Kacynski being steadily traumatized by an experiment he’s involved with at Harvard to ‘debate philosophy’; in reality, the experiment is being funded by the CIA to see how how easily it is to ‘break’ people. In the secondary track we follow an FBI agent who believes that the shared language of the Unabomber manifesto and some letters she’s been sent by a sister-in–law of a professor-turned-hermit named Ted Kaczynski indicate that Teddy K is in fact the Unabomber. Unfortunately,  however sympathetic Young Ted is (to a point – his mental state leads him to verbally abusing his parents), we don’t get to see Adult Ted speak fo himself. The man was eager to speak for himself at trial, and kept writing long after he was imprisoned – hell, his publishers sent me a copy of Anti-Tech Revolution: How and Why to review. 

The Unabomber in His Own Words.  This is a documentary on all things Unabomber:  hiss childhood,  his decision to break loose from the industrial system  in 1962, his retreat to Montana , and the decades-long campaign of sending bombs to seemingly random people working in universities and airlines (hence UNA) that only came to an end when he convinced newspapers to publish his manifesto and his sister-in-law recognized the style of writing. The “in his own words” part comes from audio from an interview with him being worked in, as well as bits from his coded diary in which he referred to his  bombs as ‘experiments’.   I’m fairly certain I’ve watched this before, but it seemed a natural follow-up to Unabomber.

TV Shows, a word which here means, “Star Trek”:

ST Voyager 5×24: “Relativity”. One of my favorite VOY episodes; it again drops us into the middle of the story….or should I say the beginning? We open on the Flying Spoon being spit-shined and polished at Utopia Planetia, the primary Starfleet shipyards. Janeway is planning her first mission, to confront the Maquis raider Jean Valjean, but – who’s that in the background? Seven of Nine, in a Starfleet Uniform? Turns out there’s time-traveling hijinks afoot, and Seven has been recruited by some mysterious agency to thwart them. So, we get to see Seven navigating her way through various VOY episodes and much fun is had by all. It’s fairly authentic: characters and their actors who have been killed off make guest appearances.

The Doctor: Next time, consult me, not the database.
Me, Seven: You are the database!
(I didn’t remember that line from heart, but considering the nature of the Doctor…)

Seven, discovering intruder: __________!
Me: SHOOT HIM! DON’T WAIT FOR THE COMMERCIAL BREAK!

Past!Cap’nKate: Seal the breaches if you can. I’ll be on the bridge.
Cap’nKate: (questions past hairstyle choices)

ST DS9 3×17: “Visionary”. O’Brien explodey-things himself and then starts popping five years into the future at random intervals. The scene where past-O’Brien and present-O’Brien stare at each other across the Promenade and each think, “Bloody hell, it’s another torture O’Brien episode” always kick it off to a great start. Klingons and Romulans show up in this one.

Future!O’Brien: But if you feel bad, and you’re my past self, shouldn’t I feel bad, too?
Future!O’Brien, O’Brien, Me: “I hate temporal mechanics!”

Star Trek 3×2: “The Enterprise Incident”. Kirk is acting very grumpy and decides to take the Enterprise into Romulan space; the E is immediately surrounded by several Romulan warships and Kirk is compelled to come aboard one to meet with the Romulan commander, played by Joanne Linville. The commander is completely smitten by Spock and Kirk fakes his own death to yoink a cloaking device and we find out this was the mad plan all along. Depending on Spock seducing a Romulan commander seems a bit high-risk to me.

ST Strange New Worlds: 4×7: “LIke Chronitons through an Hourglass”.
Star Trek is a soap opera now, complete with the hazy filter, dramatic facials and pauses, and occasionally pauses for detergent ads. Also, Final Frontier references.

Doctor M’Benga: You were caught in….an asteroid belt. (Narrating to someone off-screen). Good thing you are a gifted pilot.
Pike, looking in direction of M’Benga’s gaze: ????

M’Benga: You have…(musical sting) Temporal Amnesia!
Pike: (???) Do you hear that? Ohhh, are we back in the musical?

Chapel: He suffered severe damage to the torso. Where his heart is. To save him, I had to…..had to…
Pike: HAD TO WHAT? What is with the dramatic pauses?!

Pike: Wait, I’ve seen this before. The fancy coat-god guy…
Trelaney: COULD CAPTAIN PIKE PLEASE STICK TO THE SCRIPT.

Star Trek Enterprise, 4×10: “Daedalus”. On Star Trek Day, I was listening to the Icarus/Daedalus myth, and things progressed as they will. The Enterprise plays hosts to some visiting doctor who swears he’ll put Starfleet out of business with his extra-special long-distance transporter. Visiting doctor doesn’t understand the projection of force or the fact that you have to know where places are to beam to them. Also, he accidentally killed his kid while inventing the transporter and his visit to the Enterprise is really an attempt to use the ship to fetch his kid out of Transporter Land Limbo. So far my attempts to revisit Enterprise have been….really boring.

ST SNW, 4×8: “Orders of Magnitude” Crazy Admiral takes over the Enterprise. Also, Anson Mount wears skinny jeans and I am sad at Pike’s steady emasculation. We get cool Andorians, though! Jim Kirk is on the Enterprise…again. He says he’s there to get a checkup from Dr. M’Benga. Doesn’t he have his own doctor? Suuuuure, but his ship doesn’t have La’an on it. Cap’n Pike and a bunch of the women (except for La’an and Erica I Fly the Ship Ortegas) have gone into some caves on a planet, and are out of communicator range; an admiral shows up and is like “Hey yo, I have shady stuff to do” while La’an breaks from character and fangirls/squees all over the place at the prospect of having Admiral Whatever on board.

Admiral Whatever: Are you the ranking officer on board, Lieutenant Spock?
Spock: No sir, Commander Kirk is.
Kirk: O_O ….yes, sir, but I’m not a a member of this crew. I just stopped by.
Lemony Snicket: “Stopped by”. A word which here means, “I’m just here to chat up La’an, don’t put those command decisions on me.”

Admiral Whatever: George Kirk was my first officer. He’s a good man. A good officer. We shared many pots of coffee. Do you know why he never got his own ship?
Me: Eric Bana didn’t magically appear in his universe and kill Captain Robau and let him give a dramatic speech to his wife?

Admiral Whatever: Let the log show that I am implementing General Order 24. When we arrive at Argus 2, the entire surface of the planet will be destroyed.
Literally everyone: O_O
Surely Someone: (We have a general order for genocide? I thought we were the good guys.)
(And for context: Admiral Whatever is doing this to make sure a cloaked ship somewherrreeeee on the surface is destroyed.)

After a season of gimmick episodes, this was a surprisingly sober Trek take. Also, really good Uhura episode.

ST Discovery, 2×3: Points of Light. Lookit, I’m not asleep! The Enterprise finds a Vulcan ship. Awful….KurtzKlingons do awful KutzKlingons things. I stopped watching.

ST Strange New Worlds 4×9: “Once La’an A Time”.
Me, seeing screenshots: The hell is this? A sequel to that weird fantasy episode? I am not watching – ohhh, La’an. (I’m not going to describe this one, I’m just going to dump quotes and…let you sort it out. It turned into another “This is stupid, this is asnine, why do I like it” episode.

Pike, to La’an: Can we talk about our feelings? People are concerned.
Me: I’m concerned about you wearing skinny jeans, my dude, not about Dark La’an’s feelings.

Spock: We see the castle. We also see….fairies. Fascinating.
La’an: You have got to be kidding me.

La’an: We’re staying? Why are we staying?
Pike: To find out why a magic planet full of our doppelgangers is floating through space.
La’an: Magic. We’re saying magic is a real thing now, are we?

La’an: Are you suggesting that my shadow self is a pathetic damsel in distress?

La’an: I have never…..in my life….WANTED TO BE A PRINCESS.
Pelia: But you have the easiest part to play! You just look nice and send princes on quests and boo-hoo-hoo….
La’an: (snaps what she was holding in half)

Pike: Ah! Yes. It is…I, Roth, with whomst thou…
Fantasy M’Benga: ….”whomst” is not a word.

La’an: I mean you no harm.
Swordsmen, laughing derisively: (laugh derisively)
La’an: Harm it is, then. (Harms)

Pike: La’an?
FantasyLa’an: (making ridiculous dog-mama noises)
Spock: Not La’an.

La’an: The Queen stole my mind. I can’t remember my beloved’s…belovedness, or your bravery, or…even who Runa is. (pathetic fake crying)
FantasyOrtegas (she does not fly the ship) and FantasyKirk: You don’t remember RUNA?(Runa is Christina Chong’s dog.)

La’an: “The Swamp of Infinite Death”. No subtext there at all, is there?

FantasyKirk: I accept you for who you are. For all of who you are. If only you could do the same for yourself.
Me: Yeah, we’re going to need another season before La’an wrestles all her inner demons.

Kirk: We have a lot of history. Singing. Stabbing. Stunning.
La’an: Can we start over?
Kirk: Let’s find out.
Me: Aww.

SNW 4×10: Tomorrow’s Enterprise. The Enterprise is inspecting an enormous ring light (for an enormous YouTube creator, presumably) in space. Spock thinks this ‘white hole’ could be the other side of a black hole. Well, it’s more sensible than red matter. After the Ring Light does some anomaly-type things to the Enterprise, Uhura starts hearing audio from…..the future? An alternate reality? We get to see a future version of the SNW crew, one in which Uhura and Chapel are both in their TOS kit (and hair), and Captain Kirk is on the bridge – but it ain’t our Enterprise. This episode gets a little wild but it’s Star Trek wild, not Star Trek pretending to be Casablanca or As the World Turns or Everafter wild.

Pike: We’re sitting ducks and we can’t see a thing.
Una: Is it Tuesday? It feels like a Tuesday.

Uhura: Jim! (realizes she’d switched universes) Captain Jim!
Captain Jim: ooookay.

Captain Jim: I hate time travel.
Uhura: That’s what La’an said yesterday.
Captain Jim, significant face: La’an?!”
Me, to writers: Do. Not. Do. Sad. Things. To. La’an.
Captain Jim: (series of faces)
Uhurua: Where is she? Is she here?
Captain Jim: Let’s talk about you.

Chapel: What are we doing here?
Captain Jim: Breaching every rule we have about time travel.