Quote:
Originally Posted by Mennonite
Negatives:
- Picard looks stupid in a mask.
- One of the voices that Brent Spiner uses sounds silly.
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That's kind of it, man. It's not really the Spiner voice. It's the entire ridiculous performance for each of his characters. And it's not really his fault, either. That's the problem. I don't know what Spiner was supposed to do differently as an actor to make it successful. He clearly hammed it up and put as much energy into that shit as he could, but the result was just ridiculous. If he were more reserved, then the performance would still be cringey to watch, just in a different way.
It's the archetype of Joe Menosky episodes (that and the one where the Enterprise is a freakin train or whatever).
I'm with you in that I give credit to Menosky for pushing the envelope and swinging big. Sometimes you swing big like that and you hit a home run. I think he did just that with the Voyager episode "The Thaw." In that one he took his favorite premise (creating a world out of the manifestation of cognition/dreams) and turned it up to 11. Only in this case, the surrealism is more constrained and serves as the villain rather than a mystery or problem that has to be solved through technobabble. You don't have to go deeper and deeper into the weird rabbit hole. And in my opinion, because you made the guest star role something big and important, you were able to get a quality actor like Michael McKean to come on and do the episode instead of a bunch of randos. The result is that the viewer buys in from start to finish. It's a great episode. One of the only really good ones from those first few seasons of Voyager.
Masks doesn't do that. It's been awhile since I've seen it, and it's hard to get myself to watch it again because I just don't find its shit to be that compelling. The performance and the concept is off-putting from the start, and thus, I can't get behind it.
Just my (and most of the fanbase's) opinion. You have your tastes, I have mine.