For most of us, tonight’s episode is all about Carrie Coon’s icy stare. Sometimes calm and collected, sometimes shaking with rage, Bertha sustains her freezing disregard for an impressive amount of the run time. But let me direct your attention as well to Robert Sean Leonard’s warmth. Leonard plays the vicar with such understatement that it’s easy to lose sight of the skill of his performance. Is there any character in this show more humane and lovable?

Wounds is not a subtle film. It opens with a quote from Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness: “…it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception… and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed within him because he was hollow at the core.” I chuckled at this during my rewatch, knowing what I know now about the film.

Welcome to Star Trekking, my attempt to share points of interest and random intersections in the final frontier. Today we open with a blast from the past. My past. Here’s an article I wrote in 2010. The single most striking thing about this, the very first episode starring Captain Kirk, the second pilot film for the series, the episode meant to sell this whole venture as a series, is the way it begins: a chess game between Kirk and his alien science officer.

When Ken told me a few weeks ago that my favorite chapstick had been discontinued, it didn’t fully sink in. I figured I still had plenty of tubes scattered throughout the house that I was shielded. Maybe it was denial, an assumption that a major chain had made a choice in the state of Washington that was maybe different in . . . California? I was in Napa last week, went to Trader Joe’s.

Who is the Gen Z bimbo?  A November 2020 Rolling Stone article declares that she’s “back, like for real!” The U.K.’s CHECK-OUT Mag explains “how TikTok and Gen Z redefined the core principles of being a bimbo” as though it’s a real political movement campaigning on the platform of bimboism. ARefinery29 headline announces the “rise of the new-age bimbo.” And recently, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “Meet the Self-Described ‘Bimbos’ of TikTok.